REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 08:17
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Friday, January 18, 2019 9:17 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

A convenient stick, indeed.

I'll hold you in higher regard for realizing this. Maybe you'll reciprocate and appreciate that I noticed you don't go around Russia fearmongering either.

I'm sure there's plenty of skeletons in Trump's closet to find if you stop looking under rocks outside of Putin's mansion. We could put every single politician behind bars from here to eternity if we dug up the dirt on them.

Because, believe me, it's there. Every single time.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I get that same argument from Jehovah’s Witnesses (my sisters) on why they don’t vote: "There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both sides are evil and both will be destroyed by Armageddon." Since I’m going to be destroyed by Armageddon, I can handle a little evil and, despite what I was taught at the Kingdom Hall when I was young, there is a measurable difference between the two parties and I prefer less evil to more. That’s more or less why I vote Democrat rather than Republican. (If I was only concerned with my taxes, I'd vote Republican always.) In America there is only D and R that get elected. There is no major third party, holy and blessed by Jehovah, a party that is goodness without evil contamination.

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

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Friday, January 18, 2019 8:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

A convenient stick, indeed.

I'll hold you in higher regard for realizing this. Maybe you'll reciprocate and appreciate that I noticed you don't go around Russia fearmongering either.

I'm sure there's plenty of skeletons in Trump's closet to find if you stop looking under rocks outside of Putin's mansion. We could put every single politician behind bars from here to eternity if we dug up the dirt on them.

Because, believe me, it's there. Every single time.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I get that same argument from Jehovah’s Witnesses (my sisters) on why they don’t vote: "There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both sides are evil and both will be destroyed by Armageddon." Since I’m going to be destroyed by Armageddon, I can handle a little evil and, despite what I was taught at the Kingdom Hall when I was young, there is a measurable difference between the two parties and I prefer less evil to more. That’s more or less why I vote Democrat rather than Republican. (If I was only concerned with my taxes, I'd vote Republican always.) In America there is only D and R that get elected. There is no major third party, holy and blessed by Jehovah, a party that is goodness without evil contamination.

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



Well... I'm surely not bringing religion to the table here. I'm 50/50 on God or heaven and hell and the rest of it.

I do believe there is Evil in man though. I have no doubt about that.

Nobody is above that either. Everyone has a price.

Some politicians got into it because they were already there. Others have nobler intentions when they start off, but everybody has a price. Absolute power, and all of that.



Also, unlike your sisters, I vote regularly.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, January 19, 2019 7:34 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I vote regularly.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
But two parties are not two sides of the same coin, both worth the same. One of them is more valuable. A famous Republican has some concerns about the values of his party:

Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson stated that for generations, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.”

He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

The Fox News host says America’s “ruling class” are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.”

He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

Carlson’s position and the ensuing controversy reveals a nearly unsolvable tension in conservative politics about the meaning of populism, an ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.

I spoke with Carlson by phone this week to discuss his monologue and its economic — and cultural — meaning.

Carlson wanted to be clear: He wants to question what he calls the “religious faith” of market capitalism, one he believes elites — “mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule” — have put ahead of “normal people.”

Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist, but he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, he told me, “Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed.”

Populism is a rhetorical approach that separates “the people” from elites. It divides the country into “two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other.” Trump borrowed some of that approach for his 2016 campaign but in office has governed as a fairly orthodox economic conservative, thus demonstrating the demand for populism on the right without really providing the supply.

Carlson’s populism holds, in his view, bipartisan possibilities. In a follow-up email, I asked him why his monologue was aimed at Republicans when many Democrats had long espoused the same criticisms of free market economics. “Fair question,” he responded. “I hope it’s not just Republicans. But any response to the country’s systemic problems will have to give priority to the concerns of American citizens over the concerns of everyone else, just as you’d protect your own kids before the neighbor’s kids.”

More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/01/tucker-carlson-has-sparked-t
he-most-interesting-debate-in-conservative-politics.html

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

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Saturday, January 19, 2019 7:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
But two parties are not two sides of the same coin, both worth the same. One of them is more valuable.


Agreed. We just happen to disagree which one is more valuable.

I think your problem, Second, is that you think the Democratic party today even remotely resembles the party during your time in Nam. I would have been a Democrat back then.


You do say a lot of things to piss me off, but that's usually just the personal insults when you don't agree with me. For the most part, when we're not talking about Trump, you don't really come off as some mindless SJW, and you rarely pile on like some of the other goons here do and parrot what they're told to say by the 24 hour news networks of their choice.

The Democratic party might not even really be as bad at its core as it seems, but the extremely loud minority are poisoning everything right now, up to and including mindless entertainment. These voices need to be called out and ridiculed by people in the center left.


The Democratic party as a whole needs to find a message that resonates with the people again. "We're Not Trump" isn't going to work.

We both agree that the wars need to end and military budget needs to be greatly shrunk. Maybe we can start there.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, January 19, 2019 11:23 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Carlson iz just az bad az Hannity. Maybe wors, kuz he seemz to know that the propaganda he spouts iz a lie.

Then agen, maybe Hannity just never breaks karakter.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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Tuesday, January 22, 2019 7:14 AM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Carlson iz just az bad az Hannity. Maybe wors, kuz he seemz to know that the propaganda he spouts iz a lie.

Then agen, maybe Hannity just never breaks karakter.



True...

T


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Tuesday, January 22, 2019 7:23 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


How did the crazy mob get it so wrong?


Apologies to Covington Catholic Students Flood Twitter After Video Shows Teens Were Framed: ‘I Got Duped by Fake News’

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/01/apologies-to-covington-cathol
ic-students-flood-twitter-after-video-shows-teens-were-framed-i-got-duped-by-fake-news/

This is so radiantly stupid, jack - not only has 'rezaaslan' threatened explicit violence against Covington kids, he threatened DineshDSouza as well, but a conservative gal gets banned for criticizing the violence-spewing celebrity? =====>

https://twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/1087552390918692865

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Tuesday, January 22, 2019 9:08 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The Democratic party as a whole needs to find a message that resonates with the people again. "We're Not Trump" isn't going to work.

We both agree that the wars need to end and military budget needs to be greatly shrunk. Maybe we can start there.
Can't start with the Pentagon budget because more than 67% of Americans are both overly fond of the troops and afraid of foreigners. That makes it easy to manipulate 67% of Americans into supporting higher defense spending and poorly thought-out foreign interventions never approved by Congress.

