REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, April 3, 2025 13:54
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Monday, February 17, 2025 9:36 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Of for fucks sake, SIX!
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I didn't say you IDENTIFY AS, but that's how you behave. Consistently and predictably. In a post somewhere up there, you even said you are always "against the power". Even to the point of being against what you were previously for. That's being oppositional.


No. That is not what I said. ... blah blah blah....
Touchy, aintcha? I was just trying to to make my post short. Let me rephrase ... while Trump was against the power, you were for him. Now that he IS the power, you worry about what'll be done with that power.
Or whether there is some greater power above him, allowing him to do what he's doing*

That's still oppositional. You're against the power. Right now you're just trying to scope if Trump is it, or if there's a power behind the power.

Quote:
Quote:
I've pointed it out to you time and again. "Nobody ever died of Covid" but the vaccine, which is a subset of viral proteins, kills? That's not fact or logic. That just comes from you absofuckinglutely hating being told what to do.


That DOES come from facts and logic. The papers are out there for everyone to read
. Oh yeah??? WHICH papers say that "nobody ever died of Covid"?
LINKS PLEASE

Quote:
Quote:
That opposition, which IMHO is on the far end of the bell curve, is part of what makes you, you, and not somebody else. That's what makes others different from you. It's also something that makes it possible for you to be manipulated. All someone has to do is tell you on authority, with threats, what to do and you'll pull in the opposite direction, whether it makes sense or not. IMHO.


And all of that didn't just happen overnight in a vacuum.
You may have been born that way, same as you were born with intelligence and ADHD/bipolar.

I know a pair of identical twins. One is very mellow. The other has been a hellion since the day she was born, and was dx'd late in life with ADHD. Identical. Same genes. Same in utero environment. Not sure what point you think I proved.

And, yes, you are easily manipulated. I see it all the time here.


How about getting back on topic?


* Trump has many wealthy donors, many of them Jewish. So there's that. He also has the richest man on earth behind him. So, of course there's a power behind Trump, just as there are powers opposing Trump.

The powers opposing Trump are, IMHO, globalist financiers like Soros and son, the British bankers (who sunk a fuckton of British pounds into Project Destroy Russia/Project Ukraine), etc. The problem is, their puppets, altho numerous, are stupid to the point of being mentally defective. Just look at Biden and the Eurocrats and various central bankers.

Trump, tho, is NOT FOR THE LITTLE GUY except incidentally. He's for American industrial BUSINESSMEN. For progress to be made, sacrifices must be made. Not by the wealthy.




-----------
"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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Monday, February 17, 2025 11:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Of for fucks sake, SIX!
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I didn't say you IDENTIFY AS, but that's how you behave. Consistently and predictably. In a post somewhere up there, you even said you are always "against the power". Even to the point of being against what you were previously for. That's being oppositional.


No. That is not what I said. ... blah blah blah....
Touchy, aintcha? I was just trying to to make my post short. Let me rephrase ... while Trump was against the power, you were for him. Now that he IS the power, you worry about what'll be done with that power.
Or whether there is some greater power above him, allowing him to do what he's doing*


Yes. Call it oppositional or whatever you'd like... anybody intelligent should feel the same way about it.

TPTB have never once shown that they are aligned with the best interests of the people. Not just in America now, but in the history of the world anywhere. Any romantic stories of Great Kings of the past or even our own Founding Fathers cut out all the evil shit, dust off the the good parts and polish it up nice and shiny to give you the good feels when you read about them or see them on the screen.

In real life, the only time The People have ever been served by power is when it's just a happy bi-product of what those in power were looking to accomplish for their own reasons at that particular moment. In these modern times where we have magical printing presses that grow limitless money on trees (until the day they don't anymore), they will show no shame in outright buying your favor and your compliance. Those benefits always end up being temporary when given enough time, but everything you traded away for them seldom ever come back without one hell of a fight.

You may think you're getting what you want. But you're just not looking at the other side of things and you spend far too much time living in the moment and not looking toward the future.

The end goal of all of this constant political see-sawing back and forth is the entire erosion of freedom and individuality, coming from both sides, but done at a pace so glacial that not only don't you even notice that it's happening until far too late, but a good lot of you will beg for it when the time comes.

THAT is the American Experiment in a nutshell.



If you are aligned with whoever is in power, even when you specifically have something to personally to gain from it, you are a useful idiot and a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 12:10 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Instead of your POV depending on who's in and who's out, how about thinking about YOUR GOALS AND HOW TO GET THERE? That way you could be for certain policies and against others, regardless of who's in office.

I knew, for example, that I was going to be 200% against Trump's Middle East policies. Gotta take bad with good.

I've known for decades that this is a power struggle between globalist financiers and American businessmen. (Neither one a friend to the American people.) But what I was most interested in was returning decision- making to America, bc as Americans we have SOME influence over that. We have no influence at all over a secret trade tribunal in Singapore, or a secret BIS meeting in Switzerland.

And America can only exercise sovereignty if we aren't dependent on everyone all over the world for everything, but mostly dependent on everyone accepting our debt and our dollars.

So, economic revival first.

Overthrowing the oligarchs next.


Quote:
If you are aligned with whoever is in power, even when you specifically have something to personally to gain from it, you are a useful idiot and a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.
If you're aligned with someone in power when you have NOTHING to gain from it ... that's even stupider. You should always be asking "Whats in it for me?" even if your goals are longer term or your definition of "me" covers yiur family, your nation, or the whole globe.

But yanno, SIX, we're too far down on the totem pole to be "aligned" with anyone. Thats like saying an ant is aligned with a homeowner.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 12:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Instead of your POV depending on who's in and who's out, how about thinking about YOUR GOALS AND HOW TO GET THERE? That way you could be for certain policies and against others, regardless of who's in office.

I knew, for example, that I was going to be 200% against Trump's Middle East policies. Gotta take bad with good.

I've known for decades that this is a power struggle between globalist financiers and American businessmen. (Neither one a friend to the American people.) But what I was most interested in was returning decision- making to America, bc as Americans we have SOME influence over that. We have no influence at all over a secret trade tribunal in Singapore, or a secret BIS meeting in Switzerland.

And America can only exercise sovereignty if we aren't dependent on everyone all over the world for everything, but mostly dependent on everyone accepting our debt and our dollars.

So, economic revival first.

Overthrowing the oligarchs next.


Quote:
If you are aligned with whoever is in power, even when you specifically have something to personally to gain from it, you are a useful idiot and a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.
If you're aligned with someone in power when you have NOTHING to gain from it ... that's even stupider. You should always be asking "Whats in it for me?" even if your goals are longer term or your definition of "me" covers yiur family, your nation, or the whole globe.

But yanno, SIX, we're too far down on the totem pole to be "aligned" with anyone. Thats like saying an ant is aligned with a homeowner.


That doesn't stop at least 90% of us from believing they are aligned with someone though, does it?



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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 4:32 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I guess most people feel they're more important than they really are.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 5:23 AM

SECOND

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


DOGE Mismanagement Principles
Musk et al. don't know or care about the damage they are doing

By Don Moynihan | Feb 16, 2025

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-mismanagement-principles

Sam Rayburn, the Texan who served as House Speaker for 17 years was fond of saying:

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

Rayburn was talking about policymaking, but the point extends to more broadly to governing. Trashing government agencies is easy. Making them work is hard. DOGE, and the husk of the Office of Personnel Management that has become a DOGE zombie, are a good example.

Elon Musk has a reputation of an extraordinarily successful innovator. If you missed him devolving into a far-right conspiracy nut and hate-monger, it’s still possible to think: “well, he’s an amazing businessman—maybe he can fix government.”

The well of cautious optimism Musk enjoyed among smart people who knew a lot about government has pretty much run dry. We are moving from “maybe Elon will shake things up and reset the system” to “I really hope he does not break some deeply important government functions.”

Musk’s management style when it comes to downsizing has been to cut to the bone, and then hire back if he fired too many. This philosophy might make sense if you are running a social media company where its not a big deal if Twitter goes down for a couple of hours. It makes less sense where the a) failure of government systems has big and sometimes irrevocable costs, and b) it is not easy to replace expertise once you have eliminated it. On the latter point, many public jobs take time to develop knowledge of the policy domain, organizational practice and tasks. Those are not qualities that are easy to rebuild if you just spent a year training a new employee who has now been fired.

After 75,000 people accepted DOGE’s legally questionable deferred resignation offer, DOGE moved to engage in a mass firing of probationary employees, i.e. civil servants who have not yet received full job protections. We don’t have final numbers of those fired (you can find a tracker here), but probationary employees make up about 10% of the civilian workforce. Most of these are employees in their first year, but some were more experienced employees who became probationary when they switched positions.

Musk and DOGE are providing a real-time management case study. Unfortunately, all of the lessons are about what not to do. The quickest way to improve your management skills is to look at what DOGE is doing, and do the complete opposite.

Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes

Don’t fire employees, unfire them, and then fire them again

Don’t fire the guys collecting the money

Don’t lie to employees about their performance

Don’t fire the guys keeping the planes in the sky

Don’t tell employees to return-to-office and fire them once they get there

Treat the people who work for you with a modicum of dignity

It is a fundamental error to believe that DOGE is a government efficiency project. Cutting 1 in 4 federal employees would cut federal government spending by 1%. Cost savings are incidental. DOGE is a political control project. Firing and terrorizing public employees is a means to weakening state regulation of private interests and strengthening a personalist presidency.

