A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do you actually think anybody is going to read your bullshit dude. People tune out halfway through the second sentence.

You have no ability to influence people at all. Yet you wonder why nobody believes you successfully run a large business.

All the Trumptards I know are tuning out, which doesn't work out well for them.

"Adam Smith" trying to convince Trumptards they aren't doing bad, but if they feel bad, it is Biden's fault, not their fault nor Trump's:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/about-half-of-americans-are-in-poverty-
or-near-poverty-have-low-incomes

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, August 2, 2021 2:52 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Do you actually think anybody is going to read your bullshit dude. People tune out halfway through the second sentence.

You have no ability to influence people at all. Yet you wonder why nobody believes you successfully run a large business.
All the Trumptards I know are tuning out, which doesn't work out well for them.

Nah. I regularly read CNN, Vox, MSNBC, etc.

Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. ~Sun Tzu

You know neither your enemy, nor yourself.

I sure as shit am not going to subject myself to your dumbass interpretations of what Leftist media has to say about anything.

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

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 9:22 AM

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

President Donald Trump freed former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in February 2020 after he had served eight years of a 14-year sentence, including for trying to sell an appointment to Barack Obama’s old U.S. Senate seat for campaign cash. Leaders of both parties in Illinois sharply criticized Trump's commutation.

Speaking outside the courthouse in a gray suit that matched his hair, which went gray behind bars because inmates are prohibited from using hair dyes, Blagojevich also declared his loyalty to the former Republican president.

“I’m a Trumpocrat,” said the one-time contestant on Trump’s reality TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” Because Trump spared him from several more years at his Colorado federal prison, Blagojevich added: “I am grateful to him forever.”

The Illinois House in January 2009 voted 114-1 to impeach Blagojevich, and the state Senate voted unanimously to remove him, making him the first Illinois governor in history to be removed by lawmakers.

Monday's lawsuit argues the way legislators went about impeaching and ousting him was unconstitutional.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/03/rod-blagojevich-sues-illinois
-502250

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

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 11:23 AM

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

Republicans are increasingly ready for violence

A new nationwide public opinion survey shows just how deeply Republican voters now accept political violence as a legitimate option. Business Insider offers these details:

Less than a year after a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol, nearly half of Republican voters (47%) say that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands," per a new nationwide survey by George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs.

This is not a new finding. Previous public opinion polls and other research from PRRI, AEI and other organizations have come to similar conclusions.

These findings about Republicans and political violence are consistent with the warnings of many leading mental health experts, who have said since Donald Trump first emerged as a presidential candidate that he and his movement represent a dire threat to American democracy. This is true both because of Trump's repeated encouragement of violence and because of his proven ability to sway members of the public to share his worldview.

Dr. Justin Frank described Trump's unusual "ability to tap into people's fears and hatred," and suggesting that his followers "are actually scarier than he is":

Trump unites his supporters in a shared idea of opposition to some other groups or individuals they revile. It doesn't even matter whether they are Black or Muslim or immigrants or migrants from Latin and South America, or Democrats, for that matter.

Right-wing political violence and other antisocial and destructive behavior are gradually becoming normalized across American society. The events of Jan. 6 were a logical next step. As law enforcement and other terrorism experts have repeatedly warned, that was not the end of a wave of right-wing violence in America but just another stage in a centuries-long journey. The next step could well be a sustained right-wing insurgency against multiracial democracy.

Republicans generally oppose taking steps to address the global climate crisis, and in fact have consistently made the crisis worse. During Trump's presidency, Republicans engaged in acts of democide through their willfully incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic, choices that have now killed more than 600,000 people in the United States.

The Republican response to gun violence (including mass shootings), the health care crisis, education, wealth and income inequality, and social injustice more generally have caused the deaths of millions of Americans since the 1960s. It is no exaggeration to claim that today's Republican Party — and the larger "conservative" movement more generally — is sociopathic and dangerous.

More at https://www.salon.com/2021/08/03/republicans-are-increasingly-ready-fo
r-violence-we-look-away-at-our-peril/

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

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 1:15 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Dr. Justin Frank described Trump's unusual "ability to tap into people's fears and hatred" ...

Certainly fears! You don't see democrats discussing job loss to China! Or the lack of American basic productive capability! Or the flood of ILLEGAL immigrants coming over the border!* (Biden's* policy of non-enforcement quickly followed by forgiveness and citizenship is being shepherded through very quietly. http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63997&p=3 Biden*'s new clothes)

These are 'bread and butter' issues to real Americans - existing citizens who should be able to expect the government is looking out for their interests.

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 2:04 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:
Dr. Justin Frank described Trump's unusual "ability to tap into people's fears and hatred" ...
Certainly fears! You don't see democrats discussing job loss to China! Or the lack of American basic productive capability! Or the flood of ILLEGAL immigrants coming over the border!* (Biden's* policy of non-enforcement quickly followed by forgiveness and citizenship is being shepherded through very quietly. http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63997&p=3 Biden*'s new clothes)

These are 'bread and butter' issues to real Americans - existing citizens who should be able to expect the government is looking out for their interests.

Those are not 'bread and butter' issues to real Americans, but rather the red meat that Republican politicians are forever throwing out as bait for a certain kind of witless voters I know as stupid and crazy. The people who worry about losing their jobs to illegal immigrants are the kind of people who would inevitably vote for Trump, no matter what Trump actually accomplishes. For those dimwit worriers, Trump didn't do the one truly effective thing he could do to stop illegals, which was to arrest American citizens who hire illegal aliens, because that would have alienated wealthy people. If Biden did arrest Americans who hired illegal aliens, he would not win even one voter away from Trump, but he sure as hell would drive away Democrats from voting in 2022 and 2024.

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

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 3:29 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

2021

2020

2019

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 8:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans are increasingly ready for violence

A new nationwide public opinion survey shows just how deeply Republican voters now accept political violence as a legitimate option.

Shut up, bitch.

Leftist BLM and Antifa thugs have been doing this across the country for over a year and you don't bat an eye.

