REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 08:17
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Thursday, September 1, 2022 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Second Term Would Look Like This

The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.

By Jonathan Rauch

Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential features of the system, including the rule of law, honest vote tallies, and orderly succession, would be at risk.

Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.

Begin with the model. Viktor Orbán has been the prime minister of Hungary twice. His current tenure began in 2010. He is not a heavy-handed tyrant; he has not led a military coup or appointed himself maximum leader. Instead, he follows the path of what he has called “illiberal democracy.” Combining populist rhetoric with machine politics, he and his party, Fidesz, have rotted Hungarian democracy from within by politicizing media regulation, buying or bankrupting independent media outlets, appointing judges who toe the party line, creating obstacles for opposition parties, and more. Hungary has not gone from democracy to dictatorship, but it has gone from democracy to democracy-ish. Freedom House rates it only partly free. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s ratings show declines in every democratic indicator since Fidesz took power.

The MAGA movement has studied Orbán and Fidesz attentively. Hungary is where Tucker Carlson, the leading U.S. conservative-media personality (who is sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential contender), took his show for a week of fawning broadcasts. Orbán is the leader whom the Conservative Political Action Conference brought in as a keynote speaker in August. He told the group what it loves to hear: “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means.” Trump himself has made clear his admiration for Orbán, praising him as “a strong leader and respected by all.”

. . .

Naturally, the president’s corrupt and lawless actions incite a blizzard of lawsuits. Members of Congress sue to block illegal appointments, interest groups sue to overturn corrupt rulemaking, targets of investigations sue to quash subpoenas, and so on. Trump meets these challenges with long-practiced aplomb. As he has always done, he uses every tactic in the book to contest, stonewall, tangle, and politicize litigation. He creates a perpetual-motion machine of appeals and delays while court after court rules against him.

Ultimately, however, matters come to a head. He loses on appeal and faces court orders to stop what he is doing. At that point, he simply ignores the judgments.

A famous precedent suggests that he would get away with it. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that states were illegally seizing Indian lands. President Andrew Jackson, a racist proponent of forced assimilation, declined to enforce the verdict. The states continued stealing Indian lands, and the federal government joined in. Trump, who hung a portrait of Jackson near his desk in the Oval Office, no doubt knows this bit of history. He probably also knows the consequences Jackson faced for openly defying the Court: none.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220831002335/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-2024-reelection-viktor-orban-hungary/671264/

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

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Friday, September 2, 2022 6:49 AM

SECOND

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


The Republican Paradise

Mississippi has long been America’s poorest state, with real gross domestic product per person only about 60 percent of the national average. The United States, however, is a rich country, so Mississippi doesn’t look that bad by international standards. Specifically, it’s roughly on a par with southern European countries: a bit poorer than Spain, a bit richer than Portugal.

It’s also worth noting that because Mississippi is part of the United States, it gets huge de facto aid from richer states: It benefits enormously from federal programs like Medicare and Social Security, while its low income means that it pays relatively little in federal taxes. Estimates from the Rockefeller Institute suggest that in 2019 Mississippi received net federal transfers of almost $24 billion, roughly 20 percent of the state’s G.D.P. — far more than the aid that, say, Portugal receives from the European Union.

Yet the citizens of Portugal and Spain have things that not all citizens of Mississippi have, things like universal health care — and running water.

On Monday the water supply to Jackson, the state’s capital and largest city, collapsed. Much of the city has no running water at all; nowhere in the city is the water safe to drink. And it’s not clear when service will be restored. The city’s water system was already failing, the result of years of neglect.

This neglect, in turn, was essentially a political decision. Mississippi as a whole, despite relatively low income by U.S. standards, surely has the resources to provide safe drinking water to all its residents. However, Jackson — a largely Black inner-city core whose economy has been hollowed out by white flight — does not. And the state refused to help, even as the coming water crisis became ever more predictable.

But never fear: Back in April, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, announced that he was making “an investment in Mississippians” — by “an investment” he meant a tax cut rather than spending on, say, education or infrastructure.

The political scientist Brendan Nyhan likes to point to examples of democratic erosion and ask, “What would you say if you saw it in another country?” Well, what would we say about a place that won’t even ensure that its capital has a reliable water supply?

To put all this in perspective, you need to know about two trends, one economic, one political.

On the economics: Mississippi has, as I said, long been America’s poorest state. In fact, in the early 20th century the Deep South was, in effect, a developing nation embedded in the world’s most advanced economy. In the decades after World War II, however, Mississippi and other Southern states achieved rapid income growth, narrowing although not closing the gap with the rest of the country.

Then the relative progress stalled. In fact, by some measures, Mississippi began to fall behind again; for example, life expectancy in the United States as a whole rose about seven years between 1980 and 2015 but increased only three years in Mississippi.

We have a pretty good idea of what happened after 1980. The most likely story is that as America increasingly became a knowledge-based economy, high-value economic activities — and skilled workers — gravitated toward metropolitan areas with good amenities and highly educated work forces. Places like Mississippi, which had relatively few college-educated workers in 1980 and fell further behind over time, found themselves on the losing end of this change.

There are no easy answers to the problem of left-behind regions. But one thing is for sure: Imagining that tax cuts will bring prosperity to a poorly educated state that can’t even provide its capital with running water is just delusional.

Which brings us to the political trends that lie behind these delusions.

Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been dominated by anti-government ideology. As the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, the goal was to shrink government to the point that you could “drown it in the bathtub.” When Donald Trump ran for president, it briefly seemed as if the G.O.P. might make a break with that ideology, accepting the social safety net while focusing on ethnic and racial hostility.

Instead, however, Republicans, believing that they can win elections by riling up the base with social issues like attacks on wokeness, have doubled down on right-wing economics. Congressional candidates are once again talking about repealing Obamacare and privatizing Social Security.

And Republican-run states have gone beyond cutting social programs to eviscerating public services Americans have taken for granted for many generations, services like public education — and drinkable water.

Will this bring a political backlash? I have no idea. But I do wonder: Can you drown the government in a bathtub if you can’t even fill the bathtub?

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220901231035/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/09/01/opinion/jackson-mississippi-water-shortage.html

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

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Monday, September 5, 2022 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


These Disunited States


Emancipation of the enslaved in 1863, the defeat of the Confederate states in 1865, and postwar Reconstruction did not prevent the reestablishment of an informal confederacy. The imperative of reincorporating the South into the Union led northern elites to tolerate and eventually internalize the gauzy southern myth of the Lost Cause: a gracious agrarian culture, guided by an honor code and a noble aristocracy, that was defeated by a soulless industrial society. Contemporary Republicans have refashioned that myth into one of a predominantly white, Christian America that other races and cultures have compromised and that is bound to perish unless prompt and decisive action is taken; that is the fundamental if unspoken meaning of Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”

The conflation of Christianity and Republican politics fostered by political elites and powerfully felt at the grassroots level is encouraging absolutism on the right. Political rallies for Republican candidates and causes, especially those anticipating Trump’s second coming, are increasingly infused with religious language and symbols, and feel akin to evangelical revival meetings.

Several commentators have suggested that, historically, radical swings in domestic politics and virulent strains of racism and fascism have in fact been normal in the United States, and that talk of prospective large-scale political violence is therefore overblown. But the breadth and depth of the present threat to the country seems unprecedented in post–Civil War America.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/these-disunited-states-ste
ven-simon-jonathan-stevenson/

"Our Country is Going to Hell"
– Donald Trump doing an imitation of a preacher condemning the sinful Democrats to Hellfire.


Sep 3, 2022 Former president Donald Trump heads to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for his first rally of the midterm election season.

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

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Monday, September 5, 2022 7:32 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Death of Democracy?




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Monday, September 5, 2022 7:45 AM

SECOND

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


“Without religion, normal people will do normal things and bad people will do bad things. But for normal people to do bad things, that takes religion.” --

What Weinberg is saying that people who are otherwise reasonable and uncontroversial and boring in their lives will do something exceptionally bad because of religion. This discrepancy is not limited to religious ideology – the Nazis at Auschwitz were also otherwise “normal” people who had families and pets and hobbies – but religious ideology, because of its unreason and reliance on blind faith, seems to pose a particularly all-pervading example. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it certainly may be the root of the most diverse evil.

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/09/the-root-of-diverse-evil
.html

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

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Thursday, September 8, 2022 8:47 AM

SECOND

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


Republican Rampage: If your medical treatment offends their religion, you are in trouble

Plaintiffs in Texas argued that the system by which the federal government decides what preventive services must be covered by employer insurance plans is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit filed by Austin-based attorney Jonathan Mitchell - who is credited with devising the state's six-week abortion ban - brings together self-proclaimed Christian businesses and employers.

One plaintiff in the case, Dr. Steven Hotze, argued that covering PrEP drugs for his employees would be contrary to his "sincere religious beliefs".

