REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Sunday, September 7, 2025 16:04
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Thursday, September 4, 2025 6:35 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He was right when he praised this book.


Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.
Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 6:45 AM

SECOND

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


Cooking the Federal Reserve’s Credibility
Did Wile E. Coyote just make a cameo appearance?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 04, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cooking-the-federal-reserves-credib
ility

After markets closed Wednesday, financial news sites were full of talk about a “global bond rout.” The headlines were over the top: long-term interest rates were up, but not all that much. Call it “Apocalypse Not Yet”. And as I write this, rates have retreated again in the aftermath of a jobs report that strongly suggests a weakening labor market.

Still, market movements since Donald Trump announced that he was (probably illegally) firing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors offer a preview of what to expect if the courts allow Trump to destroy the Fed’s independence. Spoiler: Not good.

Trump began his effort to replace Cook on Friday, Aug. 25, after the markets had closed. Below is a graph of the probability that Trump will succeed assigned by betting markets. After a sharp uptick on August 25th, the probability dropped down to around 30%, reflecting a belief that he will probably fail. However, it’s important to note that a 30% probability is not trivial.

Chart 1

If Trump does succeed in firing Cook, it would be a step on the road toward a fully Trumpified monetary policy.

What would happen if Trump gained control of the Fed?

He would be able to push through large cuts in the Federal funds rate, the short-term interest rate on overnight loans banks make to each other. And I mean large: he’s been talking 300 basis points. We have in the past seen rate cuts that big, but only in the face of serious recessions. Trump, however, insists that the U.S. economy is booming, and a cut that big in the absence of a recession — and with inflation both above target and set to rise due to tariffs, deportations and surging electricity prices — would be unprecedented.

Standard economics says that a big Fed funds rate cut in the absence of a severe economic slump would be inflationary. It would also damage the Fed’s credibility — investors’ belief that it will do what is necessary to fight future inflation. Eventually, however, inflation would force even a Trumpified Fed to raise rates.

What would you expect to see in bond markets if investors put a high probability on Trumpification of the Federal Reserve? You would expect short-term interest rates, which mainly reflect expectations about Fed policy over the next one to two years, to fall. But very long-term rates, which mainly reflect expectations about long run inflation, should rise. So what did we see between Aug. 25 and Sept. 2? Two-year rates fell by 7 basis points, while 30-year yields rose by the same amount.

Granted, these weren’t huge moves, reflecting the markets’ belief that Trump is unlikely to be able to fire Cook. Yet, this was a cameo appearance by Wile E. Coyote. The divergence between short-term rates and long-term rates was a reminder that Trump’s move to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence is a real threat to the Fed’s credibility. And that matters.

At the Federal Reserve’s most recent Jackson Hole conference — its annual shindig in the Grand Tetons — Emi Nakamura, Venance Riblier and Jón Steinsson presented a paper on the effects of central bank credibility, as indicated by the ability of the Fed and its counterparts to "look through" post-Covid inflation, allowing the temporary inflation surge caused by supply chain disruptions to work itself out without needing to impose high unemployment.

Specifically, they looked at the ability of central banks to temporarily deviate from the Taylor rule, a basis for interest rate policy initially suggested by the economist John Taylor in a 1993 paper. Taylor argued that when responding to tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment, the Fed shouldn‘t fly by the seat of its pants; it should commit in advance to a specific rule linking interest rates to the inflation rate and the unemployment rate or some other measure of economic slack.

The Fed has never explicitly adopted a Taylor rule — I say “a“ rule because there are a number of variants on Taylor‘s original suggestion, similar in principle but differing in the details. The Atlanta Fed has a “Taylor Rule Utility“ that incorporates a number of popular versions: pick your rule and it tells you what the Fed funds rate will be.

Still, various rules tend to give similar guidance. And the Taylor rule has proved highly influential as a sort of baseline or norm: The Fed doesn‘t want to deviate too far from the rule without very good reason.

In 2021-22 the Fed thought that it did, in fact, have a good reason not to follow the Taylor rule. Inflation was very high, and a Taylor rule would have called for very high interest rates to match. But the Fed believed that the inflation surge was temporary, driven by post-Covid supply chain disruptions, so it held off on raising rates. Here‘s what a Taylor rule (FOMCTaylor99UR, if you want to know, which you don‘t) said, versus what the Fed actually did:

Chart 2 Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

The Fed was harshly criticized by many economists for waiting to raise the Fed funds rate, and there were many dire warnings that the Fed would have to put the economy through years of high unemployment to get inflation back under control.

Self-promotion alert: I didn't join that chorus. On the contrary, I argued that getting inflation down would not require an extended slump.

And it didn't. Chart 3, lifted from my first primer on stagflation, shows that the disinflation of 2022-2024 was nothing like the painful disinflation that followed the 1970s, involving almost no cost in higher unemployment.
A graph showing the number of unemployment rate AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Chart 3 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

What Nakamura et al showed was that the Fed was able to pull off the feat of taming inflation without putting the economy through a recession — in other words, to “look through” supply chain inflation — because of the credibility it had acquired over decades of monetary independence.

And Trump is trying to throw all of that away.

One more thing. Look back at Chart 2. Again, this chart compares the actual Fed funds rate with the rate recommended by a rule that has proved useful in the past. And right now the actual and recommended rates are about the same. So why is Trump demanding a huge cut in interest rates?

Nobody really knows. He may think lower interest rates will make him more popular. He may think of low interest rates as a reward for good performance — and in his mind the economy is doing great, he may want to reduce the budget deficit by cutting federal borrowing costs.

Whatever he’s thinking, if he succeeds in trashing the Fed’s independence, he won’t like the results. He might succeed in pushing short-term rates down for a while. But the interest rates that really matter to people’s lives are long-term — like mortgage rates. And Trumpifying the Fed, thereby destroying its credibility, will send long-term rates higher — maybe much higher.

MAGA!

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 7:21 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Trying to Blackmail the Supreme Court

The legal arguments for Trump’s tariffs are weak, so he’s arguing their rejection would bring ruin.

