Elections; 2024 by THG

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Come off it, lad.

You're talking about Trump right now. You've talked about Trump every single day for 8 years, and there has never been a single moment you haven't thought about him.

Enjoy your next 4 years.

I can do hundreds of different tasks in a day and I'm not particularly fast. For example: it took less than a minute to post about Trump's latest mathematical error. Trump doesn't do arithmetic, even for something as simple and important as his plan to replace the income tax with a tariff.

Why can’t Trump’s tariffs replace the income tax?

Year 2023
Total imports = $3,108 billion
10% tariff on imports = $310.8 billion
Income tax = $2,176 billion

Shortfall = $1,865 billion
($2,176 billion - $310.8 billion)

https://jabberwocking.com/why-cant-tariffs-replace-the-income-tax/

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country. Then we switched over to Income Tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!
11:21 PM · Jan 2, 2025
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1875049777186136481

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

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 10:06 AM

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

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

Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking.
I already did come up with a plan that is guaranteed to work. From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion. You can read about it at https://www.jw.org/en/

Second's plan is simple.

Join another cult!

Fuck your religion dude. Your family hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

You missed the point that showing self-control, behaving decently, following the law rather than impulses and shameful urges, paying your taxes, going to work, etc. is the guaranteed way to prosper in America. So many Americans do NOT prosper solely because of their poor behavior when no one is watching, not even God (in their opinion).

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

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 10:08 AM

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

The Second Coming | Fintan O’Toole

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/05/the-second-coming-fintan-o
toole/

Karl Marx famously wrote that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Kamala Harris makes him undoubtedly a world-historic personage whose impact will be felt around the world for a very long time. But his second coming is no farce. It is a brutal show of strength.

It has turned out that the drama that best encapsulates this momentous period is, after all, the shadow play of death and resurrection that unfolded in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. As Trump was grazed by a fragment of a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, he dropped to the ground, then rose again, fist in the air, triumphant and defiantly alive. Distilled into this moment and lit by a glow of heroism was the whole story of what had happened since Trump’s apparent political death on January 6, 2021, and of what was to come in the 2024 election: that which does not kill him makes him stronger.

There has been, in recent times, something of a pattern here: the strongman gets elected, is thrown out of office, and then makes a triumphant return. This is what happened with one of Trump’s political models, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It happened with Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. And what this pattern suggests is not just that the strongman comes back—he returns as a more radically authoritarian ruler. The second time he is infused with the swagger of impunity. The man they couldn’t kill is also the man they cannot inhibit.

“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably, at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.

And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses. Up to now it has been possible to take some comfort in Trump’s failure to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020, and in the fact that not once during his time in the Oval Office did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing. (This was true of no previous president in the era of polling.) It could be said with some justice that he did not really embody America.

But now he does. The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the very large core of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t much mind.

This is hard for Democrats (and just plain democrats) to get their heads around. Both inside and outside the US, liberals and progressives have had a default assumption that, even if their government sometimes does terrible things, Americans themselves are essentially decent and benign. The Harris campaign, with its messages of joy and hope and its (bleakly fruitless) pursuit of an imagined reservoir of Republicans too well-mannered to vote for Trump, rested on the same supposition.

In retrospect, one of the most telling moments of the election campaign came on September 14 in Superior, Wisconsin. Toward the end of a barnstorming speech, Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, told his audience: “I’ll go to my grave not understanding why, but I know it’s a fact that this is going to be a margin-of-error race.” The second part of this sentence was entirely unsurprising, but in the first part Walz surely said more than he meant to. He expressed a sense of incomprehension that went far beyond his own bafflement. Hovering over his words was the dread that the American republic might go to its grave with its defenders still wondering why.

Part of what made the election so strange was that everyone was flying blind. The instruments that are supposed to peer through the darkness—the polls—merely thickened the great cloud of unknowing. They are, of course, often wrong, but they usually conjure at least a mirage of what awaits on the horizon. When all the results are within the margin of error they leave us stranded in that liminal space where there is, as W.B. Yeats put it at a different time of murky anxiety, “no clear fact to be discerned.”

The actual vote came down not to the margin of error but to the margin for error. Half of Americans seem to think that their country has none, the other half that it has plenty. One tribe fears that, after almost a decade of Trump bombarding its laws, institutions, and civic life with verbal and physical assaults, another four years of him in the White House will kill them off for good. Harris appealed to those fears.

But the other tribe thinks the US can afford to gamble its future on a carnival barker, a wild improviser, a reckless disrupter. It has, paradoxically, a deep confidence in the America that Trump disparages with such dark relish, believing that a good shaking-up will not break the country but bring it back to its true self. Trump is a confidence man in both senses—he may be conning much of his own electorate, but they give him the benefit of their nonchalant belief that he is not destroying American norms, merely restoring an imagined American normalcy.

This is something else that made the campaign hard to comprehend. Trump drew a picture of an America on the brink of extinction—but many of his voters trust in an idea of an America that is so fundamentally resilient that it can afford to take breathtaking risks. Harris offered hope in the promise of America—but many of her voters see the country as too fragile to survive another disordered presidency.

Without taking this contradiction into account, it would be quite rational to struggle to understand Trump’s astonishing political potency. He is surely the most known candidate ever to face an electorate anywhere. It is not just that he has been a national celebrity since The Apprentice first aired twenty years ago. Or that he has dominated American politics for almost a decade, sucking in most of the attention that citizens give to public life. Or even that he has—unlike in 2016—actually been president for four years of malign incompetence, ruling over an administration whose inner workings have been amply revealed by his own closest advisers. (The description of him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law” comes not from one of his enemies but from his longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly.)

Beyond all of that, there is the knowledge that Trump is (in the judgment of a jury of his peers) a rapist, that he illegally paid hush money to a porn star, that he has boasted of grabbing women’s genitals, that his businesses engaged in large-scale fraud, that he kept government secrets in boxes stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, and that he tried to steal the last presidential election by any means necessary, up to and including a violent invasion of the Capitol.

And in this campaign, he let everything (from Arnold Palmer’s penis to the greatness of the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter) hang out more than ever. Trump presented to the electorate not just his Ego but his Id. His public utterances were increasingly like a version of Ulysses written by someone on a bad acid trip. His stream of consciousness was more like a meander of unconsciousness. Random thoughts surfaced like the sharks with which he was so weirdly obsessed:

Quote:
A lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that?… I watched some guys justifying it today: “Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.” These people are crazy.

This supersaturation of knowledge about Trump is what was discombobulating for the Democrats. In the old normality they still inhabit, it was natural to think, “If only people knew…” In the old politics, it was sensible to ask (with T.S. Eliot), “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” But voters did know, and they were, on the whole, willing to offer not just forgiveness but trust and approbation. In this new era the New Age creed that letting it all hang out is a sign of honesty and authenticity has become the great asset of the right. The more unfiltered Trump became, the more real and sincere he seemed to a majority of voters.

If on Trump’s side of the great divide there was a crazy overload of knowledge, on Harris’s there was a dearth. The fundamental problem was not just that Harris was relatively unknown to most voters—a problem compounded by Biden’s disastrous reluctance to honor his pledge to be a bridge to a new generation and step aside after his first term. Also unknown were, to a remarkable extent, the actual achievements of the Biden administration, of which Harris was part.

Biden has been very good at doing what Trump claims to be capable of but isn’t: getting big things done. The president had tangible successes in overseeing the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, reducing unemployment to its lowest level in fifty years, extending access to health care, beginning the transition of American industry to a post-carbon economy, and tackling the dreadful state of much of the country’s infrastructure.

Yet he was terrible at communicating those achievements to the general public. This was partly because of his wan and increasingly frail presence. But it was also because many Americans saw his presidency as a truck stop rather than a highway, a hiatus rather than a trajectory. Biden got elected by offering quiet and healing. Perhaps Americans got bored with quietness.

