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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, May 20, 2025 09:40
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VIEWED: 24548
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Friday, May 16, 2025 9:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Trade War Isn’t Over

Paul Krugman / May 16, 2025 at 5:39 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-trade-war-isnt-over

. . . Two further points about where we are right now on tariffs. First, nothing that has been announced is any kind of lasting commitment. Everything is at most an announcement about what tariff rates will be for the next 90 days. Nobody, very much including Trump himself, knows what policy will be a few months from now. We’re still living with huge uncertainty, which means an environment in which it’s impossible for businesses to make long-term plans.

Second, everything Trump is still doing on tariffs is a violation of longstanding international agreements. You may think you’ve made a deal with America, but U.S. officials treat solemn deals like suggestions at best.

In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

The interesting question, as I see it, is why so many pundits and reporters — and, it seems, small stock investors — have been sounding the all clear on Trump’s tariffs, when the reality is that all we’ve seen is a modest retreat from complete, destructive insanity to seriously harmful madness.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

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

It's great Trump backed down but Krugman is right. Tariffs on China are still at 30%. If it cost a dollar, it will now cost $1.33. If it cost $10.00, it will now cost $13.00. This is applied to most products from China. At least half those costs will have to be paid by the consumer. It's said prices will go up this month and even more next, we'll see how much.

We still have tariffs with much of the world. Mostly around 10% I believe. That too is going to have to be paid for by consumers. And I've said it before. It is possible most small businesses in America will go extinct.

Trump is using tariffs against American companies. They have to go to him personally to get a break. Trumps response, what's in it for me.

T

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Friday, May 16, 2025 4:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Krugman hasn't been right about anything in 20 years.

You guys keep listening to the same people who have been lying to you for decades and see where else it can get you.

You already let them destroy the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, don't pretend to care about small businesses now, Ted.

More small businesses were closed forever after your Covid lockdowns your party inflicted on everyone and you cheerlead every step of the way.

You really should just stop talking in 2025. All of that hypocrisy is coming home to roost and you can't ever put up a single argument on any topic that doesn't make you look like an asshole after things you said before.

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

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

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Friday, May 16, 2025 8:50 PM

SECOND

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

Moody's cuts US Treasury Bond Rating (The Winds of Change are Blowing Today, 6ixStringJack)

By David Morgan and Bo Erickson | May 16, 2025 5:45 PM CDT

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tax-bill-faces-political-test-r
epublican-infighting-2025-05-16/

Moody's, which was the last of the three major ratings agencies to rate U.S. AAA, warned that the nation's debt burden could reach 134% of gross domestic product by 2035, compared with 98% in 2024.

"Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," Moody's wrote, adding that they didn't see enough spending cuts "from current fiscal proposals under consideration."

The federal government for years has spent more than it has taken in. Moody's said it expected the U.S.'s fiscal performance to deteriorate compared with other highly developed economies.

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

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Friday, May 16, 2025 9:13 PM

SECOND

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

A Trump trifecta as he slams Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Supreme Court on same day

May 16, 2025, 8:48 p.m. ET

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/16/trump-slams-ta
ylor-swift-bruce-springsteen-supreme-court/83680151007/

Despite Trump's team previously using Springsteen songs at campaign rallies, the president insisted he has "never liked" the "Dancing In The Dark" singer.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he's not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country. If I wasn't elected, it would have been GONE by now! Sleepy Joe didn't have a clue as to what he was doing, but Springsteen is "dumb as a rock,” and couldn't see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out "prune" of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that's just "standard fare." Then we'll all see how it goes for him!

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

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Friday, May 16, 2025 9:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Moody's cuts US Treasury Bond Rating (The Winds of Change are Blowing Today, 6ixStringJack)

By David Morgan and Bo Erickson | May 16, 2025 5:45 PM CDT

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tax-bill-faces-political-test-r
epublican-infighting-2025-05-16/

Moody's, which was the last of the three major ratings agencies to rate U.S. AAA, warned that the nation's debt burden could reach 134% of gross domestic product by 2035, compared with 98% in 2024.

"Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," Moody's wrote, adding that they didn't see enough spending cuts "from current fiscal proposals under consideration."

The federal government for years has spent more than it has taken in. Moody's said it expected the U.S.'s fiscal performance to deteriorate compared with other highly developed economies.

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

Yup. Trying to fix what 60 years of Democrats have done to us is a hell of a job.

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

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 6:50 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:

Yup. Trying to fix what 60 years of Democrats have done to us is a hell of a job.

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

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

I was there for those 60 years and it was Republicans in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court who did the damage for their personal profit.

Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito took bribes, recently, in the form of gifts and deluxe vacations they could never afford on a salary of only $$303,600.

President Trump received a $400 million airplane from Qatar, which he might not be able to keep, but he also took intangible billion dollar bribes all week in the Middle East:

Trump business deals revive questions about his family profiting off the presidency

"This week, President Trump visited three Middle Eastern nations where his family has deep business ties. Over the past month, billions of dollars have poured into Trump-owned companies. It has revived longstanding questions about whether the financial windfalls are influencing policy."

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 7:02 AM

SECOND

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

The farce of Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peace talks

America’s current leaders place the onus for peace on Ukraine, blaming the victim for the war.

May 17, 2025, 5:00 AM CDT
By Nicholas Grossman, political science professor at the University of Illinois

Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently lamented that people who were alive in Ukraine are dead today “because this war continues.”

Not exactly. They’re dead because Russia killed them in an ongoing attempt to subjugate their country. The war isn’t a natural disaster out of anyone’s control, like, say, a hurricane. Russian leader Vladimir Putin chose to aggressively attack Ukraine, and decided every day since then to keep attacking while making extensive demands.

That’s the central truth of the war, but Russia has always denied it, and under President Donald Trump, the United States denies it as well. That denial renders peace negotiations a farce.

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 7:09 AM

SECOND

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

SCOTUS Is About to Suffer Buyers Remorse, Again

They decided to tackle the very messy question of nationwide injunctions instead of answering the easy, obviously unconstitutional issue.

Our eyes this week were trained on the arguments over birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court on Thursday. While Solicitor General John Sauer advanced wild arguments on behalf of the Trump administration, four of the justices (hint: the women) seemed extremely suspicious of his motives. The five men? Not so much. Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia Lithwick to break down Trump v. CASA Inc. and the growing divide on the court between those who trust this president and those who don’t.

Although Thursday’s arguments touched on fundamental rights, SCOTUS made the strange choice to largely avoid the constitutional question and focus on a different one: Whether district courts have the power to issue “universal” injunctions that apply nationwide, as multiple courts did in order to protect birthright citizenship from the president. Judges have issued an unprecedented number of these orders against the Trump administration—in response to Trump’s unprecedented barrage of lawless executive orders. Some conservative justices seem perturbed by the explosion of universal injunctions. But it became clear on Thursday that this is the worst case for the court to use to rein them in.

https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2025/05/scotus-finally-heard-the-tru
mp-birthright-citizenship-case

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 7:26 AM

SECOND

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

The New MAGA World Order

This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

By Jonathan Chait | May 16, 2025, 2:12 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/05/trump-immora
l-world-order/682826/

Earlier this week in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump delivered what the White House billed as a “major address,” which is a long-standing way to signal that a particular speech is meant to lay down a historical marker communicating the president’s values. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. Trump’s message was that, unlike interventionist Americans of the past, he did not take account of democracy or human rights when dealing with foreign states. His only concern was raw American interest. The host regime, which has had strained relations with the United States over the kingdom’s lack of human rights and its 2018 dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist, no doubt welcomed the moral reprieve.

“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” the president announced. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment; my job, to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”

Trump’s declaration meant that “the United States was done nation-building and intervening,” observed The New York Times. There was “no Wilsonianism in the speech,” noted National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, who pronounced the administration’s renunciation of moral judgment the “Trump doctrine.”

Read: A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch’
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/a-senior-white-ho
use-official-defines-the-trump-doctrine-were-america-bitch/562511/

Two days later in Qatar, however, Trump sounded altogether less callous. “We are gonna protect this country. It’s a very special place with a special royal family,” he said. “It’s great people, and they’re gonna be protected by the United States.” The U.S. State Department has previously criticized Qatar’s ruling monarchy for violating human rights and imprisoning journalists, but Trump had looked into their souls, and found them to be special indeed. The tone he struck sounded less like a cold-eyed businessman and more like John F. Kennedy pledging to defend West Berlin.

It appears that Trump does care about the internal character of regimes he deals with. Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether, Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad. And he wishes to spread those values around the world.

Whatever you say about this policy, it is not amoral. The primary difference between the Trump doctrine and traditional American values promotion is that the former, rather than seeking to impose a moral world order, aspires to create an immoral one.

In his address to the Saudis, Trump condemned his predecessors for “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” It’s true that Trump does not lecture dictatorships for suppressing democracy. But his administration is hardly reticent about denouncing other countries’ internal conduct.

Earlier this year, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded Europe for allowing in too many migrants and cracking down too hard on hate speech and far-right parties. “What German democracy—what no democracy, American, German, or European—will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered,” he said. Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and proposed that he hold elections before the Russia invasion is repelled.

The administration has in fact made human rights a centerpiece of its diplomacy in one particular country: South Africa. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that he was boycotting a G20 summit because it was held in Johannesburg. “South Africa is doing very bad things,” he wrote. “Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change.” More recently, Trump has claimed: “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people very badly.”

If you were going to take a stand on human rights for only one country, South Africa seems like a strange choice: According to Freedom House, the country has been a “proponent of human rights” since the end of apartheid and, despite some deficits, is rated as “free.” But South Africa fits with Trump’s apparent belief, one reflected in the stream of hysterical rhetoric about the treatment of Afrikaners, that anti-white discrimination is the most pernicious ideology in the world. Trump has therefore granted refugee status to white South Africans even as he has deported other asylum seekers, including those who face prison or death.

To claim that Trump is motivated purely by values would be an exaggeration. A strong odor of corruption wafts over his international dealings, especially with allies like Qatar, which gave him a Boeing plane for his personal use.

But it’s not as if Qatar had to bribe Trump into placing the country under the American military umbrella. The U.S. has had a major air base there for a quarter century. The difference in how Trump talks about this military presence, in contrast to the resentment he regularly expresses over American bases in Europe and the Pacific, is striking. When describing American commitments to Gulf states, Trump does not insult our allies as freeloaders, or lambaste former U.S. presidents for their stupidity in giving away American protection, or demand that these countries pay what he calls “dues” to retain it.

Trump has described the Boeing aircraft not as a form of repayment he demanded, but as a magnanimous gift from Qatar out of genuine friendship. The emirate had decided “very, very nicely” that it “would like to do something” to express its appreciation. He repeatedly praised Qatar as “nice” for repaying American security guarantees worth billions of dollars with one $400 million plane that may or may not be crawling with listening devices.

