REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Sunday, July 13, 2025 07:19
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Saturday, July 5, 2025 8:15 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans Are Cutting Medicare.
Not Only Medicaid, Medicare.

Passage of the Big Beautiful Bill will force mandatory sequestration that will mean half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts.

By David Dayen | July 3, 2025

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting-medicare-
not-only-medicaid/

Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.

The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act of 2010 requires the Office of Management and Budget to keep scorecards that track the cumulative effects of legislation on the budget deficit, based on estimates from the CBO. The Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill adds roughly $3.3 trillion in debt over the next ten years. That will have to be made up through automatic sequestration cuts.

As CBO confirmed in a letter to the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), OMB’s calculation is mandatory, and unless Republicans manage to also pass massive deficit-reducing legislation within this fiscal year, something that is incredibly unlikely to happen, the cuts would follow.

Republicans could have waived the inclusion of the Big Beautiful Bill on the PAYGO scorecard, averting the sequestration cuts, but they did not do so. Future legislation could waive the cuts as well, but that has yet to be discussed.

Therefore, OMB would be required to issue an order reducing spending by $330 billion by January 2026. Many accounts are exempted from sequestration, including Social Security and several programs affecting low-income Americans. But Medicare is not.

There is a limitation on Medicare cuts of 4 percent of the program. In fiscal year 2026, that would come out to $45 billion. These cuts would increase with the growth of the program, hitting $75 billion by 2034 according to CBO. The total ten-year cuts would equal $490 billion.

President Trump has promised that he would not touch Medicare over the course of his presidency; of course, he said yesterday that Medicaid wouldn’t be touched either, something he was told was untrue by House Republicans.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Health Care: Jonathan Gruber
A key founding father of Obamacare on what comes next

By Paul Krugman | Jul 05, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/health-care-jonathan-gruber

No economist played as large a role in devising and pushing forward the Affordable Care Act as Jon Gruber, one of my former MIT colleagues. He gets a lot of the credit for the 10-year stretch when America, like every other advanced country, guaranteed adequate health care to the great majority of its citizens.

But MAGA is putting an end to all that. So I talked with Jon about how the ACA came to be, what happens now, cuts to medical research and more. It’s not as depressing a conversation as you might think!

Transcript follows

Paul Krugman: So hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. I'm talking with Jon Gruber, MIT professor, probably the economist most responsible for the Affordable Care Act, which gave us something almost like national health coverage for a while, but kind of a sad occasion because of the budget bill. We're going to talk about health care, the future, and probably some other things as well.

Jon Gruber: Sounds great, Paul. It's an honor to be here. I enjoyed being your colleague at MIT and, of course, I've been honored to follow along with all the great work you've done, helping people understand economics and why it matters in their lives. So I'm happy to be here with you.

Krugman: You're looking happier than I might have expected given the catastrophic legislation that just passed the Senate. How bad are you feeling about it?

Gruber: Quite badly in the sense that, look, as you know, Republicans tried to go after Medicaid in a fundamental way on a number of occasions. First, when they shut down the government in the mid-90s. And most recently, we all remember John McCain's famous thumbs up that saved the Affordable Care Act. What folks may not remember is it wasn't just the Affordable Care Act on the line, there was a massive cut to Medicaid on the line as well. Indeed, I conjecture if the Republicans hadn't overreached and had just tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they might have actually done it. The problem is they paired that repeal with a massive cut to Medicaid. So based on all those lessons, one would have thought that the political salience of Medicaid is something that would have protected it, and now we're seeing it's not. The Republicans have found a way to at last achieve their long-time goal of taking health insurance away from millions of poor Americans.

Krugman: The last time Trump had two bills, one which was tax cuts for the rich and one which was to take away health care from lots of people. And one passed and the other didn't. And so this time he smooshed them together, which is why it's “the one big beautiful bill.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is actually the official name of the legislation, which is incredible, based on a calculation that pairing things like this would get him across the line, which unfortunately appears to have happened.

But let's just go back a little bit to the Affordable Care Act, which you had such a large role in devising. You know, I still have friends who say, “It's terrible. We should have had single payer.” Why did we do it the way we did it?

Gruber: Yeah, well, why did we do this thing that you've referred to in your columns a number of times as “the Rube Goldberg healthcare reform?” Look, single payer has a lot of advantages economically, policy wise. It has three fundamental barriers politically, which no one has figured out how to get over. The first barrier is that healthcare in America is paid for by an implicit tax. And that implicit tax is when your employer gives you health insurance, they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart, they do it and they pay you lower wages. That's the deal, you accept lower wages for health insurance. Single payer would say, “look, let's get rid of those lower wages and replace it with an explicit tax. Let's replace this implicit tax with an explicit tax.” The problem is people don't believe that that trade is gonna work. They think, “oh no, the employer will just keep the money, they won't give me a raise and I'm just gonna pay more taxes.” So that's problem one.

Problem two is that despite all the complaining, most Americans would rather keep their insurance than give it up for some unknown thing called Berniecare. There's a huge status quo bias in American politics. And to see this, think about what the Affordable Care Act actually did. We ended up really only taking health insurance away from a couple million Americans who had really crappy insurance that we mandated to get more generous.

Well, Paul, every single one of those millions of Americans emailed me and complained about it. And that was actually taking away insurance that wasn't any good and replacing with legitimate insurance. So the second problem is how do you take away something people are basically happy with?

And the third problem is we have a $1.2 trillion private health insurance industry and they’re not going to say, “hey, it's been a good run. We're happy to fold up our tent.” They're going to fight. And these are fights the government loses.

So for those reasons, single-payer just isn't happening. And so I think it engaging in a debate about whether single-payer is a good idea or not is just fantasy land until someone can come up with a plan to overcome those three barriers, which no one has. So that's the challenge that we have to face.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/health-care-jonathan-gruber

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

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Monday, July 7, 2025 7:55 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Admin Insider Blows Lid Off Tariffs: ‘It’s All Fake’

A source close to the MAGA administration suggested the president’s “deals” are all theatrics MADE FOR TV

By Will Neal | Jul. 7 2025 12:00AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-admin-insider-blows-lid-off-tariff
s-its-all-fake/

A source deeply embedded in the Trump administration’s ongoing trade talks accused the Republican president of waging a tariff war for TV ratings.

“[Donald] Trump knows the most interesting part of his presidency is the tariff conversation,” the White House insider, who chose to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisals, told Politico. “It’s all fake. There’s no deadline. It’s a self-imposed landmark in this theatrical show, and that’s where we are.”

In April, the MAGA figurehead paused his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs to announce a three-month window for the world to negotiate new trade agreements with the United States—or face the full force of his levies.

In a subsequent interview with Time magazine, Trump claimed to have in principle already “made all the deals” with more than 200 foreign partners, before later suggesting the real number would likely be closer to just a few dozen.

Yet ahead of a self-imposed July 9 deadline, only the UK and China have inked relatively limited arrangements, with less than four days now left to go.

As global markets brace for the Wednesday deadline, Trump has lately appeared full of tough talk in his public appearances, telling reporters Friday he’d already signed more than 12 “take it or leave it” letters to various countries reminding them of the levies they’ll face if a deal is not soon reached, Reuters reported.

On Sunday, Trump announced that the first dozen letters will be sent out this week as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that the looming deadline has been moved again, this time to Aug. 1.

Trump appeared to revel in the uncertainty that his tariff regime has created. “We can do whatever we want,” he said of the deadline during a White House press conference Tuesday, CNBC reported. “We could extend it, we could make it shorter. I’d like to make it shorter.”

That ambivalence apparently has some of the president’s allies questioning just how far he’s willing to go to net new trade opportunities for the country.

“You have wins. Take them,” as the White House insider put it to Politico. “You only have to assume he doesn’t want to take them because he likes the game too much.”

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

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Monday, July 7, 2025 8:01 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


The Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list” or was murdered.
https://x.com/alx/status/1942029348875256109

'I thought the guards fell asleep and the cameras stopped working?'
https://x.com/hodgetwins/status/1942042276034716064

I told you Blondi was a liar.
https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1942066317260890579

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Monday, July 7, 2025 3:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I wouldn't worry about that one yet. If they're sitting on that list and there are a ton of Democrats sitting on it as well, I wouldn't expect that list to drop until a month before the mid-term or the next Presidental election, depending on what the political climate at those times are.

That's their "in case of emergency, break glass" object now. Politically and strategically there is zero ROI releasing that information today.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 4:46 PM

SECOND

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


Trump is about to pour $200 billion into immigration enforcement—but understanding specifically why this is a bad idea is important.

By Garrett Graff | July 07, 2025

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears-about-ice-trump-s-new-mas
ked-monster-bf1f7205365d4b27

. . . As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.

All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision. According to two people I interviewed who had been involved in the hiring process, the Border Patrol regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. As I wrote, “By the middle of the hiring surge, some southwest sectors reported to the GAO that average agent field experience was down to 18 months—and falling. And whereas the agency aimed for an agent-to-supervisor ratio of 5 to 1, some stations reported ratios as high as 11 to 1. By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.”

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”

Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE — and with CBP all over again.

We should fear specifically who the next 10,000 ICE officers will be.

Hiring fast doesn’t work in law enforcement, but I think there’s a specific reason we should be wary of the next 10,000 people who want to be ICE officers in the United States: We’ve never seen anything in modern US history like the fast-rising social stigma and politicization of ICE as an agency and brand in terms of recruiting. Whole swaths of “normal” ICE applicants, the types of standard former local or state law enforcement officers who have made up the applicant pool, will surely think twice before applying to an agency that makes the NYPD or the Ferguson PD look like “Officer Friendly.” Instead, the types of people who will be attracted to a job in the wake of Kristi Noem’s special-forces cosplay, the eye-popping photo ops at El Salvador’s CECOT torture gulag and the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp are exactly the people who we shouldn’t imbue with federal law enforcement powers — you’re going to get a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

Lots more at https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears-about-ice-trump-s-new-mas
ked-monster-bf1f7205365d4b27

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

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 5:57 PM

SECOND

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


One Senator’s Vote on the “Big, Beautiful Bill” Feels Like a Particular Betrayal

It’s the most striking example yet of just how monolithic the once ideologically heterogenous Republican Party has become.