Skip over the Pentagon. Here is the Democratic Party platform shrunk down to three things that stick in my mind: higher taxes for the wealthy, medicare for all, reduced emissions of greenhouse gases. The GOP is anti-all-that. I don’t see a way to make the Democratic Party’s three point platform appealing to the masses, but all three goals are necessary in my opinion. To give you an example of why the Democratic Party cannot sweep aside the GOP: at least two of those goals, maybe three, will be to my personal disadvantage. The GOP platform doesn’t have that disadvantage because its anti-Democrat goals appeal to everybody. Who doesn’t want lower taxes? The GOP promises lower. Who wants to pay a stranger’s medical bills? The GOP promises you won’t pay. Who wants to give up the convenience of fossil fuels? The GOP says climate change is a hoax or it is natural, not man-made.

We are in for a future where neither side has the 67% majority in Congress to make the country go fast in a particular direction. Too bad for us. Maybe if the Constitution had been written with a preference for action rather than stalemate with too many checks-and-balances, where 51% was enough, the Federal ship of state won’t be stuck on a sandbar, waiting for a high tide, a celestial event, to get it unstuck.

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

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Tuesday, January 22, 2019 9:59 AM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
How did the crazy mob get it so wrong?


Apologies to Covington Catholic Students Flood Twitter After Video Shows Teens Were Framed: ‘I Got Duped by Fake News’

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/01/apologies-to-covington-cathol
ic-students-flood-twitter-after-video-shows-teens-were-framed-i-got-duped-by-fake-news/

This is so radiantly stupid, jack - not only has 'rezaaslan' threatened explicit violence against Covington kids, he threatened DineshDSouza as well, but a conservative gal gets banned for criticizing the violence-spewing celebrity? =====>

https://twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/1087552390918692865]



Don't post as jayneztown in any of my threads sig. I'll respost them in your garden thread.

T


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Wednesday, January 23, 2019 7:46 AM

SECOND

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


The US Army says Iran is the only victor of the Iraq War

https://qz.com/1530248/

The US Army has concluded that Iran was the only victor of the eight-year US campaign to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and replace him with a democratic regime.

That’s one of the findings of a massive historical study released Jan. 17, the first major military review of the Iraq war’s lessons. Commissioned in 2013 by General Ray Odierno, then the Army’s top commander, it was conducted by half a dozen field grade officers at the US Army War College.

The report consists of two volumes, one on the initial 2003 invasion
http://publications.armywarcollege.edu/publication-detail.cfm?publicat
ionID=3667
and another covering the 2007 pivot to counter-insurgency until the majority of US troops were withdrawn in 2011.
http://publications.armywarcollege.edu/publication-detail.cfm?publicat
ionID=3668

The final assessment is sobering reading:
Quote:
At the time of this project’s completion in 2018, an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor. Iraq, the traditional regional counterbalance for Iran, is at best emasculated, and at worst has key elements of its government acting as proxies for Iranian interests. With Iraq no longer a threat, Iran’s destabilizing influence has quickly spread to Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, as well as other locations.

As the conflict expanded beyond its original boundaries, the colonial creation that was the Iraqi-Syrian border was effectively erased. Bashar al-Assad, having misjudged his ability to control the Salafist foreign fighters that he gave safe haven for the better part of a decade, found himself threatened by the very forces that he had exploited to avert an American invasion, an invasion that in actuality was never forthcoming.

Syria was plunged into a vicious civil war that devolved into a brutality only seen in the worst conflicts of the 20th century, resulting in a death toll that has topped half of a million, repeated use of chemical weapons, and the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Kurdistan evolved from a proto-state into a de-facto nation, a development that has created deep tensions with Turkey. The danger of a Sunni-Shi’a regional conflict, with potentially globally destabilizing effects, is now greater than at any time since the original schism.
A key misstep identified by the study was failing to apply in Iraq the lessons the US military learned during the Vietnam war. Its authors believe that the first years of the Iraq war were spent re-learning how to fight insurgents. Following Vietnam, the US military treated that war as an aberration, but these officers argue that even future conflicts with rivals like Russia or China are likely to take the form of irregular warfare.

More at https://qz.com/1530248/

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

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Wednesday, January 23, 2019 7:48 AM

SECOND

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


CHAPTER 17 http://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/3668.pdf
CONCLUSION: LESSONS OF THE IRAQ WAR

In a way, it would be reassuring to believe that the mistakes the United States made in the Iraq War were the result of unintelligent leaders making poor decisions. If that were so, then the United States could be assured of avoiding similar mistakes in the future simply by selecting better, more intelligent leaders. However, this is not the case. The overwhelming majority of decisions in the Iraq War were made by highly intelligent, highly experienced leaders whose choices, often in consensus, seemed reasonable at the time they were made, but nonetheless added up over time to a failure to achieve our strategic objectives. Examining the reasoning behind these decisions and the systemic failures that produced them should be the first task in analyzing the Iraq War's lessons. What follow are examinations of some of those key decisions, and in some cases their unintended consequences, as well as their implications for future wars.

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

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Thursday, January 24, 2019 7:41 AM

SECOND

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


Chapter 26, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson - The Passage Of Power
Robert A. Caro, 2012
www.amazon.com/Passage-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0375713255/
Torrent Hash: 6a0fc3f515d43b07dc91f00efa5fc100d9de0d81

The bullets of Dallas had made John F. Kennedy a martyr — and the martyrdom of a leader lends new power to causes he had championed. Lyndon Johnson knew this. “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes,” he explained to Doris Goodwin. “John Kennedy had died. But his ‘cause’ was not really clear. That was my job. I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause.” He began to do that when, in that first address to Congress on November 27, he said he was trying to finish what Kennedy had started, “to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.” He couched his support of legislation in those terms. “No memorial … could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” During the transition he was constantly invoking the late President’s memory. And the invocations accomplished their purpose. JFK’s martyrdom had galvanized support for the causes with which he had identified himself in his eloquent speeches. “Kennedy’s assassination touched many people as they had not been touched before,” as an historian has written. “Could the murder of so young and promising a leader be redeemed? Must his life be wasted?” The passage of legislation he had introduced was a way of ensuring it wouldn’t be wasted. His death generated behind legislation that had seemed dead in congressional waters a tremendous new momentum.

And Johnson knew something else. Momentum can be lost. “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment,” he was to explain. “Timing is essential. Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life.” The time to catch a wave is at its crest. And while the wave of emotion, of affection and adoration, for the martyred young President would roll on for decades—is still rolling on today, almost half a century after Dallas — its crest, the height of the Kennedy tide, came in the weeks immediately following Dallas, in the weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s transition. By rushing to push through Kennedy’s bills, Johnson caught the crest. The maneuvers by which he made them begin to move through Congress were made easier — in some cases were only made possible — by that wave of emotion. Had he not caught the tide at its absolute height, he might well have lost some of its force, and as the Senate fight of 1964 was to demonstrate, every ounce of that force would be necessary to pass the civil rights bill. By moving as quickly as he did, Johnson caught a tide, seized a moment, that might not have lasted very long.