Qatar’s naked bribery is not merely payment for services rendered. It serves as a signal in Trump’s mind that Qatar is one of the good guys—because it does business the Trump way, not the international-liberal-order way. Trump’s method is still to sit in judgment over foreign leaders. He simply prefers the bad ones.

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 8:33 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Another grocery store closing down in San Francisco. This is like fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth one this year
https://x.com/darren_stallcup/status/1923463001803301175
California can’t have anything nice. I seen it too many times. People come in and steal everything, they lock everything up and then nobody shops here

VFX Artist Reveals the TERRIFYING Speed of WILDFIRES

Hindu India is still angry

India Must Take A Stand To Hurt Turkey Economically: Suhel Seth

US Approves Over $300 Million Missile Deal With Pak-Supporter Turkey
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-approves-304-million-missi
le-deal-with-pak-supporter-turkey

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 11:56 AM

SECOND

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

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Whoever had control of the “AUTOPEN” is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment. It is a major part of the real crime, THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN! Millions and millions of people knew that, but the Radical Left Democrats waged a campaign of inoculation and innocence like none that had ever been waged before. THIS IS WHY THE UNSELECT COMMITTEE OF POLITICAL THUGS, WHO WERE GIVEN A FULL AND COMPLETE PARDON BY THE PERSON WHO WIELDED THE NOW ILLEGALLY USED AUTOPEN, DELETED AND DESTROYED ALL EVIDENCE AND INFORMATION FROM THEIR CORRUPT AND VICIOUS WITCH HUNT AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE, WHOSE LIVES WERE COMPLETELY SHATTERED AND DESTROYED BY THIS HISTORICALLY CRIMINAL EVENT. Remember, it all began with DIRTY COP James Comey, Obama, a hapless and cognitively impaired Sleepy Joe Biden, and my now very famous ACCUSATION that,“THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!” Whoever had control of the Autopen is just the beginning. The biggest crime of all is that THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED! I (MAGA!) WON THE ELECTION BY MILLIONS OF VOTES, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT. GOD BLESS AMERICA, FOR THE FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN!!!

May 17, 2025, 7:34 AM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114523195208653918

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 3:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Moody's cuts US Treasury Bond Rating (The Winds of Change are Blowing Today, 6ixStringJack)

By David Morgan and Bo Erickson | May 16, 2025 5:45 PM CDT

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tax-bill-faces-political-test-r
epublican-infighting-2025-05-16/

Moody's, which was the last of the three major ratings agencies to rate U.S. AAA, warned that the nation's debt burden could reach 134% of gross domestic product by 2035, compared with 98% in 2024.

"Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs," Moody's wrote, adding that they didn't see enough spending cuts "from current fiscal proposals under consideration."

The federal government for years has spent more than it has taken in. Moody's said it expected the U.S.'s fiscal performance to deteriorate compared with other highly developed economies.

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

Ain't the first time. 4 of Obama's 8 years we had a cut rating. Some outfits actually downgrading us all the way down to a single A-.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_credit-
rating_downgrades

It was bad enough that even Wikipedia didn't scrub it despite it happening squarely in the middle of the Barack Obama admin and persisting for nearly 4 years.

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

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 3:55 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/15/the-media-kept-rooting-for-a-tari
ff-driven-recession-the-data-keep-disappointing-them/

ha!

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 7:56 PM

SECOND

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

People keep asking: How can Trump do this?

The biggest reason for Trump’s utter lack of inhibition this time around?

He believes nothing can stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants because nothing has.

He’s been impeached twice, indicted for trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, even convicted of criminal fraud. Not only has he gotten away scot-free, but the Supreme Court has given him presumptive immunity for whatever he does in office.

And a plurality of voters even reelected him president, with more votes than Kamala Harris.

Hell, he’s survived an attempted assassination.

So, he truly believes nothing can stop him, no matter what he does. This is the core reason that he’s uninhibited — feeling totally unconstrained in seeking money and power.

The only potential obstacles are forces that he can’t easily push around because they are too rich or powerful — Xi’s China, Vladimir Putin, global bond traders, possibly Harvard University and the U.S. Supreme Court.

So with them, he issues stern warnings and big threats. But if they don’t do what he wants, he ultimately caves and claims victory nonetheless (as he has with China and Harvard).

There’s one constraining force that in the long run will be the most important of all: the American public.

Like a huge sleeping giant, the American public is not easily stirred to action. Right now, some of the public is loudly opposing Trump. His net approval ratings have fallen by nearly 20 points since he took office.

But they’re still too few to credibly threaten congressional Republicans with electoral defeat unless they turn on Trump.

The American public will awaken — especially if Trump openly defies the Supreme Court, or arrests American citizens for saying or writing things he dislikes, or takes foreign bribes that compromise America’s national security (such as getting the Saudi’s to invest in his crypto exchange and coins, in exchange for which he gives them America’s most advanced AI chips, which they then give to China). We’re inches away from one or more of these scenarios.

And when the giant awakens, Trump and his regime will be toast.

https://www.alternet.org/trump-sleeping-giant/

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 8:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
People keep asking: How can Trump do this?

You should really read some of the stupid shit your idiots have written over the years that I'm pulling up to the top, dummy.

That is why nobody is listening to any of your clickbait and bullshit and why the media is less trusted than it has ever been in history.

Keep putting out daily clickbait trash everyday and driving yourself nuts and see where it gets you. The rest of the world has moved on and doesn't give one single shit what you think about about anything anymore.

That world is dead.

Get used to it. This is your new normal for the rest of your life.

Sweet Dreams.

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

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 8:16 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:

You should really read some of the stupid shit your idiots have written over the years that I'm pulling up to the top, dummy.

Walmart called Trump a fat, fucking idiot who does not understand how prices are set:

Panicked Trump Lashes Walmart for Telling Truth on Tariffs

By Liam Archacki | May 17 2025 5:09PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/panicked-trump-orders-walmart-to-eat-the
-tariffs-after-price-hikes/

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, "EAT THE TARIFFS," and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I'll be watching, and so will your customers!!!

Walmart poured cold water on Trump’s power play in a statement to the Daily Beast.

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

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Saturday, May 17, 2025 9:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

You should really read some of the stupid shit your idiots have written over the years that I'm pulling up to the top, dummy.
Walmart called Trump a fat, fucking idiot who does not understand how prices are set:

Nobody gives a shit. Nobody is listening to you anymore.

You have no voice. Your you have no purpose. You have no place in the world anymore.

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

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 7:19 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:

You should really read some of the stupid shit your idiots have written over the years that I'm pulling up to the top, dummy.
Walmart called Trump a fat, fucking idiot who does not understand how prices are set:

Nobody gives a shit. Nobody is listening to you anymore.

You have no voice. Your you have no purpose. You have no place in the world anymore.

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

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

The weakness of Catholicism is that it won't use violence on evil people such as Trump and his Trumptards. The Pope leaves violent retribution in God's hands, suitably delayed until the evil Trumptards are already dead and facing Final Judgment. The weakness of leaving things for God to fix is very simple -- it leaves things broken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII_and_the_Holocaust#Backgrou
nd

Too bad that the Catholic Church won't burn Trump at the stake. He'd burn like a candle, as fat as he is, with his hair being the wick.

Pope Leo urges calm as Trump escalates his war on the truth — but I can't do it

By Sabrina Haake | May 17, 2025 | 10:37AM ET

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/pope-trump/

America’s first Pope is the moral voice we urgently need

Pope Leo XIV is a perfectly timed antidote to the craven man in the oval office who seems hellbent on destroying forces of good. Pope Leo, like his beloved predecessor, walks the walk. Augustinians live simply and frugally, never ostentatiously. They believe in the pursuit of truth and humility, which puts them in diametric opposition to our current president. Like the Sisters of Providence, Augustinians live in service to the poor and underserved, something MAGA equates with weakness.

Pope Leo has already warned the world about the destructive combination of wealth and power. In his first papal press conference, he nailed the crisis of our current moment: Rising dictators use language of hatred and division, and suppress the media, to advance their own pursuit of power.

Defending free speech without naming Trump directly, Pope Leo stressed the need for leaders and the media to engage in more nuanced speech, condemning “loud,” i.e. boisterous communications: “We do not need loud, forceful communication, but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice.” He encouraged the world to soften and “disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred.”

He champions “the precious gift of free speech and of the press,” as Trump tries to destroy both.

In love vs. hate, my money is still on love

The world just watched Trump shamelessly accept lavish gifts and royal treatment from Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers, the same people who ordered the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, because he criticized them. Pope Leo delivered an urgent message in contrast, reiterating the Catholic church’s “solidarity with journalists who are imprisoned (and worse) for seeking and reporting the truth.” No doubt it was an unwelcome rejoinder to Trump, who has weaponized federal resources, barred journalists who fail to fawn over him from his press conferences, and filed repeated lawsuits to punish his critics as ‘enemies of the people.’

I get it that the Pope opposes abortion and gay marriage, two personal, Constitutional rights I hold dear. But unlike the U.S. government, leading by religious creed is literally the Pope’s job. More importantly, while Trump spews violent and divisive hatred trying to split the nation, including even the Catholic church, Pope Leo talks and walks the more evolved path of love and compassion.

He also plainly condemns the nativism endorsed by the MAGA movement. When Pope Leo was still Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, he posted a slap at JD Vance’s newly-minted cruelty disguised as Catholicism. Responding to Vance’s claim that Christians should “rank” their love to put poor, needy strangers at the bottom of their hierarchy of concerns, Prevost said plainly, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.”

I’m aware that I’m failing the Pope’s directive

The most brazenly corrupt president in our nation’s history considers himself anointed by God. He has perpetrated fraud on the nation by accusing others of fraud, weaponized the federal government by accusing others of weaponization, and claims license to sell the presidency to brutal foreign dictators.

In naming Trump’s vile, self-serving avarice, I’m aware that I am violating Pope Leo’s admonition against heated rhetoric.

In my defense, I, like JD Vance, rank my moral commitments: Identify the evil confronting the nation first. Then defend the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment. Then defend my neighbor’s right to fly his MAGA freak flag.

From my lapsed-Catholic and legal perspective, these commitments are actually one and the same.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 7:23 AM

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

The President Who Became a Prophet

For many of Donald Trump’s followers, his appeal has an almost mystical dimension. What happens when the spell breaks?

By Manvir Singh | May 17, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-president-who-
became-a-prophet

On April 1st, the day before President Donald Trump’s tariffs cratered global markets, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters “to trust the President’s instinct on the economy.” In the days afterward, Johnson’s message was echoed by legions of online supporters, who, amid plunging stock prices and predictions of a global recession, reminded one another to “trust the plan,” a catchphrase popular on QAnon forums.