His administration’s objectively significant accomplishments could not break through to swing voters, many of whom had chosen Biden because they wanted to get politics (which had become, in effect, Trump’s tantrums and frenzies) out of their heads for a while. And in this Biden succeeded all too well. Biden allowed people not to have to think about Trump. His administration was understood as a form of convalescence, a respite from all the craziness and chaos of Trump’s feverish presidency. But it’s hard to make voters think of a nursing home as a source of energy.

The very existence of a competent federal government, going about the ordinary business of trying to make people’s lives better, allowed for a creeping amnesia. It became possible to forget what it felt like to live under a Trump presidency, to wipe away all the reasons Trump left the Oval Office with an abysmal approval rating of 34 percent. The paroxysms of rage, the sulks of self-pity, the murderous ineptitude of his handling of the pandemic, the relentless lies and untethered violence of his attempted coup—all of this receded into the past with extraordinary rapidity.

Something odd has happened with American memory. With the “Again” in MAGA, Trump appeals to a notion of a better past to which he will allow the US to return. This certainly works: CNN’s exit polls suggest that two thirds of those who believe that “America’s best days are in the past” voted for Trump. But “the past” now seems to include at least the first three quarters of the Trump presidency, before the arrival of Covid. A glow of nostalgia surrounds a period that ought to be too recent for wistful longing.

This strange twist in time helped to shape a contradiction Harris struggled—and ultimately failed—to resolve. Was she running as a guarantor of continuity or a force for change? Perhaps, if there could be said to be a moment that she lost the election, it was her answer on ABC’s The View on October 8 to the question “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” She was trying, not unreasonably, to claim a share of the credit for Biden’s considerable achievements. Her problem was that there was precious little credit to go around. Half of a small dish of public approval makes for pretty meager fare.

Harris embodied radical change in who she is—Black and female. But she struggled to represent change in what she would do. Her signature issues—access to abortion and the defense of democracy—necessarily involved her defending rights and institutions that had seemed stable before Trump and his movement revolted against them. However just these causes, they meant that she was standing up for what was (at least until very recently) the status quo. The bold vision for progressive change embodied in her persona was blurred.

While Harris was trying for uplift, Trump’s method was overkill. In a TV ad that a group allied with his campaign aired nearly six thousand times in just six days in late October (at a cost of almost $20 million), a voice like something from a trailer for a horror movie intoned, over mug shots of dark-skinned men and pictures of female victims, that these women were “bludgeoned, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot, and murdered.” It was as though each of them had been killed several times—and slaughtered by Harris herself. The primary message that Trump hammered home, over and over, was that Harris personally unleashed this frenzy of violence by opening the southern border to the hordes of madmen and murderers loosed from the hellish asylums and prisons of foreign countries.

The strength of this terroristic messaging was that it fused racism and misogyny to produce the sum of all fears. Its apparent weakness was that the misogyny seemed too generalized. It was intended to appeal not just to sexist men but to women frightened of the kind of violence that sexist men inflict. But Trump would not keep it on target. His statement in Wisconsin on October 30 that he was going to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not” was too blatant a tell. It encapsulated the sick paradox of the grabber of women posturing as their guard.

Trump’s constant personal denigration of Harris’s intellect, career, and sexuality was, on any ordinary view of political utility, the wrong kind of misogyny. It laced his potent cocktail of race- and gender-based phobias with raw rotgut chauvinism. It seemed reasonable to think that Trump was going too far and provoking a backlash from women. As Nikki Haley put it, “This bromance and masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable.”

But not, it seems, uncomfortable enough. Trump’s bet was that this parade of misogyny would attract disgruntled young men to vote for him more than it would animate otherwise undecided women to vote against him. His instincts turned out to be right. A majority of white suburban women seem to have voted for Trump. According to exit polls, the gender gap was perfectly balanced, with Harris ten points ahead among women and Trump ten points ahead among men.

The gender divide partly accounts too for Trump’s increased popularity with men of color. This trend was already evident in 2020, but this time he seems to have made even deeper inroads. CNN’s exit poll suggests that 21 percent of Black men and a clear majority (55 percent) of Latino men voted for Trump. In such a profoundly gendered election, being male mattered more for many voters than any assumptions about racial or ethnic solidarity.

On the other side of that divide, even while pro-choice referendums passed in seven states (though they were defeated in Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska), it may well be that the prospect of passing these measures gave many women a degree of comfort that they could protect their reproductive rights at the state level. Or it may simply be that garish misogyny is now so normalized that many women had already priced it in.

In a disinhibited America, a lot of women may now be expecting nothing better from men. Perhaps, like Haley, they rolled their eyes at the spectacle of Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally being “overly masculine,” and then voted for him anyway because men being boorish is just the way of the world. Whatever this means for the future of gender relations in America, it is not likely to be pleasant.

It’s tempting, in some ways, to do the same for the election result as a whole—to normalize it by putting it down to prosaic explanations like the impact of inflation and the anti-incumbency mood that has swept through most of the democratic world. Those factors are of course very real. Inflation, in particular, acts as a cipher for a much wider range of perceptions, not only of immediate hardship but of unfairness and powerlessness. But we must not lose sight of the much larger consequence of Trump’s victory: it decisively shifts the idea of who is a normal American.

It was not wrong to see this election as pivotal, and what America has pivoted toward is a knowing and deliberate transfer of power to a nexus of interest groups whose interests are inimical to pluralist democracy. One of them is of course Trump and his family. He will have free rein for personal vengeance against his enemies and for untrammeled self-enrichment.

Another is made up of fundamentalist Christians who will gain control of federal education and health care policies and of federal court appointments and use that control to further roll back the gains made over many decades for the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people who just believe that they should be able to live their lives as they see fit. A third is the oligarchs who will be allowed to do as they see fit, whether in a free-for-all of oil and gas drilling or in already dangerous areas like social media disinformation, AI, and cryptocurrencies.

Trump’s second coming may not quite herald the end of the world, but it will hand the ship of state over to a motley crew of libertines and libertarians, control freaks and fanatics. It will stage its own spectacles of mass roundups and treason trials for the amusement of the many millions who are, it now seems abundantly clear, entertained by exhibitions of cruelty. It will be a nonstop show, its cacophonous soundtrack amplified by Elon Musk and the thriving denizens of the digital manosphere.

For those who are now defeated, there is the task of creating a story and a movement that can provide an alternative clear and coherent enough to break through the coming bedlam. Blaming Harris or retreating into the old orthodoxy that only white men can hope to win will not be useful. Neither will an insistence on chasing a supposed centrism that avoids the conflicts that have to be faced and the choices that have to be made.

Arguably, Harris had both too many messages—abortion rights, the protection of democracy, an industrial revival, support for Ukraine and NATO, prescription drug prices, housing, simultaneous loyalty to Israel and sympathy for Palestinian suffering, the creation of an “opportunity economy”—and too few. The Democrats played down two very big things: the climate crisis and the income inequality that is sure to rise as new technologies further enrich existing elites. The result was an offering that was broad but shallow, based as it was on a decision not to address issues that are shaping the lives of Americans now and will continue to shape them in the coming decades.

Harris’s defeat showed that grace, good humor, intelligence, and energy—all of which she demonstrated amply—will not be enough. There has to be a capacity to tap into and redirect the discontent that Trump has been able to channel into hatred and fear. Trump has moved American politics away from parties and toward movements, away from process and toward performance. Those who oppose him will have to be better at playing on this new stage. Harris showed that the Democrats can summon crowds, that they too have the potential to create and sustain the kind of permanent campaign that has allowed Trump to ride out every setback.

Such a campaign must start from the recognition that the people who can form it now constitute the official “enemy from within,” a minority at risk of becoming, unless they can find an effective voice, the erroneous margin of the newly dominant America

—November 7, 2024

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

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 4:27 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Come off it, lad.

You're talking about Trump right now. You've talked about Trump every single day for 8 years, and there has never been a single moment you haven't thought about him.

Enjoy your next 4 years.
I can do hundreds

Completely unrelated to the post you quoted or the fact that neither you or your article author have not been able to stop thinking about Trump for more than 5 seconds on any given day. You think about Trump more often than men think about sex in a day.

