REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 15, 2025 17:18
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Sunday, April 13, 2025 5:23 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


He was stupid for joining Kaiser (the medical care model promoted by Bill and Hillary.)

They,and Medicare Advantage, practice what they call "capitation". That is, they only get so much $$ per patient. In Kaiser's case, whatever is left over is split among doctors, technically making it a non- profit but also encouraging doctors to cheap out on their patients. I know four people PERSONALLY whose cancer was diagnosed after a year or more delay, bc Kaiser gave them the 85% solution: take ibuprofen (spinal chord cancer, spinal chord cancer, prostate cancer), and "you're just depressed" (brain tumor).


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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Sunday, April 13, 2025 5:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
He was stupid for joining Kaiser (the medical care model promoted by Bill and Hillary.)

They,and Medicare Advantage, practice what they call "capitation". That is, they only get so much $$ per patient. In Kaiser's case, whatever is left over is split among doctors, technically making it a non- profit but also encouraging doctors to cheap out on their patients. I know four people PERSONALLY whose cancer was diagnosed after a year or more delay, bc Kaiser gave them the 85% solution: take ibuprofen (spinal chord cancer, spinal chord cancer, prostate cancer), and "you're just depressed" (brain tumor).


See. It's stuff like this that I wish I could better explain to people. Everything I've heard online, most of it forgotten at this point, would lead me to believe that you're really screwing yourself over if you opt into an Advantage plan.

But my old man has it along with his VA benefits and my aunt fully intends to do it because that's what my grandma had. In the end, I can't argue the fact that they did pay for everything except for two ambulance bills. Not only with her end of life stuff, but I know she had hip surgery/therapy bills all paid for and she had cataract surgery at some point as well. All paid for.

She was not a complainer about anything though, and probably could have gone to the doctor much more than she did, which was basically never unless there was a problem. Worked for her for 90 years. But she never took regular medication her entire life and had no chronic illness (that we knew of) and the end was very swift. It should also be noted that she had very little income and easily qualified for the senior freeze on property taxes. The difference between choosing for or against an Advantage Plan may have a lot to do with what kind of retirement you've got going. Are you going on a yacht trip every year and still buying a new car every 2-5 years in retirement, or are you living on all the stuff you paid for and social security and a survivor's pension?

So I can't really compare her one example to how it would pan out for other people. It appears an Advantage plan was a great fit in her situation, but I'm worried my old man already made a mistake and my aunt is going to make one in the next few years.



As for Kevin Drum, that wasn't close to the point I was making. His 66 years of life were what led him to that ultimate end. Was it just really shitty luck? Could be. Bad things happen to people out of the blue all the time. But I don't see any reason not to assume that he wasn't chock full of vices like most of us are, or at that he didn't have him in his youth when most of us do.

Second would crawl through broken glass to prove that Trump is a bad guy.

But somebody whose opinion he agrees with automatically gets a pass from any irresponsible actions they had in the previous 66 years and the only reason that they died was because of incompetent and/or lazy doctors in the 11th hour.

There was nothing that Kevin Drum ever did that lead to his own death. Second knows this for a fact because Kevin Drum was a lifelong, loyal, straight-ticket Democratic Party voter.



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

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

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Sunday, April 13, 2025 6:18 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


HMOs and Advantage plans work great if you've got what 85% of people get, but they are very slow to test for and diagnose bc that would mean expen$ive treatment. I've seen that over and over again in capitated plans (pancreatic cancer treated as acid stomach, nonfatal heart attack treated as muscle strain, infections overlooked. I bring up cancer bc they're the most consequential.)

Kaiser SF was caught limiting organ donors to within their own patient population bc otherwise they'd have to pay for donated organs, and quite a few of their patients died waiting for donated organs.

Also, I fully believe that if Kaiser had been more willing to do an emergency Caesarean dear daughter would never had had a catastrophic brain bleed at birth.

So Advantage works great 85% of the time, but if you're in the 15% and you can't aggressively and knowledgeably advocate for yourself in a capitated plan, you may not get effective healthcare.

BTW, all of my cancer treatment- chemo, monoclonal antibodies, surgery, and radiation - plus my treatment so far for GPA- multiple sinus surgeries and debridement plus oral immune suppressants (and possibly infusions) have been, or will be, covered almost 100%. The bills have been trivial. Where the savings come in is the insurance premiums, since you don't need Medicare A (hospital) and B (doctors), Medicare D (drugs), medigap (what is not covered by A,B, and D), dental, and vision. It adds up.
What surprises ppl is that you actually have to pay Medicare a premium for coverage. At our income level, the premium is significant.

One of these days I'll look to see if my doctors and hospitals accept Advantage.

But this is way off topic. Back to our regularly scheduled program.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Sunday, April 13, 2025 9:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
HMOs and Advantage plans work great if you've got what 85% of people get, but they are very slow to test for and diagnose bc that would mean expen$ive treatment. I've seen that over and over again in capitated plans (pancreatic cancer treated as acid stomach, nonfatal heart attack treated as muscle strain, infections overlooked. I bring up cancer bc they're the most consequential.)

Kaiser SF was caught limiting organ donors to within their own patient population bc otherwise they'd have to pay for donated organs, and quite a few of their patients died waiting for donated organs.

Also, I fully believe that if Kaiser had been more willing to do an emergency Caesarean dear daughter would never had had a catastrophic brain bleed at birth.

So Advantage works great 85% of the time, but if you're in the 15% and you can't aggressively and knowledgeably advocate for yourself in a capitated plan, you may not get effective healthcare.

BTW, all of my cancer treatment- chemo, monoclonal antibodies, surgery, and radiation - plus my treatment so far for GPA- multiple sinus surgeries and debridement plus oral immune suppressants (and possibly infusions) have been, or will be, covered almost 100%. The bills have been trivial. Where the savings come in is the insurance premiums, since you don't need Medicare A (hospital) and B (doctors), Medicare D (drugs), medigap (what is not covered by A,B, and D), dental, and vision. It adds up.
What surprises ppl is that you actually have to pay Medicare a premium for coverage. At our income level, the premium is significant.

One of these days I'll look to see if my doctors and hospitals accept Advantage.

But this is way off topic. Back to our regularly scheduled program.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



Great info. Thanks. And you jogged a memory there for me. My dad mentioned the premiums he's not paying, and I would imagine where he's sitting they wouldn't exactly be pretty either. I think he figures with the VA which he likes, he can get along fine on an Advantage plan. Hopefully he remains one of the 85%.

My aunt wouldn't be able to afford anything significant though. Even if I explained everything to her as you just did to me above, she'd still go with the Advantage plan. Not gonna lie, but I would be too, unless that gets way, way cheaper for those living on almost nothing. This explains why it was never a problem with my Grandma. I mean, I would strongly argue that they could have done more at the end and that the opioids they got my family to administer is what actually killed her in only 3 days, but up until that point they did everything she needed them to without any bills or monthly premiums.

I'm sorry about your daughter and the fact you've had to live with the feeling like things could have been different for so long. You can never know that for sure. I hope that you haven't been too hard on yourself about it.



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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 7:08 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh. I see. Kevin Drum's death wasn't his fault. How could it be? He voted Democrat his entire life.



Shut the fuck up.
Have you ever wondered why Trumptards resent their betters (i.e. Kevin Drum)? Wondered why Trumptards celebrate their betters' death? University professors in the UK have an explanation based on "human nature":

Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature

Economic inequality breeds resentment and a desire to get even. That’s what fuels support for even incompetent regimes

By George Monbiot | Sun 13 Apr 2025 07.20 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/trump-populists-
human-nature-economic-growth

“He’s really gone and done it this time. Now everyone can see what a disaster he is.” How many times have we heard this about Donald Trump? And how many times has it been proved wrong? Well, maybe this time he really has overstepped. After all, his clowning around with tariffs, sparking trade wars, then suddenly reversing his position, could provoke a global recession, perhaps even a depression. Surely his supporters will disown him? But I’m not banking on it, and this is why.

Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.

This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.