The story of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson will be different in tone from the story of the transition in part because the elements of his personality absent during the transition were shortly to reappear. Yet for a period of time, a brief but crucial moment in history, he had held these elements in check, had overcome them, had, in a way, conquered himself. And by doing so, by overcoming forces within him that were very difficult to overcome, he not only had held the country steady during a difficult time but had set it on a new course, a course toward social justice. In the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this period stands out as different from the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment, as a moment not only masterful but, in its way, heroic.

If he had held in check these forces within him, had conquered himself, for a while, he wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long. But he had done it long enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Lyndon_Johnson

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

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Saturday, January 26, 2019 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


At the height of the Cold War we had about 32,000 nuclear weapons, and the Soviets had about 35,000 nuclear weapons. In the late 1940s, when Pentagon strategists were first studying how many nuclear weapons it would take to destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society, the conclusion was maybe 150 to 200, and these were atomic bombs, not even hydrogen bombs. Yet somehow, in less than twenty years, we went from needing 150 to 200 to getting 32,000. Today there are maybe 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Is that too many?

The question is, how many times can you get lucky when you have too many bombs? Eventually, luck runs out. One mind-boggling thing is that the safety problems with our nuclear weapons were recognized by around 1969 or 1970 – but it took almost 20 years for those problems to be fixed. One of the heroes is a weapon designer named Bob Peurifoy, who fought a bureaucratic battle for years to get modern safety devices installed in our nuclear weapons. You'd think that wouldn't be a controversial thing to do. But there was this enormous sense of bureaucratic denial, a refusal to admit error and confront the problem.

One of the psychological phenomena that the book explores is bureaucratic groupthink, a dangerous form of complacency. There was this dangerous attitude about the possibility of an accidental nuclear detonation: if it hasn't happened, it won't happen. Or, if it hasn't happened, it can't happen. Unfortunately, low probability things do happen. Thus far we've been very lucky that the accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon isn't one of those things.

So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted.

More at www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5812066/a-new-report-shows-nuclear-weapons-almos
t-detonated-in-north-carolina and
www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/25/18196416/nuclear-war-boris-yeltsi
n-1995-norway-rocket

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

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Saturday, January 26, 2019 7:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.

You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 7:12 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.

You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You kind of missed the point about the H-bombs, didn't you? America could have got along fine with only hundreds of bombs, more than enough to destroy Russia, but Americans wanted a few more bombs than the Russians. The result? 32,000 bombs more than needed at a cost of $10 trillion more than Americans needed to pay. That extra $10 trillion ended up making stock owners of missile builders and submarine builders very rich.

The secondary point would be that the kind of people who get rich by owning stock in defense contractors are the kind of people who don't think about the safety of the bombs being built. They can't imagine some underpaid Air Force technician accidentally causing an H-bomb to explode. The H-bombs aren't stored near their mansions, so they don't even think about it.

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

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 7:20 AM

SECOND

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


Why Taxing the Bejesus Out of the Rich Might Be Useful

https://slate.com/business/2019/01/why-aoc-70-percent-tax-is-smart.htm
l

The main reason to hike top tax rates isn’t to keep the deficit in check; it’s simply to keep individuals from becoming too wealthy, because inequality is itself toxic for society.

That’s the argument economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman laid out Tuesday in a New York Times op-ed. Their hook, of course, is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s idea to raise the top tax rate to 70 percent on incomes of more than $10 million, which has sparked a month long debate about the virtues of soaking the rich. Saez’s own work has featured heavily in that conversation; in 2011, he co-authored a well-regarded paper that suggested the economically optimal top tax rate would be 73 percent, research that has been cited by Paul Krugman, among others. In their Times piece, he and Zucman argue that “root justification” for slapping tax rates on multimillionaires “is not about collecting revenue.” Rather, it’s about “safeguarding democracy against oligarchy.”

This is, suffice to say, a very different way of talking about taxation than what we typically hear in Washington, where the subject is treated as a necessary evil and hiking rates on millionaires is framed in terms of making the affluent pay their “fair share.” Saez and Zucman, like many on the left, don’t think of the issue that way. Instead, they believe the ultra-rich themselves are a policy problem the government needs to address, because an “extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power.” (See: Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, the Mercers, Tom Steyer, etc.)

The economists note, for instance, that the 90 percent tax rates of the 1950s only applied to a minuscule slice of Americans whose earnings amounted to about $6.7 million or more in today’s dollars. Conservatives often present this fact as evidence that those rates were a mostly symbolic sham. But Saez and Zucman suggest that the opposite was true. The fact that hardly anybody paid those rates was a sign of their near-total success:

That few people faced the 90 percent top tax rates was not a bug; it was the feature that caused sky-high incomes to largely disappear. The point of high top marginal income tax rates is to constrain the immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the United States came as close as any democratic country ever did to imposing a legal maximum income. The inequality of pretax income shrunk dramatically.

More at https://slate.com/business/2019/01/why-aoc-70-percent-tax-is-smart.htm
l

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

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 7:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
More pointless paranoia from the idiots at Vox. Must be a slow news day.

You're going to give Wishy a stroke with that shit, Second.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You kind of missed the point about the H-bombs, didn't you? America could have got along fine with only hundreds of bombs, more than enough to destroy Russia, but Americans wanted a few more bombs than the Russians. The result? 32,000 bombs more than needed at a cost of $10 trillion more than Americans needed to pay. That extra $10 trillion ended up making stock owners of missile builders and submarine builders very rich.

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


I'm in agreement with that point. The folly of man, and all of that. Too much is never enough. Who's got the bigger dick? etc.

That wasn't the point of the article though. The point of the article was fear, pure and simple. It was designed to make people who already freak out about everything they can't control in their lives to have another terrible possible future to obsesses about. Then it's further summed up in your post by your closing statement "So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted."

Not sure why you made the effort to remove the ", man" from that statement. I'm assuming you were correcting the juvenile writing style of the Vox "reporter", and not removing some SJW patriarchy trigger. I'd say the opposite if it were some of the other posters here.


Hell, the original 2nd article was entirely different than the one linked, which is now removed, and no doubt was completely focused on the fact that there wouldn't have even been a Hillary Clinton to run against Trump if the Damascus bomb had detonated in 1980.

Quote:
Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that Arkansas wouldn’t exist if the Damascus bomb had gone off (and then-governor Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton would have perished), but a look at nuclear researcher Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP suggests that Little Rock probably would have been spared the blast. The language has been changed. Thanks to Paul McGrane for the pointer.


Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 10:12 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm in agreement with that point. The folly of man, and all of that. Too much is never enough. Who's got the bigger dick? etc.