Also, whatever you posted about Trump after that is probably a lie and whatever you said about yourself after that is definitely a lie.

I don't know. I didn't bother reading any of it. Just like I've never bothered to read any of the Jehovah's witness pamphlets. Eventually they got the hint and stopped coming to my house after years of ignoring them. Jehovah's Witnesses in Texas must be twice as annoying as they are in Indiana.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 4:30 PM

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

Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking.
I already did come up with a plan that is guaranteed to work. From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion. You can read about it at https://www.jw.org/en/

Second's plan is simple.

Join another cult!

Fuck your religion dude. Your family hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You missed the point that showing self-control, behaving decently, following the law rather than impulses and shameful urges, paying your taxes, going to work, etc. is the guaranteed way to prosper in America. So many Americans do NOT prosper solely because of their poor behavior when no one is watching, not even God (in their opinion).

You are a Jehovah's Witness cultist.

Why did we get stuck with you?

Shouldn't you be out knocking door to door to harass people in your free time?

This wouldn't be because you're wheelchair bound and/or 500 lbs obese now, would it fatty?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 4:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Harris’s defeat showed that grace, good humor, intelligence, and energy—all of which she demonstrated amply—will not be enough.

Kamala Harris exhibited none of the above attributes.

If the media wants to be taken seriously from now on, I suggest they put telling the truth at the top of their New Years resolutions.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 6:48 PM

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

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

Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking.
I already did come up with a plan that is guaranteed to work. From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion. You can read about it at https://www.jw.org/en/

Second's plan is simple.

Join another cult!

Fuck your religion dude. Your family hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You missed the point that showing self-control, behaving decently, following the law rather than impulses and shameful urges, paying your taxes, going to work, etc. is the guaranteed way to prosper in America. So many Americans do NOT prosper solely because of their poor behavior when no one is watching, not even God (in their opinion).

You are a Jehovah's Witness cultist.

Why did we get stuck with you?

Shouldn't you be out knocking door to door to harass people in your free time?

This wouldn't be because you're wheelchair bound and/or 500 lbs obese now, would it fatty?

This all started when Signym posted a challenge : "Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking." I gave an answer that you can't understand. There is another answer for the way to prosperity requiring adding to your vocabulary. “Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges. It applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses.

“Disinhibition” very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. Without sufficient inhibitions, people won't prosper. They won't behave well within their family, or at work, or when handling money. They won't control their eating, drinking, smoking, drugging, spending, etc. and the results are bad and get worse, but not instantaneous painful, which is why so many Americans can't make the mental connection between their “disinhibition” and their hardships and disappointing lives.

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

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Saturday, January 4, 2025 7:30 PM

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

Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking.
I already did come up with a plan that is guaranteed to work. From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion. You can read about it at https://www.jw.org/en/

Second's plan is simple.

Join another cult!

Fuck your religion dude. Your family hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You missed the point that showing self-control, behaving decently, following the law rather than impulses and shameful urges, paying your taxes, going to work, etc. is the guaranteed way to prosper in America. So many Americans do NOT prosper solely because of their poor behavior when no one is watching, not even God (in their opinion).

You are a Jehovah's Witness cultist.

Why did we get stuck with you?

Shouldn't you be out knocking door to door to harass people in your free time?

This wouldn't be because you're wheelchair bound and/or 500 lbs obese now, would it fatty?
This all started when Signym posted a challenge

No.

This started many, many, many years ago. I'm sure you were always like this long before you joined FFF.net or even watched the show. Because in the 8 years I've known you since I sobered up, you are the same Static Character you always were, so from the perspective of anybody here watching the years unfold, everyone should assume that you've always been this way and that you've never changed once, despite the fact that you're so obviously miserable 24/7/365.

You're the most judgemental person there ever was outside of Estus Pirkle.

It has been my experience that people who behave this way are the ones suffering from the most guilt and doing their damnedest to make sure nobody else knows what skeletons are really inside that closet of theirs.

Oh.... If I could be a fly on the wall and bear witness to all the evil shit you do every day when you know nobody is watching.

And yanno... I keep hearing recently the quote from Game of Thrones when Tywin Lannister says, "Any man who must say, 'I am the king,' is no true king, and how that applies to out-of-context soundbytes from Trump that MSNBC plays and frames in a false narrative.

Though the application of the quote in this context makes it a lie, the quote itself is the Truth. But that Truth doesn't just apply to Kings and to Prime Ministers and to Presidents.

That Truth can be applied to any one of us.

Any man who must remind everyone every single day of how Good and Righteous they are is neither Good nor Righteous.

We're tired of hearing that out of you, and nobody believes it anyway. You are a joke, and you need to retire this course of dialogue.

Stop behaving like a little boy.

You know about pretty much every one of my abundant character flaws, because I don't even make any attempts to obfuscate them. And I never have. I have put them out there for the world to see, and I have done so since I signed up to the site around 2006. And I have never gone back into my post history once to delete some of the terrible shit I was spouting when hitting rock bottom either. Every awful, no-good, rotten thing I ever posted is still cataloged here.

You're terrified about sharing anything real about yourself because you know that there would be people who would do EXACTLY as you do and use Your Truth as ammo in any future debate against you, or use Your Truth to just to flat out insult you and/or lord around some imaginary superiority over you.

I'm telling you here and now that I'm not going to do that to you.

On the contrary, if you told the truth about yourself and admitted you have character flaws, thus rendering any attempt for you to use other people's flaws against them completely impotent, while at the same time finally setting the starting position for all future debates on even ground, I'd have a lot of respect for that decision.

But if you refuse to do this, we're never going to have any actual conversations because you present your side of any argument from a place that is completely disingenuous. You don't even realize it, but you've lost any argument you have ever made because there is nothing real about the character you're playing for us here in the RWED.

Furthermore, I should state clearly that I'm not saying the one prerequisite of being taken seriously by other people online is to say everything there is about yourself and put everything bad about yourself out there like I kinda ended up doing for the better part of 2 decades here.

Not at all that.

It's perfectly fine for you to not put any personal information out there and debate politics or any other issue. It only becomes a problem if and when you start building your Perfect Avatar an impossible-to-defeat vantage point, perched atop your Ivory Tower, bringing other people's lives into your arguments and making other people's past and present mistakes mere bullet-points in every argument against them when it becomes a problem. Especially when you use personal information against people who would never have done that to you, but also when doing this to people you know or at the very least assume would do the exact same thing to you if they were given the same advantage which you've never provided them.

That signals the end of your own credibility to everyone else.

And that happened a very, very long time ago. You have been without credibility here for as long as I've known you.

Once you've crossed that line, unless you make things right, nothing you ever say in front of those people will ever be taken seriously by anybody ever again.

That's where we are at with Second now. He's the only person who can change it.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 5, 2025 3:45 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND:

This all started when Signym posted a challenge...

"This" what?

Your lying, hatred, propaganda, and endless self aggrandizement and virtue-signaling?

No, son. That started before you even started posting here.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, January 5, 2025 4:12 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Why don't you come up with a plan for how we can be prosperous again? That would be a lot more forward-looking.

SECOND:
I already did come up with a plan that is guaranteed to work.

Except, it didn'twork for you. At least, not in the story you told about yourself.

Quote:
SECOND:
From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion.

I notice you didn't mention the most important person in your life: yourself. A
Went off the straight and narrow, didja, eh?

Also, not hearing anything about wife and children. Either they don't exist, or they're not JW either.

Quote:
Results: everyone in the family who joined jw.org is prosperous. Even my parents, who worked at Burger King, became rich (multi-millionaires) and lived long lives, filled with health and mental stability. Nobody in this part of the family retired from working. They are, or were, restaurateurs, teachers, nurses, engineers, even doctors and scientists in the next generation. They never cheat on taxes; they never vote; they pay no attention to politics.

Clearly, you stopped believing when you went to fight in Vietnam. And considering your obsession with Trump, and politics, you're not JW now either.