Sometime soon, some big stuff will start to break in observable ways. It will be important to trace those failures back to decisions being made now.

Much more detail at https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-mismanagement-principles

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 18, 2025 6:03 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


We don't care about the opinions of the people you listen to.

It would be unfortunate now if some of their warnings were legitimate, but this is the world that you helped usher in.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 7:04 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:
We don't care about the opinions of the people you listen to.

It would be unfortunate now if some of their warnings were legitimate, but this is the world that you helped usher in.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump denied knowing anything about Project 2025 because lying comes naturally to him, but he is following that plan. When Trumptards voted for him, they voted for Project 2025. Trumptards are solely responsible for what Trump is doing right now. You will try to shift the blame away from yourselves, as Trumptards habitually do about every one of their personal failings, but only the dumbest and most peaceful Democrats are going to accept this shifty nonsense from you worthless, lazy, stupid, dishonest, drug-addicted, rapist, tax-cheating Trumptards. Trumptards must be blamed and punished brutally for what Trump does. I look forward to payback time for Trumptards. The smarter and richer Trumptards, such as Musk, will leave the country to avoid being lynched.

https://www.project2025.org/

I was thinking about mentioning the Gettysburg Address. It is short, admirable, doesn't explicitly mention that the Revolution was won by killing Redcoats nor that the Civil War would be won by killing Confederates. Instead, there are hundreds of words to lull listeners into not contemplating how to modify the behavior of their enemies. Effective modification is not done with words but with violence. Lincoln avoided making that the message of his address, which is why it is so admired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address

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 18, 2025 7:06 AM

SECOND

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


Is the Answer to Trump Hiding in Plain Sight?

By Luke Winkie | Feb 18, 2025, 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/hasan-piker-donald-trump-n
ews-elon-musk-jd-vance.html

. . . Once it becomes clear that a second Trump administration is poised to be just as destructive as advertised, Democrats are once again mired in a communications crisis. With Musk slashing the administrative state to ribbons, the specter of destabilizing tariffs, and a renewed assault on the rights of undocumented immigrants, where was the opposition? It was another stark reminder of just how overmatched the party appears to be, stricken by an enfeebling inability to summon the venom—the anger—its base is feeling.

Piker has never missed an opportunity to express his wrath. The day after the inauguration, he flew to Japan with plans of waking up in the middle of the night to broadcast on Twitch during his usual West Coast time slot.

“If you recognize that Republicans are devastating to the country, to the globe, to the lives of Americans and the lives of your neighbors, then you have to do everything in your power to fight back,” he said on a recent stream, his face softened by the milky lens of a webcam. Piker was analyzing Trump’s order to transform Guantánamo Bay into a detention camp for migrants, an action he believes is the first step toward far more heinous anti-immigration measures. It’s a classic Piker fixation, the sort of thing that innervates his fury for the inert center of the Democratic Party. To him, ceding any policy territory to the conservative elements of your coalition is death. It only provides cover for the Republicans to push further, to savor more cruelty, to inflict more pain.

“This is why I kept criticizing the Democrats during the election cycle. This is why I kept losing my mind,” Piker said. “I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want Trump to win, and it seems like you guys want him to win, or at least don’t care enough to do what is necessary to stop him from winning.’ And here we are.”

There are more days like this coming for Piker. More executive orders, more electoral defeats, more tepid reactions from the Democrats that he finds anemic or otherwise annoying. The terrible scale of this American era comes rushing at full blast through three computer monitors—on the other end is Piker, and 30,000 people who want to believe in a better future.

“You have nobody to protect you but yourselves and your neighbors,” Piker said at the conclusion of that inauguration stream. “Who knows what will happen tomorrow, but I will be there to cover it. As always.”

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 18, 2025 7:58 AM

SECOND

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


'Backfired spectacularly': European officials reportedly now view US as an 'adversary'

By Sarah K. Burris | February 17, 2025 5:33PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/european-union-trump-2671169459/

If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it didn't work, according to one senior diplomat.

Vance not only didn't persuade his audience, he insulted them, the Financial Times reported Monday.

"His speech backfired spectacularly, convincing many listeners that America itself is now a threat to Europe," said FT.

“That was a direct assault on European democracy," alleged a German politician.

“It’s very clear now, Europe is alone," confessed a senior diplomat.

The reporter asked the man if he now sees the United States as an adversary and he replied, "Yes."

Gideon Rachman, who was on hand in Munich for the outlet, wrote that the only thing that could considered positive was the allegation it was “puerile bulls---." However, he said it was ignored because it was "aimed at a US audience."

There is now a concern that President Donald Trump could use his power to make demands about trade and security.

"That means that Europe must now start the painful process of 'de-risking' its relationship with the US, looking for areas of dangerous dependence on America and stripping them out of the system," the report closed.

Trump spent much of his first term and his 2024 campaign arguing that other countries didn't respect the United States.

Upon leaving office in 2021, Trump claimed, "The world respects us again." (The world does NOT respect Trump, the oinking and lying pig.)

Read the full report at https://www.ft.com/content/11f121f9-391c-4597-93f7-f12894e1b79d

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 18, 2025 8:24 AM

SECOND

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


Making Microbes Great Again
The Texas measles outbreak is just the beginning

By Paul Krugman | Feb 18, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-microbes-great-again

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,
fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18109301-b9b8-4127-aceb-db72c380c470_1028x657.avif
Source: CDC

I’m almost certain that I had measles as a child. My memories are a bit vague, and unfortunately my parents, who would surely have remembered the incident, have passed on. But I was born in 1953, and grew up in an era when, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years old.”

However, measles cases declined precipitously after 1963, when a vaccine was licensed. (My wife, born in 1959, never caught it.) By 1980 all states had laws requiring that children entering school be vaccinated, although most allowed exemptions for religious beliefs. Measles vaccines don’t just protect the person vaccinated; by ensuring that very few children catch the disease, they also break potential chains of infection. So in 2000 the CDC declared measles in the United States eliminated.

But now there’s a significant outbreak in Texas. Only 48 cases have been identified so far (13 of whom have been hospitalized), but officials believe that there are hundreds more that haven’t been reported.

As far as I can tell, nobody following disease trends is surprised by this development, nor does anyone think it’s a one-time event; this is probably just the first of many outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases we thought had been eliminated.

The reason is simple. Measles was eliminated, for a while, because vaccination was near-universal. The “target” vaccination rate, sufficient to prevent community transmission, is 95 percent. But much of the nation has now fallen well below that target:

Source: KFF

So the widespread return of measles was just a matter of time.

How did this happen? The answer, of course, is politics, specifically Republican politics.

As an illuminating article in Lancet notes, anti-vaccine activism was originally a fringe movement with a “natural-living, left-leaning base.” Translation: it was more or less a hippie thing. In fact, you can still see some traces of those roots in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s incoherent views on health policy — views that unfortunately matter a lot now that he’s in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the anti-vax movement became powerful and deadly when it took over much of the political right.

The groundwork for that takeover was laid in the Reagan years. Reagan wasn’t specifically anti-vaccine. But he was anti-science — because, as I wrote recently, once you start rejecting scientific research that tells you things you don’t want to hear, you’re basically rejecting the whole scientific enterprise. And he also rejected the idea that the government can ever be a force for good.

So when it comes to childhood vaccinations, what you have is the government telling you that your children must get their shots, because that’s what medical science says must be done. From right-wingers’ point of view, that’s a perfect storm of everything they hate.

And if evidence shows that vaccines and vaccine mandates work — if we went from a nation where almost every child caught measles to one in which the disease had effectively been eliminated — well, people who believe in looking at evidence are probably radical left-wing Marxists who hate America.

Which helps explain the perverse political reaction to what was, by any reasonable standard, one of medical science’s greatest triumphs: the incredibly rapid development of vaccines against Covid-19.

What’s especially perverse about the politics here is that Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that helped accelerate the development and deployment of Covid-19 vaccines, was an initiative of, yes, the Trump administration. In a halfway rational world Trump would be claiming credit for the vaccines and crowing about their effectiveness.

For yes, they were effective — I’d say undeniably effective, except that what we’ve learned these past few years is that many people will deny what’s right in front of their nose if it’s inconvenient for their ideology.

How do we know that the vaccines were effective? There are multiple kinds of evidence, but the easiest one to explain is the fact that the United States inadvertently performed what researchers call a “natural experiment.” Vaccination rates varied hugely across U.S. counties, and as the indefatigable Charles Gaba has showed, there was a strong negative relationship between vaccination rates and death rates:


And why were there such large differences in vaccination rates? Covid vaccines became bound up with identity politics, with a strong negative correlation between the share of a county’s votes that went for Trump and the willingness of its residents to get their shots:


I can’t resist posting one memorable Twitter exchange:


Americans should have taken two big lessons from the Covid experience. First, scientists do know what they’re talking about. Second, taking medical advice from people who reject science is bad for your health. In fact, it can kill you.

What happened instead was a hard turn by Republicans against vaccination. Only 26 percent of Republicans now say that childhood vaccinations are important; 31 percent say that they’re more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to prevent.

