REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

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Friday, March 6, 2020 8:14 AM

SECOND

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


What’s the meaning of life? (It is a political question even more than a philosophical and religious question)

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/5/18663220/god-religion-sociali
sm-martin-hagglund-this-life

It’s the biggest question anyone has ever asked, and there is no easy answer. It’s even harder to answer if you consider this possibility: That this life — the here and now — is all we have. There is no heaven nor hell, no eternal beyond, no consciousness of any kind after death. We are thrown into existence, we live for a while, and then we pass away into nonexistence.

If all of that’s true, how should we spend our time? What should we care about? And most importantly, what do owe each other?

A new book, called This Life, by Yale philosopher Martin Hägglund somehow tackles all of these questions and much more. For Hägglund, the best religious and philosophical traditions all implicitly recognize that the highest good, the thing we’re really after, is this life that we share together. And that means we have to think about meaning and commitment with this truth in mind.

This is Hägglund’s point of departure, and it leads him through the history of religious and political ideas and finally to a deep critique of capitalism and the values that undergird it. In the end, Hägglund argues that some form of socialism is the only political project that takes the human condition seriously, unlike capitalism, because it allows us to devote ourselves to projects that we actually care about as opposed to selling our labor — and time — for the sake of profit and survival.

Sean Illing: Capitalism values time in the sense that someone has to pay us for it, but it doesn’t value the ability to spend our time in ways that aren’t connected to survival or money. Everything turns on wealth and profit and property, and you’re defined by what you own, what you possess. It’s the most spiritually impoverished way of being I could possibly imagine.

Martin Hägglund: Yes, but the thing about Marx is that, even though he’s very critical of capitalism and thinks it has to be overcome, he also thinks it was a form of progress compared to previous forms of life. And the question of time is at the center of that.

There’s a contradiction here because, on the one hand, capitalism is the first social form of life which recognizes that everyone’s time is valuable in the sense that you have to pay someone to do something rather than just enslave them. What you’re saying to the enslaved person is that you don’t own your time at all; I own you and your time.

So capitalism, at least minimally, recognizes that our time is important. Even if you’re not a capitalist or don’t own any property, you at least own the time of your life. In other words, there’s a negative recognition that your time is valuable because it costs something to buy it, and this is a qualitative shift that capitalism makes possible.

Sean Illing: Can you say a little more about Marx’s critique of capitalism and why it was both a necessary step on the way toward something like socialism and why it had to be discarded in order for us to really own our time in the way you think we should?

Martin Hägglund: Well, Marx asked, how did we come to embrace this idea of everyone’s right to freedom and equality? And the answer is that capitalism helped gives us this language, this way of thinking, because this mode of production, of buying and selling our labor on the market, couldn’t be justified by race or caste or any of these things.

But this is where the contradictions emerged for Marx. While we’re all formally equal under capitalism in terms of our rights to sell our labor, we’re still unequal because we have different amounts of capital. So we’re minimally free in that no one can just enslave us or force us to do something, but we’re only free to sell our labor in order to survive.

This is progress over the old feudal system, and it helps to establish the importance of freedom and equality, but it can’t really deliver it in any meaningful way. Because if I don’t have sufficient capital, then I have to sell my time to a capitalist who employs me and who decides the purposes of production.

And even if you’re a capitalist producer, you’re not really free to ask, “What would be the best thing for me to produce given the actual commitments and values I have and what would be good for our society?” Instead, you have to create something that is profitable.

Download the book
https://libgen.unblockit.red/search.php?req=Martin+Hägglund

Bittorrent the book
https://thepiratebay.vip/torrent/32787355/This_Life_by_Martin_H_auml_g
glund_EPUB

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, March 6, 2020 10:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Awesome links.

I'm sure the author won't mind.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, March 6, 2020 11:04 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:
Awesome links.

I'm sure the author won't mind.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, Martin Hägglund is a Commie. Excuse me -- Marxist/Socialist. He wrote the book because that is what professors do. If he was writing for money, he'd be writing movie scripts for Disney. Hollywood sure needs some smarter writers and Hägglund is one. Did you see Star Wars 9? What a stupid movie! But it made money. A billion people will eventually waste some of their life watching it and Martin Hägglund would not approve of such waste, which is why he wrote "This Life, Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom".

Chapter 5 begins with:
The greatest resources for developing a secular notion of freedom can be found in the writings of Karl Marx. This may be surprising, since Marxism is notorious for having given rise to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Yet, as I will seek to show, there is no support in Marx’s thinking for any form of totalitarian state. On the contrary, the premise for all of his work is “the existence of living human individuals” as ends in themselves. This commitment to individual freedom—what Marx describes as “the free development of individualities”—is the foundation for his critique of capitalism and his critique of religion.

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, March 6, 2020 11:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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Sunday, March 8, 2020 7:33 AM

SECOND

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


Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them?

This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health.

The book is not about racism at the individual level, though you can certainly read that into it. For Metzl, the key question is how did a politics of racial resentment become so powerful that it overwhelmed even the basic instinct for self-preservation? To get answers, he spent years talking to voters in Southern and Midwestern states, asking them to explain their political choices. The answers aren’t terribly satisfying, but they are instructive.

I spoke to Metzl about what he learned and what he thinks we can do to solve this problem. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing: Why are so many poor and working-class white Americans endorsing policies that are literally killing them?

Jonathan Metzl: That’s the core question I address in the book. I look at the rejection of the Affordable Care Act in the South. I look at policies that make it far easier for people to get guns and carry guns everywhere. I look at tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans but cut roads, bridges, and schools in poor and working-class areas. Every one of those policies has been sold as a policy that will make America great again. But they have devastating consequences for working-class populations, particularly working-class white populations, in many instances.

You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.

I think the GOP has also been remarkably successful at tapping into this narrative — a narrative that makes people anxious that immigrants and minorities are going to take away privileges that are theirs.

Sean Illing: When you say that certain policies or dogmas are “killing people,” what exactly do you mean? How are people dying?

Jonathan Metzl: Well, part of what I do in the book is talk to people in their daily lives and try to examine the everyday effects of particular GOP policies. And the other part of the book looks at the data trends of those policies, which is pretty remarkable.

I found that if you lived in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion and blocked the full passage of the Affordable Care Act, you lived about a 21- to 28-day shorter life span on the aggregate. So it was costing people about three to four weeks of life in those states.

When I looked at states that made it incredibly easy for people to buy and carry guns pretty much anywhere they wanted, I found that this correlated with hundreds of deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, particularly in white populations, because gun suicide rose dramatically. And I found that if you lived in a state that cut away infrastructure and schools and funding, that correlated with higher high school dropout rates.

All these variables are associated with shorter life expectancies, so this is what I mean when I say these policies are killing people.

Free Download for "Dying of Whiteness"
https://libgen.unblockit.red/search.php?req=Dying+of+Whiteness

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, March 8, 2020 7:40 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And you too can have a legal copy of it for just $19.98 at Target:

Or just $12.99 on Kindle:

So when are you cutting your pay to $70,000 per year and giving the rest away? You never got back to me on that one.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The free links are for you, but would you exert yourself to click? The $70,000 job is out there for you, but would you exert yourself to move where the job is?

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, March 8, 2020 9:03 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them?

This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health.

The book is not about racism at the individual level, though you can certainly read that into it. For Metzl, the key question is how did a politics of racial resentment become so powerful that it overwhelmed even the basic instinct for self-preservation? To get answers, he spent years talking to voters in Southern and Midwestern states, asking them to explain their political choices. The answers aren’t terribly satisfying, but they are instructive.

I spoke to Metzl about what he learned and what he thinks we can do to solve this problem. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing: Why are so many poor and working-class white Americans endorsing policies that are literally killing them?

Jonathan Metzl: That’s the core question I address in the book. I look at the rejection of the Affordable Care Act in the South. I look at policies that make it far easier for people to get guns and carry guns everywhere. I look at tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans but cut roads, bridges, and schools in poor and working-class areas. Every one of those policies has been sold as a policy that will make America great again. But they have devastating consequences for working-class populations, particularly working-class white populations, in many instances.