So, let me recap your story for you:

You dumped your family religion and went off to fight in Vietnam, where you discovered your true calling: calmly and efficiently shooting people from a helicopter. But thanks to a helicopter accident, you busted your ankles.

So when you returned to civilian life, you tried making $ like your dad, managing a fast food franchise. But your busted ankles hurt too much to let you stand on your feet all day, so you got a degree in engineering and played a small part in designing control systems for chemical plants.

Took some of your savings and made a what-the-hell play on Texas oil and the rest is history. At least, according to you: you got lucky, and got wealthy owning the rights to a commodity producing piece of land and making other people work for you.

Moral of the story? You can be a right bastard. You can even be a sociopath who enjoys killing. You can work hard and get an education.

But if you REALLY want to get wealthy, get lucky.

Or marry someone wealthy, or inherit your parents' wealth.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, January 5, 2025 7:15 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You're the most judgemental person there ever was outside of Estus Pirkle.

It has been my experience that people who behave this way are the ones suffering from the most guilt and doing their damnedest to make sure nobody else knows what skeletons are really inside that closet of theirs.

Oh.... If I could be a fly on the wall and bear witness to all the evil shit you do every day when you know nobody is watching.

Have you seen the show My 600-lb Life?

https://eztvx.to/shows/2870/my-600-lb-life/

The show always starts the same but the endings can be different. In the beginning, the 600-pounder can hardly move around the house, except when there is food to eat. Then they go to Dr. Now, where a nurse weighs the 600-pounder. Dr. Now gives them a diet booklet to read and the nurse schedules another weighing in two months.

Dr. Now does not brag about being lighter than the 600-pounder. This is not at all about Dr. Now. It is about being fat and an early death if the 600-pounder does not change their habits.

The homes of 600-pounders all look the same. They are poor people. The cars they own all look the same. They are poor people. There isn't much variation from one episode to the next, other than it is always a different 600-pounder who needs to change their eating habits or die young.

Some of the 600-pounders are enraged by the injustice of it all. How dare Dr. Now tell them what to eat? The Doctor shrugs. What can the Doctor do, change the force of gravity so that the 600-pounder weighs 200 pounds? That is what Trumptards want. They want the force of gravity changed so they don't have to change. They will become light as soap bubbles floating through life without trouble. Fortunately, there is Donald Trump who tells them he can control the gravity that is pulling his Trumptards down. All they have to do is believe Trump can fix their lives.

Trump is certainly NOT telling them to change themselves and go on a diet. Instead, Trump will remake America, lowering gravity, so that Trumptards don't have to diet. You are already at a perfectly healthy weight, per Trump. In vivid contrast, Doctor Now would remind Trumptards that the scales show they are very much in danger from their unfortunate lifestyles and unhealthy habits.

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 5, 2025 7:18 AM

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

As Trump's election is certified, Americans should declare war on stupidity

Shame is what keeps us in check, or at least it should. It certainly used to. Trump, devoid of shame, has gone to great lengths to eviscerate that societal check.

By Rex Huppke | 5:09 a.m. ET Jan. 5, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/01/05/trump-pres
idential-election-certification-embrace-stupidity/77409672007/

On the eve of Donald Trump’s election certification, the best thing sensible Americans who oppose him and the MAGA leadership can do is remember that stupidity should be embarrassing.

Trump exists in our political sphere because he persuaded people to forget that simple fact. He somehow turned dunderheads like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and, of course, himself – public figures who routinely utter abject nonsense – into people who get taken seriously.

Following the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Year’s Day, Trump ranted about immigration when the suspect killed in the attack was a U.S. citizen. That was stupid and unhelpful. For a president-elect and elected leaders who protect him, it should be deeply embarrassing.

Trump has made stupidity acceptable. It shouldn't be.

When Greene hypothesized that Jewish space lasers started California wildfires, that was not a mistake or an “oops” moment. It was stupid, and it should have been the embarrassing end of her political career.

When Kennedy encourages people to drink bacteria-laden raw milk, he should be laughed out of the country. Instead, Trump has picked him to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is utterly stupid and should be profoundly embarrassing for Trump.

Yet here we are, waiting for Trump to return to the White House and install harebrained MAGA acolytes in all positions of power, confidently and without shame.

It’s that last bit that’s the problem: “without shame.”

Bringing back shame may be powerful tool to deal with Trump

Shame is what keeps us in check, or at least it should. It certainly used to.

If we tolerate stupidity in the public sphere, it will flourish

Trump, devoid of shame, has gone to great lengths to eviscerate that societal check.

How else do you explain politicians supporting him – a convicted felon, an inveterate liar, a man found liable of sexual abuse – for a third time? The decision to put someone like Trump back in the most powerful position in America should be embarrassing. It wasn’t.

That’s enough to make people who dislike Trump, whether because of his politics or his personality, feel powerless. I get that.

However, I’d argue the best way to reclaim power in the age of Trumpism is to stop tolerating stupidity.
Stupidity isn't about book smarts, it's about choosing ignorance

Before I go further on that, let’s be clear what I mean by “stupidity.” I’m not talking about any level of education.

Heck, most of the people Trump surrounds himself with are highly educated but dumb as fence posts.

Stupidity is speaking authoritatively about things you don’t understand at all. It’s the willingness to say something objectively false and refuse to admit you’re wrong. It’s the lack of curiosity that allows our leaders to accept bologna conspiracy theories over provable facts.

Those, to me, are traits that should be embarrassing.

Stop giving elected officials embracing stupidity a pass

But since Trump’s first presidential win, some people have been afraid to call out such traits.

The argument is, essentially: “Well, he won people over, so we shouldn’t call him dumb lest we insult his voters, who we must do our best to understand.”

That hasn’t worked out particularly well. If anything, proud ignorance has flourished.

So now, as we await whatever fresh hell a new Trump administration will bring, it’s time to stop pandering to politicians who have embraced a reality disconnected from actual reality.
Nobody's job is to make fools feel comfortable

When Trump blames an act of domestic terrorism by a former U.S. Army soldier on immigrants, we should loudly call that what it is: stupid. It's not a matter of differing opinions or "agreeing to disagree."

It's, "If you can't accept basic facts, you're a chucklehead who should be shunned."

Making people feel embarrassed for believing claptrap or speaking a bald-faced lie isn’t cruel. It’s corrective.

We don’t coddle our kids when they spew nonsense or think the truth is irrelevant. We correct them. And we do that to avoid the kind of chaos Trump has brought and continues to bring.

Do it for America: Make Stupidity Embarrassing Again

So I encourage you, as this year goes along, to make politicians who say stupid things feel uncomfortable. You may not think your voice matters, but the collective force of all our voices reminding people our society looks down on willful ignorance might matter.

Besides, we tried the other way, and things only got worse.

Comforting fools paves a path for more fools to follow. Do America a favor – mock stupidity at every turn.

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 5, 2025 10:33 AM

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

Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration. Here's who they are
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-tapped-unprecedented-13-billionaires-t
op-administration-roles/story?id=116872968

We have a convicted criminal billionaire about to be sworn in as president with the richest cabinet in American (and, perhaps, world) history, all with an agenda of making the rich even richer. (It’s worth noting — something almost always ignored by the mainstream press — that Trump’s conviction was for using his fortune for election interference leading to a stolen 2016 election; by hiding his affair with Stormy Daniels he kept information away from the public that he believed could have led to his loss that year.)
https://hartmannreport.com/p/saturday-report-1425-is-the-scarlet

As an example of Trump's fundamental depravity, shamelessness and inability to take responsibility for what he did:

Donald Trump Calls for Stormy Daniels Case Judge Juan Merchan to Be Disbarred
Jan 04, 2025 at 7:00 PM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-judge-juan-merchan-disbarred-200
9762

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 5, 2025 12:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND attempts to conflate his life with his parents', and doesn't succeed.

Quote:
SECOND:
From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion.

