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: Thursday, June 12, 2025 09:54
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 32048
PAGE 46 of 46

Tuesday, June 10, 2025 3:34 AM

Hey...

Did you notice that Second called a group of people he doesn't agree with "Libtards" in that last post?

I find that interesting.

We should delve deeper into that.

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

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

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 6:28 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Well then, I guess you die with the rest of the Philistines, then, no matter HOW "righteous" you feel!
Unless you think you're So Special that God will make an exception for you??

I noticed that the polarity of words switches backwards when a Trumptard hears or sees them. It is a learning disorder that makes prospering in America difficult for Trumptards. Since Trumptards are certain there is little wrong with themselves, it must be the fault of Libtards why a Trumptard's life is disappointing and prone to fall into chaos. Trump's learning disorder is why his life has been in turmoil for decades, especially recently, when so many can see that he is getting things backwards and upside down, but he can't admit his mistakes. He is not even aware of his misunderstanding.

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 10, 2025 6:35 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh, wait, I get it SECOND ... you think YOU'RE God!
Here to sort good from evil!

I am burdened with the ability, calling it a sensitive inner ear, to tell up from down, or in engineering terms, I can hear and feel with finger tips when a machine is out of balance and not on the level. I've got the same ability with people; I can tell when they are malfunctioning, even when they insist they are doing their best. I have seen what the best really is, and Trump and Trumptards have no idea what that is. They think, however little they feel like doing is the best that can be done. I suspect that God hates lazy, stupid people who won't correct their mistakes. Mistakes, unacknowledged, are a trait of Trump and his Trumptards.

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 10, 2025 6:36 AM

SECOND

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

California Governor Newsom didn't request the National Guard be deployed to his state.

Trump sent them anyway.

Trump's goal isn't to keep Californians safe.

His goal is to cause chaos because he wants wartime powers.

Like his breakup with Elon Musk last week, his deploying the military against protesters could not have been more foreseeable. The only uncertainty was about timing and pretext.

Every time a protester hurls a rock or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular. In 1968, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.

The fringe left has a long love affair with the “propaganda of the deed,” a stupid concept holding that direct or revolutionary action persuades the masses to align with their cause. In America, it never works. Donald Trump subscribes to his own theory of the propaganda of the deed. In a 1990, he expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to display “the power of strength” in crushing the Tiananmen protests. His administration has been pushing claims that he should be granted wartime powers. Those claims are largely sinister nonsense as a matter of law, facts and those pesky democratic norms. But when rioters are setting Waymo cabs on fire, the debate is exactly where he wants it.

No doubt that there will be enough people willing to give Trump wartime powers. And portentously, unlike during his first term, the enablers are in the White House. Various Cabinet secretaries, White House officials and the vice president are all trying to one-up each other with talk of invasion, insurrection and “liberate Los Angeles.”

Given the cowardice of Congress and the limitations of the courts, this is leading, perhaps inexorably, to a contest of competing theories of the propaganda of the deed. That may or may not end well for Trump but it will certainly end poorly for the United States.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/column-trump-deploys-protesters
-respond-this-will-not-end-well/ar-AA1GoyQ9

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 10, 2025 6:54 AM

SECOND

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

America is on the brink of becoming a failed democracy

Cultural Decline in the U.S. Is a Threat to Democracy

By Jonathan Sumption | June 2, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/opinion/united-states-democracy-cul
ture.html

Mr. Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain, is the author of “The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law.” Download his books for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Jonathan+Sumption

As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.

They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support.

These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.

Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies in buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.

Democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable. That is the institutional framework.

A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. It depends on the instincts of politicians and citizens. It calls for a willingness to choose solutions that the greatest number of people can live with. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.

Hence the significance of President Trump, who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. The result is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.

Mr. Trump has used public powers to pursue private grudges: for example, against law firms that represented his political opponents; public figures for whom he has removed security protection; or cultural institutions, from Harvard to the Kennedy Center, that do not share his personal agenda.

Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet this, too, has become dependent on the president’s personal discretion. Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department not to enforce laws passed by Congress such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has reduced or wound up programs for which Congress has appropriated funds and has threatened governors and other authorities with cutting off federal funds unless they submit to his wishes.

Foreign observers like myself have the luxury of watching these developments from a distance, but we need to look at the vulnerability of our own democracies. What is happening in the United States is essentially a crisis of expectations that is common to other advanced democracies as well. A respected polling organization in Britain in 2019 found that a majority of people (54 percent) agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules.”

Continental Europe has seen high levels of electoral support for openly authoritarian figures, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the leading lights of Alternative for Germany.

The reasons are complex, but the main one is the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state and the electorates’ growing aversion to risk. Some of what voters expect is beyond the capacity of the state to deliver. Some of it can be delivered only at the expense of other equally important values. This is especially true of voters’ most powerful expectation, that the state will protect them against adverse economic winds.

We crave state protection from many risks that are inherent in life: job insecurity, economic misfortune, drought, fire and flood, sickness and accidental injury. This is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of humanity since the middle of the 19th century. For all perils, we demand a governmental solution. If there is none, we put that down to governmental incompetence.

When these expectations are disappointed, as they so often are, people blame the system or the “deep state.” They turn against the whole political class, which has proved unable to satisfy their demands for a progressive improvement of their lives. In the absence of a democratic culture, they spontaneously turn to strongmen and kid themselves that strongmen get things done.

The United States is a particularly interesting example. It has enjoyed a century and a half of almost unbroken good fortune. This may now be coming to an end in the face of competition from countries like India and China. Old skills have become redundant in high-wage economies as national prosperity has shifted to high-tech industries, hitting incomes traditionally derived from manufacturing, agriculture and the extraction industry. Even in the high-tech sectors where the United States is strongest, its lead has shortened and in some cases vanished.

These are not exclusively American problems. Europe suffers from them even more, and European expectations of the state are higher. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any democracy. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the crisis of Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945.

The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.

If enough Americans persistently vote authoritarian figures into government and their cheerleaders into Congress, then democracy will not survive. But that is not yet an inevitability.

The founding fathers of the United States were profoundly conscious of the cultural underpinnings of democracy and well aware of its fragility. The second U.S. president, John Adams, summed up their fears in a letter written in old age. Democracy, he wrote, was just as vulnerable to vanity, pride, avarice and ambition as any other form of government, and a good deal less stable. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote.

The founders’ answer to the self-destructive tendencies of democracy was to design “a government of laws and not of men.” A government of laws was based on rational principles, consistently applied. A government of men was something different: an invitation to rule by discretion, subject to the whims of a handful of men at the heart of the state, guided by the very vices of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition which Adams knew would sooner or later destroy any democracy.

There have been demagogues before in American history. Until now, they have failed. Political parties had enough respect for the workings of the democratic state to freeze them out.

The many friends of the United States must hope that the experience of autocratic government will persuade voters to restore the country’s democratic tradition and truly make America great again.

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 10, 2025 7:03 AM

SECOND

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

We Finally Know What “American Carnage” Was About

By Paul Krugman / Jun 10, 2025 at 5:37 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/we-finally-know-what-american-carna
ge

Does anyone remember “American carnage”? In his 2017 inaugural address Donald Trump portrayed a collapsing society, emphasizing in particular the “crime and gangs and drugs” destroying America’s cities. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugura
l-address/

It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many problems. But runaway urban crime wasn’t one of them. In fact, Trump chose to proclaim urban carnage after a remarkable generation-long run of plunging crime in our major cities. New York, for example, had only 335 murders in 2016, down from 2,262 in 1990.

So what was that about?

At the time, I thought it was mostly about sadism. Trump clearly loves punishing people, so he was eager to portray a nation full of people who needed punishing. And it remains true, as Adam Serwer pointed out back in 2018, that for Trump and many of his supporters cruelty is a goal in itself, that they rejoice in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

But the events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.

As I assume everyone knows by now, on Friday heavily armed — and masked — ICE agents began raiding workplaces in and around Los Angeles, seeking to arrest people they claimed were illegal immigrants. Crowds quickly gathered to protest. After all, ICE wasn’t rounding up members of violent gangs. It was scooping up ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, many of whom had friends and relatives in the neighborhood.

The protests were relatively peaceful, although there were some scuffles, objects thrown and vandalism. Los Angeles has experienced real riots in the past. This didn’t even come close. But ICE and some other law enforcement personnel responded with heavy application of force — not lethal weapons, at least not yet, but lots of tear gas, rubber bullets, and so on.

Until ICE moved in Los Angeles was, in fact, remarkably peaceful. Like other major American cities, LA experienced a significant but not huge crime wave in the aftermath of Covid but has since seen that wave more than completely recede:

Source: Real Time Crime Index.

Los Angeles right now is probably as safe as it has ever been.

But if you read Trump, which you should to get past the sanewashing, the City of Angels sounds like a scene from Fallout:

And Noem has called LA a “city of criminals.”

As a New Yorker, I’m accustomed to seeing my quite livable city portrayed as a hellscape. Still, there are 13 million people living in Greater Los Angeles who can testify that it has not, in fact, been invaded and occupied, let alone taken over by insurrectionist mobs.

Oh, and let’s not forget that an actual insurrectionist mob tried to overturn the 2020 election — and Trump has pardoned its members.

