REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, April 3, 2025 00:40
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Friday, February 7, 2025 9:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND is reduced to insulting people he's never met?

I guess that's what happens when his marching orders don't come thru.



-----------
"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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Friday, February 7, 2025 10:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND is reduced to insulting people he's never met?


You must be new here. Welcome to Firefly Fans dot net. Hopefully our boy JSF comes around later tonight because he's a lot better at the introductions than I am.

Pleased to meet you. We have virtual milk and cookies, so please help yourself. Freshly baked!

Quote:
I guess that's what happens when his marching orders don't come thru.




My problem now is that it comes to a point where I start feeling bad for people and I'm not enjoying any of this half as much as I thought I would.

They fucked up a whole lot of people, our government and the Media.

We've watched it play out every day in here for years now. I've watched it going on for 8 years of sobriety now. I was never joking when I talked about the perpetual state of cognative dissonance that they've got to be walking around with to justify so many contradictory beliefs. That has to be exhausting to keep up 24/7/365, even if it is being done involuntarily now by the subconscious. How could you really do it on that level unless you've been able to compartmentalize aspects of your personality and hide them from each other? Maybe even kill parts of them off over time... the parts that are the most problematic when putting any real thought into what you believe.

Second is mentally ill. We know this.

And that media keeps mindfucking them every single day and making it worse.



This used to be fun when I felt like the weight of the world and all the money and corporations were behind the walls of sanity collapsing on us all, but none of that exists right now. There's nothing but a vacuum where it all used to be, and maybe a few feint voices of 6 months ago desperatly trying to scream loud enough that anyone will hear them... but starting to realize that it's too late and nobody is even listening anymore.

This just really isn't fun anymore.

Genuinely, the only thing that Second has left is personal insults now.

He was never shy about constantly doling them out everyday when things were different, sure, but that was part of what made all of this fun, and why I really thought I would enjoy it so much more when the insanity started to finally start ebbing...


But they left people like Ted and Second out in the cold.

The few voices who are still making noise just look like lunatics, and their DNC has now been 100% coopted by the furthest Left fringes of the party.


I know the dipshit is going to come right back in here and say something that makes me have fun destroying him again in the moment, but at some point you just start feeling like you're kicking a cripple who's wheelchair just turned over.


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

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 4:15 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND is reduced to insulting people he's never met?

SIX: You must be new here. Welcome to Firefly Fans dot net. Hopefully our boy JSF comes around later tonight because he's a lot better at the introductions than I am.

Pleased to meet you. We have virtual milk and cookies, so please help yourself. Freshly baked!
I'm new here *laugh nervously* Thanks for the cookies!

Quote:
SIGNY: I guess that's what happens when his marching orders don't come thru.



SIX: My problem now is that it comes to a point where I start feeling bad for people and I'm not enjoying any of this half as much as I thought I would.

They fucked up a whole lot of people, our government and the Media.

We've watched it play out every day in here for years now. I've watched it going on for 8 years of sobriety now. I was never joking when I talked about the perpetual state of cognative dissonance that they've got to be walking around with to justify so many contradictory beliefs. That has to be exhausting to keep up 24/7/365, even if it is being done involuntarily now by the subconscious. How could you really do it on that level unless you've been able to compartmentalize aspects of your personality and hide them from each other? Maybe even kill parts of them off over time... the parts that are the most problematic when putting any real thought into what you believe.

Second is mentally ill. We know this.
Yes, he is. I'm sure that part of him wants to feel good about himself. That's why he has to keep virtue signalling 24/7/365. I think we're beginning to see the real SECOND come out. So much anger....

Quote:
SIX: And that media keeps mindfucking them every single day and making it worse.

This used to be fun when I felt like the weight of the world and all the money and corporations were behind the walls of sanity [INSANITY?] collapsing on us all, but none of that exists right now. There's nothing but a vacuum where it all used to be, and maybe a few feint voices of 6 months ago desperatly trying to scream loud enough that anyone will hear them... but starting to realize that it's too late and nobody is even listening anymore.
Not following you...

Quote:
SIX: This just really isn't fun anymore.

Genuinely, the only thing that Second has left is personal insults now.

He was never shy about constantly doling them out everyday when things were different, sure, but that was part of what made all of this fun, and why I really thought I would enjoy it so much more when the insanity started to finally start ebbing...

But they left people like Ted and Second out in the cold.

The few voices who are still making noise just look like lunatics, and their DNC has now been 100% coopted by the furthest Left fringes of the party.

I know the dipshit is going to come right back in here and say something that makes me have fun destroying him again in the moment, but at some point you just start feeling like you're kicking a cripple who's wheelchair just turned over.


Well, TBH I think you have a defiant, oppositional streak in you. Now that there's no Goliath to slay, what's gonna get your motor revving?

Yeah, I can see how it used to be fun.

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


I guess I never really did.
But I gotta say ... so many of your replies were so pointed and funny I had to read them to hubby.



-----------
"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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Saturday, February 8, 2025 6:21 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares. Go tell your mom.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Even Andrew Tobias, meekest nicest fellow in America, is insinuating that this ends with Trump and Co-President Musk as bloody corpses full of bullet holes. That's the Spirit, Andrew!

How Three Geniuses See The Current Situation
February 7, 2025

Garry Kasparov’s Take

This will be dismissed as “hysteria” like many of my warnings about Trump and Musk that are coming true. But this doesn’t end with fights over top-secret documents, budget cuts, and unaccountable agents taking over. It ends with who has the guns when they won’t listen to the judges.

There are many steps between here and there, of course. But eventually they remove enough judges, refuse any access or challenges, and simply ignore the law and court orders the way they’re ignoring Congress now. What then?

More about Musk's Nazi past at https://andrewtobias.com/how-three-geniuses-see-the-current-situation/

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 6:22 AM

SECOND

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


Musk’s Treasury incursion puts the entire financial system at risk, former officials warn

February 6, 2025

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/musks-treasu
ry-incursion-puts-entire-financial-system-at-risk

Graham Steele and Emily DiVito write:

Elon Musk’s unprecedented access to the US Treasury’s payment system deserves the public outcry that it has received. As former Treasury officials, we fear the situation is even more dire than it might appear.

Musk’s recent actions, days after the Office of Management and Budget’s government funding pause that a federal judge quickly blocked, suggest a big and broad vision for a dramatically consolidated and politicized Treasury. This could have widespread effects on our nation’s financial stability, jeopardize the livelihoods of millions of Americans, and undermine the public’s confidence in our entire financial system.

Our financial system operates on a foundation of trust. Over the past century and a half, rules and protections have been in place to ensure people can trust that their money will be there when they need it. Few people appreciate, or are even aware of, that the Treasury payment system—and the Bureau of Fiscal Service that oversees it—send billions of payments totaling nearly $6 trillion each year.

And that’s not a bad thing. That most people don’t have to spend time worrying if their money is safe is a testament to how well this system has served us and how often things run according to plan. When people lose that sense of trust, panic, bank runs, and financial crises can happen. That trust has been undermined in recent days with the news that Elon Musk and his allies have accessed the Treasury’s payment system.

It’s important to understand that the US Treasury stands behind our entire banking and financial system. It manages and provides financing for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s program that backstops most customers’ deposits and intervenes in times of crisis to stabilize the banking system. The deposit insurance program stepped up in 2023 when Silicon Valley Bank and others precipitously collapsed.

This administration reportedly is considering eliminating the FDIC, a New Deal-era agency, and consolidating it within Treasury. Like many other financial system tools, the FDIC is most effective when the public trusts that it can and will keep the financial system stable and quickly handle crises should they occur.

If we had another Silicon Valley Bank-style collapse today, there would be deep uncertainty about the Treasury’s role in that process and if people would have access to their money.

The Treasury doesn’t just backstop the banking system. It also provides a foundation for financial markets by issuing US Treasuries. As the world’s safest and most liquid financial asset, Treasuries serve as collateral for financial transactions and a source of stable investment for people and financial institutions alike.

Musk has suggested that he has control over the payments system to deny payments in an attempt to cut what he deems to be wasteful spending. Let’s be clear: The Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” is a reckless and dangerous approach to the world’s safest financial asset.

The government’s failing to make payments doesn’t amount to cutting spending; it’s a default on our obligations. It would have ripple effects for our nation’s credit rating, borrowing costs, and the Treasury markets. Ultimately, it would destabilize the global financial system.

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 6:32 AM

SECOND

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


Law Professor Flags Trump 'Doomsday Scenario' That'll Cause 'Real Constitutional Crisis'

"A lot of lawyers are worried about" it, warned New York University's Ryan Goodman.

