REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 13, 2024 08:08
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Friday, August 13, 2021 7:22 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

snicker
Afghans will live in the mess they created for themselves. The New York Times ran a piece and got someone to go on the record: A senior officer in the country’s military, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation, noted that many Taliban conquests are carried out by a small force of 10 or so fighters from whom it should be easy to take back districts. Yet even if they were to do so, he said, Afghan security forces would be unlikely to hold them because of weak defenses, weak local leaders and a lack of central government support.

Bashir Ahmad Nemani, a local police commander in the northern province of Badakhshan, saw those weaknesses firsthand. The province, including his district of Khwahan, is now almost entirely in the hands of the Taliban — a bitter pill for the government as it was the one area in Afghanistan that resisted the insurgents throughout their reign in the late 1990s.

This time, faced with a Taliban onslaught, Badakhshan’s provincial police chief “promised reinforcements,” said Mr. Nemani. “They never came.” The local militia working with the government quickly collapsed.

“There was no option,” he said. “Everything was destroyed. The police collapsed.” Mr. Nemani fled across the border to Tajikistan with six of his men.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210808210651/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/08/08/world/asia/afghanistan-government-propaganda.html

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 10:21 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Over the past 20 years, the US has spent around $1 trillion in Afghanistan, only to return to square one as soon as it departed. Nation-building is expensive, and US president Joe Biden has chosen to spend the money at home rather than in a hostile, complex overseas environment that he feels is no longer America’s problem. “I do not regret my decision [to pull the US out of Afghanistan],” said Biden on Aug. 10. “Afghan leaders have to come together. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation.”

https://qz.com/2047170/why-is-the-us-sending-troops-back-to-afghanista
n/

The Afghans knew since February 2020 that America would leave in 14 months. 17 months later, the Afghans are not fighting effectively for their nation.

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

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Saturday, August 14, 2021 7:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


The problem with Republican posturing over guns and abortion

Supporters of banning abortions and unrestricted access to rapid-fire weapons have something in common — a preference for bait and switch debate tactics. They provide emotionally charged justifications for policies that in reality have less politically potent rationales.

This is their response to a dilemma. If they did not use exaggerated melodramatic rhetoric that calls for policies much more disruptive than those they actually support, it would be harder to sway public opinion.

For the anti-choice side, making it illegal for women to decide — based on the circumstances of their lives — whether or not to go through with the difficult process of carrying a pregnancy to term because of the religious or philosophical objections of others is a hard sell. So, they label it "murder." But they lack the courage of their conviction — in this case literally. If abortion is murder, a woman who voluntarily undergoes one is a murderer. Obviously, if she took a one-year-old child to a person who she knew was going to kill the child, and she actively assisted in the act, she should — and would — be criminally liable. But when Donald Trump blurted out that he favored prosecuting the potential mother, he was immediately contradicted by his new-found anti-abortion allies, who understand that the overwhelming majority of people do not favor jailing women who have had abortions because they do not think she has murdered anyone.

Of course, an objection may be made to abortion on moral, religious or other grounds. But invoking the forces of the criminal law to make this argument legally binding on those who disagree is much harder to justify than demanding an end to unpunished murder.

In the case of those who wish to allow untrammeled access to automatic weapons and to prevent effective pre-sale background checks on the suitability of gun purchasers, the bait is the people’s right to resist an oppressive government.

More at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/567102-the-problem-with-posturing
-over-guns-and-abortion

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

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Saturday, August 14, 2021 9:47 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You said you were in the military.

Quit throwing around the term automatic like a Democrat.

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Saturday, August 14, 2021 10:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You said you were in the military.

Quit throwing around the term automatic like a Democrat.
It was Barney Frank, the Democrat who wrote the article, using "automatic". The bigger point Frank was making is about how these so-called "debates" with Republicans never get to the bottom of why Republicans make their arguments in the way they do. There is a world of difference between how Republicans think and how successful people think, but Republicans think it is unfair that they have change how they think if they wannabe a success. They handle that by insisting they are already successful and retreating into their delusions of superiority, very much the same thing that the Confederates did before the Civil War.

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

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Monday, August 16, 2021 6:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Thursday night on Fox News, Laura Ingraham straightforwardly expressed the key challenge for capitalism: How can bosses get people to do awful, degrading jobs for little pay in order to make other people rich?

Capitalism has been grappling with this problem for hundreds of years, but as history and Ingraham show, the answer now is the same as it’s always been: The laboring classes must be forced into circumstances in which they must work or starve.

Laura Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing."

After the passage of the U.K.’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British officials openly debated what they were going to do once the people they’d enslaved were free to just leave the plantations. One key issue, particularly in the West Indies, was that there was a great deal of public land that could be claimed and farmed by anyone.

“Where there is land enough to yield an abundant subsistence to the whole population in return for slight labour,” wrote Lord Glenelg, the U.K. secretary of state for war and the colonies, “they will probably have no sufficient inducement to prefer the more toilsome existence of a regular labourer.”

The solution was obvious: Put a high price on the public land so the laboring population didn’t have the option to support themselves on it. This worked, and the British were largely able to convert their former slaves into their new employees.

Anyone who’s ever had a bad job — not just, say, cutting sugar cane, but also working the cash register at Burger King or selling shoes at JCPenney — knows that human beings will generally avoid this kind of work if they can.

It is also true that for an economy to function, there is a ton of work that has to be done. But what’s needed to make this happen depends on what you believe about human nature. Conservatives think people are fundamentally greedy and lazy, and so they must be forced to work by the lash of hunger. Ingraham once dated Larry Summers, treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and a director of the National Economic Council for President Barack Obama, who recently explained that it would be bad to allow people to work less because they’ll just use it to drink beer and watch TV. They clearly see humans the same way.

By contrast, progressives believe that people, under the right circumstances, are fundamentally creative and reasonable and will do the work with the correct incentives. Crucially, these incentives aren’t just about money and the length of the work week. It’s true that capitalism’s bad jobs tend to require long hours and are underpaid. But what makes bad jobs bad is as much or more the lack of control that employees have over working conditions and hence their lives in general.

“Maverick!: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace,” a book by Brazilian businessperson Ricardo Semler, describes how Semler transformed an industrial corporation he inherited from his father that was conventionally hierarchical into one that is largely democratically run. One key change is that employees choose their own salaries, and everyone’s salary is public. This would seem outlandish to American businesses — obviously, given the opportunity, workers will go nuts and bankrupt the company! — but the management of Semler’s corporation found that employees, with real control over their working lives and a genuine desire for the whole enterprise to succeed, tended to underpay themselves. Often the company had to encourage employees to pay themselves more.

Whether companies structured like Semler’s could work everywhere is unknown, since capitalism and capitalists generally hate the prospect of surrendering control. But there’s no reason for everyone else to think that work must be about a small number of people giving orders and the rest of us obeying them. For that reason, we should all be grateful to Laura Ingraham for making so clear the perspective of the employing class. Anything that gives us the ability to subsist without jobs, as they’re currently constituted, gives us leverage against our bosses. We should use it to think creatively about how work could be transformed.

More at https://theintercept.com/2021/08/14/laura-ingraham-capitalists-labor/

Download the free book Maverick by Ricardo Semler from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.ch/search.php?req=Ricardo+Semler

The company Ricardo Semler wrote about https://www.google.com/search?q=semco+brazil

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

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Monday, August 16, 2021 10:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Laura Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing."


Careful, Laura...

That's the same type of thinking that Leftists trying to inject untested vaccines in everyone is using. And since you goons at Fox"News" like to all pretend that you're religious, it's also very close to Mark of the Beast talk too.



Quote:
Anyone who’s ever had a bad job — not just, say, cutting sugar cane, but also working the cash register at Burger King or selling shoes at JCPenney — knows that human beings will generally avoid this kind of work if they can.


25 years ago, these jobs were almost exclusively done by kids for fun money and to save for college which was quite affordable compared to prices today.

Now that we've shipped all the manufacturing AND most of the tech jobs out of the country, grown ass men and women are fighting for these shit jobs, often working 2 or even 3 of them at the same time just to get by. No health insurance at the same time either, since in most states they've priced themselves out of state assistance by working multiple part-time jobs to pay the bills.

What a way to live.


Laura Ingraham was born with a silver spoon up her ass and has never worked a day in her life, just like all of the other crooked media personalities and politicians.

Go flip your own fucking burgers bitch.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, August 16, 2021 10:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Quote:
Anyone who’s ever had a bad job — not just, say, cutting sugar cane, but also working the cash register at Burger King or selling shoes at JCPenney — knows that human beings will generally avoid this kind of work if they can.