But no matter. Trump wanted an excuse to mobilize the National Guard, even though the governor of California not only didn’t request it, but has sued Trump to demand that he rescind the order.

When did a president last federalize the Guard against a governor’s wishes? Sixty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson mobilized the Alabama National Guard against the wishes of George Wallace, so that the Guard could protect civil rights marchers.

I’m still seeing some news analyses portraying what’s happening as a confrontation over immigration. And there are definitely people in the administration, led by Stephen Miller, who simply hate immigrants — legal or not, it doesn’t much matter. White South Africans seem to be the only exception.

But this looks bigger even than a play by an administration that has been finding, to its horror, that mass deportation is a lot harder than it sounds — especially if you make any effort at all to follow due process.

What it looks like is an attempt to create confrontations that can be used to impose something that, for practical purposes, amounts to martial law.

And if that’s what it’s really about, what’s happening in Los Angeles is just the beginning.

Most immediately, what is going to happen this Saturday? The government is going to hold a costly military parade in Washington, even though we aren’t celebrating any recent victories I’m aware of. This is the kind of thing one expects to see in Red Square, not the capital of a democracy. And guess what: the parade will also fall on Donald Trump’s birthday.

Many pro-democracy groups have teamed up to organize protests against the parade. There will be “No Kings Day” demonstrations all across the country. I don’t know whether there will be any violent incidents. But I’m quite sure that Trump and his allies will claim that violent incidents are happening and seek excuses to use force against the protestors.

So it’s important to understand what is happening here. Trump isn’t reacting to any real threat of disorder in California. And while anti-immigrant bigotry is certainly an important factor, it’s not the whole story.

No, this is all about finding excuses to use force against Trump’s critics and opponents and justify an anti-democratic power grab.

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 10, 2025 7:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Still listening to those fags, huh fag?

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

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

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 7:35 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:
Still listening to those fags, huh fag?

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

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

6ix, do you realize that you, Trump and Senator Tuberville are full of shit? I see it dribbling from your mouths. Trumptards have their digestive systems running backwards, waste exits from where it is embarrassing to point out. Why don't Trumptards notice and wash their mouths with soap?

Trump endorses arrest of Governor Gavin Newsom

When pressed by reporters about what crime Newsom has committed to warrant a potential arrest, Trump said, “I think his primary crime is running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job.”

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has also announced his candidacy for the state’s governorship, is among the highest profile Trump allies to publicly echo the calls for Newsom’s arrest.

In a post to X, Tuberville wrote: “LA looks like a third world country — anarchists are in charge, law enforcement is being attacked, and the rule of law is nonexistent. Lock him up.”

https://ktla.com/news/california/trump-endorses-arrest-of-gavin-newsom/

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 10, 2025 7:41 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, idiot.

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

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

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 7:44 AM

SECOND

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

‘Wildly underprepared’: National Guard troops seen sleeping on floors in exclusive photos

“This is what happens when the president and (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth) demand the National Guard deploy immediately with no plan in place … (and) no federal funding available for food, water, fuel and lodging. This is really the failure of the federal government. If you’re going to federalize these troops, then take care of them.”

Senior military leaders advised Monday that the California troops could continue sleeping on floors or outdoors until Thursday, at which point federal officials would decide whether to make more permanent lodging plans, the source said. By Monday afternoon, additional National Guard troops were expected to reach Los Angeles, upping the total from around 300 late Saturday to more than 2,100.

It was unclear where the new arrivals would stay at night, the source said, with only a few hundred available tents.

“Currently, there is no plan for where everyone is sleeping tonight,” the source said, adding that there was an urgent need to find more portable bathrooms and dumpsters for garbage.

The Pentagon referred questions about troop provisions to the California Guard, which in turn referred questions to the U.S. Special Operations Command North, which did not immediately respond to the Chronicle.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/national-guard-californ
ia-photos-20368334.php

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 10, 2025 7:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I don't hear them whining, faggot.

How about you worry about yourself and stop pretending to be offended for everybody else.

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

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

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 11:57 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Evil people don't know the difference between good and evil

Yep!

We notice that about you pretty much every time you post!

Yanno the difference between me and you, stupid? The thing that makes me NOT EVIL?

I don't judge people as "evil" by my opinion of their opinion, I don't judge people categorically, and I don't wish to kill people by category.

I judge them by what they do, individually.

I just don't have that much hate and sociopathy in me to waste on whole groups ... political parties ... nations ... continents!

Yanno, I think you got a taste for killing people and you just can't let it go.

Really, you judge people by what they do. Then why do you constantly deny Putin is a butcher comrade? How he bombs civilian targets more than military targets.

Now remember, the civilized world agrees he does this.

Wait for it, folks.

T

Still waiting, not a problem. I'm sure you're busy.

T

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025 2:19 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

"Evil people don't know the difference between good and evil - SECOND"
Yep!
We notice that about you pretty much every time you post!

Yanno the difference between me and you, stupid? The thing that makes me NOT EVIL?
I don't judge people as "evil" by my opinion of their opinion, I don't judge people categorically, and I don't wish to kill people by category.
I judge them by what they do, individually.

I just don't have that much hate and sociopathy in me to waste on whole groups ... political parties ... nations ... continents!
Yanno, I think you got a taste for killing people and you just can't let it go.

THG:
Really, you judge people by what they do. Then why do you constantly deny Putin is a butcher comrade? How he bombs civilian targets more than military targets.

Now remember, the civilized world agrees he does this.

Wait for it, folks.

Since I need evidence I "believe" 0% what western establishment media says about Putin. Your problem? You believe 100%!

Your statement means as much to me as if you said "You deny that Trump colluded with Russia."
Yes, I deny that Trump colluded with Russia.
I also deny that Saddam had WMD, that Assad was using chemical weapons, and that Qaddafi was giving his troops Viagra for mass rapes.

I deny lies.

*****

Also, you cited the "civilized" world? Are you saying that Russia and China are uncivilized? That the entire world (except your favorite nations) is "uncivilized"?

Quote:
Still waiting, not a problem. I'm sure you're busy.

Yep, extremely busy.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 12:29 AM

SECOND

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

“The U.S. government is a representative democracy, and, in order for it to function well, the citizenry needs to be well educated, informed about the critical issues of the day, and knowledgeable about where candidates stand on these issues. I would add that voters need to possess the ability to identify disqualifying personal traits of candidates so that good choices are made for the good of the country. We are presently in a real world test of whether American voters possess this important skill.”

That is a quote from Authoritarian beliefs predict whether voters see Trump or Clinton as psychopathic by Eric W. Dolan | June 4, 2025

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-beliefs-predict-whether-voters-s
ee-trump-or-clinton-as-psychopathic/

Despite the passage of time and political events such as impeachment, the core relationships between authoritarianism, psychopathy perception, and vote choice remained stable. This suggests that these are not fleeting political impressions but deeply rooted psychological dynamics that shape how people interpret the actions and personalities of political figures.

The study also connects with a broader literature on mental health literacy—people’s ability to accurately recognize signs of psychological disorders. Prior research has shown that while many laypeople can identify common conditions like depression, few can accurately recognize personality disorders such as psychopathy. In one study, only about 39 percent of respondents correctly identified a description of psychopathy.

This lack of knowledge likely contributes to the strong role that ideological filters play in shaping perceptions. People tend to interpret candidates’ actions in ways that confirm their preexisting beliefs, rather than making judgments based on accurate diagnostic understanding.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 1:04 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Also, you cited the "civilized" world? Are you saying that Russia and China are uncivilized? That the entire world (except your favorite nations) is "uncivilized"?

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 1:08 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
“The U.S. government is a representative democracy, and, in order for it to function well, the citizenry needs to be well educated, informed about the critical issues of the day, and knowledgeable about where candidates stand on these issues. I would add that voters need to possess the ability to identify disqualifying personal traits of candidates so that good choices are made for the good of the country. We are presently in a real world test of whether American voters possess this important skill.”

That is a quote from Authoritarian beliefs predict whether voters see Trump or Clinton as psychopathic by Eric W. Dolan | June 4, 2025

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-beliefs-predict-whether-voters-s
ee-trump-or-clinton-as-psychopathic/

Despite the passage of time and political events such as impeachment, the core relationships between authoritarianism, psychopathy perception, and vote choice remained stable. This suggests that these are not fleeting political impressions but deeply rooted psychological dynamics that shape how people interpret the actions and personalities of political figures.

The study also connects with a broader literature on mental health literacy—people’s ability to accurately recognize signs of psychological disorders. Prior research has shown that while many laypeople can identify common conditions like depression, few can accurately recognize personality disorders such as psychopathy. In one study, only about 39 percent of respondents correctly identified a description of psychopathy.

This lack of knowledge likely contributes to the strong role that ideological filters play in shaping perceptions. People tend to interpret candidates’ actions in ways that confirm their preexisting beliefs, rather than making judgments based on accurate diagnostic understanding.

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

Oh fuck you dude...

"I read books and I have a college degree! How dare you disagree with me, infidels!!!"

If any of you so-called experts knew what the fuck you were talking about, the world wouldn't be shit right now.

You had your turn. We're done with you.

Either ride off into the sunset and enjoy your retirement, or scream into the void until you have a stroke for all I care.

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:33 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 fuck you dude...

"I read books and I have a college degree! How dare you disagree with me, infidels!!!"