For many devotees, Trump was a political savant. He was playing “4-D chess,” they said, supposedly outsmarting billionaire backers like Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, analysts who expected trade wars and job losses, and the twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists who cautioned that his policies would cause “higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” Elsewhere in the MAGAverse, self-proclaimed prophets announced that a divine plan was under way. In an April 7th video that’s been viewed nearly four hundred thousand times, the Iowa-based evangelist Julie Green claimed that God had warned her of the economic crash before the tariffs were announced. “Your economy, and all the markets, have been overtaken by the enemies from within,” God reportedly told her. “Their control over your nation, and its economy, is all collapsing in front of you.”

The tone marked a vibe shift from the technocracies of yesteryear. “I know that sometimes when I was President, and even when I was a candidate, folks would say, ‘Barack, you’re talking too long. You’re too professorial. You’re explaining stuff too much,’ ” Obama said, in 2018. His was a politics of complexity and deliberation, of data and binders and reasoned debate. Trump’s first term began in this style. Working alongside institutionalists like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and through appointees like Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, his Administration kicked off with a familiarly wonkish feel. But, in the eight years since Trump first took office, procedure has given way to prophecy. For millions of his followers, the President is no longer the Administrator-in-Chief but something closer to the hero Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana: a divine avatar destined to wage a holy war against evil.

Trump’s messianic appeal may seem like a twenty-first-century creation, a product of partisan rage, epistemic drift, and American-style evangelicalism. This is the conclusion of much of the analysis on the convergence of conspiratorial thinking and spiritual yearning, often termed “conspirituality.” In “The Age of Magical Overthinking,” the writer Amanda Montell treats the phenomenon as an algorithmic aberration: “Combine our organic animism with capitalism and tech-powered misinformation spread, and you get conspirituality.” Likewise, the scholars Charlotte Ward and David Voas, in their 2011 paper popularizing the term “conspirituality,” described it as a historically contingent synthesis: a fusion of the “female-dominated New Age (with its positive focus on self) and the male-dominated realm of conspiracy theory (with its negative focus on global politics).”

But to treat the right’s politico-mystical fervor as a modern malfunction is to miss its deeper logic. The Trumpian mystique echoes a dynamic that has occurred for centuries and across cultures. Its core ingredients—an alleged league of pedophiles, a godlike miracle worker, promises of an Edenic restoration—resemble archetypes that have long occupied humanity’s imagination. Trump’s followers may communicate through memes and message boards, but their faith belongs to a much older mythology: the eternal face-off between shaman and witch, prophet and cabal.

In 1987, an army of between seven and ten thousand soldiers advanced toward Uganda’s capital, Kampala. They were led by Alice Auma, a fishmonger turned spirit medium in her early thirties. A photograph from that period shows her seated between two followers. Dressed in a plain white top and a long patterned skirt, she looks less like a rebel commander than she does a schoolteacher or a market vender. To her supporters, though, she was a prophet possessed by the spirit of an Italian captain named Lakwena (“messenger,” in the Acholi language) sent to cleanse the land of sin and corruption. Known thereafter as Alice Lakwena, she pledged to destroy witches, purify warriors, and unite Ugandans against the President, Yoweri Museveni.

Alice was a healer before she was a fighter. Her first acolytes were fellow-members of the Acholi ethnic group. They feared extermination after Museveni, an ethnic Hima, overthrew Tito Okello, an Acholi officer, and the army demanded that all Acholi surrender their weapons. Her fighters later told missionaries, “The good Lord who had sent the Lakwena decided to change his work from that of a doctor to that of a military commander for one simple reason: it is useless to cure a man today only that he be killed the next day.”

Alice’s rise was not anomalous. As I explore in my new book, “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion,” upheaval often begets messianic revelation. When colonialism disrupted social orders in New Guinea and the surrounding islands, so-called cargo cults emerged, led by shaman-prophets who promised material abundance, the return of ancestors, and, in many instances, the end of foreign rule. In South Africa, the teen-age seer Nongqawuse foretold that the European settlers would be swept into the sea and a golden age would dawn—if only her people slaughtered their cattle and burned their crops. And in mid-nineteenth-century China, at a time of disasters, crippling taxation, and Western humiliation, a failed civil-service candidate claiming to be Christ’s brother launched the Taiping Rebellion, vowing heavenly rule on earth and the expulsion of demons.

Such movements share a predictable structure. People in crisis exhibit an instinctive paranoia. They are quick to blame suffering on individuals, especially the distrusted and powerful. Charismatic figures co-evolve with these understandings. They name enemies, invoke cosmic stakes, and present themselves as exceptional in precisely the ways necessary to vanquish agents of misfortune. They offer futures that are prosperous and pure but also backward-looking—lost paradises regained through sacrifice.

Core to all of this are depictions of evil. Conjured opponents are more than malicious—they’re inhuman, perverted, and often supernatural. In Alice’s sermons, they were sorcerers. In the Taiping Rebellion, they were demons dressed as bureaucrats. When I analyzed beliefs about harmful magic across sixty diverse societies, I found that the most feared malefactors were suspected not just of causing calamity but of engaging in moral depravity, with a cross-cultural fixation on cannibalism and sexual deviance. Among the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest, witches (both male and female) were said to have sex with corpses and their own family members. The Santal, in South Asia, believed that witches (always female) copulated with spirit familiars and devoured the organs of children. Similar fears haunted Europeans and British Americans during the early modern period; one need only consult the witchcraft paintings of Francisco Goya, which show covens of half-naked women killing babies, eating people, and cavorting with the Devil.

These depictions serve a purpose. Portrayed as cannibals, child-killers, and corpse-defilers, enemies become existential threats and the worst imaginable offenders, lying beyond the pale of redemption. The fear of them galvanizes collective action and deepens devotion to leaders. Unable to be reformed, opponents must be destroyed.

Trumpism revives these mythic structures. This fact is nowhere clearer than in QAnon, the sprawling super-conspiracy centered on three beliefs: first, the government, mainstream media, and élite financial institutions are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles who exploit children in a global sex-trafficking ring. Second, Donald Trump was recruited in a secret campaign to dismantle the cabal. Third, there will come a moment, “the Storm,” when mass arrests and public reckonings will purge the country of evil and restore the rightful to power.

QAnon arose during Trump’s first Presidency, growing from obscure online chatter into a mass movement. Its adherents numbered in the tens of thousands in 2018 and surged to millions by 2020. After Biden was inaugurated, in 2021, QAnon seemed like it might fizzle. Its central predictions—that Trump would win, that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, that televised tribunals would expose hidden debaucheries—failed to materialize. Q, the anonymous figure whose posts drove the movement’s folklore, stopped writing on message boards.

But the creed didn’t die. Like a spore-filled fungus, it ruptured, disseminating itself across the far right. By the end of 2021, polling by the Public Religion Research Institute revealed that more than one in six Americans accepted QAnon’s core beliefs, while only a third completely rejected the doctrine. Prophecies about salvation, spiritual warfare, and diabolic foes merged seamlessly into American evangelicalism; the disorientation of the pandemic deepened the appeal, and Q’s ideas found believers among yoga instructors, wellness influencers, and suburban moms.

The normalization of QAnon has coincided with a broader reënchantment. Astrology is booming, especially among millennials. Instagram teems with tarot, spell jars, and manifestation memes. WitchTok garners billions of views. In the 2021 census, “shamanism” ranked as the fastest-growing self-reported religion in England and Wales, beating out Zoroastrianism and Rastafari. Atheists, too, are feeling the vibes, with more than a quarter telling Pew, in 2023, that they’ve been contacted by a dead relative.

The two trends are connected. Trust in traditional sources of authority has plummeted. The public’s faith in Congress, the Supreme Court, and the media is scraping historic lows. Even confidence in scientists and doctors—long among the most trusted groups—has fallen. Between 2020 and 2024, the share of Americans who trusted scientists to act in the public’s best interest slipped from eighty-seven per cent to seventy-six per cent, while trust in physicians and hospitals plunged thirty points, to around forty per cent.

This climate of distrust has eroded institutional legitimacy. The German sociologist Max Weber famously observed that societies undergo a “routinization of charisma.” They use rules, procedures, and bureaucracy to tame the instability of magnetic leaders, with authority becoming less personal and more institutionalized. But today that process is unravelling. As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing—astrology, shamanism, divine revelation, and witchy paranoia.

The question, then, is whether the fervor will outlast the figurehead. Trump feels inherent to Trumpism. He also seems to have been uniquely prepared for a populist Presidency by a lifetime in the spotlight, including more than a decade as a reality-TV star. But, if his prophetic aura reflects a deeper, more universal pattern, what happens when he fades away? Does the mythology collapse? Or will a new messiah rise to take his place?

Alice’s power began to fade on September 30, 1987. Museveni’s military located her troops in the Tororo district, some two hundred kilometres from Uganda’s capital. The two armies had clashed many times before. Weeks earlier, Alice’s soldiers repelled his forces, nabbing a radio, AK-47s, and other weapons. This time was different. Museveni’s army encircled them and, for hours, pounded them with mortar fire. Alice’s troops eventually broke the siege, but at a cost. Nearly a third of the forces got separated and misdirected. Her civilian followers escaped into the swamps and lost their way. The battle was one of her bloodiest and most demoralizing.

Alice’s crusade had endured failures before, yet it had always managed to produce a scapegoat, often Alice herself. On at least two occasions, the spirit Lakwena—using her as his vessel, supposedly—rebuked her for disobedience. But, this time, the spell had been broken. Five hundred soldiers left immediately; in the month that followed, the movement bled support. On November 2nd, when Lakwena called on fighters, only three hundred and sixty answered. Days later, this remnant was scattered by Museveni’s army, and Alice disappeared into Kenya.

In interviews with Alice’s former soldiers, the German anthropologist Heike Behrend came across numerous theories for the defeat: the spirit Lakwena had punished them; it had deserted Alice for defying orders; Alice was a witch; Museveni had hired a “witch doctor” from far away who supplied his army with medicines powerful enough to counteract Lakwena’s blessings.

Yet, through another viewpoint, Alice’s movement didn’t die. It evolved. New prophets competed to revive her army in their image. Her father, Severino Lukoya, attracted two thousand followers and preached his own brand of end-time revelations, which centered on a “New World” in which God, humans, angels, and animals coexisted peacefully. His tenure was short-lived, however: within a year, he was declared a sinner and imprisoned by another Acholi prophet: Joseph Kony.

Claiming to be Alice’s cousin, Kony hijacked her campaign, turning it crueller and more militaristic. He made familiar promises of destroying evil and ushering in an age free of suffering, yet his techniques were more grotesque. He named his organization the Lord’s Resistance Army, and it became notorious for abducting tens of thousands of children for sex and warfare. In the nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands, the L.R.A. ravaged communities across east and central Africa, displacing some two million people and provoking the United States to spend millions a month to try to stop it. All the while, Kony retained his prophetic posture. In 2004, after the Ugandan President reportedly reached out for peace talks, Kony replied, “I will communicate with Museveni through the holy spirits and not through the telephone.”