Trump has just signed an executive order cutting off federal funds to schools that impose Covid-19 vaccine mandates — probably an illegal action, but does that even matter anymore? We have RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, in charge of the nation’s health system. And hostility to Covid vaccines has, um, infected attitudes toward vaccination in general — hence those declining rates of MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination and the Texas outbreak.

It's not clear how far this will go. So far the Trump administration appears to be singling out Covid-19 vaccines as a target, not vaccines in general. At the state level, however, things are going much further: Louisiana has announced that the state health department “will no longer promote mass vaccinations,” while lawmakers in multiple states have been pushing to expand the range of vaccine exemptions.

Furthermore, the MAGA base doesn’t seem to be making a distinction between Covid and other vaccines, and, again, RFK — whose anti-vax proselytizing helped fuel a measles outbreak in Samoa that infected 5700 people and killed 83, mostly children — is in charge of HHS.

So it seems to be a real possibility that the second Trump administration will go down in history for, among other things, making microbes 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 18, 2025 11:41 AM

SECOND

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


From Comedy to Brutality

With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/03/13/from-comedy-to-brutality-f
intan-otoole/

Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:

Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!

He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland.

Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk — a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.

Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes — long-standing and loyal allies of the US — are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.”

After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member (from the Trump 45 administration) was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. “You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real.’”

At that time Prime Minister Frederiksen dismissed Trump’s Greenland proposition as “absurd.” And even though Trump was plainly furious at her rebuff, he also played it for laughs. He tweeted a Photoshop mock-up of a mammoth Trump Tower looming over some scattered huts in what looks like an Arctic seaside village: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”

We know from Baker and Glasser that after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, killing more than three thousand people in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US in a century, Trump asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, “How much hurricane disaster relief are we giving to Puerto Rico?” and added, “Can we just take that and use it for [the purchase of] Greenland?” Likewise, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, later told MSNBC that in 2018, before a flight to Puerto Rico to inspect the damage, Trump asked him and other officials whether the US could swap the Caribbean island for Greenland. Thus the cataclysmic consequences of climate chaos — and the people who have to live with them — would become Denmark’s problem, while the US would gain a clean, cool new frontier.

The same warped logic was at work in Trump’s expression in early February of his opinion that the United States should annex the Gaza Strip: “I do see a long-term ownership position…. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” (It is telling that, in a Fox News interview six days later, the possession of Gaza had become personal: “I would own this.”) Greenland is largely uninhabited; with 56,000 people living in an area of over 800,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country on earth. Gaza has been rendered almost uninhabitable for its current population, and in Trump’s imagination those people can be made to disappear. Greenland is a postapocalyptic refuge; Gaza looks like the apocalypse has already happened. Each can be envisaged in this twisted thought process as a tabula rasa.

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 18, 2025 1:05 PM

SECOND

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


JD Vance’s Debacle in Germany Exposes MAGA’s Sinister Global Endgame

By Michael Tomasky

https://newrepublic.com/article/191622/jd-vance-germany-maga-fascist-g
lobal-endgame

I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/berlin-says-vance-should-not-inte
rfere-german-politics-2025-02-14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/world/europe/vance-europe-immigrati
on-ukraine.html

The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor.

This is not remotely normal. True, it’s not as if the United States has never allied itself with fascist regimes. There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and some others. But those were all during the Cold War, and U.S. support was, though hardly defensible, merely defensive—that is, it was offered solely because these thugs were enthusiastically anti-communist. It was support based on one mutually shared interest.

Vance’s meeting—and Elon Musk’s earlier one, since he, too, is a member of our government, however shadily—is something much different. It’s ideologically motivated. Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it.

I never could have imagined, none of us could, that the government of the United States of America would openly ally itself with a fascist political party. In the heart of Europe. In Germany, for God’s sake. And while we’re imagining things, imagine this: Although the conservative Christian Democrats are ahead in the polling, with 29 percent, AfD is in second at 21 percent. Imagine that AfD somehow wins. The U.S. government will be openly cheering a fascist victory.

Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine. The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in.

Trump wants Ukraine to basically turn over a big chunk of its wealth to him. The British Telegraph reported Monday that Trump wants $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s minerals, which the paper said would “amount to the US economic colonization of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” And take note of what Trump said last week, vis à vis the money the Biden administration spent helping Ukraine defend itself: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/17/revealed-trump-confide
ntial-plan-ukraine-stranglehold/

“They may be Russian someday.” We know what that means. That’s a nice little country you got there, I’d hate to see that something should happen to it.

Last year, many people warned that under a second Trump administration, the U.S. would fundamentally alter its posture toward the world. That our country would go from being (however imperfectly) the linchpin of the concert of democracies to being the leader of the global far-right, anti-democracy movement. Then, it was speculation. Now, it’s happening right in front of us.

It’s a horrifying thing to watch. The transformation is happening domestically, too, of course; even more pronouncedly than in the realm of foreign affairs. Musk’s DOGE power-grab, the firings of civil servants, the attacks on the press like the barring of The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, the hideous cuts to scientific research—these and other moves, like the coming assault on Medicaid and all the many services it provides to both poor and middle-class people, all carried out by unilateral edict, are the acts of a government making its contempt for democratic norms clear every day. Several times a day.

But somehow, while foreign policy doesn’t matter as much in Americans’ day-to-day lives, it tells the rest of the world what kind of nation we have become. Step by step, the United States of America is becoming part of a global fascist network. Do we care yet?

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 18, 2025 1:19 PM

SECOND

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


Ukrainian Artillery Blasted A Russian Assault Group In Ulakly. It’s The Kind Of Battlefield Win That Gives Ukraine Leverage Over Donald Trump.

As long as Russian forces struggle to advance, Ukraine can reject Trump’s mineral extortion.

By David Axe | Feb 17, 2025, 04:10pm EST

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/02/17/ukrainian-artillery-b
lasted-a-russian-assault-group-in-ulakly-its-the-kind-of-battlefield-win-that-gives-ukraine-leverage-over-donald-trump/

In a cataclysm of artillery and drone strikes, Ukrainian forces smashed an attack by Russian troops in and around the town of Ulakly on or just before Sunday. Surveillance drones working for the Ukrainian Tivaz artillery group registered around 10 destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles.

The failed assault, one of several in the southeastern corner of Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine in recent days, may have signaled the failure of the Russian offensive in the area. The political implications are profound.

As recently as two weeks ago, the Russians had the momentum. They’d just ejected the Ukrainian Khortytsia Operational Strategic Group from Velyka Novosilka, a few miles south of Ulakly, and were poised to pursue the retreating Ukrainians and potentially achieve a breakthrough in the area where Donetsk Oblast meets Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Now a Russian breakthrough appears unlikely. “Exhausted by losses and intense battles over the past month, the enemy will not be able to quickly pursue Khortytsia OSG whose units are retreating from Velyka Novosilka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies explained.

Not only have the Russians suffered heavy losses in their modest advance along the Donetsk-Zaporizhzhia corner, they’re also experiencing broader shortages of troops and equipment that have compelled them to prioritize their attacks.

Desperate to eradicate the Ukrainian-held salient in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast and equally eager to capture the fortress city of Pokrovsk, 18 miles north of Ulakly, the Russians are diverting resources from southern Donetsk. “The enemy will not be able to break through to Zaporizhzhia or Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts, as they lack the necessary troops, funds and resources,” CDS assessed.

In conclusion, “the plan to collapse the southern Ukrainian front and advance toward Zaporizhzhia is unfeasible,” the analysis group asserted.

The exhaustion of the Russian offensive in southeastern Ukraine comes at a perilous time for the Kremlin. The administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump has threatened to abandon Ukraine unless the government in Kyiv consents to Trump’s $500-billion mineral extortion scheme. At the same time, Trump reportedly is considering pulling U.S. troops from NATO states bordering Russia.

Ukraine—and Europe in general—is grappling with the possibility that 80 years of strong U.S. support for European security may come to a bizarre and abrupt end. Given the chaos resulting from the American retreat, the regime of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin should be in the strongest possible position to demand huge territorial concessions in exchange for ending its wider war on Ukraine.

But Russia isn’t actually winning on the battlefield in Ukraine. Where its forces make gains, the advance is usually measured in yards—and might cost entire infantry companies with scores of troops.

Yes, the Ukrainian military is struggling to mobilize sufficient forces. But the Russian military is struggling, too—and it’s the one that must advance hundreds of miles against a technologically advanced foe in order to achieve Moscow’s original objectives, including regime change in Kyiv, by force alone.

“The Russian military has objectively failed,” analyst Andrew Perpetua pointed out. “And they do not have the strength to ever recover from the degree to which they have failed. Russia cannot win this war on a battlefield.” But it can win at the negotiating table if, for some reason, Ukraine caves to American pressure to end the war on terms favorable to Russia.

Fortunately for Ukraine, Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky understands the political dynamics—and has so far refused to surrender. Publicly lavishing praise on Trump while also steadfastly refusing to sign the misspelled, exploitative minerals deal memo the White House forwarded to him, Zelensky “has handled negotiations very well so far,” according to Tatarigami, founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

Well-armed by its own industry, its European allies and the administration of former U.S. Pres. Joe Biden, “Ukraine has enough money to fund all of 2025 and part of 2026,” Perpetua concluded. “They have enough weapons and ammo to last most of 2025, and with aid from other nations (plus that money) they will be able to fight through 2025 without issue.”