The only time I get violent is when they force a vaccine on me. And that goes just as much for any Republican doing it as any Democrat.

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 8:40 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

2021

(Just so you don't misunderstand, 1kiki, America is controlled by the top 1% richest Americans, unless Congress does something to thwart the 1%. The Republicans do NOT want the 1% placed under control and so long as there are 34 Republican Senators the 1% can't be controlled. As for Presidents, they can't stop the 1% from being the actual leaders of America, doing whatever pleases themselves, but Congress can stop the 1% by simply taxing them and giving the IRS sufficient money to enforce the tax laws. Congress can also stop the 1% by giving the Court System sufficient money so that cases involving the top 1% get decided within months rather than years or decades. Delays always work for the advantage of the wealthy. But as long as there are 34 Republican Senators, the IRS will not be collecting all the taxes the 1% richest owe and court cases involving the 1% will not be decided quickly. This is how the rich want America to run and this is how it continues to run.)

I have an article about Trumptards voting for Trump because they don't feel respected by the Libtards. The Trumptards and their Trumpy Senators will do everything in their power to attack the Libtards, but while they are on the many year long attack, very little else will get accomplished in Congress:

The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden? The truth is, they are not totally crazy. The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.

But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide.

As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave. Around 1990, nearly a third of Labour members of the British Parliament were from working-class backgrounds; from 2010 to 2015, the proportion wasn’t even one in 10. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the 50 most-educated counties in America by an average of 26 points—while losing the 50 least-educated counties by an average of 31 points.

These partisan differences overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden won just 500 or so counties—but together they account for 71 percent of American economic activity, according to the Brookings Institution. Donald Trump won more than 2,500 counties that together generate only 29 percent of that activity. An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.

In The Great Class Shift, Thibault Muzergues argues that the creative class has disrupted politics across the Western world. In nation after nation, the rise of the educated metro elite has led the working class to rebel against them. Trump voters listed the media—the epitome of creative-class production—as the biggest threat to America. “The more than 150-year-old alliance between the industrial working class and what one might call the intellectual-cultural Left is over,” observes the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein. The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality.

The members of the creative class have labored to get their children into good colleges. But they’ve also jacked up college costs and urban housing prices so high that their children struggle under crushing financial burdens. This revolt has boosted Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and so on. Part of the youth revolt is driven by economics, but part is driven by moral contempt. Younger people look at the generations above them and see people who talk about equality but drive inequality. Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy.

If creative-class types just worked hard and made more money than other people, that might not cause such acute political conflict. What causes psychic crisis are the whiffs of “smarter than” and “more enlightened than” and “more tolerant than” that the creative class gives off. People who feel that they have been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible; people who feel humiliated will avenge their humiliation. Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016 because he had a fantastic health-care plan. He won because he made the white working class feel heard.

A 2012 study of the richest 4 percent of earners found that 44 percent voted Democrat that year while 41 percent voted Republican. (A family income of $220,000 puts you in the top 4 percent in 2012.) Some are corporate executives or entrepreneurs, but many are top-tier doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who aspire to low taxes and other libertarian ideals. This is the core of the GOP donor class, men and women who feel that they worked hard for their money, that the American dream is real, and that those who built wealth in this country shouldn’t have to apologize for it.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210804184927if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/

Free Download of The Great Class Shift - How New Social Class Structures are Redefining Western Politics from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.uno/search.php?req=The+Great+Class+Shift

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 8:56 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

2021
I have an article about Trumptards voting for Trump because they don't feel respected by the Libtards.

LOL

Of course you have a narcissistic article written by a Leftist narcissist. Your echo chamber gets choked up with more of them with every day that passes.

Respect is a two way street and respect is earned.

I could give two shits what a Leftist worm who's never worked a day in their life thinks about me. In fact, whatever they have to say is probably the equal and opposite of the truth.

I have zero respect for hive-minded people who have given up their ability to form their own opinions for the ability to just shut off their brains and let somebody else do all of their thinking and decision making for them.

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

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 9:12 AM

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 1KIKI:

2021
I have an article about Trumptards voting for Trump because they don't feel respected by the Libtards.

LOL

Of course you have a narcissistic article written by a Leftist narcissist. Your echo chamber gets choked up with more of them with every day that passes.

Respect is a two way street and respect is earned.

I could give two shits what a Leftist worm who's never worked a day in their life thinks about me. In fact, whatever they have to say is probably the equal and opposite of the truth.

I have zero respect for hive-minded people who have given up their ability to form their own opinions for the ability to just shut off their brains and let somebody else do all of their thinking and decision making for them.

I add a paragraph:

(Just so you don't misunderstand, 1kiki, America is controlled by the top 1% richest Americans, unless Congress does something to thwart the 1%. The Republicans do NOT want the 1% placed under control and so long as there are 34 Republican Senators the 1% can't be controlled. As for Presidents, they can't stop the 1% from being the actual leaders of America, doing whatever pleases themselves, but Congress can stop the 1% by simply taxing them and giving the IRS sufficient money to enforce the tax laws. Congress can also stop the 1% by giving the Court System sufficient money so that cases involving the top 1% get decided within months rather than years or decades. Delays always work for the advantage of the wealthy. But as long as there are 34 Republican Senators, the IRS will not be collecting all the taxes the 1% richest owe and court cases involving the 1% will not be decided quickly. This is how the rich want America to run and this is how it continues to run.)

Special note for 6ix: you don't really understand the power that the top 1% richest have over America. If you someday understand, and have the physical courage, you would probably turn into the DC Comics Joker and kill the top 1%. I am not expecting your transformation into a DC Super Villain, 6ix, but maybe you will surprise me. I look forward to your crazy rampage followed by treatment in Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 9:22 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

When democrats* controlled Congress and the WH, what control did THEY exercise over the 1% ?

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 9:47 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

When democrats* controlled Congress and the WH, what control did THEY exercise over the 1% ?

