REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 08:17
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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 11:52 AM

SECOND

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


Under a doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion,” law enforcement agencies and their leaders have broad authority to decide when not to enforce a particular law. A traffic cop, for example, may pull someone over for speeding but decide to let them off with a warning. Or a local prosecutor may decide that they won’t bring charges against people who commit minor marijuana offenses.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned judges not to interfere with these sorts of non-enforcement decisions. As the Court held in Heckler v. Chaney (1985), “an agency’s decision not to prosecute or enforce, whether through civil or criminal process, is a decision generally committed to an agency’s absolute discretion.” This principle, the Court added, “is attributable in no small part to the general unsuitability for judicial review of agency decisions to refuse enforcement.”

Mayorkas’s memo is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He urges ICE agents to focus their work on certain violators of federal immigration law, such as “a noncitizen who engaged in or is suspected of terrorism or espionage” or noncitizens who committed serious crimes. At the same time, the memo suggests that other undocumented immigrants, such as people of an “advanced or tender age” or those who have a “lengthy presence in the United States,” are less likely to be appropriate targets for enforcement.

Nevertheless, Tipton claimed that two federal statutes — one of which provides that the government “shall take into custody” immigrants who’ve committed certain offenses, and another saying that the government “shall remove” immigrants within 90 days after an immigration proceeding orders them removed — trumps the government’s power to exercise prosecutorial discretion and effectively makes detention of certain immigrants mandatory.

This decision was wrong. The Court has long held prosecutorial discretion is so “deep-rooted” that it can overcome a legislative command stating that law enforcement officers “shall arrest” a particular class of persons. Indeed, over a century ago, in Railroad Company v. Hecht (1877), the Court held that “as against the government, the word ‘shall,’ when used in statutes, is to be construed as ‘may,’ unless a contrary intention is manifest.”

One of the core reasons why prosecutorial discretion exists is that law enforcement agencies will always have what Kavanaugh referred to as “resource constraints.” Unless Congress agrees to fund legions of law enforcement officers, and implement a draconian surveillance state, agencies like ICE will never have the personnel, detention space, and other assets that they would need to arrest every single person who violates a law within the agency’s jurisdiction.

And Congress certainly has not done so here. As the Justice Department explained in a 2014 memo, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to “remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/11/29/23484335/supreme-co
urt-united-states-texas-ice-immigration-drew-tipton-trump

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

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 11:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


No. Noncitizens here illegally are invaders and are not Americans, and do not have any protections that citizens have.

Zero tolerance. They are to be removed. Every single one of them. Even the children.



Once they are removed, no illegal invader shall be able to attend school, go to a hospital or receive any taxpayer funded benefits. Also, any person of any age are never to be allowed to become legal citizens if they came here illegally, and if they have children while in the US this extends to the children born from illegal parents as well. Even if one of the parents is a legal citizen. This will ensure nobody else even tries to come here illegally when there is nothing here for them or their children. There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem.


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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 5:17 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No. Noncitizens here illegally are invaders and are not Americans, and do not have any protections that citizens have.

Zero tolerance. They are to be removed. Every single one of them. Even the children.

There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem.
I see a problem. How much money is spent on immigration enforcement? Approximately $8 billion. The agency has an annual budget of approximately $8 billion, primarily devoted to three operational directorates — Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA).Sep 1, 2022.

How many illegals are removed in a year for $8 billion? 400,000. That is $20,000 per illegal. If you wanted 11 million illegals removed, pronto, that would be 11 million times $20,000 = $220 billion. 6ix wrote, "There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem." There is a need. Congress has to budget $220 billion for the removal of 11 million illegals to solve this problem.

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

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 6:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No. Noncitizens here illegally are invaders and are not Americans, and do not have any protections that citizens have.

Zero tolerance. They are to be removed. Every single one of them. Even the children.

There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem.
I see a problem. How much money is spent on immigration enforcement? Approximately $8 billion. The agency has an annual budget of approximately $8 billion, primarily devoted to three operational directorates — Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA).Sep 1, 2022.

How many illegals are removed in a year for $8 billion? 400,000. That is $20,000 per illegal. If you wanted 11 million illegals removed, pronto, that would be 11 million times $20,000 = $220 billion. 6ix wrote, "There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem." There is a need. Congress has to budget $220 billion for the removal of 11 million illegals to solve this problem.

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


Nope. If you took everything away from them the taxpayers will actually make money and they'll leave on their own. And no more invaders will come once word gets out.


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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 8:20 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:

Nope. If you took everything away from them the taxpayers will actually make money and they'll leave on their own. And no more invaders will come once word gets out.
"If you took everything away from them . . ." In a simple case, everything is their car, cash, and household goods. That will require people being paid to take this stuff away. There aren't people doing that kind of work at the moment. They will have to be hired. Then there is the problem of what to do with the body of the illegal. Put them on a bus to Canada? Who is paying for the ticket? How to convince Canada to take the illegals? Canada is gonna have to be paid to take the illegals. But there is another way! There is already a perfectly good system to remove illegal aliens from the USA. If you want this to actually happen, use that system, but it is not cost-free. It is $20,000 per illegal.

6ix, if you are committed to doing this at no cost, why not have vigilantes kill the illegals and bury the bodies in shallow graves? The President can pardon the vigilantes beforehand for greater efficiency. By the way, the illegals will have guns and will shoot back, all thanks to the 2nd Amendment. Improvising with Vigilantes could get very messy. I'd think the tried-and-true method, costing only $20,000 per illegal, will probably be the cheapest in the long run.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment

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

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022 8:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Nope. If you took everything away from them the taxpayers will actually make money and they'll leave on their own. And no more invaders will come once word gets out.
"If you took everything away from them . . ." In a simple case, everything is their car, cash, and household goods. That will require people being paid to take this stuff away. There aren't people doing that kind of work at the moment. They will have to be hired.


That's not what I implied. I already wrote about what I mean above... Try and keep up.

Quote:
Once they are removed, no illegal invader shall be able to attend school, go to a hospital or receive any taxpayer funded benefits. Also, any person of any age are never to be allowed to become legal citizens if they came here illegally, and if they have children while in the US this extends to the children born from illegal parents as well. Even if one of the parents is a legal citizen. This will ensure nobody else even tries to come here illegally when there is nothing here for them or their children. There is no need for an expensive solution to this problem.


^ is Everything.

Quote:
Then there is the problem of what to do with the body of the illegal. Put them on a bus to Canada? Who is paying for the ticket? How to convince Canada to take the illegals? Canada is gonna have to be paid to take the illegals. But there is another way! There is already a perfectly good system to remove illegal aliens from the USA. If you want this to actually happen, use that system, but it is not cost-free. It is $20,000 per illegal.


Let them leave on their own when there's nothing here for them. If they won't, they can either starve to death or figure out how to live in the woods. And those who turn to crime to survive get arrested and booted out of the country. Win/win for everyone.

Quote:
e6ix, if you are committed to doing this at no cost, why not have vigilantes kill the illegals and bury the bodies in shallow graves? The President can pardon the vigilantes beforehand for greater efficiency. By the way, the illegals will have guns and will shoot back, all thanks to the 2nd Amendment. Improvising with Vigilantes could get very messy. I'd think the tried-and-true method, costing only $20,000 per illegal, will probably be the cheapest in the long run.


Why waste the cost of a bullet and the labor of digging shallow graves? If there's nothing here for them the invaders already here will leave of their own accord and word will spread quick and we won't get any new invaders.

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Thursday, December 1, 2022 8:56 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:

Let them leave on their own when there's nothing here for them. If they won't, they can either starve to death or figure out how to live in the woods. And those who turn to crime to survive get arrested and booted out of the country. Win/win for everyone.
You have been this way for years, 6ix. Today, Jayneztown dragged up an old rant of 6ix's from 6 years ago, proving 6ix fears foreigners:

More outrages from the EU migrant crisis
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60939&mid=1
018637#1018637

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

I think the EU can thank George Soros and Hillary Clinton for their "open border" policies being pushed on them.
Is there a chance you might be mistaken about who pushed Europe into its "open border" policy? The Schengen Area, where 26 European countries have no internal border controls, was started in 1985, back when Hillary was living in Arkansas. It must be all Soros's fault.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-v
isas/index_en.htm

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



Who cares how they got there?

Brexit was the first step. Other EU nations are doing their own votes.

Globalism is failing.

Economics are only a small part of the pie. All of these nations had elected officials who were the lap dogs of NON ELECTED OFFICIALS who run the EU and put all of these aggressive Muslims in their towns.

A girl was raped and left tied to the Eiffel Tower.

The Fucking Eiffel Tower.

Sacred Romantic Ground ruined forever...



Back in the day, the only Muslims with 8 wives and 26 kids were Kings that can afford it.

If we're all taking them in and paying for everything, every Muslim man can procreate without abandon and our taxes pay for their kids.

There is no fucking reason anybody should pay for that shit.


That's not "Nazi".

Calling that Nazi is insulting the Jews who were a defenseless people of that time.


How many women and children came off those refugee boats?

Almost ZERO.

Almost all young Muslim men invading foreign cultures.



You keep pretending nothing is happening until your kids get raped and it's too late.

One day we'll all be brown hair with brown eyes but if your a woman nobody could tell because you're legally forced to cover every square inch of your skin under our new Islamic Masters.



White Men used to fight for White Women...

Now I think it's more like what the fuck ever. I'll just play more video games.

"Your Princess is in Another Castle"...



Maybe She is, Maybe She isn't.

All I can say for sure is that over 10 years ago you became way too much more trouble than you were worth.... White Women in general.


There is NO CAKE and EAT IT TOO.

Enjoy HUGE black cock and then raising a kid on your own without child support.