You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.

I think the GOP has also been remarkably successful at tapping into this narrative — a narrative that makes people anxious that immigrants and minorities are going to take away privileges that are theirs.

Sean Illing: When you say that certain policies or dogmas are “killing people,” what exactly do you mean? How are people dying?

Jonathan Metzl: Well, part of what I do in the book is talk to people in their daily lives and try to examine the everyday effects of particular GOP policies. And the other part of the book looks at the data trends of those policies, which is pretty remarkable.

I found that if you lived in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion and blocked the full passage of the Affordable Care Act, you lived about a 21- to 28-day shorter life span on the aggregate. So it was costing people about three to four weeks of life in those states.

When I looked at states that made it incredibly easy for people to buy and carry guns pretty much anywhere they wanted, I found that this correlated with hundreds of deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, particularly in white populations, because gun suicide rose dramatically. And I found that if you lived in a state that cut away infrastructure and schools and funding, that correlated with higher high school dropout rates.

All these variables are associated with shorter life expectancies, so this is what I mean when I say these policies are killing people.

Free Download for "Dying of Whiteness"
https://libgen.unblockit.red/search.php?req=Dying+of+Whiteness

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



Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, March 8, 2020 9:37 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
If I had a dollar for every time a Texas Republican told me he wasn't a racist but he did have a problem with lazy, no good niggers and Mexicans expecting the government to give them free stuff, I'd have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.

I forgot to mention how much Texas Republicans, who described themselves as completely non-racist, hated that goddamn stupid Obama because the nigger only got into Harvard since there is a quota for dumb niggers. Then they would remind listeners that they are not racist, they are simply stating the facts.

He is not a Texas Republican, but Donald Trump in 2011 upped the ante against President Barack Obama's legitimacy, raising questions about how the president was admitted to two Ivy League schools.

Trump openly questioned how Obama, who he said had been a "terrible student," got accepted into Columbia University for undergraduate studies and then Harvard Law School.

"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible," Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he's made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he's probing that area of the president's life.

"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records," he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, "I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard."

"We don't know a thing about this guy," Trump said. "There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president."

More at www.politico.com/story/2011/04/trump-howd-obama-get-into-ivies-053694

Trump claims he is ‘least racist person in the world’ despite repeated racist attacks
More at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-racist-twe
ets-aoc-ilhan-omar-baltimore-al-sharpton-jamestown-a9027306.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, March 8, 2020 2:22 PM

THG


I blame the damn russians'. Hell, it's always the russians'.

T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Monday, March 9, 2020 7:36 AM

SECOND

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


We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America
by Jennifer M. Silva
Oxford University Press, 206 pp., $24.95

During the run-up to the 2016 election, the sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed people in the Pennsylvania coal region, which delivered Trump a two-thirds majority, to find out how they made political decisions. Pennsylvania’s coal mines, which once employed 175,000 people, now employ just 837. With those jobs went an entire way of life. The work was dangerous and dirty; thousands died in accidents or succumbed to black lung disease; miners depended on company stores and homes, and those who lost their jobs faced destitution; but they nevertheless had a profound sense of solidarity. Most marriages lasted a lifetime, and communities were held together by social clubs, churches, unions, and friendships.

Today, Coal Brook, the (pseudonymous) town that Silva describes in We’re Still Here, is a depressed wasteland of bars, chain stores, fast food restaurants, and drug rehab centers. Most of the white, black, and Hispanic men and women Silva interviewed struggled with drug or alcohol problems, had spent time in jail, and/or were unemployed. Virtually all said that voting was pointless because the system was rigged in favor of the rich. When Silva turned up for an interview on Election Day wearing an “I Voted” sticker, she was mocked as a gullible fool.

“All politicians are bought off,” declared Joshua, a twenty-eight-year-old white ex-con in drug recovery. “Once they get thrown into the machine they become puppets like all the rest…. I’m not a fan of either [Trump or Clinton]. It’s like choose shit or a shit sandwich.”

Bree, a white waitress suffering from chronic pain whose black boyfriend was recently released from prison, felt similarly:

I love women, and I think they can do anything a man can do, but that woman should not be the President of this United States, so help me God, but neither should that jackass. So it’s like, who the frick do you pick? I’m like, you’re not giving us much of a choice here. Either way we’re going to be destroyed.

Very few of the people of color interviewed by Silva bothered to vote at all, but some whites held their noses and voted for Trump. “Oh, he got us rednecks!” said Steven, a sixty-two-year-old janitor. Danielle, a twenty-eight-year-old child abuse survivor with debilitating anxiety, put it this way: Trump is “so in your face, like eff you, I don’t give a crap what you think of me. I think he belongs in this area because that’s what we are.” Bree agreed: “At the end of the day, I would rather have President Dickhead than President Sellout.”

Silva’s white informants tended to see themselves as lonely warriors facing strange, undefined threats to their community. Weird conspiracy theories were common. Graham Hendry, a white nursing-home aide who’d been chain-smoking since age nine and had recently lost three friends to heroin, believed that September 11 and the Sandy Hook school massacre were hoaxes, that FEMA was building a network of concentration camps for minorities, and that the government put fluoride in toothpaste and aluminum chloride in deodorant in order to calcify people’s pineal glands, allowing the authorities to control their minds.

“Everybody is getting cancer,” Mary Ann Wilson, a fifty-one-year-old white smoker, told Silva. “There’s something in the air,” said her adult daughter Vivian, also a smoker. Could it be landfill from those trucks from New York, they wondered? Or the dust kicked up by the mines?

Many of the white men carried guns everywhere—to high school football games, the supermarket, the sub shop. Their anger focused on a faceless government that neglected people like them and on supposedly shiftless immigrants and minorities who feasted at the public trough. Some embraced white nationalist ideas, which unconvincingly concealed deep feelings of loneliness, shame, worry about the future, and a yearning for solidarity.

America’s white working class seems to have fashioned a new culture of pain and trauma, rooted in white America’s peculiar imperative to seem happy all the time (unless you’re sick) and to personalize and depoliticize financial hardship. This self-defeating belief system is reinforced by neoliberal “government is the problem” slogans and self-help gurus such as Melody Beattie, author of Codependent No More, who warn against getting wrapped up in other people’s problems. “If Tori dies, that’s on her,” one of Silva’s informants said of her drug-addicted sister.

Opioids, my drug-using friends say, don’t just ease pain. They liken the effect to the warmth of bonding with a newborn or being praised for a great piece of work. These drugs stimulate the dopamine system in the brain, which, among other things, helps make the world appear more meaningful. No wonder they seem to be the perfect medicine for the anomie** that is blighting so many American lives.

If, decades ago, we’d built a health system like Switzerland’s, which costs 30 percent less per capita than ours does, we’d now have an extra trillion dollars a year to spend, for example, on replacing the pipes in the nearly four thousand US counties where lead levels in drinking water exceed those of Flint, Michigan, and on rebuilding America’s bridges, railroads, and highways—now so run-down that FedEx replaces delivery van tires twice as often as it did twenty years ago. Median income growth over the past thirty years would have been twice what it actually was, and many of the 45,000 uninsured Americans who die annually because they can’t afford care might be alive. More and better jobs might also be available to people without BAs. In the US, health insurance accounts for 60 percent of the cost of hiring a low-wage worker. Many employers opt instead to hire contract workers with no benefits, or illegal immigrants with no rights at all.

Silva’s Pennsylvania informants, including those most critical of minorities on welfare, do support the expansion of access to education, health care, fair pay, and good jobs. “A political candidate who puts economic justice for working-class families at the center of their platform,” she notes, “and who does not shy away from criticizing the collusion of financial and political elites, could have a shot at gaining their support.” Interestingly, many informants, including Trump supporters like Steven, the sixty-two-year-old janitor, indicated that they would have voted for Bernie Sanders had he been on the ballot in 2016. It’s worth noting that 117,000 Pennsylvanians who voted for Sanders in the primary cast their general election ballots for Trump, who won the state by only 44,292 votes.