So Zelensky can afford to politely say no to Trump while his troops continue to kill and maim hundreds of Russians every day. Zelensky can wait for peace terms that are actually good for Ukraine.

Ironically, that gives Zelensky leverage over Trump, inasmuch as Trump wants to be known as the man who brought peace to Ukraine. “The only way for Trump to achieve peace is through a fair agreement with guarantees for Ukraine,” Tatarigami explained.

Sources

1. Tivaz artillery group

2. Center for Defense Strategies

3. Andrew Perpetua (and here)

4. Tatarigami

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 18, 2025 1:38 PM

SECOND

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


MAGA's maniacal reaction to Tom Hanks proves they are his 'SNL' character | Opinion

There are so many things that co-presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing that deserve outrage. MAGA reserved theirs for a TV comedy skit.

By EJ Montini | Feb 18, 2025

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2025/02/18/to
m-hanks-saturday-night-live-trump-maga/79025292007/

The most zealous supporters of President Donald Trump practically broke the internet with maniacal rants protesting actor Tom Hanks’ comic portrayal of a guy named “Doug” wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat during the 50th anniversary show of “Saturday Night Live.”

Strangely (or maybe not), these same people did not go nuts or flood the internet with protests when Trump and co-president Elon Musk fired several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, many with training in FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, at a time when airplane safety is a growing concern.

But watching Hanks speak with a southern accent in a skit about “Black Jeopardy” really, really irked them.

Unlike when Trump and Musk laid off vital employees of the Veterans Health Administration, which U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called “attempting to balance the budget on the backs of veterans.”

That didn’t trouble them in the least.

Tom Hanks makes MAGA furious, but not this

Not like Hanks cutting it up with SNL cast member Kenan Thompson, which made them absolutely furious.

Then again, these same MAGA faithful expressed no outrage whatsoever when Musk tried to give his bro gang of hackers access to Americans’ most private financial information, including Social Security benefits, VA benefits and much more.

But they went positively ballistic over Hanks reprising a role in a skit first performed eight years ago.

Not a peep from them, on the other hand, when hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health were let go, including “disease detectives” at the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

All of which puts Americans at risk.

They are completely unbothered by Elon Musk

Hank backing away from a Black man’s handshake during a comedy TV skit, though, had them foaming at the mouth.

Yet when Trump gave enormous power to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an unofficial government agency with no congressional approval, they didn’t blink.

But Hanks wearing a denim jacket over an American Eagle T-shirt. Terrible! Outrageous!

It didn’t bother them at all, however, when Musk — a self-proclaimed champion of free speech — said, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Maybe MAGA is worse than that 'SNL' character

Musk was upset about a segment the program did on killing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides disaster relief to impoverished countries, particularly those working on democratic reforms.

During the program, it was said about Musk: “The world’s richest man cut off aid for the world’s poorest people.”

The fact that MAGA is angrier and more upset at Hanks than they are with the world’s richest man cutting off aid to the world’s poorest people might prove that Trump supporters outraged by Hanks’ MAGA portrayal could have a point.

It could be they’re not exactly versions of the Hanks character.

It could be they’re worse.

Conservatives BLAST Tom Hanks's MAGA Character On SNL: 'Hate Mongering'



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 18, 2025 1:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I can’t resist posting one memorable Twitter exchange:


Andrew Tate wouldn't fuck that broad with your shriveled up micropenis.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 1:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
'Backfired spectacularly': European officials reportedly now view US as an 'adversary'

By Sarah K. Burris | February 17, 2025 5:33PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/european-union-trump-2671169459/

If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it didn't work, according to one senior diplomat.


According to who? Give a name.

Quote:
Vance not only didn't persuade his audience, he insulted them, the Financial Times reported Monday.


Fuck his authoritarian audience.

Democrats are on their way to becoming full blown Nazis now.

It suits you.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 1:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is the Answer to Trump Hiding in Plain Sight?

By Luke Winkie | Feb 18, 2025, 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/hasan-piker-donald-trump-n
ews-elon-musk-jd-vance.html

. . . Once it becomes clear that a second Trump administration is poised to be just as destructive as advertised, Democrats are once again mired in a communications crisis. With Musk slashing the administrative state to ribbons, the specter of destabilizing tariffs, and a renewed assault on the rights of undocumented immigrants, where was the opposition? It was another stark reminder of just how overmatched the party appears to be, stricken by an enfeebling inability to summon the venom—the anger—its base is feeling.

Piker has never missed an opportunity to express his wrath. The day after the inauguration, he flew to Japan with plans of waking up in the middle of the night to broadcast on Twitch during his usual West Coast time slot.

“If you recognize that Republicans are devastating to the country, to the globe, to the lives of Americans and the lives of your neighbors, then you have to do everything in your power to fight back,” he said on a recent stream, his face softened by the milky lens of a webcam. Piker was analyzing Trump’s order to transform Guantánamo Bay into a detention camp for migrants, an action he believes is the first step toward far more heinous anti-immigration measures. It’s a classic Piker fixation, the sort of thing that innervates his fury for the inert center of the Democratic Party. To him, ceding any policy territory to the conservative elements of your coalition is death. It only provides cover for the Republicans to push further, to savor more cruelty, to inflict more pain.

“This is why I kept criticizing the Democrats during the election cycle. This is why I kept losing my mind,” Piker said. “I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want Trump to win, and it seems like you guys want him to win, or at least don’t care enough to do what is necessary to stop him from winning.’ And here we are.”

There are more days like this coming for Piker. More executive orders, more electoral defeats, more tepid reactions from the Democrats that he finds anemic or otherwise annoying. The terrible scale of this American era comes rushing at full blast through three computer monitors—on the other end is Piker, and 30,000 people who want to believe in a better future.

“You have nobody to protect you but yourselves and your neighbors,” Piker said at the conclusion of that inauguration stream. “Who knows what will happen tomorrow, but I will be there to cover it. As always.”

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




Holy shit.

You're sucking Hasan Piker's dick now?

Democrats will never win an election again.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 5:06 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments

Tuesday, Feb 18, 2025 - 12:15 PM

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

Mind you, it's not as if such a federal tracking system wasn't already in place -- it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there's little hope in figuring out where all that money went.

"In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those "optional" days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going," DOGE added.

Musk celebrated the move. "Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity going live!" he tweeted. "This was a combined effort of DOGE, USTreasury and FederalReserve. Nice work by all."


I wonder if there's any indication who the departmental payor was, i.e. DoD? HUD? Homeland Security?

That way you could figure out who abused the system the most.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 5:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why aren't people talking about the Epstein List, the Diddy List and the JFK/MLK files?

If we're going to drain the swamp, you're going to be able to take out a lot of the major players from both sides when those become public.

We were promised them, after the Joe Biden* admin and his criminal party blocked us from seeing them.

Where are they?

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 5:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I wonder if there's any indication who the departmental payor was, i.e. DoD? HUD? Homeland Security?

That way you could figure out who abused the system the most.


That's all in there.

If they were smart, it's all encrypted or coded with a cypher at least.

If anybody comes out and tells you that information is not in there, they are lying to you.



Because on the off chance that they're not lying to you and there is zero paper trail on all of this, it means that the shadowy corruption rotting our country to the core is much worse than we thought it was.

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

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

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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 5:25 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:

Democrats will never win an election again.
That is the plan. Trump Is Rolling Out a Huge Part of Project 2025’s Proposed Attacks on Elections

The Trump Administration Is Going After Our Elections Too

Government employees have long protected the ballot from attacks. The president is preparing to fire many of them.

By Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler | Feb 18, 2025 3:19 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layoffs-project
-2025-election-security-cisa-firing.html

In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.

The work of CISA and the EI-ISAC has been central to election security in the United States for most of the past decade, providing state and local election officials with critical tools and assistance to defend against cyber and physical threats to election systems. These steps and other recent blows to federal election guardrails were foretold in Project 2025. Understanding the playbook will help us be ready to push back when the next shoes drop.

Changes to CISA began shortly after Kristi Noem was sworn in as secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency. Beyond the announced election security pause and defunding of EI-ISAC, the agency also put critical election security staff on leave and targeted them for potential termination. These staff include CISA’s regional election security advisers, who are former state and local election officials that provide on-the-ground security support to current frontline election workers, and members of the agency’s Election Resilience team, who were reportedly targeted because they had previously been involved with the agency’s efforts to communicate accurate information about election security to election officials and the public.

Although state and local election officials from both sides of the aisle have praised CISA for providing such support, President Donald Trump and several other conservatives have criticized the agency ever since Trump’s first appointee to lead CISA, Christopher Krebs, promoted accurate information about the 2020 election, including that the election was secure. (The president continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged.)

According to reports, leaders at the Department of Homeland Security will decide next steps for CISA’s election security initiatives when its review is completed March 6. But given the president’s attacks on CISA’s work, it is not difficult to imagine that the administration will permanently gut the agency’s election security role, as recommended in Project 2025.

Even if CISA nominally continues to offer limited election security support, cutting its staff and deprioritizing its work may mean that the nearly 10,000 local election officials on the ground feel very little benefit from the group.