By Jill Filipovic | July 08, 2025 12:18 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/big-beautiful-bill-lisa-mu
rkowski-republicans-donald-trump.html

Not so long ago, U.S. presidents assured voters that it didn’t matter whom they cast their ballots for; the president was on everyone’s side. Now Trump rails against liberals and Democrats and journalists, American citizens he deems “enemies of the people.” He used the Fourth of July to tell a crowd that when it comes to the people who voted against his bill (mostly Democrats), “I really do, I hate them.” That he is also willing to make his own supporters suffer is of course strategically stupid. But it’s no more morally terrible than if these cuts had primarily hit Democrats.

This my-supporters-should-get-theirs/screw-my-opponents mentality seems to have infected GOP senators too — including those who, like Murkowski, got special gifts for their state even as they fully understood just how shattering this bill would be for millions of other Americans. This is not standard pork-barrel politics, in which every member of Congress vies to get some benefit for their district as part of a bloated budget. This is several elected officials who know that their votes are going to kick eligible people off Medicaid, shutter rural hospitals, and drive poverty, illness, despair, and even death nationwide — and who, in exchange for some special treatment for their state and a better chance of getting reelected, sold out their country.

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

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 6:28 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025 11:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump is about to pour $200 billion into immigration enforcement—but understanding specifically why this is a bad idea is important.

By Garrett Graff | July 07, 2025

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears-about-ice-trump-s-new-mas
ked-monster-bf1f7205365d4b27

. . . As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.

All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision. According to two people I interviewed who had been involved in the hiring process, the Border Patrol regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. As I wrote, “By the middle of the hiring surge, some southwest sectors reported to the GAO that average agent field experience was down to 18 months—and falling. And whereas the agency aimed for an agent-to-supervisor ratio of 5 to 1, some stations reported ratios as high as 11 to 1. By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.”

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”

Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE — and with CBP all over again.

We should fear specifically who the next 10,000 ICE officers will be.

Hiring fast doesn’t work in law enforcement, but I think there’s a specific reason we should be wary of the next 10,000 people who want to be ICE officers in the United States: We’ve never seen anything in modern US history like the fast-rising social stigma and politicization of ICE as an agency and brand in terms of recruiting. Whole swaths of “normal” ICE applicants, the types of standard former local or state law enforcement officers who have made up the applicant pool, will surely think twice before applying to an agency that makes the NYPD or the Ferguson PD look like “Officer Friendly.” Instead, the types of people who will be attracted to a job in the wake of Kristi Noem’s special-forces cosplay, the eye-popping photo ops at El Salvador’s CECOT torture gulag and the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp are exactly the people who we shouldn’t imbue with federal law enforcement powers — you’re going to get a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.

Lots more at https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/four-fears-about-ice-trump-s-new-mas
ked-monster-bf1f7205365d4b27

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



Good.

That should mean a lot more of them will self-deport when they see what's coming for them.

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

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 8:07 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Good.

That should mean a lot more of them will self-deport when they see what's coming for them.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump gave ICE hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the rest of law enforcement. Are you still thinking these deportation schemes are free, 6ix?

Would you feel safe about your local police terminating every good cop and replacing them with a bunch of criminals to enforce local laws? Just like your local police, ICE can stop anybody for any reason, including you. A short person like you, 6ix, is a perfect target for ICE. Maybe you Trumptards, especially the ones who are short, strongly indicating they weren't born in America, should leave the country.

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 8:08 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Latest Ukraine Reversal Reveals a Disturbing Truth About the Administration

We didn’t quite know the extent to which no one is in charge.

By Fred Kaplan | July 08, 2025 4:18 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-news-ukraine-weapons
-hegseth-rubio-russia-putin.html

Take the latest mind bender: the on-again, off-again, on-again release-then-cutoff-then-release of U.S. weapons to Ukraine.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, mocked the American president for “once again swinging back and forth on his favorite political seesaw.”

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 8:21 AM

SECOND

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


Confused about where things stand with Trump's tariffs? Here's a handy primer

By Scott Horsley | July 9, 2025 5:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5460936/trump-tariffs-economy-chi
na-policy

This week was supposed to mark the deadline for other countries to strike trade deals with the U.S. — or face tariffs of up to 49% on the goods they sell in the United States.

President Trump is still threatening sky-high import taxes, but he has pushed back the effective date to Aug. 1, sowing even more uncertainty.

Here's an update on where Trump's tariff policy stands, from which tariffs he has in place to which countries are currently affected.

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 7:31 PM

SECOND

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


Trump is using tariffs to get his friend out of jail:

Trump sets 50% tariff rate for Brazil, blasting treatment of former far-right president

July 9, 2025 6:05 PM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462903/trump-brazil-tariff-bolso
naro

It is incorrect to use tariffs to address Trump's emotional issues, but the winds of change are blowing, so he's doing it anyway.

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 9:24 PM

SECOND

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


Trump's Dictator Protection Program

Using tariffs to fight democracy

By Paul Krugman | Jul 09, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-dictator-protection-program

Trump’s latest letter, imposing a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, marks a new departure, and I think merits a special bulletin. After all, it’s both evil and megalomaniacal.

Here’s the first page:
Quote:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2025

His Excellency
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
President of the Federative Republic of Brazil
Brasilia

Dear Mr. President:

I knew and dealt with former President Jair Bolsonaro, and respected him greatly, as did most other Leaders of Countries. The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace. This Trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!

Due in part to Brazil's insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans (as lately illustrated by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which has issued hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market), starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge Brazil a Tariff of 50% on any and all Brazilian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs. Goods transshipped to evade this 50% Tariff will be subject to that higher Tariff.

In addition, we have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with Brazil, and have concluded that we must move away from the longstanding, and very unfair trade relationship engendered by Brazil’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers. Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal.

Please understand that the 50% number is far less than what is needed to have the Level Playing Field we must have with your Country. And it is necessary to have this to rectify the grave injustices of the current regime. As you are aware, there will be no Tariff if Brazil, or companies within your Country, decide to build or manufacture product within the United States and. in fact, we will do every thing possible to get approvals quickly, professionally, and routinely - in other words, in a matter of weeks.
Notice that Trump barely even pretends that there’s an economic justification for this action. This is all about punishing Brazil for putting Jair Bolsonaro on trial.

Bolsonaro, as most readers probably know, is Brazil’s previous president, who lost the last election — but tried to stay in power through a coup overturning that election. Of course that sounds familiar.

Now, this wouldn’t be the first time America has used tariff policy for a political purpose. On the contrary, the international trading system we set up after World War II was in part motivated by the belief of U.S. officials that trade, in addition to being economically beneficial, was a force for peace and would strengthen democracy around the world. They were probably right, and in any case it was a noble goal.

Now Trump is trying to use tariffs to help another wannabe dictator. If you still thought America was one of the world’s good guys, this should tell you whose side we’re on these days.

Why do I say that it’s megalomaniacal? Brazil has more than 200 million people. Here’s where its exports go:

Source: World Trade Organization

Those exports to the U.S. are less than 2 percent of Brazil’s GDP. Does Trump really imagine that he can use tariffs to bully a huge nation, which isn’t even very dependent on the U.S. market, into abandoning democracy?

So as I said, evil and megalomaniacal. If we still had a functioning democracy, this Brazil gambit would by itself be grounds for impeachment. Of course, it would have to wait in line behind all the other grounds.

Anyway, don’t shrug this off. We’re looking at yet another terrible step along our nation’s downward spiral.

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

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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 10:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Good.

That should mean a lot more of them will self-deport when they see what's coming for them.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump gave ICE hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the rest of law enforcement. Are you still thinking these deportation schemes are free, 6ix?


The price we have to pay to clean up YOUR fucking mess. Same as always.

Leaving them here and paying all their welfare and their kids welfare is infinately more expensive. Don't talk to me about money, worm. You are far out of your depth.

Quote:
Would you feel safe about your local police terminating every good cop and replacing them with a bunch of criminals to enforce local laws? Just like your local police, ICE can stop anybody for any reason, including you. A short person like you, 6ix, is a perfect target for ICE. Maybe you Trumptards, especially the ones who are short, strongly indicating they weren't born in America, should leave the country.


Nah... They'll probably just go after you short-dicked, low-T Democrat men and throw you out of the country for being Anti-American.

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

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 12:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Would you feel safe about your local police terminating every good cop and replacing them with a bunch of criminals to enforce local laws? Just like your local police, ICE can stop anybody for any reason, including you. A short person like you, 6ix, is a perfect target for ICE. Maybe you Trumptards, especially the ones who are short, strongly indicating they weren't born in America, should leave the country.


Nah... They'll probably just go after you short-dicked, low-T Democrat men and throw you out of the country for being Anti-American.


And it's not like you don't bring up a good point here (for once). That is the stuff that I always consider whenever I see any changes being made. I don't want to see us go back to where we were when GWB was militarizing the local police forces.

But you lunatics had to take everything so far the other way...

Lets' let in tens of millions of illegals.

Let's watch all of our neighborhoods we grew up in turn to shitholes that are unrecognizable and call it "Progress" and call anyone who doesn't like what they see a Nazi.

Let's defund the police.

Then lets villainize them to the point that for over 2 years the ones that dared stick around can't even do their job because they're terrified of the media and/or of losing their job.

Let's celebrate lawlessness or at least pretend it doesn't exist when people we agree with do it over and over and over again, but bring up January 6th any time somebody points it out. And call them a Nazi.



What the fuck did you think was going to happen man? That was all nuts. And you were lock-step behind it all with the Legacy Media every day for years.


God help us and I hope the pendulum never swings so far that way where we're wishing GWB were President again. But your utter insanity for the last 10+ years now is the reason for any over-corrections here. We won the culture war. But some of you had to take it to extreme levels of crazy.

Good luck to everybody. I hope everything all works out. We got a huge mess to clean up right now and extreme measures had to finally be taken to start doing it for once instead of just talking about it like they've done my entire life.

I hope when we get the illegals out the Democrats can start defunding ICE like Trump did the IRS. But not entirely. We need to bring stuff like this to Equilibrium and Efficiency. There is a "Right" number for the amount of ICE agents, buildings and prisons which should be maintained after we've removed our current problem and ensured that there won't be a problem in the future. I don't know what that number is, but it's between Zero and far below whatever number we're going to have by the mid-term elections.