25 years ago, these jobs were almost exclusively done by kids for fun money and to save for college which was quite affordable compared to prices today.
You are wrong. 50 years ago adults were working those crappy jobs. 6ix, my father worked at Burger King for pennies. I worked there too until the pain of standing on my feet all day made me follow my sisters' example of going to college. They became a nurse and a school teacher. I became an engineer because it was manly, graduating when I was 25 years old, 4 years older than my sisters when they graduated because I made a wrong decision by detouring into Vietnam. My brother-in-law worked for JCPenney . . . selling shoes. He votes for Trump.

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

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Monday, August 16, 2021 10:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Quote:
Anyone who’s ever had a bad job — not just, say, cutting sugar cane, but also working the cash register at Burger King or selling shoes at JCPenney — knows that human beings will generally avoid this kind of work if they can.


25 years ago, these jobs were almost exclusively done by kids for fun money and to save for college which was quite affordable compared to prices today.
You are wrong. 40 years ago adults were working those crappy jobs. 6ix, my father worked at Burger King for pennies. I worked there too until the pain of standing on my feet all day made me follow my sisters' example of going to college. They became a nurse and a school teacher. I became an engineer because it was manly, graduating when I was 25 years old, 4 years older than my sisters when they graduated because I made a wrong decision by detouring into Vietnam. My brother-in-law worked for JCPenney . . . selling shoes. He votes for Trump.


That's the problem with anecdotal evidence then, I'm afraid.

Where I lived, in the mid to late 90's when I had a shitty job, the only ones doing shitty jobs around me were the kids. Outside of the customers, the only adults in those buildings were management.


P.S. And seriously dude. Why am I still hearing about Trump from you every single day?

If you haven't noticed, we've got a new douche in office screwing everything up right now.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 17, 2021 6:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's the problem with anecdotal evidence then, I'm afraid.

Where I lived, in the mid to late 90's when I had a shitty job, the only ones doing shitty jobs around me were the kids. Outside of the customers, the only adults in those buildings were management.


P.S. And seriously dude. Why am I still hearing about Trump from you every single day?

If you haven't noticed, we've got a new douche in office screwing everything up right now.
Is Trump dead? No. Is Trump highly regarded in Texas? Yes.

Is Biden screwing up? No. Is Biden poorly regarded in Texas? Yes.

Those are what you call anecdotal evidence.

If you asked Americans in a poll, what would be their the answer to "How many Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War?" Before Google, Americans would say 100,000. After Google? 3,000,000. More anecdotal evidence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-
fall-of-saigon-vietnam-comparison.html

If you google What percent of population are working poor you will be enlightened. The percentage is NOT constant over time. And it is not the same in every state in any particular year.
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percent+of+population+are+working
+poor

I'm not capable of explaining in a way that would change your mind, because I have tried many times with real people who are in the same location as I am, for example when we are hunting, but this is true: the world around you is actually not the same world as you see it from inside your head. Maybe their eyesight is poor; maybe they don't pay sufficient attention; maybe their beliefs are a poor guide to reality; maybe it is their personality; maybe ... you could go on and on. For many reasons, most people will never understand the world-outside is not the world-inside until the world kills them or collapses on them. The few people who do adjust their world-inside to match the actual world-outside tend to do MUCH better and live longer, as would a near-sighted person who gets eyeglasses or has cataracts removed late in life, but the rest of humanity can't be bothered to adjust their vision. They already believe their vision is almost perfect, but they go through life almost blind, bumping into things unless they keep to routine and keep far away from new/complicated environments.

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

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Wednesday, August 18, 2021 7:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


A story about mental illness: The Millions of Christs of America

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/08/the-millions-of-christs-
of-america.html

As an undergraduate History major, I reluctantly dug up a halfway natural science class to fulfill my college’s general education requirement. It was called Psychology as a Natural Science. However, the massive textbook assigned to us turned out to be chock full of interesting tidbits ranging from optical illusions to odd tales. One of the oddest was the story of Leon, Joseph, and Clyde: three men who each fervently believed he was Jesus Christ. The three originally did not know each other, but a social psychologist named Milton Rokeach brought them together for two years in an Ypsilanti, Michigan mental hospital to experiment on them. He later wrote a book titled The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Rokeach hypothesized that since Jesus exists by the same code that the Immortals in Highlander later stated as “There can only be one,” these three men might be cured of their delusions when confronted with others who insisted likewise. Of course he was very wrong. Much like Highlander’s Immortals, they simply fell into conflict. When faced with the others’ unrelenting presence, each dug their heels in and doubled down on their delusions. Even Rokeach’s jaw-dropping manipulations, which included a string of outrageous lies and elaborate fabrications, could not dissuade them.

I’ve recently been pondering this infamous tale of poorly conceived psychological experimentation because in it I see reflections of problems currently plaguing America. Except instead of being thrown together in confinement, people with similar mental disorders are now finding each other on their own. And instead of a psychological professional at least trying (albeit in a highly flawed manner) to cure them, the medium of connection is the largely unregulated and even more manipulative internet. And, finally, instead of insisting there can only be one, mentally ill people are now reinforcing and reduplicating each other’s delusions.

Of course you don’t have to be mentally ill to believe most of the world wide web’s whack-a-doo conspiracy theories. One need merely be stupid or gullible, or in most cases perhaps, just a bit desperate. Take for example the entirely discredited “theory” that childhood vaccines cause autism. It is very understandable that the trauma of conceiving and parenting a severely autistic child would break someone just a little bit, to the point that they demand an explanation that satisfies them more than what we currently know about autism’s causes, which is very little. For some, “very little” just won’t do. Furthermore, the little we do know, including that genetics might be a factor, may contribute to a sense of misplaced guilt that some simply cannot shoulder, leading them to grasp at whatever else is out there. And what’s out there is an internet-fueled story about vaccines.

Funnel it through the internet, and suddenly it’s the conspiracy theory that’s infectious, spreading from the desperate to the naive. By 2011, 18% of Americans believed this incredibly dangerous hooey. That’s roughly 50 million people.

Likewise, you don’t have to be mentally ill to sincerely believe that the Earth is flat, that the Holocaust is a hoax, that the moon landing was faked, that Princess Diana was murdered, that 9-11 was an inside job, or that JFK was killed by the CIA or the Mafia or the Cubans. You might very well be mentally ill. But you don’t have to be.

However, as we move up the ladder to more and more ludicrous internet conspiracy theories, it begins to seem as if some sort of mental illness is a prerequisite for full faith. That is not a professional assertion. Psychology as a Natural Science was a fun course, but not life changing. I stuck with my major and became a Historian, not a mental health professional, and I respect professional boundaries. But just as any reasonable person can make lay interpretations about the past, any reasonable person can conclude that your brain must not be working properly if you sincerely believe that the world’s leading politicians, business leaders, and artists are actually blood-sucking Lizard People from outer space responsible for the Holocaust and 9-11, and hell bent on ruling the world and enslaving humanity.

The appropriate lay word here would be “crazy.” That’s what I said to my partner about a new friend who began sending her Lizard People conspiracy theory emails. Not as a joke, which is what my partner first assumed. But as educational material. As in, this is real. “Your new friend is crazy,” I told her. “Stop hanging out with her.” She did. Yet the emails about Lizard People and other lunacy continued. So she blocked her.

But of course it’s not so simple. At least not for us as a society. This isn’t about just three avatars of Christ locked up in an Ypsilanti hospital, with any other people clinging to the same delusion scattered and isolated across the country. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions who believe either in Lizard People or other outrageous conspiracies. And they are not scattered. They are not isolated. They are finding each through the internet, where they reinforce and expand their delusions and recruit new believers, just as this woman attempted to recruit my partner. They are voting. They are running for office. They are serving in Congress. They were among those who stormed the Capitol at the president’s urging, and attempted to violently overturn a national election.

That is only half of the article. More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/08/the-millions-of-christs-
of-america.html

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

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Wednesday, August 18, 2021 7:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Another story about mental illness:

Malignant normality: The psychological theory that explains naked emperors, narcissists and Nazis

https://www.salon.com/2021/08/12/malignant-normality-the-psychological
-theory-that-explains-naked-emperors-narcissists-and-nazis/

There are many variations to Hans Christian Andersen's classic literary folktale "The Emperor's New Clothes," but most have the same basic plot points: A vain emperor is duped by two con men into buying clothes that don't exist. They trick him by saying that the non-existent fabric is actually visible, but only stupid and incompetent people can't see it. The emperor pretends that he can see the clothes, and then ordinary people follow his lead — whether because they believe him, or because they are simply afraid to state otherwise. It is only when a child blurts out that he is naked that the illusion is shattered.

