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, October 16, 2025 11:23
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PAGE 73 of 73

Monday, October 13, 2025 4:21 PM

Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.

If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.

Go for it. I dare you.

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

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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Monday, October 13, 2025 4:49 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:
Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.

If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.

Go for it. I dare you.

President Trump Wants You to Buy His New $599 Watch So Bad He’s Appearing in the Ads Himself

A Trump-starring commercial for the new “Fight Fight Fight” chronograph is airing regularly on Newsmax.

By Oren Hartov | October 13, 2025

https://www.gq.com/story/trump-watches-newsmax-commercials

It’s been roughly a year since President Trump launched his own line of watches, which includes a $100,000 “Victory Tourbillon” made of solid gold as well as a “Fight Fight Fight” dive watch cased in stainless steel for $500. (A Wired article alleges that the tourbillon contains, ironically, Chinese components.) Now, despite some viral quality-control issues with the pink-dial “Inauguration First Lady” watch, the president is pushing his horological venture forward by appearing in new commercials airing on cable news.

“Check out this new red beauty, it’s one of my favorites,” Trump says in the spot, referring to Trump Watches’ new “Fight Fight Fight Chronograph Red.” “Wear it proudly on your wrist, and everyone will know exactly what it’s for, who it’s for, who it represents. It’s really gonna be something special—it’s from your favorite president.”

Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom took to X to retweet journalist Aaron Rupar’s post about Trump Watch commercials popping up regularly on Newsmax: “NO HEALTH CARE FOR YOU BUT YOU MUST BUY MY WATCH!!” Newsom wrote alongside the video.

The $599 “Fight Fight Fight Chronograph Red” comes individually numbered and uses a Miyota 6S20 quartz movement. According to the Trump Watches website, it’s “a major league timepiece worthy of a seat in The Oval Office” and “A future family heirloom, ready to pass down for generations.” The MAGA red dial too loud for you? You’re in luck: There’s also a two-tone version in steel and gold-hued steel.

The brand is also promoting a new 18-karat gold-plated “Fight Fight Fight Onyx” GMT with a Jubilee-style bracelet and a Miyota NH35 automatic movement. (At least, that’s what the Trump Watches website says, though the NH34 is the Miyota NH-series automatic GMT movement, whereas the NH35 is the three-hander.) While it’s seemingly a Rolex GMT-Master dupe, the watch costs $799 and boasts a real onyx stone dial. (Purchase is limited to three units per household, begging the question: What household is trying to buy more than three of these?)

Some fine print at the bottom of the ad states that “Trump watches are not designed, owned, managed, or controlled by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, CIC Digital LLC, or any of their respective principals or affiliates.” Nice to have that reassurance that there’s absolutely zero conflicts of interest happening here—no matter how many times a day the President of the United States himself appears on your television screen enticing you to buy a watch.

https://gettrumpwatches.com/

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

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Monday, October 13, 2025 5:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up fag. You lost the election 9 months ago, BIGLY. Stop crying about it and move the fuck on.

If you want a Civil War, your endangered species dies overnight and the war is over almost as soon as it began.

Go for it. I dare you.
President Trump Wants You to Buy His New $599 Watch So Bad He’s Appearing in the Ads Himself

This has nothing to do with the Civil War you're stupidly praying for, moron.

If some dumb asshole wants to spend $30k more on a watch than I paid for my house, more power to them. They ain't my daddy.

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

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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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 6:40 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:

This has nothing to do with the Civil War you're stupidly praying for, moron.

If some dumb asshole wants to spend $30k more on a watch than I paid for my house, more power to them. They ain't my daddy.

Clarence Thomas’s Legal Clerk Issues Dire Warning About Supreme Court’s Agenda
‘BOMBSHELL’

Legal scholar Caleb Nelson is worried about the “pro-president” direction the Supreme Court seems to be moving toward.

By Wiktoria Gucia | Oct. 14 2025 2:16AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/clarence-thomas-clerk-issues-dire-warnin
g-about-supreme-courts-agenda/

A former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas has warned that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution “appears to be moving toward a sweepingly pro-president position.”

In an essay for the NYU Law Democracy Project, originalist legal scholar and University of Virginia School of Law professor Caleb Nelson argued that the Constitution’s text and historical context give Congress wide latitude to organize the executive branch and to impose limits on the president’s power to remove officials. https://democracyproject.org/posts/must-administrative-officers-serve-
at-the-presidents-pleasure

It’s an issue that is already front and center on the court’s docket, and one that Nelson warns “can do lasting damage to our norms and institutions” in the case of “a President bent on vengeful, destructive and lawless behavior.”

