REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, May 29, 2025 20:26
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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump's distraction machine is working

Trump continues to win the information war. Democrats, the media and the American people are left overwhelmed


Shut the fuck up, cunt.

We get 20 stories of meaningless bullshit and predictions that never come true out of you and Ted every single day for 12 years straight. And that didn't let up at all for a second the entire time Joe Biden* was president either.
The prediction that Trump would sell pardons came true:

Trump pardoned man 1 month after mother attended $1M per person fundraiser

by Julia Mueller - 05/27/25 12:43 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5319932-trump-pardon-paul-
walczak/

Walczak had pleaded guilty back in November, shortly after Trump’s election, to not paying employment taxes and not filing his individual income tax returns, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). He’d withheld nearly $7.5 million in taxes from workers at his health care companies but did not pay those over to the IRS.

In early April, the Floridian was sentenced to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay more than $4 million in restitution. His pardon spares him both from serving time and paying the fees.

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



Nobody cares, faggot.

Do you know what would have made them care? If you and your mindless Democratic syncophants ever once called out bad behavior from the politicians and beaurocrats on your side.

You simply won't.

I do it all the time. All the time.

But you braindead fuck sticks and your corrupt media that does all of your thinking for you never looks inward. Not once.


So you tell me that Trump pardon's some guy I don't give a flying fuck about, and somebody made $1 Million bucks that they don't even need over it, I don't give a fucking shit that this happened.

Why are Nancy Pelosi and her husband worth over $250 Million when she's only made very low six figures her entire life on the taxpayer dole? Why did they make so much fucking money during Covid when they were fucking with everyone's lives and livelihoods?

You don't fucking care.

So don't expect anybody outside of your ever-shrinking bubble to give a shit about this story you're going to forget all about 3 days from now.

Nobody cares.

And that's YOUR fault.

YOU did that.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:03 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 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

How's that rail in California going? I wonder which one will end up costing more and which will be completed first.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
California High Speed Rail is failing to be completed because Democrats are pussies who won't kick the asses of people who are stopping the project.


That would be funny watching them kick their own asses though.

Democrats are the people who are stopping the project, stupid.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66792

But it didn't stop them from burning through BILLIONS over 17 YEARS to get absolutely nothing done so far though, did it?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There are people who are neither Democrat nor Republican. There are an estimated 22 million millionaires in the United States who are just as selfish and stupid as the angry poor white trash Trumptards, and the Trumptards associate them with Democrats, but they are really just rich people who despise Trumptards and anything that they would never use themselves, such as high speed rail. These people take a plane, never a train.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

How's that rail in California going? I wonder which one will end up costing more and which will be completed first.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
California High Speed Rail is failing to be completed because Democrats are pussies who won't kick the asses of people who are stopping the project.


That would be funny watching them kick their own asses though.

Democrats are the people who are stopping the project, stupid.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66792

But it didn't stop them from burning through BILLIONS over 17 YEARS to get absolutely nothing done so far though, did it?

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There are people who are neither Democrat nor Republican.


Bullshit. EVERY REGULATION HOLDING BACK PROGRESS IS BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATS.

Every. Single. One.

I don't give a flying fuck about any rich non-politicians who are "really to blame" for it. They aren't the Democratic politicians that are passing all of these laws and regulations who have the power. They just bought the power. They bought your Democrats and their votes.

So shut the fuck up. We're done listening to your bullshit everyday.

You have no opinion worth the electricity that's being spent powering your internet connection.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:16 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:

Bullshit. EVERY REGULATION HOLDING BACK PROGRESS IS BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATS.

Every. Single. One.

I don't give a flying fuck about any rich non-politicians who are "really to blame" for it. They aren't the Democratic politicians that are passing all of these laws and regulations who have the power. They just bought the power. They bought your Democrats and their votes.

So shut the fuck up. We're done listening to your bullshit everyday.

You have no opinion worth the electricity that's being spent powering your internet connection.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Most of these barely a millionaire and nominally Democrats have all their wealth in their California home, which they violently protect by opposing rail and every other project, from power lines to pipelines to new buildings in their neighborhoods, which would reduce the value of their precious little $850,000 home that would be worth only $100,000 anywhere other than California.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:55 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Media says it’s raising $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin

Tue, May 27 2025 4:21 PM EDT

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/27/djt-trump-media-bitcoin.html

The announcement comes as bitcoin nears record highs and the year’s biggest gathering of digital asset enthusiasts gets underway on the Las Vegas Strip: Bitcoin 2025. The conference helped solidify President Donald Trump’s image as the country’s first “crypto president.”

This year, it’s a full-court press from the Trump White House at the conference, with Vice President JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, crypto czar David Sacks, and other top officials attending.

Funny how government employees and their families are making money from what they regulate . . .

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:10 AM

SECOND

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


Repeat.
When Trump isn't making billion-dollar deals to enrich himself, he is taking million-dollar bribes:

Trump pardoned man 1 month after mother attended $1M per person fundraiser

by Julia Mueller - 05/27/25 12:43 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5319932-trump-pardon-paul-
walczak/

Walczak had pleaded guilty back in November, shortly after Trump’s election, to not paying employment taxes and not filing his individual income tax returns, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). He’d withheld nearly $7.5 million in taxes from workers at his health care companies but did not pay those over to the IRS.

In early April, the Floridian was sentenced to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay more than $4 million in restitution. His pardon spares him both from serving time and paying the fees.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Bullshit. EVERY REGULATION HOLDING BACK PROGRESS IS BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATS.

Every. Single. One.

I don't give a flying fuck about any rich non-politicians who are "really to blame" for it. They aren't the Democratic politicians that are passing all of these laws and regulations who have the power. They just bought the power. They bought your Democrats and their votes.

So shut the fuck up. We're done listening to your bullshit everyday.

You have no opinion worth the electricity that's being spent powering your internet connection.




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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Most of these barely a millionaire and nominally Democrats have all their wealth in their California home, which they violently protect by opposing rail and every other project, from power lines to pipelines to new buildings in their neighborhoods, which would reduce the value of their precious little $850,000 home that would be worth only $100,000 anywhere other than California.

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


I'm not talking about the people voting for the Democrats, although I'm sure plenty of them hold more blame than just their voting patterns... Especially HOA's and any interest groups similar to that with deep pockets to pay off the politicians.

But even then, it all falls to the Democratic politicians and all of the people they appoint.

Don't listen to me. Listen to Ezra Klien. He won't stop talking about it right now. I know you've posted him before and you know who he is.

Democrats have lawyered themselves into absolute gridlock when it comes to getting anything done. Yet somehow they still manage to spend billions every year getting nothing done.



Don't you remember? California used to be paradise dude.

When I was 6 years old my favorite uncle and his family moved to California and I remember the huge party and seeing my cousins for the last time except for once or twice per year after that. That was a lifelong dream of his to move out there. California was the place to be.

Now everything about it sucks.



You just have to stop denying how shit ALL of our major cities have become over the last 20 years. You need to recognize that, and you need to recognize that they were all run by Democrats the entire time.

Until you do that, nobody cares what you have to say about Trump or what he's doing. Democrats have been ruining this country for decades and it's finally boiling over now.

And that's why you lost people in every racial demographic. The only increase the Democratic Party saw in the last election was college educated white women. College educated white women in the 2020s are the most easily manipulated group of people in the history of the entire world.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:33 AM

SECOND

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


America Turns Its Back on the World

Blocking foreign students is an act of self-destruction — and self-betrayal

By Paul Krugman | May 28, 2025 at 5:36 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-turns-its-back-on-the-world



My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.

So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.

So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.

According to Politico, a cable from Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has directed U.S. embassies and consulates to halt all processing of visa applications from foreigners hoping to study in the United States. This is reportedly a temporary measure in preparation for a new system in which would-be students will be screened on the basis of their social media history. And you can be sure that the criteria for denying entry will go far beyond, you know, advocating terrorism. Probably asking “Why was Trump talking to West Point grads about trophy wives?” will be grounds for rejection.

This completely insane policy move is presumably a temper tantrum in response to a court’s rejection of the administration’s attempt to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students, which was in turn a temper tantrum in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands from Trumpists that they be allowed to dictate the university’s hiring and curriculum.

The courts will probably reject this policy move, too, but I worry that Rubio and co. can put enough sand in the gears of the visa process to bring the entry of international students to a near halt. And even if they can’t, the clear message to students that they aren’t welcome (and may be arrested once here) will have an immensely chilling effect.

It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.

We don’t often think of education as a major U.S. export, but it is. International students typically pay full tuition and require little or no financial aid. Here’s “education-related travel,” basically international students, compared with some other major U.S. exports:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

And because international students typically pay full freight, while domestic students often don’t, foreign students help support higher education financially. That’s a big deal. My sense is that most people have no idea how important higher education is as a source of jobs, many of them middle-class. Here’s a comparison of employment in “Universities, colleges and professional schools” with employment in some politically prominent sectors:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Apparently, Making America Great Again means destroying one of our most successful industries.

But wait, there’s more.

International students make up an especially large proportion of graduate students. And if you know anything about higher education, you know that grad students do a lot more than study. More often than not, they participate in research — some of it financed by the government, some of it sponsored by foundations, these days often sponsored by businesses. There are good reasons America’s clusters of high-tech innovation, from Silicon Valley to Greater Boston, are often centered around great research universities. And ambitious international students, sometimes bringing new perspectives, are part of what keeps these research universities great.

Last but not least, international students often get something important from the experience of studying in America that goes beyond what they learn in classrooms and labs. They learn what it means to live in an open society, and bring that knowledge home. We talk about “soft power,” which is very real. But this actually goes beyond that. Educating students from abroad helps to disseminate fundamental American values around the world.