If you feel an urge to tear it all down, to burn the whole stinking, hypocritical, exclusive system to the ground, Trump is your man. Or so he claims. In reality his entire performance is both a distraction from and an accelerant of spiralling inequality. He can hardly lose: the more he exacerbates inequality, the more he triggers an urge for revenge against his scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, scientists, teachers, China.

But such killer clowns can’t pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democrats’ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: “One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.”

In the UK, Labour, like the Democrats, has long assured itself that it doesn’t matter how wide economic disparities are, as long as the poorest are raised up. Now it has abandoned even that caveat: we can cut benefits, so long as GDP grows. But it does matter. It matters very much. A vast array of evidence, brought together in 2009 in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and updated in 2024, shows that inequality exerts a massive influence on social, economic, environmental and political outcomes, regardless of people’s absolute positions.

If there is a such a thing as Starmerism, it collapses in the face of a paper published by the political scientists Leonardo Baccini and Thomas Sattler last year, which finds that austerity increases support for the radical right in economically vulnerable regions. Austerity, they found, is the key variable: without it, less-educated people are no more likely to vote for rightwing demagogues than highly educated people are. In other words, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are busily handing their core constituencies to Nigel Farage.

Of course, they deny they’re imposing austerity, using a technical definition that means nothing to those on the sharp end. Austerity is what the poor experience, while they must watch the rich and upper middle classes, under a Labour government, enjoy ever greater abundance.

Starmer and his minions suggest there’s nothing they can do: wealthy people are already taxed to the max. As private jets and helicopters cross the skies, anyone can see this is nonsense. Of all the remarkable things I stumbled across while researching this column, the following is perhaps the most jaw-dropping. On the most recent (2022) figures, once benefits have been paid, the Gini coefficient for gross income in the UK scarcely differs from the Gini coefficient for post-tax income. In other words, the gap between the rich and the poor is roughly the same after taxes are levied, suggesting that taxation has no further significant effect on income distribution. How could this possibly be true, when the rich pay higher rates of income tax? It’s because the poor surrender a much higher proportion of their income in sales taxes, such as VAT. So much for no further options. So much for Labour realism.

The one thing that can stop the rise of the far right is the one thing mainstream parties are currently not prepared to deliver: greater equality. The rich should be taxed more, and the revenue used to improve the lives of the poor. However frantically centrist parties avoid the issue, there is no other way.

Download The Spirit Level and The Inner Level from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Richard+Wilkinson+Kate+Pickett

The 2024 update of The Spirit Level is here: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 7:23 AM

SECOND

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


Good jobs don’t have to be in manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs aren’t always good

By Paul Krugman | Apr 14, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/democrats-shouldnt-support-tariffs

“McDonald’s workers in Denmark are paid more than Honda workers in Alabama.” That claim has been showing up in my inbox, so I checked it out. And it’s true. McDonald’s workers in Denmark are paid more than $20 an hour, in addition to receiving substantial benefits. Indeed.com says that “production associates” at Honda’s Alabama plants are paid an average of $14 an hour.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-hourly-pay-mcdonalds-140000799.h
tml
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Honda/salaries/Production-Associate/Alabama

What this comparison tells us is that institutions that empower workers are more important in determining workers’ pay than what sector they work in. Two-thirds of Danish workers are represented by unions, while auto workers in Alabama aren’t unionized. Empowering service sector workers can make their jobs good; disempowering manufacturing workers can make their jobs bad.

There’s a lot of romanticism about what manufacturing jobs in America used to be like. It’s true that some industrial workers were well paid. But that was mainly because they had strong unions. Nonunionized workers in, say, South Carolina’s textile industry had low pay and terrible working conditions. Many came down with brown lung disease caused by breathing in lint. Why should we want to bring those jobs back?

And even in America, where many service-sector jobs pay poorly, there are also many jobs outside manufacturing that offer good wages. Employment in health care now greatly exceeds employment in manufacturing; well, according to Pew, 55 percent of health care jobs provide middle-class incomes. And policies that increase workers’ bargaining power could greatly expand the number of good jobs outside manufacturing.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1I79b
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/11/jobs-with-the-largest-shares-of-middle
-class-earners.html

The point is that Democrats shouldn’t engage in Trumpian nostalgia for an industrial era that isn’t coming back. They should be pushing for policies that will make jobs better in the 21st century, not harken back to a rose-colored vision of America in 1955.

And they should never, ever say that Trump’s tariffs have a point. Because they don’t.

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 8:28 AM

SECOND

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


Governed By Confused Intuition

By Andrew Tobias | April 13, 2025

https://andrewtobias.com/governed-by-confused-intuition/

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Holman W. Jenkins Jr. — who in the middle of Trump’s first term was paraphrased as saying “Trump can do anything and I’ll support it” — now writes: Trump Wants to Be Impeached Again.

It’s already in the cards thanks to his ill-founded trade war, no matter how that war plays out.

. . . A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.

. . . Mr. Trump’s great achievement was his 2024 re-election, a rebuke to the injustices and insults meted out to him and his fans since 2016, some of which were even real. However, no consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American “golden age” with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition.

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 10:26 AM

SECOND

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


Bond markets turmoil shows the world that ‘the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing’

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/business/trump-risk-us-bonds.html

There are not many certainties in the world of money, but this traditionally has been one of them: When life turns scary, people take refuge in American government bonds.

Investors buy U.S. Treasuries on the assumption that, come what may — financial panic, war, natural disaster — the federal government will endure and stand by its debts, making its bonds the closest thing to a covenant with the heavens.

Yet turmoil in bond markets last week revealed the extent to which President Trump has shaken faith in that basic proposition, challenging the previously unimpeachable solidity of U.S. government debt. His trade war — now focused intently on China — has raised the prospect of a worldwide economic downturn while damaging American credibility as a responsible steward of peace and prosperity.

“The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing,” said Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University and co-author of the forthcoming book “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.”

An erosion of faith in the governance of the world’s largest economy appears at least in part responsible for the sharp sell-off in the bond market in recent days. When large numbers of investors sell bonds at once, that forces the government to offer higher interest rates to entice others to buy its debt. And that tends to push up interest rates throughout the economy, increasing payments for mortgages, car loans and credit card balances.

Last week, the yield on the closely watched 10-year Treasury bond soared to roughly 4.5 percent from just below 4 percent — the most pronounced spike in nearly a quarter century. At the same time, the value of the American dollar has been falling, even as tariffs would normally be expected to push it up.

Other elements also go into the explanation for the bond sell-off. Hedge funds and other financial players have sold holdings as they exit a complex trade that seeks to profit from the gap between existing prices for bonds and bets on their future values. Speculators have been unloading bonds in response to losses from plunging stock markets, seeking to amass cash to stave off insolvency.

Some fear that China’s central bank, which commands $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, including $761 billion in U.S. Treasury debt, could be selling as a form of retaliation for American tariffs.

Given the many factors playing out at once, the sharp increase in yields for government bonds registers as something similar to when medical patients learn that their red blood cell count is down: There may be many reasons for the drop, but none of them are good.

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 10:27 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Finally Met an Adversary Totally Immune to His Bullshit
And it’s not the Supreme Court.

The bond market is not like the Supreme Court, or Paul Weiss, or Columbia University, or any of the other institutions Trump has conquered, co-opted, or corrupted.

He cannot scare it into submission. He cannot bribe it.

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 11:32 AM

THG


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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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!



Donald Trump warned the 'winds are moving' after EU makes huge China decision

Europe appears to be shifting its gaze eastward, seeking assistance from China rather than the US as leaders pursue trade agreements with the Asian giant instead of American President Donald Trump, whose stance towards the Chinese was roasted by US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

Euronews reveals that following President Trump's infamous "reciprocal tariffs" speech at the White House earlier this month, the first call made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was to China, which has promised to "fight until the end" against Trump tariffs, as the superpower levied their own tariffs in response.

The European Commission - who recently issued Trump a stark warning over his economic policies - issued an official statement saying: "In response to the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs, President von der Leyen stressed the responsibility of Europe and China, as two of the world's largest markets, to support a strong reformed trading system, free, fair and founded on a level playing field. The news comes as Trump's real height was revealed in his medical assessment, after doubts had previously been cast.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/donald-trump-warned-the-winds-are
-moving-after-eu-makes-huge-china-decision/ar-AA1CRGVq?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=31e50bdb4e8643a3aca41410d8d20601&ei=50


Yes stupid, the winds have shifted. The world is turning away from America and looking towards China going forward into the future. You stupid fucking MAGA moron.

