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, August 21, 2025 10:41
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VIEWED: 49998
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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 9:16 AM

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

In February 1945, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain met in Yalta — then a city in Soviet Russia, later a city in Ukraine, now a city in Russian-occupied Crimea — to negotiate the end of World War II. Among other things, Joseph Stalin wanted the Kuril Islands, which stretched from Soviet Kamchatka to the coast of Japan.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed to let the Soviets have the Kurils. The islands weren’t theirs to give — the Kurils belonged to Japan — but they were theirs to take. Six months later, Soviet troops, with significant support from the U.S. military, took control of the islands and deported the Japanese residents. The Soviet troops had gone to Alaska to train for the operation.

That military operation began on Aug. 18, 1945, exactly 80 years before Trump met with Zelensky at the White House. Putin, who is a history buff and, more important, has for years been floating the idea of a second Yalta Conference, is certainly mindful of the date and the historical rhyme.

More than 80 years after Yalta, no peace treaty exists between Japan and Russia. World War II never officially ended for these two countries, because Japan never ceded the Kuril Islands. All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/opinion/ukraine-russia-war-territor
y.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, August 20, 2025 9:26 AM

SECOND

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

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. government to own a piece of Intel, less than two weeks after demanding the Silicon Valley pioneer dump the CEO that was hired to turn around the slumping chipmaker.

The Trump administration is in talks to secure a 10% stake in Intel in exchange for converting government grants that were pledged to Intel under President Joe Biden. If the deal is completed, the U.S. government would become one of Intel’s largest shareholders and blur the traditional lines separating the public sector and private sector in a country that remains the world’s largest economy.

The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are helping to power the craze around artificial intelligence, to pay a 15% commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.

Didn’t Trump want Intel’s CEO to quit?

That’s what the president said August 7 in an unequivocal post calling for Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign less than five months after the Santa Clara, California, company hired him. The demand was triggered by reports raising national security concerns about Tan’s past investments in Chinese tech companies while he was a venture capitalist. But Trump backed off after Tan professed his allegiance to the U.S. in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, who applauded the Intel CEO for having an “amazing story.”

https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-chips-government-stake-lutnick-
09584b8418fe3589e1c4cd03cc5f156b

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 4:51 PM

SECOND

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

Trump's "Truth" About Voting

By Joyce Vance | Aug 18, 2025

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/trumps-truth-about-voting

It’s one of those days with so much going on that it was clear to me early in the day I needed to do a standalone post on the topic of Trump’s most recent attack on our elections to give that topic the focus it deserves. I hope you’ll share this post with friends and family—and whoever needs to hear it. A President telling lies to the American people, especially about something as important as the integrity of our elections, is intolerable.

Early this morning, Trump was on Truth Social. His post (he calls them “truths”) was yet another screed about voter fraud and ending mail-in voting—something that’s up to every state, and not the president.

Here’s the post (but you should feel free to skip it for now, we’ll discuss the salient points below):

Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly “Inaccurate,” Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election. We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED. WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and “WOKE” for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115049485680941254

Trump elaborated on the post Monday afternoon, saying the quiet part out loud: “If you [end] mail in voting, you're not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said in the Oval Office. Trump mumbles a bit as he’s making the comment, but the context is plain. He’s moving beyond his failed plan to rig the House with his midterm redistricting in Texas—now capably checkmated by Texas state legislators, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and other Democrats. Trump, who says that ending mail-in voting is “bigger” than redistricting, has a new plan to interfere with the 2026 election: Making it more difficult for fully eligible American citizens to vote.

For many election cycles, I woke up early, got my kids ready, and voted on the way into work, because it was difficult—and sometimes impossible—to get away during the workday. That was relatively easy for me, because everything was nearby, and the lines were short. Voting added 15 minutes max to the commute, and the kids loved going with us. For people with long commutes, limited mobility, reliance on public transportation, nontraditional work hours, or family care responsibilities, mail-in voting is essential to exercising their right to vote. And despite the myths spread by Trump and his allies, there is no evidence that mail-in voting is linked to fraud. Trump has been searching for that evidence since he stood up his “Election Integrity Commission” in 2017, which was supposed to find it but couldn’t, and was forced to fold just months into its work.

