REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, June 2, 2025 13:51
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 28305
PAGE 38 of 44

Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:53 AM

SECOND

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


Trump officials want Medicaid to pay drug makers “the lowest price charged by other developed countries” as, the Journal suggested, “a path of less political resistance to achieve some $880 billion in Medicaid savings.”

“President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it,” the Journal said of his drugs plans. “To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-donald-trump-worst-
idea_n_681c4a39e4b0b11c497973a4

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:56 AM

SECOND

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


Trump is taking bribes because Why Not? Who will stop him? Nobody is Who!

President Donald Trump’s meme coin is already a thing that shouldn’t exist, much less as a vehicle for foreign entities to funnel money to the sitting president, yet here we are.

According to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg, over half of the top holders of $TRUMP — a personal cryptocurrency token established days before his inauguration — are likely foreign buyers, who have dumped millions into the project.

And likely not without motive. Last month, the token announced that Trump would be hosting an exclusive May 22 dinner for about 200 of $TRUMP’s largest investors at his Washington, D.C., golf club, leading to a flurry of purchases. According to Bloomberg, “76 percent of the token value held among the top 220 wallets likely belongs to foreign owners because the wallets used exchanges that are not available to U.S. residents.” According to a separate analysis by The Washington Post, roughly $100 million worth of tokens were purchased after the dinner was announced.

$TRUMP’s existence as a piggy bank through which so-far anonymous entities from across the globe can dump untold amounts of cash into the president’s coffers in exchange for exclusive access to his time is a pretty clear cut case of corruption. According to an analysis published by the Associated Press earlier this week, the coin has already generated over $320 million in transaction fees for its creators.

The president’s crypto coin is by no means a safe investment. A Tuesday report from NBC News found that of the approximately two million crypto wallets that purchased $TRUMP, around 764,000 lost money on their investment. Just 58 wallets account for roughly $1.1 billion in value gains, each making more than $10 million on their investment.

“The sitting president appears to be selling personal cryptocurrency while in office, granting access to people who buy it, and thereby enriching his business and his family. It’s gobsmacking,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) told Politico on Wednesday. “I’d like to hear one Republican senator defend it. Any self-respecting Congress would demand an accounting of everyone trading this coin who has any business before the government.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-meme-coin-to
p-bu-1235333516/

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:16 AM

SECOND

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


The Impending Doom of Trump’s Trade War

The uncertainty is doing plenty of economic damage. He may make things much worse.

By James Surowiecki | May 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/05/trump-trade-war-se
lf-defeat/682726/

Little more than a month has passed since Donald Trump announced his plans to upend the global economic order by imposing huge tariffs on almost every country in the world. The stock market sold off sharply following the announcement; within days, the S&P 500 had lost about 12 percent of its value. But if you look at the U.S. economy right now, it doesn’t look obviously different from the way it did just before Trump’s so-called Liberation Day. Job growth in April was respectable. Forecasts for April’s inflation number, which is due next week, suggest price increases have remained muted. Corporate-earnings reports have come in strong. And the stock market itself has regained the ground it lost in the weeks after April 2.

Unfortunately, none of this means the economy will emerge unscathed from Trump’s trade war. The conflict, after all, has barely begun: After markets’ steep sell-off, Trump put a 90-day pause on his higher tariff rates with every country except China, Canada, and Mexico; he also issued a host of exemptions from the minimum 10 percent global tariff he’s kept in place (though some of these tariff exemptions, such as the one on auto parts, were temporary and are now kicking in). Trump’s 145 percent tariff rate on Chinese imports did go into effect on April 9, but the administration then exempted semiconductor chips, smartphones, computers, solar cells, flat-panel TVs, and computer-storage devices. And U.S. retailers had already begun stocking up on inventory in anticipation of the tariffs, which is why we haven’t seen empty shelves or skyrocketing prices—so far.

We’re in a phony-war period of Trump’s trade conflict. Things appear fine on the surface, but look closely and plenty of signs of impending trouble are emerging. It’s still early enough that if Trump rolls back his tariffs on China and reaches deals with other U.S. trading partners, the damage will be limited. Stock-market investors seem convinced that Trump will come to his senses and make this happen, and it’s certainly in America’s best interest that he does so. But if the deals prove elusive and the tariff war escalates amid beggar-thy-neighbor tactics, economic reality will assert itself.

Worrisome data are already coming in. Trucking volumes—basically, a measure of how many goods are being moved around the country—have begun to fall. Starting this week, shipping volumes at West Coast ports appear to be plummeting as shipments from China simply dry up: Container-ship arrivals in L.A. this week will be down 35 percent year over year.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week that Trump’s exorbitant tariffs have created an effective “embargo” on Chinese goods. The steep decline in imports from China will translate into even less demand for trucking within the U.S. by the end of this month, which will almost certainly lead to layoffs in that industry. Depending on where a product is made, we’ll see empty shelves in some stores by the end of June, and that could lead to layoffs in retail as well.

American importers have, to a degree, diversified away from Chinese-made goods in recent years, but they still account for almost 13 percent of imports—and a higher percentage of imports of manufactured goods. So retailers and consumers have no way to entirely dodge the impact of a virtual trade embargo with China. And Trump has acknowledged this with his odd riffs on how American kids might have to make do with three expensive dolls rather than 30 cheap ones, or with five pencils rather than 250—which one Republican pollster has called a “Marie Antoinette” moment.

Annie Lowrey: How to prepare for the Trumpcession

Those who are going to take a hit are not limited to the retailers that sell imports and the consumers who buy them. American exporters are already feeling the effect of other countries’ retaliatory tariffs. That’s especially true of U.S. farmers, who lost tens of billions of dollars in sales thanks to Trump’s trade war with China during his first term (and were made whole only thanks to a hefty bailout). Those farmers are already facing a renewed wave of canceled orders, to the point that the head of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, an export-trade group, told CNBC that farmers are in a “full-blown crisis” as their sales nosedive. This not only is leading to job cutbacks in agriculture but also means that container-ship departures, as well as arrivals, are falling at U.S. ports. That will put the jobs of dock workers, warehouse workers, and truckers in further jeopardy.

The deeper concern is that reduced demand from consumers because of higher prices will combine with layoffs in retail, trucking, logistics, and allied sectors to create a cascading effect: weaker demand leading to lower sales, triggering more layoffs, leading to still lower demand, and so on. Amid such concern, consumer confidence has been severely shaken by the insecurity Trump has injected into the economy. The business-intelligence nonprofit Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence fell in April for the fifth month in a row, and consumer expectations for the short-term future tumbled to a 13-year low as survey subjects expressed pessimism about business conditions, employment prospects, and future income—in other words, pretty much every practical dimension of the economy.

Concrete signs of reduced consumer spending are already appearing: McDonald’s said last week that sales in its nationwide restaurant chain fell unexpectedly in the first quarter of 2025 because customers were “grappling with uncertainty,” while Harley-Davidson reported a double-digit decline in sales because of consumer uncertainty. The motorcycle manufacturer said it was pulling its guidance for future quarters’ revenue and profit because it cannot predict where the economy or consumer sentiment will be just a couple of months hence.

Even so, the more far-reaching effects of the trade war may not be felt until late summer, after the inventories that businesses have stockpiled run out and when companies realize they have to cut back on investment and hiring in order to adjust to the higher input costs and reduced demand they’re facing. For now, companies are mostly holding off on any big changes—because they’re counting on the possibility that Trump will either cut deals with China and other trading partners or indefinitely extend the pause on higher tariff rates.

The fact that Trump should do these things does not mean, however, that he will. Hardly a day goes by when he does not propose some new tariff—on Sunday, it was on movies made abroad—or tell Americans they don’t need to buy so much stuff. No investor or business person should be all that surprised if Trump went back to his Liberation Day rates and continued to try to strong-arm China, which would almost certainly send the U.S. economy into a self-inflicted, utterly unnecessary recession. The markets are betting that the phony war will never become a real one. We can only hope they’re right.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:48 AM

SECOND

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


Will Trump Pretend to Fix What He Broke?
Why you shouldn’t get excited about his “deals”

By Paul Krugman | May 08, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-trump-pretend-to-fix-what-he

The Trump administration is planning to announce its first trade deal today, with Britain. Except it won’t be a deal; more of a “deal.” Reportedly it will mainly be a “framework” for an actual deal that may or may not happen sometime in the future. This is the tariff equivalent of “concepts of a plan” for health care.

In other words, this will be smoke and mirrors, an attempt to persuade the gullible that Trump’s tariffs are actually working. Markets — driven by small investors who seem desperate to believe that the people in charge have some idea what they’re doing — may briefly bounce on the announcement.

Trump, however, has already declared that the tariff that really matters right now, the prohibitive 145 percent rate on imports from China, won’t be coming down. That tariff has already caused a 30-40 percent drop in the volume of US-China trade, which, given the time it takes to ship stuff, guarantees a sharp increase in consumer prices and possibly empty shelves a few weeks from now.

But back to that UK “deal.” Nobody knows what will eventually come out of it, but we can be sure of one thing: It won’t lead to any significant opening of the British market to U.S. goods. Why? Because that market was already wide open before Trump stomped in.

The most important thing to understand about Trump’s trade war is that it’s an attempt to solve a problem that only exists in his imagination. He keeps insisting that other countries are engaged in unfair trade, but the reality is that most of our important trading partners impose very low tariffs on U.S. products:

https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/uk-us-trade-and-tariffs-real-stats

You could argue that China is less open to trade than the tariff number suggests, because the government plays such a large role in the Chinese economy. But for Britain, Canada and the European Union Trump’s tariffs are a huge, destructive attempt to fix something that wasn’t broken. These nations can’t stop doing bad stuff on trade because they weren’t doing bad stuff before Trump came along.

What about America’s trade deficit? As economists have repeated ad nauseam, this deficit doesn’t reflect unfair foreign trade policies. It is, instead, the flip side of large flows of capital into the United States, which historically reflected the fact that the U.S. was perceived as an attractive place to invest. Even if Trump manages to score some actual deals, as opposed to concepts of deals, they won’t change that logic. If his strategy does manage to reduce the trade deficit, it will do so only by destroying America’s attractiveness to foreign investors, which may be an achievable goal.

But let me go back to the point that Trump’s tariffs are a response to a problem that didn’t exist. That’s actually an observation that goes beyond trade policy. The Trump team likes to claim that it inherited an economy in terrible shape. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, keeps claiming that the economy needs a “detox.”

In fact, however, when Trump took over the U.S. economy was in very good shape. Unemployment was around 4 percent, while inflation was at most a fraction of a percentage point above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. Our productivity growth was the envy of the world. We had a trade deficit, but as I said, this mainly reflected America’s attractiveness as a place to invest.

It's true that Goldilocks now seems to be leaving the building, but that’s entirely — entirely — due to Trump himself. In discussing the Fed’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged, Jerome Powell repeatedly talked about “uncertainty,” but the only reason things seem much more uncertain now than they did a few months ago is the chaos Trump has created.