T

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Monday, April 14, 2025 1:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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!



Donald Trump warned the 'winds are moving' after EU makes huge China decision

Europe appears to be shifting its gaze eastward, seeking assistance from China rather than the US as leaders pursue trade agreements with the Asian giant instead of American President Donald Trump, whose stance towards the Chinese was roasted by US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

Euronews reveals that following President Trump's infamous "reciprocal tariffs" speech at the White House earlier this month, the first call made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was to China, which has promised to "fight until the end" against Trump tariffs, as the superpower levied their own tariffs in response.

The European Commission - who recently issued Trump a stark warning over his economic policies - issued an official statement saying: "In response to the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs, President von der Leyen stressed the responsibility of Europe and China, as two of the world's largest markets, to support a strong reformed trading system, free, fair and founded on a level playing field. The news comes as Trump's real height was revealed in his medical assessment, after doubts had previously been cast.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/donald-trump-warned-the-winds-are
-moving-after-eu-makes-huge-china-decision/ar-AA1CRGVq?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=31e50bdb4e8643a3aca41410d8d20601&ei=50


Yes stupid, the winds have shifted. The world is turning away from America and looking towards China going forward into the future. You stupid fucking MAGA moron.

T


The ASSessment of the situation from the retard on these boards who doesn't understand any of these concepts is duly noted.



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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 1:54 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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!



Donald Trump warned the 'winds are moving' after EU makes huge China decision

Europe appears to be shifting its gaze eastward, seeking assistance from China rather than the US as leaders pursue trade agreements with the Asian giant instead of American President Donald Trump, whose stance towards the Chinese was roasted by US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

Euronews reveals that following President Trump's infamous "reciprocal tariffs" speech at the White House earlier this month, the first call made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was to China, which has promised to "fight until the end" against Trump tariffs, as the superpower levied their own tariffs in response.

The European Commission - who recently issued Trump a stark warning over his economic policies - issued an official statement saying: "In response to the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs, President von der Leyen stressed the responsibility of Europe and China, as two of the world's largest markets, to support a strong reformed trading system, free, fair and founded on a level playing field. The news comes as Trump's real height was revealed in his medical assessment, after doubts had previously been cast.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/donald-trump-warned-the-winds-are
-moving-after-eu-makes-huge-china-decision/ar-AA1CRGVq?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=31e50bdb4e8643a3aca41410d8d20601&ei=50


Yes stupid, the winds have shifted. The world is turning away from America and looking towards China going forward into the future. You stupid fucking MAGA moron.

T


The ASSessment of the situation from the retard on these boards who doesn't understand any of these concepts is duly noted.





Another bit of news for you Jack. And Trust me, they don't like guys like you.

T

Two-thirds of US wealth is held by women | Melinda French Gates



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Monday, April 14, 2025 2:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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!



Donald Trump warned the 'winds are moving' after EU makes huge China decision

Europe appears to be shifting its gaze eastward, seeking assistance from China rather than the US as leaders pursue trade agreements with the Asian giant instead of American President Donald Trump, whose stance towards the Chinese was roasted by US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

Euronews reveals that following President Trump's infamous "reciprocal tariffs" speech at the White House earlier this month, the first call made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was to China, which has promised to "fight until the end" against Trump tariffs, as the superpower levied their own tariffs in response.

The European Commission - who recently issued Trump a stark warning over his economic policies - issued an official statement saying: "In response to the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs, President von der Leyen stressed the responsibility of Europe and China, as two of the world's largest markets, to support a strong reformed trading system, free, fair and founded on a level playing field. The news comes as Trump's real height was revealed in his medical assessment, after doubts had previously been cast.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/donald-trump-warned-the-winds-are
-moving-after-eu-makes-huge-china-decision/ar-AA1CRGVq?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=31e50bdb4e8643a3aca41410d8d20601&ei=50


Yes stupid, the winds have shifted. The world is turning away from America and looking towards China going forward into the future. You stupid fucking MAGA moron.

T


The ASSessment of the situation from the retard on these boards who doesn't understand any of these concepts is duly noted.





Another bit of news for you Jack. And Trust me, they don't like guys like you.

T

Two-thirds of US wealth is held by women | Melinda French Gates




Wow. Show me a picture of a wrinkly old ass woman and tell me she doesn't want me.

Oh no. My heart is broken dude.

I don't need money, and after 30 years old a woman has nothing to offer me.

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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 3:01 PM

SECOND

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


The Kleptocracy Presidency

Under Trump, conflicts of interest are just part of the system.

By Anne Applebaum | April 14, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-kleptocracy-au
tocracy-inc/682281/

As the stock markets crashed on Friday, April 4, Donald Trump left Washington, D.C. He did not go to New York to consult with Wall Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead, he went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where many tournament fans and sponsors were staying too. His private businesses took precedence over the business of the nation.

Many of his guests were also interested in boosting Trump’s personal interests, as well as gaining the American president’s favor. One of them was Yasir al-Rumayyan, who runs the $925 billion Saudi sovereign-wealth fund and is also the chair of the LIV tournament. Other sponsors of the tournament included Riyadh Air, a Saudi airline; Aramco, the Saudi state oil company; and, startlingly, TikTok, the Chinese-owned social-media platform whose fate Trump will personally be deciding, even as he profits from its sponsorship and support.

Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid. No previous inhabitant of the White House would have wanted to be seen doing personal business with companies from countries that seek to influence American foreign policy. Such dealings risk violating the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting “gifts, titles or emoluments from foreign governments.” But during Trump’s first term, the court system largely blew off his commercial entanglements. Now he not only does business with foreign as well as domestic companies that have a direct interest in his policies, he advertises and celebrates them. We know the identities of the golf-tournament sponsors not because investigative journalists burrowed deep into secret contracts, but because they appear on official websites and were displayed on a billboard, observed by The New York Times, at his golf course.

Both the website and the billboard would have been scandals in any previous administration. If they are hardly remarked upon now, that’s because Trump’s behavior is a symptom of something much larger. We are living through a revolutionary change, a broad shift away from the transparency and accountability mandated by most modern democracies, and toward the opaque habits and corrupt practices of the autocratic world. For the past decade, American government and business alike have slowly begun to adopt the kleptocratic model pioneered by countries such as Russia and China, where the rulers’ conflicts of interest are simply part of the fabric of the system.

The change began during Trump’s first term—Vice President Mike Pence once made a 180-mile-plus detour on a trip to Ireland, in order to stay at a Trump hotel—but Trump was constrained by his advisers and perhaps by what was then still his fear of legal consequences. This time around, he knows he got away with a series of crimes, including an attempt to overthrow an election. His advisers are supine; he feels no more constraints. New standards were already set in December, when the Trump Organization announced the construction of a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, an investment that posed a clear conflict of interest for the president-elect.

Trump’s family also created a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, that could, in practice, serve as a vehicle for anyone to pay him indirect bribes. Nobody around him objected. After Trump’s return to office, his administration, unbothered by appearances of impropriety, did indeed quickly suspend a civil investigation into Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur and an adviser to World Liberty Financial, who had also invested at least $75 million in the company. More recently, The Wall Street Journal discovered that executives from Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, met with Treasury officials to ask for looser oversight, even while they were at the same time negotiating a private business deal with World Liberty Financial. In the past, Binance has been fined $4.3 billion, a record, for letting terrorists, drug traffickers, and people under sanction use its exchange, so the company’s interest in looser oversight is not theoretical.

In keeping with the new atmosphere, the inauguration itself became an ostentatious display of the new administration’s kleptocratic values. American tech CEOs were the most prominent guests and got the most attention, but several foreign business partners of the Trump Organization also attended inauguration-related events, posed for photos with Trump, and referenced their connections to his presidency in promotional materials. Several lesser-known companies involved in regulatory and other negotiations with the U.S. government quietly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Soon afterward, in a late-night purge, Trump fired 17 inspectors general, all people who were responsible for monitoring corruption and ethical violations inside the government.