I notice you didn't mention the most important person in your life: yourself.
Went off the straight and narrow, didja, eh?

Also, not hearing anything about wife and children. Either they don't exist, or they're not JW either.

Quote:
Results: everyone in the family who joined jw.org is prosperous. Even my parents, who worked at Burger King, became rich (multi-millionaires) and lived long lives, filled with health and mental stability. Nobody in this part of the family retired from working. They are, or were, restaurateurs, teachers, nurses, engineers, even doctors and scientists in the next generation. They never cheat on taxes; they never vote; they pay no attention to politics.

Clearly, you stopped believing when you went to fight in Vietnam. And considering your obsession with Trump, and politics, you're not JW now either.

So, let me recap your story for you:

You dumped your family religion and went off to fight in Vietnam, where you discovered your true calling: calmly and efficiently shooting people from a helicopter. But thanks to a helicopter accident, you busted your ankles.

So when you returned to civilian life, you tried making $ like your dad, managing a fast food franchise. But your busted ankles hurt too much to let you stand on your feet all day, so you got a degree in engineering and played a small part in designing control systems for chemical plants.

Took some of your savings and made a what-the-hell play on Texas oil and the rest is history. At least, according to you: you got lucky, and got wealthy owning the rights to a commodity producing piece of land and making other people work for you.

Moral of the story?

You can be a right bastard.
You can even be a sociopath who enjoys killing.
You can work hard and get an education.

But if you REALLY want to get wealthy, get lucky.

Or marry someone wealthy, or inherit your parents' wealth.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, January 5, 2025 6:31 PM

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

(President) Elon Musk killed PBM reform without knowing what a PBM is

By Kevin Drum | January 5, 2025 – 1:04 pm

https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-killed-pbm-reform-without-knowing-
what-a-pbm-is/

I was puttering around on something else when I ran across this:

Quote:
What is a “pharmacy benefit manager”? https://t.co/wQSRCreBDK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 31, 2024

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1873972860106268740

Well, Elon, a pharmacy benefit manager is a company that handles negotiations with pharma companies on behalf of health insurers. Three big ones control almost the entire market and they supposedly bring down the cost of drugs through their collective buying power.

But they're also in the business of being maximally profitable, which doesn't always match up with saving consumers money. After years of PBM abuses being reported, in 2024 Congress was finally ready to do something:

Quote:
Bipartisan lawmakers introduced a new bill on Tuesday that aims to crack down on the business practices of drug supply chain middlemen who are widely accused of inflating prescription medication prices and harming U.S. patients and pharmacies.

....Lawmakers and drugmakers alike argue that PBMs overcharge the plans they negotiate rebates for, underpay pharmacies and fail to pass on savings from those discounts to patients. Auchincloss said those practices have allowed PBMs to trap $300 billion in revenue in the middle of the drug supply chain between manufacturers and patients.

....Among the bill’s other efforts, it requires PBMs to share 80% of rebates with patients and prohibits several other practices. It would bar requiring patients to obtain branded medications when a cheaper generic version is available, steering patients to PBM-affiliated pharmacies and excluding any in-network pharmacy from filling a prescription, among other tactics.

Unfortunately, the bill failed to pass. You, Elon, should know this since you were the one who killed it. It was part of last month's Continuing Resolution that you mounted a jihad against, demanding that the CR should maintain current funding and absolutely nothing else.¹ This meant ditching PBM reform because it was 500 pages long and you insisted that page count was the proper metric for judging the bill.

So PBM reform died. And now you're telling us you never even knew what it was?

¹Except for hurricane relief, farm subsidies, the Key Bridge, Virginia class subs, and pediatric cancer research.

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 6, 2025 11:19 AM

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

Trump tells the world that he is Looney Tunes.

Trump’s Sunday evening tale of woe continued, in third person no less: “Ultimately, the Biden/Harris DOJ forced Bragg to concoct anything to embarrass TRUMP. But it was even more so what the CORRUPT and TOTALLY CONFLICTED POLITICAL HACK Judge did, and is doing, on this sham trial.”

He then claimed he is legally not allowed to speak about the judge’s “conflicts of interest,” even after calling Merchan a “TOTALLY CONFLICTED POLITICAL HACK” in the previous sentence.

“I even have, STILL, an Unconstitutional Gag Order where I am not allowed to speak about the Judge’s highly disqualifying Conflicts of Interest. Virtually ever legal scholar and pundit says THERE IS NO (ZERO!) CASE AGAINST ME,” he lamented.

“The Judge fabricated the facts, and the law, no different than the other New York Judicial and Prosecutorial Witch Hunts,” Trump added. (No, Mr Trump, the judge did not fabricate laws or facts.)
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-blasts-corrupt-and-broken-legal-sy
stem-ahead-of-hush-money-sentencing/

That Trump speech was absolutely Looney Tunes

It'd be like if Ebenezer Scrooge spent all night with those ghosts, woke up, saw the poor kid out his window, and instead of tossing him a coin to buy a Christmas goose, spit on him and dropped an anvil on his head.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/1e73q52/that_trump_speec
h_was_absolutely_looney_tunes/

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 6, 2025 11:56 AM

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

Trump preparing to abandon yet another promise

January 6, 2025

The Great Walkback continues. First, Donald Trump said he couldn't guarantee that his tariffs wouldn't raise prices. Then he admitted that he couldn't bring down the cost of groceries after all. Today comes news that he's backing down from his sweeping tariff plan on everyone:

Quote:
President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are exploring tariff plans that would be applied to every country but only cover critical imports, three people familiar with the matter said — a key shift from his plans during the 2024 presidential campaign.

....Exactly which imports or industries would face tariffs was not immediately clear. Preliminary discussions have largely focused on several key sectors that the Trump team wants to bring back to the United States, the people said. Those include the defense industrial supply chain (through tariffs on steel, iron, aluminum and copper); critical medical supplies (syringes, needles, vials and pharmaceutical materials); and energy production (batteries, rare earth minerals and even solar panels), two of the people said.

This stuff accounts for less than 5% of US imports — and some of it is subject to high tariffs already. Stay tuned for more abandoned Trump promises.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/06/trump-tariff-econom
y-trade/

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 6, 2025 12:28 PM

Shouting into the void, huh?

That's what it's come to.

I'm sure there's better things you can be doing with your time, Second.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 6, 2025 2:12 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shouting into the void, huh?

That's what it's come to.

I'm sure there's better things you can be doing with your time, Second.

I've gotten satisfaction many times over many years by telling certain assholes that smoking causes cancer. They irritably respond with, "None of your business", "You can't make me stop!" or some other nitwit Trumptard retort. Where does the satisfaction come in? When they suffer and die horribly from smoking. The very real advantage to building long-term wealth by not smoking is one of many things I picked up at JW.org, without joining that religion. Trumptards' behavior is constructed mostly from habits that kill them and make them poorer but they see their behavior as expressing Freedom and Happiness.

https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/smoking-sin/

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 6, 2025 2:32 PM

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

Trump’s Rage Over His Sentencing Suddenly Takes a Dark, Unnerving Turn

As Trump erupts over his coming sentencing for his hush-money conviction, a leading political theorist explains how his fury is sending unsettling signals about his coming authoritarian rule.

Buried in Trump’s rage was a key tell: He’s signaling that he’ll use his conviction as a pretext to carry out his own autocratic second-term designs. There are also indications that he hopes to milk his sentencing toward other ugly ends.

https://newrepublic.com/article/189843/trumps-rage-sentencing-suddenly
-takes-dark-unnerving-turn

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 6, 2025 2:45 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shouting into the void, huh?

That's what it's come to.

I'm sure there's better things you can be doing with your time, Second.
I've gotten satisfaction many times over many years by telling certain assholes that smoking causes cancer. They irritably respond with, "None of your business", "You can't make me stop!" or some other nitwit Trumptard retort.

That predates Trump by millions of years. The only difference is if we were cavemen I'd put you in the fucking ground for even speaking to me.

It is none of your business, and you can't make anybody do shit.