By Lee Moran | Feb 7, 2025, 03:49 AM EST

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/law-professor-donald-trump-doomsday-sce
nario_n_67a5bc05e4b011cd6d36e8eb

What happens if Donald Trump decides he will not abide by a court ruling?

Simmons suggested “we’re in a real jam” if Trump simply tells the Justice Department to ignore any court orders that prohibit him from carrying out his agenda.

Goodman agreed.

“That’s right. I think that is the doomsday scenario,” he reiterated.

Goodman pointed out that it “hasn’t happened yet” that the Trump administration has refused to abide by a court order, despite it possibly appearing to some people that they are.

“But what happens come the day that they do lose at the Supreme Court?” he asked. “Because I think some of these cases are just losers. And if they really want to push it, we’re in a real constitutional crisis.”

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 6:37 AM

SECOND

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


Bad News About Some of Those DOGE Staffers

A Researcher Found More Links Between DOGE Staffers and Far-Right Content

By Ben Mathis-Lilley | Feb 07, 2025 1:56 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-social-medi
a-donald-trump.html

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is running rampant through Washington at the moment. The group, created by executive order, has been trying to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development, a humanitarian agency, and has reportedly gained direct access to the Treasury Department system that distributes federal payments. (Whether either of these acts—or numerous others it’s taken—are legal is very much TBD.)

For all the headlines it’s generated, though, little is known about how many people are working for DOGE, or where they were drawn from. But reporting by Wired and others has identified six staffers, all evidently in their late teens or early 20s, who have backgrounds in computer science and ties to Musk’s private companies.

Using this information, extremism researcher Travis Brown has found a number of apparent connections between three DOGE staffers and the online far-right community that Musk has allowed to run amok on the social media service X, formerly known as Twitter. (Brown has been in the news previously for suing Musk in 2023 after his X account was suspended, but told me that the suit has been dropped. Neither the White House press office nor a spokesperson for DOGE responded to requests for comment on this article.)

An email ordering USAID employees to stay home, for instance, was written by an individual named Gavin Kliger. Per Wired, Kliger works in artificial intelligence and was a college student at the University of California, Berkeley, as recently as 2020. Brown used the Wayback Machine archive to retrieve the activity of a now-private X account which identified itself as belonging to a Gavin Kliger and listed its location as Berkeley. (Note: Some of the archived pages are saved only in the form of XML code.)

The Kliger account, Brown found, recently retweeted a Twitter/X post by Nick Fuentes, a far-right streamer who has said that he pursues the cause of “Aryan victory” and that Jews, who have “bastardized” the United States, do not belong in “Western civilization.” Here’s the Fuentes tweet, and what it was responding to:

Much more about the Nazis working for Co-President Musk at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-social-medi
a-donald-trump.html

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 7:12 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIX: Second is mentally ill. We know this.
Yes, he is. I'm sure that part of him wants to feel good about himself. That's why he has to keep virtue signalling 24/7/365. I think we're beginning to see the real SECOND come out. So much anger....
Signym, I am sure that you and 6ix have wasted your lives. But you try and try to convince yourselves you haven't by supporting Russia. Or by following Trump.

What should we do with these lives that we have? These existences? Borne out of nothingness, hurtling towards annihilation…. How can we make sense of these fragile, fleeting moments of existence that we have been given? More precisely, how can we do justice to the being that has been bestowed upon us? This incomprehensible, awesome gift that is so easy to lose sight of: buried beneath the detritus of everyday mundanity.

The Human Condition: Struggles of Cosmic Insignificance

https://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/human-condition-ze0z1310zjhar/

Throughout human history, people have repeatedly swung between extremes. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1986) noted these swings in his classic book The Cycles of American History. In this book, Schlesinger articulated the continuous political swings in U.S. history, particularly those between conservatism and liberalism, rigidity and permissiveness. However, there are many other forms of such swings in many other times and places.

The usual explanations for the swings of history, as well as individuals, are cultural, political, and biological. The founders of the United States swung away from the British motherland because of political and religious oppression. Certain nineteenth century abolitionists resorted to armed struggle because of unrelenting federal support of slavery. Post World War I Germany amassed a titanic arsenal, in part to avenge the humiliation it perceived at the Treaty of Versailles. McCarthyite anti-communists swelled in number following the advent of Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe. And so on. Schlesinger provides a cogent summation of these various dynamics:

“The roots of…cyclical self-sufficiency doubtless lie deep in the natural life of humanity. There is a cyclical pattern in organic nature — in the tides, in the seasons, in the night and day, in the systole and diastole of the human heart….People can never be fulfilled for long either in the public or in the private sector. We try one, then the other, and frustration compels a change in course. Moreover, however effective a particular course may be in meeting one set of troubles, it generally falters and fails when new troubles arise.”

From The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do About It by Kirk J. Schneider, PhD and published by University Professor’s Press, 2013.

Download The Cycles of American History from https://libgen.is//search.php?req=The+Cycles+of+American+History

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 8:08 AM

SECOND

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


Trump appoints Attorney General Pam Bondi to head a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias”:

“The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI ... and other agencies. In addition, the task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and Earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide. You never had that before, but this is a very powerful document I’m signing.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/06/trump-task-for
ce-christian-religious/78286967007/

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 10:10 AM

SECOND

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


What the Edwardians Could Teach Trump About Trade
Canada yesterday, Japan today: Another bogus trade complaint from Trump

By Paul Krugman | Feb 08, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/what-the-edwardians-could-teach-tru
mp

Trump’s latest trade spat: Telling Prime Minister Shigeru Ishida that Japan must eliminate its trade surplus with the United States.

I guess the campaign to alienate all of our allies continues. Beyond that, however, I think we can do a useful compare-and-contrast between Trump’s new complaint about Japan and his complaints about Canada, which brought us to the brink of a destructive trade war four days ago.

As a number of people finally caught on, Trump’s complaint that Canada’s trade surplus with the United States was somehow evidence that Canada was exploiting us fell apart as soon as you realized that this surplus was entirely explained by exports of oil from the Athabasca tar sands to the Midwest — a benefit to America, not a cost.

The story of Japan’s surplus is different. But like Canada, Japan is entirely innocent of wrongdoing.

Unlike Canada, Japan has been running significant surpluses on its current account — a broad definition of the trade balance that includes services and investment income:

Source: International Monetary Fund

But that’s OK, because Japan is exactly the kind of country that should be running current account surpluses.

Remember the basic accounting identity:

Current account + Net inflows of capital = 0

A nation that has net outflows of capital — that invests some of its savings abroad — must, as a matter of sheer arithmetic, be running a surplus on current account.

So when should a nation be investing a lot abroad? Well, we want and expect capital to flow from places where it earns a low return to places where it earns a higher return. The classic example is Britain in the decades before World War I. Britain was a mature, already industrialized economy that had already accumulated a lot of capital. It made sense for some of that capital to flow abroad to places that needed it.

To a large extent this involved sending capital to places where Europeans were moving in: Canada, Australia, Argentina, southern Brazil and, yes, the United States. The economic logic was clear: These places needed capital for their economic expansion, especially but not only to build railroads.

And so Britain ran very large current account surpluses for decades before World War I:

Source: Bank of England

How does modern Japan fit into this paradigm? Like late Victorian/Edwardian Britain, it’s a mature economy with limited opportunities for domestic investment, above all because of demography: Low fertility and limited immigration have meant a startling decline in Japan’s working age (15-64) population:

Source: OECD

So as I said, Japan is exactly the kind of country that should be running current account surpluses. Claiming that it is doing something wrong, or that America is somehow a victim here, is malicious nonsense.

And pointing this out will, of course, have no impact at all on Trump’s thinking.

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 10:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Mentally ill.

Sad. :(

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

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

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Saturday, February 8, 2025 1:27 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Im sure this is a santized version of govt spending, but I never knew it ecusted.

https://www.usaspending.gov/

The great thing about DOGE, tho, is instead of tackling corruption item-by-item, they went to the source and turned off the tap.

-----------
"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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Saturday, February 8, 2025 1:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Biden as brain-dead meatpuppet was apparently the logical extension of how the Presidency has been working since at least "the decider" GWB, with various department heads acting on their own agendas.

No more.

Quote:
These “expert” managers from Bush through Biden were proper figureheads of an unconstitutional counter-state comprising some 78 government agencies and 35,000 lawyers who seek to govern the full span of human existence through rules and regulations. And although the governance-by-committee approach presented it as a more “inclusive” and ethical form of leadership, the truth was that, in practice, administrative managerialism pushed the powers of the American people first to the margin of politics, then out of government completely.