That wasn't the point of the article though. The point of the article was fear, pure and simple. It was designed to make people who already freak out about everything they can't control in their lives to have another terrible possible future to obsesses about. Then it's further summed up in your post by your closing statement "So enjoy the day. Take nothing for granted."
6ix, you are not quite right. To make it more obvious: it makes perfect sense to overspend by $10 trillion on H-bombs and delivery systems, but only if you are rich and all that money is going into your bank accounts. On the other hand, it make no sense for the poorer people who are making the rich richer to believe the sales pitch of the rich who are appealing to less-than-thoughtful fears of being murdered by 1) terrorists, 2) illegal aliens, and 3) Russians. The Defense Industry rotates thru 1, 2 & 3 in search of whatever will efficiently get Americans and their Congress to buy more "defense".

Trump Says U.S. Defense Spending Is 'Crazy.'
www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/12/04/trump-says-u-s-defense-s
pending-is-crazy-does-that-signal-a-shift/

President Trump shocked the defense establishment on Monday with a tweet describing the current level of U.S. military spending as “crazy,” and endorsing a “meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race.” The president seems to share Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, because the sentiments expressed in his Monday tweet at first blush appear very much at variance with statements he has made in the past about national security.

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

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 11:03 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You will get zero arguments from me that the rich keep getting richer and war is a large part of that machine.

You're actually one of the only Democrats left here that I agree with on military actions and spending. It seems the rest of them have drunk too much of the Neo-Liberal Corporatist Kool Aid.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 12:17 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You will get zero arguments from me that the rich keep getting richer and war is a large part of that machine.

You're actually one of the only Democrats left here that I agree with on military actions and spending. It seems the rest of them have drunk too much of the Neo-Liberal Corporatist Kool Aid.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The problem is not the rich. The problem is Americans and their Congress. When is the last time Congress declared War? 1942. When did the draft end? January 27, 1973. Americans and Congress got awfully sloppy about Wars in the last 46 years because they are not there, aiming and pulling the trigger. They just watch on TV news and avoid physical involvement, which might force them to think clearly. Or not.

The defense industry has built very expensive, profitable, and highly effective killing machines for sell, but the users, the military, pick the wrong targets to kill. Since I quit that business I’ve got no idea how to the fix the problem of hitting the wrong targets, other than don’t allow the President to go to War without Congressional approval. The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. Maybe Congress should take sole responsibility, rather than informally delegating it to the Pentagon and White House?
www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/h_multi_sections_and_teasers/WarDecl
arationsbyCongress.htm

I would think that decades of losing wars would make Congress and Americans start thinking carefully about what they are doing with their money when they buy "defense". It is not really the fault of the rich who are selling "defense" that the users with their fingers on the triggers won't think clearly about who to kill and who not to kill. Not enough care and thinking is why America keeps losing wars and spending too much on "defense".

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

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 1:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Can't argue with any of that.

It sounds like something I might have written here 10 to 12 years ago or so.


Although the rich aren't absolved here. Everyone is part of the problem.

What's worse? Complacency or feeding off of it?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, January 27, 2019 5:53 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Can't argue with any of that.

It sounds like something I might have written here 10 to 12 years ago or so.


Although the rich aren't absolved here. Everyone is part of the problem.

What's worse? Complacency or feeding off of it?

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Take this example from today: Sen. Marco Rubio said Sunday he did not know of anyone calling for a US military intervention in Venezuela amid the escalating political crisis gripping the South American nation and the Trump administration's embrace of an opposition leader. Rubio, a vocal critic of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, said he supported Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself the nation's interim president and been recognized by a slew of other nations, including the US.
www.cnn.com/2019/01/27/politics/marco-rubio-venezuela-cnntv/index.html

If Trump sends the Marines to Venezuela and deposes Maduro, Rubio would support it, despite there being no declaration of war voted for by Rubio. President Bush did to Panama in 1989 what Trump is contemplating in Venezuela.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-u-s-invades-panama

Senator Rubio is one of those guys responsible for everyday, normal overspending on "defense". He would say that he is following what Floridians want, they want Florida protected from the likes of Maduro of Venezuela, which justifies an oversized "defense" budget. But if Trump does invade Venezuela, and flubs the invasion, Rubio and most of Florida would blame Trump, not themselves, for the fiasco.

I would blame Rubio and Floridians and Trump. I would not blame the wealthy who own stock in defense contractors. They are very upfront about motivation -- they make money by selling weapons. The Merchants of Death accusation? That is a fool's way for Rubio and Floridians to avoid thinking about what they did when they order up another $1 trillion in H-bombs and submarines, or whatever makes them feel safer. The people that buy this stuff never grasp that they are never buying safety. They are buying death and are responsible for who dies. But we all know that your average American won't see it that way, which makes it pretty easy for Presidents like LBJ, Nixon and Bush II to get away with mass-murder of civilians.

(Recall, George H.W. Bush killed 500 civilians to place one Manuel Noriega on trial for racketeering and money laundering. While Castro was the nemesis of the U.S., and Pinochet was its ally, Noriega was both. www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-u-s-invades-panama )

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

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Monday, January 28, 2019 7:01 AM

SECOND

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


The grandson of a Republican Texas Governor explains why Texas became Republican.

Gov. Bill Clements gave Texas Republicans a roadmap 40 years ago this month

A bitter split between liberal and conservative Democrats set the stage for a sea change in Texas politics. Two men made it happen, one Democratic and one Republican.

Lyndon Baines Johnson successfully walked a tightrope between the chasm of liberal and conservative Democratic politics for decades — until his presidency.

As president, Johnson embraced liberal ideology, passing progressive legislation through the Great Society and his War on Poverty programs. Johnson exacerbated the liberal-conservative divide among Democrats, embittering conservatives, which led to his protégé John Connally switching parties as Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary and culminating in liberal John Hill defeating incumbent Gov. Dolph Briscoe in the 1978 Democratic primary. Briscoe’s loss cracked open the door to Texas becoming a two-party state.

Bill Clements, Republican, kicked the door open. . . . Through force of personality, quintessential Texas life story, financial resources and identification with mainstream Texas voters, Clements squeaked out his victory by approximately 17,000 votes.

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Gov-Bill-Clements-gav
e-Texas-Republicans-a-13562826.php

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

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Tuesday, January 29, 2019 7:17 AM

SECOND

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


Harris County GOP draws fire for post blaming "leftism" for the Holocaust

www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/Harris-Count
y-GOP-draws-fire-for-post-blaming-13566040.php

"Leftism kills," the group wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post published on Sunday, Holocaust Remembrance Day. "In memory of the 6 million Jews lost to Nazi hatred in the name of National Socialism. We will never forget."