If any of you so-called experts knew what the fuck you were talking about, the world wouldn't be shit right now.

You had your turn. We're done with you.

Either ride off into the sunset and enjoy your retirement, or scream into the void until you have a stroke for all I care.

6ix, did you know that Confederate slave owners invaded the US and murdered hundreds of thousands in an almost successful coup? What's that got to do with you and Trump?

Trump is renaming military bases to honor Confederate traitors because nothing says patriotism like honoring enemies of the United States.

Donald Trump Lists Confederate Fort Names He Plans to Restore

By Gabe Whisnant | Jun 10, 2025 at 7:34 PM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-restoring-confederate-fort-names
-including-robert-e-lee-2083684

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that he's restoring the name of Fort Robert E. Lee and other current or former military instillations that were previously named after soldiers that led the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Trump told U.S. Army soldiers during a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, "For a little breaking news, we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee."

As with the recent renaming of Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, Defense officials said Tuesday they selected service members with matching last names to rename the bases—ensuring the installations no longer “officially” bore names linked to the Confederacy.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:41 AM

SECOND

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

Did you wonder why Trump says America is falling apart? Scientifically proven answer: To attract people with a certain kind of personality to himself. By the way, America is not breaking down, but there are broken-down Americans, thanks to their smoking, drinking, and their other self-destructive ways and means of coping with anxiety:

Perceived social breakdown fuels desire for authoritarian leaders, new psychology study shows

By Eric W. Dolan | June 10, 2025

https://www.psypost.org/perceived-social-breakdown-fuels-desire-for-au
thoritarian-leaders-new-psychology-study-shows/

When people perceive society as falling apart, they may become more receptive to authoritarian leaders—those who promise order, control, and certainty. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which provides the first causal evidence linking the perception of societal breakdown, or “anomie,” to support for authoritarianism. According to the researchers, this link is explained by a sequential process: anomie leads people to feel politically powerless, which then creates political uncertainty—ultimately increasing the appeal of authoritarian rule. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000483

The study aimed to address several unresolved questions in the existing literature on political psychology. While many prior studies had shown that people who perceive society as chaotic are more likely to support authoritarianism, the evidence had been correlational. It was unclear whether anomie truly caused increased support for authoritarianism or whether other psychological factors were responsible. It was also unclear how anomie exerted its influence—whether through feelings of powerlessness, uncertainty, or both.

Anomie is the perception that a society’s norms, values, and leadership are breaking down. People experiencing anomie often feel that social order is disintegrating, moral standards are unclear, and institutions are ineffective or illegitimate. This sense of societal instability can create feelings of alienation and disconnection.

To investigate these questions, the researchers began by reviewing prior theories and debates. Sociologists and psychologists have long suggested that anomie, defined as the perception that society’s moral fabric and leadership structures are disintegrating, can lead individuals to seek strong, controlling authorities. Some have argued that this happens because people feel politically ineffective; others have emphasized the role of confusion and unpredictability in politics. The new study sought to test whether both of these processes work together—and whether one leads to the other.

The researchers proposed a sequential model. According to their hypothesis, anomie leads to a perceived lack of political control. This repeated feeling of powerlessness then causes political uncertainty—a sense that politics no longer makes sense or is too chaotic to understand. People then turn to authoritarianism, which promises clarity, order, and strong leadership. To test this model, the researchers conducted a multi-part investigation combining large-scale survey data and controlled experiments.

In their first study, the researchers analyzed data from the 2006 . . .

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:59 AM

SECOND

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

How does Trump find time to be President and also make $billions?
The answer is that he could not make $billions unless he were President because he is deregulating the new business he opened since being elected!

Trump’s Crypto Playbook Is Now Clear

His business dealings and policy agenda are now in perfect alignment.

By Will Gottsegen | June 10, 2025, 11:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/06/trump-crypto-pe
rfect-alignment/683094/

The world of crypto can feel impenetrable. The basic technology is complicated enough, but the subculture—with its own particular argot and decorum—is what’s truly forbidding. Even if you’re not quite ready to figure out what DePIN or zk-SNARKs are, you can get a solid glimpse into the industry right now just by looking at the lineup of the 2025 Bitcoin Conference, held late last month in Las Vegas. Speakers included goofball meme-coin boosters, good-hearted cypherpunks, crypto podcasters with names such as “Gwart,” and an army of Wall Street execs who seem to have waited until bitcoin hit $100,000 to give the whole crypto thing a shot.

There were also a whole lot of MAGA acolytes. Vice President J. D. Vance, the eldest Trump sons, and the White House crypto czar David Sacks all gave speeches that coalesced around a unifying theme: Trump and crypto are meant for each other. “What’s going on here in this very room, at this very conference, that’s the financial side of everything we’ve been fighting for on the free-speech side,” Don Jr. said during a conversation with the CEO of Rumble, a social-media platform favored by right-wing users. “They’re inextricably linked.”

In other words, the message was that Trump cares deeply about the kinds of civil-libertarian ideas that the bitcoin world has long touted. It’s a convenient narrative, a lofty way of explaining this once very bitcoin-skeptical president’s sudden embrace of crypto. At least, it’s one that transcends sheer self-enrichment: In the past year, members of the Trump family have launched two meme coins and announced a majority stake in a new crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. As I’ve previously written, crypto is quickly becoming the Trump family business: Last month, the president hosted the biggest investors in his $TRUMP coin for a private dinner at his golf course outside Washington, D.C.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/trump-crypto-bi
llionaire/682763/

But the linkages between Trump and crypto run deeper than just a couple of business investments. His White House has also ushered in a starkly pro-crypto agenda—rolling back regulations and dropping lawsuits to punish alleged crypto wrongdoing. The same week that Don Jr. spoke at the Bitcoin Conference, the Department of Labor eased a Biden-era guidance that made it difficult for Americans to invest their 401(k) plans in crypto because digital currencies can be volatile and prone to hacks. In cutting this language, regulators are taking away a guardrail, encouraging more investment in crypto. This, in turn, could boost the price of bitcoin and other coins, which is a boon to Trump’s own enterprises. It always comes back to the president himself: Trump’s crypto ambitions are as much about public policy as they are about his own meme coins.

Crypto has become the glue that binds together so much of what the president and his administration are doing. Consider Trump Media & Technology Group, best-known as the parent company of his social-media app, Truth Social. Trump Media didn’t start as a crypto business, but now it’s pivoting to crypto. Late last month, Trump Media announced that it would raise money to purchase $2.5 billion in bitcoin, effectively creating a corporate bitcoin reserve. Why? “We view bitcoin as an apex instrument of financial freedom,” Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media and a former Republican congressman, said in a statement. Putting the pseudo-utopian language aside, such a bitcoin reserve mostly just serves to tie the price of Trump Media’s stock, $DJT, to the price of bitcoin writ large. A multibillion-dollar investment is unreservedly good for crypto, but it’s also good for the Trump family, because much of the president’s own net worth is now tied up in crypto assets. (Neither the White House nor the Trump Media & Technology Group responded to my requests for comment.)

Perhaps the idea of a bitcoin reserve sounds familiar. It explicitly mirrors the White House’s announcement of a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” in March, as part of a broader effort to make the U.S. a global leader in crypto. Both serve the same function: Such large-scale institutional investment in crypto—whether from the government or a company—further legitimizes these digital currencies, ensuring their long-term viability as an asset class. Trump’s campaign to promote crypto and juice the price of these coins is in essence two-pronged: Once the White House sets its agenda, the Trump family’s private-sector business can back it.

Trump was all about pro-crypto policy even before he began launching his raft of crypto businesses. His campaign promise to fire Biden’s top crypto cop, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, helped pull in donations from industry heavyweights. Especially after the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, Gensler was focused on prosecuting individual crypto companies—a policy now derisively referred to as “Operation Choke Point 2.0” (a nod to the Obama-era initiative that put pressure on banks to stop working with payday lenders, pawn shops, and certain other businesses). During his keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference, Vance put it bluntly: “Operation Choke Point 2.0 is dead, and it’s not coming back under the Trump administration.”

Indeed, the administration has dropped more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations against crypto firms. And as Trump’s second term has gone on, the distinctions between what’s pro-Trump and what’s pro-crypto have blurred together, approaching something like a singularity. In MAGA cosmology, crypto, Trump, and America now exist in perfect alignment—what’s good for one is good for the others. While Trump talks about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the U.S., the Trump sons are running a crypto-mining company called American Bitcoin and Trump Media is throwing its weight behind “Made in America” crypto investment funds. After firing many of the top regulators responsible for keeping crypto in check, Trump has cleared the way for major cash injections throughout the crypto industry—including, of course, in his own businesses. The pretense for the regulatory rollbacks and Trump’s personal crypto investments is the same: It benefits America.

The irony is that cryptocurrencies were supposed to be a form of protection against exactly this sort of connection to the state. Bitcoin was invented as a way to privately transfer money online, with the ambitious goal of creating a new financial order outside the purview of the international monetary regime, uncontrolled by any government. (After all, the technical basis for crypto is known as “decentralization.”) In loosening crypto restrictions that benefit the industry (and Trump himself), Trump is manifesting the old crypto dream of a new financial order. But far from being faceless and decentralized, the very concept of crypto is starting to reflect the image of just one man.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 7:06 AM

SECOND

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

If You Lie With DOGE You Get Fleeced

By Paul Krugman / Jun 11, 2025 at 5:34 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/if-you-lie-with-doge-you-get-fleece
d

I have to admit that even now I’m not sure how the Donald Trump/Elon Musk breakup will play out. We’ve seen so many Trump critics eventually cave, engaging in humiliating acts of self-abasement, that it’s hard to be sure that even Musk — who has a monstrous ego, but whose business interests can be badly damaged by a vengeful president — is immune.