Donald Trump is making a last-ditch effort to salvage his beloved, beleaguered tariff policy, heading to the Supreme Court in hopes that the Republican appointees will come to his rescue. The desperation is both palpable and warranted given the conspicuous weakness of the administration’s legal arguments, as underscored by a series of lower court rulings against him. That has in turn led the president and his aides to make increasingly histrionic public claims about what will happen if the Supreme Court does not cave and side with Trump.

Call it The Chicken Little Defense: If the courts do not sign off on the administration’s tariffs, it “would be a total disaster for the Country” and “would literally destroy the United States of America,” Trump said on Friday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the bulk of the president’s tariffs are illegal. He doubled down on those claims on Tuesday while tacking on the transparently ridiculous assertion that the U.S. is “taking in $17 trillion … because of tariffs.”

Trump claimed last month that a loss would yield “a GREAT DEPRESSION.” Solicitor General John Sauer and Brett Shumate, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the court that “the United States was a dead country” before Trump took office and that “the economic consequences” of a loss “would be ruinous, instead of unprecedented success.”

If Trump is right — if his tariffs are necessary and wonderful and will stave off a Great Depression while also bringing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war — then he should go to Congress and get it to pass a law codifying them.

That would moot the whole legal challenge. The reason it will not happen, at least so far, is because the public is not buying the Trump administration’s claims, the tariffs are very unpopular and most GOP lawmakers have no interest in voting for them.

More at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/04/trump-tariffs-suprem
e-court-appeal-column-00543196

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 9:59 AM

SECOND

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


Survivors of Epstein's crimes held a press conference outside of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, where several of them shared their personal stories and called on Congress to release the files. A few moments after the press conference ended, Trump spoke with reporters in the Oval Office, where he said the Epstein files are "a Democrat hoax that won't go away."

Brad Todd, a GOP strategist, discussed the events. "One of the cardinal rules of politics is that you don't get in a fight with someone who is the victim of a sexual abuse crime," Todd said. "It's pretty high up on the list, and people have made that mistake. Believe me."

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2673958367/

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 10:21 AM

SECOND

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


Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson warned that the Republican Party is destroying their brand with their mismanagement and apparent cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files review — an issue President Donald Trump has tried to dismiss in recent days by calling it "irrelevant" and a "hoax."

"I want to play some of what the president and and others around him, many of whom are in the administration, have said about this before for quite some time," said Anderson Cooper, playing an extensive list of clips of various Trump administration officials, like Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, saying the public deserves the truth on Epstein and it would be coming soon. "Gretchen, it's crazy. They ran on this. They've been talking about this. They're the ones running the FBI now, and the Justice Department. It's remarkable to see what they said and what they're saying now."

"Exactly," said Carlson, who herself faced sexual harassment and won $20 million in a lawsuit against Fox News over it. "And I think that this is actually political suicide, not necessarily for Donald Trump, but as this story continues to grow without more information being given out. This is political suicide for the midterm elections."

https://www.rawstory.com/gretchen-carlson-2673959047/

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 10:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He was right when he praised this book.


Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.
Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".


What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



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

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 11:32 AM

THG

Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM _ I posted, "I am an independent."


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.

He was right when he praised this book.


Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.
Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".

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



too funny...

T

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 1:43 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't get proud of yourself. ChatGPT is more articulate than you, yet it isn't alive. 6ix, you are no better than a zombie like all the other Trumptards I know. Are you surprised when the walking dead don't prosper in America? I'm not because I have seen what happens to Trumptards, even the most articulate ones.

https://chatgpt.com/overview/

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 1:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't get proud of yourself. ChatGPT is more articulate than you, yet it isn't alive. 6ix, you are no better than a zombie like all the other Trumptards I know. Are you surprised when the walking dead don't prosper in America? I'm not because I have seen what happens to Trumptards, even the most articulate ones.


Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

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

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 3:18 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:

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.
The only people who would mourn Trump's death

By John Stoehr | Sept 4, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-press-conference-26
73959693/

As far as I can tell, Donald Trump is not dead, but he was an hour late to today’s White House presser, where he announced something. It doesn’t matter what it was, because the purpose of the announcement was proving he’s alive, though he’s clearly in a state of steep decline.

I think Garrett Graff’s piece this week says pretty much what needs saying about the newsworthiness of the subject, but I will take it a step farther: the reason Trump’s health has not made the leap from “news story” to “news event” is because the Washington press corps, especially the people who cut checks, doesn’t have the incentive.

The press corps needs attention. It’s the kind of need normal people cannot understand, nor should they, for their own sake. Trump, meanwhile, provides attention, especially when he says insane things.

So the incentive is not toward revealing the truth about Trump’s failing health but concealing it, even going so far as to accept uncritically the preposterous claim that he’s the fittest man to ever hold the office. If there’s nothing to see, even though it’s happening in front of television cameras, the gravy train can continue, and “everyone” is happy.

Here’s an example. At today’s presser, Trump was asked by one of the Fox chodes whether he would send National Guard troops to Chicago and other major cities. Trump hemmed and hawed, as he usually does, searching for an answer. He was clearly not trying to make an announcement, just saying whatever popped into this demented head.

Then the AP pushed this breaking news alert, in effect giving an improvised response the look and feel of serious presidential thought: “President Donald Trump said he will order federal law enforcement intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite local opposition.”

Joe Biden did not do that. He did not bring mindless attention to himself. He did not invite reporters into the White House every day. He did not say crazy things in front of cameras, though he could mangle the English language like few others could. He did not speak with absolute contempt for facts and the truth. And he did not provide attention-seekers with what they needed more than anything else.

So like junkies, they went looking for what Biden would not give them. They accepted as true Trump’s allegation that the Afghan withdrawal was the worst disaster in history, even though Trump negotiated the disastrous terms of it. Reporters also accepted as true allegations made by a federal prosecutor who said Joe Biden was old and tired.