Trump isn’t just disregarding old norms for his own sake. He’s making it easier for others to cut corners too. From the beginning of his career, Trump participated enthusiastically in the opaque, offshore world of shell companies and anonymous bank accounts, a milieu that has always attracted autocrats, criminals, and anyone else who seeks to hide their money. As of 2018, more than one out of every five condos in Trump-branded buildings had been purchased by shell companies whose true owner was unknown, and anonymous owners continued to buy into his businesses during his first term as president. Now his administration is helping other businesses that operate in the shadows to stay there. Trump’s Treasury Department announced last month that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, hampering recent congressional efforts to end money laundering, tax dodging, and other lawbreaking by anonymous investors. In an executive order, Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits American and foreign companies from paying bribes to do business. The Department of Justice is also disbanding a task force set up to administer sanctions on Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Oversight will be removed from many domestic financial and government institutions too. Trump ordered a full work stoppage at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had been created to protect consumers from manipulation by banks and other financial institutions He has fired top officials overseeing ethics, whistleblower protections, and labor rights, including the heads of the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials are drafting plans to reduce investigations of fraud and public corruption, which means that prosecuting crooked officials will be more difficult. Cuts to the IRS mean that tax fraud will also be harder to identify and prosecute. Just last week, the Justice Department announced that it would curtail investigations of cryptocurrency fraud and disband its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

One particular Trump backer has already profited from this new world in which conflicts of interest just don’t matter. Elon Musk, who has no mandate other than the personal blessing of the president, now has enormous influence over the very same government institutions that have long subsidized and regulated his companies. Musk slashed jobs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees auto safety and crash investigations, including those involving his own electric-vehicle company, Tesla. Musk oversaw mass firings at other regulatory agencies that had launched more than 30 investigations into his companies, which include SpaceX and Neuralink.

At the same time, major government agencies, including the General Services Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, are using or were considering the use of Starlink, a product of SpaceX. The State Department planned to buy armored Teslas. One Commerce Department official, Evan Feinman, resigned last month because of an administration push to use Starlink to provide rural broadband services. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he said. Musk isn’t breaking the law, and he doesn’t have to say or do anything to encourage these changes. His new role as America’s premiere oligarch means that all kinds of people and agencies will kowtow to him anyway.

Musk has also had real influence over American foreign policy. If they are upheld by courts, DOGE’s cuts to USAID, to the U.S. Institute of Peace, and to U.S.-backed foreign broadcasters, including Voice of America, will all deliver deep blows to American diplomacy and soft power, in addition to the damage they will do to international health care and humanitarian aid. The end of American-funded broadcasting by itself will particularly benefit China, which competes with the U.S. in the realm of narratives and ideas as well as economics. It’s curious that Musk was in a position to make these decisions, all so favorable to Chinese soft power, even though he has important ongoing business relationships in China. His “gigafactory” in Shanghai, opened with hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese loans, has become Tesla’s largest production site.

But in Trump’s administration, outside interests are no big deal. To take one of many examples, FBI Director Kash Patel, during his Senate hearings, revealed that he has accepted $1 million to $5 million in stock as payment from the corporate parent of Shein, a Chinese e-commerce company that has been accused of using forced labor in its supply chain; he told senators that he would not divest. Patel has also consulted for the Czechoslovak Group, a foreign arms conglomerate that J. D. Vance, when he was still a senator, said had “ties to the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Although Patel, in his new role, will be responsible for countering Russian and Chinese influence and espionage operations, 51 Senate Republicans nevertheless confirmed him.

But these are only the conflicts of interest we know about. How many people benefited last week from advance knowledge that Trump would reverse his position on tariffs? How many others are making other stock-market bets based on their access to government information? We don’t know the answers, and Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to want to find out. We are living in the dark, just as people do in other kleptocracies, and this changes everything.

Earlier this year, I published a book, Autocracy, Inc., which argues that many modern dictatorships are best analyzed not through the prism of ideology but through the political and financial interests of the people who run them. The presence in the American government of so many people, most notably the president, whose financial interests can be directly and immediately affected by their political decisions means that we now need a different way of analyzing American policy too.

To understand Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine, for example, one should ask not merely How will they end the war? and How will they shape America’s relationship to Europe? but Who in Trump’s immediate circle will benefit from the lifting of sanctions? and Have the Russians made explicit financial offers already, and to whom? The rare-minerals deal now being negotiated with Ukraine deserves especially close scrutiny. We need to establish which Americans, exactly, will benefit, and how.

The right question to ask about Trump’s tariff policy is also financial: How will this enormous change to American trade policy benefit Trump? One answer is already clear. The countries and large companies damaged by these tariffs, some of which could face huge losses or even bankruptcy, will have an enormous incentive to play up to the president, to offer him political donations, and maybe even to offer business deals to him, his family, or his friends in order to get some kind of exception made for themselves or their industry.

In a law-abiding administration, personal finances wouldn’t be an important part of the public debate. But this administration’s leaders have decided that laws and norms of behavior that have held for a century or more don’t apply to them. The Republican-led Congress has so far decided not to enforce them either. It’s now up to the media, to outside organizations, and to whistleblowers to keep reporting the slide into kleptocracy to the public and to the courts, to make sure that remaining laws are enforced. It’s up to the Democratic Party to follow the lead of opposition movements in other kleptocracies and to put corruption at the center of their arguments. Before it’s too late, everyone who can do so must communicate what is happening: American government, American foreign policy, and American trade policy are slowly being transformed, not to benefit Americans but to benefit the president, his family, and his friends. Only voters can stop them.

This article was adapted in part from the preface to the paperback edition of Autocracy Inc., which will be published in the United Kingdom in May and in the United States in August.

Download Anne Applebaum’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Anne+Applebaum

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 4:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Who the fuck wants to read neocon extraordinaire Anne Applebaum's criticisms after she and her gang drained the USA of money and weapons?



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, April 14, 2025 4:47 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Everything is unwinding, according to this guy ...

Quote:
"Things Are Breaking 'Out There'..."
Monday, Apr 14, 2025 - 01:20 PM

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
Systemic Considerations

“Every western society is confronted by an internal cultural conflict between those who wish to distance society from its civilizational legacy and those who wish to renew it.”

- Frank Furedi on Substack

Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo.

Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people elsewhere in the world — taking back what we used to do. You are correct to wonder if this is even possible. The wish is surely understandable, if a bit fuzzy and over-simplified: to be again a nation of people occupied purposefully in the service of a bright future. Redemption stories are deeply appealing.

Many of us are aware that the hour for this is late. We’ve already lived through our decades of pumping cheap oil out of American ground, extracting the ores, fashioning the metal into I-beams and rails, raising the skyscrapers, laying the asphalt ribbons of highway, and strewing the landscape with split-level houses and strip-malls. Let’s not try a re-run of that.

What have we got to work with?

An overly-complex matrix of systems and subsidiary systems operating on the verge of failure at excessive scale. For example, our cities and their asteroid belts of suburbs. The rot is already well-advanced in many of them from their centers outward, and we can see the process underway of strip-mining the remaining assets on-the-ground. Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore. . . all occupy important geographically strategic sites. All are populated by dwindling societies of the cope-less, floundering their way out of existence. The geographies will abide without them. Others will come along and make something of these places’ virtues.

Agri-business is a method for strip-mining the value from what remains of our fruited plains. Everything about it is on an arc of failure, mortgaged to a futureless giantism. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now that time has passed. The remaining soil itself can probably be rescued with heroic ant-like peasant labor over generations, which is to say a long and rather desperate project with no quick resolution. Even if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hadn’t come along to read America the riot act on food, anyone can see that the age of Froot Loops is drawing to a close.

Town and country, what human society at its best was composed of, has got to be rearranged. This is something that MAGA is not talking about. MAGA looks like it is seeking a reenactment of the years 1950 to 1964. That isn’t going to happen. What then? The tech broz propose something that looks like an A-I printed robotic future. They are drunk on their own Stanford University brand Kool-Aid, hallucinating a future that is little more than math dressed in spandex.