Kony’s cannibalization of Alice Lakwena’s movement carries a dark lesson. Prophets may fail. Their predictions may go unfulfilled. They may die or abandon their followers when ruin is imminent. Yet new narratives can emerge to justify the collapse: the prophet was false; we were betrayed; the enemy had unnatural powers. Whatever the story, prophetic energy can survive, awaiting a new commander to channel it toward a more ambitious purification.

Trump is brusque and erratic, but he is far from irreplaceable. Although he has no clear successor, there are numerous contenders who orbit his office like hungry ghosts. These include the dynastic heirs (Donald Trump, Jr.), the administrative acolytes (J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi), and the new-media influencers (Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon). Carlson, for his part, has begun speaking in occult terms, claiming this past November that he was “physically mauled” by a “demon.” Whether any of them will manage to consolidate Trump’s power remains to be seen. But unless the grievances that fuelled his apotheosis are reckoned with, his downfall may only clear the stage for someone else—more polished, more destructive, more ruthless—to ascend his holy throne and finish what he began.

Download Manvir Singh - Shamanism (2024) from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Manvir+Singh

ABOUT THE BOOK

From a brilliant, young, Harvard-trained anthropologist and contributor to The New Yorker comes a fascinating investigation into the spiritual practice of shamanism, from its beginnings to the present moment, for readers disaffected with organized religion who seek a more personal approach to spirituality.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 7:28 AM

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

'Weird reluctance to criticize': Expert explains why media ignores Trump's decline

By John Stoehr | May 12, 2025 | 11:27PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/trump-mental-decline/

The Washington press corps saw Joe Biden’s aging, but it doesn’t seem to notice Donald Trump’s. Why? It’s pretty simple, really. Trump acts like a big, tough man. He spends a lot of his time demonstrating his big, tough manhood. Biden never did that. It’s not in his nature. Guess which personality type gets more positive attention from reporters?

So even if Trump lies and lies and lies, even if he inexplicably sways and bops to music for minutes on end, even if he descends into outright gibberish, and even if he demands that you and everyone you know accept as gospel truth his maniacal delusions — even if he does all these things that old men with dementia often do, he’ll never be called old.

Because he looks big and tough.

Fact is, he’s weak. He’s always been weak. And his weakness is always on display, if you’re paying attention, even as he daily demonstrates his so-called dominance. Indeed, there is no other way of putting it honestly.

When you do a thing that triggers a reaction, then pull back that thing as a consequence of that reaction, that’s textbook weakness. That’s what he’s been doing with tariffs since he took office. On again, off again, no consistency, no logic, utter chaos – because he’s weak.

I don’t have much faith in recent polls that show majorities disapproving of his job performance, but I do think they could be useful in one important way: getting members of the press corps to take a harder look at Trump, perhaps even draw a lesson from their time covering Biden, and come to a conclusion about the president.

That said, I don’t have much faith in the press corps, as I say below to Jennifer Schulze. She does, though, and you should take her seriously. She’s a longtime Chicago journalist and publisher of Indistinct Chatter, a newsletter about the news. While the mainstream media has a “weird reluctance” to criticize Trump, she says, independent media and local news reporters don’t. She puts her faith in them. I’m inclined to agree.

John: So the president wore a blue suit to the pope’s funeral. He fiddled with his phone. He chewed gum. He fell asleep. If a Democrat were violating decorum like this, the press corps would be all over it.

Jennifer: Rightwing media will ignore all of it. Mainstream media might mention it in a throwaway sentence or as part of a pundit panel. But I doubt any will do it as a stand-alone story. (The New York Times did do a story on the blue suit, but it was by the fashion editor.) I do expect to see coverage of Trump’s behavior in independent media and in newsletters. That’s been the pattern for years with Trump coverage and especially since the start of the 2024 campaign.

There is a weird reluctance to criticize Trump. The thinking that it’s just “Trump being Trump” or “nothing new here” gets in the way of telling some hard truths about him, his patterns of behavior, etc.

John: That seems to be grounded in the belief that he’s dominant.

Jennifer: The press has always had an odd, hands-off approach to Trump. Now I think it’s driven by fear – of losing access, like the AP and others did; of being called out and then being targeted by Trump, Elon Musk, or the Maga hordes; of angering corporate media owners who seem more interested in protecting their other business interests.

A good test is to ask yourself if a Democrat (like Joe Biden) did this, how would the press cover it? Biden’s polling 100 days in was significantly higher than where Trump is now (52 percent versus 39 percent), yet much of the press seems to buy the Trump spin that he’s all powerful, overwhelmingly popular, etc. Is that because they are locked in the Trump bubble and can’t see what so many of the rest of us see? I think that’s certainly part of it, combined with fear.

John: You have written a lot about local news reporting, and how the administration’s policies are being reported on the ground level. There, representations of reality are very different. Why is that?

Jennifer: The job of local news is to tell stories about real-life community impacts. If a Head Start program is cut by DOGE, there are compelling stories to tell about the families hurt by those cuts.

The same is true if Trump’s tariffs result in layoffs at the local factory. Or if fewer people come to visit the nearby National Park that is a key economic driver for a region. In every case, there are real people who are impacted and telling those stories is what local news does best.

I’d also add that local news does a really good job of covering voter outrage. With some few exceptions, the national media is not capturing the deep anger and frustration we are seeing at these town hall meetings, “Tesla Takedown” protests and marches.

The reporters covering these stories haven’t parachuted in. The people impacted are their friends and neighbors, as well as their audience. All of this is also big news in cities and towns around the country. It’s what people are talking about, it’s hitting their pocketbooks, their livelihoods. Of course, local news is going to be on top of it.

John: Trump’s polling is falling. I don’t expect his behavior to change. He didn’t respond to polling the first time. I doubt he will this time. Even so, polls might affect the press corps’ rose-colored glasses. Thoughts?

Jennifer: Throughout the 2024 campaign, polling seemed to drive almost all the coverage, so I’m very curious to see how much ongoing coverage there is of these various polls that show Americans are pretty upset with everything Trump is doing. Some of the initial headlines are brutal and accurate. ABC News: “Trump has lowest 100-day approval rating in 80 years.” USA Today: “More than 75% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, new poll finds.”

The DC press corps may eventually start to be a little more critical of Trump as his popularity tanks. But I don’t expect any significant changes, at least in the immediate future. It’ll be like turning the Queen Mary with slow, barely perceptible shifts in tone. No matter what, I’m not sure we will ever reach the level of riotous behavior we saw towards Biden. I mean the press was literally screaming at a sitting president. I do expect independent media to continue to be as fearless, as it’s been all along, no matter what the polling shows.

John: I have very little faith in the press corps. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an award-winning reporter said journalists have to regain public trust, and pointed to the “cover up” of Biden’s age as an example of what they need to do better. This, in the context of Trump’s very obvious cognitive impairments.

Jennifer: I think there are pockets of excellent coverage by the mainstream media outlets. NBC News is excellent on everything Pete Hegseth and Signalgate. Reuters, the AP and CBS News are breaking lots of news about the DOGE cuts at the health agencies, National Weather Service, NOAA, etc. The beleaguered Washington Post has had some excellent DOGE cuts reporting. But it’s the independent outlets that are really doing remarkable work.

I agree with media critic Mark Jacob who suggests that the daily media circus at the White House is best covered by a camera and an intern. We need experienced reporters digging up real news, not regurgitating lies from Trump and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

John: The DNC’s new chairmen has said it’s important for the party to build its own media infrastructure. I see movement here and there. First, do you think that’s important and why? If so, what are you seeing?

Jennifer: I’m one of many folks who have long suggested that Democrats – whether it’s the DNC or Congress – must offer the country a daily fact-based counternarrative. That should be the core of any new media infrastructure. Remember the very popular daily COVID briefings from Democratic Governor JB Pritzker here in Illinois? The Democrats should be doing that right now. Don’t try to dream up some new podcast or something like that. Make a commitment to putting someone in front of a microphone every single day to tell Americans the truth. That should include specific stories about the impacts of Trump’s policies, how regular people are organizing, play clips from voters at town hall meetings, share what Democrats are actually doing to push back, etc. There is an information void just waiting to be filled.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 7:43 AM

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

Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like

Story by Maxine Joselow, Hannah Natanson, Ian Duncan | May 18, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-orders-the-government-to-stop-
enforcing-rules-he-doesn-t-like/ar-AA1EZHBy

At the Transportation Department, enforcement of pipeline safety rules has plunged to unprecedented lows since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Trump recently ordered Energy Department staff to stop enforcing water conservation standards for showerheads and other household appliances. And at one Labor Department division, his appointees have instructed employees to halt most work related to antidiscrimination laws.

Across the government, the Trump administration is trying a new tactic for gutting federal rules and policies that the president dislikes: simply stop enforcing them.

“The conscious effort to slow down enforcement on such a broad scale is something we have never seen in previous administrations,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “It amounts to a dramatic assertion of presidential power and authority.”

This account of the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back application of many laws is based on interviews with more than a dozen federal employees across seven agencies, as well as a review of internal documents and federal data. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Trump officials say these efforts will allow the president to swiftly scrap regulations that are burdening a variety of businesses and industries.

“When you have a new regulation, it’s really, really hard on business,” Kevin Hassett, who directs Trump’s National Economic Council, told CNBC on Monday.

“They’ve got to hire all these engineers and lawyers to figure out, ‘What are we going to do with this new regulation?’” Hassett added. “And so by pausing that, already, we’re having a big, massive, positive effect.”

Critics say the administration is breaking the law and sidestepping the rulemaking process that presidents of both parties have routinely followed.

“They’re making across-the-board decisions not to enforce whole categories of standards, and it is of very dubious legality,” said Richard Revesz, who led the White House regulatory affairs office under President Joe Biden and is now the faculty director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

At the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a division of the Transportation Department that enforces pipeline safety regulations, officials have opened five cases against potential violators of those rules since Trump’s inauguration, federal data shows. That marks a 95 percent drop from the 91 cases that PHMSA officials opened in the same period under Biden, as well as a 93 percent drop from the 68 cases in the same period in Trump’s first term and a 90 percent drop from the 52 cases opened in that period under President Barack Obama.

It is unclear whether the Trump administration’s mass firings have reduced enforcement staff at PHMSA and other safety agencies. But the decline in pipeline cases comes as the Transportation Department overhauls its approach to compliance, empowering challenges to enforcement actions and heightening scrutiny of those who carry them out.

On Thursday, the agency issued a proposal that would enable Transportation Department lawyers to recommend discipline against enforcement employees suspected of breaking agency rules. The blueprint also outlines a system for the targets of investigations to complain to the transportation secretary’s office, and seek to have evidence thrown out or a do-over of the investigation.

The proposal says it is designed to ensure that the department’s actions are “fair and free of bias.” But three department employees said that the disciplinary provision and other measures in the blueprint would probably have a chilling effect on enforcement.

