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: Sunday, August 17, 2025 17:47
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VIEWED: 49026
PAGE 60 of 60

Saturday, August 16, 2025 6:06 PM

Shut the fuck up, Second. And shove your faux empathy right up your ass where it belongs. You have no idea what that word actually means.

I've known genuinely bad people who had more empathy in their pinky knuckle than you've ever been able to muster in the entirety of your selfish, entirely self-centered life.

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

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

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Saturday, August 16, 2025 9:30 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 the fuck up, Second. And shove your faux empathy right up your ass where it belongs. You have no idea what that word actually means.

I've known genuinely bad people who had more empathy in their pinky knuckle than you've ever been able to muster in the entirety of your selfish, entirely self-centered life.

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

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

6ix, you have said that you don't talk about politics with people. I can see why because your beliefs mark you as an evil little man. Your beliefs are only acceptable by other Trumptards, equally evil or worse.

6ix, I have zero empathy for Nazis and Confederate slave-owners. But I'd punish Trumptards even more harshly because, unlike Nazis and Confederates, I know Trumptards personally, know their life stories and how they screwed up badly because they are fundamentally evil people, the very worst Americans.

Someone helpfully listed what good Americans do and contrasted it with what Trumptards do:

Trump is losing support for his destruction of Medicaid because taking away people’s healthcare is wrong, and (some Americans, but not Trumptards) know it.

He is losing support on cutting Food Stamps because denying poor, malnourished children food is wrong, and (some) Americans (but not Trumptards) know it.

He is losing support on his hacking away at medical research because depriving us of medical advances is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support on insisting climate change isn’t a real problem because ignoring global warming is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because terminating the Department of Education and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Voice of America and other federal agencies that help Americans and American allies is wrong, and they know it.

He is losing support because his self-interested attacks on law firms and universities and independent media are wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because transferring FEMA to the states and refusing FEMA aid to blue states is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because firing federal workers on the false pretense that they are wasteful and fraudulent is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because giving aid to Israel while ignoring Palestinian starvation, and playing footsy with Vladimir Putin while giving and then withdrawing and then giving again and then withdrawing again aid to Ukraine is wrong, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because many Americans now realize how much USAID contributed to saving lives and he is wrong — dead wrong — to have killed it, and Americans know it.

He is losing support because vaccine denial is wrong and deadly measles outbreaks are unnecessary, and Americans know it.

He is losing support — and we haven’t even begun to make a dent in the list — because all his instincts, everything he does, is wrong. Everything.

And (some people, but not Trumptards,) are beginning to notice, finally, and perhaps too late, that Trump is so thoroughly transactional that there is no morality in him whatsoever, no moral gene, and we miss it. We miss right and wrong. They are like old friends who went AWOL. And many of us want to welcome them back.

https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/because-its-wrong-how-we-m
ight-save-america-from-donald-trump/

6ix, the standard Libtard attitude is Live and Let Live. Standard version Libtards oppose the death penalty. That's not me because I have been around you goddamn worthless Trumptards all my life. The only efficient way to make Trumptards behave better is to fire them. Or like during the Civil War, kill the slave-owners and burn their cotton plantations. Or with Nazis and Japanese Imperialists during WWII, fire bomb them or nuke them. Negotiation with evil people, be they Trumptards, Confederates, or Fascists doesn't work until after a large percent of these evil people have suffered or died violently. If they weren't evil, a minority of them won't have to be brutally beaten to death in order for majority of them to see the error of their ways.

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

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Saturday, August 16, 2025 9:33 PM

SECOND

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

Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?

By Anne Applebaum | August 16, 2025, 10:50 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-ukraine-
talks/683899/

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.

I appreciate that many Ukrainians, Europeans, and of course Americans are relieved that Trump didn’t announce something worse. He didn’t call for Ukrainian capitulation, or for Ukraine to cede territory. Unless there are secret protocols, perhaps some business deals, that we haven’t yet learned about, Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.

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

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Saturday, August 16, 2025 11:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, Second. And shove your faux empathy right up your ass where it belongs. You have no idea what that word actually means.