Trump believes the best hope for his party to win, or at least not lose too badly in the midterm elections and beyond, is stripping Americans of their right to vote. He seems to be afraid of the outcome if Republicans have to run on his record—and their own records—because there’s no need to cheat if you’re confident you’ll win.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded to the post: “Two facts: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and vote by mail is safe, secure, and reliable. Let’s be clear - this is not based in fact or reality, but it is yet another way for Trump to silence Americans from using their voice in the democratic process and implement Jim Crow laws across America.”

Trump’s post is full of—I’ll be generous and call them—errors. Some of his other lines, beyond the lies about mail-in voting, include:

• His claim is that he will get rid of “Highly Inaccurate, Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” It’s ironic that he put this out there the same day Newsmax agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $67 million to settle their defamation lawsuit for lying about the machines. That settlement, of course, follows one agreed to by Fox News. Smartmatic also obtained settlements from outlets that had falsely inflated its role in the 2020 election and claimed its machines were faulty. Trump continues to circulate these mythical claims, in what, at this point, can only be viewed as a deliberate effort to deceive Americans.

• Trump also endorses “accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper,” which is supposed to allow detection of tampering. States are free to use it if they want to. Trump could encourage that by making funding available to those who do. There is no suggestion he has, nor is there much to suggest it’s needed.

• Trump claims that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” That’s not true. Countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland use mail in ballots, and there is no more suggestion of fraud there than there is here.

• Trump continues, “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE.” I’m not going to even dignify this with a response. Trump lost dozens of cases making this claim after the 2020 election. Joe Biden conceded the Democrats’ loss in 2024 and gave Trump a smooth transition to power.

• Trump claims he will sign an executive order to this effect (he hasn’t yet) because “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.” That’s another wild and false claim. Congress sets the date and the time for national elections, but all other matters are reserved to the states, and each state runs its own elections with its own rules. If that wasn’t clear to Trump previously, it should be now. In June, a judge blocked the part of Trump’s March executive order that sought to stop states from counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrived afterward. The judge emphasized that presidents can’t impose their views about how to conduct elections on the states.

• Trump tries to argue that Democrats can’t win because of policy positions he doesn’t like. But isn’t that the whole point of having an election? We let the voters decide; that’s the essence of democracy.

It’s nauseating. Trump voters should be offended, although I’ve seen few signs of this, that he would tell such blatant lies and expect them to stomach them. The hypocrisy of Trump claiming that only free and fair elections guarantee democracy can’t be lost on elected Republicans, even if they refuse to publicly acknowledge it.

Trump conflated policy choices with the right to vote. Voters choose their elected officials—and the policies they want them to pursue—through free and fair elections, where each of us has the right to vote. It’s up to Republicans to compete for those votes in the marketplace of ideas. Trump doesn’t get to dictate the outcome of our elections. But Trump wants to be a dictator—that’s abundantly clear in this post.

It is true that Democrats will oppose ending mail-in voting, as Trump has predicted. That’s because Democrats believe that who you vote for is a political choice. But your ability to vote, your right to vote, is a fundamental part of being an American. Having mail-in voting makes that easier for some people, including a lot of older people who tend to vote Republican. Trump and his wife, Melania, have notoriously voted by mail in the past.

Trump always returns to his fantastical myth of voter fraud, which doesn’t exist, in moments of stress. It’s the fairytale he tells the kids when he wants to distract them. Was it the embarrassing meeting with Putin, for whom he literally had American service members roll out a red carpet on their hands and knees? Or is he still worried about Jeffrey Epstein, with that matter heating up again this week? Trump seems stressed, but the lies are dangerous.

We know from his earlier executive order on voting, the SAVE Act, and the whole redistricting scam in Texas that Trump is worried that his presidency cannot carry a free and fair election for his party. As I’ve written to you before, there will be elections in 2026 and beyond, but it will likely become harder for us to exercise this fundamental right. We will have to fight to register to vote, to stay registered, to cast our ballots, and to make sure they get counted. We must do that because it matters. We should not have to, but this is our fight for democracy. And Trump has made it clear it’s time for us to get to work.