And stuff like this doesn’t help:
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
"Too Late" Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn't have a clue. Other than that, I like him very much! Oil and Energy way down, almost all costs (groceries and "eggs") down, virtually NO INFLATION, Tariff Money Pouring Into the U.S. — THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF "TOO LATE!" ENJOY!
454 ReTruths 1.85k Likes
May 08, 2025, 6:31 AM
Actually, I’m baffled by the quotation marks around “eggs.”

Anyway, aside from the attempt to bully the Fed, you should be worried by Trump’s evident disconnect from reality. Prices are, in fact, going up, with a notable upturn in the inflation expected by businesses:


So what will Trump do if, as seems likely, Monday’s report on consumer prices shows the first signs of accelerating inflation? Even more important, what will he do when the cutoff of imports from China really hits consumers? There’s no chance that he will admit that he was wrong. There’s a very good chance that he and his minions will soon begin trying to corrupt the economic data.

So should we celebrate the trade deal that will be announced today? No. It won’t solve any of the problems Trump has created. It will, if anything, offer Trump the temporary illusion of success, encouraging him to create even more problems.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 11:07 AM

SECOND

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


The price of Trump’s war on universities

Trashing American science is not only the goal of the Trump White House, it has the support of the Republican Party.

Self-Destruction

By Josh Marshall | May 7, 2025 10:29 a.m.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/self-destruction-2

A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.

At the same time, what Trump and his cronies are doing to the education system with their anti-science agenda will pretty much guarantee that home grown talent is likely to be non-competitive globally. As the split with Musk over visas indicates, the tech sector knows how much it has benefited from draining the brains from overseas. Trump’s actions will reverse the flow — that loud sucking sound will be top talent leaving the US. US higher ed is a significant export industry in which the US runs a big surplus (a lot more international students come to study here than the other way around). Losing the US edge in higher ed, means not just losing the research expertise and findings, but also the students.

Trump and co. don’t care as long as it means weakening the university system. As is becoming clear, their ideological project outstrips economic considerations. They are happy to weaken the US and relegate it to second tier status globally if they can remake the cultural and ideological landscape. I guess they don’t care about turning the US into a backwater as long as they get to be the tin-horn dictators.

What continues to confound me is how many people who do not benefit from this support it.

It was striking to me to hear Trump talking about kids getting fewer dolls at Christmas. If a democrat had done something similar, the right would have gone nuts. It’s like some weird Kennedy parody: “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’s billionaires…” It’s fascinating how many Trump supporters are willing to make the sacrifices they would never countenance from a Democratic administration.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:04 PM

SECOND

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


The Actual Math Behind DOGE’s Cuts

If you thought Elon Musk was really trying to cut costs, you weren’t in on the joke.

By Jessica Riedl | May 8, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/05/musk-doge-spendin
g-cuts/682736/

In November, when Donald Trump first announced his plan to place Elon Musk in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency, the idea was widely written off as a joke. Then Trump took office, and DOGE began its very real stampede through the government. As an effort to meaningfully reduce federal spending, however, DOGE remains wholly unserious.

Musk initially promised that he would eliminate $2 trillion of the $7 trillion federal budget, before scaling back his ambitions to $1 trillion, and then $150 billion. Even that revised target is highly improbable.

Precisely measuring the budgetary effects of the Musk experiment remains difficult, but we can begin by looking at the claims made by DOGE itself. In late February, its website claimed to have achieved $55 billion in annual-spending reductions. However, its “wall of receipts” detailed only $16.5 billion of this total. Half of that figure came from a typo claiming $8 billion in savings from terminating an $8 million contract. As The New York Times has reported, that was far from the only accounting error. Once such mistakes as false contract cancellations, triple counts of the same reform, and the inclusion of contracts that expired decades ago were fixed, verified budget savings stood at just $2 billion.

The DOGE website now claims $165 billion in savings. However, it still details only a fraction of the supposed cuts, and earlier accounting errors have given way to new ones. A common sleight of hand is canceling a “blanket purchase agreement”—in which the recipient had been given the equivalent of a credit limit to incur necessary costs on a project—and then claiming savings of the full credit limit rather than the (in many cases substantially lower) amount that was actually spent. Even assuming that the website’s stated savings have become twice as accurate as they were in February, annual savings would reach perhaps $15 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal spending.

Fortunately, more reliable sources than DOGE’s self-reported figures exist. The best is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of spending by agency and program. Any true DOGE spending reductions should show up in these budget totals, as should the results of other White House initiatives, including cuts to public-health spending and the ongoing efforts to eliminate USAID and the Department of Education.

These spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth—approximately $500 billion at an annualized rate—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.

We can see this by looking at Treasury’s breakdowns of monthly spending by agency. Short-term program spending can fluctuate greatly, and sustained trends might not be fully apparent for several months, but the early data are nonetheless revealing. Perhaps the highest-profile cuts under the Trump administration so far have been to public-health spending and foreign aid. And yet, even here, the numbers are rounding errors in the context of the federal budget. Public-health spending, previously about $8.2 billion monthly, fell to $7.1 billion in March, led by cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration, the latter of which funds state and local health grants to serve underprivileged families.

Monthly spending on targeted foreign-assistance programs has fallen from $2.4 billion to $1.4 billion. This includes spending on “Global Health and Child Survival” programs—which includes highly effective funding to combat HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and other illnesses in less developed countries—falling in half to $400 million a month. Payments to “International Organizations and Conferences,” such as the United Nations, have fallen to zero. And monthly USAID spending has fluctuated wildly but overall declined by one-third in the first quarter of 2025.

These cuts have already been highly disruptive to beneficiaries, contractors, and employees, and they threaten immense long-term harm. And yet, their total monthly savings have totaled just $2.1 billion. At the Department of Education, another shutdown target, spending has remained steady aside from the early termination of post-pandemic funding that was already scheduled to phase out over the next year.

Cost reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to show up in the data. This is not surprising, because even laying off one quarter of the 2.3 million federal civilian employees would shave off just 1 percent of federal spending. To be fair to DOGE, more savings will materialize in October, when the salaries of the 75,000 federal employees who took a buyout come off the books. That should save Washington $10 billion a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending—except even that is an overestimate, because Washington will surely end up hiring contractors to perform at least some of the work previously handled by those civil servants, and many contractors cost more than employees.

Moving forward, identifying politically acceptable savings will become harder. Trump and Musk have already hit their easiest targets that do not directly burden most MAGA voters, such as government employees, foreigners, academics, and recipients of contracts with some kind of DEI component. More recent moves to slash Social Security customer-service and veterans’-health personnel have faced a backlash from affected Republican voters. Congress has shown little interest in passing legislation to ratify the executive branch’s cuts, meaning many of them will likely be reversed in court. This year’s appropriations bills—which require seven Senate Democratic votes to break a filibuster—will probably continue to finance and mandate the existence of the Department of Education, USAID, and traditional public-health spending.

That, by the way, is the good news for DOGE. The bad news is that the project seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. Slashing IRS enforcement will embolden tax evasion and reduce revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade. Laying off Department of Education employees who ensure collection of student-loan repayments will increase the deficit. Illegally terminated federal employees are already being reinstated with full back pay, leaving the government with little to show for its trouble besides mounting legal fees.

Even if DOGE somehow manages to end up in the black, any modest savings it achieves will be completely overwhelmed by the GOP’s push to expand the 2017 tax cut at a cost of roughly $500 billion annually. Claims that Washington can no longer afford to spend 0.1 percent of its budget providing lifesaving HIV treatments to 20 million impoverished Africans cannot be taken seriously when the administration and Congress are preparing to cut taxes and expand other spending by trillions of dollars.

None of this is to say that DOGE has failed. Musk might not have followed through on his unfocused and evolving promises to eliminate payment errors, balance the entire budget, and implement regulatory reform. But he has successfully given the White House cover to purge and intimidate the civil service, helped Congress justify exorbitant tax cuts, rewarded MAGA voters with revenge against their perceived enemies, and granted himself the ability to access sensitive government data and possibly ensure his companies’ continued government contracts. Sure, annual budget deficits remain on track to double over the next decade. But if you thought DOGE was really about cutting costs, you were never in on the joke.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump officials want Medicaid to pay drug makers “the lowest price charged by other developed countries” as, the Journal suggested, “a path of less political resistance to achieve some $880 billion in Medicaid savings.”

“President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it,” the Journal said of his drugs plans. “To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-donald-trump-worst-
idea_n_681c4a39e4b0b11c497973a4

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


The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.





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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:46 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:

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

Do you realize that every Republican in Congress, including a few of the dumbest Democrats, opposed all changes? If just a few Republicans would have voted for change, it could have happened despite the idiotic Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the stupid bitch from Arizona, whatever her name was, who was forced to leave politics when Democrats in Arizona realized what a goddamn bribe-taking cunt she was. She has cited U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, as a role model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrsten_Sinema#Political_positions

Both Manchin and Sinema had been kicked out of the Senate because they were neither Democrat nor Republican. They were taking bribes from industry to vote against Democratic sponsored legislation, but they were not charged or convicted of bribery.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:48 PM

SECOND

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


Trump radically remade the US food system in just 100 days

The people who grow and sell America's food no longer trust the USDA. We made a timeline to show you what happened.

https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-usda-food-system-agricult
ure-first-100-days/

Grist interviewed farmers, food businesses, and agricultural nonprofits across seven states about what the first 100 days of the administration has looked like for them. Nearly all of them told Grist that the agriculture department’s various funding cuts and decisions, as well as the moves to shrink its workforce capacity, have changed how much trust they have in the agency — and, by extension, the federal government.

Food policy analysts and experts throughout the nation also told Grist that this swift transformation of the USDA is unprecedented.

“Multiple parts of our food systems are now under attack,” said Teon Hayes, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. At the same time, food prices and overall costs of living are continuing to rise.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:20 PM

SECOND

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


New American Pope Trolls Trump in Very First Speech

By Kenneal Patterson | May 8 2025 3:45PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/read-pope-leos-full-speech-here-new-amer
ican-pope-trolls-trump-in-very-first-speech/

Newly-elected Pope Leo XIV appeared to take aim at President Donald Trump Thursday during his first speech as pontiff.

American-born Cardinal Robert Prevost echoed the words of the late Pope Francis, a regular critic of Trump’s, when he advocated for migrant rights.

“We must seek together how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, [and is] always open to receive—like this square, with open arms—everyone, all those who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love," he said.

Francis, often called the “People’s Pope,” often countered Trump’s anti-undocumented immigrant campaign slogan “Build the Wall” by urging global leaders to instead “build bridges.”

“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times,” Cardinal Re said when he delivered the late pontiff’s homily.

