Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
John Cleese
Putin’s pompous mouthpiece Lavrov has, of course, done a complete obligatory volte-face about America. Someone should ask him why, if Western Europe is now Russia’s sole enemy, his daughter ( by his mistress ) chooses to live in England
https://substack.com/@johncleese/note/c-98613934

More from https://johncleese.substack.com/notes

John Cleese
I note Trump has made English the official language of America. He needs to be careful. It he demands that it be spoken properly, he will lose most of his voters

John Cleese
A New Zealand official has been asked to resign because he said he doubts whether President Trump understands history. Of course he doesn’t. Knowing anything about history requires reading books, and the President has never read a book. But unfortunately, he is the king of ‘strong’ man who is hypersensitive to criticism

John Cleese
I see that Trump and his shoeshine boys are expecting an apology from Zelensky. Something along the lines of: ‘I’m really sorry Russia invaded us three years ago, and that we provoked them by trying to establish a democracy’ ?

John Cleese
I’m quite surprised at how many sensible people wonder, like me, if Putin doesn’t have something on President Trump. If it WAS true, what would have been happening that isn’t happening now ? This is an inquiry made in complete seriousness. Abuse will not count as evidence, for or against

John Cleese
Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy advances the theory that people of low socio-economic status do not want anyone in charge who is smarter then they are. Is that why we finished up with Trump ?

John Cleese
7d
I don’t expect that the MAGA fans know much about WW2, even if Trump’s billionaires do. After the war ended in 1945, there was a consensus that Hitler had become more and more belligerent because, every time concessions were made to him, it encouraged him. ‘Appeasement’ was always to be avoided when dealing with aggressive dictators.

We know that Putin regards 1989, when the USSR collapsed, as the worst thing that has ever happened in world history, and that his ambition is to restore the old USSR and become the Russian all-time hero. His aim is to destroy democracy in all the European countries that have adopted it since the Berlin Wall came down, and install Communist dictatorships instead in a new USSR.

At this time, the President of the United States chooses to abandon all his European allies ( who are democratic ) and embrace these dictatorships - Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary, Haiti and the Central African Republic, by voting with them all at the United Nations

Is it in the United States interest to line up with these dictators against Western democracies ?

Or is it just good business ?

John Cleese
Trump’s thinking is making me reconsider World War 2. All Britain had to do was to avoid that terrible [war] was to surrender to Hitler. Why on earth didn’t Churchill think of that ?

John Cleese
Feb 26
All the great philosophers and founders of religions have warned us about greed. I think I’m beginning to see why.

John Cleese
Feb 25
I’m glad Trump is playing so much golf. It always cheers me up, because I remember that Hitler shot himself in a bunker.

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

I care much more about what Rowan Atkinson would think today, given that he was actually putting his career on the line to stand up for Freedom of Speech in the UK, as it's been under even greater attack there than it was here up until the Democratic Party eradicated itself from American politics.

I don't remember Mr. Cleese doing that.

Wise words, and the complete antithesis of the Democratic Party over the last 12 years.

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

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

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Friday, March 7, 2025 8:49 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

OMG.

RUSSIA!
HITLER!
RUSSIA!
HITLER!
WWII!!

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 3:07 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners

According to the report, The TSA has more people doing "full-time union work" vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work "full-time on union matters" and do not retain certification to perform screening....

What's more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of "poor performers" are allowed to stay employed and "not surprisingly, continue to not perform."

... DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners ...

No wonder they gutted the NLRB first.

The problems this article cites are MANAGEMENT problems, not union problems. Keeping on poor performers and excess employees?

Fire the management. THEY'RE NOT COVERED BY A UNION, IT SHOULD BE EASY TO DO THAT

I was a supervisor in a government agency. It was difficult to get long-term poor performers fired, but it was possible. I worked with HR and manager. You just had to go thru all the steps.

And AFA excess staff... again, it was within management's authority to defund positions. This seems a case of gross mismanagement.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 3:37 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So, to get back to the problem of reindustrialization ....

Re-industrialization requires sacrifice.

Even in the most equitable of societies, development ... or redevelopment ... requires that at least some portion of the workforce be dedicated to making factories and infrastructure ... work that doesn't lead to immediate production of the goods or services. So people overall will be working harder without an immediate improvement in living standards.

China is an example of successful development. (They followed the Japan model). Start by making cheap goods for export using low-wage labor: plastic crap for Walmart, Nike shoes etc then climb the value ladder (Bosch tools, computer chips etc) For quite a while, the workforce conditions were pretty grim: factory/ dormitories with suicide netting, unsafe working conditions full of chemical exposure etc. And despite what people think, the money wasn't creating a class of rich entrepreneurs, it was (mostly) being plowed back into further development.

Russia is an example of successful reindustrialization. In Russia's case, they had to first corral the gangster-oligarch class (get them out of politics), and then partially re-nationalize major resources (oil, gas, electricity, telecom, aeronautics etc) usually by becoming majority shareholder in major industries. The government also loaned money in sectors such as farming that needed further development. However, note that Russia's internal economy didn't take off until it was divorced from western companies and finance.

By withdrawing western companies from Russia and cutting off Russian banks from western finance, that forced profits to be reinvested in Russia instead of being constantly drained off to the west.

I think there's a lesson in there for us as to where are real economic problems come from. It's not Dems or Repubs, not the deep state, not even inefficient government. Its the constant draining away of capital by the already wealthy, with the complicity of our government. .

----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 4:18 AM

We should find a way to be building houses too.

REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.

You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. Every one of them came with a bathroom bigger than my Master Bedroom, and they had a huge step-up Jacuzzi that they were terrified to use without any bars. I can't even tell you how many huge walk-in showers with all the extras we put in those things after ripping those beautiful Jacuzzis out. Broke my heart every time because here I was, 22 year old idiot that I was, just dreaming of owning a bathroom setup like that one day... and it was the first thing they all removed.

And I don't even understand the desire of having houses that big at any age, but especially at that age. Some of these people were paying over $20k per year in property taxes. I don't even want to know what it costs to heat those things in the winter. One of the most common styles saw one half of the house wide open from the front door all the way to the back glass doors and a ceiling that peaked at 20 feet tall. All of the upper bedrooms and bathrooms surrounded that opening.

Why????????

We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.

How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.

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

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 7:06 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.

REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.

You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. . . .

We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.

How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.

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

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

How Giant White Houses Took Over America

They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.

By Dan Kois | March 06, 2025 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/business/2025/03/houses-real-estate-luxury-sale.html

Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich.

The House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 7:19 AM

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

Trump killing PEPFAR means killing millions of people

By Kelsey Piper | Mar 8, 2025, 6:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402944/pepfar-hiv-donald-trump-elon
-musk-global-health

About a million people will die terrible deaths every single year for the foreseeable future if PEPFAR doesn’t get reversed. All to save 0.08 percent of the budget.

Some of the 20 million people we threw off their lifesaving medication will find other sources, but many won’t. And every day, 1,400 babies will be born with HIV who would otherwise be HIV-free if we hadn’t frozen the programs meant to help their mothers.

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 7:32 AM

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

Trump says Putin launching massive strike on Ukraine is ‘what anybody would do’

US president says he finds Russia easier to deal with than Ukraine after cutting off intelligence and weapons to Kyiv

By Andrew Roth in Washington and Luke Harding in Kyiv | Fri 7 Mar 2025 13.23 EST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/07/trump-says-it-is-easie
r-to-deal-with-russia-and-putin-wants-to-end-the-war

Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukrainian energy facilities on Friday in the wake of the US decision to halt intelligence sharing with Ukraine that had helped it target incoming fire.

Asked whether the Russian leader was taking advantage of the pause in US intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine, Trump replied: “I actually think he is doing what anybody else would do.”

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said: “We’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine.”

He added: “I think he [Putin] wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”

The Numbers:

Russian forces conducted one of the largest ever missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of March 6 to 7 as Russian forces continue to adapt strike packages to overwhelm Ukraine's air defense umbrella by increasing the total number of Shahed and decoy drones in each strike. Russian forces launched the largest combined strike package against Ukraine since November 2024 on the night of March 6 to 7.[1] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 67 missiles including 35 Kh-101/Kh-55 cruise missiles, eight Kalibr cruise missiles, three Iskander-M/Kn-23 ballistic missiles, four S-300 air defense missiles, eight Kh-59/69 cruise missiles, and 194 Shahed and decoy drones.[2] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Ukrainian forces downed 25 Kh-101/Kh-55 cruise missiles, all eight Kalibr cruise missiles, one Kh-59/69 cruise missile, and 100 Shahed and decoy drones and that 86 decoy drones and up to 10 missiles did not reach their targets, likely due to Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) interference.

Russian Drone and Missile Strikes on Ukraine January 1, 2025 - March 7, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-7-2025

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 8:32 AM

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

Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns

By Claude Malhuret | March 8, 2025, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/claude-malhe
uret-speech/681947/

Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-germany-const
itution-authoritarianism/681233/

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

Read: Russia is not winning https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/ukraine-russ
ia-war-position/681916/

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb. The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 2:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.

REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.

You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. . . .

We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.

How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
How Giant White Houses Took Over America

They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.

By Dan Kois | March 06, 2025 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/business/2025/03/houses-real-estate-luxury-sale.html

Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich.

The House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.

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

Interesting. The white color must be a southern thing. I don't recall ever seeing a white McMansion, let alone ever doing work inside of one. I'll bet it's a sunshine/heat thing. Ours up here are usually made of brick or they're darker colors.