The physician, who is a megadonor to the Republican party and a frequent litigator on behalf of conservative causes, claimed common over-the-counter medications like Truvada and Descovy can "facilitate or encourage sexual behavior".

District Judge Reed O'Connor ruled on Wednesday that the government can NOT require "private, religious corporations" to cover the drug. He wrote that PrEP specifically violated the plaintiffs' constitutional rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The RFRA is frequently invoked in challenges to abortion access.

More https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62827615

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

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Friday, September 9, 2022 6:05 AM

SECOND

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


I Watched the Hunter Biden Movie So You Don’t Have to

To watch My Son Hunter is to experience an attempted red-pilling, directed by the bad guy from Goonies.

By Dana Stevens
Sept 09, 2022 5:40 AM

A vaguely pornographic looking publicity still shows a man (Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden) passed out on the coach, his shirt unbuttoned, and scantily clad strippers all around him, posing for a selfie.
Publicity still via MySonHunter.com

Breitbart Media makes its first foray into feature film distribution with the release of My Son Hunter, a lurid satire about the alleged international shenanigans of the current president’s wayward second son. The scandal of “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” long the source of amusement on the left and furious what-abouting on conservative cable TV, is now a major motion picture, or at least a motion picture shot in Serbia on a crowd-funded budget of $2.5 million. “This is not a true story,” announces Gina Carano, playing a Secret Service agent fond of addressing snarky asides at the camera, in the movie’s hectic opening moments. “Except for the facts.”

Carano’s name may unfortunately be most familiar because of her 2021 firing from the Disney series The Mandalorian, rather than because of her memorably raw performance in the Steven Soderbergh action thriller Haywire or her earlier career as a pro mixed martial arts fighter. Like several other cast members of My Son Hunter, Carano is now a self-announced victim of “cancellation,” cast out of mainstream entertainment for her controversial comments about vaccine mandates, Black Lives Matter protests, and the, in her view, illustrative analogy between the Jewish genocide of the Holocaust and the silencing of conservative voices.

Carano’s fed-up Secret Service agent is far from the central character of My Son Hunter, which takes place mainly over one debauched night in 2019 in the hookers-and-blow-filled Chateau Marmont suite of the prodigal younger son. For the first 40 minutes or so, the protagonist seems to be Hunter himself, a drug-crazed, sweat-glazed, pitifully self-deluded but not entirely unsympathetic figure as played by the nothing-if-not-all-in Laurence Fox. Fox is a British actor, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art who appeared in supporting roles in Robert Altman’s 2001 drawing-room mystery Gosford Park and the long-running ITV detective show Lewis, but who has become better known in recent years for his crusades against “extreme political correctness.” He has caused controversy for his remarks about COVID lockdowns and casting diversity, and he ran for mayor of London last year on the ticket of his own self-founded “Reclaim Party,” winning just 1.9 percent of the vote.

More at https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/my-son-hunter-biden-laptop-movie-bre
itbart-review.html

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

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Saturday, September 10, 2022 9:52 AM

SECOND

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


The United States will soon drop out of the Top 50 nations in terms of life expectancy.

Every country above us has a public option for health insurance of a publicly funded healthcare system. Not some. Not most. Every single one.

https://twitter.com/johngreen/status/1567578183683162116

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

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Monday, September 12, 2022 8:18 AM

SECOND

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


Religion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb

By Andrew Koppelman, Opinion Contributor - 09/11/22 3:00 PM ET

An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it.

That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans without drugs that prevent transmission of HIV, contraception, the HPV vaccine and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use. The employers claim that providing such coverage makes them complicit in homosexual behavior, drug use and sexual activity outside of marriage.

. . .

Alito’s irresponsible sentence mused that the “most straightforward way” of providing coverage “would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections.”

Alito’s dictum was the basis for Judge O’Connor’s decision last week. Quoting “Hobby Lobby,” O’Connor wrote that the Biden administration had not “shown that the government would be unable to assume the cost of providing [HIV preventive] drugs to those who are unable to obtain them due to their employers’ religious objections.”

And that was that. With this one sentence, the employees’ coverage disappeared. Gone are Kennedy’s concerns about the difficulty and expense of demanding entire new programs. Or the certainty that those programs will not in fact ever be enacted, so that the employees must simply do without. And a majority of the new, extremely conservative court appears likely to agree with Alito.

I’ve focused at length on what Alito wrote in Hobby Lobby because O’Connor’s decision shows that it was a time bomb, one now in the process of exploding. It is available in any case where any obligation could imaginably be fulfilled by the government.

Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?

More at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3637154-religion-and-samuel-alit
os-time-bomb/

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

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Monday, September 12, 2022 10:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?


This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Monday, September 12, 2022 1:57 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:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?


This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.
Judge Alito said that if a rich person doesn't want to follow a law then they don't have to follow the law if their "religion" says they don't have to. Alito's justification? The Federal government can take over the responsibility that the rich person does not want. Alito moved the responsibility from the rich person to the Federal government just because he felt like it. Alito didn't point to any part of the Constitution or to laws or to culture or anything justifying what Alito was doing. Alito felt good and that was good enough for him.

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

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Monday, September 12, 2022 5:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Where is the stopping point to the ‘let the government pay’ alternative? Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage, or according women equal pay for substantially similar work? Other costly mandates are landlords’ obligations to keep premises safe, or employers’ duty to purchase expensive safety equipment. And what about religious people who object to paying taxes?


This is a paragraph meant to influence stupid people.
Judge Alito said that if a rich person doesn't want to follow a law then they don't have to follow the law if their "religion" says they don't have to. Alito's justification? The Federal government can take over the responsibility that the rich person does not want. Alito moved the responsibility from the rich person to the Federal government just because he felt like it. Alito didn't point to any part of the Constitution or to laws or to culture or anything justifying what Alito was doing. Alito felt good and that was good enough for him.

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


There is no federal law doing what the article claims.

If you don't like it, stop having butt sex with random strangers you met on Grindr without wearing a condom or get another fucking job.

The paragraph I was referring to is full of false equivalencies and is designed to manipulate stupid people, such as yourself.

Mission accomplished, I see.



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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, September 13, 2022 7:41 AM

SECOND

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


The world is not a debating club

by Kevin Drum

Pamela Paul introduces us to Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion. He thinks we have a problem:
Quote:
“We disagree badly: Our arguments are painful and useless.” We spend more time vilifying, undermining and nullifying those we disagree with than opening or changing their minds. If more people took their cues from the world of competitive debate, he argues in a recent book, it would be easier to get people to reconsider their views or at least consider those of others.
You may think I have no standing to disagree with this. Au contraire! It so happens that both my parents were university debate champions back in the day, and I'm quite sure that both of them would disagree with Bo Seo in the strongest possible terms.

(What do you say about that, mom? Give me a call.)

Formal debate is all about introducing facts — as many as possible — and then refuting them. In real life, this is not called debate, it's called the most boring thing in the entire world. It persuades no one. I've been doing it for 20 years and, as far as I can tell, have persuaded virtually no one of anything.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, almost literally doesn't know any facts. Nor can he refute them in any rational way. But he is practically a cult leader.

Sadly, people are not persuaded by facts. They are persuaded by emotions. They are persuaded only when they're listening to someone who shares their worldview. They are persuaded by "arguments" that are beneficial to them — perhaps monetarily, perhaps in conferring status, perhaps in vilifying people they already didn't like. This is how you win in real life.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that you're the exception. Oh, you might be. The odds are a thousand to one against, but there are a few of you. The other 999, however, from PhDs down to ninth-grade dropouts, have no interest in dull facts and have no way of evaluating them anyway. They just want their biases confirmed and their status in the world elevated. Do that, and you too can win the presidency.

https://jabberwocking.com/the-world-is-not-a-debating-club/

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

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Tuesday, September 13, 2022 12:23 PM

SECOND

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


Aaron Sorkin was a writer for The West Wing TV show.

Sorkin is not perfect, but his understanding of the Republican party has always been spot on:

"I promise you, [The Republican Party] is not the least bit interested in solving it. [They are] interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."

Aaron Sorkin's The American President (1995) - The Final Speech



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

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Saturday, September 17, 2022 12:22 PM

SECOND

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


The Next Trump may not be an Idiot — Ron DeSantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt is straight out of Stormfront and 'border militia' rhetoric

For months, Republican governors eager to get a piece of Donald Trump's ability to get attention through race-baiting have engaged in a bizarre stunt: Sending busloads of often deeply confused refugees to places perceived as "liberal enclaves."

Since its inception, a huge obsession on Stormfront has been this notion that "elites" — though they often just come right out and call them "Jews" — want to impose "diversity" on working and middle-class neighborhoods, while living in white-only enclaves themselves. Their slogan for this is "diversity for thee, but not for me." Just a casual search of the forum shows how much the users obsess about "the hypocrisy of rich liberals who promote 'diversity' but who also live in 99% white neighborhoods," as one user griped.

