REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, October 2, 2025 22:48
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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 6:34 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump Will Never Be a Restrainer

By Stephen M. Walt | September 30, 2025, 7:00 AM

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/30/donald-trump-will-never-be-a-rest
rainer/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

. . . The idea of U.S. foreign-policy restraint emerged in opposition to the grand strategy of liberal hegemony, which sought to use American power to spread democracy, markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values around the world, and to bring as many states as possible into institutions dominated by the United States. Restrainers believe that trying to spread democracy with military force is a fool’s errand, and that threatening or bullying other states usually backfires, making adversaries more suspicious and turning allies or neutrals into enemies. For this reason, they believe diplomacy should be America’s first impulse and the use of force its last resort. They are neither isolationists nor pacifists, because they believe that the United States has an interest in helping maintain favorable balances of power in key regions, that allies are useful but should pull their weight, that force is sometimes necessary to defend vital interests, and that well-designed international institutions can facilitate cooperation even as states compete. And while restrainers recognize that the world can be a dangerous place and that the United States has serious conflicts of interest with some countries, they oppose the relentless threat inflation used to justify excessive U.S. military spending and the overuse of force abroad.

Restrainers do not agree on every issue—for example, some favor confronting China more vigorously while others favor greater efforts to accommodate its rise—but they are united in their opposition to the self-indulgent hubris that has characterized U.S. grand strategy under recent Democratic and Republican administrations. Above all, restrainers oppose the capricious use of military force and believe the United States could be more secure and more prosperous if it spent less on national security and used its still considerable power more judiciously.

So why is Trump not a true restrainer? Let me count the ways.

First, Trump continues to favor unnecessary increases in the U.S. defense budget, which recently topped $1 trillion and still dwarfs that of every other country. Even worse, he is diverting some of these vast sums from their true purpose—defending the United States against foreign dangers—and using them to go after fictitious domestic enemies. Instead of deflating threats, Trump is using imaginary enemies at home and abroad to justify expanding presidential authority to dangerous levels. Restrainers have long warned that excessive militarization would eventually threaten civil liberties here in the United States, and Trump has proved them right.

Second, restrainers believe the United States should reduce its military footprint in Europe and the Middle East and adopt a more even-handed posture in the latter region. Trump has had ample opportunity to do both things and has yet to do either one. The U.S. presence in both regions remains largely unchanged, and Trump has doubled down on America’s “special relationships” in the Middle East and refused to engage seriously with opponents there.

Third, although Trump has been wary of committing U.S. ground forces to battle in potentially open-ended conflicts, he is perfectly comfortable using airpower in visible but strategically dubious acts of military theater. Since retaking office in January, he has struck targets in Yemen and Iran, and ordered the military to sink several boats in the Caribbean that were supposedly smuggling illegal drugs. In addition to the dubious legality of these actions, none of them are likely to accomplish any significant or lasting strategic purpose. The Houthis remain defiant, Iran has not ended its nuclear program, and anyone who thinks that sinking a few boats will reduce the flow of illegal narcotics to the United States is living in a dream world. Along with Trump’s tariffs, such pointless military displays are the opposite of foreign-policy restraint, and I can’t help but wonder what the handful of genuine restrainers still serving the Trump administration—and they know who they are—think of these antics.

Fourth, Trump has neither reached a grand bargain with China on economic and security issues—as some restrainers recommend—or made a serious effort to strengthen a coalition to balance China in Asia and prevent it from achieving regional dominance there (as other restrainers favor). Instead, the administration has picked fights over trade with critical U.S. partners like Japan, South Korea, and India; undermined relations with South Korea further by mistreating South Korean workers at a battery plant in Georgia; and is systematically undermining America’s ability to compete with China in key areas of science and technology.

Fifth, a key recommendation of the restraint camp—and especially organizations such as the proudly trans-partisan Quincy Institute—has been to reinvigorate U.S. diplomacy and deemphasize the reflexive use of military power. But as I’ve written before, Trump and his minions are the poster children for poorly prepared, incompetently staffed, inconsistently pursued, and ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic engagements. Trump and Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Marco Rubio have gutted the State Department, discarded the normal interagency process, and turned critical negotiations on Gaza and Ukraine over to a real estate lawyer with no obvious qualifications and some potential conflicts of interest. Is it any wonder that they have achieved so little?

As for Trump’s own approach to diplomacy, I suggest you watch his utterly bizarre performance in front of the United Nations General Assembly last week. You don’t have to love the United Nations or dislike Trump to be disturbed by the spectacle he put on there, and what it told the world about our country and its leader. Exceeding his allotted 15 minutes by almost three-quarters of an hour, Trump subjected dozens of world leaders to a rambling, self-pitying, falsehood-filled, and frequently insulting rant that undoubtedly left U.S. adversaries grateful that the world’s most powerful country was in such incompetent hands and left America’s remaining friends worried for the same reason.