It is nearly impossible to grok the size of their vast fortunes, their billions. Thousands upon thousands of millions. From what? From marshaling squadrons of lawyers to draw up ownership documents for this and that venture enabling idiots with nose-rings to lecture each other about sexual etiquette on cell-phone screens? Warning: don’t become infatuated with singularities, journeys beyond biology and the ecology of planet earth. That’s a story for saps, cargo-cultists, the mentally ill.

Speaking of all that money, one thing you can surely depend on is a violent unwinding of global finance. The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide. The hedge fund broz and related broz in the shared hallucinations of capital can make some provision for wealth preservation if they have half-a-brain. It’s the great wad in the middle that has the worst problem: they get wiped out and then they discover they have no Plan B. That’s when the fun really kicks off in America (and other sovereign lands, of course.)

Things are breaking ‘out there.’ The financial world’s feedstock is promises. In a trusting world, promises are a splendid technology. Promises allow you to borrow hamburgers from next Tuesday to have a hamburger today. . . .and all else that follows from that. In a not-so-trusting world, promises go up in a vapor with the morning dew.

The folks in charge will attempt to manage the manifest contraction that is upon us by doing everything possible to pretend that it isn’t happening and to deflect from any signals that happen to get through the muzak they broadcast about blue skies and staying on the sunny side. If you are serious — even serious about the comedy sure to arise out of this — you will be prepared for all kinds of trouble: shortages, hunger, civil strife, cold, darkness, the absence of TikTok.

Your number-one job is to stay sane.

Now, go forth and revel in today’s fine spring weather, mindful of the many more fine days to come as history spools out.


-----------
"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, April 14, 2025 5:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Who the fuck wants to read neocon extraordinaire Anne Applebaum's criticisms after she and her gang drained the USA of money and weapons?



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



The same people that side with NeoCons, race hustlers, foreign terrorist, etc., etc., etc....

Yanno... Democrats.

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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 5:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Iran.

Fuck Muhammad and Allah.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
And this is where you turn into SECOND and want to see a whole bunch of people wiped out.
America would be made great again if all Trumptards were dead. Trumptards are killing themselves, but not fast enough.
Quote:
6ixStringJack wrote:
And with my athletic-leaning-toward-muscular build, I used to break the BMI chart and they called me overweight before the Diabetes hit. And back in my power lifting days when I was built like a brick shithouse I was considered morbidly obese.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=12165
40#1216540

6ixStringJack has forgotten the illegal drugs he took for muscle growth harmed him in ways he has not yet learned. The price of Trumptard Freedom to be a jackass is ill health as they get older. I see illness in all old Trumptards caused by Trumptard drinking, smoking, libertine sex lives, drug taking, gluttony, etc. If all Trumptards would follow Rush Limbaugh's example and kill themselves quickly, America would be great this year.


I didn't take anything illegal. Although, I DID take stuff from GNC. Very possible that some Amino Acid or Creatine pills, or the copious amounts of shit tasting protein shakes on top of the 6,000 calories per day I ate for 2 years had some negative effect.

Let's just say that with all the stuff the FDA has approved that's made us the least healthy 1st world nation, even the FDA won't approve 90% of the stuff in a GNC once you leave the vitamin counter.

Although it might just be that nobody at GNC had powerful lobbyists.

It's actually shocking in retrospect to think there was anything the FDA didn't approve.


Speak of the devil... this was just up on RCP today...


This Is Your Brain on Creatine

Most commonly linked to muscle building, the supplement can actually encourage short-term memory and clear thinking, too

https://www.insidehook.com/longevity/creatine-supplement-brain-benefit
s

Maybe that's just one of the many, many, many reasons why I'm so much smarter than you and superior to you in every way, Second.



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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 5:29 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Who the fuck wants to read neocon extraordinaire Anne Applebaum's criticisms after she and her gang drained the USA of money and weapons?
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times. You would hate Anne Applebaum because she wrote The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

Applebaum also wrote Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Applebaum also wrote Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization--in effect a second Russian revolution--which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic's borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum's compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Download Anne Applebaum's books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Anne+Applebaum

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 6:28 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Wow. Show me a picture of a wrinkly old ass woman and tell me she doesn't want me.

Oh no. My heart is broken dude.

I don't need money, and after 30 years old a woman has nothing to offer me.
The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology

Meet the lonely men who think the tariffs will get them girlfriends.

By Constance Grady | Apr 14, 2025, 11:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/culture/408578/trum-tariffs-incels-misogyny-email-
jobs

The “this” in question was a TikTok video from last summer in which the all-women executive team of an Australian skin care company playfully sang and danced around their office. Faced with the option of a woman joking about being a “Gen Z boss” and probable economic ruin: “Tariffs,” the X user concluded.

The apparent link between a group of Australian women having fun at their office and the historic economic fallout of Trump’s tariffs in the US may be obscure to a lot of people. But for a vocal contingent of incel-adjacent men on X, the link is self-evident.

“A lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace,” explained Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her in March in the midst of the DOGE shutdowns. “They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs.” In this reading, the Australian skin care executives are callously celebrating their oppressive privilege by filming themselves dancing.

In this worldview, the fun, pretend jobs include federally funded government jobs. These men further believe that because DEI initiatives mandate that women get these fun, pretend jobs — usually described as “email jobs” — women have achieved unnatural degrees of self-sufficiency. No longer do they have to rely on marrying a good provider for economic stability. With that impetus gone, women’s standards for romantic partners have skyrocketed, leaving these hapless men unable to get a girlfriend.

Cartoons Hate Her quotes an X user who berated her for arguing that single women can be happy living by themselves. “Your ‘happy life alone’ only exists because the state funnels taxpayer money into your independence LARP,” he wrote. “I call it ‘negative prostitution’ because it takes men’s money away to ensure women don’t have sex with them.”

These men read Trump’s economic policy as a project of redistributing money and jobs away from women and back to men, ultimately for men’s sexual gain. DOGE slashed away the email jobs in the government, they argue, while tariffs will force a recession that will ultimately kill the email jobs of the private sector. Meanwhile, tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs, which are understood to be the rightful domain of men, back to the US. By the time the process ends, they believe, men will be gainfully employed and now-destitute women incentivized to sleep with them, and the world will be restored to its proper order.

To be clear, this worldview is deeply deluded. Even if you agree it’s bad that women have the ability to make their own money and thus don’t need to settle for subpar romantic partners (personally, I take the radical position that this is good), the economics don’t work. While it’s true that women make up the majority of office workers, it’s not true that they only work pretend email jobs. They also make up the majority of workers in the leisure and hospitality industry (selling on the floor of a retail store, waiting tables, etc.) and in education and health services (home health aids, nurses, teachers, etc.).

Finally, perhaps most crucially, even if a tariff-led recession may mean layoffs from office jobs, the tariffs are highly unlikely to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. They are far more likely to raise prices and make everyone’s quality of life worse.

What’s true is that tariffs are likely to make women’s lives disproportionately worse. The tariffs are expected to raise costs for American families by as much as $3,800 per year, and that burden will be carried most heavily by the people who are already poor. As Lauren Leader noted at MSNBC, women still make less money than men, and the pink tax means they also pay more than men do for basic toiletries and other necessities. They’re more likely than men to shoulder the financial burden of childrearing. Perhaps, as a consequence, women make up the majority of America’s poor. (Yet they still won’t sleep with those men on X!)

In the TikTok video that enraged so many of these men, the gimmick is that the executives are participating in a girly TikTok trend within the confines of their office.

The original trend began with a group of hot girls chanting rapid one-liners about their appearance as they headed out for a night at the club, their voices taking on the register of children playing a clapping game: “Boots and a slicked-backed bun! Boots and a slicked-back bun!” In the Australian office version, the women are chanting in their business casual attire around an array of cubicles. Frequently, they play with refrains that juxtapose their girliness with professionalism. “Gen Z boss and a mini!” chants one. “Five-foot-three and an attitude!” says another.

It’s that very juxtaposition that seemed to strike the angry men of X as so unjust, that seemed to prove the video is more than just a bunch of women in another country having fun in a way that didn’t affect American men at all. “‘Girls just being silly’ is okay,” explains one of the men Cartoons Hate Her quotes. “‘Girls just being silly on top of the ruins of bastions of masculinity that they just destroyed, sending millions into despair’ is not okay.”