The new Holy Father payed tribute to Francis in a speech honoring the world’s migrants. Francis, who was a migrant himself having been born in Argentina, was the world’s first Latin American pope.

“Help us too, then, each other, to build bridges... uniting all of us to be one people, always in peace,” Leo XIV added. “Thank you to Pope Francis.”

He even took a moment to speak Spanish and encourage the church to always seek peace, charity, and “to be close, especially to those who suffer.”

“I too would like this greeting of peace to enter your hearts, to reach your families, to all people, wherever they may be, to all nations, to the whole earth‚” the pontiff said to the thousands that gathered beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, adding that God “loves us all, unconditionally.”

“Peace be with you all,” Pope Leo XIV said from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, a common message within the Catholic Church but also one that could apply to Trump’s divided America.

Cardinal Robert Prevost has directly criticized the Trump administration in the past, including calling out Vice President JD Vance.

Francis was one of the most transgressive popes in the church’s history and was revered by progressives for his stances on social causes. He spent his final moments on Earth lamenting the world’s xenophobia. In his frail state, he directed Archbishop Diego Ravelli to read what would be some of his final words.

“What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Ravelli read. “How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!”

Francis implored the world to “revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas. For all of us are children of God.”

Trump congratulated Leo XIV in a post on Truth Social, despite recently suggesting that he should be pope instead.

“Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope,” he wrote. “It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!”

The rest of MAGA, however, has already begun to melt down over the Vatican’s choice, with rightwing influencer Laura Loomer posting on X that Leo XIV “is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.”

Leo XIV is a native Chicagoan and the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

***

Read Leo XIV’s full speech below:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/read-pope-leos-full-speech-here-new-amer
ican-pope-trolls-trump-in-very-first-speech/

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

Do you realize that every Republican in Congress, including a few of the dumbest Democrats, opposed all changes? If just a few Republicans would have voted for change, it could have happened despite the idiotic Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the stupid bitch from Arizona, whatever her name was, who was forced to leave politics when Democrats in Arizona realized what a goddamn bribe-taking cunt she was. She has cited U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, as a role model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrsten_Sinema#Political_positions

Both Manchin and Sinema had been kicked out of the Senate because they were neither Democrat nor Republican. They were taking bribes from industry to vote against Democratic sponsored legislation, but they were not charged or convicted of bribery.


No. See... You don't get to make this argument, because it's not a valid argument.

You're coming into it presenting this as if there was one singular bill that everyone was voting on, relating specifically to this one issue. And then you're pointing fingers at individual people who voted against a much, much, much larger piece of legislation that just so happened to include your current specific talking point.

Do you see the flaw in your logic here? Or should I go further into depth?

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:03 PM

SECOND

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


A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming

From militarized crackdowns to legal impunity, Trump’s policing agenda is designed to crush dissent and critics.

The Intercept Briefing | May 8, 2025, 4:30 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/05/08/trump-police-crime-radley-balko/

Donald Trump’s all-caps executive order on policing — “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS” – is less about policy and more about intent. And that intent is clear: To give Trump direct control over local law enforcement and further shield police from accountability.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/strengthening-
and-unleashing-americas-law-enforcement-to-pursue-criminals-and-protect-innocent-citizens/

As journalist and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop” Radley Balko puts it, “It’s a statement of intent and whether or not Trump is able to do a lot of the more pernicious and unconstitutional things he wants to do.”

The executive order calls for “military and national security assets” to assist in local policing, directs federal resources and protections for state and local law enforcement, and enhances police protections, among other proclamations. But it reflects a deeper ambition.

“He wants more federal militarized law enforcement under his thumb instead of under the thumb of governors or mayors,” says Balko. “He wants to use them to help with immigration deportations. He wants help with cracking down on protest.” And the concern and fear, says Balko, is that Trump will also “use law enforcement to go after his critics and people he perceives to be his enemies.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Balko joins senior reporter Akela Lacy and host Jessica Washington to break down the Trump administration’s push to federalize local law enforcement and “unleash” police who already face minimal meaningful restraint.

“We’re really getting to the point where law enforcement officers have almost no accountability at all,” says Balko, who writes the newsletter The Watch. He adds, “All of this is based on a premise that isn’t true, which is that we’re in some sort of massive crime wave that’s been sweeping the country.”

The fearmongering, Lacy notes, is that cities run by Democrats — San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Baltimore — are dangerous.

But as Balko points out, “When [Trump] took office for the first time he had actually inherited the lowest crime rate of any president since like Eisenhower. And [he] was the first president in 40 years to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered it.” While crime spiked during the pandemic under Trump, Balko continues, “Under Biden it started going down over the last two years of [his] administration and it continues to go down.”

“The narrative,” Lacy adds, “is extremely detached from reality.”

But that narrative serves to justify a sweeping law-and-order agenda.

“The vision is for police to respond to everything,” says Lacy. It’s a vision for a militarized police force with no accountability under the discretion of the president that “they can deploy to enforce any and every part of their agenda beyond criminal issues, and then further criminalize participation in the public’s sphere and exercise of constitutional rights.”

Chilling Dissent

Over the last few months, Balko adds, the federal government has increasingly used masked, unidentified agents to snatch people off the streets — not for violent crimes, but for political speech, protests, and civil offenses “in a deliberate effort to evade judicial review.”

“They’re snatching people off the street and taking them to an overseas prison that’s more like a gulag and imposing on them what’s effectively a life sentence with no due process,” Balko continues. “No habeas corpus, no judicial review whatsoever. These are very classic characteristics of a police state.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-trumped-up-police-state-is-com
ing/id1195206601?i=1000706880860
https://open.spotify.com/show/2js8lwDRiK1TB4rUgiYb24

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 6:06 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:

No. See... You don't get to make this argument, because it's not a valid argument.

You're coming into it presenting this as if there was one singular bill that everyone was voting on, relating specifically to this one issue. And then you're pointing fingers at individual people who voted against a much, much, much larger piece of legislation that just so happened to include your current specific talking point.

Do you see the flaw in your logic here? Or should I go further into depth?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you're like a talentless lawyer or self-taught computer programmer whose code is full of errors. A competent lawyer or programmer would dump in the trash your wordy legal briefs and programs because debugging your crap, and listening to your whininess, is more trouble than rewriting the whole thing, ignoring you and your half-baked ideas. Everything is words with you, but meaning escapes you, so don't bother explaining.

Do you remember that asshole Joe Lieberman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Joe_Lieberman

Lieberman screwed the Democrats during his entire career, taking the Republican's side. If the FBI had monitored his bank transactions with lobbyists, he would have been imprisoned. The voters finally dumped him for a real Democrat, but he and the Republicans had screwed over the USA.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:50 PM

SECOND

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


The IRS has lost almost one-third of its tax auditors after 2 months of DOGE cuts, report says

May 7, 2025

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-doge-cuts-layoffs-31-percent-auditors
-tax-revenue-impact/

Losing a large share of auditors could impact the federal government's ability to collect tax revenue, given that these agents typically handle cases involving wealthy taxpayers or corporations, experts say.

"You lose the very staff trained to keep high-end taxpayers and corporate tax payers in compliance," noted Emily DiVito, senior adviser on economic policy at the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative and a former policy adviser at the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS.

She added, "You can see some behavioral effects when taxpayers, especially those that really don't want to pay their bills, come to accept there is very little risk to not paying at all, or even filing."

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, May 8, 2025 8:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

The only problem with that statement is no matter how many times Democrats promised to do it they never did.

Just like a Democrat to fight lowering drug prices when they're not in control

Take the win here, stupid.

Or at the very least, shut the fuck up about it because this makes you look terrible.

Do you realize that every Republican in Congress, including a few of the dumbest Democrats, opposed all changes? If just a few Republicans would have voted for change, it could have happened despite the idiotic Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the stupid bitch from Arizona, whatever her name was, who was forced to leave politics when Democrats in Arizona realized what a goddamn bribe-taking cunt she was. She has cited U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, as a role model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrsten_Sinema#Political_positions

Both Manchin and Sinema had been kicked out of the Senate because they were neither Democrat nor Republican. They were taking bribes from industry to vote against Democratic sponsored legislation, but they were not charged or convicted of bribery.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No. See... You don't get to make this argument, because it's not a valid argument.

You're coming into it presenting this as if there was one singular bill that everyone was voting on, relating specifically to this one issue. And then you're pointing fingers at individual people who voted against a much, much, much larger piece of legislation that just so happened to include your current specific talking point.

Do you see the flaw in your logic here? Or should I go further into depth?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Quote:
6ix, you're like a talentless lawyer or self-taught computer programmer whose code is full of errors. A competent lawyer or programmer would dump in the trash your wordy legal briefs and programs because debugging your crap, and listening to your whininess, is more trouble than rewriting the whole thing, ignoring you and your half-baked ideas. Everything is words with you, but meaning escapes you, so don't bother explaining.


And yet, I continue to make progress and you're the one who's stuck constantly in the past. Making predictions that never come true. And you're always wrong about everything in the end.

Sucks to be you, huh?

I write things out and it's a great way to work things out in my head. A lot of times I end up coming up with other solutions I wouldn't have ever thought of had I not been writing out my thoughts. Not just with the programming and the project, but pretty much everything.

I'm perfectly happy with my life and the way things are going.

You're miserable every single day.

I wouldn't trade places with you for anything.

Good luck buddy.



In the meantime, nobody is forcing you to read anything I write. You do that on your own because you're a real fucking creepy guy. And your bullshit argument above was bullshit, and you know that it's bullshit. And that's why you didn't say a fucking thing about that in your reply and went right back to personal insults because you are an astoundingly stupid human being.



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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 6:16 AM

SECOND

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


Can President Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?

The president thinks he can return America to manufacturing glory — but the cycles of economic history are hard to break.

By Binyamin Appelbaum | May 7, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/magazine/trump-economy-finance-hist
ory.html

Historians make their names by persuading people to see patterns in the chaos. In the late 1970s, the French historian Fernand Braudel thought that one of those patterns was about to repeat. Braudel was a student of the slow-moving currents that shape events. He wanted people to pay less attention to great men like Napoleon and more to seemingly humble things like the potato, a New World import that made it easier for European farmers to grow more food than they needed; this surplus, in turn, gave a wider array of Europeans time to engage in new hobbies like complaining about their rulers. One might say that he regarded the potato as the cause of Napoleon.

In the third volume of his epic “Civilization and Capitalism,” published in 1979, Braudel explored the forces that made one city at a time the economic center of the Western world, from Venice to Amsterdam to London, and then inexorably lifted up another in its place. He wrote that cities rose as centers of commerce, and then, as they prospered, they began to invest their surpluses in building new centers, engineering their own declines. Commerce moved on, leaving a financial hub behind. Download the free books from https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Fernand+Braudel+Civilization

Braudel’s account ended with the decline of Amsterdam, the entrepôt of Europe through the 17th and into the 18th century, a city of astonishing wealth and diversity. Wide-eyed visitors wrote of its wonders with the same astonishment as later generations would write of New York. The young czar of Russia went home so impressed that he built St. Petersburg in its image. But as Amsterdam grew fat and happy, its merchants became bankers and began to seek better returns in fast-growing London. Amsterdam, Braudel wrote, became “a society of rentier investors on the lookout for anything that would guarantee a quiet and privileged life,” a society that had moved on “from the healthy tasks of economic life to the more sophisticated games of the money market.”