I've known genuinely bad people who had more empathy in their pinky knuckle than you've ever been able to muster in the entirety of your selfish, entirely self-centered life.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you have said that you don't talk about politics with people. I can see why because your beliefs mark you as an evil little man. Your beliefs are only acceptable by other Trumptards, equally evil or worse.

Shut the fuck up, cultist.

Your cult is dead. You have no audience.

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

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

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Saturday, August 16, 2025 11:58 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Has No Cards

Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?

Annie is right, but it has nothing to do with Trump.

Between deindustrialization and our high-profit model of military weaponry, plus our multi-front, delusional "full spectrum dominance" ambitions, we don't have weapons to spare.

What does it take to be a realist around here???

End of story, case closed.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 12:30 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, Second. And shove your faux empathy right up your ass where it belongs. You have no idea what that word actually means.

I've known genuinely bad people who had more empathy in their pinky knuckle than you've ever been able to muster in the entirety of your selfish, entirely self-centered life.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you have said that you don't talk about politics with people. I can see why because your beliefs mark you as an evil little man. Your beliefs are only acceptable by other Trumptards, equally evil or worse.

6ix, I have zero empathy for Nazis and Confederate slave-owners. But I'd punish Trumptards even more harshly because, unlike Nazis and Confederates, I know Trumptards personally, know their life stories and how they screwed up badly because they are fundamentally evil people, the very worst Americans.

Someone helpfully listed what good Americans do and contrasted it with what Trumptards do:

Blah blah blah

First of all, whoever is writing is pretending to speak for all Americans. I find that pretense offensive.

But I read thru the list just to see how much I agreed with. Cutting away the false narrative, hyperbole, and hyperventilation I decided that only Medicare, climate change, FEMA, and Israel merit discussion.

Quote:
SECOND:
The only efficient way to make Trumptards behave better is to fire them... [or] fire bomb them or nuke them.

SECOND, the only morally significant thing you've done in your life is kill people.
SIX'S retail jobs were more beneficial to society than anything you've done.
All of your virtue signaling doesn't change that. You're a bad man pretending to be a good man, and I'll bet your family would be shocked to see the venom that you post.

You spend most of your time running away from truth, and the rest of the time hiding the truth from others. With your psychopathy, I can see why.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 7:34 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, Second. And shove your faux empathy right up your ass where it belongs. You have no idea what that word actually means.

I've known genuinely bad people who had more empathy in their pinky knuckle than you've ever been able to muster in the entirety of your selfish, entirely self-centered life.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you have said that you don't talk about politics with people. I can see why because your beliefs mark you as an evil little man. Your beliefs are only acceptable by other Trumptards, equally evil or worse.

6ix, I have zero empathy for Nazis and Confederate slave-owners. But I'd punish Trumptards even more harshly because, unlike Nazis and Confederates, I know Trumptards personally, know their life stories and how they screwed up badly because they are fundamentally evil people, the very worst Americans.

Someone helpfully listed what good Americans do and contrasted it with what Trumptards do:

Blah blah blah

First of all, whoever is writing is pretending to speak for all Americans. I find that pretense offensive.

But I read thru the list just to see how much I agreed with. Cutting away the false narrative, hyperbole, and hyperventilation I decided that only Medicare, climate change, FEMA, and Israel merit discussion.

Quote:
SECOND:
The only efficient way to make Trumptards behave better is to fire them... [or] fire bomb them or nuke them.

SECOND, the only morally significant thing you've done in your life is kill people.
SIX'S retail jobs were more beneficial to society than anything you've done.
All of your virtue signaling doesn't change that. You're a bad man pretending to be a good man, and I'll bet your family would be shocked to see the venom that you post.

You spend most of your time running away from truth, and the rest of the time hiding the truth from others. With your psychopathy, I can see why.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Signym, the most recent episode of Star Trek - Strange New Worlds covered almost exactly this situation. Captain Kirk kills a shipload of Americans the very first time he has command of a starship. Really! That the dead were Americans wasn't revealed until the end, where Captain Pike is explaining Pragmatism to Kirk. "We will never know why the (Trumptards) Americans became evil."