Or, in another typical Stormfront rant about "limousine liberals": "Hey scumbags! How about sending your kids to the 'inclusive' public schools or living in the 'diverse' neighborhoods you patronizing bastards created!?"

As one can imagine, the posters at Stormfront are ecstatic to see their ideas mainstreamed in Republican circles by Carlson, Abbott and DeSantis. As one poster said, "White people are waking up and the fact that news anchors at Fox News are pointing out liberal hypocrisy on things like rich liberals living in the Whitest neighborhoods possible is a good sign."

More at https://www.rawstory.com/ron-desantis-martha-s-vineyard-stunt-is-strai
ght-out-of-stormfront-and-border-militia-rhetoric/

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

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Sunday, September 25, 2022 7:29 AM

SECOND

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


George Will’s perfect column: Why Mastriano’s candidacy presents a special danger to the nation.

“His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.”

Pennsylvania is on fire. Since 1915, the Red Ash colliery has been burning beneath the hills near Wilkes-Barre, and dozens of other fires smolder in abandoned coal mines. This year, however, the important heat is on Pennsylvania’s surface, in the contest to become the state’s next governor, the 2022 election that poses the most risk to the nation. Risk assessment involves weighing the probability of an event against the event’s potential destructiveness.

Suppose voters pick the Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano. And suppose that late in the evening of Nov. 5, 2024, Gov. Mastriano thinks Pennsylvanians picked the wrong person to receive the state’s presidential electoral votes. Today, candidate Mastriano promises that, as governor, he will have the executive power, and a mandate, to intervene, thus plunging the nation into chaos.

A member of the House of Representatives is 1/435th of one half of one of the federal government’s three branches. A senator is 1 percent of the other half. There are limits to how much actual, as opposed to aesthetic, damage a rogue legislator can do to the nation. A governor, however, can do important things on his own, especially if, as in Pennsylvania, he appoints the secretary of state, who administers elections.

A plucky disregard for public opinion has its charms, but Mastriano perhaps too wholeheartedly embraces John Quincy Adams’s 1825 injunction that politicians should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this nation, Mastriano’s indifference to the parameters of the possible is apparent regarding abortion, which he wants to outlaw, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s life, a policy pleasing to (per a Pew Research Center poll) 8 percent of Americans. He opposes same-sex marriage, which (per Gallup) 71 percent support.

Mastriano easily won (by 23 points) a nine-candidate Republican primary, receiving 43.8 percent of the vote. He is a human cafeteria dispensing ample portions of all the spicy fare that causes many Republicans to salivate, and gives most voters indigestion. He was at (but apparently not in) the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, having used campaign funds to rent buses to bring some supporters to the goings-on that President Donald Trump promised would be “wild.” Mastriano has raised money on a social media network frequented by antisemites, including the one who is accused of murdering 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

But what makes Mastriano more than an especially exotic political exhibit is his vow to appoint a secretary of state “who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything. And I can decertify every [voting] machine in the state.” In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Pennsylvania was decided by 0.7 and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, the state probably will again be closely contested, and its electoral votes could determine the national winner. So, imagine Mastriano, who has neither evidence nor doubts that Trump won the 2020 election, decreeing “corrections” to the election. His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.

His state senate Republican colleagues, weary of his hair-on-fire approach to advocating his monomania, removed him as chair of the pertinent committee. It would be more difficult to deal with him as governor while a nation on tenterhooks is a horrified spectator to his keeping his campaign promise to prevent a recurrence of the 2020 enormous Pennsylvania voting fraud that never happened.

Fortunately, Mastriano’s Democratic opponent is two-term Attorney General Josh Shapiro, 49, who when reelected in 2020 received about 3,000 more votes than Joe Biden drew in carrying the state. Although 24 percent of Pennsylvanians are Catholics, Shapiro says he encounters from them more gratitude than resentment for his tenacious assault on the church’s stonewalling about sexual abuses of children by priests. Speaking of religion, the author of Ecclesiastes 10:19 — “money answereth all things” — was a better writer than political scientist. Yes, social media provides inexpensive deliveries of messages, and there is a steeply declining utility of dollars spent on television ads after a saturation is reached. Nevertheless, money matters and Shapiro will spend more than Mastriano.

From the first census (1790) until that of 1940, Pennsylvania was the second-most populous state. In 1960, it had as many electoral votes (32) as California, which today has 54 to Pennsylvania’s 19. This fall, however, the state will matter more than any other as its voters’ choice of governor will either imperil or reassure the nation that began here.

https://www.somerset-kentucky.com/opinion/mastrianos-candidacy-could-p
resent-a-danger-to-the-nation/article_16a63eae-3ab9-11ed-80b5-0f1ddbf86ca3.html

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

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Sunday, September 25, 2022 8:06 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Ridin' with Biden?






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Monday, September 26, 2022 4:15 AM

SECOND

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


What Joe Biden Knows That No One Expected Him To

We need better technologies to enable better politics. But we need better politics to create better technologies. Maybe, just maybe, we’re on the verge of getting both.

On Monday, President Biden announced that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a biotech executive who previously worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, would be the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, ARPA-H. The alphabet soup here obscures the ambition. Darpa is the defense research agency that was critical in creating the internet, stealth technology, GPS navigation, drones and mRNA vaccines, to name but a few. The record is remarkable, and it’s built on the agency’s ability to do something unusual in Washington: Make big, risky bets.

Shortly after winning the presidency, Biden persuaded Congress to fund an analogue focused on medical technology: ARPA-H. Why do we need an ARPA-H when the National Institutes of Health already exists? Because the N.I.H., for all its rigor and marvels, is widely considered too cautious. ARPA-H will — in a move some lament — be housed at the Institutes, but its explicit mandate is to take the kind of gambles that Darpa takes, and the N.I.H. sometimes lets go. Wegrzyn, Biden promised, is “going to bring the legendary Darpa attitude and culture and boldness and risk-taking to ARPA-H to fill a critical need.”

Here, two facets of the Biden administration reveal themselves, one of which I don’t think gets enough credit, the other which I worry doesn’t receive enough critique. The first is that the Biden administration has put technological advance at the very center of its agenda. Every big bill Biden has passed has carried a theory of how better policy could lead to better technologies that could lead to a better world. The second is that the Biden administration’s technological optimism is paired with an institutional conservatism: Too many Washington agencies proved too cautious during the pandemic, and little has been done to make them more daring.

Let’s start with Biden’s ambition. Four major bills have passed during his presidency: The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Every one of them, at a core level, is about creating or deploying new technologies to solve ongoing problems.

The American Rescue Plan deployed vaccines and widespread testing and genomic surveillance to stifle the pandemic; the infrastructure bill is thick with ideas to make broadband access universal and develop next-generation energy and transportation technologies; CHIPS is an effort to break our reliance on Taiwanese and South Korean semiconductor manufacturing and keep ahead of China in fields of the future like artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and the Inflation Reduction Act uses tax breaks and loan guarantees to supercharge the wind and solar industries, build up advanced battery manufacturing, develop cost-effective carbon capture systems, and give the auto and home-heating industries reasons to go entirely electric.

Much attention, in recent years, has revolved around how technology can coarsen politics and denude communities. Look no further than the disinformation enabled by social media or the factories closed and towns wrecked by the communication and shipping advances that supercharged globalization. But new technologies can also create new possibilities. The politics of climate change would be impossible if solar panel costs hadn’t fallen by 89 percent and onshore wind costs by 70 percent in 10 years. California’s decision to ban the sale of cars running on internal combustion engines after 2035 would be unthinkable without the rapid advances in battery technology. Vaccination can curb the threat of disease in ways that social distancing can’t, as vaccinations can be sustained, but lockdowns become economically, politically and educationally ruinous.

And we are far from either the political or technological frontier. Take Covid, where the miracles and calamities coexist. The Biden administration’s vaccination effort started strong and then foundered on the shoals of political polarization, widespread misinformation and terrible messaging about booster shots. The money to upgrade school ventilation proved hard to spend. The F.D.A. dragged its feet on allowing rapid tests, which left us without anything near the tools we needed when the Omicron wave began.

Some problems persist: I have spoken to some of the researchers working on universal coronavirus vaccines and I’m stunned by how little help they’re getting. One described months of delay trying to find the monkeys needed for trials. You might think the U.S. government, with all its power and might, would name a point person that the teams working on these vaccines could call if they needed something, anything. Instead, many of our most brilliant virologists spend their work days trying to find lab animals and figure out how to conduct due diligence regarding manufacturing facilities.