Trump repudiates that paradigm.

There will be no administrative committee that jointly deliberates a course of action and then finds a “compromise” that always amounts to a half-measure with little buy-in. Trump knows exactly what he wants to do and to whom he is obligated. For ten years, Trump has put forward his beliefs and accepted the public’s judgment again and again, modifying some positions but holding firm on most. His election marks the end of an era that put the group over the individual, administration over execution.

Trump’s second term will be fundamentally different from his first. Through the appointments of Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard, and others, Trump is establishing a system of communication that will facilitate his command of the executive branch and the country. By replacing resistors with transistors – highly capable communicators of his energy, ideas, goals, and politics – Trump will project his vision and his achievements to the world. It’s what the American people voted for on November 5.

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/02/07/trump_alone_can_fix_it_1
52321.html

-----------
"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, February 9, 2025 7:20 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Mentally ill.

Sad. :(

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Indeed, Trump's Tax Plan shows his mental illness:

Trump Tax Priorities Reduce revenue by $5.0 trillion to $11.2 trillion

Trump Boosts debt to between 132 and 149 percent of GDP by 2035 compared to 100 percent today

Feb 6, 2025

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/trump-tax-priorities-total-5-11-trillion

Fiscal Impact of Trump’s Reported Tax Priorities (2026-2035)
Policy Low Est. High Est.

Extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act $3.9 trillion $4.8 trillion
Provide SALT Relief $200 billion $1.2 trillion
Cut Taxes on Tips $100 billion $550 billion
Cut Taxes on Overtime Pay $250 billion $3.0 trillion
Cut Taxes on Social Security $550 billion $1.5 trillion
Cut Taxes for Domestic Production $100 billion $200 billion

| Total $5.0 trillion $11.2 trillion |

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 7:33 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The great thing about DOGE, tho, is instead of tackling corruption item-by-item, they went to the source and turned off the tap.
“If you’re not a woke communist, you have nothing to fear”

By Scott Aaronson | February 8th, 2025

Last week, after I blogged about the freeze in all American federal science funding (which has since been lifted by a judge’s order), a Trump-supporting commenter named Kyle had this to say:
Quote:
No, these funding cuts are not permanent. He is only cutting funds until his staff can identify which money is going to the communists and the wokes. If you aren’t a woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.
Read that one more time: “If you aren’t woke or a communist, you have nothing to fear.”

Can you predict what happened barely a week later? Science magazine now reports that the Trump/Musk/DOGE administration is planning to cut the National Science Foundation’s annual budget from $9 billion to only $3 billion and to shift the little NSF funding that remains from universities to private companies.

More at https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8638

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 7:47 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Trump repudiates that paradigm.
Why Trump’s Data Purge is a Digital Book Burning

Erasing wokeness, one dataset and line of code at a time.

Using Github, you can watch as government websites are brought into compliance with Donald Trump’s executive orders. Out goes the word “equity;” in comes “fair.” And health and science data, once publicly available, disappears.

More at https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2025/02/donald-trump-is-chang
ing-america-down-to-the-code

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 8:25 AM

SECOND

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


What Happened the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy

The impact can linger not just for years but decades.

By Clay Risen | 02/06/2025 05:00 AM EST

Clay Risen is the author of RED SCARE: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, out from Scribner on March 18, 2025

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/06/government-workers-p
urge-1950s-communism-00202336

On Jan. 22, 1953, his first day as secretary of state, John Foster Dulles addressed a group of diplomats at his department’s still-new headquarters in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. For years, the State Department had come under fire from Republicans and conservative activists as a haven for Communist spies and sympathizers — and not without reason, since one of its rising stars, Alger Hiss, had been convicted of perjury in January 1950 for lying about giving secret government documents to a Soviet spy.

The failure to find more Hisses, and the fact that Hiss’ actions had taken place over a decade in the past, did nothing to appease men like Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who shot to national prominence just weeks after Hiss’ conviction with his claim to have a list of hundreds of spies within the State Department. By the time Dulles arrived that morning, public faith in the department, and morale within it, had cratered.

With his opening speech to his new employees, Dulles made clear that while he was their boss, he was not on their side. “Dulles’s words were as cold and raw as the weather” that day, wrote the diplomat Charles Bohlen. Dulles announced that starting that day, he expected not just loyalty but “positive loyalty” from his charges, making clear that he would fire anyone whose commitment to anti-communism was less than zealous. “It was a declaration by the Secretary of State that the department was indeed suspect,” Bohlen wrote. “The remark disgusted some Foreign Service officers, infuriated others, and displeased even those who were looking forward to the new administration.”

So began what — until now — was the largest purge of “disloyal” government workers in U.S. history.

Similar scenes soon played out across the federal government under the new administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican elected president in two decades. Though the State Department was ground zero for the anti-communist purges, FBI agents scoured the files of thousands of employees across the federal government. In April 1953, Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which opened an energetic campaign to investigate thousands of potential security threats throughout the government.

“We like to think we are plugging the entries but opening the exits,” said White House press secretary James Hagerty.

Over the next four months, 1,456 federal employees were fired, despite the fact that no one was ever found to be involved in espionage. Many were removed simply for being gay, which the order had explicitly defined as a security risk. Air Force Lt. Milo Radulovich was forced to resign his commission simply because his sister was a suspected communist. Others, like cartographer Abraham Chasanow, were pushed out on the basis on flimsy rumors of suspicious political beliefs.

The widespread political purges of the early 1950s echo clearly today. Seventy years ago, the reasonable pretext of hunting Soviet agents opened the way to a yearslong, paranoid campaign, motivated by outlandish conspiracy theories, that destroyed countless careers but did nothing to improve America’s security.

Today, a stated desire to check the excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs has already been used to justify whirlwind firings and closures of entire federal offices. So it may be wise to consider the consequences of that previous era of purges, part of what came to be known as the “Red Scare.”

At a time of intense geopolitical competition, the United States kneecapped itself, removing thousands of valuable employees and forcing those who remained into unhappy conformity. It is hard not to see the same mistake being repeated today.

The hunt for disloyal public servants did not begin with Eisenhower and Dulles. Following the 1946 midterm elections, in which Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate with a campaign built on anti-communist attacks, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835. It ordered the Civil Service Commission to screen the background of every current and new federal employee, well over a million people, for evidence of “disloyalty,” a term that was left ominously undefined. The screening drew on files from across the government, as well as police departments, former employers, even college transcripts. Truman also instructed his attorney general, Tom Clark, to devise a list of “subversive” organizations; current or former membership in just one would constitute a bright red flag.

If something suspicious came up in the initial screen, even the smallest doubt, the FBI would conduct a full field investigation, digging into every corner of a person’s life. Any derogatory information went into a file. It was then up to the department or agency involved to decide what to do with the employee. In theory, it might mean discipline or reassignment, though in practice most people who reached that point lost their job.

The flaws were apparent to anyone who took the time to read the order itself. Writing in The New York Times, a quartet of Harvard Law professors worried the program would “miss genuine culprits, victimize innocent persons, discourage entry into the public service and leave both the government and the American people with a hangover sense of futility and indignity.”

And that is what happened. The loyalty program’s first director, Seth Richardson, insisted that the government had a complete right to discharge employees, “without extending to such employee any hearing whatsoever.” In one case, James Kutcher, who lost both his legs in World War II, was fired from the Veterans Administration because, a decade earlier, he had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party, an anti-Stalinist organization that Clark had nevertheless added to his subversives list.

Dozens of Black employees were subjected to harassing, invasive investigations because, outside of work, they were involved in civil rights activity, which was considered potentially subversive. The same happened to pro-labor employees. During its five and a half years in operation, Truman’s loyalty program conducted 4.76 million background checks, including 2 million current employees and 500,000 new hires each year. The screens resulted in 26,236 FBI investigations. Of those, 6,828 people resigned or withdrew their applications, and 560 were fired.

Not a single spy was ever discovered by the program. Its defenders argued that it succeeded by deterring potential subversives. But it also likely deterred many bright, talented people from applying in the first place, especially if they had dabbled in progressive politics in college. The same went for then-current federal employees: The order put a premium on submission and raised the price for individual expression.

In his memoirs, Truman defended the rationale behind the program but admitted that it was deeply flawed in practice. He called the program the best he could do “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” To friends he admitted, “Yes, it was terrible.”