Andersen was unfamiliar with the psychological concept known as malignant normality, but his tale captures it perfectly. The folktale also teaches an important lesson about standing by one's own common sense, even when social pressures are insurmountable, and remembering that confidence in your correctness is not enough on its own — particularly if those around you don't buy in too. And the idea — of a narcissist with power and/or popularity normalizing an "alternate reality" that is patently absurd — clearly has analogues in schoolyard politics, global politics, and everything in-between.

The concept of malignant normality, as explained by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, is rooted in history — specifically, in our understanding of Nazi Germany. Lifton argued that many Nazi doctors weren't active ideologues, but were willing to send Jews to gas chambers because this was their job — even though they had taken a hippocratic oath.

The reality of institutionalized genocide, which had not seemed plausible to Germans only a dozen years earlier, had become a malignant normal. Not everyone had to buy into the ideas of Nazism, at least not in full. They simply had to live in a society where actions that would usually be considered atrocious are instead perceived as routine. In turn, while they didn't have to believe in Hitler's lies, they had to at least accept that a social order based around those lies could be legitimate. The moral system and fundamental political beliefs of millions of people had been radically altered — and all of it based on a narcissist's word.

That last detail — and all of it based on a narcissist's word — is crucial to understanding malignant normality, clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula told Salon.

More at https://www.salon.com/2021/08/12/malignant-normality-the-psychological
-theory-that-explains-naked-emperors-narcissists-and-nazis/

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

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Wednesday, August 18, 2021 9:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's the problem with anecdotal evidence then, I'm afraid.

Where I lived, in the mid to late 90's when I had a shitty job, the only ones doing shitty jobs around me were the kids. Outside of the customers, the only adults in those buildings were management.


P.S. And seriously dude. Why am I still hearing about Trump from you every single day?

If you haven't noticed, we've got a new douche in office screwing everything up right now.


FACTS:

Quote:
Is Trump dead? No. Is Trump highly regarded in Texas? Yes.


OPINION:

Quote:
Is Biden screwing up? No.


FACT:

Quote:
Is Biden poorly regarded in Texas? Yes.



Quote:
Those are what you call anecdotal evidence.


No. You have no idea what anecdotal evidence is. Go look it up.

I've grown weary conversing with the retarded.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Thursday, August 19, 2021 7:42 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


The Tax Policy Center estimates that last year nearly 107 million households, or about 61 percent, owed no income tax or even received tax credits from the government. The share of non-payers will decline to about 102 million or 57 percent this year.

The importance of the refundable credits is clear when you look at families with children. For example, this year 70 percent of all those families and 84 percent of unmarried people with dependents (who file as heads of household) will pay no federal income tax.

More at https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/covid-19-pandemic-drove-huge-te
mporary-increase-households-did-not-pay-federal-income-tax

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

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Friday, August 20, 2021 6:04 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


A Conservative brilliantly explains what is wrong with angry white men

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," conservative commentator and U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols went into an extended explanation about the rising tide of angry middle-aged white men that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump and why their reasoning is dead wrong.

Promoting his book, "Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within of our Modern Democracy," Nichols explained that they are wallowing in "poisonous nostalgia" because they believe the world is coming apart before their eyes.

"We want to believe things are not our fault and things are so terrible and we would do better and wouldn't have to be so angry if things weren't so awful all the time," he told host Joe Scarborough. "Every age has its advantages and disadvantages. but the notion that somehow in 2021 -- when we're living longer, healthier, the world is mostly at peace, whether people want to believe that or not, it's true -- people want to believe this is the worst time ever, and it's a poisonous nostalgia that looks back and there's no way a democratic government can keep up with that unless they can invent a time machine."

With co-host Willie Geist asking about former president Donald Trump running on lost jobs as part of his "Make America Great Again" campaign, Nichols explained that the decline of industrial jobs is not a recent phenomenon.

"I do not come from a privileged family, my parents were Depression-era high school dropouts. I grew up among factories that by the time I was a child were empty and rotting, " he recalled. "I played in abandoned -- with abandoned equipment and empty factories and coal yards and railroad trestles. I write about that this morning in USA Today, there are two things about that. A lot of that happened before people were willing to admit that happened. I talked to a friend in a book and said I remember when all those factories were full. I said that was impossible; we broke the windows in that factory when we were 11, like 50 years ago. People have convinced themselves there was once this golden age they remember that was only taken away in the last few years."

"I had a friend who, you know, working-class guy I went to school with since we were small children, spends his weekends on his boat, and he says everything is changed, it's awful."

"What he means is the street we grew up on, we had a neighborhood barber, candy store and diner, and one of them is an antique shop now, another is a Spanish storefront church, and the library is closed," he elaborated. "He just wants it to be -- it's like a mid-life crisis for a lot of white males for whom they want it to be 1969 again. I think that the problem of becoming a minority is really anxiety-producing for a lot of them. But again, the answer to that is more democracy, not some kind of illiberal backlash and trying to turn the clock back by force. But they've been told by politicians and political entrepreneurs that with just enough willpower and rage and anger and resentment they can turn the hands of time back and, you know, make it 1965 again."

"I think anyone who is nostalgic for the 1970s - I talk about this in the book -- people see the 70s as a benchmark," he added. "I was a teenager in the 70s and I can not imagine a decade I would rather not go back to in my hometown and the way I grew up. But people have, you know, sanitized these memories and turned them into sepia-toned photographs in their minds that aren't true."

More at https://www.rawstory.com/angry-white-men-trump/

Our Own Worst Enemy
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Own-Worst-Enemy-Democracy/dp/0197518877/

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

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Friday, August 20, 2021 11:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A Conservative brilliantly explains what is wrong with angry white men...


Quote:
...Promoting his book...


Fuck your book dude.

Enjoy Trump for 4 more years once we vote him in again.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Saturday, August 21, 2021 6:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fuck your book dude.

Enjoy Trump for 4 more years once we vote him in again.
I know you will want to read the book called The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge. From introduction:

Back in the late 1980s, when I was working in Washington, DC, I learned how quickly people in even casual conversation would immediately instruct me in what needed to be done in any number of areas, especially in my own areas of arms control and foreign policy. (As usual, it was what “they” should do, as in “they ought to ....”) I was young and not yet a seasoned expert, but I was astonished at the way people who did not have the first clue about those subjects would confidently direct me on how best to make peace between Moscow and Washington.

To some extent, this was understandable. Politics invites discussion. And especially during the Cold War, when the stakes were global annihilation, people wanted to be heard. I accepted that this was just part of the cost of doing business in the public policy world. Over time, I found that other specialists in various policy areas had the same experiences, with laypeople subjecting them to ill-informed disquisitions on taxes, budgets, immigration, the environment, and many other subjects. If you’re a policy expert, it goes with the job.

In later years, however, I started hearing the same stories from doctors. And from lawyers. And from teachers. And, as it turns out, from many other professionals whose advice is usually not contradicted easily. These stories astonished me: they were not about patients or clients asking sensible questions, but about those same patients and clients actively telling professionals why their advice was wrong. In every case, the idea that the expert knew what he or she was doing was dismissed almost out of hand.

Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so many issues, and with such anger. Again, it may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.

This makes it all the harder for experts to push back and to insist that people come to their senses. No matter what the subject, the argument always goes down the drain of an enraged ego and ends with minds unchanged, sometimes with professional relationships or even friendships damaged. Instead of arguing, experts today are supposed to accept such disagreements as, at worst, an honest difference of opinion. We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong ... well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.

The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Thomas M. Nichols
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/46750905-the-death-of-expertise-
the-campaign-against-established-knowledge-and-w

Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.ch/search.php?req=Tom+Nichols+Expertise

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

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Saturday, August 21, 2021 10:54 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fuck your book dude.

Enjoy Trump for 4 more years once we vote him in again.
I know you will want to read the book called The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge.


Nah. I'm reading Influence: The Power of Persuasion right now.

I don't waste my time with pseudo-intellectual books written for pseudo-intellectuals by pseudo-intellectuals.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Saturday, August 21, 2021 10:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Hey. Where's Ted, BTW?

Finally realized what a fuck up voting for Biden* was and in hiding, I presume.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Saturday, August 21, 2021 1:31 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nah. I'm reading Influence: The Power of Persuasion right now.

