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

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law

By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM

Shut the fuck up, Ali.

What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.

Let's find out, shall we?

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:16 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law

By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM

Shut the fuck up, Ali.

What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.

Let's find out, shall we?

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

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

What the world needs is more diversity of ideas. Nazis have many ideas to share on Twitter and at the White House with the world:

Elon Musk, once a tacit backer of DEI, now focuses on anti-White bias

Musk, who was raised during South African apartheid, used to steer clear of debate about race. Now, he frequently advocates for White people.

By Beth Reinhard, Faiz Siddiqui and Clara Ence Morse | March 20, 2025

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/20/elon-musk-race-dei-
doge/

In the spring of 2017, two months after a Black employee sued Tesla and alleged that co-workers frequently called him the n-word with impunity, chief executive Elon Musk sent out a companywide email with the subject line “Doing the right thing.”

The note marked one of the first times that the billionaire tech icon, born and raised in privilege during South African apartheid, engaged in a public conversation about race. Avoid making offensive comments, Musk said — but don’t be overly sensitive.

“Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of an historically less represented group,” Musk wrote to thousands of employees, in a message later included in court filings in another lawsuit. But Musk added: “In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.”

Over the next eight years, as he became the richest man in the world, Musk shifted from a Democratic-leaning critic of Donald Trump to a Republican-friendly Trump acolyte. He emerged as a hero on the far right who frequently comments on racial issues — and who wields extraordinary power overseeing the president’s cost-cutting operation, known as the U.S. DOGE Service. Musk’s operatives at DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency — have taken root in offices across the federal bureaucracy, sweeping up reams of potentially sensitive data and demanding drastic cuts to programs and personnel.

An early target was the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at all federal agencies. While opposition to DEI programs has become a mainstream Republican position, Musk has articulated more radical views on race in interviews and posts on X, his social media platform.

He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.

Now, civil rights activists and government watchdogs are concerned that Musk is bringing these views on race and immigration to bear as he and his DOGE staffers scrutinize all corners of the government and execute major public policy changes. Having dispatched with DEI programs, Musk’s team is starting to purge those tasked with protecting employees’ civil rights and investigating discrimination claims.

Earlier this year, Trump seized on Musk’s long-standing claim that DEI efforts have made air travel less safe. He and Musk contended, without evidence, that DEI contributed to the fatal collision in Washington of a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger plane. “DEI has caused people to DIE,” Musk wrote on X.

“As a spreader of hate and disinformation on his own platform, what pops into Mr. Musk’s head at 3 in the morning can be seen by millions of people,” said Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks extremism and that X has unsuccessfully sued. “He is in a position of considerable political power, with the ability to withhold or increase government funding based on his whims.”

Musk’s comments circulate through a public address system unmatched in modern politics. With roughly 220 million followers, his X account is the platform’s most popular — with a reach that exceeds Trump’s — and it reflects a preoccupation with race, immigration and diversity. He posted about these topics an average of roughly four times a day in the four months leading up to Trump’s inauguration; about 10 percent of his posts were about those topics from the beginning of 2024 through the middle of this month, a sevenfold increase over 2021, according to a Washington Post review that used keywords to categorize them.

Musk frequently interacts with accounts that comment on racial issues and draw attention to crimes committed by Black people or immigrants. For example, Musk has interacted more than 60 times in the past year with an account named @iamyesyouareno that has about 471,000 followers. In response to a post that said, “White people aren’t allowed to have their own homelands,” Musk wrote, “I think it’s great that America is so diverse but this does seem asymmetric.” Musk also highlighted several posts that suggested non-White people “hate” White people by responding with exclamation marks or comments like “True.”

That’s a typical Musk tactic: amplifying a controversial opinion on a racially sensitive topic in a way certain to raise hackles on the left. “Something to think about,” Musk wrote recently in response to podcaster Ben Shapiro calling for Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.

Musk did not respond to The Post’s request for an interview. He also did not respond to questions about the 2017 email to Tesla employees, nor did he address whether his views about race have changed. Tesla and X also did not respond to requests for comment.

In response to detailed questions about Musk, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attacked The Post and said: “This story is literally just combing together random things from the internet to paint Elon Musk as a racist. Get a life.”

Musk, 53, has argued it is White people who are frequently the victims of discrimination because of what he views as left-wing overreach to correct perceived racial inequities and to silence right-wing commentary. “We need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic, and anything that results in the suppression of free speech,” Musk said in a 2023 interview.

Musk frequently uses X to call attention to what he sees as anti-White racism. A Tucker Carlson podcast last year was billed on X with this takeaway: “There is systemic racism in the United States, against whites. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it. How come?” Musk reposted it, adding, “Concerning.”

Allies say Musk is simply embracing an open exchange of ideas in a way that liberals reject. Tech investor Bill Lee once observed on social media that “only a handful of [people] truly know him but so so so many haters.”

“This is a debate about speech the left doesn’t like, and speech they don’t like they deem racist,” said Tom Fitton, who leads the conservative group Judicial Watch. “Musk is helping increase the free speech rights of millions of citizens.”

But Musk’s views have increasingly attracted public scrutiny, including after he made a gesture during Trump’s inaugural festivities that critics said resembled a Nazi salute. Musk denounced that claim, then posted a message on X using Third Reich leaders’ names as puns. “Bet you did nazi that coming,” Musk wrote, leading Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt — who had previously defended the salute as “an awkward gesture” — to admonish: “The Holocaust is not a joke.”

The electric car company Musk leads faces several ongoing lawsuits alleging racial discrimination. Some complaints have been moved to private arbitration as part of the company’s efforts to keep disputes out of open court, including the case that was followed by his 2017 companywide email; that plaintiff lost. In one racial discrimination case against Tesla that went to trial, a jury awarded $3.2 million in 2023 to a Black elevator operator. In all of the cases, Tesla staunchly denies that Black employees were mistreated or retaliated against for reporting racist conduct.

Musk is not a defendant in these suits. But some former employees and their lawyers say his comments about racial sensitivities set a tone of intolerance. Nathan Murthy, a Black and Filipino former Tesla engineer fired in 2020 after leading a racial justice protest in a factory, recalled reading Musk’s “thick-skinned” email over and over again.

“It felt really dismissive when there was very obvious racial tension,” Murthy said. “Musk was essentially saying, ‘Shut up and go back to work.’”

Murthy added: “I’ve been trying to raise the alarm on Elon for years.”

‘I had a tough childhood’

Musk was raised in South Africa during the last chapters of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, a period he rarely discusses publicly. “I had a tough childhood,” he has said in multiple interviews. His parents divorced when he was 8, and he was bullied by classmates and verbally abused by his father, according to Musk biographies.

Still, Musk enjoyed the privileges that came with being White in Pretoria at a time when segregation was violently enforced on the impoverished Black majority.

“We grew up in a bubble of entitlement,” said Rudolph Pienaar, who graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988 and now works in the U.S. as a biomedical scientist. “I am not sure if Elon can conceive of systematic discrimination and struggle because that’s not his experience. His life now in some ways is how it was under apartheid — rich and entitled with the entire society built to sustain him and his ilk.”

Pretoria Boys High was a socially progressive school that admitted a handful of Black students, but Pienaar and two other former classmates who said they were friendly with Musk said they could not recall him ever talking about politics.

In an email to The Post, his father, Errol, said Musk and his younger brother were “interested in motorbikes, computers, basketball and a little about girls. They were not into political nonsense, and we lived in a very well-run, law-abiding country with virtually no crime at all. Actually no crime. We had several black servants who were their friends.”

Errol added that Musk and his brother also had several Black friends.

In a sign that the family disapproved of racial segregation, Musk and his brother attended an anti-apartheid concert, according to a biography by Walter Isaacson. Terence Beney, who knew Musk at Pretoria Boys High, remembered him attending a funeral for a Black friend who was killed in a car crash in 1987. Beney said that growing up in a country in which official censors would use nails to scratch banned records at radio stations helps explain why Musk cast himself as a “free speech absolutist” when he bought Twitter and reinstated social media accounts previously suspended for hate speech.

Musk’s father worked as an engineer and imported emeralds from an unregistered mine in Zambia, which “helped me and my two boys sustain ourselves during the collapse of Apartheid in SA,” he said in the email to The Post. Musk noted his father’s share in an emerald mine in a 2014 interview but wrote years later about “the fake emerald mine thing.” Errol told Isaacson about the mine: “If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the Blacks would take everything from you.”

Errol also served on the Pretoria City Council after defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro-apartheid National Party in 1972. Musk’s mother, Maye, is a Canadian-born model. Her father, Joshua Haldeman, moved the family from Canada to South Africa during apartheid and embraced racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to reporting by the Atlantic. He died when Musk was 2.

Musk, who left South Africa when he was 17, frequently says that slavery has been practiced all over the world for centuries by people of all races. “We are all descended from slaves,” he said in a podcast interview last year.

“Elon hasn’t been back much,” said Beney, who still lives in Pretoria. “I don’t think he considers himself South African at all. … The U.S. is home.”

‘Phony social justice warriors’

By 2017, Musk was a monster Silicon Valley success story, worth an estimated $15 billion. He had led Tesla for nearly a decade and was hailed as an environmentally conscious innovator. Early in Trump’s first term, Musk criticized the president’s executive order banning travel from several majority-Muslim countries. He later resigned from an advisory board when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

After the racial discrimination lawsuit was filed against Tesla that March, Musk sent the companywide email saying that on one hand, minorities “have endured difficulties that someone born or raised in a more privileged situation did not.” He added, “Don’t ever intentionally allow someone to feel excluded, uncomfortable or unfairly treated.”

On the other hand, Musk wrote, “Sometimes these things happen unintentionally, in which case you should apologize.” Lawsuits from people from underrepresented groups who claim they have not been promoted enough, he said, are “obviously not cool.”

But Tesla soon faced several other racial discrimination lawsuits from individuals as well as California and federal regulators, who alleged that in multiple instances, the n-word was used and swastikas and racial slurs were scrawled on bathroom walls and lunch tables. One ongoing suit — certified by a state judge as a class action representing thousands of Tesla employees — claimed, “In light of CEO Musk’s message to employees that racist epithets can be directed ‘unintentionally’ and that it is ‘important to be thick-skinned,’ it is not surprising that the Tesla Factory has become a hotbed for racist behavior.”

Tesla pushed back. A response titled “Hotbed of Misinformation” said Tesla investigates all complaints of discrimination or harassment and if they are proved to be true, the company takes immediate action. The company also said that Musk’s email was meant to ensure a collegial workplace and noted that in a company of 33,000 employees, “it is not humanly possible to stop all bad conduct, but we will do our best to make it is as close to zero as possible.” Later, in an interview, Musk personally vouched for the climate at Tesla’s factory in California, calling it “a very good atmosphere.”

In 2020, the violent deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. Musk briefly commiserated, writing “#JusticeForGeorge” on social media and demanding criminal charges against Chauvin’s colleagues present during Floyd’s arrest. A top Black Tesla executive wrote about her sorrow and fear after Floyd’s death, later adding that Musk “told me that I had his full support.”

At the time, Tesla was publishing DEI reports that highlighted “unconscious bias trainings” and recruitment on historically Black college campuses. But Murthy, who had started working as a Tesla engineer a few years earlier, said he routinely heard about and experienced racially insensitive remarks, echoing a claim made in the racial discrimination lawsuits against the company. He helped organize a protest in September 2020 in which he said five employees on the assembly line stopped working and sat mostly in silence for about three hours to honor Taylor.

“A lot of us were fed up and let down and felt betrayed by all of our leaders,” Murthy said. He was fired a few days later for “intentionally sabotaging” the assembly line, according to documents Murthy provided to The Post. Tesla did not respond to questions about Murthy’s firing.

By the time the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued Tesla in 2023, a prominent index of sustainability-focused public companies had ousted the company, citing, in part, the racial discrimination claims. Musk called the index a “scam” and questioned how ExxonMobil could get a higher rating than Tesla. The index, he said, “has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

By the following year, Tesla had removed all DEI references from documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk said on X. “Shame on anyone who uses it.” Musk endorsed Trump later in 2024, and his shift from tacit supporter of DEI to outspoken opponent was complete.

Musk made extensive public remarks on race in an hour-long interview last year with former CNN host Don Lemon. He denied accusations that he buys into the “great replacement theory,” a far-right trope that there is a deliberate effort to “replace” White people in Western societies with racial and ethnic minorities. “I’m simply saying there appears to be a very clear incentive for Democrats to have to maximize the number of illegals because it helps them win elections,” he said.

People should be rewarded for their talent and skills, Musk said, not their skin color. “I think being aware of inequities in society is fine, of course, but trying to make everything a race issue is, I think, divisive and corrosive to society,” he said.

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment trial and has discussed free speech issues with Musk, said he has become someone “worth listening to” by people across the political spectrum.

“He shoots from the hip sometimes, but I think he’s right about DEI,” Dershowitz said. “The left doesn’t really want diverse ideas, just diverse skin colors in the room.”

A right-wing firebrand

Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 marked a turning point in the evolution of his public persona from business-minded tech prodigy to pro-Trump champion of MAGA ideas.

He restored accounts suspended for hate speech and misinformation — including Trump’s — and later rebranded the platform as X. Advertisers fled. But Musk dug in. X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate after it reported that the social media site was profiting by restoring accounts of “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories.” A federal judge dismissed the case, calling it a blatant attempt to punish X’s critics.

On the right, Musk’s takeover of Twitter made him a hero. Fitton and other prominent conservatives view Musk’s running commentary about race relations as a crucial counterpoint to liberal rhetoric. “Maybe him pushing back is not what’s unusual — it’s the racial obsessions of the left that are the problem,” Fitton said.

Meanwhile, an outspoken minority of Tesla shareholders who manage sustainability-minded investments began pressing Musk to focus more on electric cars and less on divisive politics. His constant trolling of liberals on X has driven away potential customers and created a divisive work environment — since before the current backlash over his DOGE role, said Kristin Hull, founder of the Nia Impact Capital asset management firm. “He is always insulting somebody,” Hull said, “and that’s very problematic for investors and for the brand.”

In 2023, Musk fended off accusations of antisemitism following his attacks on the Jewish billionaire George Soros and the Anti-Defamation League and, most notably, after he promoted an X post accusing Jewish people of a “dialectical hatred against whites.” Musk wrote, “You have said the actual truth.”

Behind the scenes, several of Musk’s Jewish friends chided him and tried to act as brokers between him and the ADL, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. He later apologized for his social media post and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Israel in late 2023.

Musk also visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in early 2024. The European Jewish Association invited Gidon Lev, a Holocaust survivor who was eager to share his personal experiences with Musk.

Musk, however, was surrounded by an entourage of photographers and Shapiro, the Jewish right-wing podcaster, Lev said. Musk greeted him kindly but never engaged him in conversation, according to Lev. “There was no attempt by his part to make any human connection to me,” he said.

In an interview with Shapiro after the tour, Musk said, “It was incredibly moving and deeply sad and tragic that humans could do this to other humans.” The billionaire also reflected on his insular lifestyle: “I must admit to being somewhat, frankly, naive about this. In the circles that I move, I see almost no antisemitism. … I never hear it in dinner conversations.”

The keys to the government

When Trump returned to the White House, he gave Musk the keys to powerful government agencies while shielding him from some of the public disclosure requirements that bind other officials who command his level of influence.