And I have been puzzled by the Biden administration’s disinterest in building on the Trump administration’s central success: The Operation Warp Speed program that sped the vaccines into development. We could have Warp Speeds for so much more (and we are far from done with vaccines). I’ve asked this question of top Biden staffers, and I cannot say the answers I’ve heard have made much sense. I suspect the problem here relates more to crediting the Trump administration than with the possibilities of the Warp Speed program. Trump wasn’t exactly eager to build on Obama administration successes, either. But that doesn’t explain why Biden hasn’t launched Warp Speed-like policies under a new brand. Call them Moonshots. Call them Biden Bets. It doesn’t matter.

But what we have not done should not distract from what we have done. Vaccines, treatments like Paxlovid, improvements in hospitalization protocols and rapid testing — along, of course, with post-infection immunity — have uncoupled caseloads from death rates. The pandemic still exerts a terrible toll — hundreds still die each day from the disease — but it is far less than what it would be otherwise, and it could be far better were boosters more widely taken and therapeutics more widely used. Something like normalcy is possible for many people today, and pharmaceutical innovation and deployment is a driving cause.

This is only the first half of the article.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220920120207/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/09/18/opinion/biden-invention-arpa-h.html

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

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Monday, September 26, 2022 8:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Ridin' with Biden?








Yup.

And there were more stories written about Kyle in one day than there will ever be about the
Democratic psychopath. Hell I'd have to look up his name right now if it wasn't on the picture
you posted. There's no chance that Second or Ted know what his name is without asking Alexa.
And Alexa might be programmed not to tell them.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Monday, September 26, 2022 11:29 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yup.

And there were more stories written about Kyle in one day than there will ever be about the
Democratic psychopath. Hell I'd have to look up his name right now if it wasn't on the picture
you posted. There's no chance that Second or Ted know what his name is without asking Alexa.
And Alexa might be programmed not to tell them.
How many drunken murders have occurred in East Texas in the last month? A hundred, but the national news didn't cover any of the them because the weapon was a gun, not a car. This particular murder is interesting, not because drunks were arguing about politics at 2:35 AM but because a car as a murder weapon is kind of unusual. I remember one story where the wife caught her husband cheating at the Hilton Hotel on Clear Lake. Old story that has ended with murder a million times and does not become national news but this particular time the wife ran her husband over with her car. That made national news and the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_David_Lynn_Harris

Clara Harris, Who Killed Cheating Husband With Her Mercedes, Released From Prison
Originally sentenced to twenty years for first-degree murder, the former Houston dentist has been paroled. (If there was true justice in Texas, Clara should have gotten a medal for marital merit by killing that worthless husband.)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/clara-harris-released-from-
prison/

News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/article/hous
ton-pedestrian-killed-driver-flees-17466922.php

Four pedestrians were hit and killed by cars this weekend in Houston, bringing the total number of deaths in 2022 up to at least 74, according to the crash records database maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation.

Last year, a record 106 pedestrians were killed within the city, 72 of those in the first nine months of the year.

Since Jan. 1, 2021, the most pedestrian deaths have occurred along Interstate 45, FM 1093 — which is Westheimer Road in Houston — and Loop 610.

The Houston area ranked 36th among 101 U.S. metropolitan areas for highest pedestrian risk, in a “Dangerous by Design” 2022 report by a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit,

The 2022 report used data from 2016 to 2020.

The report said there are 2.23 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people per year in the Houston, Woodlands and Sugar Land area. It marked 779 pedestrian deaths from 2016 to 2020.

Here are the four separate deaths from the weekend in Houston.

4600 Bellfort Ave.

A pedestrian died after being hit by up to two cars late Friday on Bellfort Avenue.

A car was traveling east on Bellfort Avenue and hit the pedestrian, according to the HPD Vehicular Crimes Division. The driver pulled over into a parking lot and paramedics took the pedestrian to the hospital, where he died.

The driver was not impaired and the investigation thus far indicated that the pedestrian may have been struck by an unknown vehicle first, according to the HPD Vehicular Crimes Division.

The driver who stayed at the scene was arrested for outstanding unrelated warrants.

9400 Main St.

A 53-year-old woman was killed at about 5:20 a.m. Saturday while crossing Westridge Street outside of a crosswalk.

The driver of a white Honda Civic struck the woman at 9400 Main Street and remained at the scene after the incident. The Houston Fire Department found the pedestrian dead on scene.

The driver was questioned, determined to be unimpaired and released. No charges have been filed and the investigation is ongoing.

9400 North Freeway

A 28-year-old man died in a hit-and-run after trying to cross a freeway exit ramp Saturday morning.

The pedestrian was struck at about 8:30 a.m. by a southbound vehicle on the West Mount Houston Road ramp at 9400 North Freeway, according to the HPD Vehicular Crimes Division.

The driver fled the scene without stopping to help. The pedestrian was pronounced dead at the scene.

The identity of the victim is pending verification by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.

9500 Clearwood Drive

A pedestrian was fatally struck by a car with an unknown driver, who fled the scene early Monday in southeast Houston, police said.

The woman driving was not the owner of the car and is someone the three passengers — including the car’s owner — said they met earlier that night.

The driver was described as a woman in her 30s, Sgt. David Rose with the Houston Police Vehicular Crimes Division told On Scene TV. The occupants of the car were returning from a club.

The Dodge Charger was going down Clearwood Street at a high speed around 1:20 a.m.

“Alcohol or drugs may have played a factor, but we really don’t know that at this time,” Rose said.

He said the cause of the wreck was the speed.

The car lost control and started to flip. It hit a utility pole and landed on the roof. While tumbling, it struck a pedestrian who was either in the crosswalk or on the road, Rose said.

An officer was on patrol in the area, heard the crash and pulled up to the scene.

The pedestrian, a woman probably in her 30s, died before the Houston Fire Department arrived at the scene.

The occupants and witnesses said the driver of the car fled the scene before police arrived.

“I am not sure how it came to be that this person was driving this vehicle they did not own, but that is one of the reasons we are still investigating,” Rose said.

The three passengers were detained for questioning and the driver is being sought for failure to stop and render aid, a felony.

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

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Wednesday, September 28, 2022 8:41 AM

SECOND

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


Why Zombie Reaganomics Still Rules the G.O.P.

I’ll summarized the essence of the Commitment to America announced by House Republicans last week:
What’s my plan for the next two years? I will be happy, healthy and successful. What will I do to achieve these things? What are you, a Marxist?
https://www.republicanleader.gov/commitment/

This “plan” was obviously meant to evoke Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America, which was followed by a Republican takeover of Congress. But the Contract With America offered a fairly specific policy agenda, with a list of planned legislation. What Republicans have just released, by contrast, is mainly a list of good things they claim will happen, with barely a hint of how they propose to make them happen.

If you squint hard at the economics section of the Commitment to America, however, you can see the faint outlines of a familiar set of ideas — zombie Reaganomics. Which raises a question: Why are deregulation, benefit cuts and tax breaks for the rich still the ruling ideology of a party that now claims to stand for the working class?

Before I get there, a couple of notes on what the economics portion of the commitment actually says.

First, it’s striking how many of the economic complaints are about things that are barely, if at all, affected by government policy, like the price of gas (which has come down a lot since its peak) and supply-chain disruptions (which have been diminishing).

Second, immediately after declaring that “we have a plan to fix the economy,” House Republicans say that they will “curb wasteful government spending.” As anyone who follows budget debates knows, that’s the ultimate weasel phrase. What spending are we talking about, specifically?

Bear in mind that the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army: The great bulk of spending is on health care, retirement and the military. You can’t meaningfully cut expenditure without attacking at least one of these. So which parts of that spending are wasteful?

Well, Senator Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has called for sunsetting all federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare — every five years, which would open the door to gutting America’s social safety net. Other Republicans have tried to distance themselves from that idea, although without removing Scott from his position. But again, what is this wasteful spending they propose to cut?

But back to the commitment. Its economic program, such as it is, calls for “pro-growth tax and deregulatory policies.” No specifics, but this is clearly a call for zombie Reaganomics.

Why “zombie”? Because we now have four decades’ worth of experience showing that deregulation and tax cuts for the rich do not, in fact, produce higher wages and faster economic growth. So the idea that tax cuts are the secret of prosperity should be dead, yet somehow it’s still shambling along, eating Republican brains.

Of course, I’m just saying that because I’m a Marxist. (I’m not, but that’s what modern Republicans call anyone who supports progressive taxation and social insurance.) But for what it’s worth, financial markets share my skepticism. Look at what’s happening in Britain, where Prime Minister Liz Truss’s recent announcement of a Reaganite economic plan sent interest rates soaring and the pound plunging.

Which brings me back to my original question: Why is the G.O.P. still committed to a failed economic ideology?

For a long time, the G.O.P. seemed to fit the portrait famously drawn by Thomas Frank in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” That is, it was a party mostly dedicated to making the rich richer that managed to win elections on social issues — which in practice meant catering to bigotry while campaigning, then pivoting to tax and benefit cuts immediately afterward.