“If we lived in a world where there existed a bunch of malicious DOT employees whose mission it was to screw over innocent pipeline owners or car manufacturers, I’d understand the purpose of imposing these guidelines,” one of the employees said. “But the people I know, and have worked with for years, are just trying to make sure everyone follows the rules.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) criticized the proposal in a letter Thursday to PHMSA, saying it creates an avenue for political appointees to retaliate against civil servants.

“Inspectors and investigators will fear that they could be fired just for doing their job — ensuring the safety of the American public,” wrote Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the Transportation Department said in a statement that “the last administration carried out enforcements without sufficient due process, consistency and fairness.”

“We see it differently,” the spokesperson said, adding that the department would focus trucking enforcement efforts on issues such as cargo theft, fraud by brokers and visa issues.

In some cases, Trump has personally ordered a halt to enforcement. The president on May 9 signed a memorandum directing the Energy Department “not to enforce” what he called “useless” water conservation standards for home appliances including bathtubs, faucets, showerheads and toilets.

Devin Watkins, an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that has long fought efficiency standards, praised Trump’s move.

“Federal limits on water and energy use have made appliances slower and less effective, frustrating consumers and limiting their choices,” Watkins said in an email. “President Trump’s new executive order marks a return to consumer choice — allowing Americans to purchase appliances that are faster, more effective and better suited to their needs.”

Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of groups that advocate for energy conservation, said he had never seen such a directive to bypass the standard rulemaking process. He said Trump’s actions may violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to solicit public comments on rules, as well as the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which prohibits the Energy Department from weakening existing efficiency standards.

“It’s patently illegal, so hold your horses,” deLaski said.

At the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, a little-known branch of the Labor Department charged with rooting out discrimination among government contractors, enforcement of equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws has also sputtered.

On Jan. 24, the acting secretary of labor issued a memo instructing staff to “cease and desist” work required by a 1965 executive order that Trump had repealed on Jan. 21, according to four employees and a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post. Since then, the employees said, work at the entire branch has ground to a halt, even though much of it is still mandated by EEO laws from 1973 and 1974 that have not been overturned.

Stalled activities include audits of contractors’ hiring and pay practices to ensure that companies are not discriminating on the basis of race or gender. Complaints have also piled up from veterans and people with disabilities.

And at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump officials have scaled back enforcement of rules intended to curb air and water pollution from power plants, oil refineries, hazardous waste sites and other industrial facilities.

The EPA’s enforcement office has been initiating 19 fewer cases per month on average than the Biden administration during its last year in office, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group. The Trump administration filed 92 cases per month on average during its first three full months in office — February, March and April — the analysis found. The Biden administration brought 111 cases per month on average in 2024. During the first three months of Trump’s first term, the EPA opened an average of 116 enforcement cases per month.

“We are deeply concerned about EPA slowing down or walking away from enforcement, particularly for violations at fossil fuel and petrochemical operations,” said Jen Duggan, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project.

Overall, EPA enforcement actions have fallen during the past decade because of budget cuts and staffing declines. Under Trump, however, a March 12 memo stated that the agency would no longer take enforcement actions that could “shut down any stage of energy production” unless there’s an “imminent” threat to public health.

This directive could benefit the oil and gas sector and could “violate a fundamental rule of enforcement, which is that there should be no favored or disfavored industries,” said David Uhlmann, who led the EPA’s enforcement office under Biden. “No one gets special treatment.”

Spokespeople for the Energy and Labor departments and the EPA did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts on presidential power said the wide-ranging enforcement slowdown in Trump’s second term has no modern precedent.

Trump is “saying across the board that ‘if I don’t like it, I’m not going to enforce it,’” said Peter Shane, an emeritus law professor at Ohio State University and a scholar in residence at NYU. “To my knowledge, no other president has taken that kind of stance.”

Shane said presidents in both parties have taken smaller steps to stop enforcing laws they disliked. Richard M. Nixon refused to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because he opposed busing children to limit racial segregation in schools. Obama deprioritized the deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, leading to complaints from conservatives that the administration was not enforcing certain immigration laws.

With the downturn in enforcement and a possible recession looming, many big law firms have slowed recruitment and hiring for their practices that defend companies against enforcement actions, legal recruiters said.

“Do we see a slowdown coming in the enforcement landscape? The answer, by and large, is yes,” said Lauren Drake, the comanaging partner in the D.C. office of the legal recruiting firm Macrae.

The trend is especially pronounced, recruiters said, at law firms that specialize in defending clients against actions by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Trump administration has sought to shutter the CFPB, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to combat unfair, deceptive and abusive financial practices. In March, the administration fired most of the agency’s workforce, a move that a federal judge has temporarily blocked.

While the litigation plays out, political leaders have instructed CFPB employees not to work on most earlier-stage enforcement cases, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. Since Trump took power, the CFPB has also dropped at least 21 lawsuits against entities including Walmart and Bank of America, a review of news reports and other public records shows.

“CFPB enforcement work is dormant completely,” said Stephen Springer, a managing partner in the D.C. office of the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

“I don’t think anybody expects those enforcement areas to be particularly busy for the next three years,” he said, “unless there’s a dramatic change.”

Julian Mark contributed to this report.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 7:45 AM

THG

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

People keep asking: How can Trump do this?

You should really read some of the stupid shit your idiots have written over the years that I'm pulling up to the top, dummy.

That is why nobody is listening to any of your clickbait and bullshit and why the media is less trusted than it has ever been in history.

Keep putting out daily clickbait trash everyday and driving yourself nuts and see where it gets you. The rest of the world has moved on and doesn't give one single shit what you think about about anything anymore.

That world is dead.

Get used to it. This is your new normal for the rest of your life.

Sweet Dreams.

Shit SEOCND, Gilligan is cutting and pasting what he says to you, and reposting it when he responds to what I've posted elsewhere. Too Funny.

So, Gilligan, how about you show us some of the stupid shit that's been written by political leaders not affiliated with MAGA. And be thorough.

T

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 8:00 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump keeps declaring national emergencies. Why?

Presidential emergency declarations mean emergency powers — and a way around Congress.

by Amanda Lewellyn and Noel King | May 18, 2025, 6:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/413218/donald-trump-nation
al-emergency-declaration-powers-congress-why

President Donald Trump has made a habit of declaring emergencies.

Since he took office for his second term, Trump has issued declarations of emergency at the southern border. On energy and trade. About drug trafficking and cartels, and even the International Criminal Court. In all, he’s declared eight emergencies in his first 100 days, a rate that far outstrips any previous president, including his own first term.

It’s unclear whether all these things meet the legal standard for an “emergency” — a situation so unusual and extraordinary that it can’t wait for congressional action. The US trade deficit with China, for instance, has been the status quo for decades. But by declaring it an emergency, Trump unlocks special authorities that wouldn’t otherwise be available to him.

The question of whether Trump can use his emergency powers this way is currently making its way through the courts . . .

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 9:03 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 THG:

Shit SECOND, Gilligan is cutting and pasting what he says to you, and reposting it when he responds to what I've posted elsewhere. Too Funny.

So, Gilligan, how about you show us some of the stupid shit that's been written by political leaders not affiliated with MAGA. And be thorough.

T

I do not know every detail about Trumptards, other than Trump, because his life is well documented. From my experience with average Trumptards in Texas, I have concluded that they are all crazy, which is why their lives are disappointing and sad. The Trumptards want to punch back at America for not being kinder to them, but Trumptards should be punching themselves in the face because all their problems are the psychological problems that they can't adapt to their environment, and they can't control themselves.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 9:27 AM

SECOND

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

Is Qatar’s Shiny Plane a White Elephant?

May 16, 2025, 6:11 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/16/is-qatars-shiny-plane-a-white-ele
phant/

Cameron Abadi: Qatar has offered to donate a new airplane to the Trump administration to serve as Air Force One—and for potential use by Trump after he leaves office. What sort of transaction is at work here?

Adam Tooze: Yeah, just for the record, the whole business of Air Force One is symptomatic of the state of things right now. I mean, the existing planes, which are so much the emblem of the American presidency in the world, they’re 30 years old. They need replacing—they are well beyond their usual service life. Talks about replacing them have been ongoing for 10 years or more. Trump’s first presidency already occupied itself with the issue. So there’s a real issue here. I mean, it’s not the top national priority, perhaps, but if you’re the president, it’s embarrassing to be flying around in an aircraft of this vintage.

And Trump has been in talks, actually, with the Qatari royal family—the Al Thanis, who are only too eager to help out—for some time about eyeing up one of their various flying palaces. The aircraft in question here is about 12 or 13 years old. Apparently, it’s already gone out of service as a main vehicle for the Al Thanis, so it had been palmed off on Global Jet Isle of Man, I think, a holding company, but this is the aircraft which is up for grabs. It’s valued variously at somewhere between $100 million and $400 million.

But obviously, yes, it’s a blurring of the fundamental lines between household and state, which are fundamental to the emergence of modern politics even in monarchies, let alone in republics where we have a president who is elected and rotates, and the office of state is therefore fundamentally separated from the person. But even in a constitutional monarchy, you would expect a clearer division than is exhibited here. This goes hand in hand with a bunch of other extremely personalistic deals. The Trump family is not shy about meddling in business in the Gulf. The Kushner real estate empire has strong links to various types of Gulf investors. There’s a Trump-branded golf course opening in Qatar as we speak.

But anyone who actually knows anything about Air Force One and aircraft and flying command centers and stuff will tell you that this is no deal at all, because Air Force One has to be a hardened aircraft. It has to have incredibly sophisticated communications equipment. It basically would have to be disassembled and reassembled to confirm A, that it was airworthy and up to the standards that you would want and B, that it wasn’t littered with bugs, various types of listening devices.

And so it doesn’t save any money at all. And to bring this thing into operation as a repurposed American Air Force One command center would require at least as much time as the most optimistic timelines on the Air Force Ones that are under contract. So it’s another one of those Trump spectacles, I think, which serves the purpose of ostentatiously flaunting levels of corruption, but also dysfunction at the heart of American government.

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 12:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

You two little whiny cunts are on the edge today, huh?

Finally figuring out that the world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.

Womp womp

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

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 12:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Looks like Trump is up in all the polls this week. Even the leftiod ones.

Democrats are falling apart. CNN caught singing his praises every week, more and more.

Are you two feeling the walls closing in yet?

Your party is dead and the world you thought you were living in 6 months ago is dead along with them.

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

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

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Sunday, May 18, 2025 3:28 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Looks like Trump is up in all the polls this week. Even the leftiod ones.

Democrats are falling apart. CNN caught singing his praises every week, more and more.

Are you two feeling the walls closing in yet?

Your party is dead and the world you thought you were living in 6 months ago is dead along with them.