Among Truman’s targets were gay and lesbian employees of the government, especially in the State Department. In the retrograde spirit of the immediate postwar era, homosexuality was associated with weakness, femininity and progressivism. One writer, warning of the “sisterhood in our State Department,” wrote that “in American statecraft, where you need desperately a man of iron, you often get a nance.” In what later became known as the Lavender Scare, Congress ordered government agencies — from State to the American Battlefield Monuments Commission — to investigate any employee suspected of being homosexual, an ill-defined category that might mean anything from middle-age bachelorhood to, paradoxically, “Don Juanism,” or an energetic sex drive.

Yet another target were the so-called China Hands, a loose collection of academics and Foreign Service officers with deep experience in China. As the pro-Western Nationalists lost ground to the Communists under Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War following World War II, despite massive American support, the China Hands recommended caution, arguing that Mao’s victory was inevitable, and that U.S. policy could exploit cracks between him and Moscow. In retrospect, it was wise advice — but following Mao’s victory in 1949, it was taken as evidence that the China Hands had not only been “soft on communism,” but had been the core of a pro-communist conspiracy within the State Department.

One by one, the China Hands fell: Esteemed diplomats like John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies and O. Edmund Clubb were drummed out of the Foreign Service, some under Truman, others under Eisenhower. John F. Melby was dismissed simply because he had an affair with Lillian Hellman, a progressive playwright who had refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The China Hands were relatively few in number, but the decimation of their ranks sent a clear signal to the rest of the foreign-policy establishment: Dissent at your own risk; retribution will be swift.

While it is impossible to quantify a counterfactual, the cost of the anti-communist purges of the 1950s was clearly enormous and played out not just over the subsequent years but over decades. For instance, had expertise not been purged and dissent not been punished so severely across the government during the early 1950s, wiser heads might well have raised the right objections to America’s short-sighted anti-communism in East Asia, above all its rush to intervene in Vietnam. Does the Trump administration run the same risk of short-sightedness today?

Aside from historical parallels, there is another insight connecting then and now. The Red Scare eventually ended. Journalist Edward R. Murrow helped turn the tide, including with a long news report on the case of Lt. Radulovich. The Supreme Court in 1956 put limits on Eisenhower’s executive order. By the mid-1950s, voters, happy with the conservative stability wrought by Eisenhower, stopped backing candidates who ran on hardcore red-baiting platforms. Joseph McCarthy, who had captured the American political imagination for years, saw his support collapse in 1954 during his televised, and ill-advised, confrontation with the U.S. Army over an allegedly subversive military dentist. And Eisenhower, despite — or because of — his earlier efforts, was able to push out the hardcore anti-communist conspiracists who had, for a brief moment, captured the American imagination.

But they did not go quietly. Men like Alfred Kohlberg, a textile magnate and a key supporter of McCarthy, and Robert Welch Jr., the founder of the John Birch Society, saw Eisenhower as a prisoner of the communist cabal they had hoped to defeat. If they remained on the fringe of American politics, it was still a sizable swatch: “None Dare Call It Treason,” John Stormer’s 1964 book alleging the continuation of a pro-communist cabal at the top of the U.S. government, sold millions of copies. Over time the belief that the liberal wing of American politics and the federal bureaucracy were controlled by an “enemy within” became a litmus test for hard-right demagogues, linking the Red Scare era through the Pat Buchanan insurgency of the 1990s to today. When President Trump declared a moratorium on federal spending to root out “Marxist” elements in the government, he was drawing on a 75-year-old obsession.

It can be tempting to say that just as the Red Scare petered out, so too will the current hunt for “disloyal” elements. But for all the parallels, there’s an important difference: Loyalty then meant loyalty to the United States; today Trump demands loyalty to himself and his agenda.

Once the public realizes the destructiveness of the purges conducted in Trump’s name, will he halt them? That remains an unsettlingly open question.



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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 8:54 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


a Turkic conservative islamic natuional newspaper accuses

when it hits the fan which side will they be on, time to end dual citizenship...

the Cabal is still there, a collection of Saudis, the Israelis, the British pedophiles, the Roman Catholic pedophiles and human traffickers doing their border runnings, the Marxists of the East and Bolseviks, Elon didn’t discover them all, nor will it stop unless foreign powers are named, so then money to Egypt, yo Israel etc Who’s really in control?

Why is there a Foreign Country's Flag in the American Congress Building?
https://x.com/RyanRozbiani/status/1888180986334330928

Israeli Tel Aviv University receives millions in US funding: Report
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/news/israeli-tel-aviv-university-receives
-millions-in-us-funding-report-3698191

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 9:37 AM

SECOND

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


Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

By Ben Tarnoff | February 7, 2025

The week I became a father, two things happened. Fires engulfed the Amazon, and a man who made his living as a columnist for the largest newspaper in the country complained to a university provost that a professor had called him a bedbug on the Internet. This was the world into which I welcomed my first child: a place where people with power behaved like children while the planet burned.

Five and a half years later, our civilizational outlook has not improved. It is not just the fires, floods, zoonotic diseases, and other insignia of ecological emergency. It is also the discomfiting spectacle of a leadership class so extravagantly unfit for the task at hand. Incompetent rulers are nothing new. They are one of human history’s main themes. What feels more specific to our time is the extent to which our leaders have responded to a moment of severe and proliferating crisis by regressing into a childlike state, and encouraging their followers to do the same.

In 1933, the year that Hitler took power in Germany, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich proposed that fascism begins at home, in the domestic sphere. The first authoritarian state is the family, he argued, ruled by the father. Here children learn the submission to authority—and the identification with it—that makes a good fascist subject. The idea proved influential for later thinkers trying to map the psychology of authoritarianism, and it has an obvious kernel of truth. In our own extremely desublimated era, one doesn’t have to look very far for verification: “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off,” a ruddy Mel Gibson gushed the other day on Fox News about Trump’s visit to Los Angeles, during which he had scolded Karen Bass, the city’s mayor and a Black woman, at a press conference.

But Trump is poorly cast for the part of patriarch. While he glowers in his official portraits, his political style is more silly than stern. He babbles. He is a creature of impulse and instinct, fickle and dysregulated. His humor is that of the schoolyard; his train of thought is, at minimum, haphazard. If you have ever heard a toddler tell a story, it sounds like Trump: digressive, bizarre, filled with tonal shifts, often hilarious. His inner circle exudes a similarly infantile affect. Elon Musk is nothing if not a smirking preadolescent. J.D. Vance looks uncannily like a baby, which is presumably why he decided to grow a beard, with the result that he now looks like a bearded baby. “Let me say very simply,” he told an audience of antiabortion fanatics in his first speech as vice president: “I want more babies in the United States of America!”

More at "More Babies!" https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/02/07/more-babies-trump/

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 9:48 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

By Ben Tarnoff | February 7, 2025

More at "More Babies!" https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/02/07/more-babies-trump/

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

It is stressful to be young. The world is confusing, the process of fitting oneself into it long and painful. But these difficulties are offset by certain pleasures, chief among them the relative absence of responsibility. If children misbehave they can be punished, but in moral and legal terms they are not accountable for their actions to the same degree as adults are. When people feel nostalgic for their childhoods, even when they had bad childhoods, this is what they miss: to be carefree.

The desire to be carefree is integral to the psychic allure of Trumpism. It is pleasurable to disinter one’s deepest resentments, to worship power, to go berserk with rage, to be floridly conspiratorial, to know nothing, to hallucinate Marxists under the bed, to picture the people you hate in tears and in chains. But the unifying principle, the rind that envelops and coheres these delights, is the abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others. It is precisely this responsibility that Trump and his set refuse. They are carefree in the face of catastrophe. And they give their supporters permission to take the same flight from responsibility—indeed, their political appeal depends on it. They want more babies in the United States of America.

*

Reactionary infantilism is not original to Trump. He is not, after all, an especially original figure. His specific genius lies in taking long-festering inflammations within the Republican mind and aggravating the swelling to the point of rupture. Back in 2012 the editors of n+1 identified “the personality type and cultural style of the contemporary right-wing commentator” as “Big Baby.” Rush Limbaugh was the first Big Baby, followed by Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O’Reilly. Trump sits easily in this lineage. Big Baby, the editors explained, was not merely “juvenile, impish, and wounded,” but a devoted hater of women. One of his favorite enemies was the Nanny State, the government imagined as a woman:

Contemporary Big Baby conservatism relies on the conceit that there is someone who wants to legislate against trivial and immature pleasures, who doesn’t want you to have fun — a giant Nanny (with Nancy Pelosi’s face) who regulates for regulation’s sake. Again, as with real babies, it’s only the rule standing between Me and cookie that seems real — not the rationale, nor the collective good that could come of mutual restraint. The future can’t be kept in view. Cookie is too big!