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

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I hope when we get the illegals out the Democrats can start defunding ICE like Trump did the IRS. But not entirely. We need to bring stuff like this to Equilibrium and Efficiency. There is a "Right" number for the amount of ICE agents, buildings and prisons which should be maintained after we've removed our current problem and ensured that there won't be a problem in the future. I don't know what that number is, but it's between Zero and far below whatever number we're going to have by the mid-term elections.
I'm pleased you mentioned the IRS, which has been understaffed for decades. The result? A $trillion per year in tax cheating, which will get worse now that the IRS auditors who concentrate on wealthy tax returns have been fired. By Trump, who also underpaid his taxes. See the connection?

Treasury plans to cut up to 50% of IRS enforcement staff, 20% of other components

Treasury’s proposed cuts would have major impacts on the IRS’ ability to collect taxes owed.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reorganization/2025/04/treasury-plans-t
o-cut-up-to-50-of-irs-enforcement-staff-20-of-other-components/

Staff cuts at IRS: https://www.google.com/search?q=staff+cuts+at+IRS

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 6:53 AM

SECOND

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


Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely (because Trumptards’ stinginess and stupidity killed those kids)

When it comes to disasters, accountability delayed is accountability denied

By Paul Krugman | Jul 10, 2025

Whenever natural disaster — like the flash flood that just killed large numbers of people, many of them children, in Texas — strikes, we can count on a quick response from officials, both federal and state, who arguably could or should have done something to avert or minimize the disaster. Namely, there will be self-righteous denunciations of anyone trying to assign responsibility: “Now is not the time to politicize this tragedy.”

In fact, now is exactly the time to put officials on the spot and ask how much responsibility they bear for the horror. Because the reality of America today is that if we don’t make an issue of how this happened within the next few days, nothing will be learned and nothing will change.

OK, you could make a case for putting off hard questions if you believed two things. First, you would have to believe that the relevant officials are well-intentioned and open-minded, that they will make a good faith effort to learn from the disaster. Second, you would have to believe that the news media will stay on the story, as opposed to quickly dropping it in favor of more pressing topics like Zohran Mandami’s college application.

And you might believe these two things if you’ve spent the past 40 years in suspended animation.

The reality is that the people now on the spot are right-wing hard-liners, who are the opposite of open-minded. Their mindset was perfectly captured by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who denounced efforts to politicize the disaster, then suggested that the problem may be that we have too many federal bureaucrats.

It also more or less goes without saying that there’s massive hypocrisy involved. Trump officials are reacting with rage to any suggestion that their policies may have contributed to the Texas disaster, but Trump was quick to make completely false attacks on the Biden administration’s responses to natural disasters on its watch.

So let me offer some suggestions about the lesson we should be learning from the Texas tragedy.

The specifics are still coming into focus. We know that thanks to payroll cuts, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting was fine, but the official in charge of “warning coordination” — basically, getting the message from the forecasts to the relevant local officials — had taken the DOGE buyout and hadn’t been replaced.

We also know that local officials had been told repeatedly over the years that the affected area needed a better warning system, including sirens, but refused to raise taxes to pay for it and were denied a grant from the state.

We’ll probably learn more about failures to prepare for floods in a river plain that was known to present major risks, and perhaps about the failures in officials’ real-time response. We may never know how many lives might have been saved if Elon Musk hadn’t taken his chainsaw to the National Weather Service or if local officials had been more responsible. But we don’t need specific numbers to understand that this kind of tragedy is only to be expected after politicians have spent decades denigrating government and degrading its effectiveness.

There was a crucial turning point in both attitudes toward government and the resources devoted to public goods — basically, goods we can’t expect the private sector to provide, like, say, weather prediction and flood protection — in 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan, who insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, took office, and this attitude has been pervasive in U.S. politics ever since.

Overall government spending continued to rise despite political hostility, because federal civilian spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the combination of an aging population with rising health care costs made these programs ever more expensive. But other forms of government spending were cut back sharply under Reagan, and much of our government was understaffed and underfunded, in effect held together with paper clips and rubber bands, even before Elon Musk came along with his chainsaw.

Anyone who has worked in American government or has friends there knows how much of a shoestring operation it has become. Here’s one measure, nondefense discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP, which bumped up briefly after the 2008 financial crisis and Covid, but has remained low and gradually declining otherwise:

Source: Congressional Budget Office

In a way, Musk’s disastrous attempt to eliminate government waste proved that the government is in fact underfunded. He assumed that the budget was full of fat that could be cut away without doing any harm but immediately found himself cutting deep into muscle. As the Washington Post reported,

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

So what is a thinly stretched government, asked to do too much with too little, going to do? It’s going to make more mistakes than it would if it had adequate resources. Mistakes will always happen, of course, and it may be impossible to prove that any given mistake was the result of reduced spending and staffing. But there will be more and bigger mistakes than would have happened if anti-government ideology hadn’t taken its toll.

Actually, the relationship between under-resourced government and natural disasters is a lot like the relationship between climate change and such disasters. You can’t prove that climate change “caused” any particular disaster — extreme weather and hundred-year floods have always happened. At most you can say that a warming planet made that disaster more likely. But climate change is raising the risks of disaster — a fact acknowledged by the insurance industry, whatever politicians may say.

Which brings us back to why we absolutely should politicize the tragedy in Texas. It illustrates the kind of disaster that will happen with increasing frequency if we keep depriving government of the resources and respect it needs to do its job.

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 8:40 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Let's watch all of our neighborhoods we grew up in turn to shitholes that are unrecognizable and call it "Progress" and call anyone who doesn't like what they see a Nazi.
--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You're probably aware that the German-version of Trumptards, the Nazis, knew what the difference was between right and wrong, at least in their opinion. The Nazis, millions of them, were absolutely determined to right every wrong. At least in their opinion of what is right. The Nazis had a leader, just like Trumptards have Trump, who also shared their understanding of what was right and wrong. In their opinion. It is not at all surprising to me that Trumptards do NOT know what they think they know about right vs wrong. That is a fact, not an opinion. I've had an entire lifetime of experience with Trumptards making the wrong decisions, suffering the consequences from those decisions, not understanding in any way, shape, or form that they made the wrong decision. There is even books written about how people decide what is moral and what is not. It gets into details about how people can confidently conclude their actions are highly moral while being absolutely confused in their thinking:

Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

The work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre helps illuminate some central questions of our time.

By David Brooks | July 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration
-supporters-good/683441/

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?

I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher.

Read: The Trump voters who like what they see
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/satisfied-trump-v
oters/682645/

By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that.

If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.” He continued: “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”

Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives.

Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.

Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain.

I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me.

There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?

And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well.

After Virtue opens with MacIntyre’s most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together.

Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don’t cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose.

How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.)

In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”

But the moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.

Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don’t know why you’re living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come.

Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That’s the project that a lot of today’s post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag.

I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.)


We’re not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.

A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position.

Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.

These are the kinds of humanistic endeavors that MacIntyre devoted himself to, and they are part of the legacy he leaves behind.

Download Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+After+Virtue

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 9:13 AM

SECOND

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


The Echoes of Hitler That Make Trump the World’s Most Dangerous Man

The president’s casual cruelty to his cabinet reveals echoes of 1930s Germany.

By David Gardner | Jul. 10 2025 2:18AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-echoes-of-hitler-that-make-trump-the
-worlds-most-dangerous-man/

On Jan. 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler held his first Cabinet meeting in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Friends and sycophants surrounded the newly appointed Chancellor. The handful of holdovers from the previous regime wouldn’t be there when the group met again.

Hermann Goering, his right-hand man, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and had known Hitler since 1922. Ernst Rohm was the only one to call him “Adolf.” SS chief Heinrich Himmler had been a friend for over a decade, and all three were at Hitler’s side in his doomed attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess shared a cell with Hitler after the failed coup.

At the Cabinet meeting, these men jockeyed for their leader’s favor. They offered ideas they knew he would like and praised him before every remark. It’s how the Holocaust was born. They knew his views on Jews and Aryan supremacy.

Hitler would, in turn, praise and ridicule his subordinates. He would sometimes set two of them the same task and watch them squirm to outdo each other. At this particular meeting, Goering had the Führer’s ear. They discussed how a big, beautiful bill could be passed by the Reichstag, the German parliament, that would effectively hand total power over to Hitler.

It was necessary, they argued, to bring peace to the Fatherland and make Germany great again.

Hitler opened the Cabinet meeting by explaining that millions of people across Germany were “joyfully” greeting his appointment. He told his Cabinet he had confidence in each member. But he was worried, he told them, that the opposition Center Party and the Communist Party opposed his aims and would bring the nation to a halt with a general strike.

Hess urged Hitler to give an interview, explaining that inflation was under control and “the danger of the rights of civil servants are untrue.”

The only real answer, they agreed, was to persuade the Reichstag to voluntarily give up its power. And trust Hitler to usher in a new golden era.

Less than three months later, on March 23, 1933, hundreds of brown-shirted stormtroopers stood guard at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin as the Reichstag voted on Hitler’s Enabling Act.

With his implacable Nazi guards intimidating the lawmakers, Hitler told them he would end unemployment, bring down inflation, and broker peace with Russia, Britain and France.

The compliant congress voted overwhelmingly to pass the act by a vote of 441 to 84. And that was the day democracy died in Germany.

Soon, there would be no opposition to worry about. Just one party and only one voice that mattered. One man who ruled. Adolf Hitler.

It’s a lazy comparison to draw parallels between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. But the specific time we find ourselves in right now in America does, indeed, have some disturbing echoes of 1930s Germany.

Trump is not an ideologue. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. Trump wrote The Art of the Deal (or his ghostwriter did).

But he is an emboldened president. Through an astonishing combination of guile, instinct, foresight, and plain luck, Trump finds himself in a position of unchallenged power in the White House.

And this is where the comparison with Hitler is worthy of note; there is nobody to rein him in.

Trump’s two-plus-hour Cabinet meeting on Tuesday had no point. There was just one reason to allow the cameras in. To show the world his casual power. Trump was so comfortable he wasn’t even trying.