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

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

Trumptards are passively playing Russian roulette. Trump actively spins the cylinder and points the barrel at Trumptards, then pulls the trigger to see if Trumptard politicians are smart enough to jump out of the way. Very few are. Mike Pence is one who jumps:

'That neocon traitor': MAGA erupts at Mike Pence over criticism of Trump's policies

By Ailia Zehra | May 18, 2025 | 01:49PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/mike-pence-trump-maga/

Former Vice President Mike Pence said it was disheartening to see President Donald Trump revert to the same kind of rhetoric in his second term that had contributed to the January 6 Capitol riot.

In an interview with NBC aired Sunday, Pence also voiced criticism of Trump’s tariff strategy and various foreign policy choices.

“The initial reciprocal tariffs that he unveiled would be the largest peacetime tax hike on the American people in the history of this country,” Pence said, referencing the broad tariffs Trump introduced on the nation’s major trading partners in early April.

Supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement on social media strongly criticized the former vice president over his remarks, calling him a "traitor"

"Every time they parade Mike Pence out for an interview, he reminds everyone just how much of a backstabbing traitor he really was as Trump's vice-president. Judas," wrote a MAGA supporter on the social platform X.

Another wrote: "Since Mike Pence is once again running his mouth about Donald Trump, let’s remind everyone of that Pence is a traitor. He had both a constitutional obligation and a moral responsibility to challenge the legitimacy of electoral votes from states that mysteriously halted counting in the middle of the night, something unprecedented in American history."

Trump's claims of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 elections were widely debunked.

Another MAGA supporter @RealHickory posted a photo of Pence and wrote: "Do you consider Mike Pence a traitor? Yes or No?" The post received several responses calling Pence a traitor.

Another user wrote: "Mike Pence showing his true colors again - attacking Trump for advocating PEACE while defending the same BS wars that killed our troops and bankrupted America. What a pathetic attempt to stay relevant. This traitor stood by while J6 protesters rotted in jail, and now he's whining because Trump wants to END conflicts instead of starting new ones? Thank God Trump dumped this establishment puppet."

"Oh, look, that neocon traitor Mike Pence runs on Meet The Press to cry about President Trump and a free airplane," wrote another supporter.

In early 2021, amid intense pressure from Trump to reject the outcome of the 2020 election, Pence proceeded with the formal certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's victory. This followed the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, when a mob of Trump supporters tried to halt the certification process.

Later, Pence publicly distanced himself from Trump, criticizing aspects of his conduct and backing political figures who opposed Trump’s endorsed candidates.

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 3:42 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Dan Bongino and Kash they refused to wear clown make-up for this one and a red nose but they seem to confirm Epstein died by jumping from a 2 foot bed, and all that camera mechanical failure, another camera with software malfunction seems to just be Coincidence, move along nothing to see here

meanwhile Zionist Sarah Silverman is all All-In for cancel culture wants to un-do all the vulgar comedy stuff she did

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Monday, May 19, 2025 3:46 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Looks like Trump is up in all the polls this week. Even the leftiod ones.

Democrats are falling apart. CNN caught singing his praises every week, more and more.

Are you two feeling the walls closing in yet?

Your party is dead and the world you thought you were living in 6 months ago is dead along with them.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards are passively playing Russian roulette. Trump actively spins the cylinder and points the barrel at Trumptards

Mayhap he's pointing it right in your face, son.

Keep on being miserable everyday. There are less and less of you choosing to keep doing this to themselves in 2025. I can't imagine there will be too many more of you around at all 10 years from now.

Just a dying breed that couldn't adapt when they couldn't leave the world from six months ago that no longer exists and is gone forever.

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

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 7:34 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:

Mayhap he's pointing it right in your face, son.

Keep on being miserable everyday. There are less and less of you choosing to keep doing this to themselves in 2025. I can't imagine there will be too many more of you around at all 10 years from now.

Just a dying breed that couldn't adapt when they couldn't leave the world from six months ago that no longer exists and is gone forever.

You write like a Nazi marching to victory behind your hero, Adolph Trump. You are a pretty common type in history:

How to Fight Fascism in America — with Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder, a leading historian of authoritarianism, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, joins Scott Galloway to discuss the threats to American democracy, echoes of 1930s fascism, and what still gives him hope.

Which leaders from history does Trump most resemble?
Does the current administration invite a terror attack?
Is the U.S. vulnerable right now?

Download the book On Tyranny at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Timothy+Snyder+Tyranny

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 7:45 AM

SECOND

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

Trump claims tariffs could 'eliminate' income tax

President Donald Trump says tariffs could deliver a financial windfall for everyday Americans — by wiping out their income taxes.

“When tariffs cut in, many people’s income taxes will be substantially reduced, maybe even completely eliminated,” Trump declared in a Truth Social post on April 27. “Focus will be on people making less than $200,000 a year.”

That’s a bold promise, especially considering that only 14.4% of U.S. households earned more than $200,000 annually in 2023, according to Census Bureau data. In other words, if Trump’s vision holds true, the vast majority of Americans would pay no income tax at all.

But don’t celebrate just yet. While Trump is optimistic, experts say the math simply doesn’t add up.

Economists Erica York and Huaqun Li of the Tax Foundation were blunt, explaining in a response on April 28 that “the individual income tax raises more than 27 times as much revenue as tariffs currently do,” and “even eliminating income taxes for a subset of taxpayers, such as those earning $200,000 or less, would require significantly higher replacement revenues than tariffs could generate.”

They estimate that the tariffs Trump has imposed and scheduled as of April 2025 would generate nearly $167 billion in new federal tax revenue in 2025 — covering less than 25% of the cost of eliminating income taxes for people earning below $200,000.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/trump-claims-tariffs-c
ould-eliminate-income-tax/ar-AA1F0jxj

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 8:14 AM

SECOND

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

Attack of the Sadistic Zombies

By Paul Krugman / May 19, 2025 at 5:36 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-sadistic-zombies

Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.

OK, news at 11. Isn’t this what Republicans always do? But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.

And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.

To get a sense of how extreme this legislation is, do a side-by-side comparison of the impact on different groups of Americans between this bill and Trump’s one major legislative achievement during his first term, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It looks like this:

Source: Tax Policy Center and Penn-Wharton Budget Model

The TCJA, like the current legislation, gave big tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. But it also threw a few crumbs to people further down the scale. By contrast, the House Reconciliation Bill, by slashing benefits — especially Medicaid — will cause immense, almost inconceivable hardship to the bottom 40 percent of Americans, especially the poorest fifth.

Medicaid, in case anyone needs reminding, is the national health insurance program for low-income Americans who probably don’t have any other way to pay for medical care. In 2023 Medicaid covered 69 million Americans, far more than Medicare (which covers seniors), including 39 percent of children.

Providing health care to children, by the way, isn’t just about social justice and basic decency. It’s also good economics: Children who receive adequate care grow up to be more productive adults. Among other things they end up paying more taxes, so Medicaid for children almost surely pays for itself.

And although Republican legislation apparently won’t explicitly target childrens’ care, it will impose paperwork requirements that will cause both children and their parents to lose coverage.

Back to the comparison with the TCJA. It's true that 2017 would have looked considerably worse in this comparison if Trump had also succeeded in his attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act, depriving millions of Americans of health insurance coverage. But he didn’t. This time the assault on health care and the tax cuts for the 0.1 percent are part of the same legislation — a “big, beautiful bill,” as Trump calls it. And after some adjustments to make the bill even nastier, it’s likely to pass.

Wait, it gets worse. One of the ways Republicans will try to slash Medicaid is by requiring that adult Medicaid recipients be gainfully employed — or, more accurately, that they demonstrate to the satisfaction of government bureaucrats that they are gainfully employed, which is not at all the same thing.

The belief that many Americans receiving government support are malingering, that they could and should be working but are choosing to be lazy, is a classic zombie idea. That is, like the claim that cutting taxes on the rich will unleash an economic miracle, it’s a doctrine that should be long dead. It has, after all, been proved wrong by experience again and again.

But right-wingers simply refuse to accept the reality that almost everyone on Medicaid is either a child, a senior, disabled or between jobs. A recent article in the Times by Matt Bruenig had a very illuminating chart:

Only 3 percent of Medicaid recipients were non-disabled working-age adults persistently not working — the kind of people right-wingers imagine infest the program. And it’s a good bet that a fair number of these people had extenuating circumstances of some kind.

So what do work requirements actually accomplish? They don’t get lazy people to work. What they do, instead, is take away benefits from people who are legally entitled to aid, because they can’t overcome the paperwork and administrative barriers. Think about it: Low-income adults, even when working, are often employed as day laborers or in other informal ways that don’t generate the right forms. They may lack the formal education to deal with complex reporting requirements. So the people who need help most are unjustly cut off.

Why, then, are Republicans doing this? Part of the answer is to save money: By making the poor even poorer they reduce the extent to which tax cuts for the rich explode the budget deficit.

But I’m actually skeptical that this is the whole story, or even most of it. If you pay attention to what right-wing Republicans do, as opposed to what they say, it becomes obvious that they don’t really care about budget deficits. Oh, they do a lot of posturing, issuing dire warnings about debt and pretending to be deficit hawks. But can you think of a single example in which the U.S. right has been willing to give up something it wants, such as tax cuts for the rich, in order to reduce the deficit?

As I see it, right-wingers’ rhetoric about the budget deficit is a lot like their rhetoric about antisemitism. It’s not something they actually care about. It’s just a club they can use to bash their opponents.

But in that case, why the cruelty toward less-fortunate Americans? Well, as I see it the cruelty, as opposed to the dollars saved, is actually the point. Inflicting harm on the vulnerable isn’t something they do with regret, it’s something they do with a sense of satisfaction.

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 9:04 AM

SECOND

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

A Texas salesman discovers the truth about 'Made in the U.S.A': no one's buying

May 18, 2025 8:20 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/18/nx-s1-5399796/a-texas-salesman-discover
s-the-truth-about-made-in-the-u-s-a-no-ones-buying

VAN MEER: I wanted to see how many people actually would pay for the more expensive made-in-the-USA version.

HORSLEY: The test ran for a couple of weeks and the results were not even close. Of the more than 25,000 people who visited the website and the 600 or so who bought showerheads, not a single one chose the more expensive American-made model.

VAN MEER: I was surprised and not surprised. I was expecting the cheaper made-in-Asia to, quote-unquote, "win," but I was not expecting that the results were this off balance. We sold zero made-in-the-USA versions.

HORSLEY: Maybe that's why at my neighborhood Ace Hardware store, I found more than a dozen showerheads on display, almost all of them made in China. The one exception was a low-flow model called the SaverShower. Rick Whedon's (ph) family has been making them in West Hartford, Connecticut, for nearly half a century.

RICK WHEDON: My dad designed the original SaverShower in 1976. We were shipping 2,000 showerheads a week out of here 'cause everybody wanted to save energy.