Enjoy flinging yourself into the arms of a Muslim if you're still young enough to be attractive if you're ready to wear full body garb and be completely submissive for the rest of your life.


We had a great thing for a decade or two. Equality between sexes that I grew up with.

It just wasn't enough though.

We reap what we sow.

I'm just glad I don't have any kids to try to explain all of this bullshit to.



Do Right, Be Right. :)


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

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Thursday, December 1, 2022 12:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Let them leave on their own when there's nothing here for them. If they won't, they can either starve to death or figure out how to live in the woods. And those who turn to crime to survive get arrested and booted out of the country. Win/win for everyone.
You have been this way for years, 6ix. Today, Jayneztown dragged up an old rant of 6ix's from 6 years ago, proving 6ix fears foreigners:


Don't mistake Loathing for Fear, dipshit.

And also don't mistake me telling you that you've never changed one little bit for me saying that every opinion you ever have needs to change.

I was right about all of that back then, and I'm still right about it now.

Sober me from the future stands by every one of those statements. And the benefit of time has only made them more true in hindsight.


Fuck the invaders. I don't care what happens to any of them as long as they're not here.

And if the nations of Europe want to survive, they'd better get on board with that too, sooner than later.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Thursday, December 1, 2022 12:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck the invaders. I don't care what happens to any of them as long as they're not here.

And if the nations of Europe want to survive, they'd better get on board with that too, sooner than later.



Europe Shows a Clear Link Between Immigration and Crime -- Like the One the U.S. Seriously Downplays

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/12/01/europe_sho
ws_a_clear_link_between_immigration_and_crime_-_like_the_one_the_us_seriously_downplays_867625.html

The first step is to stop calling it an immigration problem, and call it exactly what it is. An Invasion.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, December 2, 2022 9:06 AM

SECOND

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


Taiwan makes more than 90% of the world’s semiconductor chips. But the threat of an impending invasion by China imperils its dominant position. Any disruption to the Taiwanese industry would derail global production of just about everything, from home appliances to automobiles to fighter jets.

Biden's visit to TSMC's Arizona plant underlines his big chip manufacturing push.
The T in TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Biden will visit TSMC’s upcoming Arizona factory on Dec. 6, the White House said, to attend its “tool-in ceremony”: the installation of the first batch of equipment on the shop floor. It’s a landmark moment for TSMC, the world’s biggest semiconductor chipmaker, but an even bigger moment for Biden, whose policies have lured TSMC to open its first advanced chip plant in the US.

After the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions caused a worldwide shortage of chips, Biden has pushed to bolster chip manufacturing in America. In August, he earmarked $52.7 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research, the bulk of which — $39 billion — went into incentives for domestic manufacturing. The legislation also provides a 25% investment tax credit for capital expenses and equipment.

The US needed the push. Last year, the country produced only 12% of the world’s chips. And if any firm has the know-how to boost the industry, it’s TSMC.

https://qz.com/bidens-visit-to-tsmcs-arizona-plant-underlines-his-big-
1849845281

Why the decline in US chip manufacturing? It became cheaper to build chip facilities in countries outside of the US. Foreign governments offer more attractive financial incentives to construct semiconductor factories, like tax breaks and grants. A US law was passed to do what other countries do, over the objection of every Republican Congressman, resulting in chip factories being built in the US instead of Taiwan.

There was an attempt to do something under the Trump administration — Apple supplier Foxconn (another Taiwan-based company) was slated to build a Wisconsin facility that would produce large-screen TV displays and said it would create 13,000 jobs, but the whole project never panned out. (Wisconsin offered incentives to Foxconn, but Trump wouldn't pay Foxconn so Foxconn didn't build the factory. No money == no factory. It was really that simple.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-us-doesnt-make-chips-semiconductor
-shortage-2021-4

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

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Friday, December 2, 2022 9:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Taiwan makes more than 90% of the world’s semiconductor chips. But the threat of an impending invasion by China imperils its dominant position. Any disruption to the Taiwanese industry would derail global production of just about everything, from home appliances to automobiles to fighter jets.

Biden's visit to TSMC's Arizona plant underlines his big chip manufacturing push.
The T in TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Biden will visit TSMC’s upcoming Arizona factory on Dec. 6, the White House said, to attend its “tool-in ceremony”: the installation of the first batch of equipment on the shop floor. It’s a landmark moment for TSMC, the world’s biggest semiconductor chipmaker, but an even bigger moment for Biden, whose policies have lured TSMC to open its first advanced chip plant in the US.

After the pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions caused a worldwide shortage of chips, Biden has pushed to bolster chip manufacturing in America. In August, he earmarked $52.7 billion for semiconductor manufacturing and research, the bulk of which — $39 billion — went into incentives for domestic manufacturing. The legislation also provides a 25% investment tax credit for capital expenses and equipment.

The US needed the push. Last year, the country produced only 12% of the world’s chips. And if any firm has the know-how to boost the industry, it’s TSMC.

https://qz.com/bidens-visit-to-tsmcs-arizona-plant-underlines-his-big-
1849845281

Why the decline in US chip manufacturing? It became cheaper to build chip facilities in countries outside of the US. Foreign governments offer more attractive financial incentives to construct semiconductor factories, like tax breaks and grants. A US law was passed to do what other countries do, resulting in chip factories being built in the US instead of Taiwan.

There was an attempt to do something under the Trump administration — Apple supplier Foxconn (another Taiwan-based company) was slated to build a Wisconsin facility that would produce large-screen TV displays and said it would create 13,000 jobs, but the whole project never panned out. (Wisconsin offered incentives to Foxconn, but Trump wouldn't pay Foxconn so Foxconn didn't build the factory. No money == no factory. It was really that simple.)

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-us-doesnt-make-chips-semiconductor
-shortage-2021-4

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


I love how BusinessInsider needs to dumb things down for its barely literate readership.

I've been telling ya'all about the perils of Six Sigma-ing everything to fucking death for going on two decades now.

It's all fun and games streamlining the fuck out of everything to make the Globalists at the top rich off of all of our collective backs until something like worldwide shutdowns break all the feeble chains that were left after everything was gutted by The Bobs, leaving zero contingency plans in place to get anything back on track and leaving Big Gay Pete from South Bend, IN with nothing to do but sit on his big gay thumb and spin on it while the port shipping crisis never gets fixed, a worldwide diesel shortage further increasing retail prices, and we're staring down the barrel of a train rail shortage that could make things even worse.

Told 'ya so.


You think a chip shortage is bad? Just wait until we're forced to start making our own t-shirts, jeans and shoes again. You'll be paying $300 for a pair of XJ-900's from Payless when that happens.

And you won't even be paying union wages 'cause there ain't no fuckin' textile union in the US anymore. When the textile union comes back those XJ-900's at Payless just went up to $600 per pair.



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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Monday, December 5, 2022 5:08 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Biden admin refuses to say if Nuclear Energy Waste non-binary staffer Samuel Brinton still getting paid after theft of womens under panties arrest




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Thursday, December 8, 2022 7:38 AM

SECOND

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


Men are dropping out of the labor force because they’re upset about their social status

Men have been silently walking away from work for several decades — well before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Men without four-year college degrees, between the ages of 25 and 54, have left the workforce in higher numbers than other groups. And they’re leaving because of their perceived social status relative to better-educated men of similar age, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-working-pap
er/2022/wage-inequality-and-the-rise-in-labor-force-exit-the-case-of-us-prime-age-men.aspx

Non-college-educated men have seen their pay shrink by more than 30% since 1980 compared to the average earnings of all other prime-age workers. Their weekly earnings have declined 17%, while those of college-educated men rose by 20%, adjusting for inflation. That earnings loss has caused a decline in their social status, prompting them to walk away from work entirely, Pinghui Wu, the author of the study, wrote.

“For many workers, a job not only offers financial security, it also affirms their status, which is tied to their position relative to their age peers and many social outcomes,” Wu wrote.

Younger white men in particular were more likely to leave when their expected wages fell relative to their more educated peers, according to the Fed study. Unlike men, women have not seen the same level of decline in their wages based on education. That group has seen a 32% increase in weekly earnings, irrespective of their educational qualifications.

There have been numerous studies investigating the decline of non-college prime-age men in the labor force over the past 40 years. Some have linked the decline in male labor force participation to the contraction of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., since men were disproportionately represented in the manufacturing sector. However, Wu says those do not explain the persistence of the decline in prime-age men’s labor participation over several years.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/men-are-dropping-out-of-the-labor-fo
rce-because-they-re-upset-about-their-social-status-according-to-a-new-study/ar-AA151JeY

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

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Thursday, December 8, 2022 11:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


There is always a shortage of skilled labor. Always.

Young men in America need to go to trade school unless they're really smart, motivated AND fully intend to get into a REAL job like being a doctor, engineer, lawyer, architect, etc.

Shitty cubicle office jobs aren't for white men anymore. Arguably, if it weren't for the great economy through the late 80's to early 2000's, they never were. Let the women and minorities have them. They were always miserable and thankless jobs that wouldn't give you any sense of pride or a feeling of a job well done at the end of the day anyhow. The pay was nice, but what a worthless existence it is to be a cubicle drone.


If you skipped out on trade school and can't afford it now, get yourself a tool belt. Fill it with tools. Learn how to use them. You'll always be able to find work somewhere, even if it's bartering and gig work at first.

Then get yourself some power tools. Hone your skills. YouTube University is one of the greatest things made for men so far in the 21st Century, and it's free.

There's nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment you have when you actually make something, or turn something that was in ruins into something that is fully functional and beautiful.

The big side benefit from choosing this less traveled path is that you're going to be in far better shape than your cubicle drone friends are.



And if you drink too much. Drink less. And if you play video games too much. Play less video games. And if you watch too much TV. Watch less TV.