If you include those who have left the workforce altogether, the US unemployment rate is almost as high as it was in 1931. Back then, the grandfathers of today’s non-BA whites were drawn to Franklin Roosevelt, who supported generously funded public works programs and expressed open contempt for greedy corporate tycoons. Perhaps a Democratic candidate with similar policy positions will offer America’s struggling workers a reason to go to the polls in 2020 without feeling like fools.

More at www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/left-behind-life-expectancy-crisis/

** Anomie: the disintegration or disappearance of the norms and values that were previously common to the society.

Anomie is "the condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals". Anomie may evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community (both economic and primary socialization).

The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his influential book Suicide (1897), outlining the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression.

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

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Monday, March 9, 2020 11:08 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
If I had a dollar for every time a Texas Republican told me he wasn't a racist but he did have a problem with lazy, no good niggers and Mexicans expecting the government to give them free stuff, I'd have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.


Lucky for me you got those hundreds of millions in tax breaks from your fake business you lie about about everyday so you have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.

I'm sure the check is in the mail.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, March 9, 2020 11:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
I blame the damn russians'. Hell, it's always the russians'.

T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.



And now T has become a parody of himself.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, March 10, 2020 6:43 AM

SECOND

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


In 2020 we’re relearning the lessons of 2008 — namely, that America’s right-wingers can’t handle the truth.
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/opinion/trump-economy-coronavirus.html

Over the weekend Donald Trump once again declared that the coronavirus is perfectly under control, that any impressions to the contrary are due to the “Fake News Media” out to get him. Question: Does anyone have a count of how many times he’s done this, comparable to the running tallies fact checkers are keeping of his lies?

In any case, we’ve pretty clearly reached the point where Trump’s assurances that everything is fine actually worsen the panic, because they demonstrate the depths of his delusions. Even as he was tweeting out praise for himself, global markets were in free-fall.

Never mind cratering stock prices. The best indicator of collapsing confidence is what is happening to interest rates, which have plunged almost as far and as fast as they did during the 2008 financial crisis. Markets are implicitly predicting not just a recession, but multiple years of economic weakness.

And at first I was tempted to say that our current situation is even worse than it was in 2008, because at least then we had leadership that recognized the seriousness of the crisis rather than dismissing it all as a liberal conspiracy.

When you look back at the record, however, you discover that as the financial crisis developed right-wingers were also deeply in denial, inclined to dismiss bad news or attribute it to liberal and/or media conspiracies. It was only in the final stages of financial collapse that top officials got real, and right-wing pundits never did.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

The 2008 financial crisis was brought on by the collapse of an immense housing bubble. But many on the right denied that there was anything amiss. Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s chief economist, ridiculed “bubbleheads” who suggested that housing prices were out of line.

And I can tell you from personal experience that when I began writing about the housing bubble I was relentlessly accused of playing politics: “You only say there’s a bubble because you hate President Bush.”

When the economy began to slide, mainstream Republicans remained deeply in denial. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s senior economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign, declared that America was only suffering a “mental recession” and had become a “nation of whiners.”

Even the failure of Lehman Brothers, which sent the economy into a full meltdown, initially didn’t put a dent in conservative denial. Kudlow hailed the failure as good news, because it signaled an end to bailouts, and predicted housing and financial recovery in “months, not years.”

Wait, there’s more. After the economic crisis helped Barack Obama win the 2008 election, right-wing pundits declared that it was all a left-wing conspiracy. Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly accused the news media of hyping bad news to enable Obama’s socialist agenda, while Rush Limbaugh asserted that Senator Chuck Schumer personally caused the crisis (don’t ask).

The point is that Trump’s luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media aren’t really that different from the way the right dealt with the financial crisis a dozen years ago. True, last time the crazy talk wasn’t coming directly from the president of the United States. But that’s not the important distinction between then and now.

No, what’s different now is that denial and the resulting delay are likely to have deadly consequences.

It’s not clear, even in retrospect, how much better things would have been if right-wingers had recognized economic reality in 2008. Years of deregulation and lax enforcement had already weakened the financial system, and it was probably too late to head off the coming crisis.

Virus denial, by contrast, squandered crucial time — time that could have been used to slow the coronavirus’s spread. For the clear and present danger now isn’t so much that large numbers of Americans will get sick — that was probably going to happen anyway — but that the epidemic will move so fast that it overloads our hospitals.

By not instituting widespread testing from the start, the U.S. has ensured that there are now cases all over the country — we have no idea how many — and that the virus will spread rapidly. And even now there is no hint that the administration is ready for the kinds of public health measures that might limit the pace of that spread.

Oh, and when it comes to the economic response, it’s worth noting that basically everyone on the Trump economic team was totally wrong about the 2008 crisis. It seems to be a job requirement.

The bottom line is that like so much of what is happening in America right now, the coronavirus crisis isn’t just about Trump. His intellectual and emotional inadequacy, his combination of megalomania and insecurity, are certainly contributing to the problem; has there ever been a president so obviously not up to the job? But in refusing to face uncomfortable facts, in attributing all bad news to sinister conspiracies, he’s actually just being a normal man of his faction.

In 2020 we’re relearning the lessons of 2008 — namely, that America’s right-wingers can’t handle the truth.

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, March 10, 2020 9:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, March 10, 2020 10:02 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:
Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You don't remember 2008, do you? I do. I clearly remember Bush not doing a damn thing about the crisis until too late to make any difference. Then the clock ran out and Bush and his team were gone from the White House, having not saved the situation and leaving a mess for somebody else to clean up.



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, March 11, 2020 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


Texas oil loses when OPEC doesn’t manipulate prices

www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Texas-o
il-loses-when-OPEC-doesn-t-manipulate-15121361.php

Everyone loves a free market on the ride up, but they become socialists on the journey down.

Saudi Arabia, Russia and other oil producers struck a deal two years ago to boost oil prices by cutting production. At the time, I questioned how long this new group, calling itself OPEC+, could connive without some party cheating or rewriting the deal.

Meanwhile, American oil executives, those conservative paragons of capitalism, hypocritically cheered the price-fixing scheme. After all, they know they can’t compete in a truly free market, where oil flows without someone, somewhere manipulating the market.

What OPEC+ gives, though, OPEC+ can take away.

Dozens of times over the past two years, energy consulting firms have confidently predicted oil prices would skyrocket and generate enormous profits for investors. They assumed OPEC+ was going to subsidize Texas shale drillers, who cannot turn a profit for less than $55 a barrel.

I repeatedly warned the world had too much supply. Why would Saudi Arabia and Russia allow U.S. oil companies to leech market share? OPEC+ has 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity, most of it cheaper to produce than West Texas Intermediate.

The deal lasted longer than I expected and fell apart last week.

For the first time in two years, we have a free market in crude, and the price is about $35 a barrel. In a note released Monday, Bank of America expects the price to remain below $50 for the rest of the year.

Big Oil’s cries of betrayal would be hilarious if they were not so cynical. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s lobbying arm, sent an email to journalists calling the price drop “Putin’s War on America’s Shale Oil Industry.”

“Russia has a history of using energy policy to advance geopolitical goals,” advises Scott Parker, an API spokesman. “Ultimately, it’s helpful to remind readers that this may be a foreign policy decision by Russia to reclaim its geopolitical leverage and undermine a key U.S. strategic asset.”

Who cares if the policy decision creates a competitive market where consumers pay only the marginal cost for petroleum instead of a rigged price that benefits oligarchs and dictators? I guess nothing sets Big Oil’s hair on fire like a 50 percent drop.

President Donald Trump called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman on Monday, presumably to get him to resume price-fixing. The Trump administration’s chest-pounding is pitiful.