So, no, Trump is neither a restrainer nor a realist. There are several other labels that would be more apt, but I’m too polite to list them here.

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 6:56 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:
You two fags sound pretty scared now.

You're not scared, are you?
You know the generals always had contempt for Trump and Butt-head, his secretary of war. They have more reason after yesterday:

Bulging Biceps Don’t Win Modern Wars

Hegseth’s speech was vile. It was also stupid.

By Paul Krugman | Oct 1, 2025 at 5:34 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bulging-biceps-dont-win-modern-wars

Why did Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary — he may call himself secretary of war, but Congress has not, in fact, voted to change his department’s name — summon 800 top generals and admirals to Washington? I admit that I feared the worst — that he would demand that they pledge personal fealty to Donald Trump. But no: They were summoned to listen to a speech about “lethality,” followed by a highly political speech by Trump himself.

How do you achieve lethality, according to Hegseth? By telling the military that it’s OK to engage in hazing, sexual abuse and bigotry — he didn’t say that explicitly, but that was his clear message. Also, war crimes are no big deal. And members of the military, including the top brass, must shave their beards, lose weight and do pull-ups.

Hegseth’s speech was morally vile. It was also, however, profoundly stupid. Hegseth seems to have gotten his ideas about what an effective military looks like by watching the movie 300.

I am, of course, by no means a military expert myself. But I read and talk to people who are military experts, and think I have some idea about how modern wars are fought. Furthermore, there’s a clear family resemblance between Hegsethian stupidity about modern war and Trumpian stupidity about economic policy. Modern nations don’t achieve prosperity by emphasizing “manly” jobs; they don’t win wars by having big biceps.

War still requires extraordinary courage from the men and women engaged in combat — courage that, according to officers I’ve spoken with, is rooted in a sense of honor, not swaggering machismo. Combatants also have to be physically fit enough to endure incredible hardship.

But they don’t have to look like bodybuilders — and anyway, only a small fraction of a modern army engages directly in combat. These days, war is conducted largely with machines and ranged weapons, and most of an army’s personnel are employed, one way or another, keeping those machines and weapons in action and providing the intelligence that makes them effective. These noncombatants are every bit as essential to victory as front-line troops.

Actually, this has been true for a long time, at least since World War II. I very much doubt that Hegseth would consider the team led by Alan Turing, which broke Germany’s Enigma code, or the group led by Joseph Rochefort, which broke Japan’s naval code, warriors — even leaving aside the fact that Turing was gay. Yet they contributed as much to victory as any front-line soldier.

And the “warrior ethos” Hegseth touts is even less sufficient, on its own, to win wars today.

We don’t have to speculate about what a 21st century war would look like, because there’s ferocious, dare I say lethal, combat happening in Ukraine as you read this.

Some readers may recall how impressive many politicians on the right found Russia’s army before it tried to conquer Ukraine.

But it turned out that the Russian army was much better at looking tough than it was at actually waging war. All that non-woke masculinity didn’t prevent Russia’s initial attempt to seize Kyiv from becoming an epic disaster.

And while the war goes on, and on, and on, it’s now waged largely with drones and cruise missiles, not well-groomed guys with six-pack abs. As the military historian and analyst Phillips O’Brien wrote in a recent Substack post, technology has turned large parts of the Ukraine battlefield into “kill zones” — sort of like No Man’s Land in World War I, but 40 or more kilometers wide. Sending men into these zones, no matter how tough they look, is just a way to throw their lives away.

The Ukrainians, although outnumbered, have held their own in this new kind of war, not by being tougher than the Russians — although they are awesomely, almost inconceivably tough — but by being smarter, more flexible and more innovative, virtues I doubt loom large in Hegseth’s concept of lethality.

But Hegseth and Trump, not surprisingly, have learned nothing from this story. Here’s how O’Brien summarized it in a note yesterday:

“If you listened closely to Hegseth and Trump, they were basically saying the US military should be more like the Russian military—unaccountable for its actions, using lethality in favor of intelligence, and where training can be used to abuse recruits. And if they do that, I can guarantee you it will be as effective as the Russian military.”

I’d add that a military rife with sexual abuse and bigotry isn’t going to attract the best minds — many of which, although people like Hegseth will never believe it, reside in female and nonwhite bodies.

As I said, all of this is of a piece with Trumpian policy in other domains. Of course a regime that believes it can make America great by defunding science and destroying higher education believes that it can make our military more effective by making it prejudiced and stupid.

The good news is that America’s officer corps isn’t stupid, at least not yet. The stony silence with which the assembled generals and admirals greeted Hegseth’s and Trump’s rants was eloquent.

But you can now add the military to the list of great American institutions that MAGA is, in effect, trying to destroy.

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 7:15 AM

SECOND

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


The Commander in Chief is not okay.