With the rise of MAGA, however, catering to bigotry is no longer a marketing device; it’s the party’s main agenda. In that case, however, why continue plutocrat-friendly policies? Why not add some actual populism to the mix? Why did Representative Kevin McCarthy, who will likely become speaker if Republicans take the House, declare that his first bill would be one to repeal additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service, allowing wealthy tax cheats to breathe easy?

Part of the answer may be that anti-abortion, anti-L.G.B.T.Q., anti-immigrant warriors don’t know or care much about economic policy, so they’ve left it in the hands of the usual suspects — congressional staff members, conservative think tankers and other apparatchiks who’ve spent their whole careers promoting the tax-cut mystique.

But there may also be a strategy here. Billionaires may no longer run the G.O.P. the way they used to, but the party still wants their money. So plutocrat-friendly policies may be a way of keeping wealthy donors and corporations on board, even if many of them are uncomfortable with the right-wing social agenda.

This strategy depends, however, on working-class voters not realizing what Republicans are up to. Hence the vacuous nature of the Commitment to America; any acknowledgment of what the G.O.P. might actually do could be a big political problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220927221501/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/09/26/opinion/gop-economic-policy.html

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

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Saturday, October 1, 2022 7:20 AM

SECOND

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


Republican states keep refusing to expand Medicaid — until you ask their voters

Medicaid expansion is 6-for-6 with voters on ballot initiatives. South Dakota could make it seven in a row.

A 2012 Supreme Court decision made Medicaid expansion optional for states, and a dozen Republican-controlled states still have not accepted the expansion a full decade later, leaving 4 million people without Medicaid coverage who would otherwise be eligible. (5 Republican Justices voted to deny Medicaid expansion.)

In the face of that obstruction from Republican state officials, health care advocates have taken the issue directly to voters in largely Republican states, with remarkable success.

GOP leaders have still tried — unsuccessfully to date — to stop or subvert these ballot initiatives by changing the laws controlling ballot initiatives.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2022/9/30/23377495/medicaid-expansion-
states-south-dakota-ballot-initiative

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

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Saturday, October 1, 2022 9:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:


How disingenuous.

If there were a MAGA bumper sticker on that car and the tables were turned, Ted would have made a thread about it that day and it would still be getting posts from you losers here every single day.

They buried this almost as quick as they buried the Christmas massacre in Wisconsin.

And you fuckin' idiots still can't stop talking about the "deadly" "coup" almost 2 years ago, even though the only people who died were Trump supporters, and the FBI plant that egged them all on didn't get any prison time while the corrupt DOJ was throwing everyone else in jail.

The media is completely one sided, and you know that it is.



And the media is dying.

Add Trevor Noah to the LONG list of Leftist media that is being fired post Trump.

Nobody watches them anymore.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, October 1, 2022 9:24 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:
News Flash! Deaths that were NOT covered by the national news! It seems so unfair that you can be squished by a car and nobody on fireflyfans.net will be aware of your death nor will they blame the Democrats for a dead Republican:


How disingenuous.

If there were a MAGA bumper sticker on that car and the tables were turned, Ted would have made a thread about it that day and it would still be getting posts from you losers here every single day.

They buried this almost as quick as they buried the Christmas massacre in Wisconsin.

And you fuckin' idiots still can't stop talking about the "deadly" "coup" almost 2 years ago, even though the only people who died were Trump supporters, and the FBI plant that egged them all on didn't get any prison time while the corrupt DOJ was throwing everyone else in jail.

The media is completely one sided, and you know that it is.



And the media is dying.

Add Trevor Noah to the LONG list of Leftist media that is being fired post Trump.

Nobody watches them anymore.
Three traits all Trumptards have: fear death, whine about how mean Democrats are to them and follow the leader. 6ix, you showed all traits in a few sentences. That Trumptard psychology is the reason Trumptards struggle to remain in the middle class. Trumptards were born to be followers, whiners, and fearful. Not a pathway to success, 6ix, but you got to be you.

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

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Saturday, October 1, 2022 9:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Three traits all Trumptards have: fear death, whine about how mean Democrats are to them and follow the leader. 6ix, you showed all traits in a few sentences.


I don't fear death. I can be a lot more mean than you or any Democrat can be. I don't respect any authority other than my own autonomy, and certainly don't follow anybody.


Speaking of follow the leader, how many hours would you say you wore a face mask in the last two years, Mudblood?

Get that fifth booster yet, didja?


You should be the one afraid of dying right now. Don't put any undue stress on that little heart of yours, mkay?



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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, October 4, 2022 6:36 AM

SECOND

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


Sackett v. EPA seeks to hobble federal protection of wetlands under the Clean Water Act.

When Brian Fletcher got up to defend the EPA’s position, the conservative justices jumped down his throat. Justice Neil Gorsuch — whose mother tried to dismantle EPA while leading it in the 1980s — performed outrage over the plight of homeowners persecuted by government bureaucrats. How, he asked, does “any reasonable person know” if wetlands on their property are “adjacent to” protected waters? Would 3,000 feet be close enough? How about three miles? Fletcher tried to explain that the EPA has to study the actual ecosystem to decide if wetlands affect nearby waters, but Gorsuch wasn’t deterred: “If the federal government doesn’t know,” he pressed, “how is a person subject to criminal time in federal prison supposed to know?”

This line of questioning is classic Gorsuch: shallowly persuasive and easily refuted. Jackson then asked Fletcher: “Is there a process by which a homeowner can ask?” Which, of course, there is: Homeowners can request a free determination from the Army Corps of Engineers. “And so,” Jackson continued, “you’re not really facing criminal liability without the opportunity to get an assessment from the government regarding your particular circumstances.” You could almost hear the air going out of Gorsuch’s balloon.

Throughout Wednesday’s arguments, the usual battle lines revealed themselves: The three liberal justices were concerned about the environment; the six conservatives were worried about landowners. The three liberals sought to enforce the text of the statute that Congress wrote; the six conservatives suggested that vague concerns about federalism gave them a license to rewrite the law to their liking.

When Sackett v. EPA comes down next spring, the Supreme Court will dismember the Clean Water Act by a 6–3 vote.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/ketanji-brown-jackson-supr
eme-court-debut-arguments.html

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

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Tuesday, October 4, 2022 9:24 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


LOL @ Slate.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Tuesday, October 4, 2022 1:55 PM

SECOND

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


A GOP insider on the Republicans who knew Trump was dangerous — and went MAGA anyway

A conversation with ex-GOP operative Tim Miller about how Trumpism swallowed the Republican Party whole.

Sean Illing - Of all the characters in the book, all the operator types, some of them you know personally, some of them you don’t — which of them sticks out to you the most in terms of just like abject nihilism or cynicism?

Tim Miller - It’s Elise for me. Elise Stefanik.

Sean Illing - Can you say who she is?

Tim Miller - Yeah, sure.

So just going all the way back, I worked with her on the Republican “autopsy.” People might remember, after Mitt Romney lost, we put together this document that basically had a bunch of blocking and tackling recommendations for how the party can catch up to Obama’s data nerds, but also said that we should soften our rhetoric around immigration and other issues.

Elise was the editor of that document. And I was the spokesperson at the time. So I was working with her very closely.

So Elise then runs for Congress as a very moderate Republican — climate change is a problem, gay marriage, immigration reform. You know, as moderate of a Republican as you have in Congress when she wins in 2014. 2016, she runs for reelection with Trump on the ballot, won’t say his name. Literally can’t even spit out his name.

In 2018, something happens. Trump comes to campaign in her district, huge crowd. She gets this huge applause on the stage. She starts to reassess her power trajectory. Paul Ryan, who was kind of her mentor, retires. So her little path up through the normal establishment ranks in Congress started to seem not as likely.

And she flips on a dime. And in the first impeachment becomes Trump’s most rabid defender with the most absurd defenses. She was like a foreign policy neocon Republican who would’ve been very much “arm the Ukrainians against the Russians,” flips on it, sides with Trump against Zelenskyy. And is now literally indistinguishable from a MAGA troll.

And there was no policy anything about this. I interviewed tons of mutual friends. She wouldn’t talk to me. She emailed me saying that she sees my tweets and is not interested in participating in the book. And didn’t reply to any other of my entreaties.

So to me, she is the worst because it’s just the most brazen. It also is the worst at some level because it’s paying off for her. I truly think she’ll be on a VP shortlist for Trump, ’cause he’ll want a woman if he runs in 2024. And if not that, I think she’s on a speaker of the house trajectory.

https://www.vox.com/2022/10/4/23386159/tim-miller-trump-maga-republica
ns-stefanik

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

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Sunday, October 9, 2022 7:48 AM

SECOND

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


Did American Business Leaders Really Try to Overthrow the President, Like in Amsterdam?