But one indication that this breach won’t be easily resolved is the pace at which anti-Musk stories are being leaked to the news media.

I was especially struck by reports of a confrontation between Musk and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. We have solid reporting of the fact that the two men fought over the choice of acting IRS commissioner, and that Bessent won. Unfortunately, our only account of what happened next comes from Steve Bannon. But that story is almost too good not to be true.

According to Bannon, after the meeting the two men began exchanging insults, with Bessent pointing out that Musk had promised to find trillions of dollars in wasteful spending but come up empty. “You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,” Bessent supposedly said. At that point Musk body-checked the Treasury secretary, who hit back, and White House staff had to break up the fight.

Is this story plausible? Is the world’s richest man so lacking in self-control that he would behave like a hopped-up adolescent in the White House? Of course he is — that’s the completely plausible part of the story. I’m a little more skeptical of the portrayal of Bessent as someone willing to speak the truth that bluntly.

But in any case what Bessent supposedly said was completely true. Musk is a total fraud. He failed to deliver on his promises of huge deficit reduction. In fact, DOGE almost certainly lost money. There’s no evidence for many of the cost savings it claims, and the “receipts” it has provided are full of misstatements and errors. And the disruption it caused almost surely cost taxpayers more than any minor savings it may have found.

Furthermore, its depredations have left both the federal government and the nation as a whole degraded and weakened in ways that will take years to reverse.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect anyone in the Trump administration to admit that DOGE was a complete, costly bust. These people never admit being wrong. But if you look at what is actually happening right now, there’s clearly a frantic effort at de-DOGEification. The Washington Post reports,

Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.

The people DOGE installed in federal agencies appear to be losing most or all of their influence now that they no longer have a patron with the president’s ear, and it appears that at least some of the young tech bros Musk tried to put in charge of government programs they didn’t understand are self-deporting.

Oh, and if you think I’m being disrespectful by making fun of the Muskenjugend, consider what we’ve learned about the U.S. Institute for Peace, which DOGE took over for a while before being forced by the courts to give up control. Returning workers reportedly found the office full of cockroaches and rodents, with leftover marijuana and empty beer bottles strewn about.

All of this was completely predictable. Well, maybe not a fistfight in the White House, but anyone who knew anything about how the federal government spends its money knew that DOGE would fail.

To repeat the old line, the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army. Musk made a brief stab at going after the insurance side, with his ludicrous claim that millions of dead people were collecting Social Security, but aside from that all of DOGE’s efforts were focused on where the money isn’t — nondefense discretionary spending (NDD).

Was this small segment of the budget bloated and full of waste? Hardly. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documents, NDD on the eve of Musk’s arrival was historically low as a percentage of GDP:

And if you look at the major categories within NDD, nothing stands out as an obvious waste of money:

Or maybe I should say, nothing looks like an obvious place to make big cuts unless you think it’s a good idea to slash spending on international affairs — largely foreign aid — along with spending on science, environment and medical research. The Trump administration is indeed making big cuts in all these areas, but not because they involve waste and fraud. Instead, the goal seems to be to undermine U.S. influence in the world and destroy U.S. scientific leadership.

In any case, none of this has anything to do with the massive savings Musk claimed he would achieve by eliminating waste and fraud.

So how could he have made such foolish claims? After all, Musk is a brilliant businessman, creator of fantastic products like the Cybertruck. Oh, wait. https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-problems-cybertruck-trump-mus
k-feud-89501946

But the real point isn’t Musk’s personal failings. It’s the falsity of the whole claim that the U.S. government wastes vast amounts of taxpayers’ money. Of course there’s waste and fraud there, as there is in any large organization. But the federal government has in fact historically been a well-run organization, with many dedicated workers doing their jobs as best they can despite often being paid less than they could earn in the private sector.

Then Musk marched in, told these workers that they were worthless and pushed many of them out. He was wrong, and now he’s gone. But after the way they’ve been treated, the best federal workers are probably the least likely to return now that even the Trump administration is beginning to realize that it needs them.

America will spend years paying the price for Musk’s fraudulence.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 7:37 AM

SECOND

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

Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 campaign.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-trump-family-presidency-wealth
/?embedded-checkout=true

Billions of foreign dollars have flowed into his family’s real estate and crypto ventures.

The United States is becoming just another country with a strongman personalizing and profiting from power. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a MAGA favorite, has pursued this playbook on a smaller scale, leveraging the power of the state to marginalize opponents while his associates became ostentatiously wealthy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-17/orban-style-cronyis
m-turns-gas-fitter-friend-into-a-billionaire?embedded-checkout=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, June 11, 2025 9:18 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

"Evil people don't know the difference between good and evil - SECOND"
Yep!
We notice that about you pretty much every time you post!

Yanno the difference between me and you, stupid? The thing that makes me NOT EVIL?
I don't judge people as "evil" by my opinion of their opinion, I don't judge people categorically, and I don't wish to kill people by category.
I judge them by what they do, individually.

I just don't have that much hate and sociopathy in me to waste on whole groups ... political parties ... nations ... continents!
Yanno, I think you got a taste for killing people and you just can't let it go.

THG:

Really, you judge people by what they do. Then why do you constantly deny Putin is a butcher comrade? How he bombs civilian targets more than military targets.

Now remember, the civilized world agrees he does this.

Wait for it, folks.[/font]

Western media often frame events through individualistic and conflict-oriented lenses, emphasizing freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

You do not believe what any Western Media reports to be true about Putin. You say it here. I’ve got you quoted here saying that.

Freedom, democracy and human rights describe the Lens with which Western Media see things.

So, if not Western Media, then it must be Eastern Media where you get your news about Putin. Which is, “State-driven.” Russia and China are two examples of Eastern style Media. I’ve been saying this about you since we’ve met comrade. Nice of you to confirm it.

“Eastern media tend to adopt collectivist perspectives, prioritizing stability, national unity, and state-driven narratives. “

Or, you know the truth comrade. You've seen the stories and videos posted in these threads and on the news. Just like the rest of us. And because you are a worm you pretend it is not true. It’s the latter. You know better. It's just that you're cut from the same cloth as Putin.

Type Eastern Media vs Western Media into a search. Tell me which you prefer to have where you live? And too anyone else who reads this, which do you prefer?

T

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 10:19 AM

SECOND

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

Do you want to know why Trump supporters (Musk to 6ix, Rich to Poor) act that way? Here is why:

The LA protests reveal what actually unites the Trump right

For Trump’s ideological allies, it’s always 2020.

By Zack Beauchamp | Jun 11, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/416336/la-protest-riot-tru
mp-right-tech-populist-2020

When President Donald Trump and Elon Musk had their dramatic falling-out last week, it appeared the right was on the brink of civil war — with Musk’s allies in the “tech right” poised to battle Steve Bannon and his faction of populist tribunes. The battle lines reflected deep disagreements between the right’s factions about the nature and purpose of government, divides made increasingly salient by Trump’s policies in areas like trade.

But now, after several days of protests and unrest in Los Angeles, everyone is once again reading from the same hymnal — condemning disorder and calling for a harsh crackdown. Even Musk is back to retweeting Trump like nothing happened.

Why this intra-right ceasefire? Because what’s happening in LA reminds every component of the modern right why they’re in coalition together: They believe that progressives in general, and the “woke” left activists in particular, represent an existential threat to everything good about the United States.

This vision has deep philosophical roots on the right, which has always positioned itself around defending elements of the status quo from its enemies on the left. But the 2025 American right tells itself a very particular version of that general story, one that focuses on the events of summer 2020.

In their minds, the combination of Covid restrictions, mainstream calls for wide-ranging social change, and mass street upheaval was the terrible terminus of modern progressive politics. Whatever their internal disagreements on issues like trade or spending or even immigration, the modern right agrees that the left must never be permitted another year like 2020 — and that Trump is the best vehicle for stopping it.

The Trump coalition has appeared fractious for much of 2025 because the big policy moves, like tariffs, have made areas of disagreement in the coalition more salient. It appears united for now because the news cycle has shifted to a topic — the specter of radical left street disorder — on which nearly everyone inside of it agrees.

The right’s long 2020

Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump’s radically destabilizing administration.

Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek to overturn this order, either through sweeping legislation or revolutionary violence, will inevitably do more harm than good. For this reason, the right’s intellectuals have long positioned themselves against what they saw as instances of leftist street violence.

Yet Trump has spent the past 10 years setting the American political order on fire — demolishing its norms, enacting radical changes to its longstanding policies, and flagrantly violating its laws. He even incited an honest-to-God insurrection aimed at overturning an election. How could any of this fit with a tradition premised on the values of stability and order?

The answer, in part, is that it doesn’t. The intellectual right has adopted a self-consciously revolutionary mode of politics, seeing the current political order as a fundamentally corrupt system that deserves to be torn down. This is a reactionary rejection of Burkean conservatism, which is why so many erstwhile Burkeans became the Never Trumpers who publish at places like the Dispatch and the Bulwark.