Braudel noted that London, too, eventually ceded its role, underwriting the rise of New York in the early 20th century. And in the late 1970s, he judged that New York was entering the “autumn” of its era as the center of the global economy. Commerce and industry were fleeing the city, leaving behind a thriving financial center — a sure sign in Braudel’s view that New York, and the nation it anchored, were on the edge of decline.

Donald Trump became Donald Trump in that city, building towers and bankrupting casinos as Wall Street boomed and the working class faded away, and he emerged with a similarly bleak view of America’s prospects. His career as a political figure has been built on his conviction that America is losing its wealth and its power. If Ronald Reagan filled voters with hope, Trump offers to keep them company in their misery. He has an intuition for the things that people fear and is comfortable saying what other politicians won’t. Where other presidents intone that it’s still Morning in America, Trump has touched a nerve by insisting that it’s not long before midnight.

To the president, the solution is straightforward, if drastic: building a wall of tariffs around the United States in order to neatly accomplish two of his primary goals at once. It would force companies to make products for the American market in the United States — thereby rebuilding the nation’s manufacturing base — and it would enable big cuts in income taxation. He claims that we wouldn’t even need income taxes if we just forced the rest of the world to pay our bills. What he’s really saying is that our problems are always someone else’s fault. The heart of Trump’s economic agenda, and his political agenda, is that other people are hurting the United States and that we can solve our problems by hurting other people.

Expanding manufacturing is a goal increasingly shared by elected officials across the political spectrum, but Trump is trying to overhaul the rules of global trade with all the finesse of a do-it-yourselfer living in a house while renovating it, and the disruptions are shaking the global economy. Shipping lines are canceling trans-Pacific voyages. Investors are moving money out of U.S. government bonds, no longer treating America as the ultimate safe haven. Trump’s actions appear to be hastening the decline of American manufacturing and even jeopardizing America’s afterlife as a financial center.

It’s easy to blame Trump. But Braudel, who died in 1985, probably would have regarded the president as nothing more than a cork bobbing on the currents of history. If he was right, no matter the president or policies, America’s era of economic domination is ending and its political hegemony is unsustainable. If he was right, it’s time to accept that our second-rate status is inevitable and irreversible. It’s time to get ready for life as London.

In the summer of 1944, the United States gathered its allies at a resort called Bretton Woods in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to claim what the State Department described as “the main prize of the victory” in World War II: the power to dictate new rules for the global economy.

Dominant economic powers have always demanded the freedom to trade. European nations had colonized much of the world to expand trade, including the creation of the little port of New Amsterdam. The United States, which built its economic strength behind formidable protective barriers, now was ready to reap the benefits. America and its allies agreed to establish the dollar as the basis of a new international monetary system, and they created a set of international institutions, dominated by the United States, that would work to dismantle trade barriers.

At the retreat, the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the new system should include a mechanism for limiting trade imbalances, but the United States rejected that idea. The Roosevelt administration could foresee that after the war, with Europe and Japan in ruins, the United States would enjoy a period of unrivaled economic supremacy. The arsenal of democracy would return to making consumer goods, and the United States did not want to constrain its ability to sell those goods in foreign markets.

Many Americans, very much including Donald Trump, look back on the decades that followed as a golden age of profits so abundant that even blue-collar workers were lifted into the bliss of middle-class life: car, house, vacation. But the American empire, though distinct in many ways from its predecessors, was not immune to the forces described by Braudel. Dominance brought about decline.

The dollar’s role as the world’s currency made it more valuable than it would have been if it were just a national currency, because everyone needed dollars. That allowed Americans to purchase imported goods more cheaply; it also made American exports more expensive. American companies began to pour money into foreign markets, building global businesses. And the United States expended vast resources fighting hot and cold wars while the nations that lived under its protection invested in themselves. Toyota’s president said that American military contracts for cargo trucks during the Korean War saved and revived his company, to the eventual chagrin of General Motors and Ford.

Trump was 25 in 1971, when the United States ran its first trade deficit since the late 19th century. He was raised in an era of American economic hegemony, only to enter adulthood as that extraordinary era was reaching its end. By the late 1970s, Braudel’s view that America was entering its “autumn” passed for optimism. It felt more like winter. The year after Braudel’s book appeared, the American author and illustrator David Macaulay published “Unbuilding,” in which he imagined the deconstruction of the Empire State Building by a Saudi prince who intended to ship the parts to the Arabian Peninsula. In place of the building, New York was left with a park commemorating the building.

Barely a generation had passed since Americans came firmly into the idea that their nation had surpassed Europe, that New York had replaced London as the center of the world, and Americans already feared their sun was setting. It was in those years, in that atmosphere, that Trump started talking about his conviction that other nations were taking advantage of America — not just surpassing us but cheating us.

Trump has the chassis of a typical Republican businessman: willfully blind to his dependence on government, resentful of taxes and regulation, convinced that what’s good for his business is good for the country. But where most country-clubbers of Trump’s generation viewed the rest of the world as patsies ripe for exploitation, or more generously as patsies in need of American know-how, Trump has long been distinguished by his belief that Americans are the patsies. In 1987, Trump paid $94,801 for full-page ads in The Times and two other papers. In an open letter addressed “To the American People,” Trump proposed that the United States should bill nations including Japan and Saudi Arabia for America’s military spending, which he said would reduce federal deficits and allow for tax cuts. The letter concluded, “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

Trump’s political message found little purchase during the 1990s and early 2000s. Those were years of plenty and the promise of more. The consensus among American elites in the second half of the 20th century was that the nation’s defense budget was the price of power, and trade was the reward. The collapse of the Soviet Union was taken as a proof text. America’s leaders saw little reason to fear the migration of manufacturing to China. They treated job losses as a tragedy for factory workers and factory towns, but not as a harbinger of national decline. They encouraged the rise of finance and tech companies as new engines of prosperity. American pre-eminence seemed secure.

As Braudel anticipated, finance replaced manufacturing. In the late 1970s, factories produced about 45 percent of U.S. corporate profits while finance produced about 15 percent. Over the last two decades, finance has consistently produced the larger share. I like to imagine that if Braudel had lived long enough to witness the astonishing rise of cryptocurrencies as one of America’s national pastimes, he would have died laughing.

But financialization also helped to postpone the reckoning. We lived like the scions of successful businessmen, spending the family money and borrowing against the family’s good name. Then in the wake of the Great Recession, as hopes curdled, Trump started recycling and updating his longstanding grievances — and finding larger audiences.

I know a lot of educated and prosperous Americans, and I know that they generally find it difficult if not impossible to understand why Trump’s bleak view of the American economy resonates with so many of their countrymen. I’m an educated and prosperous American, and I have trouble understanding it, too. But the anger is real. People see a nation in which the rich got tired of paying Americans to make things and replaced them with cheaper foreign workers. A nation in which the rich built nice houses in nice suburbs and then refused to make room for anyone else. A nation in which it is harder to get an education, harder to earn a living wage, harder to afford housing. Three-quarters of Americans born in 1950, in the early years of the baby boom, ended up earning more than their parents, but for Americans born in the 1980s, only half have ended up doing better. Americans now experience less economic mobility than in much of Western Europe. American society is less egalitarian than Denmark, and they have an actual king.

Free trade is not the primary reason for these trends. It’s not even the biggest reason manufacturing employment has declined; technology has eliminated a lot more jobs than China. But Trump’s fixation on trade resonates with many Americans because it captures something fundamental about the way that American elites have betrayed the social contract. Economists argued that trade could benefit everyone, but even if that was true, it required the government to redistribute the gains — and for the most part, it didn’t.

Trade made the rich richer, and it reduced the earnings of the 70 percent of workers who didn’t have college degrees. “The argument was always that the winners could compensate the losers,” the economist Joseph Stiglitz told me in 2015. “But the winners never do.” Trump didn’t need an economist to tell him that. He felt it in his bones. The crowds at his campaign rallies knew it, too. But it meant something to hear it from a rich man.

Amsterdam prospered as a banking center even as it declined as a center of manufacturing and commerce. By the late 18th century, Europe no longer wanted Dutch fabrics or Dutch fish, and it no longer needed Dutch ships. In 1783, a group of Dutch merchants sent a gift of salted herring to George Washington, requesting his endorsement and, presumably, seeking a new market. Washington responded that the herring was “undoubtedly of a higher flavour than our own,” but that America had plenty of fish. What remained in demand was all the money the Dutch had made from trade. The merchants and princes of Europe flocked to Amsterdam to negotiate loans. The following year, 1784, the fledgling American government joined them, arranging to borrow 2 million florins.

But prosperity increasingly was concentrated in the hands of an elite. Amsterdam, and its satellites, no longer needed as many workers. The population of Holland actually shrank in the 18th century, even as much of Europe experienced a population boom.

Moreover, Amsterdam’s pre-eminence as a financial center did not long survive the end of its hegemony as the center of European commerce. In the city’s heyday as a trading port, it shook off financial upheavals. Commerce was the main event; even the indelible spectacle of the tulip bubble in the 1630s was just a sideshow. But as the city’s economy became more dependent on finance, it become more vulnerable. One historian has calculated that by 1782, half of Amsterdam’s capital had been lent to foreigners. Instead of financing its own development, Amsterdam was betting on other countries, and it started losing too many of those bets. A culminating blow came in August 1788, when the French government of King Louis XVI, on the verge of collapse, defaulted on its debts. As Amsterdam’s economic power declined, so did its political autonomy. During the final two decades of the 18th century, the Dutch state descended into civil strife and endured humiliating defeats at the hands of the British and the French. In 1810, Napoleon annexed Holland to his empire.

Braudel focused on the long run of history precisely because he didn’t want to make too much of short-term pain or setbacks. It was an approach that he said he developed to maintain his equanimity during the five years that he spent in German prisoner-of-war camps during World War II, refusing to make too much of “daily misery” or the latest scraps of news. And in his view, what was most significant about Amsterdam’s life after hegemony was not the turbulence in the immediate aftermath, but the long-term resilience of the Dutch economy. Amsterdam never fell that far, and what Braudel wrote in 1979 remains true: “It is still today one of the high altars of world capitalism.”

The arc of London’s story is much the same. It is not a city anyone would think to pity. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands have plenty of problems, of course, but each remains among the most prosperous nations on Earth. It’s important to note, however, that Amsterdam had the good fortune to cede its supremacy to a city, and a nation, that shared many of its basic values. Indeed, Braudel observes that Amsterdam lost its supremacy in part because some of the richest Dutch merchants preferred to live in London, a Protestant, capitalist city they regarded as more fun. London, in turn, yielded to a city and society that even shared its language.

