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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 3, 2025 15:57
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VIEWED: 28476
PAGE 44 of 44

Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:30 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Why is the USA being held responsible?
Nobody has held Trump responsible for what he does, which is why his history has been one damn evil thing after another.

When was the last time you saw a wicked person killed before they committed their next evil deed? Probably in the movie Serenity, where River methodically kills numerous evil people. In contrast, Mal has only one evil person to kill, The Operative, and Mal fails time after time to kill him. But Mal does kill someone who asked for Mal's help after a bank robbery.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Your diversion for everything is "trump", innit?

But yanno, it's evil people like you that are the problem. And nobody has held YOU responsible for what you've done, have they?

Nobody has held Biden and his Band of Merrie Neocons responsible. Nobody held Hillary responsible, and nobody held Obama or GWB responsible. There's a lot of karma building up, best you not get caught in your richly deserved portion.

But I have been held responsible for my "evil" deeds with a perfectly serene life.

I have never killed children. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been charged with a crime. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been arrested. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been sued. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been bankrupt. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been divorced. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never cheated on my taxes. (Trump can't claim that.)

I also have never been audited by the IRS, but that is more because the IRS is understaffed due to the Republican Party. (Trump can't claim that. He is the guy firing IRS auditors.)

I never need Secret Service protection because nobody wants me dead. (Trump can't claim that.)

I have never been accused of rape. (Trump can't claim that. He owes $91.6 million to E. Jean Carroll.)

I have never done many things that routinely got Trump Into Trouble.

There are no bumps in my life.

Signym, have you heard of the Russian technique called But-What-About-ism? The Russians used it so that they would not have to respond to their evil deeds involving murdering tens of millions of other Russians. Or Ukrainians. It goes something like "But what about the Indians murdered by American Presidents?"

Signym, you use But-What-About-ism all the time to protect the reputation of your murderous Russians and your child murderer Trump.

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:33 AM

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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:
1/2 a Million people who never belonged here Thanos Snapped out of existence.

Buh bye. None of you will be missed.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
That 1/2 million are still in the USA and very alive.

Oh. They're getting the fuck out. Every single one of them, including their children.

Fuck their children too.

And I don't mean the way you sick Democrat pedophiles do it either. That wasn't an invitation or permission for more bad behavior out of you.

Fuck you, Second.

You've lost everything.

You were warned, now pay the price bitch.

If you don't like it, you can leave with them and see if you like it better over there.

Quote:
Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300,000 deaths — most of them children

Elon Musk’s tenure running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has, according to the academic Brooke Nichols, caused thousands of ‘preventable deaths’

And fuck those made up stats on kids too.

Don't pretend like you give a shit. Your party has been responsible for murdering no less than 70,000,000 babies in the US since the 1970s. And that's not theoretical. That's well documented fact. You have no moral high ground on anyone, and everybody sees that now.

Take your emotional blackmail and shove it up your well-laid ass and bounce on it. It doesn't work on anyone anymore, and using it to fuck yourself is the only use it has anymore.

Nobody wants to hear another fucking word out of you in 2025, you sick, evil, manipulative fuck.

Shut the fuck up. Forever.

You're done. You're finished.

Game Over.

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

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

I wish to remind you that 6ixStringJack is insane. Meanwhile:

Mike Johnson stated on May 25, 2025 in a "Face the Nation" episode: “We are not cutting” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Mike Johnson is wrong: Millions could lose SNAP benefits under GOP bill, analysts find.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/may/29/mike-johnson/SNAP-re
conciliation-bill-tax-cuts-food/

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:38 AM

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

The House passed H.R. 1, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” on May 22.

When Trump signs the bill, he will increase the National Debt by several trillion dollars.

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/05/checking-the-math-on-white-house-gop
-claims-about-big-beautiful-bill/

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 6:42 AM

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

What Trump is doing has been done in Hungary by Viktor Orban

https://andrewtobias.com/those-who-cannot-remember-the-past/

May 31, 2025

From Joyce Vance’s interview with Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele:

After the end of the communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Hungary was the star pupil in the class of new democracies, quickly installing a stable multiparty democracy checked by a powerful constitutional court. Fast forward to 2010, and Viktor Orban was elected at a time when Hungary was reeling, like many countries at the time, from the global financial crisis.

As soon as he took office with a parliamentary majority big enough to allow him to amend the constitution with the votes of only his own party, Orban rewrote the entire constitution, weaponized the national budget against his opponents to destroy their ability to fight him, mass-fired many civil servants to replace them with loyalists, captured the constitutional court, brought most of the media under his control, attacked universities to eliminate academic freedom, used unlawful measures to fight immigration and eventually sidelined the parliament to govern by emergency decree. While it took the world nearly a decade to realize just how bad things were in Hungary, Orban had actually managed to capture virtually all independent institutions and destroy democracy within the first three years of his now 15-year rule.