In September, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 emergency order allowing President Donald Trump to remove Federal Trade Commission leader Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position. Slaughter, who was appointed to the FTC in 2018 during Trump’s first administration, argued that she was “illegally” fired in a move that violated “clear Supreme Court precedent.”

The Court will hear arguments in the case in December, when it will consider whether to overturn the 1935 precedent that limits the president’s ability to remove independent agency regulators over policy disagreements.

“It is true that Article II vests the executive power in the President,” Nelson, who clerked for Thomas from 1994 to 1995, wrote in his article. “But Congress is in charge of creating offices within the executive branch, and the Constitution does not give the President unilateral power to dictate who will fill those offices or what their authorities and duties will be.”

While the current Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with the Trump administration since the president returned to office in January, Nelson hopes “the Justices will not act as if their hands are tied and they cannot consider any consequences of the interpretations that they choose” when deciding cases like Slaughter’s.

However, The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak believes “There is little question that the court will side with the president. Its conservative majority has repeatedly signaled that it plans to adopt the ‘unitary executive theory,’ which says the original understanding of the Constitution demands letting the president remove executive branch officials as he sees fit.”

Still, Nelson’s article has elicited a massive response from the legal community.

“Bombshell!” was constitutional law scholar and professor William Baude’s immediate reaction to Nelson’s commentary. “Caleb Nelson, one of the most respected originalist scholars in the country, comes out against the unitary executive interpretation of Article II,” he wrote.
https://bsky.app/profile/williambaude.bsky.social/post/3lzyvlfbz4s2w

Nelson’s originalist understanding of the Constitution has led to his opinions previously being cited in more than a dozen Supreme Court decisions. Thomas himself referenced his former clerk’s work six times in a 2023 concurring opinion, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh named Nelson among a small group of “respected scholars” in a concurring opinion last year.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-86_l5gm.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf

Article II of the U.S. Constitution states that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The “unitary executive interpretation” referenced by Baude is based on the “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the president has sole authority over the executive branch, including the power to dismiss executive branch officials at will.

“If most of what the federal government currently does on a daily basis is ‘executive,’ and if the President must have full control over each and every exercise of ‘executive’ power by the federal government (including an unlimitable ability to remove all or almost all executive officers for reasons good or bad), then the President has an enormous amount of power,” Nelson wrote.

“If a highly respected originalist scholar like Professor Nelson, on whom the court relies frequently, denies that originalism supports the unitary executive theory,” NYU law professor Richard H. Pildes told The New York Times, “that inevitably raises serious questions about an originalist justification for the court’s looming approach.”

Nelson concluded his article by issuing a warning about how upcoming decisions could impact the future.

“The current Supreme Court may likewise see itself as interpreting the Constitution for the ages, and perhaps some of the Justices take comfort in the idea that future Presidents will not all have the character of Donald Trump,” Nelson wrote. “But the future is not guaranteed; a President bent on vengeful, destructive, and lawless behavior can do lasting damage to our norms and institutions.”

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

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 6:54 AM

SECOND

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

How Crypto Became a Trump Trade

It’s primarily a vehicle for crony capitalism now

By Paul Krugman | Oct 14, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-crypto-became-a-trump-trade

By now it’s obvious that Donald Trump suffers from CBS — Cowardly Bully Syndrome.

On Friday, Trump blasted China’s new export controls on rare earths, declaring them a “moral disgrace” which were “obviously a plan devised by them years ago.” And he threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on China, on top of the already high existing tariffs.

Less than a day later he was groveling:

Donald J. Trump Truth Social Post 12:43 PM EST 10/12/25
Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A, wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT
12:45 PM • Oct 12, 2025 788.4K Views

So it only took a few hours to go from “a plan devised by them years ago” to they “just had a bad moment,” from “moral disgrace” to “highly respected President Xi.” The Chinese must be having a good laugh: They took Trump’s measure and he came out looking very, very small.

But what caused this quick, abject retreat? I’d like to believe that economic experts within the administration took a sober look at the situation and concluded that China would have the upper hand in a trade war. But there are no economic experts in this administration, and anyway, who would dare to tell Trump anything he doesn’t want to hear?