The new administration’s attacks on federal election security assistance extend beyond CISA or the EI-ISAC. Almost immediately after she was sworn in as attorney general, Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—another target of Project 2025.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layoffs-project
-2025-election-security-cisa-firing.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 18, 2025 5:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Of course, that appears to be exactly what's been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of "the biggest fraud in history," as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.


The minimum Social Security payment ranges from about $50 to about $1,000/ month.

Lowballing the typical minimum, let's say $300/ month. Assuming that the recipients under 120 years old are legitimate (unlikely, but possible), that's

$300/mo * 12,000,000 * 12 months= 43,200,000,000

Right?




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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 6:01 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Of course, that appears to be exactly what's been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of "the biggest fraud in history," as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.


The minimum Social Security payment ranges from about $50 to about $1,000/ month.

Lowballing the typical minimum, let's say $300/ month. Assuming that the recipients under 120 years old are legitimate (unlikely, but possible), that's

$300/mo * 12,000,000 * 12 months= 43,200,000,000
What happened to your "Critical Thinking Skills" that you brag about, Signym?

No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits

By David Gilbert | Feb 17, 2025

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-ol
d-benefits/

Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits.

But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.

Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records … So that's a case where I think they're probably dead.”

While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets.

Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.

COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.

Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.

That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.

However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from “the Social Security database” to X, writing that “the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”

The figures suggested that over 10 millions people aged over 120 were collecting benefits.

“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk wrote.

The database Musk took the screenshot from listed almost 400 million people, which is more than five times the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to the SSA’s own website. It’s also significantly more than the entire US population.

The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.

“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records,” Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency executive-turned-whistleblower, tells WIRED.

Musk, during the Oval Office press conference which was attended by his son, claimed the payments to 150-year-olds was part of the billions, maybe even tens of billions, in corruption and waste that his DOGE effort had already uncovered.

But just like condom shipments to Gaza or payments to Politico, Musk’s claims of Social Security fraud seems to be a gross misrepresentation of what’s actually happening and why.

In the same press conference where he made the remarks about 150-year-olds collecting Social Security benefits, Musk said his DOGE project would be “maximally transparent” with all savings being made posted to its website.

But when the site came online last week, not only was it just a repurposed Twitter feed with terrible security, it also lacked any details in a section dedicated to savings.

At the time, the site’s administrators claimed the savings section would be updated no later than Valentine’s Day. When that deadline came and went without any update, the administrator wrote: “Receipts coming over the weekend!” The page was briefly populated on Saturday before being taken down; at the time of publication on Monday, no receipts were posted.

“I do worry about bait-and-switch and further transfers of wealth and even more debt financing into the hands of even fewer, driven and riven by power and abject self-interest, not public interest,” Drake believes. “Democracy is in real danger.”

Neither DOGE nor the White House responded to requests for comment about Musk’s claims.

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 18, 2025 6:07 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Already Showing How Much He Hates Labor Unions

After the president hobbled the NLRB, corporate America is jumping for joy.

By Nitish Pahwa | Feb 18, 2025 1:33 PM

https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/whole-foods-union-amazon-trump-la
bor-board-jeff-bezos.html

The National Labor Relations Board is one of the many federal agencies that have been subjected to purges of their employees, obstruction of their duties, and all-around sabotage of their most elemental functions.

Trump fired both the NLRB’s general counsel and a Biden-appointed commissioner on the five-member board, even though she’d been confirmed by the Senate to serve until 2028. The latter firing was blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, which is why the ousted board member sued Trump in court. While that case makes its way through the system, the NLRB has been left with just two members, depriving it of the ability to do just about anything substantive.

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 18, 2025 9:07 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nobody cares about your propaganda.

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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 7:22 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 about your propaganda.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards create hardships for themselves that normal people wouldn’t:

Trump will replace US attorneys with unemployed Trumptards. They are unemployed for obvious reasons. It is DEI for the incompetent, the obnoxious, and the useless to serve Mein Führer Trump.

Trump says he has instructed DOJ to terminate all remaining Biden-era US attorneys

By Jasper Ward | February 18, 2025 5:58 PM CST

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-has-instructed-doj-term
inate-all-remaining-biden-era-us-attorneys-2025-02-18/

WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed the Justice Department to terminate all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys, asserting that the department had been "politicized like never before."

"We must 'clean house' IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence. America’s Golden Age must have a fair Justice System - THAT BEGINS TODAY," Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 7:32 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 about your propaganda.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, Trump is thinking about forcing you to work in order to get health care for your diabetes:

Republicans consider slashing Medicaid

By Amanda Seitz, Andrew DeMillo, Kevin Freking | February 18, 2025 at 1:03 PM CST

https://fortune.com/well/2025/02/18/republicans-consider-slashing-medi
caid-siphon-billions-health-care-poorest-americans/

Republicans are weighing billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, threatening health care coverage for some of the 80 million U.S. adults and children enrolled in the safety net program.

Millions more Americans signed up for taxpayer-funded health care coverage like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace during the Biden administration, a shift lauded by Democrats as a success.

But Republicans, who are looking to slash federal spending and offer lucrative tax cuts to corporations and wealthier Americans, now see a big target ripe for trimming. The $880 billion Medicaid program is financed mostly by federal taxpayers, who pick up as much as 80% of the tab in some states. And states, too, have said they’re having trouble financing years of growth and sicker patients who enrolled in Medicaid.

To whittle down the budget, the GOP-controlled Congress is eyeing work requirements for Medicaid. It’s also considering paying a shrunken, fixed rate to states. All told, over the next decade, Republican lawmakers could try to siphon billions of dollars from the nearly-free health care coverage offered to the poorest Americans.

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 7:45 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 about your propaganda.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
About Trump’s proposal to Ukraine. I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.

In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.

Trump thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.

Some observers have compared the Trump proposal to the reparations the victorious allies demanded from Germany after World War I — a demand that yielded very little money to the victors but enraged the Germans and played a role in the rise of Hitler.

But Trump’s vision reminds me more of old-fashioned imperialism, in which powerful nations tried to seize the wealth of less-powerful nations just because they could. This doesn’t look to me like Weimar Germany in the 1920s; it looks like the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.

Trying to carry out that kind of exploitation in the 21st century is depraved. It’s also deeply stupid.

There’s no way we could actually get the money. If Ukraine were to lose, and Putin takes over, he wouldn’t honor the deal. If Ukraine were to survive, its populace would be even more enraged than the Germans after World War I, and they wouldn’t pay either.

And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.

Yet some reports suggest that Trump officials were surprised that Zelensky rejected the proposal.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-belgian-congo-plan-for-ukraine

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 11:12 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
blah blah blah ....

Trump says he has instructed DOJ to terminate all remaining Biden-era US attorneys

By Jasper Ward | February 18, 2025 5:58 PM CST

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-has-instructed-doj-term
inate-all-remaining-biden-era-us-attorneys-2025-02-18/

WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed the Justice Department to terminate all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys, asserting that the department had been "politicized like never before."


What SECOND failed to quote

Quote:
There are 93 U.S. attorneys, each responsible for a specific judicial district. Two districts share a U.S. attorney. In each district, they are the head law enforcement officer.The president replacing federal prosecutors is common as the new administration settles in.


https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5152413-trump-firing-bide
n-era-us-attorneys/

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 11:16 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
“President Trump has a method of operating which the Russians call razvedka boyem —reconnaissance through battle: You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position. … And we need to respond,” the Polish minister said.



IMHO Trump makes outrageous proposals. Then he sees who stands firm, who wobbles, and who falls over.


******

Peace may break out in Ukraine!

Quick! Call a meeting to stop that from happening!!!

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 11:40 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:

What SECOND failed to quote

Quote:
There are 93 U.S. attorneys, each responsible for a specific judicial district. Two districts share a U.S. attorney. In each district, they are the head law enforcement officer.The president replacing federal prosecutors is common as the new administration settles in.


https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5152413-trump-firing-bide
n-era-us-attorneys/
You failed to quote the part about Trump being a belligerent jackass who fires competent people, replacing them with unemployed Trumptards:

Trump did not understand Pearl Harbor, new book reveals: ‘What’s this all about?’

A Very Stable Genius reveals a US president ignorant of geography who struggled to read constitution

By Tom Embury-Dennis | Wednesday 19 February 2025 07:00 GMT

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-pe
arl-harbor-new-book-very-stable-genius-b2700639.html

Donald Trump barely knew of Pearl Harbor, was ignorant about the basics of geography and complained the US constitution was like reading “a foreign language”, a new book reveals.

A Very Stable Genius, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, is the latest book detailing the Trump administration’s tumultuous first three years in the White House.

Named after Mr Trump’s self-declared intellectual brilliance, the book, excerpts of which have been published by The Washington Post, reveals his litany of missteps and willingness to break long-standing legal and ethical norms since becoming president in 2017.

“Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Mr Trump reportedly asked John Kelly, his then-chief of staff, when they took a private tour in 2017 of the USS Arizona Memorial, a ship commemorating the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.

"Trump had heard the phrase 'Pearl Harbor' and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else," write the authors, who quote a former White House adviser concluding the US president was “dangerously uninformed”.

During a meeting with Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister’s “eyes bulged out in surprise”, the Washington Post reporters claim, when Mr Trump told him: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”

China and India in fact share more than 2,000 miles of common border.