Go all the way back to FDR. Taxes were raised to 99% of taxable income. The Republican Supreme Court justices raged against the New Deal until FDR threatened them. Social Security was passed. Herbert Hoover, who FDR defeated, spent the rest of his life accusing Democrats of being Communists. J. Edger Hoover, the Republican FBI director, accused Democrats of being Communists.

Go back to LBJ. Medicare passed. Voting Rights Act was passed. Finally, there was an end to the system that the slave-owners had established after the Civil War. And what were Republicans (and Democrats who would switch parties) doing? Raging against the Democrats for being Communists. What were the top 1% doing? Electing Nixon to take back control of America from those Communists and lower taxes. Nixon went a little too far in lowering his own taxes. So did Trump, following Nixon's example.

1kiki, whenever there are 34 Republican Senators, those Communists in the Democratic Party cannot stop the top 1% from doing as they please.

https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Income-Tax-Rat
es.aspx

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

Trump paid no federal income taxes
https://fortune.com/2020/09/27/trump-paid-no-income-taxes/

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 10:09 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Did LBJ REALLY threaten the power structure? Was it by doing this? How L.B.J. Pushed Through Kennedy's Tax Cut https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/how-l-b-j-pushed-through
-kennedys-tax-cut/

/snicker

Come to think of it, maybe that was JFK's problem, the one that got him killed. The fact that the CIA was running US foreign policy, and he threatened that.

Anyway, if democrats* ever threatened the 1%, it was all the way back to FDR, and even that's debatable. And that was 80 or more years ago.

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 10:26 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Did LBJ REALLY threaten the power structure? Was it by doing this? How L.B.J. Pushed Through Kennedy's Tax Cut
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/how-l-b-j-pushed-through
-kennedys-tax-cut/

/snicker

Come to think of it, maybe that was JFK's problem, the one that got him killed. The fact that the CIA was running US foreign policy, and he threatened that.

Anyway, if democrats* ever threatened the 1%, it was all the way back to FDR, and even that's debatable. And that was 80 or more years ago.

You are trolling me, 1kiki. I've got a perfect example of the 1% running a corner of America exactly the way they want to. The Democrats in the Senate can't stop the 1% from doing this because there are more than 34 Republican Senators and the Democrats are also fearful of, once again, being called Communists. Here is the example:

The U.S. again ranks last in health care compared with other high-income countries: report

Aug. 4, 2021 at 5:02 p.m. ET

Despite spending more than the other countries on health care as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. still ranks last in health care performance

https://web.archive.org/web/20210805140426/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/the-u-s-again-ranks-last-in-health-care-compared-with-other-high-income-countries-report-11628110844

High prices and low performance is exactly what the 1% want from the Health Care System. 1kiki, you can look up the Republicans' ideas for taking control of Health Care away from the top 1%. If you ignore the Republican obfuscation, you will find that the Republicans have no plans for taking control away from the top 1% and the Democrats have very detailed plans that the 34 Republican Senators have stopped and will continue to stop for the rest of this century because that is how the Constitution was designed and that is how the top 1% want it to be.

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 7:03 PM

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

Another example showing the top 1% richest are the true leaders of America:

When industry wants a chemical safety assessment done yesterday, EPA managers classify it as “hair on fire.” . . .

Although she had resolutely refused to change her conclusion about the threat posed by the chemical, the new document dismissed the information Osterweil had inserted about the developmental hazards. Instead, it was deemed unlikely to present an unreasonable risk — making it a “not likely,” in the agency’s parlance. The industry had once again won the battle over a chemical assessment — getting the risks of its product minimized and speeding up the review process. In an email sent by Osterweil’s supervisor that day, she wrote, “Please move this Not Likely expeditiously, as the submitter is anxious.”

In June, after several of the whistleblowers had filed complaints with the EPA’s science adviser and the EPA inspector general, the assessment was again changed, this time to reflect that the chemical “may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health.” It was nevertheless allowed onto the market.

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/04/epa-hair-on-fire-chemicals-leaked-
audio/

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

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Thursday, August 5, 2021 7:43 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You seem to think I'm disputing that the country is run by the rich, for the rich. I'm not, I agree with that.

BTW - Signy made that exact point a long time ago posting a paper. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/artic
le/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B So nice of you to catch up!

Anyway, democrats* have had a long enough time to prove they're* not just like republicans. But instead of doing that, they* actively pursue the same policies: Obama* blowing the financialists, spying even more on innocent citizens, starting foreign wars on the cheap through CIA operations ... and so on; Clinton* gutting Glass-Steagall, signing NAFTA, and 'reforming' welfare ... and so on.

That's just a small sampling of how the democrats* aren't just cowering before republicans and frozen into immobility, they're actively pursuing the exact same policies.

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Friday, August 6, 2021 7:30 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

You seem to think I'm disputing that the country is run by the rich, for the rich. I'm not, I agree with that.

BTW - Signy made that exact point a long time ago posting a paper. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/artic
le/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B So nice of you to catch up!

Anyway, democrats* have had a long enough time to prove they're* not just like republicans. But instead of doing that, they* actively pursue the same policies: Obama* blowing the financialists, spying even more on innocent citizens, starting foreign wars on the cheap through CIA operations ... and so on; Clinton* gutting Glass-Steagall, signing NAFTA, and 'reforming' welfare ... and so on.

That's just a small sampling of how the democrats* aren't just cowering before republicans and frozen into immobility, they're actively pursuing the exact same policies.

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

1kiki, you use the asterisk too much. It is a sign of a mushy mind, not much focused on a goal.

There are simple reasons why the richest 1% are the actual rulers the USA and why the President and Congress do not rule.

1) The 1% are focused. It may appear that they squabble within their group, but the entire group actually knows exactly what they want. On the other hand, politicians are a bunch of dithering, unfocused blabbermouths listening to voters who are even more unfocused and dithering than the politicians. The voters want a million different things which conflict with what other voters want, which leads to endless compromising, negotiating, confusion, uncertainty and (the favorite weakness that gives the top 1% its enormous power) delays that stretch out for years or even decades.