No, Trump was almost certainly reacting to the markets. Stocks fell sharply Friday, but the really striking action came in crypto, where Bitcoin fell 20 percent and smaller, less liquid tokens fell even more. Here, to take an arbitrary example, is what happened to the value of the official Trump coin:

Also, it just so happens that Trump himself holds an estimated $870 million worth of Bitcoin, so he suffered large personal financial losses from the crypto crash.

This was the largest one-day crash crypto has experienced so far. My question, however, is why the prospect of an intensified trade war caused a crypto crash.

Oddly, I’ve seen almost no reporting about this issue. There has been a lot about the way the crypto crash was magnified by forced sales: Many crypto investors are highly leveraged, and there were many forced liquidations — with widespread speculation that one or more “whales,” that is, major players, may have imploded. But why did a threatened trade war cause crypto to fall in the first place?

The answer, I believe, has little to do with economics and everything to do with politics. These days crypto derives its value largely from the support of politicians and government officials — in particular, officials who can be bribed. As a result, at this point crypto is largely a Trump trade. And crypto fell because the backlash against the potential trade war threatened to weaken Trump politically.

A brief history of crypto: When Bitcoin, the original crypto asset, was introduced, enthusiasts predicted that it would displace conventional fiat money, that is, currency issued by governments. The blockchain, they claimed, would make transactions using cryptocurrency easier and cheaper than transactions using dollars. And cryptocurrencies would be safe from the ravages of the printing press: governments couldn’t debase your money through inflation.

That was more than 15 years ago, and crypto has completely failed to deliver on those promises. Almost nobody uses cryptocurrency as a means of payment. A recent research paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City notes that

The share of U.S. consumers who report using cryptocurrency for payments—purchases, money transfers, or both—has been very small and has declined slightly in recent years.

Here’s the chart. The blue line at the top shows the percentage of consumers using crypto for any kind of payment:

Yet the public holds roughly $4 trillion in crypto assets. Why? Largely as a pure speculative investment. In addition, however, crypto has found real-world use as a convenient tool for criminal activity and money-laundering. In fact, that Kansas City Fed paper noted that the most important reason people gave for paying in crypto was “person or business receiving the money preferred cryptocurrency.” It’s not a stretch to imagine that the reason for that preference was often the desire to hide the payment from the authorities.

As for the vision of a private currency insulated from government, at this point the biggest factor supporting the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has become the belief that Donald Trump — whose family has made billions from crypto sales, and whose party received hundreds of millions in crypto campaign contributions — will promote the industry. No pesky regulations that might limit the financial risks from stablecoins. No serious efforts to limit the use of crypto to facilitate criminal activity.

And Trump has declared his intention to create a “strategic crypto reserve.” True, this reserve will supposedly come out of crypto seized from criminals. But it would still support crypto by keeping those tokens off the market.

The prospect of high-level political support is why the prices of Bitcoin and other tokens surged when Trump won in November. As I said, at this point Bitcoin is basically a Trump trade, since it’s hard to imagine Democrats being remotely as favorable to the industry.

In the past I’ve described the case for Bitcoin as being a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. My view about the technobabble hasn’t changed. But I will amend the case against crypto by adding that the crypto industry is one of the prime beneficiaries from a new regime of crony capitalism, in which an industry’s success depends on its ability and willingness to bribe the right people.

So why did Trump’s threat of all-out trade war with China cause crypto prices to plunge? Not because the economic damage from such a war would reduce the use of crypto, because crypto basically doesn’t have any legitimate uses. But an intensified trade war, especially a trade war America would almost surely lose, would drive Trump’s public support into an even deeper hole. And this would reduce the ability of history’s most corrupt administration to keep showering favors on the industry that made Trump rich.

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

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 9:38 AM

SECOND

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

MAGA Rage at “No Kings” Boils Over

President Trump’s allies are suddenly raging over the October 18th “No Kings” protests. MAGA Mike Johnson and MAGA-fied Representative Steve Scalise are angrily sliming expected attendees as America-haters, antifa, Marxists, and terrorists. MAGA influencers and other GOP figures have done the same, with one hinting that the National Guard should crack down on them. This unanimity of messaging about “terrorists” means it’s all almost certainly being coordinated by Stephen Miller. Yet it’s backfiring: Democrats and rally organizers are using it to galvanize attendance, which will likely succeed. Robert De Niro amplified the call to turn out, inspiring more anger on Fox News. Indeed, the GOP demonization of legitimate protests itself ratifies the “No Kings” message. We talked to Jill Lawrence, who writes well for The Bulwark on Trump’s hatred of blue America. We discuss why large legitimate protests infuriate Trump-MAGA, why the correct response to their smears is to turn out in force, and why that’s likely to happen. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/201672/maga-rage-no-kings-boils-over-a
nd-quickly-backfires-trump

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

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 10:14 AM

SECOND

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

Can America recover from Trump? Here’s what new data says.