These are two examples of dozens of stories that generated enormous public interest, that is, enormous attention for the attention-seekers. Together, along with Biden’s terrible debate performance, these stories paved the way for Jake Tapper’s post-election book alleging a secret and massive cover-up of Biden’s health, especially his mental decline, and even that Biden is somehow responsible for Donald Trump’s victory.

If reporters like Jake Tapper (and Alex Thompson) really believed what they said about a massive cover up of Biden's infirmities, you would expect them to never, ever, make that mistake again. You would think professional integrity and service to the public would compel them to chase down every tip as to the well-being of the current president.

But here we are in the middle of the near-total absence of any serious and sustained reporting on Trump's visible infirmities – as Graff said, the bruised hands, the swollen ankles, the changes to his personal habits (since when does he spend a holiday weekend at the White House?) and, most of all, the utterly confabulated things he says daily.

This near-total absence is reason alone to believe that Tapper, Thompson and others did not themselves believe what they said about Biden, only that saying it brought them the attention they needed.

And this near-total absence is reason alone to believe something else: that they don’t need to go out looking for attention because the president already provides it. As long as he does, the public may never know what shape he’s really in, perhaps not until the day he dies.

And even then, we may never know.

Donald Trump’s death would trigger a power vacuum full of infighting and backstabbing between contentious factions of his already fragile coalition, especially between his family, which wants the grift to keep going, and anyone who might get behind Vice President JD Vance.

In life and in death, Trump is good news for the news business. And it’s because the demagogue and the press are in a symbiotic relationship that the evidence of our eyes – the daily decay of the oldest man to take the presidential oath – is not nearly enough incentive for beltway reporters to set aside their self-interest for the good of the people.

Donald Trump is the most miserable person on God’s earth. He’s never known a moment of joy. He steals it from those around him. The only people he’s ever made happy were those who need attention like you and I need air. For this reason alone, they might mourn his passing.

Maybe.

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 4:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.
The only people who would mourn Trump's death


Americans are only concerned with those who would celebrate it.

In the end, you are going to be the Last Democrat Standing.

R.I.P. Democrats.



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

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 5:37 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

THUGR:
No, you think everything, and everyone is corrupt. Except Russia of course. I believe...

SIGNY:
Well, just like I've been saying: That's your problem, right there.

THGR
I realize government works for the people

SIGNY:
The government is indeed full of people, and MOST of them are honest. Unfortunately many at the top ARE NOT.

I worked in government, remember? People up thru about the manager level were honest, well educated, motivated to do their jobs. If there was anything screwed up, it was the inability to fire people who REALLY needed to be fired. That would have lit a fire under some asses that really needed to move more. But there were truly honorable, impressive, people who worked there. Some were personal heroes of mine, people I held in very high regard.

...

[But] America is an oligarchy. Why don't we have Medicare for all, if most people wanted it? Why do we wind up in so many wars, even if most people vote against it? Why did we offshore so many industries, even tho 19% voted against "that giant sucking sound" that we were warned about with NAFTA?

Here's the Cambridge paper, published in 2014, that demonstrates it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/artic
le/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Corruption is the deathknell of nations and empires. There is no institution so large that can survive once it's been infected beyond a certain point. If we really want our government to work for the people, we [you] have to stop being in denial about the corruption that runs thru Congress and the WH, the all-pervasive need for campaign contributions, the revolving door, secrecy, and insider trading.[ And pork barrel legislation] It's a clusterfuck, and it's not just Trump or Republicans.


As I posted elsewhere, the only thing that Dems and Repubs differ in whose payroll they're on. With Dems it was finance and transnationals (think Bill Clinton, "free trade" and killing Glass Steagal) and more recently big pharma, "clean energy", George Soris, and big tech. And of course Israel and the MIC.

With Repubs it's oil and gas (think Dick Cheney). And Israel and the MIC.

Elizabeth Warren, (Fauxchahontas) on big pharma's payroll:

Quote:
'You've Taken $855,000 From Pharmaceutical Companies": Kennedy Spars With Senators During Wild Testimony

Update (1520ET): Well that was actually pretty interesting. As Democrat Senators read prepared zingers to try and corner RFK Jr. over vaccines and other malarkey, Kennedy hit back with several very specific haymakers during the three-hour session - calling the Democratic lawmakers 'liars' - and even pointing out that Elizabeth Warren has taken nearly a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies.

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

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 7:40 PM

THG

Thursday, September 28, 2017 5:39 PM _ I posted, "I am an independent."


This methodology appears to have misled users. Both Sanders and Warren ran for president in 2020, and raised millions of dollars from supporters across the country. Many of them were rank-and-file employees at drug companies, whose voting preferences may not always align with their companies’ interests.

“Some of the people making these claims know full well that they’re being misleading,” said Daniel Weiner, the director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There is a distinction between a random donation from someone who happens to work in a particular industry, versus a donation from a corporate PAC.”

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/03/big-pharma-pac-contributions-berni
e-sanders-elizabeth-warren-open-secrets-data/



The problem with your longwinded posts comrade signym is that you aggregate facts with bullshit. Glass-Steagall was a wrongheaded decision by Clinton. But Warren did not take shit from the brass at pharma. Kennedy said the same shit about Sanders which was also not true.

Another fact you got wrong is that kennedy got his ass handed to him. And as for Warren claiming to be of Indian descent, it's what she was told as a child. And you have some set talking about others while ignoring all Trumps bullshit. He's using the presidency to make money and pay to play. The fact that he is not your main focus says it all.

T

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 8:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The problem with Ted's super-short posts, aside from the fact that he can't read or write a lick of English, is that they're all 100% pure bullshit without even an attempt at sprinkling in any semblance of reality or Truth to disguise it.

What Ted? No Billionaire George Soros funded Dark Money clickbait for us today? Have you finally learned your lesson on that one?

Rosie O'Donnell was at least man enough to apologize when she made a TDS fueled mistake. Guess she's got bigger balls than you do.

But that's no surprise because everyone already knew that about you, didn't they?