No one who knew Hungary in the 1990s would have expected it to fall so far so fast. Hungary is now classified by virtually all observers as a “competitive authoritarian” regime, no longer a democracy.

Ring any bells?

And isn’t it odd that America’s Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — has convened each year since 2022 in . . . Hungary?

Professor Scheppele continues:

The U.S. is on the same path as Hungary and Venezuela, whose autocratic leaders moved very quickly to destroy their previous constitutional orders and substitute personalistic rule. In Hungary and Venezuela, wholly new constitutions were written in the first year, and now the Trump administration is trying to swiftly and radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution in the only practical way available – through channeling a whole set of constitution-remaking cases to the Supreme Court that has already been packed in an irregular fashion with Trump-supporting justices.

. . .

Don’t think it can’t happen here. We are far along a path familiar from international examples that runs from democracy to dictatorship. A solid democratic history cannot save a country from autocratic capture once the key institutions that hold the executive in check are severely damaged. And we are witnessing the destruction of those key checking institutions with alarming speed.

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 7:19 AM

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

Remember the 50% tariff on films? Nobody's talked about that in like a month. Remember the 50% tariff on the European Union? Everybody's forgotten about that one.

That's still stated to go on July 9th, but maybe not.

July 9th, but no, there's never been an executive order. It's just tweets. So is that real? Is that not real? Are the courts going to agree with that one? I’ve got no idea.

A court — a real court, with lifetime judges — has ruled most of Trump’s trade war unconstitutional. It is, but we’re all so cynical that nobody thought it would matter.

Another court has put a temporary hold on the order canceling most of the tariffs, although this seems to have been more procedural than a rejection of the basic conclusion.

More at "If You Don't Like Today's Tariffs, Wait A Day"

By Paul Krugman | May 31, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-emergency-trade-discussion-with

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 7:29 AM

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

Brandy Bryant @InkMasterbator
Feb 11, 2025
Canada is preparing for war with the US. Not economic, I mean boots on the ground war. Do you know what an absolute intolerable and unhinged piece of shit you have to be for CANADA to be ready to bitch slap you?

Brandy Bryant @InkMasterbator
Mar 3, 2025
My trump supporting transphobic christian uncle who said I was going to hell for being trans and needed to "Get right with god" murdered his wife and then offed himself the other night. Save me a seat down there!

Brandy Bryant @InkMasterbator
Dec 6, 2024
Elon never spends time with his kids but the day after a CEO gets shot in the streets he's father of the year hanging with his little human shield.

More at https://x.com/InkMasterbator

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 8:46 AM

SECOND

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

Musk drug use on campaign trail sparked concerns: Report

By Filip Timotija - 05/30/25 10:34 AM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5325589-elon-musk-drug-use
-reports/

Alleged drug use by tech billionaire and close President Trump ally Elon Musk on the campaign trail during the 2024 presidential election has sparked concerns, according to an explosive New York Times report published Friday morning.

The article comes as Musk is exiting the Trump administration after a whirlwind several months in which he led efforts to cut down on the government’s size.

Musk told people he was using ketamine so often that it was impacting his bladder, along with utilizing psychedelic mushrooms and taking ecstasy, the Times reported.

The tech executive, who was advising the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) panel on federal government cost-cutting measures, would travel every day with a box containing 20 pills, the Times said, citing individuals who have seen the box and the photo of it. Some of the pills were marked as Adderall.

Musk has said previously that he has a prescription for ketamine.

The billionaire, who heads six companies, spent well north of $250 million to help Trump get elected in November last year. One of those companies is SpaceX, an aerospace firm, that is a significant contractor with the federal government. Because of that government relationship, SpaceX has to maintain a drug-free workplace. The paper reported Musk has gotten advanced warnings of SpaceX drug tests, citing individuals close to the process.

The Times reporting included interviews with dozens of individuals Musk worked with or knew, along with obtaining private messages. Musk and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment sent by the outlet.

When asked on Friday if he was concerned about Musk’s alleged drug use, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters that “the drugs that we’re concerned about are the drugs running across the southern border.”

Musk announced Wednesday that he would be departing the White House as his 130-day period as a special government employee expires.

The world’s richest person criticized the House GOP budget bill, which contains Trump’s legislative agenda, saying the legislation undercuts the work DOGE has done in the past four months.

“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit … and it undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Trump, who earlier this week shrugged off Musk’s criticism of the bill, said Thursday night that he will hold a press event Friday with Musk at 1:30 p.m. EDT.

“This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific! See you tomorrow at the White House,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

According to the Times, some of Musk’s friends have severed ties with the tech billionaire over his public behavior.

“Elon has pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,” Philip Low, a neuroscientist, told The Times.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2024 that Musk has used cocaine, LSD, psychedelic mushrooms and ecstasy at private parties, prompting concerns from board members and executives at SpaceX and Tesla.