Mr Modi’s expression “shifted from shock and concern to resignation”, with aides telling the authors the Indians “took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the US following the meeting.

Foreshadowing the later special counsel investigation into his ties with Russia, during the presidential transition Mr Trump interrupted an interview with a potential secretary of state to inquire about when he would be able to meet Vladimir Putin.

"When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?" he reportedly asked.

When the leaders did meet, at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Mr Trump dismissed the expertise of his then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson, an oil executive who knew Mr Putin personally, telling him: “I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin. That's all I need to know ... I've sized it all up. I've got it.”

He also clashed with Mr Tillerson in 2017 when he asked his help in attempting to ditch the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a decades-old law banning Americans from bribing foreign officials for business deals.

"It's just so unfair that American companies aren't allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas. We're going to change that," Mr Trump said, according to the authors, who claim the president complained the rule prevented industry friends and his own company officials from paying off foreign governments.

When Mr Trump early in his tenure agreed to feature in an HBO documentary in which all living presidents read from the constitution, Mr Trump blamed others in the room when he struggled to read the text.

"It's like a foreign language,” he allegedly complained.

Another chapter reveals Mr Trump speculated an ex-wife of former White House official Rob Porter, who was forced to resign over domestic abuse allegations, faked a photograph in order to frame her ex-husband.

The image, which surfaced online, showed Colbie Holderness sporting a black eye.

“Maybe Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter?" Mr Trump reportedly said.

The book, the authors say, is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with hundreds of sources, and corroborated when possible with documentation.

The White House has been contacted for comment.

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 12:29 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is Already Showing How Much He Hates Labor Unions

After the president hobbled the NLRB, corporate America is jumping for joy.

By Nitish Pahwa | Feb 18, 2025 1:33 PM

https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/whole-foods-union-amazon-trump-la
bor-board-jeff-bezos.html

The National Labor Relations Board is one of the many federal agencies that have been subjected to purges of their employees, obstruction of their duties, and all-around sabotage of their most elemental functions.

Trump fired both the NLRB’s general counsel and a Biden-appointed commissioner on the five-member board, even though she’d been confirmed by the Senate to serve until 2028. The latter firing was blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, which is why the ousted board member sued Trump in court. While that case makes its way through the system, the NLRB has been left with just two members, depriving it of the ability to do just about anything substantive.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I never thought Trump was in favor of labor. He's promoting American BUSINESS, preferably production and manufacturing.

What I think he's trying to do is free up capital on the one hand, and make imports relatively expensive. That is supposed to create investment opportunity.

I personally don't think its going to work as planned. American wealthy have a habit of using their spare capital for speculating in non-productive financial activities like stock buybacks and M&As and hedge funds, or abroad.

Putin managed to re-industrialize Russia, but he did a couple of things first. He re-nationalized the oil and gas industry But in order to do that, he had to take at least one oligarch's head and put it on a pike at the city gates, and that happened to be Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of Yukos Oil and one of the winners in the free-for-all after the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin broke the Khordokovsky- Magnitsky- Bill Browder connection. Russia is now majority shareholder of the largest oil and gas companies and defense industries. It offers preferred loans to businesses in critical sectors, like food production. Russia also continues to become owner of various budinesses.. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/russia-sets-record-with-67-com
panies-nationalized-in-2024/ar-AA1vxGpg. And finally, sanctions against Russia, and especially being barred from SWIFT, created capital controls that the Russian government itself could never hope to achieve.

I bring this up only to say that Putin had options open to him that Trump doesn't have. And even if some options were open, by Trump's nature as a "businessman " he would never take them. Because of that, I predict they'll be a percentage improvement in some sectors, but we won't see production increase by multiples or across the board.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 1:06 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Incoming! DOGE Poised To Strike Defense Department With Mass Layoffs

Wednesday, Feb 19, 2025 - 07:00 AM

After firing thousands of "probationary employees" at various federal departments, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has arrived at the largest of them all -- the Department of Defense -- and is expected to unleash a mass termination as early as this week.

On Tuesday, DOGE staffers were reportedly at the Pentagon and being given lists of probationary employees in compliance with an end-of-business-day deadline. That term generally applies to any federal employee who's in the first one or two years of their current position, regardless of whether they've held other roles before taking their current one. During the probationary period, employees generally can be fired without any privilege of appeal.

Though it's not clear how many DOD employees are probationary, the Pentagon has about 950,000 civilian employees in all. Along with the lists of probationary employees, officials were also asked to identify any employees they wanted to spare, and provide a justification. However, according to the Washington Post's sources, few exceptions are expected to be made. The mass termination may happen by the end of this week. Uniformed service members are exempt.


MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/political/incoming-doge-poised-strike-defens
e-department-mass-layoffs

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 1:19 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Excellent.

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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 3:23 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:
Excellent.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Bill Would Make Trump's Birthday A Federal Holiday

It seems that Trump has essentially outsourced the Presidency to Musk and the Project 2025 people while he golfs, signs executive orders and does insane press conferences.

Trump wants all the glory, but doesn't want any of the work that usually entails. He is as lazy as he is dishonest. The only thing he works at diligently is bragging about himself.

Trump got to go to the Super Bowl. He led the cars in the Beast at the Daytona 500.

Trump is acting as a Monarch, Musk his Prime Minister--without bothering with the Parliament thing.

Trump wears the crown. Musk runs the technocracy in its mission to reduce government programs to Gaza-like rubble.

Musk does what Trump won’t. Through his whole career it's been rare for Trump to *do* the wet work with his own hands, face to face. He did a lot of firings on a fake TV show but almost never in reality -- last term it was almost always by tweet or done by someone else. Trump doesn't have the manic ADHD- and ketamine-fueled energy or attention to detail to do even a tenth of this himself. Nor the kind of mind that can grasp how the machinery interacts. Musk doesn't get that last point either. But why should that matter?

The Republican controlled Congress sits on its hands waiting for the Project 2025 apparatchiks' orders. Really. What is the legislative agenda for this regime? Besides tax cuts? Wait! Here's one: a bill was filed to make Trump's birthday a national holiday!

https://www.ktvu.com/news/bill-would-make-trumps-birthday-federal-holi
day

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 4:01 PM

SECOND

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


Trump’s plan sounds great to not tax tips. But it’s quite bad for tipped workers.

But wait, as they say, there’s more! If the Republicans make this happen, we’ll soon be tipping lawyers, doctors, and anyone else who is public-facing. Tax-free income for the wealthiest workers! But what about the poorest workers?

Many tipped workers don’t make enough money to be subject to income tax or pay very little. So excluding tips solely for income-tax purposes won’t provide tipped workers much in the way of a benefit. In other words, it’s an empty promise.

However, even if some tipped workers don’t pay income taxes, they do pay payroll taxes, which finance Social Security and Medicare; if Congress exempts tips from those taxes, the workers lose out on better Social Security benefits. Social Security benefits are based on taxed income.

People will tip less if they know that tips are tax-free, and pressure to increase the minimum wage will lessen. That would also be bad for tipped workers.

Now the policy: Imagine that someone told you we should tax teachers at a higher rate than bartenders. To be clear, bartenders perform a valuable service—who doesn’t like a well-made cocktail?—but most people would say that’s ridiculous. A core Republican talking point is, or at least used to be, that the government is not supposed to interfere with the market or pick winners and losers. Exempting from tax income earned by people in certain professions does just that.

Consider a bartender and a teacher, both of whom earn $50,000. They should be taxed the same. But if $20,000 of the bartender’s $50,000 are in the form of tips, the bartender will pay far less in taxes than the teacher, even though they earn the same amount. Do we really want to create a tax incentive for folks to become bartenders instead of teachers?

Now, the skeptic might argue that the tips I would receive under this plan are merely salary in disguise and therefore should be taxed. And that’s the point. Tips are income and should be taxed, no more — and no less — than other kinds of income. If you don’t believe me, check out the federal minimum wage, which is lower for tipped employees.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-taxes-tips-budget-ve
gas-workers-unions.html

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 4:47 PM

SECOND

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


Trump and Musk set their sights on killing Social Security by spreading rumors

On X, Musk said he was “100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Appearing on Fox News Monday night, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked up the baton to suggest massive fraud that Trump has directed Musk to investigate.

“They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” she said.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/politics/trump-musk-social-security-pay
ments-what-matters/index.html

Not an atom of evidence for these assertions. It’s just the big lie, and as Lenin and Goebbels showed, the bigger the lie, the more effective it is. Trump's next logical step is to shutdown Social Security payments. That will stop dead people from defrauding the government. Proof of life will be required to restart your Social Security payments. Seems perfectly reasonable that if you can't prove you deserve payment, you shouldn't be paid. And thus fraud is eliminated.

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump and Musk set their sights on killing Social Security by spreading rumors


Blatant lie.

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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Many tipped workers don’t make enough money to be subject to income tax or pay very little. So excluding tips solely for income-tax purposes won’t provide tipped workers much in the way of a benefit. In other words, it’s an empty promise.


This paragraph was written by somebody who never worked a day in their life and has no idea how taxes work.

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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 6:22 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Wow, COBOL??? That was the big thing when I was learning Fortran ... 50 years ago!!


If there are errors in the database bc of COBOL deficiencies, these are bright lads doing the looking. I'm sure they'll figure it out.