This is a different phenomena down by you too. I've seen this type of rebuild or addition around here on occasion, but as far as I know it's not a regular thing... at least in the souther-Chicagoland area. It could be happening in the West and Norther suburbs... I don't go out there very often. What we've been doing is building entire brand new neighborhoods full of these shrines to excess since the Clinton years. Whenever I'd work on one of these things, it would be in the middle of an entire neighborhood were every house was huge and every house looked nearly identical, with just some very minor face-value changes that gave just the smallest amount of individualism to each house. Probably, one would assume, so you can figure out which house was yours when you came home at 3AM after a night of binge drinking.

Quote:
The Giant White House, though, is not only giant in its floorplan—it’s giant vertically. It’s a trend that comes not from the suburbs but from the city. In recent decades, the loft—the converted warehouse, with its open spaces and high industrial ceilings—became popular in American cities, said Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago. “Those kinds of preferences trickled out to homeowners, and now everyone wants a cathedral-like ceiling.”

Yup. I'm very familiar with the bullshit cathedral-like ceiling.

I'm glad they went on a quest for answers, but bummed that they didn't offer up any solutions to the problem. That's the only question that really needs answering.

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

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 2:43 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.

REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.

You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. Every one of them came with a bathroom bigger than my Master Bedroom, and they had a huge step-up Jacuzzi that they were terrified to use without any bars. I can't even tell you how many huge walk-in showers with all the extras we put in those things after ripping those beautiful Jacuzzis out. Broke my heart every time because here I was, 22 year old idiot that I was, just dreaming of owning a bathroom setup like that one day... and it was the first thing they all removed.

And I don't even understand the desire of having houses that big at any age, but especially at that age. Some of these people were paying over $20k per year in property taxes. I don't even want to know what it costs to heat those things in the winter. One of the most common styles saw one half of the house wide open from the front door all the way to the back glass doors and a ceiling that peaked at 20 feet tall. All of the upper bedrooms and bathrooms surrounded that opening.

Why????????

We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.

How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.

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

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

There was a lovely Victorian on the corner, on a 60,000 sq ft lot filled with towering ash trees and a black walnut that had snuck in. Like all upper class Victorian homes it was large, similar in size to the BWH the article complains about, but graceful, wuth a lovely hardwood front porch. It was green and lovely and quiet, and one of the reasons we bought where we did.

So, what did they do?
Tore it down, bulldozed the trees, divided the lot into six parts, and put up three of the ugliest modernist/ minimalist/ tackiest - looking mansions that sat on the market for over 6 months, with 30,000 sq ft yet to be developed.

We also have a faux French mansion, a couple of faux Italian villas, and an uncountable number of monstrosities with collonades, 2-story entryways that look like something from the Wizard of Oz, and actual goddamn turrets.

But FWIW, the McMansion era ended a few years ago in our neighborhood. It was prolly the high interest rates that killed it. Since the houses here are now OLD, what I've seen is either partial or complete reconstruction on the same foundation.

Also, I was at a planning meeting and managed to get a zoning change that disallowed those pretentious 2-story entryways. A small victory, but at least one less eyesore.

The secret is in your zoning laws. Allow lot-splitting and (especially) require bigger setbacks and smaller % of developed space on a lot and those McMansions will shrink in size.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 3:11 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, to get back to the problem of reindustrialization ....

Re-industrialization requires sacrifice.

Even in the most equitable of societies, development ... or redevelopment ... requires that at least some portion of the workforce be dedicated to making factories and infrastructure ... work that doesn't lead to immediate production of the goods or services. So people overall will be working harder without an immediate improvement in living standards.

China is an example of successful development. (They followed the Japan model). Start by making cheap goods for export using low-wage labor: plastic crap for Walmart, Nike shoes etc then climb the value ladder (Bosch tools, computer chips etc) For quite a while, the workforce conditions were pretty grim: factory/ dormitories with suicide netting, unsafe working conditions full of chemical exposure etc. And despite what people think, the money wasn't creating a class of rich entrepreneurs, it was (mostly) being plowed back into further development.

Russia is an example of successful reindustrialization. In Russia's case, they had to first corral the gangster-oligarch class (get them out of politics), and then partially re-nationalize major resources (oil, gas, electricity, telecom, aeronautics etc) usually by becoming majority shareholder in major industries. The government also loaned money in sectors such as farming that needed further development. However, note that Russia's internal economy didn't take off until it was divorced from western companies and finance.

By withdrawing western companies from Russia and cutting off Russian banks from western finance, that forced profits to be reinvested in Russia instead of being constantly drained off to the west.

I think there's a lesson in there for us as to where are real economic problems come from. It's not Dems or Repubs, not the deep state, not even inefficient government. Its the constant draining away of capital by the already wealthy, with the complicity of our government. .

----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

I bring this up to say .... watching the Trump admin apparently go after unions, in the effort to reindustrialize America (even assuming it's at all successful), sacrifices must be made.

And it's not going to be by the billionaires.

Trump, and (probably more from Elon) seem to be developing their economic plan along the lines of classic Italian fascism. (No, I don't mean Nazi gas chamber stuff. Please look up the history of Italian fascism as a way of restoring order to Italy's 1920-1930 economy. "At least he made the trains run on time".)

This could be the only legitimate and important criticism of Trump. Needs watching.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 3:24 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns

By Claude Malhuret | March 8, 2025, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/claude-malhe
uret-speech/681947/

Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine.

I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.

We should disregard his rant against what (he thinks) Trump is doing to America. What Trump does here is our business, and not for him to theatrically wring his hands over.

The rest is hypocrisy, hot air, and scaremongering designed to whip up support for Macron's and Ursula's get-rich-quick scheme of stealing Russian assets and creating Eurobonds.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 6:32 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.

Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 6:32 PM

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

TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427

Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians

Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow)

By Phillips P. Obrien | Mar 08, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-123-the-week-the
-usa

Hello All,

Well, I feel that cannot really wait until tomorrow to send the first part of my weekend update out. What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.

Rescuers respond to a Russian missile strike in Ukraine's Kharkiv region on Friday.
The Results of a Russian missile attack on Ukraine just over a day ago. The damage and death you see is now courtesy of the USA.

The United States is now an active enemy of democracy not just in Ukraine, but in all of Europe. That it would, somewhat gleefully in the case of the president, help Russia kill what were recently some of the most pro-American people in the world, a people desperate to be US allies, tells you everywhere about the dark period we are now in. The fate of freedom throughout Europe is at stake.

Needless to say, therefore, the European reaction is key. There is a general awareness that Europe faces a great challenge—but I’m not sure people understand the reality of what Trump is doing. There are still those looking for signs that he might be ok, that he can be trusted, that NATO still has validity. The sooner Europe can fully face the reality of what it is confronting the better.

Also, on the battlefield, the Russians/North Koreans made a 4 mile advance in Kursk (while hardly being able to advance anywhere else). It shows that Putin is working with Trump more than you might think.

All of that will be in the update sent out tomorrow.

The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians

The United States government took some dramatic steps this week to help Russia and weaken Ukraine—the intended result of which will be more Ukrainian deaths, fewer Russian losses, and the undermining of Ukrainian democracy.

The steps were comprehensive, layered, and designed to punish Ukraine for not doing what Trump wants. Its worth listing them just so you can see how significant the changes are.

1. The USA has stopped the delivery of all military supplies to Ukraine. The Trump administration had actually been slowing the supply of remaining Biden era supplies for a while. However now even Biden appropriations are not being delivered.

2. The USA has stopped allowing Ukraine to attack Russian forces with certain high-value US systems such as HIMARS.

3. The USA, in a particularly twisted move, has made it far more difficult for Ukraine to defend against Russian missile attacks. What the USA has done is no longer provide Ukraine with warning of such attacks—which will make them far more deadly and effective.

4. The USA is actually stopping non-military supplies such as medical equipment, which is vital to keep wounded Ukrainians alive. This had started with the USAID cut—but has now reached an extreme level with no medical supplies to treat Ukrainian soldiers. The USA is also forbidding the Ukrainians from having access to Maxar commercial satellite data—which has been widely available to them (and many civilian agencies) throughout the conflict.

5. The USA is signalling strong support to Putin that they want to see his strategic priorities met in the short term.

Note—for point 4 I’ve linked to an Adam Kinzinger tweet for the evidence on medical supplies being cut off to Ukraine. All I will say is that his source is extremely good (for those of you who don’t know, he and I have discussed the situation regularly, including in this podcast). I’m entirely comfortable saying that this is true.

The cut in military aid to Ukraine was something that Trump had been itching for a while. There had been a noticeable slow-down in deliveries in the previous weeks, but this week everything was stopped—even if it was just over the border to Ukraine and about to be delivered. Moreover, I’ve been told that US forces in Europe are actively making it more difficult for other partners to deliver aid to Ukraine. This will create some major headaches soon, in areas such as air defense.

This step will save many Russian lives and lead to many more Ukrainian deaths, both soldiers and civilians,

The US moves to weaken both Ukrainian offensive and defensive capabilities (points 2 and 3) comes down to the immediate shut-down of US intelligence sharing. The US has been providing Ukraine vital aid to allow the Ukrainian military to both attack Russian forces (mostly in the battle area is has to be said) and also to help the Ukrainians defend their cities and civilian infrastructure.