“These attempts by state actors to manipulate and shock oil markets reinforce the importance of the role of the United States as a reliable energy supplier to partners and allies around the world,” Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said in a statement.

OPEC and Russia are not manipulating the market; they just stopped colluding. Not long ago, Republicans in Congress were promoting an anti-trust law to make OPEC’s quota-setting punishable in U.S. courts. Now they want OPEC to rig the game and force American consumers to pay more?

A few years ago, American oil executives bragged that shale oil companies were the new swing producers, ready to raise or lower production depending on global demand. They claimed they would make OPEC irrelevant because they would guarantee energy independence.

The oil and stock market’s behavior over the last 10 days proves that energy independence is a fairy tale told (by Trump and) by nationalists who do not understand how markets work.

The truth is that Texas shale drillers can’t compete on an even playing field with Saudi or Russia, where production costs are half of those in the Permian Basin. They do not have to drill horizontally. They don’t have to hydraulically fracture the well. Their oil always will be cheaper.

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, March 11, 2020 7:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Anybody need more proof that NYT is a biased Democrat shill farm?

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You don't remember 2008, do you? I do. I clearly remember Bush not doing a damn thing about the crisis until too late to make any difference. Then the clock ran out and Bush and his team were gone from the White House, having not saved the situation and leaving a mess for somebody else to clean up.



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



I also remember back in 2008 when the NYT at least held up the pretense of being non-partisan as well.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 12, 2020 10:28 AM

SECOND

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


Last week, five Democratic senators sent disturbing missives to three Trump administration officials about secret forces transforming the US courts and about one very powerful American lawyer in particular, Leonard Leo.

www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Barr Letter.pdf

United States Senate

WASHINGTON, DC 20510
March 4, 2020

Attorney General William Barr
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Barr,

As members of the United States Senate, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in anonymous funding which now pervades the process for selecting federal judicial nominees, confirming them, and advancing cases and legal theories that serve special interests to the detriment of the American people. We believe this anonymous funding, likely from entities that have interests before the federal courts, is undermining the rule of law and the bedrock American principle of equal justice under law.

Investigative reporting has brought attention to Leonard Leo’s leading role in these efforts, including his service with the Trump Administration advising its judicial selection and nominations process.1 In March 2016, Mr. Leo, who was then Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, met with Don McGahn and then-candidate Donald Trump to provide a list of possible Supreme Court nominees. After President Trump’s election, Mr. Leo reportedly also served on his transition team, took leave from the Federalist Society to advise the Trump Administration on Supreme Court nominations, and continues to serve as an advisor on nominations to federal district and appeals courts. To date, over 85 percent of President Trump’s appellate court nominees, including both of his nominees to the Supreme Court, are current or former members of the Federalist Society.

This reporting also places Mr. Leo at the center of a complex network of nonprofit groups and shell entities funded largely by anonymous donors. Between 2014 and 2017 alone, Mr. Leo’s network collected more than $250 million in donations, the sources of which remain unknown. While much of this money has been directed toward advocacy spending in support of judicial nominees through advertising and other means, it appears that Mr. Leo also has a financial interest in these anonymous donations. Although he has regularly received upwards of $400,000 in annual compensation from the Federalist Society, Mr. Leo has declined to disclose his total compensation received through other entities in his network, including from the BH Group, which contributed $1 million to President Trump’s inaugural committee. In addition, he has recently indicated that he is forming a new venture which plans, among other things, to raise and spend millions on issue advocacy campaigns focusing on judges in the 2020 election cycle.

1 Robert O’Harrow & Shawn Boburg, A Conservative Activist's Behind-the-Scenes Campaign to Remake the Nation’s Courts, THE WASHINGTON POST (May 21,2019).

Mr. Leo’s prominent role in the Trump Administration’s judicial selection and nominations process while maintaining a financial interest in advocacy efforts related to this process has raised questions regarding his potential status as a federal employee and compliance with accompanying laws and regulations. By outward appearances, Mr. Leo may have engaged in the performance of a federal function that must be conducted by government employees authorized to act on behalf of the United States by leading the Administration’s efforts to identify and select judicial nominees, and press for their confirmation.2

As a federal employee, Mr. Leo would have been responsible for complying with federal records retention and financial disclosure requirements, as well as the criminal financial conflict of interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208. If he was not deemed a federal employee, Mr. Leo’s role in the Trump Administration may have violated legal limitations on the federal government’s acceptance of voluntary services or restrictions on access to non-public records.3

Mr. Leo’s personal financial interest in advocacy efforts related to the judicial selection and nominations process raises serious concerns regarding potential conflicts of interest and the independence of the federal judiciary, given his leadership role in the Trump Administration’s work on this issue. As Congress conducts oversight and considers legislation related to conflicts of interest, we request that you provide the information requested in the attached Appendix. Because of the Department’s role in the judicial selection or nomination process for federal judicial nominees, Mr. Leo’s potential interactions with the Department as part of that process are relevant to our inquiry.

Please provide the documents specified in the attached Appendix by no later than April 3, 2020. Please also consider this letter formal notification of your obligation to identify, collect, and preserve any records that are responsive to requests in that Appendix.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Sheldon Whitehouse United States Senator
Richard J. Durbin United States Senator
Sherrod Brown United States Senator
Richard Blumenthal United States Senator
Mazie K. Hirono United States Senator


2 Mr. Leo’s service appears to meet the legal definition of an “inherently governmental function” that is “so intimately related to the public interest as to require performance by Federal Government employees,” 31 U.S.C. §501 note, at §5(2)(A), or that “involves, among other things, the interpretation and execution of the laws of the United States so as ... to commission, appoint, direct, or control officers or employees of the United States,” id. at §5(2)(B)(iv).

3 31 U.S.C. § 1342 (“An officer or employee of the United States Government or of the District of Columbia government may not accept voluntary services for either government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”); 5 U.S.C. § 552a(b)(l) (permitting disclosure of certain agency records only to “officers and employees” having a need for the record in the performance of their duties).

Appendix

From the period beginning January 20,2017, to the present, please provide all records in the custody of the United States Department of Justice (including emails, email attachments, notes, hard copy correspondence sent through any medium including courier service, telephone call logs, calendar invitations/entries, meeting notices, meeting agendas, talking points, any handwritten or electronic notes taken during any responsive communications, and summaries of any responsive communications) related to Mr. Leo’s involvement in any potential, actual, or suggested judicial selection or nomination.

For the purposes of this request, the Department may limit its search to custodians within the Office of the Attorney General, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the Office of the Associate Attorney General, the Office of Legal Policy, and the Office of Legislative Affairs.

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, March 15, 2020 7:32 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Can’t Cancel the Election. But States Could Do It for Him.

There’s a perfectly legal shortcut around a free and fair presidential election.

If the pandemic gets so severe that we cannot responsibly hold in-person elections, Congress should require states to allow no-excuse absentee balloting. But if Trump does not want to risk a loss at the polls, he can exploit a constitutional shortcut around free and fair elections. The president can ask Republican-controlled state legislatures to assign their electoral votes to him—without allowing any citizen to cast a ballot for president. This maneuver would constitute an appalling assault on democracy. But it would be legal.

As the 2016 election reminded the country, the president is chosen by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. There are 538 electors, and a candidate needs 270 of them to win. Currently, every state assigns electors to the candidate who won the popular vote statewide. (Two states add a twist that’s irrelevant here.) But the Constitution does not require states to assign their electors on the basis of the statewide vote. It does not even require a statewide vote. Rather, it explains that each state “shall appoint” its electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In other words, each state legislature gets to decide how electors are appointed—and, by extension, who gets their votes.

Today, every state legislature has delegated this task to the people. But at first, state legislatures just did it themselves. In the first presidential election, for instance, the legislatures of Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina appointed electors directly. Eventually, every state moved toward the modern system. But the Supreme Court confirmed in 1892’s McPherson v. Blacker that states were free to revert to the old method, and in 2000’s Bush v. Gore, the court reiterated this point. The majority declared that the state legislature “may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself,” and retains authority to “take back the power to appoint electors” even after switching to a statewide vote.