*****

That software should be rewritten. COBOL is still good software.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 6:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Many tipped workers don’t make enough money to be subject to income tax or pay very little. So excluding tips solely for income-tax purposes won’t provide tipped workers much in the way of a benefit. In other words, it’s an empty promise.


This paragraph was written by somebody who never worked a day in their life and has no idea how taxes work.

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

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




Allow me to elaborate....

https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes353031.htm

Median Waiter/Waitress yearly salary in 2023 with tips: $36,530

Standard Deduction in 2023: $13,850 if single, $27,700 if married/jointly.

Page 6 here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/i1040gi--2023.pdf

Federal tax is 10% on the first $11,000 above the deduction, and then 12% on every dime of that $36,530 above $24,850.

$11,000 @ 10% = $1,100

$11,680 @ 12% = $1,401.60

TOTAL FEDERAL TAX = $2,502

Federal minimum wage for servers is $2.13/hr., which means if they worked full time at 40 hours per week, their income from employer pay would only be $4,430.40 per year, which was well under the $13,850 standard deduction in 2023. Even if your employer was paying you $6.50 per hour before tips, you still would earn less than the standard deduction of 2023 with only $13,520 after working 40 hours per week, every week.

The VAST majority of states pay less than $6.50 per hour minimum to servers in 2025, with most of them going along with the federal minimum of $2.13:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

Only 15 states and DC pay more than $6.50 per hour minimum for servers:

Washington: $16.66
California: $16.50
Oregon: $14.70
Hawaii: $12.75
Nevada: $12.00
Alaska: $11.91
Arizona: $11.70
Colorado: $11.79
Montana: $10.50
DC: $10.00
Florida: $9.98
Minnesota: $9.25
Illinois: $9.00
New York (has some law where they need to be paid $15/hour, so if they don't get the tips up to that amount the owner needs to kick in the rest... otherwise $2.13 federal minimum).
Maine: $7.33
Missouri: $6.88
Massachusetts: $6.75


At this point I need to point out that only 33% of servers in the US actually get full time with benefits and 40 hours per week.

https://oysterlink.com/career/waitress/demographics/


But if you're living in a state where you're getting an obscene amount of money before you're even starting to count tips, you have the potential to be saving a hell of a lot out of this.


Let's take California for example.

I'm a part-time server getting screwed out of benefits and healthcare and I'm working a steady 30 hours per week in California as a waiter.

My take home pay before tips is going to be at least $25,470, which not only goes way beyond the standard deduction of $13,850 in 2023, but it also bumps me up past the 10% bracket into the 12% bracket which starts at $24,850 when you add the standard deduction back in. This now means that for every dollar I make in tips all year, I'm keeping 12 cents that I would have been pissing away to the Federal Government.

So if I made the $11,060 in tips that would get me to the $36,530 national server average, I'd be paying either $1,372.20 in Federal Taxes on these tips the way the laws are now, or I'd be able to pocket that $1,372.20 if Trump ends tax on tips.


And hey... if they were a really freaking great server and made $20,000 in tips that year, now they just saved $2,400 in Federal taxes. And I'm pretty sure despite how god awful expensive it must be to eat out in California if the servers make that kind of money, they're still getting good tips in California.


Meanwhile the guy in Indiana might have $8,000 or so in tips to earn before he starts getting a 10% tax on them, but if he's making less than that and working 40 hours per week for only $13,800 per year, than that person doesn't exist because nobody in Indiana could afford to live on $13,800 per year and sure as fuck wouldn't work full time for that.

Even if he doesn't get good tips and break past that national average for servers, he's still saving 10% on quite a bit and might even break into that 12% tax savings too. They could still very easily bump that tax savings up to over $2,000 per year.


So honestly, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Second. Worst case scenario people are taking home an extra $1,300 or so. The sky is the limit if you're one of the ones lucky enough to be serving at places where the tips are huge.


And at the end of the day, if a journalist is going to come right out and tell somebody making under $30,000 in 2025 that the $1,000+ that they'd save in taxes on tips is "very little" than FUCK YOU AND YOUR IVORY TOWER, BITCH.



You morons keep taking the 20 side of every 80/20 issue and see where it gets you.



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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 6:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, COBOL??? That was the big thing when I was learning Fortran ... 50 years ago!!


If there are errors in the database bc of COBOL deficiencies, these are bright lads doing the looking. I'm sure they'll figure it out.

*****

That software should be rewritten. COBOL is still good software.

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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



Things that were mostly legacy stuff that was only briefly mentioned in computer courses by the time I went to college.

I wonder how many missiles we've got secured by monochrome AS400 dumb terminals still.

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

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

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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 8:28 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Wow, COBOL??? That was the big thing when I was learning Fortran ... 50 years ago!!


If there are errors in the database bc of COBOL deficiencies, these are bright lads doing the looking. I'm sure they'll figure it out.

*****

What I meant was, the application should be rewritten and the database cleaned up. COBOL is still good software.

Quote:
A majority of the Computerworld readers who took part in our survey seem to concur with Stoodley: 64% of the respondents said that their organizations still use Cobol — more than any modern language except for Java/JavaScript and Visual Basic. That figure is actually slightly higher than the response rate to a similar question the last time we conducted a survey on Cobol use, back in 2006: In the previous survey, some 62% of the respondents said they still used Cobol.


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


AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 10:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yeah? I wasn't saying that COBOL is bad. Just that I don't think it's used or even taught that often anymore except for the fact that there are so many legacy machines that still require them, and even by 2025 it has never been a financially and/or logistically sound decision to take the time and labor to make a switch. Not to mention all the security and backup and privacy problems that can occur when you touch anything like this.

Let's just say that none of the youngin's on youtube making coding look cool today are using COBOL on any of their projects.





I'm still wondering when they're going to start talking about the whole Windows 10/11 situation brewing this year. Outside of some tech YouTube channels, I don't ever hear about it.

The staggering amount of e-waste that is about to be created by Microsoft should be front page news right now, and they should be hammered with that every day until they fix their new operating system to work with PCs that still have years of life left in them, or they are forced to continue at least doing security updates on Win10 for everyone without charging for them.

Oh...

I did just look and the situation has improved slightly. Nowhere near good enough though.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-stay-on-windows-10-after-2025-itll-
cost-you

It seems like now they're making the offer to extend security updates to anyone, and not just businesses. It looks like a one time fee of $30 per computer, but it's only for 1 year after which they will not even be doing security updates for businesses on Windows10 anymore.




Fortunately, I think there will be a surprisingly big 2nd hand market for these machines because of how cheap they will be. It might even be big enough to keep these things from dropping in price as low as they otherwise should, and it could even keep most if not all of them out of landfills.

I know I will be looking to buy more of them to go along with what I have currently, even if none of my current computers can make the jump. These things make for excellent video game machines, for instance. I've made some really cool things for family and friends out of my outdated tech before. But if I can pick up half a dozen laptops on the cheap, those make the best gifts just because of how little space they take up on somebody's entertainment system compared to a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard attached.



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

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:11 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:

You morons keep taking the 20 side of every 80/20 issue and see where it gets you.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The 80% don't want to pay taxes, neither FICA nor income tax on tips or anything else. The point that the 80% cannot understand is that will kill Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. I know who that 80% is. So does Trump. Neither he nor I need those programs.

Furthermore, Trump proposed funding the government with only tariffs, not with income tax. The 80% cannot understand that is a sales tax they pay. The 80% think it is a tax that foreigners pay. The top 1% will benefit when the 80% get what they want, but the 80% will be worse off, losing all their Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

Does the 80% understand? No. No. Never. That's why they waste years drinking and why they kill themselves with tobacco and food. Trump knows that perfectly well and so do I: Nobody thinks of themselves as stupid, and yet they are dumb.

The Art of Politics is to get dumb people to act smart, for example, convince them that slavery is bad even when they aren't chained slaves themselves. Or another example, convince them that Hitler needs to die even when they are not Jewish themselves. The same Art, in Trump's hands, can get them to act dumb. For example, Trump would ask voters: Why care about slavery? Why care what Hitler does in Europe? Why pay taxes that benefit someone who is not you?

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:13 AM

SECOND

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


If people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (revised and updated in 2019).


Download from https://z-library.sk/book/28355141/d841a8/snakes-in-suits-revised-edit
ion.html



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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:31 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm still wondering when they're going to start talking about the whole Windows 10/11 situation brewing this year. Outside of some tech YouTube channels, I don't ever hear about it.

The staggering amount of e-waste that is about to be created by Microsoft should be front page news right now, and they should be hammered with that every day until they fix their new operating system to work with PCs that still have years of life left in them, or they are forced to continue at least doing security updates on Win10 for everyone without charging for them.

Oh...

I did just look and the situation has improved slightly. Nowhere near good enough though.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-stay-on-windows-10-after-2025-itll-
cost-you

It seems like now they're making the offer to extend security updates to anyone, and not just businesses. It looks like a one time fee of $30 per computer, but it's only for 1 year after which they will not even be doing security updates for businesses on Windows10 anymore.




Fortunately, I think there will be a surprisingly big 2nd hand market for these machines because of how cheap they will be. It might even be big enough to keep these things from dropping in price as low as they otherwise should, and it could even keep most if not all of them out of landfills.