“After that one puff with Rogan, I agreed, at NASA’s request, to do 3 years of random drug testing,” Musk wrote in a social media post shortly after that article was published. “Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol. @WSJ is not fit to line a parrot cage for bird [poop emoji].”

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

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Saturday, May 31, 2025 9:13 AM

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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 wants to hear another fucking word out of you in 2025, you sick, evil, manipulative fuck.

Shut the fuck up. Forever.

You're done. You're finished.

Game Over.

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

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

Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American

Trump’s dystopian plan is already underway.

By Hafiz Rashid | May 30, 2025 10:22 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-americans

This is literally Big Brother from dystopian fiction. Literally.

******

Palantir: How Tech Bros Misread Tolkien

Apr 21, 2025

https://informedalarmist.substack.com/p/palantir-how-tech-bros-misread
-tolkien

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Palantiri were magical orbs that could give their users a vision of something taking place far away. Only very powerful and capable beings, such as Saruman the wizard, Denethor the leader of Gondor, and the big baddie Sauron were able to use these seeing stones. But even the very wise could be deceived by what they saw, and using a Palantir led to their downfall.

For a nerd such as myself, the Palantiri are a sinister symbol of hubris and a tool of manipulation. So a red flag went up as soon as I heard about a company called Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and surveillance company that primarily works with the military, immigration control and intelligence communities. I was incredulous that anyone would name their data mining company after a tool that promises foresight but ultimately leads to ruin.

And then I realized that Palantir is one of Peter Thiel’s companies.

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

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 5:33 AM

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

Reverse Robin Hood - The Seven Ugliest Provisions in Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

The Trumpy tax bill that's headed to the Senate has many nasty surprises

By Tim Dickinson | May 31, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-tax-bill
-big-beautiful-seven-ugly-provisions-2025-1235351717/

Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is a reverse-Robin Hood nightmare. It steals from the poor to give to the rich. The 1,038-page version that passed the House will also balloon the deficit by nearly $4 trillion.

The Trump tax bill achieves this feat by extending (and in many cases expanding) tax breaks for the richest Americans, while at the same time depriving more than 10 million Americans of health insurance and regular access to their doctors, by axing $880 billion from Medicaid. It also increases red tape for Obamacare, while allowing other subsidies to lapse, boxing millions more out of their insurance.

The bill is regressive as a matter of tax policy. It will reduce the take-home incomes of bottom 10 percent of income earners by four percent by the end of the decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects. Penn Wharton, Trump’s alma mater, finds that most households earning less than $51,000 will immediately see their after-tax income decrease. Meanwhile, the bill boosts the incomes of the top one percent by nearly $70,000 in the first year alone, giving that elite cohort a collective $124 billion net tax cut.

The Trump bill sorta makes good on Trump’s campaign sales gimmicks — offering temporary, three-year tax breaks on tips (cost: $40 billion); the extra income earned from overtime ($124 billion); and auto loan interest ($58 billion); while also offering a tax credit to seniors, meant as an offset of taxes on Social Security income ($72 billion).

But as passed by the House, the tax bill also has many ugly provisions. Some are related to taxes, like the abolition of taxes on gun silencers, or ending tax incentives for clean energy and cars. Others are just completely extraneous, like language prohibiting state- and local regulation of artificial intelligence for 10 years.

Below is a survey of seven terrible tricks up the sleeves of the Big Beautiful Bill:

1) Undermining the Rule of Law

A provision slipped into the House bill, unrelated to taxes, would have a major impact on the courts and the rule of law. It blocks any funding to enforce contempt of court orders. This, in turn, could enable the Trump administration to flout the rulings of judges without consequence. Erwin Chemerinsky, a professor of law as the University of California, is sounding the alarm that this is an affront to the basic functioning of our democracy. He writes in a post at Just Security that “nothing could be done” to enforce injunctions against the executive branch were this provision to become law — “even when the government had been found to violate the Constitution.” In fact, he adds, “the greatest effect of adopting the provision would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.” These concerns are ripe because the Trump administration’s countless illegal executive orders and actions keep getting turned back in court, and the administration’s compliance — as with falling to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the gulag in El Salvador, as directed by the Supreme Court — has been irregular at best.

2) Rewarding Rich Homeowners

Rich people in blue states have cause to laud the Big Beautiful Bill. It quadruples a tax break that one analysis finds “Overwhelmingly Benefits Wealthy, White Households.” We are talking here about the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction. The tax break has some logic. It is intended to keep folks from having to pay federal taxes on the tax dollars they owe to governments closer to home. The 2017 Trump tax bill limited the deductibility of these payments — once unlimited — to $10,000, to help pay for its sweeping tax cuts for the rich and corporations. That partially preserved a break that’s a boon to middle-class homeowners in blue states with high property taxes, including the Northeast or the West Coast, while stripping it from the vacation home and private-school set.