Our democracy depends on truth. When disinformation is spread deliberately by a president and permitted to take hold, Civil Discourse is about cutting through the noise and explaining what’s really happening, in plain language. If you value clear, fact-based analysis in an era of intentional distortions, I hope you’ll subscribe and support my work, so it remains available for everyone.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We’re in this together,

Joyce

You're in this alone, bitch.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up Second.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I wish to reiterate that Trumptards are evil.

I don't believe that Evil can recognize other Evil.

You are an evil piece of shit, dude.

And you're done.

You're done, you're done, you're done.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:49 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up Second.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I wish to reiterate that Trumptards are evil.

I don't believe that Evil can recognize other Evil.

You are an evil piece of shit, dude.

And you're done.

You're done, you're done, you're done.

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

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

I'm guessing you missed all the lessons of WWII. According to the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists, the Americans were worshipers of Satan, which is why Americans firebombed Germany and Japan. And then there were the nukes. Americans were absolutely evil as far as German and Japanese propaganda was concerned. Same thing in the Civil War, where the Northerners were absolutely the most horrible individuals in creation according to Confederate slave-owners who raped, tortured and murdered slaves on a daily basis because that is the only way to get those darkies to do their work. (Almost forgot, but Lincoln was totally evil, worst than Satan, according to the same slave-owners who were murdering Northerners to protect the rights of states in the South.)

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 5:50 PM

SECOND

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

D.C. needs real policing, not propaganda

I’m worried Trump is only going to make crime worse

By Matthew Yglesias | Aug 20, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/dc-needs-real-policing-not-propaganda

Crime is a good issue for Republicans, because it’s one where the public’s broad values are very conservative — it’s the opposite of health care in that regard. So in raw political terms, Trump’s decision to take over D.C.’s local police department and send in the National Guard is an easy win for him. It shifts crime to the center of the national political conversation and invites progressives to express their views about crime, which involves appealing to values and concepts that most voters reject.

I think it’s also clear that, on some level, Trump is actively seeking the emergence of a mass protest movement against him.

When he deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles, he seemed excited about the idea of confronting protesters. When the protests fizzled, the troops themselves were mostly coping with boredom, and Trump basically sidled away from the whole thing. On paper, it’s clearly good for the city to have federal law enforcement agents supplementing the D.C. police’s manpower. If you think about why previous administrations haven’t sent investigators from the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement agencies to serve as beat cops in D.C., it’s for the obvious reason that this isn’t in the national interest. But additional cops on the beat aren’t something any D.C. mayor or most D.C. residents would complain about.

Yet Trump clearly seems to want complaints, so he’s throwing a fit about one guy who threw a sandwich. He’s going beyond the extensive powers that are genuinely granted him by the Home Rule Act to do additional, illegal stuff, like trying to unilaterally override D.C.’s immigration rules. He is, generally speaking, looking for a fight.

As a concerned citizen of the United States of America, I worry about where the politics of all this is going. But as a longtime D.C. resident, I have two more specific worries:

1. I would like people to have accurate rather than inaccurate information about the crime situation, and the current situation has brought out a ton of misinformation.

2. I worry that running the police department for presidential propaganda purposes is going to leave D.C. with more rather than less crime.

My basic view is that there is not an “emergency” crime situation in DC — the city was safer in 2024 than in 2023, and the 2025 trends were moving in a positive direction before Trump intervened. On the other hand, while D.C. is not the most dangerous city in America (the most dangerous cities in America are almost all poor cities in the South), it is a lot more dangerous than the other Discourse Cities, like New York and San Francisco.

D.C. is also a partial exception to big national crime trends. It’s a rare city that had more murders in 2023 than in 2021, and while crime was falling in 2025, it was falling at a slower rate than in most cities.

There are many genuinely constructive things the federal government could do about this, without invoking any extraordinary power or abrogating Home Rule. The federal government is already extensively involved in D.C. governance, notably in running the courts and criminal prosecutions and most of the parks and the parole system. All this work is generally not done very well, precisely because it’s in the hands of officials who are not accountable to D.C. voters. It would be amazing if Trump became earnestly concerned about D.C. local governance and started performing all the federal aspects of this in a constructive way.