How David O. Russell’s movie messes around with the story of the Business Plot.

. . .

Which brings me to the real point: The thesis underlying Amsterdam is that some sinister outside influence — German Nazis, “un-American” industrialists — is needed for fascism to take root on American soil. What Butler knew first-hand was how good Americans were at destroying democracy, without anyone’s help, because he had done that himself, all over the world. Those ribbons on his uniform represented the decades of repression he and his fellow Marines had visited on places like the Philippines, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Those two Medals of Honor were earned crushing resistance to an illegal and avaricious U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, and killing women and children who tried to stop the Marines from coming ashore in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. It is the habit of such imperial violence, as writers like Aimé-Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Hannah Arendt have written, that makes fascism thinkable, and even seem preferable, to those with a certain kind of mind.

Russell implies that the sterilization clinic that Washington and Robbie stumble upon is part of a Nazi plot. To do that he blows past (save for an earlier, out-of-place, and hard-to-follow aside about Washington’s character’s childhood in Texas) the extensive history of forced sterilization — not only in the Jim Crow South but across the United States and its colonies, especially Puerto Rico. The movie notes (again, without naming names) the support of U.S. industrialists for Hitler, but doesn’t note the degree to which U.S. race policy directly inspired the Nuremberg Laws. It deals with American racism, and to a lesser extent WASP antisemitism, but never seems to ask itself how the structures that it fosters might do more than a couple of glass-clinking plutocrats to bring representative democracy to its knees.

Amsterdam’s ultimate resolution is somewhat like what really happened: Butler was mocked for his allegations, especially by the corporate press — though, contrary to the movie, the publishers of the New York Times and other major newspapers were not part of the conspiracy itself. (Class interest alone enough to bring them in on the side of the accused.) The specifics are wrong, though: Butler’s court-martial for insulting Benito Mussolini happened three years before his Business Plot testimony. What really cast Butler into the mists of American historical memory was not his testimony about the conspiracy, but our forgetting of the wars in which he fought, and the strong antiwar and anti-imperialist stance he took in the years leading up to World War II — years in which he wrote the pamphlet War is a Racket, and denounced himself as having been “a racketeer for capitalism.”

More at https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/amsterdam-movie-true-story-real-hist
ory-business-plot.html

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

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Thursday, October 13, 2022 9:22 AM

SECOND

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


How to direct America toward fascism

Jonathan Chait writes:

In mid-September, I attended the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, where Republican politicians, right-wing thought leaders, and various party apparatchiks had gathered to articulate their vision of the conservative movement’s future. The National Conservatives are only one faction vying to define the Republican agenda, but in a short period of time, they have sharpened their focus and expanded their influence, and the conference gave them a forum to display the dominant position their ideas have achieved on the right. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the conference’s speakers, recognized their triumph when he announced from the stage, “I come not to invite National Conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”

What exactly this movement entails has been the subject of a long-running debate largely obscured by the figure of Donald Trump. When Joe Biden warned in August of the rise of “semi-fascist” ideas on the right, even many Trump critics suggested that the president had gotten carried away. CNN’s John Avlon said this rhetoric was “not befitting” a president. Larry Hogan, among the most staunchly anti-Trump Republicans left in the GOP, scolded Biden for his “divisive rhetoric.” The implication was that it was a miscategorization of Trump and a smear of his followers to suggest that his anti-democratic behavior in any way resembled an ideology, let alone the fascist regimes of the 20th century. And it is true that Trump gravitates toward power instinctively; as president, he dispensed with democratic norms in large part because he did not understand them. Trump’s authoritarianism is sub-ideological.

But that does not mean his style of governance defies theorization or a philosophical rubric. The chaos of the Trump presidency has given way to a period of rethinking on the right, the result of which is a political and intellectual infrastructure determined to carry out his despotic impulses in a more systemized and, its supporters hope, victorious fashion. They may not call it fascism or semi-fascism, but this is only because the word has become a universally recognized slur since World War II. To most Americans, fascist simply means “bad,” and nobody self-identifies as “bad.” People imagine democracy and fascism as a simple binary, leaving them unable to acknowledge political systems that reside in the vast space between the two. But this middle ground between Reagan and Mussolini is where the Republican Party’s most influential ideologists and power brokers are consciously heading.

Semi-fascism contains many features of democracy, like contested elections and permissible criticism of the ruling party, but without the liberal guardrails that maintain democracy’s openness and stability, such as a judiciary, bureaucracy, and news media that are empowered and motivated to check abuses of power. Thus semi-fascism has a nasty tendency to slide into something more like the outright version, in which effective public opposition to the ruling party becomes impossible. Two decades ago, Vladimir Putin’s Russia looked very much like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary does today, and some observers still considered it a democracy, albeit one with challenges and limits. Today, Putin has seized so much power that even though voters have regular opportunities to defy him at the ballot box, it’s unlikely they ever will.

The Republican Party’s ascendant semi-fascist wing wishes to take several steps down this road. I watched the conference’s attendees practically declare they would do so. Their methods and goals are ones that if embraced by their opponents would unquestionably (and correctly) be described as authoritarian or worse. Nobody expressed any fear that a right-wing state dedicated to endless political warfare might violate anybody’s rights. The only rights they respected were those of red America. The only risk that concerned them was losing.

More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/how-to-make-a-semi-fascist-par
ty.html

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

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Thursday, October 13, 2022 10:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Shove it, idiot. We're living through 2 years of fascism right now.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, October 14, 2022 5:13 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:
Shove it, idiot. We're living through 2 years of fascism right now.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
I found an entire book that charmingly explains people like you and my Trumptard relatives. It is called DENIAL
The Unspeakable Truth by Keith Kahn-Harris

– Preface –

I’ve always loved nonsense dressed up as scholarship. During my A-level studies in early modern history, one of my teachers gave me a copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to read and report back on to the class. I loved it. Its outré thesis – that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to live in the South of France and spawned a secret society, the ‘Priory of Zion’, that has acted as a hidden hand in the history of Western civilisation – was thrillingly written. And of course, as I took pleasure in pointing out in my class presentation, it was no less improbable than the Christian story of crucifixion and resurrection.

I cannot say that my teacher’s point-by-point dismantling of the book’s thesis was a shock to me; I never seriously believed its claims. But the debunking was disillusioning because my first exposure to the world of alternative history was so much fun. I felt the same about other works I devoured as a teenager, such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of The Gods, a 1970s bestseller arguing that aliens visited earth and inspired the glories of ancient civilisations. Books like these seemed to me to be delightful in their portentous ludicrousness. Finding evidence that debunked their claims felt like a duty; it also felt like a disappointment. Although I was never taken in, I almost envied those who were.

My Jewish upbringing meant that I had been conscious of the Holocaust from an early age. As a teen who liked to read radical anti-fascist publications such as Searchlight, I also heard about Holocaust denial, although I never encountered it first-hand. This was pre-Internet, and it took commitment to track down such works – commitment that, as a soft suburban Jew, I didn’t have. But I did yearn to explore this demi-monde. What could be sillier than arguing the Holocaust never happened? It was all a big joke to me. A Jewish university friend and I used to fantasise about forming a Jewish metal band that espoused Holocaust denial and boasted that we really do kill Christian kids and use their blood in our Passover rituals. On holiday in Egypt, another Jewish friend and I visited bookstores to ask if they stocked Did Six Million Really Die? and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What larks!

Today, it’s harder for me to see the fun in all this. The breezy insouciance with which I consumed ‘alternative’ scholarship was based on the assumption that none of it really mattered. In my cynical, self-absorbed late teens and twenties during the smug 1990s there was no reason to think that neo-Nazis were anything other than marginal idiots; alternate histories and conspiracy theories similarly appeared to pose no threat to anyone.

I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. Of course, I knew that there were those who denied nicotine was addictive, who tried to prove that environmental pollution wasn’t happening or wasn’t harmful. I was appalled at this, but it wasn’t my major worry. What I didn’t spot was either their long-term determination to prevail or the threads that tied them to the shady world that I refused to take seriously.

Mea culpa. We are a long way from the smug certainties of 1990s liberalism, and my attitude to those who challenge real scholarship is no longer one of indulgence. As I will show in this book, for decades, centuries even, something deeply poisonous has been growing. This poisonous process has produced diseased fruit in our ‘post-truth’ age.

My focus is on denial and denialism, which deploy a cluster of techniques that enable those with unspeakable desires to pursue them covertly. What I thought were simply ridiculous (if sometimes nasty) examples of human loopiness, are much more than that. Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable.

Yet I have retained just enough of my youthful indulgence that my approach to denial and denialism in this book is not only one of condemnation. I continue to have just enough enjoyment of alternative scholarship that I can sense something more in it than just evil pseudo-science. I can feel the audacity, the joys, the predicaments, the wretchedness and – above all – the desire that courses through multiple assaults on knowledge.