Of course, the people now running things do not themselves accept what people like me consider fundamental American values. They may insist that they’re pro-American, but what they mean by “America” is a land of bigotry where your identity is determined by blood and soil, a land of closed borders and closed minds.

And they must be resisted to save the America I believe in.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:34 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Oh. I guess we're done here now, huh?

Pity.

That was a conversation that was bordering dangerously close to civil on a topic that is actually important, and we just can't have that in here.




But since you're asking. No. Nobody gives a fuck that international students aren't going to be clogging up our colleges.

Seriously. If you're not going to learn any lessons here than that's it. You're never going to see your party win an election again.


And forget about the old playbook chock full of emotional blackmail and emotional manipulation. The only demographic that works on anymore are young college educated white women. Nobody else.

The rest of us have become inoculated to it, and nobody pays any attention to white women whining anymore.

And without that, the Democratic Party has nothing left.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:13 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh. I guess we're done here now, huh?

Pity.

That was a conversation that was bordering dangerously close to civil on a topic that is actually important, and we just can't have that in here.




But since you're asking. No. Nobody gives a fuck that international students aren't going to be clogging up our colleges.

Seriously. If you're not going to learn any lessons here than that's it. You're never going to see your party win an election again.


And forget about the old playbook chock full of emotional blackmail and emotional manipulation. The only demographic that works on anymore are young college educated white women. Nobody else.

The rest of us have become inoculated to it, and nobody pays any attention to white women whining anymore.

And without that, the Democratic Party has nothing left.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I am well aware that 90% of Americans are creatures of emotion, fearful of strangers, scared of other races, terrified of actually working hard, controlled by their lusts for food, sex, alcohol, drugs, money, rest/leisure, novel experiences, all the things immature teenagers want. Too bad those feelings won't get Americans very far in life. That is why Trump is so attractive to some Americans. Trump promised to give them what these childish Americans crave without them doing more than voting once in awhile. But he is failing and when the childish ones notice the failure they will switch to the other political channel. And when they discover that sitting on their fat lazy asses won't get them what they want, they switch back in four years. The flip-flopping of childish Americans between the two parties has been going on all my life. Meanwhile, I actual have goals and purpose that are unstoppable, thanks to how sloppy, lazy, and stupid most Americans are. I'm Monty Burns to their Homer Simpson. Trump is Mayor Quimby and Fat Tony, the gangster, in a dual role.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


If you're done being childish now, here's the conversation we were having.



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

Bullshit. EVERY REGULATION HOLDING BACK PROGRESS IS BECAUSE OF DEMOCRATS.

Every. Single. One.

I don't give a flying fuck about any rich non-politicians who are "really to blame" for it. They aren't the Democratic politicians that are passing all of these laws and regulations who have the power. They just bought the power. They bought your Democrats and their votes.

So shut the fuck up. We're done listening to your bullshit everyday.

You have no opinion worth the electricity that's being spent powering your internet connection.




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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Most of these barely a millionaire and nominally Democrats have all their wealth in their California home, which they violently protect by opposing rail and every other project, from power lines to pipelines to new buildings in their neighborhoods, which would reduce the value of their precious little $850,000 home that would be worth only $100,000 anywhere other than California.

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


I'm not talking about the people voting for the Democrats, although I'm sure plenty of them hold more blame than just their voting patterns... Especially HOA's and any interest groups similar to that with deep pockets to pay off the politicians.

But even then, it all falls to the Democratic politicians and all of the people they appoint.

Don't listen to me. Listen to Ezra Klien. He won't stop talking about it right now. I know you've posted him before and you know who he is.

Democrats have lawyered themselves into absolute gridlock when it comes to getting anything done. Yet somehow they still manage to spend billions every year getting nothing done.



Don't you remember? California used to be paradise dude.

When I was 6 years old my favorite uncle and his family moved to California and I remember the huge party and seeing my cousins for the last time except for once or twice per year after that. That was a lifelong dream of his to move out there. California was the place to be.

Now everything about it sucks.



You just have to stop denying how shit ALL of our major cities have become over the last 20 years. You need to recognize that, and you need to recognize that they were all run by Democrats the entire time.

Until you do that, nobody cares what you have to say about Trump or what he's doing. Democrats have been ruining this country for decades and it's finally boiling over now.

And that's why you lost people in every racial demographic. The only increase the Democratic Party saw in the last election was college educated white women. College educated white women in the 2020s are the most easily manipulated group of people in the history of the entire world.

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

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


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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:39 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:

If you're done being childish now, here's the conversation we were having.
After all these years, do you believe I have something other than contempt for Trumptards? I have called Trumptards semi-humans. I mean it. I have much in common with Charlie Munger, now deceased, and almost nothing with any living Trumptard. Charlie said it well:

Competency is a relative concept. And what a lot of us needed to get ahead was to compete against idiots. And luckily there’s a large supply.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220105024232/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/charlie-munger-warren-buffetts-right-hand-man-just-turned-98-and-has-some-choice-words-about-inflation-ebitda-and-marriage-11641319939

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:46 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

If you're done being childish now, here's the conversation we were having.
After all these years, do you believe I have something other than contempt for Trumptards? I have called Trumptards semi-humans. I mean it. I have much in common with Charlie Munger, now deceased, and almost nothing with any living Trumptard. Charlie said it well:

Competency is a relative concept. And what a lot of us needed to get ahead was to compete against idiots. And luckily there’s a large supply.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220105024232/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/charlie-munger-warren-buffetts-right-hand-man-just-turned-98-and-has-some-choice-words-about-inflation-ebitda-and-marriage-11641319939

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



No. I get it dude. You have an astoundingly simple mind.

Once I sobered up it didn't take me very long at all to suss you out and call you what you were. A static, 2 dimensional character with no personality and nothing interesting to say.

I keep trying to give you chances to prove otherwise, because I truly believe that anyone can pull themselves back off the cliff, but I don't know man... I think you just might be a lost cause.


Just keep doing what you're doing. Keep screaming into the void like an idiot.

Just realize that the void is all you have left now. There's no one left to hear you scream. We left that all behind in the world from 6 months ago that you're still clinging on with every fiber of your being.

It's gone. Forever.

Let it go...

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 1:34 PM

SECOND

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


Why the left gets the far right wrong

The left’s attachment to thinking of politics in “material” terms is causing it to misread the moment.

By Zack Beauchamp | May 28, 2025, 6:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/414503/left-materialism-far-right-trump-e
conomic-anxiety

Zack Beauchamp is the author of The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (2024)

Download a free copy from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Zack+Beauchamp
Quote:
There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation’s birth. In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change.
  
As right-wing populism has surged globally in the past 10 years, the socialist left has advanced a distinctive explanation for its emergence and how to respond.

Their theory: President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders’ ascendance is a symptom of Democrats and other center-left parties betraying their working-class base. These parties’ embrace of free trade and neoliberal cuts to the welfare state cost them core supporters among low-income and non-college voters. When those policies produced painful job losses and stagnating wages, voters grew furious — anger that only mounted after the 2008 financial crisis and the worldwide rise of the billionaire class.

Far-right populists were able to channel that rage into electoral victory by promising to burn the system down. The only way to beat them is to turn sharply to the left — with political parties trying to win back the working class by promising them a bigger and more redistributive state.

Yet this “class-first” theory has repeatedly failed the test of reality. While some research finds economic roots for rising far-right support, studies that compare economic to cultural and ideological factors generally find that the latter two are far more important in both Europe and the United States. Socialist candidates, like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, failed spectacularly to win over either far-right or working-class voters when given a chance in national elections. And attempts by center-left politicians to tack left, like President Joe Biden’s “post-neoliberal” agenda on trade and antitrust, have failed to bring disaffected voters back from the right-wing cold.

Some of the left’s leading voices have, in short, consistently gotten the right’s roots wrong. I think there is a deep reason why: the left’s traditional commitment to a doctrine called materialism.

Materialism is a very old theory of human behavior, most strongly identified with Marx and Engels. In a recent essay defending the idea, NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber locates its core premise as the idea that “agents are acting on their objective interests — more specifically, their material or economic interests.” These “material” concerns are not just one set of interests among many, but the primary ones — the most fundamental and basic forces in shaping human decisions.

“If I wish to be a successful artist, I have to first earn a living; in order to pursue my religious ends, I have to keep my body and soul together,” Chibber explains. “It is not that we don’t value anything else. It’s that there is no other value that acts as a precondition for satisfying higher-order values.”

Chibber is correct to put materialism in this sense at the center of a distinctively socialist analytic, one that profoundly shapes the modern left’s approach to politics. This approach has produced brilliant works of analysis and contributed vitally to left-wing social movements in the past.

However, that does not mean it is (as Chibber claims) a “universal” analytic tool or a “necessary foundation” of left-wing politics. Rather, there are cases where trying to fit a situation into a materialist lens can lead one astray.

The rise of the far right is one such case — and the implications of this particular error are profound.

The materialist dilemma

The typical knock on materialism is that it is “reductionist.” This means, in brief, that materialism reduces humans to simple consumption machines, ignoring all the other things — like love, religion, or ideology — that really matter to people.

This reductionism is, I think, a serious problem for left analysis of the far right.

Because so many on the left are wedded to a materialist account of human behavior, they begin with the assumption that far-right voting has to have some ultimate materialist cause. Voters’ right-wing beliefs on race or religion must ultimately trace back to a material factor (like rage at factory closures being displaced onto immigrants).

There is no room, in this theory, for the possibility that people arrive at beliefs for other reasons. The notion that ideas, values, and religions may have independent causal force — motivating people for their own reasons — is dismissed by some leftists on ideological grounds, even though there’s ample evidence it’s the case today.