The wreckage of masculinity this man is describing is the idea that being a professional office worker should be a specifically masculine identity: The 1950s ideal of the man in the gray flannel suit, a man who does serious business to provide for his family and, as such, is afforded a certain amount of respect. It is true that this archetype has become a species in decline. It is also true that women are now more likely to work at offices than men are — but that didn’t happen because of any vast conspiracy from women to destroy men. There’s actually a very clear and well-documented pattern that can happen whenever a profession becomes dominated by one gender or the other.

The canonical example here is computer programming, in part because it is so new that it’s easy to see the switches happen. From the 1940s through to the 1960s, programming was considered women’s work. At the time, the physical building of computers — the engineering, the hardware — was considered dangerous and intelligent and masculine. The laborious, sedentary grinding away of computer code was considered glorified secretary work: feminine. Women provided cheap, docile, and uncomplaining behind-the-scenes labor in an expensive industry whose glamour was all in the hardware.

As computing developed, however, it gradually became clear that coding was skilled labor — what publications of the 1950s called a “black art” that called for mathematical flair and a talent for innovation: a job that was no longer considered proper for docile, patient, domesticated women but wild and unruly genius men. Programming’s prestige increased. Its pay scale went up. And its workforce turned overwhelmingly masculine.

We can see the opposite effect when a profession starts masculine and becomes feminine, as we saw with human resources. As a culture, we consider jobs more valuable, prestigious, and worthy of financial remuneration when we associate them with men. If we come to associate them with women, the job in question loses prestige and its salaries stagnate. At the same time, men in large numbers will start to leave the now-feminized profession, thereby increasing the impression that it is properly women’s work.

Another way of saying this is that the angry men of X don’t hate women who work in offices because they took away the jobs of hard-working men. Men stopped working in offices because women had started working in offices, too, and our culture hates women.

Now, office jobs, thoroughly feminized, are held to be worthless, pointless, producing nothing of value. The only thing to do, according to this worldview, is to sweep the jobs away and replace them with good, honest factory work and push the women who held them into marriage or sex work — here considered to be equivalents.

That so many online are celebrating the idea that Trump’s agenda will destroy the financial lives of women speaks to how deeply misogynistic the ideology that unites Trump and his supporters can be. The promise of good manufacturing jobs becomes not the promise of a respectable union-protected job that pays well enough for you to raise a family without requiring a college degree but of a manly job that will, somehow, force women to sleep with you. The whole project is to fulfill the incel’s dream of federally mandated sex.

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 7:13 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times

No, I have not.

And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.

You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.



-----------
"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, April 14, 2025 8:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


You spend an awful lot of time mind-reading... badly.

What Trump feels.
How Trumptards think.
What drives ("incel- adjacent" ... WTF is THAT??) right- wingers.
How they're all secretly Nazis.
Or misogynists.
Or unreformed Confederates.
Or dog- haters.

Or ... something!

If you have to resort to ad hominens, you really don't have much in your arsenal, do you?

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, April 14, 2025 9:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Wow. Show me a picture of a wrinkly old ass woman and tell me she doesn't want me.

Oh no. My heart is broken dude.

I don't need money, and after 30 years old a woman has nothing to offer me.
The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology


Who do you think you're trying to shame?

Very much a v-cel over here.

I get to do whatever I want whenever I want because I didn't put myself into a one-sided financial contract for life.

Because I'm a lot smarter than you are.

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

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

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Monday, April 14, 2025 9:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times

No, I have not.

And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.

You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



It's never too late for me to say it for the thousandth time.

Fuck Ukraine.



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

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 5:54 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You spend an awful lot of time mind-reading... badly.

What Trump feels.
How Trumptards think.
What drives ("incel- adjacent" ... WTF is THAT??) right- wingers.
How they're all secretly Nazis.
Or misogynists.
Or unreformed Confederates.
Or dog- haters.

Or ... something!

If you have to resort to ad hominens, you really don't have much in your arsenal, do you?
There is consensus on Trump supporters being unable to understand anything about unobservable mental states or even what it would mean to understand the concept of a 'mental state'.

Theory of mind in animals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 5:55 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times

No, I have not.

And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.

You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.
Trump Will Never Betray Putin (Again)

Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 13, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/i/161218499/trump-will-never-betr
ay-putin-again

It's in many ways rather bizarre that Trump feels the need to go through the motions, pretending that he is irritated with Putin and will come down hard on the Russian dictator for not agreeing to a cease-fire. Having said two weeks ago that he was really “pissed-off” at Putin for being recalcitrant, Trump showed how angry he really was by leaving Russia off the list of states to receive extra sanctions during his truly destructive sanctions fiasco of the last 10 days.

Ahh, but I hear MAGA say that they have justified this lack of Russia being on the sanctions list because they are doing almost no business with Russia due to the existing sanctions regime. The fact that this is taken seriously by MAGA shows how desperate they are to pretend that Trump is not completely in the bag with Putin. Trump’s great tariff list contained, for instance, the completely non-human populated, but penguin-filled, Heard and MacDonald Antarctic islands that do no trade with the USA.

The whole tariff performance was mostly performative—and even then, Trump could not bring himself to do anything to offend Putin.

So this week, in what can only be called the Groundhog-Day phase of the war, Trump once again expressed irritation with Russia (he never expresses anger at Putin).
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Russia has to get moving. Too many people are DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war - A war that should have never happened, and wouldn't have happened, if I were President!!!
Apr 11, 2025, 2:35 PM
Of course he quickly backed off—no new sanctions have been announced, and almost immediately after this, Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, showed up at a meeting in St Petersburg and in a sign of devotion/fealty put his hand over his heart when he saw Putin.

I released a piece yesterday pointing out that we need to adjust our language to understand these ridiculous pantomimes. Trump does not want “peace”—he wants to help Putin win. He is a pro-war president, and is maneuvering on Russia’s side.

Trump Is A War President. He Is Working For Putin's Victory And Using The Right Language Is Crucial
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-war-president

I just really hope I don’t have to keep saying this every two weeks (which is about the cycle we are in for these performative moments.

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 5:58 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Obsession With “Manly Jobs” Ignores the Most Obvious One

Trump Is Actually Killing the Best Way to Bring Back Blue-Collar Jobs

If Americans must work with their hands, we could at least build something we need.

By Henry Grabar | April 14, 2025 12:24 PM

https://slate.com/business/2025/04/trump-news-blue-collar-jobs-housing
-construction-tariffs.html

What is the point of the Donald Trump Tariff Show? No one seems to know, not least the man himself. Are we trying to raise a bunch of new tax revenue? Reshore manufacturing? Are tariffs simply a pretense to negotiate better trade deals? Or must we treat the spiritual malaise that comes from dependence on an endless stream of disposable consumer goods? These aims are contradictory, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and his supporters from claiming all these justifications and more.

The closest thing to a through line is the GOP’s fixation on the righteousness of a certain type of old-fashioned factory work, the sort of thing that might be represented in the popular imagination by Rosie the Riveter, if she hadn’t been flagged for removal by the Pentagon’s anti-DEI team. Who are we kidding: Trump’s hard worker is a man. The work should be dirty, difficult, and dangerous. “They wanna mine,” POTUS said last week of coal miners, whose job is one of the country’s most dangerous, marred by both on-site injuries and lifelong health problems. “You give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of job, and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.” Or as Elon Musk said this weekend, “We need to shift people from low- to negative-productivity jobs in government to high-productivity jobs in manufacturing (as well as mining and refining of materials).” Make America shower after work again.

Beneath all this A.I.-generated policymaking and culture-war posturing lies a real labor-market quandary: Men without college degrees have struggled to find good jobs or hold down any job at all, a phenomenon with some big downstream effects on politics and culture, up to and including the election of Donald Trump. Addressing this has become a cause célèbre on the right, though liberals have also recognized the problem. But it’s unlikely that Trump’s chaotic tariff moves will reindustrialize the United States in any meaningful way or put men back to work.