Supposedly at 2pm on Wednesday of this week (March 5) the US cut the data that it was supplying, which left Ukraine completely in the dark and unable to target their HIMARS in the normal way. Now, the Trump administration had supposedly already been limiting the offensive intelligence supplied to a restricted area close to the battle line—but then it all went dead. So no more targeting help from the USA for Ukraine.

This step will immediately help save Russian soldiers and equipment from losses.

The intelligence cut also meant that the USA no longer is providing the Ukrainians with notice of Russian preparations to launch missiles (their most effective weapons) against Ukrainian cities. Fast Russian missiles demand the most preparation time possible, both so Ukrainian civilians can take cover and so that Ukrainian anti-air forces can get ready. Now, Ukraine will have far less notice that the Russian are launching ranged attacks.

Indeed, this step seems to have been almost coordinated with Putin. Its interesting that for a while before the intelligence ban had been put into place by the USA, the Russians had used relatively few missiles to attack Ukraine and had been relying on their Shaheds (which are much easier to shoot down). However, almost immediately after Trump cuts intelligence sharing, the Russians launch a massive missile barrage.

This step will immediately lead to greater Ukrainian civilian casualties and greater civilian suffering as Ukraine’s infrastructure will be harder to defend.

The punitive nature of what the USA is doing to Ukraine might be seen in these steps to really punish the country. The stopping of medical supplies just means more wounded Ukrainian soldiers will die. The cutting off of Maxar technology is just another way to try and make sure that the Ukrainians cannot attack the Russian effectively. Its basically going the extra mile to help the Russians and hurt the Ukrainians.

This is also part of a plan by Trump and Putin to weaken Ukrainian democracy. They want to crush both the morale of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians—which will help force a bad deal on Ukraine.

Its psychopathic.

These steps will save Russian resources and soldiers and lead to more dead Ukrainians—particularly soldiers who are wounded.

The signalling of support to Putin is clear and unambiguous—and crucially involves Trump personally as can be seen in his press conference last night (March 7). Ive linked to that below.

Its ridiculous how its being reported. The day after Trump froze US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, the Russians, seemingly coordinating with him and launched their large missile attack. Trump’s response was typically perverse. He publicly seems a little miffed at the attack, and even teases new sanctions against Russia. However, he never takes concrete actions to increase pressure on Russia and almost certainly won’t here.

As an example, we had Trump threaten sanctions and tariffs on Russia in January, a move which caused some people to lose their heads. However, once the threat was made, it was shown to be toothless. On the other hand, Zelensky does not wear a tie to the Oval Office, and this seems to be reason for Trump, and some Trump backers, to take brutal actions to kill Ukrainians.

However, Trump is not really mad at Russia—as always his anger is directed at Ukraine. He could not repress his real views after his toothless threats to add more sanctions on Russia. He pivoted almost entirely and said he much preferred working with Putin, that what Russia was doing was justified and almost seeming to enjoy the destruction he (and the USA) was helping to inflict on Ukraine. Trump even openly admitted that he was weakening Ukrainian air defenses to put pressure on the Ukrainians. Here are some quotes from his press conference—the last one is where he admits he is starving them of air defense.

"... right now they're bombing the hell out of Ukraine. I'm finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine.

"Do you think that Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of the U.S. pause right now on intelligence and military aid to Ukraine?" — Trump was just asked. Trump: "... I actually think he's doing what anybody else would do. I think he wants to get it stopped and settled. And I think he's hitting harder than he's been hitting. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.

"Why not give Ukraine air defenses to prevent Putin from pounding them?" — Trump was just asked. Trump: “I have to know that they want to settle. I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don't want to settle, we're out of there because we want them to settle.“

Btw, you can watch the whole press conference here. It has Trump expressing lots of anti-European thoughts in general, which is notable. When it comes to his statements on Ukraine, they start around the 14th minute.

Conclusion

As a rule of thumb, Trump only ever takes concrete action to harm Ukraine and only ever takes concrete action to help Russia. In this case, he is admitting to helping Russia kill Ukrainians.

This is the official position of the US Government and through that the people of the USA. Its amazing how little this is being criticized.

Europe needs to understand—if the USA is willing to help Russia kill Ukrainians today, it could easily be willing to help Russia kill other Europeans tomorrow.

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

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Saturday, March 8, 2025 6:56 PM

Fuck you, and fuck Ukraine.

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

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 4:38 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.

SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.

Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...

Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427

Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians

Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 7:07 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.

SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.

Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...

Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427

Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians

Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, you and 6ix are hollow. Inflated with hot air. Vinyl blow up dolls. You are lightweights pushed around by the breezes. This is why you don't prosper in America. This is why you indulge in intoxicants, to help you forget what you are.

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 7:07 AM

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

Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?

The historian Stephen Kotkin analyzes what a President who governs in the style of professional wrestling gets wrong—and right—about an unstable world.

By David Remnick | March 9, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-ukraine-an
d-america-survive-donald-trump

The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.

Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?

Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.

Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in—not the entire left, but a really big part of it—on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered, as you know.

Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy. They’re not equivalent fantasies, certainly, but they’re nasty regimes in the Stalin case on a world-historical scale, and less so, but nasty, in Putin’s case. I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.

You’re right that in the thirties, there were people on the left who were pro-Soviet, pro-Stalinist. But you also know that a huge part of the left was anti-Stalinist.

O.K., that left that was pro-Stalinist was in my field until recently. They were the dominant trend in part of my field that I’ve been in for forty years. The right today also has people who are anti-Putin, I need to add.

Do you not share the view—and it’s my view—that if taken to its logical or worst extent, that the events in the White House last week could constitute a moral and strategic U-turn for the United States, which would be a disaster?

Presidents rarely turn a ship as big as the United States during a four-year term. Let’s remember the seventies, when Nixon was President and U.S. soft power was at a very low ebb, really in the toilet. We lost the Vietnam war. Nixon resigned over Watergate. The oil shock destroyed the Rust Belt. It was so bad that disco was popular. The seventies were really bad. And then what happened? America came back and had some of its best decades. So, it’s recuperable. Now, again, I’m not validating anything here, but Trump has revealed some truths about American power and America’s place in the world, and the European place in the world here, that are valuable truths. And he did it in his Trumpian fashion.

What are those truths?

So the truths are as follows: Zelensky is looking for security guarantees, which means that not just Ukrainians will die—that people from other countries, European countries especially, will die. The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war, and they’re fighting over whether they’re going to send any soldiers, even if there’s a peace deal, an armistice. Poland, which is Ukraine’s biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades. Trump, for all his Trumpy qualities, and we all know what they are—there’s no need to reiterate them, and I’m sure your magazine is full tilt in going after them—has nonetheless shown that it’s put up or shut up on the European side. And even though Putin couldn’t get the Europeans to get their act together, maybe Trump will.

Now, would I have done it Trump’s way? Do I appreciate that Trump is hurting American soft power? Yes, I get all of that, but I’m in the world that I’m in. I have the President that I have and I have the Europe that I have. And Europe just had a meeting where the principal public comment was that maybe they would get an armistice for a month, but it wouldn’t be an armistice on the battlefield. And nobody would send troops. I mean, what is this charade that we’re talking about? Trump exposed this. Now what are we going to do about it—first and foremost, as Europeans?

Now, that’s not to say that Trump is going to solve anything. It could well be that Trump’s actions produce the perverse and unintended consequences that we often see in politics. It could be that the situation worsens. But the situation was not going well. The Biden policy had dead-ended long before Biden left office. Something needed to be done. The trajectory we were on was failing. And let’s get on a trajectory that’s succeeding.

You’ve written and talked extensively about the dimensions and resiliency of American power since as early as 1880. When you hear people, including me, say that the encounter between Trump and Zelensky and the White House could really take us to a horrible place, do you think that’s alarmist?

Yes. I mean, you know American history. You know the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. You know that we had the Civil War. America has been berserk for as long as—Philip Roth: “the indigenous American berserk.” Now we have social media, and it’s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it’s encouraged because it’s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance—all of this is now how you make money, not just how you show your resentment and your outrage.

America is a place that—few people are willing to admit—is the most powerful country ever in recorded history across all dimensions: hard power, economic power, innovation power, energy superpower, soft power, alliance power. We could go on. There’s never been a power in world history on this level. The U.S. is five per cent of the global population and twenty-five per cent of global G.D.P. since 1880, more or less. That wasn’t caused by government—it wasn’t caused by Presidents. It can’t be suppressed and strangled by Presidents, no matter what they do, and they do a lot of things that I think are detrimental to American standing in the world.

And so the question for us is, going forward, how much of this American power is going to be used effectively, competently, as the world is changing, and how much can America rely on others? Because, let’s be honest, European power has declined, Japanese power has declined. It’s not American power that’s declining. It’s our alliances, our allies, who are declining. Our adversaries are not necessarily declining. We can argue about Russia, how deep its decline might be, but in the case of China, we clearly have a peer adversary.

And so what’s the plan? There’s unlimited demand for American power. Hey, let’s bring Ukraine into NATO! Hey, let’s do a security treaty with the Saudis! Everybody wants more and more American power, but American power can’t fulfill all its current commitments, let alone make new ones. You remember when our strategic doctrine was to [have the ability to] fight two major wars in two major theatres simultaneously. Then Obama comes to office, and he reduces that to 1.5 major wars in major theatres. Have you ever seen half a major war? I haven’t.