And yet, there’s a crucial element of the Burkean emphasis on order that the Trump right has retained: a belief that some specific elements of American life remain uncorrupted, and that the “woke left” must be defeated for those elements to again become the country’s defining traits. Traditional religion, conservative cultural values, a market economy, the notion of national pride, and even nationhood itself — these are the elements of the United States that the modern right sees as being under attack from the left and the institutions (like universities) where it is in control.

This sense of siege, of a need for counterrevolution, crystalized in the summer of 2020.

It wasn’t only that there was rioting in America’s cities, or that major American cultural institutions were aligning themselves with once-radical views on race and gender. It’s that both were happening at the same time, suggesting that radicals in the streets were seizing the commanding heights of American public life.

“The individual acts of violence — the sacking of urban police stations, the Molotov cocktails thrown at police cruisers, the toppling of historical statues, the wholesale looting of big-box stores — were, in fact, the representations of a long-running cultural revolution,” leading right-wing activist Chris Rufo wrote in his 2023 book America’s Cultural Revolution. “In city after city, [Black Lives Matter] activists, including its paramilitaries in the black nationalist and anarcho-socialist factions, shut down urban neighborhoods, intimidated residents, and established their ideology as a social requisite.”

This is, to my mind, a wildly exaggerated narrative of that summer’s events (a consistent problem in Rufo’s work). It vastly overstates the pervasiveness of the violence and paints with an ideologically overbroad brush, ignoring that most people were in the streets because they were deeply and sincerely concerned about racism in policing.

Yet there’s some truth as well. The summer’s events, including riots in Minneapolis and Seattle’s disastrous “autonomous zone”, did real harm to real people — in ways that many mainstream liberals and leftists were unwilling to admit at the time.

That liberal elites endorsed street protest amid the Covid pandemic, when the public health establishment was recommending people stay away from mass gatherings, fueled the right’s outrage. It was, to them, a sign that the so-called establishment was not only flawed but fully corrupt; so shot through with political bias that it would tell people to go protest for George Floyd, but stop attending church.

From this was born the mythic underpinnings of the modern Trump right: a deep fear of chaotic, violent left-wing radicals, paired with a sense that mainstream liberals and nonpartisan experts are in thrall to said extremists. This is the narrative that knits together the various factions of MAGA 2.0: the tech right, the national populists, the atheist anti-wokes, the Christian nationalists, and on down the line. There are reasonable grounds to doubt that everyone believes it sincerely, but it defines much of the conceptual vocabulary right-wingers use to communicate across factional lines. We may not agree on everything, they say, but we are all against that.

What’s happening in LA right now brings this set of uniting concerns to the fore.

Once again, progressives and radicals have taken to the streets to demonstrate against what they see as social injustices. Once again, there are clear instances of looting and violence (though I’d add that these are once again being widely exaggerated). And once again, it appears to many on the right as if the liberal establishment were siding with the people in the streets — with LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (correctly) downplaying the scale of the violence and rejecting Trump’s efforts to send in the troops, in large part because they believe it to be at once unnecessary and counterproductive.

It is thus no surprise that in the face of recent events, the right’s infighting would give way to a display of unity. When the right sees the specter of 2020 looming over America, its cadres feel an urgent need to form ranks.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 11:35 AM

SECOND

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

As President Donald Trump crossed a dangerous line at Fort Bragg, the brass failed to speak out in the Army’s defense.

By Tom Nichols | June 10, 2025, 8:14 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/silence-generals/683
106/

President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.

He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.

He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.

The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?

The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. Today, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.

Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders. Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?

And if these men cannot muster the courage to defend American traditions—by speaking out or even resigning—where are the other senior officers who must uphold the values that have made America’s armed forces among the most effective and politically stable militaries in the world? Where is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine? He was personally selected by Trump to be America’s most senior military officer. Will he tell the man who promoted him that what he did today was obscene?

Will any of these men say one word? Will any of them defend the Army and the other services from a would-be caudillo, a man who would probably be strutting around in a giant hat and a golden shoulder braid if he could get away with it? The top officers of the U.S. military wear eagles or stars on their shoulders that give them great privilege, as befits people who assume responsibility for the defense of the nation and the welfare of their troops. They command the power of life and death itself on the field of battle. But those ranks also carry immense responsibility. If they are truly Washington’s heirs, they should speak up—now—and stand with the first commander in chief against the rogue 47th.

President Trump Delivers Remarks at Fort Bragg

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 12:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 2:18 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:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

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

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

You know, that is a common attitude of Trumptards who are flunking out of school. How many times did you flunk out of college, 6ix? You didn't flunk? You left voluntarily because you knew more than the professors, who were biased against your deeper understanding than they had? I've heard that excuse from Trumptards, too.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 2:30 PM

SECOND

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

$134 Million Later, Hegseth Still Can’t Say What Law Justifies LA Troops

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced sharp bipartisan criticism in Congress on Tuesday after deploying thousands of troops to Los Angeles without clear legal approval or a complete defense budget in place. The fiery House hearing left many Americans questioning both the cost and the constitutionality of using military force against civilians during domestic protests.

https://voznation.com/134-million-later-hegseth-still-cant-say-what-la
w-justifies-la-troops/

https://www.google.com/search?q=%24134+Million+Later%2C+Hegseth+Still+
Can%E2%80%99t+Say+What+Law+Justifies+LA+Troops

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 2:49 PM

SECOND

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

The Way Trump Speaks About the Military Is Awfully Revealing

By Fred Kaplan | June 11, 2025 12:20 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/trump-military-parade-spee
ch-washington-dc.html

The big military parade that will be taking place along the National Mall in Washington this Saturday is shaping up to be not so much a celebration of the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday but rather a high-octane ego boost and joyride for President Donald Trump.

It has been widely noted that the event happens to fall not only on the Army’s birthday but on Trump’s as well. The convergence is no mere coincidence. After all, this year will also mark the 250th birthday of the Navy and the Marine Corps, on Oct. 13 and Nov. 10, respectively. But the president has not announced plans to join—much less preside over—their festive, if less grandiose, celebrations. . . .

More striking is what Trump omitted from his list of enthusiasms: the men and women who serve in the armed forces. Trump clearly doesn’t care much about any of the people who train, fight, or die for our country. It’s worth recalling the claim, made by his former chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, that Trump once derided fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump denies he ever said that. But if you believe the president over the general, consider that, earlier this year, Trump changed the names of Memorial Day and Veterans Day to “Victory in World War II Day” and “Victory in World War I Day.” The change is significant—and appalling. It means that the vast majority of American veterans have no day of their own to commemorate. (About 66,000 World War II vets are still alive, but that amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s 15.8 million living veterans from all wars.) Nor do the families of those who died in more recent wars—around 36,000 in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam, 4,500 in Iraq, and 2,200 in Afghanistan, among others.

Trump has no interest in memorializing service or sacrifice for their own sake. (Remember his dis of John McCain, who was tortured in North Vietnamese jails for five years after getting shot down: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”) Winning is all that matters in Trump’s book—and our most solemn national holidays have been altered to reflect his mindset.

Even winning is an abstract concept, floating on bombast. Trump wanted to throw a massive military parade in his first term after French President Emmanuel Macron hosted him at the cavalcade in Paris celebrating Bastille Day. French troops marched down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées alongside tanks and armored vehicles as fighter jets swooshed over the Arc de Triomphe. Trump was elated. Back home, he told everyone he could that he needed to stage his own version—and to “top it.” His defense secretary at the time, retired Gen. James Mattis, hated the idea, telling his aides that he’d “rather swallow acid.” Mattis responded by saying the parade would cost $90 million—a deliberate exaggeration, according to a Pentagon source of mine at the time. The ploy worked; even Trump backed off, seeing the price tag as too high.

The parade this Saturday is said to cost $45 million, not counting the expense of disrupting much of the city for four days and repairing the damage done by tank treads. (Each Abrams tank weighs 70 tons, almost twice the avenue’s maximum capacity.) This seems like a lot of money, given the latest round of Department of Government Efficiency budget cuts. But it’s a lot less than the $134 million that the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines in California is estimated to cost. And that show of force is no less performative or unnecessary than the parade in the nation’s capital.

Trump may hope that the parade will provide another occasion for force as well as show. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that “those people that want to protest” at the parade “are going to be met with very big force.” Those protesters, he added, without identifying who they might be or what they might be protesting, “hate our country,” so, he repeated, “they will be met with very heavy force.”

Notice: He wasn’t warning of a forceful response to violent protesters—just to “people that want to protest,” who, he claimed, by definition, “hate our country.” He doesn’t seem to be aware—or, if he is, he doesn’t care—that citizens’ protest is an American tradition every bit as hallowed as the Army. Nor should his remark be dismissed as a lighthearted joke. In his first term, he suggested that National Guard members should be ordered to shoot protesters in the leg. His defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, calmly said he couldn’t do that. Trump’s current defense secretary, Pete Hegseth—who speaks excitedly about “the warrior ethos,” campaigned for the pardoning of war criminals, and expresses utmost loyalty to Trump—might savor the opportunity.