That lingering empathy means that I have no choice but to recognise the allure of denialism and to face up to the fact that to condemn is not enough. How can one suppress desires so strong? Rather, we have to consider what alternatives are available to the deniers. As this book will show, these are neither easy nor pleasant. They force us to confront brutal dilemmas and hard choices.

I don’t know whether confronting what I call in this book the denier’s alternative can lead to a better way of dealing with our desires. What I do know is that, as I suggest in the final two chapters, we may soon be forced to do so. Something is shifting, something profound. And perhaps, in an odd way, cultivating an appreciation of the mischievous freedom at work in alternative forms of knowledge that I revelled in during my youth might be a better way of facing the dark times ahead than angry pessimism.

Download for free the book from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.nz/search.php?req=Keith+Kahn-Harris+Truth

Blurb for the Book:
The Holocaust never happened. The planet isn't warming. Vaccines harm children. There is no such thing as AIDS. The Earth is flat. Denialism comes in many forms, often dressed in the garb of scholarship or research. It's certainly insidious and pernicious. Climate change denialists have built well-funded institutions and lobbying groups to counter action against global warming. Holocaust deniers have harried historians and abused survivors. AIDS denialists have prevented treatment programmes in Africa. All this is bad enough, but what if, as Keith Kahn-Harris asks, it actually cloaks much darker, unspeakable, desires? If denialists could speak from the heart, what would we hear?

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

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 5:22 AM

SECOND

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


If You’re Like Me, You’ll Want To Send This To Everyone You Know
By A.T. On October 19, 2022

Seriously: you will. Click here. Turn on sound. https://twitter.com/iampoliticsgirl/status/1582175918411304961?s=46&am
p;t=qEyCnqOtAMiq2FYNr3VtZg

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

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 5:42 AM

SECOND

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


The Red State Murder Problem . . . And Everything Else
By A.T. On October 20, 2022

A thoughtful piece we should send viral:

. . . Murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.

For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry . . .

That’s one of my friend Carl’s key issues — crime.

Carl sends me one or two often nasty emails each day in what I have to assume is his sincere effort to heal the world. Why am I always picking on Trump and perpetuating the Russia “hoax”? (He knows it’s a hoax because he did not read the Mueller report.) Why am I not demanding an investigation of Hunter Biden? (See below.**) Why am I not blasting Democrats on crime?

The first thing to say about that last one — crime — is that whoever came up with the slogan “defund the police” had the right motivation but, taken literally, a horrible solution. Effective criminal justice reform may in some cases require more funding, not less. “Defund” is a position not held by a single Democrat I know of among the thousands running for office.

The second thing to say is that Carl is right: Crime sucks (well, duh) and we should all be looking for ways to reduce it.

Both kinds:

> White collar crime that involves money. (Here’s a start: funding the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats at the expense of honest wealthy taxpayers and all the rest of us. Dems support; R’s oppose.)

> And, even more concerningly, violent crime. (A start on that: Keeping kids too young to buy beer from buying assault weapons; imposing universal background checks for gun-buyers of any age. Dems support; R’s oppose.)

Another needed improvement — already underway — is to tweak some of the bail reforms Democrats (and some Republicans) have supported. Do we want not to ruin poor kids’ lives because they can’t make bail on minor non-violent infractions? Yes! That’s simple justice — and a good investment because a ruined life costs taxpayers a lot of dough and often leads to more crime. But should we help alleged violent offenders make bail? Clearly (in my view), rarely if ever.

The main takeaway on crime? We might well have less of it going forward — both kinds — if Carl chose to vote Democrat this year. Spread the word.

https://andrewtobias.com/the-red-state-murder-problem-and-everything-e
lse/

** Hunter Biden. Carl is convinced he’s guilty of a crime — and if Carl is right, the First Son should be indicted, tried, convicted, and punished. (The FBI, long dominated by Republicans, is investigating.) No one should be above the law. But Hunter Biden should only be of significance to voters if (a) he holds some role in running the government, which he does not; or (b) his dealings in China have corrupted his father in his dealings with China (maybe he secretly hopes to make a fortune building a Biden Hotel in Beijing?) But that’s clearly not been the case. E.g.: With New Crackdown, Biden Wages Global Campaign on Chinese Technology. And there are lots more examples of Biden’s standing firm. So even if Hunter needs to be punished for something, of what possible relevance is that to your vote? To whether we should codify Roe (as Dems want to) or entertain cuts to Social Security and Medicare (as Republican leaders want to). Please! Focus, Carl!

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

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 8:34 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If You’re Like Me, You’ll Want To Send This To Everyone You Know
By A.T. On October 19, 2022

Seriously: you will. Click here. Turn on sound. https://twitter.com/iampoliticsgirl/status/1582175918411304961?s=46&am
p;t=qEyCnqOtAMiq2FYNr3VtZg

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


Thanks. Cool. Nothing of interest to see here. I'll save the free bandwidth.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 8:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shove it, idiot. We're living through 2 years of fascism right now.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
I found an entire book that charmingly explains people like you and my Trumptard relatives. It is called DENIAL
The Unspeakable Truth by Keith Kahn-Harris


Oh cool. I found a book that charmingly explains you as well.



And one for Ted too.



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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, October 21, 2022 8:00 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:

Shove it, idiot. We're living through 2 years of fascism right now.

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

Oh cool. I found a book that charmingly explains you as well.
Many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington. But reality has intervened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a real dictatorship trying to crush a genuinely free society with rockets and tanks, and may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake.

In his time in the White House, Trump had made it his business to short-circuit representative democracy, embedded in Congress, political parties, and the full range of American institutions. He had weakened the checks and balances of the system, pushing out government watchdogs and pulling back oversight mechanisms. He had also tried to eliminate or push aside established political and social intermediaries. Populist systems always give a boost to those who are best funded and can shout the loudest, which is exactly what Trump was good at doing — drawing in money, setting up a myriad of political action committees, and drowning out everyone else. During his tenure, America veered toward plebiscitary democracy — a system driven by polling, popular opinion, and periodic personality-focused elections, precisely the kind of political territory carved out by Vladimir Putin over the twenty years of his rule in Russia.

Indeed, Russia offered a grim comparison and a portent of something much worse ahead. In the 1990s, President Yeltsin had fired on his parliament in the Russian “White House” to push through a constitution that gave him stronger executive powers. In the end, Yeltsin did not use those powers to their full effect. He too was a populist, but of a “softer” sort, and the Russian state was weaker under his tenure. Yeltsin’s appointed successor, Vladimir Putin, however, had proven to be of a harder disposition. In the following years, Putin took the constitution’s presidential powers and ran with them. He also enhanced them to the point of extending his own term in office essentially indefinitely. Likewise, President Trump’s interpretation of executive power and his attempt to usurp the presidency may have paved the way for another, less personally insecure and more capable populist president — someone who actually did his or her homework and was skilled in project management — to pull a Putin in America.

- from Fiona Hill, The Great Reckoning, Chapter 14 of There Is Nothing for You Here
Download the free book from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.nz/search.php?req=fiona+hill

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

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Friday, October 21, 2022 6:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
- from Fiona Hill, The Great Reckoning


There isn't enough money in the world to get me to read a book by that dude.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 7:00 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:
- from Fiona Hill, The Great Reckoning


There isn't enough money in the world to get me to read a book by that dude.
Angry poor white trash don't have money because they don't read much more than trashy novels and Rush Limbaugh-style books complaining about libtards. The exact same thing (lack of money because of not reading worthwhile books) is happening in 21 countries around the world:

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004.

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times/Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes, this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration.

They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “openness to experience.” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus.

Inglehart’s core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “high-education low-income voters” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled the affluent to the right and the working-class to the left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

We would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

More at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/education-polarization-diploma
-divide-democratic-party-working-class.html

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

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 8:06 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'd be concerned that you'd choke on your own dick and nobody would find you for weeks, but it's only two inches so you'll be fine.

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


What have Democrats done for you lately? Here’s a short list.

1 You can now buy an OTC hearing aid without a prescription, and for a fraction of the cost of current hearing aids.

2 We have cut off China's access to advanced computer chips.

3 The price of insulin will be cut to $35 in January, and President Biden has ordered HHS to lower other prescription drug prices later in the year.

4 HHS is also working to ensure greater access to contraceptives in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

5 President Biden has lowered gasoline prices by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It will be replaced by future purchases of lower cost oil, which will save taxpayer money in the long run.

6 Thanks to Democratic management of the economy, inflation is already starting to come down.


7 If you use Obamacare, subsidies have been increased for middle-class workers. This means that their premiums have gone way down.


8 The CHIPS Act dedicates billions of dollars to bringing back advanced chip design and manufacturing to America.

9 The bipartisan infrastructure act provides money for new bridges, roads, airports, and other transportation projects in all 50 states.