Trump inherits and intensifies this legacy. Meanwhile, the acceleration of environmental breakdown has simultaneously made the escape from adulthood more appealing and given Big Baby new limits to transgress. Lockdowns, vaccinations, electric vehicle “mandates”: Mommy has never been so mean. Fortunately, the joy of defying her grows in proportion. Usually my kids will wait until I’m in the room before they eat some forbidden nub of chocolate.

No picture of Trumpism would be complete without the Democratic Party bumbling about in the background, and here too the logic of Big Baby finds a foothold. The counterpart to the feral puerility of American conservatism is a senescent American liberalism whose grandees are well into their second childhood. Watching Biden’s smooth, uncomprehending face at the debate, as Trump snickered Bart Simpsonishly beside him, we came into possession of a perfect emblem of Democratic babyhood.

It cannot be banished by banishing Biden, as it is a more general condition. The party is run by sundowning seniors who refuse to cede the driver’s seat even though they pose a danger to themselves and others: recall Dianne Feinstein berating a room full of literal children for politely asking her to do something about climate change. But liberal infantilism is not solely a product of physical decline; it afflicts functionaries of all ages. Think of the attendees of the 2024 Democratic National Convention plugging their ears like grade-schoolers as protesters read aloud the names of children killed in Gaza. These are the symptoms of another party in flight from responsibility, but having far less fun along the way. The Democrats have staked so much on being the adults in the room, but they are actually something much worse: those hated children who think they are adults. At recess, they would be bullied.

*

Nobody went to jail for the Iraq War or the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In a time of mass criminalization, when children can be tried as adults, the worst adults are never punished. Creating a culture of elite impunity has been a bipartisan affair, and it has bred the cynicism on which Trumpism feeds. Equally bipartisan is the state’s decades-long divestiture from the obligation of caring for its citizens, a process that the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.”

Earlier generations of social movements were able to force the creation of institutions that, however imperfectly, bore a degree of responsibility for our collective wellbeing. The story of the last half-century is the corrosion of those institutions, with prisons, private equity, and other toxins oozing through the cracks. It is a sign of how antisocial our society has become that the basic values one learns in kindergarten—to share, to be kind, to tell the truth, to reciprocate and cooperate—are so vilified in our political life. More than once I have had the thought that I am raising my children for a world that does not exist.

Responsibility is not a concept we typically associate with the political left. But it was one of Grace Lee Boggs’s favorite words. The philosopher and activist, together with her husband James Boggs, believed that revolutionaries must take responsibility for creating a new society in which people take responsibility for one another. Protest is good, and often required, but the Boggses believed that it carried a risk. When we protest injustice, we put the onus of restitution elsewhere. A revolution, they believed, is less about making demands on those in power than building new power from below. This is a daunting but exhilarating prospect: millions of people acting as architects of a social order that endows them with the freedom to cultivate their broadest selves, a commonwealth of the grown. When Big Baby sleeps, these are its nightmares.

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 10:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

By Ben Tarnoff | February 7, 2025

More at "More Babies!" https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/02/07/more-babies-trump/

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

It is stressful to be young. The world is confusing, the process of fitting oneself into it long and painful. But these difficulties are offset by certain pleasures, chief among them the relative absence of responsibility. If children misbehave they can be punished, but in moral and legal terms they are not accountable for their actions to the same degree as adults are. When people feel nostalgic for their childhoods, even when they had bad childhoods, this is what they miss: to be carefree.


Ben doesn't know about bad childhoods. Ben is talking about the childhoods of kids in gated communities.

You don't know shit about nothing with that silver spoon up your ass you were born with, Ben.


I'm smart enough to know that you can't go back to a time that never existed.

And since the world you thought you were living in 6 months ago never actually existed, you should probably finally become an adult and give up on that yourself.

As somebody who has suffered from chronic insomnia since he was 5 years old, I know how much the first time you face adversity can be rough. Especially when you've sailed through life up until this point without ever being around anyone who's faced it, let alone yourself.

Don't worry. It's about to get worse when you are replaced by A.I. and you get to deliver Amazon packages for $15/hr.

Good luck to ya, Ben.

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

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 3:22 PM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office — and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/catholic-charities-t
rump/681610/

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 3:31 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and his set act carefree in the face of catastrophe—and they give their supporters permission to do the same.

It is stressful to be young. The world is confusing, the process of fitting oneself into it long and painful. But these difficulties are offset by certain pleasures, chief among them the relative absence of responsibility. If children misbehave they can be punished, but in moral and legal terms they are not accountable for their actions to the same degree as adults are. When people feel nostalgic for their childhoods, even when they had bad childhoods, this is what they miss: to be carefree.
As somebody who has suffered from chronic insomnia since he was 5 years old, I know how much the first time you face adversity can be rough. Especially when you've sailed through life up until this point without ever being around anyone who's faced it, let alone yourself.
6ix, you didn't get to the second paragraph:

The desire to be carefree is integral to the psychic allure of Trumpism. It is pleasurable to disinter one’s deepest resentments, to worship power, to go berserk with rage, to be floridly conspiratorial, to know nothing, to hallucinate Marxists under the bed, to picture the people you hate in tears and in chains. But the unifying principle, the rind that envelops and coheres these delights, is the abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others. It is precisely this responsibility that Trump and his set refuse. They are carefree in the face of catastrophe. And they give their supporters permission to take the same flight from responsibility—indeed, their political appeal depends on it.

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 3:34 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
DOGE's Targets...
Sunday, Feb 09, 2025 - 06:20 AM

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As the second Trump administration nears the end of its first three weeks leading the federal government, Elon Musk’s advisory commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has deployed teams within multiple agencies to use technology to cut costs and streamline processes.

Moving at breakneck speed as President Donald Trump shakes up the executive branch, Musk’s engineers and advisers have accessed information technology (IT) systems in several federal departments.

Anonymously sourced reports, not yet independently verified by The Epoch Times, allege DOGE is probing several other agencies, and groups are filing lawsuits to bar Musk’s advisers from accessing those departments’ computer systems.

DOGE’s actions, which Musk says are aimed at reducing government spending and waste, have spurred a backlash from some Democratic lawmakers who describe it as a breach of congressional oversight
If Congresspeople were actually doing their jobs DOGE wouldn't be necessary. Instead, they treated the Federal budget ... our taxpayer dollars ... as their personal and party piggybanks.

Quote:
by an unelected “special government employee.”

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) cited cybersecurity concerns if DOGE is connecting to federal databases with “their own unvetted commercial servers.”

This week, during a House Oversight Committee on “Reducing Waste in Government,” Rep. James Comer (R-K.Y.) defended Musk’s unprecedented role in the executive branch, saying “real innovation isn’t clean and tidy.”

President Donald Trump defended DOGE’s access to federal data systems on Friday, adding that the Pentagon and the Department of Education are next.
The Pentagon. They haven't passed an audit since audits began.

Quote:
“We’re going to be looking at tremendous amounts of money … being spent on things that bear no relationship to anything and have no value,” Trump said.

“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people … [are] doing. They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”

So far, the DOGE team has accessed IT systems at agencies, including the Treasury Department, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), while a coalition of labor unions has sued to block access at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Additionally, students in California are suing the Department of Education, alleging that DOGE staffers are accessing confidential student data.

The Epoch Times could not independently confirm other agencies—including the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the U.S. Agency for International Development—where DOGE may have received access to internal systems or databases.
Treasury Department

The Treasury Department confirmed in a Feb. 4 letter to Congress that DOGE staff had been given “read-only” access to the agency’s nearly $6 trillion federal payments system.

According to the letter, Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause will work with the agency as a “special government employee” to review the Bureau of the Fiscal Service for operational efficiency and prevent abuse, fraud, and waste. The work will be done in conjunction with career Treasury officials.

On Feb. 5, the Justice Department wrote in a court filing that it would, for now, restrict DOGE’s access to Treasury Department payment systems.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

DOGE was also granted access to systems and technology at CMS, the agency said on Feb. 5. CMS will be in direct collaboration with DOGE while two senior agency staffers will direct the effort.

CMS, which is within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, oversees the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Medicare is a health insurance plan for older and disabled Americans, while Medicaid covers low-income enrollees.

While DOGE has said it wants to cut $2 trillion in government spending, the goal would likely be difficult to reach without reducing spending on health and social assistance programs.

Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace health insurance subsidies made up 24 percent of the 2024 federal budget, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

However, Trump told reporters last week that there would be no impacts on Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security unless his administration finds waste or abuse.

“The people won’t be affected,” Trump said, referring to recipients of those benefits.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

DOGE has also been granted access to NOAA’s IT systems through the Department of Commerce, according to several Democratic lawmakers.