How do I know? In private, he has a potty mouth. He swears loudly and often. Previously, only in private. But now he’s calling BS all the time. Not BS. But BullS--t.

He insults his henchmen with casual insouciance. Humiliating a crestfallen Pete Hegseth while sitting right next to him. Patting Marco Rubio as he mocks the thoroughly defeated man he once derided as “Little Marco” and continues to punish like some mugging Machiavelli.

Hegseth tries to channel a Fox TV producer and line up a ratings winner by blocking Ukraine’s defensive weapons, only to discover on live TV that he has effed up yet again. It’s why he never escaped weekends on Fox & Friends. He was never prime time smart.

Bondi thought she was onto a winner with Epstein, thinking she’d curry favor with the boss by promising full transparency. She didn’t understand that it was all just PR. Billionaires stick together. Too many emperors. Not enough clothes.

And all the while, Rubio is grinning like a Cheshire cat who swallowed the stinking cheese and is trying too hard to disguise his self-disgust.

As for the other Cabinet members, they’re so busy sucking up to the boss they have forgotten to think for themselves. Trump muses about gilting the ceiling cornices in the Cabinet room and guilts them into voting if they agree. Of course, they all agreed. With whatever Trump wanted.

Their pathetic attempts to brown-nose are about as successful as Bondi and Hegseth’s, because Trump is already one step ahead of them.

You can imagine him laughing with Dana White later, telling him on the phone how much fun it was to make them all look like idiots.

Trump had four years to plot his comeback, and it hasn’t all been as smooth as he would have liked, but he would claim that he is now the most powerful U.S. president in history. And he may be right.

He has steamrolled Congress into accepting his agenda-defining policy bill despite the ardent opposition of the GOP deficit hawks, the centrist chickens, and the MAGA vultures. He even got us all calling it his “big beautiful bill.”

He harangued the Supreme Court into backing his deportation flights to God knows where. He humbled academia into accepting his lunatic DEI demands by cutting off its cash.

And he has browbeaten the media, forcing CBS and ABC into humiliating settlements nobody truly thought they should pay. He even kicked the Associated Press out of the White House press briefings and replaced the venerable agency with right-wing pigeon posts.

Don’t think for a moment that there weren’t swathes of the country cheering every move.

Foreign leaders may have fancied their chances after the tariff market meltdown, but then Trump blew up Iran’s nuclear bunkers and, to everybody’s amazement, it kinda worked out.

Then, Trump gradually brought back the tariffs at similar percentages, and the investors barely blinked.

Trump’s Tuesday Cabinet was more sprawling, more unpredictable than any appearance he has ever made in front of the media and, consequently, the world. But Trump was in his element. He was like Hitler in that he knew that he held all the cards. This was his front room. His stage.

It’s easy to dismiss the specter of 1930s Germany. It could never happen here, you may say.

But consider this. In 1930s America, in Long Island, New York, to be precise, scores of brown-shirted young Nazis were led on parades through the streets to a summer camp where they would be taught the doctrines that would culminate in the Holocaust just a few years later and 6,000 miles away.

Tens of thousands of people caught the “Camp Siegfried Special” train from Penn Station in New York to live out their Nazi dreams.

There would be street signs in Yaphank, Suffolk County, Long Island, that would read Adolf Hitler Street. And Goebbels Street. And Goering Street.

They were removed in 1941. But the stain remains.

Donald Trump is no puppet. There is no one pulling the strings. Susie Wiles, his chief-of-staff, is a gatekeeper and little more. Stephen Miller’s sphere of influence rarely reaches beyond immigration and deportation. Scott Bessent is a convenient luxury. Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, Bondi, Hegseth, and Rubio are on borrowed time, and who knows what Vance really thinks, but Trump doesn’t care.

The president of the United States can do whatever he wants, and there is nobody to stop him.

The checks and balances are gone.

That is real power.

Beware.

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 1:43 PM

SECOND

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


Are We on the Verge of Civil War?

ICE is radicalizing America. 1850 is looking mighty familiar.

By Mary Harris | July 10, 2025 10:00 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/ice-public-opinion-civil-w
ar-trump-revolt.html

The year 1850 was a turning point, primarily because of a single law. The Fugitive Slave Act mandated that free states return runaway slaves — and even incentivized states to send free people into slavery.

As the American public gets a firsthand look at President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan in action, does history give us a clue as to how this is about to play out? Mary Harris spoke to Jamelle Bouie about why Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions remind him of the fallout from the Fugitive Slave Act, and the lessons and warnings that can be drawn from that law.

With the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Act, you’re just living your life, and some federal agents come in and they burst down the doors of some person’s home, and you witness someone that you know being dragged out of their home, accused of being a slave. Your reaction is that this is unacceptable. You’re thinking, Where’s the due process? Where’s the fairness? Who gave these people the right to come here and take this man? And this experience turned you from being someone who’s just sort of like “Slavery’s bad” to being a stark-raving-mad abolitionist.

This was what was happening all throughout the North. You had white citizens who ordinarily might not have become antislavery radicals but are witnessing and hearing of “man stealing” — that’s what they’re calling it — and kidnappings, and it’s driving them to a much more aggressive place than they would have been otherwise, and it is driving them to pressure their state lawmakers to be much more aggressive.

That drives the Southern state lawmakers into even more radicalism and paranoia. So the conflict of the 1850s doesn’t happen without the emergence of a mass public that is genuinely antislavery and open to more aggressive methods that push back on slavery.

Lots more at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/ice-public-opinion-civil-w
ar-trump-revolt.html

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 2:15 PM

SECOND

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


MAGA mom seized by ICE showers Trump with praise from cell: 'I will support him until the day I die'

Despite being handcuffed in front of her children, ripped away from her family and thrown in a disgusting cell, the 39-year-old refuses to criticize Trump

By Mataeo Smith | 09:46 ET, 10 Jul 2025

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/maga-woman-seized-ice-showers-3
5533931

ICE agents seized Arpineh Masihi, 39, on June 30th in California

A passionate Trump-loving mom said she still loves and admires the president, despite being thrown in an ICE detention center over crimes committed almost two decades ago.

Mom-of-four Arpineh Masihi, a woman born in Iran who came to the US at age 3, was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles in June as part of President Donald Trump's aggressive deportation initiative. Masihi's children were born in the US, but she was arrested by agents due to alleged crimes she committed 17 years ago.

Despite being handcuffed in front of her children, ripped away from her family and thrown in a disgusting cell, Masihi refuses to criticize Trump. “He’s doing the right thing because lots of these people don’t deserve to be here,” Masihi told the BBC in a phone call from her holding cell in California's Mojave Desert.

Masihi believes she's safe from deportation.

The 39-year-old is reportedly enduring "very challenging" conditions in captivity, but her stance hasn't changed. “I will support him until the day I die. He’s making America great again.”

Even though Masihi's green card was revoked in 2008 after she was apprehended for robbery, she and her husband, Arthu Sahakyan, maintain that she's safe from deportation thanks to her Christian Armenian-Iranian background.

Sahakyan even justified the actions of ICE agents who interrupted the family's breakfast to detain his wife.

“We are Christians. She can’t go back, there’s no way,” Sahakyan told the BBC, hinting that his wife's life would be in danger. Sahakyan still proudly waves the Trump administration's flag but said their "home is broken" following his wife's detention. Somehow, the California resident doesn't consider Trump responsible, but former President Joe Biden.

“I don’t blame Trump, I blame Biden,” Sahakyan said. “It’s his doing for open borders, but I believe in the system and all the good people will be released and the ones that are bad will be sent back.”

The 39-year-old mother said she is facing "challenges" in the detention center

Sahakyan even justified the actions of ICE agents who interrupted the family's breakfast to detain his wife. He believes that hastily arresting people like his wife “will resolve a lot of issues because we’ll know exactly who’s in here, for what reasons. Even though I miss her dearly.”

He added that Trump is not a bad guy for throwing his spouse into a sweltering facility to await possible deportation. “Trump is not trying to do anything bad. We understand what he’s doing. He wants the best for the country.”

The couple's hope is reasonably unfounded as the president has deported migrants who's life would be in danger if returned to their home country. In March, the White House mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a mega prison in El Salvador notorious for violating the human rights of inmates.

He was returned last month but only after President Trump was ordered by the Supreme Court to do so — even then his administration dragged its feet.

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

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Thursday, July 10, 2025 9:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's a lot of text to say that Trump is more popular than any President in modern history and that the Democratic Party is on life support.



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

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 4:26 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.




Quote:
Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

By David Brooks | July 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration
-supporters-good/683441/

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?


Decades of getting fucked over by pols pretending to "care" while selling us downriver.


Quote:
Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe.

But, there isn't. The Mayans had their moral code, the Chinese theirs, the Enlightenment theirs.

He gets to the point with this

Quote:
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.


Capitalism does away with moral codes because it frees the powerful from moral constraint. The message is individual greed and universal competition create the best society. Eventually, that message filters down to everyone. We are seeing the results of that today.

And how was this new, amoral code transmitted? Referring to philosophers as anything other than signposts is meaningless. Nobody acquires their philosophy from philosophers. People used to get their instructions from priests, then (badly miquoted) scientists (social Darwinism). Then television and radio, advertising and movies. Now, social media: an endless cornucopia of self-involvement, echo chambers, and gladiatorial pits.

Problem is, this asocial "society" is destined to fail. Even monkeys have a sense of "fair", and when society is allowed to become massively infair, people become alienated, and all of the functions that people perform that glue a society together and keep it running go undone. And you can't make everyone perform thru coercion and threat.

So, on a practical note, societies NEED a common moral code, and one thing it has to be is FAIR ENOUGH to get enough of a buy-in from enough people to survive.

Nonetheless, some societies that we would say were very unfair persisted for hundreds, if not thousands, of year. Pharoanic Egypt, for example (which BTW did experience revolts) and early Medieval society. These were under conditions where most people had to work brutally hard for sustenance.

We're not like that. We have technology to do a lot of the hard work for us. OTOH, people feel intrinsically nervous when they don't have a legit social function

The point being, we aren't hemmed in by dire circumstance. Assuming we decide on a common moral code, it can be based on WHAT DO WE WANT OUR SOCIETY TO LOOK LIKE? Once we agree on what that should be, the rest is easy: reward the behaviors you want to see, punish those you don't, find a role for everyone.