2) The Constitution is designed to paralyze the Federal government. The Founding Fathers, who wrote the rules, were the top 1% who knew exactly what they were doing. While the 21st Century top 1% are going after their goal, the Federal government can't move because the 1% know exactly what circuit breakers to turn off in order to stop the Federal government from interfering with the top 1%.

The Democratic Party and the GOP give a demonstration every day of the week that they absolutely don't know what to do with a true top 1%, Trump for one example, but there are 3,300,000 more of them besides Trump. The Federal government doesn't know how to handle the top 1%. If the Federal government functioned properly, Trump would have paid his taxes. There would not be an endless "audit" and court cases. Trump shows how silly, weak and dithering the Federal government is, as it was designed to be by the top 1%.

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

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Friday, August 6, 2021 7:51 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
The Democratic Party and the GOP give a demonstration every day of the week that they absolutely don't know what to do with a true top 1%

The beginnings of wisdom. Serving the 1% is a bipartisan effort.

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Friday, August 6, 2021 8:28 AM

Did you notice that Second said "there are 3,300,000 more of them.

Dummy thinks the 1% is all American.

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

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

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Friday, August 6, 2021 1:12 PM

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

The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week

Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers was the first huge offensive in corporate America’s war on everyone else.

Forty years ago, on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and barred them from ever working again for the federal government. By October of that year, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, the union that had called the strike, had been decertified and lay in ruins. The careers of most of the individual strikers were similarly dead: While Bill Clinton lifted Reagan’s ban on strikers in 1993, fewer than 10 percent were ever rehired by the Federal Aviation Administration.

PATCO was dominated by Vietnam War-era veterans who’d learned air traffic control in the military and were one of a vanishingly small number of unions to endorse Reagan in 1980, thereby scoring one of the greatest own goals in political history. It’s easy to imagine strikers expressing the same sentiments as a Trump voter who famously lamented, “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

The significance of Reagan’s actions is rarely discussed today in the mainstream, and for understandable reasons: It was the first huge offensive in a war that corporate America has been waging on this country’s middle class ever since. As Warren Buffett — current estimated net worth $101 billion — has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The stunning victory of the wealthy over everyone else can been measured in several straightforward ways. During a speech last May at a community college in Cleveland, Joe Biden explained one of them: “From 1948 after the war to 1979, productivity in America grew by 100 percent. We made more things with productivity. You know what the workers’ pay grew? By 100 percent. Since 1979, all of that changed. Productivity has grown four times faster than pay has grown. The basic bargain in this country has been broken.”

More at https://theintercept.com/2021/08/06/middle-class-reagan-patco-strike/

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

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Friday, August 6, 2021 1:57 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week

And continued under "I feel your pain" Clinton, and every other President and Congress, Democrat and Republican, since then.

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

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Friday, August 6, 2021 2:20 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week
And continued under "I feel your pain" Clinton, and every other President and Congress, Democrat and Republican, since then.

I get the feeling that you have some misunderstanding that the Democrats in the Senate can stop the Republicans on Supreme Court and in the Senate from killing unions. It is possible if there were 67 Democratic Senators and 6 Democratic justices, but very unlikely with fewer because there will be Democrats defecting to the Republican side. Senator Joe Manchin, for example. There won't be Republican Senators defecting to the Democrats' side because all Republicans hate unions.

Supreme Court rules against labor in private property case, barring access for organizing
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/23/supreme-court-
backs-farmers-private-property-rights-over-union-access/7465146002/

The Supreme Court decision gutting public sector unions
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/14/17437832/janus-afscme-supreme-court-unio
n-teacher-police-public-sector

Minimum mandatory paid vacation days passing Congress? Not gonna happen until there are fewer than 34 GOP Senators. Every other country has mandatory paid vacation days, but not the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country

Mandatory Maternity Leave passing Congress? Not gonna happen, although other countries have it, but those other countries don't have a Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas

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

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Friday, August 6, 2021 4:03 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
I get the feeling that YOU have some misunderstanding that the Democrats* ...

... are hapless Little Nells instead of active participants actively pursuing the same policies in service to the (global) 1% (but especially those from the City of London): Obama* blowing the financialists, spying even more on innocent citizens, starting foreign wars on the cheap through CIA operations ... and so on; Clinton* gutting Glass-Steagall, signing NAFTA, and 'reforming' welfare ... and so on.

That's just a small sampling of how the democrats* aren't just cowering before republicans and frozen into immobility, they're actively pursuing the exact same policies.

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 7:34 AM

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

America faces cascading crises. Democrats must act.

Any serious effort to alleviate the real crises facing Americans will depend on progressives corralling Democratic unity around the $3.5 trillion budget resolution that has been put together under the leadership of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). That bill will authorize crucial funding left out of the bipartisan deal — clean energy, research and development, manufacturing aid, housing and schools, child care — as well as sustaining the child tax credit and expanding Medicare coverage.

But to pass the reconciliation bill, Democrats need the votes of all 50 caucus members, and Sinema and Manchin have indicated that they may balk at the $3.5 trillion price tag. (Sinema has even said that she won’t allow any votes to interfere with her vacation plans. If she were to carry out that threat, she could torpedo both bills on her way out the door.) Once again, these so-called centrists are standing in the way of Congress addressing catastrophic climate change, investing in civilian research and development, boosting domestic manufacturing vital to our economy, and alleviating inequality and the pressures on working families. Also at stake are the chances Democrats have to retain their majorities in both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, for their vote will surely be depressed by a failure to deliver.

It’s not that Sinema or Manchin have a specific, principled stance. They just want less. If there is a final agreement, it will probably be reached just like the infrastructure deal, by lowering the total price tag while sustaining most of the annual level of spending by reducing the number of years the programs are authorized. That will give the programs less time to take effect and make them more vulnerable to repeal.

With record wildfires, a terrible pandemic starting to revive, extreme inequality and an economy that doesn’t work for working families, most Americans increasingly realize that it is time for bold action. Yet, we have a Republican Party consumed by delusions and dedicated to making the administration fail. For all the bipartisan blather, Democrats must get it done on their own — despite having only a one-vote margin in the Senate (counting the vice president breaking a tie) and a three-vote margin in the House. And that requires Sinema, Manchin and others to get with the program.