It just so happens that every evil person, deep down in their core, believe they cannot be judged. And evil people think they need to give their approval for any punishment of themselves, as if they are members of the jury with veto power over their sentence. Pragmatic Captain Pike reminded Captain Kirk to NOT judge based on what evil people think is good, but judge them on what Kirk thinks is good. And then kill all of the evil Trumptards without mercy.

Download Star.Trek.Strange.New.Worlds.S03E06.720p.10bit.WEBRip.2CH.x265.HEVC-PSA.mkv using the Bittorrent Link: 9bbe0f806e6096061b0f31a7568b616b11548eb1
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27335229/

Signym, you will need free software to make the download and receive your personalized lesson in the philosophy of pragmatism as taught by Star Trek. Get the software at https://www.qbittorrent.org/

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 7:37 AM

SECOND

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

An example of an evil person who does not want to receive his just punishment:

BREAKING: Donald Trump reportedly screamed at his lawyers to sue Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling him a rapist, until they explained that doing so would require her lawyers to access the Epstein files, and that he would have to testify under oath about Epstein. Then he got real quiet.
Trump. Delighting comedians for decades.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) torched President Donald Trump in an X post on Friday, calling him a “rapist” over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?” the congresswoman wrote.

Trump was found civilly liable in 2023 for rape and defamation of columnist E. Jean Carroll. He maintains his innocence.

https://www.aol.com/aoc-accuses-rapist-trump-withholding-222726458.htm
l

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 8:38 AM

SECOND

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

On the flight to Alaska, President Trump declared that if he did not secure a cease-fire in Ukraine during talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “I’m not going to be happy,” and there would be “severe consequences.”

Just hours later, he got back on Air Force One and departed Alaska without the cease-fire he deemed so critical. Yet he had imposed no consequences, and had pronounced himself so happy with how things went with Mr. Putin that he said “the meeting was a 10.”

Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency, the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions. Mr. Trump abandoned the main goal he brought to his subarctic summit and, as he revealed on Saturday, would no longer even pursue an immediate cease-fire. Instead, he bowed to Mr. Putin’s preferred approach of negotiating a broader peace agreement requiring Ukraine to give up territory.

The net effect was to give Mr. Putin a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending time-consuming negotiations for a more sweeping deal that appears elusive at best. Instead of a halt to the slaughter — “I’m in this to stop the killing,” Mr. Trump had said on the way to Alaska — the president left Anchorage with pictures of him and Mr. Putin joshing on a red carpet and in the presidential limousine known as the Beast.

For all the promises of a cease-fire, of severe economic consequences, of being disappointed, it took two minutes on the red carpet and 10 minutes in the Beast for Putin to play Trump again. What a sad spectacle.

The cease-fire that Mr. Trump gave up in Alaska had been so important to him last month that he threatened tough new economic sanctions if Russia did not pause the war within 50 days. Then he moved the deadline up to last Friday. Now there is no cease-fire, no deadline and no sanctions plan.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/08/16/once-again-trump-exposed-h
is-weakness-and-got-played-by-putin/

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 9:31 AM

SECOND

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

Scoop: White House loyalty rating for companies

By Mike Allen | Aug 15, 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/white-house-rating-big-beautiful-bill

The West Wing has created a scorecard that rates 553 companies and trade associations on how hard they worked to support and promote President Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill," a senior White House official tells Axios.

Why it matters: Trump works transactionally, and companies have rushed to pay demonstrative homage. Now, senior aides will have data to consult when considering corporate requests.

The unusual spreadsheet fits this administration's proclivity for micromanaging companies and administering loyalty tests.

Factors in the rating include social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, attendance at White House events, and other engagement related to "OB3," as the megabill is known internally.

The organizations' support is ranked as strong, moderate or low.

Axios has learned that "examples of good partners" on the White House list include Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, Cisco, Airlines for America and the Steel Manufacturers Association.

How it works: The data, which is being circulated to White House senior staff, will be used as a reality check when someone from K Street calls and says, for instance, that they'd "love to catch up — was so great working with you to pass the big, beautiful bill."

The ranking "helps us see who really goes out and helps vs. those who just come in and pay lip service," the official said.

Separately, a running list on the White House website tracks announcements of "Trump Effect" investments in U.S. manufacturing, production, and innovation.