HORSLEY: Whedon told me that, along with Ace Hardware, he sells a lot of showerheads through Menards, the big Midwestern chain.

WHEDON: Menards buys from us because we had a U.S.-made product, and we were the only ones they could find. The Ace buyer told me he doesn't think consumers care at all where a product's made, and I kind of think he's right.

HORSLEY: In fact, Whedon's company makes most other models of their showerheads overseas, with the exception of that original water-saving version. It takes eight local suppliers to make the parts for that showerhead, and Whedon says they're getting harder to come by.

WHEDON: When we started this, there were 300 machine shops in Connecticut that turned brass to make parts. Today, there might be 75. There's nobody in the United States that's going to start making showerheads here, even if the tariff were 250%.

HORSLEY: I heard a similar story from David Malcolm (ph), who turned his irrigation expertise to making showerheads in California, about 15 years ago. The regional machine shop he used to buy parts from went out of business when most of their customers left the country. So Malcolm now sources parts from Taiwan.

DAVID MALCOLM: When I go to a hardware store, I - and I'll buy something that has American flag on it, and I'll look very closely at it, and it'll say, made in the USA using global components.

HORSLEY: If you really want to bring this kind of manufacturing back to the U.S., you'd have to restore the whole ecosystem of parts suppliers and skilled workers, and neither shoppers nor the president have shown the patience for that. Trump temporarily suspended his most punishing tariffs on imports from China after just over a month. Van Meer, the Texas showerhead salesman, says there's no telling what comes next.

VAN MEER: The uncertainty is really bad for business owners. What's going to happen after 90 days? Is it going to be 200%? It's going to be lower? We don't know. So it's just going to be very hard to even plan ahead longer than three months.

HORSLEY: Van Meer says he's not giving up on making showerheads in the U.S., but it's not a high priority. He's got 30 American employees on his payroll and needs to keep selling imported showerheads to keep those paychecks coming.

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 11:22 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

Shit SECOND, Gilligan is cutting and pasting what he says to you, and reposting it when he responds to what I've posted elsewhere. Too Funny.

So, Gilligan, how about you show us some of the stupid shit that's been written by political leaders not affiliated with MAGA. And be thorough.

T
I do not know every detail about Trumptards, other than Trump, because his life is well documented. From my experience with average Trumptards in Texas, I have concluded that they are all crazy, which is why their lives are disappointing and sad. The Trumptards want to punch back at America for not being kinder to them, but Trumptards should be punching themselves in the face because all their problems are the psychological problems that they can't adapt to their environment, and they can't control themselves.

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

Agreed, and it's why Gilligan won't find crazy shit said by any others, other than Trump and MAGA politicians.

T

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Monday, May 19, 2025 1:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Meanwhile... in reality.

No good news in the media for Democrats ever. Zero. None, whatsoever.

Your party is dead and your opinions are irrelevant.

May I suggest you move out of my country if you don't like here anymore. I hear El Salvador is nice this time of year.

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

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 1:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Mayhap he's pointing it right in your face, son.

Keep on being miserable everyday. There are less and less of you choosing to keep doing this to themselves in 2025. I can't imagine there will be too many more of you around at all 10 years from now.

Just a dying breed that couldn't adapt when they couldn't leave the world from six months ago that no longer exists and is gone forever.
You write like a Nazi marching to victory behind your hero, Adolph Trump. You are a pretty common type in history:

How to Fight Fascism in America — with Timothy Snyder

Stop making threats and come fight me bitch.

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

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 4:22 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:

Stop making threats and come fight me bitch.

If someone responsible in Indiana, and a Nazi killer, becomes aware of 6ixStringJack, they will extinguish his candle. But even in Germany, millions and millions of Nazis got away with murder, except for a few dozen extremely obnoxious and famous Nazis who were made examples by the American and British legal systems.

Author offers warnings after interviewing former Nazis for decades

By Russell Contreras | May 17, 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/17/author-laurence-rees-nazi-mind-warnin
g-holocaust

Why it matters: "The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History" released in the U.S. last week comes as antisemitism and new authoritarian regimes are rising around the world.

London-based author Laurence Rees tells Axios he wasn't interested in calling out any present world leader or current policy, but sought to examine why former Nazis did what they did and later insisted they were right.

The intrigue: The book was released in the U.S. days before hip hop artist Ye released a song praising Adolf Hitler that is spreading online despite attempts to remove it.

• It also follows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, giving what scholars, journalists and rights groups said was a Nazi salute.

• Last year, President Trump repeatedly said undocumented immigrants were ''poisoning the blood of our country," language echoing the rhetoric of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler.

Yes, but: Rees said he did not write the book to attack Trump because he didn't even know if he'd win the U.S. election. (But Rees knows Trump is a Nazi.)

• "It would be unbelievably presumptuous of me to say, 'Oh, well, here's how this applies in Caracas or in Seoul'," Rees said.

• "So the idea was to write it in such a way that the reader, whilst reading it, makes those links themselves, depending on where and when they are."

Download all Laurence Rees’ books for free from mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?&req=Laurence+Rees

Quote:
Introduction to "The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History"

I first met a former member of the Waffen SS, the Nazis’ elite fighting force,1 while researching a television documentary in Austria in 1990. It was an extraordinary experience.

Not only was he intelligent and amiable – it was easy to understand how, after the war, he had forged a career as a senior executive with a German car company – but I soon discovered over our lunch that while he managed to function extremely successfully in the present, his view of the past was a fantasy: an alternative history in which the Third Reich had been a ‘golden era’, the war had not been Germany’s fault and the Jews had been a ‘problem’ that had to be dealt with ‘one way or another’. His eight years of imprisonment in Stalin’s Gulag immediately after the war had made him even more convinced that the Nazis deserved praise for trying to protect Europe from the ‘scourge of Bolshevism’. Over coffee he said he had agreed to see me because he admired the British, although he criticized Churchill for making the ‘terrible mistake’ of not pursuing an alliance with Nazi Germany, because then ‘we could have both ruled the world’

Ever since that lunch I’ve sought to understand how it was possible for this sophisticated individual to think, long after the end of the war, in the way he did. And in pursuit of that goal, over the intervening years I’ve met hundreds of other people who experienced the Third Reich.

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

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Monday, May 19, 2025 6:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Stop making threats and come fight me bitch.
If someone responsible in Indiana, and a Nazi killer, becomes aware of 6ixStringJack, they will extinguish his candle.

You just keep digging yourself a deeper hole while I laugh at how pathetic you are, buddy.

Hey... How'd you like that 8-1 Supreme Court decision today?

Must really suck to be you when real life is just constantly ripping you back out of that fantasy world inside of your diseased brain all the time in 2025, huh?

At this point, I'm not really sure why you would even want to live here. There are far more of us than there are of you. Maybe you should move out of my country and find one more inclined to your delicate sensibilities.

Maybe Rosie O'Donnel has an extra room in her mansion for you and your imaginary wife and kids and 3 cats?

Too white for you in Ireland still? That's okay...

I hear they've got plenty of vacancies in El Salvador right now and the weather there is absolutely gorgeous.

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

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

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 7:48 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:

Stop making threats and come fight me bitch.
If someone responsible in Indiana, and a Nazi killer, becomes aware of 6ixStringJack, they will extinguish his candle.

You just keep digging yourself a deeper hole while I laugh at how pathetic you are, buddy.

Hey... How'd you like that 8-1 Supreme Court decision today?

Must really suck to be you when real life is just constantly ripping you back out of that fantasy world inside of your diseased brain all the time in 2025, huh?

At this point, I'm not really sure why you would even want to live here. There are far more of us than there are of you. Maybe you should move out of my country and find one more inclined to your delicate sensibilities.

Maybe Rosie O'Donnel has an extra room in her mansion for you and your imaginary wife and kids and 3 cats?

Too white for you in Ireland still? That's okay...

I hear they've got plenty of vacancies in El Salvador right now and the weather there is absolutely gorgeous.

6ix, I'm prospering in America and not leaving it. I guess you don't understand that the German Nazis reorganized Europe because they were not prospering in the system as it was. After the British and Americans beat the shit out of the Nazis, putting millions of them to death, Germany prospered. East Germany, under Russian control, did NOT prosper because Russians are dumber than Nazis.

Trumptards, Nazis and Russians (from the Russian Revolution to 2025) are stupid people who tear things apart because they cannot adapt to things as they are. They cannot prosper because they cannot adapt.

I see Trumptard failure constantly at work. These semi-humans absolutely cannot troubleshoot technical problems. (Or family problems, but that's beyond my caring) They have to be shown the solution. Often they have to be threatened: if you don't use my solution right this second, I'm firing your stupid ass. The most belligerently stupid Trumptards will refuse to adapt and get fired, bringing peace and prosperity to work once the Trumptards are cleared. The same would be true for all of America. MAGA by ridding America of Trumptards. It worked in Germany, once the Nazis died or, if left alive, feared to act on their Nazis impulses because they would be killed. It will work in America. Make Trumptards fearful of being snuffed out. (The family problems I mentioned? With Trumptards, that class of problem isn't solved, but ends with dissolving their families. Divorce. Abandonment. Avoidance. Fleeing the family. If the Trumptard family stays together, they suffer because they won't adapt to the family.)

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

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 7:52 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law

By Adam Serwer | May 19, 2025, 1:34 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/birthright-citizensh
ip-trump-supreme-court/682823/

The Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law is a kind of arson: It is setting so many blazes that the fire department is having trouble putting them all out at once. Last week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to cut off the water.

Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants—which flagrantly overrides law, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment—has, at least for now, reached the justices primarily as a procedural question. At issue during oral argument before the Court was the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions put in place by district-court judges, rather than the merits of the order itself.

Nationwide injunctions are not an inherently partisan issue—leaders of both parties have complained at one point or another about an overreaching federal judge. But in this case, allowing the federal government to revoke birthright citizenship would create a logistical nightmare for states that would have to figure out how to verify the citizenship of babies in order to allocate or administer benefits. An entire class of stateless infants would be created overnight. Indeed, one could imagine a ruling that narrows the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions to specific circumstances but that would still allow for such an injunction in this extraordinary case. That may be where the justices are headed, although there was no apparent agreement at oral argument on how to do so.

After listening to the arguments, I was convinced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s observation that, in many cases, “universal injunctions” are just the courts “telling the defendant, Stop doing this thing that the court has found to be unlawful.” However frustrating nationwide injunctions may be when you oppose them, they seem preferable to the alternatives floated. Yes, they sometimes lead to judges making overbroad decisions, as with the abortion-medication case unanimously reversed by a very conservative Supreme Court. But the Trump administration’s view that such injunctions are unconstitutional, and that district-court judges should be able to bar the executive order revoking birthright citizenship with respect to only individual parties, would produce even worse outcomes, in which the federal government would be free to trample the constitutional rights of anyone who doesn’t specifically assert them unless the Supreme Court decides to act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor put this in a context that her conservative colleagues might understand. “So when a new president orders that because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, and he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ then he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” Sotomayor asked.