High earners in states from New Jersey to California have since bridled against the SALT deduction limit, arguing it’s a form of double taxation, and have won over political allies in both parties. Inside the House GOP, a group of lawmakers calling themselves the “very salty” five held up the Trump bill until the SALT deduction was boosted to $40,000 and made available to couples earning up to half-a-million dollars a year.

3) A Boondoggle for Private Schools

On the charitable giving side of the tax act, the House Bill creates a back-door subsidy for private school vouchers. Rich people who donate to nonprofits that hand out vouchers to private K-12 schools will now receive not a tax deduction — usually capped at 35 cents off taxes for every one dollar donated — but a tax credit. Every dollar donated is counted as a dollar paid in taxes. This tax credit not only applies to the value of cash donations, but the market value of stocks. In many cases — as outlined here — donors would be able to reap a greater return on their investments by donating stock that has appreciated in value, and reaping the tax benefits, than by selling the investment and then owing capital gains taxes. The value of this incentive is estimated at $23 billion over 10 years, with the administration subsidizing the flight from public education at the same time it aims to eliminate the federal Department of Education.

4) Leave No Heir Behind

No GOP tax bill would be complete without a giveaway to the scions of billionaire families. The Republican Party has long demonized the estate tax as the “death tax,” inveighing against it as a threat to salt-of-the-earth family farmers. Thanks to Trump’s first tax bill, the estate tax exemption currently stands at nearly $27 million for couples, but is due to fall to about half that, absent a change in the law. The “Big Beautiful Bill” indexes the current exemption to inflation and makes the tax break permanent. A rich couple will be able to pass on $30 million to their descendants without paying a penny of tax next year. According to a letter from Americans for Tax Fairness, “this handout to lucky heirs and heiresses will cost over $200 billion in lost revenue over 10 years.”

5) Shortchange Kids of Immigrants

A MAGA tax bill needs some anti-immigrant juice. And the Big Beautiful Bill provides that by limiting availability of the child tax credit to only citizen children with a citizen parent. The child tax credit is currently available to children with Social Security numbers, so long as their parents have a taxpayer identification number, given to immigrants who pay taxes. The BBB would increase the value of the credit to $2,500, but require that the parent or parents claiming the credit also have Social Security numbers, as a proxy for citizenship status. The change is expected to disqualify nearly two million citizen children in mixed-status households from this vital government support.

6) No Insurance for You!

One of the most controversial changes in the Big Beautiful Bill is to impose a work requirement on supposedly “able-bodied” adults to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. The requirement is spelled out as 80 hours a month of work or volunteering. The implementation is left up to states, some of which are committed to expanding health coverage, but others which have long been ideologically opposed. Enrollees must often navigate a maze of forms and bureaucratic hurdles to establish and maintain eligibility — even before this new work requirement — because Medicaid contains strict income caps. Recipients must prove they are, in fact, poor. The Big Beautiful Bill however adds insult to injury. People who are kicked off Medicaid by failing to navigate the requirements around work and work-reporting, will be punished by becoming ineligible for subsidies for individual insurance plans sold under Obamacare. By design, the Trumpy Medicaid changes will eliminate coverage for 10.3 million people, according to the CBO.

7) Work for Your Supper

Work requirements are fetishized throughout the Big Beautiful Bill, and also apply to recipients of SNAP, the acronym for the federal food assistance program. As passed, the House bill would expand work requirements in SNAP on adults up to the age of 65. (Current work requirements phase out at 55). It would also require parents with children as young as eight to work outside the house, turning another generation of young poor children into latchkey kids. According to modeling by the Urban league, the Big Beautiful Bill — which so richly rewards billionaires and their heirs — would be financed in part by taking food out of the mouths of hungry families. As many as 2.7 million households would lose food benefits, with the average blow to the family grocery budget totaling $254 a month.

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

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 6:00 AM

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

DOGE is on track to cost taxpayers more money than it saved

Elon Musk took a chainsaw to his brand and reputation with nothing to show for it.

By Zachary B. Wolf | 4:00 AM EDT, Fri May 30, 2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/30/politics/doge-musk-government-savings

Despite everything DOGE claimed to do, government outlays are on track to rise by 9% in 2025 compared with 2024.

“Chainsaws and bluster can’t solve the yawning gap between revenue and spending that has led American debt to rise to unsustainable levels,” Stevenson said.

In total, estimates suggest that what has been spent to generate these cuts may be as great as the cuts. In the long run, it’s not clear that DOGE generated any savings. DOGE cuts could end up costing the US $135 billion simply because it will need to retrain and rehire elements of the work force that have been let go.

While Musk has promised maximum transparency, it has been impossible to verify much of what DOGE has said it has done.

We expect the government to show receipts. And the receipts that DOGE has shown that are posted publicly are nonetheless woefully inadequate to back their claims.