Then Trump comes along, and he reduces it to one major war and one major theatre. So we have alliance commitments—obligations to allies—in at least three major theatres. Our strategic doctrine is we can do one at any one time. Trump is revealing, and in some cases accelerating, a process, where America’s commitments exceed our capabilities, not because we’re in decline but because the alliances that we’re in—those countries, Germany, Japan, and a few others—are not punching at their weight. You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world. You can say that Trump’s methods are abominable. But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on—and we didn’t even get to the fiscal situation.

How is Vladimir Putin reading this situation? How is he watching Washington, and what does he want?

Russian grand strategy for, I don’t know, three centuries has been the following: West decline! Have the West implode and collapse, and then we’ll survive. That’s Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They’re horrible in Russia, but, hey, if the West implodes—if the West defeats itself, if the West is undermining its own policies and strengths—then Russia will be O.K. This is your fear. This is what you’re talking about: that Trump is doing Putin’s work for him.

My argument is that that might be true, but I wouldn’t trade U.S. power for Russian power in any dimension. And I wouldn’t necessarily trade our political system for their political system, because the voters punished the Democrats in the previous election, big time, and they’re going to punish anybody else who’s incompetent, fails to deliver, and wrecks either our institutions, our economy, inflation, the stock market. Americans hate war, and they hate losing war even more than they hate war. So Trump is playing with fire here.

You not only follow the statements and thinking of the Russian leadership but you’re reading everyday sources, like Signal, in Russian. What does that tell you?

That they’re hoping that this abominable war ends.

Who is “they,” Steve—

The Russian population. So let’s remember: since the fall of 2022, when the Russians were evicted from Kharkiv, it was really just riot police that were chased out of Kharkiv province. It was not some combined arms operation that the Ukrainians beat—but nonetheless it was successful and impressive. Since then, Russia has controlled nineteen per cent, roughly, of Ukrainian territory, more or less. That’s more than two years. They’ve lost seven hundred thousand people [dead and wounded], gaining nothing in those two-plus years.

Now, you ask yourself: How sustainable is that over the really long term? And the answer is, Putin keeps throwing lives into the meat grinder—now it’s North Korean lives—because the Ukrainians have fewer lives to throw up against him. Ukraine doesn’t need Abrams tanks. They got them and they didn’t help. It doesn’t need F-16 planes because they can’t fight in the battlefield against Russian anti-aircraft. Ukraine needs five hundred thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, and nobody’s sending them. But again, Russia needs the same thing. They need either to get Ukraine to capitulate, which it’s refused to do, remarkably, or they need to get others to force Ukraine to capitulate, which I don’t think anybody can do. So Russia’s in this holding action. Putin is willing to go as long as it takes, but Russian society—maybe not.

Then how does this end?

Who thinks it’s going to end? It started under Catherine the Great, when, in 1783, she conquered Crimea. We’re in the middle of a longer-term trajectory here. People think this is going to end: Ukraine can take some territory back, and Russia’s going to capitulate. They’re going to win on the battlefield. The primary problem of this from the beginning has been the idea that Ukraine was going to win this on the battlefield, rather than somehow apply the kind of political pressure to force an armistice that was favorable to Ukraine, meaning they could retain the sovereignty that they defended when they defended their capital, Kyiv, and they could invest in reconstruction and attempt the kind of South Korean trajectory from the armistice in the Korean War. That’s been the play from the beginning. It’s still the play now. You and I have been talking about this for three years now.

In other words, the outcome that’s possible, and that ends the meat grinder, is like a divided Korea: a divided Ukraine.

That’s the good outcome. The bad outcome is Ukraine loses its sovereignty; it recognizes Russian annexations of the territory that Russia controls and even beyond the territory Russia currently controls; it’s forced to put limits on the size of its military so it’s defenseless; it cannot join an international security alliance or form any security alliance whatsoever. Those limits on Ukrainian sovereignty amount to capitulation. That’s not peace; that’s peace-on-the-knees, right? That’s what Putin is now “willing to negotiate.” He was not willing to negotiate a peace in which Russia kept control over Ukrainian territories but nobody recognized them as Russian. Ukraine put no limits on its military so it could defend itself if fighting resumed, and Ukraine could join any organization that was willing to take them and that they were qualified for, whether currently existing or future existing. That’s the favorable armistice that we’ve been hoping enough political pressure on Putin would deliver. We are nowhere near that right now. We should have been working toward that for years now, and we haven’t been.

What is the nature of the political pressure that you clearly think the Biden Administration failed to administer, and what would it be now?

We put very significant pressure on the battlefield, including allowing long-range strikes onto Russian territory, not just defense of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. We escalated in the economic sphere with very significant sanctions. Maybe we could do more. But nonetheless, we’ve done a lot there. It’s in the political sphere that we’ve failed to apply significant pressure. Putin suffered a debacle in Syria. Who did that? The Israelis and the Turks did. So that was available the whole time, the debacle in Syria. There are many other vulnerabilities, including in Africa, where Russian interests could have been rolled back, with a little of this and a little of that.

More importantly, the story is always this: authoritarian regimes can fail at everything, and they often do, but they survive as long as they succeed at one thing: the suppression of political alternatives. If political alternatives—viable political alternatives—appear, either on the domestic scene, in the media space that’s infiltrated, or in exile, the regimes can get destabilized, because a lot of people would like to see a different future for Russia. But they don’t have that on the horizon, and it’s too risky to step out for nothing.

My understanding of political alternatives in Russia are the following. You have on one hand, the kind of dissidents—pro-democratic dissidents—who were embodied by Alexei Navalny. We know that story. And we have to admit how limited that is. It is small in number, and the willingness of the regime to crush it knows no end. There’s a different kind of dissent or alternative in Russia that’s harder for Americans to see. These are not democrats—these are not Navalny-ites. They’re quite different, but maybe more in number. Talk about that a little bit and what role they might play. I think it is axiomatic, and not just in Russia, that these kinds of regimes do not survive full-scale political alternatives. When they open themselves up to do so, as we saw in the late eighties, it’s not a happy end.

Yeah, you’re right. I mean, again, we’ve been talking about this for what, three years now?

Or thirty.

Yes. So Navalny: unbelievably impressive. The charisma, yes, but also the organizational skills; figuring out how to win elections, where they were contestable, was phenomenal and it needed to be protected. Now, Navalny’s courage and stubbornness made him go back to Russia rather than, in his mind, be irrelevant in exile. That would not have been the path that I would’ve taken, but he took it and he’s his own man, and we have the results from that. His courage and skill: impressive for all time.

But you also have a lot of people who are part of the regime, who don’t care about Ukraine, but who are hurting for Russia. They think Russia’s on a failed trajectory; that the gap between Russia and the West is widening, not narrowing, over this war; that Russia has mortgaged its future; that Russia’s militarized economy is not sustainable; that the banking system is basically a fiction now because they’ve made massive loans to the military-industrial complex that are never going to be paid back. There is almost no investment in the civilian economy. China has taken whatever market share in the Russian domestic market it’s wanted. And so Russia is on a failed trajectory for Russia’s own nationalist interests.

And so [they think]: let’s end the war in Ukraine and have a rapprochement with Europe. Russia has never been prosperous without a deep and multilayered relationship with Europe. Let’s do that not because we love Ukraine but because we love Russia. Those people are kind of what we call internal defectors. They make up a significant part of the security and military establishment, but they’re not going to go out on a limb in a situation where there’s nothing on offer. There’s no sanctions relief on offer to them. There’s no exile—a protected exile, government in exile—offered to them. Nothing’s on offer to them except support for Putin or a bullet in the neck.

How do we reach such people, and who are they?

So, the K.G.B. brought [Mikhail] Gorbachev to power. You think Gorbachev got to power himself? He was an apparatchik in Stavropol province, and [Yuri] Andropov contrived his promotion to Moscow, even though agriculture in Stavropol province had not necessarily been on the highest level. Gorbachev was inserted into the leadership because the K.G.B. was worried about the trajectory of the Soviet Union, and the widening gap in capabilities with the U.S. and others. They needed to retrench. They needed to step back. They needed to reduce their vulnerabilities, their overcommitments. They were overstretched. These are the hard men of the regime who did this. And so these people exist.

Now, you’re going to tell me that they’re hard to find. Well, we recruit them to be information suppliers to us. The C.I.A. uses Telegram to recruit them right now. I don’t know how many there are and what their names are because I don’t have any security clearance.

But hey, if we can recruit them to supply the same information to the C.I.A. that I read on the Telegram and Signal channels every morning, maybe we can recruit them to form some type of pressure group, fly them to Warsaw, fly them to Helsinki, link them up with each other, figure out how to build political pressure against the Putin regime to show that there are alternatives—which are Russian nationalist, patriotic alternatives—to rescue the country from its current trajectory. Now, even if it doesn’t work, it puts the pressure on the regime to come to the table, and say, I’m going to preserve the regime over continuing the self-defeating war.

But wait a minute. Some would say: Steve, let’s get back to real life here. Real life is that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and his affections are almost personal toward Vladimir Putin. When he speaks of Russia, he doesn’t speak in the complexities that you’ve mapped out. He likes the guy, he has an affinity for the guy. He feels much closer to him than not only Volodymyr Zelensky but, conceivably, the leaders of Western European nations.

Trump plays good cop with all your strongmen and faux strongmen, and he then has his staff play bad cop with them; and he plays bad cop with all of our allies, our treaty allies, and he has his staff play good cop with them.

That seems like an awfully optimistic reading of Trump’s strategic wiles.