Many leftists, Chibber included, protest that this is an unfair critique: an attack on a vulgar strawman rather than a more sophisticated materialist theory. But such sophistication trades greater intellectual coherence for lesser practical utility.

Chibber describes material interests less as necessary ultimate causes than as constraints. He admits there are plenty of cases where people care about non-material interests, but argues that people are only likely to pursue such interests when they experience limited physical constraints.

“As long as agents can satisfy their basic needs, it’s perfectly consistent with materialism for them to abjure further economic gain in order to pursue different ends,” Chibber explains. “But there will be limits to how far they are willing to go, and this is not just the limit of physical viability. Long before viability comes into question, simple physical hardship is often enough to incline social actors to return to the mundane reality of their material interests.”

Such a concession fundamentally weakens materialism’s ability to serve as a guide to understanding modern politics. It shifts the location of analysis away from “objective” material interests to people’s perceptions of those interests — whether they actually believe that their physical security is at stake in any given election, and whether they’re right about those perceptions. These beliefs could all be influenced by non-material factors: A partisan Republican, for example, is more likely to have a favorable view of a GOP tax bill than a Democrat in a similar tax bracket.

Any materialist theory of voting is caught in a dilemma. Either it advances a distinctive, yet wrong, reductionism, or else it is a theory broad enough to provide little distinctive insight. The left’s errors when it comes to the far right generally stem from choosing the former over the latter.

How the materialist dilemma looks in practice

To understand how the materialist dilemma can hamper understanding of the far right, it’s helpful to look at a particular case — Chibber’s analysis of the declining relevance of class in democratic politics.

Voting across advanced democracies is increasingly less connected to class. More wealthy citizens are voting to raise their own taxes, while certain segments of the poor and working class vote for right-wing parties willing to cut benefits they depend on.

Surely this would be an instance of ideological or identity factors trumping material self-interest?

Chibber’s broad materialism allows for such a move. He could simply say that the rise of the welfare state has created a floor of material comfort for everyone, meaning that there is not enough “physical hardship” at stake for voters to prioritize economic concerns over ideological ones.

But to do so would be to betray his own purpose in writing. Chibber’s central argument is that materialism remains the best lens to understand modern politics and guide left-wing movements going forward. If he concedes that voting behavior is no longer driven primarily by material concerns, then that claim is fatally undermined.

So he goes a more reductionist route — positing that “rather than an example of workers acting against their interests, [voting for right-wing parties] is an example of workers trying to pursue them.”

Chibber argues, reasonably, that it is very hard for voters to accurately assess the likely consequences of policy actions. They have to rely on trusted sources, most notably the media and political leaders, to make such judgments. And Chibber’s view is that these sources have simply misled the working class for their own (nefarious) material reasons:
Quote:
If it turns out that the experts on whom I rely are media outlets, political leaders, and community leaders that have interests of their own and benefit from misleading me, then it is very likely that, even though I am acting rationally and trying to defend my interests, I might end up giving my vote to somebody who promulgates policies that are suboptimal or even harmful to me. And in the United States, media and political parties are thoroughly captured by economic elites. The information they provide to citizens is overwhelmingly partisan, even though it is presented in a language designed to appear neutral and concerned. It should be no surprise that people end up voting for parties that do not cater to their interests when the information they receive is systematically biased.
This is preposterous.

In the United States, mainstream media and cultural figures were overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump all three times that he ran for president. They provided no end of information about how his policy proposals would harm the working class, and how his opponents’ ideas would benefit them. He won two out of three times anyway, with an increasing percentage of votes among lower-income and non-college voters.

A more sophisticated version of the argument might blame Fox News and other right-wing outlets specifically for deceiving these voters. But why do people trust Fox more than mainstream outlets with more objective descriptions of policy? To explain that, we need to rely on factors — most notably partisan and cultural identities — so far afield from anything reasonably termed “materialist” that we are no longer operating in Chibber’s universe.

And when you look beyond the United States, to other countries experiencing similar rises in support for far-right parties, the story makes even less sense. No one could seriously claim that the media and cultural landscape across the European Union is systematically biased in favor of far-right parties.

In theory, then, Chibber’s materialism is broad enough to avoid the charge of reductionism. But in practice, his efforts to apply materialism as a theory of voting behavior falls into a reductionist trap.

Beyond materialism

This is not to deny that voters care about material concerns. It’s obvious that inflation was a central reason for Trump’s 2024 victory (inflation that was, in part, caused by Biden’s post-neoliberal policies).

But the issue here is not whether material factors are in any way relevant to modern politics. Individual elections can turn on all sorts of specific factors, ranging from scandals to wars to elderly candidates.

What we’re discussing here is more fundamental. It is the question of why the party system in so many countries has changed, with far-right factions consistently commanding enough support that they are now a viable option for swing voters. This was not the case for most of the post-World War II era; it clearly is now. What changed?

The left continues to favor various poorly evidenced explanations for this, like a revolt against neoliberalism, because it still wants to insist on a distinctively materialist theory of politics. If you believe that, at bottom, the roots of political behavior can ultimately trace back to material interests — that ideas and identities are secondary causal factors — you will always end up looking for material explanations.

Doing so causes many on the left to dismiss what is, to my mind, the best explanation of the far right’s rise — one that focuses on a change to the ideological structure of global politics.

Across the world, an egalitarian vision of democracy and social order has beaten its competitors — leading to the decline of formal hierarchies along racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and caste lines. This manifested in concrete social changes, like the entry of women into the workforce or the end of racially discriminatory immigration regimes, that profoundly unsettled certain traditionally-minded segments of the global population. Far-right parties became their champions.

This is a fundamentally postmaterial account of far-right politics. It argues that the right wins not by channeling people’s displaced economic anger, but by articulating ideas that match their deeply held beliefs, values, and identities.

They did not arrive at said beliefs because of their place in the class structure or assessment of self-interest, but rather because ideas and identity are social facts in their own right. When people go to church or talk to their parents about culture, they listen. And that defines who they are as human beings every bit as much as their role as economic producers, especially in a world where the average voter in a wealthy democracy is orders of magnitude more materially secure than the workers of Marx’s day.

Adopting a postmaterial analytic framework does not require abandoning left-wing politics. You can see voters as driven on ideas without abandoning normative commitments to improving the lot of workers, to bolstering the too-weak welfare state, or even to seeing the existence of billionaires as a crime against democracy and human decency.

In fact, I’d argue, doing so is essential for the left to succeed.

As long as the left insists on materialism as its most fundamental theory of politics, not just one possible account of human behavior but always the primary one, it will continue to misunderstand the sources of its far-right enemy’s power. It will continue proposing the same old slogans, regardless of their political efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that materialism is in some important political sense no longer true.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 2:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't you remember? California used to be paradise dude.

When I was 6 years old my favorite uncle and his family moved to California and I remember the huge party and seeing my cousins for the last time except for once or twice per year after that. That was a lifelong dream of his to move out there. California was the place to be.

Now everything about it sucks.




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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 2:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why the left gets the far right wrong


The left can't figure out the left.

Shut the fuck up until you figure that out first.


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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 2:56 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why the left gets the far right wrong


The left can't figure out the left.

Shut the fuck up until you figure that out first.


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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump will be raping every 401K he can. Could you understand, 6ix?

DOL pulls guidance discouraging crypto in 401(k)s

The Biden administration had required “extreme care” before adding crypto to retirement plan options.

By Nick Niedzwiadek | 05/28/2025 11:05 AM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/28/dol-pulls-guidance-discouragi
ng-crypto-in-401ks-00372223

The Labor Department on Wednesday yanked Biden-era guidance that strongly discouraged employers against offering cryptocurrency in workers’ 401(k) plan options.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the policy was an attempt by the previous administration “to put their thumb on the scale” against cryptocurrency investments.

“We’re rolling back this overreach and making it clear that investment decisions should be made by fiduciaries, not DC bureaucrats,” she said in a statement.

The March 2022 compliance document warned defined-contribution plan fiduciaries — typically employers — to “exercise extreme care” before adding a crypto product to their menu of 401(k) options. Failure to do so could have been considered a breach of their fiduciary duty and exposed them to liability for losses, though the document did not outright prohibit crypto investments.

The policy shift comes as the Trump administration enthusiastically embraces the crypto industry and members of President Donald Trump’s family pursue crypto-related ventures. The Trump-owned parent company of his social media platform, Truth Social, on Tuesday announced plans to establish a “bitcoin Treasury” by raising $2.5 billion from investors.

Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at a bitcoin conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

DOL did not issue a replacement to therescinded document and is instead reverting to a “neutral approach” to crypto and other assets.

************

How Trump is building a crypto empire out of ‘thin air’

Critics say Trump’s growing footprint in the industry could become a new means for corporate actors and foreign entities to influence the administration. President Donald Trump's growing business ties to the $3.5 trillion cryptocurrency market are stirring concern within the industry itself.

By Declan Harty | 05/28/2025 12:07 PM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/28/crypto-trump-industry-memecoi
n-00372101

Washington’s most powerful cryptocurrency champion is starting to become a headache for the industry.

More than four months after he took back the Oval Office, President Donald Trump’s business empire is quickly establishing itself as a new crypto empire.

Its interests in the loosely regulated industry include the digital assets startup World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP memecoin, a risky type of crypto token that launched just before Inauguration Day. Last week, the president appeared at a private gala dinner at his golf club in Virginia for the memecoin’s top holders, sparking national news coverage. And on Tuesday, Trump Media & Technology Group, whose stock is majority owned by Trump, unveiled plans to raise $2.5 billion to finance a bitcoin buying spree.