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

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 6:01 AM

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

Trump Praises Musk’s DOGE For Ending Studies on ‘Making Mice Transgender’ – Which Were Actually Asthma and Cancer Research

By Alex Griffing | May 30th, 2025, 3:48 pm

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-praises-musks-doge-for-ending-
studies-on-making-mice-transgender-which-were-actually-asthma-and-cancer-research/

Trump’s claim about the government funding studies on “making mice transgendered” was widely debunked in early March as Trump also made the claim during his address to Congress at the time. Outlets from CBS to PBS to Rolling Stone all ran fact checks that rebutted the claim. “Trump Decried Millions Spent ‘Making Mice Transgender.’ It Was Cancer and Asthma Research,” blared Rolling Stone’s headline at the time.

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

Your semi-regular reminder that if your concern with trans women is that men might claim to self-ID as trans to gain access to women's spaces and assault them, then your problem is actually with predatory men and not trans women.

https://x.com/harriet1marsden/status/1207964296820461575

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

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Sunday, June 1, 2025 12:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Don't you have anything better to do on Sunday, faggot?

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

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

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Monday, June 2, 2025 7:12 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:
Don't you have anything better to do on Sunday, faggot?

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

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

Trump to give away the land run by the National Park Service because he is an asshole:

Trump Plans to Offload National Park Sites, But States Don’t Want Them

By Bobby Magill | June 2, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-plans-to-offload-nationa
l-park-sites-but-states-don-t-want-them/ar-AA1FUI9V

(Bloomberg) — Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve sprawls north from Everglades National Park over 729,000 acres of swamp, an ancient forest that protects the endangered Florida panther and the pristine waters of the Everglades — the source of drinking water for millions of south Floridians.

About 2.2 million people visited last year, roughly three times the number at Everglades National Park, according to National Park Service data. The preserve and others like it are "typically the places where the local people enjoy the most," said Neal McAliley, an environmental lawyer at Carlton Fields in Miami and a former environmental litigator at the Justice Department.

The Trump administration may walk away from Big Cypress and some other national monuments, historical parks, battlefields and protected areas that aren't among the 63 with "national park" in their name.

The White House is proposing to cut about $1.2 billion from the NPS's budget, including $900 million from park operations, mainly by shedding sites that it considers too obscure or too local to merit federal management, transferring these to states and tribal governments. But some states with large numbers of such sites — there are roughly 370 in total — warn that they can't afford to manage and staff them, either, and that some could end up closing.

"It takes about 350 parks to wipe out in order to get $900 million in budget savings," said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association. "So it's everything from battlefields to seashores, to recreation areas to monuments."

The stakes are high: Big Cypress as well as Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, protect their regions' drinking water supplies. Park Service staff at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina keep the sand on Outer Banks beaches in place and the islands from eroding away. Dozens of NPS locations preserve American history, from the birthplaces of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln to Gettysburg National Military Park and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

It's not clear who wants the national park system to be trimmed, other than the White House and some conservative groups who say the plan promotes federalism. But even some Republicans who are eager to see other federal lands developed or taken over aren't necessarily excited about breaking up the national park system.

Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-plans-to-offload-nationa
l-park-sites-but-states-don-t-want-them/ar-AA1FUI9V

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

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Monday, June 2, 2025 1:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't you have anything better to do on Sunday, faggot?

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

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

Shut up, faggot.

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

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

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 7:02 AM

SECOND

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

We Are No Longer a Serious Country

By Paul Krugman | Jun 3, 2025 at 5:37 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/we-are-no-longer-a-serious-country

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” This line is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan. Whoever said it definitely had a point, and not just about politics. If you’re trying to explain to people, be they voters or bond investors, that you aren’t really as bad or untrustworthy as you seem, you’re already in deep trouble.

So when I saw Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, declaring Sunday that “The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” my reaction was, “Uh-oh.”

And it’s not just me. For generations investors have treated U.S. government debt as the ultimate safe asset. Whenever disaster strikes — even if it’s disaster largely made in America, like the 2008 subprime crisis — bond buyers pile into U.S. Treasuries, because America is a serious country, and the idea that we would fail to honor our debts was unthinkable.

But are we still that country? Markets seem to have doubts.

Yesterday the Financial Times had a neat chart showing that there used to be a clear relationship between U.S. interest rates and the international value of the dollar. Actually, the chart was a bit too neat: When I set out to reproduce it, I found that the FT chose a time period during which the relationship looked especially clear. Still, it used to be true that when U.S. interest rates rose, so did the dollar, because higher yields pulled in foreign capital. But since Donald Trump returned to power, that relationship has broken down. Instead, we’ve seen a combination of rising interest rates and a falling dollar:

As many have noted, what we’ve been seeing in recent months, with interest rates and the dollar moving in opposite directions, doesn’t look like what we normally see in the United States, or for that matter advanced nations in general. Instead, it’s the kind of thing one sees in emerging markets, where big market moves often reflect crises of confidence: International investors lose faith, pulling their money out, and capital flight causes both a falling currency and rising interest rates.