Quote:
Where does the satisfaction come in? When they suffer and die horribly from smoking.

That's because you are a garbage human being and you get glee out of watching people who disagree with you suffer.

I'll bet you were rock hard while telling everyone at the funeral that you told him so.

Nobody cares about your personal stories because you are completely full of shit, worm.

None of this ever happened.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 8:00 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's because you are a garbage human being and you get glee out of watching people who disagree with you suffer.

I'll bet you were rock hard while telling everyone at the funeral that you told him so.

Nobody cares about your personal stories because you are completely full of shit, worm.

None of this ever happened.

6ix, you are like this because you are a dimwit who, after a long time delay allowing you to forget years of living negligently, is finally facing the consequences of being a fool. You want mercy. You are terrified by the cold hands of natural law around your neck, squeezing the life out of you for what you did while drunk.

Republicans trolled with their own January 6, 2021 comments

On Monday, Kinzinger posted a January 6, 2021 tweet from U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that reads, “Those who made this attack on our government need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their actions are repugnant to democracy.”

Graham has since fully embraced Donald Trump and his allies, including those who supported his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Kinzinger also posted two tweets from now-Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that read: “I unambiguously condemn in the strongest possible terms any and all forms of violent protest. Any individual who committed violence today should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and, “It is beyond time to remember that while we may disagree, we are all Americans, and there is far more that unites us than divides us. I extend my deepest thanks to the United States Capitol Police for protecting the Capitol complex today and all days.”

Johnson was a top architect of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) had written, “These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable. While I am safe and sheltering in place, these protests are prohibiting us from doing our constitutional duty. I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws.”

U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) wrote, “This violence and destruction have no place in our republic. It must end now.”

Kinzinger also responded by thanking him.

He then summed up his thoughts, saying: “Jan 6th is a reminder to me: cowardice spreads like wildfire… this country needs leaders who are willing to tell the people the truth, not pander to lies.”

https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/cowardice-trump/

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 7, 2025 8:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's because you are a garbage human being and you get glee out of watching people who disagree with you suffer.

I'll bet you were rock hard while telling everyone at the funeral that you told him so.

Nobody cares about your personal stories because you are completely full of shit, worm.

None of this ever happened.
6ix, you are like this because you are a dimwit

Oh, you and I both know that nothing could be further from the truth.

The rest of your post was ignored.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 12:37 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh, you and I both know that nothing could be further from the truth.

The rest of your post was ignored.

‘Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,’ says Danish PM as Donald Trump Jr. arrives

By Seb Starcevic and Jakob Weizman | January 7, 2025 4:20 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/greenland-not-for-sale-danish-pm-mette
-frederiksen-us-donald-trump-jr/

Greenland has made it clear that it is not for sale, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday, in response to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s fixation with buying the massive Arctic island.

Frederiksen said Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede “has been very, very clear … that there is a lot of support among the people of Greenland that Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either.”

The Danish leader’s remarks come after Trump suggested purchasing Greenland from Denmark last month, calling a U.S. acquisition of the Arctic territory an “absolute necessity.” He also made the proposal in 2019 during his first term which drew a rebuke from Frederiksen.

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., landed in Greenland on Tuesday on what he called a private visit. But his entourage included firebrand conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the elder Trump’s personnel director, Sergio Gor. Trump Sr. described them as his representatives.

“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote in a Tuesday post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Five years after slapping down Trump’s Arctic aspirations, Frederiksen reiterated once more that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.”

“On one hand, I am pleased regarding the rise in American interest in Greenland,” Frederiksen said in an interview Tuesday with Danish broadcaster TV 2. “But of course it is important that it takes place in a way where it is the Greenlanders’ decision, what their future holds.”

Greenland, the world’s largest island with a population of around 60,000, was a Danish colony until it became self-ruling with its own parliament in 1979. It remains a territory of Denmark, with Copenhagen exercising control over its foreign and defense policy.

As global powers seek to expand their reach and footprint in the Arctic, mineral-rich Greenland — which hosts a U.S. military base — is coveted for its strategic value in security and trade.

Frederiksen, who in 2019 described Trump’s bid to purchase the island as “absurd,” said it was up to Greenlanders to decide their own future, calling the growing independence movement on the island “legitimate.”

“I can notice a strong wish amongst many Greenlanders to move toward independence,” she said. “It is legitimate, and therefore I think that it is important that Greenland’s future is shaped in [the Greenlandic capital] Nuuk.”

Under a 2009 agreement with Denmark, Greenland can declare independence only after a successful referendum — which its leader Egede appeared to hint, during his New Year’s address, might be held in tandem with the island’s upcoming parliamentary election in April.

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 7, 2025 3:41 PM

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

US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened "very high" tariffs on Denmark if it resists his effort to take control of Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.

Asked during a news conference Tuesday if he would rule out using military or economic force in order to take control of the strategically-important island, he said: "No, I can't assure you on either of those two."

"I can say this, we need them for economic security," he said.

Trump also said he would use "economic force" against Canada and called the US-Canada border an "artificially drawn line".

Trump's remarks came as his son, Donald Trump Jr, visited Greenland.

Since winning re-election Trump has repeatedly returned to the idea of US territorial expansion - including taking back the Panama Canal.

During the news conference Trump said the canal "is vital to our country" and claimed "it's being operated by China". He previously accused Panama of overcharging US ships to use the waterway, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

"Giving the Panama Canal to Panama was a very big mistake," Trump said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzn48jwz2o

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 7, 2025 4:48 PM

THG

JANUARY 6 THE WAY DEMOCRATS DO IT—PEACEFULLY

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 5:26 PM

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

Here are the highlights of Donald Trump's press conference this morning.

• The Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the Gulf of America.
Fact check: Too late. Mississippi already proposed this a decade ago as a joke.

• He might seize the Panama Canal with military force.
Fact check: Sure he will.

• Biden has no right to keep implementing policies Trump dislikes.
Fact check: Biden’s term ends on January 20, 2025.

• “We have inflation at a level we’ve never had before.”
Fact check:

• The FBI mounted a false flag operation on January 6. Or maybe Hezbollah.
Fact check: No, neither of them did.

• He'll levy high tariffs on Denmark if it doesn't give him Greenland.
Fact check: Everyone who uses Ozempic (made in Denmark) will love this.

• “All hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas doesn't release its hostages.
Fact check: Does this mean Trump plans to send US troops to Gaza?

• He will use “economic force” to join Canada and the United States together.
Fact check: The joke is getting old.

• Inflation is due to high energy costs.
Fact check:

https://jabberwocking.com/trump-blathers-inanely-at-press-conference/

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 7, 2025 6:46 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I NOTICED SECOND IS STUDIOUSLY AVOIDING THE STORY OF HIS LIFE, BC IT DOESN'T TELL THE STORY HE WANTS.

Quote:
SECOND:
From your viewpoint, it would be an experiment that started 62 years ago in my family in Texas. From my perspective, it is a proven fact. The most important people in my life, parents/sisters/my mother's sister/her children joined the same religion.

Quote:
Results: everyone in the family who joined jw.org is prosperous. Even my parents, who worked at Burger King, became rich (multi-millionaires) and lived long lives, filled with health and mental stability. Nobody in this part of the family retired from working. They are, or were, restaurateurs, teachers, nurses, engineers, even doctors and scientists in the next generation. They never cheat on taxes; they never vote; they pay no attention to politics.

Clearly, you stopped believing when you went to fight in Vietnam. And considering your obsession with Trump, and politics, you're not JW now either.

So, let me recap your story for you:

You dumped your family religion and went off to fight in Vietnam, where you discovered your true calling: calmly and efficiently shooting people from a helicopter. But thanks to a helicopter accident, you busted your ankles.

So when you returned to civilian life, you tried making $ like your dad, managing a fast food franchise. But your busted ankles hurt too much to let you stand on your feet all day, so you got a degree in engineering and played a small part in designing control systems for chemical plants.