This is his birthday bash, goddammit, and he’s not going to let some pacifists or immigrant-loving protesters upset the party.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 3:34 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

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

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

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:13 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

GOP Senators Freak Out When Asked About Trump’s Military Parade Costing $145 Million

Out of 14 GOP senators, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the only one HuffPost talked to who criticized holding the parade. “If you ask me about a military parade, all the images that come to mind, the first images, are of the Soviet Union and North Korea,” he said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gop-senators-trump-military-parade-cost
_n_6849b95de4b0cf5f0c9ad0ab

This is the first major national military parade in the U.S. since 1991. President George H. W. Bush held the event on June 8 that year, after the U.S. led a successful coalition in the Gulf War. (But Trump's birthday parade is of the greatest importance.)

https://time.com/7293222/us-national-military-parade-1991-bush-gulf-wa
r-history/

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:24 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:

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah......

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

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

How much does it cost for Trump to fly to Mar-a-Lago to play golf each weekend?

$3.4 million

$3,383,250 in 2017 dollars more precisely

Maybe Trump should golf in DC rather than Florida?

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/05/691684859/government-watchdog-trumps-tr
ips-to-florida-costing-taxpayers-millions

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-florida-golf-weekends-costing-1859300
03.html

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Maybe you should worry about yourself, cunt.

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:38 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:
Maybe you should worry about yourself, cunt.

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

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

How much did Trump pay in income taxes, that we have documentation for?

$750

Compare $750 to $3,383,250 for Trump to fly down to Mar-a-Lago for a golf weekend.

Trump is certainly getting his tax money back.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144472882/a-house-panel-voted-to-publi
cly-release-a-report-on-trumps-tax-returns

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, fag.

You don't know shit about nothin'.

We're done listening to you read headlines.

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 5:57 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:
Shut up, fag.

You don't know shit about nothin'.

We're done listening to you read headlines.

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

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

Reading beyond the headline:

In both 2017 and 2020, the former president reported no taxable income on his personal, joint return with wife Melania Trump.

In 2016 and 2017, he paid just $750 in net tax on his income. In 2020, he paid $0 in net tax on his income.

How much income tax will Trump pay while President? We will never know as long as he is President.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/20/1144472882/a-house-panel-voted-to-publi
cly-release-a-report-on-trumps-tax-returns

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 6:11 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:
Shut up, fag.

You don't know shit about nothin'.

We're done listening to you read headlines.

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

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

You may not know that V.P. JD Vance did not reveal his income taxes, following Trump's example. We only know Trump's because of Congressional Investigations.

But for all other Presidents' tax returns, see https://www.taxnotes.com/presidential-tax-returns

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 6:55 PM

SECOND

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

Trump’s top general contradicts his assessment of Putin, L.A. unrest

Gen. Dan Caine’s comments in Senate testimony were restrained but significant, perhaps easing lawmakers’ fears he will bow to political pressure.

By Abigail Hauslohner | June 11, 2025 5:42 p.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/06/11/dan-caine-
trump-la-protests-russia/

Gen. Dan Caine, who since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April has assiduously avoided the public spotlight, on Wednesday broke with President Donald Trump’s assessment of the threat posed by Russia and the ongoing protests and violence in Los Angeles.

Caine’s comments during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing were restrained but significant, coming from the nation’s top military officer who Democrats and moderate Republicans had feared might show little appetite for going against a president prone to pushing falsehoods in pursuit of his political agenda.

Trump has routinely downplayed alarm about Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe and, in an address this week, branded those in the United States protesting his immigration policies as agents of a “foreign invasion.” But Caine declined to confirm either assessment.

When asked by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) whether Putin intends to “stop in Ukraine,” the general was frank: “I don’t believe so, sir.”

When pressed by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) to say if he believes the demonstrations and violence in Los Angeles are a sign the United States is “being invaded by a foreign nation,” as Trump told an audience of soldiers Tuesday in North Carolina, Caine said he doesn’t.

“At this point in time, I don’t see any foreign, state-sponsored folks invading,” the general replied, before adding, “but I’ll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time.”

When Schatz asked if there has been a “rebellion” against the government, another politically charged term the president and his administration have employed since unrest flared in Southern California, Caine declined to affirm that either. “I think there’s definitely some frustrated folks out there,” he offered.

Trump’s second term in office has been remarkable, in part, for the frequency with which false and misleading statements by the president go unchecked by a majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill, and Caine’s responses Wednesday offered a stark contrast with the man seated beside him, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

As the president’s top military adviser, the Joint Chiefs chairman is expected to provide honest and unflinching advice to the commander in chief, the defense secretary and to Congress, even when that assessment conflicts with the political messaging of the administration in power. During his confirmation hearing, Caine, a surprise selection for the job after Trump abruptly fired the general’s predecessor, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., in February, promised to earn lawmakers’ trust.

Hegseth tried to paper over what Caine had said.

“It’s quite easy to point out that there has been an invasion of 21 million illegals in our country under the previous administration,” he told Schatz. “So this administration was elected to get a hold of that.”

To Graham’s question about Putin’s intent to pummel Ukraine and turn his war machine westward, Hegseth allowed only that “it remains to be seen.”

Graham — whom Republican lawmakers often view as the senator best equipped to persuade the president on the GOP’s more traditional foreign policy postures — laughed. “Well, he says he’s not,” the senator said, referencing the Russian leader. He likened Putin’s ambitions to Adolf Hitler’s stated intentions to kill Jews and take over Europe in the 1930s. “It doesn’t remain to be seen,” Graham went on. Putin, he added, “tells everybody around what he wants to do.”

Wednesday’s hearing was the second time in as many days that Hegseth and Caine faced lawmakers’ questions, with another hearing, before the House Armed Services Committee, set for Thursday. Senate Democrats, just as their House counterparts had on Tuesday, seized the opportunity to attack Hegseth’s record of “chaos and poor judgment” while helming the Defense Department, and his unwillingness to respond to congressional inquiries and the news media.

The Trump administration has so far failed to provide Congress with a complete defense budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, and meanwhile the Pentagon has diverted funds meant to rebuild barracks and improve U.S. troops’ quality of life to support instead Trump’s immigration crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border, said Sen. Chris Coons (Connecticut), the subcommittee’s top Democrat.

Coons accused Hegseth of committing the “unthinkable” mistake of sharing sensitive military plans over an unclassified messaging app, including with members of his family; of firing some of the military’s most senior commanders “without cause”; and of “censoring” military academies’ libraries.

“Far more of your time so far has been spent inside the building on culture wars, rather than outside the building, deterring real ones,” Coons said.

“You are deploying the American military to police the American people,” Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the full Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat, said to Hegseth of the scene in Los Angeles. “Sending the National Guard into California without the governor’s request. Sending the Marines — not after foreign threats, but after American protesters.”

If Caine toed a delicate line Wednesday, Hegseth — who caught the president’s eye during his tenure as a right-wing commentator on Fox News — adhered to White House talking points as he responded to Democrats’ queries and doubled down on Trump’s claims. He also left open the possibility that the deployment of troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles “could expand to other places.”

The president’s deployment order is partly about “getting ahead of a problem, so that if in other places, if there are other riots in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there if necessary,” Hegseth said.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the former Senate leader who has made little secret of his dislike for both Trump and Hegseth, criticized the administration for spending too little on national security, and for the appearance of siding with Russia in its war against Ukraine.

“Which side do you want to win?” he pressed Hegseth.

“This president is committed to peace in that conflict,” Hegseth replied, declining to name Ukraine. “Ultimately, peace serves our national interests and, we think, the interest of both parties, even if that outcome will not be preferable to many in this room and many in our country.”

Patrick Svitek and Amy B Wang contributed to this report.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 7:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up already, idiot.

You're done.

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 8:37 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND finds the stupidest people to re-post.
I guess it's bc he uses grossly left-biased AI to scour the inet.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 9:38 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND finds the stupidest people to re-post.
I guess it's bc he uses grossly left-biased AI to scour the inet.

Among the Trumptards of Texas, everybody is stupid except other Trumptards. This story is labeled fake news by Trumptards in the coal/oil/natural gas industry, but it is not:

EPA says power plant carbon emissions aren't dangerous. We asked 30 scientists: Here's what they say

The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday proposed a new ruling that heat-trapping carbon gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution

By Seth Borenstein - AP Science Writer | June 11, 2025 at 4:00 pm

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/epa-says-power-plant-
carbon-emissions-arent-dangerous-we-asked-30-scientists-heres-what-they-say/

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday proposed a new ruling that heat-trapping carbon gas “emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”

The Associated Press asked 30 different scientists, experts in climate, health and economics, about the scientific reality behind this proposal. Nineteen of them responded, all saying that the proposal was scientifically wrong and many of them called it disinformation. Here’s what eight of them said.

“This is the scientific equivalent to saying that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the temperature monitoring group Berkeley Earth. “The relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperatures has been well established since the late 1800s, and coal burning is the single biggest driver of global CO2 emissions, followed by oil and gas. It is utterly nonsensical to say that carbon emissions from power plants do not contribute significantly to climate change.”

“It’s about as valid as saying that arsenic is not a dangerous substance to consume,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.

“The world is round, the sun rises in the east, coal-and gas-fired power plants contribute significantly to climate change, and climate change increases the risk of heat waves, catastrophic storms, infectious diseases, and many other health threats. These are indisputable facts,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health and a retired public health professor at the University of Washington.