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government … and gutting programs people depend on,” Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), two of the lawmakers confirming the development, wrote in a joint statement.

NOAA is the “principal federal agency tasked with understanding and predicting changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

Huffman and Lofgren noted that Americans rely on NOAA’s services “day in and day out” for warnings on “incoming severe weather, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes.”

The NOAA is home to the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, two critical tools for weather forecasting and warning residents in vulnerable areas about approaching storms.

Department of Energy

Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed to CNBC on Feb. 7 that DOGE staffers were actively probing the U.S. Department of Energy but denied allegations that Musk’s people had access to U.S. nuclear secrets.

“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” Wright told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan.

The Department of Energy manages the nation’s nuclear infrastructure and implements U.S. energy policy. The agency also funds scientific research into energy, while one of its central responsibilities is maintaining and modernizing the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
Other Developments

A coalition of labor unions sued the U.S. Department of Labor, its acting secretary, Vince Micone, and Musk on Feb. 5, alleging that DOGE plans to illegally access the agency’s computer data.

The coalition also alleges that DOGE intends to “fire any employee who protects the integrity of those systems” and that Musk would have access to information on Labor Department investigations into his business dealings.

On Feb. 5, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Musk would stay out of matters where he has conflicts of interest.

The University of California Student Association sued the U.S. Department of Education on Feb. 7, alleging that DOGE staffers are illegally accessing confidential student data.

The lawsuit, filed in Washington federal court, accuses DOGE of violating federal privacy laws by accessing Education Department computer systems containing student financial aid information.

DOGE did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Andrew Moran, Stacy Robinson, Zachary Stieber, and Reuters contributed to this report.



-----------
"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, February 9, 2025 3:55 PM

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


(Almost) everyone is getting torched by the Trump meme coin

....more than 810,000 wallets had lost money on [$Trump].... The total losses are almost certainly much larger: The data does not include transactions that took place on a series of popular crypto marketplaces that started offering the coin only after its price had already surged.

....Whether people made or lost money, it was stellar business for the Trumps. Nearly $100 million in trading fees have flowed to the family and its partners.

Trump and his buddies don't need to care about the price of the coin. They'll make $100 million in fees every month as long as there's plenty of churn among the chumps. Or maybe less. But who cares? It's a lot and it's risk-free. Just sit back and let the Oval Office make you rich.

https://jabberwocking.com/almost-everyone-is-getting-torched-by-the-tr
ump-meme-coin/

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 5:17 PM

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


Pushback Begins Against Trump’s Oil Agenda

By Irina Slav | Feb 08, 2025, 6:00 PM CST

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Pushback-Begins-Against-Trumps-
Oil-Agenda.html

President Trump declared a national energy emergency as soon as he took office. The declaration had the goal of facilitating growth in energy supply or, as Trump likes to call it “Drill, baby, drill.” Yet this time, Baby doesn’t feel much like drilling. And it’s saying this loud and clear.

West Texas Intermediate has been trading around $70. Trump has insisted that lower oil prices will force Russia to negotiate peace with Zelensky. His special envoy to Russia and Ukraine has an exact price in mind: $45 per barrel. Unfortunately, that price — while certain to cause Russia economic pain — will also cause pain to U.S. shale drillers.

U.S. oil and gas producers will not do the President’s bidding. There is untapped crude in the shale patch, but drillers are going to tap it in a measured way rather than a burst of activity that saw so many go under when debt burdens became unsustainable. This led to that strict financial discipline everyone’s been praising for years now, and that has become the new normal in shale.

With that discipline, cheap oil may turn out to be one promise Trump can’t keep — because it’s not entirely up to him.

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 5:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Keep hoping for a Trump failure and cheerleading for that for the next 4 years and see where that gets you.

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

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 5:51 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Since the original article was written so badly .... Where was the editor?
... I'll try to recap ..

Quote:
DOGE's Targets...
Sunday, Feb 09, 2025 - 06:20 AM

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As the second Trump administration nears the end of its first three weeks leading the federal government, Elon Musk’s advisory commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has deployed teams within multiple agencies to use technology to cut costs and streamline processes.

Moving at breakneck speed as President Donald Trump shakes up the executive branch, Musk’s engineers and advisers have accessed information technology (IT) systems in several federal departments.

the Pentagon and
Department of Education are next


So far, the DOGE team has accessed IT systems at agencies, including the
Treasury Department, the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the
Department of Energy, and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Trump says
the Pentagon and
Department of Education are next

Since a coalition of labor unions has sued to block access at the
U.S. Department of Labor,
that implies that they're on the list, too.

Epoch Times could not independently confirm other agencies like
U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)*

were also on the list.

* Seems like DOGE has already been there.

Seems like most of these invetigations are being done with the cooperation of agency heads.


Don't forget HUD! It's been pointed to as the slush fund for dollar stabilization activities.


-----------
"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, February 9, 2025 6:07 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep hoping for a Trump failure and cheerleading for that for the next 4 years and see where that gets you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Remember George Bush, the governor of TEXAS? As governor, Bush was a complete asshole and nothing could stop the inevitable fiasco of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Crash of 2008 because Bush is a negligent asshole. Why inevitable? Republicans won't do what needs doing. Trump is no different. Trump will run up the nation debt (my consolation prize is lower taxes from Trump) and Trump will cause something important to fail out of neglect by the White House. Will it be another Crash? I don't know, but Trump is negligent. There will be an avoidable accident that Trump won't avoid.

Stock Market Crash of 2008
Explore the Causes and Events at the Heart of the Financial Crisis
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/subprime-market-200
8.asp

The Trump Prayer
Trump supporters be like...
He didn't say that
and if he did, he didn’t mean that
and if he did, you didn't understand it
and if you did, it’s not a big deal
and if it is, others have said and done worse.

https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer

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

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Sunday, February 9, 2025 9:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?

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

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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 7:52 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?
I don't want to say you are crazy, but that did not happen. Not even a little bit. Where do these Trumptard hallucinations come from? Bad genetics? Is family passing ancient emotional trauma from one generation to the next? Wherever this unreality comes from, it is not helping Trumptards prosper in America.

Winds of Change: Donald Trump Becomes 1st Sitting President To Attend SUPER BOWL - Access Hollywood. This happened, unlike 6ix's claim that Biden's administration was a "shitshow" "destroying the country". What is so bad about going to the Super Bowl? Trump is always on TV, 24/7, flapping his mouth. Don't his Trumptards understand why he has to always be in the spotlight? Always he has got to be commenting? Never being modest? Can't admit he made a mistake? Pretending he knows what he does not? That psychology will bring on a disaster that could have been avoided.



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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 8:12 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?
6ix, that did NOT happen, but this did happen:

Trump Sabotages the Pax Americana
Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak

Feb 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/sabotaging-the-pax-americana


Source: World Bank

Elon Musk — with Donald Trump’s acquiescence, but clearly Musk was calling the shots — has effectively destroyed USAID, the aid agency that was, aside from its humanitarian role, a major pillar of US foreign policy. This move was clearly illegal, and a court has already put a hold on some of Musk’s actions.

But it may already be too late. The destruction of USAID is a prime example of what Dan Drezner calls Humpty Dumpty foreign policy, as in, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. By furloughing the agency’s employees, ordering those working abroad to come home and canceling crucial programs and grants, the Musk/Trump administration undermined decades’ worth of relationship-building. Even if the courts eventually order everything the wreckers did reversed, it will be hard if not impossible to put the structure back together again.

USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago.

America’s imperial era — the Pax Americana — began after World War II. With Europe and Japan in ruins and Britain exhausted, the U.S. had no military or economic peers outside the Soviet bloc. As Phillips O’Brien recently noted, America could easily have gobbled up lots of territory if it had thought in conventional Great Power terms.

But our leaders were more sophisticated than that. I don’t know whether they had read Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion about how conquest no longer made sense, but they certainly understood that America needed prosperous, willing allies, not more territory.

Most famously, America not only departed from the ancient tradition of extracting tribute from vanquished foes, we followed our victory in World War II with the Marshall Plan — a large aid program designed to help both our allies and our former enemies get back on their feet. At its peak in 1949, the U.S. government spent about 17 percent of its budget on foreign aid.

Many Americans believe, by the way, that we still give aid on something like that scale. In reality, these days aid is only around 1 percent of the budget. But humanitarian aid to other nations is still a vital part of U.S. diplomacy, and plays — or played — an important role in supporting America’s moral authority, in maintaining our image as a mostly benevolent power.