It’s all the sillier because—to risk taking the president’s goals at face value—there is a way to put lots of American men to work with their hands. It’s a field the president should know well: construction. A giant trade, made up mostly of men, doing work that can’t be outsourced, creating housing that the country desperately needs. Instead, the president is doing his best to crush construction—even as he tries to put the country to work in toaster factories.

Trump’s yearning for manual labor is fueled mostly by the nostalgia that constitutes his entire political reason for being, but there’s a reason people like the idea. Manufacturing jobs, though far outnumbered by hospitality jobs, still pay much more—in spite of the GOP’s efforts to crush unions, worker protections, and so on. Still, they’re distant enough from most Americans’ reality in 2025 that when Ron DeSantis ran for president, he identified not as the son of a steelworker but as the grandson of a steelworker. Surveys show everyone wants more factory jobs; few people want to give up their own job to work in a factory. (Like the old Onion headline: “98 Percent of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others.”)

In the Washington Post this week, Rotimi Adeoye referred to Trump’s tariff philosophy as “MAGA Maoism”:

Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

The philosophy manages to be both misogynistic and misandrist all at once. The office is an inane and emasculating environment ruled by a “Gen Z boss in a mini”; men are apes who can only find fulfillment working with their hands.

This proposed American downskilling makes for good right-wing revenge porn. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued the tariffs would work in concert with Elon Musk’s mass layoffs of federal workers, saying this week, “That will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing.” Maybe when Trump shuts down NYU we can reopen the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which is currently being used as classroom and laboratory space.

My colleague Nitish Pahwa has an excellent rundown of the feasibility of reshoring manufacturing, which concludes that: No, Donald Trump will not get Nikes or iPhones made in the United States anytime soon. Not that most of our outsourced manufacturing would fit with the right-wing vision of men’s work anyway: See this apparently Chinese-made A.I.-generated video that imagines Americans back at the jobs that went overseas a half-century ago.

The irony is, Trump actually had a pretty good shot at putting lots of men back to work literally swinging a hammer—or more realistically, holding a nail gun. Construction is that rare field of building things that can’t be moved overseas. As Matt Yglesias noted in a Slow Boring post last week, it pays even more than the factory. In his article “YIMBYism as Industrial Policy,” Yglesias imagines a construction boom unleashed by land use reform, with spillover effects for adjacent U.S.-based industries, like furniture. A boost for modular construction (which Canada is trying to create) would even create new factories. Construction fits Trump’s mission of giving men fulfilling careers: The industry is 90 percent male, and employs about 20 times more people than mining. But more importantly, it creates more housing, which is good, as opposed to coal, which is bad.

But Trump could not have concocted a more hostile set of policies for construction work. Nobody’s making money in the stock market this year, but one investment has been worse than almost all the rest: U.S. homebuilders. A combination of stubbornly high mortgage rates, volatile tariff policy, and efforts to deport the labor force has made it a hard time to build. Over the past six months, ETFs of homebuilder stocks are down 25 to 30 percent, compared with 10 percent for the S&P 500.

Even before you take interest rates into account (both builder and buyer are affected), the administration’s attack on labor and materials has made building things much more expensive. The New York Times recently estimated the administration’s policies might increase the cost of labor by 16 percent and materials by 31 percent on a high-end home, increasing the total cost by 20 percent. One man’s cost of labor is another man’s higher salary, of course, but the effect has been a general slowdown across the industry and less work for everyone.

Lobbyists for developers are having trouble keeping up with what’s going on, let alone responding to it. In March, the National Association of Home Builders announced they had “worked with the White House” to ensure that Canadian softwood lumber—which makes up the frame of your typical American house or small building—had been exempted from that week’s tariff blitz. A month later, just as the president was walking back “Liberation Day” last week, the Commerce Department decided it would raise the import tariff on Canadian lumber to 35 percent.

Of course, it would be nice to live in a world where men could work at skincare companies and women on construction sites. But if the American email class must be put to work with our hands, I’d rather be framing houses than assembling air conditioners.

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 6:05 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Running Economic Development In Reverse

The combination of tariffs and cuts to scientific research seems designed to move America down the value chain.

Jonathan Chait | April 14, 2025, 3:02 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-econ
omic-vision/682433/

The markets are going haywire, and consumer confidence is nosediving. You might be wondering why the Trump administration decided to burn down the healthy economy it inherited. Is it pure incompetence? Or is there a plan?

The answer to both questions appears to be yes. The incompetence is undeniable. But the administration does have a plan, or at least a vision, for what will spring up from the ashes. The trouble is that the long-term economic program is even worse than the short-term one.

The clearest picture of the new America that is meant to arise from the crash was provided by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an interview last week with Tucker Carlson. Bessent acknowledged some short-term discomfort—the stock market plunged as he spoke—but in the service of something grand. “On one side, the president is reordering trade,” he said. “On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.” Elon Musk shared the same idea on X: “We need to shift people from low to negative productivity jobs in government to high productivity jobs in manufacturing (as well as mining and refining of materials).” Think of the plan as a classic economic-development strategy, but run backwards.

The typical pattern for economic development involves moving a nation’s economy up the value chain. A poor country develops export markets by specializing in low-wage manufacturing. Eventually, these industries develop higher levels of sophistication, adding more intellectual value—first they build toasters and cameras, then cars, then robots. These industries generate tax revenue that can support better schools and other forms of public investment, feeding back into the developmental cycle. That’s how the “Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) enjoyed rapid economic growth over the past two generations, and it’s the pattern other developing countries are hoping to follow.

Donald Trump is basically running this play in reverse.

The tariffs, while putatively intended to promote industrialization, have the more direct impact of directing American production back into industrial inputs. Trump has raised tariffs on metals, which makes building things more expensive but creates an incentive to reshore the production of steel and aluminum. This moves the industrial economy down the value chain, rather than up, which makes sense only if the objective is to have an economy with more guys wearing hard hats.

Meanwhile, Trump is laying waste to basic scientific research. The administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars in funds to the National Institutes of Health, slashed National Science Foundation grants, and canceled or threatened to cancel billions of dollars in research funding to elite universities (putatively in response to their handling of anti-Semitism).

This has had a catastrophic effect on a wide array of high-tech fields. A group of medical-innovation investors took the immense risk of putting their names on a letter to the administration warning that the research cuts “are an assault on the foundation of biomedical and technological progress.”

The cuts to the bureaucracy imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency have likewise targeted the government’s most specialized experts, whose work maintains the economy’s place at the technological frontier. Trump and Musk are slashing staff at the FDA, a regulatory body that allows new drugs to enter the market, and are reportedly planning to fire half of the Energy Department’s loan officers, who are needed to approve nuclear facilities.

The combination of tariffs and the mass cancellation of research funding threatens to lay waste to the tech and biomedical sectors with devastating precision, almost as if an enemy combatant had targeted key plants with a fleet of bombers. These industries are the envy of the world. What sense is there in driving them offshore?

The logic, as it were, is a rose-tinted view of the American past to which the administration wishes to return. In his interview with Carlson, Bessent brought up campaign stops with Trump where he communed with the working class: “There are the union workers, the steelworkers. They’ve got on their hats. They’ve got on their vests. They’re there with their children. It was very moving.”

Some of Trump’s conservative-media supporters, who inhabit the same information space as the president and his advisers, have expressed versions of this same nostalgia. The Fox News host David Asman delivered a soliloquy about his father, who, he said, earned $3,500 a year in 1954 and had a three-bedroom home and a stay-at-home wife. Trump, Asman argued, would bring back those times of plenty.

The economy was growing rapidly in the ’50s, but Americans back then did not have higher incomes than we do today. They were, in fact, much poorer. When Trump says he will make America great again, implying a return to the past, we should take him seriously. In economic terms, that is literally what he has set out to do.

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


Happy Tax Evasion Day!
DOGE is stealing your tax revenue and giving it to rich cheaters

By Paul Krugman | Apr 15, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day

One agency that has been singled out for especially severe cuts is the Internal Revenue Service, which has already laid off thousands of employees. And that’s just the beginning: The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to cut the IRS workforce in half. This would cripple the agency’s ability to conduct audits and discover fraud.