I don't waste my time with pseudo-intellectual books written for pseudo-intellectuals by pseudo-intellectuals.
Are you working on a legal way to swindle fools out of their money, 6ix? Because if you aren't working on a swindle, yet you're reading that book, you're wasting your time. I will quote from the 2021 version:

Chapter 4 Social Proof
Truths Are Us

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. —Eric Hoffer

A few years ago, the managers of a chain of restaurants in Beijing, China, partnered with researchers to accomplish something decidedly profitable—increasing the purchase of certain menu items in a way that was effective yet costless. They wanted to see if they could get customers to choose them more frequently without lowering the items’ prices or using more expensive ingredients or hiring a chef who had more experience with the dishes or paying a consultant to write more enticing descriptions of them on the menu. They wanted to see if, instead, they could just give the dishes a label that would do the trick. Although they found a label that worked particularly well, they were surprised it wasn’t one they’d thought to use previously for this purpose, such as “Specialty of the house” or “Our chef’s recommendation for tonight.” Rather, the label merely described the menu items as the restaurant’s “most popular.”

The outcome was impressive. Sales of each dish jumped by an average of 13 to 20 percent. Quite simply, the dishes became more popular because of their popularity. Notably, the increase occurred through a persuasive practice that was costless, completely ethical (the items were indeed the most popular), easy to implement, and yet never before employed by the managers. Something similar happened in London when a local brewery with a pub on its premises agreed to try an experiment. The pub placed a sign on the bar stating, truthfully, that the brewery’s most popular beer that week was its porter. Porter sales doubled immediately. Click, run.

https://libgen.unblockit.ch/search.php?req=Robert+B.+Cialdini

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

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Saturday, August 21, 2021 9:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nah. I'm reading Influence: The Power of Persuasion right now.

I don't waste my time with pseudo-intellectual books written for pseudo-intellectuals by pseudo-intellectuals.
Are you working on a legal way to swindle fools out of their money, 6ix? Because if you aren't working on a swindle, yet you're reading that book, you're wasting your time.


That Jamaican took every last dime with that scam.
It was worth it just to learn some slight of hand.
~Modest Mouse

I'm always adding to my tool collection.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 22, 2021 9:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nah. I'm reading Influence: The Power of Persuasion right now.

I don't waste my time with pseudo-intellectual books written for pseudo-intellectuals by pseudo-intellectuals.
Are you working on a legal way to swindle fools out of their money, 6ix? Because if you aren't working on a swindle, yet you're reading that book, you're wasting your time.


That Jamaican took every last dime with that scam.
It was worth it just to learn some slight of hand.
~Modest Mouse

I'm always adding to my tool collection.
Slights of Hand, Tool Collection -- what cute names for being a cheating, lying crook who hasn't been caught. 6ix, you (and every Trumptard I know) don't care that Trump hasn't paid his taxes. The excuse for not caring? IRS already has his tax returns which claim he paid nothing for 20 years because of, ha-ha, "deductions". With Trumptards it is okay for Trump to legally swindle the IRS out of tax payments until the IRS stumbles upon the swindle. As with every tax return, it is not the IRS calculating Trump's taxes. It is Trump calculating his own taxes. Completely accidentally, Nixon got caught cheating, but he wasn't caught by the IRS and he didn't voluntarily "correct" his tax return, ha-ha, "errors". If the IRS had collected the taxes owed by cheaters in the last 52 years since Nixon cheated in 1969, the IRS would have collected an additional $52 trillion, adjusted for inflation, which is much larger than the national debt of $29 trillion. That is the consequence of not punishing cheating, lying crooks who vote for Trump.

Nixon's Troublesome Tax Returns
http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/cf7c9c870b600b9585256df8007
5b9dd/f8723e3606cd79ec85256ff6006f82c3?OpenDocument

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

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Sunday, August 22, 2021 10:53 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Nah. I'm reading Influence: The Power of Persuasion right now.

I don't waste my time with pseudo-intellectual books written for pseudo-intellectuals by pseudo-intellectuals.
Are you working on a legal way to swindle fools out of their money, 6ix? Because if you aren't working on a swindle, yet you're reading that book, you're wasting your time.


That Jamaican took every last dime with that scam.
It was worth it just to learn some slight of hand.
~Modest Mouse

I'm always adding to my tool collection.
Slights of Hand, Tool Collection -- what cute names for being a cheating, lying crook who hasn't been caught.


Nah.

I buy a lot of actual tools. Pretty much anytime any job comes up that most people would pay somebody else to do I end up doing it myself at a fraction of the cost, buying the tools that I need to do the job, and also adding the tool of knowledge about how to get the job done next time it comes up. Like when I saved my neighbor's garage with a pole jack last fall that certainly would have caved in this February when we had 40" of snow that sat on our roofs for 3 weeks straight.

A job I did for free for them, I might add.

But the obligation has been planted. If I ever need a favor, they're obligated.

I don't need to scam people to get what I want. I have a lot of tools at my disposal to actually genuinely give something valuable in return for something else valuable.

And unlike most Americans, I have a lot of free time at a relatively young age to facilitate this on a fairly large scale if and when I so choose. There's no need to gouge anybody. You already know that I'm excellent with money and I don't need much to get by.


As for the book, there's nothing wrong with adding some mental tools to my arsenal dealing with the psychology of people and using that to further my advantage.





But you keep reading your crybaby books written by crybabies for crybabies and wondering why you never have any productive days and why nobody listens to anything you say or does anything you ask them to do.

I appears to have worked really well for you so far.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 22, 2021 11:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

But you keep reading your crybaby books written by crybabies for crybabies and wondering why you never have any productive days and why nobody listens to anything you say or does anything you ask them to do.

I appears to have worked really well for you so far.
The fundamentally wrong idea that most Democrats live by is that peacefully settling political differences is the only way. Talk, followed by more talk, followed by additional discussions, followed by reasoning with crooks about the benefits for all of society when the crooks stop being liars. But if the Democrats want government that doesn't run up a huge debt, the Democrats will have to force people like Trump to pay taxes. The Democrats won't be able to talk him into complying with tax laws. He will simply talk back, forever, and not pay. For that matter, the kind of people who vote for Trump, with their slights of hand and tool collections of dishonest techniques, won't comply without being forced.

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

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Sunday, August 22, 2021 2:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

But you keep reading your crybaby books written by crybabies for crybabies and wondering why you never have any productive days and why nobody listens to anything you say or does anything you ask them to do.

I appears to have worked really well for you so far.
The fundamentally wrong idea that most Democrats live by is that peacefully settling political differences is the only way. Talk, followed by more talk, followed by additional discussions, followed by reasoning with crooks about the benefits for all of society when the crooks stop being liars. But if the Democrats want government that doesn't run up a huge debt, the Democrats will have to force people like Trump to pay taxes. The Democrats won't be able to talk him into complying with tax laws. He will simply talk back, forever, and not pay. For that matter, the kind of people who vote for Trump, with their slights of hand and tool collections of dishonest techniques, won't comply without being forced.


The fundamentally wrong idea that most Democrats live by is that they somehow have a monopoly on virtue.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, August 23, 2021 5:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The fundamentally wrong idea that most Democrats live by is that they somehow have a monopoly on virtue.
Before and during the Civil War, the Confederates literally could not stop talking about how morally, spiritually and even militarily superior they were to those social justice warriors (SJW) who condemned the Biblical approved system of slavery. There was no way to change the Confederates' minds about their own superiority because, for a long while, the Confederates actually were militarily superior and they had all the wealth they needed from their cotton plantations to prove their superior manners. In modern Texas, most of the Trump voters would fit right into the Confederacy because they haven't changed their psychology of being the best in their own imaginations without being more than mediocre in reality. Being only mediocre, they struggle to stay in the middle class, but believing they are superior, they can't believe their struggles are their fault. It's got to be the SJW's fault.

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

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Monday, August 23, 2021 11:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The fundamentally wrong idea that most Democrats live by is that they somehow have a monopoly on virtue.
Before and during the Civil War, the Confederates literally could not stop talking about how morally, spiritually and even militarily superior they were to those social justice warriors (SJW) who condemned the Biblical approved system of slavery. There was no way to change the Confederates' minds about their own superiority because, for a long while, the Confederates actually were militarily superior and they had all the wealth they needed from their cotton plantations to prove their superior manners. In modern Texas, most of the Trump voters would fit right into the Confederacy because they haven't changed their psychology of being the best in their own imaginations without being more than mediocre in reality. Being only mediocre, they struggle to stay in the middle class, but believing they are superior, they can't believe their struggles are their fault. It's got to be the SJW's fault.


If you're going to bring up some dumb old shit that's not even related to the point, I'll just point out that Southern Democrats were confederates and that Abe Lincoln was a Republican. Hillary Clinton spent her life blowing Robert Byrd.