Put simply, it is perfectly constitutional for a state legislature to scrap statewide elections for president and appoint electors itself. It would also be constitutional for a state legislature to disregard the winner of the statewide vote and assign electors to the loser. And because the Constitution grants legislatures the authority to pick electors this way, Congress cannot stop them.

Due in part to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans control the legislatures of 28 states. Collectively, these states have 294 electoral votes. (Only 270 votes needed to win.) Trump himself could not cancel the entire presidential election. But he could ask these GOP-dominated legislatures to cancel their statewide presidential elections and assign their electors to him. It’s doubtful that we will face this situation in November. But imagine a worst-case scenario: The election is approaching, and the coronavirus remains rampant in our communities. States are unsure whether they have the personnel and resources to hold an election. Congress has failed to mandate no-excuse absentee balloting, and many states have declined to implement it. Or the postal service is so hard hit that it cannot reliably carry ballots to and from voters’ residences. It’s not difficult to envision Trump’s allies in state legislatures assigning their states’ electoral votes to the president, insisting that these dire circumstances justify pulling a constitutional fire alarm.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/trump-cancel-election-day-
constitution-state-electors-coronavirus.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, March 15, 2020 7:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I seriously doubt this is going to happen.

November is a LONG way away and this will have all died down by then and we'll be left with the economic fallout.


The WORST thing we can do is absentee ballots on a wide scale. It's bad enough we do as many as we do today.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 18, 2020 9:55 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 seriously doubt this is going to happen.

November is a LONG way away and this will have all died down by then and we'll be left with the economic fallout.


The WORST thing we can do is absentee ballots on a wide scale. It's bad enough we do as many as we do today.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
But Trump and Biden will be older fools by then:

Presidential inability hasn’t exactly been a rarity. Beginning with George Washington, who nearly died of a month-long bout of pneumonia a few months into his presidency, a number of chief executives have been incapacitated, from periods ranging from a few hours to several weeks. In 1881, President James A. Garfield, mortally wounded by an assassin, lingered for two and a half months before dying. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke, which permanently altered his cognitive functioning. During his final years, Franklin D. Roosevelt was suffering badly enough from cardiovascular disease to cause his top subordinates severe worry before his death, from a cerebral hemorrhage, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan was under general anesthesia for a time following John Hinckley’s assassination attempt. There are many more examples.

Many episodes of disability, such as Wilson’s stroke, FDR’s illness, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack and 1957 stroke, and Reagan’s 1985 cancer surgery, relate to infirmities that are more likely to occur in older populations. But nearly all of these instances were sudden occurrences, unlike dementia, Alzheimer’s, and the generally reduced cognitive functioning that are an almost inescapable consequence of growing older. Presidential advisers have often worried about a chief executive’s deteriorating condition, as in the case of Reagan and even Richard Nixon (though the latter was more a case of depression than age), but no official statement of inability or disability from individual advisers, the Cabinet, or even Congress has ever resulted from such concerns. Yet senescence, the creeping incapacity of an aging presidential brain, is something that could very well lead to a crisis in the coming years.

The Founders, of course, knew that age could affect capacity. Anyone who has dealt with either young children or elderly relatives has learned this from personal experience. But in discussing age qualifications for federal office, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention never expressly connected advancing age with the Constitution’s standard of “inability.” Instead they limited their age concerns to the dangers of having officeholders who were too young. Representatives must be 25; senators, 30; presidents, 35. (Interestingly, there’s no minimum age for judges, who are supposed to be the repositories of disinterested reason born of mature wisdom.) The convention’s longest discussion of age came in the context of debating requirements for representatives. The Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson argued that minimum-age requirements were undemocratic and could deprive the country of the services of youthful geniuses, citing England’s William Pitt the Younger as an example. In the end he was overruled; George Mason retorted that while people claimed that the Confederation Congress “had proved a good school for our young men,” he himself preferred those youngsters to “bear the expense of their own education.”

More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/no-constitution-old-presiden
ts/608206/

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, March 19, 2020 6:05 AM

THG


I think they'll all get the virus before the elections are over and all will be dead.

T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Thursday, March 19, 2020 6:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Mortality rate is extremely low, even among old people. Once there are millions of people tested, that will become crystal clear.

My prediction is that not one single person who was running for President is going to die of COVID-19.

Expect to hear about Tom Hanks and his wife recovering shortly.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, March 19, 2020 6:47 AM

SECOND

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


The Fantasy of “Paying for” Universal Health Care

One of our most bizarre delusions, manifested in the Democratic presidential primary, is that we can’t have Medicare for All unless we figure out how to pay for it. In reality, Medicare for All would either cost as much as we’re currently paying or save America money.

Between government and private spending, our current monstrous hybrid system spends more than 18 percent of our gross domestic product on health care, twice the average for the other 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even worse, health care costs are going up faster than the economy is growing. That means that if nothing changes, the 18 percent number will continue to increase. This is already a genuine drain on the U.S. and will eventually cause something to break.

The only solution to this problem that any country has ever discovered is universal health care. A unified system that covers everybody has the power and moral authority to bargain with providers and hold costs down. So while Medicare for All would require more spending by the federal government, individuals would spend so much less in premiums, deductibles, and copays that we’d almost certainly come out ahead overall — plus we’d never have to think about paying doctor’s bills again. In other words, in reality, the only question is how we can possibly pay for the status quo.

This total disconnect from the real world was embodied by former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s lament that Medicare for All would eliminate millions of private health insurance jobs. Yes, it would — and that’s the point. At best, these jobs are pointless bureaucratic time-wasting; at worst, they involve preventing patients from getting health care. If Buttigieg thinks that’s a good thing, he should propose hiring millions of Americans to play World of Warcraft all day long and occasionally go to emergency rooms and strangle people.

More at https://theintercept.com/2020/03/18/stock-market-coronavirus/

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, March 19, 2020 9:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If Buttigieg thinks that’s a good thing, he should propose hiring millions of Americans to play World of Warcraft all day long and occasionally go to emergency rooms and strangle people.


Pretty hilarious, if quite dated reference.

I can't tell if that was a Boomer comment or an OK Boomer comment.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, March 20, 2020 1:55 PM

SECOND

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


3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.

www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html

March 19, 2020, 4:58 p.m. ET

So Donald Trump is now calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.” Of course he is: Racism and blaming other people for his own failures are the defining features of his presidency. But if we’re going to give it a nickname, much better to refer to it as the “Trump pandemic.”

True, the virus didn’t originate here. But the U.S. response to the threat has been catastrophically slow and inadequate, and the buck stops with Trump, who minimized the threat and discouraged action until just a few days ago.

Compare, for example, America’s handling of the coronavirus with that of South Korea. Both countries reported their first case on Jan. 20. But Korea moved quickly to implement widespread testing; it has used the data from that testing to guide social distancing and other containment measures; and the disease appears to be on the wane there.

In the U.S., by contrast, testing has barely begun — we’ve tested only 60,000 people compared with South Korea’s 290,000, even though we have six times its population, and the number of cases here appears to be skyrocketing.

The details of our failure are complex, but they all flow ultimately from Trump’s minimization of the threat: He was asserting that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu just last week (although true to form, he’s now claiming to have known all along that a pandemic was coming).

Why did Trump and his team deny and delay? All the evidence suggests that he didn’t want to do or say anything that might drive down stock prices, which he seems to regard as the key measure of his success. That’s presumably why as late as Feb. 25 Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist, declared that the U.S. had “contained” the coronavirus, and that the economy was “holding up nicely.”

Well, that was a bad bet. Since then, the stock market has more or less given up all its gains under the Trump presidency. More important, the economy is clearly in free-fall.

I’ll leave health policy to the experts. On economic policy, I’d suggest three principles. First, focus on hardship, not G.D.P. Second, stop worrying about incentives to work. Third, don’t trust Trump.