And preliminary indications are that widespread belief that a damaged IRS won’t be able to police tax evasion is already undermining federal revenue.

Last month the Washington Post reported that
Quote:
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.
That’s a gigantic number. If it’s right, surging tax evasion may do as much or more to add to the national debt as the huge tax cuts Republicans are trying to ram through Congress.

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 10:41 AM

SECOND

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


(Trump is murdering civilians and gloating about it)

Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs to Reduce Civilian Casualties

The defense secretary’s focus on “lethality” could lead to “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law,” one Pentagon official said.

By Nick Turse | April 15 2025, 7:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-cas
ualties-harm/

The Pentagon had been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press, nongovernmental organizations, government-supported think tanks, and even the U.S. military itself.

But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.

The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.

On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties.

The Army also recently announced it will make law of war training — which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement — optional, in an effort to remove “unnecessary distractions” and increase focus on “decisive action in combat.”

This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on “lethality” and cuts to programs that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks and reports of civilian casualties in war zones like Somalia and Yemen spiked.

“There is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Basically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.”

The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth’s priorities might mean for the world. One of them mused that “lethality” might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”

CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the “CHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.”

Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under different names. But even one of those former officials said that the CHMR enterprise was likely to end up “stillborn,” unable to even complete the phased implementation first laid out in the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan — written at the direction of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — that was released in 2022.

One official emphasized that CHMR’s core principles provide more benefits to the military than an overriding focus on lethality. “Shrinking or perverting it beyond recognition or getting rid of it altogether does a disservice to the men and women of the DoD and the institution itself, not to mention the American public,” that official said.

The Pentagon refuses to say whether Hegseth will rescind the CHMR instruction, which established the Pentagon’s policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to noncombatant casualties. “We have no new announcements to make regarding office closures or changes to policy at this time,” an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson replied, by email, to repeated detailed questions.

“Dismantling these efforts would undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm from its operations — work that actually began under the first Trump administration,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress mandated many of these efforts through bipartisan legislation, and it must ensure that the programs it authorized and funded are not abandoned.”

Hegseth has made it clear that enhancing his department’s capacity to kill people is his number one priority. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We will revive the warrior ethos,” he announced. “We will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.”

As a Fox News personality, Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq — cast troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for pardons of Army Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, and championed Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom was charged or convicted of war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, tagging Hegseth in a tweet announcing the review of one of the cases.

Hegseth takes a dim view of the Geneva Conventions, which form the foundation of the law of armed conflict, or LOAC, and remain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war by protecting civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war, among others. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth asked, “Should we follow the Geneva conventions? … Aren’t we just better off in winning our wars according to our own rules?”

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that during his time in the military, “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a military lawyer, known as a JAG, made war-fighting more difficult. But rules of engagement, which provide instructions for the use of deadly force in military operations, are issued by a senior commander — not a JAG officer.

Bryant — who worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, or JTAC, and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East before serving as chief of civilian harm assessment — said that Hegseth has little grasp of the laws of war.

“In Hegseth, you have a Secretary of Defense who really does not understand LOAC. Every time I’ve heard him talking about his time in Afghanistan and the law of armed conflict, he’s talking about things that were not actually LOAC but policy,” said Bryant. “So, Hegseth blames all his experiences of being overly restricted in combat on military lawyers and LOAC — when the types of operational restrictions he has cited have nothing to do with lawyers, the law of armed conflict, or international law.”

The Signal Chat among senior Trump administration officials (and a journalist) discussing military strikes in Yemen revealed that the attack targeted a civilian residence in an effort to kill a Houthi target. It is one of more than 200 strikes conducted in Yemen by the Trump administration since the beginning of March, carried out in an attempt to force Houthi fighters to halt attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the Houthis say is in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Local Yemeni authorities say more than 50 civilians have been killed in the attacks.

(Hegseth is currently under investigation for his use of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. That inquiry is being conducted by Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins because Trump fired Robert Storch from his Senate-confirmed Pentagon inspector general role as part of his firings of 17 inspectors general across the government in January.)

Fifteen civilians were reportedly killed and at least 20 injured in strikes on March 15 and 16, alone, according to Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. “In just two days of strikes under the new Trump administration, U.S. forces reportedly killed half the number of civilians killed in a full year of strikes under Biden,” the group reported.

These strikes were conducted with CENTCOM’s civilian harm mitigation and response officers still on the job. “The CHMR team at U.S. CENTCOM continues to be focused on their assigned tasks. There has been no change to their status or work focus,” a nameless “defense official” told The Intercept by email. “We do not anticipate the DoD CHMR effort at CENTCOM being shutdown at this point.”

Trump also recently posted a black-and-white video showing more than 70 people gathered in a circle. An explosion occurs during the 25-second video, leaving a massive crater. “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack,” Trump claimed, without offering a location or any other details about the strike. “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!”

A former U.S. drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in the CENTCOM and Africa Command regions during the first Trump administration was skeptical of the vetting process that identified the targets in Trump’s video. “My suspicion is that it is very low. NAI — names, area of interest — and gatherings would be all that is required. This is not proper vetting, if this is what they are doing,” he told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his nondisclosure agreements with the government. “Remember in his first term the whole of AFRICOM was shut down due to negligent strikes. They had multiple ‘missed’ strikes that killed civilians.”

After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled and U.S. military and independent counts of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional war zones.

During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that one April 2018 attack on al-Shabaab militants in Somalia — conducted under Trump’s loosened rules — killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”

The Pentagon’s inquiry into the attack that killed Luul and Mariam found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. The U.S. strike cell members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male, killing Luul and Mariam in a follow-up attack as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the strike — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but did not receive a response.

When asked how the demise of CHMR would affect AFRICOM operations, spokesperson Kelly Cahalan punted. “CHMR is an OSD policy,” she told The Intercept, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “We aren’t going to speculate about potential policy changes.”

Multiple sources, speaking on background, said that CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla had specifically advocated for civilian harm mitigation efforts, which the Washington Post previously reported, purportedly telling others that his CHMR officers were an integral part of the command’s operations. CENTCOM refused to offer comment. “We have nothing to provide you on this,” a “defense official” wrote in an email.

Some experts worry that the pending demise of CHMR, the firings of the judge advocates general, and loosened rules of engagement for drone strikes and commando raids is part of a broader push to shunt aside ethics and accountability across the military.

“The U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”

“We’re seeing a dramatic reversal of progress across the armed forces, which will ultimately undermine the United States’ strategic goals. Military success isn’t measured by the number of people the armed forces kill; it’s measured by winning carefully-planned battles designed to achieve a strategic military goal without causing needless destruction,” Daphne Eviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “By emphasizing lethality and eliminating training on the laws of war, loosening rules of engagement and firing anyone with power to exercise oversight over U.S. armed forces, the U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”

Bryant voiced similar concerns about where the potential demise of CHMR efforts would ultimately lead. “I do worry about the direction that Hegseth and the Trump administration are going after this first step of dissolving the CHMR enterprise. Is this administration now going to try to change the warfighting culture and doctrinal standards of the U.S. military, and have us executing our next conflict more like Israel has carried out in Gaza?” he asked. “If we do get into a large-scale conflict — whether in Europe or China or elsewhere — will we not care one way or another about the civilian populace? Will our current low tolerance for civilian casualties and historically conservative application of ‘proportionality’ under international law be completely reversed?”

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 3:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


We'll see.

You've been wrong about literally everything so far up to this point. Maybe you're right this time.



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

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 4:56 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We'll see.

You've been wrong about literally everything so far up to this point. Maybe you're right this time.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, I will never know for certain the origin of your erratic behavior and goofy misunderstanding but today I did discover a big clue hidden beneath 3 bags of pine bark mulch in the pickup bed of another Trumptard. There were eight 1.75L bottles of Platinum 7X vodka. Yep, you Trumptards have problems with addictive substances addling your brains and skewing your judgment.

P.S. - Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pledged to stop drinking, but he is the guy who changed the rules about killing civilians. I wonder if Pete did stop drinking? Doubtful.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Pete+Hegseth+pledged+to+stop+drinking

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 5:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Keep crying because you're losing everyday, bitch.

You'd better get used to it.

Your party is dead.



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

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

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