Beyond providing aid, America set out to create an international trading system that would foster widespread prosperity. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947, set up rules designed to foster gradual tariff reductions and block any reversion to protectionism. These rules constrained the United States the same way they constrained everyone else — that is, we deliberately chose not to rig the system in our own favor.

And we created a system of military alliances, NATO in particular, that were notable in the formal equality they granted to all their members. Everyone knew that America was the senior partner, but we were careful to avoid any hint that we were treating our allies as subject nations, required to obey U.S. orders.

Above all, America was a nation that honored its agreements. During my year in government, I personally witnessed discussions of trade policy in which someone from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative would shut down another agency’s proposal simply by pointing out that it would violate the GATT.

Were we always the good guys? Of course not. America engineered the overthrow of democratically elected leaders it didn’t like, from Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddegh to Chile’s Salvador Allende. We supported tinpot dictators where that served U.S. interests (or in some cases corporate interests.) We killed huge numbers of civilians in Korea, and then again in Vietnam.

But compare the Pax Americana with any previous hegemony, and we look like a beacon of enlightenment. And our relative decency was rewarded.

Consider the contrast between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Superficially, they might have looked similar: military alliances facing each other across the Elbe, each with a single dominant power.

But NATO members were, and considered themselves, partners, while Warsaw Pact members were, and considered themselves, vassals. Indeed, in Hungary in 1956 and again in Czechoslovakia in 1968 the Soviet Union used military force to reinstall puppet regimes. I don’t think anyone ever imagined that America might send tanks rolling into Belgium or Denmark.

And there’s a real sense in which American decency and restraint explains our victory in the Cold War. Western governments didn’t need the threat of external intervention to stay in power; Eastern European governments did. When the regime in East Germany lost its grip, and Russia was either unable or unwilling to send in the tanks again, Communism quickly collapsed all across Eastern Europe, and eventually in the Soviet Union itself.

Despite the frictions caused by the invasion of Iraq, America retained much of its moral authority and received crucial support from its allies right through the Biden years. For example, there’s a widespread myth on the right that European nations have provided little aid to Ukraine, leaving it up to the U.S. to combat Russian aggression. This is totally false. Europe has given Ukraine substantially more aid than we have, although America has supplied more of the weapons:

Source: Kiel Institute for World Economics

But in less than three weeks Musk, Trump and their minions have taken a wrecking ball to the foundations of the Pax Americana.

As I said, foreign aid is no longer a major part of US spending. But the abrupt demolition of USAID, apparently in response to right-wing conspiracy theories and the claim that the agency was full of “radical-left marxists who hate America,” didn’t just leave millions relying on American aid in the lurch. It said that America doesn’t believe in helping people in need, and considers anyone who does suspicious. So much for moral authority.

At the same time Trump threatened to impose high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on obviously spurious grounds. Never mind that he blinked, at least so far. (He is, as I write this, saying that he will impose a new set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, which would, if they happen, hit Canada in particular.) We have a trade agreement with our neighbors that specifically rules out unilateral tariff increases and calls on members to go through a dispute settlement process instead. Trump personally signed a minor revision of that deal in 2018.

So now we’re a nation that doesn’t keep its word, that can’t be trusted to honor its agreements.

Finally, Trump’s threat to seize Greenland, a territory belonging to Denmark, a member of NATO, and his talk of annexing Canada show that we no longer consider our erstwhile allies partners worthy of respect.

All of this makes us distrusted and friendless. It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War.

Back then the U.S. economy was considerably larger than that of our major rival; it was always a severe strain on the Soviet Union to maintain anything resembling military parity. Now, however, as the chart at the top of this post shows, China’s GDP, adjusted for differences in price levels, is significantly larger than America’s. And that’s the right measure if you’re thinking about raw power. As the chart also shows, however, the world’s democracies as a group still considerably outweigh the major autocratic powers.

So this is a really bad time to be alienating democracies around the world and destroying America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.

I mean, what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 1:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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


Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?
6ix, that did NOT happen


Yeah. It did.

And until you recognize and admit this, you will never win again.

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

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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 3:11 PM

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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:


Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?
6ix, that did NOT happen


Yeah. It did.

And until you recognize and admit this, you will never win again.
I hear the same from Texas Trumptards. Their experience is unlike mine because they cannot adapt. They are deep in a rut and aren't steering out. So sad for inflexible Trumptards but they have been like that all their lives and won't change. Tough shit, retards.

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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 3:12 PM

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


A Childhood Neighbor Terrorized My Family. It Prepared Me for Trump’s Takeover.

My Family Had a Stalker. The ordeal prepared me for what we’re all dealing with now.

By Elle Reeve | Feb 10, 2025, 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-musk-alt-right-fasci
sm-psychological-war.html

. . . Before Charlottesville, there had been a struggle for what alt-right meant: Was it a new type of right-wing populism that was anti-war and anti-immigration, or was it neo-Nazis? At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Steve Bannon had told a Mother Jones reporter that the alt-right was nationalist, not white nationalist. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic,” Bannon said.

After Charlottesville, after the alt-right had been filmed bearing torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” that fight over meaning was over. “Unite the Right” participants faced devastating social, financial, and legal consequences, each one compounding the next. They’d been so proud to march barefaced, and now the internet at large was doxing them. They were shunned in their communities, some fired from their jobs. Financial services companies booted them as customers, so they couldn’t raise money online. That made it hard to pay for lawyers when they got sued. Many retreated and disbanded their groups, some denounced white nationalism, some got divorces, some struggled with addiction, a few died by suicide. One started going on Grindr, he told me, to find new interview subjects for his podcast.

And then, a strange shift: While many of my old alt-right sources remained ostracized, the most important people in the world started ripping off their ideas.

The alt-right talked about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory as a plot by Jews to dilute the culture and power of white people through immigration and gay rights; Fox News hosts began to warn of “replacement” as a plot by Democrats to dilute the power of white voters with immigrants. (In 2023 Vivek Ramaswamy referred to it as “the Democratic Party’s platform.”)

“Import the Third World, Become the Third World” was a slogan that circulated on 4chan and other websites for more than a decade before it started creeping into mainstream conservatism. Last fall, when Donald Trump said at a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, Donald Trump Jr. said: “You look at Haiti—you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average IQ. If you import the Third World into your country, you’re going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. Like, it’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

This fixation on IQ in online conservatism, with increasingly popular insults like “midwit” and “low IQ,” is an echo of the alt-right’s view that IQ is the most important factor to explain individual lives as well as whole societies. That doesn’t mean that everyone who uses this slang was in an alt-right group chat or even within a couple degrees of one. But it does show how completely this subculture has become the main culture. Vice President J.D. Vance recently dismissed a critic for supposedly having an IQ of 110. I’ve been here before. Several men in the alt-right told me their IQ scores; one even sent proof. And the truly bizarre thing is that some of those alt-right guys have since told me that their focus on IQ was a mistake, that it was not a helpful way to evaluate a person or understand the world. “It is ultimately a way to arbitrarily, retroactively justify inequalities,” one told me. “It’s saying, ‘Look at all the science that says I should live like this and you should live like that. Deal with it.’ ”

During inauguration weekend, when I watched Elon Musk put his hand over his heart, then thrust it outward at a peculiar angle, it reminded me of an incident more than eight years earlier, in November 2016. Trump had just won his surprise victory, and Richard Spencer was speaking at his organization’s white nationalist conference in Washington. At the end of his speech, Spencer told the crowd, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Many people think they remember watching Spencer himself give a Nazi salute, but he didn’t. It was the men in front of him who leaped to their feet; some of them gave Nazi salutes.

That didn’t happen with Musk. The crowd did not make the gesture back at him. And that’s important to remember, not for what it says about Musk but for what it says about us. The edgelord stuff is titillating but not that popular. Most people don’t want it, once they see it for what it is.

My neighbor took a lot from my family: money, time, peace of mind, my cat’s life. My mom says her children learned too early that their parents were not all-powerful. What I got out of it was a deeper understanding of not-so-wholesome small-town America and a permanent chip on my shoulder that has been a powerful motivator in my work. It taught me that you can’t assume that being polite and following the rules will lead to righteous outcomes.

I am often asked how to defeat fascists. If I had an easy answer, we wouldn’t be here! The point of my story is that I do have experience dealing with people who enjoy the anguish of others, and I know how fragile those people’s confidence is. When I did a story on a troll harassment campaign against a woman in Montana, I published the audio of the creepy voicemails the trolls had left for her. A couple of my alt-right sources were furious because they felt embarrassed—the voicemails did not sound cool when played to a mass audience. As troll culture has ascended to the highest levels of American governance, it’s worth remembering this simple fact: One way to rebalance the power between a billionaire troll and regular people is to make sure everyone sees who they really are.