In Trump’s first term, the president was surrounded by people who ensured that some of his nuttiest—and most dangerous—ideas were derailed before they could reach the military. Today, senior U.S. officers have to wonder who will shield them from the impulses of the person they just saw onstage. What are officers to make of Trump’s accusation that other nations, only a year ago, supposedly called America “a dead country”? (After all, these men and women were leading troops last year.) How are they supposed to react when Trump slips the surly bonds of truth, insults their former commanders in chief, and talks about his close relationship with the Kremlin?

In 1973, an Air Force nuclear-missile officer named Harold Hering asked a simple question during a training session: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question cost him his career. Military members are trained to execute orders, not question them. But today, both the man who can order the use of nuclear arms and the man who would likely verify such an order gave disgraceful and unnerving performances in Quantico. How many officers left the room asking themselves Major Hering’s question?

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/trump-hegseth-
speech-incoherent/684421/

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 10:13 AM

SECOND

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


Veterans react to Hegseth’s ‘insulting’ address to generals and admirals

Defense secretary’s speech touching on physical fitness and doctrine of lethality was seen as ‘egotistical’ and ‘dangerous’

Dana Pittard, an author and retired U.S. Army general interviewed by The Guardian, said of Hegseth's speech, "I thought it was insulting." And Pittard, who is Black, said he deeply resented Hegseth's claim that non-white military leaders were promoted based on a racial quota system.

Pittard also criticized Hegseth's "partisan" attacks during the speech as a "dangerous, slippery slope."

U.S. Navy veteran Tamara Steven found Hegseth's "lethality" rhetoric deeply troubling.

Stevens told The Guardian, "Basically, he's saying that we're no better than Hamas because people are joining because they want to break things and they want to kill people. I mean, for anyone that's been in the military, he's not qualified to be secretary of defense. He's barely qualified to be a host on Fox News. But so say these things in front of the preeminent generals and admirals leading our military? Has he no honor, to say that we don’t belong in polite society? Maybe he doesn’t."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/01/pete-hegseth-generals-
speech-veterans-react

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 12:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 6:26 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:
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--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Veterans react to Hegseth’s ‘insulting’ address to generals and admirals



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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 7:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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


You go get 'em, Che.


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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 8:21 PM

SECOND

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


Republican Hoaxes

https://andrewtobias.com/grindr-explodes-at-charlie-kirk-memorial-trum
p-rally/

Trickledown helping everyone
Dems trying to outlaw guns
Dems secretly communist
Dems controlling the media
Climate change not being real
Climate change not man made
Bin Laden/Saddam partnership
Iraq threatening with WMDs
Gays destroying marriage
Gays choosing to be gay
Gays turning other people gay
Obama secretly a Muslim
Obamacare death panels
Obama bom in Kenya
Obama dividing the nation
Obama seeking third term
Dems waging war on Christmas
Dems waging war on God
Benghazi show trials (30)
Hillary being a criminal
2016 election being rigged
Dems wanting open borders
Mexico sending its people
Walls solving all problems
Mexico paying for the wall
QAnon conspiracy cult
Obama spying on Trump
Denial of Russian collusion
Denial of Ukrainian extortion
Democrats secretly racists
Dems both “woke” and racist
Whites being oppressed
Christians being oppressed
Republicans being oppressed
Antifa gangs attacking
Covid being just like the flu
Masks being ineffective
Masks making people slaves
Masks traumatizing children
Scientists lying for money
Hospitals faking Covid #’s for $
Dr Fauci being a villain
Vaccines having microchips
Vaccines making people sick
Vaccines making people slaves
Vaccines not being effective
Unvaccinated mostly Democrats
Hydroxychloroquine curing Covid
Ivermectin curing Covid
“Real science” being suppressed
Legit questions being suppressed
Illegal immigrants voting
Dead people voting
People voting multiple times
Dems stealing 2020 election
Dems suppressing free speech
Dems controlling social media
Dems controlling private companies
Dems orchestrating race riots
Dems getting rid of police
Antifa behind Jan 6 insurrection
Jan 6 rioters just like tourists
Jan 6 not Trump’s fault
Jan 6 riot not a crime
Trump reinstatement dates
Teachers being pedophiles
Teachers turning kids gay
Disney run by pedophiles
Disney turning kids gay
Critical Race Theory in kid’s math books

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 8:22 PM

SECOND

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


Goebbels' principles of propaganda

1. Repeat lies till accepted as truth.
2. Blame opponents for all problems.
3. Every act must be justified in the name of nation.
4. Aggressive media manipulation.
5. Floating theory of conspiracies.
6. Brand opponents as anti-national.
7. Constant visibility of the leader.
8. Use rallies. Slogans. Symbols. Icons.
9. Emphasis on glorious past.

https://andrewtobias.com/grindr-explodes-at-charlie-kirk-memorial-trum
p-rally/

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

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025 9:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


An Autocracy of Dunces

How stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy

By Paul Krugman | Oct 02, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces

If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.