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/03/america-faces-casca
ding-crises-democrats-must-act/

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

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 7:59 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America faces cascading crises. Democrats must act.

Any serious effort to ~~alleviate the real crises facing Americans~~ buy American votes will depend on progressives corralling Democratic unity around the $3.5 trillion budget resolution that has been put together under the leadership of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

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

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 9:25 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Any serious effort to alleviate the real crises facing Americans ...

Global warming? Nuclear proliferation? An 80-year Pentagon-sized black hole in the US budget? Dependence on other countries for basic manufacturing? An economy based on gigs and loans, with the great vampire squid financialism sucking the lifeblood out?

Like those real crises?

Don't look to Joe.*

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 9:52 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:
Any serious effort to alleviate the real crises facing Americans ...
Global warming? Nuclear proliferation? An 80-year Pentagon-sized black hole in the US budget? Dependence on other countries for basic manufacturing? An economy based on gigs and loans, with the great vampire squid financialism sucking the lifeblood out?

Like those real crises?

Don't look to Joe.*

And if democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?

The real problem is that a majority of Americans don't want any of this to change. They say they do, but when you get to specifics, there is not a majority behind anything, nor a majority to pay for it. There is not even one person in America who will do a damn thing about it, other than rage ineffectively. For the crudest imaginable example, stealing an idea from the final Firefly episode Heart of Gold, where the villain was killed in cold blood, how many Wall St. financiers were murdered, or attempted murdered, or kidnapped, or even successfully sued by borrowers who were cheated? Zero. There is exactly nobody in America, sane or criminally insane, who has the guts to "regulate" big time cheaters. So, there is no reason to think Biden or Congress or any state governor or state legislature will.

Firefly: "Heart of Gold"
Written by: Brett Matthews
http://www.russellmadden.com/Firefly_transcript_HEART_O.html

PETALINE
Rance, this is Jonah.
(beat)
Jonah, say hi to your daddy.

Burgess smiles like a proud papa. He's actually moved at the sight of his son.

Petaline raises her free hand in which she holds Nandi's favorite gun.
She aims it at Burgess' head. She fires. Rance drops face down to the ground.

PETALINE (cont'd)
Say goodbye to your daddy, Jonah.

Petaline looks up from Burgess' dead body, icy.

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

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 11:00 AM

lol

Things aren't going the way you wanted them to after you got what you wanted, huh Second?

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

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

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 2:33 PM

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

Things aren't going the way you wanted them to after you got what you wanted, huh Second?

Trump on Saturday, however, said that Republicans should wait until after the midterm elections to vote for any infrastructure bill . . .
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/566838-trump-slams-mcconnell-infra
structure-package-a-disgrace

Translating Trump's meandering bullshit into English: Don't pass infrastructure until January 2023. Trump is a complete asshole because he told any GOP Senators who vote for infrastructure that he will do what he can to remove them from the Senate.

Senators voted 67-27 to advance the infrastructure bill. Eighteen GOP senators voted with all Democrats to help get the legislation over the 60-vote hurdle. The bill will face another vote on Sunday to formally shut down debate and put the bill on a glide path to passage. If every Democrat continues to vote yes, that means they need to have 10 GOP senators in order to get over the final hurdle for the bill. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/566855-1t-infrastructure-bill-pass
es-key-test-vote

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

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 3:20 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
The real problem is that a majority of Americans don't want any of this to change ...

... no matter what the polls say, no matter that Trump was completely unexpectedly elected when Hillary voters stayed home. A majority of Americans' words ... and actions! ... are all lies!

Because that makes so much sense. /

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Monday, August 9, 2021 6:24 AM

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

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very
-stupid

Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Such stupidity is perfectly compatible with intelligence: Haig was by any standard a smart man. Indeed, in at least some cases, intelligence actively abets stupidity by allowing pernicious rationalization: when Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, took Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, through the tricks underlying the seances in which Conan Doyle devoutly believed, the author’s reaction was to concoct a ludicrously elaborate counter-explanation as to why it was precisely the true mediums who would appear to be frauds.

Stupidity has two features that make it particularly dangerous. First, stupidity is primarily a property of groups or traditions, not individuals: after all, we get most of our concepts, our mental tools, from the society we are raised in. Suppose the problem with Haig had been laziness: there was no shortage of energetic generals to replace him. But if Haig worked himself to the bone within the intellectual prison of the 19th-century military tradition, then solving the difficulty becomes harder: you will need to introduce a new conceptual framework and establish a sense of identity and military pride for it. Once stupidity has taken hold of a group or society, it is thus particularly hard to eradicate – inventing, distributing and normalizing new concepts is tough work.

Second, stupidity begets more stupidity. Take politics, where stupidity is particularly catching: a stupid slogan chimes with a stupid voter, it mirrors the way they see the world. The result is that stupidity can, ironically, be extremely effective in the right environment: a kind of incapacity is in effect being selected for. Stupidity is compatible with high educational achievement, and it is more the property of a political culture than of the individuals in it, needing to be tackled at that level.

There will be many cases that aren’t fully fledged stupidity but that mimic its effects. Imagine someone who had been blind to all evidence that they were being cheated on finally asking themselves ‘How could you be so stupid?’ Here the problem is not pure stupidity: the concept of a cheat is common enough. What we have here is rather someone ‘acting as if they were stupid’. It’s not just that they failed to apply the concept of betrayal, but that they literally didn’t think of it: it was effectively ‘offline’, due to emotional and other pressures. In this kind of case, agents possess the necessary intellectual tools but unwittingly lock them away. This marks an important contrast with dumbness – we can make ourselves stupid, but we don’t make ourselves dumb.

Stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a hundred years from now, our ancestors will find at least part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.