Took some of your savings and made a what-the-hell play on Texas oil and the rest is history. At least, according to you: you got lucky, and got wealthy owning the rights to a commodity producing piece of land and making other people work for you.

Moral of the story?

You can be a right bastard.
You can be a sociopath who enjoys killing.
You can work hard and get an education.

But if you REALLY want to get wealthy, get lucky.

Or marry someone wealthy, or inherit your parents' wealth.

Quote:
Where does the satisfaction come in? When they suffer and die horribly from smoking.

I guess if you can't get your jollies shooting people from a helicopter, you do the next best thing.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 7:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh, you and I both know that nothing could be further from the truth.

The rest of your post was ignored.
‘Greenland

We weren't discussing Greenland. Stop quoting tweeting me and replying with stuff that has nothing to do with our conversation.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 7:30 PM

Did you guys enjoy watching Kamala Harris certify Trump?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 7:49 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, let me recap your story for you:

There is one religious lesson I learned and always obey. It is the same one that Trump always violates. Trump and his Trumptards claim to follow, but don't, because tax-cheating and lawlessness feel good for Trumptards when they think they can get away with it:

"Render unto Caesar" means to give to the earthly authority, represented by "Caesar," what is rightfully theirs, typically referring to paying taxes or respecting government laws, while simultaneously acknowledging that ultimate allegiance belongs to God; it comes from a Bible verse where Jesus says, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:17), essentially separating earthly and spiritual duties.

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 7, 2025 8:12 PM

Okay, Socrates.

STFU dude. You judgemental, mental midget.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, January 7, 2025 8:13 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, let me recap your story for you: You dumped your family religion and went off to fight in Vietnam, where you discovered your true calling: calmly and efficiently shooting people from a helicopter. But thanks to a helicopter accident, you busted your ankles.

So when you returned to civilian life, you tried making $ like your dad, managing a fast food franchise. But your busted ankles hurt too much to let you stand on your feet all day, so you got a degree in engineering and played a small part in designing control systems for chemical plants.

Took some of your savings and made a what-the-hell play on Texas oil and the rest is history. At least, according to you: you got lucky, and got wealthy owning the rights to a commodity producing piece of land and making other people work for you.

Moral of the story?

You can be a right bastard.
You can be a sociopath who enjoys killing.
You can work hard and get an education.

But if you REALLY want to get wealthy, get lucky.

Or marry someone wealthy, or inherit your parents' wealth.

SECOND:
There is one religious lesson I learned and always obey. It is the same one that Trump always violates. Trump and his Trumptards claim to follow, but don't, because tax-cheating and lawlessness feel good for Trumptards when they think they can get away with it:

Oh, well!
At least there's that!
Must make up for you being an utterly miserable person!

*****

OK, I'll stop picking in your now. Clearly, you're very angry about something. But your constant lying and trying to make other people miserable isn't gonna fix whatever's bothering you.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 7:08 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Okay, Socrates.

STFU dude. You judgemental, mental midget.

Trump's lawyer was jailed for years because he delivered payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump's DOJ put him in jail. Later, Trump was convicted over the same payments. Is it too hard for a Trumptard to understand that Trump's bad actions cause Trump's legal troubles? I already know the answer from every Trumptard I asked. I also know they get into legal trouble, too, and believe the world is unfair to them, which is why they voted for Trump. He will change the world for them. Changing the world as a whole seems easier than changing themselves a tiny bit, at least to them.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/22/former-donald-trump-lawyer-michael-coh
en-finishes-criminal-sentence.html

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 7:29 AM

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

Elon Musk Biographer Details Why He Thinks Billionaire Is ‘Going Mad’

Josh Fiallo | Jan. 7 2025 10:23AM EST

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-biographer-seth-abramson-detai
ls-why-he-thinks-billionaire-is-going-mad/

An Elon Musk biographer has sounded the alarm that the world’s richest man may be losing his mind.

The Harvard Law-educated biographer Seth Abramson speculated Monday that Musk might be “going mad” in a setting for all to see—brought on by his growing stress, history of mental illness, and self-described heavy drug use.

“I legitimately believe Elon Musk may be going mad,” he posted to X. “I’m a Musk biographer who has been tracking his online behavior for the last two years—and given that he’s admitted to all of mental illness, heavy drug use, and crippling stress, it is now reasonable to fear he is deeply unwell.”

Abramson, 48, added that Musk’s mental state could have consequences worldwide.

“His private struggles would not be of general concern except they have dramatic public consequences,” he said. “His holdings across many civilization-essential industries and the fact that he’s the incoming POTUS mean that his madness and increasing incitement of violence endanger us all.”

The biographer’s “informed warning,” as he described it, comes after Musk went on a posting frenzy about British politics that has ruffled more than a few feathers across the pond. A tracking website says that Musk has averaged 62 posts daily for the last week.

It appears Musk’s relentless posting—and near-constant presence near Donald Trump—may also be annoying some in the MAGA world, including its leader.

It was reported shortly after the election that Musk had a “massive blow-up” with a Trump aide inside Mar-a-Lago regarding the leaking of Trump’s cabinet picks.

More recently, The New York Times journalist and “Trump whisperer” Maggie Haberman said on a podcast this weekend that “Trump does complain a bit to people about how Musk is around a lot.”

Trump hasn’t shared such a sentiment publicly. He has instead embraced Musk, 53, as his “First Buddy”—a title and relationship that conveniently came on the heels of the South Africa native pumping at least $250 million into his campaign.

Musk has reportedly been renting out the $2,000-per-night Banyan Cottage at Mar-a-Lago, from where he has been crashing the president-elect’s dinners with tech billionaires and has also sat in on personnel meetings.

From his new South Florida digs, Musk has also shown that he plans to flex his immense influence beyond U.S. politics. He endorsed the German far-right party Alternative for Germany ahead of the country’s snap election last month and has since diverted his Twitter fingers to trying to overthrow the current British government.

Abramson suggested the outgoing Biden Administration should use its final weeks in power to put in safeguards to protect against—or at least try to limit—Musk before Trump steps foot in the Oval Office.

This “urgent action,” he said, could include ending U.S. contracts with him, filing lawsuits to block his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, and launching federal probes into his dealings.

“If no action is taken—and I suspect no action will be taken—what this man in his burgeoning madness does to America as POTUS in the coming years will be on the heads of not just him and those who support or enable him but those who ignored urgent, informed warnings like this one,” Abramson concluded.

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 7:51 AM

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

When Trump began overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.

An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money . . .

A second reason is that Trump uses his international bullying as fan service for his base.

Trump’s most recent gestures reveal his symbolic intent. To be sure, you can construct a coherent policy rationale for some kind of international deal involving Greenland. But there is little evidence that Trump is interested in any kind of practical deal. He wants to menace allies. You don’t dispatch Donald Trump Jr., whose professional expertise, to the extent he has any, is monetizing the Trump brand, to advance a real diplomatic or military strategy. You send Don Jr. to entertain the base. Meanwhile, renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t even plausibly related to any economic or territorial objective. It’s pure symbolic bluster.

Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/the-politic
al-logic-of-trump-s-international-threats/ar-AA1x7UYe

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 1:26 PM

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

Something strange is happening in the bond market. Is it Trump?

Quote:
Look at the dynamic over the past few days. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that people around Trump were planning a fairly limited, strategic set of tariffs rather than the destructive trade war against everyone Trump has been promising; Trump quickly responded with a Truth Social post calling the report “Fake News” and declaring that he does too intend to impose high tariffs on everyone and everything.

In short, Sources: “Trump isn’t as crazy as he looks.” Trump: “Yes I am!”

Then, as if to dispel any lingering suspicions that he might be saner than he appears, Trump held a press conference in which he appeared to call for annexing Canada, possibly invading Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. This morning CNN reported that Trump is considering declaring a national economic emergency — in a nation with low unemployment and inflation! — to justify a huge rise in tariffs.