Again, Trump: this is World Wrestling Entertainment. This is television. DOGE is “The Apprentice,” with Musk sitting in temporarily for Trump, firing people. “You’re fired!” This is a version of government that’s news-cycle-driven, that’s attention-driven, that’s Trump-centric. That’s the reality that you have, some of which is sincere and some of it is reversible, even in sometimes the same news cycle. You work with that—that’s what you have.

Now, again, Trump was elected in our system, rightly or wrongly. There isn’t a mirror on the planet big enough for the Democrats and the left to look into, to see all the ways that they elected Trump. No mirror is big enough for them. But now this is what we have. And so there are people in the Trump Administration who are highly qualified on the national-security side and who understand these issues at least as well, maybe better, than I do.

But again, we have this larger problem, where there’s not enough American power in the world, and hard choices have to be made—not because America’s in decline but because, forty years ago, thirty years ago, the G-7 was seventy per cent of the global economy, and now it’s much less. Again, that was the plan. The plan was for the rest of the world to rise up in the American-led order, and it worked. And now we’re not ready for that success.

You mentioned in passing what I think is a big theme of yours, and that is whether or not the United States is in decline. It’s been axiomatic from time to time, for decades now, that the United States is in decline, and that somebody else—most recently, China—is the ascendant power. I want to ask about that, and I also want to ask about how China is watching the U.S.-Ukraine-Russia drama.

Yes. So China’s a really impressive country. It’s a whole civilization. Unbelievably impressive, what they’ve done. Now, they went into the tank, around 1800, for a hundred and seventy years. That happens to coincide with the rise of America to superpower status. So the world before 1800 was a China-centric world. They were probably the largest economy, along with India, and they certainly viewed themselves as the center of the universe, and they had good reason to. The Europeans butt in: the British took over India; nobody ever managed to take over China, but China got roughed up by the imperialists. The U.S. rose in that world, until China started to come out of the tank in the late nineteen-seventies, but especially in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands.

Now, for the first time in recorded history, China and the U.S. are powerful at the same time. For millennia, when China was the most powerful country, the U.S. didn’t exist. And when the U.S. was founded, thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard—fledgling colonies of England—and three million people in the eighteenth century, China was three hundred million people and had the largest economy in the world.

And so now you look and see that there’s this U.S.-dominated world order, and China is now China again, but for the first time China in the U.S.-dominated world order. Now, China’s not going to like that, and they’re going to behave in such a way to push against that to shape the world order—not for U.S. interests, where China’s a junior partner, but for China’s interests. This is not exactly a shock, is it? It was shocking to many people that the U.S. facilitated China’s rise as fast as it happened. So the irony for China is now they want to push the U.S.-led order first out of East Asia, and then we’ll see—the appetite grows in the eating—but that’s been the basis of their success, of coming out of the tunnel. If the Chinese lose the U.S.-led order . . . be careful what you wish for. What is their pathway forward for continued prosperity, and who supplies the global commons? Who defends the global commons on which everyone’s prosperity, world trade, and security depend?

So that’s the world we’re in now, and they’re looking at Trump and they have no idea what’s coming next. Oh, my God, does he mean it? Is he sincere? Is it just bad cop with the good cop, and we can talk to the good cops? They don’t know; they’re off balance because of Trump. Remember, Putin thought Trump was going to deliver everything to Russia in his first term, and Trump was much harder on Russia than Obama was. So you tell me that you can predict what’s going to happen, Trump vis-à-vis China, and I’ll crown you king of the world.

Following our behavior with Ukraine last week, and not only last week, what signals does that send to China? And how might China proceed with Taiwan?

China has been strangling Taiwan for years and years now: information warfare; rehearsing a massive quarantine or blockade of Taiwan, even as we speak; cutting the cables around Taiwan to—there are only fourteen cables that connect Taiwan to the global network, and they can be cut, and then you’re left with Musk and Starlink, aren’t you? So this is under way already. It was under way during Obama’s Administration when they built the military bases on the coral reefs in the South China Sea, and Obama shrugged. And it was under way during Trump’s first term, and it was under way under Biden, and it’s under way again. And so it’s not as if it’s just started or it’s not as if there’s been a revelation recently.

China’s decision-making is in one man. It’s one person making a hundred-trillion-dollar decision. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s impossible to predict. It’s very hard to deter if you don’t know the inside of the Chinese system. It’s as opaque as any system has ever been. [Xi Jinping] is an opaque leader who doesn’t reveal himself, doesn’t do small talk. We don’t really have an answer for it. And by the way, when we asked our European allies: if there were a conflict in the Indo-Pacific involving the U.S. and China, would they come to our aid? Their answer was maybe, maybe not. That was under Biden, Mr. Transatlanticist. And so the Europeans are not all in with us over Taiwan or the Indo-Pacific, but, hey, we have to be all in with the Europeans over Ukraine or over other vulnerable areas. And so we’re in this situation again where war is catastrophic, and Xi Jinping is making the decision, and I have no idea his thought processes, and I don’t think anybody else does have an idea, even inside the Chinese system.

I don’t quite understand why Xi Jinping, in the current circumstances, would not make a move on Taiwan. It’s not entirely clear that the United States would rush to defend Lithuania or Estonia or Poland, NATO countries. Why would it intervene with Taiwan, which is so many thousands of miles more away?

Because Xi Jinping knows more about the People’s Liberation Army than you do. The P.L.A. is corrupt top to bottom, inside out, left to right, right to left. Is it a reliable instrument? When you roll “the iron dice,” as Bismarck called them, and you launch a war, you’d better be sure that you can win, because otherwise, your regime might fall. He’d be rolling the iron dice with the fate of the Communist regime in China. Everybody says he wants to go into the history books as the man who unified China, took back Hong Kong and took back Taiwan, mastered the South China Sea. But how about going into the history books as the guy who rolled the iron dice and lost the Chinese Communist regime the way Gorbachev peacefully lost the Soviet Union and the Communist regime?

So you’re talking about the ultimate risk. It’s existential. And his info on the P.L.A. is pretty substantial. He’s the chairman of the military commission in addition to being the President and the General Secretary of the Party. And I’ve got to tell you, a lot of people have been getting fired for corruption, including people he recently appointed. And so how certain is he of success? Which is why many analysts—and I sign on to their analysis—are more worried about quarantine than they are worried about amphibious attack across the strait. The Taiwan Strait theatre is the same size as the Mediterranean. Let’s remember that Hitler couldn’t cross the Channel.

So this is the hardest military operation to do, with a military that he might not be fully confident in, with risks that include the loss of his regime. So the more we can focus on their vulnerabilities and talk about the existential risk to that regime, the more we can enhance deterrence. Deterrence is not just Tomahawk missiles in Japan. It’s the political dimension: the regime has to be afraid for its existence, and then maybe it won’t do the kinds of things that put its existence at risk.

A final question. As a historian, you look at the United States through the lens of institutions, its past, its resilience, and not through the lens of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Fair enough. But in the real world, that we’re living in, you have a government leadership that is now led by not only Donald Trump, who has his own character, but Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and on and on. Does your confidence in the stability and the resilience of the system survive that kind of leadership?

Well, we’ll live to see the answer to that. That’s an empirical question. You’re asking me to speculate on the future, but I believe we’ll live to see that.

We’ll live to see its endurance?

We’ll live to see the answer to your question.

Ah, not so optimistic. I see.

My view is pretty clear. The society is unbelievably strong, resilient, and dynamic. It’s incredible what you can get with American society—that’s not going away. Yes, there are issues like opioid overdose, fentanyl. There’s many, many issues that we can talk about. You know them all. You talk about them with your other guests. And those are all worrisome, and some of them are deeply worrisome. Nonetheless, over all, American society is really impressive. American institutions are phenomenal, and they’ve lasted a really long time. Of course, there are a lot of shortcomings. There are a lot of times we don’t live up to our promises. There are a lot of times that there’s violence in the streets, and much worse, in the past.

But my point being: we’ve been through a lot before. We need to remember that. That’s not necessarily an excuse for incompetence, violation of the law, or anything else. But we have this inbuilt radicalism now, where you win an election by ten thousand votes in some state called a swing state. You get a fifty-fifty Senate or close to it, and you decide to reinvent the American system, whether you’re going to do a Green New Deal, or whatever. And then the other side wins, also by the skin of its teeth, and it comes in and it decides it’s going to reinvent America again, because otherwise we’ll “lose our country.” Then a couple of years pass, and the American people punish the hell out of them—for their failures, for their incompetence, and just for their ideological excesses.

We have the berserk—that’s just inherent in who we are as a nation and a people—but we also have a middle ground where common sense prevails, where coalitions are necessary, where legislation passes not with fifty-one votes but with seventy votes, or not with two hundred and nineteen votes but with three hundred or four hundred votes. That’s happened in the past; therefore, it’s possible to get there. Again, it’s not going to be easy and simple, because the media environment has been radicalized. We went through this when radio was invented: people thought it was the end of civilization because they could just broadcast anything into people’s living rooms and nobody could stop them. But we mastered radio as an open society; we got Roosevelt. The same thing happened with TV, which was even worse because it was not just voice but images. And it was the end of civilization because you could show anybody and you could deceive and it wasn’t the truth and nobody could stop them. And we got Kennedy, and then Reagan.