Musk, who has a net worth of more than $320 billion, is leading the charge to eviscerate the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers humanitarian assistance abroad. “USAID is a ball of worms,” Musk said. “There is no apple.” Last month, when the president halted all U.S. aid to South Africa and called for resettling White Afrikaners as refugees, both he and Musk made the baseless assertion that the government there is confiscating land from White people.

Musk has cheered Trump’s orders wiping out DEI programs and his decision to rescind a 1965 executive order requiring federal contractors to take “affirmative action” to root out discrimination. Proponents of DEI programs say they are designed to correct historical injustices and level the playing field for underrepresented groups. Musk and other Trump allies argue that such efforts are no longer needed and even a form of racism against White people. “One of the major reasons why I left the Democratic party,” Musk wrote on X a few months ago.

In late January, breaking with decades of precedent, Trump fired Charlotte Burrows, a Democratic commissioner on the EEOC who had initiated the investigation into Tesla. It was the only lawsuit filed by the EEOC in fiscal year 2023 that stemmed from an investigation recommended by an individual commissioner. Trump also replaced the agency’s general counsel, raising questions about whether the EEOC will continue to pursue the lawsuit. An EEOC spokeswoman said the commission does not comment on litigation. Burrows told The Post it would “betray the agency’s core mission” if the EEOC dropped the civil rights case. The racial discrimination case against Tesla brought by California’s civil rights agency is scheduled for a jury trial in September, according to court documents.

Amid Musk’s aggressive moves into government agencies, he also has faced questions about his gesture at Trump’s inaugural rally. In a recent podcast, Shapiro said it was clearly just a show of enthusiasm. “You know why my Nazi radar doesn’t go off around Musk? Because he’s not a damned Nazi,” Shapiro said, mocking the left for casting opponents as “not just wrong … evil.”

Musk also drew criticism in January for addressing a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Germany’s domestic intelligence service considers the AfD a “suspected extremist case,” a designation affirmed by a court last year. There is “too much of a focus on past guilt,” Musk told the crowd, in what critics viewed as a rebuke of the Jewish community’s long-standing vow to never forget the Holocaust.

Gideon Fourie, who attended high school with Musk in South Africa and now lives in Germany, said he was shocked by Musk’s support for a party that is under investigation by national authorities for Islamophobia and radical anti-migrant stances.

“I am incredibly sensitive to racism because of where I came from, and for him to support this far-right party really blows my mind,” Fourie said. “Everything that has happened in the last few years was very contrary to the trajectory I thought he was on.”

Last month, Musk announced that he would rehire a DOGE staffer who resigned after the Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. “To err is human,” Musk wrote, “to forgive divine.”

Pranshu Verma, Jeremy B. Merrill and Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:24 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
16.Judge warns of "consequences" as Trump administration resists disclosing deportation flight details, while AG Bondi attacks court's authority.
Judge is out of bounds.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday.

Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back against President Donald Trump and his allies’ calls to impeach judges who’ve ruled against the administration.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said Tuesday in a rare and brief statement issued just hours after Trump publicly joined demands by his supporters to remove judges he called “crooked.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/john-roberts-donald-trump-imp
each-federal-judges-00235742

I posted that the judge was out of bounds but didn't bother to explain why. Apparently, he demanded the details of deportation flights, which are secret. That sounds like misconduct to me.

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"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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Thursday, March 20, 2025 2:32 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Rogue Soros-Funded NGO Plots Multi-City Assault On Tesla As Domestic Terrorism Escalates

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rogue-soros-funded-ngo-plots-multi
-city-assault-tesla-domestic-terrorism-escalates

Unhinged globalists out themselves as the terrorists that they are, while their "extinction event" climate crisis is thrown out the window.

Fortunately under Trump II, ANTIFA/ BLM/ TDS violence won't be tolerated.

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"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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Thursday, March 20, 2025 3:43 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law

By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM

Shut the fuck up, Ali.

What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.

Let's find out, shall we?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
What the world needs is more diversity of ideas.

Yes. I agree.

That's another reason why the Democratic Party is dying. They don't agree.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 5:32 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.

I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism. The Mar-a-Lago Accord is, on its face, a far-fetched policy proposal and it is easy to pick holes in it.

By Adam Tooze | Mar 19, 2025

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome

What is the Mar-a-Lago Accord?

The US gives the rest of the world:
1. Security
2. Access to US markets/US consumers

The US gets from the rest of the world:
1. A weaker dollar
2. A bigger manufacturing sector
3. Existing US Treasury debt swapped to new Treasury century bonds (100 year maturity. The longest maturity for U.S. Treasury bonds currently available to investors is 30 years.)

Two tools to achieve such an outcome:
1. Tariffs to exert pressure on countries to sign the Mar-a-Lago Accord and to grow the US manufacturing sector
2. A US sovereign wealth fund that can be used to buy foreign currencies to depreciate the dollar

Q1: Why is a Mar-a-Lago Accord in the news?
President Trump aims to restructure global trade by addressing the overvalued dollar, seen as the root cause of U.S. trade deficits. Inspired by an essay by Stephen Miran (Trump’s economic advisor), the Accord proposes weakening the dollar, similar to the 1985 Plaza Accord.

Q2: Key observations of the essay?
The U.S. trade deficit stems from dollar overvaluation driven by inelastic demand for U.S. Treasuries and Foreign Exchange interventions by trading partners. No viable alternative reserve currencies (e.g., eurozone fragmentation, China’s capital controls) exacerbate the issue.

Q3: Key recommendations?
Two paths: 1) Multilateral “Mar-a-Lago Accord” with allies to weaken the dollar via coordinated policies.
2) Unilateral measures (tariffs, security threats) if partners resist

Q4: How would the Accord work?
Key nations (eurozone, China, Japan) would sell dollars/Treasuries from reserves. Incentives include lower tariffs; challenges include reluctance from China/eurozone and market instability from reserve managers selling Treasuries.

Q5: Unilateral approach?
1) Impose a “user fee” on foreign Treasury holdings to drive out reserve managers. 2) Expand the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund or sell gold reserves. Risks include inflation and market dislocation.

Q6: Impact on Treasuries?
Forced swaps to century bonds could trigger defaults and rating downgrades. Voluntary swaps avoid default but face market skepticism. Treasury yields could rise, losing benchmark status to corporate debt

Q7: Sequencing of the blueprint?
Tariffs and security threats first to create leverage. Reciprocal tariffs in April 2025 signal intent Fed cooperation (post-2026 leadership change) may mitigate bond market fallout

Q8: Implications for the dollar?
Short-term dollar strength (to offset tariff-driven inflation), followed by long-term decline post-Accord. JPY (Japanese yen) could surge 20-25% due to undervaluation and safe-haven demand.

Q9: Opportunities for Europe?
Euro could gain reserve status if the dollar weakens. Requires eurozone joint debt issuance and Capital Markets Union to address fragmentation.

Q10: Other takeaways?
Higher financial volatility, reassessment of sovereign risk premia, and shifts to non-U.S. assets. Risks include destabilizing Treasury markets and counterproductive dollar strength.

More at https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome

A strong dollar definitely gets in the way of re-industrializing America. A strong dollar makes imports cheap, and American exports expensive. It's not the ONLY cause of our trade deficit; Bill Clinton's original plan (devised by a group of globalists) was to assign each nation in our trading zone specific functions (Mexico to be cheap industrial labor, Haiti would be sweatshop labor etc.) and the function of the USA was to drive small farmers off their land (by undercutting Mexican corn prices and Haitian rice and sugar prices etc), and to become THE world financial center, taking advantage of reserve currency / petrodollar status.

Once China was accepted into the WTO, American business flooded China with investments, hoping to tap into their giant market.

Every President since then screwed the pooch by running huge deficits, so now we have a $35 trillion debt.

Unforgivable.

Trump looks like a President frantic to save the USA from bankruptcy:
Cutting costs.
Weakening the dollar deliberately instead of having it collapse catastrophically
Scavenging war zones for any economic opportunity he can bully people into.

He still wants/ needs the dollar to be THE reserve currency, but on more sustainable terms.

BTW, GDP is supposed to reflect AMERICAN production of goods and services. In no way are "imports" part of that. Liberals have done a lot to jigger the figures (for example, counting home ownership as part of GDP, by adding in what the homeowners MIGHT have spent on rent as a "service")... but counting imports?
A bridge too far.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, March 21, 2025 7:47 AM

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

The case for conservatism

By Ian Millhiser | Mar 21, 2025 at 5:05 AM

https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/405324/case-for-conservatism-trump-el
on-musk

The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton labels the “more intelligent type of reformer,” scolds his companion, warning him that they should only remove the fence once they know why it was put there.

The point is that, before anything is changed, decision-makers should at least know why the thing that they are changing exists, lest they discover its true purpose after its removal ends in disaster.

Never has Chesterton’s wisdom been so apparent than the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, which, among other things, have seen a broadly worded freeze on domestic spending, a similar pause on foreign aid, and an indiscriminate effort to push as many federal workers out of their jobs as possible. All of these initiatives have had unintended consequences, from defunding a prison full of ISIS fighters to leaving the agency meant to safeguard nuclear material in dire straits.

Some of these decisions were rapidly reversed, but not all of them. And even a temporary error by the government can have catastrophic effects, because the government — unlike the business world — does the kind of work that must be done right every single time.

Every Social Security recipient must receive their check on time, lest they be unable to make their rent or buy food. Every hospital must be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid, lest they shut down and leave entire swaths of the country without care. The country still reels from a single terrorist attack that our intelligence and national security communities failed to stop a quarter century ago.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that change is happening so rapidly right now, because there is no meaningful political movement in the United States advocating for a more methodical, conservative approach.

We need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.

The Republican Party, long the home of American conservatism, is now entirely under the sway of impatient reactionaries. The GOP isn’t just the party of Trump; it’s the party that made a notorious booster of quack medical theories health secretary, and that chose a Fox News host accused of substance abuse and sexual assault to lead the Pentagon — both with near-total support from Republican senators.

Democrats, meanwhile, often feel trapped into a role as the sole remaining defenders of institutions, and they chafe against that role. As Neera Tanden, recently President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser and now the leader of the Center for American Progress, told Politico, “it’s incumbent on us not to be defenders of the status quo.”

It’s not surprising that neither major party wants to be the voice of this status quo. Americans are discontent — according to Gallup, the last time a majority of the country were satisfied with “the way things are going in the US,” George W. Bush was still in his first term. And I am not making the case for stagnation. We don’t need to settle for broken systems; we just need to make sure we don’t make them worse in the name of “fixing” them.

But as we observe the chaos of Trump’s second presidency, where US trade policy can shift wildly over the course of any given day, it’s clear that something is out of balance. There is no one — or, at least, no one in a position of power — pushing for thoughtful consideration before half-baked ideas are implemented.

America needs conservative voices. Not the politicians who align themselves with the so-called conservative movement, but policymakers who are conservative in a more traditional sense. That means we need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.

America needs lawmakers who instinctively kick the tires on new policies before they will vote for them. It needs a predictable legal system that allows businesses and ordinary Americans to plan for the future. It needs a president who at least asks why the United States provides foreign aid before he blithely cancels all of it. It needs leaders who are reluctant to mess with a good thing.

The blessings Americans enjoy today — liberal democracy, well-regulated capitalism, a welfare state, and global institutions that have successfully prevented great power conflict and nuclear war — are, to borrow from Edmund Burke, “an inheritance from our forefathers.” We sacrifice them at our peril, especially if we welcome chaos and uncertainty as their replacements.

The pre-Trump status quo was better than anything else that anyone has ever come up with

Democrats are temperamentally ill-suited toward conservatism. It was a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fought a conservative Supreme Court to bring the modern-day welfare and regulatory states into existence. It was another Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the legislation breaking the back of Jim Crow. Democrats were America’s dominant party when the United States became the world’s dominant nation, and they played an outsized role in building the international order that has successfully prevented nuclear war.

Today, large numbers of Democrats expect their party to continue in this tradition, expanding the welfare and regulatory state and extending freedom and prosperity to groups that have historically faced discrimination. Barack Obama, the most successful Democratic president of the last half-century, lends his name to Obamacare, the most significant expansion of federal public benefits in decades. In 2020, the last year the party held a presidential primary, nearly a quarter of Democrats chose Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described socialist.

These voices pushing for shared prosperity are as essential to a just and stable society as voices of caution, and it is important to remember that the affluence modern-day Americans take for granted would not be possible without reformers like Roosevelt or Johnson.

But the admittedly quite rapid reforms of the New Deal era grew out of a unique economic catastrophe that simply does not exist today. And Johnson’s civil rights laws were the culmination of over a century of struggle that included a Civil War. The United States in 2025 does not face the same kind of moral or economic emergency that justifies throwing caution to the wind.

If Democrats are unaccustomed to thinking as conservatives, they also have a great deal to lose from the kind of smash-and-grab politics that now offers itself as an alternative to America’s liberal democratic status quo. And so do the rest of the American people.

Americans prospered under the business regulations and gradually expanding welfare state that began under Roosevelt, just as they’ve prospered under the racial, gender, and other forms of legal equality wrestled into law by Johnson. The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world — so powerful, in fact, that we’ve held back the full might of the Russian empire by spending a tiny percentage of our defense budget on Ukraine.

The entire globe faced economic turmoil and widespread inflation during the years following the Covid-19 pandemic. But no nation weathered this storm better than the United States of America.

G7 real GDP% change compared to pre-pandemic level

Casting aside the most successful policies on the globe is a risky business, as is abandoning the most successful ideological approach to governance in human history. Liberalism, democracy, regulated capitalism, and an economic safety net are all worth defending on the merits.

Those who would abandon this status quo must show that they have somehow discovered a better way of governing a nation than the most successful system ever derived.

Even the most even-keeled Republicans abandoned conservatism

Rather than attempt to meet this burden, the Republican Party offers only a change in temperament, abandoning the deliberative process that has historically driven the federal government under both Democratic and Republican administrations in favor of ever-shifting calls for swift and disruptive change.

Trump is the embodiment of impulsive change over deliberation and caution, and he heads a party that’s been eager for such a leader for quite some time. Before MAGA, there was the slash-and-burn fiscal policies captured by the Ryan Budget, an agenda widely supported by Washington Republicans. Named for former House Speaker Paul Ryan, this budget tried to gut Medicaid and food stamps, kill Obamacare, and, at least in its early forms, repeal Medicare and replace it with a voucher that lost value every year.

Before the Ryan Budget, there was the Tea Party, a movement that launched the careers of politicians like Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who’ve argued that a wide range of laws from the ban on child labor to the prohibition on whites-only lunch counters are unconstitutional. Tea Party Republicans also sought to constitutionalize a fiscal policy that was even more draconian than Ryan’s vision. Many of this era’s Republicans even claimed that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional.

Disruption, destruction, and a gleeful desire to bring about avulsive change have been the lynchpins of Republican politics for nearly two decades. This is true even in the one branch of government that is supposed to be a bastion of conservatism, because its nine members are the stewards of a fixed Constitution.

At first glance, Chief Justice John Roberts is as unlike Trump as a man can be. His first marriage is decades-old and ongoing. He presides over Court hearings with an almost-weaponized professionalism. He’s long persuaded opinion writers to pen fawning profiles claiming that he’s “worked to persuade his colleagues to put institutional legitimacy above partisanship.”