What's next: We're told this is an evolving document, with the organizations' engagement on other presidential initiatives to be added.

"If groups/companies want to start advocating more now for the tax bill or additional administration priorities, we will take that into account in our grading," the official said.

Zoom in: Companies on the White House "good" list took a variety of approaches to supporting the megabill, often singling out specific benefits for their industry.

• DoorDash deliverer Maliki Krieski of Ripon, Wisconsin, wore a red "DoorDash Mom” T-shirt as she stood behind President Trump at a White House event promoting the bill the week before final votes. She later plugged the "no tax on tips" provision in a Fox News Digital interview.

• "No Tax on Tips is now law,” Uber cheered on a blog for drivers. "No Tax on Tips, first proposed by President Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign, is a proposal to change how tips are taxed. Now that this has become law, you won't pay federal income taxes on your tips that are reported to the IRS on a 1099 form."

• Chuck Robbins — CEO of Cisco, who's also chair of Business Roundtable, the association of top U.S. CEOs — posted on X: "Encouraged by the House #reconciliation package's corporate tax provisions. By preserving a competitive rate, retaining FDII, & restoring immediate R&D expensing, this bill will strengthen America’s pro-growth tax system — allowing US companies to better innovate & invest at home."

• AT&T announced "plans to more quickly build fiber infrastructure thanks to pro-investment policies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Congress."

Airlines for America (A4A), which represents major U.S. airlines, issued a statement saying it "strongly supports the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and applauds the inclusion of a critical investment of $12.5 billion in modernizing the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic facilities, systems and infrastructure."

• United and Delta issued statements of support for the air-traffic provision.

• The Steel Manufacturers Association said the megabill "will allow manufacturers to buy new equipment, to further their lead in research and development, to raise wages and improve employee benefits. Most importantly, this legislation will allow our members to create more jobs."

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 11:44 AM

SECOND

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

Trump surrenders in the war on cancer

By Joel Eissenberg | August 17, 2025 8:36 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/08/trump-surrenders-in-the-war-on-cance
r

Progress in the war on cancer in the last 20 years has been amazing. Innovations like CAR-T cells and mRNA vaccines are the culmination of years of painstaking research and are finally finding their way into clinics and patients.

But in his war on universities, Trump is calling a halt to this life-saving progress.

The Trump administration informed UCLA it was suspending roughly 800 research grants that, together, are worth more than $500 million. The freeze has already disrupted operations.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-and-nih-suspend-grants-ucl
a

The longer the freeze stays in place, the more likely to slow down the studies, downsize the laboratory’s operations or even shut down the project altogether.

Trump’s move against UCLA is the latest in a series of funding suspensions that have targeted individual schools like Columbia and Harvard. Trump has told UCLA it will have to pony up $1 billion if it wants a restoration of its funds, according to the New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/us/trump-ucla-research-funding-deal
.html

And Trump hasn’t simply been using federal research funds as leverage against individual institutions. He’s also been wrecking the entire government apparatus for supporting scientific research—by purging senior leaders and career staff at the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies, and canceling or withholding hundreds of millions (and probably billions) of dollars in previously awarded grants.

There may be more to come. Trump’s budget for next year calls for reducing NIH funding by 37 percent, and reducing funds for the National Cancer Institute (which is a division of NIH) by the same magnitude. “If implemented,” the American Cancer Society Action Network warned, “these cuts will deal a devastating blow to cancer patients and their families, and the United States could lose its global competitive edge in biomedical research.”

The US used to be the world’s leader in biomedical research. Trump aims to change that.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 12:34 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, fag.

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

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 12:50 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.

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

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

Trump says tariffs are going to be enough to pay down national debt

By Eleanor Pringle | August 17, 2025

https://fortune.com/2025/08/17/trump-tariffs-pay-national-debt-interes
t/

President Trump has a two-pronged plan for the proceeds of his tariff regime. Firstly, he says, it’s going to pay down America’s $37 trillion national debt. Secondly, he’s considering sharing the spoils with the public.