What does this have to do with interest rates? There’s near-unanimity among economists that Trump’s announced agenda of high tariffs, tax cuts and mass deportations would be highly inflationary, although probably not right away; whatever Trump does, inflation will probably remain low for much of this year. Still, if he were to go through with any substantial part of that agenda, the Fed would definitely have to put further interest rate cuts on hold. In fact, it might well feel the need to raise rates again.

True, Trump — who declared yesterday that rates are still too high — would fly into a rage if the Fed were to raise rates. In fact, he might well demand that the Fed continue cutting rates. And given the way almost every prominent American institution has been prostrating itself, are we sure — really, really sure — that the Fed would be able to maintain its independence? Can we envision Fed officials hiding in their offices as a MAGA mob storms the Eccles Building? Actually, yes.

But if the Fed does let itself be pressured, that would eventually mean higher, not lower rates. Many economics students learn about how Richard Nixon pressured the Fed to keep rates low before the 1972 election, despite growing inflation concerns. The end result was to help send inflation and interest rates soaring.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-there-an-insanity-premium-on-int
erest

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 2:23 PM

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

Trump's minions are laying the groundwork for military action

Donald Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin's Ukraine invasion

By Heather Digby Parton | January 8, 2025 10:02AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/08/minions-are-laying-the-groundwork-for
-military-action/

We have every reason to believe that he's serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don't be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion. He wanted to do it in his last term.)

Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn't even a "vibe" in last November's election.

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 2:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump's minions are laying the groundwork for military action

Donald Trump appears to have taken some inspiration from Vladimir Putin's Ukraine invasion

By Heather Digby Parton | January 8, 2025 10:02AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/08/minions-are-laying-the-groundwork-for
-military-action/

We have every reason to believe that he's serious about some kind of military action in Mexico. (And don't be surprised if he proposes a Venezuelan invasion. He wanted to do it in his last term.)

Nobody voted for any of this. It wasn't even a "vibe" in last November's election.

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

I'm fine with it.

If we're going to spend money on the military, we might as well spend it fighting an actual enemy.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 3:12 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm fine with it.

If we're going to spend money on the military, we might as well spend it fighting an actual enemy.

Pope Francis says Donald Trump is not a Christian because Christians build bridges, not walls.

You gotta be pretty goddamn evil to be denounced by the Pope.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/pope-says-trump-is-not-christian
-for-plan-to-build-a-wall-on-u-s-mexico-border

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

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Wednesday, January 8, 2025 4:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm fine with it.

If we're going to spend money on the military, we might as well spend it fighting an actual enemy.
Pope Francis says Donald Trump is not a Christian because Christians build bridges, not walls.

You gotta be pretty goddamn evil to be denounced by the Pope.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/pope-says-trump-is-not-christian
-for-plan-to-build-a-wall-on-u-s-mexico-border

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

Pope Francis is a DEI, kid-fucking plant.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 7:31 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pope Francis is a DEI, kid-fucking plant.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

You are special, 6ix.

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

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 9:08 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pope Francis is a DEI, kid-fucking plant.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You are special, 6ix.

Maybe we should put it in the predictions thread.

You're not Catholic. No shame in admitting that you think the chances are greater than a coinflip that he's had more than his fair share of altar boys.

Besides... Nobody's given one single shit what any pope had to say about anything since Sinead O'Connor ripped up John Paul's glamour shots. Especially not any of you godless Democrats.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 2:40 PM

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

The problem of pardons

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US Constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. This has frequently been abused, mostly in banal ways, by lame-duck presidents to pull selfish stunts with no grounding in the public interest. Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. Of course, in practice, we do have a local criminal code and local courts that enforce it. But constitutionally speaking, these are federal laws and federal courts, and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution.

Needless to say, I would be extremely surprised if Trump has Hakeem Jeffries assassinated later this month. But bad actors (as Republicans know better than Democrats when talking about “normal” crime) probe boundaries to see what they can get away with. Trump got in hot water after 1/6, but ultimately he got away with it. He won the nomination, and he won the general election. He’s stated his intention to pardon the perpetrators, and by all accounts, he’s going to do it. If he gets away with that with minimal intra-party pushback or criticism, he’ll try more stuff. And we’ll see what happens.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later?r=87ery&utm_campaign
=post&utm_medium=web

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

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 8:52 PM

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

Elon Musk: A trillion here, a trillion there; whatever

By Tami Luhby | January 9, 2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/politics/elon-musk-backtracks-federal-b
udget-cuts/index.html

Elon Musk’s claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget showed he couldn’t do arithmetic. Elon has finally acknowledged this, but he tries to make a virtue of necessity:

Quote:
Elon Musk has walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, saying Wednesday that half that amount would be “an epic outcome.”

Look, here’s what’s gonna happen. Congress will eventually pass a bill that will cut a few billion from federal programs while making earlier tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses permanent. As a result, the deficit and debt will skyrocket. When the GOP loses their Congressional majorities in the midterms, they can go back to flogging Democrats for the deficits they created. Rinse and repeat.

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

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 9:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The problem of pardons

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US Constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. This has frequently been abused, mostly in banal ways, by lame-duck presidents to pull selfish stunts with no grounding in the public interest. Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. Of course, in practice, we do have a local criminal code and local courts that enforce it. But constitutionally speaking, these are federal laws and federal courts, and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution.

Needless to say, I would be extremely surprised if Trump has Hakeem Jeffries assassinated later this month. But bad actors (as Republicans know better than Democrats when talking about “normal” crime) probe boundaries to see what they can get away with. Trump got in hot water after 1/6, but ultimately he got away with it. He won the nomination, and he won the general election. He’s stated his intention to pardon the perpetrators, and by all accounts, he’s going to do it. If he gets away with that with minimal intra-party pushback or criticism, he’ll try more stuff. And we’ll see what happens.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/four-years-later?r=87ery&utm_campaign
=post&utm_medium=web

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

Well you just laid out the exact actions of the Democratic party under Clinton/Obama/Biden* leadership.

Thanks for that.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, January 9, 2025 9:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Elon Musk: A trillion here, a trillion there; whatever

By Tami Luhby | January 9, 2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/politics/elon-musk-backtracks-federal-b
udget-cuts/index.html

Elon Musk’s claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget showed he couldn’t do arithmetic. Elon has finally acknowledged this, but he tries to make a virtue of necessity:
Quote:
Elon Musk has walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, saying Wednesday that half that amount would be “an epic outcome.”
Look, here’s what’s gonna happen. Congress will eventually pass a bill that will cut a few billion from federal programs while making earlier tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses permanent. As a result, the deficit and debt will skyrocket. When the GOP loses their Congressional majorities in the midterms, they can go back to flogging Democrats for the deficits they created. Rinse and repeat.

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

Nobody is a fan of Tami's fan-fiction.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, January 10, 2025 7:00 AM

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

Trump’s Obsession With Greenland Is Funny. But It’s Sending a Dangerous Message to the Exact Wrong People.

Putin and Xi are listening.

By Fred Kaplan | Jan 10, 2025 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/trump-greenland-gulf-of-am
erica-panama-canada-putin-xi.html

Trump’s rants have a dangerous effect. His rhetoric is not different from Vladimir Putin’s on Ukraine or Xi Jinping’s on Taiwan. Russia and China arguably have sounder — more historically and culturally grounded — claims on Ukraine and Taiwan than the United States has on Greenland, Canada, or Panama. Trump probably won’t send an army to intimidate or conquer foreign lands, but his implicit claim that he has the right to do so sends a message to Putin and Xi that Trump wouldn’t mind if they went ahead and enacted their claims on Ukraine and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the once and future president alienates Canada and Mexico, our democratic neighbors and two of our closest trading partners. He is alienating all of South America by invoking horrible (and not so ancient) memories of gringo domination. He insults two charter members of NATO who have long stood as reliable strategic partners. And he is emulating — and flashing what could fairly be interpreted as a green light to — the world’s two dictators who are most able and tempted to upset the international norms about preserving sovereign borders.

And his second term in office hasn’t even begun.

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 10, 2025 3:34 PM