The Trump family’s fast-growing crypto interests have predictably drawn outrage from progressive advocacy groups, Democratic lawmakers and ethics watchdogs. But they’re also stirring concern within the industry itself. With critical legislation advancing on Capitol Hill, several lobbyists and executives say they are worried that the president could undermine their policy agenda and even jeopardize his own efforts to establish the U.S. as the world’s crypto capital.

“It’s a distraction,” said one lobbyist, who, like several other industry players who spoke with POLITICO, was granted anonymity to speak freely about Trump’s business ventures. “We’re excited to have a president who is enthusiastic about crypto. But the way they’ve done this … it just doesn’t look good.”

Of course, Trump — a one-time crypto critic who once warned that digital assets were “based on thin air” — has brought about a marked change for the industry in the U.S. that has been broadly welcomed by investors. Their support for the administration will be on full display Wednesday when Vice President JD Vance appears at a bitcoin-focused conference in Las Vegas.

Many of the world’s biggest crypto firms were under intense fire from former President Joe Biden’s Wall Street regulators over allegations that they were violating decades-old investor protections. But Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped most of those lawsuits and investigations, while his administration has rolled out a series of industry-friendly proposals such as a plan for the U.S. government to hold bitcoin reserves.

“President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world and revolutionizing our digital financial technology,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest.”

Yet Trump’s reach into the market is causing issues.

Earlier this month, Democrats managed to temporarily sidetrack a landmark crypto bill proposing how to regulate so-called stablecoins — a token backed by an underlying asset like the dollar — by dredging up the president’s connections with the industry. Another crypto executive expects that a separate bill proposing how the SEC and its sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, oversee the industry won’t move forward until after the midterm elections next year because of the uproar over Trump’s ventures.

A third industry official said that while it ultimately is a question about ethics, the ventures are giving crypto’s critics new fodder to bash the industry — reviving their opposition just months after Trump’s election quieted many of them.

The industry’s brewing concerns present a new front in the pushback in Washington over Trump’s increasing footprint within the industry, which critics have warned could become a new means for corporate actors and foreign entities to influence the administration.

“The bottom line here is it’s so inappropriate,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen. “It’s not something we should ever get comfortable with.”

But neither the Trump administration nor the president’s business ventures are blinking.

Trump Media rolled out its plans to start buying bitcoin just days after the memecoin dinner drew widespread backlash, including among some congressional Republicans. House Financial Services Chair French Hill of Arkansas, whose committee is a critical player in pushing through crypto legislation, said last week on CNBC that the $TRUMP memecoin makes his “work in Congress more complicated.”

In his remarks in Las Vegas, Vance, a long-time crypto advocate who disclosed owning more than $250,000 worth of bitcoin last year, will lay out how the administration plans to forge a new and friendlier regulatory path for the industry compared to the Biden administration, a person familiar with the speech said.

Indeed, Trump has promised to give crypto the long-sought “regulatory clarity” that Biden’s watchdogs failed to provide the industry.

And while Trump’s interests in the market could gum up progress on the industry’s policy preferences, crypto and the president appear to be inseparable, with Republicans in control of Washington for the foreseeable future.

“There’s an ideological alignment,” said Nic Carter, a founding partner at the crypto investment firm Castle Island Ventures who has previously criticized the Trump crypto ventures. But, he added, “the crypto industry wants to see results in Washington, and Washington wants this spigot of money to keep flowing.”

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 4:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why the left gets the far right wrong


The left can't figure out the left.

Shut the fuck up until you figure that out first.


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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump will be raping every 401K he can. Could you understand, 6ix?


Yeah. Sure he will.

I don't have a 401k so I don't give a fuck. Good luck, buddy.


Hopefully, for your sake, this story is bullshit like all the rest of them you've ever posted.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 5:16 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:

Yeah. Sure he will.

I don't have a 401k so I don't give a fuck. Good luck, buddy.


Hopefully, for your sake, this story is bullshit like all the rest of them you've ever posted.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist

He is taking self-enrichment to a scale never seen before in America.

By David Frum | May 28, 2025, 8 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/trump-golden-age-cor
ruption/682935/

During his first presidency, Donald Trump collected millions of dollars of other people’s money. He charged the taxpayer nearly $2 million to protect him during the hundreds of times he visited his own properties. He accepted millions of dollars of campaign-related funds from Republican candidates who sought his favor. His businesses collected at least $13 million from foreign governments over his first term in office.

When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor.

The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: “Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.”

Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.

One of Trump’s tricks, throughout his career in office or competing for it, has been to depict the U.S. political system as corrupt from top to bottom. Here’s how the method works.

In August 2015, Fox News hosted the first of the 2016 Republican-primary debates. Trump then led the polls, but he was still generally dismissed as a novelty candidate, certain to fade as summer turned to autumn and the contest became more serious. After all, Trump had briefly led the polls of prospective candidates in 2011 too, but never entered the race. Trump was asked a question that must have looked deadly when it was drafted by the Fox hosts:

Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies; you’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations, saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

The trap set for Trump in this seemingly damning choice is either to justify his support for liberal causes or to condemn himself as a crook who paid bribes for corrupt favors. Trump answered:

I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

The moderator tried to close the trap: “So what did you get from Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi?”

Trump nimbly pivoted and thrust the likely Democratic Party nominee into the trap instead: “I’ll tell you what. With Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.”

Suddenly, a potentially damning image—of Trump grinning for the cameras alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton—was converted from a vulnerability into a weapon. Trump did not care if listeners thought ill of him, so long as they thought equally badly of everyone else. If all were crooked, then the most shameless crook might present himself instead as a brave truth-teller.

“Everybody does it” became Trump’s all-purpose excuse. The excuse worked, to the extent it did, because of widespread disinformation about the “everybody,” the “does,” and the “it.” If Trump and his supporters can defame others, they can dull voters’ awareness of the astounding and horrible uniqueness of Trump’s corruption.

Not all past presidents were great men. Many were highly flawed.

But one flaw is strikingly rare in the men who reached the presidency, even the worst of them. Very few, if any, of our past presidents used the office to gain improper wealth. Their conduct has given rise to plenty of scandals, but almost none of those scandals originated in self-enrichment of the kind that Trump has practiced since 2016.

Ask any American about the worst case of corruption in the nation’s history pre-Trump, and they will likely recall the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974. Two years earlier, burglars hired by Nixon’s reelection committee had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. They were caught. To prevent them from admitting their connection to Nixon, the president tried to mobilize government agencies to suppress the investigation and abused campaign funds to buy the burglars’ silence. Officials obstructed justice and committed perjury to protect the president. In the end, some 48 people were convicted of Watergate-related crimes.

But Watergate was a scandal produced by the struggle for political power. Nixon hoped that the Democratic headquarters might yield material that would help his reelection, and his associates organized the funds to pay the operatives who got caught. Power was the prize; money was only a means.

Watergate was about “corruption” in the sense of abuse of power, not in the sense of peculation and self-dealing. Nixon certainly cared about money, and he was willing to cut corners to keep it. The investigation into Watergate found that he had underpaid his income tax by $432,000 during his presidency. But the money was not gained by bribery or extortion, and the sums were relatively trivial. When Nixon left office, he was in desperate financial straits. He sold his vacation property in Florida and submitted to more than 28 hours of television interviews with the British journalist David Frost to earn a $600,000 fee and a percentage of any profits. He recouped his fortune largely from the nine books he wrote after leaving the presidency, not from ill-gotten gains stashed away during his time in office.

Money scandals, there have been. But the presidents at the center of them have almost always been motivated by misplaced loyalty to others, rather than their personal greed. Warren Harding was no moral exemplar: Sworn to enforce the nation’s laws on alcohol prohibition, he served liquor in the White House at the regular poker games he hosted. He was also a serial adulterer; one of his lovers claimed that he’d fathered a daughter with her. But even Harding’s harshest critics—such as Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, who despised him—regarded him as lax and stupid, rather than corrupt. “Harding,” she wrote, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” Though not a crook himself, he was surrounded by crooks. His secretary of the interior was convicted of accepting bribes to lease government oil reserves to private interests, the scandal that became known as “Teapot Dome” after a landmark feature of the main oil field in question. Harding’s attorney general would later be twice indicted in another scandal, though the jury could not agree on a verdict at either trial, and was suspected of other wrongdoing too, including selling pardons to wealthy men.

Herbert Hoover, who served in Harding’s Cabinet, delivered the final verdict:

Harding had a dim realization that he had been betrayed by a few of the men whom he had trusted, by men whom he believed were his devoted friends. It was later proved in the courts of the land that these men had betrayed not alone the friendship and trust of their staunch and loyal friend but they had betrayed their country. That was the tragedy of the life of Warren Harding.

Ulysses S. Grant likewise indulged and protected crooks, including a close aide and friend, Orville Babcock. Babcock served as the equivalent of a chief of staff in the White House, and was accused of participating in the “Whiskey Ring,” as a criminal conspiracy to underreport liquor sales became known. Grant attested to Babcock’s innocence and helped him escape punishment. Yet Grant did not profit from the whiskey scheme, or from any of the other “rings” that tainted his presidency.

Not unlike Harding, Grant could be naively trusting of former comrades in arms. He believed that men who had been brave in war must also be honest in peace—and that anyone who claimed otherwise was a slanderer.

Again, neither Grant, nor Harding, nor Nixon operated a personal business from the White House. Other presidents and their associates did on occasion accept gifts unwisely. President Dwight Eisenhower lost his chief of staff because the man had accepted an expensive coat and a valuable rug from a favor-seeker. But the gratuities were small and personal, and seldom involved cash. No predecessor of Trump’s ever violated the explicit constitutional prohibition on accepting gifts of considerable value from a foreign power.

Many presidents have tolerated or endured profit-seeking by relatives. Plenty of political families have a Hunter Biden. Jimmy Carter ranks among the most financially scrupulous men ever to have held the presidency, yet he had his embarrassing brother, Billy, who was investigated by Congress for influence-peddling on behalf of the terrorist Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi (he was a registered lobbyist for Libya).