(Society as an organism.)


-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 8:26 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?

By David Brooks | July 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The point being, we aren't hemmed in by dire circumstance. Assuming we decide on a common moral code, it can be based on WHAT DO WE WANT OUR SOCIETY TO LOOK LIKE? Once we agree on what that should be, the rest is easy: reward the behaviors you want to see, punish those you don't, find a role for everyone.
Trump broke a moral code: E. Jean Carroll took a victory lap on Thursday in response to an appeals court order affirming its ruling to uphold a civil verdict that found President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.

https://www.newsweek.com/e-jean-carroll-reacts-trump-defamation-sexual
-abuse-appeal-2097580

The Trumptards at work, who heard about this, are already angry, but not at Trump for breaking the moral code. They are angry at the court.

Signym, Society's common moral code cannot be understood by most citizens. I'm certain that almost no one who voted for Trump would read After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition by Alasdair Macintyre. Trumptards won't understand the book, written at a level anyone who votes should be able to comprehend.

I was just with a Trumptard, last night, who was panicky because the IRS sent him a letter. He confused the letter number (something like 135000.00) to mean he owed $135,000. There are 70,000,000 Trumptards too stupid to read a simple letter from the IRS, in this case, a request for Form 1095-A, Health Insurance Marketplace Statement. They are too stupid to follow a moral code. This particular Trumptard's life is exactly like all the other Trumptards' lives I know: filled with drama and confusion because they cannot understand even the simplest codes, such as do NOT lie, steal, rape, etc. The code that Trump breaks.

Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.

These are the kinds of humanistic endeavors that MacIntyre devoted himself to, and they are part of the legacy he leaves behind.

Download Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Alasdair+MacIntyre+After+Virtue

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 8:38 AM

SECOND

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


The Inscrutable Supreme Court

Six justices rewarded the Trump administration’s bad behavior — and they did not even tell the American people why.

By Paul Rosenzweig | July 8, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/supreme-court-third-
country-deportations/683445/

In the American system, courts don’t make law; they interpret it. The act of interpreting the law requires, well, interpretation—not mere pronouncement, but an explanation for that pronouncement, backed up by law, evidence, and logic.

That’s why the Supreme Court’s failure to offer any sort of reasoning to justify its order in Department of Homeland Security v. D. V. D. is a threat to the rule of law, a reward for defiance, and a horrific example of a judicial process off the rails. The order is, unfortunately, only one of a recent spate of unexplained orders by this Court. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1153_l5gm.pdf

The case involved the efforts by DHS (where I worked from 2005 to 2009 as a George W. Bush appointee) to deport aliens who are allegedly illegally present in the United States to third countries (that is, to countries other than the one from which they came) without affording them notice or due process. At issue was Donald Trump’s efforts to send several individuals to South Sudan, where, they said, they would be subject to torture. Trump’s process denied them the opportunity to prove that they had a “credible fear” of harm and to argue that sending them there violates the Convention Against Torture (to which the United States is a signatory). A district court in Massachusetts had provided a preliminary-injunction order that prohibited sending the individuals to South Sudan without a hearing, leaving them stuck in limbo en route in Djibouti. The Supreme Court order lifted that injunction.

The order is so problematic that two commentators have dubbed it “the worst Supreme Court decision of Trump’s second term.” But even that is, in a way, too generous. Calling the order a “decision” suggests that the Court offered reasons for its judgment.

In D. V. D., in what could be, quite literally, a matter of life or death, the Court simply ordered the injunction lifted.

This disregard for explanation is destructive to the idea that law matters. Reason and persuasion are a court’s stock in trade; as Aristotle said, “the law is reason.” Reason is all that stands between a court’s claim that it is doing “law” and the challenge that it is doing “politics.”

At least one of the conservative justices, Amy Coney Barrett, has said that she understands the importance of justification. Three years ago, she gave a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, in which she movingly spoke about what she viewed as the Court’s defining characteristic—the commitment to explaining its decisions in public. To those who criticized the Court (this was in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs abortion decision) for imposing a political-policy position, she had a simple response: “Read the opinion.” Even the most odious of the Court’s decisions, such as the fugitive-slave case, Dred Scott, and the Japanese-internment case, Korematsu, offered reasons for their analysis—reasons that could be read and understood then and today, however unconvincing and repulsive they were.

But at least one could be repulsed and unconvinced by them! Even poor reasoning in controversial decisions, such as in the transgender-health-care decision this term, shows how the Court reached its decision and allows for the possibility of a counterargument. One can’t argue with a void. The complete absence of any attempt to explain (especially in controversial 6–3 cases such as D. V. D.) turns the Court into a mere vote-tabulation machine, accumulating political preferences by a “yes” or “no” accounting that is functionally indistinguishable from how Congress passes legislation.

If Barrett wants us to read the opinion, she has to write it first. And perhaps in the act of writing, the Court might have recognized the error of its ways.

Read: Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial philosophy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny

In the D. V. D. case, a Massachusetts district judge had issued first a temporary restraining order (TRO) and then a preliminary injunction requiring immigration officials to tell immigrants where they were going to be deported to and allow them to object if they feared they would face torture at their intended destination. Whatever one may think of that requirement—and I think it is an eminently reasonable one—the Trump administration should follow court orders while a case is pending. If it disagrees with such a requirement—as it did—it should appeal the ruling, not ignore it.

The administration did appeal the ruling; it did not, however, obey it in the meantime. This is a problem. To buttress the general requirement that rulings should be obeyed, the law has an overarching principle that courts should grant relief only to those who come before it with “clean hands.” There should be no reward for bad behavior.

No longer. In D. V. D., the Trump administration came before the Court with its hands as dirty as possible. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounted in her dissent, “In violation of an unambiguous TRO, the Government flew four noncitizens to Guantanamo Bay, and from there deported them to El Salvador. Then, in violation of the very preliminary injunction from which it now seeks relief, the Government removed six class members to South Sudan with less than 16 hours’ notice and no opportunity to be heard.”

But far from punishing this executive defiance, the Court rewarded it, relieving the Trump administration of its obligations. As Sotomayor put it, “This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”

All of this would likely not have been acceptable even if the majority had chosen to tell the nation why it did what it did. But as it is, Americans can infer only that the majority simply wanted what it wanted, and couldn’t be bothered to explain its decision to the public, to the district-court judges below (who can only assume that the Court will no longer “have their back” in the future), and to the individuals who have been deported to war-torn South Sudan, a country to which they have no apparent connection.

Worse yet, by giving the Trump administration what it wanted, even though it openly defied the district court, the Court seems to be inviting yet more defiance of the sort. Certainly, that is how the administration will read the decision, especially in the absence of any limiting explanation.

If it had chosen to write, the majority of the Court might also have explained how it analyzed the balance of equities in its decision. One factor in injunctive relief is that a court is required to determine who would be harmed more in the interim and grant relief to try to prevent that greater injury. It would have been nice for the Court to have offered even a word or two about why it saw the possibility of being sent without notice to South Sudan as a less harmful result than the government being subject to restraint while a case is pending. One would love to “read the opinion” about why the Court thinks thus.

The reasoning is anyone’s guess, and that is at least part of why the district-court judge initially concluded that the Supreme Court’s order didn’t apply to a portion of the case pending before him. The Court had only itself to blame for his confusion and soon issued a clarification of its order, again without a word of substantive justification. As Sotomayor wrote in response to the Court’s peremptory, cryptic order: “The Court’s continued refusal to justify its extraordinary decisions in this case, even as it faults lower courts for failing properly to divine their import, is indefensible.”

Finally, on the merits, the substantive result of this decision portends possible death for those who have now been sent to South Sudan and immigration chaos for the broader system, again without any explanation of why this result is mandated by law. In two earlier unexplained decisions, the Court allowed the Trump administration to withdraw “temporary protected status” and “humanitarian parole” status from individuals who had received those designations during the Biden administration. As the names imply, immigrants with those designations are allowed to stay in the country. Once rescinded (as the Court now says Trump may do), the aliens in question are required to leave the United States, and if they do not do so voluntarily, they may be deported. Taken together, these decisions mean that more than 500,000 immigrants who are lawfully present in the United States are now eligible for wholesale expulsion to parts unknown. Under the Court’s orders, Trump could, in theory, send 100,000 Venezuelans to Bhutan if the Bhutanese would agree to take them, all without a word of explanation.

This is not law and reason. Rather, it is power, plain and simple. The Court’s actions look and feel like nothing so much as the authoritarian rule of six Platonic Guardians, who, without a hint of humility, are so convinced of their own rectitude that they offer their subjects not even the courtesy of justification.

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 8:46 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, you're twisted and you don't have a moral code.

And I don't have to imagine what kind of society you prefer, bc you once posted that this chaotic society allows you to do as you please.

-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 9:37 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're twisted and you don't have a moral code.

And I don't have to imagine what kind of society you prefer, bc you once posted that this chaotic society allows you to do as you please.
Signym, your preference is for Russia to win in its conquest of Ukraine. You have no morals, like a typical Russian who feels the same. It is not at all surprising that Russians as a mass are materially poor compared to Europeans because Russians are morally evil, comparatively. They have no clear idea about how to live right. Neither does Trump nor his Trumptards, and it shows every day in every way.

Nobody needs to be Sherlock Holmes discovering clues to what crimes Trump and his Trumptards have committed in their distant past, because knowing the rottenness of their lives today doesn't require a great detective.

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 1:15 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


So you think that being moral guarantees wealth? That you must be moral bc you're wealthy?

Well, then Trump must be more moral than you bc he's richer than you, and Elon Musk must be the most moral man in the whole world.

-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 3:08 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So you think that being moral guarantees wealth? That you must be moral bc you're wealthy?

Well, then Trump must be more moral than you bc he's richer than you, and Elon Musk must be the most moral man in the whole world.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, you are too fucked up in the head to understand anything, anything at all. So is 6ixStringJack. Maybe that is why neither you had a life worth living and are both close to the end of what you've got?