‘Lieutenant Dangerous’ uses wry humor to point out the absurdity of the Vietnam War

After a distinguished career as an editorial cartoonist for The Christian Science Monitor, Jeff Danziger recounts the story of his military experiences in “Lieutenant Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir,” a book that is by turns funny, sad, horrifying, and thought-provoking.

More at https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2021/0803/Lieutenant-Dang
erous-uses-wry-humor-to-point-out-the-absurdity-of-Vietnam-War

The quote summing up the book:

Quote:
This makes me sound to the right politically, but I am not. I simply distrust abstractions. Being successful, or even secure, in the United States — the sad, silly United States — requires a hard-eyed evaluation applied daily, to everything. A war can provide a realistic attitude and a knowledge of what human existence actually is, of what can be expected, and how much you can trust your fellow citizens and your nation. This is hard to teach.

Free download of Jeff Danziger’s book
Lieutenant Dangerous: A Vietnam War Memoir from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.uno/search.php?req=Jeff+Danziger+Vietnam

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

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Monday, August 9, 2021 6:45 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:
The real problem is that a majority of Americans don't want any of this to change ...
... no matter what the polls say, no matter that Trump was completely unexpectedly elected when Hillary voters stayed home. A majority of Americans' words ... and actions! ... are all lies!

Because that makes so much sense. /

Are you aware that if only a few thousand votes had changed, Hillary would have been President in 2016?

A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) — or 0.06% of 137 million cast — would have made Hillary Clinton president.
https://www.axios.com/hillary-clinton-2016-election-votes-supreme-cour
t-liberal-justice-1b4bc4fc-9fad-44b4-ab54-9ef86aa9c1f1.html

I would say that if America is that closely divided, by only a few thousand votes, America does NOT know what it wants. How about in 2020? How close was the vote then?

When you look at the smallest popular vote shift needed to give Trump a victory, the 2020 election was close. Indeed, it was even closer than 2016. If Trump picked up the right mix of 42,921 votes in Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), the Electoral College would have been tied at 269 all. The House would have then decided the election. Republicans will hold the majority of state delegations in the new Congress, and they undoubtedly would have chosen Trump. If Trump had also picked up the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which he lost to Biden by 22,091 votes, he would have won the Electoral College outright. Back in 2016, Clinton needed to pick up the right mix of 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to win the Electoral College.
https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers

Again, 2020 was much the same as 2016. A few thousand votes separate the winner from the loser. And again America does not know what it wants. Congress will not make bold decisions when the country is split 50/50 about the difference between Trump/Biden or Trump/Hillary. Even the Senate is split 50/50 between D and R Senators. Even the House of Representatives is split almost exactly 50/50.

This is crazy when America cannot get a clear majority for either party. It is as if America is flipping a coin when it goes to vote rather than comparing the obvious differences between D vs R and choosing one or the other.

1kiki: Does Russia have crash barriers where roads split? If you are unfamiliar with those crush-able barrels on the Interstate Highway System, this analogy will totally confuse you: When America comes to the split in the road between going left or right, America always hits the crash barrier. This is a crazy way to drive. Either go left or right, America. Please stop trying to go both ways.

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

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Monday, August 9, 2021 8:44 AM

Trump won. Democrats stole it.

You're watching the country and the world fall apart as a result of it.

I think we'll survive another 3 years though.

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Monday, August 9, 2021 9:38 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Trump won. Democrats stole it.

You're watching the country and the world fall apart as a result of it.

I think we'll survive another 3 years though.

America is falling apart because it can't decide whether to go left or right. If a few thousand voters changed their minds, the other party would win the Presidency. Same with the Senate and the House of Representatives. So America keeps running into the crash barrels where the road splits to go left and right. Crashing America over and over into the barrels is a continuous and wonderful moneymaking opportunity for tow truck owners and collision repair shops (the top 1% wealthiest Americans) who will keep getting more and more of America's wealth until they own 67% of the country, unless American voters pick either left or right instead of crashing at every election. Once at 67% ownership of America, Congress can be shutdown because the top 1% will be making all political decisions. How soon until the richest own 67%? Probably another 50 years if present trends continue:

Newly released data from the Fed show that the top 1 percent of income earners now hold 32.1 percent of all wealth in the United States. That is the highest percentage of wealth the top 1 percent has held since the Fed began publishing the data set in 1989 (see below). That’s up nearly 20 percent from the period following the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, and nearly 35 percent from 1990. This data should not be surprising.
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/the-top-1-hold-a-record-amoun
t-of-wealth-in-the-u-s-heres-how-much-and-why

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

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Tuesday, August 10, 2021 5:44 AM

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

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

In Idaho, one state legislator, in the service of promoting anti-CRT legislation, cited To Kill a Mockingbird to call for banning Critical Race Theory from public schools because the book supposedly makes white people look bad.

Frederick Douglass could just as easily be banned from school systems in states adopting anti-CRT legislation, for this is a man who from the beginning of his career in the late 1830s to his death in 1895 viscerally and intellectually understood the centrality of slavery and race to American history and culture. Consider the most famous lines from his most famous speech, his 1852 “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass declares about the supposedly democratic nation in which slavery is the law of the land:

“Roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

Could such a speech be taught in Idaho, Texas, Florida, or any other state with anti-CRT legislation on the books? Would educators be willing to take this risk? In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass displays white people’s anti-Black racism in action: he shows Black people being indiscriminately killed and tortured under slavery and depicts racism penetrating the North as well. In the autobiography’s devastating appendix, he attacks white Christianity, North and South, for its hypocrisy and cruelty, stating sarcastically that white Christians profess “to love God whom they have not seen, whilst they hate their brother whom they have seen.” Douglass did not relent on white racist practices after the Civil War, attacking Radical Republicans for not moving quickly enough to help the freedpeople, proclaiming that Lincoln was “preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” laying bare the prejudice that made it difficult for his sons and other Black people to find jobs in the Northeast, and condemning the nation for becoming a charnel house of lynching in his last major speech, “Lessons of the Hour” (1894).