Here, for example, is what Mexico looked like during the “tequila crisis” of 1994-5, which involved both soaring interest rates and a plunging peso:

Why are markets beginning to treat America as unreliable? It’s not just the debt numbers. Yes, we have large debts, but we’re an immensely wealthy country that, among other things, has lower average taxes than most of our peers. So we certainly have the resources to honor our debts.

But do we have the political will? Maybe even more important, do we have the political seriousness?

Like many economists, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the substance of Trump’s tariffs — how much they are likely to raise prices and reduce trade volumes. I’ve also written about the impacts of policy uncertainty, about how hard it is for businesses to make plans when they have little idea what tariff rates will be even a few months from now, let alone over the next few years.

But I wonder whether we’ve spent enough time looking at the policy process — how decisions get made in Trump’s America. Consider: On April 2, “Liberation Day,” Trump announced extremely high tariffs on many countries, the biggest tariff hike in U.S. history. The tariff rates — which differed hugely from country to country — were determined by a formula universally panned as stupid and ridiculous. And this tariff announcement was made with so little planning and forethought that it included taxes on imports from remote islands inhabited only by penguins.

Then, a week later, these tariffs were replaced by a completely different set of tariffs. How did that happen? Two of Trump’s cabinet members were able to beard him in the Oval Office while Peter Navarro, responsible for the original tariffs, was in another meeting.

Does this sound like policymaking in a serious country?

Then there’s the budget bill making its way through Congress. It’s a terrible thing, imposing savage cuts on social programs (and decimating U.S. science) while giving such big tax cuts to the wealthy that it will explode the deficit. But content aside, notice that this hugely important piece of legislation is being rushed through with essentially no hearings or analysis.

And when outsiders, including the Congressional Budget Office and a variety of think tanks — conservative and centrist as well as progressive — have put out the analyses the bill’s sponsors won’t, pointing out the likely effects on debt, health coverage, and so on, the G.O.P. response has basically been to accuse all of the independent analysts of being part of a globalist conspiracy.

Wait, it gets worse. The name of the legislation — not its nickname, its official title — is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, because that’s what Trump has been calling it. Are we a mature republic with a normal head of state, or are we being ruled by Kim Jong Un in orange makeup?

Why, next thing you’ll be telling me that key policy decisions, leading to layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and many deaths around the world, have been made by a presidential crony whose erratic behavior may have reflected massive consumption of ketamine, Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Oh, wait.

Imagine yourself as a foreigner considering investing in the United States. You may well know that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a “revenge” provision that would allow the U.S. government to impose extra taxes on foreign investors whose home countries have policies America doesn’t like. You probably know that one of Trump’s advisers has suggested the forced conversion of short-term debt into century bonds. Once upon a time everyone would have dismissed these things as stuff that couldn’t happen in America. Now? Who knows?

In a way, the amazing thing is that we haven’t seen even more capital flight. Presumably investors still can’t believe that America has changed so much from the responsible, reliable nation it seemed to be just a few months ago.

But I think they’re headed for a rude awakening.

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

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 11:42 AM

SECOND

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

A useful one-sentence guide to the second Trump administration might go something like this: A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.

In the past four months, President Trump has announced tariffs on Canada, paused tariffs on Canada, restarted tariffs on Canada, ruled out tariffs on certain Canadian goods, and then ruled in, and even raised, tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

And that’s just for starters. On April 2, so-called Liberation Day, Trump announced a broader set of tariffs on almost every country in the world. Soon after, the plan was half-suspended. Then Trump announced a new set of elevated tariffs on China, from which he backtracked as well. Next the courts, as often happens, took over the job of erasing the president’s previously announced policies. Last week, a trade court struck down the president’s entire Liberation Day tariff regime as unconstitutional, only for a federal circuit court to reinstate the tariffs shortly thereafter. Now a higher court has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: undo the undoing of the undoing of the tariffs, which have been in a permanent state of being undone ever since they were created.

Got all that? No, you most certainly do not, and neither does anybody else. Economists and corporate executives I’ve interviewed to understand future tariff policy have communicated to me a combination of confusion, fury, and resignation. Commentators have noticed the chaos too, of course. Observing how frequently Trump seems to back out of his own brinkmanship, the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong memorably deemed this trend TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

David A. Graham: The TACO presidency

Un-happening doesn’t affect just trade and economic policy. In the realm of foreign policy, the Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the ignominious on-camera spat between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President J. D. Vance. Trump went further, claiming that Ukraine had started the war and that Zelensky was a dictator—raising the prospect that the administration was on the verge of explicitly aligning with Russia. Days later, the administration reversed course and resumed intelligence sharing and security assistance. Trump has since attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin for being “absolutely CRAZY!”