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

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

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Friday, September 5, 2025 7:14 AM

SECOND

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


War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

Also, "Germany violates human rights more than El Salvador" and Trump had a "ten out of ten" meeting in Alaska

Anne Applebaum
Aug 20, 2025

https://anneapplebaum.substack.com/p/war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery

Forgive me for using an Orwellian cliche in this headline (The full quote is “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” It’s from the novel 1984, if you don’t recognize it, and it is an example of doublethink, the Party’s propaganda). But unfortunately we are entering that territory. I wound up writing on that theme in two different ways this past week.

Let me first note that in the days before and during Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, I contracted a mystery virus. Because it initially seemed like it could be something worse, I spent a few days in a hospital. From that more distant perspective the absurdity of the meeting, the Kabuki theater element, was perhaps clearer. Everyone was playing their roles for the camera. Putin was there so that he could show his audience at home that he is the leader of a great superpower. Trump was there to fulfill the demands of his own ego, to prove that Putin really is his friend. American soldiers literally kneeled and rolled out a red carpet for a war criminal. The American president stood on the carpet clapping like a seal as the war criminal arrived.

Trump also looked weak because he is. In a burst of antibiotic-inspired energy, I did write something for the Atlantic on Saturday: Trump Has No Cards. I started by listing all of the ways in which Trump has already dismantled all forms of American pressure on Russia:

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report.

Given all of that, it’s hardly surprising that Putin now thinks he can win the war. Instead of agreeing to a ceasefire, he can enter prolonged “negotiations.” Instead of feeling pressure to stop fighting, he is convinced that the US, at least, will do nothing to stop him. The Anchorage meeting encouraged that perspective.

Certainly the Europeans, who are now providing Ukraine with more money and weapons than the United States, understood the PR catastrophe of Alaska very well. They flew to Washington, on short notice, because they wanted to prevent the Alaska disaster from morphing into something worse. But quite a lot of damage has already been done:

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

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

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Friday, September 5, 2025 7:21 AM

SECOND

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


Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman
Sep 05, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-the-right-reject-progress

Earlier this week I interviewed Peter Hotez and Michael Mann, authors of a new book, coming out next week, titled “Science under siege.” I’ll be posting that interview Saturday.

Both men are eminent scientists who have played key roles in public policy debates — Hotez over vaccines, Mann over climate change. They wrote their book to fight back against the tide of reaction against science. And this tide of reaction is especially tragic because there is, or should be, a lot of good news right now. In both their fields, reactionaries are trying to strangle technologies that have the potential to make the world a much better place.

As Hotez points out, vaccines in general have done incredible good, and the new mRNA vaccines are a scientific and medical miracle — yet RFK Jr. and his allies are trying to kill both vaccines and thousands, maybe millions of people. Mann, famous for his “hockey stick” chart showing the recent spike in global temperatures, has documented the danger from climate change. Advances in renewable energy, however, have made tackling global emissions far easier than anyone imagined — yet Trump and co. are actively suppressing the adoption of this technological breakthrough.

What I realized after our conversation is that the problem they discuss, of reactionaries who both refuse to accept progress and try to block it, goes well beyond their specific fields, and even science in general. America is now ruled by people who hate progress of all kinds, economic and social as well as scientific. They refuse to acknowledge the progress we’ve made on multiple fronts and are doing their best to reverse it.

Why? I don’t have a full theory, only some scattered thoughts, which I’ll get to at the end.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-the-right-reject-progress

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

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Friday, September 5, 2025 9:31 AM

SECOND

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


Governors in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Missouri and other red states are dispatching their own National Guard troops to support Trump's “crackdown on crime” outside their own borders, despite these states governing cities with murder rates twice as high as DC’s. Given that they govern the worst per capita violent crime rates in the country, these self-proclaimed ‘states rights’ champions obviously don’t give a damn about that as they prepare to invade their sovereign neighbors.

Trump, Vance and Stephen Miller are now explicitly threatening domestic political opponents — Democrat run states and cities — with military occupation. That is the real reason behind the big beautiful bill that funded the world’s largest police state. That is the real purpose behind $45 billion to build new concentration camps, and a 265% increase in ICE’s detention budget. Stephen Miller just admitted as much on Fox News, saying, “The Democrat Party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

So there we have it. Democrats have been Trump’s true ‘enemy within’ all along. Democrats are the intended beneficiaries of illegal occupying forces, concentration camps, and tank-mounted rifles in the streets. If this doesn’t sound like a red declaration of civil war against half the nation, nothing does.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-new-kind-of-civil-war-is-her
e-and-this-is-the-only-way-to-fight-back-opinion/ar-AA1LW97e

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

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Friday, September 5, 2025 10:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman


Funny, coming out of you after the last 4 years.


We're going to make Democrats miserable.

America will be doing great though.


Globalism is dead. The Democratic Party is dead. Your ideology is dead.

You killed it all. Pat yourself on the back.

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

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

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Friday, September 5, 2025 11:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Don't take it from me...

Rahm Emanuel: Democrats have lost touch with Roosevelt, Johnson, and Truman

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3791978/rahm-ema
nuel-democrats-lost-touch-roosevelt-johnson-truman/

Quote:
In casual conversations with Democrats in August from across the Midwest, I found that their biggest frustration with the national party is that its platform didn’t appeal to them. I was not surprised to see that same sentiment captured in a poll by the Wall Street Journal around the same time. It found Democrats’ popularity cratering with a staggering 63% of voters holding an unfavorable view of the party.

One month later, another survey by the Wall Street Journal showed that people are losing faith that they will achieve the American dream in their lifetime — and worse, they fear it will even be further out of reach for their children and grandchildren. This sentiment should concern leaders in both parties, but in particular the Democrats, who have bottomed out with appealing to the middle-class voter.


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

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

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 7:26 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman


Funny, coming out of you after the last 4 years.


We're going to make Democrats miserable.

America will be doing great though.


Globalism is dead. The Democratic Party is dead. Your ideology is dead.

You killed it all. Pat yourself on the back.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Globalism is only dead in the US. Not so in the rest of the world, which is NOT increasing tariffs.