Climate economist R. Daniel Bressler of Columbia University, said: “We can use tools from climate economics, including the mortality cost of carbon and the social cost of carbon, to estimate the climate impacts of these emissions. For instance, in my past work, I found that adding just one year’s worth of emissions from an average-sized coal-fired plant in the U.S. causes 904 expected temperature-related deaths and over $1 billion in total climate damages.”

University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs said: “Their statement is in direct conflict with evidence that has been presented by thousands of scientists from almost 200 countries for decades.

“It’s basic chemistry that burning coal and natural gas releases carbon dioxide and it’s basic physics that CO2 warms the planet. We’ve known these simple facts since the mid-19th century,” said Oregon State’s Phil Mote.

Andrew Weaver, a professor at the University of Victoria and former member of parliament in British Columbia, said: “President Trump is setting himself up for international court charges against him for crimes against humanity. To proclaim you don’t want to deal with climate change is one thing, but denying the basic science can only be taken as a wanton betrayal of future generations for which there should be consequences.”

Stanford climate scientist Chris Field, who coordinated an international report linking climate change to increasingly deadly extreme weather, summed it up this way: “It is hard to imagine a decision dumber than putting the short-term interests of oil and gas companies ahead of the long-term interests of our children and grandchildren.”

___

Matthew Daly and Michael Phillis contributed from Washington.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 10:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND finds the stupidest people to re-post.
I guess it's bc he uses grossly left-biased AI to scour the inet.

Who can even tell where Second ends and the AI begins. That process began the first moment he started using a "smart" phone.

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

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 10:38 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 SIGNYM:
SECOND finds the stupidest people to re-post.
I guess it's bc he uses grossly left-biased AI to scour the inet.

Who can even tell where Second ends and the AI begins. That process began the first moment he started using a "smart" phone.

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

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

These are not hard questions to ask:

1) How much does it cost the Federal government when Trump flies to Florida to play golf instead of playing in DC?

$3,383,250

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-florida-golf-weekends-costing-1859300
03.html

2) This questions follows from Question 1) How much income tax did Trump pay?

$750 but $0 in 10 of 15 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54319948

Even when Trump is playing golf, he is raping (or sexual violating) taxpayers.

3) How much does Trump owe that woman he raped? Or sexual violated?

$91,000,000

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-posts-bond-e-jean-carroll-case-91-m
illion/

4) How much money has Trump made since Inauguration Day?

$3,000,000,000 (approximately $3 billion, meaning he more than doubled his wealth)

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-trump-family-presidency-wealth/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/03/31/how-truth-social-
and-crypto-helped-donald-trump-double-his-fortune-in-just-one-year/

So many questions about Trump and so many startlingly easy to understand answers.

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

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025 11:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut the fuck up.

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

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

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Thursday, June 12, 2025 3:14 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I think SECOND is just jealous.

-----------
"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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Thursday, June 12, 2025 5:08 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I think SECOND is just jealous.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

So, you approve of Trump's tax cheating? Approve of Trump more than doubling his wealth since Inauguration, made possible because he is President and stopped regulation of crypto-currency and bribery? Approve of Trump increasing CO2 emissions because climate change is a Chinese hoax? The all-purpose excuse Trumptards use when confronted for their bad behavior is sometimes NOT to express approval but to claim the bad behavior isn't happening by saying "Fake News". I've seen all the tricks Trumptards have to disguise that they are evil.

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

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Thursday, June 12, 2025 5:09 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:
Shut the fuck up.

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

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

This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters

His military deployment in Los Angeles follows a long, disturbing tradition.

By Anne Applebaum | June 11, 2025, 8:05 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/california-protests-
ice-trump/683102/

Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know people will object. Committed to their ideology, the revolutionaries pursue their goals anyway.

Inevitably, a crisis appears. Perhaps many people, even most people, don’t want regime change, or don’t share the revolutionaries’ utopian vision. Perhaps there are unplanned disasters. Smashing institutions can have unexpected, sometimes catastrophic, consequences, as the history of post-revolutionary famines shows very well.

But whatever the nature of the crisis, it forces the revolutionaries to make a choice. Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence.

The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices. When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows a lot about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage does. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy.

Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao’s Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump’s family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves.

But their revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk’s engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president’s signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government’s credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself.

Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.

For the moment, the administration’s demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids—Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida—seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops.

But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on.

The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.

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

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Thursday, June 12, 2025 6:48 AM

SECOND

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

Too bad that the Republicans didn't do this 20 years ago:

The House spending bill, which is now under consideration in the Senate, allocates $185 billion for immigration enforcement, including $27 billion for ICE operations such as raids. That’s an increase of about $150 billion over the current funding levels for immigration enforcement.

If the Republicans had been spending $185 billion per year (or as little as $27 billion) on immigration control for the previous 20 years, there wouldn't be an illegal migrant problem today.

https://www.vox.com/politics/416496/trump-immigration-worksite-raids-l
os-angeles-protests

Now, if Republicans spent $185 billion per year (or $27 billion) on the IRS, there wouldn't be a $2 trillion per year increase in the National Debt, year after year. IRS’s actual expenditures were $18.2 billion for overall operations in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024. There is $1 trillion in tax cheating that the IRS could stop if only the enforcement budget were large enough. Illegal migration could be stopped if only the enforcement budget were large enough.

https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce

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

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Thursday, June 12, 2025 7:26 AM

SECOND

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

Trump's "beautiful" bill wrecks our energy future

By Matthew Yglesias / Jun 12, 2025 at 5:05 AM

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-beautiful-bill-wrecks-our

I continue to feel that Donald Trump is pulling off something close to the heist of the century by creating so much news on other topics that there’s barely any public attention on the multi-trillion dollar piece of legislation that already passed the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate. I don’t want to do a huge disquisition on political strategy, but I do want to flag that progressives are allowed to organize protests against looming Medicaid cuts, not just immigration enforcement.

We’ve already written about those health care provisions several times, but just to review, we’re talking about nearly 11 million people losing their health insurance if this thing passes.

And it’s also going to increase the national debt by $3 trillion.

This generates a short-term boost to GDP growth via fiscal stimulus, but in the long run, the growth rate and level of GDP are lower than they would be without this bill.

That all sounds pretty bad. But what’s received even less attention is the energy provisions of the bill, which would repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act. And because the IRA replaced prior energy programs with new, enhanced programs, the repeal wouldn’t just put us back where we were pre-IRA. It would leave us with no policy support whatsoever for wind, solar, or emerging technologies, including advanced nuclear and geothermal and carbon capture. It doesn’t even leave us with policy support to keep existing conventional nuclear plants open.

The upshot is going to be a loss of innovation and momentum for the long term. And in the short term, it’s going to mean higher electricity prices, as Trump’s multi-pronged effort to kneecap renewables runs up against the supply chain constraints limiting the pace at which new natural gas facilities can be brought online.

This is all genuinely really bad, and I think in a deep and profound way, this is truly not what voters angry about inflation wanted when they cast ballots for Trump.

And yet, it’s what we’re getting.

Trump’s BBB will raise electricity prices

The basic story here is that by killing the Production Tax Credit for solar and wind and storage, as well as the Investment Tax Credit for biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, offshore wind, and nuclear, the BBB is going to reduce the rate at which new electricity sources come on the grid.

NERA Economic Consulting did some modeling of the impact of repeal and found significant state-to-state variation. Household electricity prices would go up 20 percent in Maine, for example, versus only 3.5 percent in New Hampshire, according to their estimates. But prices are up either way. The Princeton Zero Lab has a somewhat more restrained set of estimates, suggesting an average 9 percent increase nationally (though again with state-to-state variation), while the Rhodium Group sees something like a 7 percent increase.

Modeling the entire electrical system is complicated, but directionally speaking, the story here is that by eliminating the tax breaks, the BBB will slow capital investment in solar, storage, and onshore wind. This will be offset by burning more natural gas, both by running the stock of gas-fired plants more intensively and also by building more gas plants. But there’s a supply crunch in the availability of turbines to build more gas plants, and relying on the existing natural gas plants so heavily to power the country will raise the price.

This bottlenecking of electricity sources will happen against the backdrop of structurally rising demand for electricity thanks to EVs and data centers.

To a limited extent, this higher price of electricity will help keep existing nuclear plants open. Except that Energy Secretary Chris Wright himself concedes that removing tax credits is going to kneecap the nuclear industry. Wright is a renewables-hater but a nuclear enthusiast, and he keeps saying that scrapping the nuclear tax credits — and scrapping the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office, which the legislation also does — is a bad idea for the long-term future. Unfortunately, Wright seems to have very little sway over the Trump administration’s actual policy, and the president and the rest of his team are making no effort to change the legislation.

So the upshot is that in the short-term, we get a slower renewable buildout and higher electricity prices, existing nuclear plants probably close anyway (which could drive prices further up), and our ability to advance innovative future technologies is also damaged.

Losing the energy future

Back in February, Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath tried to put on the table a proposal for what they called “IRA Reform.”