Un-happening also affects media, immigration, science, and education policy. Judges have ruled that the administration improperly froze grant money, inappropriately blocked the Associated Press from the White House press pool, and illegally sought to place sanctions on law firms that have done work, or employed lawyers, that Trump found unsuitable. On immigration, judges have blocked several of the administration’s measures, including its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove migrants and its attempt to bar Harvard’s international students. Federal judges have blocked so much of the Trump agenda that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has described the constitutional balance of power as a form of “judicial tyranny.” “I know this is inflammatory,” Vance said in an interview with The New York Times, “but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.”

The administration’s claims to monarchical power are a real threat to America’s constitutional order. But its executive orders and policy feints are so haphazard and poorly articulated that they amount to a kind of autocratic takeover written in smudge-able crayon: terrifying, cartoonish, and vulnerable to erasure, all at once.

J. Michael Luttig: The end of rule of law in America

This is not to say that Americans should ignore Trump’s efforts to make confetti of the Constitution. Rather, when evaluating any one Trump policy, one has to keep front of mind the possibility that it simply won’t exist by the end of the week. Despite an energetic effort by some right-wing intellectuals to make Trump out to be some kind of 14-dimensional-chess player, his approach doesn’t resemble chess so much as a denial-of-service attack on a functioning government.

All this un-happening shows both the upside and the downside of Trump’s political instincts. The president’s slippery relationship to his own policy agenda can serve as a kind of superpower, as Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times. The TACO reputation is “crucial to Trump’s political resilience,” because “the willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable.” The constant backtracking gives Trump the ability to both bend the Constitution to its breaking point and always step back to claim that “anything extreme is also provisional,” Douthat wrote. Indeed, Trump’s approval rating for trade has rebounded since its Liberation Day implosion, according to several polls.

Questions of popularity aside, however, businesses tend to prefer certainty over promises and threats that keep disappearing. At some point, Trump’s pledge to reinvigorate American industry and energy will require fat investments in factories and supply chains. Multi-hundred-million-dollar investments require clear expectations of financial return. Those aren’t going to happen in a world where each policy idea boasts a half-life of 48 hours. Steve Bannon coined one of the most famous Trump-world truisms when he revealed MAGA’s media strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” Far stranger, however, is the administration’s insistence on flooding the policy zone with Schrödinger’s cats—executive orders and Truth Social posts that exist in a liminal state among existence, nonexistence, and imminent radioactive decay.

The substantive problem with the MAGA agenda isn’t just that too much is happening for any median voter to follow; it’s that too much is un-happening for employers, investors, and consumers to know what the hell to do about it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/trump-self-destru
ctive-agenda/683013/

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

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 1:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, faggot.

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

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

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 2:27 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
"Disgusting Abomination": Elon Musk Slams "Massive, Outrageous, Pork-Filled" Bill As Trump Goes After Rand Paul
Tuesday, Jun 03, 2025 - 11:00 AM

With whatever savings DOGE may have achieved about to become a drop of piss in the ocean by the "Big Beautiful Bill" - which codifies exactly zero of DOGE's cost-saving efforts, raises the debt limit by $5 trillion, and increases the deficit by $2.5 trillion over 10 years (per CRFB) - former DOGE head Elon Musk pulled no punches on Tuesday, calling the legislation a "massive, outrageous, pork-filled" abomination.

"I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore," Musk wrote on X.

"This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination."

In a subsequent tweet, Musk wrote "Congress is making America bankrupt"

When asked about Musk's comments, the White House deflected...

Trump vs. Rand

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump on Tuesday slammed Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) after Paul appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box," saying he's "just not open to supporting $5 trillion ... in debt ceiling increase.

Trump hit back, writing on Truth Social: "He loves voting ‘NO’ on everything, he thinks it’s good politics, but it’s not."

In a subsequent post, Trump attacked Paul again, writing that he "never has any practical or constructive ideas," adding "His ideas are actually crazy (losers!). The people of Kentucky can’t stand him. This is a BIG GROWTH BILL!"

As author and commentator Tom Woods wrote of Trump's decision to attack Paul:

Rand Paul has defended Donald Trump at times when other Republicans ran and hid.

All through Russiagate, Rand insisted the whole thing was a witch hunt and that Trump was innocent.

During the first impeachment trial, Rand emerged as one of Trump's staunchest defenders in the Senate. Same for the second such trial, which Rand denounced as "absurd" and "political theater."

He defended Trump against campaign finance allegations in 2018.

Establishment left and right alike went after Trump in 2019 for his Syria withdrawal, and at that moment when the President needed allies, Rand supported him.