Trump’s idea of diplomacy

Until this January, you might have thought that a gift for diplomacy would be high on the list of qualifications for an ambassadorship. You’d be wrong. Trump doesn’t care. He expects the Senate to confirm a total loser like Nick Adams in just another exercise of dominance by Trump. He’ll stuff it down the Senators’ throats and they’ll take it:

Trump Wants ‘Alpha’ Twitter Troll Who Says ‘Straight White Males’ Are Persecuted to be Ambassador to Malaysia

By Hunter Walker | Jul 10, 2025

https://wherethingsstand.talkingpointsmemo.com/p/trump-wants-alpha-twi
tter-troll-who

Coverage of his (Nick Adams’s) nomination has largely focused on his openly misogynistic content and internet boasts about having “the body of a Greek God” and hanging out at “Hooters.” Adams has also posted extensive racial commentary online. He’s argued many, many, many times that “straight white alpha males” are the most oppressed and persecuted group in America today. While he has accused the left of being “obsessed with race,” Adams has used his own platform to muse about making an unbeatable “all white NBA team” and to bizarrely, repeatedly assert white people no longer appear in television commercials. His rhetoric on race has also included the use of the racist term “Chinese virus” to refer to the COVID pandemic, an insult which feels particularly notable given people of Chinese descent are the second largest ethnic group in Malaysia and comprise over 20 percent of the country’s population.

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 4:22 PM

SECOND

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


Why You Should Fear a MAGAfied Fed

The next Fed chair will debase himself for Trump

By Paul Krugman | Jul 11, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-you-should-fear-a-magafied-fed

Jerome Powell’s term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board will end in May 2026. We don’t know who Donald Trump will choose to replace him, but we already know that his successor will be a disaster.

How can I say that without knowing who will get the nod? By invoking Bessent’s Law.

Let me explain. What Trump looks for in his personnel choices is, above all, groveling loyalty. So anyone he chooses will, more or less by definition, be a spineless toady. Even if the appointee looks qualified for the position, we can be sure that he or she will indulge and cheer on every Trump idea, no matter how bad. If they weren’t that kind of person, Trump wouldn’t have chosen them. At this point the mere fact that someone is willing to work for Trump, knowing who he is, tells you that they’re willing to debase themselves.

I call this Bessent’s Law because when Trump chose Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary a number of Wall Street people assured us that he was a good, competent choice, someone who would promote sensible policies. But Trump knew his man. In office, Bessent has enthusiastically backed every bit of Trumpian nonsense: Tax cuts pay for themselves, critics of Trump’s trade policy are suffering from “tariff derangement syndrome,” a trillion-dollar reduction in Medicaid isn’t really a benefits cut. Oh, and anyone doing serious analysis of Trump’s policies is just an angry partisan.

So it doesn’t really matter whether the next Fed chair is Kevin Warsh, Kevin Hassett, Larry Kudlow or the My Pillow guy. For practical purposes Trump will be running the Fed.

To explain why this should worry everyone, a brief refresher on what the Fed does and why it matters.

Without getting into the weeds, when we talk about “monetary policy” we’re mostly talking about the Fed’s ability to determine very short-term interest rates like the Federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend to each other overnight. These very-short-term rates don’t have much direct effect on the economy, but longer-term rates — which affect borrowing and spending decisions — reflect investor expectations about future Fed funds rates. As a result, the Fed usually has a lot of influence over how hot the economy runs.

What the Fed aims for is Goldilocks: An economy that is neither too hot — which can lead to excessive inflation — nor too cold — which can lead to high unemployment.

It’s not an easy job, because the economy is always changing and being hit by new shocks. So the Fed often gets it wrong. Here’s the history of the Fed funds rate since 2000:


You can see the tracks of two significant cases of getting it wrong in that history. In the second half of the 2010s the Fed hiked rates in the belief that the economy was on the verge of overheating; it wasn’t, and the Fed brought rates down again. In 2021-22 the Fed was caught off guard by the post-Covid surge in inflation, and was forced to rapidly hike rates in a (successful) attempt to get inflation back under control.

So the people running the Fed are human and make mistakes. But they’re well-informed, apolitical technocrats doing the best they can, and there’s a longstanding tradition of respecting the Fed’s independence. For the big problem with monetary policy is that it’s too easy to abuse. You don’t want interest rates set by politicians who don’t know the facts, don’t understand the issues, and want the political benefits of low rates.

And you really, really don’t want someone like Donald Trump controlling monetary policy.

Let me acknowledge that the Fed may be making a mistake by keeping rates too high for too long. But there’s also a good case for waiting before making any more rate cuts. As I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s a complicated situation made more complex by Trump’s erratic policies.

There is, however, no plausible case for claiming, as Trump did Wednesday, that the Fed funds rate is 3 points too high. And then there’s this, from yesterday:
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Tech Stocks, Industrial Stocks, & NASDAQ, HIT ALL-TIME, RECORD HIGHS! CRYPTO, "Through the Roof." NVIDIA IS UP 47% SINCE TRUMP TARIFFS. USA is taking in Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs. COUNTRY IS NOW "BACK." A GREAT CREDIT! FED SHOULD RAPIDLY LOWER RATE TO REFLECT THIS STRENGTH. USA SHOULD BE AT THE "TOP OF THE LIST." NO INFLATION!!!
Jul 10, 2025,10:28 AM
The economy is booming, so the Fed should cut rates? Huh? That doesn’t make any sense, EVEN IF YOU SAY IT IN ALL CAPS.

At this point Trump seems determined to emulate another autocrat, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who decided that he was an expert on monetary policy and forced his central bank to keep rates low despite rising inflation. The result was not just high but runaway inflation. In the end, Turkey was forced to raise interest rates to 50 percent:




In fact, let me make a prediction: Trump may initially force the Fed to cut short-term interest rates, but quite soon long-term interest rates will go up, not down, because forward-looking investors will realize that politicized monetary policy is feeding inflation, and even a Trumpified Fed will eventually be forced to raise rates to contain the damage.

Let me acknowledge that so far markets aren’t pricing in the Turkey-style inflation that, it seems to me, is almost inevitable once Trump gets to replace Powell. As far as I can tell, TACO — Trump always chickens out — rules the narrative on inflation, just as it does on tariffs.

But people should read Trump’s Truth Social posts and ask whether he really sounds like someone who will behave sensibly in the end.

Addendum: And now Russell Vought, the White House budget director, is accusing Powell of mismanaging the Fed’s own budget. Does anyone believe that this reflects serious concerns, as opposed to an attempt to intimidate?

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 4:45 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
It is not at all surprising that Russians as a mass are materially poor compared to Europeans because Russians are morally evil, comparatively.

SIGNYM:
So you think that being moral guarantees wealth? That you must be moral bc you're wealthy?

Well, then Trump must be more moral than you bc he's richer than you, and Elon Musk must be the most moral man in the whole world.

SECOND:that Signym, you are too fucked up in the head to understand anything, anything at all. So is 6ixStringJack. Maybe that is why neither you had a life worth living and are both close to the end of what you've got?


I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you.


-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 5:17 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you.
You know perfectly well what I am saying: that Signym is a lying sack of shit. This is one of your favorite lies that got shot down over and over, but you insist it is still flying: Russia and the 2016 election.

Trump Wants Revenge for the Russia Investigation

By Fred Kaplan | July 11, 2025 12:34 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/russia-trump-james-comey-j
ohn-brennan-cia-john-ratcliffe-russiagate.html

In an exclusive interview with the New York Post, which was picked up by other news agencies, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the review showed claims of Russian tampering in the election were strictly political. This is not what the CIA’s review says at all.
https://www.cia.gov/static/Tradecraft-Review-2016-ICA-on-Election-Inte
rference-062625.pdf

The review affirms the substance of the Obama-era report ( https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf ) and even attests to its integrity, noting it was, for the most part, “robust and consistent” with the intelligence community’s formal directive on analytical standards. It also praises the report’s “analytic rigor” in citing 173 separate documents from the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency.

It criticizes the Obama-Brennan CIA for concluding with “high confidence” that Putin “aspired” to help elect Trump. Ratcliffe’s reviewers object that this claim should have been made with “medium confidence.” A “high confidence” claim needs to have, among other things, multiple sources, whereas this claim had only one source.

However, Ratcliffe’s authors go on to say that they do “not dispute the quality and credibility” of the single source that drove the CIA to make that judgment. (It has been rumored that the source was an NSA intercept of Putin himself talking with aides.) They also note that all the intel agencies at the time agreed with “high confidence” that the Russian government (a) tried to interfere with the U.S. election in a way that would (b) help undermine public trust in the democratic process and (c) help defeat Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The authors acknowledge that one might “infer” from this that the Russians were trying to help Trump win, but this should have been explicitly noted as an inference. Even here, though, they contradict their argument, because the Obama-era report, even in its unclassified version, did note that the NSA disagreed with the CIA, ascribing “moderate confidence” to the assessment that Putin “aspired” to help elect Trump.

To deny that there was a Russian campaign, and for the CIA director to distort the findings of his own agency’s review in order to perpetuate that denial for strictly political purposes, is not merely dishonest but dangerous.

Neither Ratcliffe nor his agency’s review mentions a 158-page report by the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2020, during Trump’s first term. That report, which drew on all of the classified material available, concluded that Putin did interfere in the 2016 election, with the aim of harming Clinton’s chances and boosting Trump’s. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-d
efault-files-documents-report-volume4.pdf

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

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Friday, July 11, 2025 6:07 PM

THG


Trump's guilty...

T

BOMBSHELL: Shocking update on Epstein prison video






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Friday, July 11, 2025 6:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you.

SECOND: You know perfectly well what I am saying: that Signym is a lying sack of shit. This is one of your favorite lies that got shot down over and over, but you insist it is still flying: Russia and the 2016 election.


Uh huh.
Whatever.


-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 6:17 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by THG: Trump's guilty...


Guilty of ...?
I scanned thru the video.
What did they accuse Trump of?
Guilty of "over promising and under delivering"?
Guilty of a coverup?

Most likely.
Protecting wealthy donors, possibly.





-----------
"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, July 11, 2025 7:40 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you.

SECOND: You know perfectly well what I am saying: that Signym is a lying sack of shit. This is one of your favorite lies that got shot down over and over, but you insist it is still flying: Russia and the 2016 election.


Uh huh.
Whatever.