But I think the more likely outcome is the reverse: that the feds taking over local police will simply lead to local law enforcement being run in the same neglectful, half-assed way that the National Park Service runs our local parks.

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

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 6:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up Second.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I wish to reiterate that Trumptards are evil.

I don't believe that Evil can recognize other Evil.

You are an evil piece of shit, dude.

And you're done.

You're done, you're done, you're done.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'm guessing you missed all the lessons of WWII.

No.

YOU did.

You're the bad guy. You were always the bad guy.

Go fuck yourself. Your party is dead. You need to go away now.

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

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

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Thursday, August 21, 2025 8:05 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:

No.

YOU did.

You're the bad guy. You were always the bad guy.

Go fuck yourself. Your party is dead. You need to go away now.

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

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

What is wrong with Trumptards? They don't want to know the bad news about themselves. Trump takes that attitude to the highest level -- outer space. Since climate change is a Chinese Hoax, a satellite for studying Climate Change must be destroyed by Trump:

Trump wants NASA to burn a crucial satellite to cinders, killing research into climate change

By Michael Hiltzik | Aug. 19, 2025

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-19/trump-wants-nasa-to-
burn-a-crucial-satellite-to-cinders-killing-research-into-climate-change

By any reasonable metric, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory has been a spectacular success. Originally designed to support a two-year pilot project, it has been operating continuously in space for more than 10 years and could continue doing so for three decades more.

The data it produces “are of exceptionally high quality,” NASA stated in a 2023 review, when it labeled the project “the flagship mission for space-borne measurements” of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Trump administration plans to shut the program down. It gets worse: The White House has given NASA instructions to destroy the spacecraft by plunging it to a fiery demise in the atmosphere.

These are national assets....They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.
— David Crisp, former NASA team leader

Knowledgeable scientists and engineers say that Trump could choose to temporarily mothball the orbiting observatory, leaving a skeleton staff in place at NASA to monitor its hibernation until cooler heads prevail at the White House. Destroying the spacecraft, however, will hamstring climate research for decades.

The zeroing out of climate research budgets by the Trump White House, of which the cancellation of the OCO program is a part, is taking place just as the value of space-borne climate research has been rising sharply.

“The bottom line is that the societal and scientific benefit of this research increases almost exponentially with sustained and long-lasting measurements,” says Ben Poulter, an expert in greenhouse gas measurements formerly at NASA and now a senior scientist at the nonprofit Spark Climate Solutions. “We’re starting to see the positive impact of OCO-2 at helping to detect trends in greenhouse gas emissions and removals in natural ecosystems as the Earth undergoes the impacts of climate change.”

Under the most recent Republican administrations, NASA’s involvement in Earth science — that is, research into global warming and other climate change — has consistently come under fire.

As I reported recently, these programs were specifically targeted by Russell Vought, currently Trump’s budget director and an architect of Project 2025, in a 2023 unofficial budget proposal. There, Vought groused about NASA’s “misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs.” He called for a 50% reduction in the budget for NASA Earth science research — a cut that made it into Trump’s current proposed budget.

The vastly reduced Earth science budget for NASA was passed by the House earlier this year, but it isn’t part of the Senate version, which hasn’t been passed.

What isn’t understood by Vought, Trump or the current acting director of NASA, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, is that Earth science was specifically made part of NASA’s portfolio in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created the agency. Among the agency’s directives, the act stated, would be “the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere.” That’s where climate change occurs.

The effort to zero out Earth science alarmed more than 60 Democratic House members, who wrote Duffy on July 18 to warn that “the scale of reductions to NASA Earth science would ... severely impair the use of Earth science data and research to improve our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and wildfires, leaving the nation less prepared for the challenges of the future and impacting local communities’ abilities to adapt and respond to severe weather and natural disaster events.”