By one hostile tally, Grant bestowed government perks on 42 of his relatives, a degree of nepotism that helped make corruption an important issue in the election of 1872. The Republican senator and legendary civil-rights champion Charles Sumner was disgusted with Grant’s patronage and instead endorsed his opponent, Horace Greeley. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son James also traded on his father’s position. In 1938, The Saturday Evening Post published a detailed exposé of James’s insider dealing.

The Trump family’s exploitation of the presidency, however, has no precedent in the Grants or the Roosevelts or any of the presidential families that followed.

One difference is scale. James Roosevelt made a lot of money by Depression standards, but he did not score dynastic wealth. The Grant relations got government jobs—very cozy, but again, not dynastic wealth. Billy Carter was paid $220,000, which, even adjusting for half a century of inflation, seems hardly worth the brouhaha. The Trumps, by contrast, are using the second-term presidency to accumulate billions of dollars.

The second difference is the degree of separation from the president himself. Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name, but the Republican-chaired committee that went looking into the matter found no link either to President Biden’s decisions or to his personal bank account. But President Trump remains the beneficial owner of the Trump enterprises nominally run by his sons. The ill-gotten gains flow directly to him.

The third difference is the utter lack of conscience in this presidential family. When George H. W. Bush ran for president in 1988, he wrote a letter to his sons warning, “You’ll find you’ve got a lot of new friends.” Those friends, the elder Bush predicted, would ask for favors. “My plea is this: please do not contact any federal agency or department on anything.” Franklin D. Roosevelt was not so strict. Yet when James’s business affairs blew up into a scandal, James published his income-tax returns, submitted to press interviews, and resigned from his role as a White House adviser. He moved to California, volunteered for active duty in the Marine Corps in 1940, and was decorated with the Navy Cross for valor in battle. As for Harding, he came to feel ashamed of his own presidency. According to Nicholas Murray Butler, the then-president of Columbia University and an important figure in Republican politics in the early 20th century, Harding confessed to him: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” This is even more true of Trump, but Trump would never have the self-knowledge or grace to admit it.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were haunted by many fears, but nothing terrified them more than corrupt foreign interference in the affairs of the young republic. They had read in their Thucydides and their Polybius how foreign bribery undermined the Greek city-states. The American Founders were keenly aware of their proximity to the empires of Britain, France, and Spain, each richer and stronger than the nascent United States. The emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbade officeholders from receiving any kind of foreign gift without permission from Congress, was their safeguard to answer that terror of interference.

Today, the United States is rich and powerful. Rather than wait for a foreign government to offer emoluments, a corrupt U.S. president can extract them. The emoluments clause depends on congressional enforcement, backed by the ultimate sanction of impeachment and removal. And if Congress does not enforce it? Then public opinion remains the only sanction. Cynics deny that public opinion matters, but Trump is not one of them. His belief in how much popular disgust for corruption matters is precisely why he and his supporters worked so hard to promote dark legends about rivals: the Bushes, the Clintons, the Bidens. Those stories were not based on nothing, but the closer anyone looked, the less there was to see.

The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 5:34 PM

SECOND

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


A Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses.

By David Frum | May 28, 2025, 12 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/05/the-david-frum-sh
ow-vances-bargain-with-the-devil/682954/

I record this discussion on Memorial Day 2025, the day when Americans honor those who have served America to the utmost of human capability by laying down their lives for their country. It seems a fitting occasion to try to address the monstrous display of self-service we have seen in the past days from the Trump administration, this staggeringly corrupt administration—not just the most corrupt administration in American history, but one of the most corrupt administrations in any democratic country ever.

Two things just from the week’s docket. This past week, President Trump hosted a dinner for more than 200 people who were invited to dinner with the president of the United States because they had purchased souvenir meme coins directly from his company. They paid millions of dollars. Many of them were foreign nationals. We don’t know their names, because those have not been disclosed, but they directly bought access to the president of the United States by putting money into the hands of his own company in exchange, really, for nothing because these are just souvenir meme coins. They’re not worth anything. And everyone who’s invested in them has lost money because they devalue once you’ve had your access to the president. Maybe you’re investing in the hope of continued future access to the president, but they have no function, no purpose, no value. They’re just ways for people who want access to buy it, and buy it directly from the president himself and his family and his companies.

The same week, The New York Times obtained a copy of a letter from inside the Vietnamese government explaining why they were bending their own laws to make possible a golf course—a Trump golf course—in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese government is largely financing, and for which it’s providing land and other services. The letter explained that the golf-course project was, quote, “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Trump personally.”

Since Donald Trump became president, billions of dollars have flowed from Americans and from people worldwide into his pocket—billions of dollars. And the largest share of those billions of dollars has been from his meme-coin business. Some estimate that the president has more than doubled his net worth just since January, all because of these direct payments to him and, of course, these golf courses that he’s opening in the Persian Gulf and in Vietnam, often financed by the host governments looking to achieve Donald Trump’s failure. Sorry—looking to achieve his favor. The projects may be failures, but the favor is real.

Now, some trying to explain what is happening invoke comparisons from American history: Watergate; Teapot Dome, a great scandal of the 1920s; if you’re very historically minded, you may mention the scandals around the Ulysses Grant administration. But all of that falls so far short of the truth, as to create and enter this world of mind-bending alternatives. Donald Trump’s corruption cannot be compared to anything in American history.

I have an article this week in The Atlantic that goes into some of the details, but just to refresh memory: In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was trying to place bugs or get some information from inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. He used campaign funds to hire burglars to break into the premises and do their mischief. And then when they were caught, he organized further government funds and—sorry; not government funds, further campaign funds—to try to buy the burglars’ silence and to use government power to cover it up.

It’s a big, big, serious scandal. But Nixon was not doing any of this to enrich himself. He was doing it to compete and win in a presidential election in a way that was beyond the rules. That was illegal but was not motivated by his personal appetite for wealth and position. Teapot Dome, which was a scandal in the 1920s, involved people in the Harding administration—not President Harding himself—accepting bribes to open government oil reserves to private exploration. And the Grant administration was riddled with all kinds of scandals: people cheating on excise taxes on whiskey, speculating on gold and silver and paper money.

But again, President Grant, although he was protective of the people in his administration who did these wrong things, he himself was completely uncontaminated, as was, as far as anybody knows, President Harding in Teapot Dome. Nixon was contaminated, but he was not taking money. He was using campaign funds to support his reelection in a dishonest and illegal way.

What is happening with Donald Trump cannot be compared. The scale of the self-enrichment—billions of dollars flowing to the president and his family, not just from American donors, which would be shocking enough, but from people all over the world—this can’t be compared to anything in American history. It’s more like something from a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African state. It is a scale—in terms of the money being diverted to the president, it’s on a scale as big as anything the world has seen in the modern era.

You might call it bribery. Except there’s something about the word bribery that conjures up the image that the bribe taker is kind of passive: A bribe taker is in office doing some function, and then there’s a rap on the bribe taker’s door, and there’s the briber offering a bribe to pervert the bribe taker from the bribe taker’s proper, official duty.

What’s going on in the Trump administration is not so passive as that. It looks like Donald Trump is taking the initiative. The Vietnamese were not urging the Trump family, Please, please, please accept a golf course from us. Donald Trump was squeezing them, as they wrote in writing, in a letter published by The New York Times—Donald Trump was squeezing them—to approve his golf course. It wasn’t someone else who said to Donald Trump, Here. Please, take our money. He invented the meme coin—or he and his confederates invented the meme coin—that offered a way for people to seek his favor.

And to back all of this up, at the same time as he was selling these meme coins, his administration has undertaken a series of arbitrary and punitive executive actions that threaten people, If you don’t get in my good graces, bad things will happen to you. As a law firm, you will be punished in various ways unless you submit to me. As a private university, you’ll be subject to personal reactions that we’ll single out a university, and we will say you can’t have foreign visa holders. He has attacked other kinds of businesses and institutions. He’s got this whole tariff schedule that allows him to retaliate against businesses that incur his disfavor. There’s one tariff for Apple. There’s a different tariff for other people. There’s one tariff for businesses in one set of countries, different tariffs in other countries. And the tariffs, of course, can be laid on and alleviated, laid on again, and alleviated according to his personal whim.

This isn’t bribery. This is extortion. This isn’t centering the bribe taker as the target of someone else’s action, but as actually the architect and author of the scheme. And what we’re seeing here is extortion on a kind of scale, again, unlike anything in American history: billions of dollars from people who are seeking favor, seeking to protect themselves from disfavor, and finding ways—not finding ways, being offered by the president and his family ways to buy the favor of the president and his family.

If the president likes you—if you’re a candidate for mayor of New York and the president likes you—you get pardoned for your crimes. If you’re a candidate for the mayor of New York and the president doesn’t like you, he opens an investigation into you. As the president of South Africa said when Donald Trump was lecturing him, “I wish I had a plane to give you.” Because, of course, if you give the president a plane, there’s no limit to what you can get.

It’s hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won’t be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called “shitholes.” Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they’re poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies.

It’s on this day when we ought to honor everything that is good, we ought, also, to hold the measure in our minds of what is happening that is wrong, and not accept easy excuses and not shrug it off and not allow ourselves to find some kind of consolation, that maybe there’s something in the 1870s that is like this. There is nothing in American history that is like this, ever. And if we absorb that knowledge and if we feel it, and if we feel the proper shame and anger, only then will we be in position to take the corrective action that your national duty calls upon you. So much was asked from others on this Memorial Day. That’s what’s asked from you on this Memorial Day.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 6:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Yeah. Sure he will.