Trump couldn't make $billions if he weren't President:

Trump Family Amasses $5 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-6-billion-
fortune-after-crypto-launch-567faec5

Updated Sept. 1, 2025 4:24 pm ET

The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.

The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.

The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.

WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.

President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”

World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.

In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.

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

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 8:07 AM

SECOND

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


Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann

Lysenko comes to America (Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture)

Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/science-under-siege-a-talk-with-pet
er

There was a transition there, right? Nixon gave us the EPA, Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, George H.W. Bush gave us cap and trade to deal with acid rain. It wasn't that long ago that the Republican Party was not fundamentally an anti-science or an anti-environmental party. But back in the early 2000, that's when we really saw, as the fossil fuel industry was coming in, a sort of purity test emerged: the Republican candidates had to kiss the ring of the fossil fuel industry.

We saw a purging of those “moderate”, so-called, New England Republicans of the sort that we used to have, you're right. There is this Republican base, the MAGA base, that are receptive to this misinformation and disinformation. But that's not accidental. That's because it's been very carefully created. It's been nurtured. There's been an effort for decades to weaponize their base for an agenda that goes against their base’s own interests: environmental degradation. I mean, if you look at the policies now of the Republican Party, almost every single policy goes against the interests of the voters who are actually voting for them. That's the amazing achievement, that they've been able to create this army that wins elections and is weaponized to further their very specific agenda, the agenda of the plutocrats at the top of this whole structure who profit from 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, September 6, 2025 8:12 AM

SECOND

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


If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/03/economy/trump-tariff-refund

American businesses have paid over $210 billion as of August 24 to cover the tariffs that US courts have determined are illegal. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that the court’s decision, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could result in the US Treasury having to “give back” tariff revenue collected.

That potentially dramatic turn in the tariff saga comes after a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Trump unlawfully leaned on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose across-the-board duties on countries. Trump had used those powers to push import tax rates as high as 50% on India and Brazil – and as high as 145% on China earlier this year.

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

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 8:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion


He won't lose. So don't worry about it.




Why are you always against America?

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

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

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 9:29 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Why are you always against America?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I am against Trumptards. I'm against Nazis, tax cheaters, rapists, thieves, liars and crooks such as Trump and 6ix. 6ix, don't claim you are not a crook. Your whole life is about getting something for nothing. That's why you brag about not working, but owning property. Trump doesn't work, either, and yet he has $billions. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Trump's crookiness:

Trump Family Amasses $5 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-6-billion-
fortune-after-crypto-launch-567faec5

Updated Sept. 1, 2025 4:24 pm ET

The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.

The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.

The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.

WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.

President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”

World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.

In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.

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

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 9:30 AM

SECOND

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


In my opinion, Trump II remains by far the worst president in American history—beating out the second-worst, either Trump I or Andrew Jackson. Trump is destroying vaccines and science and universities and renewable energy and sane AI policy and international trade and cheap, lifesaving foreign aid and the rule of law and everything else that’s good, and he’s destroying them because they’re good—because even if destroying them hurts his own voters and America’s standing in the world, it might hurt the educated elites even more. It’s almost superfluous to mention that, while Trump himself is neither of these things, the MAGA movement that will anoint his successor now teems with antisemites and Holocaust “revisionists.”

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9130

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 7:53 AM

SECOND

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


The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously

At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined.

By Tom Nichols | September 5, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-parade-china-p
utin-xi-kim/684113/

The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.

Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.

Nor has Trump fared very well with the other two members of this cheery 21st-century incarnation of SPECTRE. In the midst of Trumpian chaos, Xi is adroitly positioning China as the new face of international stability and responsibility. He has even made a show of offering partnership to China’s rival and former enemy India: Chinese diplomats last month said that China stands with India against the American “bully” when Trump was, for some reason, trying to impose 50 percent tariffs on India.

Likewise, the North Koreans, after playing to Trump’s ego and his ignorance of international affairs during meetings in the president’s first term, have continued their march to a nuclear arsenal that within years could grow to be larger than the United Kingdom’s. Trump was certain that he could negotiate with Kim, but the perfumed days of “love letters” between Trump and Kim are long over. Pyongyang’s leadership seems to know that it costs them little to humor Trump politely, but that they should reserve serious discussion for the leaders of serious countries.

Trump responded to his exclusion from the gala in Beijing by acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is. As the event was taking place, Trump took to his social-media site—of course—to express his hurt feelings with a cringe-inducing attempt at a zinger. “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”

Now, the reality is that Russia, China, and North Korea are conspiring against America, but it is beneath both the dignity and the power of an American president to whine about it. Trump continued his unseemly carping with a demand that China recognize the valor of the Americans who died in the Pacific:

The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and 'blood' that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader. Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!

This message does not exactly project confidence and leadership; instead, it sounds like the grousing of a man beset by insecurities. A more self-assured commander in chief would have ignored the parade and, if asked about it, would have said something to the effect that the United States has always respected the sacrifices of our allies in World War II. But not Trump: He petulantly declared that he would not have attended even if the cool kids had invited him.

Authoritarians are unfortunately in good company in treating Trump as an incompetent leader. Even America’s allies have recognized that Trump may be their formal partner, but that they mostly get things done with the American president by soothing his ego and working around him. After Trump emerged from the summit in Anchorage essentially parroting Putin’s talking points, seven top European leaders rushed to Washington to tell Trump that he had done well and that they truly, really respected him, but that perhaps he should hold off on being a co-signer of Kremlin policy.

Trump’s damage to American power and prestige would be less severe if the president had a foreign policy and a team to execute it. He has neither: Trump ran for president mostly for personal reasons, including to stay out of prison, and his foreign policy, such as it is, is merely an extension of his personal interests. He holds summits, issues social-media pronouncements, and engages in photo ops mostly, it seems, either to burnish his claim to a Nobel Prize or to change the news cycle when issues such as the economy (or the Jeffrey Epstein files) get too much traction.