On the first point: Many of the job losses we’ll experience over the next few months will be not just unavoidable but actually desirable. We want workers who are or might be sick to stay home, to “flatten the curve” of the virus’s spread. We want to partly or wholly close large business establishments, like auto plants, that could act as human petri dishes. We want to close restaurants, bars and nonessential retail establishments.

Now, there will surely be additional, unnecessary job losses caused by a plunge in consumer and business spending, which is why we should be engaged in substantial overall stimulus. But policy can’t and shouldn’t prevent widespread temporary job loss.

What policy can do is reduce the hardship facing those who are temporarily out of work. That means that we need to spend much more on programs like paid sick leave, unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicaid that aid Americans in distress, who need far more help than they’ll get from an across-the-board cash drop. This spending would also provide stimulus, but that’s a secondary concern.

Which brings me to my second point. The usual suspects are already objecting that helping Americans in need reduces their incentive to work. That’s a lousy argument even in good times, but it’s absurd in the face of a pandemic. And state governments that have been trying, with encouragement from the Trump administration, to reduce public assistance by imposing work requirements should suspend all such requirements, immediately.

Finally, about Trump: Over the past few days state TV, I mean Fox News, and right-wing pundits have abruptly pivoted from dismissing Covid-19 as a liberal hoax to demanding an end to all criticism of the president in a time of national emergency. This should come as no surprise.

But this is where the history of the Trump pandemic — all those wasted weeks when we did nothing because Donald Trump didn’t want to hear anything that might hurt him politically — becomes relevant. It shows that even when American lives are at risk, this administration’s policy is all about Trump, about what he thinks will make him look good, never mind the national interest.

What this means is that as Congress allocates money to reduce the economic pain from Covid-19, it shouldn’t give Trump any discretion over how the money is spent. For example, while it may be necessary to provide funds for some business bailouts, Congress must specify the rules for who gets those funds and under what conditions. Otherwise you know what will happen: Trump will abuse any discretion to reward his friends and punish his enemies. That’s just who he is.

Dealing with the coronavirus would be hard in the best of circumstances. It will be especially hard when we know that we can’t trust either the judgment or the motives of the man who should be leading the response. But you go into a pandemic with the president you have, not the president you wish you had.

Has South Korea Stabilized Its COVID-19 Outbreak? Yes.
www.statista.com/chart/21095/covid-19-infections-in-south-korea/

Why South Korea has so few coronavirus deaths while Italy has so many
www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/opinions/south-korea-italy-coronavirus-survivab
ility-sepkowitz/index.html

2020 coronavirus pandemic in South Korea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_South_Korea

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, March 20, 2020 2:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.


LOL

As if anybody trusts the NYT.


It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, March 20, 2020 4:07 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.


LOL

As if anybody trusts the NYT.


It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I knew people like you - knew because they died in their forties since they would not listen to warnings about cigarettes, seat belts, alcohol, guns, etc. declaring that the dangers were exaggerated. One particularly memorable death involved a warning to not bypass an interlock. His lasts words to me were "I've done this hundreds of times." It has been 26 years, but whenever I remember him my first and last thoughts are "Never could tell him anything. The world is better with him dead." That will be engraved on your tombstone, 6ix.

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, March 21, 2020 7:16 AM

SECOND

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


The Romans Tried to Save the Republic From Men Like Trump. They Failed.

by Joy Connolly
January 17, 2017

A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He’s rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he’s saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd’s resentment of his own class.

Call him Donald Trump. But this man is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Clodius, and a legion of other men who lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration for the political system we have today. Long before Max Weber studied “charismatic authority” or Adorno the “authoritarian personality,” Alexander Hamilton, unexpected darling of today’s Broadway, would have recognized the type instantly from his knowledge of Roman history.

He’s a man of wealth and power, but he tells the people he is an outsider, just like them. He insists the system is rigged against them by the influential few. He rails against the people, too: “You’ve given up everything in exchange for laziness and apathy, thinking you’ve got freedom in abundance because your backs are spared the lash. The elite will fight and enjoy their victory, and regular people will be treated like a conquered nation: This will be more the case every day, so long as they work harder for total power than you do to get your freedom back.”

That’s not Trump, though it sounds like him. It’s a politician called Licinius Macer, haranguing a crowd in Rome in 73 BCE. It was with men like Macer in mind that in the first of the Federalist papers, Hamilton identified the claim to fight for popular freedom as the demagogue’s most insidious and effective tactic. “Dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people,” he wrote. Far from the innocent meaning of the original ancient Greek word, “leader of the people,” for Hamilton the demagogue paves a “much more certain road to the introduction of despotism.”

Trump now takes office on the strength of his demagoguery. A student of little else, Trump is an intuitive expert in popular fantasy, and he plays his American audience like a well-worn instrument. What to the pundits seemed like outrageous rhetorical excesses (“total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.,” “She has to go to jail,” and so on) turned out to be the notes roughly half the country wanted to hear.

Since the election, the excesses have continued, in speeches, casual asides, and tweets at all times of day or night. The professional classes marvel that Trump summarily dismisses advice (“I know a lot about hacking”), jabs at perceived enemies in the press, and tweets bellicose threats to foreign governments. But this is par for the course. Both as candidate and president-elect, Trump has invited the elites to bring it on, rubbing raw the weakest point of the republican constitution: the relationship between the people and their elected politicians, or as the Romans would put it, “plebs” and “pauci,” the many and the few.

More at www.villagevoice.com/2017/01/17/the-romans-tried-to-save-the-republic-
from-men-like-trump-they-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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Saturday, March 21, 2020 7:55 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
3 Rules for the Trump Pandemic
One: Don’t trust the president.


LOL

As if anybody trusts the NYT.


It's 2020 dude. There's more truth on the front page of The Onion than an entire NYT paper.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I knew people like you - knew because they died in their forties since they would not listen to warnings about cigarettes, seat belts, alcohol, guns, etc. declaring that the dangers were exaggerated. One particularly memorable death involved a warning to not bypass an interlock. His lasts words to me were "I've done this hundreds of times." It has been 26 years, but whenever I remember him my first and last thoughts are "Never could tell him anything. The world is better with him dead." That will be engraved on your tombstone, 6ix.

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



I know that smoking is bad for me, dummy. I just don't give a shit is all.




You know the character of a man by what he does when he knows nobody is watching him. If we had any clue at all about the real you, then we could have equally stupid and unrelated arguments to any of yours based off of your bad habits.

That being said, shut the fuck up dude. You're an idiot.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, March 21, 2020 10:54 AM

THG


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.



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Sunday, March 22, 2020 9:35 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That being said, shut the fuck up dude. You're an idiot.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
The GOP’s War on Government

For many years, Republicans and conservatives have demonized government. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan, the superstar of the right, proclaimed, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” The well-known conservative strategist and lobbyist Grover Norquist once said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The tea party arose in opposition to federal assistance for those Americans slammed by the housing collapse of 2007 and became a movement encompassing anti-government fervor and intense paranoia. And Trump rode this wave into the White House.

On the campaign trail, Trump embraced the right-wing caricature of the federal government as a collection of ineffectual fools who did little more than collect taxes, impose regulations, and hinder American greatness. Trade, health care, the economy—all of this, Trump said, were challenges he could easily take on while delivering spectacular results. Know-how and experience were not needed. Not with a brain like his. Governing was simple.

Trump could only be acceptable to voters who had long been told that government was the problem. He was the antithesis of government experience and expertise. And he made that a selling point and convinced 63 million people to vote for him, as if they were picking a winner on a reality television show. After all, he was amusing and a kick in the ass of the libs who thought credentials and seriousness actually mattered.

Trump entered the White House not taking the job seriously. He fretted over the estimates of the inauguration crowd size, while, out of neglect or with intent, he depopulated the federal government. Key positions across various agencies have gone unfilled throughout his tenure. He hollowed out the State Department. The Department of Homeland Security has had top slots empty for long stretches. As has been noted much in recent days, Trump’s downsizing of the National Security Council included dumping the office of global health. And when he did appoint people, there frequently was little consideration of experience. His acting director of national intelligence has no previous background in intelligence. And if you haven’t seen the recent stories about college seniors snagging important posts in the Trump administration, google away.