I don't have a 401k so I don't give a fuck. Good luck, buddy.


Hopefully, for your sake, this story is bullshit like all the rest of them you've ever posted.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist


Oh, I'm sure it is. Oh boy, oh boy.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:24 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh, I'm sure it is. Oh boy, oh boy.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We (and 6ix) are all capable of believing things which we KNOW to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. – George Orwell

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:31 PM

SECOND

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


The cost of a pardon

Donald Trump is on a white-collar pardon spree.

by Cameron Peters | May 28, 2025, 5:00 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/414757/donald-trump-pa
rdons-white-collar-fraud-corruption

What just happened? Trump pardoned two reality TV stars and a former Virginia sheriff convicted of fraud earlier this week. Today, he also pardoned a labor union leader convicted of failing to report more than $300,000 in gifts.

Why do these pardons matter? Trump’s pardons have — at the very least — the appearance of corruption. Not only is he giving the imprimatur of presidential clemency to those convicted of fraud, but another pardon, issued in April, came shortly after the recipient’s mother donated $1 million to a Trump-affiliated super PAC. Savannah Chrisley, whose parents were pardoned Tuesday, was also a speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

At the Justice Department, Trump’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, tweeted “No MAGA left behind” this week, followed by a threaded tweet praising Trump for pardoning the sheriff.

Who else has Trump pardoned? Lots of people. Trump began his term with a sweeping grant of clemency to some 1,500 January 6 rioters, and has also pardoned people like pro-Trump Las Vegas city council member Michele Fiore, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and other white-collar criminals.

Trump also said today he is considering pardoning the men who planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020; Martin has previously commented that, “On the pardon front, we can’t leave these guys behind.”

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 7:49 PM

SECOND

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


Trump was just asked about the ‘TACO trade’ for the first time. He called it the ‘nastiest question’

By Elisabeth Buchwald | 4:11 PM EDT, Wed May 28, 2025

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/28/economy/trump-wall-street-taco-trad
e-nastiest-question

Wall Street has been riding a historic roller coaster the past few months due to President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats. Now, investors are learning to take his words with a grain of salt — and a bit of salsa, too.

That’s because there’s a new type of trade taking hold: TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, don’t fret too much about Trump’s latest tariff threat and go on a selling spree, because eventually he’ll back down and a relief rally will ensue.

Trump said he first learned of the term, coined by Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong, on Wednesday when a reporter sought his reaction to it.

“I chicken out? Oh, I’ve never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100 and then to another number?” Trump said Wednesday, referring to tariff rates he imposed on imported Chinese goods. (The rate is now 30%, after Trump raised it as high as 145% last month, much to investors’ dismay, only to reduce it a few weeks later.)

Last week, Trump threatened to impose 50% tariffs on goods from the European Union come June 1. Stocks turned lower after his threat, which he doubled down on later in the day, claiming there was no room to negotiate. Two days later, he said he’d wait until July 9 to levy a 50% tariff on EU goods following promising talks. When US markets reopened after Memorial Day, stocks closed well in the green.

Trump said he was willing to delay the move because EU counterparts called him up saying, “Please, let’s meet right now.”

“You call that chickening out?” Trump responded to a reporter at an Oval Office event Wednesday, referring to his recent announcements on EU and Chinese tariff rates.

“It’s called negotiation,” Trump added, saying that part of his tactic can include setting “a ridiculous high number” for tariff rates and going down if he gets other nations to give in to his demands.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” Trump told the reporter, calling it “the nastiest question.”

The China and EU about-faces are hardly the only ones Trump has made on tariffs.

On April 2, he announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries that were set to take effect on April 9. Hours after they took effect, he announced a 90-day pause for all impacted countries but China, saying investors were getting “yippy yappy.”

Translation: US financial markets, particularly the bond market, weren’t taking his tariff changes well.

Indeed, before he announced the pause, markets had slumped and the S&P 500 had been on the precipice of bear market territory, while bond yields spiked as investors sold off US debt.

After the pause was announced, the S&P 500 posted its best day since October 2008.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Oh, I'm sure it is. Oh boy, oh boy.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We (and 6ix) are all capable of believing things which we KNOW to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong


Well since the amount of times you've been proven wrong and have admitted it are incalculable at this point, maybe you should read that to yourself every morning when you wake up and every night right before you go to sleep until it sticks.

Nobody is listening to anything you have to say anymore.

You did that.

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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:18 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:

Well since the amount of times you've been proven wrong and have admitted it are incalculable at this point, maybe you should read that to yourself every morning when you wake up and every night right before you go to sleep until it sticks.

Nobody is listening to anything you have to say anymore.

You did that.
There never was a Nazi in history, or a Confederate slave owner, whose mind was changed about Jews or slaves by reason and logic. Their minds were changed by violence. The effective way to knock those crazy ideas out of their heads was death. Anything less, such as merely losing a war, left the same nonsense swirling around in their heads but no-longer expressed out loud, except in the company of other Nazis, Confederates, or what have you, Trumptards.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 8:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Well since the amount of times you've been proven wrong and have admitted it are incalculable at this point, maybe you should read that to yourself every morning when you wake up and every night right before you go to sleep until it sticks.

Nobody is listening to anything you have to say anymore.

You did that.
There never was a Nazi


You would know, Nazi.


Maybe you want to tell all of your faggot Democratic Party activists to stop abusing Jews and putting up swastikas everywhere.

Yanno... since you just read a headline in an article that programmed you to pretend you give a shit about Jews for the next 5 minutes before you move on to the next thing.

Tool.

Anytime you want to fight, I'll be happy to oblige you.

You'd better bring your insurance card, although you probably won't be needing it where you'd likely be going.



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

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:03 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 would know, Nazi.


Maybe you want to tell all of your faggot Democratic Party activists to stop abusing Jews and putting up swastikas everywhere.

Yanno... since you just read a headline in an article that programmed you to pretend you give a shit about Jews for the next 5 minutes before you move on to the next thing.

Tool.

Anytime you want to fight, I'll be happy to oblige you.

You'd better bring your insurance card, although you probably won't be needing it where you'd likely be going.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
When I was a teenager, there were Ku Klux Klan members in Pasadena TX distributing flyers to motorists on Red Bluff Road explaining how the South would rise again and the inferiority of the decedents of slaves. The sons, grandsons, and great grandsons of those Klan members are today's Trumptards. I know their names, their histories, their sadly defective lives. They remain perfectly aligned with their forefathers. Only a violent death will knock that nonsense out of their heads. Unfortunately, Democrats believe it is evil to kill evil people. The Democrats believe reason and logic will change evil minds to good. That has never worked anywhere on Earth.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:05 PM

SECOND

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


Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Struck Down In Court

By Colleen Curry | May 28, 2025, 08:01pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/05/28/trumps-liberation
-day-tariffs-struck-down-in-court/

Topline

President Donald Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were struck down in court Wednesday as a federal trade court declared the president exceeded his authority by imposing them, delivering a blow to Trump’s signature economic policy — though an appeals court could still overturn the decision.

KEY FACTS

• A three-judge panel at the Couit of International Trade ruled Trump’s tariffs imposed on April 2 should be “set aside,” siding with business groups and Democratic-led states that asked the court to strike the tariffs down as unlawful.

• The judges agreed with plaintiffs’ claims that Trump doesn’t have authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which gives presidents the power to impose some sanctions during national emergencies.

• IEEPA does not explicitly mention anything about tariffs, which plaintiffs argued means that Trump doesn’t have authority to impose them under the law, and the trade court agreed, writing, “Any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.”

• The ruling halts Trump’s tariffs on nearly every country - minus the tariffs on Mexico, China and Canada that were imposed prior to April 2 - but the White House is likely to appeal the decision, and either an appeals court or the Supreme Court could quickly put the tariffs back in effect.

Crucial Quote

Trump’s executive orders covering his “Liberation Day” tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the three-judge panel wrote in their ruling.
Quote:
Regardless of whether the court views the President’s actions through the nondelegation doctrine, through the major questions doctrine, or simply with separation of powers in mind, any interpretation of IEEPA that delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf

What To Watch For

Trump is all but certain to appeal the court’s ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court could put the tariffs back into effect, as Bloomberg noted in April that court has historically been deferential to presidents when it comes to tariffs. It’s likely the dispute will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, though it’s unclear how and when justices could rule on the issue. Trump could also try to impose his tariffs though other laws, but legal experts told Forbes prior to Wednesday’s ruling that other laws would require Trump to go through a lengthier process to impose any tariffs.

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

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025 9:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

You would know, Nazi.


Maybe you want to tell all of your faggot Democratic Party activists to stop abusing Jews and putting up swastikas everywhere.

Yanno... since you just read a headline in an article that programmed you to pretend you give a shit about Jews for the next 5 minutes before you move on to the next thing.

Tool.

Anytime you want to fight, I'll be happy to oblige you.

You'd better bring your insurance card, although you probably won't be needing it where you'd likely be going.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
When I was a teenager,


Nobody cares, liar.

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

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 6:17 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:

Nobody cares, liar.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trumptards inherited their evil dispositions from their parents. Back in 1968, there was angry poor white trash who were bitter about how badly they were doing in America. Jumping forward to 2025, their decedents are still angry. It is very obvious, except not to the Democratic party, why Trumptards do poorly in America, and it is not because of America. Trumptards do poorly because there is something wrong with them.

It took decades for America to finally wake-up to how wrong slave-owners were. The entire culture of slavery was rotten. The evil slave-owners woke America by making war on the country to bring their culture to all states. The Trumptards are waking America about how evil they are. It is not Trump who doing the waking. He is a puppet doing what tens of millions of evil Trumptards want.

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 6:56 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Ignores Brutal Tariff Ruling in Bizarre Late-Night Posting Spree

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

The president made several posts on Wednesday night, none acknowledging a massive ruling against his tariffs.