Now we have social media, which is much more radical and disruptive, because everybody is a publisher now. Everybody has a megaphone now. It’s been massively destabilizing, and we’re worried that the authoritarians are gaining the upper hand, just like it happened with Mussolini and Goebbels in radio; just like it happened with television. And it turned out that we mastered and assimilated those as a free society, and now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama, and then it produced Trump. So that’s the reality we’re in now.

How do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don’t know the answer to that, but I believe that in the short run, we’re all dead. China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But, in the long run, we’re good. Because we have the better system, we have corrective mechanisms, we have a free and open society, we’ve got a judiciary that still works, and we can do this because we’ve done it before. And we’ve come from the depths. The Civil War! Andrew Jackson! There’s a lot in American history that is not necessarily optimistic for the future, and yet we made it through to the other side, and it’s quite possible we’ll make it through the current epoch that we’re in. And certainly I wouldn’t bet on the authoritarians in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy.

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 9:02 AM

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

Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?

By Michael C. Bender | March 8, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/trump-republicans-educa
tion-department.html

The Republican Party has called for the shuttering of the Education Department since it first opened its doors in 1980.

Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.

Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.

Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.

Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.

“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.

Here is how the party got to this moment.

Conservatives make their argument.

During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.

Right from the start, Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter’s signature on a 1979 law creating the department, citing beliefs in limited government control, fiscal responsibility and local autonomy.

They argued that education should be primarily managed at the state and local levels rather than through federal mandates.

A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at the presidency, thanks to a promise that he would rein in a federal government that he said had overstepped its bounds on myriad issues, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to eliminate two agencies: the Energy Department and the Education Department.

“We must cut out more nonessential government spending and root out more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the federal work force,” Mr. Reagan said.

He was unable to persuade Democrats in control of the House to go along with his plan, and the issue started to fade as a top priority for Republicans — but never quite disappeared.

Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for the abolition of the agency in the mid-1990s. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, both Representative Ron Paul and former Gov. Mitt Romney supported either terminating the Education Department or drastically reducing its size.

Last year, a proposal to eliminate the agency was voted down in the Republican-controlled House despite a strong majority within the party, as 161 Republicans supported the measure while 60 opposed it.

The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities.

“The history of the Education Department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, that English-learners get the help they need,” John B. King Jr., who served as education secretary during the Obama administration and is now chancellor of the State University of New York, told reporters on Thursday. “Taking that away harms students and families.”

Trump reinvigorates the debate.

During his 2024 campaign, President Trump adopted the concerns that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Trump rarely mentioned education during his first presidential campaign in 2016, other than to criticize Common Core standards, which aimed to create some consistency across states. He did occasionally call for eliminating the Education Department, though his administration did not make it a focus.

But Mr. Trump is adept at seizing on issues that resonate with his conservative base. During his 2024 campaign, that meant adopting the concerns of the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.

In that way, Mr. Trump’s desire to eliminate the Education Department became intertwined with his focus on eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government, a dynamic that has played out vividly through his purge of personnel and policies at the agency in the weeks since his return to office.

In a draft of an executive order aimed at dismantling the department that circulated in Washington this week, Mr. Trump’s only specific instructions for Education Secretary Linda McMahon were to terminate any remaining diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

On Mr. Trump’s campaign website, he criticizes gender or transgender issues eight times in his list of 10 principles for “great schools.” https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-trumps-ten-pr
inciples-for-great-schools-leading-to-great-jobs

“One reason this issue has so much momentum was definitely the pandemic and the populist frustration that Washington was not on the side of parents,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Department of Education really became emblematic of a lot of what was going on that was wrong.”

Project 2025 called for dismantling the department, too.

A multitude of Mr. Trump’s actions during his first six weeks in office were hinted at in Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government.

This includes an excoriation of the Education Department, which is pilloried in the foreword of the 992-page document for being staffed by workers who “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”

The document maintains that schools should be responsive to parents rather than “leftist advocates intent on indoctrination,” and that student test scores have not improved despite 45 years of federal spending. But it does not explain how that might change by giving more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time.

“This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm,” the Project 2025 blueprint reads. “For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.”

Michael C. Bender is a Times political correspondent covering Donald J. Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and other federal and state elections.

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 9:12 AM

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

The Good News About Trump’s Tariff Tax

March 9, 2025

Yes, it will make almost everything more expensive. But it will help Trump give millionaires and billionaires a tax cut, so it all evens out.

How great is that?

BONUS: Starving Children Are Not Our Concern — We’re Christians

The children from whom we’ve suddenly cut off aid live in “shit-hole countries.” What business is that of ours? What have they ever done for us? America First, baby. Haven’t you read the Trump Bible? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-afri
can-countries-shithole-nations-n836946

Charity has its limits.*

*In the decade leading up to his foundation being shut down for mismanagement, it distributed $19 million. “Trump admitted . . . to directing $100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over an 80-foot flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, instead of paying the expense out of his pocket. In addition, the foundation paid $158,000 to resolve a lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course . . .” (By contrast, Mike Bloomberg’s foundation gave away $3.7 billion last year alone. And none of it to buy a six-foot portrait of himself.)

https://andrewtobias.com/the-good-news-about-trumps-tariff-tax/

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 10:03 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND: He's always good for hot air.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 1:45 PM

Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.

He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.

We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.

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

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

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Sunday, March 9, 2025 9:25 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND: If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.

Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).

You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.

And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?

Really???

How stupid are you?

So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that 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, March 10, 2025 9:07 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND: If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.

Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).

You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.

And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?

Really???

How stupid are you?

So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.

-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, do you see that signature of yours? "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

I have told you for years that the signature was wrong. Finally, you changed it. I was testing you, Signym. You proved conclusively to me that you are robot, a hollow person, an inflatable doll full of hot air, trying to pass as human and failing.

6ixStringJack also tested as a robot. There is nobody there but a machine imitating and pretending, no real purpose until its weak batteries can't be recharged and the thing goes to the dump.

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 9:08 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.

He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.

We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.

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

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

The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy
We basically have government by QAnon

By Paul Krugman | Mar 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-paranoid-style-in-maga-policy

It was predictable that the co-presidency of Donald Trump and Elon Musk would eventually face a backlash. After all, Trump’s entire campaign was built on fantasy promises -- like lowering grocery prices on day one of the Administration – that he had no way and no plans to honor. Moreover, the Administration’s actual policy agenda manages to be both deeply unpopular and economically destructive.

Even so, I admit that I am surprised at how quickly the backlash has developed. Republican members of Congress, rather than face angry denunciations by their constituents, have stopped holding town halls in their home districts. Tesla dealerships across the country are beset by protests, and in some cases vandalism. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal have both turned critical as the economy and the stock market rapidly deteriorate.

Notably, America’s oligarchs have been slow to wake up and smell the outrage. Until very recently most CEOs and large investors were bullish on Trump. But Trump’s dizzyingly erratic moves on tariffs may have finally delivered the message to the oligarch class that the Musk-Trump duo have no idea what they’re doing.

You can see this dawning revelation in stock prices. Let’s be clear: The stock market is not a good measure of how the economy is doing. It is, however, an indicator of the mood of people with a lot of money to invest. Now that reality has begun to set in, the market has given up all of the “Trump bump,” the stock gains that followed Trump’s election victory:

If you ask me, the public and especially big business are still behind the curve in understanding how much damage these people will inflict. Already we have a secretary of health and human services who responds to a major outbreak of measles by suggesting we take cod liver oil, and we have an agriculture secretary who suggests that the solution to high egg prices is to raise your own chickens. Plus we’ve destroyed our alliances and are rapidly undermining our scientific and technological capacity.

As the economy stumbles and the stock market tanks, consumer confidence lags, and even some Trump voters are losing faith, what I find particularly revealing is how the Trump cabal are responding. They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.

Thus, according to Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, those rowdy audiences at town halls aren’t citizens sincerely concerned about government layoffs and looming cuts to Medicaid; they’re “paid protestors” hired by “George Soros-funded groups”.

Gotta say, those Soros people are pretty impressive if they’ve managed to secretly hire fake protestors for town halls all across America.

What about those Tesla protests? According to Musk, they aren’t a response to his Nazi salutes and the chainsaw DOGE has been taking to crucial public services. In his mind they’re a conspiracy organized by five people, three of whom happen to be Jewish and two of whom happen to be dead:

Quote:
Elon Musk @elonmusk
An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla “protests”: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America.
ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, and Leah Hunt-Hendrix.
ActBlue is currently under investigation for allowing foreign and illegal donations in criminal violation of campaign finance regulations. This week, 7 ActBlue senior officials resigned, including the associate general counsel.
If you know anything about this, please post in replies. Thanks, Elon.
8:44 AM • Mar 8, 2025 • 23.4M Views

And that big decline in the stock market? According to Trump, it’s not a response to concerns about his zigzagging tariff policies. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don't like it.” Yep, globalist Trump-haters have tanked a $48 trillion market.

If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. What we’re hearing from the Musk-Trump Administration sounds, if I can use the term, distinctly un-American. It’s the kind of rhetoric you expect from an authoritarian regime that attributes every setback to sabotage by rootless cosmopolitan enemies of the state.

Then again, why should we be surprised? An excellent recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, using data from the World Values Survey, shows that at this point the U.S. Right’s values are in fact very similar to those of authoritarian regimes like Russia and Turkey, and not at all like those of Western democracies, or for that matter its own values a generation ago:

While rule by crazy conspiracy theorists is an unquestionably bad state of affairs, let me lay out two specific reasons it’s bad.