Vlad Davidiuk, communications director at the Harris County Republican Party, initially declined to comment on the post except to say: "The Nazis identified themselves as National Socialists. The name of the party was the National Socialist Workers party."

"History recognizes that the Jews were killed by the Nazis and the Nazis were officially the National Socialist Workers Party," he added.

The post was subsequently amended to remove "leftism kills" before being taken down altogether.

The GOP logic runs like this: Democrats are socialists. Socialists are Nazis. Nazis killed Jews. Therefore Democrats are responsible for the Holocaust. I have been hearing this "thinking" from Texas Republicans for 55 years, starting back when they were first angry about LBJ and the War on Poverty. Texans hated social welfare programs. There is that word "social" which meant "Nazi" to Texans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

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

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Wednesday, January 30, 2019 6:01 AM

SECOND

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


Welcoming Donald Trump last year, Klaus Schwab, Davos’s majordomo, praised the Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and said, “I’m aware that your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretations.” The super-rich don’t hate all populists – just those who refuse to make them richer.

Cutting the ribbon on this new economic order back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan claimed that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” A joke perhaps, but the intention was real enough. The last three decades have seen the political and economic elites hack away at our social scaffolding – rights, taxes and institutions. It proved profitable, for a while, but now it threatens their own world. And still they block the quite reasonable alternatives of more taxes on wealth, of more power for workers, of companies not run solely to enrich their owners. The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves. Three decades after Reagan, the nine most laughable words in the English language are: “I’m from the elite and I’m here to help.”

More at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/23/panic-davos-inequality-g
lobal-elite

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

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Wednesday, January 30, 2019 8:53 AM

SECOND

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


Trump lied about E-Verify during 2016 Campaign. As we all know, nothing matters. Still:

President Trump’s company plans to institute E-Verify, a federal program that allows employers to check whether new hires are legally eligible to work in the United States, in every one of its golf clubs, hotels and resorts, following a Washington Post report that its club in Westchester County, N.Y., employed undocumented immigrants for years . . . The move is the first acknowledgment by the president’s private business that it has failed to fully check the work status of all its employees, despite Trump’s claims during the 2016 campaign that he used E-Verify across his properties. At the time, he called for the program to be mandatory for all employers.

Just another routine lie.

www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trumps-company-plans-to-check-
the-legal-status-of-employees-following-report-that-it-hired-undocumented-workers-for-years/2019/01/29/88974678-23fe-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html

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

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Wednesday, January 30, 2019 1:28 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Can you imajin the hurricane uv outraje that woud hav blown out uv the GoP eko chamber if that wuz uncovered about the Clintonz or Obamaz?

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

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Thursday, January 31, 2019 6:31 AM

SECOND

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


Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor Wednesday to rail against HR 1, the sweeping anti-corruption proposal House Democrats have put forward as their first bill in the majority. Among many other measures, it proposes making Election Day a federal holiday and encourages private sector businesses to do the same. www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1/text

McConnell, who calls the bill the “Democratic Politician Protection Act,” sees that as a “power grab.”

“Just what America needs, another paid holiday and a bunch of government workers being paid to go out and work ... [on Democratic] campaigns,” he snarked on the Senate floor. “This is the Democrat plan to restore democracy? ... A power grab.”

McConnell is saying that the more people vote, the worse it is for the Republican Party.

The proposal to make Election Day a federal holiday is based on a simple reality: A wide swath of the American public doesn’t vote — and most of those nonvoters say they skipped the polls because they had to work or get kids to school and didn’t have the time.

www.vox.com/2019/1/30/18203936/mitch-mcconnell-election-day-federal-ho
liday

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

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Thursday, January 31, 2019 12:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Can you imajin the hurricane uv outraje that woud hav blown out uv the GoP eko chamber if that wuz uncovered about the Clintonz or Obamaz?

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .


It probably wouldn't look too dissimilar to every day in the RWED for the last two years.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, February 1, 2019 5:50 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


This thread is looking more and more like SECOND's soapbox.

SECOND, I rarely come here, and you're the reason why.


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

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Friday, February 1, 2019 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

This thread is looking more and more like SECOND's soapbox.

SECOND, I rarely come here, and you're the reason why.

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND
Signym, people like you are the reason why "Medicare for All" won't get passed without melodrama within the Democratic Party. Too many Americans are too finicky. Add into that political mixture 100 Senators pulling in 50 different directions because of the built-in structure of the Federal government and it becomes impossible to please the Signyms and a super-majority of Congress.

The Coming Drama with Democratic voters over Medicare for All

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/2020-could-be-test-medica
re-alls-popularity/581746/

As more Democratic politicians propose moving beyond the Affordable Care Act, the party may be steaming toward the same iceberg that sank Republican efforts to repeal the law.

During the ACA debate, Republicans failed to recognize the degree to which their traditional priority of minimizing government involvement in health care could threaten the financial security of the older and working-class whites now central to their electoral fortunes. Similarly, Democrats may be underestimating how much of their new coalition — which increasingly relies on well-educated whites in major metropolitan areas — may resist entrusting the health-care system entirely to government control and ending private health insurance.

The Medicare for All debate sharpens that tension because voters overwhelmingly receive insurance through their employers — and polls show that the vast majority of them are satisfied with that coverage.

The idea of trying to completely eliminate private insurance unnerves many veterans of the health-care fights. After the ACA’s passage, Obama — who had famously promised that those who like their insurance plan could keep it — faced a huge backlash after only a few hundred thousand people in the individual insurance market were forced to give up coverage that did not meet the law’s standards. Ending private insurance would affect the 181 million Americans who today receive health insurance through their employers, according to census figures.

The Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank, implicitly reflected that perspective last year when it issued a universal coverage plan that allowed those with private insurance to maintain it if they preferred. “We did that because we want to have a system where everyone in America has health insurance, but you don’t face the legitimate concern that people have about losing coverage that may even be better than the Medicare plan that’s available,” said Neera Tanden.

Support among the general public in the Kaiser poll plummeted to just 37 percent when respondents were told it could eliminate private insurance companies. Support sagged to the same level when respondents were told it could require most Americans to pay more in taxes. (The taxes needed to pay for it would almost surely be less than what Americans now pay in insurance premiums.)

More at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/2020-could-be-test-medica
re-alls-popularity/581746/

Personally, I am on Medicare. It could be extended to everyone. If that is too much to get around the GOP obstruction, maybe it could be extended to only the uninsured. But even that will be adamantly opposed by the GOP.

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

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Friday, February 1, 2019 7:40 AM

SECOND

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


The Great Texas Immigrant Voter Hunt Shoots Itself In the Foot

AUSTIN — Last Friday afternoon, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton took to Twitter to blast out alarming news.

“VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” the tweet said. “The @TXsecofstate discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections.”

The tweet ricocheted across the internet for two hours before the state sent notice of the explosive number of suspected non-citizen voters to county election officials, who are charged with verifying the initial findings and purging any ineligible voters. The state had been working on the analysis since March 2018, but it took the elections officials less than a day to spot glaring errors. By Tuesday, the original list of 95,000 had been cut to roughly 75,000 names.

“I can’t speculate as to why the original list had mistakes,” said Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis, who is President of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators and was among the first to notify the state of inaccuracies. “We weren’t, my county, wasn’t consulted on search parameters or methodology.”

The sequence of events spotlights a rocky rollout that put far more emphasis on splashy numbers than accuracy.

All 366 registered voters on the list sent to McLennan County election officials, for example, were incorrectly flagged and had already proven citizenship, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported.

More at www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article/Texas-officials-l
aunched-voter-purge-with-big-13579145.php

Election officials in Texas’ largest county say they have already cleared about 18,000 voters in the Houston area who the state had wrongly flagged as potential noncitizens.

Harris County special assistant attorney Douglas Ray said Wednesday he expects to find more mistakes as the state backpedals on claims that tens of thousands of illegal ballots had potentially been cast since 1996.
www.wacotrib.com/news/elections/state-all-on-local-list-of-potential-n
oncitizen-voters-are/article_20771942-538d-506d-bcad-7e7ca79e261d.html

By the time this fiasco is completed I’ll be surprised if they find more than a dozen noncitizens.

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

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Saturday, February 2, 2019 8:49 AM

SECOND

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


Russia nuclear treaty shelved

“For too long, we have been held back by self-imposed limits while foreign competitors grow and they advance more than we have over the years,” Trump said.

Some experts are skeptical. “Nobody in the administration has laid out what the action-reaction cycle looks like as the United States makes all these moves — building new warheads, withdrawing from treaties, pursuing new missiles,” said Jon Wolfsthal.

“The enemy gets a vote,” he added. “The idea that we’re going to do these things, and they’re going to stand still, is nonsensical. They’re going to respond for both political and military reasons.”

If a new arms race begins, it will be expensive. For the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said, the cost of nuclear upgrades has increased to $494 billion. It might end up costing much more than that if Trump starts an arms race while he claims he is only catching up with where Russia already is today.

www.pressreader.com/usa/houston-chronicle/20190202/281479277652393

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

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Sunday, February 3, 2019 6:03 AM

SECOND

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


David Dunning:

People really don’t make the distinction between facts and opinion. So if you survey Democrats and Republicans right now, of course they differ in terms of their priorities for the country and their theories of where we should take the country.

But they also differ in what they think the country is. They really differ in terms of “is the economy doing well?” “What’s the record of the Obama administration?”

These are factual questions. What’s impressed me in the past few years is how much people not only author their opinions but author their factual beliefs about the world.

I ask people a lot of questions in political surveys where I think the answer they ought to choose is, “I don’t know.” And that answer is there for people to give, and they go right past it. We’ve asked, for example, factual questions about the United States, like, “Is teenage pregnancy at an all-time high?” Or, “What’s the financial shape of Social Security?”

We know what the facts are, and we ask people about the facts. Not only that, we put incentives into the survey that are designed to make people honest, borrowing some techniques from economics.

And basically, what we get is Democrats and Republicans differ wildly in terms of what they think is factually true about the world.

What I’m trying to figure out is can we actually diagnose whether these beliefs are authentic or not?

We did try to see if we could figure out if “birther” views that Barack Obama was not born in the United States were authentic. That is, when a person says, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya,” does that look and act like a real belief? And the answer appears to be yes. People seem to be uncomfortable about saying, “I don’t know.” That’s one thing we’ve never been able to get people to do.

I have to admit that over 30 years of research, I often think the correct answer to the question I’m asking you in a survey is, “I don’t know.” But people give me an answer other than “I don’t know”.

How do you get people to say, “I don’t know”? I don’t know.

More at www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/31/18200497/dunning-kruger-effec
t-explained-trump
An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think

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

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Sunday, February 3, 2019 8:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup.

I'm not surprised that Vox didn't also include a counterpoint to the other side as well.

How's this for one?

So we know that Hillary scrubbed her server clean and had her people take hammers to all of the phones. Was there anything truly damning as far as evidence goes that somebody would go to such great lengths to hide it?



Yanno what? I don't have the answer to that one. It's okay to say "I don't know".


And yeah. I don't know if Obama was born in Kenya or not either. He could have been. Birth certificates that old are easy to fake in photoshop.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, February 3, 2019 10:38 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.

Yanno what? I don't have the answer to that one. It's okay to say "I don't know".
Yanno what? I go through life betting based on probabilities. That article mentions “superforecasters” — which is that people who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties. There is a high probability that Trump owes $550 million in taxes that he avoided by fraud.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-sc
hemes-fred-trump.html

One of the biggest "mysteries" of the 2016 campaign was why Trump did not release his income tax returns. The harder Trump fights to keep his returns a secret, the less mysterious the reason: he cheated. He really doesn’t want an auditor who has more accounting information than Trump wants the auditor to see. He’d never voluntarily let an auditor dig deep into areas of his business where the bodies are buried. No IRS auditor ever has. They only had what Trump gave them.
www.cnn.com/2019/02/03/politics/treasury-house-democrats-president-tax
-return-fight/index.html

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

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Sunday, February 3, 2019 8:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Yanno what? I go through life betting based on probabilities. That article mentions “superforecasters” — which is that people who think not in terms of certainties but in terms of probabilities tend to do much better in forecasting and anticipating what is going to happen in the world than people who think in certainties.


Yup. It's not often that I say anything is certain anymore, is it?

Two years of sobriety under my belt and you might have noticed that I'm always talking in percentages.

Some of the goons here think I'm a dummy for this, and because I just don't outright buy anything that is printed in news sites that speak to their disposition.



The older I get, the more I realize I don't know a fucking thing. Young me would have been extremely troubled by this, since young me thought that I was the bright shiny center of the universe.

It's liberating to finally grow up and realize that you're just another speck of dust in the universe. Not only does that lift a lot of weight that you were unnecessarily putting on your shoulders, but you realize that it's alright not to have all of the answers.



I've thought about that quite a bit as I was growing up. I had vivid memories of my parents saying that certain things were or weren't true when I asked them questions as a kid. As I grew up, I realized that a lot of those answers were full of shit. It didn't mean that my parents were lying to me, or even that they were necessarily wrong given that they grew up in a much different time period than I did. But I don't have any memory of either of my parents ever saying "I don't know".