For Trump, governing didn’t really matter. He had no interest in it. When Republican legislators met with him to discuss a health care bill, he told them he didn’t care about the details: “Forget about the little shit.”

Trump took credit for an economic recovery that was long in motion before he moved into the White House. He claimed responsibility for plant openings that had been planned prior to his election. He bombed other nations without bothering to formulate strategic policies. And he ripped up international agreements that had been the result of tremendous work and effort—the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord—claiming he could come up with better deals. And then he didn’t even try to come up with better deals.

Government was just another show for Trump. If a celebrity was interested in an issue, perhaps then it counted. If he could build something that would carry his brand, that counted, too. And, of course, if he could demagogue a controversy, that would hold his interest. But managing an entire branch of government and ensuring it served the public? He’d rather be bragging about ending environmental regulations or be on the golf course. With his nonstop tweeting and constant retreating to Trump properties, he gave the impression the presidency was not a full-time position.

After decades of Republican attempts to delegitimize government, he came along and downgraded the job of president. Mostly, Trump has been a post-government president.

More at www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/gop-small-government-trump-corona
virus-incompetence/

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, March 23, 2020 6:38 AM

SECOND

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


Someday there will be "Trump The Final Days", but until then there is "Nixon The Final Days" a serious movie about a brilliant but flawed man trying his best, excluding Vietnam, Watergate, tax cheating, etc. Trump’s movie will be a dark comedy about an entertaining blowhard barely trying at all.

https://yts.mx/movie/the-final-days-1989

Thirteen years before it was filmed as a TV-movie, "The Final Days" was the title of a bestselling book, whose 1976 publication "just happened" to coincide with the cinematic release of "All the President's Men" (based on an earlier book by the same authors). The Final Days book was noted for its complete reliance on anonymous sources, and for its witheringly negative portrait of Nixon and his personality, even including humiliating details about the Nixons' marriage. Shortly after it was published, Pat Nixon determined to read the book (against her husband's advice), and suffered a stroke within a day or two after she started on it. She was in hospital for about a month. All in all, TFD was probably the most sadistic literary attack ever leveled on a living ex-President up to that time.

With all that background, it seems very unlikely to me that Nixon, personally, sat through the TV-movie version of "The Final Days" when it came out in 1989. My guess is that he had one or more staff aides watch it; possibly Tricia/Julie and/or their husbands, but that he himself couldn't bear the thought of it. But who knows for sure. Nixon's office put out a press release at the time, saying that sponsor AT&T should change its slogan to "Reach Out and Smear Someone", which (IMO) was rather clever.

The movie itself was highly praised by William F. Buckley, Jr., who specifically singled out the performance of Lane Smith as impeccable. Despite misgivings about the source-material, I watched it (I think it was broadcast on ABC, if I remember correctly) and was mesmerized. The whole show was simply brilliant from start to finish. Smith's performance as Nixon is, indeed, flawless, and the overall atmosphere of the last 15 months of the Nixon White House was nicely judged, in my view. "The Final Days" is absolutely one of the small handful of TV- movies with an abundance of dramatic power and credibility, and with the ability to withstand repeated viewings.



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, March 23, 2020 8:26 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Hashtag # PelosiHatesAmericans Trends On Twitter https://twitter.com/hashtag/PelosiHatesAmericans?src=tren

Secretary Mnuchin Outlines Details of Recovery Bill some are Blocking…
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/03/23/important-details-secr
etary-mnuchin-outlines-details-of-recovery-bill-democrats-are-blocking/


The Virus is Not Invincible, But It’s Exposing Who’s Irreplaceable
https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/22/the-virus-is-not-invincible-but-its
-exposing-whos-irreplaceable/
I think one of the strangest of all sequelae to the virus... might be the millions of high-paid Americans whose absences were hardly missed either by the public or count much in subsequent economic analyses of damage to the economy.

In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer?

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Monday, March 23, 2020 8:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Hashtag # PelosiHatesAmericans Trends On Twitter https://twitter.com/hashtag/PelosiHatesAmericans?src=tren


I actually don't argue with the things that Democrats don't want in the bill (although I bet I'd argue a lot of things they want to stick in there themselves).

But there is zero scenarios where this ends up well for Democrats. They can pretend all they want to have the upper hand here, but when you're talking about money promised to millions of Americans, especially millions of Americans who are going to depend on it, you're going to see hellfire reign down on the Dems if they don't let the bill pass, no matter what.

As the current face of the Democratic Party, Nancy will become the most hated person in America overnight if those checks aren't in accounts by April 6th.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, March 23, 2020 9:38 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Youre failing to see hoo haz the most to looz.

Trump and the GoPs are toast alredy and every day he desperately gets up in frunt uv the cameraz he burnz himself and them deeper.

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 7:48 AM

THG


tick tock

T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 9:53 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 JO753:
Youre failing to see hoo haz the most to looz.

Trump and the GoPs are toast alredy and every day he desperately gets up in frunt uv the cameraz he burnz himself and them deeper.

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

http://www.7532020.com .
Trump is NOT TOAST.

I will not vote for Trump but:

45% of likely voters approve of Trump
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/voters/

48% of gamblers approve of Trump
https://odds.watch/trump-2020

If Biden dies before the election (4% chance) Trump will be in an even better position to win.
www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying

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, March 25, 2020 10:36 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Youre failing to see hoo haz the most to looz.

Trump and the GoPs are toast alredy and every day he desperately gets up in frunt uv the cameraz he burnz himself and them deeper.

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

http://www.7532020.com .
Trump is NOT TOAST.

I will not vote for Trump but:

45% of likely voters approve of Trump
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/voters/

48% of gamblers approve of Trump
https://odds.watch/trump-2020

If Biden dies before the election (4% chance) Trump will be in an even better position to win.
www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying


His odds are even better than that.

RCP aggregate 3/25: 46.3%


https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_app
roval-6179.html

That's tied right now with his highest ever approval rating since he's taken office.

Also, Gallup: 49%

https://news.gallup.com/poll/298313/president-trump-job-approval-ratin
g.aspx

Also, Trump's handling of the Coronavirus, per Gallup: 60%, meaning even Democrats are jumping ship. (and that 60% is a benchmark that Trump never got when his polls against impeachment were at their highest and conflicted with his job approval percentages).


OPPS

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:27 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:

OPPS

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump won with 46.1% of the votes in 2016. That is also his approval rating with likely voters in 2020. Any Democrat that believes Trump cannot win cannot be remembering 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election

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, March 25, 2020 4:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

OPPS

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump won with 46.1% of the votes in 2016. That is also his approval rating with likely voters in 2020. Any Democrat that believes Trump cannot win cannot be remembering 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election

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


Yup.


Also keep in mind all of the things that have happened in the last 2 weeks that SHOULD have knocked him down so low he wouldn't have a chance no matter who he ran against.


I'll state for the record once again that this has little to do with Trump and says far more about the Democratic Party and how terrible it is in 2020.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 7:18 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Yup.


Also keep in mind all of the things that have happened in the last 2 weeks that SHOULD have knocked him down so low he wouldn't have a chance no matter who he ran against.
Nope.

1. Political leaders' popularity often rises temporarily after the onset of a crisis. Political scientists call this pattern the "rally effect," and it's been documented many times over decades of history; most dramatically, George W. Bush's job approval shot up from about 50 percent to about 90 percent virtually overnight after the events of September 11, 2001. There are several plausible factors contributing to this phenomenon: citizens close psychological ranks around their national leaders in a moment of uncertainty and fear; they evaluate these figures on different criteria than they did before the crisis erupted; and the normally critical opposition party (sometimes) mutes its attacks on the incumbent. Both French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte have enjoyed spikes in popularity during the current coronavirus outbreak, despite (especially in Italy's case) substantial national dislocation and tragedy.