White men today aren't dropping out of the workforce merely because of the financial reasons listed above, although I'm sure that working at Wal-Mart stocking shelves for a pittance at 30 years old isn't helping. They're among the two and going on three generations of divorced white families who's lives were trashed at a young age because their selfish and idiot parents should have never married in the first place.

They're lost. They had no role models at home, and there are no good male role models on TV for them to try to emulate either. They need an anchor. Many of them just need to find a reason to live.

It's out there. If you look for it.

I wish you all luck.

I can't give any advice to you beyond that, because trust me... You don't want to find the reason to live via the same means that I did.

All I can tell you is that when you find it, it's going to be a great feeling to have a reason to get out of bed every morning to face the challenges ahead of you for the day that doesn't involve hacking and slashing Orcs and Dragons with your fake online friends.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, December 9, 2022 7:36 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:
There is always a shortage of skilled labor. Always.

Young men in America need to go to trade school unless they're really smart, motivated AND fully intend to get into a REAL job like being a doctor, engineer, lawyer, architect, etc. . . .

If you skipped out on trade school and can't afford it now, get yourself a tool belt. Fill it with tools. Learn how to use them. You'll always be able to find work somewhere, even if it's bartering and gig work at first.

Then get yourself some power tools. Hone your skills. YouTube University is one of the greatest things made for men so far in the 21st Century, and it's free.

There's nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment you have when you actually make something, or turn something that was in ruins into something that is fully functional and beautiful.
Specifically, build housing:

How One Tiny-Home Designer Makes a Small Space Feel 10 Times Bigger

Matt Impola was already living in a small space when he decided he would take on a new weekend project: his first-ever tiny home. With a background in construction and woodworking, he spent about 10 months putting it together. Almost instantly, he had nearly 500 email inquiries and 20 prospective buyers for his creation — so he decided to enter the tiny-house business for real.

Now Impola runs Handcrafted Movement, where he is the lead builder, structural and interior designer, photographer, marketer, and seller. Basically, he wears a lot of hats. https://handcraftedmovement.com/

The most striking thing about Impola’s tiny homes is that they don’t immediately look tiny. Interior shots reveal luxurious details (think: rich wood countertops and exposed ceiling beams) yet the structures themselves average about 250 square feet. Clearly Impola has picked up on plenty of ways to make even the smallest spaces feel much larger, and his advice can be applied to cramped apartments or even not-so-tiny homes. Here, he shares his tips.

The tips are at https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-tiny-home-designer-makes-a-
small-space-feel-10-times-bigger

Choosing a Tiny House Builder

The thing is, a tiny house is more than just a “normal house that is small”. Tiny houses have their own unique challenges. Make sure your builder has experience with tiny houses. Whether it is a company that specializes in tiny houses or a local builder from your region, ask these specific questions:

• Does the builder know advanced wall framing techniques that will minimize the lumber that goes into the structure, helping the house be as light and lean as possible?
• How do they plan to address moisture problems in your particular climate?
• How do they plan on properly sealing up and insulating a tiny house on a trailer?
• How will they install all appliances and systems?
• How do they plan to engineer the structure to withstand mobility or extreme weather?

Portland Alternative Houses’ Tiny Houses’ manual, Go House Go. ( https://padtinyhouses.com/product/go-house-go/ ) is a terrific resource book for tiny house builders that includes all the irregularities and uniqueness of building a tiny house.
https://insteading.com/building/tiny-house-builders/

Download one of Dee Williams' Tiny House books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Dee+Williams

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

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Tuesday, December 13, 2022 9:05 AM

SECOND

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


Ted Conover lives 5 years with the angry poor white trash Trump voters to bring back their story:

Little House on the Prairie—With Meth

December 8, 2022, 9:22 AM ET

In the many decades that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called settler colonialism but of her father, Charles—that is, Pa, the fiddler with the twinkling eyes.

As portrayed by Wilder’s biographer Caroline Fraser, Charles Ingalls was a feckless man, if a loving father. He dragged his wife and daughters out of Wisconsin and “a comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden,” in Fraser’s words, and then from bad to worse: a house illegally built on Native American territory from which they are expelled; a farm in Minnesota prey to apocalyptic locust swarms; a hotel in Iowa next to a saloon, where a man tried to force his way into the young Wilder’s room; and finally the Dakota Territory. Scientists at the time had warned that the Great Plains were arid and infertile and sure to drive small farmers into bankruptcy, but the government, urged on by the railroads, lured people there anyway, giving away homesteads, unleashing land rushes, creating the conditions that laid waste to the prairie ecosystem. When Pa died in 1902, he had nothing to leave his widow and blind daughter but the house they lived in.

A century and some years later, Donald Trump wins the presidential election, and the journalist Ted Conover lights out for the territories—well, for southern Colorado, parts of which have indeed become a barren land. An earlier magazine assignment sent him to that part of the state to write about South Park, the real town of TV-show fame, “a place nearly devoid of people that was overlaid with dirt roads from a moribund 1970s subdivision.” After the election, Conover feels compelled to go back. He heads for a settlement not far from South Park in the San Luis Valley, sometimes called the flats, where a transient population lives in one-room shacks or trailers, many without plumbing, electricity, or internet. “The American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand,” he writes in his new book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge. “These empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that.”

I’m happy to report that over the course of his journey, Conover appears largely to forget his mission to explain the Trump voter, a too-common assignment that typically degenerates into cliché-mongering. Anyway, the people he meets in the valley strike him not as enemies of the great American experiment but, on the contrary, as the direct heirs of the pioneers—you might say, of Pa, which is perhaps why Conover has chosen a passage from Wilder’s The Long Winter as one of his epigraphs. The land isn’t free anymore, but, as Conover writes, “it is some of the cheapest in the United States”: $5,000 or so for a five-acre lot. The settlers “have a truck instead of a wagon and mule,” plus “some solar panels, possibly even a weak cell-phone signal,” he notes. “And legal weed.”

Who moves to the flats in the 21st century, and why? “What would drive you to it?” he wonders. Of course, that’s the mystery of Charles Ingalls, too. I should be clear that Conover doesn’t talk about Pa, but you can’t miss his ghostly presence. “My wife quipped that I could title this book Little House on the Prairie, with Meth,” Conover writes.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221209203933/https://www.theatlantic.com
/books/archive/2022/12/ted-conover-cheap-land-colorado-book/672398/

Download the free book Ted Conover Cheap Land (2022) from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Ted+Conover+cheap+land

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

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Thursday, December 15, 2022 9:28 AM

SECOND

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


Why the Age of American Progress Ended

Invention alone can’t change the world; what matters is what happens next.

. . . After World War II, Vannevar Bush, the architect of our thrillingly successful wartime tech policy, published an influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” in which he counseled the federal government to grow its investment in basic research. And it did. Since the middle of the 20th century, America’s inflation-adjusted spending on science and technology, through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, has increased by a factor of 40.

But the government hasn’t matched that investment in the realm of implementation. This, too, was by design. Bush believed, with some reason, that politicians should not handpick nascent technologies to transform into new national industries. Better to advance the basic science and technology and let private companies — whose ears were closer to the ground — choose what to develop, and how.

You could say that we live in the world that Bush built. “The federal government, through NIH and NSF, pours billions into basic science and defense technology,” Daniel P. Gross, an economist at Duke University, told me. “But for civilian technology, there has been a view that Washington should fund the research and then get out of the way.”

As a result, many inventions languish in the so-called valley of death, where neither the government nor private ventures (risk-averse and possessed by relatively short time horizons) invest enough in the stages between discovery and commercialization. Take solar energy. In 1954, three American researchers at Bell Labs, the R&D wing of AT&T, built the first modern solar-cell prototype. By 1980, America was spending more on solar-energy research than any other country in the world. According to the Bush playbook, the U.S. was doing everything right. But we lost the technological edge on solar anyway, as Japan, Germany, and China used industrial policy to spur production—for example, by encouraging home builders to put solar panels on roofs. These tactics helped build the market and drove down the cost of solar power by several orders of magnitude—and by 90 percent in just the past 10 years.

The U.S. remains the world’s R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we are plainly going backwards. We’ve lost out on industrial opportunities by running Vannevar Bush’s playbook so strictly. . . .

In 2022, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of which variables best predicted the rates of COVID infection across 177 countries. Outside wealth, one of the most powerful variables was trust in government among the public. “Trust is a shared resource that enables networks of people to do collectively what individual actors cannot,” the authors of the Lancet paper wrote. When I first read their definition, I stared at it for a while, feeling the shock of recognition. I thought of how much that could serve as a definition of progress as well: a network of people doing collectively what individual actors cannot. The stories of global progress tend to be the rare examples where science, technology, politics, and culture align. When we see the full ensemble drama of progress, we realize just how many different people, skills, and roles are necessary.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221214161827/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2023/01/science-technology-vaccine-invention-history/672227/

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

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Monday, December 19, 2022 2:40 PM

SECOND

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


The White House trading desk did well this year:

Emergency releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are slated to end this month, concluding an unusual attempt to lower gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring. Over the release period, Washington sold 180 million barrels of crude at an average of $96.25 apiece, well above the recent market price of $74.29—meaning the U.S., for now, is almost $4 billion ahead.

Excellent work, team! I hope your boss gets a healthy bonus this year for bucking the conventional wisdom and going short on oil.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-scores-4-billion-windfall-on-oil-rese
rve-sales-11671420244

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

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Monday, December 19, 2022 10:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The White House trading desk did well this year:

Emergency releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are slated to end this month, concluding an unusual attempt to lower gas prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring. Over the release period, Washington sold 180 million barrels of crude at an average of $96.25 apiece, well above the recent market price of $74.29—meaning the U.S., for now, is almost $4 billion ahead.