Worse, Trump is no longer surrounded by people who care about foreign affairs or can competently step in and create consistent policy. In his first term, Trump had a secretary of defense, James Mattis, who helped to create a national-defense strategy, a document that Trump might have ignored but was at least promulgated to a national-security establishment that needed direction from someone, somewhere. Now, at the Pentagon, Trump has Pete Hegseth, who shows little apparent inclination or ability to think about complexities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was supposed to be one of the new “adults in the room,” but he has instead become a man in a Velcro suit, with the president sticking jobs and responsibilities onto him without any further guidance. He has been reduced to sitting glumly in White House press sprays with foreign leaders while Trump embarrasses himself and his guests. Meanwhile, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is spending her time trying to root out the spies she thinks hate the president. Unfortunately, the agents she’s hunting are Americans, which must bring a smile to Xi’s face and perhaps even produce a belly laugh from former KGB officer Putin.

America is adrift. It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him. Little wonder that the men who gathered in Beijing—three autocrats whose nations are collectively pointing many hundreds of nuclear weapons at the United States—feel free to act as if they don’t even think twice about Trump or the country he leads.

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 8:04 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Crypto Dealings Now Have the Perfect Cover

In recent weeks, the family has dressed up its business dealings in the veneer of legitimacy.

By Will Gottsegen | September 6, 2025, 10:42 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/trump-crypto-wo
rld-liberty-financial/684130/

The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.” Or how about the $TRUMP meme coin and accompanying gamified gala dinner for its biggest investors?

It has been easy, in part because of the bluster of the Trumps’ approach to promotion, to discount the family’s dalliances in crypto as a cash grab: The meme coin—which has no function except to facilitate gambling—almost immediately made Trump a crypto billionaire. But recently, the family has taken a decidedly different tack—less Trumpian bombast, and more sober promotion of its crypto businesses. On Wednesday, Eric Trump joined CNBC after American Bitcoin, the crypto-mining company he co-founded, went public and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For the most part, he sounded like any other C-suite exec talking up their company after an IPO: “Watching what the stock is doing right now is just—it’s beautiful and incredibly rewarding.”

The public debut of American Bitcoin is just one way that the Trump family’s crypto play has been dressed up over the past two weeks. The crypto firm Trump and his sons co-founded, World Liberty Financial, has aggressively expanded; the media company behind Truth Social has hoovered up millions in even more crypto; and that same company created a new crypto treasury to hold the stockpile. This blitz has proven to be enormously consequential (and enormously lucrative) for the maturing Trump crypto empire. Each of these moves has a veneer of legitimacy that the family’s earlier crypto dealings lacked: They are much easier to defend than an Iron Man–inspired NFT, while doing just as much to enrich Trump and his sons.

The core of this maneuver is World Liberty Financial, which, despite counting Trump’s three sons (including 19-year-old Barron) as founders, is by far the most legitimate-seeming operation in Trump’s crypto universe. It is goofy—a “gold paper” issued by the company is plastered with a cartoon of Trump’s face—but the company has attached itself to one of the most bulletproof parts of the crypto industry: stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies pegged to the price of another asset, such as the U.S. dollar, and are typically backed by reserves. Think of them like digital cash. Thanks to a couple years of widespread adoption, stablecoins are now broadly accepted as the crypto industry’s most robust innovation—one of the only true use cases in an industry that has long sought to prove it’s more than just an avenue for speculation.

The company’s stablecoin, USD1, launched back in March—but this week, the company moved to unlock a large tranche of what are known as “governance tokens.” All governance tokens, in theory, can bring a level of accountability and democracy to a crypto project, conferring voting rights that can influence corporate-governance decisions—a little like how shareholders use voting stock to sway public companies. Except that in this case, the governance power conferred by the tokens seems mostly symbolic: World Liberty Financial’s management team likely owns so much of the coin that it can veto the decisions. The Trumps alone hold nearly a quarter of the governance tokens that exist. The family netted as much as $5 billion in “paper wealth” once the tokens hit the market this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. The tokens, as of today, are likely the Trump family’s most valuable asset, eclipsing all their golf courses and hotels.

It’s a great example of the family’s new crypto philosophy in action. World Liberty Finance certainly presents as a legitimate cryptocurrency business, but it is also, like the Trump meme coin, a way to put the Trump brand to work and potentially capitalize on the office of the presidency. In an emailed statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s crypto dealings: “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read. Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”

Just in case the stablecoin operation wasn’t enough to pass the legitimacy test, come Monday, Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, a new crypto company that exists mostly to buy lots of a single coin, will join American Bitcoin as a public company and be listed on Nasdaq. Tellingly, neither of these firms chose to go public through a traditional IPO, which involves all sorts of regulatory hurdles and public disclosures. By fast-tracking these stocks’ public debuts, the Trumps are attempting to prove that these are real companies—legitimate assets backed by the fundamentals, rather than vaporware. Nasdaq, unlike some of the exchanges that listed the Trump meme coin, can be halted and controlled.

Few serious crypto investors could support Trump’s meme coin with a straight face (Anthony Scaramucci famously called it “Idi Amin level corruption”), but today those same investors can point to American Bitcoin, or to World Liberty Financial’s stablecoins, or to Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, and say, See? You can still buy the meme coin, or the Trump NFTs, or any of those other, more questionable, assets—but in the realer parts of their crypto empire, the Trumps have a perfect cover.

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 10:07 AM

SECOND

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


More than $1.1 trillion in Texas real estate is at risk from severe climate change-related disasters, a new Realtor.com report shows, as the Trump administration downplays the danger and deletes research that could help protect from future storms.

Nationwide, one in four homes faces severe or extreme risks from flooding, hurricanes or wildfires, the real estate company found in partnership with Insurify, an insurance data firm. More than $12 trillion in real estate is at high risk nationally, and worsening extreme weather is driving insurance premiums higher.

“Climate risks are no longer a distant threat for U.S. housing—they are a present reality that put a large chunk of U.S. real estate value at risk,” Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, said in the report. “In many markets, the gap between perceived risk and actual risk is sizable, particularly for flooding.”