But Roberts is also the driving force behind the Court’s decisions holding that America has been so successful in eliminating racism, that it must dismantle the very laws that defeated Jim Crow — the equivalent, in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” He also authored Trump v. United States (2024), which gives Trump broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits using his official presidential powers.

Indeed, Roberts went so far as to declare, at a time when Trump was a presidential candidate threatening “retribution” against his perceived enemies, that, if elected, Trump may order the Justice Department to target anyone he chooses, even if he does so “for an improper purpose.” Trump v. United States is one of the most reckless opinions in the Court’s history, preemptively giving Trump permission to commit some of the most authoritarian acts he touted as a candidate.

It fell to Justice Sonia Sotomayor to offer, in dissent, a Chesteronian warning that Roberts’s “single-minded fixation on the President’s need for boldness and dispatch ignores the countervailing need for accountability and restraint.” There is still conservatism to be found on the Supreme Court, it’s just that it comes almost exclusively from the Court’s Democrats.

All of this has happened, moreover, despite the fact that Roberts is the most moderate member of the Court’s Republican majority, and he is one of the most even-tempered politicians in the country. And yet even his career is marked by the same Trumpian disinhibition that drives the Republican Party.

Americans who support liberal democracy need time to regroup and recover

It’s hard not to envy Germany in this benighted moment in American history. Like the United States, Germany recently had an election. And, like the United States, that election was fueled by the same anti-incumbent sentiment that plagued in-power political parties throughout the globe during the post-pandemic era.

But the German system, unlike ours, permits more than two parties to thrive. So, while the incumbent Social Democratic Party took a beating and the far right made gains in the German election, the big winner was the Christian Democratic Union, a normal center-right party that governed Germany as recently as 2021.

The absence of a conservative party in the United States has forced Democrats to do double duty, defending the system that we have while simultaneously pushing for progressive change. That’s left them unable to do either job well. The Democratic Party’s popularity is at historic lows.

What America needs right now is not more stagnation or quick fixes — it is more careful deliberation.

If the US election had played out like Germany’s, electing a conservative government that doesn’t threaten constitutional democracy or global stability, the American left could have spent its time out of power making long term plans for the future, as it has done in the past. Democrats spent most of Bush’s second term designing the legislation that became Obamacare, and building political support for it.

Now, by contrast, neither major American party is well-positioned to offer similar solutions. The GOP has become little more than a vehicle for Trump and his inner circle’s personal grievances. And the Democratic Party has been stuck in anti-Trump crisis mode for so long that its policy infrastructure has atrophied.

Democrat-aligned organizations produced hundreds of rapid response pieces clapping back at Trump’s outrage of the day during his first term, but there was no Project 2021 to match Republicans’ Project 2025. Now, many top Democrats mistrust those very organizations, which house the policy experts who are supposed to come up with the party’s long-term plans when it is out of power. Some mistrust their own staff.

The fact that America’s traditional conservative party has been replaced by reactionary chaosmongers, in other words, does not simply create crises in the present. It is a tax on the future. Endless crises prevent liberal institutions from doing the difficult, deliberative work of coming up with sophisticated solutions to the United States’ real problems.

What America needs right now is not more stagnation or quick fixes — it is more careful deliberation. If there is a better system than the liberal democratic capitalism that has dominated the United States since the 1960s, then we should embrace it. But we should do so carefully, cautiously, and only after our lawmakers understand why our current system exists and which parts of it are worth retaining.

Government should not move as quickly as Twitter. If it does, we are likely to wake up in a world that is far worse than the one that Americans thrived in for nearly a century.

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 8:06 AM

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

Europe is a superpower, if it wants to be

By Paul Krugman | Mar 21, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-the-sleeping-giant-awakening

A quick note from Brussels: Everyone I talked to was horrified and terrified by what’s happening in America — but not cowed. If anything the mood was that Europe has to grow up and stand up.

I doubt many people in the U.S. realize what a geopolitical earthquake just happened in Germany. They didn’t pass legislation; they changed the constitution (or will have, assuming the upper house goes along) to lift the “debt brake” on a trillion euros of defense and infrastructure spending. Combine that with tough talk from France and strong indications that on security matters, at least, Britain will consider itself part of Europe, and suddenly it seems as if a continent that was always a superpower, but refused to act like one, may be waking up.

The truth is that there are three economic superpowers in the world — and by one measure, at least, purchasing power of GDP, the United States is the smallest of the three:

Source: World Bank

Yes, European productivity has lagged for the past couple of decades, and none of the world’s giant technology firms is European. Yet this is still a rich, highly capable society, with immense capacity to defend its values on the world stage.

Until now, however, Europe has lived in a state of learned helplessness, relying on America for its security. That’s now over. It’s not just the tariffs and Trump’s obvious support for Putin. I don’t know if Americans realize how big a shock it has been that European citizens are being arrested and detained by ICE. Suddenly it’s clear that America is not an ally, may not even be a democracy, and Europe must look after itself.

The question, which I can’t answer, is how quickly Europe can stand up. There’s clearly going to be a shift away from U.S. weapons, and Europe clearly has the technological capacity to do that. Will it be able to do so soon enough to turn the tide in Ukraine? I have no idea.

Nor can we rule out the possibility that Europe will return to form and disappoint everyone.

But big stuff is happening, and team Trump, which seems to believe that nobody can stand up to his whims, may get a rude shock from old Europe.

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 9:30 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:

Once China was accepted into the WTO, American business flooded China with investments, hoping to tap into their giant market.

Every President since then screwed the pooch by running huge deficits, so now we have a $35 trillion debt.

Unforgivable.

Trump looks like a President frantic to save the USA from bankruptcy:
Cutting costs.
Weakening the dollar deliberately instead of having it collapse catastrophically
Scavenging war zones for any economic opportunity he can bully people into.

He still wants/ needs the dollar to be THE reserve currency, but on more sustainable terms.

BTW, GDP is supposed to reflect AMERICAN production of goods and services. In no way are "imports" part of that. Liberals have done a lot to jigger the figures (for example, counting home ownership as part of GDP, by adding in what the homeowners MIGHT have spent on rent as a "service")... but counting imports?
A bridge too far.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001, after a lengthy 15-year accession process. Is there other explanations than China for why the National Debt has increased at an ever accelerating rate? Yes, there are:

1. Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio

Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.

Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-respon
sible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/

2. The Wealthy and Corporations Have Received Massive Tax Cuts in Recent Decades

U.S. policymakers have substantially reduced taxes for wealthy households in recent decades. The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts[2] reduced individual income tax rates, taxes on capital gains and dividends, and the tax on estates, all of which provided the largest benefits to the highest-income taxpayers. Though policymakers let many of the Bush tax cuts for high-income households expire in 2013, the 2017 Trump tax cuts again lowered individual income tax rates (including the top rate) and weakened the estate tax, so that it applied only to the wealthiest estates: those worth more than $11 million per person or $22 million per couple, indexed for inflation. The 2017 law also created a large new tax deduction on “pass-through” business income (business income from partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships) and enacted large and permanent tax cuts for corporations.

Taken together, these tax cuts disproportionately flowed to households at the top and cost significant federal revenues, adding trillions to the national debt since their enactment.[3] By shrinking revenues, these tax cuts limit policymakers’ ability and willingness to make public investments that pay off in tangible and important ways for individuals, families, communities, and the country as a whole.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/after-decades-of-costly-regr
essive-and-ineffective-tax-cuts-a-new-course-is

3. Trump and Musk do not pay income taxes. Really. They don’t. That is the reason Trump and Musk do not publicize their IRS form 1040.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+and+Musk+do+not+pay+income+taxes

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 10:05 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
Monday, January 20, 2025 8:20 AM
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=66397&p=1

The entire atmosphere surrounding all of this is completely different than it was in 2016 and 2020.

Things just kind of feel normal again.

It's like all the loudest voices either screamed themselves out or they aren't being platformed anymore and/or we just finally, collectively tuned them out for a change.

It's kind of nice, innit?

Happy Inauguration Day!

The Tesla Secret That Exposes Elon Musk’s Whole Game

By J. Dylan Sandifer | March 21, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/192993/tesla-elon-musk-credits-money

Two egos like Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s could never share the spotlight if it weren’t for the unifying force of grifter solidarity—two oligarchs teaming up to further tip the scales against everyone else. Just as Trump’s P.R. campaign as a canny dealmaker hid his multiple bankruptcies, Musk’s rogue genius performance serves as cover for the fact that he’s just another billionaire buying up others’ ideas and playing the system with enough of a safety net to repeatedly fail. His whole shtick is built on the idea that he’s a bold, self-made innovator who defies the odds, shuns government handouts, and stands for the unbridled power of the free market. In reality, his empire, built originally on an apartheid emerald mine, has been propped up by public money for years. One of its most consistent sources of income has been Tesla’s exploitation of the carbon credit market.

Tesla, the supposed future of clean energy, isn’t just making money by selling electric cars—it’s making a fortune off a regulatory loophole. In the first nine months of 2024, 43 percent of Tesla’s net income came from selling credits to other automakers that hadn’t met emissions standards. It’s not innovation that’s keeping Tesla’s finances afloat; it’s a rigged system that Musk is milking for everything it’s worth. And all the while, he’s using his newfound power as Trump’s unelected co-president to gut the very government programs that provide working people with a fraction of the support that he’s quietly pocketing.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump

Musk loves to sneer at working-class people who rely on food stamps or unemployment benefits, claiming they’re lazy or entitled. But what’s more entitled than using regulatory credits to boost your company’s stock price and then leveraging that stock for loans to keep your cash flow steady? The hypocrisy gets even more grotesque when you look at Musk’s role in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—the dystopian fever dream where he’s now helping Trump dismantle social programs under the guise of “cutting waste.” While he’s ensuring billionaires like himself keep their tax breaks and loopholes, he’s working to slash food assistance, disability benefits, and Social Security. The plan is clear: If you’re rich, the government will help you get richer. If you’re poor, you’re on your own.

Meanwhile, Musk has strategically positioned himself to undermine public infrastructure alternatives to his products. Musk has started targeting public transit and infrastructure projects, claiming they are bloated and inefficient—while his own half-baked ideas, like the Las Vegas “Loop” (a glorified tunnel for Teslas), receive public subsidies and fizzle out into tech-world vaporware. He is claiming that government spending on social good is a waste, while positioning himself as the one true visionary who should receive those taxpayer dollars instead.

Here’s how Tesla’s legalized scam works: Under California’s Zero Emission Vehicle, or ZEV, mandate and the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards, carmakers are required to meet emissions targets. If they don’t, they have to buy carbon credits from companies that produce cleaner vehicles. Tesla, which only sells electric cars, racks up a surplus of these credits and sells them to gas-guzzling automakers that don’t want to invest in real change.

In other words, Tesla isn’t making money because it’s selling cars efficiently—it’s making money because Ford and GM still rely on gasoline. Musk has figured out how to turn regulatory inaction into a billion-dollar side hustle. If Tesla’s carbon credit well ever runs dry—if regulatory standards change or if automakers finally catch up—Tesla’s bottom line takes a hit. That’s when the whole house of cards Musk has built starts to wobble.

Musk’s entire empire hinges on one thing: Tesla’s sky-high stock price. He’s leveraged Tesla shares to take out massive loans, using them as collateral to fund his lifestyle and side projects. This means that keeping Tesla’s valuation high is a matter of personal financial survival. Those carbon credits—essentially free money from the government—make Tesla’s earnings look better than they actually are, which in turn props up its stock price.
https://newrepublic.com/post/192687/elon-musk-panicking-tesla-stock-va
lue

But this strategy is starting to fall apart. Tesla’s stock is plummeting—down nearly 40 percent this year—due to increased competition, battery technology falling behind, and Musk’s erratic behavior scaring off investors. When a company is built on smoke and mirrors, it doesn’t take much for the illusion to shatter.

Musk isn’t an anomaly. The ultrawealthy have always found ways to rig the rules in their favor, whining about government overreach while their fortunes are built on government handouts. They attack welfare programs for the poor while hoarding subsidies for themselves. They position themselves as antiestablishment disruptors, even as they manipulate laws, lobby for loopholes, and install themselves in government positions to protect their wealth.

But Musk isn’t just exploiting the system—he is the system. Directing DOGE, he has the power to engineer even more policies that funnel taxpayer money to himself and the rest of the parasite class while gutting the programs that hold society together. Through DOGE, Musk is orchestrating deep cuts to social programs while ensuring billionaires like himself keep extracting wealth from public resources. While DOGE regularly inflates its cost savings, the proto-agency is doing real harm in service of funding an extension of the 2017 tax cuts from which wealthy earners would get an outsize share of tax benefits. According to the Tax Policy Center, those making $450,000 and up would get nearly half the benefit.

DOGE’s slashing of the workforce across agencies like the Social Security Administration threatens the on-time delivery of benefits to those who rely on assistance. But the threats to Americans’ livelihoods hardly stop there. The Agriculture Department cut $1 billion that would provide food to schools and food banks through local farms. The School Nutrition Association warns that this ruthless decision could end free school meals for approximately 12 million students in 24,000 schools across America, hitting hardest in the poorest communities already grappling with rising food costs. This comes in tandem with Republican cuts to SNAP, which helps no- and low-income Americans afford groceries. Some recipients say their benefit has already been cut by half.

With DOGE’s help, the Trump administration is also dismantling the Department of Education, which provides social mobility to millions of students by making college more accessible to low-income students and students who could otherwise be discriminated against by race, sex, or other characteristics. DOE also provides critical funding for K-12 education. Cutting that would deprive particularly low-income families, students with disabilities, and marginalized communities of essential educational resources, entrenching systemic disparities for generations to come. Simultaneously, Musk is advocating for the dismantling of consumer protections such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite his conflicts of interest. This would directly benefit predatory financial institutions at the expense of working-class Americans.

This is what happens when a billionaire grifter is put in charge of the government: The money flows up, the protections collapse, and working-class Americans are left to fend for themselves. The parasite class, led by Musk, isn’t just feeding off the system—they are actively tearing it apart so that no one else can ever use it again.

Reagan may have invented the welfare queen to shame the poor, but it was always the rich that embodied it. The carbon credit scheme that bolsters Tesla’s finances perfectly exemplifies this larger pattern: a system that appears to promote environmental goals while primarily enriching those who know how to game it. While ordinary Americans struggle under inflation and stagnant wages, billionaires like Musk can transform regulatory requirements into profit centers. They build their fortunes on handouts while demanding that everyone else fend for themselves.

The question isn’t whether we’ll finally see through the con—it’s whether we’ll do anything about it before people like Musk can cement their power even further. Instead of allowing this plunder to continue, we need comprehensive regulatory reform that closes these loopholes and ensures that environmental incentives serve their intended purpose rather than becoming billionaire bailouts. We need transparency around DOGE’s operations and stronger congressional oversight of unelected power brokers who shape policy without accountability. And, as the climate crisis accelerates, we need real fixes, not get-out-of-tax-free cards for those most responsible for carbon emissions: large corporations. The Trump-Musk project is the inheritance of four decades of class warfare. Not content to merely buy favorable policies, the oligarchs are now in the driver’s seat. Their rise to power highlights the broken system that lets the rich extract limitless wealth from the working public while the rest of us are told to work harder, sacrifice more, and expect less.

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 10:20 AM

We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.

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

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 7:45 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:
We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.