It's not even worth conversing with you anymore on this topic since you won't just admit that there are plenty of shitty people in every party. I don't know what's so hard about that dude. It's very easy to see.

You need to detach your identity from the Democrat Party. Until you do that, you'll never get healthy.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 6:01 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


“In my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) comprehensively changing capitalism.”
-Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “Earth: Under Repair Forever,” OnEarth, December 3, 2012.

Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames

https://www.ft.com/content/ff94df96-b702-4e01-addd-f4253d0eecf6

Kim Stanley Robinson, August 19, 2021

What does it feel like to live on the brink of a vast historical change? It feels like now.

Of course that sounds hyperbolic, and maybe even panicky, but I think we’re there. Not that a science fiction writer can see the future any better than anyone else; very often worse. But between the pandemic, the accelerating drumbeat of extreme weather events and the accumulations of data and analysis from the scientific community, it’s become an easy call.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove across the US east to west. In Wyoming, we hit a pall of wildfire smoke so thick that we couldn’t see the mountains just a few miles away on each side of the road. It went on like that for 1,000 miles.

Then we arrived in California just in time for the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which documents in meticulous detail the true scale of the climate problem. Humanity now stands on the brink of not just change, but disaster. And because we can see it coming, just as clear as a black storm on the horizon, our attempts to dodge disaster and create a healthy relationship with our only home will bring huge changes in our habits, laws, institutions and technologies.

All this is visible to us now. Unlike the people living in the years before the first world war, we won’t be sandbagged by catastrophe. The 2020s will not be filled with surprises — except perhaps at the speed and intensity of the changes coming down. With its atmosphere of dread foreboding, our time more resembles the years preceding the second world war, when everyone lived with a sensation of helplessly sliding down a slippery slope and over a cliff.

But historical analogies will take us only so far in understanding our current situation, since we have never before been able to wreck our own means of existence. Scientists coined the name the Anthropocene to signal that this moment in history is unprecedented. There are so many of us, and our technologies are so powerful, and our social systems so heedless of consequences, that our damage to Earth’s biosphere has increased with stunning speed.

Many historians refer to the period since the second world war as the Great Acceleration, and the harmful aspects of the changes we’ve initiated have immense biological and geophysical momentum. We can’t just gather our diplomats and call it off, declare peace with the biosphere.

Although we did do that, in 2015: it’s called the Paris agreement. But that was an agreement to start a process of change, which we now have to live up to if it is to become real. We in effect agreed to decarbonise our civilisation across the board: in energy generation, transport, construction — everything. But since all these activities were run largely by the burning of fossil fuels, this change is a stupendous challenge, equivalent to the mobilisations made in the 20th century to fight world wars.

Whether we can muster that kind of intense effort now is an open question. Not everyone is yet convinced that such an effort is necessary, and there are vested interests — not just private individuals or corporations, but many of the most powerful nations on Earth — deeply committed to continuing to burn fossil fuels.

So the Paris agreement could end up as something like the League of Nations, a nice idea that failed. But if we fail this time, the consequences could be even worse than the great wars of the 20th century. Again, this feels hyperbolic, but the facts in hand support the thought, alarming as it is. We are in terrible trouble, and not everyone agrees that we are; never will everyone agree on this, even though droughts and fires, storms and floods, are coming faster than ever.

Each moment in history has its own “structure of feeling”, as the cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it, which changes as new things happen. When I write stories set in the next few decades, I try to imagine that shift in feeling, but it’s very hard to do because the present structure shapes even those kinds of speculations.

Right now things feel massively entrenched, but also fragile. We can’t go on but we can’t change. Even though we are one species on one planet, there seems no chance of general agreement or global solidarity. The best that can be hoped for is a working political majority, reconstituted daily in the attempt to do the necessary things for ourselves and the generations to come. It’s a tough challenge that will never go away. It’s easy to despair.

Still, recently some things have happened that give me cause for hope. I wrote my novel The Ministry for the Future in 2019. That time surely torqued my vision because several important developments — ones I described in my novel as happening in the 2030s — I see now are already well begun. My timeline was completely off; events have accelerated yet again.

Part of that acceleration was caused by Covid-19. It was a slap in the face, an undeniable demonstration that we live on a single planet in a single civilisation, which can be disrupted in deadly ways. And it wasn’t just people everywhere dying of the same disease, but also our reactions to that shocking reality.

Supply chains that we rely on for life itself can be disrupted by hoarding, which is to say by loss of trust in our systems. In the US, it was toilet paper and cleaning supplies — but if it had been food, then boom: panic, breakdown, famine, the war of all against all. That’s how fragile civilisation is; that’s how much individuals are forced to trust each other to survive. A prisoner’s dilemma indeed, all of us locked together on this one planet. We either hang together or we hang separately: Franklin’s law.

Another lesson from the pandemic, one we should have known already: science is powerful. We need to learn to put it to better use than we do, but if we were to do that, lots of good things would follow. Aiming science is the work of the humanities and arts, politics and law. We have to decide as a civilisation what tasks are most important for us to take on now.

A third lesson we learnt in 2020 was the medical news that humans can’t survive prolonged exposure to extremely high combinations of heat and humidity. This realisation, which was already somewhat known but not yet recognised as an existential problem, should have silenced those sanguine commentators who were asserting that humans could simply adapt to whatever climate we happened to create. “Just adapt!”, these confident people pronounced. So what if we create a 3C or 4C rise in average global temperature? We’ll just adapt. Humans can adapt to anything!

But no. Human beings can’t live in conditions above the heat-index number called wet-bulb 35C, a measure of air temperature plus humidity. We didn’t evolve for such conditions and, when they occur, we quickly overheat and die of hyperthermia. And in July this year, wet-bulb 35s were briefly reached in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

As we keep burning fossil fuels, global average temperatures will continue to rise, and this deadly combination of heat and humidity will occur more often. And not just in the tropics, where more than 3bn people live; British Columbia’s high temperature record this summer overtook that of Las Vegas. So mitigating climate change by rapidly cutting greenhouse gases becomes not just a good idea but a survival necessity.

The Paris agreement can serve as our way to organise this massive effort. We need it because, although our problem is global, we live in a nation-state system in which the representatives of each nation are charged with defending that nation’s interests. In any perceived discrepancy between the interests of one’s nation and the world at large, some people will choose their nation.

This creates a lot of problems of the prisoner’s dilemma sort. When it comes to virtuous action, who goes first? The countries that act first might create future advantages for themselves, but many people are too cautious to see that, and so there are some very tough choices coming.

For example: we can burn about 900 more gigatons of carbon before we cross the 2C average global rise in temperature that will put us in truly dangerous territory. But we’ve already located thousands of gigatons of fossil fuels around the world. Most of those, which simply must be left in the ground if we want to avoid cooking the biosphere, are owned by national governments, who consider these reserves part of their national assets. They’re already collateral, and a steady source of income and, for quite a few of these nations, a big portion of their wealth.

So although almost every nation has signed the Paris agreement and agreed in theory to the principle of rapid emissions reduction, nations including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Canada, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia, Mexico, China, Venezuela, Norway and the US — not to mention several others — have made promises under the Paris agreement that will cost them many trillions of dollars in lost income.

Naturally, there will be elected officials and civil servants in these governments doing their best to burn a few last trillions’ worth of these soon-to-be-stranded assets. They will see this as their patriotic and fiduciary duty. So unless we make other arrangements, there will be a fire sale.

This means that one giant aspect of the problem we face is financial. Thinking about money, and directing money, are key to getting through this crisis century successfully. We have to figure out ways to pay ourselves to decarbonise as fast as possible, and to do all the other work needed to establish a sustainable civilisation. Keeping the petrostates from going bankrupt and doing desperate things will have to be part of that new arrangement, tricky though that will be. Discounts, amortisation, giving up on blame and righteousness, big haircuts — all these will come into play.

And don’t think that the market will do all this by itself, because it won’t. That whole notion of rule by market was a catastrophic example of monocausotaxophilia, “the love of single causes that explain everything”, Ernst Pöppel’s joke neologism for a tendency very common in all of us. This weakness in our thinking, the futile hope for a reliable algorithm, or a monarch, needs to be resisted at all times but especially when constructing a global economy.

It is not true that leaving finance to the market will arrange everything well, as the past 40 years have shown. The market systemically misprices things by way of improper discounting of the future, false externalities and many other predatory miscalculations, which have led to gross inequality and biosphere destruction. And yet right now it’s the way of the world, the law of the land. Capital invests in the highest rate of return, that’s what the market requires.