. . .

Dessler and the authors of the Realtor.com report agree that most Americans do not understand their risk and are not economically prepared.

“If I tell you you’re in a hundred-year floodplain, you think the odds of your house flooding are really low,” Dessler told me. “Over a 30-year mortgage, your chance of flooding is about one in three.”

Our prosperity and safety depend on making well-informed decisions about growing climate risks. For that, we need reliable data. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is working to conceal it.

More at https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=ac278b89-94d8-4ccb-b5b9-4e53a31c16c3&share=true

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 1:00 PM

SECOND

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


The Dangers of Fiscal Dominance

How Trump could Zimbabwify America

By Paul Krugman | Sep 07, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-fiscal-dominance

Donald Trump wants to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve and assume personal control of monetary policy. It’s clearly an obsession with him and his efforts just keep getting more extreme.

First he spent several months haranguing Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. Next he announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, on the basis of extremely thin accusations involving mortgages she took out before she joined the Board. When Cook filed suit, claiming — almost surely correctly — that he had no legal right to fire her, his Justice Department upped the ante, saying that it was considering criminal charges. And need I add that three other members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have made the same mortgage arrangement as Lisa Cook, as well as the parents of Bill Pulte, Trump’s hired assassin in this matter.

Unless the Supreme Court is more in Trump’s back-pocket than is already evident, I don’t Trump will prevail in firing Cook. But his over-arching goal, clearly, is to personally intimidate Fed officials — “get in our way,” the White House is saying, “and we will ruin your life.”

Meanwhile, Trump has nominated Stephen Miran, chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, to fill a vacancy on the Board. Incredibly, Miran says that he will not resign his current appointment. Rather, he intends to just take a leave of absence. Having an employee of the executive branch serve as a member of the Board would be completely unprecedented. An act like that is effectively a textbook case of the elimination of Fed independence.

And trashing the Fed’s independence is clearly a top agenda item of Trump’s accomplices: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has just published a remarkably sleazy article smearing the Fed. More on that in a future post.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-feds-gain-of-function-monetary-policy-
ac0dc38a

There is no real dispute over what Trump is doing. Trump has announced that not only should the Fed lower the Fed funds rate, the short-term interest rate that the Fed controls, but that it should be lowered by 300 basis points. That would be dropping the current rate from 4.5 to 1.5. That’s an enormous drop – one which has never been done except in the teeth of a deep recession.

Why is Trump demanding this? In answering that question, one should never rule out the role of sheer ignorance. Trump may imagine that lower short-term interest rates will lift him in the polls, while ignoring the high likelihood that such a steep fall in short-term interest rates will raise expected inflation and, as a result, long-term rates will go up, not down. And sometimes he seems to think of interest rate reductions as a sort of trophy, like an award you get for supposedly winning a golf tournament.

But there is another reason that might explain why Trump wants to end the Fed’s independence — and this reason makes economists very, very nervous. For it’s likely that Trump is seeking to establish “fiscal dominance” of monetary policy — a policy regime in which the Fed’s actions are dictated, not by an effort to achieve low inflation and full employment, but by the desire to avoid hard choices on taxes and spending.

So I’m going to devote today’s primer to fiscal dominance: What it means and how it has played out in the past. Beyond the paywall I’ll talk about four ways a central bank that has lost its independence can enable fiscal irresponsibility:

1. Seigniorage: Using the printing press to cover budget deficits

2. Financial repression: Using low rates to reduce budget deficits

3. Goosing the economy: not exactly fiscal dominance, but political dominance

4. Expropriation through inflation: Inflating away government debt.

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 1:16 PM

SECOND

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


Why This Administration Can’t Fill Its Jobs

By David A. Graham | September 5, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/trump-administ
ration-staff-jobs/684125/

The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Rubio, who was serving as secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID. (He’s since handed the latter to Russell Vought, who now also has three titles.) Three of these roles are subject to Senate confirmation; Rubio has been confirmed, and for that matter nominated, only as secretary of state. Trump has not put any nominee forward for the other two positions.

From top roles on down, the Trump administration continues to struggle to find people who can and will fill jobs, leaving the president to rely on a small circle of advisers, each playing multiple roles. The result is short-staffing and conflicts of interest that help explain why the executive branch has been bad at accomplishing not only its statutory responsibilities but also some of its political goals.

Consider Stephen Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Trump has nominated him to fill a recently vacated seat on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Miran told senators during a hearing yesterday that if he is confirmed, he will not resign from the CEA.

“I have received advice from counsel that what is required is an unpaid leave of absence from the Council of Economic Advisers,” Miran said. “And so, considering the term for which I’m being nominated is a little bit more than four months, that is what I will be taking.” (Miran said that if confirmed to a full term, he would resign.)

In other words, Miran would be simultaneously serving (albeit without pay) a president who has demanded that the Fed lower interest rates and sitting on the ostensibly independent board that sets interest rates. Conflicts of interest aren’t usually quite so obvious. The claim that an attorney advised Miran that his approach is fine is not encouraging: This administration seems to be able to get a lawyer to sign off on practically any arrangement. That doesn’t mean the public should accept it. But don’t worry—Miran demurred when a senator asked if he was Trump’s “puppet.”

Somehow, this is not the most disturbing case. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official, was narrowly confirmed as a federal appeals judge in July. But between that vote and taking his spot on the bench, Bove continued to work at the Justice Department, reportedly attending both internal meetings and a public event—a highly unusual arrangement. Once again, this didn’t appear to be an explicit violation of the judiciary’s rules, because he hadn’t yet been sworn in; nevertheless, he risked working on issues that could come before him in court. It doesn’t take a law degree to see why this arrangement looks bad, especially at a moment when faith in the courts as a check on the executive branch is in question.