But how did this happen?

It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic.

It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines, Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made.

Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting.

While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something.

The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth.

Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year.

It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:

Source: KFF

The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse?

Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t aware of the issue. Who would tell them? As far as I can tell there are no competent health analysts working either for Trump or for Republicans in Congress.

So let me return to my opening point: America is no longer a fully functioning democracy. In the good old days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party had the conscience and backbone to standup to Nixon’s attempt at autocracy. William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, recused himself from US vs Nixon because of his close prior association with Watergate conspirators? Can you imagine Scalia or Thomas having any such sense of fairness and duty?

But like all authoritarian regimes, America’s autocracy is being run by malevolent incompetents. And while our hallowed institutions are utterly failing to rise to the occasion, the sheer incompetence of these hacks is generating pushback that may yet save us.

While it is likely that the top ranks of the US military skew right politically, all of us – liberals included – should applaud their stony reception of Hegseth and Trump. Likewise, while business leaders are also likely to skew right politically, we all should applaud their pushback over tariffs, the appointment of E.J. Antoni, and the attempt to fire Lisa Cook. And let’s give special thanks to the many Disney subscribers who canceled after the abortive attempt to fire Jimmy Kimmel.

Many innocent people — above all, federal employees — will be hurt by the government shutdown. But Democrats needed to take a stand, to show that they will try to hold Republicans accountable for their assault on the welfare of Americans, and Republican incompetence gave them good ground for doing so.

In a perverse way, we can be grateful that Trump and his minions are so incompetent, because that is forcing the dormant parts of our country to push back. Let’s just hope that the pushback is strong enough and fast enough to save us all.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 8:33 AM

SECOND

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


Pope Leo rebukes climate skeptics after Trump calls warming a ‘con job’

The Illinois native’s comments come a week after the U.S. president derided the fight against climate change.

By Louise Guillot | October 1, 2025 7:10 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-leo-rebukes-climate-skeptics-afte
r-us-donal-trump-calls-warming-con-job/

Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God's creation.

"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," Leo said.

The pope's comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” On Tuesday, Leo made a direct foray into U.S. politics, defending the Chicago Archdiocese’s decision to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who supports abortion rights.

“I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done,” said the pope, a Chicago-area native.

"Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life," he added. "Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

The pope was speaking on Wednesday at a conference commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Laudato Si, a 2015 formal doctrinal letter issued by his predecessor, Pope Francis, that called for the protection of the planet, including the fight against climate change.

"We cannot love God whom we cannot see while despising his creatures, nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded," Leo said.

Following in the footsteps of Francis, Leo called on "everyone in society ... to put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls" to fight climate change and protect the environment.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 9:28 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Steadily Pushing the Republic Toward the Edge of Oblivion

The administration has entered its most anti-Constitutional phase yet. We must call a regime that’s a danger to our way of life what it is.

By Katherine Stewart | October 2, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/201058/trump-dangerous-autocracy-crack
down-rights

It is well past time to connect the dots. The Trump administration’s assault on democracy has entered a new and dangerous phase. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do, and what many of us warned was coming. He is at the head of a political movement that has long aimed to demolish American democracy, and he and his inner circle of supporters are now backed into a corner where they have few options but to double down. In the next phase of this corrupt takeover of America’s governing institutions, the Trump administration is certain to expand on its already substantial control of both the system of justice and the corporate media, and it will use this control to suppress dissent and spread still more disinformation. Whether the GOP’s plan to destroy American democracy for good will succeed can’t be known. What those who still believe in the promise of America should do is clear.

Dot number one is the conversion of federal law enforcement and the system of justice into an instrument for punishing enemies of the regime and its leader. The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, just days after President Trump said that Attorney Pam Bondi should prosecute him along with other political adversaries, takes us a giant step toward this objective. This radical action is not surprising for a man who appointed many of his own personal defense attorneys to top positions within the Department of Justice. It really doesn’t matter that the case against Comey is unlikely to result in a conviction. Trump’s adversaries will have already gotten the message that federal law enforcement is now a thoroughly political instrument of the leader and the ruling party. That is how corrupt autocracies work.

Dot number two: the executive order declaring “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization.” As an article published on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out, “antifa” is not a formal organization but rather “an idea”—the way Taoism or Crossfit or “going keto” are ideas—and it declared the move “idiotic on multiple levels.” The point of the order is to follow through on the hateful rhetoric with which Trump and many of his followers responded to the horrendous murder of Charlie Kirk. The administration intends to use the coercive power of federal law enforcement to attack all those who disagree with its political views on the pretext that to disagree with the ruler is to invite “terrorism.” With the administration’s attack on the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation, this weaponization of the DOJ and FBI is already well underway.