Excellent work, team! I hope your boss gets a healthy bonus this year for bucking the conventional wisdom and going short on oil.


Fuck you, Second.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/aid-ukraine-explained-six-charts

Quote:
U.S. aid to Ukraine totals $68 billion, and the White House has just asked Congress for another $37.7 billion. In the spring, the new Congress will consider aid in the context of the administration’s proposed FY 2024 budget. With these decisions ahead, it is worth reviewing how much aid there has been, what that aid does, and what the administration is requesting. Such a review turns up some surprises and will help clarify discussions about future aid packages.

Q1: How much aid has there been?

A1: Congress has passed three aid packages. The first in March ($13.6 billion) was tacked onto the massive $1.5 trillion omnibus appropriations for FY 2022. The package in May ($40 billion), which contained the major portion of the aid, was a standalone bill. The package in September ($13.7 billion) was attached to the continuing resolution. It was designed to provide aid through December, when Congress will consider full-year appropriation bills. As the chart below shows, the three packages total $68 billion.


Your President* is an swiss cheesed brained asshole.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, December 24, 2022 8:05 AM

SECOND

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


Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.

Here at The Intercept, we are committed to ruining the holidays.

by Jon Schwarz / December 24, 2022 at 05:30AM
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/christmas-capitalism-covid-climate
-change/

Here at The Intercept, our internal motto is “More Bad News for You, the Bad News Consumer.” We also sometimes refer to ourselves as “Your Daily Death March of Sorrow.”
That’s why, as you celebrate the holidays with your family, snuggling your loved ones close and putting out the cookies for Santa Claus, it’s on brand for us to remind you that capitalism is killing us all.

So let’s get going. (If you’re not ready to dive in immediately, you can limber up by reading our previous yuletide bummer, “Merry Christmas! Remember the Children Who Live in Fear of Our Killer Drones.”)

Ho Ho Ho for Capitalism

Instead of the good news of Jesus, let’s start with the good news of capitalism. Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, not known as capitalism’s biggest fans, acknowledged it in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848:

The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

The writer William Greider takes the same perspective in “Secrets of the Temple,” his gigantic tome about the Federal Reserve. Capitalism, he contends, was “a Faustian bargain. People surrendered control over their own lives and accepted a smaller role for themselves as cogs in the vast and complicated economic machinery, in exchange for mere material goods.” Nevertheless, you have to admit that “the devil certainly kept his half of the bargain.”

Take a look around where you’re sitting now and consider the huge quantities of crap just in your eyesight that you’ve accumulated, all thanks to capitalism. One of us (Jon) can see his iPad, which helps him understand the amount of grease his thumbs apparently exude. There’s his smoke detector, which is beeping in a vain plea to get him to replace its battery. And there’s the huge bag of chipotle powder that he bought in a burst of misguided enthusiasm in 2018, still four-fifths full. The other one of us (Elise) is sitting in fast-fashion polyurethane pants, made in Vietnam, that are already ruined and will eventually end up in the Great Pacific Trash Vortex. She’ll be spending her Christmas alone, traveling Italy, contributing to the tourist economy of a deeply neofascist government which hates journalists by buying large amounts of burrata, Aperol spritz, and whatever readily available substances she finds from the global market to numb the pain of living in such a society.

OK, those are the good parts of capitalism. Now let’s move on to the ones that risk the obliteration of Homo sapiens.

Covid-19 and Its Sequels
Our response to Covid-19 should make us dubious about our chances if we go up against something even deadlier. Only 5.5 billion people have gotten even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, leaving billions more to host a constantly proliferating assortment of mutations. Already vaccines and therapeutics are less effective against new variants.

With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse. This scenario is increasingly likely considering climate change and globalization. Another accurate point in “The Communist Manifesto” is that “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Sure, we could have decided to vaccinate everyone. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated this would cost $50 billion, or 0.05 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product. But we didn’t do it for very good reason: This would have hurt the “intellectual” “property” — and hence the profits — of Moderna and Pfizer.

So the downside here is our unending Covid nightmare. The upside is we now have 10 vaccine billionaires! We’d like to believe they’re spending this Christmas Eve together, downing negroni sbagliatos somewhere on the Amalfi coast, toasting the freedom that is capitalism. (If you violate their vaccine patents, the government will crush you like a bug.)

Death Is Profitable
Capitalism also means the proliferation of weapons with no purpose — not that they ever, really, have a purpose. One key reason the U.S. advocated the expansion of NATO was that it would open up new markets for American arms dealers. A little-known but significant figure named Bruce Jackson cofounded an NGO called the Committee to Expand NATO in 1996 — all the while serving as vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin. He was also co-chair of the finance committee for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Jackson was still at Lockheed in 2002, the year he became chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

This had led to many merry Christmases, indeed. With dividends reinvested, Lockheed’s stock is up over 1,600 percent since the liberation of Iraq commenced on March 19, 2003, It’s up 25 percent just since Russia’s attack on Ukraine last February. Jackson currently owns a chateau and vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France.

Moreover, it’s a fervently held belief at the top of American society that they are doing good by doing well. George W. Bush once told Argentina’s president that “all of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.” Way to say the quiet part out loud, again and again.

And it’s not just conventional arms that are profitable. Building nuclear weapons systems is also quite lucrative. With these kinds of financial incentives in place, it’s incredible that human civilization still exists.

But of course, we could go at any moment. The U.S. military is likely to secure $858 billion for its budget next year. At $150,000 apiece, this is enough to fire 57 million Hellfire missiles at Santa’s sleigh as he speeds in terror across the winter sky.

Global Warming, Plus Bigger Problems
This is the one problem of capitalism where we’d really like to beg the Gods — Christian/Jewish/Muslim, Hindu, Norse, Mesopotamian, miscellaneous — for a Christmas miracle. The Earth, as we know it, is fucked. We’re currently at 417 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up from 280 ppm pre-capitalism. And that’s still not enough to satiate the shrieking, sucking mouth of the market.

Russia sees the melting Arctic and has decided this is a wonderful opportunity to extract the region’s hitherto inaccessible oil. Burning this will melt the Arctic further, making more oil available, in a virtuous circle of suicide. While making false promises in the fight against the climate crisis, America took the lead in crude oil production last year. Right behind us are the world’s other oil producers, from the despots of Saudi Arabia to the bland democracy of Canada. It’s like a “Murder on the Orient Express”-style mystery, where humanity is killed by every passenger.

It’s getting pretty close to night-night time for ocean life, most of the insects on Earth, half of the birds, too. Oh, and a third of the trees. When this will take out people is hard to predict, just as you never know which piece you have to remove to cause everything to collapse in a game of Jenga.

If you find this distressing, consider the more distressing fact that even if we develop massive amounts of green energy and stop global warming, capitalism will still probably destroy a livable biosphere.

The Terrifying Politics of Wanting, Wanting, Wanting
You probably don’t fantasize about how to decorate your mansion on Mars. This is because owning a Mars mansion has never seemed like a possibility in your life. But what if you were constantly bombarded with ads showing Matthew McConaughey in his luxurious nine-bedroom Mars home, living it up with all the Powerball winners who also live on the fourth planet from the sun?

While we Americans have spent our entire lives marinating in advertising tempting us with luscious products to consume, the truth is that humans do not have strong inherent desires for material goods. Let’s imagine humans in a world devoid of induced craving: We would probably work enough to have food to eat, live off the land, and spend the rest of the time futzing around (aka leisure).

Capitalism has truly perfected the creation of wants.
How, then, could capitalists get people to work hard at extremely unpleasant jobs? For a long time, the answer was simple: slavery. But then, in the 19th century, slavery was driven to extinction in the Western hemisphere. During this time, there was surprisingly frank planning among capitalists about this aspect of human nature. Given this problem, how could they motivate people to do the same awful work enriching others without the threat of force? They decided one important tactic should be to “create wants.”

As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1833:

They [people formerly enslaved by the British Empire] must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came, among all classes and conditions of men, to be necessaries. … This was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject.

A United Fruit staffer made the same point in the 1920s about Central Americans:

The mozos or working people have laboured only when forced to and that was not often, for the land would give them what little they needed. … The desire for goods, it may be remarked, is something that has to be cultivated. … Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States … All of this is having its effect in awakening desires.

By now capitalism has truly perfected the creation of wants. They’re as much a part of those of us in rich countries as our arms or legs. We will resist anyone telling us we should give up these wants, as much as we’d resist someone trying to cut off our limbs.

This is surely a part of the recent rightward lurch in politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. Progressive politics necessarily makes the case that there’s more to life than the money in your individual bank account. It’s inevitable that many people will experience this as psychological violence and respond in kind, or with real violence.

Stay tuned to find out how this dynamic will interact with all the capitalistic crises heading our way.

Now Dasher, Now Prancer, Now Insoluble Dilemma
Traditionally this is the part of the article where we describe the uplifting solution to the aforementioned problem. Here’s what we’ve got for you:

…

…

[faint sound of coughing]

…

The literary critic Fredric Jameson has famously said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Capitalism isn’t just outside of us, it’s inside too. It’s grown in us like an aggressive tumor, twining around our organs until it’s hard to know where it stops and we begin. It’s killing us, but cutting it out might kill us too.

So, uh, Merry Christmas. No need to thank us for this atrocious conclusion. Here at The Intercept, we don’t need thanks for getting up every day and doing our job. But that Jameson quote reminds us that a big bottle of Jameson whiskey can be ordered online for $56.92 (if you’ve got the money).

The post "Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism" appeared first on The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/christmas-capitalism-covid-climate
-change/

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

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Saturday, December 24, 2022 10:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You call me a Nihilist and then you post shit like that unironically?

OK, Arthur.