But saving the biosphere is not the highest rate of return (surely clear proof of another market miscalculation) because that rescue involves replacing most of our infrastructure, while also building what will be in effect a planetary sewage system, retrieving and disposing of the waste we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere.

This is no one’s idea of a high-return investment, because no one actually wants thousands of billions of tons of dry ice. Pulling that much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is simply a cost — the cost of survival, but not the highest rate of return. So private capital will not invest in it, and if we allow that judgment to stand, we are cooked.

But finance, too, is a technology, being civilisation’s software. It’s critically important software because it’s how we value our own work; and, being a human system, we are free to improve it by way of various alterations and improvements. And now we have to.

Happily, many people staffing the central banks of the world are feeling this need, and looking into innovations. Their involvement is critically important, because no cryptocurrency will do the job. Indeed, some of these new cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, only exacerbate the problem. And in any case, none of them are money; they are tulips, or any other speculative bubble. Money is a medium of exchange, a storehouse of value, and — crucially — a sign of social trust. And in a nation-state system, the money we trust is money that is nationally backed. The richer the country, the more we trust its money. So fiat currency is what we’ll need to deal with the existential emergency that climate change represents.

What this suggests is that we are soon going to be testing out how many trillions of dollars our central banks can create per year without altering people’s trust in money. This will be an experiment, an improvisation. The quantitative easings of 2008-11 and 2020-21 gave strong evidence that a pretty large amount of new money can be created every year without negative results. The new wrinkle to add to that finding is the idea of spending newly created money first on decarbonisation and other biosphere-friendly activities. This is getting called carbon quantitative easing, and is something many central banks are now investigating.

The Network for Greening the Financial System, an organisation of 89 of the biggest central banks, recently released a paper outlining possible methodologies for this financial innovation. They suggested that possibly nations, companies and individuals who draw carbon from the atmosphere could be paid for it directly. https://www.ngfs.net/en/ngfs-climate-scenarios-central-banks-and-super
visors-june-2021

Possibly petrostates could be compensated for the fossil fuels they keep in the ground. Possibly oil companies could be paid to suck carbon from the air and then pump it back into the ground; they could also be paid to pump water from under the great glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently sliding into the sea on newly melted subterranean water slides.

Of course, legislatures and citizens will need to urge their central banks, and ultimately to instruct or order them, to do these things. But the good news is that with these new strategies in hand, even in our current political economy, awkwardly suited at best to the task at hand, we might be able to pay ourselves to do the necessary things, and thus dodge the coming mass-extinction event.

This is not the total solution; I don’t want to succumb to monocausotaxophilia myself. It will take far more than carbon quantitative easing to finesse the coming years. We’ll need to re-establish wild land to maintain biodiversity, as in the various “30x30” plans; we may start growing food in vats from micro-organisms, freeing up land for other purposes; we’ll have to green our cities; we have to replace much of our infrastructure; and so on. All this implies a stupendous amount of work, all of which will have to be paid for.

Carbon quantitative easing won’t be enough to do all of that but, when combined with regulation and taxation channelling private capital into useful, survival-oriented projects, we might squeak through. And, by the way, full employment is very much implied in all this; there’s that much work to be done. Can we leverage all that needed work toward climate equity between nations and to the lessening of the grotesque inequality between rich and poor? It seems like we could.

This array of new policies means returning to some kind of Keynesian balance of public and private. Good. We need that. But this big shift naturally adds to the feeling of dread in our time. What — a new political economy? Didn’t that kind of change last happen in 1980, or 1945, or in the 18th century’s great democratic revolutions? Surely it’s impossible now? Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?

No. The time has come to admit that we control our economy for the common good. Crucial at all times, this realisation is especially important in our current need to dodge a mass-extinction event. The invisible hand never picks up the cheque; therefore we must govern ourselves.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’ is published in paperback in October. He will be speaking at the UN’s Cop26 climate change conference in Glasgow in November

Download ‘The Ministry for the Future’ from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.ch/fiction/?q=The+Ministry+for+the+Future

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

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 7:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

If you're going to bring up some dumb old shit that's not even related to the point, I'll just point out that Southern Democrats were confederates and that Abe Lincoln was a Republican. Hillary Clinton spent her life blowing Robert Byrd.

It's not even worth conversing with you anymore on this topic since you won't just admit that there are plenty of shitty people in every party. I don't know what's so hard about that dude. It's very easy to see.

You need to detach your identity from the Democrat Party. Until you do that, you'll never get healthy.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
I've got to repeat myself because you keep misunderstanding. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, has all the same complaints you have. Until yesterday I had never read the Unabomber Manifesto. The Unabomber does not attach his complaints specifically to the Democratic Party, but there aren't any Trump voters who like what the Unabomber dislikes. Before the Unabomber was jailed, he was just a nut who was killing/maiming "Leftists" with mailed bombs for unknown reasons, but now that I have read the Unabomber Manafesto, it is unsurprising that Trump voters and the Unabomber dislike the same people.

Two paragraphs from the Unabomber Manifesto:

229. The leftist is oriented toward large-scale collectivism. He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically "enlightened" educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the common catch-phrases of the left, like "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," "capitalism," "imperialism," "neocolonialism," "genocide," "social change," "social justice," "social responsibility." Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, political correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with ALL of these movements is almost certainly a leftist. [36]

230. The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain oversocialized types who avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values, "enlightened" psychological techniques for socializing children, dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists (as we may call them) approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology and motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control of the system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply because his attitudes are conventional. The crypto-leftist tries to bring people under control of the system because he is a True Believer in a collectivistic ideology. The crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he is more securely socialized. He is differentiated from the ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep lack within him that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself in a collectivity. And maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.

More about "Industrial Society and Its Future" by Theodore Kaczynski (1995) at
https://www.josharcher.uk/tags/unabomber-manifesto-pdf/

If only Trump had read the Unabomber Manifesto, Ted Kaczynski would have been pardoned.

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

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 8:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Hitler liked dogs.

Hitler was a Nazi.

If you like dogs, you're a Nazi.


Shut up, boy.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:15 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hitler liked dogs.

Hitler was a Nazi.

If you like dogs, you're a Nazi.


Shut up, boy.
I was thinking about Firefly story where Mal is trying to persuade settlers to get aboard Serenity, but the settlers give a whole litany of tiresome reasons/excuses to not, mostly around price and schedule -- price is too high, schedule is too soon. River starts the fan-jets and closing the ramp while Mal is outside talking-talking-talking with those settlers.

Mal gets aboard damn quick and demands River land so he can keep talking even more and make a little money transporting the settlers. River says, "They will talk you to death." She is not very communicative with Mal, beyond those words and she will not allow Mal to take control.

One day later, Reavers land and kill the settlers. Only then does River explain, in her usual cryptic manner, that she knew the Reavers were coming and knew that the settlers won't believe her and won't change their minds until the Reavers are entering the atmosphere. At that point, Serenity would have been first thing the Reavers attacked and the settlers the second thing.

River saved as many people as possible, despite Mal's propensity to talk too much and negotiate fruitlessly. He is really poor at running a business and sometimes that almost kills Mal and his crew. Similarly, Democrats talk too much and negotiate fruitlessly when they could learn a lesson from River: if Trump voters don't get it after a few minutes, leave them for the Reavers to eat.

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

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Similarly, Democrats talk too much and negotiate fruitlessly when they could learn a lesson from River: if Trump voters don't get it after a few minutes, leave them for the Reavers to eat.


Said by the biggest dumbass windbag to ever post on FFF.

Go away then.

Nobody takes anything you say seriously anyhow.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Similarly, Democrats talk too much and negotiate fruitlessly when they could learn a lesson from River: if Trump voters don't get it after a few minutes, leave them for the Reavers to eat.


Said by the biggest dumbass windbag to ever post on FFF.

Go away then.

Nobody takes anything you say seriously anyhow.
My parents were exactly the kind of people who would have voted for Trump. They struggled to stay in the middle class, same as typical Trumptards. It took the Vietnam War to convince me that the people all around me, that I depended on, and even my parents, did not know what they were talking about. The way they believed how money and business works was childishly naive. Their worries over Communism and Socialism were ridiculous. Their understanding of the stock market was absurd. So many things wrong about their beliefs and they wouldn't change anything because they knew they were right. I proved them wrong. Despite them saying often 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' the proof never changed their minds. It was amusing to listen to their explanations of why doing things the opposite of the way they would do it cannot possibly work. But work it did. Oh, and I didn't cheat on my taxes like some people (Trump) I know.