I know I will be looking to buy more of them to go along with what I have currently, even if none of my current computers can make the jump. These things make for excellent video game machines, for instance. I've made some really cool things for family and friends out of my outdated tech before. But if I can pick up half a dozen laptops on the cheap, those make the best gifts just because of how little space they take up on somebody's entertainment system compared to a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard attached.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Today, anyone smart enough to use Windows, a very low bar indeed, can use desktop Linux.

Take, for example, my own favorite Linux desktop: Linux Mint. I've gotten people in their 70s who wouldn't know a shell command from Excel up and running on Mint without any trouble. https://www.linuxmint.com/

Still not convinced? Tell you what, go to your local junk shop and buy a cheap computer. Unlike Windows, Linux runs on pretty much anything. For instance, Mint only needs 2 GB of RAM (4 GB recommended), 20 GB of disk space (100 GB recommended), and a graphics card that handles 1024 x 768 resolution. In other words, any PC from the last 20 years or so should do just fine.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/28/windows_10_demise_linux/?td=kee
preading

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:35 AM

SECOND

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


“They’re Scared Shitless”: The Threat of Political Violence Informing Trump’s Grip on Congress

With the president smashing norm after norm, even lawmakers within his party have feared for their personal safety, and at least one has told confidants that it has swayed his decision-making.

By Gabriel Sherman | February 19, 2025

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-congress-political-violenc
e

In the past week, Donald Trump has signaled a desire to rule like a strongman rather than a president constrained by constitutional norms. Last Friday, Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, scolded democratic NATO allies and met with the leader of Germany’s extreme-right AfD party. On Saturday, Trump declared on social media: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.) Download the 2019 revised and updated book from https://z-library.sk/book/28355141/d841a8/snakes-in-suits-revised-edit
ion.html

From the moment Trump descended his golden escalator in June 2015 to announce his first run for president, he injected menace into his political rhetoric. On the campaign trail he talked about wanting to punch protesters in the face. During his first term, he praised Montana’s then representative Greg Gianforte for physically attacking Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs in 2017. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!” Trump said. (Gianforte later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and received a six-month deferred jail sentence.) When protests erupted after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, Trump called protesters “thugs” and said: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The phrase echoed a remark made in the 1960s by a Miami police chief associated with stoking racial tensions in the city (Trump claimed he wasn’t aware of its origins). In a September 2020 debate against Joe Biden, Trump refused to condemn white supremacist violence and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

January 6 further catalyzed GOP fear of Trump-inspired violence. Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins, that an undercurrent of anxiety thwarted Republican efforts to formally punish Trump for his role in inciting the riot. “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins wrote in his book. “When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”

Former Wyoming representative and prominent anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney told CNN that House GOP members confided to her that they were “afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado told NBC News after January 6: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

Republican Peter Meijer, then a Michigan representative, told Atlantic writer Tim Alberta in 2021 that one colleague seemed to nearly have a nervous breakdown over fears of being harmed by MAGA supporters if he were to vote to certify the 2020 election results: “He asked his new colleague if he was okay,” Alberta reported. “The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. ‘Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,’ Meijer says. ‘If they’re willing to come after you inside the US Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?’”

Trump’s mass pardoning of January 6 participants has recentered those events in Republican minds of late.

“A guy sends a mob into your workplace to kill you, and you’re okay with that?” Stevens tells me, speaking about his frustration with congressional Republicans. Stevens says the clemencies send the message to Republicans that Trump will defend those who commit political violence in his name.

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 9:08 AM

SECOND

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


An Explosion of Lies

The Musk Administration chokes on the truth

By Paul Krugman | Feb 20, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-explosion-of-lies

On Monday a White House official made an extraordinary declaration. Elon Musk, he said, doesn’t run DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Why, he doesn’t even work there.

This was obviously a lie, since Donald Trump has repeatedly said that Musk does, in fact, run DOGE. The immediate purpose of the lie may have been to protect Musk from the consequences of a case brought by Democratic attorneys general against DOGE and Musk himself.

But the lie about Musk’s role in DOGE barely registered amid the explosion of lies emanating from Musk and Trump these days, ranging from the claim that Social Security is sending checks to tens of millions of dead people to the claim that Ukraine started a war that, as I hope everyone remembers, began with a Russian attempt to seize Kyiv.

Why the frantic lying? I suspect that it’s because Musk, Trump and their Congressional allies are flailing. I don’t think any past administration has ever failed so thoroughly in its first month.

About DOGE: Until last week DOGE’s efforts mainly came across as sinister — an effort to gain control of federal payments systems, along with the personal information of millions of Americans. That effort remains deeply sinister, and we shouldn’t forget about that menace even as we note just how shambolic the Musk team’s efforts have been on other fronts.

But it has been an extraordinary shambles.

Beginning late last week Trump officials, clearly operating on instructions from DOGE, laid off large numbers of “probationary” federal workers — that is, workers who have been hired relatively recently or, in some cases, have experienced a change in job status (often a promotion!) and as a result have fewer job protections than the rest of the federal work force.

As I wrote the other day, this was mainly austerity theater — an attempt to look strong and decisive, to create the appearance that DOGE was saving lots of money even though it wasn’t. And Musk’s people appear to have believed that these layoffs would have few visible consequences, that essential public services wouldn’t be much affected.

They were proved wrong almost immediately, indeed within hours after the layoffs began.

There has been a fair amount of coverage of the layoffs at the National Nuclear Security Agency, which officials somehow failed to realize helps secure our nuclear weapons. When they figured this out, they quickly tried to rehire some of those laid off, but had trouble reaching them because their government email accounts had already been suspended.

There has been less coverage of the firing, then attempted un-firing, of workers who help maintain the western power grid, or the layoffs of USDA employees working on bird flu, whom the administration is similarly trying to get back on the job.

All in all, what we’ve just witnessed is a stunning display of incompetence, dismissal of critical federal workers by people with no idea of what they do and why it matters. Musk and Trump have, of course, apologized and promised to do better in the future.

See, I made a joke.

What they have actually done is try to cover up the mess they made with desperate lies — and the lies themselves provide even more evidence that they have no idea what they’re doing.

DOGE quickly responded to the chaos created by the layoffs it orchestrated by claiming that it has already saved taxpayers $55 billion. But the purported specific savings it listed added up to only $16.6 billion — and half of that number reflected a typo, listing a canceled $8 million contract as $8 billion.

Think about the level of incompetence it takes to get a number crucial to your case wrong by a factor of a thousand.

Wait, it gets worse. On Monday Musk put up a series of posts on X claiming that the Social Security Administration has been wasting vast amounts of money, making payments to “tens of millions of people” who are actually dead. Trump then echoed the claim Tuesday.

This is completely false. Yes, Social Security loses some money to fraud — you can’t spend $1.5 trillion a year without a few dollars going astray. But anyone who has actually looked into the program knows that it’s remarkably clean — much cleaner, for example than Medicare, which spends tens of billions a year in overpayments to privatized insurance plans.

So where is this coming from? Although the people Musk has been sending into the agencies are supposedly tech-savvy, they don’t know their way around the software the Social Security Administration runs on. Wired has a good summary of what probably happened. They came in with the assumption that there must be massive waste and fraud and quickly jumped on harmless quirks in the way data are reported as proof that 150-year-olds and dead people were receiving benefits. Think of it as the coding equivalent of mistaking $8 million for $8 billion.

You should see the DOGE debacle in tandem with what looks like a looming budget crackup in Congress. Republicans took control of Congress screaming about the evils of budget deficits, but also determined to ram through huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Even a liberal application of voodoo economics, of claims that tax cuts and deregulation will somehow unleash rapid economic growth, isn’t remotely enough to square that circle. So their answer has to involve big spending cuts.

But which spending can they cut? Here’s a summary of federal spending in fiscal 2024:

Source: CBO

OK, I changed the name of one category and cut the rest of the budget slightly differently from the usual breakdown. What I call DOGEland is nondefense discretionary spending — basically the operation of the government, from aviation safety to medical research to emergency relief to law enforcement — which is more or less the only thing DOGE has targeted. It’s a fairly small slice of the budget, so it could only be a significant source of savings if DOGE could find massive waste, fraud and abuse. Since it is actually coming up with nothing, that won’t help.

What I’m calling “the expendables” are means-tested programs, especially Medicaid, food stamps and earned-income tax credits, that help lower-income Americans. Republicans are afraid to touch Social Security or Medicare, so the resolution just passed by the House Budget Committee instead imposes savage cuts on programs that help Americans in need.

Republicans may imagine that such people don’t matter. But there are a lot of them. For example, around 70 million Americans receive Medicaid, including a lot of Trump voters in swing districts.

So at this point it’s very hard to see how the G.O.P., with its razor-thin House majority, can pass a budget, or for that matter raise the debt ceiling and avoid U.S. default.

Combine that with the disaster that Trump’s foreign policy has already become. The best guess is that his crazy talk about Ukraine starting the war is a response to President Zelensky’s rejection of his proposal that Ukraine turn over much of its wealth to the United States, getting nothing in return.

As I see it, the explosion of lies is a sign that the Musk/Trump Administration is cracking up after just one month in office.

So what should Democrats do? Nothing. Trump and Musk have created this situation, even as they try to undermine our democracy. They should be forced to own the disaster they made, and not a single Democrat should vote to help them out.

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

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