As for this part:

Quote:
And it’s not just conventional arms that are profitable. Building nuclear weapons systems is also quite lucrative. With these kinds of financial incentives in place, it’s incredible that human civilization still exists.


Your Democrat buddies teamed up with the Bushite NeoCons in Congress and just sent a 1.7 Trillion Dollar bill to Joe* for him to sign that will release another $858 Billion to the cause.

Yay!


And why doesn't it surprise me that people who work at the Intercept are going to be alone with their cats and blow up dolls on Christmas?

Quote:
So the downside here is our unending Covid nightmare. The upside is we now have 10 vaccine billionaires! We’d like to believe they’re spending this Christmas Eve together, downing negroni sbagliatos somewhere on the Amalfi coast, toasting the freedom that is capitalism.


There is no Covid nightmare. Feel free to triple mask and stay in your safe room all day if you'd like though. The rest of your family will be relieved that you didn't take up their invitation.



You're right about the 10 vaccine billionaires though. I was telling you stupid fucks about that for two years now. And nobody is going to forget how you were cheerleading the Democrats when they made deals with Big Pharma stating that nobody can sue them when the vaccines start ruining lives and killing people.

I'll let you get back to writing clickbate hate articles for what I can only assume is government cheese wheels since it's very clear that you would never accept money as compensation for your "hard work". Nosir. Never that.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, December 27, 2022 6:07 PM

SECOND

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


A Tale of Two Presidents

President Joe Biden on Twitter:
"There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter's evening. I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve."

Donald Trump on Truth Social:
"Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing & paying Social and LameStream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant, and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump, and, of course, The Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special 'Prosecutor' who, together with his wife and family, HATES 'Trump' more than any other person on earth. LOVE TO ALL!"

https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/109580927119071130

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

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Tuesday, December 27, 2022 6:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Joe Biden*.

How many babies did he and Dr. Jill eat this year?

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, December 31, 2022 6:52 AM

SECOND

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


I was watching His Dark Materials. In the TV show, the goal of establishing “the Republic of Heaven” is repeated several times. What is that Republic? Sounds very political, especially in contrast to the more common phrase "the Kingdom of Heaven". Since the show is based on three novels by Philip Pullman, I went to essays written by Pullman to learn what was meant. To my surprise I discovered that Trumptards think like Gnostics without even knowing or caring what Gnostism is:

The Gnostic religion, like the Christian one, tells us a story that involves ourselves. Some characters we know from Christianity appear in the Gnostic story too, but they have a very different aspect. To sum it up briefly and crudely, the Gnostic myth says that this world – the material universe we live in – was created not by a good God but by an evil Demiurge, who made it as a kind of prison for the sparks of divinity that had fallen, or been stolen, from the inconceivably distant true God who was their real source. These little sparks of god-ness are known as the pneuma, or soul, and each of us has a portion inside us. It’s the duty of the Gnostics, the knowing ones, to try and escape from this world, out of the clutches of the Demiurge and his angelic archons, and find a way back to that original and unknown and far-off God.

Now whatever else this is, it’s a very good story, and what’s more it has an immense explanatory power: it offers to explain why we feel, as so many of us do, exiled in this world, alienated from joy and meaningfulness and the true connection we feel we must have with the universe, as Jane Eyre feels that she must have love and kindness.

So Gnosticism fits the temper of the times. It lends itself to all kinds of contemporary variations: a feminist one, for example, partly because of the important role it assigns to the figure of the Sophia, or Wisdom, the youngest and paradoxically the rashest of the emanations of the divine being. Somehow we’re not surprised to learn that it was all her fault that the material universe came about in the first place.

And Gnosticism appeals powerfully too to the sense of being in the know, of having access to a truth not available to most people. And not least, it appeals because the story it tells is all about a massive conspiracy, and we love massive conspiracies. The X-Files, for example, is pure Gnosticism. ‘The truth is out there,’ says Mulder: not in here, because in here is permeated by evil conspiracies that reach right to the heart of the Pentagon and the FBI and the White House and every other centre of power in the world. The Demiurge is in charge, in here. But out there somewhere is that distant unknowable God, the source of all truth, and we belong to him – not to the corrupt and dishonest and evil empire that rules this world.

So it’s a powerfully dramatic myth, and it has the great advantage of putting us human beings and our predicament right at the heart of it. No wonder it appeals. The trouble is, it’s not true. If we can’t believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it’s even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and so on. It certainly explains, and it certainly makes us feel important, but it isn’t true.

And it has the terrible defect of libelling – one might almost say blaspheming against, if the notion had any republican meaning – the physical universe; of saying that this world is just a clumsy copy of a perfect original which we can’t see because it’s somewhere else. In the eyes of some Christian writers, of course, this sort of Platonism is a great merit. C. S. Lewis, at the end of the last book in the Narnia series, has his character the wise old professor explaining: ‘Our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world…’ In fact, the two things are ‘as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.’ And then he goes on to add under his breath ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them in these schools!’

This notion that the world we know with our senses is a crude and imperfect copy of something much better somewhere else is one of the most striking and powerful inventions of the human mind. It’s also one of the most perverse and pernicious. In the Gnostic world-view, it encourages a thorough-going rejection of the physical universe in favour of an unfortunately entirely imaginary world inhabited by evil powers, archons, aeons, emanations, angels and demons of every sort. Tremendously exciting stuff, but all utter nonsense. Just like The X-Files.

Why do I say it’s pernicious? It’s pernicious because it encourages us to disbelieve the evidence of our senses, and allows us to suspect everything of being false. It leads to a state of mind that’s hostile to experience. It encourages us to see a toad lurking beneath every flower, and if we can’t see one, it’s because the toads now are extra cunning and have learned to become invisible. It’s a state of mind that leads to a hatred of the physical world. The Gnostic would say that the beauty and solace and pleasure that can be found in the physical world are exactly why we should avoid it: they are the very things with which the Demiurge traps our souls.

Of course, the Puritanism that so poisoned the human mind later on said just the same sort of thing. I’d say that that position is an unhealthy and distorted one which can only be maintained at the cost of common sense, and of that love and kindness that Jane Eyre demanded, and finally of sanity itself. The Gnostic situation is a dramatic one to be in – it’s intensely exciting – but it’s the sort of paranoid excitement felt by those American militias who collect guns and hide in the hills and watch out for the black helicopters of the evil New World Order as they prepare for Armageddon. It’s nuts, basically.

The above paragraphs are from Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (2017). This is from the essay "The Republic of Heaven".

Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Philip+Pullman+Voices

The TV show "His Dark Materials" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5607976/
Rated 71 out of 100 at https://www.metacritic.com/tv/his-dark-materials
Rated 83 out of 100 at https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/his_dark_materials

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

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Saturday, December 31, 2022 9:08 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So it’s a powerfully dramatic myth, and it has the great advantage of putting us human beings and our predicament right at the heart of it. No wonder it appeals. The trouble is, it’s not true. If we can’t believe the story about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men and the star and the manger and so on, then it’s even harder to believe in Demiurges and archons and emanations and so on. It certainly explains, and it certainly makes us feel important, but it isn’t true.


I know you think you're super intelligent enough where you can decide what is and isn't true, Mr. Pullman, but you don't know any more than I do what is and isn't real outside of this meatsack that our consciousnesses have been shoved inside of. And you won't until you die. Or maybe you won't know because nothing happens when you die and the 7 Octillion atoms that make up these finite vessels are just to where our scattered bodies go.

Other than the word itself, I didn't know anything about Gnosticism except for what I read here. But it's not just the X-Files that is heavily Gnostic, but The Matrix as well.

Scientific American (The Serious Article in their "Space and Physics" section): Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-
chances-are-about-50-50/

Scientific American (The Parody Article in their "Opinion" section 6 months later): Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation

We must never doubt Elon Musk again

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-we-live-in-a-simu
lation/


Quote:
So Gnosticism fits the temper of the times.


It fits the temper of all times. Past, present and future. Regardless of how right or wrong it is.

Quote:
What are the implications of this monumental find? Well, first of all we can’t question Elon Musk again. Ever. Secondly, we must not forget what the simulation hypothesis really is. It is the ultimate conspiracy theory. The mother of all conspiracy theories, the one that says that everything, with the exception of nothing, is fake and a conspiracy designed to fool our senses. All our worst fears about powerful forces at play controlling our lives unbeknownst to us, have now come true. And yet this absolute powerlessness, this perfect deceit offers us no way out in its reveal. All we can do is come to terms with the reality of the simulation and make of it what we can.

Here, on earth. In this life.


This wrap-up to Fouad Khan's parody article from April of 2021 matches the points Pullman was making about Gnosticism in his own article.

But I offer another solution. Just live your life and don't worry about what comes after this, because nobody who lives among us knows. And if you need religion or superstition as a crutch, there's no harm in letting it guide you if it helps you be a better person than you were going to allow yourself to be without it.

And hopefully if there is a God out there in one form or another, it was mankind itself who wrote the parts in all those holy books that said that anybody who doesn't believe in THEIR GOD (or any god for that matter) is not going to a better place.

Otherwise, I wish you luck in that Lottery!



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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Thursday, January 5, 2023 6:15 AM

SECOND

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


Brief though the transition period was, during it Lyndon Johnson not only rescued his predecessor’s programs but launched one of his own. Barely into his second month in office he seized on a concept that had just begun to surface—a suggestion, a gleam in the eyes of a few members of the Kennedy Administration, that the late President had endorsed in theory but had done almost nothing to push forward—seized on it the moment a Kennedy adviser mentioned it to him, seized on it with such passion (“so spontaneous … instinctive and intuitive and uncalculated”) that the adviser knew in that moment that he had been very wrong about Lyndon Johnson. Enlarging it far beyond anything previously envisioned, he pushed it forward, prodded his advisers into bringing their imagination to bear on it, and, in the second major speech of his presidency, the State of the Union address he delivered to Congress on January 8, 1964, announced it, and it was a program whose title, however hyperbolic, made clear that he viewed it—this crude, coarse, ruthless, often cruel man, who all his life had made a mantra of pragmatism (“It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things”)—as nothing less than a crusade. It was a crusade for a noble end.