I think that's comforting, from a child's perspective, never hearing your parent's say "I Don't Know". "Of course my parents know everything", you think, since for a large part of your extremely young life they typically are your greatest role models.

Unfortunately, I think that puts a lot of pressure on you when you grow up, maybe subconsciously, to have all of the answers yourself.


I make it a point to say "I Don't Know" to my niece when she asks me something that I really don't know the answer to. She's not yet old enough to really digest that, or at least have a meaningful conversation afterward, but when she is, I do intend to tell her that it's alright to admit that you don't know the answers to everything, and if you're really interested in a subject you can research it and get your own answers instead of relying on somebody else's "knowledge" to get the answers.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, February 3, 2019 11:29 PM

REAVERFAN


Self-directed study of Youtube and Twitter propaganda. That goes well...



https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/i-didnt-incite-mosque-shooter-
conservative-pundit-ben-shapiro-insists

Ben Shapiro is a stochastic terrorist. Of course he won't admit it. Neither have Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, to name just a few.


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Monday, February 4, 2019 12:23 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
David Dunning:

People really don’t make the distinction between facts and opinion. So if you survey Democrats and Republicans right now, of course they differ in terms of their priorities for the country and their theories of where we should take the country.

But they also differ in what they think the country is. They really differ in terms of “is the economy doing well?”
Maybe because some people are doing well and others aren't. Like in France, URBAN France is doing well because of financialism, rural France is suffering. And how well you PERSONALLY are doing affects your POV on how well you think the country is doing.

Quote:
“What’s the record of the Obama administration?”
It depends on what aspect you're looking at. He presided over an ever-increasing wealth gap (It's not like the rate of increase even slowed down compared to GWB), destroyed just as many nations, shredded the Constitution even more, added more to the Federal deficit, and presided over an even worse drop in manufacturing. Plus, he shoved the population into the maw of private health insurances with a sweetener of Federal tax dollars. OTOH, he was great at "social" issues, presiding over LGBTQ issues like nobody's business.

Quote:
These are factual questions
with complex answers.
Quote:
What’s impressed me in the past few years is how much people not only author their opinions but author their factual beliefs about the world.
Can one have a "factual belief "? Facts are based on reality. Beliefs defy facts. I think this is an oxymoron.

Quote:
I ask people a lot of questions in political surveys where I think the answer they ought to choose is, “I don’t know.” And that answer is there for people to give, and they go right past it. We’ve asked, for example, factual questions about the United States, like, “Is teenage pregnancy at an all-time high?” Or, “What’s the financial shape of Social Security?”
I've taken phone surveys. They really, and I mean REALLY, press you for an answer other than "I don't know". I've had to insist on "I don't know" many times, especially if they were asking a compound question.

Quote:
We know what the facts are, and we ask people about the facts. Not only that, we put incentives into the survey that are designed to make people honest, borrowing some techniques from economics.

And basically, what we get is Democrats and Republicans differ wildly in terms of what they think is factually true about the world.

What I’m trying to figure out is can we actually diagnose whether these beliefs are authentic or not?
All "beliefs" are authentic. Whether you believe in a six foot white rabbit or the god of ancient Israel, there is no way to prove or disprove a belief.

Quote:
We did try to see if we could figure out if “birther” views that Barack Obama was not born in the United States were authentic. That is, when a person says, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya,” does that look and act like a real belief? And the answer appears to be yes. People seem to be uncomfortable about saying, “I don’t know.” That’s one thing we’ve never been able to get people to do.
Like I said, I've had to insist on that answer. I'd be curious what kind of incentives they offer for honest answers; they seem a little secretive on that point.

Quote:
I have to admit that over 30 years of research, I often think the correct answer to the question I’m asking you in a survey is, “I don’t know.” But people give me an answer other than “I don’t know”.
Another correct answer is ... "When you ask me this question, are you asking about X or Y?" Because sometimes the questions themselves are unclear.

Quote:
How do you get people to say, “I don’t know”? I don’t know.


HA HA! Funny. Maybe he needs to tweak the incentives attached to his survey? Clearly, the assumptions that he's using about WHY people answer with certainty are flawed because even he, from his intellectual height, can't seem to manage to get the "right" answers. But by tweaking the incentives and following the ones that elicit the most success, he might be able to answer his own question.

I often answer dear daughter with I don't know..." simply to demonstrate the fact that "other people" don't know things too, not just her. We all have our voids.

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

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Monday, February 4, 2019 1:02 AM

REAVERFAN


Russian troll obfuscates.

Must be Monday.

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Monday, February 4, 2019 9:44 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

It's not often that I say anything is certain anymore, is it?

Some of the goons here think I'm a dummy for this, and because I just don't outright buy anything that is printed in news sites that speak to their disposition.

. . . if you're really interested in a subject you can research it and get your own answers instead of relying on somebody else's "knowledge" to get the answers.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ixStringJack, I predict a high probability that you shall do well because you’ve got a powerful mind and the energy to use it. I don’t have the powerful part, but I have got a operating technique -- when I don’t know for sure I often do know enough to take action (and also have a way to back-out when what I didn’t know goes horribly wrong). An example, not from me, but from life in general: It was okay to vote for Trump when not knowing he was lying about himself. It is not okay once you do know there are some things horrible, not precisely sure what, Trump did. There is a high probability that he is guilty of something, don’t know what for sure. (What is the general backup plan? Support V.P. Pence to replace Trump.)

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

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Monday, February 4, 2019 11:14 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


An exit strategy is always highly recommended.

If Trump is implicated, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong. But at this point in time, it just hasn't happened yet. As far as presidents that have served since I've been old enough to vote, I personally think that things aren't going all that bad, relatively speaking. I'm sure that you would argue that it was better under Obama. I'm pretty sure that JSF would argue that it was better under GWB.

It's been a never ending parade of "bombshells" that would ensure that "this is the time he's going to be impeached" for the last two years, and still nothing.



I'm not a mindless MAGA hat wearing Trumpite. I have a general distrust in government on both sides. My quote that you'll find on older posts that I used for years was Book's "A government is a body of people, usually, notably ungoverned".



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, February 4, 2019 1:11 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
An exit strategy is always highly recommended.

If Trump is implicated, I'll be the first to admit I was wrong. But at this point in time, it just hasn't happened yet. As far as presidents that have served since I've been old enough to vote, I personally think that things aren't going all that bad, relatively speaking. I'm sure that you would argue that it was better under Obama. I'm pretty sure that JSF would argue that it was better under GWB.

It's been a never ending parade of "bombshells" that would ensure that "this is the time he's going to be impeached" for the last two years, and still nothing.