Trump’s budgetary cheeseparing at NASA means the waste of billions of dollars already spent by taxpayers. As I reported before, the bulk of the cost of space missions is in the development of spacecraft and their launch; once that’s done, the cost of maintaining a satellite in orbit is nominal. According to David Crisp, who led the OCO development team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena from the outset and is now a private consultant, the OCO program development and launch cost was about $750 million, but since the launch it costs only about $15 million a year to operate.

That doesn’t count the value of the lost data. Crisp reckons that Duffy and the administration “decided that NASA should not do Earth science, and the fact that we have billions and billions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars invested in that enterprise right now and really valuable hardware in place, providing critical information to organizations across the world is irrelevant. I think what’s going on here is that they’ve made a strategic move without taking into account tactical realities.”

The average layperson — and that includes some White House officials making policy decisions about scientific endeavors — has no idea about the effort required to put a satellite into space and keep it there.

The OCO project was typical. As described by Crisp, the process began in the mid-1990s as an inquiry into how carbon dioxide produced on Earth got absorbed by natural “sinks” such as forests. The project won approval in 2001 from the George W. Bush administration. Environmental science wasn’t the partisan football it later became. “You could be a good Republican and still think this was a good thing to do,” Crisp told me.

The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory was readied for launch in February 2009. “It was a tremendous challenge, an instrument designed to make a measurement three or four times more difficult than anything ever attempted at JPL,” Crisp says. The launch was successful — for just over three minutes, at which point it failed, plunging rocket and satellite to a watery grave in the Indian Ocean.

“We’d spent eight years and $270 million and engaged more than 1,000 work-years of heroic effort,” Crisp recalls. NASA wanted to keep the project alive. For 10 months, Crisp and others beat down the doors of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and commercial enterprise to find the money to preserve it, but this was in the teeth of the Great Recession, and no one signed on. But ultimately the Obama administration appropriated $50 million in December 2009 to restart the mission.

Crisp’s team built a carbon copy of the original satellite, and it was launched successfully on July 2, 2014. The original vision was to operate OCO-2 for two years as a proof-of-concept, showing that carbon dioxide could be accurately measured from space. Because of the peculiarities of the launch, however, it carried enough fuel to last 40 years. The reconstruction left enough spare parts in hand to build a twin instrument dubbed OCO-3, which was launched in May 2019 and installed on the International Space Station, where it is still operating.

When I asked NASA for a response to widespread criticism of its actions by the scientific community, I got the same standardized response that others have received. It labeled OCO-2 and -3 “two climate missions beyond their prime mission,” and added that as the proposed budget has “not yet been enacted, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further at this time.”

What NASA believes the OCO “prime mission” is, if not studying atmospheric conditions on Earth, is a mystery.

Within weeks of its own launch, OCO-2 began producing data that would revolutionize climate science. Its applications went well beyond measuring carbon dioxide. OCO-2 was able to detect “solar-induced fluorescence” in plants, an artifact of photosynthesis, which could be used as a “reliable early warning indicator of flash drought with enough lead time to take action,” JPL reported last year.

Those measurements, Crisp says, “have been a bigger hit with the science community than the CO2 measurements.” And they’re the product not of planning, but serendipity, a crucial feature of scientific progress.

At this moment, OCO-2 seems destined for oblivion. Crisp says NASA staffers have been instructed to make a plan to move the spacecraft into a “disposal orbit” that would incinerate it in the Earth’s atmosphere within a few months. But that’s expensive, requiring a detailed plan to ensure that its deteriorating orbit doesn’t threaten other orbiting craft. The quick and dirty alternative would be to “point the thing down and fire the thruster, which would basically produce an instantaneous reentry.” Which option will be chosen isn’t clear.

A third alternative is to place the craft in a sort of suspended sleep, so it could be started up again after Trump and his minions leave office. But that would require 24-hour monitoring to adjust the OCO orbit to avoid space junk — not an infrequent occurrence. (With OCO-3 attached to the International Space Station, it will remain in place, though nonfunctional, as long as the ISS stays aloft.)

The plan to destroy OCO-2 is beyond shameful. Crisp says of the OCO hardware, “these are national assets.... They are what made this country great. Tearing things down doesn’t make it great again. It just tears things down.”