The center of global industry now sits somewhere in southeast China, and perhaps the most powerful argument for radical efforts to reclaim manufacturing supremacy is that the United States — and other nations that have prospered under its hegemony — ought to fear the consequences of ceding power to an illiberal and increasingly hostile country.

You can read Braudel’s book as an argument that the rise of Shanghai is inevitable and that the question that ought to be preoccupying American policymakers is how best to preserve American interests during the impending Chinese century. But the past is an imperfect guide. Forty-six years after it was published, Braudel’s account still feels fresh in part because the French historian was wise enough to avoid predictions. He judged that New York, and the United States, were in decline, but he did not tell us what would happen next.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 6:21 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And yet, I continue to make progress and you're the one who's stuck constantly in the past. Making predictions that never come true. And you're always wrong about everything in the end.

Sucks to be you, huh?

I write things out and it's a great way to work things out in my head. A lot of times I end up coming up with other solutions I wouldn't have ever thought of had I not been writing out my thoughts. Not just with the programming and the project, but pretty much everything.

I'm perfectly happy with my life and the way things are going.

You're miserable every single day.

I wouldn't trade places with you for anything.

Good luck buddy.



In the meantime, nobody is forcing you to read anything I write. You do that on your own because you're a real fucking creepy guy. And your bullshit argument above was bullshit, and you know that it's bullshit. And that's why you didn't say a fucking thing about that in your reply and went right back to personal insults because you are an astoundingly stupid human being.
The Trumptards around me display very maladaptive behavior. Much of it is inexplicable. They can't reveal their unhealthy motivations, but 6ix explains his!

What goes on inside a Trumptard's head? What are the feelings driving them over a cliff, to crash on the rocks and burn? (Why do they drink? Smoke? Cheat? Lie? Shirk? Fear? Neglect? Why are they indecent?) Since I'm not telepathic, I mostly don't know. If there were a Trumptard novelist who made himself the main character in his story, I'd learn more, but Trumptards don't write novels or confessionals. 6ix, you are the closest to a novelist, a diarist. You provide the mental monologue in writing that average Trumptards, and Trump, cannot. That does not make your behavior "good", but your writing does suggest your motives for bad behavior. A trained Freudian psychiatrist could help you because you are so articulate. You dump your guts in public. Most Trumptards crap in public but we can't see what was going on inside them, the emotional turmoil, before they take a dump on the floor like a dog not housebroken. See Trump in many interviews for a stinking dump in public. What makes him feel free to act that way? Like dogs, other Trumptards are similar to him, adding their own stinking behavior.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 6:40 AM

SECOND

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


The Cost of Chaos: This is Getting Scary
And it’s all on Donald Trump

By Paul Krugman | Apr 09, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-chaos-this-is-getting

Herbert Hoover, move over.

The 31st president has long been the patron saint of bad economic management. But while Hoover responded badly to the coming of the Great Depression, he didn’t cause the slump. By contrast, it seems more and more likely that Donald Trump will single-handedly push the solid economy he inherited into crisis. This is, as Trump might say, disastrous policy like nobody has seen before.

How is he managing that feat? While the vast majority of economists think high tariffs are bad policy, they don’t normally associate them with recession. Many, perhaps most economists who’ve looked hard at the evidence don’t accept the popular story that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 caused the Great Depression.

But this time looks and feels different. Why is a Trump Slump brought on by tariffs looking more probable by the day?

Like many others, I’ve been talking a lot about the huge uncertainty Trump is creating. Ignore the desperate efforts to retcon Trump’s trade policy, to pretend that it comes out of some coherent economic doctrine. We’re clearly looking at tariffs driven by id, not ideology — Trump’s biggest motivation seems to be the desire to see other countries grovel. Because there’s no clear policy objective, nobody knows what Trump will do tomorrow, let alone over the next few years. Did you have 104 percent tariffs on China and 34 percent tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber on your dance card? (Are 2x4s the industry of the future?)

As I wrote a few days ago, Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.

Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment? Everyone is going to sit on their hands, waiting for clarity that may never come.

But wait, there’s more. There are growing signs that we’re at risk of a tariff-induced financial crisis.

There are multiple indicators of that risk. Bear with me while I give a somewhat wonkish explanation of one indicator that really caught my eye.

Back in the good old days, that is, two weeks ago, the main concern about Trump’s tariffs was that they would cause sustained inflation. We knew that they would produce at least a temporary bump in consumer prices, but the big question — crucial for Federal Reserve policy — was whether this bump would lead to a sustained rise in expected inflation, and become entrenched in the economy.

That’s what happened in the 1970s and is the reason getting inflation down in the 1980s required years of high unemployment. It didn’t happen during the Biden years, which is why this time we were able to get inflation way down without a recession.

So everyone has been watching measures of expected inflation for clues. And the news from consumer surveys has been very worrying. Here’s long-term expected inflation from the widely cited Michigan Consumer Surveys:

Source: University of Michigan

Whoa. But consumers don’t set prices. Furthermore, the last few years have shown that what consumers say they believe about the economy isn’t a good predictor of their behavior. So you’d want some confirmation from other measures.

Late last month Austan Goolsbee, president of the Chicago Fed, said that it would be a “major red flag of concern” if market-based measures of expected inflation rose. He mainly meant “breakeven” rates, the spread between interest rates on bonds that are indexed to consumer prices and bonds that aren’t. That spread can normally be seen as an implicit prediction of how much consumer prices will rise.

So here’s the 5-year breakeven rate this year:


Wait, what? Has expected inflation actually fallen as Trump’s tariff plans have proved far more aggressive than anyone expected?

No, that’s not what’s happening. What we’re actually seeing is investors, especially hedge funds, selling assets in a “dash for cash.” When investors sell off bonds, they drive their price down, which means that they push their yield up. Why does this cause the breakeven rate to fall? Because the market for indexed bonds is relatively small and thin, so the rush to sell has a bigger effect in depressing prices and raising interest rates for index bonds than for ordinary bonds.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Look at the breakeven rate over the long term: It plunged during the 2008-9 financial crisis and again when Covid hit:


Investors weren’t really predicting huge deflation in 2008-9, they were just rushing to sell assets and raise cash. And that’s what’s happening now, although not to the same degree (yet).

In other words, I was looking for guidance about inflation and instead found the telltale signs of an incipient financial crisis. Others, looking at other indicators, from the basis trade to junk bonds to struggles to refinance private loans, are seeing the same thing.

Why is this happening? Trump’s erratic policies have increased the risk of recession, but besides that their sheer extremism — from almost-free trade to tariffs higher than Smoot-Hawley in less than three months — has hurt some borrowers much more than others. Look at the chart at the top of this post. There’s a reason Elon Musk is lashing out at Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff guru, calling him “Peter Retarrdo” and declaring that he is a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

Aren’t you glad that grownups are in charge?

And here’s the thing: Lenders will be hurt if some borrowers are forced into default, even if others are doing well, because lenders don’t share in the upside. So even though stock prices are dominating the headlines, the real, scary action is in the bond market. The nightmare scenario, which we saw play out in 2008, is that falling asset prices cause a scramble for cash, which leads to fire sales that drive prices even lower, and the whole system implodes. Suddenly, that scenario doesn’t look impossible.

Maybe we’ll steer away from the edge of the abyss. But Trumponomics has already proved worse than even its harshest critics imagined, and the worst may be yet to come.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 9:12 AM

SECOND

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


New Pope Leo XIV Bashed Trump and JD Vance on Twitter Just Weeks Ago

The very online new pope has made his feelings about MAGA’s top two figures clear.

By David Gardner | May 8, 2025 3:27PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-pope-leo-xiv-bashed-jd-vance-on-twit
ter-just-weeks-ago/

Pope Leo XIV called out Vice President J.D. Vance in a social media post just weeks ago bluntly calling him “wrong”—and bashed Donald Trump in a retweet less than a month ago.

Posting on his X profile as Cardinal Robert Prevost, he criticized Vance for an interview he gave about Christianity on Fox News.

“JD Vance is wrong,” he said.

The new pope, 69, posted the rebuke on X, together with a link to an article from the National Catholic Reporter reporting on the fallout from Vance’s remarks.

Vance had claimed that a teaching known as “ordo amoris” justified MAGA’s crackdowns on immigrants. “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said in late January.

But Pope Francis spoke out strongly against him, giving the Catholic convert a lesson on theology in a public letter—and his successor, Pope Leo XIV tweeted his approval.

MAGA supporters were quick to show their disdain for the new Pope, with right-wing activist Laura Loomer commenting on several of his posts on X.

Loomer posted: “Meet the new American Pope. Of course he’s anti-MAGA and WOKE. Another Open Borders Pope. Gross.”

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 9:49 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Killing of Energy Star Program Will Cost Families a Bundle

Created to encourage efficient appliances, the initiative has saved US households and businesses more than $500 billion.

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in.

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

For years, though, Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow showerheads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED light bulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets “10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “the electric bill is 10 times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate.

Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards — one that the White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began.

More at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/trump-epa-energy-star-pro
gram-eliminate-reaction-cost-families-businesses-500-billion-efficient-appliances/

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 12:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s Killing of Energy Star Program Will Cost Families a Bundle

Created to encourage efficient appliances, the initiative has saved US households and businesses more than $500 billion.

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in.

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”


Well then. I think this gives us a real barometer whether or not these big corporations really "care".

They really seemed to give a shit when fentanyl addict and street-abortionist murder George Floyd committed suicide by cop. And they love showing just how much gay pride they have on their Twitter accounts by making their logos rainbows for pride month (but only in America and a select group of European countries).

Maybe they'll show you just how much they really care about the environment and put the Energy Star stuff in there for free.



Maybe you shouldn't have tried forcing electric stoves and just take the win you've had for decades. But you didn't, and you went full retard like Democrats always do and this is just another of countless reasons why the Democratic Party is dead.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 2:50 PM

SECOND

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


6ix is venting his spleen:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Well then. I think this gives us a real barometer whether or not these big corporations really "care".

They really seemed to give a shit when fentanyl addict and street-abortionist murder George Floyd committed suicide by cop. And they love showing just how much gay pride they have on their Twitter accounts by making their logos rainbows for pride month (but only in America and a select group of European countries).
MAGA Rage Erupts as New Pope’s Views of Trump Prove Unexpectedly Harsh

As MAGA personalities fume about the newly elected pope’s indictments of Trump and JD Vance, a political theorist steeped in the post-liberal right decodes why Trumpism is so inimical to Catholic teaching.

By Greg Sargent | May 9, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/195039/maga-rage-erupts-new-pope-views
-trump-prove-unexpectedly-harsh

Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger. They attacked the new pope as anti-Trump, pro–open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs and drug dealers, as Media Matters documented.