Dot number three is the deployment of the U.S. military against (so-called) domestic enemies. This began with the deployment of the National Guard and now includes various orders and declarations that make clear that Trump expects to use the military to apply coercive pressure against large sectors of the American population. The transformation of ICE into a federal police force largely outside of traditional law enforcement is a connected part of this project.

Dot number four is the conversion of mainstream media into regime-compliant propaganda and disinformation providers. The big story last week wasn’t the cancellation and (partial) return of Jimmy Kimmel. It was the clear declaration, long foretold, that antitrust regulators now work not for the American public but rather for the advance of Trump administration interests, which include the consolidation of America’s mainstream media industry into the hands of a small number of Trump-boosting billionaires. The sale of TikTok (with a Trump-loving billionaire in charge), the ongoing elevation of Fox News into the semiofficial party-state broadcast network, and other data points—including the involvement of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner in a $50 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, completes the picture. The creation of these media oligopolies will impoverish and misinform the public, which is exactly what authoritarians want.

Dot number five is the capture of the corporate sector. As predicted early on, this has proved the easiest part of the authoritarian project. CEOs with MBAs trained in the shareholder-value theory of management are, all too often, pushovers for autocrats. You just point to the “bottom line” as you enlist their support in depriving the public of its rights. They have no clue that you’ll be coming back later to shake them down too.

Dot number six is the reduction of the legislature to a plate of Jello. As long as Republicans control both chambers of Congress, this mission is done and dusted. The Constitution places the power of the purse in Congress; this Republican Congress has handed it over, along with every other matter of substance, to the president. Congress has also always had the power of oversight. This Congress isn’t just wearing blindfolds; it has poked its own eyes out so that it won’t have to witness the epic levels of corruption and self-dealing at the highest office.

And dot number seven, which is to remove any opposition in the form of expertise by decimating the federal government, has been underway ever since Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, and his 22-year-old minions went on their chain saw rampage through the federal government.

While we have arrived at a dire moment, make no mistake: Now is not the time to curl up in despair. We have work to do—institutions to defend, pro-democracy organizations to support, lawsuits to pursue, corruption to expose, and midterm elections next year.

The same forces that have brought us an antidemocratic movement have succeeded in undermining key institutions: the judiciary, the integrity of religious institutions, and the guardrails of one of our two political parties. If we want better outcomes, we can start by learning how those institutions have been undermined and commit ourselves to the process of restoring them.

Last December, Politico published a terrific piece by the Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas, who lived through and documented Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s methodical process of state capture—and the pushback, which is ongoing. It is well worth a read. It takes time for the autocrat to consolidate control, she reminds us, so it is vital to remain active and engaged. She advises that we focus on strategic and broad-based actions that have appeal beyond the professional classes.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/01/anti-trumpists-guide
-next-four-years-00191724

She tells us to take a step back from identity politics and purity politics and work with other like-minded people and organizations, even if we don’t agree on everything. She reminds us that nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democratic principles. “America will survive the next four years,” she writes, if those who support democracy “pick themselves up and start learning from the successes of opponents of autocracy across the globe.”

Katherine Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism [2019] and Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy [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, October 2, 2025 10:08 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:18 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


It wasn't enough that you idiots turned half the swing states Red and lost all of them, but you're going to lose New Jersey too.

https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/10/is-nj-having-a-political-identity-
crisis-trump-now-has-higher-approval-rating-than-murphy.html



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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 1:08 PM

SECOND

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


Hegseth’s Hatred of Americans Makes Him Unfit for Office but a Perfect Fit for Trump

The secretary of war is a Christian nationalist who wants to eliminate those who don’t agree with his totalitarian vision

By Cathy Young | Oct 01, 2025

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes

The image of Hegseth that emerges from his authorship of The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.

The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.

In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.

Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and that it includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule—first by North African sultanates, then by the Ottoman Empire—until the 20th century.

Hegseth’s caveat that he is using the Crusades analogically and not calling for actual violence is at least somewhat belied by his suggestion that a future phase of this conflict may involve literal war. He writes in his 2020 book: “Our fight is not with guns. Yet.” One may also ask if Hegseth believes that the time for guns has now come?

Much more at https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes

Download all Pete Hegseth books for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Pete+Hegseth

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 2:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Shut up faggots.

Go move to a different country if you don't like it here. You won't be missed.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:22 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 faggots.

Go move to a different country if you don't like it here. You won't be missed.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.

Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.

An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.

By Peter Turchin | Oct 2, 2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin

. . . the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?

Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods.

The “wealth pump”

The collapse of ancient empires, the revolutions that convulsed early modern Europe, or the tensions tearing apart today’s democracies are often treated as products of unique historical circumstances. But my analysis of more than a hundred past crises spanning the last two millennia shows that these outbreaks of societal instability are driven by a mechanism that operates with surprising regularity across different historical eras and places: the wealth pump. The term describes a set of conditions — economic and political — that transfer wealth from the broad base of the population to the elite, a small proportion of people who concentrate power in their hands.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-tur
chin/
Free download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Peter+Turchin

The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder. In the past, this was from peasants to landlords; today, from workers to business owners and corporate executives. First, economic inequality rises. Then political inequality follows, as the wealthy convert their riches into influence. This development erodes democratic institutions, making it harder for the non-elite majority to defend their interests through formal politics. Eventually, systemic stability is threatened.