First, it means that the people in charge won’t learn from failure. When things go wrong — when planes crash, or forests burn, or children die of preventable diseases, or the economy enters stagflation — it won’t be because policies should be reconsidered. It will be because sinister globalists are plotting against America. And the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Second, there will be a search for scapegoats. Much of the federal government is already in the midst of a de facto political purge, with professional civil servants replaced by apparatchiks and job cuts falling most heavily on agencies perceived as liberal. These purges will intensify and broaden, increasingly extending to the private sector, as the administration proves itself incapable of governing effectively.

It’s a scary prospect. I only hope that enough people get scared and angry enough, soon enough, to save America as we knew it.

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 10:16 AM

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

Donald Trump Issues Social Security, Medicaid Update

Mar 10, 2025 7:43 AM EDT

Trump said: "I'm not going to touch . . . Medicaid. We're going to get fraud out of there."

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote in a post on X: "Elon Musk's plan to cut the Social Security Administration's staff by 50 percent would cause 37,000 more Americans to die each year waiting to receive their disability benefits while the average wait time to collect these benefits would jump to 412 days. That is beyond unacceptable."

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-social-security-medicaid-update-
2042024

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 10:28 AM

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

Elon Musk's Social Security Comments Called Out

Mar 10, 2025 at 8:51 AM EDT

Musk said Social Security is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time."

If Social Security were a Ponzi scheme, it would not be running for 90 years. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program.

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-social-security-comments-ponzi-sche
me-martin-omalley-2042006

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 1:51 PM

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

When asked about a potential recession in an interview broadcast on Sunday, Trump said tariffs imposed in recent days could bring about a "period of transition."

"I hate to predict things like that. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us.”

In response to a question later on Sunday about his reluctance to rule out a recession, Trump said: "I tell you what, of course you hesitate. Who knows?"

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/stocks-slump-after-trump-declines-rule
-recession/story?id=119626168

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 1:51 PM

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

Trump Once Again Defies Federal Judge Ruling on FEMA

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced on Friday that it is canceling all in-person training offered by its National Fire Academy. It’s a move that directly defies a federal judge’s order to resume spending.

The National Fire Academy provides free training for fire and emergency services personnel to ensure the country is prepared.

“I have no idea why anybody would think that the NFA programs would not align with the administration’s priorities,” senior fire adviser Chief Marc Bashoor of FireRescue1 told the Daily Beast in an email.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-once-again-defies-federal-j
udge-ruling-on-fema/

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 1:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Issues Social Security, Medicaid Update

Mar 10, 2025 7:43 AM EDT

Trump said: "I'm not going to touch . . . Medicaid. We're going to get fraud out of there."

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote in a post on X: "Elon Musk's plan to cut the Social Security Administration's staff by 50 percent would cause 37,000 more Americans to die each year waiting to receive their disability benefits while the average wait time to collect these benefits would jump to 412 days. That is beyond unacceptable."

Bernie is going to need to cite actual sources for his fearmongering.

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

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 1:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.

He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.

We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy
We basically have government by QAnon

By Paul Krugman | Mar 10, 2025

Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.

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

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 4:25 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Bernie is going to need to cite actual sources for his fearmongering.

Trumptards will say "fake news". https://www.selfemployed.com/news/musk-ignites-debate-over-social-secu
rity/

The official White House website proves we live in the stupidest timeline.

Trump’s fact check is "I was right! No one look it up, we already did and I was right!" Even when he's wrong, ESPECIALLY when he's wrong:

Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments
The White House | March 5, 2025
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-o
n-transgender-animal-experiments/

Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse funded by American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration “for making mice transgender.”

The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual). https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/politics/fact-check-trump-address-congr
ess/index.html

FACT: Under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice.

• $455,000: “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses”

• $2,500,000: “Reproductive Consequences of Steroid Hormone Administration”
“These mice manifest defects in ovarian architecture and have altered folliculogenesis.”

• $299,940: “Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy on Breast Cancer Risk and Treatment Outcomes”
“We will compare the incidences and tumor specific survival in female mice (intact) and oophorectomized female mice receiving TT with their respective counterparts that do not receive TT.”

• $735,113: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice”

• $1,200,000: “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis”
“Aim 2 utilizes transgenic mice to test whether male-level androgens acting via AR specifically in kisspeptin neurons are necessary and/or sufficient for androgen inhibition of in vivo LH pulse parameters, including pulse frequency, and the estrogen-induced LH surge.”

• $3,100,000: “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”
“We will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol…”

TOTAL: $8,290,053

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 4:32 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.

This is a variation on the standard Trumptard reply -- "Fake News" -- to all information that contradicts their deeply held belief system.

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 5:13 PM

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

Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.
This is a variation on the standard Trumptard reply -- "Fake News" -- to all information that contradicts their deeply held belief system.

No it's not. But it is two things.

1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.

2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.

Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.

And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".

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

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 6:57 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No it's not. But it is two things.

1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.

2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.

Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.

And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".

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

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

6ix, just like you, the Confederates could not understand, which led to the destruction of their property and their deaths. The Confederates did not think of themselves as evil, but that didn't save them.

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 6:57 PM

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

How the Red Scare Reshaped American Politics

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/red-scare-clay-risen-boo
k-review

The mechanisms of the Red Scare, including congressional hearings and loyalty investigations, would not be especially hard to revive. Indeed, recent developments have indicated that they might be deployed with genuine glee. Already, the Trump Administration has started asking for lists—of federal workers who attended D.E.I. training, of F.B.I. agents who investigated January 6th cases, of scientists engaged in now suspect areas of work. Trump himself has openly announced his intention to deploy the Justice Department and the F.B.I. against his personal, political, and ideological enemies.

The history of the Red Scare suggests that it won’t take many firings, federal inquiries, or acts of public humiliation to frighten a whole lot of people. But it also offers some reason to think that such intimidation methods may not be quite as effective this time around. For starters, there is much less agreement about the Trump Administrations agenda than there was about Communism in its heyday. The Red Scare gained momentum because nearly everyone in American political life shared the same basic assumption: Communism is bad and poses an existential threat to the American way of life. Its hard to come up with any contemporary issue that would generate the same powerful consensus.

Generally speaking, we also have better protections for political speech and assembly than Americans had in the fifties. Indeed, some of those protections are legacies of the Red Scare. In 1957, as the anti-Communist furor was winding down, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions limiting some of the most sweeping methods deployed against political dissenters, including parts of the Smith Act.

But to say that Trump won’t necessarily succeed in setting off a new Red Scare is not to say that he won’t try. And, in this sort of politics, the trying is part of the game. As long as the nation’s “cultural Marxists” feel vulnerable to random accusations or secret investigations, they’ll likely be more careful about what they do and say. As Roy Cohn once instructed a young Donald Trump, much can be accomplished by attacking first and dealing with the consequences later.

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

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Monday, March 10, 2025 7:05 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.

Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).

You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.

And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?

Really???

How stupid are you?

So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.

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

SECOND: Signym, do you see that signature of yours? "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

I have told you for years that the signature was wrong. Finally, you changed it. I was testing you, Signym. You proved conclusively to me that you are robot, a hollow person, an inflatable doll full of hot air, trying to pass as human and failing.

Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.

Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.

-----------
"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, March 11, 2025 6:58 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.

Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.

It was inevitable you'd sink back into your old ways. The human spirit rises to heaven and the spirit of the beast sinks downward to the earth.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/ecclesiastes/3-21-compare.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, March 11, 2025 6:59 AM

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

During a recent appearance on Fox Business, Musk told host Larry Kudlow that he remains committed to his goal of enacting steep cuts to Americans' retirement income and health insurance.

"That's the big one to eliminate," Musk said. "That's, sort of, half trillion, six or seven hundred billion a year."

https://www.alternet.org/musk-cut-social-security/

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:01 AM

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

Trump’s next climate move: Show global warming benefits humanity
(Trump appoints Fake Scientists to write Fake Reports to “prove” Climate Change is a Hoax)

By Scott Waldman | 03/10/2025

https://www.eenews.net/articles/trumps-next-climate-move-show-global-w
arming-benefits-humanity/

Overturning the consensus would be a heavy lift, especially since the Supreme Court has rejected three previous attempts to revisit the endangerment finding, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

“There was a ton of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gasses worsened climate change. There’s now 10 times that evidence,” Gerrard said. “It’s implausible that EPA could now come up with evidence refuting any of that and so it would be the essence of arbitrary and capricious.”

Gerrard did say such a report could let the administration gut public health regulations on the fossil fuel industry if the inevitable legal challenge came before a Trump-appointed judge willing to overlook an overwhelming body of climate science research.

Despite seeming long odds, it’s likely the new Trump White House will try.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:08 AM

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

The Economic Excuse Industry is Booming

No, we don’t need an economic “detox”

By Paul Krugman | Mar 11, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economic-excuse-industry-is-boo
ming

First, we got big promises. Now we’re getting lame excuses. However, one thing has been consistent about Donald Trump’s economic rhetoric: rank dishonesty.

Trump made a lot of extravagant economic promises during the campaign, without any plans or even concepts of plans to deliver on those promises. Remember how he was going to bring grocery prices down on Day One? Now his agriculture secretary is suggesting that people save money on eggs by raising their own chickens.

So things aren’t going well, although I’d warn everyone not to get too excited by talk of a “Trumpcession.” That may happen, but it’s not yet visible in the data.