But these popularity bumps fade with time.

More at "Four Reasons to Be Cautious About Trump's Approval Ratings"
www.honestgraft.com/2020/03/four-reasons-to-be-cautious-about.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, March 25, 2020 8:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Yup.


Also keep in mind all of the things that have happened in the last 2 weeks that SHOULD have knocked him down so low he wouldn't have a chance no matter who he ran against.
Nope.

1. Political leaders' popularity often rises temporarily after the onset of a crisis. Political scientists call this pattern the "rally effect," and it's been documented many times over decades of history; most dramatically, George W. Bush's job approval shot up from about 50 percent to about 90 percent virtually overnight after the events of September 11, 2001. There are several plausible factors contributing to this phenomenon: citizens close psychological ranks around their national leaders in a moment of uncertainty and fear; they evaluate these figures on different criteria than they did before the crisis erupted; and the normally critical opposition party (sometimes) mutes its attacks on the incumbent. Both French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte have enjoyed spikes in popularity during the current coronavirus outbreak, despite (especially in Italy's case) substantial national dislocation and tragedy.

But these popularity bumps fade with time.

More at "Four Reasons to Be Cautious About Trump's Approval Ratings"
www.honestgraft.com/2020/03/four-reasons-to-be-cautious-about.html

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



lol...

Funny how you weren't critical of the temporary dip in polls when they told you what you wanted to hear, huh?



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, March 25, 2020 9:55 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Toast
o
a
s
t

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

http://www.7532020.com .

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Friday, March 27, 2020 7:59 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:

lol...

Funny how you weren't critical of the temporary dip in polls when they told you what you wanted to hear, huh?
You’ve read stories about when a small town elects a dog as mayor?
America did that when Trump was elected President.

About half of America sees no reason NOT to reelect the dog. Story from Fox News:
www.foxnews.com/us/duke-dog-mayor-of-minnesota-town-went-to-doggy-heav
en

Trump Wants to Reopen America by Easter as Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerates: A Closer Look



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, March 27, 2020 8:16 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 JO753:
Toast
o
a
s
t

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

http://www.7532020.com .
Trump is suing TV stations that run this ad. Many voters actually need advertisements to remind them since they can't remember without help what happened. In an environment like that, where many voters are foggy in the head, Trump can still be the winner.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/trump-political-ad-cease-a
nd-desist-letter.html

Exponential Threat




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, March 27, 2020 9:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You seemed to like the message when I posted it in the other forum, Second, so I'll respond to this post with the same thing.

Maybe somebody should make an ad with all the shit these lefty Legacy Media outlets had to say. Throw in footage of Joey B calling Trump a racist when he first suggested shutting down flights spliced in with Joey B saying that it was done to late when it happened.

To be fair to Coomer Joe, he doesn't even know what year it is.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
From sledgehammer to scalpel

It’s worth remembering why we’re in this situation.


Yes. Yes it is.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/opinion/china-travel-coronavirus.ht
ml

Quote:
Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China?

Sadly, one doesn’t have to look far for evidence of these top-down decisions morphing into outright racism within the general population, a trend that has a long history in the narrative of outbreaks such as this one.

Coronavirus shares something in common with other kinds of civil disruption, natural disasters or emergencies that affect localized travel industries: Its destructive power lies not in the actual risk but in the perception of that risk. Numerous experts have said that the majority of people who contract coronavirus will experience it as a respiratory infection they will fully recover from. But the extreme reactions — the canceling of flights, closing of borders and level-four travel warnings — seem more appropriate for something much worse.

With the rhetoric surrounding coronavirus, however, it appears the astonishing growth of the Chinese travel market in the past 15 years did little to rid the industry of the impulse to treat Chinese travelers as “others” in the face of doubt and uncertainty. Canceling flights, cruises and locking down borders when it’s not advised by international agencies will be not only an act of economic self-harm but also a wasted opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past.


Well, Rosie. That article hasn't aged well, has it?

Have we learned anything from mistakes of the very recent past yet?


I'll bet you haven't. I'll bet when the COVID thing blows over you'll be at the front lines of the Legacy Media to open our boarders wide to everybody else and call anybody who doesn't agree with you a Nationalist, as if that is a bad word or something.




https://www.vox.com/2020/2/7/21126758/coronavirus-xenophobia-racism-ch
ina-asians

Quote:

The coronavirus exposes the history of racism and “cleanliness”

While the epidemic may be new, xenophobia has been intertwined with public health discourse for a very long time.


Quote:
While panic about a sudden, deadly virus is to be expected, some fears — especially in North America and the West — have been based on something other than health. The panic has exposed a deep-seated xenophobia, and with it, a symptom of its own has surfaced: hostility toward East Asian people.


Maybe if instead of listening to the Twitter Mob and the Legacy Media lefty shills and they did what I said all along and shut down all flights when I said to, including for US citizens who were abroad (which JSF said I was being un-American by suggesting), we wouldn't have it spreading in the US now and terrorizing people like Kiki and Sigs.



https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/31/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-racism-fear-intl
-hnk/index.html

Quote:
As the coronavirus spreads, fear is fueling racism and xenophobia


Quote:
Toronto Mayor John Tory also spoke out this week about the coronavirus panic. "Standing with our Chinese community against stigmatization and discrimination," he said. "We must not allow fear to triumph over our values as a city."


Well... those of you who are still standing right now, be sure to do it at least 6 feet apart from each other, mkay?


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-chinese-allowed-racism-and-fear-a
re-now-spreading-along-with-the-coronavirus-2020-01-29

Quote:
‘No Chinese allowed’: Racism and fear are now spreading along with the coronavirus


Quote:
An online petition signed by parents in one school district in Ontario, Canada, asked the school board to request parents whose children or whose families have recently returned from China “to stay at home and keep isolated for a minimum of 17 days for the purpose of self-quarantine.”


Those terrible, terrible, racist Canadians, huh? /sarcasm





These articles are gross, and they only fester and reek even more with time. And it's a wonderful thing that we live in the age of the internet where they're preserved forever and we can REALLY do some research to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Hindsight is truly 20/20 in 2020.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, March 27, 2020 10:20 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:

These articles are gross, and they only fester and reek even more with time. And it's a wonderful thing that we live in the age of the internet where they're preserved forever and we can REALLY do some research to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Hindsight is truly 20/20 in 2020.
6ix, you've got a future as propagandist for the GOP, but get paid. Stop working for free at fff.net.

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, March 27, 2020 10:34 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

These articles are gross, and they only fester and reek even more with time. And it's a wonderful thing that we live in the age of the internet where they're preserved forever and we can REALLY do some research to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Hindsight is truly 20/20 in 2020.
6ix, you've got a future as propagandist for the GOP, but get paid. Stop working for free at fff.net.

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



Why would I ever do that. I'm not a Republican. I hate Republicans. I just happen to hate Democrats more is all. In 10 or 15 years, it will probably look like I flipped sides again, when in actuality I'm still standing in the same place.

I like doing volunteer work.

Check out the volunteer work I did for Marvel in the Cinema board.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, March 27, 2020 10:48 AM

SECOND

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


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

These articles are gross, and they only fester and reek even more with time. And it's a wonderful thing that we live in the age of the internet where they're preserved forever and we can REALLY do some research to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Hindsight is truly 20/20 in 2020.
6ix, you've got a future as propagandist for the GOP, but get paid. Stop working for free at fff.net.

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



Why would I ever do that. I'm not a Republican. I hate Republicans. I just happen to hate Democrats more is all. In 10 or 15 years, it will probably look like I flipped sides again, when in actuality I'm still standing in the same place.

I like doing volunteer work.

Check out the volunteer work I did for Marvel in the Cinema board.



Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, I have heard hundreds of Republicans claim they are anything but. Some use the word "Independent" to describe themselves. Make life simple and call yourself a "Republican", 6ix, and get paid to write GOP propaganda.

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

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