Undermining society

The wealth pump undermines the stability of societies in three ways.

1) It causes growing popular discontent.

The obvious effect of the wealth pump is that it enriches the upper strata and increases their numbers via upward economic mobility — for example, enabling CEOs of large companies to enter the ranks of uber-wealthy. However, this happens at the expense of the majority. To understand this, consider the relative wage, defined as the wage earned by typical workers (technically, the median wage) relative to the GDP per capita. When the relative wage declines, non-elite workers receive less and less of the fruits of economic growth. This decline in relative wages means that while wages stagnate, the costs of housing, education, and healthcare soar.

In the United States, for example, the relative wage began falling from the 1970s onward. Even as the economy grew, most Americans fell behind. This results in anger and increased mass-mobilization potential.
https://peterturchin.com/population-immiseration-in-america/

2) The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.

This is most clear when we consider that some top wealth holders are interested in translating their economic power into political office (think Trump, but also Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, and so on). There are 10 times as many decamillionaires today (and the number of billionaires has increased even more), but still the same number of political positions — one president, 100 senators, and so on.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28383/w28383.pdf

3) The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming “precarity.”

Increasing the number of elite wannabes (stemming from the overproduction of both wealth-holders and degree-holders) who compete for a fixed number of power positions results in a game of musical chairs. As the proportion of aspirants who are frustrated in their quest for power positions swell, many are tempted to start breaking the rules of the game.

This all creates an explosive mixture: raw energy and mass action, coupled with organization and charismatic leaders. We are thus left with a paradoxical coalition: alienated elites from above, and angry masses from below. Historical revolutions — from the late Roman Republic to 18th-century France to the Russian Revolution — have often emerged from this volatile combination. It is not just the poor who revolt; revolutions are incubated among those who are downwardly mobile or shut out of power despite their elevated status and aspirations.
The long arc of instability

Of course, human societies are complex systems and the road to state breakdown is affected by other factors. And this dynamic — wealth concentration, elite overproduction, mass immiseration — does not lead to collapse overnight. But there is a point at which the contradictions can no longer be contained. Eventually, something gives.

We can trace this cycle through history. In ancient Rome, the wealth pump destroyed the class of independent citizen farmers, while the elite class ballooned with equestrians and senators jockeying for position. The result was a century of civil wars that ended with the Republic’s death and the rise of autocracy. The original populist party (populares in Latin), was launched by the Gracchi brothers, and its most successful (for a while) leader was Julius Caesar. The careers of Roman populists, who channeled the discontent of non-elite Romans, are eerily similar to the modern populists, most notably Trump.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691136967/secular-cycl
es

In 17th-century England, decades of population growth, declining wages, and dramatic expansion of the landed gentry numbers led to civil war, regicide, and a revolutionary reordering of the political economy. In pre-revolutionary France, the aristocracy and clergy entrenched their privileges while the rural and urban poor bore the burden of taxation — until the whole system exploded in 1789.

These were not isolated incidents. They are manifestations of a recurring structural dynamic. To end a crisis, a society, first and foremost, needs to shut down the wealth pump.
What can we learn from history about ending crisis periods?

Once a society steps on the road to crisis, it resembles a massive ball rolling down a narrow valley with steep slopes. It’s very difficult to stop or even deflect its rush to an impending disaster. But when the ball arrives at the crisis point — for example, when counter-elites seize power — the valley opens up.

In the past, most exits from crisis had to pass through a lengthy period of disintegration and disunity, lasting many decades and sometimes longer than a century. An example is the early modern crisis in France, which began in 1562 with the Wars of Religion and ended with the start of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661. The next disintegrative period in France, the Age of Revolutions, also lasted many decades — from 1789 to 1870.

Most commonly, wealth pumps were turned off by a major epidemic, calamitous civil war, or transformative revolution. “Death is the great leveler,” as the historian Walter Scheidel argued in his eponymous book. The Black Death in 14th-century Western Europe carried away half of the population. Collapsing labor supply drove up real wages, reversing the wealth pump. In France and England, this was followed by many decades of internecine wars, in which overproduced elites partly exterminated themselves, driving large swaths into the commoner class. In the next cycle, known as the General Crisis of the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) killed off more than one-third of German population, also resetting the structural conditions that then ended the crisis.

But there are other ways to exit the crisis and some trajectories manage to avoid a revolution or a civil war. Analysis by my research group suggests that at the cusp of the crisis the massive ball of the state can be nudged to achieve better outcomes. This insight is highly relevant to us today — in fact, a high degree of unpredictability and historical contingency is grounds for optimism. It means that we collectively can really shape the future.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rk4gd_v1

We should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war).