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

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


DR

I'm still waiting for you to show yourself to be smarter than the average Democrat and stop talking.


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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Thursday, August 26, 2021 6:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Residents of California:

Next month will see a recall election for Gavin Newsom. If you want to impede rightwing efforts to continue undermining democracy, please vote 'No' on recalling Newsom. Here's why:

1. If a Republican candidate is elected, they have the power to appoint new senators if one dies in office or has to otherwise leave.

2. California Senator Dianne Feinstein is 88 years old. If she dies or has to leave office, the new Republican governor could appoint a replacement, who will be all-but guaranteed to be Republican. If this happens, the 50-50 split in the Senate will be tilted in favor of the Republicans.

3. If the Republicans take control of the Senate, it will all but doom any chance to pass legislation that will protect democracy, such as universal voting rights. This will subsequently make it easier for the Republican party to continue passing laws in individual states making it easier for them to win elections. And if this happens, the Republicans will cement their minority rule for a generation, and possibly much longer.

Gavin Newsom is not the best governor (if you truly cannot stand him, you can always vote him out in next year's gubernatorial election), but the balance in the Senate will hold if he remains in power, and right-wing efforts to undermine democracy will continue to be blunted.

On the 14th, please vote 'NO' on recalling Newsom. This election may seem trivial, but all of us must do our part to help protect our Democracy and give it a fighting chance to survive.

More about How California’s bizarre recall system could elect a Republican governor at
https://www.vox.com/22617048/california-recall-gavin-newsom-larry-elde
r

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

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Thursday, August 26, 2021 8:13 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Polls say that Newsom looks to be recalled, and the Dem Party is losing its collective shit. I know bc I'm a registered Dem, and the # of spam phone calls on the topic has become intolerable. We get more than eight a day.

When I engage with any of these callers - which is seldom - I get the same canned spam that SECONRATE posted, along with the added feature

Republicans from out of state are funding the recall effort!! You don't want those [uout of state Republicans to determine our governor, do you???

Yeah, like Dems in California never funded a Dem in Minnesota? Seriously? Between the endless lockdowns and promotion of illegal immigration, Newsom is seriously unpopular now, with everybody.

People forget, CA has had Republican governors in the recent past, too. Now, if I can just find someone who isn't a complete idiot to vote for.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake


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Friday, August 27, 2021 8:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Polls say that Newsom looks to be recalled, and the Dem Party is losing its collective shit. I know bc I'm a registered Dem, and the # of spam phone calls on the topic has become intolerable. We get more than eight a day.

When I engage with any of these callers - which is seldom - I get the same canned spam that SECONRATE posted, along with the added feature

Republicans from out of state are funding the recall effort!! You don't want those [uout of state Republicans to determine our governor, do you???

Yeah, like Dems in California never funded a Dem in Minnesota? Seriously? Between the endless lockdowns and promotion of illegal immigration, Newsom is seriously unpopular now, with everybody.

People forget, CA has had Republican governors in the recent past, too. Now, if I can just find someone who isn't a complete idiot to vote for.
If you are a registered Democrat, you are the biggest faker in California. There is nothing about the way you think that is anything like a Democrat. Why not do the honest thing and register as what you are? But if the truth would be known, a lot of people, including about every black I know, are better suited emotionally for the GOP. If the white racists every leave the GOP and form a third party, blacks will switch back to Lincoln's party. Switching won't make any sense, but it will feel right. Since when have Americans ever done the sensible thing rather than be ruled by their fears of Communism, terrorists, crime, vaccines, or whatever the latest thing they have found to be fearful of and confused about? For example: Killing Japanese women and children with nukes was not a sensible response, but a majority of Americans approved. It Americans can get that wrong, there is nothing they can't get wrong. And Americans proved they can stay wrong by approving of the building of a super stockpile of nukes. What planet did they think those nukes would fall on? Mars?

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

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Friday, August 27, 2021 9:21 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Polls say that Newsom looks to be recalled, and the Dem Party is losing its collective shit. I know bc I'm a registered Dem, and the # of spam phone calls on the topic has become intolerable. We get more than eight a day.

When I engage with any of these callers - which is seldom - I get the same canned spam that SECONRATE posted, along with the added feature

Republicans from out of state are funding the recall effort!! You don't want those [uout of state Republicans to determine our governor, do you???

Yeah, like Dems in California never funded a Dem in Minnesota? Seriously? Between the endless lockdowns and promotion of illegal immigration, Newsom is seriously unpopular now, with everybody.

People forget, CA has had Republican governors in the recent past, too. Now, if I can just find someone who isn't a complete idiot to vote for.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake



AOC's receipts for donations from the state of California between 2019 and 2020.

https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?data_type=processed&committee_i
d=C00639591&two_year_transaction_period=2020&contributor_state=CA

There are 22,859 of them.

Her total receipts during that period were 172,447, meaning that almost 15% of the contributions came from the state of California (not in terms of dollar amount, but of the number of them).

If anybody would like to throw the entire thing into a spreadsheet I'd love to know how much of the 21.25 million she got came from California.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 8:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


How Redistribution Makes America Richer

There’s been a lot of important work on the social and political effects of inequality — separate (though tightly related) issues. But unlike the steady stream of “incentive” theory from Right economists over decades, Left and heterodox economists have largely failed to ask or answer a rather basic theoretical (and empirical) question: what are the purely economic effects of highly-concentrated wealth, held by fewer people, families, and dynasties, in larger and larger fortunes?

A new paper and model published in Real-World Economics Review tackles that question. The model takes advantage of national accountants’ wealth measures that have only been available since 2006 or 2012 (with coverage back to 1960), and measures of wealth distribution that were only published in 2019. Combined with thirty+ years of consistent survey data on consumer spending at different income levels, the paper derives a novel economic measure: velocity of wealth.

The bottom 80% group turns over its wealth in annual spending three or four times as fast as the top 20%. The arithmetic takeaway: at a given level of wealth, more broadly distributed wealth means more spending: the very stuff of economic activity, which is itself the ultimate source of wealth accumulation.

The details of the model are somewhat more complex, but it only employs five easy to understand formulas — all basically just arithmetic, and all expressed without resort to abstruse symbols; they use plain language.

How good are the model’s predictions? It starts with just two numbers in 1989 — the wealth of the top 20% and the bottom 80% — and extrapolates forward using those few formulas to predict levels of wealth, spending, and shares of wealth and spending, thirty years later.

Compare the model’s predictions for 2019 to actual results; in each case, they’re almost identical.

It’s easy to add counterfactuals to this model: what would have happened if some percentage of top-20% wealth was transferred, redistributed, to the bottom 80% every year over those three decades. The results are pretty eye-popping. Downward redistribution appears to make everyone quite a lot wealthier, faster – especially (no surprise) the bottom 80%:



More at https://angrybearblog.com/2021/08/how-redistribution-makes-america-ric
her-2

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

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 10:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Polls say that Newsom looks to be recalled, and the Dem Party is losing its collective shit. I know bc I'm a registered Dem, and the # of spam phone calls on the topic has become intolerable. We get more than eight a day.

When I engage with any of these callers - which is seldom - I get the same canned spam that SECONRATE posted, along with the added feature

Republicans from out of state are funding the recall effort!! You don't want those [uout of state Republicans to determine our governor, do you???

Yeah, like Dems in California never funded a Dem in Minnesota? Seriously? Between the endless lockdowns and promotion of illegal immigration, Newsom is seriously unpopular now, with everybody.

People forget, CA has had Republican governors in the recent past, too. Now, if I can just find someone who isn't a complete idiot to vote for.
If you are a registered Democrat, you are the biggest faker in California. There is nothing about the way you think that is anything like a Democrat. Why not do the honest thing and register as what you are? But if the truth would be known, a lot of people, including about every black I know, are better suited emotionally for the GOP. If the white racists every leave the GOP and form a third party, blacks will switch back to Lincoln's party. Switching won't make any sense, but it will feel right. Since when have Americans ever done the sensible thing rather than be ruled by their fears of Communism, terrorists, crime, vaccines, or whatever the latest thing they have found to be fearful of and confused about? For example: Killing Japanese women and children with nukes was not a sensible response, but a majority of Americans approved. It Americans can get that wrong, there is nothing they can't get wrong. And Americans proved they can stay wrong by approving of the building of a super stockpile of nukes. What planet did they think those nukes would fall on? Mars?

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


In other words, unless you worship at the Altar of Maddow, you shouldn't be a Democrat.

You're an idiot.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 11:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

In other words, unless you worship at the Altar of Maddow, you shouldn't be a Democrat.