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

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

I don't take Trumptards seriously because you aren't humans, you're self-pitying Nazis wailing that they aren't respected for their imaginary importance to the functioning of America. I'm not sorry to tell you that, 6ix, self-pitying loser who thinks he is a winner because of Trump.

Trump’s commerce secretary: Don’t complain if we don’t send your Social Security check

By Brett Arends | March 21, 2025

Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary made another staggering statement on Friday when he suggested that only “fraudsters” and people “stealing” from the government would complain if they didn’t get their Social Security checks next month.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said during a YouTube interview Friday. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month.”

By contrast, he said, “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah. ’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.”

The comments, coming just as Musk and his DOGE team slash the number of people working at Social Security and close branch offices, are unlikely to win friends and influence people even among Republicans, let alone anyone else.

While the mother-in-law of a Wall Street billionaire might not worry too much if her monthly check was late, others might worry if their own goes missing.

And if they complain that their check didn’t arrive — particularly if that is the result of the latest DOGE cuts to the Social Security Administration — it may not be because they are “stealing” from the government by asking for the Social Security benefits they earned over a lifetime of work, but because they need them to live on.

The bizarre, almost surreal comment comes just days after Lutnick, a former Wall Street tycoon, used his position to pump stock in Elon Musk’s company Tesla even though he knew that Musk stands to make a staggering $400 million in personal gain for each $1 the stock rises.

Forbes, which recently estimated Lutnick’s personal fortune at $1.5 billion, has also referred to him as “the most hated man on Wall Street.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-commerce-secretary-dont-compl
ain-if-we-dont-send-your-social-security-check-236e2702

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

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Friday, March 21, 2025 10:21 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I don't take Trumptards seriously because you aren't humans,

You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.

We reject the Pod People.

It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.

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

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

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Saturday, March 22, 2025 7:23 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.

We reject the Pod People.

It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.

Trumptards are bonded to Trump by the same rhetorical mechanisms as Nazis were bonded to Hitler

Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a “Little Man” whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter to his Nazis.

By Timothy W. Ryback | March 21, 2025, 9 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/hitler-press-germany
/682130/

While awaiting trial and execution at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocities, the Hitler attorney Hans Frank observed that it had been this alleged commitment to the common man and a “greater cause” that bonded the führer to his followers. “If one is to be brutally honest, one has to admit,” Frank explained, that Hitler “said aloud what was in the minds of most people and gave clear expression to what everyone was experiencing along with a plan to address the hopes and suffering of the people.”

Frederic Sackett, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1930 to 1933, confirmed Frank’s assessment that the bond between Hitler and his political base seemed infrangible, no matter how ridiculous he appeared to the reporters who covered him. “The expectation frequently voiced here that failure of his policies would result in large and immediate losses of following for Hitler,” Shackett reported to the State Department, “does not take into account the blindness of great sections of his adherents.”

Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian, put this in different terms. After attending one of his beer-hall rallies, Prinzhorn observed how Hitler manipulated the crowd by dramatically modulating his voice, first rising to a “demagogic register” before falling silent, then continuing to speak in a subdued tone, “as if nothing had happened.” Prinzhorn also noted that Hitler limited himself to a small number of tropes that he repeated incessantly: the “treason of Versailles,” the danger of “Jewish influences,” his vow that “heads will roll” once he was in power.

According to Prinzhorn, Hitler’s calculated and mesmerizing combination of volume, rhythm, modulation, and repetition induced the suspension of logic and reason in rally attendees, generating an emotional response in his followers that rendered him nearly impervious to rational attack by political opponents and probing reporters. “They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say that Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” Prinzhorn observed of reporters. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience miss the point entirely.” Ambassador Sackett called Hitler “one of the biggest showmen since P. T. Barnum,” an “indefatigable spellbinder” with an uncanny capacity for “twisting events” to suit his “fancies and purposes.”

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 22, 2025 7:28 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.

We reject the Pod People.

It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.

'Raw animosity': 4 conservatives explain why MAGA voters 'want their opponents to suffer'

By Alex Henderson | March 21, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/trump-brooks-french-stephens/

In the 2024, voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House ranged from hardcore MAGA Republicans to swing voters and independents — some of them 2020 Joe Biden voters — who blamed the Biden Administration for inflation. The economy was a major concern of Biden-to-Trump voters, and the term "buyer's remorse" is being used in connection with swing voters and independents who now regret voting for Trump and are worried about steep new tariffs or possible cuts to Social Security.

But diehard MAGA voters have no regrets about voting for Trump. In a conversation published by the New York Times' opinion section on March 21, four conservative columnists — David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat — lay out some reasons why those voters continue to be diehard Trump supporters.

The writers aren't promoting Trump's policies during the conversation — French, in fact, is very much a Never Trump conservative — but rather, are explaining the president's unending appeal to his hardcore MAGA base.

Brooks cited "brokenism" as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes "brokenism" as "the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down."

Brooks told his Times colleagues, "Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption."

French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, "In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there's a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They're actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the 'deep state' or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who's being disrupted really matters — and if it's the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain."

French added, "Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire."

According to Brooks, diehard MAGA voters enjoy seeing him target institutions they feel excluded form.

Brooks told French, Douthat and Stephens, "I'd offer up one more word for consideration: 'exclusion.' Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge."

Douthat alluded to the fact that Trump's strongest support continues to be within the MAGA movement.

Douthat told his colleagues, "First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis, his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent. Second, Americans lived through the first Trump term, when sky-is-falling rhetoric was commonplace, but the average American did not experience a crisis until COVID hit."

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 22, 2025 7:32 AM

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

Trump Promised to Protect Social Security. Musk Didn’t.

Musk Comes for the ‘Third Rail of American Politics’

By Russell Berman | March 21, 2025, 11:21 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-musk-doge-s
ocial-security/682131/

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.

Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention. Back then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a leader of DOGE, he’s opened an unexpected crusade against Social Security.

Musk recently called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Security Administration and obtained sensitive taxpayer data, and the Trump administration has cut the agency’s workforce by thousands. Earlier this week, Social Security officials announced changes that could make it harder for retirees to access their benefits. These moves—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who have jammed congressional phone lines and town-hall meetings to register their concerns. And they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who could pay for Musk’s decisions in next year’s midterms.

If Musk wants to meet his goal of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll have to do a lot more than eliminate USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and even the Department of Education. He knows the real money is in the three pillars of America’s social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”

Republicans have learned that going after these programs carries a huge electoral risk. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t think politically,” Tom Davis, a former House Republican from Virginia who ran the party’s campaign committee in the early 2000s, told me. His approach, Davis said, is “ready, fire, aim.”

Musk has “been quite successful in business, but he is clearly not very popular, and his DOGE actions are making him less popular,” a senior GOP strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking a fight with the president or his wealthy lieutenant. “He will end up being a heavy weight around the neck of not only President Trump but Republicans generally.”

Most elected Republicans have been careful to avoid criticizing Trump or Musk. But as DOGE has continued to assail Social Security, some have started feeling pressure from their constituents. Callers inundated Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan with concerns about Social Security cuts during a telephone town hall the Republican held earlier this month. He assured them the program would not be touched. “I will admit that there have been times where Elon Musk has tweeted first and thought second,” Huizenga told me, summarizing his message to constituents.

Trump might be able to claim a mandate from voters to justify some of his early cost cutting; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for example. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeatedly vowed to preserve entitlements, even when some in his party wanted to trim them. Republicans have relied on those promises to try to reassure voters that their benefits are safe. “I think President Trump has made it very clear that he does not want to touch Social Security,” Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, told reporters at the Capitol last week. “We are not cutting Social Security.”

Musk’s offensive against Social Security, however, has made those claims harder to sustain. And Trump himself has amplified some of Musk’s most specious charges about the program. During the president’s address to Congress earlier this month, he said his administration had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security. But the examples he cited—people born in the 19th century supposedly still getting checks—were almost certainly data-processing errors that reflected the program’s antiquated computer systems, not fraud.

The administration’s attempts to reduce fraud could jeopardize legitimate recipients. Beginning next month, people will no longer be able to call the Social Security Administration to file for benefits or update their banking information. Instead they’ll have to do so on the agency’s website or—if they can’t verify their identity online—visit an SSA office in person. The new requirements could be a particular hardship for older beneficiaries who live in rural areas—a constituency that leans heavily Republican.

“If they kill the ability to phone Social Security with questions, that will cause real problems with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This would give Democrats an opening."

Polling backs up the strategist’s claims. In a survey released yesterday, the Democratic firm Blueprint read respondents a list of 20 different facts about Musk and what he has done with DOGE, then asked which ones they found concerning. The four examples that respondents worried about most all involved possible cuts to Social Security. “This is what Democrats need to get through their heads: It’s all Social Security right now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, told reporters during a briefing.

What Trump and Musk are doing now is far different from what Bush proposed two decades ago. His plan called for structural changes to Social Security that would allow recipients to put their benefits into private investment accounts, which Bush argued could yield more earnings for beneficiaries while extending the fiscal solvency of the program. Davis was serving in the House when the public rejected Bush’s idea. He offered a reminder that Trump and Musk might want to consider: “When you move too far, too fast in politics,” Davis said, “the voters pull you back.”

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 22, 2025 7:33 AM

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

Trump’s commerce secretary: Don’t complain if we don’t send your Social Security check

By Brett Arends | March 21, 2025

Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary made another staggering statement on Friday when he suggested that only “fraudsters” and people “stealing” from the government would complain if they didn’t get their Social Security checks next month.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said during a YouTube interview Friday. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month.”

By contrast, he said, “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah. ’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.”

The comments, coming just as Musk and his DOGE team slash the number of people working at Social Security and close branch offices, are unlikely to win friends and influence people even among Republicans, let alone anyone else.

While the mother-in-law of a Wall Street billionaire might not worry too much if her monthly check was late, others might worry if their own goes missing.

And if they complain that their check didn’t arrive — particularly if that is the result of the latest DOGE cuts to the Social Security Administration — it may not be because they are “stealing” from the government by asking for the Social Security benefits they earned over a lifetime of work, but because they need them to live on.

The bizarre, almost surreal comment comes just days after Lutnick, a former Wall Street tycoon, used his position to pump stock in Elon Musk’s company Tesla even though he knew that Musk stands to make a staggering $400 million in personal gain for each $1 the stock rises.

Forbes, which recently estimated Lutnick’s personal fortune at $1.5 billion, has also referred to him as “the most hated man on Wall Street.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-commerce-secretary-dont-compl
ain-if-we-dont-send-your-social-security-check-236e2702

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 22, 2025 7:34 AM

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

Dr. Oz Is Now the Grown-Up in the Room

By Benjamin Mazer | March 20, 2025, 11:48 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/dr-oz-senate-hearin
g/682102/

I’ve had a front-row seat for Oz’s unlikely transformation from maligned to mainstream. In 2013, when I was still in medical school, I launched a public effort to censure him. His exuberant pitches for unproven remedies were harming patients, I contended. I asked medical societies to do more to combat the spread of misinformation. My efforts were rebuffed at first; doctors were worried about infringing on free speech and criticizing professional colleagues. To buttress my campaign, I started collecting anecdotes from viewers of The Dr. Oz Show describing potential harm caused by his advice.

Oz did not respond to any of these efforts at the time. (He also did not respond to a request for comment on this story.) His initial dressing-down in Congress followed soon after, and then in 2015, I helped a group of medical students and residents cajole the American Medical Association into writing guidelines for ethical physician conduct in the media. Oz himself remained unchastened after this previous run of bad press, though. “We will not be silenced. We will not give in,” he told his TV viewers in 2015, while accusing one group of critics of having industry ties and denying that he ever promoted treatments for personal gain. In short, he embraced his reputation as a wellness guru and anti-establishment truth teller—the sort of person who would find a natural home in the “Make America healthy again” movement that has been popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Oz is likely to join Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services—and assume control of my parents’ health insurance, among so many others’—in the weeks ahead. That prospect would have terrified me in the 2010s, when I first watched him testify before the Senate. But when I saw him do so for a second time on Friday, he no longer struck me as a major threat. Rather, he looked like an anachronism: a charming celebrity physician with a penchant for theatrical claims. In the face of the Trump administration’s chaotic razing of the nation’s biomedical infrastructure, Oz’s brand of hucksterism seems relatively mild, even quaint.

Perhaps that’s why the Senate showed so little interest in his history of hawking suspect treatments. Even Democrats went pretty easy with their questions. Senator Ron Wyden accused Oz of having engaged in “wellness grifting,” and Senator Maggie Hassan said he’d backed “unproven snake oil remedies,” but this was not a central focus of the hearing. “There are many things I said on the show,” Oz said in response. “I take great pride in the research we did at the time to identify which of these worked and which ones didn’t.”

Instead of grilling Oz on his questionable supplement endorsements, the legislators mostly used their time to lobby for niche policy fixes, and Oz in turn displayed an expertise in health-care policy that seemed worthy of his Wharton MBA. He was fluent on the topics of pharmacy benefit managers, prior authorization, insurance payment models, and the Affordable Care Act. He came out in favor of work requirements for Medicaid—a conventionally conservative approach—while also making sure to show some sympathy for health-care consumers, calling the insurance companies that profit from excessive upcoding “scoundrels who are stealing from the vulnerable.”

This all came off as rather serious and boring, in the way that such a hearing really should come off. Compare that with the nomination hearings for Kennedy: When questioned by the Senate, he botched basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, refused to admit that vaccines don’t cause autism, and accused committee members of being shills for pharmaceutical companies. Dave Weldon, who was Trump’s pick to run the CDC, didn’t even make it to his hearing, which was also scheduled for last week. Why Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn is not exactly clear, but it’s possible he made the error of being slightly too transparent about his suspicions of standard childhood vaccines. When positioned next to Kennedy and Weldon, or to Trump’s picks to run the NIH and the FDA, Oz seems quite conventional. He clearly stated that the measles shot is both safe and effective, while doing little to attach himself to the angry COVID contrarianism expressed by Kennedy and other nominees for leadership at HHS. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

So now we seem to have arrived at the strange moment when a celebrity TV doctor with no significant experience in public administration, a physician who once suggested that pineapple chunks and chia seeds were reasonable treatments for sciatica, can present himself as an unusually rational and stable candidate for leadership in the nation’s public-health establishment. Oz may even become an advocate for a more conventional approach to health-care policy in a department that is now run by someone who touts the benefits of treating measles with cod liver oil. Improbably, the “green coffee beans” guy is poised to be the grown-up in the room.

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 22, 2025 7:57 AM

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

WHAT HAPPENED TODAY THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW - #50
Friday, March 21,2025

1. Columbia caves to Trump for $400m, bans masks at protest, authorizes protest arrests and forces demonstrators to identify themselves.

2. Voice of America staff sue Trump over shutdown, citing First Amendment violations and 1,450 job cuts.

3. Trump moves student loans to Small Business Administration and children's special needs programs to HHS after ordering McMahon to close the Education Department.

4. Acting Social Security administrator threatens to shut down agency over court order denying Musk's DOGE access to records, then reverses himself hours later.

5. U.S. restricts Canadian access to historic border-straddling library, sparking backlash in Quebec town.

6. DHS shutters watchdog offices monitoring migrant kids, civil rights, detention conditions—calls them roadblocks to immigration enforcement.

7. Judge vows to investigate if Trump defied deportation order using 1798 war powers: 'I will get to the bottom of who ordered this,’ with Tuesday deadline for answers.