My colleagues and I review several examples that successfully avoided revolution or civil war. In one article, we discuss the Conflict of the Orders in ancient Rome, which brought the Roman Republic to the brink of civil war, but was resolved when the patricians agreed to share power with the plebeians.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mw3d3r7

During the reform period in England (1838–1857), political reforms removed “rotten boroughs,” thus shifting the balance of power away from the landed gentry in favor of the upwardly mobile commercial elites. Later reforms increased the electorate by broadening who could vote. Another key legislation that alleviated immiseration was the repeal of the Corn Laws that had imposed tariffs on the import of grains, which benefited large landowners but inflated the price of staple food in domestic markets.

The Great Reforms in the Russian Empire (1861–1874) not only abolished serfdom, but also relaxed censorship of the media and revamped the judicial system. Other reforms include military modernization, local self-government, education reforms, reform of the Russian Orthodox Church, and economic modernization.

The US was in crisis before the New Deal (1933–1938). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343312442078 But the New Deal instituted a broad array of redistributive policies: steeply progressive tax rates, strong labor rights, regulation of finance, large-scale investment in infrastructure and education, and the expansion of social safety nets. These reforms didn’t happen overnight. They were the product of hard-fought political struggles (beginning during the early decades of the twentieth century), often driven by mass movements and reform-minded segments of the elites who recognized that continued extraction risked systemic collapse. Social Democratic movements in northern and western Europe, such as Denmark, did an even better job of turning off their wealth pumps, over the same period of time.

Finding a way out

Unfortunately, analysis of 150 of past crises showed that they avoided substantial bloodshed only in about 10 to 15 percent of cases. But it is encouraging that successful crisis resolutions, rare in the distant past, become more frequent as we get closer to today.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0402

Our societies are different from Imperial Rome and from even our mid-20th century predecessors. But the principles behind a successful exit from crisis remain relevant. While the specific policies will differ across societies, the overarching goal remains the same: to rebalance the distribution of wealth and power in a way that promotes long-term stability, not short-term elite enrichment.

One principle is the need to emphasize the importance of productive, and not just extractive, economic activity. In recent decades, financialization and monopolization have shifted the economy’s center of gravity away from industries that produce real goods and services toward those that merely rearrange ownership or extract rents. To reverse this, we need tax and regulatory structures that reward innovation, job creation, and sustainable enterprise — while discouraging speculative asset bubbles, predatory lending, and corporate hoarding.

Progressive taxation is another cornerstone of any effort to slow the wealth pump. This may include not just higher income tax rates on the top brackets, but also wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, and the closing of loopholes that allow billionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.

Equally important is the restructuring of the labor market from below. For decades, the decline of organized labor has weakened the bargaining power of the majority, resulting in wage stagnation. When workers are empowered to demand their fair share of economic gains, the upward suction of wealth slows — and the society becomes both more equitable and more resilient.

Another key front may be the regulation of political power itself. As wealth has concentrated, so has influence — often in ways that distort democracy. Campaign finance reform, lobbying restrictions, anti-corruption measures, and increased transparency in government are all essential to ensure that public policy serves the broad citizenry rather than narrow elite interests. A democracy dominated by oligarchic donors is a contradiction in terms — and a recipe for social unrest.

But policies alone are not enough. The wealth pump is also sustained by narratives: the belief that extreme inequality is the price of progress, that markets always know best, that poverty reflects moral failure rather than structural disadvantage. These cultural frames must be challenged and replaced with a new ethic of social solidarity and reciprocal obligation. No society can thrive when it abandons the idea of a common good.

The thoughts above should not be taken as a concrete reform program. Historically, different societies used a variety of ways to end their disintegrative periods. Often, finding a way out requires many decades of experimentation and political conflict. The main problem is that the continuing operation of the wealth pump is extremely lucrative for most elites. Institutional inertia and vested interest will resist every step of the rebalancing. This is why I wouldn’t expect rapid action. Instead we should be ready for years and perhaps even decades of social turbulence and political infighting (and I hope we will avoid hot civil war). But the longer we fail to tame the wealth pump, the longer our own disintegrative period will be.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.


Archived.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 4:47 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.