By Julia Ornedo | May 29 2025 1:09AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ignores-brutal-tariff-ruling-in-bi
zarre-late-night-truth-social-posting-spree/

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

BREAKING! In a major WIN in our powerful lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the illegal and defamatory "Award" of their once highly respected "Prize," to fake, malicious stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, by the Failing New York Times and the Washington Compost, the Florida Appellate Court viciously rejected the Defendants' corrupt attempt to halt the case. They won a Pulitzer Prize for totally incorrect reporting about the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax. Now they admit it was a SCAM, never happened, and their reporting was totally wrong, in fact, the exact opposite of the TRUTH. They'll have to give back their "Award." They were awarded for false reporting, and we can't let that happen in the United States of America. We are holding the Fake News Media responsible for their LIES to the American People, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
7:26 PM ¦ May 28, 2025

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 7:43 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump sent out a remarkable primal scream of frustration. It was a deeply emotional outburst, aimed at Vladimir Putin. It was also both self-pitying and threatening. It might have been the most extraordinary communication ever sent out by a President of the United States of America.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
What Vladimir Putin doesn't realize is that if it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!
May 27, 2025, 4:44 PM

https://thehill.com/homenews/5320633-trump-putin-zelensky-war-dilemma/

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 12:34 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Nobody cares, liar.

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

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


Shut up, faggot.



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

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 1:35 PM

SECOND

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


The Trade Emperor Has Always Been Stark Naked

But it’s a shock to see someone say it

By Paul Krugman | May 29, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-trade-emperor-has-always-been

Punitive tariffs on everyone, including the penguins of uninhabited islands, have been one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, along with epic corruption and abductions by masked men claiming to be federal agents. All of these policies have involved blatant violations of the letter of the law, its spirit, or both. But there has been very little effective pushback.

So it came as a shock yesterday when the United States Court of International Trade suddenly ruled that almost everything Trump has been doing on tariffs is illegal. The Court is clearly right on the merits. But I, like many observers, thought that we were past the point where the merits of cases mattered. It’s gratifying to learn that I was wrong. https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf
https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/about-court

For the past 90 years U.S. tariff policy has been set through a process of negotiation with other countries — we’ll cut our tariffs if you cut yours. The purpose of these negotiations is, in large part, to protect ourselves from our own special interests. Once a trade deal has been struck, Representative Bomfog of Middletown can’t insert a special provision benefiting his district’s paperclip factory.

But the rigidity of trade deals can itself be a problem. What if rapid changes in trade create irresistible pressure to do something, but you don’t want to renegotiate everything? So U.S. trade law creates some safety valves — conditions under which presidents can unilaterally impose temporary tariffs that relieve some of the political pressure. The idea was always that presidents, keeping in mind both domestic economic consequences and relations with our allies, would use that discretionary power sparingly.

It was a very clever system, but one utterly unprepared to deal with a president like Donald Trump.

Until he announced the massive “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, Trump mainly relied on Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, which empowers the president to impose tariffs when imports “threaten to impair national security.” Such tariffs are supposed to follow a quasi-judicial process in which the Commerce Department investigates the claim, reaches a decision, and the president then chooses whether to act:

But hey, this is the Trump administration, so if the president wants his flunkies’ officials’ opinion, he’ll tell them what it is. The result has been a series of absurd claims — Canadian aluminum is a national security threat? — but no real pushback.

But Trump wanted to do much more:

Section 232 and a grab-bag of other measures weren’t going to be enough to get there. So Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president very broad powers under emergency conditions. And so he went ahead tariffing everyone, penguins included.

It turns out, however, that really major tariff changes are subject not to a quasi-judicial process involving MAGA loyalists, but to an actual judicial process involving the Court of International Trade, which is a real court populated by real judges appointed for life.

And the Court, to almost everyone’s surprise, decided to do its job. It basically said to Trump, “What is this economic emergency of which you speak?” Take a crude but useful measure of the state of the U.S. economy, the “misery index” — the sum of unemployment and inflation:

Do you see an emergency there? I don’t, and neither did the Court, which as I understand it demanded that Trump call off his trade war immediately — do not pass Go, do not collect $2 billion in crypto.

Presumably the Trumpists will try to undo this judgment, one way or another — exploiting other loopholes in the law, maybe trying to bully the Court into submission, maybe just defying the Court altogether. But this is a huge political defeat, and Trump has nobody to blame except his own overreach. You can bet that trade negotiators around the world are snickering, and maybe celebrating with TACOs for lunch. (TACO == Trump Always Chickens Out)

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 4:58 PM

SECOND

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


Striking Down Trump’s Tariffs Isn’t a Judicial Coup

Congress, not the executive branch, has the power to enact tariffs.

By Conor Friedersdorf | May 29, 2025, 10:09 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/trump-tariffs-court-
rulings/682964/

The debate over President Donald Trump’s tariffs often focuses on whether they are prudent. Defenders insist that Trump’s tariffs will help make America great again and boost national security. Critics counter that they’ll wreck the economy. But the strongest argument against the tariffs is actually that they are unlawful. Neither the Constitution nor any statute authorizes Trump to impose what he ordered.

Now, months after sticklers for the rule of law began making that argument, it has finally been vindicated: Yesterday, the United States Court of International Trade, the federal court with jurisdiction over civil actions related to tariffs, struck down almost all of Trump’s tariffs in a 49-page ruling. The decision includes a detailed discussion of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the 1977 law delegating increased power over trade to the president during national emergencies, which the White House had cited to support its moves. It concludes that the law does not authorize any of Trump’s tariff orders. https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-66.pdf

Administration officials quickly challenged the ruling’s legitimacy. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “The judicial coup is out of control,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted on social media. But their objections are dubious, not because the judiciary never overreaches, but because at least three features of this dispute make the argument for judicial overreach here especially weak.

First, the Constitution is clear: Article I delegates the tariff power to Congress, and Article II fails to vest that power in the presidency. So the Trump administration begins from a weak position. And the court’s ruling did not arrogate the tariff power to the judiciary, which might have warranted describing it as “a judicial coup.” It merely affirmed Congress’s power over tariffs. Americans need not fear a judicial dictatorship here. Congress can do whatever it likes. Indeed, it could pass a law reinstating all of Trump’s tariffs today without violating the court’s ruling. But Congress is extremely unlikely to do so, in part because Trump’s tariff policy clearly lacks public support; for example, a recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of it.

Second, the plaintiffs in this particular lawsuit include the states of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont––all democratically accountable entities in a federal system where states are meant to act as a check on unlawful exercises of federal power. All of those states asked the court to rule in this manner to vindicate their rights under the law. As Oregon’s attorney general put it, “We brought this case because the Constitution doesn’t give any president unchecked authority to upend the economy.” States controlled by both Republicans and Democrats routinely file lawsuits asking the judiciary to strike down purportedly unlawful actions by the president. There is bipartisan consensus that such judicial review is legitimate, not couplike, and such rulings have constrained presidents from both parties.

Third, when Congress created the Court of International Trade and later defined its jurisdiction, its precise intent was to create an arm of the judiciary that would exercise authority over trade disputes. Congress made a deliberate choice to alter an earlier law vesting that power in the Treasury Department, under the executive branch, and deliberately vested it in a court instead. To quote from the 1980 law that defined its powers, “The Court of International Trade shall have exclusive jurisdiction of any civil action commenced against the United States, its agencies, or its officers, that arises out of any law of the United States providing for tariffs.” Policing whether or not a tariff complies with the law and the Constitution is central, not peripheral, to the court’s ambit.

If the Trump administration kept its criticism of the judiciary to edge cases, where there is real doubt about how the Constitution separates powers, it could plausibly claim to be engaged in the sort of dispute that is inevitable when branches of the federal government are checking one another as intended. That it seeks to delegitimize even this ruling suggests contempt for any check on the power of the presidency, not principled opposition to judicial overreach.

The Constitution explicitly vests the tariff power in Congress, and wisely so: Empowering one person to impose taxes and pick economic winners and losers tends toward corruption and dictatorship. Going forward, Congress should set tariff policy itself, and impeach any president who tries to usurp its authority.

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 5:33 PM

SECOND

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


Trump points to $5.1 trillion in investments from the Middle East that aren’t exactly real

What’s worse than the president pointing to a made-up investment figure? His willingness to make plans to spend some of the money that doesn’t exist.

By Steve Benen | May 29, 2025, 2:22 PM CDT

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-points-51-tr
illion-investments-middle-east-arent-exactly-real-rcna209811

At an Oval Office event on Wednesday, a reporter asked Donald Trump why he never followed through on his threats to impose economic sanctions on Russia. The president never quite got around to answering the question, but he did seem eager to emphasize a completely unrelated point.

“I went to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and [the United Arab Emirates], and we brought back $5.1 trillion,” Trump claimed. “So, I made that money in about two hours, the money that we’re talking about.” After briefly suggesting — without a shred of evidence — that Ukraine has misused U.S. security aid, the Republican went on say, “I’m more interested because I picked up $5.1 trillion and, by the way, got a beautiful big, magnificent free airplane for the United States Air Force, OK? Very proud of that, too.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that the plane from Qatar wasn’t free, and it’s proving to be far more controversial than the White House cares to admit. Let’s instead consider that statistic the president is apparently quite excited about.

If the “$5.1 trillion” figure sounds at all familiar, that’s because Trump can’t seem to stop talking about it. He referenced it a week ago when unveiling the “Make America Healthy Again” report, which came two days after he pushed the same line during a visit to Capitol Hill, which came one day after he repeated the talking point at the White House.

For reasons unknown, the president went on to say last week that the figure might even be “$7 trillion” at some undetermined point in the future.