“The purpose of what I’m doing is primarily to pay down debt, which will happen in very large quantity,” Trump told media earlier this month. “But I think there’s also a possibility that we’re taking in so much money that we may very well make a dividend to the people of America.”

The plan sounds welcome, in theory. But there’s just one problem. At present, tariff revenues don’t even cover the interest on the debt—let alone reduce its overall size.

According to Treasury data seen by Fortune, the accrued interest expense on Treasury notes in July alone was $38.1 billion. Add to that $13.9 billion in interest on Treasury bonds, $2.85 billion on Treasury Floating Rate Notes (FRN) and a total of $6.1 billion across Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) assets. The bill is eye-watering: The total comes to $60.95 billion for the month.

By contrast, Treasury statements show that tariffs only brought in $29.6 billion to offset it. An impressive figure, but still not enough to rival interest payments. If the Trump team does intend to pass through circa $30 billion a month toward offsetting the national debt, it would have accrued a gargantuan $360 billion payment over a year. This figure is less than 1% of America’s national debt, at the time of writing.

In exclusive interviews with Fortune, Wharton’s Professor Joao Gomes and AEI’s Desmond Lachman warned that while tariffs may slow debt growth, they won’t meaningfully reduce it. Markets are largely skeptical of Trump’s math . . .

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 12:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up fag.

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

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 1:00 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.

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

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 5:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Fuck off, Second. Grow up.

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

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 5:19 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:
Fuck off, Second. Grow up.

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

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

Trump Leaves Alaska Empty-Handed

Well, What Did You Think Would Happen?

Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin but failed to make a deal.

By Jonathan Lemire

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-alask
a-summit/683897/

So what was that all for?

President Donald Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say. Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage. But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting, Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed. Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference, he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.

In his brief remarks, Trump conceded that he and Putin had not reached a deal to end the war in Ukraine or even pause the fighting. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” the president said. He characterized their three-hour meeting—vaguely—as “very productive.” Of the outstanding issues between the two sides, he admitted that “one is probably significant,” but he didn’t say what that was. “We didn’t get there but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump insisted. The Russian president, for his part, made mention of “agreements” that had been struck behind closed doors. Yet Putin also provided no elaboration, leaving the distinct impression that it was a summit about nothing.

If anything, Putin seemed to make clear that his demands regarding Ukraine haven’t changed. In his usual coded way, he said an agreement could be reached only once the “primary roots” of the conflict were “eliminated”—which means, basically, that Ukraine should be part of Russia. “We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will perceive that constructively and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works,” Putin said, in what sounded like a warning. “They will not make any backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.”

As Putin and Trump boarded their respective airplanes for their flights home, Ukraine and Europe were left guessing as to what the coming days will bring. Will more missiles fly toward Kyiv? Will a second meeting involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky occur? Trump was equally as vague in a Fox News interview taped after the summit, though he did suggest that the next steps in the process would be up to Zelensky. What was clear today was that Trump, who had once promised to bring the war to a close within 24 hours, left the summit empty-handed.

“Summits usually have deliverables. This meeting had none,” Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told me. “I hope that they made some progress towards next steps in the peace process. But there is no evidence of that yet.”

At their last summit, in Helsinki in 2018, Trump and Putin captivated the world when they took questions, revealing details of their private discussions as the American president sided with Moscow, rather than his own U.S. intelligence agencies, over Russia’s 2016 election interference. This time, they quickly ducked offstage as reporters shouted in vain. When the two men did speak, they mostly delivered pleasantries. Putin even repeated Trump’s talking point that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would never have happened had Trump been in office then. And Trump, once more, said that the two men “had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

That the summit happened at all was perceived by many as a victory for Putin, who, after years as an international pariah, was granted a photo with a U.S. president on American soil—on land that once belonged to Russia, no less. And he was greeted in an over-the-top, stage-managed welcome that involved a literal red carpet for a man accused of war crimes. Putin disembarked his plane this morning moments after Trump stepped off Air Force One, and the two men strode toward each other past parked F-22 fighter jets before meeting with a warm handshake and smiles. After posing for photographs, and quickly peering up at a military flyover that roared above them, the two men stepped into the presidential limousine, the heavily fortified vehicle known as “the Beast.”