Their argument was that the IRA is kind of like an Opposite Day version of a carbon tax, delivering open-ended subsidy to any emissions-reducing technology in order to compensate for the unpriced negative impacts of greenhouse gases. They called on Congress to abandon that approach in favor of a narrower focus on innovation policy. This kind of policy would say that onshore wind and especially solar are now, in fact, mature technologies. The cost per electron of utility scale solar is currently very low; the cost barriers to further adoption relate to intermittency, land use, and transmission.

Their proposal is that all clean energy technologies should be eligible for subsidy in the short-term, but that subsidies would phase out for any given technology as it reaches five or ten percent of total generation. The point would be to use the money to kickstart investment in unproven technologies — advanced geothermal, advanced nuclear, carbon capture — which would preserve a majority of the global benefit of investment-led climate policy, while eliminating a large share of the expense of the IRA.

I think this idea has a lot of merit, and it aligns with the strategy recommended in the excellent Founders’ Pledge report on climate strategies for a new political landscape.

The key point is that there’s a difference between the purely local impact of getting one additional wind turbine built and the worldwide impact of commercializing a new technology. If US government subsidies made it possible to do carbon capture in a remotely cost-effective way, for example, lots of places around the world would voluntarily use that technology. I’m pretty skeptical that will pan out, but it would be great if it did. I think a more plausible candidate is geothermal. Right now, every new well that Fervo drills is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. It costs a lot of money, and it’s only reasonable to invest in because subsidy is available. But they are making a lot of progress on drilling deeper wells, faster, and reaching hotter rocks.

Robinson Meyer @robinsonmeyer
The advanced geothermal company @fervoenergy says it drilled a 15,700 ft well and reached temperatures of 500°F (260°C) in just 16 days of drilling.
That’s an improvement over last year when it drilled an 8000 ft well and reached 370°F temps in 41 days.
2:21 PM Jun 10, 2025
https://x.com/robinsonmeyer/status/1932503444503605544

If you can figure out how to drill deep enough, fast enough, and then do it a few dozen times, it gets cheaper to do the next dozen because you’re no longer engaged in trial-and-error learning. Getting over that hump could potentially unlock huge quantities of cheap clean energy for the United States and the world.

The basic concept of hydraulic fracturing had been around for a long time, but it was only sustained US government support for shale fracking starting during the 1970s oil crisis that turned it into a scalable, commercially viable technology for securing natural gas. The vision of doing the same for geothermal and for factory-built small modular reactors seemed compelling, and also sufficiently non-green-coded that I thought it might appeal to Republicans in Congress. And for a while it did, until they changed their minds.

Key Republicans say this is bad

What’s a little maddening about this is that earlier this spring, a group of over a dozen House Republicans was making some of these points and wrote letters urging leadership to scale back — but not completely kill — the clean energy tax breaks in the IRA.

These members had the votes to block the bill, and many of them are frontline members whose seats are deeply imperiled by the basic dynamic of a midterm election. They urgently need to show some independent-mindedness and moderation. If they wanted to insist on making this better, it seems to me that they could have gotten their way. But instead, Speaker Mike Johnson blew them off and they all voted for the bill anyway.

Then on Monday, they wrote another letter reiterating their desire to change the energy provisions and urging the Senate to modify the bill.

On Tuesday, it emerged that there were various technical corrections that needed to be made to the bill text, which will require another vote. But once again, the frontline members aren’t using their leverage, they’re just kicking it to the Senate.

The good news is that various senators have indicated they want to make some changes to the energy provisions.

I hope this happens. But I’m skeptical. The GOP margin in the Senate is significantly bigger in percentage terms than the House margin, and while the House GOP caucus has a bunch of frontline members at risk of losing their seats, in the Senate it’s really just Thom Tillis. It’s the frontline House members who really have the most credibility in a bargaining dynamic, and they keep showing us they won’t use it.

Identity politics for fossil fuels

As I’ve said many times, one of the biggest structural weaknesses of the center-left in the United States (and around the world) is their profound desire to get people to make short-term material sacrifices for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not personally opposed to doing this — I put rooftop solar panels on my house and drive a plug-in hybrid and have an induction stove. I burn fossil fuels to power my HVAC system, but when it needs to be replaced, I’ll get an electric heat pump.

But most voters don’t want to do it.

Trump, I think, sold a lot of people on the idea that instead of trying to limit global warming, he would focus on advancing their material prosperity.

In office, though, he’s doing things like ordering utilities to cancel scheduled closures of old, non-economical coal plants. This is going to lead to higher electricity prices for consumers, but it’s a payoff to an interest group that Trump happens to approve of. It’s also bad for the climate. What’s more, coal is dramatically worse than natural gas for air quality, so this is really bad for people with asthma or heart disease.

This is a separate issue from the energy provisions of the BBB legislation, but the spirit is the same: going beyond indifference to global warming, or even indifference to local pollution and clean air, into a reckless embrace of fossil fuels, regardless of the economic interests of most households.

Renewables complement natural gas very well in the short-term, which is especially valuable in light of the turbine bottlenecks. Investments in geothermal and nuclear are our best bets of achieving true long-term energy dominance. Things like having a domestic battery manufacturing industry are important not only for decarbonization, but for things like military drones. And Trump wants to throw it all away to maximally polarize the debate and do a dumb kind of identity politics for the fossil fuel industry. It stinks almost as much as the Medicaid cuts, and it keeps being terribly under-covered and under-discussed as Trump generates a dozen other controversies per week.

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

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Thursday, June 12, 2025 9:54 AM

SECOND

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

This Is Not a Drill
American democracy is on the line right now

By Paul Krugman | Jun 12, 2025 at 7:24 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/this-is-not-a-drill

There are two disastrously wrong ways to read the news from Los Angeles right now, and the rest of America over the next few days. The first is to believe that there is actually anything resembling an insurrection underway. The second is to believe that the Trump administration’s response to the nonexistent insurrection is simply cynical politics, an attempt to gain Donald Trump a few points in the polls.

What we’re actually seeing is much worse: An attempt to end politics as we know it, to deploy force to suppress dissent. Not eventually, but right now.

On the first point: No, LA isn’t a city in chaos, wracked by devastating riots requiring military intervention.

LA knows what real chaos looks like. The Rodney King riots in 1992 killed 63 people, injured thousands, and involved widespread looting and arson. Nothing like that is happening now. When heavily armed ICE agents arrested workers who may or may not have been legal residents but were definitely not threats by any stretch of the imagination, they set off demonstrations — which was clearly their intention. But while there were, inevitably, some relatively minor acts of violence, the demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful — and nothing local law enforcement couldn’t handle. The chief of the Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement practically pleading with the Feds to stay out of the situation:

The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively.

Of course, Trump ignored that plea. He federalized part of California’s National Guard despite the opposition of the governor — something that hasn’t happened since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson mobilized part of the Alabama National Guard, basically to protect civil rights protestors. And Trump sent in some Marines, too, which would be completely crazy if the goal was to defuse tension and prevent violence. After all, the mission of the Marines, what they’re trained to do, is to deliver deadly violence.

It's easy to see how this could spin out of control. Which is, of course, what Trump is hoping for.

But why does Trump want chaos? Many pundits and, I’m sorry to say, all too many Democrats assume that performative cruelty, both in the form of those ICE arrests and in roughing up demonstrators, will work to Trump’s political advantage. After all, isn’t immigration one of the few issues on which he polls positively? Doesn’t acting tough make him look strong?

For what it’s worth, that’s not what the available polling says. According to YouGov, pluralities of Americans disapprove of the deployment of both the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles. According to Quinnipiac, 56 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s policies on deportations, while only 40 percent approve.

The poll analyst G Elliott Morris, who recently talked with Greg Sargent, summarized some more detailed polling, and found that

The only real part of [Trump’s] agenda that’s popular in immigration is deporting convicted violent criminals—so you get about 87 percent support for deporting those people. That one makes sense. And basically everyone else, Americans say, Don’t deport them.

And for those who don’t trust polls, Democrats keep beating expectations, often by very large margins, in special elections.

So have Trump and his advisers simply misjudged the politics here? No. The militarized response to the LA demonstrations and Trump’s warning that anyone protesting his military birthday parade (which millions probably will) will be “met with heavy force” aren’t about moving the poll numbers. They’re all about rejecting the idea that Americans have a right to oppose Trump policies. In the same interview Morris says it’s “part of his destruction of mutual tolerance for the party system, which is classic authoritarianism. And that’s it. That’s the motivation, and everything else circles around that.”

In a follow-up note on Bluesky, Morris — who is hardly a wild-eyed radical — added this:

If Trump gets away with this, he will absolutely do the same thing during the 2026 & 2028 elections. He will manufacture unrest just like in LA and send federal troops to every major city as a way to intimidate voters and decrease turnout. Functional end to fair elex.

And Trump’s highly partisan speech to the troops at Fort Bragg — a name change the administration pretends is to honor a World War II hero, but is obviously a reversion to the old practice of naming forts after Confederate generals, that is, traitors — was a naked attempt to coopt the military in his tyrannical project.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, gets it. I’ve never had strong views about Newsom, one way or the other, but this line from his big speech Tuesday was what everyone who cares about this nation should be saying right now:

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.

If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand.

This is the moment. Everything is on the line, right now.

Paul Krugman usually ends his writing with a light-hearted musical video, but not today. I will provide the music that Krugman didn’t:
“Dream Baby Dream” by Suicide from the movie Civil War (2024).

Civil War (2024) Ending Scene | The President's death

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

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