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

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Thursday, August 21, 2025 8:14 AM

SECOND

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

The Trump administration has a clear view of the state of the nation 7 months into Trump’s presidency. The economy, it says, is wonderful, with surging growth and no inflation, while big cities are crime-ridden hellscapes where nobody dares to go out.

The data, of course, don’t support any of this. Growth is slowing, possibly to “stall speed,” while inflation is accelerating. Urban crime, however, has been plunging, and in general our cities are safer than they’ve been since the 1960s, or maybe ever.

The administration’s response has been to attack the data and the people who report it. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the BLS released a disappointing jobs report, and is trying to install someone completely unqualified (who may be a deranged QAnon type) to replace her. Stephen Miller has declared that “crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” that true crime levels are “orders of magnitude higher.”

And now this:

In Battle Over D.C. Police, Federal Prosecutors Open Inquiry Into Crime Data
The same U.S. attorney’s office that praised a drop in crime in the capital in April has begun an investigation into the Police Department resisting President Trumps takeover.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/dc-police-crime-data-in
vestigation.html

God knows about the politics. Suburban and small-town residents who believe that we have a national crime crisis, not from personal experience but because Fox News says that blue cities are dangerous hellscapes, may well just get angry when presented with contrary evidence. But let’s not mistake what they say about crime as an indication of anything real.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crime-and-self-promotion

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

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Thursday, August 21, 2025 9:17 AM

SECOND

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

Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. [T]hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-20-2025

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

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Thursday, August 21, 2025 9:58 AM

SECOND

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

A warning sign for America about Trump’s personalist rule

Why and when do autocracies underperform on growth?

Matthew Yglesias

Aug 21, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-warning-sign-for-america-about

. . . Trump keeps talking about running for a third term.

He’s also taken advantage of the conservative legal movement’s longstanding advocacy for “unitary executive” theory to dispense with the idea that American institutions exist separately from the whims of the president.

Whether it’s the F.B.I. or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, every single executive branch official is merely an extension of Trump. And he exerts personalistic control over the Republican Party like nobody we’ve ever seen in American politics. China hawks wanted export controls on advanced Nvidia chips; Nvidia wanted to sell powerful chips to a large market. Trump announced that Nvidia can sell the chips, if they pay a 15 percent fee to the U.S. government. But we don’t see G.O.P. China hawks denouncing this as a sellout of national security or G.O.P. free marketers denouncing this as a pretextual shakedown.

Trump is shutting down renewables deployment, and all we get from even senior G.O.P. members from wind-oriented states is passive-aggressive complaints, no actual effort to oppose him.

Of course the U.S. remains more democratic than China or P.R.I. Mexico or any of the other autocratic states, whether personalist or institutionalized.

But we are living through a pretty extraordinary de-institutionalization of American politics, driven exclusively by Trump and the G.O.P. His ability to completely cow intra-party opposition gives him remarkable scope to get away with corruption and remarkable tactical flexibility in addressing difficult policy questions. But it’s also eating away at some of the fundamental wellsprings of American prosperity. And in things like firing the head of the B.L.S. we see the rapid emergence of bad epistemic habits, like killing the messenger.

Maybe it’s all fine. China, as I say, continues to hold up better than I might have thought as it descends into personalism instead of moving toward the democracy we once hoped for. Maybe the country will hold up and defy the patterns of history, and maybe a totally MAGA-fied America will be okay too. But I’m awfully uncomfortable banking on it.

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

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Thursday, August 21, 2025 10:41 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump displayed a breathtaking lack of understanding about the Cold War during his recent summit with Vladimir Putin — and left his own advisors “basically helpless” as he waved away their attempts to interject.

Trump's version of Cold War history was so mangled that "it would appear that the U.S. and USSR are on the same side."

Friday’s chaotic meeting in Alaska began with Trump launching into what Wolff described as "a combination of flattery" mixed with "things that he's just pulled out of somewhere...observations, it's both inconsequential and incoherent."

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff attempted to redirect the conversation with an actual agenda, Trump simply "talked over them," leaving the meeting rudderless after 20 minutes with "nothing clear about what anyone is doing there except that Putin is totally impassive."

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2673905305/

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

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