Douglass was also a student of the law, and some of his greatest speeches expose the racist underpinnings of Supreme Court decisions supposedly made in relation to an objective or originalist vision of constitutional law. In this way, Douglass could be considered a founder of CRT practice. He wrote and spoke powerfully about the racist underpinnings of the 1857 Dred Scott case, which at the time denied Black people citizenship in perpetuity, and he later assailed the Supreme Court’s 1883 nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 for the way it upheld white supremacist racial hierarchies. It was a “deed,” he said, “done for slavery, caste, and oppression.” Had he lived another two or three years, his would have been a powerful voice speaking out against the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), showing how its “separate but equal” outcome ultimately meant separate and unequal — which he would have critiqued for violating the nation’s founding principles.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/frederick-douglass-and-the-trouble
-with-critical-race-theory/

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

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Tuesday, August 10, 2021 6:33 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

It's not that the people of the US don't know what they want. It's just that the choices they're offered are not it.

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Wednesday, August 11, 2021 7:38 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

It's not that the people of the US don't know what they want. It's just that the choices they're offered are not it.

You are wrong. Americans allowed their choices to be made for them. An example: Healthcare is more expensive in America than anywhere else in the world. Millions get no healthcare. Bankruptcy because of medical expenses is common. But when there is talk of fixing this system which is obviously designed to make the maximum amount of money for people who own the healthcare system, the talk always turns to America has the best healthcare in the world and to change it would be socialism and do you want the government to interfere with the doctor/patient relationship? At that point, 99% of Americans lazily decide they will tolerate things as they are because changing anything would make it worse.

Republican politicians know it is easy to herd American opinion to do nothing about everything, especially when the Democrats start talking about the price tag for changing things. Americans don't want to pay. Things will not change swiftly because Americans are so easily discouraged and don't want to think about solutions to problems.

Not one American in 100 would click the link below:

Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mi
rror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly

Not one American in 1,000 would read the Conclusion: Four features distinguish top performing countries from the United States:
1) they provide for universal coverage and remove cost barriers;
2) they invest in primary care systems to ensure that high-value services are equitably available in all communities to all people;
3) they reduce administrative burdens that divert time, efforts, and spending from health improvement efforts; and
4) they invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults.

All this information is easy to find by googling https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+compared+to+other+countries but Americans are NOT going to do it. Therefore, the Democrats can't get it done in Congress.

There will be nobody but a very few Democratic voters pushing Republican Senators to solve this healthcare problem and the GOP Senators won't vote for what a Democrat wants. I have seen that dynamic with the two Republican Senators from Texas. Those two guys don't give a damn about what the Democrats want. And Republican voters won't push their GOP Senators to solve the healthcare problem.

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

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Wednesday, August 11, 2021 8:33 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not one American in 100 would click the link below:

You're so Elite.

Quote:
Not one American in 1,000 would read the Conclusion... Americans are NOT going to do it. Therefore, the Democrats can't get it done in Congress.

1 in 1000 voted for Biden*.

That sounds about right.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 11, 2021 9:32 AM

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:
Not one American in 100 would click the link below:

You're so Elite.

Quote:
Not one American in 1,000 would read the Conclusion... Americans are NOT going to do it. Therefore, the Democrats can't get it done in Congress.

1 in 1000 voted for Biden*.

That sounds about right.

6ix, I read what you write over at this thread:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=58882&mid=11385
85#1138585

You are no different than 999 Americans out of 1,000. You are alone. That's what you wrote. You have no lofty purpose. (By the way, worshiping god or worrying about children/money or fixing your house is NOT lofty. ) No Republican Senator need be concerned about what you want because you aren't persistent and you won't apply sufficient brute force to make your Republican Senator concerned about you. Instead of thinking about you, your GOP Senator will spend his workday looking after people who are persistent and who will use brute force. Who are they? The top 1% richest. More accurately, the top 0.1% richest. The 1 in 1,000 Americans.

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

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Thursday, August 12, 2021 6:50 AM

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

How Trump blew his chance to steal the election

Trump committed abundant crimes in trying to steal the election, but being Trump, he was impulsive and disorganized and failed.

The months leading up to Nov. 3, 2020, were for Donald Trump almost a carbon copy of what he had done going into the presidential election four years previously: He thumbed tweets, whined at his rallies and complained to anyone who would listen that the election had been "rigged" by Democrats. Of course, after election eve in 2016, we never heard another peep out of him about the dastardly Democrats and the wily ways they had rigged the election against him, because he won.

But from the moment that his network of pet poodles at Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden in November of 2020, causing a series of eruptions in the private quarters at the White House, culminated in a call to Fox executives to demand that the network reverse its Arizona projection, Trump understood that this time it would be different. He would lose.

Trump turned immediately to the courts, filing more than 60 federal lawsuits in the battleground states he lost claiming that the election had been "stolen" from him. But as one case after another went down to defeat or outright dismissal, he turned to loyalist loons like former general Michael Flynn, online conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, My Pillow guy Mike Lindell and — wait for it — the Proud Boys to push his obsession that he hadn't lost, and that the election had been rigged by nefarious forces. . . .

After seven hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Saturday by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, and five hours of testimony before the same committee on Friday by Rosen's former acting deputy, Richard Donoghue, we now know that behind the scenes, Trump was very busy. . . .

Trump's problem, to put it frankly, was that he didn't start committing crimes early enough. The crimes he committed in December and January were largely impulsive, not carefully planned or focused. He exploded with tweets and phone calls and meetings and rallies.

In short, Trump was Trump, as incompetent a criminal conspirator as he was a president. The only question left to be answered at this point is whether Merrick Garland and the Biden Department of Justice will have the courage to charge him and his co-conspirators with the felonies they committed: defrauding the United States by attempting to illegally influence the outcome of the 2020 election.

If that crime sounds familiar, that is because it is the same one special counsel Robert Mueller charged 24 Russian nationals with committing in 2016, when they illegally hacked into Democratic National Committee servers, stole campaign emails and set up fake accounts to influence voters on American social media platforms. With Donald Trump, nothing is ever new. Just watch him. He's out there right now raising $100 million to do it all over again in 2024. And the entire Republican Party is right there with him.