10 The Inflation Reduction Act is creating 550,000 jobs in wind, solar, battery plants, and solar panels. It also provides a $7,500 rebate on electric vehicles.

11 The No Surprises Act bans surprise billing in hospitals from out-of-network providers or air ambulance services for emergency medical care, and prohibits out-of-network doctors from issuing surprise bills for non-emergency care.

That's a top ten list. Feel free to add your own, but keep them simple, concrete, and not hated by anyone outside the MAGA cult.

https://jabberwocking.com/what-have-we-done-for-you-lately-heres-a-sho
rt-list/

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

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 8:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 9:39 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:


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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
There is a list of 10 things Republicans accomplished during Trump's four years:

1. Lower taxes on the wealthy. Yes! $5.5 trillion. Good job! https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/trump-tax-cuts-beat-gilti.
html

2. Reduce the total national debt to zero? Trump promised that. Nope. Increased by $8.2 trillion. https://www.sounddollar.com/national-debt-by-president

It is kind of funny that the tax decrease for the wealthy was about the same size as the increase in the national debt. I wonder if the two are related? Couldn't be because Trump said so.

4. Trump: I will eliminate U.S. debt in 8 years
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/275003-trump-i
-will-eliminate-us-debt-in-8-years/

Also funny how Trump never got one word on a piece of paper outlining how he would do what he promised.

5. Back to the Future: Trump’s History of Promising a Health Plan That Never Comes
https://khn.org/news/back-to-the-future-trumps-history-of-promising-a-
health-plan-that-never-comes/

6. - 10. Trump run his mouth nonstop. That goal was scored!

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

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 1:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


$5.99 for a can of spray foam before taxes in October of 2022.

Democrats didn't do anything on your list.

Democrats are finished.




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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Thursday, October 27, 2022 1:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Let's see ...

Democrats ...

Vaccine mandates
Taxes, and MOAR spending!
Jiggered elections
INFLATION!
Authoritarianism and partisan prosecution
Crime
Splintering the USA into victim/identity politics
MOAR WAR
Illegal immigration
Censorship
Offshoring of manufacturing
Job loss

... and NOW, with NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON!

What's not to like?




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


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Friday, October 28, 2022 1:47 PM

SECOND

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


Worker compensation is down. Corporate profits are up. Imagine that.

Obviously, wages and salaries are the main component of compensation, but it also includes other expenses like bonuses, the employer share of Medicare and Social Security taxes, health care, time off, retirement contributions and any other expenses a company might have that's related to worker compensation.


This is not a percentage or anything like that, but it is a ratio of profits to compensation. I call it the Greed Index, and it's gotten worse and worse: up from 14 to 16.5 over the past five years. That's a fairly astonishing 19% increase. But perhaps not a surprising one.

https://jabberwocking.com/worker-comp-is-down-corporate-profits-are-up
-imagine-that/

You need to be reminded that the Federal government has zero control over what companies pay their employees. Employees could have control, but only if they are unionized, otherwise employees are just another expense, not much different than electricity to run the business. Not so odd, but electric generators know that forcing a price increase is good for them. Meanwhile, employees don't act as if they know that forcing a compensation increase is good for them.

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

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Friday, October 28, 2022 2:31 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worker compensation is down. Corporate profits are up.
Under Biden* and the Democrats.
Imagine that.

Quote:
You need to be reminded that the Federal government has zero control over what companies pay their employees.
Which YOU should be reminded of next time you accuse the GOP of promoting corporate greed.

You've painted yourself into a corner.
Again.


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


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Friday, October 28, 2022 5:18 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 SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worker compensation is down. Corporate profits are up.
Under Biden* and the Democrats.
Imagine that.

Quote:
You need to be reminded that the Federal government has zero control over what companies pay their employees.
Which YOU should be reminded of next time you accuse the GOP of promoting corporate greed.

You've painted yourself into a corner.
Again.
It is the American voters who painted themselves into a corner. The lower 90% in wealth voters made the country what it is: a fabulous place for the rich to do as they please. Once upon a time, the voters were not like that.

During WWII, the Federal government, which was all Democrats, controlled the economy, even to the point of kicking the asses of industrialists that didn't want to cooperate with the war effort. But year after year, all through the war and after, the Republicans got bigger and bigger majorities in Congress, and eventually Republican President Eisenhower, because the Republicans kept calling Democrats a bunch of Communists. That tactic of calling Democrats Communists (and later Socialists) would not work if voters were smarter. But the rich are pleased by stupid voters helping the rich get richer.

The Democrats know that if they reduce the ratio of profits to compensation from 16 down to 10 (as if it was WWII and the government controlled the economy) the voters will revolt to protect the wealthy. Voters don't even act like they understand Social Security and Medicare exist only because Republicans don't have the votes to kill the programs. But when they get their 67 Senators, those programs will be as canceled as Firefly. Under Bush, the GOP tried passing "privatization". With a few more votes, it would have happened. It still can if voters get stupid enough.


This is not a percentage or anything like that, but it is a ratio of profits to compensation. I call it the Greed Index, and it's gotten worse and worse: up from 14 to 16.5 over the past five years. That's a fairly astonishing 19% increase. But perhaps not a surprising one.

https://jabberwocking.com/worker-comp-is-down-corporate-profits-are-up
-imagine-that/

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

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Friday, October 28, 2022 8:13 PM

SECOND

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


Voters are stupid, which is why the policy has to be stupid in order to get their votes. Example: nukes. Stupid people think more nukes make them safer, therefore, more nukes.

(First, smart politicians think about what nukes are for:)

President Obama himself led his National Security Council in two debates on whether the U.S. should officially declare a no-first-use policy—and decided not to. He was convinced to leave the policy unchanged for three reasons. First, our allies would panic that we were abandoning them. Second, they might respond by building nuclear weapons of their own, thus setting off regional arms races. Third, we might want to use nukes in response to a large-scale biological-weapons attack. So, although Obama thought that no U.S. president should actually use nuclear weapons first, he saw the value in reserving the right to do so—if just to deter a wide range of enemy attacks.

As a compromise, Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review said that deterring a nuclear attack was the “fundamental” purpose of nuclear weapons—and added that the U.S. would never use nuclear weapons first against a country that had signed, and was in compliance with, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This would still make first-use possible against Russia, China, or North Korea. It also provided some incentive for other adversaries not to go nuclear.

Biden’s posture review repeats Obama’s language, though less clearly.

(Next, smart politicians must do something stupid because Congress is as stupid as the voters who selected Congress are:)

This was in many ways predictable but there was some chance that Biden might decide not to “modernize all three legs of the nuclear Triad”—i.e., to build all-new replacements for our aging intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, and cruise missiles. Obama had been manipulated into agreeing to fund them, at least in the short run, in exchange for getting the Senate to ratify the New START arms-reduction treaty, and Biden knew that Obama had regretted doing so. Biden could reverse that move, since these weapons were all in their early stages of research and development. Some of the existing weapons could simply be modified rather than replaced. Several of Biden’s second-tier officials in the Pentagon and the NSC were inclined toward this view.

But this prospect has fallen by the wayside as well. Biden’s review fully supports pushing ahead with all the new nuclear weapons—which are estimated to cost roughly $2 trillion over the next 25 years. Lots of vague formulas are mustered to rationalize this decision (e.g., “these replacement programs are planned to deliver modernized capabilities to avoid any gaps in our ability to field a credible and effective deterrent”), but none of them make sense, and this would be obvious if someone had written those passages in plain English.

Biden, of course, is in a spot. Given the rising tensions with Russia and China, it would be politically difficult, if not impossible, to cut back on existing plans to build more weapons, even if these weapons do nothing, objectively, to improve our security. In fact, a case can be made that we would be safer if we reduced the number of land-based ICBMs or eliminated them entirely. Just because Moscow and Beijing are wasting their money on new nukes doesn’t mean that Washington has to follow suit. It’s all theater.

The posture review does announce the cancellation of one nuclear weapon: a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile. on the grounds that a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile can handle the mission well enough. Despite Biden’s concessions on every other aspect of the “nuclear enterprise,” Republicans will no doubt accuse him of “appeasement” on this one; my guess is the cruise missile will be funded after all. Liberals sometimes get hammered for “throwing money” at a problem. There is currently no resistance to throwing money at the weapons budget; in fact, there’s enormous resistance to not throwing it.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/biden-nuclear-weapons-iran
-north-korea-pentagon.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, October 28, 2022 10:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worker compensation is down. Corporate profits are up.
Under Biden* and the Democrats.
Imagine that.

Quote:
You need to be reminded that the Federal government has zero control over what companies pay their employees.
Which YOU should be reminded of next time you accuse the GOP of promoting corporate greed.

You've painted yourself into a corner.
Again.


OPPS!

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

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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