The speech made clear on whose behalf the crusade would be launched. “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both,” he said in that State of the Union address. “Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

The speech made clear also the weapons he was going to deploy in the crusade, and the enemies—ancient enemies, hitherto invincible, whom he named by name—that he intended the crusade to conquer. “Our chief weapons … will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment,” he said.

And the speech announced also the crusade’s goal, which was revolutionary: “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

By the time Lyndon Johnson stepped down from the dais after that speech, it was apparent that the program to which he was committing his still-infant Administration was one whose purpose was to right, on a vast scale, vast wrongs, to use to an extent rare in history a great nation’s wealth to ameliorate the harshness of life for a portion of its citizens (a substantial portion: one-fifth of America’s 150 million citizens in 1964 was 30 million people) too often overlooked by government in the past. It was clear that it was a program whose aim was to launch America on a course toward social justice that, were it to be completed, would result in nothing less than a society’s transformation.

If, as Martin Luther King Jr. had said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” during the two centuries since the United States of America had come into existence, the arc had bent slowly indeed. During those transition weeks (and, in fact, during the following years, as Lyndon Johnson widened the War on Poverty by introducing legislation on a dozen fronts to transform not just low-income America but the nation as a whole into “the Great Society”) one can see the new President trying to bend it faster. That State of the Union speech—delivered forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, after the assassination of John Kennedy—marked the moment when Lyndon Johnson, moving beyond a continuation of Kennedy’s policies, made the presidency fully his own, so it is therefore the event that signifies the end of the transition, the moment when the passage of power from Kennedy to Johnson is completed. And to see Lyndon Johnson take hold of presidential power, and so quickly begin to use it for ends so monumental is to see, with unusual clarity, the immensity of the potential an American President possesses to effect transformative change in the nation he leads.

The cost of the Vietnam War had to be borne by the same national treasury that was funding the War on Poverty, and the implications of that fact for liberal dreams would be devastating. Monumental as were some of the achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration, they were as nothing beside the dreams he had enunciated in that first State of the Union speech. Although there would be many reasons that the poverty war was lost, one of the main reasons was the Asian war.
–
Title: The Passage of Power
Author: Robert A. Caro
Series: Book IV of The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.pet/search.php?req=Robert+A.+Caro+Power

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

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Monday, January 9, 2023 6:29 AM

SECOND

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


House Republicans are making America the opposite of great

I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.

There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we saw in the House of Representatives last week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.

This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.

But while the spectacle was amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.

And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy.

Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish.

I won’t claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. As I said, MAGAfreude is a real thing, and I’m feeling a bit of it myself. But liberals have never seemed as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.

And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?

I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?

The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.

And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!

The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it’s terrified, too. America is still the essential nation, on multiple fronts. When the world’s greatest economic and military power seemingly can’t even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.

Of course, the world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/opinion/america-kevin-mccarthy-grea
t.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, January 9, 2023 10:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


There was nothing wrong with what happened last week.

It was 100 years overdue. It should happen every 2 years.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, January 10, 2023 8:49 AM

SECOND

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


The all-but-certain debt ceiling crisis of 2023, explained

Joe Biden can use executive power to defuse the debt ceiling bomb

The Republican House rebels who voted against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker election over a dozen times forced a promise from McCarthy to never pass a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts attached.

How Biden can kill the debt ceiling

There are at least four different ways a president could nullify the debt ceiling without Congress.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/10/23542845/joe-biden-d
ebt-ceiling-kevin-mccarthy

Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”

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

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Tuesday, January 10, 2023 9:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The all-but-certain debt ceiling crisis of 2023, explained

Joe Biden can use executive power to defuse the debt ceiling bomb

The Republican House rebels who voted against Kevin McCarthy in the speaker election over a dozen times forced a promise from McCarthy to never pass a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts attached.

How Biden can kill the debt ceiling

There are at least four different ways a president could nullify the debt ceiling without Congress.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/10/23542845/joe-biden-d
ebt-ceiling-kevin-mccarthy

Beth Ann Bovino, chief US economist at Standard and Poor’s, predicted that “the impact of a default by the U.S. government on its debts would be worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating markets and the economy.”

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



Keep on cheerleading that one-man dictatorship now that your guy is in office and see where it gets you when Trump is reelected.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, January 13, 2023 8:22 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


Some news headline feeds

'Classified Biden docs they say are found in his Delaware garage next to Corvette'?

https://communities.win/

?

https://media.patriots.win/post/1VNIJXCT071g.jpeg



Ban the Oven, Banning the Stove?



,





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Friday, January 13, 2023 9:35 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Keep on cheerleading that one-man dictatorship now that your guy is in office and see where it gets you when Trump is reelected.
I will be happy if Trump is the Republican candidate for President. That election will sort out who does not remember what an idiot Trump was. Knowing who the untrustworthy Trumptards are is very useful information for me. If Trumptards weren't so idiotic, they would be terrified that I know who they are. Should Trump win, I know what to expect. The last time Trump was President, he lowered my taxes and crashed the stock market, both beneficial to me. Who doesn't love a half-price sale on stocks? Trump was just like George Bush, who had a half-price sale during the stock market crash of 2008. I love how Republican Presidents can be depended upon to predictably crash the economy. I give Trump credit for what he is best at: looking after his own interests and being lazy by not enforcing laws governing natural gas drilling. It just so happens that making Trump richer and his lazy law enforcement and his inevitable crashing of the economy will benefit me.

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

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Friday, January 13, 2023 9:40 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


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

Keep on cheerleading that one-man dictatorship now that your guy is in office and see where it gets you when Trump is reelected.
I will be happy if Trump is the Republican candidate for President. That election will sort out who does not remember what an idiot Trump was.
Says the guy who voted for someone with full=on dementia.

Trrump may be an idiot, but he has America's interests at heart. Unlike Biden* who seemed to be more interested in lining his pockets when he was compos mentis (as opposed to now, when he's compost mentis and just reading the teleprompter that the necons write for him. Yanno, the neocons don't have our interests at heart, either.)



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


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Friday, January 13, 2023 9:53 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Trrump may be an idiot, but he has America's interests at heart. Unlike Biden* who seemed to be more interested in lining his pockets when he was compos mentis (as opposed to now, when he's compost mentis and just reading the teleprompter that the necons write for him. Yanno, the neocons don't have our interests at heart, either.)
Signym, you keep reminding me that you know nothing. How is your struggle to remain in the middle-class going? If you live long enough, you will lose it. I will guarantee it. Your money will end up in my bank account and we both can give credit to Republicans like Trump and Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin.

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221231063313/https://time.com/5888024/50
-trillion-income-inequality-america/

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

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Friday, January 13, 2023 10:34 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Who doesn't love a half-price sale on stocks? Trump was just like George Bush, who had a half-price sale during the stock market crash of 2008. I love how Republican Presidents can be depended upon to predictably crash the economy. I give Trump credit for what he is best at: looking after his own interests and being lazy by not enforcing laws governing natural gas drilling. It just so happens that making Trump richer and his lazy law enforcement and his inevitable crashing of the economy will benefit me.

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


The economy is already crashed right now, dummy.

Two more years of Biden fucking everything up to look forward to.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, January 13, 2023 11:33 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:
Who doesn't love a half-price sale on stocks? Trump was just like George Bush, who had a half-price sale during the stock market crash of 2008. I love how Republican Presidents can be depended upon to predictably crash the economy. I give Trump credit for what he is best at: looking after his own interests and being lazy by not enforcing laws governing natural gas drilling. It just so happens that making Trump richer and his lazy law enforcement and his inevitable crashing of the economy will benefit me.

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


The economy is already crashed right now, dummy.

Two more years of Biden fucking everything up to look forward to.
Last week I was at Kroger when a beggar asked for money. My answer was "No." The USA looks terrible to people who are like the beggar and you, 6ix, and cattle about to be slaughtered to make a delicious meal for me. But the USA is doing finer right now for people like me than it has ever before done for people like you and the beggar. Vote any way you want, 6ix. Your ass will still be kicked by America because of who you are. Nobody in the USA respects angry poor white trash.

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

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Friday, January 13, 2023 11:51 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Who doesn't love a half-price sale on stocks? Trump was just like George Bush, who had a half-price sale during the stock market crash of 2008. I love how Republican Presidents can be depended upon to predictably crash the economy. I give Trump credit for what he is best at: looking after his own interests and being lazy by not enforcing laws governing natural gas drilling. It just so happens that making Trump richer and his lazy law enforcement and his inevitable crashing of the economy will benefit me.

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


The economy is already crashed right now, dummy.

Two more years of Biden fucking everything up to look forward to.
Last week I was at Kroger when a beggar asked for money. My answer was "No." The USA looks terrible to people who are like the beggar and you, 6ix, and cattle about to be slaughtered to make a delicious meal for me. But the USA is doing finer right now for people like me than it has ever before done for people like you and the beggar. Vote any way you want, 6ix. Your ass will still be kicked by America because of who you are. Nobody in the USA respects angry poor white trash.

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



I'm fine dude. My house and car are paid for. Anything that won't spoil has a 5 year supply stocked up.

Most of these price increases I'm not going to feel for years, and even when I do I have no mortgage or car payment to worry about anyhow.

I haven't worked for 3.5 years and I'm not sweating anything. And if I ever feel the need or desire to go back to a job, I can just hop across the state border and make $20 an hour working at a gas station now that they're paying insane rates for work in Illinois.