8. Judge rejects WH claim that brand-new USAID leader isn't covered by his order, says excluding him would've undermined it, and explicitly bars him from acting.

9. Trump threatens Tesla vandals with 20 years in Salvadoran prison, says they're worse than Jan. 6 rioters-apparently violating their 8th Amendment rights.

10. Trump strips security clearances from Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Biden's family, and key people from his impeachments and trials.

11. Trump ends early the legal permission granted to 532,000 Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Venezuelans to live in the U.S, tells them to leave or face arrest.

12. Trump cancels legal permission to live in the US for half a million people… after 8 p.m. on a Friday. He also told reporters that he never signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 wartime act that let him deport people, except his signature is published on it. Somehow he found time to threaten Tesla vandals with 20 years in a Salvadoran prison too.

https://govbrief.today

https://imgur.com/gallery/what-happened-today-50-6pb40f0

Sources (full links below): The Guardian, NPR, ABC News, CNBC. CBC, MSN. Politico, the Washington Post. Axios, the Tampa Free Press. CBS News. Yahoo

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/columbia-university-fu
nding-trump-demands

2. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5336351/voice-of-america-trump-la
wsuit-kari-lake-voa

3. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-student-loans-special-programs-m
oved-new-departments/story?id=120032077

4. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/21/social-securitys-lee-dudek-raises-conc
erns-following-judges-restraining-order.html

5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/us-border-canada-quebec-stanst
ead-library-1.7489528

6. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dhs-shuts-down-internal-watchdog-age
ncies-that-advocated-for-immigrants/ar-AA1BpCtf

7. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/james-boasberg-trump-administ
ration-deportations-00003815

8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/03/21/doge-usaid-federal-
workers-fired/

9. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/trump-musk-tesla-protests-el-salvador
-prisons

10. https://www.tampafp.com/trump-revokes-security-clearances-for-biden-fo
rmer-vp-harris-and-hillary-clinton-in-sweeping-memo/

11. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-to-revoke-legal-status-of-over-a-half
-million-migrants-chnv/

12. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-didn-t-sign-002445774.html

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

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Saturday, March 22, 2025 1:10 PM

Excellent.

It was a good day.

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

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

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Saturday, March 22, 2025 5:22 PM

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

In only two months Trump convinced Americans to follow his example and not pay their income tax. Are you feeling the Winds of Change Blowing?

Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS

Story by Jacob Bogage | March 22, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/tax-revenue-could-drop-by-10-per
cent-amid-turmoil-at-irs/ar-AA1Bs7Yp

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases.

The IRS has dropped investigations of high-value corporations and taxpayers, according to several agency employees involved in those inquiries, because it’s had to triage resources to keep internal systems operating. Two agency commissioners have resigned since Trump took office. The IRS’s head of compliance, Heather Maloy, stepped down effective Friday.

The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.

That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.

Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.

The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.

“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said.

The IRS has noticed an uptick in online chatter from individuals declaring their intention to not pay taxes this year or to aggressively claim credits and deductions for which they are ineligible, the three people said — wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts.

Representatives from the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Other dynamics could explain some of the projected drop in revenue, experts say. Natural disasters, such as the Los Angeles-area wildfires, could lead taxpayers in wealthy areas to postpone filing until October, said Timur Taluy, CEO of tax-prep service FileYourTaxes.com. And during times of economic turbulence, some taxpayers typically opt for a penalty-free six-month filing extension.

But neither would entirely account for such a large drop in revenue, experts say, especially after the 2.8 percent growth the U.S. economy experienced in 2024. Tax officials entered filing season expecting to collect more revenue that last year, the people said, because of economic growth and the lack of significant tax law changes.

“There’s no reason to anticipate this based on the economic year we had in 2024,” said Dorothy A. Brown, who studies tax policy and racial disparities at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The results could mean the government has to borrow more money to cover the cost of federal services. The IRS collects 95 percent of federal revenue each year. A shortfall in tax dollars, if Congress doesn’t cut spending to match, would drive up the national debt, which already sits at $36.2 trillion.

IRS officials have weathered well-documented showdowns with Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and immigration officials over access to highly sensitive personal and business financial data.

But tax filing season has generally proceeded smoothly this year, Taluy said, though IRS data is beginning to show weak spots in agency operations. Roughly 85 percent of callers to IRS helplines are reaching a representative, compared with 93.6 percent at this point in 2024, according to records obtained by The Post.

Senior IRS officials attempted to warn the Trump transition team about the effects of planned staffing and budget cuts at the agency, according to other records, obtained by The Post through the Freedom of Information Act. On top of the DOGE-driven workforce reductions, congressional Republicans also repealed $20.2 billion in resources for the agency as part of a recent government funding law.

“Aggressive reductions to budget and personnel capacity risk backlogs, delays, reduced receipts, and diminished capacity to build next generation digital capabilities,” according to a January presentation given by tax officials to the incoming Trump administration’s Treasury Department team.

The presentation — a 68-slide deck — included recommendations for how the Trump administration could gradually decrease IRS staff numbers without disrupting tax administration. It called for digitizing tax-filing processes and automating the work of some employees in the customer service and compliance divisions.

“The IRS is pursuing a vision of digitalization and automation which will increase the speed and quality of its processes while reducing the overall IRS footprint,” the presentation states. “In the past we have increased our staffing levels to improve taxpayer assistance, tax assessments, and collection processes. However, once modernized, our staffing footprint can be reduced while maintaining performance.”

But the presentation also compares current IRS operations to an “assembly line,” noting that much of the agency’s productivity is dictated by its staffing levels.

“We tried to make clear this is a logistics operation. There’s a science to it. If you put 30 people on the line, this is how much you can accomplish today. If you put 15 people on the line, you can accomplish half of that,” said one person involved in the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. “You can change the productivity over time with a smaller input of personnel, but not this filing season. This is where we are today.”

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 23, 2025 4:32 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:
Excellent.

It was a good day.

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

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

IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency

Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season

By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html

IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired

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 23, 2025 4:44 AM

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

Money money money for Trump from Amazon Prime Video.

On ‘The Apprentice,’ Donald Trump Showed Us Who He Was. If Only We Had Listened.

Rewatching the series that rebuilt Trump’s reputation is a thoroughly unpleasant experience I wouldn’t recommend.

By Karen Valby | March 19, 2025

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/rewatching-the-apprentice-o
riginal-donald-trump

The braid of Amazon and Donald Trump grows tighter. Prime Video announced last week that it would stream the first seven seasons of The Apprentice, the boardroom reality show that resurrected Trump’s cultural relevance when it premiered in 2004. (This deal is likely to directly line the pockets of Trump, who not only starred in the show but also served as an executive producer, even retaining that credit during his first year in the White House, when The New Celebrity Apprentice aired with Arnold Schwarzenegger as host.) Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose company contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, is earning praise from the president for his recent moves at The Washington Post, such as neutering the editorial staff. Amazon has also entered into a $40 million licensing agreement for a documentary about first lady Melania’s life, which will reportedly see her earn at least $28 million. Democracy dies in backroom deals at the hands of dark billionaires.

It’s a bad trip revisiting The Apprentice today—watching Trump hawk his show from the base of the Statue of Liberty. A Gallup poll measuring Trump’s reputation before the show revealed that 98% of people surveyed knew his name, but 58% viewed him unfavorably. We the people gave the dog back his teeth. As an audience, we were seduced by his mean-spirited catchphrase and illusion of authority. Yet he seemed harmless enough as a TV star, like the charismatic uncle at family dinner who would pick up the check if the table let him tell the same old stories. His hair has forever been his business card. He loved showing contestants his hairline so that they could marvel that it was real.

There’s always been an undertone of menace around Trump. But on The Apprentice, his shifting moods and leering once-overs of female contestants were softened by the fun he was clearly having. His only role on the show was to preen and slice people off at the knees. Firing people gave Trump such pleasure. He loved pitting members of the losing team against one another in final deliberations, goading them to go after one another. His side of the boardroom table was like the emperor’s balcony; the other, the gladiator ring. “She’s killing you,” Trump would say. “You’re getting destroyed.” “Everybody’s killing you, you’re done.”

Occasionally, someone would impress Trump with a bit of clever spin. Rewatching the show, I could see him flipping positions in real time, like how a toddler can change their mood if they’re served dinner with the wrong spoon. Being impressed by people seemed to annoy him; he would sucks in his cheeks and give a begrudging nod. Any expression of vulnerability or ambivalence or pushback incurred his wrath. “How stupid can you be?” he’d ask in what seemed like nearly every episode. Adulation of self and disdain for others were his two home bases.

During my nauseating rewatch, it was interesting to note how morally offended Trump got in season six after a contestant self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “white trash.” Derek Arteta, an entertainment lawyer, was on the chopping block after his team lost a challenge due to a misguided use of go-karts. As he defended his misunderstanding of the challenge’s target audience, he joked, “I’m white trash. I only eat at restaurants with deep-fried appetizers…”

Trump was appalled by the term. “What do you mean, you’re white trash? What does that mean? You don’t joke about that. What does that mean, you’re white trash?” he said. “You know, I grew up in a small town and I’m not sophisticated,” Arteta responded, still smiling. Trump was livid at this point. “I don’t like it as a joke. You know what, Derek? You’re fired! I think that is so stupid for you to say. You’re fired! Go! Terrible! You shouldn’t use that expression anymore either. How stupid can you be? I don’t want to hire white trash. You know what? ‘White trash’ is a terrible expression. It’s not a nice expression.” White trash is where Trump, who has systematically dehumanized groups of people like it’s his job, apparently drew the line.

It was discombobulating to watch Kwame Jackson make it to the finals of season one, knowing now that footage of Trump referring to him as the N-word is said to exist. Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, shared this in a 2024 Slate essay, which he published after waiting out the two decades covered by his NDA. In the piece, he quoted Trump during an alleged discussion about potentially selecting Jackson as the winner: “I mean, would America buy a [N-word] winning?”

Apparently, nobody blinked, and the topic was “swiftly” changed, as Pruitt writes. “None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had.” (A spokesperson for Trump has denied Pruitt’s account, calling it politically motivated.)

History repeats itself. We keep letting this man back into our living rooms, as people in the room with him stay silent. The Statue of Liberty weeps.

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 23, 2025 1:11 PM

Vanity Fair writing about white trash.

You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.

Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.

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

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

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Sunday, March 23, 2025 1:13 PM

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

It was a good day.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency

Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season

By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html

IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired

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

Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.

Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.

Good luck. You'll need it.

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

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

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Monday, March 24, 2025 6:44 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:

Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.

Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.

Good luck. You'll need it.

You know that IRS will NOT prosecute these people because the IRS doesn't have the auditors. Why not? Trump fired the auditors. You also know from court cases involving Trump that the courts can't swiftly handle tax cheating. Trump's winds of change will blow in an increase in tax cheating.

Tax Cheats Could Prosper Under Trump, IRS Experts Say

The Internal Revenue Service could lose 10 percent of its revenue — $500 billion — because taxpayers and businesses think the Trump administration won't go after them for not paying taxes

By Peter Wade | March 23, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tax-cheats-trump-i
rs-1235301645/

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 24, 2025 6:56 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:
Vanity Fair writing about white trash.

You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.

Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.

Even I disapprove of the Democrats. Why? Because they (Biden is a particularly relevant example, but Chuck Schumer is another ) are acting like James Buchanan, the President just before the Civil War, the President who could have had the entire leadership of the Confederacy rounded up in Washington DC (where they were serving in Congress and talking openly of destroying America) and executed. But Buchanan wouldn't do a goddamn thing to stop those talkative traitors before they went on a rampage. The necessary job of burning slave owners' plantations and killing those traitors was left to Lincoln's Generals Grant and Sherman. Grant went on to be President and Sherman "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve" became the General of the Army rather than President.

In 1888, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions".

Sherman's purpose in 1864: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#General_of_the_
Army

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 24, 2025 6:57 AM

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

Canada, May I Introduce You to Ukraine?

By David French | March 23, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/opinion/trump-canada-ukraine.html

I had a conversation last week with a Canadian journalist about the culture war on American campuses. After we finished talking about that, she had one final question for me.

“What the hell is Trump thinking about Canada?”

She wasn’t just asking about President Trump’s tariff threats. She was also asking about Trump’s obsession with referring to Canada as the 51st state. The tariffs were somewhat understandable, even if terribly misguided. They are, after all, one of Trump’s few consistent policy obsessions. He likes tariffs perhaps even more than he likes walls.

But if anyone thinks that Trump is merely trolling or joking with his constant references to Canada as the 51st state, I refer you to my newsroom colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff’s report that Trump told the former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”

Trudeau told Canadians that Trump wanted “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” The president’s statement is not one a world leader lightly makes, even if that world leader is named Donald Trump.

And why wouldn’t Canadians be alarmed? Trump has been quite clear with his intentions and his reasoning.

Let me quote Trump’s recent conversation with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host.

“Here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump told Ingraham. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year.”

When a baffled Ingraham pressed him, saying, “You’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries,” Trump responded with the same talking point: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.” Later, he said, “One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”

So, how did I answer my new Canadian friend? “Canada is Donald Trump’s Ukraine.”

Apparently, Trump agrees. On Friday, he made the comparison explicit. While talking to the press in the Oval Office, he once again called for Canada to become the 51st state and then compared Canada’s bargaining position to Ukraine’s. “The expression I use is some people don’t have the cards,” he said. “I used the expression about a week and a half ago” — referring to his infamous exchange with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he told Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

I did not mean that Trump is preparing to invade or use force against Canada. But he does intend to dominate Canada, to render it little more than a vassal of the United States, making it only nominally independent. In fact, you can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa.

By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump are feudal lords, and each is entitled to his own feudal domain.

It’s easy to forget that Trump’s open hostility to Ukraine isn’t the full story of his response to the Russian invasion. The day after Putin signaled his intent to attack and as the Russian Army massed on Ukraine’s border, Trump told a pair of conservative radio hosts, “This is genius.”

In the same interview, he even declared his admiration for Putin’s ruse of declaring the independence of Ukraine’s eastern regions. “But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m going to declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,’” Trump said. “He used the word ‘independent,’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You got to say that’s pretty savvy.”

It’s a mistake to think of Trump as a student of history, but he does learn, and he does carefully observe the men he thinks of as his peers (and they are all men). As a result, his second term is already substantially different from his first. He had some ideas in his first term, but much of his foreign policy and domestic policy seemed to be rooted in impulse rather than ideology. His senior team often resisted those impulses — sometimes to the point of public disagreement and submitting a resignation.

Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, resigned in protest against Trump policies, for example, and his second secretary of defense openly broke with Trump when Trump proposed sending active-duty soldiers to police American streets in 2020. It’s hard to imagine Pete Hegseth permitting any daylight between him and his boss.

The Biden years transformed both Trump and his movement. Trump still has his impulses, but he’s surrounded by people with plans, and we can now see a much more coherent plan in operation.

Domestically, his administration is attempting to revolutionize the constitutional order, placing the president at the head of the American government and subordinating the legislative and judicial branches to his wishes and whims and granting himself unchecked power, including — most recently — the power to yank people off American streets and send them to El Salvadoran prisons without due process.

Economically, Trump has praised the Gilded Age. Just after his inauguration, Trump said: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country.”

In foreign policy, his actions no longer appear to be isolationist as much as they’re a revival of Manifest Destiny, the belief that God had destined the United States to spread across the continental United States and the rest of North America, and the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration to the European powers that the United States was the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere.