This is more or less what is happening now with birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let Trump run riot over the Constitution indefinitely while narrowing the ability of those affected to challenge violations of their constitutional rights. And its proposed remedy—class-action lawsuits—is something that it also believes to be legally suspect, and that it would presumably attack later. As Solicitor General D. John Sauer made clear to the justices, “I do not concede that we wouldn’t oppose class certification in this particular case.” It was reminiscent of when, during Trump’s second impeachment, his lawyers argued that impeachment was unnecessary because he could be criminally prosecuted; once prosecutions began, those same people argued that prosecuting him was unconstitutional. There is no acceptable way to oppose Trump and his agenda.

At one point, Sauer complained that nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration have been issued in the past four months. His implication was that the courts are out of control. But another explanation is also available: An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here.

Nationwide injunctions certainly aren’t a perfect solution to the problem of a lawless president, but class-action lawsuits are even more flawed. To begin with, a class action requires that a group get a lawyer and persuade a judge to certify it as a class. That’s already a difficult task—and likely not a speedy process—and in doing so, those bringing suit might reveal themselves to the federal government, which now claims that it can clap undocumented people in irons, put them on a plane, deport them to an overseas Gulag in El Salvador, and then refuse to bring them back. Many people likely would not participate for fear of this outcome. Then there’s the fact that the Trump administration has successfully bullied so many white-shoe law firms out of doing pro bono work opposing it that those seeking to assert their constitutional rights may find themselves short of advocates.

Even beyond this nightmarish but realistic scenario, the government’s solution is to impose ever-heavier administrative burdens on the people whose rights are at stake. This is the reverse of how it should be. Having each individual get a lawyer to assert his or her constitutional rights is much more difficult and complicated than one judge telling the government to stop breaking the law.

“Your argument turns our justice system into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Jackson told Sauer. “Your argument says, We get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

To appeal to a higher court, one has to lose a case. Winners cannot appeal, meaning that if the administration lost in the lower courts, a final resolution on the question would be elusive, and a lawless administration could continue to violate the Constitution. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, under the Trump administration’s theory, the government could lose in one part of the country and then decide not to appeal, allowing it to keep enforcing an unconstitutional executive order elsewhere. “The government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court, because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies,” Kagan said.

That’s why the nationwide injunctions are necessary for getting cases to the Court. “If the Court narrows the scope of the nationwide injunction or eliminates it entirely, it means that the administration will have free rein to basically bring these cases in whatever district they want, and they’ll get unfavorable resolutions, and then they just sit on them, and there’s no way to actually get to a final resolution where the court weighs in on the merits,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “They can win by losing by simply sitting on their hands and not appealing any of their losses.”

The argument against birthright citizenship is an entirely ahistorical and atextual one that would restore the antebellum understanding of citizenship, in which one inherits the status of their parents—a kind of “blood guilt” where the sins of the parents are visited on the child. As the legal scholars Anthony Michael Kreis, Evan Bernick, and Paul Gowder dryly put it, “There was, to be sure, one circumstance where the American founders permitted degraded legal status to be heritable, but we hope that it is not one that today’s denationalizers would embrace.” (They mean slavery.)

Sauer, for his part, kept insisting that “the Fourteenth Amendment related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren’t even present as a discrete class at that time.” The Framers could have easily written “the descendants of the emancipated” if they had meant it that narrowly. Instead, they enshrined nonracial citizenship in the Constitution with the phrasing “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Indeed, President Andrew Johnson complained that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, parts of which were later adopted in the Fourteenth Amendment, extended citizenship to “the Chinese of the Pacific States” and “the people called Gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood.” Yes, and that was the point. “A liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt,” Frederick Douglass declared in 1869. “It would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed.”

The text of the Constitution is at odds, however, with the Trumpist project. The conservative legal movement has done what it does best, which is fabricate a historical justification for a contemporary political goal. Former Justice Warren Burger called the transformation of the Second Amendment into a personal right to firearm ownership a “fraud,” but that interpretation of the right to bear arms at least has a long cultural tradition of firearm ownership behind it. Trump’s executive order is an attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment by fiat as the Confederacy would have written it—the precise opposite of the intent of the Republicans who drafted it.

“They wanted everyone to have citizenship. They did not want to leave it up to the political parties, and they wanted it to be clear,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “They said, We’re going to resolve this question of citizenship once and for all, and if we leave it unclear, we’re afraid a future political party who doesn’t share our view of basic equality will have a different view.” That was prescient, although they couldn’t have imagined that the party that would not share that view would be their own.

A few days ago, Chief Justice John Roberts warned in an appearance at Georgetown Law School that the rule of law is “endangered.” One reason for that is Roberts’s own opinion that the president is nigh immune to criminal prosecution for lawbreaking, a finding that has emboldened Trump to ignore the law. Immunity is apparently insufficient, however—Trump also wants the ability to violate the Constitution at will without meaningful resistance from the courts. In the cases involving his deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has already begun to ignore the judiciary and the Constitution. Here, Trump is asking permission. Have the justices learned their lesson yet?

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

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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 9:40 AM

SECOND

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

The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial

The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.

By David Gelles | May 19, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/climate/trump-climate-denial.html

When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.

But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.

The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.

“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.

By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,” he said.

At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.

The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.

Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.

Mr. Trump dismisses the threats posed by climate change, suggesting that rising seas would create more “oceanfront property.” He blames “climate lunatics” for environmental regulations that he says have been a drag on the U.S. economy.

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump declared a national energy emergency, something that experts dispute because the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Mr. Trump has cited the emergency as justification for speeding approvals for oil, gas and coal projects and expanding logging in national forests.

Some agree that reforms to the nation’s environmental regulations were overdue. Complex and lengthy processes to get permits to build pipelines, transmission lines and drilling projects have also meant significant delays for wind farms, solar projects and other clean energy, said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University.

“Permitting as whole in the United States is just a mess,” he said.

But the president has gone much further than just trying to speed up permits. He’s made the American government a global outlier in its denial of science.

“It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Eliminating climate data

At the most basic level, the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s ability to monitor a rapidly changing climate.

Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.

In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”

NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting effort spearheaded by the billionaire Elon Musk, has proposed closing a NOAA observatory in Hawaii that has been continuously monitoring greenhouse gas levels since 1958.

The data collected there were used to create the Keeling Curve, a well-known graph that showed the sharp recent rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The data from Hawaii and other NOAA monitoring stations are shared with scientists around the globe and inform international climate negotiations.

“The lack of scientific data collection is going to harm our ability to understand the natural and physical world,” said Brandon Jones, president of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s also going to impact our ability to provide early warning systems for severe storms or the next wildfire. It’s going to have an impact on lives.”

A spokesman for the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, defended the cuts, saying that the agency was exploring new ways to collect data and did not expect disruptions to weather forecasting.
The capacity to respond

Instead, the White House is trying to shift responsibility to the states. The administration has canceled a FEMA program aimed at making communities more resilient before disasters hit, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” And it said FEMA staffers would no longer go door to door to help survivors after a catastrophe.

In a statement, a spokesman for the National Security Council said that when disasters strike, states must have “an appetite to own the problem.”

“The Trump administration is reforming a broken disaster relief system that has repeatedly let Americans down,” said Kush Desai, an administration spokesman. “Instead of doling out blank checks, the administration is working with state and local governments to proactively make investments and enact common sense policies that prioritize disaster preparedness and resilience.”

As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. There were just three billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 1980, but that total increased to 27 last year, according to data collected by NOAA. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.

Daniel Kaniewski, who served as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator during the first Trump administration, said it made little sense to cut programs that help harden communities against extreme weather.

“The longer we go without these programs, the more risk will accrue to these communities and the nation,” said Mr. Kaniewski, who is now a managing director at Marsh McLennan, an insurance broker and risk adviser. “And soon enough, we’ll all bear the consequences.”

Going into hurricane season, FEMA is being run by an acting administrator with no experience in emergency management. As of May 8, the agency had available about half as many staff members trained to respond to disasters as it did at the same time last year, according to agency documents. That follows months of downsizing at FEMA through resignations and layoffs.

FEMA has recently denied some requests for assistance from Arkansas, where a series of tornadoes in March was followed by a second round of destructive weather, including flooding and hail. It also rejected requests from several counties in West Virginia where February floods caused extensive damage; Washington State, which was battered by windstorms; and North Carolina, which is still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, which destroyed 1,000 homes last year.

Jonas Anderson, the mayor of Cave City, Ark., population 1,994, where a tornado destroyed more than 20 homes and many local businesses, said FEMA’s denial of community assistance was “shocking and disappointing.”

“It’s pretty rough on people,” Mr. Anderson said.

Slashing regulations

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled to end those functions. The administration is shredding the E.P.A.’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.

Mr. Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”

But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems and premature deaths.

Sensing an opening, two major chemical industry trade groups, have asked the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, for a complete exemption from limits on hazardous pollution.

“Rolling back regulations will have a catastrophic effect on health in America,” said Harold Wimmer, the chief executive of the American Lung Association.

Throttling the energy transition

Mr. Trump has made no secret of his hostility toward wind power, along with most of the clean energy technologies that would help the country pivot away from oil, gas and coal and reduce the emissions driving climate change.

But actions by his administration last month shocked many observers. It ordered a stop to construction that was underway on a wind farm off the coast of Long Island.

That wind farm, developed by Norway-based Equinor, had received all necessary permits in 2023 — after nearly four years of environmental reviews — along with $3 billion in financing. The project, which been expected to provide electricity to 500,000 homes by 2027, was about 30 percent complete when the stop work order was issued.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested on social media that the permits had been rushed. Equinor is considering legal action.

“To stop a project that already has all its federal permits is fairly unprecedented, especially at a large scale, like this,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs for Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to promote development in the area around New York City. “It shows how determined they are to hurt this industry.”

The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.

Some Republicans are trying to preserve the tax credits, saying that they have helped drive investment in manufacturing.

“A lot of these members have billions and billions of dollars invested in their districts,” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group.
Alone in the world

The American retreat from climate action has made the United States a global outlier. Nearly every other government has recognized that a hotter planet poses a profound threat to humans and ecosystems. Not the Trump administration, which made the United States the only nation to formally withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit planetary warming.

Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.

Average global temperatures last year were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that nations had been working to avoid. Every fraction of a degree of additional warming raises the risk of severe effects and possibly irreversible changes to the planet. Nations must make deep and fast cuts to pollution to avoid a grim future of increasingly violent weather, deadly heat waves, drought, water scarcity and displacement, scientists have said.

But at this perilous moment, the United States is virtually alone in the world in rejecting climate science.

“Here we see a government that is taking a hatchet to the scientific enterprise,” Ms. Cleetus said. “It’s the kind of destruction that will have implications for a while to come.”

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

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