You're talking to the wrong guy, buddy. I'm doing America better than at least 90% of Americans are.

Have fun at work today, honey.



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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, January 13, 2023 2:06 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:

I'm fine dude. My house and car are paid for. Anything that won't spoil has a 5 year supply stocked up.

Most of these price increases I'm not going to feel for years, and even when I do I have no mortgage or car payment to worry about anyhow.

I haven't worked for 3.5 years and I'm not sweating anything. And if I ever feel the need or desire to go back to a job, I can just hop across the state border and make $20 an hour working at a gas station now that they're paying insane rates for work in Illinois.

You're talking to the wrong guy, buddy. I'm doing America better than at least 90% of Americans are.

Have fun at work today, honey.
6ix, I learned from you that Trumptards are happier when unemployed. Good for you. I am happier when I unemploy Trumptards. It will be a win for everyone when all Trumptards are finally unemployed, replaced by illegal aliens and robots. Then the Trumptards can spend all day plotting how, someday, but not today because that is too much work in this weather, they will take back their country. Except it never was theirs. It is mine and you are neither tough enough nor brave enough nor energetic enough to take it back in a direct confrontation. Instead, Republicans will have to manipulate the vote count - the way of the weasel.

https://www.google.com/search?q=republican+vote+cheating

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

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Friday, January 13, 2023 2:27 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Trrump may be an idiot, but he has America's interests at heart. Unlike Biden* who seemed to be more interested in lining his pockets when he was compos mentis (as opposed to now, when he's compost mentis and just reading the teleprompter that the necons write for him. Yanno, the neocons don't have our interests at heart, either.)

SECOND: Signym, you keep reminding me that you know nothing. How is your struggle to remain in the middle-class going?


Inept trolling.
Heh heh heh.
And Biden* is still compost mentis.

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


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Friday, January 13, 2023 2:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I'm fine dude. My house and car are paid for. Anything that won't spoil has a 5 year supply stocked up.

Most of these price increases I'm not going to feel for years, and even when I do I have no mortgage or car payment to worry about anyhow.

I haven't worked for 3.5 years and I'm not sweating anything. And if I ever feel the need or desire to go back to a job, I can just hop across the state border and make $20 an hour working at a gas station now that they're paying insane rates for work in Illinois.

You're talking to the wrong guy, buddy. I'm doing America better than at least 90% of Americans are.

Have fun at work today, honey.
6ix, I learned from you that Trumptards are happier when unemployed.


I'm not unemployed. I'm semi retired with very little worry or obligations to anyone or anything.

I'm almost always working on something, whether it's my own DIY or yard work/landscaping, helping others with their DIY, making or repairing furniture or working on digital projects.

I get more done in a day than you get done in a month.



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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, January 13, 2023 2:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Since SECIND does nothing except troll on fff.net it's a sure thing you get more done in a day than he does in a year.

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


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Friday, January 13, 2023 2:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


True.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, January 15, 2023 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Since SECIND does nothing except troll on fff.net it's a sure thing you get more done in a day than he does in a year.
The Russians and Signym constantly complain about this, but they never get around to doing anything effective about it. They are just too lazy, too philosophical, and definitely too unfocused. But what else would you expect from people who write "What are America's interests?" and then proceed to blather on and on for years and years, with occasional forays attacking Ukraine or supporting Russia. http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60986&p=1

The climate crisis offers a new angle from which to evaluate US dollar hegemony, since carbon emissions are tied to economic activity.

Daniel Driscoll, January 14, 2023

Amidst the turbulence of the Second World War, hundreds of delegates from the Allied Nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to construct a post-war economic system. While it might strike one as odd that post-war choreography began in 1944, a year before the war ended, the truth is that states were planning peacetime from the moment the war began. The West feared replicating the blunders of the Treaty of Versailles and wanted to establish the next post-war order with prudence.1 One principal task for Bretton Woods attendees was to implement an international monetary system. Several proposals existed, including Keynes’ Bancor, which would have established an International Clearing Union to issue a supranational currency, oversee currency exchanges, and correct global imbalances. The war had weakened Europe, however, and strengthened the US. US negotiators exploited their influence. While the adoption of the dollar as the global reserve asset would hand the US a significant upper hand, Europeans were assured that the arrangement was only temporary and eventually relented because they could convert dollars to gold.

Twenty-seven years later, a new crisis fractured the postwar economic peace enjoyed by the West. Rising inflation drove many countries, particularly European ones, to convert their US dollar reserves into gold. President Richard Nixon faced a choice between devaluing the dollar or pumping it up through perilous austerity measures. Global markets predicted that Nixon’s political savvy would drive him toward the former, but he shocked the world by taking a surprise third route, severing the dollar from the gold standard. There is a great deal of disagreement as to his decision’s long-term ramifications, but little debate about the global economic turmoil that immediately followed. Through it all, the dollar’s global hegemony endured, and it remains to this day. 

More at https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-dollar-and-climate/

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

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Sunday, January 15, 2023 7:03 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not unemployed. I'm semi retired with very little worry or obligations to anyone or anything.
In Texas I am constantly hearing bragging from angry poor white trash about how well their lives are going without the need for strenuous work. Jobs are for chumps. So is paying taxes. (If you hire one of these guys, they slack off when nobody is looking. Worst. Employees. Ever.)

Do you know what else they have in common with 6ix and Signym? Strong feelings about Trump and deep bitterness that Democrats exist in their country. "Did you know that Democrats are horrible?" When I hear that I agree with them because it is pointless to explain anything to a know-it-all (never have I known a Trumptard that wasn't both arrogant and unaware of how big a failure they are. See Trump for that psychology in action in its most pathological form. ) I certainly don't tell them that I'm a Democrat.

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

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Sunday, January 15, 2023 12:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I'm not unemployed. I'm semi retired with very little worry or obligations to anyone or anything.
In Texas I am constantly hearing bragging from angry poor white trash about how well their lives are going without the need for strenuous work. Jobs are for chumps. So is paying taxes. (If you hire one of these guys, they slack off when nobody is looking. Worst. Employees. Ever.)


I'm worth 2 of any employee at the non-physical jobs. 5 to 10 employees at physically demanding jobs.



Quote:
Do you know what else they have in common with 6ix and Signym? Strong feelings about Trump and deep bitterness that Democrats exist in their country. "Did you know that Democrats are horrible?" When I hear that I agree with them because it is pointless to explain anything to a know-it-all (never have I known a Trumptard that wasn't both arrogant and unaware of how big a failure they are. See Trump for that psychology in action in its most pathological form. ) I certainly don't tell them that I'm a Democrat.


Tell me how that's any different for you deep feelings about Trump and your bitterness that Republicans exist in your country.

Get fucked, idiot.

And I also don't have political conversations with Democrats IRL either. At best I know they're too stupid to keep up any real conversation, at worst they might get a well-deserved pop in the jaw.

I actually turned my back on some stranger and laughed at him while in line at the hardware store when an innocent conversation that started about the "change shortage" of 2020 because of a sign posted on the register devolved into him shit talking Trump.

Conversation over, dummy. Don't talk politics with strangers.

I hope you enjoyed the smell of that fart you had to sit through too.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2023 12:55 PM

SECOND

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


Opinion | Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams
by Ezra Klein

For decades, the cliché in politics was that “Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.” The Democratic Party was thought to be a loosely connected cluster of fractious interest groups often at war with itself. “I don’t belong to an organized political party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” Republicans were considered the more cohesive political force.

If that was ever true, it’s not now. These days, Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart.

It’s not just the 14 votes Kevin McCarthy lost before promising away enough of his power and prestige to finally be named speaker. It’s his predecessors, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who both quit the job McCarthy now holds. It’s the Tea Party repeatedly knocking off Republican incumbents. It’s Ted Cruz and the Freedom Caucus forcing government shutdowns their colleagues never wanted. It’s Donald Trump humiliating virtually the entire Republican Party establishment and becoming the erratic axis around which all Republican Party politics revolves. It’s House Republicans ousting and isolating Liz Cheney because she insisted on investigating an armed assault on the chamber they inhabit. Today, a gaggle of Republicans isn’t a party. It’s closer to a riot.

Perhaps the rise of small-donor money and social media and nationalized politics corroded party cohesion. But Democrats have been buffeted by all that, too, and responded very differently. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2008, but rather than exiling the Clintons to the political wilderness, he named Hillary secretary of state and then supported her as his successor. In 2020, the party establishment coalesced behind Joe Biden. When Harry Reid retired from the Senate, he was replaced as leader by his deputy, Chuck Schumer. When Bernie Sanders lost in 2016, he became part of Schumer’s Senate leadership team, and when he lost in 2020, he blessed a unity task force with Biden. Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats from 2003 to 2022, and the handoff to Hakeem Jeffries and Katherine Clark was drama free.

So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.

1. Republicans are caught between money and media

For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.

At least, it did. “One way I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party is that it’s outsourced most of its traditional party functions,” Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” told me. “It outsourced funding to PACS. It outsourced media to the right-wing media.”

Let’s take funding first. Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez have documented the way money has flowed out of the Republican Party’s official organizations and into an “extra-party consortia of conservative donors” centered around the Koch network (which, importantly, is and long has been far bigger than the Kochs themselves). Between 2002 and 2014, for example, the share of resources controlled by the Republican Party campaign committees went from 53 percent of the money Skocpol and her colleagues could track to 30 percent.

What rose in their place were groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Action network and the American Legislative Exchange Council — sophisticated, well-financed organizations that began to act as a shadow Republican Party and dragged the G.O.P.’s agenda further toward the wishes of its corporate class.

What were the hallmark Republican economic policies in this era? Social Security privatization. Repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Free trade deals. Repealing Obamacare. Cutting Medicaid. Privatizing Medicare. TARP. Deep spending cuts. “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters,” Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, told me.