This is one reason the Trump administration refuses to blame Russia for starting the war. In this formulation, assertions of actual independence by neighboring countries are deemed a threat even if they don’t offer a military challenge. They’re a threat to the great power’s desire to spread its dominion. In this formulation, Zelensky and Trudeau both committed the same sin — they refused to subjugate themselves when the feudal lord was entitled to their subservience.

The MAGA movement is pushing America back to the 19th century on a number of fronts, but it is worth noting that this was a century in which we invaded Canada during the War of 1812 and threatened to go to war again over the border with the Oregon Territory in the 1840s. The slogan “54-40 or fight” (the northern border of the Oregon territory was at 54 degrees 40 minutes latitude) became closely associated with the Polk administration, one of the most militaristic and expansionist presidencies in American history.

Canadians remember this history well. I must confess it was a jarring experience to visit the Canadian Naval Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, several years ago and see exhibits celebrating victories over American forces in the War of 1812. The successful defense of Canada against American aggression helped establish Canadian national identity.

The pattern is unmistakable. Trump has questioned our defense commitments to Japan, an allied nation only a few hours away from China, and Taiwan holds its breath as Trump has accused the nation of stealing from America’s semiconductor industry. Trump threatened to impose crippling tariffs on Taiwan until the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC agreed to build new manufacturing plants in Arizona.

There’s an old foreign policy term for this new Trump approach: spheres of influence. Under this theory of foreign relations, each great power has its own zone of dominance. Think, for example of the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War — the countries in the pact were nominally independent, but if they exercised actual independent will, they’d soon see Soviet tanks in their streets.

Or think of the competing spheres of imperial influence in the 19th century. Imperial France, Russia, Britain and Germany were constantly colliding with one another.

America hasn’t been immune from the desire to dominate. I’ve already referred to past conflicts with Canada, but the history of Latin America is checkered with armed American interventions.

The problem with spheres of influence is that they’re inherently unstable. Smaller nations chafe under domination. Larger nations don’t agree on the boundaries of their respective zones of influence. As a result, an approach that theoretically separates the great powers actually causes them to collide, as they deploy violence to determine the full extent of their reach.

In practice, the spheres of influence aren’t separate. They’re more like a Venn diagram, with overlapping regions — and it is often in these regions where wars begin.

The inherent injustice and instability of spheres of influence (see August 1914 and September 1939) are one reason the Western alliance reached for voluntary cooperation as a competing model. The United States is the most powerful nation in the Western alliance, but it exerts disproportionate influence, not Soviet levels of control.

As a result, it’s been eight decades since the great powers have gone to war against one another. In addition, free trade and mutual cooperation have helped lift the nations of the Western alliance and our Asian allies to extraordinary levels of prosperity.

I’m hardly the only person to see the similarities between Canada and Ukraine. The Bulwark’s Will Saletan wrote an excellent piece last week noting the remarkable similarities between Trump’s rhetoric about Canada and Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine. But more people need to recognize the patterns.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-lust-for-canada-echoes-putin-lust-f
or-ukraine-artificial-borders-greenland

The MAGA movement has real ideas, and those ideas will outlast Trump’s impulses once Trump finally leaves the political scene. Those ideas have been tried — and been found wanting.

We already know what happens when great powers feel entitled to their zones of control, and the strong try to dominate the weak.

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 24, 2025 7:30 AM

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

Social Security: A Time for Outrage
Trump’s policies attack his own base — but who will tell them?

By Paul Krugman | Mar 24, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/social-security-a-time-for-outrage

Donald Trump is often described as a “populist.” Yet his administration is stuffed with wealthy men who are clueless about how the other 99.99 percent lives, while his policies involve undermining the working class while enabling wealthy tax cheats.

What is true is that many working-class voters supported Trump last year because they believed that he was on their side. And that disconnect between perceptions and reality ought to be at the heart of any discussion of what Democrats should do now.

Right now the central front in the assault on the working class is Social Security, which Elon Musk, unable to admit error, keeps insisting is riddled with fraud. The DOGE-bullied Social Security Administration has already announced that those applying for benefits or trying to change where their benefits are deposited will need to verify their identity either online or in person — a huge, sometimes impossible burden on the elderly, often disabled Americans who need those benefits most. And with staff cuts and massive DOGE disruption, it seems increasingly likely that some benefits just won’t arrive as scheduled.

Oh, and Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security administrator, threatened to shut the whole thing down unless DOGE was given access to personal data.

Not to worry, says Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce secretary. Only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a Social Security check:

Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

There’s so much wrong with that statement that it’s hard to know where to start. But it’s clear that Lutnick — like many affluent people — has no idea how important Social Security is to the finances of most older Americans. According to a Social Security Administration study, half of Americans over 65 get a majority of their income from Social Security; a quarter depend almost entirely on Social Security, which supplies more than 90 percent of their income. I doubt that these people would shrug off a missed check.

Reliance on Social Security isn’t evenly distributed across the population; it’s strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. In particular, it very much depends on education, with less-educated Americans much more reliant on the program than those with more education:

Source: Social Security Administration

But here’s the thing — less educated voters strongly favored Trump in November:

And by putting him over the top they set the stage for demolition of a government program that is the only thing standing between them and dire poverty in their later years.

Now, it’s true that during the campaign Trump claimed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security or Medicare. If you were paying attention, however, you knew that Trump was highly likely to break that promise, that a second Trump administration would be pursuing the Project 2025 agenda and would do all it could to dismantle the social safety net. And let’s not forget (although many voters did) that during his first term Trump came within a whisker of destroying the Affordable Care Act, thereby denying health insurance to millions of Americans. Certainly any pundit who’s surprised by what’s happening now should find another profession.

Oh, and on this as on other issues, above all rule of law and the survival of democracy, the “alarmists” whose warnings were dismissed by the supposedly savvy have been completely vindicated.

In any case, what’s clear is that working-class voters weren’t paying attention; they thought they were voting for lower grocery prices, not an assault on Social Security.

And the fact that so many voters seemed oblivious to clear signs about what Trump would do if he won ought to inform every discussion about how to oppose him.

I generally try not to be one of those people saying “This is what Democrats must do,” for a couple of reasons. One is that I don’t have firm views about what works politically. Another is that all too often “what Democrats must do” just happens to reflect the speaker’s policy preferences rather than a realistic assessment of political effectiveness.

But I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.

On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.

On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.

What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice.

This almost certainly requires new leadership, if only to help persuade voters that the party isn’t run by tired careerists. The problem with someone like Chuck Schumer isn’t that he’s too centrist, it’s that he’s a 74-year-old (writes a stripling of 72) whose instinct is to try to deftly navigate his way through a political landscape that demands not careful calculation but vocal, visible outrage, both to motivate the Democratic base and to get other voters’ attention.

And the attack on Social Security is something that should both inspire outrage and offer an opportunity to connect with working-class Americans.

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 24, 2025 9:10 AM

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

There’s a pattern in Trump’s power grabs

By Zack Beauchamp | Mar 24,2025, 5:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/405489/trump-deportations-gang-pro-palest
ine-spech-power-grab

When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.

The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University, the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff. Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.

Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.

There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.

How Trump’s strategy works

To see this Trump strategy in action, watch White House aide Stephen Miller’s recent interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt.

During the interview, Hunt repeatedly presses Miller on whether the administration violated a court order by sending alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Miller refuses to engage on that key issue of democratic principle. Instead, he repeatedly tries to reframe the debate around the necessity of confronting the gang, arguing that insisting on legal niceties means handing the country over to marauders.

“How are you going to expel illegal alien invaders from our country, who are raping [and] murdering little girls, if each and every deportation has to be adjudicated by a district court judge?” Miller argues. “That means you have no country. It means you have no sovereignty. It means you have no future.”

This, of course, is not a legal argument. If anything, it sounds like a parody of a political argument: “Oh, so you oppose sending people to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison camp without due process? Guess you must support Tren de Aragua killing little girls.”

But as absurd as this sounds, it’s proven to be a powerful form of logic — and not just in extreme cases like Nazi Germany.

In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration and its allies used similar arguments to discredit critics of its policies who have since been vindicated by events. Observers who warned of the threat to civil liberties from warrantless spying and Guantanamo Bay were dismissed as terrorist sympathizers. Iraq war skeptics were labeled Saddam apologists. This “you’re with us or against us” kind of moral blackmail worked on many, both at home and abroad.

The crucial role of partisan polarization

Of course, this kind of thing worked in the Bush era because there was so much hurt and anger among ordinary Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As much as many Americans may dislike Tren de Aragua or pro-Palestine campus protesters, there’s nothing like the level of public hysteria that we saw in the wake of one of the country’s greatest disasters.

Which is why the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategy also taps into another kind of dividing logic — the all-powerful force of partisan polarization.

The Trump administration’s rhetoric doesn’t just attempt to link their opponents in general to gang members and terrorists. They also attempt to link judges and other nonpartisan authorities to Democrats. At a Wednesday press briefing, for example, press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to the judge who weighed in on the legality of the El Salvador deportations as a “Democrat activist.”

The idea here is to assimilate a question of basic legal principles into a familiar partisan script — Democrats vs. Republicans. And by invoking the polarizing power of partisan politics, they portray what is really a fundamental clash over the rule of law as yet another spat between the two parties.

There’s substantial evidence that this approach could really work to legitimize Trump’s policies.

Eminent Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has written several essays in the New York Review of Books that document what he calls “troubling similarities” between interwar Germany and America today. One of Browning’s key points is that the rise of Nazism was, in large part, a cautionary tale about “hyperpolarization.” The German center-right elite hated the left parties so much that they preferred Hitler, who was extreme even to their tastes — and were willing to hand him exceptional powers to crack down on civil liberties in service of crushing socialism and communism.

While Browning focuses his ire on conservative elites — he compares Sen. Mitch McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who made Hitler chancellor — social science tells us that polarization can have a similar effect on ordinary voters.

In a 2020 paper, political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik published a paper testing the effect of polarization on citizens’ views on democracy. Using unusually high-quality data, Svolik and Graham were able to show that vanishingly few Americans — roughly 3.45 percent — were willing to vote against a candidate from their preferred party even if that candidate engaged in clear anti-democratic behavior.

This, they argue, is a function of polarization. When you hate the other side enough, the policy stakes of elections feel really high — and voters are willing to overlook even egregious abuses of power.

“In sharply divided societies, voters put partisan ends above democratic principles,” they write.

This analysis was critically important to understanding why Trump could win in 2024 even after the stain of January 6. Today, it helps us understand how Trump’s rhetorical strategies hope to numb Americans — and especially fellow Republicans — to an assault on their fundamental liberties.

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 24, 2025 1:51 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Vanity Fair writing about white trash.

You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.

Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.
Even I disapprove of the Democrats. Why? Because they (Biden is a particularly relevant example, but Chuck Schumer is another ) are acting like James Buchanan, the President just before the Civil War, the President who could have had the entire leadership of the Confederacy rounded up in Washington DC (where they were serving in Congress and talking openly of destroying America) and executed. But Buchanan wouldn't do a goddamn thing to stop those talkative traitors before they went on a rampage. The necessary job of burning slave owners' plantations and killing those traitors was left to Lincoln's Generals Grant and Sherman. Grant went on to be President and Sherman "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve" became the General of the Army rather than President.

In 1888, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions".

Sherman's purpose in 1864: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#General_of_the_
Army

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

Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.

You lost. You are a loser. It's over.

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

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

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Monday, March 24, 2025 4:09 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There’s a pattern in Trump’s power grabs

By Zack Beauchamp | Mar 24,2025, 5:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/405489/trump-deportations-gang-pro-palest
ine-spech-power-grab

When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.

The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University,

WHAT HAPPENED

Quote:
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents...

The arrest of a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests of the war in Gaza ...

Khalil is being held at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, while he awaits immigration court proceedings. His arrest has drawn criticism that he’s being unfairly and unlawfully targeted for his activism while the federal government has essentially described him as a terrorist sympathizer.

Trump has argued that protesters forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated as a terrorist organization.

Khalil has not been convicted of any terrorist-related activity. In fact, he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
But experts say the federal government has fairly broad authority to arrest and try to deport a green card holder on terrorism grounds...

So, Khalil hasn't been deported, but is awaiting a hearing in immigration court.
IDK what Khalil did, or didn't do. Trump initially said he was guilty of "antisemitism". IMHO “antisemitism“ isn't a crime. Later alleged guilty of "supporting' terrorists. Again, IMHO speaking in favor of Hamas isn't "support", it's an OPINION. However, it's possible that Khalil organized a VIOLENT protest. Like ANTIFA, that could constitute terrorist actions.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-protections-do-green-card-h
olders-and-foreign-students-have-in-the-u-s

Quote:
the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff.

WHAT HAPPENED
Quote:
The Trump administration demanded several changes, including the university enforce its disciplinary policies, implement rules for protests, ban masks, announce a plan to hold student groups accountable, empower its law enforcement, and review its Middle East studies programs and its admissions.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/21/us/columbia-university-policies-funding
-dispute/index.html
I'm good with everything except the last part. Universities are supposed to be where you hear a variety of opinions (not, however, a diversity of facts) and meet different people.

Quote:
Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.
If you're in the USA illegally, you can't be "law abiding" bc you've already broken the law. I don't have any problems with them being deported, whether they're gang members or not.

Quote:
Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.
"Russian troll" bearing "disinformation“ was the previous bad guy justifying censorship, debanking, establishment lies, etc.
So, what's new?

Quote:
There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.

Blah blah blah..
Our rights have been undermined by BOTH parties since the so-called “Patriot Act“, when the bad guy was "jihadists“.

-----------
"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 24, 2025 8:29 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:

Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.

You lost. You are a loser. It's over.

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

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

Greenland did not invite an American delegation to come visit this week, the self-ruling island’s government said Monday, flatly denying a claim made by President Donald Trump.

Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance, will land in the Danish territory on Thursday, alongside National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

The planned visit has been met with anger in Greenland, with outgoing Prime Minister Múte B. Egede calling it part of the U.S.’ “very aggressive” bid to seize the Arctic island.

“We are now at a level where this cannot in any way be characterized as a harmless visit from a politician’s wife. … The only purpose is to demonstrate power over us,” he said.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/24/greenland-trump-00246587

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 24, 2025 9:57 PM

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

I DON'T ALWAYS INCLUDE REPORTERS IN UNSECURE WAR PLAN GROUP CHATS.
BUT WHEN I DO, IT'S BECAUSE I’M INCOMPETENT AND DRUNK.
- Pete Hegseth, chosen to be Secretary of Defense as a stunt to taunt the libs

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

By Jeffrey Goldberg | March 24, 2025, 12:06 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administrat
ion-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

That was the end of the Thursday text chain.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

The next day, things got even stranger.

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
A screenshot of a group chat
Screenshot of a group chat
A screenshot from the Signal group shows debate over the president’s views ahead of the attack.

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.
Screenshot of a group chat
A screenshot from the Signal group shows reactions to the strikes.

On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Shane Harris contributed reporting.

About the Author

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic.

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 24, 2025 11:42 PM

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

Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg

Today’s news of an astonishing security failure at the White House, from an operational security perspective, is the highest level of fuckup imaginable.