We talked to the excellent political theorist Matt McManus, who was raised in the church and regularly wrestles with the intellectual roots of today’s right wing, including in his 2023 book, The Political Right and Equality. He explains what Vance gets wrong about Catholic teaching, why it’s so inimical to Trumpism, and how today’s pro-Trump influencers and “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals alike are refusing to reckon with what MAGA has truly become.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195048/transcript-maga-fury-boils-new-
pope-anti-trump-views

MAGA and Trumpism thrives—it gets its energy, its spiritual energy, if that’s the right term for it—from meanness to the outsider, hostility to the outsider, demonization of the outsider.

A lot of people on the Christian Right, what they’re concerned with and what they worship is America first, or at least their own understanding of it, America tomorrow, and America forever. And you could say whatever it is that you want about this, but it is not an ethically demanding outlook.

Ethics, and Christian ethics particular, is an ideal. You don’t achieve an ideal by compromising it every chance you get to obtain power — let alone to try to do the cruel things that are on display to everyone day in and day out. So I just can’t think that there’s any way of making this intellectually palatable, even if it is something that is deeply desired by a lot of people on the Christian right, who, again, seem much more concerned with worshiping America than with worshiping anything that actually looks recognizably like the Christian God.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 2:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix is venting his spleen:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Well then. I think this gives us a real barometer whether or not these big corporations really "care".

They really seemed to give a shit when fentanyl addict and street-abortionist murder George Floyd committed suicide by cop. And they love showing just how much gay pride they have on their Twitter accounts by making their logos rainbows for pride month (but only in America and a select group of European countries).

Maybe they'll show you just how much they really care about the environment and put the Energy Star stuff in there for free.



Maybe you shouldn't have tried forcing electric stoves and just take the win you've had for decades. But you didn't, and you went full retard like Democrats always do and this is just another of countless reasons why the Democratic Party is dead.
MAGA Rage Erupts as New Pope’s Views of Trump Prove Unexpectedly Harsh


Not a valid reply, so go fuck yourself for quoting me before posting it.

And like I said yesterday, fuck the dead pope and fuck the new pope.

There's no rage. Nobody gives a shit.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 3:02 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:

Not a valid reply, so go fuck yourself for quoting me before posting it.

And like I said yesterday, fuck the dead pope and fuck the new pope.

Nobody gives a shit.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't you realize that you are acting crazy? Your insane way of dealing with life is why your life been hard, at least so far. Maybe you should try religion? Or meditation. Or drown your demonic urges with alcohol, assuming that alcohol calms you rather than excites.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 3:36 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


Pakistan launches multiple attacks along India's western border, India says

https://japantoday.com/category/world/pakistan-launched-multiple-attac
ks-along-india's-western-border-india-says#comments


Turkey Has Been Totally Aligned With Pakistan




NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, May 9, 2025 4:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Not a valid reply, so go fuck yourself for quoting me before posting it.

And like I said yesterday, fuck the dead pope and fuck the new pope.

Nobody gives a shit.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't you realize that you are acting crazy?


No. I'm not.

We're done with YOUR insanity.

Your party is dead, and your activists are going to prison when they're not being outright deported for not belonging here.

You've lost everything, including your voice. It's time for you to finally go away now.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 7:58 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Not a valid reply, so go fuck yourself for quoting me before posting it.

And like I said yesterday, fuck the dead pope and fuck the new pope.

Nobody gives a shit.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't you realize that you are acting crazy?


No. I'm not.

We're done with YOUR insanity.

Your party is dead, and your activists are going to prison when they're not being outright deported for not belonging here.

You've lost everything, including your voice. It's time for you to finally go away now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Are you absolutely sure that Trump and you aren't crazy? Because it is crazy for Trump to be doing this:

The Real Trump Family Business Is Crypto
The president's side hustle is proving to be very, very lucrative.

By Will Gottsegen | May 9, 2025, 1:47 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/trump-crypto-bi
llionaire/682763/

Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to https://gettrumpmemes.com

A visit to the website paints a slightly fuller picture: Buy as many tokens as you can of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, and you could be invited to a private event later this month at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. There, you will get the unique opportunity to meet with the president and “learn about the future of Crypto.” The gala looks very much like a thinly veiled gambit to pump up the price of $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin that is mostly owned by Trump-backed entities. Funnel the greatest amount of money to the president of the United States, and you could win some face time with the big man himself.

In 2021, Trump called bitcoin a “scam.” Now he seems to understand exactly what crypto can do for him personally: namely, make Trump and his family very, very rich. The $TRUMP gala is one part of a constellation of Trump-affiliated crypto efforts that includes Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs, a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, and a bitcoin-mining firm. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the Trump family has already banked nearly $1 billion from these projects. Long before he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower a decade ago, Trump’s public image was rooted in his business prowess. But compared with his real-estate projects or The Apprentice, crypto is already turning into his most successful venture yet.

Trump perhaps wouldn’t be president at all if it wasn’t for crypto. During the 2024 campaign, the industry was among his campaign’s biggest donors. That money flowed in from both crypto corporations and individual donors, such as the bitcoin billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (The identical twins gave $1 million each in bitcoin to the Trump campaign, but had to be refunded because they exceeded the legal donation limit.) In exchange, Trump promised the imperiled industry a fresh start after four years of a Biden-sanctioned crypto crackdown. Last summer, as the keynote speaker at the annual bitcoin conference, Trump promised that if elected, he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” The crypto industry is now getting its money’s worth. Consider the crypto firm Ripple, which spent four years squaring off against Biden’s regulators in federal courtrooms and donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Yesterday, the new administration dropped the government’s case, as the White House has effectively stopped enforcing crypto rules.

Trump is still tapping crypto magnates for money. On Monday, he attended a super PAC’s “Crypto & AI Innovators” fundraiser, for which donors shelled out $1.5 million to get in the door. But for Trump, crypto has quickly become about more than soliciting campaign donations and rewarding supporters. In September, Trump announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance company to be managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. and a couple of young entrepreneurs. (One previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls, while the other is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally serving as special envoy to the Middle East.) Then, in January, just before Inauguration Day, he launched $TRUMP. Like all memecoins, it has no underlying business fundamentals or links to real-world assets—the point is to just quickly capitalize on a viral trend, conjuring value out of practically nothing. This proved extremely lucrative almost immediately: $TRUMP initially spiked in value before crashing back down, at one point accounting for almost 90 percent of the president’s net worth. (There’s also an official $MELANIA coin, if that’s more your thing.)

With crypto, Trump has found an unnervingly effective way to transmute the clout and power of the nation’s highest office into cold, hard cash. Last week, World Liberty Financial announced that its cryptocurrency, USD1, would facilitate an Abu Dhabi investment firm’s $2 billion stake in the crypto exchange Binance. Eric and Don Jr. are also on the crypto press circuit, with plans to speak at the 2025 bitcoin conference later this month. Some of Trump’s decisions as president, such as creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” may also function to inflate his crypto riches, in the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats; promoting crypto as part of the national interest can only support the idea that these coins are worth buying into.

Crypto is a conduit for the self-interest that has defined Trump’s entire political career—an M.O. that has consistently blurred the boundary between public and private, country and party. For the most part, Trump has been especially good to those who line his pockets, rewarding them with all kinds of preferential treatment.

During his first term, Trump enriched himself the old-fashioned way—by way of merchandising deals and real-estate investments across the globe. But with crypto, all of that has ratcheted up in Trump’s second term. In crypto, money is fast, loose, and digitally native—properties that have made his personal dealings in the industry even more galling, and potentially more vulnerable to outside sway. Someone looking to gain access to Trump might have once had to pay thousands of dollars a night for a room at Mar-a-Lago for a chance encounter with the president on the golf course. Now the door is open for influence from almost anyone in the world with an internet connection.

The White House insists that there is nothing to see here. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement. Keeping that wealth in a trust may do very little to sever the connection between Trump and his riches, though, depending on the exact conditions of the arrangement. Even when Eric and Don Jr. serve as a buffer, the money stays in the family.

Crypto’s anonymous nature poses unique challenges in understanding exactly what is happening—transactions on a blockchain are typically posted using long strings of numbers known as addresses, rather than verified by legal name. By all accounts, to interact with $TRUMP is to funnel money directly into the president’s pockets, but the campaign-finance laws that caused the Winklevosses’ exorbitant donations to be refunded don’t apply here. Nothing is stopping, say, agents of foreign powers, or tech billionaires looking for favorable tariff treatment, from using $TRUMP to gain access to the highest echelons of government. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to get it: Yesterday, three GOP senators joined Democrats to block a major crypto bill that would serve to benefit World Liberty Financial.

Ironically, Trump’s embrace of crypto is pumping money into the industry while simultaneously damaging it. Since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, the image of crypto as a haven for scams and hackers has loomed large. At a moment when the crypto industry is trying to claw its way back to respectability and legitimization, Trump has taken every opportunity to cement it in the minds of the Americans as nothing more than a vehicle for channeling money directly to him. In crypto, “there are many people who have ethics, and have been working for years to build the system because they believe what they are doing is in the public interest,” Angela Walch, a crypto expert and former law professor, told me. “And what this does is it makes all the messaging that has come from extreme crypto critics about, ‘It’s only a tool for grift,’ and makes it look like that.”

By hitching their wagon to Trump, the industry’s leaders have unleashed a force they can’t control. The moment the president cashed in on crypto, the calculus shifted. Like the hot dogs at Costco, “being the president” is the loss leader; crypto pays the bills.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 8:19 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Surrenders to the Houthis

May 8, 2025, 8:03 PM CDT
By Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-operation-hou
this-cost-1-billion-rcna205333

Donald Trump is one of the worst negotiators in the history of international relations. He lacks focus, does not seem to have any real strategic priorities, seems to fold remarkably easily, and can be purchased for relatively little. We have seen many of these qualities in display during his extraordinary campaign against the Houthis in Yemen—which ended this week when he basically threw in the towel after having thrown away billions of dollars and achieved nothing.

On the first day he took office for his second term, Trump redesignated the Houthis as a terrorist group in a grand pronouncement which was released by the White House. Trump laid out three clear policy goals; to cripple the Houthis as a military force so that they would no longer be able to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, to stop attacks on US military forces, and to stop attacks on US “partners”. Here is the heart of the proclamation laying out all three:
Quote:
Under President Trump, it is now the policy of the United States to cooperate with its regional partners to eliminate the Houthis’ capabilities and operations, deprive them of resources, and thereby end their attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians, U.S. partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea.
In mid March Trump would start a massive air campaign, supposedly to achieve these specific policy aims.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-do
nald-j-trump-re-designates-the-houthis-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 10:11 AM

SECOND

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


Senator Thom Tillis
Rare spine sighting.