"During the 2016 presidential campaign and up to his inauguration, Donald J. Trump and at least 18 campaign officials and advisers had numerous contacts with Russian nationals, WikiLeaks, or intermediaries between the two. As of January 28, The New York Times had tallied more than 140 in-person meetings, phone calls, text messages, emails and private messages between the Trump campaign and Russians or WikiLeaks."

Final Report on Russian Interference in 2016 Elections
U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C.The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the fifth and final report, Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities, on the Committee’s bipartisan investigation of Russian 2016 election interference. The new volume focuses on the counterintelligence threat posed by the Russian influence operation preceding the 2016 election. In particular, the report highlights Paul Manafort’s connections to Russian influence actors, suggesting that his “high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, […], represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” Furthermore, the report examined the FBI’s handling of Christopher Steele’s reporting. Namely, the Committee found that certain FBI procedures and actions “were flawed,” in particular with its treatment of Steele’s memos.

Overall, the final volume provides “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.” With additional information provided in earlier reports covering election infrastructure security, Russia’s use of social media, the Obama’s Administration’s response to the threat, and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, the Committee found that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”


T

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 4:55 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
"During the 2016 presidential campaign and up to his inauguration, Donald J. Trump and at least 18 campaign officials and advisers had numerous contacts with Russian nationals, WikiLeaks, or intermediaries between the two. As of January 28, The New York Times had tallied more than 140 in-person meetings, phone calls, text messages, emails and private messages between the Trump campaign and Russians or WikiLeaks."


THAT was from the Meuller report, and it was about so-called collusion. There wasn't any.

Quote:
Obama’s Trump-Russia collusion report was corrupt from start: CIA review

A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies’ assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who were “excessively involved” in its drafting, and rushed its completion in a “chaotic,” “atypical” and “markedly unconventional” process that raised questions of a “potential political motive.”

Further, Brennan’s decision to include the discredited Steele dossier, over the objections of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts, “undermined the credibility” of the assessment.


Includes a copy of the review
https://nypost.com/2025/07/02/us-news/obamas-trump-russia-collusion-re
port-was-corrupt-from-start-cia-review/

And yet, when an indicted Russian company showed up for trial, the DOJ quietly folded its tent and slipped away.

I'll bet you believed that Saddam had WMD too.


-----------
"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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Saturday, July 12, 2025 5:17 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


There's plenty to criticize Trump for without bringing up make-believe.

Some say that some who've known Trump for a long time believe that he's losing his marbles. A head case like Biden, but of a different sort. I've long thought that Trump has a case of galloping adult ADHD, but his current erratic behavior is way beyond that. I wonder if he has PTSD.

Or maybe he's just doing a good imitation of St Vitus' dance, trying to stomp out all the burning bags of dog shit

-----------
"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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Saturday, July 12, 2025 5:18 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Lost in the ether somewhere

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 7:34 AM

SECOND

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


Trump's Brazil Tariff Is Blatantly Illegal
Shouldn't someone be suing?

By Paul Krugman | Jul 11, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-brazil-tariff-is-blatantly

I wrote the other day about Trump’s Brazil tariff, which is, as I said, evil and megalomaniacal. But I forgot to point out that it’s blatantly illegal. Maybe — probably — the Supreme Court is so corrupt at this point that it will ratify anything Trump does. But can’t we at least put them on the spot? Can’t we force Scott Bessent to explain why he supports such a grotesque abuse of presidential power?

Let’s be clear: U.S. law does give the executive branch a lot of discretion to impose tariffs without additional legislation. It does this for a reason: Temporary tariffs were intended to serve as a political pressure-release valve that would make low tariffs emerging from international agreements sustainable. This worked well as long as we had responsible presidents; it has been a disaster under Trump. Still, he does have a lot of legal authority to set tariffs.

But that authority is by no means open-ended. Tariffs can be imposed only for specific reasons:

Section 201: Market disruption
Basically, if a sudden import surge puts a U.S. industry in danger, temporary tariffs can be imposed to give the industry time to adapt

Section 232: National security
Tariffs can be used to sustain industries we might need during international confrontations

Section 301:
1) Unfair practices
Tariffs can be used to offset, say, foreign export subsidies

2) Anti-dumping duties
Tariffs can be imposed when foreign companies are selling below cost

3) International Economic Emergency
The president has broad tariff-setting powers during an economic crisis

Trump has hugely abused all these justifications, especially Section 301. There is no economic emergency. According to Trump himself, things are great:
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Tech Stocks, Industrial Stocks, & NASDAQ, HIT ALL-TIME, RECORD HIGHS! CRYPTO, "Through the Roof." NVIDIA IS UP 47% SINCE TRUMP TARIFFS. USA is taking in Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs. COUNTRY IS NOW "BACK." A GREAT CREDIT! FED SHOULD RAPIDLY LOWER RATE TO REFLECT THIS STRENGTH. USA SHOULD BE AT THE "TOP OF THE LIST." NO INFLATION!!!
140 ReTruths 482 Likes
Jul10, 2025, 10:28 AM
But the Brazil tariff is something else: It’s not about economics at all, it’s an attempt to interfere with another country’s politics. Who says so? Trump. Here, again, is how his letter to Lula begins:
Quote:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2025

His Excellency
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
President of the Federative Republic of Brazil
Brasilia

Dear Mr. President:

I knew and dealt with former President Jair Bolsonaro, and respected him greatly, as did most other Leaders of Countries. The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace. This Trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!

Due in part to Brazil's insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans (as lately illustrated by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which has issued hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from the Brazilian Social Media market), starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge Brazil a Tariff of 50% on any and all Brazilian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs. Goods transshipped to evade this 50% Tariff will be subject to that higher Tariff.

In addition, we have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with Brazil, and have concluded that we must move away from the longstanding, and very unfair trade relationship engendered by Brazil’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers. Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal.

Please understand that the 50% number is far less than what is needed to have the Level Playing Field we must have with your Country. And it is necessary to have this to rectify the grave injustices of the current regime. As you are aware, there will be no Tariff if Brazil, or companies within your Country, decide to build or manufacture product within the United States and. in fact, we will do every thing possible to get approvals quickly, professionally, and routinely - in other words, in a matter of weeks.
That letter is basically a confession that he is imposing a tariff for non-economic reasons. And that’s not legally allowed.

Memo to mainstream media: No, Trump isn’t “testing the limits of his authority” or some other euphemism. He’s breaking the law. Period. And it should be reported that way.

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

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 8:45 AM

SECOND

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


Are Trumptards killing themselves because Trump is a disappointment? I hope so.
Make America Great Again - By Suicide, also known as MAGA-BS:

Help! My Ex-Fiancé Just Died. Now His Mother Is Accusing Me of Something Horrific.
I can’t have people thinking this!

Advice by Jenée Desmond-Harris | July 12, 2025 8:00 AM

https://slate.com/advice/2025/07/dear-prudence-fiance-dead-accusation.
html

Dear Prudence,

Five years ago, I broke up with my fiancé after I could no longer tolerate his support for MAGA. We went our separate ways, and a couple of years later I met my now-husband. Last month, I learned of my ex-fiancé’s passing. I had always had a good relationship with his mother prior to us splitting up, so I decided to give her a call to express my condolences. What happened next has been a completely nightmare…

It turned out that he had died by suicide. To my shock, his mother put the blame for his death on ME; she claimed that if I had stayed with him, he never would have taken his life. When I tried to defend myself, she launched into a profanity-filled tirade, so I ended the call. Should I try and speak to her again to try and clear the air and my name (I’m concerned she’s telling everyone that I’m somehow responsible for her son’s suicide), or would it be best to just close the door on this one?

—Scapegoated

Dear Scapegoated,

Just close the door. If romantic disappointment caused suicide, we would see a lot more suicide. Instead, most men who feel slighted by the way their relationships have turned out simply start listening to bad podcasts about how to be alpha males. You know this. Your ex’s mom knows this. Anyone she speaks to blames you for his death knows this, so you don’t have to worry about being seen as a villain by people who are thinking straight. She’s a grieving woman who is reeling from an awful tragedy, and you can’t take what she says at face value. You’ve given her someone to blame, which she probably really needs to cope with right now. Silently wish her the best and delete her number.

But don’t let all of this distract you from the fact that your ex’s death is traumatic for you, too. Sure, you didn’t want to be with him anymore. But you’re still entitled to be sad about his suicide, and sad that you’re being unfairly blamed. Obviously, his family and friends aren’t the right people to lean on, but don’t hesitate to look elsewhere for support as you process all of this.

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

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 2:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


All of the sudden Ted cares about Epstein. He didn't care for 4 years but he cares now.

Wonder why that is?



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

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

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 2:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Are Trumptards killing themselves because Trump is a disappointment? I hope so.
Make America Great Again - By Suicide, also known as MAGA-BS:

Help! My Ex-Fiancé Just Died. Now His Mother Is Accusing Me of Something Horrific.
I can’t have people thinking this!

Advice by Jenée Desmond-Harris | July 12, 2025 8:00 AM

https://slate.com/advice/2025/07/dear-prudence-fiance-dead-accusation.
html

Dear Prudence,

Five years ago, I broke up with my fiancé after I could no longer tolerate his support for MAGA. We went our separate ways, and a couple of years later I met my now-husband. Last month, I learned of my ex-fiancé’s passing. I had always had a good relationship with his mother prior to us splitting up, so I decided to give her a call to express my condolences. What happened next has been a completely nightmare…

It turned out that he had died by suicide. To my shock, his mother put the blame for his death on ME; she claimed that if I had stayed with him, he never would have taken his life. When I tried to defend myself, she launched into a profanity-filled tirade, so I ended the call. Should I try and speak to her again to try and clear the air and my name (I’m concerned she’s telling everyone that I’m somehow responsible for her son’s suicide), or would it be best to just close the door on this one?

—Scapegoated

Dear Scapegoated,

Just close the door. If romantic disappointment caused suicide, we would see a lot more suicide. Instead, most men who feel slighted by the way their relationships have turned out simply start listening to bad podcasts about how to be alpha males. You know this. Your ex’s mom knows this. Anyone she speaks to blames you for his death knows this, so you don’t have to worry about being seen as a villain by people who are thinking straight. She’s a grieving woman who is reeling from an awful tragedy, and you can’t take what she says at face value. You’ve given her someone to blame, which she probably really needs to cope with right now. Silently wish her the best and delete her number.