These people cannot keep America safe.

https://www.thedailypoliticususa.com/p/pete-buttigieg-destroys-trump-w
ith

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 25, 2025 6:25 AM

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

Just because he did two Nazi salutes on live television, designed a car that looks like a Nazi tank, supports Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, un-banned Neo-Nazis from twitter, and used a Nazi term to describe poor people, it doesn't mean he's…

OH LORD HE'S A NAZI

Well, his rich gramps wanted to get rid of Jews and coloured people. He's also named after a character from Das Marsprojekt by von Braun, an ideological member of Allgemeine SS. Von Braun's Elon was a leader of the Martian civilisation. Go figure.

Joshua Haldeman, the father of Maye Haldeman-Musk, Elon Musk's grandfather. A chiropractor (ouch.) and a leader of a Canadian technocratic movement, Technocracy Incorporated. Convicted for attempting to install an antidemocratic, authoritarian mode of rule, based upon an elitist government composed of technicians and people of science. It was called Technate, a total subservience of national proceedings to engineers and economists. The technocracy started to rip itself apart in dissent after their predictions about the contemporary economic system falling apart did not come true, which blocked the apocalyptic phase needed to realise their imagined utopia.

Beforehand, Haldeman left the Technocracy and became a member of the famously anti-semitic Social Credit Party of Canada, supporting the release of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying that "the plan outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation in this generation." Later, in South Africa, he embraced apartheid and the ruling National Party, claiming that South Africa leads "White Christian Civilization" against an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and "hordes of coloured people".

His grandson's name, Elon, mirrors the title of the ruler of Mars from Wernher's von Braun's Das Mars-projekt. All signs point to Technate still attempting to destabilize the world and realise their vision.

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/joshua-haldeman-elon-musk
-saskatchewan-tech-utopian-conspiracist

https://imgur.com/gallery/well-his-rich-gramps-wanted-to-get-rid-of-je
ws-coloured-people-hes-also-named-after-character-from-das-marsprojekt-by-von-braun-ideological-member-of-allgemeine-ss-von-brauns-elon-was-leader-of-martian-civilisation-go-figure-9VXqRS5

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 25, 2025 6:46 AM

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

Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t

By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations

Economists have never considered Canada boring: It has often been a laboratory for distinctive policies. But now it’s definitely not boring: Canada, which will hold a snap election next month, seems poised to deliver a huge setback to Donald Trump’s foreign ambitions, one that may inspire much of the world — including many people in the United States — to stand up to the MAGA power grab.

So this seems like a good time to look north and see what we can learn. Here are three observations inspired by Canada that seem highly relevant to the United States.

1. Other countries are real

I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada, what made him think that it would be a good idea to start talking about annexation. Presumably, though, he expected Canadians to act like, say, university presidents, and immediately submit to his threats.

What he actually did was to rally Canadians against MAGA. Just two months ago Canada’s governing Liberals seemed set for a historic collapse, with Conservative leader Pierre Polievre the all-but-inevitable next prime minister. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Polievre — who has been trying to escape his image as a Canadian Trump, but apparently not successfully — is effectively out of the running.

I won’t count my poutine until it’s served, but it does seem as if Trump’s bullying has not only failed but backfired spectacularly. (And, arguably, saved Canada; all indications are that Polievre is a real piece of work.) But why?

Much of this is on Trump, who always expects others to grovel on command. But it also reflects a general limitation of the American imagination: we tend to have a hard time accepting that other countries are real, that they have their own histories and feel strong national pride. Canada, in particular, arguably defined itself as a nation in the 19th century by its determination not to be absorbed by the United States.

In fact, there are almost eerie parallels between some of those old confrontations and current events. The 1890 McKinley tariff, of which Trump speaks with such admiration, was in part intended to pressure Canada into joining the U.S.. Instead, it inspired a backlash: Canada imposed high reciprocal tariffs, sought to strengthen economic linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.

Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.

Trump may expect submission; he’s actually getting “elbows up.”

2. Time and chance happeneth to us all

Why, but for the grace of Donald Trump, was the Liberal Party headed for electoral catastrophe? There were specific policy issues like the nation’s carbon tax and Justin Trudeau’s personal unpopularity, but surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.

Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did? But there was never much chance of that argument getting traction in the United States, where we have a hard time realizing that other countries exist.

The Canadians, however, definitely know that we exist, and you might think that public anger over inflation would have been assuaged by the recognition that Canada’s inflation very closely tracked inflation south of the border:

But no, Canadian voters were prepared to punish the incumbent party anyway for just happening to hold power in a difficult time. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet electoral victory to parties with good policies; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

3. Life is about more than GDP

Canada’s inflation experience looks a lot like ours, but in other ways Canada has clearly underperformed. In particular, it has had weak productivity growth, which has left it substantially poorer than the U.S.. Canada, The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita.

That’s not quite what my numbers say, but close. Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:

Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank

So yes, Canada’s GDP per capita is comparable to that of very poor U.S. states. So is per capita GDP in Finland, generally considered the world’s happiest nation. But Canadians appear, on average, to be more satisfied with their lives than we are, although not at Nordic levels. We don’t have a comparable number for Alabama, but surveys consistently show it as one of our least happy states.

Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.

And I don’t know about you, but I believe that one important contributor to the quality of life is not being dead, something Canadians are pretty good at; on average, they live more than a decade longer than residents of Alabama.

The general point here is that while GDP is a very useful measure, and is generally correlated with the quality of life, it’s not the only thing that matters. And the more specific point is that Canada, which among other things has universal health care, has some good reasons beyond national pride not to become the 51st state.

So Canada isn’t boring now, and it never was. As I said, try looking north; you might learn something.

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 25, 2025 8:07 AM

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

Danish PM condemns Trump team over imminent Greenland visit

Mette Frederiksen vows to “stand against” aggressive overtures from the White House toward Arctic island.

By Csongor Körömi | March 25, 2025 11:45 am CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-greenland-visit-mette-fre
deriksen-denmark-condemns/

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen lashed out at President Donald Trump’s U.S. administration for putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland, as she slammed the upcoming visit to the Danish territory by U.S. Second Lady Usha Vance.

“This is clearly not a visit that is about what Greenland needs or wants,” Frederiksen said, about the scheduled trip involving Vice President JD Vance’s wife, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

“Therefore, I have to say that it is unacceptable pressure being put on Greenland and Denmark in this situation. And it’s a pressure we will stand against,” the prime minister added.

Frederiksen’s condemnation marks her most trenchant criticism of the White House since Trump turned his attention to seizing the self-ruling Danish territory, with its vast reserves of critical minerals and vital geostrategic location in the Arctic.

Frederiksen also noted that Greenlandic representatives were “clear” that “they do not want a visit right now, because they do not have a government,” following an election earlier this month.

“You cannot make a private visit with official representatives from another country,” the Danish prime minister said.

Trump first floated the prospect of the U.S. acquiring Greenland during his first term but has raised the stakes since reentering the White House, refusing to rule out taking the world’s largest island using military force or economic coercion — and calling it an “absolute necessity” for U.S. national security.

Frederiksen stressed that when Trump talks about Greenland, the U.S. president “is serious,” and poses a real threat. “He wants Greenland. Therefore, it cannot be seen independently of anything else.”

She also emphasized that both Copenhagen and Nuuk have a strong desire to cooperate with the U.S. “We are allies, we have a defense agreement on Greenland dating back to 1951. There is no indication in either Denmark or Greenland that we do not want to cooperate with the Americans.

“But when you make a visit like this and the Greenlandic politicians say they don’t want this visit, you can’t interpret that as respectful,” she added.

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 25, 2025 8:24 AM

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

Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant over Hegseth Fiasco Makes Scandal Worse

An interview with national security lawyer Bradley Moss, who explains why the stunning exposure of highly sensitive war-planning texts might have been unlawful—and reveals Trump as a disastrously failed leader.

By Greg Sargent | March 25, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/193120/transcript-trump-angry-rant-heg
seth-fiasco-makes-scandal-worse

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now you may have heard that President Trump’s most senior officials discussed war plans on Signal, and that the group chat actually included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Goldberg published his findings, and it caused an explosion in Washington with many Democrats calling for an investigation, and even the occasional Republican slamming this as an unacceptable security breach. President Trump was asked about this, and shockingly he claimed not to know anything about it. What struck us though is what Trump didn’t say. He failed to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of this mess, and that it should have never happened. Today, we’re trying to dig through all this with the perfect guest, veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Brad, thanks for coming on, man.

Bradley Moss: Absolutely, any time.

Sargent: National security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and some others were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis to open up shipping in the Red Sea. Somehow, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got included. The top officials argued a bit about the plans, and then soon after Hegseth openly shares operational details about the move itself, about the operation itself. Can you lay out what happened here, Brad?

Moss: This is the movie Idiocracy come to life. This is just completely reckless. So, to be clear, what we know so far is that on the commercially available Signal encrypted chat platform, which everybody and anybody in D.C. uses, these various senior officials were discussing a number of things regarding the upcoming attacks they were gonna launch against the Houthis. And what originally looked like a set of policy discussions quickly devolved into extensive details about how these attacks would take place, by what units, what locations, what the government knew about foreign entities. It demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications.

These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.

Sargent: Well, Brad, I want to ask you: It’s common enough, as you said, for top officials to communicate via Signal about certain things, but is it typical for the country’s top national security officials to talk this way on Signal about extremely sensitive military operations as well as the complicated considerations that go into them? The Signal app isn’t an approved channel for such communications, is it? How serious a breach is this?

Moss: This could be a very significant breach if for no other reason than that it’s a commercial platform. It’s not controlled by the U.S. government. Other foreign governments almost certainly have tried to breach it and steal information from it. It is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion.

There’s two legal concerns that a lot of us have right now. There is the more benign and more simplistic one from an archival standpoint, which is these are all senior officials who are all subject to the Federal Records Act and, to a lesser extent, the Presidential Records Act, who have to document everything that happens for historical purposes, for the government archives and documents, for future historians, for accountability, for oversight purposes. So that’s one issue. That’s the civil archival issue.

The separate one, the more concerning one is potential criminal liability. These discussions—we don’t know the full extent of what was in these texts because even Jeffrey Goldberg, who is under no obligation to redact classified information, withheld those details because it concerned him as an American to think of that type of detail being put out in the public venue. If those details are in fact classified, if we assume for the sake of argument that Goldberg didn’t totally misinterpret it, it is a significant and serious breach of classified protocols, of criminal law, and it exposed all this information to being stolen by other entities.

And it raises questions. This is just the one chat we know about. What other chats are there? What other threads are there that the director of national intelligence, the attorney general are on, where they’re discussing plans to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua? What other types of sensitive U.S. government details are on Signal, and what, if anything, is being done to ensure these officials keep that in approved classified channels?

Sargent: That brings me to the next point here: what Donald Trump had to say about this. He was asked about it, and here’s what happened.

Reporter (audio voiceover): Your reaction to the story from The Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and they included in an Atlantic reporter for that? What is your response to that?

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?

Reporter (audio voiceover): They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials—

Trump (audio voiceover): Having to do with what? Having to do with what? What were they talking about?

Reporter (audio voiceover): —with the Houthis.

Trump (audio voiceover): The Houthis, you mean the attacker, the Houthis?

Reporter (audio voiceover): That’s correct.

Trump (audio voiceover): Well, it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that. I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.

Sargent: Brad, note that Trump’s immediate instinct is to be angry at The Atlantic for reporting this, not to wonder whether it’s actually true or why it happened, or to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of it and fix any problems that led to this mess. Everything is always about whether something is embarrassing to him. This is not what he should be focused on. It’s not ideal to have a megalomaniac like this in charge in such situations. What do you make of that, Brad?

Moss: Yeah, you have to feel bad for poor Donald Trump. He is the last person in this government to ever know anything. It’s always the I know nothing about it, I didn’t hear anything about it, you’re all fake news, you’re the enemy of the people response. And that’s what you saw here. Just as you noted, his initial concern wasn’t, This is really concerning to me as the commander in chief and the ultimate classification authority. I’m going to personally look into this to make sure that my appointees, my cabinet officials are complying with the law. And if they’re not, I will take action because I am the ultimate decider of national security protocols. No. All he knew to do was to attack The Atlantic and say, I know nothing else, because that’s who Donald Trump is. Accountability, laws, procedures—those only apply to other people. They don’t ever apply to Donald Trump.

Sargent: Exactly right. We should note that a spokesperson for the administration actually confirmed that the exchange was real, so we know it happened. We know this happened and Donald Trump refused to address something that had actually been confirmed.

Moss: And I’m sure Donald Trump had no idea that statement had gone out. I’m sure Donald Trump knew nothing about the story. He was probably busy jumping between hitting the Coke button on his desk, chatting up some business deal from people at Mar-a-Lago, and discussing his next tee time. That’s the entirety of what his presidency is. He is the puppet head. He sits there to ramble to the press, to show off his signature, and then to go play golf. He has no insight into what truly happens in this government. And he’s left it to what I would politely describe as a bunch of unserious gaslighting trolls. Not qualified professionals but people whose entire ethos is premised on political gaslighting, from the attorney general to the director of national intelligence to the secretary of defense—all of them. Their entire background is political, not necessarily this area of expertise and professionalism.

Sargent: Let’s go back to what you brought up earlier, which is the legality of this. It seems like it’s cause for serious investigation. It looks as if Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, coordinated this communication, so it’s possible some laws were violated, right? Can you walk us through that?

Moss: Sure. This would almost certainly violate the Espionage Act in that they were placing classified information or, more broadly, national defense information into an unauthorized location, namely the Signal chat, which is not authorized to contain classified discussions. They were disseminating it to other individuals. It’s questionable whether or not everybody in that chat had the requisite need to know; but putting that aside, they’re disseminating it to Jeffrey Goldberg. For whatever reason that these various individuals put him on, that is in and of itself a violation of the Espionage Act and a couple different statutory provisions that don’t even require willful intent but simply have to do with you gave it to an unauthorized third party.

In any other world, in any other time in D.C. politics and governance, this would be a cause for immediate congressional investigations. It would be cause for immediate internal inquiries to determine why this was allowed to happen, to what extent this is a larger problem, and to what extent people involved on these chats cross the line into civil or criminal liability. In the world of Donald Trump and his presidency, it is unlikely that any of that will happen unless and until the Democratic Party finds a way to gather itself together and win the midterms to at least have some oversight authority. I have no reason to believe that’ll happen for the next two years though.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that in a second. I just want to pin down one point, though: Even if you remove the accidental admission of Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat, putting aside the Goldberg leak, there’s still potential criminal liability simply by virtue of them having this group discussion on Signal, right?

Moss: Correct. The actions that Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and all these individuals took of putting this level of clear national defense information on a commercial platform—doing it knowingly, putting what [they] absolutely knew was national defense information there—would almost certainly be considered a violation of the Espionage Act. Will it be prosecuted, even in a perfect world? Unlikely, if for no other reason than Donald Trump has no political interest in throwing these people under the bus. But from a strictly legal standpoint, this was the violation of security procedures, of the trust that’s afforded those with a clearance, and of the simple basic precepts of criminal exposure for national defense information that everyone who works in this field is told to respect.

Sargent: Brad, you pinpointed a key point there, which is that in a world where the people in charge have absolutely zero interest in accountability of any kind, this type of thing becomes more problematic. And I think that is why we should be looking at what Trump said about this and really balking a whole lot and getting alarmed. He clearly doesn’t want accountability for anything that could potentially make him look bad. That’s always the organizing principle for him. And this brings us to Congress as well. You mentioned that there would be a potential role for serious congressional investigations, but as far as I can tell, almost no Republican has said anything. I think Congressman Don Bacon did say communicating via these channels was a huge mistake. It seems like there’s a situation where having an entire political party whose whole project is to protect Trump at all costs is really not ideal, is it?