The White House had announced earlier in the day that the two men would not have a previously planned one-on-one meeting, but would instead have a pair of sit-downs flanked by advisers. But here, in the back seat of the Beast, Putin had his time alone with Trump. As the limousine drove off the tarmac to the summit site, Putin could be seen in a rear window laughing.

Putin and Trump were scheduled to have a formal meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, followed by lunch. But after the first meeting ran long, extending to more than three hours, reporters were abruptly rushed to the room where the press conference would be staged. The second meeting had been canceled. Had there been a breakthrough or a blowup? Putin sported the better body language: He almost glowed as he spoke to the press, offering a history lesson about Alaska, while praising the “neighborly” relations between the men. And, oddly, he got to speak first, even though Trump was the summit’s host. Trump, in contrast, seemed subdued, only perking up when Putin ended their media appearance by suggesting that their next summit be in Moscow.

“I think Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won. Putin got everything he could have wished for, but he’s not home free yet,” John Bolton, who was a national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told me. “Zelensky and the Europeans must be dismayed. And I thought Trump looked very tired at the press event. Putin looked energetic.”

Putin seemed eager to broaden the conversation beyond Ukraine. He brought Russian business leaders to Alaska, hoping to play to Trump’s hopes of better economic relations between the two countries, and perhaps strike a rare-earth-minerals deal. He also suggested earlier this week that he would revisit a nuclear-arms agreement, perhaps allowing Trump to leave the summit with some sort of win that did not involve Ukraine. But nothing was announced on those fronts either.

The fear in Kyiv and across Europe was that Trump is so desperate for the fighting to stop, he might have agreed to Putin’s terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. That did not happen, which was cheered across the continent, and Trump said that he would soon consult with Zelensky and NATO. But Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine.

The Europeans and Ukrainians had good reason to be nervous about today’s summit. Trump has spent most of his decade on the global stage being extraordinarily deferential to Putin, which continued when he returned to the White House this year. He initially sided with Russia—even blaming Ukraine for causing its own invasion—before slowly souring on Putin’s refusal to end the war.

Read: Things aren’t going Donald Trump’s way

This summit came together in about a week’s time; final details were still being arranged even as some of Putin’s delegation arrived in Alaska yesterday. Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, made several visits to Moscow in recent months. He had been in the Middle East when he received word through a back channel that Putin might finally be willing to come to the table given Trump’s more hostile rhetoric toward Putin and threat of sanctions. After a series of meetings with key Trump senior aides and multiple flights across the Atlantic, Witkoff met again with Putin and accepted the offer of a summit. (He also accepted a twisted gift: Putin presented Witkoff with an Order of Lenin award to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son had been killed in Ukraine fighting alongside Russia.)

Summits, particularly those as high-stakes as ones between American and Russian presidents, usually take weeks if not months to plan. Everything is carefully choreographed: the agenda, the participants, the ceremony. Normally, the outcome is more or less predetermined. In the days before the actual summit, aides hash out some sort of agreement so the two leaders simply need to show up and shake hands to make the deal official. That was clearly not the case today—or in other Trump-Putin meetings.

Trump had met with Putin seven previous times, all but one coming on the sidelines of larger summits and all friendly. The first was at the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, when the two men sat next to each other for an hours-long leaders’ dinner. Their last meeting, at the G20 in Osaka, Japan, in the fall of 2019, ended with Trump mockingly warning Putin to never interfere again in American elections, with a sarcastic smile and an exaggerated finger wag.

But Helsinki is the headliner. It came against the backdrop of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. I was one of the two American journalists called upon to ask a question, and I posed to Trump whether he believed Putin or his own U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Putin glared at me. Trump sided with Moscow. The eruption on both sides of the Atlantic was fierce and immediate, and even some loyal Republicans said they thought Trump’s answer was a betrayal of American values. Some of Trump’s top aides—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chief of Staff John Kelly—were photographed with pained expressions on their faces. Fiona Hill, Trump’s Russia adviser, told me later that she nearly faked a heart attack in a desperate attempt to get the summit to stop.