But what really eroded the party’s legitimacy with its own voters was that the attention to the corporate agenda was paired with inattention, and sometimes opposition, to the ethnonationalist agenda. This was particularly true on immigration, where the George W. Bush administration tried, and failed, to pass a major reform bill in 2007. In 2013, a key group of Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to make another run at it only to see their bill killed by Republicans in the House. There’s a reason immigration was Trump’s driving issue in 2016: It was the point of maximum divergence between the Republican Party’s elite and its grass roots.

The failure of Bush’s 2007 immigration bill is worth revisiting, because it reveals the pincer the Republican Party was caught in even before the Tea Party’s rise. The bill itself was a priority for the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. The revolt against that bill was centered in talk radio, which was able to channel the fury of grass-roots conservatives into a force capable of turning Republican officeholders against a Republican president.

It wouldn’t be the last time. As the Republican Party’s corporate class was building the organizations it needed to tighten its control over policy, the party’s grass-roots base was building the media ecosystem it needed to control Republican politicians. First came Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on talk radio, then Fox News (and eventually its imitators and competitors, like OANN), and then the blogs, and then digitally native outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Wire. The oft-missed secret of the right-wing media ecosystem is that it is ruthlessly competitive. If you lose touch with what the audience actually cares about, you lose them to another show, another station, another site.

Conservative media became, on one hand, the place that grass-roots discontent with the Republican Party’s leadership or agenda could be turned against the party’s elite, and on the other hand, the place where the party’s elite could learn about what the grass roots really wanted. It also — with the rise of online fund-raising — became a place rebellious Republicans candidates could find money even after they alienated their colleagues and repelled the Koch class. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the 10 top fund-raisers in the House in the 2022 election cycle.

So that’s one explanation for what happened to the Republican Party: It’s caught between a powerful business wing that drives its agenda and an antagonistic media that speaks for its ethnonationalist base, and it can’t reconcile the two.

But notice a problem lurking in the language here. Talking about “the Republican Party” makes it sound like the Republican Party is, in each era, the same thing, composed of the same people. It’s not.

2 Same party, different voters

A few decades ago, the anti-institutional strain in American politics was more mixed between the parties. Democrats generally trusted government and universities and scientists and social workers, Republicans had more faith in corporations and the military and churches. But now you’ll find Fox News attacking the “extremely woke” military and the American Conservative Union insisting that any Republican seeking a congressional leadership post sign onto “a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.”

“The reason the Democrats are much more supportive of the institutions is because they are the institutions,” Matt Continetti, author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” told me. “Republicans are increasingly the non-college party. When Mitt Romney got the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P. was basically split between college and non-college whites. That’s gone. The Republicans have just lost a huge chunk of professional, college-educated voters — what you would have thought of as the spine of the Republican Party 40 years ago has just been sloughed off.”

The problem for the Republican Party as an institution is that it is, in fact, an institution. And so the logic of anti-institutional politics inevitably consumes it, too, particularly when it is in the majority. This was almost comically explicit during the speaker’s fight. “BREAK THE ESTABLISHMENT ONCE AND FOR ALL,” wrote Representative Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, in a fund-raising appeal tied to his opposition to McCarthy. Representative Chip Roy told reporters the aim was “empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.”

The more that the anti-establishment wing of the Republican Party expresses itself, the more the party loses once-loyal voters inclined toward institutions and gains new voters who mistrust them. You can see this, to some degree, in the so-called Woo-Anon pipeline, where anti-establishment hippies found themselves, particularly during the pandemic, drifting into the furthest reaches of the right — in one case, going from teaching yoga classes in Southern California to joining the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Democrats are increasingly the party, when they’re in the majority, of the suburbs,” Continetti told me. “And to me, the American suburbs are the ballast of this country — they’re more small-c conservative than movement conservatives. The suburbs don’t want to rock the boat. So the Republican Party, as it’s become more rural and more non-college educated, they don’t have as much investment in the system. By that very reason, they become much more inclined to rock the boat.”

Suburban voters provided Joe Biden his crucial margin of victory in 2020 and saved the Senate for the Democrats in 2022. Depending on how you look at it, they’re a check on the Democratic Party’s radicalism or an impediment against its much-needed populism. Either way, the parties are pushing each other to become more distilled versions of themselves. The closer the Democrats come to the major institutions in American life, the more Republicans turn against them, and vice versa.

3. Republicans need an enemy

When I asked Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, what the modern Republican Party was, he replied, “it’s not the Democratic Party.” His point was that not much unites the various factions of the Republican coalition, save opposition to the Democratic Party.

“The anchor of Democratic Party politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals,” Sam Rosenfeld, author of “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era,” told me. “The conservative movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”

It wasn’t always thus. The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”

Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.

And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans.

There is an irresolvable contradiction between being a party organized around opposition to government and Democrats and being a party that has to run the government in cooperation with Democrats.

You can see this dynamic even now. The easiest route to bipartisan cooperation is to frame a bill as anti-China, like the CHIPS and Science Act. McCarthy’s first act with any bipartisan support was to create a new committee to focus on competition with China. But China isn’t our outright enemy in the way the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda was. It’s certainly not enough of a force to organize Republican Party politics around a positive agenda.

All of this suggests that McCarthy has won himself a miserable prize. To become speaker, he traded away many of the powers he would have had as speaker. He reportedly promised to give those who would destroy him plum committee assignments that will, in turn, give them more control over what comes to the House floor. He apparently agreed to spending caps and budgetary guarantees that will commit House Republicans to the kinds of brutal cuts and dangerous showdowns that make them look like a party of arsonists, not legislators. He made it possible for any member of his caucus to call a vote on him at any time. And most important, he was proved weak before he ever held the gavel.

“All McCarthy has is the title on the door above his office,” Skocpol told me. He’s a hollow speaker for a hollow party.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/15/opinion/mccarthy-republicans-coming
-apart.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, January 17, 2023 4:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion | Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams
by Ezra Klein


Once you read the name Ezra Klein, there's no reason to read any further.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2023 4:43 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:
Opinion | Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams
by Ezra Klein


Once you read the name Ezra Klein, there's no reason to read any further.
Ezra Klein once wrote that only one President was elected to a nonconsecutive term in office but four were assassinated, which would suggest that Trump is four times more likely to be assassinated than reelected. But you didn't read that because you saw the name Ezra Klein, therefore you didn't report Ezra Klein to the Secret Service as threatening the President. The Secret Service is waiting for your phone call, 6ix, because they love to talk to ignoramus Trumptards and make fun of you retards. https://www.secretservice.gov/contact/field-offices

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

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Tuesday, January 17, 2023 5:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion | Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams
by Ezra Klein


Once you read the name Ezra Klein, there's no reason to read any further.
Ezra Klein once wrote that only one President was elected to a nonconsecutive term in office but four were assassinated, which would suggest that Trump is four times more likely to be assassinated than reelected. But you didn't read that because you saw the name Ezra Klein, therefore you didn't report Ezra Klein to the Secret Service as threatening the President. The Secret Service is waiting for your phone call, 6ix, because they love to talk to ignoramus Trumptards and make fun of you retards. https://www.secretservice.gov/contact/field-offices

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



Ezra Kline is a joke of a dumb cunt.

There's zero surprise here that you take anything he has to say seriously.

But thanks for pointing out that even your death threats against Trump aren't original and you stole them too.

My god, you are a waste of carbon.


And when I report anybody, it will be you. The only reason I haven't posted your mailing address for you to see is because I am not a hypocrite and I will not doxx anyone. But if something does happen to Trump I will be sending it to the Secret Service for you.

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

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2023 2:10 PM

SECOND

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


Operation Warp Speed was a huge success. So why is the US turning away from it?

Immunologist Moncef Slaoui, who headed Warp Speed under the Trump administration, spent years before the pandemic advocating for a simple, cheap measure that would have made it possible to develop vaccines even faster: maintaining idle capacity so the country can respond to emergencies.

As he told Science in a 2021 interview:

“The whole concept—after we went through the flu pandemic, the Ebola outbreak, the Zika outbreak—was to say, “Listen, the problem is always the same, which is there are no manufacturing facilities sitting there idle, waiting to be used. Even if we had one, we would have trouble because we would have to stop manufacturing other vaccines, which are essential for saving people’s life. So we thought, “Why don’t we take a dedicated facility and have them work on discovering vaccines against known potential outbreak agents, one after the other?” They would become incredibly skilled and trained at going fast, discovering vaccines. The company was prepared to make available the facility and ask just for the cost of running it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fly.”

But, flush from Operation Warp Speed’s success, he was optimistic that Covid would change the US government’s disinterest in maintaining capacity for rapid vaccine development. “This pandemic is costing $23 billion a day to the U.S. economy, every single day,” he said. “Investing $300 million to $500 million a year into such a facility is peanuts and would save countless lives.”

With another two years of hindsight and Kessler’s eventual departure from the White House, Slaoui’s optimism is almost painful. That investment? Didn’t happen. Before the pandemic, some of this country’s smartest experts spent years telling us that a pandemic was coming and would be catastrophic, but that we could prepare and substantially mitigate the harms. We didn’t.

During the pandemic, we developed significant expertise in vaccine development and distribution, which we easily could have leveraged into maintaining capacity for rapid vaccine development to prevent the next pandemic. We didn’t. Given Warp Speed’s unpopularity and the increasing political divisiveness of vaccination, I’m not even sure that, if another pandemic struck, we’d attempt something like Warp Speed again.

The politics around the pandemic, and especially around vaccines, has only gotten more toxic.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/1/18/23560407/operation-warp-s
peed-pandemics-vaccines-covid-white-house-biden-trump

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

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