Moss: This is the concern that so many of us had in terms of this current formulation of the Republican Party. It’s not about anything in particular regarding political principles. It’s not about a particular vision for governance. It’s about kneeling before Donald Trump. Whatever he says on a particular given day is now the position in his government, they’ll fall in line with it. It doesn’t matter if it violates every other provision and every other principle they’ve ever upheld. So I have no reason right now, as you noted, to think that any of these Republican chairmen or members of Republican leadership in the House or the Senate are going to authorize some wide-ranging investigation. There would have to be immense political pressure from within, which I just don’t anticipate seeing.

But it’s going to bubble up, and it’s going to be one of many pieces of evidence of how unserious this administration is and how they’re jeopardizing not only national security but also your safety and your paycheck by doing all these other things with Elon Musk. That will be almost certainly part of the Democratic messaging in the midterms. Whether or not Democrats can effectively do that is a whole different discussion that we can write books about, but this is going to be part and parcel of the next two years of political messaging.

Sargent: Brad, it seems to me that one thing this will also do is really wet the appetites of journalists. They’re going to really start pushing very hard to look at more such situations that could be developing. There’s going to be a tendency to give the administration even less of the benefit of the doubt when they offer their defenses of breaches like these. Where do you see this going? What can you envision happening in terms of future breaches given what we’re talking about here, which is a world with zero accountability?

Moss: One could only hope, standing from outside the journalistic world and the fourth estate, that this reinforces the spine and the backbone of a lot of members and elements of corporate traditional media, who have spent the last two or three months cowering before Donald Trump. They’re intimidated at this point. He’s exerting all kinds of leverage against their shareholders and their corporate bosses. So even if it was unwittingly, they’ve taken a mild hands-off approach at the moment out of fear.

This is yet another crack in Trump’s armor. He can be scrutinized. He can be held accountable, even if only through just public news gathering and dissemination of information. This is what the fourth estate is supposed to do, regardless of Republican or Democrat. This is a clear, obvious angle to pursue to get into how reckless this administration has been, and you would hope that journalists will do so.

Sargent: To wrap this up, looked at this way, you could even see his weird rambling and defensive response as a display of weakness. If he’s not able to grab these situations in hand and act like a real leader, which he isn’t, I think he’s actually showing a pretty major vulnerability there. What do you think?

Moss: Yeah. It’ll call into question not only his competence but also his ability to avoid the curse of Biden, who people took less and less seriously over the course of the four years when it didn’t look like he could really handle the difficult questions, that he was cognizant of the full extent of what was going on. That’s got to be Trump’s biggest fear, because he’s only got about 18 months until he becomes irrelevant. The moment the midterms are done and everybody starts angling for the presidential run in 2028, he becomes an irrelevant lame duck—and it’s going to drive him nuts.

He is either going to pull himself together at this point, or he’s going to watch these types of stories chip away at his political armor, chip away at the ethos, the myth of Donald Trump as an invincible political titan who’s taken down all these political families. It will drive him crazier and crazier to not be able to control what is going on, and to be viewed and seen as simply an ineffectual puppet.

Sargent: One hundred percent. I would even add that Donald Trump knows as well as anybody that he has no effing business standing up there. And that’s why he lashes out whenever the emperor’s clothes are ripped off so violently.

Moss: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s always been his concern: that he’d be exposed.

Sargent: Brad Moss, thanks so much for talking to us, man. Really good conversation.

Moss: Not a problem. Talk soon.

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 25, 2025 2:19 PM

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

It’s over. America has ceased to be the leader of the free world

Accidentally copying in a journalist to senior officials’ private thoughts about Europe was a gift of Providence

By Janet Daley | 25 March 2025 10:14am GMT

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/03/25/its-over-america-has
-ceased-to-be-leader-of-the-free-world/

No more room for doubt now. It’s over. The United States has ceased to be the leader of the Western alliance. That is the clearest and most significant message that emerges from this exchange of puerile texts – which a White House official has described as a “demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials” in the administration. If describing the European nations as a bunch of pathetic free loaders is what they do when they are being thoughtful and deep, what do they say when they are being shallow and irresponsible?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/24/trump-cabinet-compl
ained-free-loading-europe-secret-chat/

Getting this glimpse into what is (or should have been) the private thinking of the Trump White House is the most remarkable gift of Providence. By some bizarre accident, a journalist unconnected to the administration received top secret information on military planning, which in itself must constitute an illegal security breach, and gave us an unforgettable view into the American government’s attitude to its role in the world. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, and the surprise beneficiary, was scrupulous enough to keep the sensitive military details from public exposure – for which he received no gratitude whatever from the White House.

Indeed, he was met with the administration’s stock response when its own actions result in public humiliation: he was pilloried in the most vicious terms by the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.

What on earth is this supposed to mean? That this whole incident is some sort of malicious lie invented by Mr Goldberg? When the White House has already admitted that his account is absolutely true?

Trump himself, of course, has denied any knowledge of the whole farrago. He is never in the room at the time when any of this stuff happens. His initial remarks were simply an iteration of the usual White House response to any embarrassment: he knew nothing about it but suggested that the Atlantic is “not much of a magazine”. What is that supposed to mean? And if Mr Goldberg and his publication are so low in esteem, what was he doing on Mike Waltz’s contacts list?

There are demands now for both Mr Waltz, who has been described by a White House official as a “f—ing idiot”, and Mr Hegseth to resign, which – given the seriousness of the security breach - should be the minimum required of them. But what must we conclude about JD Vance, who joined in the sneering at what are supposed to be his country’s chief allies with such gusto? And what about the future of our security operations? Do we continue to supply highly sensitive intelligence to a White House which holds us in contempt and might just accidentally broadcast critical information to random contacts?

And the biggest question of all: whose side is America on now? The “pathetic” Western countries with which it supposedly shares a democratic tradition or its new friend, Vladimir Putin, with whom it could comfortably carve up the world?

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 25, 2025 2:51 PM

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

Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.

You lost. You are a loser. It's over.

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

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

We're not talking about Greenland.

We're talking about how much of a loser you are.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 25, 2025 2:59 PM

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

Trump kills millions with Tuberculosis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/03/25/john-green-everything-
is-tuberculosis-tour/

“Everything Is Tuberculosis” tells the real-life story of Henry Reider, a young poet battling drug-resistant TB, whom author John Green befriended during a trip to Sierra Leone. It also tours the history of one of humanity’s oldest contagious diseases, and probes why — despite the existence of effective treatments — it remains the most fatal.

Back when Green finished writing the book, “I really felt like we were at a moment of inflection with tuberculosis.” A good new vaccine candidate had emerged. Cheaper diagnostics — crucially, ones that would work reliably for children — were on the cusp of becoming available. More attention would come to the disease, and with it, more resources. Green pictured his advocacy as part of that process, nudging the flywheel forward.

And now? “Now I feel like we are on the edge of the cliff. And, in fact, that we have chosen to step over the cliff.”

He remembers the precise moment when President Donald Trump issued the executive order freezing nearly all foreign aid, with the aim of ending the U.S. Agency for International Development entirely. Green was at his son’s birthday party when texts started coming in: from friends who worked in public health programs; from friends who relied on such programs to access lifesaving medication. The next day, Green sat down to record the audiobook for “Everything Is Tuberculosis.”

As he read, he thought about the next chapter now being written by American politicians. He knew hundreds of thousands of people would lose access to their treatment, in the middle of their regimens. He knew that if they couldn’t access treatment, they would die; even if they could resume treatment, they were likely to develop drug resistance.

“It was surreal. It was terrifying. It still is terrifying. I can’t get my head around that kind of punitive cruelty,” he said.

“I would give anything for my book to be less timely,” he kept saying. Earlier, he’d met with USAID staffers; the conversation, he said simply, was “difficult.” These days, many were. In briefings he got from health workers, which were “usually quite dry,” people had been breaking down in tears.

“Ultimately the legislative branch is going to have to do its job,” he said, unblinking. “Which is not just true for USAID — it’s also true across the board. The legislative branch is going to have to claim the power that is given to it in the Constitution, the power of the purse.”

After the book launch winds down, in April, Green will return to Washington, where he and other advocates will lobby lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The terrain of their fight has shifted tectonically. In the past, the system to detect, treat and prevent tuberculosis may have been frustratingly under-resourced — but it existed, and that bare fact represented America’s commitment to the ideal of global health. Now it has collapsed.

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 25, 2025 3:13 PM

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

An airport, Mount Rushmore and the $100 bill: Inside the GOP effort to venerate Trump while he’s still in office

House Republicans say they’re honoring the sitting president with their unprecedented bills. Historians see something darker.

By Ben Jacobs and Gregory Svirnovskiy | 03/22/2025 10:00 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/22/trump-honors-still-in-office-
republican-bills-00244107

Benjamin Franklin might have made scientific breakthroughs, invented a stove and helped to found the United States, but did he ever usher in a “golden age” for the nation? In the view of Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, that’s precisely why Donald Trump — not the Founding Father — deserves to grace the $100 bill, replacing Franklin.

Gill’s Golden Age Act of 2025 is just one of five Trump-adulating House bills introduced in the two months since the president began his second term. Other measures would make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor, carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore and create a new $250 bill with Trump’s likeness.

Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz called it an effort “to transform a sitting president into a kind of deified figure” — something, he said, George Washington himself feared.

“This is exactly what the American Revolution was fought to prevent,” said Wilentz, author of “The Rise of American Democracy.”

But to some lawmakers, Trump is a figure worth deifying.

Rutgers University historian David Greenberg said there have been “huge cults of personality” around presidents such as Washington, Lincoln and Reagan. “But even allowing for that on its own terms, it’s pretty crazy,” he said of the spate of Trump-themed legislation.

Some of the bills honoring Trump present practical difficulties. The National Park Service has said there is no suitable rock left to carve on Mount Rushmore, and putting Trump’s image on money would require repealing an 1866 law prohibiting the printing of a living person’s image on American currency.

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 25, 2025 5:56 PM

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

Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?

By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM

The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”

But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.

https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html

Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death

Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death

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 25, 2025 6:49 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?

By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM

The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”

But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.

https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html

Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death

Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death

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

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book (At least 20 year old me says it was, and the version I read would have been quite old and possibly the original printing, and if memory serves that book has been updated at least once or twice as technology advanced). I've written about it here probably 15 or 20 years ago now.

It's the book that pointed me in the direction of 1984 and Brave New World. I've always said that I felt 1984 was a life-changing read and I totally understand why the Public School system would want to remove it from schools, but maybe it was actually Postman's book that was the life-changer. That would actually be hard to gauge since I read all 3 of them in the same month almost 25 years ago.

I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 25, 2025 6:51 PM

BRENDA

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t

By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations

Economists have never considered Canada boring: It has often been a laboratory for distinctive policies. But now it’s definitely not boring: Canada, which will hold a snap election next month, seems poised to deliver a huge setback to Donald Trump’s foreign ambitions, one that may inspire much of the world — including many people in the United States — to stand up to the MAGA power grab.

So this seems like a good time to look north and see what we can learn. Here are three observations inspired by Canada that seem highly relevant to the United States.

1. Other countries are real

I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada, what made him think that it would be a good idea to start talking about annexation. Presumably, though, he expected Canadians to act like, say, university presidents, and immediately submit to his threats.

What he actually did was to rally Canadians against MAGA. Just two months ago Canada’s governing Liberals seemed set for a historic collapse, with Conservative leader Pierre Polievre the all-but-inevitable next prime minister. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Polievre — who has been trying to escape his image as a Canadian Trump, but apparently not successfully — is effectively out of the running.

I won’t count my poutine until it’s served, but it does seem as if Trump’s bullying has not only failed but backfired spectacularly. (And, arguably, saved Canada; all indications are that Polievre is a real piece of work.) But why?

Much of this is on Trump, who always expects others to grovel on command. But it also reflects a general limitation of the American imagination: we tend to have a hard time accepting that other countries are real, that they have their own histories and feel strong national pride. Canada, in particular, arguably defined itself as a nation in the 19th century by its determination not to be absorbed by the United States.

In fact, there are almost eerie parallels between some of those old confrontations and current events. The 1890 McKinley tariff, of which Trump speaks with such admiration, was in part intended to pressure Canada into joining the U.S.. Instead, it inspired a backlash: Canada imposed high reciprocal tariffs, sought to strengthen economic linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.

Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.

Trump may expect submission; he’s actually getting “elbows up.”

2. Time and chance happeneth to us all

Why, but for the grace of Donald Trump, was the Liberal Party headed for electoral catastrophe? There were specific policy issues like the nation’s carbon tax and Justin Trudeau’s personal unpopularity, but surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.

Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did? But there was never much chance of that argument getting traction in the United States, where we have a hard time realizing that other countries exist.

The Canadians, however, definitely know that we exist, and you might think that public anger over inflation would have been assuaged by the recognition that Canada’s inflation very closely tracked inflation south of the border:

But no, Canadian voters were prepared to punish the incumbent party anyway for just happening to hold power in a difficult time. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet electoral victory to parties with good policies; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

3. Life is about more than GDP

Canada’s inflation experience looks a lot like ours, but in other ways Canada has clearly underperformed. In particular, it has had weak productivity growth, which has left it substantially poorer than the U.S.. Canada, The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita.

That’s not quite what my numbers say, but close. Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:

Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank

So yes, Canada’s GDP per capita is comparable to that of very poor U.S. states. So is per capita GDP in Finland, generally considered the world’s happiest nation. But Canadians appear, on average, to be more satisfied with their lives than we are, although not at Nordic levels. We don’t have a comparable number for Alabama, but surveys consistently show it as one of our least happy states.

Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.

And I don’t know about you, but I believe that one important contributor to the quality of life is not being dead, something Canadians are pretty good at; on average, they live more than a decade longer than residents of Alabama.

The general point here is that while GDP is a very useful measure, and is generally correlated with the quality of life, it’s not the only thing that matters. And the more specific point is that Canada, which among other things has universal health care, has some good reasons beyond national pride not to become the 51st state.

So Canada isn’t boring now, and it never was. As I said, try looking north; you might learn something.

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

No, we Canadians are not boring but that article is right. He has succeeded in bringing us closer together even Quebec, which looks the Liberals will even get seats there come the election.

Still working on the trade barriers between provinces but I think it will happen this time.

Remember when I said we are boycotting your booze, it goes further than that. I have seen many Canadians when I am out reading labels to see where a product is made or grown. If it comes from the US, they won't buy it. Been doing it myself. Just changed dish soaps.

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Tuesday, March 25, 2025 9:45 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.

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

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

It wouldn't do you harm to know that Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

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 25, 2025 9:47 PM

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

Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump. (Indeed, in this breakdown, divorced men were more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump.) The finding resonated with Gallup research showing that the partisan divide between divorced men and divorced women was higher in recent years than it had been in two decades, with men skewing Republican. Marriage is well established as a predictor of political behavior—divorce, these figures suggested, could be a similarly profound and potentially radicalizing event, one with the power to alter its participants’ lives and their fundamental understanding of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/no-fault-haley-mlotek-bo
ok-review

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 4:40 AM