Anchorage wasn’t Helsinki. For that, Europe can be grateful. Trump didn’t give away Ukrainian land to Russia or demand that Zelensky take a bad deal, at least immediately. But Putin did get much of what he wanted, including a high-profile summit and, most of all, more time to continue his war. When he boarded his plane to leave Alaska, he was spotted smiling again.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 5:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck off, Second. Grow up.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump Leaves Alaska Empty-Handed

Jonathan Lemire

As opposed to you and Jonathan, who have your hands full playing with each other's 2" puds.

Keep cheering for America to fail, losers.

You suck. Your party is dead. You should just move out of my country now.

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

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Sunday, August 17, 2025 5:47 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:

Keep cheering for America to fail, losers.

You suck. Your party is dead. You should just move out of my country now.

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

If there’s one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever happens, it is never, ever, his fault.

Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin

Even the puffery-prone President couldn’t alchemize his non-deal with Russia into Trumpian gold.

By Susan B. Glasser | August 15, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-tr
ump-self-own-summit-with-vladimir-putin

Nothing says standing up to Russian aggression quite like welcoming the aggressor on a red carpet and applauding him. On Friday, Donald Trump did both at the start of his summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. This triumphant greeting was followed by multiple friendly handshakes, a cordial pat or two on the arm, and a companionable stride past an enfilade of American F-22 fighter jets at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. When the pair got within shouting distance of the American press corps, a bit of harsh reality crept in. “President Putin, will you stop killing civilians?” someone called out. But, on the twelve-hundred-and-sixty-eighth day since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Trump never wavered from the chummy cordiality with which they had greeted each other for their first meeting in six years. Putin pantomimed not being able to hear the question and shrugged. In an instant, Trump ushered him away for an apparently impromptu ride in his Presidential limousine; pictures of the Beast rolling slowly toward the venue where their formal talks would be held showed Putin, through the window, grinning broadly.

When they emerged a little more than three hours later, after a shorter-than-expected session that did not include a scheduled lunch, the mutual admiration still flowed freely. Both men smiled. Trump gushed to the media about the “fantastic relationship” he’d always had with Putin and praised his “very profound” opening statement. Putin was, if anything, more over the top than Trump, praising the American President’s personal commitment to “pursuing peace,” as the logo projected on the stage behind them put it. Putin even played to Trump’s loathing of his predecessor, Joe Biden, adopting his talking point that the war with Ukraine never would have happened if Trump, not Biden, had been the American President. After twenty-five years in power, the former K.G.B. agent has learned well how to stroke the ego of his fifth U.S. counterpart.

What Putin did not offer, however, was what Trump has been demanding, without any success, for months: a ceasefire in Russia’s war with Ukraine. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump acknowledged in his brief remarks. While he spoke of “great progress” and Putin gestured at unspecified agreements that had been reached, “we didn’t get there,” Trump admitted. And that was it. After twelve minutes, and without a single question, the press conference adjourned, leaving stunned journalists to interpret the cryptic outcome: Was that really it, after all Trump’s hype?

Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.

Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:

Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!

The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.

In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.

But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”

In the coming days, there will be endless explanations from Trump and his team as to why he didn’t get more out of the session. But, even in his post-summit interview with the great White House amplifier, Sean Hannity, the President struggled to alchemize the non-deal into Trumpian gold. “On a scale of one to ten,” Hannity asked the President, how would he grade the session? “The meeting was a ten in the sense that we got along great,” Trump responded. When Trump started talking, however, it was hardly about the summit at all, but about the “rigged election” in 2020 and how terrible Biden was and how he and Putin could have got so much done together if there had been no Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Soon he was on to riffs about Iran and the border and his tariffs and how things in the U.S. are going so great that “Vladimir” told him, “Your country is hot as a pistol.” (Yeah, right.) On and on Trump went, about beating ISIS and why mail-in voting is terrible, about how big China is and how powerful America’s nuclear weapons are. Those tough-guy sanctions he once promised to place on Putin if he didn’t produce a deal weren’t so much as mentioned.

The more he talked about anything other than Russia, in fact, the more it was obvious: Even Trump knew he had bombed. “Now it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said at one point. If there’s one unwavering Law of Trump, this is it: Whatever happens, it is never, ever, his fault.

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

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