Trump placed an especially ludicrous test on the Senate by pressing it to confirm “Eagle Ed” Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., to the position indefinitely. Martin’s nomination was a joke. He had no prosecutorial experience, had lost repeated bids for political office, was supportive of the #StopTheSteal movement, and forgot to disclose to the Senate his hundreds of appearances on Russian state-sponsored media programs. Trump, of course, liked him because of all the Jan. 6 stuff. But his involvement in #StopTheSteal, support for Jan. 6 defendants, and investigation of Jan. 6 prosecutors also closed off his path to confirmation in the Senate. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a key vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced this week that he wouldn’t support Martin’s nomination because of his posture toward Jan. 6.

It’s a rare thing to see a Republican senator commit to killing a favored nominee of Trump’s in committee; we believe, in fact, that this is the first time we’ve seen it. And while the MAGA mediaverse quickly moved into formation to threaten Tillis, Trump seemed to take the news relatively well, saying on Thursday that it’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Martin is “a terrific person, and he wasn’t getting the support from people that I thought,” he told reporters. “I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day, but we have somebody else that will be great.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/05/thom-tillis-ed-martin-dona
ld-trump-medicaid-john-fetterman.html

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 11:44 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s push for control of Greenland

Fri 9 May 2025 14.48 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/09/us-greenland-trump

US officials are discussing a plan to pull Greenland into America’s sphere of influence using a type of agreement that the United States has used to keep close ties with several Pacific Island nations, according to two US officials and another person familiar with the discussions.

Under the plan being considered, the Trump administration would propose to Greenland’s leaders that the island enter into a so-called compact of free association, or Cofa, with the United States.

While the precise details of Cofa agreements – which have only ever been extended to the small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau – vary depending on the signatory, the US government typically provides many essential services, from mail delivery to emergency management to military protection. In exchange, the US military operates freely in Cofa countries and trade with the US is largely duty-free.

Donald Trump, who during his first administration floated the idea of acquiring Greenland, has pressed even harder since taking office in January, refusing to rule out taking the island by force. Denmark, which governs the island, has sharply rebuffed the idea.

A Cofa agreement would stop short of Trump’s ambition to make the island of 57,000 people a part of the US. It is not the only Greenland plan on the table, the sources said, and it would face many practical hurdles.

Much more at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/09/us-greenland-trump

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 1:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Surrenders to the Houthis

May 8, 2025, 8:03 PM CDT
By Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-operation-hou
this-cost-1-billion-rcna205333

Donald Trump is one of the worst negotiators in the history of international relations. He lacks focus, does not seem to have any real strategic priorities, seems to fold remarkably easily, and can be purchased for relatively little. We have seen many of these qualities in display during his extraordinary campaign against the Houthis in Yemen—which ended this week when he basically threw in the towel after having thrown away billions of dollars and achieved nothing.

On the first day he took office for his second term, Trump redesignated the Houthis as a terrorist group in a grand pronouncement which was released by the White House. Trump laid out three clear policy goals; to cripple the Houthis as a military force so that they would no longer be able to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, to stop attacks on US military forces, and to stop attacks on US “partners”. Here is the heart of the proclamation laying out all three:
Quote:
Under President Trump, it is now the policy of the United States to cooperate with its regional partners to eliminate the Houthis’ capabilities and operations, deprive them of resources, and thereby end their attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians, U.S. partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea.
In mid March Trump would start a massive air campaign, supposedly to achieve these specific policy aims.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-do
nald-j-trump-re-designates-the-houthis-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/

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



Oh. You mean the operation that crippled the Houthis and left them begging to end it?



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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 1:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Not a valid reply, so go fuck yourself for quoting me before posting it.

And like I said yesterday, fuck the dead pope and fuck the new pope.

Nobody gives a shit.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, don't you realize that you are acting crazy?


No. I'm not.

We're done with YOUR insanity.

Your party is dead, and your activists are going to prison when they're not being outright deported for not belonging here.

You've lost everything, including your voice. It's time for you to finally go away now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Are you absolutely sure that Trump and you aren't crazy?


I don't speak for other people. I'm not crazy.

Say hi to Kevin Drum and the rest of the Democrat-voting club that never gets sick and never dies.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 7:02 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:

Oh. You mean the operation that crippled the Houthis and left them begging to end it?
No. The operation where the US Navy lost two F-18 fighters into the ocean because the Houthis were attacking an aircraft carrier. Also, Trump dropped billions worth of bombs, but on civilians, not Houthis. He can't tell the difference between one rag-head and another. So, Trump surrendered, but called it Victory!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/world/middleeast/us-navy-fighter-je
t-truman-carrier-red-sea.html

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 7:16 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:

I don't speak for other people. I'm not crazy.

Say hi to Kevin Drum and the rest of the Democrat-voting club that never gets sick and never dies.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There were perfectly obvious reasons why Kevin Drum deserved to die. He stopped working decades ago, just like you, but let his wife support him. He wrote about his fatal illness that he couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath, but if it continued a few more days he was calling the doctor. He was like a Trumptard, waiting and then waiting some more for problems to solve themselves or for the President to solve them so that Kevin wouldn't have to get off his fat ass and do something more than write words on the Internet, much like you, 6ix, who has never known a problem that required strenuous effort to solve. You and Kevin certainly have never confronted an evil fucking bastard (Trump is an example, but there are millions of others) and killed his goddamn worthless ass, making America great again. Instead, you just watched the show.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 7:17 PM

SECOND

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


JD Vance, a practicing Catholic, now has the dubious honor of being scolded by two Popes, a rare feat that puts him in the company of the serpent from the Garden of Eden and Satan himself.

It’s a testament to Vance’s loyalty to Trump that he has not wavered from his path even after being chastised by the last two of God’s representatives on Earth.

Within hours of the white smoke emerging from the chapel, Trump loyalists had scoured Cardinal Prevost’s tweets and labeled the new Pope an “open borders globalist,” “a liberal piece of s***,” a “WOKE Never Trumper liberal” and a “MARXIST.”

There is a familiar path for how these things usually play out. If a prominent figure criticizes Trump, he comes back at them tenfold with a barrage of crude nicknames, late-night tweets and press conference diatribes.

It’s one thing to insult the leader of New York’s 9th Congressional district, it’s quite another to insult the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics.

More at https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/pope-l
eo-trump-vance-woke-b2748269.html

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 8:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I don't speak for other people. I'm not crazy.

Say hi to Kevin Drum and the rest of the Democrat-voting club that never gets sick and never dies.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There were perfectly obvious reasons why Kevin Drum deserved to die. He stopped working decades ago, just like you, but let his wife support him. He wrote about his fatal illness that he couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath, but if it continued a few more days he was calling the doctor. He was like a Trumptard, waiting and then waiting some more for problems to solve themselves or for the President to solve them so that Kevin wouldn't have to get off his fat ass and do something more than write words on the Internet, much like you, 6ix, who has never known a problem that required strenuous effort to solve. You and Kevin certainly have never confronted an evil fucking bastard (Trump is an example, but there are millions of others) and killed his goddamn worthless ass, making America great again. Instead, you just watched the show.


Getting Second to throw Kevin Drum under the bus.

Man... I'm getting good at this.

You suck at everything Second, and you are a pure garbage human being.

You deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.






Meanwhile... in reality. I'm a survivor of a brutal 4-on-1 attack and a deep stab wound to the lower back. I don't feel any need to go online every day and tell people my fantasies who I'd like to murder if I had a pair of balls. That's what little crybaby faggot bitches like you do.

You're always invited to come find me and see who's dick is bigger. Door's always open.



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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, May 10, 2025 8:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You also have the option of not being a lunatic everyday and coming back down to earth and behaving like a serious person too.



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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 1:58 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


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

I don't speak for other people. I'm not crazy.

Say hi to Kevin Drum and the rest of the Democrat-voting club that never gets sick and never dies.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There were perfectly obvious reasons why Kevin Drum deserved to die. He stopped working decades ago, just like you, but let his wife support him. He wrote about his fatal illness that he couldn't walk across the room without being out of breath, but if it continued a few more days he was calling the doctor. He was like a Trumptard, waiting and then waiting some more for problems to solve themselves or for the President to solve them so that Kevin wouldn't have to get off his fat ass and do something more than write words on the Internet, much like you, 6ix, who has never known a problem that required strenuous effort to solve. You and Kevin certainly have never confronted an evil fucking bastard (Trump is an example, but there are millions of others) and killed his goddamn worthless ass, making America great again. Instead, you just watched the show.


Getting Second to throw Kevin Drum under the bus.

Man... I'm getting good at this.

You suck at everything Second, and you are a pure garbage human being.

You deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.






Meanwhile... in reality. I'm a survivor of a brutal 4-on-1 attack and a deep stab wound to the lower back. I don't feel any need to go online every day and tell people my fantasies who I'd like to murder if I had a pair of balls. That's what little crybaby faggot bitches like you do.

You're always invited to come find me and see who's dick is bigger. Door's always open.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You ARE getting good at winding SECOND up. I can always tell when you get under his skin bc he posts about killing, again.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 10:30 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:

Getting Second to throw Kevin Drum under the bus.

Man... I'm getting good at this.

You suck at everything Second, and you are a pure garbage human being.

You deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.






Meanwhile... in reality. I'm a survivor of a brutal 4-on-1 attack and a deep stab wound to the lower back. I don't feel any need to go online every day and tell people my fantasies who I'd like to murder if I had a pair of balls. That's what little crybaby faggot bitches like you do.

You're always invited to come find me and see who's dick is bigger. Door's always open.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Have you heard of Mark Twain? His public image was admirable. But in private, not so much:
Quote:
Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.
That is from the article by Graeme Wood "The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain" Ron Chernow’s biography dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/ron-chernow-mark-
twain-review/682584/

Unlike Mark Twain, neither the public nor private life of Trump is admirable. The nastiness of the two halves of Trump is what attracts Trumptards to him. They handle Trump's obviously evil personality and behavior with phrases such "Fake News", but Trump is truly what his detractors have discovered about him.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 12:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Getting Second to throw Kevin Drum under the bus.

Man... I'm getting good at this.

You suck at everything Second, and you are a pure garbage human being.

You deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.






Meanwhile... in reality. I'm a survivor of a brutal 4-on-1 attack and a deep stab wound to the lower back. I don't feel any need to go online every day and tell people my fantasies who I'd like to murder if I had a pair of balls. That's what little crybaby faggot bitches like you do.

You're always invited to come find me and see who's dick is bigger. Door's always open.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Have you heard of Mark Twain? His public image was admirable. But in private, not so much:
Quote:
Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.
That is from the article by Graeme Wood "The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain" Ron Chernow’s biography dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/ron-chernow-mark-
twain-review/682584/

Unlike Mark Twain, neither the public nor private life of Trump is admirable. The nastiness of the two halves of Trump is what attracts Trumptards to him. They handle Trump's obviously evil personality and behavior with phrases such "Fake News", but Trump is truly what his detractors have discovered about him.