I'm not a mindless MAGA hat wearing Trumpite. I have a general distrust in government on both sides. My quote that you'll find on older posts that I used for years was Book's "A government is a body of people, usually, notably ungoverned".



Do Right, Be Right. :)
When the board of directors fires a CEO, they do NOT have Robert Mueller investigate the CEO for years to determine wrong doing and the board does NOT ask for permission from the millions of stockholders. The board fires the CEO's ass and then it is over. In the case of the Federal government, the CEO, Trump, is a blood-brother to most of the board of directors, the GOP Senators. Those Senators will use any excuse to delay firing Trump. But you are not Trump's blood-brother. Trump has given plenty of indication there is something wrong with him and V.P. Pence is standing by to replace him with very little change in policy, but a huge increase in mental stability of the President. If there is anything Trump has done you like, Pence will give you more of it and he will do it without Trump's silliness. Obviously, the GOP Senators will, with 99% probability, never remove Trump, no matter what comes out from Mueller or anybody else.

Maybe I should give an example of mental instability? Candidate Trump repeatedly promised his base voters not to enact a tax proposal that he would personally benefit from and claimed over and over again that he wanted to crack down on abusive loopholes used by hedge fund and private equity managers. He got many audiences to applaud what he said. Once he was President, Trump actually delivered a regressive tax cut that contains special new loopholes he benefits from personally. Trump was not lying as usual for a politician; he was talking crazy, maybe because candidate Trump's mouth was running without a sane brain in control.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16778658/pass-through-real-
estate-tax-bill

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

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Monday, February 4, 2019 8:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I have doubt that he's not mentally stable either.

He's not acting any different than he did before he was voted in.


I don't really care much for Pence. I don't think you would either if this ever were to happen.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 7:45 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I have doubt that he's not mentally stable either.

He's not acting any different than he did before he was voted in.
I strongly disagree with you about Trump acting no different before versus after the election. Trump knew that populism is popular, and sold himself as populist. Exactly like a crazy person, he was unworried about consequences of being a President not who he says he was while campaigning. But he is sane enough to correctly predict that Trump voters would only slowly and partially understand that he cheated on the economic promises. Better healthcare? No. Coal coming back? No. Higher taxes on the wealthy? No. That is not all the "No"s. He needs at least one "Yes": the Texas/Mexico Wall. He is going to try to get that Wall using any crazy method he can think of. Tonight's State of the Union address will be insane, I predict. Take another look at his Inauguration Speech on "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.": www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/

That was one of the weirdest speeches of all times. Compare it to Lincoln's Inauguration Speeches if you want to see how strangely Trump's mind works. www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/inaug2.htm

I also predict Trump voters won't understand how crazy and strange Trump is, just as most didn't understand the shutdown to get a Wall was crazy, too. And like most crazy plans, the shutdown failed.

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

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 7:55 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Shutdown didn't exactly fail...

We'll have to wait and see what happens next.

Bring popcorn.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 8:03 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shutdown didn't exactly fail...

We'll have to wait and see what happens next.

Bring popcorn.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You say it did not exactly fail? You and I are living in different Universes. That shutdown was the stupidest thing I ever saw, other than those youtube videos of some guy, it could be Trump, cutting down a tree and it falls on his truck. Well . . . since the truck was borrowed, it is no problem for Trump the Lumberjack who knows chainsaws but doesn't understand gravity.

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

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 8:18 AM

SECOND

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


The two great absences in American political life are:

1) socially liberal, economically conservative voters. Basically they don’t exist, accounting for only around 4 percent of the electorate.
www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/political-division
s-in-2016-and-beyond

2) socially conservative, economically liberal politicians — let’s be blunt and just say “racist populists.” There are plenty of voters who would like that mix, and Trump pretended to be their man; but he wasn’t. Trump, who ran as a populist on promises to expand health care and raise taxes on the rich, began betraying his working-class supporters the moment he took office, pushing through big tax cuts for the rich while trying to take health coverage away from millions.

Once upon a time there truly were racist populists: George Wallace for President and in Congress the New Deal coalition relied on a large contingent of segregationist Dixiecrats. But this was always unstable. In practice, advocating economic inclusion seems to spill over into advocacy of racial and social inclusion, too. By the 1940s, Northern Democrats were already more pro-civil rights than Northern Republicans. The Democratic party now has very little tolerance for even the appearance of racism.

Meanwhile, the modern Republican Party is all about cutting taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor and the middle class. And Trump, despite his campaign posturing, has turned out to be no different.

Hence the failure of our political system to serve socially conservative/racist voters who also want to tax the rich and preserve Social Security. Democrats won’t ratify their racism; Republicans, who have no such compunctions, will — remember, the party establishment solidly backed Roy Moore’s Senate bid — but won’t protect the programs they depend on.

Tax cuts for the rich are the G.O.P.’s defining policy, but two-thirds of voters believe that taxes on the rich are actually too low. Cuts in Medicaid have been central to every G.O.P. health care proposal, but only a small minority want that. Why did Republican politicians stake out a position so far from voters’ preferences? Because they could.

As Democrats became the party of civil rights, the G.O.P. could attract working-class whites by catering to their social and racial illiberalism, even while pursuing policies that hurt ordinary workers. Basically nobody wants these policies on their own; they only sell if they’re packaged with racial hostility.

More at www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/ralph-northam-howard-schultz.html

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

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Tuesday, February 5, 2019 8:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shutdown didn't exactly fail...

We'll have to wait and see what happens next.

Bring popcorn.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You say it did not exactly fail? You and I are living in different Universes. That shutdown was the stupidest thing I ever saw, other than those youtube videos of some guy, it could be Trump, cutting down a tree and it falls on his truck. Well . . . since the truck was borrowed, it is no problem for Trump the Lumberjack who knows chainsaws but doesn't understand gravity.

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


What I mean is that it's not exactly over yet...

No telling what the future holds.

Not a damn thing I could do about it any way it turns out, so I'll just sit back and enjoy the shit show.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, February 6, 2019 8:50 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

No telling what the future holds.

Not a damn thing I could do about it any way it turns out, so I'll just sit back and enjoy the shit show.
Enjoy this: 4 Trump vacations cost $13.6 million

Four of President Donald Trump’s trips to his Florida home cost taxpayers nearly $13.6 million, the U.S. government’s watchdog reported Tuesday.

The federal government costs included $60,000 paid directly to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, the Government Accountability Office said in its report, which examined Trump’s visits over four weeks in early 2017.

The GAO noted in its report that it didn’t include some expenses that are classified nor did it include salaries or benefits of Secret Service and Defense Department personnel.

The government also spent nearly $400,000 protecting the president’s two older sons during three international trips they took in early 2018, the office found.

http://time.com/5521886/trump-trips-mar-a-lago-cost/

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

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