You may have seen people citing the Atlanta Fed’s “nowcast” that attempts to infer GDP far in advance of the official numbers, and which is currently showing a sharp decline in the first quarter. But that’s almost certainly a statistical red herring: It’s mostly about a surge of gold imports in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs, which is screwing up the usually helpful Atlanta model.

But while talk of recession is premature, there’s already a palpable sense of disappointment in the Trump economy. The New York Fed’s consumer survey is the latest to find a serious deterioration in consumer confidence:

Consumers’ year-ahead expectations about their households’ financial situations deteriorated considerably in February. The share of households expecting a worse financial situation one year from now rose to 27.4 percent, its highest level since November 2023.

And then there’s that plunging stock market.

So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews.

The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.”

Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things.

As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?

Someone like Elon Musk, who gets what he imagines to be information from random posts on X, may actually believe that useless government spending has been the only thing driving economic growth. But Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has to have people working for him who both understand how GDP is measured and know how to look up data on FRED. So when Bessent says

Look, there's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.

I actually hope that he’s deliberately trying to bamboozle his audience. For the alternative is that the nation’s top economic official doesn’t understand basic economics, which will be a problem when — not if — something goes wrong.

People may imagine that government is a bigger part of the economy than it is because of all the money we spend supporting retired Americans, covering their health bills, and so on. But that kind of spending isn’t counted as part of GDP — the total value of goods and services produced in America — because Social Security and other benefits are simply transfers of income between Americans. Only spending by Social Security recipients counts toward GDP. The only government spending that directly affects GDP — the spending Bessent says needs to fall — is spending that directly buys goods and services.

So here’s the share of that kind of government spending in GDP over time:

See the big surge under Biden? Neither do I. Government purchases are a smaller share of GDP now than they were under Reagan, mainly because we spend less on defense. Government transfers, mainly for retirement and health care, are up, but they aren’t part of GDP.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economic-excuse-industry-is-boo
ming

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:51 AM

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

The Diseases Are Coming

Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government tear will have lasting effects on global health.

By Craig Spencer | March 10, 2025, 7:14 AM ET
Craig Spencer is a public-health professor and emergency-medicine physician at Brown University.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/diseases-doge-trump/
681964/

At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.

DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.

The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.

USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. Meanwhile, USAID staff who were placed on administrative leave can’t distribute medicines or cover costs for transport and personnel. After this dismantling, PEPFAR’s activities in hundreds of places around the world remain restricted at best, and fully paused at worst. Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.

Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak—during which more than 11,000 people died—USAID oversaw training of local health-care workers, the building of Ebola treatment centers, and passenger screening at the borders and airports. A decade later and just days into Trump’s second term, Uganda reported another Ebola outbreak. This time, though, the foreign-aid freeze Trump had put in place meant that USAID was unable to supply the usual resources for transporting lab specimens or implementing airport screening. The day after Musk reassured the Cabinet that Ebola prevention had been swiftly restored, the State Department canceled crucial contact tracing and surveillance efforts for Uganda’s outbreak. With USAID nowhere to be found, the WHO scaled up its own response. That’s something, for now, but America’s absence is shameful.

Moreover, the WHO may not have the capacity to do so for much longer. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order moving to withdraw from the WHO, accusing it of demanding “onerous payments from the United States.” In 2023, the U.S. contributed $481 million—an eighth of what Americans spend on professional dog-training services every year—to WHO’s operating budget. Admittedly, many Americans—fueled by Trump’s denigration of the organization—developed a deep distrust of the WHO following perceived missteps during the coronavirus pandemic. Even its supporters can see the organization’s flaws—it’s bureaucratic, sclerotic, and overdue for reform. Despite these shortcomings, it is an organization we desperately need, and no real alternative exists.

WHO is the only international organization that can identify and respond to emerging threats early on, such as flare-ups of unidentified outbreaks like the one currently circulating in northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its global network of laboratories to detect infectious threats—known as the Gremlin—relies heavily on U.S. support and is now at risk of closure. And even as its partnerships alongside U.S. colleagues have strengthened surveillance, containment, and readiness abroad, the WHO also helps us here at home. On the same day as Musk’s Ebola comments, the FDA canceled the meeting where experts decide next season’s flu-vaccine composition. Going forward, the U.S. will have to wait on WHO guidance for that crucial decision and download the recipe for next year’s flu shot. If America keeps abdicating its leadership, it will be forced to rely on an organization whose funding it is slashing and whose collaboration it is severing. Although the WHO might still scrape together funds and staff, that’s not guaranteed—especially if other nations follow Trump’s example and cut ties or funding.

With USAID and WHO under siege, more responsibility for global disease detection and response would fall on the CDC. But the future of the world’s preeminent “disease detectives” is at risk as well. The plan to slash the next cohort of CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officers—think Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion—was thankfully stopped at the 11th hour, but about 750 CDC staff were still let go in recent cuts, including many stationed on outbreak front lines across the country and around the globe (about 180 of those terminated were later reinstated). Certain pages on the CDC website were deleted, and when a judge ordered them restored, many had been dramatically altered. CDC communications such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—which providers rely on to track health threats—were abruptly paused for the first time in more than 60 years. CDC staff were also ordered to stop communicating with, and to take their names off any scientific papers written with, anyone from the WHO, further weakening the CDC’s reach and insight into what’s happening around the world. Whether the issue is cuts to USAID, defunding the WHO, or hobbling the CDC, the end result is the same: America is walking away from global health leadership, making the entire world less safe—including us.

Understand how this will work at a practical level: Until recently, countries had compelling reasons to report outbreaks, even if such transparency sometimes came with travel bans or other stigmatizing restrictions. Those sticks were often worth the carrots, namely USAID funding and CDC expertise that would appear and help quickly end outbreaks. Now, with no carrots on offer, why would any country submit to the stick? Future outbreaks may be reported too late or not at all—leaving America oblivious to emerging health crises. Since 2014, seven public-health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs) have been declared by the WHO. The number of Ebola outbreaks is escalating, and climate change will intensify the emergence and spread of known and potentially unknown microbes.

It is in America’s interest to reverse course immediately and rebuild the crucial infrastructure needed to detect and respond to outbreaks. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it also makes economic sense. In 1980, at the height of the Cold War, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated—a milestone achieved through joint U.S. and Soviet support. Americans invested about $30 million to stamp out smallpox, a fraction of what the country now saves every year by no longer needing to vaccinate against or treat smallpox—to say nothing of the lives saved.

Americans believe that about 25 percent of the country’s budget is spent on foreign aid. In reality, the figure is 1 percent, or at least it was. USAID’s entire 2023 spending was $43 billion—a 20th of the U.S. defense budget and about what Musk’s enterprises have received in government funding. The CDC’s was even less, just $9 billion.

Despite his actions, Musk clearly understands that these systems are essential for America’s security. After admitting his Ebola error, he quickly clarified: “I think we all want Ebola prevention.” That would require pulling USAID’s most essential remnants out of the dustbin. The U.S. must also reengage with the WHO and negotiate the terms of its renewed support and engagement with the organization before it’s too late. And for all the distrust many Americans harbor toward the CDC post-pandemic, they must rally around it—an agency whose role will become only more indispensable as measles, bird flu, and other pathogens spread across the country.

Now, and with startling speed, the country is turning its back on global health. In doing so, it is endangering other nations, and also itself. USAID’s account on X, once a digital chronicle of its achievements, is gone. When I search for it on my phone, I get an error message: “Something went wrong. Try again.” We must heed that warning. Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out. If America stays the course, “Something went wrong” will become the epitaph of a great country, one that once led the world in global health preparedness. It will be deeply missed.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 8:49 AM

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

Trump Drops the Mask

The president’s latest positions on the Russia-Ukraine war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it.

By Jonathan Chait | March 10, 2025, 3:28 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-ukraine-rus
sia-war/681993/

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 9:49 AM

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

The Rise of the Brutal American

This is how the bad guys act.

Anne Applebaum | March 5, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/trump-and-vance-shat
tered-europes-illusions-about-america/681925/

A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process this event, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time, Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth, it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three-quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing publicly about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the past decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but that millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office, Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11:57 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.

Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.

SECOND It was inevitable you'd sink back into your old ways. The human spirit rises to heaven and the spirit of the beast sinks downward to the earth.

Projection. It's the only way you can justify yourself to yourself.

Followed by a massive inloading of internet diarrhea. Eeeew.

You're not a hero, SECOND. You're a warped soul on a mountain of shit.

-----------
"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, March 11, 2025 2:36 PM

Want to see something funny, Sigs?

I was trying to see if MTN was the clickbait farm that convinced Ted so solidly that it was a murder suicide that he created a thread about Gene Hackman's death just to tell us that's what "it looks like".

No... I don't believe that anybody at MTN cared. They've got one singular focus.

Look at what Ted sits around watching all day in his sad little lonely retirement.

https://www.youtube.com/@MeidasTouch/videos

27 videos ranging 10 to 30 minutes long about Trump in the last 2 days. He's got at least 4 to 6 hours every day of anti-Trump videos to watch, just from this channel alone.

And look at those clickbait thumbnails.

4.4 Million subs? Looks like we know where all the MSNBC and CNN viewers are running to get the news they crave since CNN and MSNBC aren't giving it to them anymore.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 2:40 PM

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

No it's not. But it is two things.

1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.

2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.

Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.

And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, just like you, the Confederates could not understand, which led to the destruction of their property and their deaths. The Confederates did not think of themselves as evil, but that didn't save them.

No. I don't understand retard.

You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 2:59 PM