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


Yeah, Mark Twain (Second). We've heard all about Mark Twain's (Second's) fake life.

We can only imagine how terrible your real life is and what a terrible person you actually are in real life when this is the best you can fake.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 9:13 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:

Yeah, Mark Twain (Second). We've heard all about Mark Twain's (Second's) fake life.

We can only imagine how terrible your real life is and what a terrible person you actually are in real life when this is the best you can fake.
Here is some real news that Trumptards will either call Fake News or see nothing wrong with:

Trump is accepting a luxury jumbo jet as a gift from Qatar that will be transferred for his personal use.
It is the most blatant example of bribery in presidential history.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-pal
ace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reportedly-getting-luxury-qatari-jet-gi
ft-sparks-fury-2070672

I suppose that if there is enough screaming from Congressional Republicans about this being as immoral as hell, either Trump or Qatar might say, "Well, never mind." But then maybe not. It's just one preposterous thing after another with Trump. Next week, there will probably be something absurdly stupid, evil, and bigger than a jumbo jet that Trump is contemplating doing.

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 9:20 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


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

Yeah, Mark Twain (Second). We've heard all about Mark Twain's (Second's) fake life.

We can only imagine how terrible your real life is and what a terrible person you actually are in real life when this is the best you can fake.
Here is some real news that Trumptards will either call Fake News or see nothing wrong with:

Trump is accepting a luxury jumbo jet as a gift from Qatar that will be transferred for his personal use.
It is the most blatant example of bribery in presidential history.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-pal
ace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reportedly-getting-luxury-qatari-jet-gi
ft-sparks-fury-2070672

I suppose that if there is enough screaming from Congressional Republicans about this being as immoral as hell, either Trump or Qatar might say, "Well, never mind." But then maybe not. It's just one preposterous thing after another with Trump. Next week, there will probably be something absurdly stupid, evil, and bigger than a jumbo jet that Trump is contemplating doing.

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


Trump should get smacked for that. That may be common in the billion-dollar business world, but not when you're making decisions for the USA. Whatever made him think he should get away with that?
Ridiculous and obscene.

Don't be so blatant, Mr Trump.
Save that for AFTER your Presidency, like everybody else.


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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 9:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Yeah, Mark Twain (Second). We've heard all about Mark Twain's (Second's) fake life.

We can only imagine how terrible your real life is and what a terrible person you actually are in real life when this is the best you can fake.
Here is some real news that Trumptards will either call Fake News or see nothing wrong with:

Trump is accepting a luxury jumbo jet as a gift from Qatar that will be transferred for his personal use.
It is the most blatant example of bribery in presidential history.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-pal
ace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reportedly-getting-luxury-qatari-jet-gi
ft-sparks-fury-2070672

I suppose that if there is enough screaming from Congressional Republicans about this being as immoral as hell, either Trump or Qatar might say, "Well, never mind." But then maybe not. It's just one preposterous thing after another with Trump. Next week, there will probably be something absurdly stupid, evil, and bigger than a jumbo jet that Trump is contemplating doing.

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


Trump should get smacked for that. That may be common in the billion-dollar business world, but not when you're making decisions for the USA. Whatever made him think he should get away with that?
Ridiculous and obscene.

Don't be so blatant, Mr Trump.
Save that for AFTER your Presidency, like everybody else.


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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA




Yup. It wasn't no good when Bill Clinton was getting $1 Million birthday presents from the Prince of Qatar when Hillary was in office, and it ain't any good now.


I'm reserving my judgement on this one until I see what he does.

He has no need for this jet, whatsoever. There is absolutely zero upside for Trump to take this jet under any circumstances. Trump lived and breathed ROI his entire life and understands concepts like weighing out positives and negatives in a way that would break most of you mouth-breathers' little brains.

And I don't imagine that he and every single person in his inner circle of family, friends, employees and political allies weren't aware of this and that every single one of them who were aware of it must have brought up what a bad idea it was at some point, knowing full well that nothing but deserved bad publicity would come of it, and that there was zero chance they'd ever be able to pull this off in 2025 without every single person on the planet knowing about it within 24 hours.

So what's the angle?

Who is about to look like a giant asshole?

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 9:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup. It wasn't no good when Bill Clinton was getting $1 Million birthday presents from the Prince of Qatar when Hillary was in office, and it ain't any good now.


I'm reserving my judgement on this one until I see what he does.

He has no need for this jet, whatsoever. There is absolutely zero upside for Trump to take this jet under any circumstances. Trump lived and breathed ROI his entire life and understands concepts like weighing out positives and negatives in a way that would break most of you mouth-breathers' little brains.

And I don't imagine that he and every single person in his inner circle of family, friends, employees and political allies weren't aware of this and that every single one of them who were aware of it must have brought up what a bad idea it was at some point, knowing full well that nothing but deserved bad publicity would come of it, and that there was zero chance they'd ever be able to pull this off in 2025 without every single person on the planet knowing about it within 24 hours.

So what's the angle?

Who is about to look like a giant asshole?

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

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




I'm going to get a huge fucking laugh out of this if he immediately gets the plane repainted with "THE DEPORTATION WAGON" with the "R" backwards like in Toys R Us and he unveils our new free illegal alien-deporter that was gifted to us by the Prince of Qatar on his cute little Truth Social platform.



Even better if he got some sort of celebrity tagger artist to do it and make it look Ghetto Fabulous!



There are so many ways this could go.


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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 9:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Another reason for believing that Trump was accepting a free jet from Qatar isn't what surface value would suggest...

Even under the impossible scenario where Trump thought he'd dotted all of his T's and crossed all of his I's and there was an Absolute Zero chance that any other human being would know that he got a new jet and where it came from, what then?

Donald J. Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America, who has shown everyone in the world who's running the show right now, just put himself in the eternal blackmail pocket of some foreign leader for a free airplane he didn't need?


C'mon people, now...

This is the type of shit I'm talking about when I say that none of y'all have any critical thinking skills and you just believe whatever you're told.


Wake up and use your fuckin' noggins for once and stop letting headlines rule your emotions everyday.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 10:11 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Another reason for believing that Trump was accepting a free jet from Qatar isn't what surface value would suggest...

Even under the impossible scenario where Trump thought he'd dotted all of his T's and crossed all of his I's and there was an Absolute Zero chance that any other human being would know that he got a new jet and where it came from, what then?

Donald J. Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America, who has shown everyone in the world who's running the show right now, just put himself in the eternal blackmail pocket of some foreign leader for a free airplane he didn't need?


C'mon people, now...

This is the type of shit I'm talking about when I say that none of y'all have any critical thinking skills and you just believe whatever you're told.


Wake up and use your fuckin' noggins for once and stop letting headlines rule your emotions everyday.




Jack likes to tell us he has critical thinking skills. Well Jack, these people proved they have those skills. When you had the chance, you flunked out. And look at what they think of you/MAGA. What do ya think; are they going to vote republican in the mid-terms?

T

WOW: College graduates WALK OUT as MAGA Republican governor speaks



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 10:24 PM

THG


Here's some more MAGA critical thinking skills. Warning, you won't be able to stop laughing. Hey Gilligan, do you feel the winds shifting?

T






NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 10:32 PM

THG


Hey Gilligan, how did those critical thinking skills of yours miss this? Fucking dummy...

T

WHOA: Joe Rogan TURNS on Trump








NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, May 11, 2025 10:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Another reason for believing that Trump was accepting a free jet from Qatar isn't what surface value would suggest...

Even under the impossible scenario where Trump thought he'd dotted all of his T's and crossed all of his I's and there was an Absolute Zero chance that any other human being would know that he got a new jet and where it came from, what then?

Donald J. Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America, who has shown everyone in the world who's running the show right now, just put himself in the eternal blackmail pocket of some foreign leader for a free airplane he didn't need?


C'mon people, now...

This is the type of shit I'm talking about when I say that none of y'all have any critical thinking skills and you just believe whatever you're told.


Wake up and use your fuckin' noggins for once and stop letting headlines rule your emotions everyday.




Jack likes to tell us he has critical thinking skills. Well Jack, these people proved they have those skills. When you had the chance, you flunked out. And look at what they think of you/MAGA. What do ya think; are they going to vote republican in the mid-terms?

T

WOW: College graduates WALK OUT as MAGA Republican governor speaks


Quite frankly, I don't care what a bunch of college "educated" dipshits who are going to take that student debt to their graves think about anything, Theodore.

Let's see how many of them are still living with their parents 10 years from now, shall we?



And why is this a capital "WOW" moment for the clickbait farmers at MTN, Ted?

You couldn't trip at a college campus without landing dick deep in Liberal Idiot.


The only reason reasonable folk are surprised about any of this is that they didn't set shit on fire or smash windows on their way out.







"QUICK!!!! DID ANYBODY CHECK FOR SWASTIKAS!!!!!"

We all know how much you crazy Lefties love your doodles.



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

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, May 12, 2025 4:26 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:

Who is about to look like a giant asshole?
Even if he later turns down the gift, or bribe from the persnickety viewpoint, because someone convinced him not to take it, Trump sees no problem:

Trump defended the move and attempted to see off potential criticism online, by posting on his Truth Social platform: "So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA [Make America Great Again]."

Donald Trump Will Get to Keep Qatar Jet Even After He Leaves Office

May 12, 2025 at 3:06 AM EDT

The jet will then be donated to Trump's presidential library when he leaves office, meaning he can continue to use it (or sell it)

The nature of the gift is unprecedented given its value, estimated at around $400 million.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-qatar-plane-air-force-one-207076
1

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

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE
second 06.02 07:12
6ixStringJack 06.02 13:51

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
Western Canada on Fire
Mon, June 2, 2025 23:51 - 16 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Mon, June 2, 2025 23:38 - 8426 posts
Check out Lying Leftist Cory Booker Doing a Nazi Salute, Ted
Mon, June 2, 2025 23:35 - 1 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Mon, June 2, 2025 18:22 - 5485 posts
Game Companies are Morons.
Mon, June 2, 2025 18:04 - 231 posts
Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
Mon, June 2, 2025 17:58 - 404 posts
Trunp loses again in Court
Mon, June 2, 2025 17:57 - 684 posts
Countdown to Trumps 2026 Impeachment.
Mon, June 2, 2025 17:55 - 88 posts
Russian losses in Ukraine
Mon, June 2, 2025 17:04 - 1219 posts
What happened to Corporate PRIDE?
Mon, June 2, 2025 16:14 - 1 posts
NBC Chicago: 8 hurt when man in Colorado hurls ‘flamethrower' at group supporting Israeli hostages: What we know
Mon, June 2, 2025 14:58 - 4 posts
Activist Judges, Bureaucracy Are Fighting a Losing Battle
Mon, June 2, 2025 14:41 - 1 posts
 VIEW MORE TOPICS 

FFF.NET SOCIAL