But don’t let all of this distract you from the fact that your ex’s death is traumatic for you, too. Sure, you didn’t want to be with him anymore. But you’re still entitled to be sad about his suicide, and sad that you’re being unfairly blamed. Obviously, his family and friends aren’t the right people to lean on, but don’t hesitate to look elsewhere for support as you process all of this.

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


You are a disgusting human being.

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

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

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 3:35 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are a disgusting human being.
I have decades of experience with Trump voters. They are the worst Americans, worst employees, worst bosses, worst parents, worst grandparents, worst children when they were young, but they perceive themselves as best, which is all part of their horrifying psychological characteristics. They cannot see themselves or others of their kind for what they actually are. Trump is a perfect example of what is wrong with them:

Why Trump blames decisions on others – a psychologist explains

By Geoff Beattie, Professor of Psychology, Edge Hill University | July 11, 2025 7:23am EDT

https://theconversation.com/why-trump-blames-decisions-on-others-a-psy
chologist-explains-260877

It was US president Harry S. Truman who, in the years just after the second world war, kept a little wooden sign on his desk which read: “The buck stops here!”. It emphasised his willingness to accept ultimate responsibility for his decisions and actions as president, even the ones that didn’t quite work out.

This phrase has since become emblematic of presidential accountability and leadership. Truman wasn’t interested in trying to pass the buck, not as a man and certainly not as president.

Interestingly, the sign was made in the Federal Reformatory (prison) at El Reno, Oklahoma, suggesting an implicit moral dimension to this issue of responsibility and accountability. We’re all accountable for our actions, whoever we are, but the president above all.

But how things seem to have changed with Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump continually takes personal credit for any perceived successes as president – fixing global tariffs, Nato members paying more, the Middle East (even taking credit for things that were completed before he took office). But he makes sure that any failures are immediately attributed elsewhere.

He frequently positions himself as surprised or “blindsided” by unpopular decisions, which are always somebody else’s doing, somebody else’s fault. Subordinates are held responsible. He is not averse to pointing the finger directly at them, and often in public, high-profile settings.

That great loyal Trump supporter, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, for example, has recently been in the firing line for being personally responsible for pausing the delivery of missile shipments to Ukraine. US defence officials had apparently become concerned that weapons stockpiles were becoming low, as they needed to divert arms to Israel to help in the war with Iran.

But the pause in supplying some weapons to Ukraine announced by the Pentagon on July 2 was a hugely unpopular decision that resonated around the world. Hegseth was blamed.

Some have suggested that having loyalists such as Hegseth in critical positions like secretary of defense is highly strategic, and not just for the more obvious reasons. You could argue that having loyal supporters with delegated but overlapping authority is highly advantageous when it comes to the blame game.

Trump can publicly distance himself when things go wrong (as he did here), claim a degree of surprise, and swiftly change course. That way he is publicly reasserting his role as leader without admitting fault.

It is also noteworthy that Trump often reverses these decisions made by his subordinates in high-visibility environments, which suggests a determined pattern of strategic image management.

It’s a simple set of moves – you allow a subordinate to initiate a controversial decision, then you rein it in publicly and reassert your authority, thus showcasing your resolve. In other words, delegation to loyal insiders like Hegseth becomes a useful buffer against political fallout.

Loyal insiders still stay loyal (for the foreseeable future at least). They won’t sling mud, like some might in their position. So Trump can appear masterful.

But of course, there’s more to this than everyday political shenanigans. Personality plays a major role. Some psychologists have argued that not internalising failure is psychologically beneficial.

If you take credit for success but externalise failure, that makes you resilient (and happy). But there are clearly limits to this, and there’s a darker side.

People with high levels of narcissism (“I like to be the centre of attention”; “I am an extraordinary person” – both items on the narcissism personality inventory, a method of measuring personalities) often avoid accountability because they perceive themselves as superior to others. But only, it should be noted, in certain “key” aspects of life.

In the words of Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, authors of The Narcissism Epidemic: “Narcissists think that they are smarter, better looking and more important than others, but not necessarily more moral, more caring or more compassionate.”

Narcissistic individuals tend to externalise blame to protect their fragile self-esteem and maintain their self-image. They may refuse to admit fault because doing so threatens their grandiose concept of self.

Individuals exhibiting Machiavellian traits, characterised by manipulativeness and a lack of empathy, are also more prone to shifting blame. They may deflect responsibility to serve their self-interest, which is clearly a highly manipulative manoeuvre. You just do whatever is required.

Research also indicates that individuals with low conscientiousness, one of what are considered the “big five” personality traits, are less likely to accept responsibility for their actions. They may be somewhat careless or irresponsible in their work or actions, and when mistakes do occur – which they will – they blame external factors or other people.

In other words, certain personality traits are associated with a tendency to avoid accountability and responsibility.

It has been said that Trump’s inner circle consists of loyal sycophants who, even when it’s cringeworthy for outsiders, publicly praise him to amplify and protect his self-image. He needs this from them.

But they have another use as well. When things don’t go so well, they take it on the chin for him. That’s almost part of the job description. When things go wrong, his inner circle all understand the buck really stops with them.

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

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Saturday, July 12, 2025 3:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

You are a disgusting human being.
I


You are a disgusting human being.

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

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

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Sunday, July 13, 2025 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are a disgusting human being.
I've dealt with thousands of people and noticed a pattern: people who vote for Trump see the world the way he sees it and interact the way he does. Their lives are inevitably as messy as his is. He and 6ix act in the same unwise ways — no surprise how much trouble they cause and get themselves into.

Trump Thinks He Can Take Away Citizenship From Anyone He Doesn’t Like

July 12, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-us-citizensh
ip-rosie-o-donnell-zohran-mamdani-1235384436/

Since the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has been trying to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants born in the United States, in a direct challenge to the plain language of the Constitution. Now, he’s openly musing about attempting to take away the citizenship of comedian Rosie O’Donnell, who was born here, because he doesn’t like her.

“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

To some extent, the irrepressibly catty president of the United States is just barfing his feelings onto the internet. It is highly unlikely O’Donnell will face the loss of her citizenship and basic rights, even during this exceedingly lawless administration. And yet Trump’s threat to a comedian he’s long despised is not happening in a vacuum, in the same way that his threat to criminally investigate Bruce Springsteen, because the rock star said something Trump didn’t like, comes as Trump’s government is, in fact, criminally investigating Trump’s enemies only because they made the president mad. These are all different words in the same sentence in the exact same authoritarian tome.

Trump’s Justice Department has explicitly stated how serious the administration is about prioritizing a large denaturalization push as part of Trump’s broader immigration crackdowns. Privately, Trump has repeatedly told lawyers and others in his second administration that when it comes to certain people he’d want to see lose their citizenship and then be shipped overseas for supposedly “national security” or “crime”-related reasons, he does not see a meaningful distinction between naturalized citizens and those who were born in the U.S.

“He just wants it done,” says a source who’s been in the room when the president has discussed this topic this year.

And now, the president is openly telling a celebrity and political enemy that he is “serious” about taking away her American citizenship, merely because she has exercised her free speech rights.

In a saner time, that alone — even if no executive order or blatantly lawless action followed — would be a presidential scandal, revealing a commander in chief with nothing but contempt for the First Amendment, baseline constitutional values, and his own people.

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

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Sunday, July 13, 2025 7:19 AM

SECOND

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


I Don't Disapprove of Trump's Strategy, Because He Doesn't Have One
When you're a “Tariff Man”, you don't need reasons

By Paul Krugman | Jul 12, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/i-dont-disapprove-of-trumps-strateg
y

Trump’s 50 percent tariff on Brazil for the sin of actually putting a would-be dictator on trial was shocking. But in its own way the 30 percent tariff on the EU is just as shocking — because the EU has done nothing to warrant this tariff, and Trump’s letter doesn’t even hint at any action Europe could take to satisfy him.

Here’s the letter, with emphasis on Trump’s complaint:
Quote:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 11, 2025

Her Excellency
Ursula von der Leyen
President of the European Commission
Brussels

Dear Madam President:

It is a Great Honor for me to send you this letter in that it demonstrates the strength and commitment of our Trading Relationship, and the fact that the United States of America has agreed to continue working with The European Union, despite having one of our largest Trade Deficits with you. Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward, but only with more balanced and fair TRADE. Therefore, we invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far. We have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with The European Union, and have concluded that we must move away from these long-term, large, and persistent, Trade Deficits, engendered by your Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers. Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal. Starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge The European Union a Tariff of only 30% on EU products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs. Goods transshipped to evade a higher Tariff will be subject to that higher Tariff. Please understand that the 30% number is far less than what is needed to eliminate the Trade Deficit disparity we have with the EU. As you are aware, there will be no Tariff if The European Union, or companies within the EU, decide to build or manufacture product within the United States and, in fact, we will do everything possible to get approvals quickly, professionally, and routinely - In other words, in a matter of weeks.

The European Union will allow complete, open Market Access to the United States, with no Tariff being charged to us, in an attempt to reduce the large Trade Deficit. If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs and retaliate, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 30% that we charge. Please understand that these Tariffs are necessary to correct the many years of European Union Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, which cause the large and unsustainable Trade Deficits against the United Slates. This Deficit is a major threat to our Economy and, indeed, our National Security!
What is Trump talking about here? If you didn’t know anything about EU policies you might assume that Europe actually does impose significant barriers to US exports, which it could offer to remove. But it doesn’t. According to the World Trade Organization, US nonagricultural exports to the EU face an average tariff rate of 1 percent — that’s right, 1 percent. Agricultural goods face slightly higher barriers, 3.9 percent. Basically, US products already have almost free access to Europe’s market. The EU can’t make trade concessions because there’s nothing to concede.

My advice to the EU is to go ahead and retaliate. Trump says he’ll raise his tariff even higher if it does, but how much more damage can he do? And remember, US consumers will eventually pay Trump’s tariffs.

We’ll presumably hear many attempts to explain the strategy behind all of this, but there clearly isn’t a strategy, just the prejudices of an ignorant man and his enablers.

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

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