Archived.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Archive this, you little Nazi: Trump has doubled his wealth in the last 8 months to about $10 billion, and he can double it again and again, endlessly. America is in trouble because of guys like Trump stealing all the wealth, but he cannot keep doubling if he is dead.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+wealth+double

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 8:44 PM

SECOND

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


Jeff Bezos pays a bribe to Trump's wife

Get ready for your closeup, Melania: Amazon reportedly paid $40M to license an upcoming Melania Trump documentary.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/get-ready-for-your-
closeup-melania-amazon-reportedly-paid-40m-to-license-an-upcoming-melania-trump-documentary/vi-AA1x8fgH

According to Forbes, as of May 2025, Bezos's estimated net worth exceeded $220 billion, making him the third richest person in the world. A $40 million payoff is small compared to the damage Trump could do to Bezos.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 9:09 PM

SECOND

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


Why Trump is sticking with Pete Hegseth.

by Devan Schwartz and Noel King | Oct 2, 2025, 5:40 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/463675/pentagon-hegseth-trump-quantico-ch
aos

. . . Instead of trying to solve some of the problems that Hegseth mentioned during his confirmation — things he might have been ambitious about reforming earlier, as someone described it to me — the department stopped being creative, and it started being just a mechanism for implementing executive orders.

In other words, he was waiting for Trump to tell him what to do.

Hegseth is not an ideological character. This is something that sources close to him emphasized. He used to have a more interventionist mindset. He wrote several books about how we should have been in Iraq longer. But as soon as he came into this administration, he started parroting isolationist points of view. He’s someone who’s willing to shift his ideology depending on who he might be talking to, and I think that’s particularly useful to Trump, who might want Hegseth to follow questionable orders.

This isn’t somebody who’s going to have a red line, because he is not someone who has strong ideas about what the military ought to be doing. So if Hegseth’s square jaw is ultimately what got him this job, what’s keeping him in the job is his demonstrated loyalty to the strong man at the top. I think he is here because Donald Trump trusts that when Donald Trump calls on Pete Hegseth to do something questionable, he is a guy who’s going to follow orders.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 9:37 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Administration Conjures Up New “Terrorist” Designation to Justify Killing Civilians

The U.S. military justified the slaughter of alleged drug traffickers by claiming links to “designated terrorist organizations.”

“Dressing this up as self-defense is wordplay, not law.”

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/trump-venezuela-boat-strike-design
ated-terror-organization/

According to email return receipts, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson read but did not respond to repeated requests for information on the legal justification for attacks on “designated terrorist organizations,” the definition of the term and how a group is so designated.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, said that the briefers’ repeated references to “designated terrorist organizations” suggested there was an undisclosed legal opinion within the administration — possibly from the Department of Justice — that makes a case that lethal force is somehow lawful against so-called DTOs under Article 2 of the Constitution.

“That might be the construct that they are using for a justification,” Finucane said. “We don’t know because the administration has not disclosed any sort of underlying legal opinions or legal memos that might provide a basis for these strikes.”

The White House did not respond to repeated requests for information about the legal authorities underpinning the attacks.

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 9:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Trump is sticking with Pete Hegseth.


Because he's awesome.

Because, fuck you.



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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 9:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.


Archived.

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Archive this, you little Nazi: Trump has doubled his wealth in the last 8 months to about $10 billion, and he can double it again and again, endlessly. America is in trouble because of guys like Trump stealing all the wealth, but he cannot keep doubling if he is dead.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+wealth+double

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



Archived.

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:03 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Trump is sticking with Pete Hegseth.


Because he's awesome.

Because, fuck you.
For the past 49 days, the National Guard has occupied the nation’s capital. President Trump’s order of the guard to Washington, initially announced as a short-term move to fight crime, has turned into a mandate for near-indefinite presence. Guard members from other states assigned to Joint Task Force-D.C. are now rotating through assignments, akin to an overseas mission. On Monday, Trump announced 100 National Guard troops would be sent to Chicago. As Trump made clear in his pep-rally assembly of the military’s generals and admirals on Tuesday, there will be many more deployments to America’s cities to come: “We’re going to straighten them out [kill them] one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too.”

Our military has tried to straddle a fundamental cultural disconnect between whether it is an accessible, civilianized professional force, of no harm to democratic life, or an institution of pure martial prowess.

https://slate.com/life/2025/10/trump-national-guard-army-portland-chic
ago-memphis.html

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

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Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:48 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:

Archived.
Archive this about how Trump will go to jail. It happened to his buddy:

Cindy Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of molesting her at age 12, sat in the courtroom, surrounded by family, as Morris accepted responsibility - a moment she sought for decades.

The plea represents a remarkable fall for Morris, who founded Gateway in 2000 in Southlake, Texas, and grew it into a megachurch with tens of thousands of weekly attendees. His sermons were broadcast to audiences around the world, his books became bestsellers in evangelical circles, and he served as a faith adviser to President Donald Trump.

That career collapsed in June 2024 after Clemishire, 55, publicly accused him of sexually abusing her. Within days, Gateway announced that Morris was stepping down. In a statement at the time, Morris acknowledged what he described as “a moral failure” with a “young lady” decades earlier but didn’t respond to the specifics of the allegation.

The scandal drew national attention as an example of how decades-old allegations of child sex abuse can be prosecuted.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/robert-morris-guilty-child-sexual
-abuse-texas-megachurch-pastor-rcna234748

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

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