To be sure, the boast certainly sounds impressive. Americans are apparently supposed to believe that Trump went to the Middle East, met with some officials for “about two hours” and left with investments so enormous, they represent roughly a sixth of the United States’ GDP.

But that’s not what happened.

For one thing, as The Washington Post reported, Trump has started referring to Biden-era foreign investments as his own, pretending that they’re new and that he deserves credit for them. The Post’s report added:

The math behind the White House’s claim that Trump secured ‘trillions’ on this trip is fuzzy even including the contracts that predate his presidency. The sum of the deals is under $1 trillion, but the White House is also counting announcements it made months before the trip, including a vague plan that the UAE said would result in $1.4 trillion in investment in the United States over the next decade. The UAE and White House previously announced that deal in March. The White House did not explain why its announcements included deals that predate Trump’s presidency.

Around the same time, The New York Times took a closer look at the data and reported, “The list of some of the agreements published by the White House left many details vague. The value of the agreements appeared to total about $283 billion.”

If those investments happen, terrific. But they might not happen, and $283 billion is a small fraction of $5.1 trillion.

What’s more, as MSNBC’s Paul Waldman wrote in a piece for Public Notice, some of the money Trump referenced might materialize in future decades. It led Waldman to conclude that the presidential claims amounted to little more than “smoke and mirrors.”

The problem, however, is not just that Trump keeps talking up an investment figure that isn’t real. The problem is made worse by the way that the president appears to be making plans to spend some of the money that doesn’t exist.

At an Oval Office event last week, Trump was asked whether his wildly unrealistic “Golden Dome” idea might be prohibitively expensive. He responded, “We can afford to do it. You know, we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East, and when you think about it, this is a tiny fraction of that.”

But therein lies the point: Trump didn’t take in $5.1 trillion, so making plans to devote those imaginary resources to a missile shield project that won’t work is an enormous problem.

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 7:31 PM

SECOND

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


10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs as 'TACO trade' jab gains traction

Trump has ordered a number of sweeping tariffs driving up costs of imports, but he has threatened far more tariffs than he has carried out, leading some to embrace "TACO theory."

By Shannon Pettypiece | May 29, 2025, 5:46 PM CDT

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/10-trump-threate
ned-backtracked-tariffs-wall-street-embraces-taco-trad-rcna209450

Tariffs were a defining promise of President Donald Trump's campaign, and they have been a defining feature of his second term in office. But just over five months in, many of his tariff proclamations haven’t turned into reality.

While Trump has imposed a number of sweeping tariffs that have been driving up costs for American businesses and consumers buying goods from overseas, he has threatened far more tariffs than he has carried through on.

That has created a climate of uncertainty that has caused some businesses to lay off workers and delay investments, as well as led to volatility in the stock market. Some financial analysts have taken to calling Trump’s on-again, off-again moves TACO trade or the TACO theory — an acronym for "Trump Always Chickens Out." (Asked by a reporter about the phrase, Trump called the question "nasty" and said, "It’s called negotiation.")

Here are 10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs since he took office. Notably, in some cases, like threatened tariffs against Colombia, the administration did win policy concessions in other areas after it wielded the threat. But other tariffs threats have come and gone without other tangible results.

1) E.U. tariffs

In one of his latest tariff moves, Trump threatened last Friday to impose a 50% tariff on goods shipped into the United States from the European Union, saying the European countries weren’t taking ongoing trade talks seriously enough.

Trump said the tariff would go into effect on June 1, but two days later, he delayed it until July 9, after he said he had spoken with E.U. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Trump said she asked for the delay.

Trump had threatened Europe with a 20% tariff as part of his "reciprocal" tariffs announced April 2. But hours after those tariffs were scheduled to go into effect, Trump reduced tariffs on Europe and most other countries to 10% for 90 days to give his administration time to work out individual trade deals. The tariff on European imports remains at 10%.

2) Wine tariff

Aside from the wider tariffs on the E.U., Trump announced March 13 on social media that he would impose a 200% tariff on wine imported into the United States from the E.U. after the E.U. threatened a 50% tariff on American whiskey. That threat came in response to Trump’s earlier tariffs on European steel and aluminum.

The tit-for-tat over alcohol never came to fruition, with European officials saying a week later that they would delay the threatened whiskey tariff until mid-April, pending negotiations with the United States. There have been no tariffs on European wines aside from Trump’s blanket 10% tariff on all imports.

3) Canada and Mexico tariffs

Among Trump’s first tariff targets were the United States' neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Just weeks into office, he signed an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, saying they weren’t doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl across the border.

In response, Canada and Mexico announced their own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, and Canadians began to boycott American brands.

A day before the tariffs were set to be collected, Trump said he was pausing them for 30 days. He said he was making the pause because of actions Canada and Mexico said they were taking at their borders, though a number of those steps were already underway when Trump first announced his tariffs.

Once the 30-day pause was up, Trump said March 4 that the 25% tariffs on Canada would go into effect. But two days after he implemented the tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he said he would pause them again until April 2 for most goods. When Trump announced wider tariffs for nearly all countries on April 2, Canada and Mexico were excluded.

Despite the back-and-forth, there are no tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico that fall under the North American trade deal signed during Trump’s first term.

4) Tariff on films

Trump said May 4 on social media that he was directing his administration to start collecting a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands,” without giving any details about when or how it would be collected.

A few hours later, the White House said that no final decisions had been made and that the administration was “exploring its options.” By the afternoon, Trump said he would meet with industry officials to make sure they were “happy” with his plan. The administration hasn’t taken any action since the initial social media post.

5) Reciprocal tariffs

Trump announced a variety of tariffs on nearly every country in the world as part of his so-called reciprocal tariffs in an event dubbed “liberation day.” Trump said it would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

Those tariffs ranged from a baseline of 10% to a high of 49%.

But on April 9, the day those tariffs were set to go into effect, Trump said he was pausing them until July 2 to have time to negotiate individual trade deals with the more than 90 countries that had reached out to his administration. In the interim, he said, he would put a blanket 10% tariff on nearly all countries.

Since the "reciprocal" tariff pause, Trump has announced just one outline of a trade agreement with the United Kingdom.

A trade court ruled Wednesday that Trump exceeded his authority to impose those tariffs. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling, and for now, the tariffs remain in place.

6) China tariffs

Tariffs against China have been one of Trump’s most consistent threats — he has accused it repeatedly of “ripping off” the United States with unfair trade practices. Trump had ratcheted up his tariffs on China over several months to more than 145% in April, a level that caused businesses to halt shipments coming from China and pause future orders.

But just as the last of the pre-tariff imports from China had arrived in U.S. ports and shipments from China were on track to tumble, Trump said he was lowering the tariffs to 10% for 90 days, giving U.S. and Chinese officials time to begin trade discussions after an initial meeting between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chinese counterpart. Trump left a separate 20% tariff in place related to the country's production of the ingredients in fentanyl.

The trade court ruling Wednesday struck down both the 10% and the 20% fentanyl tariffs, though they remain, for now, while the appeals process continues.

7) Tariff on iPhones

Days after he increased tariffs on China to at least 145%, Trump created a carve-out for iPhones and some other electronics made in China, lowering the tariff rate for them to 20%.

Still, Trump has continued to push for iPhones to be made in the United States, not other lower-cost countries, like India, where Apple has said it is increasingly shifting manufacturing. Trump said last Friday that he would impose a 25% tariff on iPhones and other smartphones, regardless of where they were made, starting at the end of June.

But senior administration officials seemed to walk back Trump’s demands that iPhones be made in the United States, as well as the scope of any potential tariffs. Bessent said it was the chips in the phones, not necessarily the phones themselves, that Trump wanted to see made in the United States.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said a few days later that the administration doesn’t want to “harm Apple,” and he referred to the move as “a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs.”

8) Colombia tariff

On Trump’s sixth day back in office, he ignited a trade spat with Colombia that lasted less than 24 hours. Trump threatened Colombia with a 25% tariff after its president barred two U.S. military aircraft carrying migrants from landing in the country. The United States is a major importer of coffee, flowers and produce from Colombia.

Colombia responded with its own 25% tariff on U.S. products. But it soon said it would allow the flights, and the two countries backed down on their trade war threats.

9) Tariff on dolls

Trump said he would impose steep tariffs on toymaker Mattel — even if it moves its overseas production out of China — after its CEO said it was looking to shift more production out of China but didn’t see it moving to the United States.

“That’s OK, let him go, and we’ll put a 100% tariff on his toys, and he won’t sell one toy in the United States, and that’s their biggest market,” Trump said in the Oval Office on May 8. Trump had said children in the United States would simply have fewer dolls if the cost of the toys increased because of tariffs.

Trump has since suggested that the United States is more interested in bringing higher-skilled manufacturing with a national security element to the country rather than lower-cost consumer goods.

“I’m not looking to make T-shirts, to be honest. I’m not looking to make socks. We can do that very well in other locations,” he said Sunday. “We are looking to do chips and computers and lots of other things, and tanks and ships.”

10) Auto tariffs

Trump announced a 25% tariff on all auto imports effective April 3 that would apply to any vehicle not assembled in the United States, which would account for nearly half of all vehicles sold in the country.

About a month later, he signed an executive order easing some of those tariffs, addressing concerns that they would drive up the cost of cars assembled in the United States with parts imported from other countries.

Trump later said he would reduce tariffs for cars made in the U.K., such as those by Land Rover and Aston Martin, to 10% under a tentative trade agreement between the United States and the U.K. that officials on both sides continue to negotiate.

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

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Thursday, May 29, 2025 8:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I see our number one loser here had plenty of headlines to bitch about today.

Keep us up to date on those topics that you'll forget about by Monday, mkay?



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

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

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