More at https://www.salon.com/2021/08/11/how-trump-blew-his-chance-to-steal-th
e-election-the-clock-was-ticking-he-was-tweeting/

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

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Thursday, August 12, 2021 6:50 AM

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

Why Hasn’t Trump Been Charged For Attempting To Overturn Election?

Many Democrats are nervous about stating that Donald Trump's many attempts to overturn the election were criminal, were violations of the law. Why is Donald Trump not charged with any crimes?

“The real answer,” writes Andrew Reinbach, “is a bad one: It’s how we do things in this country. Jefferson Davis was held for two years but never tried for treason. Lee was indicted, but never tried. No one involved in the Business Plot** was indicted, though the House UnAmerican Activities Committee found they were ready, willing, and able — they just never pulled the trigger. Nixon was allowed to resign, then pardoned. Trump pulled this in hopes of avoiding the pending criminal cases in New York. But, alas, he’ll probably not be indicted for 1/6. He may, however, be convicted in New York. That’ll do.”

** The Business Plot (also called the Wall Street Putsch and The White House Putsch) was a political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a dictator. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler asserted that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 11:11 AM

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

Did we need just another few months in Afghanistan?

In the New York Times today, Fred Kagan has a guest essay titled "Biden Could Have Stopped the Taliban. He Chose Not To." I haven't heard Kagan's name since the heyday of the warbloggers circa 2004, so I was curious to see what he had to say:

"As U.S. military planners well know, the Afghan war has a seasonal pattern. The Taliban leadership retreats to bases, largely in Pakistan, every winter and then launches the group’s fighting season campaign in the spring, moving into high gear in the summer after the poppy harvest. At the very least, the United States should have continued to support the Afghans through this period to help them blunt the Taliban’s latest offensive and buy time to plan for a future devoid of American military assistance. American diplomats could have used this time to negotiate access to regional bases from which to continue counterterrorism operations. Simultaneously, the American military should have prepared contingencies in case those negotiations failed."

In other words, just a few more months would have done it! After 20 years of American training and assistance, after which the Afghan military literally collapsed at the mere sight of Taliban troops, waiting until next year would have made all the difference.

I don't doubt that Kagan is sincere in this belief. That's the problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210813112158/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/08/12/opinion/biden-afghanistan-taliban.html

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 11:57 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

The US isn't entirely out of Afghanistan. There is still plenty of bombing and covert ops going on. I do wonder how the CIA self-funding heroin business is going on tho. My sense is that despite all appearances, that will carry on as per usual (unless they've largely supplanted that trade with other drugs in other countries and no longer need the Golden Triangle).

Joe* is trying to negotiate with other countries to carry the white man's burden. I guess we'll see just how vital other countries think Afghanistan is to their own welfare.

OH ... yeah. This'll be a good opportunity to see how quickly Afghanistan disappears from the news*. The more we read about how the those poor people are suffering because of US laziness and perfidy, the more it'll appear that the Deep State is still running the Afghanistan War show.

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Friday, August 13, 2021 12:18 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

OH ... yeah. This'll be a good opportunity to see how quickly Afghanistan disappears from the news*. The more we read about how the those poor people are suffering because of US laziness and perfidy, the more it'll appear that the Deep State is still running that Afghanistan War show.

It is the Afghan people's laziness and perfidy and general chicken-heartedness causing Afghanistan suffering because there has been only a few thousand Americans there for the last year, while there are 40,000,000 Afghans there at this moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Afghanistan

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 12:38 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Despite your claim to Afghani's laziness and perfidy being at the root of their suffering - they were doing just fine until the US decided to fund the Taliban in the 80's. Because ... RUSSIA!!! RUSSIA!!! RUSSIA!!! And then there was the CIA-funded drug trade which put a LOT of money - and weapons - into the hands of the warlords and Taliban, against which common people had no defense.

The obscene volume of money funding the drug trade is unstoppable.

And just to put this back OT: "A thread for Democrats Only" - these policies were pursued vigorously by democrats*.

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Friday, August 13, 2021 1:33 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Despite your claim to Afghani's laziness and perfidy being at the root of their suffering - they were doing just fine until the US decided to fund the Taliban in the 80's. Because ... RUSSIA!!! RUSSIA!!! RUSSIA!!! And then there was the CIA-funded drug trade which put a LOT of money - and weapons - into the hands of the warlords and Taliban, against which common people had no defense.

The obscene volume of money funding the drug trade is unstoppable.

And just to put this back OT: "A thread for Democrats Only" - these policies were pursued vigorously by democrats*.

Who are you kidding when you say Afghanistan was doing fine? The Afghans have been the most backward people for thousands of years and they won't change their ways and it is all the fault of 40,000,000 Afghans, not the fault of a few dozen Democrats in DC.

https://www.thoughtco.com/afghanistan-facts-and-history-195107
https://www.press-citizen.com/story/opinion/2021/08/10/collapse-narco-
state-may-bring-misery-afghanistan-and-iowa/5556158001/

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 2:46 PM

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

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

In his new book, Spencer Ackerman makes the case that the Trump years were the logical conclusion of a multidecade borderless war without end.

Trump internalized and weaponized the war’s most important lesson of all: “The terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner whose work has appeared in the Daily Beast and The Guardian, Ackerman this year chose to go independent, partnering with an editor to publish his journalism via Substack. He spoke to The Intercept about the disconnect in how the U.S. security state has historically responded to the nation’s oldest, deadliest form of terrorism — that of the white supremacist far right — and its world-altering response to the September 11 attacks. Ackerman recounted how events early on in Trump’s presidency, particularly the reemergence of key figures from the war on terror as top administration officials, motivated him to write “Reign of Terror”; spoke about the people whose stories shaped the book; and shared his analysis of the state of the war on terror today — and where it might go next.

More at https://theintercept.com/2021/08/13/reign-of-terror-spencer-ackerman-s
eptember-11/

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

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

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Friday, August 13, 2021 5:33 PM