Likewise for Trump's 2018 summit with Vladimir Putin. Said Rand:

"Yes, the vast majority of the foreign policy community, the bipartisan consensus said you shouldn't meet with Putin. They also said he shouldn't meet with Kim and this is an extraordinary thing about President Trump that should be lauded and not belittled is that he is willing to meet with adversaries to try to prevent us from having World War III."

So you'd think the response to all that would be to say: thanks, Rand, for all the support, especially when it was most difficult to stand in my corner and other Republicans had abandoned me. Now let's see if we can address your concerns.

In short, not great!

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 3:10 PM

SECOND

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

We are witnessing the suicide of a superpower

The president’s assault on science dangerously undermines America’s superpower status.

By Max Boot | June 3, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/02/trump-science-cuts/

On June 14 — the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army and, not so coincidentally, the 79th birthday of President Donald Trump — a gaudy display of U.S. military power will parade through Washington. No doubt Trump thinks that all of the tanks and soldiers on display will make America, and its president, look tough and strong.

But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.

Since the 1940s, when the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the University of California played a central role in the Manhattan Project, the engine driving U.S. economic and military competitiveness has been federal support of research universities. That partnership has produced most of the key inventions of the information age, including the internet, GPS, smartphones and artificial intelligence.

Federal support of university research has also made possible the success of the United States’ world-leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Advances enabled by federal support include magnetic resonance imaging, the Human Genome Project, LASIK surgery, weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, and drugs that have saved countless AIDS and covid-19 patients.

Now Trump is sabotaging a research and development pipeline that is the envy of the world. The Trump budget would cut the National Science Foundation budget by 55 percent. Already, the U.S. DOGE Service has terminated more than 1,600 active grants from the foundation, worth $1.5 billion. According to the New York Times, the science foundation’s grants this year are being disbursed at the slowest pace in at least 35 years. The NSF directly supports 357,600 researchers and students; many of them will now be out of luck.

It’s a similar story at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who subscribes to an array of crackpot health theories, has already reduced the HHS workforce by 10,000 people with buyouts or early retirements, and now he intends to lay off an additional 10,000. Adding insult to injury, Kennedy wants to prohibit government scientists from publishing in the leading peer-reviewed journals. “CDC clobbered,” one official told The Post. “The agency will not be able to function. Let’s be honest.”

These budget cuts are hitting hard at America’s — and the world’s — leading research universities: Johns Hopkins is losing $800 million; Columbia, $400 million; the University of Pennsylvania, $175 million. No school has suffered more than Harvard University, which has lost more than $2.6 billion in federal funds.

Indeed, Trump says he wants to eliminate all of Harvard’s federal contracts and give the money to trade schools. This is populism gone crazy. Valuable as trade schools are, they will not be making breakthroughs in fighting Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, strokes, sickle cell anemia or other diseases that are being researched at Harvard.

Then there is the administration’s assault on foreign students. Trump tried to kick all international students out of Harvard — an order halted by a federal judge Thursday. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has vowed to retaliate against U.S. allies that censor free speech, has sought to expel foreign students for expressing views he dislikes about the war in Gaza. The State Department announced last week that it was temporarily halting all interviews for foreign-student visas, and Rubio said the agency would “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students in the United States “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

As The Post noted, about 100 million people belong to the Chinese Communist Party, most for careerist rather than ideological reasons. And of the 277,398 Chinese students currently studying at U.S. universities, more than 110,000 are pursuing degrees in math, science and engineering — all areas of weakness for the U.S. educational system. Expelling a substantial number of foreign students, who typically pay full tuition, would deal another heavy blow to universities already reeling from federal budget cuts.

It isn’t just universities that benefit from the presence of foreign students — so does the entire country. According to the Association of International Educators, the more than 1.1 million international students in the United States create about $44 billion in economic activity and 378,000 jobs. And then there are the benefits they deliver after they graduate, assuming they are allowed to stay in this country. The National Foundation for American Policy reports that one-quarter of all billion-dollar U.S. start-ups have a founder who attended a U.S. university as an international student.

The United States’ competitors are salivating at the prospect of gaining an edge in technological competition at our expense. France, Australia and Canada are throwing out the welcome mat to scientists who can no longer do their work in the United States. But the biggest beneficiary is likely to be China. Even before the Trump cutbacks, China was already catching up to the United States in scientific spending; its research and development budget has been growing by an average of 8.9 percent a year, compared with just 4.7 percent in the United States.

In March, Beijing announced a $138 billion government fund that will invest in cutting-edge fields such as AI, quantum computing and hydrogen energy.

So while China is investing to win the economic (and potentially military) contests of the future, Trump is undercutting long-term U.S. military and economic competitiveness with his anti-intellectual animus. The weapons systems that will be paraded in Washington on June 14 won’t be of much help to the United States in the future if it falls behind in the R&D race with China. I fear we may be seeing, as suggested by China expert Rush Doshi, the suicide of a superpower.

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

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Tuesday, June 3, 2025 3:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, faggot.

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

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

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