You're an idiot.
What did you think about the $10 trillion America spent on nukes and the delivery system for nukes, the planes, missiles, submarines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States

What do you think of the radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973?
https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a
-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

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

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 6:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

In other words, unless you worship at the Altar of Maddow, you shouldn't be a Democrat.

You're an idiot.
What did you think about the $10 trillion America spent on nukes and the delivery system for nukes, the planes, missiles, submarines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States

What do you think of the radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973?
https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a
-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/


Let's just say they're on my always growing list of reasons that I don't intend to ever make enough money in a year to pay any Federal Income Tax again in my life and leave it at that.


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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 7:05 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Let's just say they're on my always growing list of reasons that I don't intend to ever make enough money in a year to pay any Federal Income Tax again in my life and leave it at that.
You didn't answer the question about hypothetically destroying the world. And you didn't answer about killing Americans with fallout. How about another two questions?

Should America do something about climate change before it kills millions of Americans? Or, in order to lower taxes, should America wait and see how many die, first? For reference: "These skeptics believe in climate change. Why is it so hard to convince them catastrophe is coming?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210827190516/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/climate-change-global-warming-skepticism-houston-16410884.php

The Houston Chronicle doesn't say it, but the unconvinced are all Republicans who don't want to spend tax money on climate change until after the catastrophe is killing 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, August 29, 2021 8:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Let's just say they're on my always growing list of reasons that I don't intend to ever make enough money in a year to pay any Federal Income Tax again in my life and leave it at that.
You didn't answer the question about hypothetically destroying the world. And you didn't answer about killing Americans with fallout. How about another two questions?

Should America do something about climate change before it kills millions of Americans? Or, in order to lower taxes, should America wait and see how many die, first? For reference: "These skeptics believe in climate change. Why is it so hard to convince them catastrophe is coming?"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210827190516/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/climate-change-global-warming-skepticism-houston-16410884.php

The Houston Chronicle doesn't say it, but the unconvinced are all Republicans who don't want to spend tax money on climate change until after the catastrophe is killing people.

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



I won't be paying for any of it.

Meanwhile, half of the taxes line the pockets of the politicians, the lobbyists and the contractors that are in bed for them who get quadruple the going rate to get the job done and hire their union contractors to carry out the work.

Being a taxpayer yourself though, you have a much more vested interest into where the money is going. I can understand that.

Me? I don't care.

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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 8:30 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I won't be paying for any of it.

Meanwhile, half of the taxes line the pockets of the politicians, the lobbyists and the contractors that are in bed for them who get quadruple the going rate to get the job done and hire their union contractors to carry out the work.

Being a taxpayer yourself though, you have a much more vested interest into where the money is going. I can understand that.

Me? I don't care.
You didn't answer questions about climate change, either, but here are more questions:

What will you do when the Federal government shuts down the interstate pipelines for natural gas, petroleum, and gasoline to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? Will you switch to all electricity? Or will you show your independence and only ride a bicycle to the grocery store and only take freezing cold showers at home because there is no such thing as climate change and you refuse to go all electric because you have Constitutional rights as an American citizen to not do what you don't wanna do?

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

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 8:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I won't be paying for any of it.

Meanwhile, half of the taxes line the pockets of the politicians, the lobbyists and the contractors that are in bed for them who get quadruple the going rate to get the job done and hire their union contractors to carry out the work.

Being a taxpayer yourself though, you have a much more vested interest into where the money is going. I can understand that.

Me? I don't care.
You didn't answer questions about climate change, either, but here are more questions:

What will you do when the Federal government shuts down the interstate pipelines for natural gas, petroleum, and gasoline to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? Will you switch to all electricity? Or will you show your independence and only ride a bicycle to the grocery store and only take freezing cold showers at home because there is no such thing as climate change and you refuse to go all electric because you have Constitutional rights as an American citizen to not do what you don't wanna do?

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


I'm not paying for any of it.


It will never happen in our lifetime, but if we ever do shut down natural gas and petrol you're going to have a lot more to worry about than taking cold showers. We'll put a pin in that one until it happens.

Meanwhile, start building that moat for your ivory tower, "rich guy".



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 9:04 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Meanwhile, start building that moat for your ivory tower, "rich guy".
This is your fantasy that I am weak, frightened and stupid while you are strong, brave and intelligent, but your fantasy is backwards. I'm sure from looking at Texas Trump voters' lives that they aren't competent and they can't understand why life is hard for them when the Trump haters lives are easy.

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

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Sunday, August 29, 2021 9:09 PM

DREAMTROVE


Second, allow me

6isStringJack,

NFW are you a democrat. Didn't you read the sign? Now GTFO this thread.

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Monday, August 30, 2021 12:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup. He's the most static and 1 dimensional character that ever trolled the RWED.

Tragic.



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

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, August 30, 2021 7:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


The Great American Science Heist

After malaria and yellow fever killed more of their soldiers than bullets in the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army and Navy spearheaded the government’s entry into infectious disease research. It has since expanded its medical purview to other maladies affecting its ranks, from PTSD to cancer. Since 1997, the Defense Department’s Prostate Cancer Research Program and the National Institutes of Health have spent tens of millions of dollars supporting research at UCLA. An early trial funded by the Pentagon showed that one of the candidate drugs to emerge, enzalutamide, showed promise in extending the life of late-stage prostate cancer patients.

The “reasonableness” of that drug’s monopoly price in the U.S. market is at the center of a march-in petition currently awaiting judgement before the Department of Defense and the NIH.

In 2005, the University of California, the enzalutamide patent holder, cut an exclusive-rights deal with a Bay Area biotech firm called Medivation. To finish trials and bring the drug to market, Medivation partnered with a Japanese firm, Astellas Pharma. In 2012, the Food and Drug Administration approved it for sale under the brand name Xtandi. Four years later, Xtandi was making Medivation-Astellas more than $2 billion a year globally. Most of these profits were generated in the U.S., where a yearlong course was priced at $130,000 — several times higher than in any other member-country of the G-7, where governments negotiate drug prices. Medicare Part D spending for Xtandi topped $900 million annually.

These numbers drew the salivating attention of the biggest multinational drug companies, but there was a problem. The U.S. government was named alongside UCLA researchers on three of the drug’s key patents, leaving the drug vulnerable to a march-in petition. Sure enough, in 2016, two medicines-access groups filed a petition with the Department of Defense and the NIH to pull Bayh-Dole’s march-in trigger and license generic competition. All of the pieces were in place: a formal petition, a clear government stake in the rights, and a flamboyant violation of “reasonable terms” that placed a huge and unnecessary cost burden on Veterans Affairs hospitals and Medicare.

“You would think the military has a strong interest in not paying more than $100,000 for a drug it paid to develop and has manufacturing costs in single digits,” says Robert Sachs, a retired lawyer and prostate cancer patient who joined the Xtandi march-in petition in 2018. “Nobody is trying to micromanage prices. Just compare the U.S. price to other developed economies, and if it’s unreasonably higher, authorize competition.”

The missing ingredient was a self-respecting government. HHS was quiet on the petition. Inside the Pentagon, no Adm. Rickover came forward to take up the cause. Only after the Army, White House, and NIH all quietly declined to back the petition did the drug majors feel secure enough to descend with buyout offers. A bidding war ended with Pfizer acquiring Medivation and the Xtandi monopoly for $14 billion.

The pricing scandal continued to simmer during the Trump administration. In July 2017, the Senate Armed Services Committee added to the National Defense Authorization Act a new standard for determining the “reasonableness” of prices on drugs emerging from military grants. That standard — the median price of the drug in the G-7 countries — was never applied.

“The July executive order forces the government to finally make a decision on Xtandi,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, one of the groups that filed the 2016 march-in petition. “It should be a slam dunk. Biden did the right thing in stopping the NIST proposals. The question is, does he have the guts to take next step?”

The answer will open a window not only into the administration’s viscera, but also the balance of forces between a number of senior officials with ties to the pharmaceutical industry and the “antitrust dream team” of Jonathan Kanter in the Justice Department, Tim Wu on the National Economic Council, Lina Khan at the FTC, and Xavier Becerra at HHS. The executive order clearly reflects the influence of the so-called New Brandeis movement — named for former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis — said to inform this group’s approach to monopoly as an economic and a political problem. If Biden’s neo-Brandeisians are looking for inspiration to translate this approach into patent policy, they’ll find it in the records and summary statements of the New Dealers who so clearly understood the dangers of allowing public science to slip from public control and become untethered from the public interest.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210829112018/https://theintercept.com/20
21/08/29/bayh-dole-act-public-science-patents/

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

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