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

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Monday, February 10, 2025 5:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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


Well, your shitshow of a last administration destroyed the country and itself, so what the fuck do you know?
6ix, that did NOT happen


Yeah. It did.

And until you recognize and admit this, you will never win again.
I hear the same from Texas Trumptards.


Nobody fucking cares about your Texas Trumptards, idiot.

I'm way the hell smarter than you are and the idiots that run in your circles sound to be twice as stupid as you are.

You'd better start listening to smart people, or your Party is dead forever.

You do with that fact what you will. I don't care.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 8:28 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody fucking cares about your Texas Trumptards, idiot.

I'm way the hell smarter than you are and the idiots that run in your circles sound to be twice as stupid as you are.

You'd better start listening to smart people, or your Party is dead forever.

You do with that fact what you will. I don't care.
6ix, are you smart enough to see Trump's error?

Trump Says Other Countries Caused $36 Trillion U.S. Debt — Is He Right?

Published Feb 10, 2025 at 3:44 PM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-countries-caused-36-trillion-us-de
bt-super-bowl-2029040

President Donald Trump used his pre-Superbowl interview to blame foreign nations for America's $36 trillion debt, claiming other countries had taken advantage of the U.S.

Trump did not explain during the Fox interview the relationship between the U.S. national debt and the actions of foreign nations.

Under President Trump's last administration, gross national debt rose by $7.8 trillion while foreign nations increased their securities by more than $1 trillion.

This is not the first time Trump has connected U.S. debt and trade deficits. In 2017, he said: "The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue," adding, "For many, many years the United States has suffered through massive trade deficits; that's why we have $20 trillion in debt."

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 8:43 AM

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


Civil War (2024) Ending scene HD | The President's death



List of presidents who have been shot dead or only wounded
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/13/politics/presidents-who-have-been-shot-
or-shot-at/index.html

Shot, but didn’t die:
Theodore Roosevelt
Ronald Reagan
Donald Trump

Four sitting presidents have been killed:
Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth),
James A. Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau),
William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz),
John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald).

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 10:06 AM

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


Before entering WWII, could you imagine President Roosevelt demanding that the United Kingdom give him the Crown Jewels and all the UK's coal, or else FDR welcomes Hitler's conquest of the English? You can't imagine that? Trump can imagine that:

In an interview with Fox on Monday night, Trump said, "They (Ukraine) may make a deal, they may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday."

What Ukrainian deal in exchange for US ammo is Trump talking about? This one: Trump Demands $500 Billion in Rare Earth Metals From Kyiv, Says Ukraine ‘May Be Russian Someday’ (if Ukraine doesn't give Trump $500 Billion)
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/11/trump-demands-500bln-in-rare
-earth-metals-from-kyiv-says-ukraine-may-be-russian-someday-a87937

Here is the deal in Trump's words: "We are going to have all this money in there, and I say: 'I want it back.' And I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earth," Trump said during the Fox News interview. "And they have essentially agreed to do that, so at least we don't feel stupid."

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 10:27 AM

SECOND

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


Trump hated that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has forced scammers to return billions of stolen dollars.

CFPB was shutdown by Trump with this email:

Good morning, CFPB staff,

As you have been informed by the Chief Operating Officer in an email yesterday, the Bureau's DC headquarters building is closed this week. Employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks. If there are any urgent matters, please alert me through Mark Paoletta, Chief Legal Officer, to get approval in writing before performing any work task. His email is Mark.Paoletta@cfbp.gov.

Otherwise, employees should stand down from performing any work task.

Thank you for your attention on this matter.

Best,
Russ Vought
Acting Director
Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection

Read the details at Springtime for Scammers
Financial predation now has friends in high places

By Paul Krugman | Feb 11, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/springtime-for-scammers
Quote:
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so. But now we have government of, by and for financial predators. Trump has famously left behind a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid contractors, and is furiously grifting even now. Musk has faced multiple lawsuits from vendors and former employees over unpaid debts.

And let’s not forget that crypto, which has gained a lot of influence with this administration, has yet to find a real-world use case other than money laundering.

So the best way to explain the sudden closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as I see it, is as part of an effort to make predatory finance great again.


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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 12:30 PM

SECOND

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


Efficiency - or empire?

Musk has an enormous corporate empire, ambitions in artificial intelligence, desire for financial power and a long-standing disdain for government oversight. His access to sensitive government systems and ability to restructure agencies, with the opaque decision-making guiding DOGE to date, have positioned Musk to extract unprecedented financial and strategic benefits for both himself and his companies, which include the electric car company Tesla and space transport company SpaceX.

https://theconversation.com/efficiency-or-empire-how-elon-musks-hostil
e-takeover-could-end-government-as-we-know-it-249262

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 1:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so.


Bullshit. Who's been protecting the American People from the financial predation of our own Government?

Why isn't our government doing its job and preventing monopolies? Or breaking up monopolies?


Our government is fucking worthless. If they were doing half as good of a job as idiot Krugman says they are, Democrats would be running the entire show right now.

Paul Krugman needs to crawl into a hole and die.

Nobody needs to be poisoned by his idiot thoughts anymore.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 2:11 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So what is the real reason? It seems fairly obvious. CFPB was created to protect Americans from financial predation, and has done a very good job of doing so.


Bullshit. Who's been protecting the American People from the financial predation of our own Government?

Why isn't our government doing its job and preventing monopolies? Or breaking up monopolies?


Our government is fucking worthless. If they were doing half as good of a job as idiot Krugman says they are, Democrats would be running the entire show right now.

Paul Krugman needs to crawl into a hole and die.

Nobody needs to be poisoned by his idiot thoughts anymore.
6ix, does it occur to Trumptards that they are not understanding the joke President Musk, an immigrant, is telling?

TRUMP'S WIVES WERE IMMIGRANTS -- PROVING THAT THERE ARE SOME JOBS THAT EVEN AMERICANS WON'T DO.

A sign outside a Vermont hardware store sparked more than one wave of internet outrage.

By Bethania Palma | April 1, 2021

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-wives-sign/


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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 2:47 PM

SECOND

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


LOOK, ALL I’M SAYING IS IF ELON’S ONLY GOAL WAS TO LOOK FOR FRAUD, HE WOULD HAVE HIRED ACCOUNTANTS, NOT PROGRAMMERS.

https://x.com/CitizenJane99/status/1888796507190559057

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 2:53 PM

SECOND

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


Kristi Noem warns the public that they can’t trust the government - then is reminded that she is part of it

Dept. of Homeland Security chief signals that Musk’s team has access to FEMA systems containing Americans’ private information

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/09/politics/noem-homeland-security-doge-mu
sk-cnntv/index.html

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 2:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
LOOK, ALL I’M SAYING IS IF ELON’S ONLY GOAL WAS TO LOOK FOR FRAUD, HE WOULD HAVE HIRED ACCOUNTANTS, NOT PROGRAMMERS.

https://x.com/CitizenJane99/status/1888796507190559057

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


If Elon's only job description was looking for fraud, he'd have already been named employee of the century.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 3:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, does it occur to Trumptards that they are not understanding the joke President Musk, an immigrant, is telling?


We don't laugh at your jokes, because Democrats aren't funny.

We don't listen to your warnings because they are mindless drool coming out of the mouths of lobotomized MSNBC viewers.

Nobody cares about your opinion, Second. On anything.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 3:17 PM

SECOND

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


Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Signed another beautiful Executive Order, finally getting rid of “Press 2 for Spanish” No more pressing 2 for Spanish. Nobody likes “Press 2 for Spanish” so we’re getting rid of it. In America we only press 2 for “MORE ENGLISH” ... NO MORE SPANISH...NO MAS ESPANOL! #commonsense

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 3:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Signed another beautiful Executive Order, finally getting rid of “Press 2 for Spanish” No more pressing 2 for Spanish. Nobody likes “Press 2 for Spanish” so we’re getting rid of it. In America we only press 2 for “MORE ENGLISH” ... NO MORE SPANISH...NO MAS ESPANOL! #commonsense

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



Wonderful.

This was probably my 2nd pet peeve "1st World" problem, right behind the sun going down before 5PM when we fuck with the clocks in the middle of winter.

#1 should always be implied and automatic. This is America. If you want to speak Spanish, go home.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 3:30 PM

SECOND

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


DEI initiatives were not put in place to ensure lower-qualified minorities could get hired instead of more highly-qualified white people.

It was put in place to ensure lower-qualified white people were not hired instead of more highly-qualified minorities.

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

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