“Socializing with Trump is fine. Advising Trump is not fine. Putting himself physically in a place where it looks like he is identifying with the president’s political agenda is not fine,” the legal ethicist Stephen Gillers told The New York Times. Then again, Bove has never seemed all that concerned about appearing to be anything other than a Trump sycophant. During his confirmation process, he refused to say whether a third presidential term was permitted, despite the clear language of the Constitution, and accounts from several whistleblowers contradict statements he made in his confirmation hearing, which suggests that he may have lied to senators. (He denies this.)

I first wrote about Trump’s use of dual-hatting, which is the term for one person filling multiple jobs, back in May. At the time, the possibility existed that this was a temporary state of affairs. Now it’s starting to look more permanent. Despite a focus on identifying qualified nominees, a key point in Project 2025, Trump’s pace of confirmations for top jobs is roughly the same as it was in his first, shambolic term. This comes even though Republicans control the Senate and have not voted down any nominees. Democrats have tried to slow down various appointments, and the GOP is considering the “nuclear option” to circumvent Democrats’ efforts, but they can’t confirm someone who hasn’t even been nominated, as is the case for nearly 300 roles.

Jobs that don’t have a person devoted to the work full-time are bad for effective governing. For example, the Department of Homeland Security recently told the nonprofit watchdog American Oversight that since early April, it has not been saving text messages exchanged by top officials, as required by law. (DHS later told the Times that it does preserve texts but did not explain why it had previously denied American Oversight’s requests for them.) Responsibility for collecting public records and enforcing laws falls on the National Archives, which Rubio now runs, but he seems unlikely to crack down on DHS, even if he had the time to concentrate on the matter.

An ideological case for failing to appoint individuals for each opening is more plausible: Traditional conservatives who prefer that government do less might cheer this. But as I wrote last week, Trump is attempting to establish an extremely intrusive government that flexes its muscles in nearly every area of American life. That’s hard to do with a skeleton crew, and it sometimes means staffers trying to do things that they don’t really have the authority to do.

Or, in other cases, the expertise. This week, the Department of, uh, War reportedly approved plans to detail as many as 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges. A shortage of immigration judges is a real problem that has dogged the U.S. government for years. A person who comes to the United States and requests asylum may wait for years before they receive a hearing or an interview. Some of those people will be accepted, but some will not, and the prospect of spending years in the U.S. while waiting is understandably attractive for migrants.

That doesn’t mean military lawyers are a good solution, and not simply because the Pentagon seems to have its hands full of tricky legal situations, including the soft launch of martial law in American cities and what look like extrajudicial murders of suspected drug smugglers (the administration has said that it acted lawfully, but it hasn’t offered a detailed explanation). Immigration law is notoriously complex. Bringing in military lawyers “makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement,” Ben Johnson, the head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Associated Press.

This is the latest instance of Trump turning to the armed forces to do things for which they aren’t trained or prepared. A militarized society isn’t merely a threat to the Constitution and freedom; it’s also unlikely to work very well. Nor is a Federal Reserve that’s a subsidiary of the White House, or a federal bench that is a wing of the Department of Justice, which itself appears to be an appendage of Trump’s personal legal team. These moves have the same ultimate effect as Trump’s efforts to steamroll the judiciary and seize powers from Congress: They create a president who is worse-informed, worse-advised, and ever more powerful.

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 1:39 PM

SECOND

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


"Donald Trump has completely lost it. He’s not only planning to go to war with Venezuela — to manufacture a crisis that gives him cover to implement Project 2025 and stay in power forever — but he’s also preparing to go to war with America itself. Plans are on the table to unleash the National Guard on cities like Chicago and Portland," Parnas wrote. "And make no mistake, folks: none of this is about the safety or security of our country. It’s all part of Trump’s authoritarian playbook — an orchestrated campaign of chaos designed for one purpose only: to cement himself in power for good."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-lost-it-ex-insider-flags
-evidence-president-prepping-to-stay-in-power-forever/ar-AA1M3eU5

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

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 4:04 PM

SECOND

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


New report outlines how many people might lose SNAP in Greater Boston under Trump bill
About 7% of Boston-area SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their food assistance thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

By Morgan Rousseau | September 7, 2025 | 8:47 AM

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/09/07/new-report-outlines-
how-many-people-might-lose-snap-in-greater-boston-under-trump-bill/

A new report from a Boston research center sheds light on how the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill will affect people who rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in Greater Boston.
https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2025/september/mtm-snap

About 40,000 adult SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their food assistance due to the new federal law, according to the Meeting the Moment: SNAP Cuts and the Local Fallout report released Tuesday by Boston Indicator, a research center at the nonprofit Boston Foundation. That figure translates to roughly 7% of adults who use SNAP in the Boston area.

Researchers also found that about 9,600 legally present immigrants in Massachusetts may now lose SNAP eligibility under the new rules.

The sweeping bill includes cuts and reforms to safety-net programs, including SNAP and Medicaid, and tightens work and eligibility requirements. While the bill provides tax benefits to higher-income households, opponents say it unfairly targets lower-income families who will be forced to struggle more with health coverage and food assistance.

The report states that as of July 2025, Greater Boston accounted for 56 percent of Massachusetts’ SNAP caseload—361,473 cases and 578,686 clients.

The largest concentrations are in cities such as Lawrence and Brockton, where more than one-third of residents rely on SNAP benefits. Residents of Lowell, Lynn, Chelsea, Randolph, Wareham, Methuen, and Haverhill also heavily rely on food assistance, with between 22 and 28 percent of people in those cities receiving benefits.

In Boston, approximately 21 percent of the population, or 138,523 clients, rely on SNAP benefits.

“In a state as wealthy as Massachusetts, no one should go hungry,” researchers wrote in the report. “Yet even here, many families struggle to afford healthy food. For decades, [SNAP] has helped close that gap. But the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ recently passed by Congress and signed by President Trump risks undercutting progress we have made in reducing food insecurity in Massachusetts.”

Researchers said the new rules will shift SNAP administrative costs to the state, forcing Massachusetts to cover 75% of SNAP administration costs—up from 50%. This would have resulted in an additional $58 million in fiscal year 2025, increasing total state costs to $175 million, according to the report.

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

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