New political science research suggests democracy can survive leaders like Trump. But there’s a catch.

By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 14, 2025

https://www.vox.com/politics/464459/trump-american-democracy-u-turns

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

Earlier this year, two teams of researchers published papers trying to answer this exact question — and came to seemingly opposite conclusions.

Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2024.2448742
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-myth-of-democratic-res
ilience/

So who’s right? To find out, I reexamined the basic data and spoke to researchers from each of the two teams. It turns out that the seemingly opposed findings are actually more consistent than they seem — with implications for the United States that are at once hopeful and disturbing.

What researchers learned about “democratic U-turns”

The scholarly research on U-turns draws from a database called V-Dem, widely considered the gold standard for quantitative research on global democracy. V-Dem works by getting a broad group of experts on individual countries to give numerical assessments of different aspects of that country’s democracy (e.g., how free the press is, or whether elections are administered impartially). These judgements are turned into composite scores that assess how democratic a country is as a whole.

The first team of researchers, the more optimistic ones, are based at the institute that compiles and publishes the V-Dem database. Looking over their own data, authors Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht, and Staffan I. Lindberg found that U-turns — defined as a country’s democracy score starting to increase after a recent decline — are very common. Over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn. And those U-turns are typically very successful, hence the topline finding that 90 percent of U-turns saw a country returning to its previous level of democracy or even improving on it.

To understand what a U-turn looks like more concretely, it’s helpful to look at the recent history of Poland. Once considered one of the strongest post-communist democracies, the right-wing PiS government elected in 2015 turned the country’s public broadcaster into propaganda and packed the judicial system with its own cronies. But in 2023, a coalition of opposition parties defeated PiS in national parliamentary elections and began trying to undo the damage. You can see, in Poland’s V-Dem score, the characteristic U-shaped curve — a decline under PiS and an increase after its defeat.

Yet this is all very new, and Poland has not returned to its pre-PiS democracy. Moreover, there’s a real question of whether its progress in the right direction can be sustained. The new coalition has had a lot of trouble fixing what PiS broke, and just this year narrowly lost the presidential election to the PiS candidate.

The second paper argues that such a failure to make sustained gains would be more common than not.

Its authors — Nic Cheeseman, Jennifer Cyr, and Mattías Bianchi — also use V-Dem data and focus their analysis on post-1994 cases of democratic U-turn. Twenty-one cases (out of the initial 102) fit these parameters. The authors then analyzed how many of those countries managed to maintain their higher, post U-turn democracy scores — looking at what happened in the years after the analysis of the first paper ended to see if the gains of a U-turn could be sustained.

The results weren’t promising. Of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn. And the record of the two exceptions, Malawi and Mali, wasn’t exactly stellar.

“Malawi maintained a consistent, if low, level of democracy for the first five years after the U-turn, but in the sixth year became non-democratic once more,” the authors wrote. “Mali’s progress has been even less auspicious. The country remained stably democratic, if weakly so, for five years. But by year six, it too had become nondemocratic, suffering two coups in 2020 and 2021.”

What the not-so-contradictory papers tell us about modern democracy

Marina Nord and Nic Cheeseman, researchers from the first and second teams, respectively, both emphasized in phone calls that they didn’t see their findings as being in tension. In fact, Cheeseman said, the two groups were in communication and discussing joint projects going forward.

This is unusual in academic disputes, which (in my experience) often get petty and bitter. And it reflects the fact that the two papers may be two sides of the same coin.

Both scholars agree that modern autocratization is different from the historical pattern. Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

Because democratic backsliding happens through law and political maneuvering, rather than at the point of a gun, its opponents have more avenues (such as litigation, legislative resistance, and elections) for disrupting it. This might be why the first team found that attempts at authoritarianism were actually more likely to end in a U-turn in the post-1994 period (73 percent of cases) than in the full historical sample (52 percent).

Yet at the same time, any individual defeat for authoritarian forces might be less permanent.

Because elected authoritarians were, well, elected, they often represent a real constituency in the country’s politics. This support base is often large enough to make it 1) impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and 2) democratically illegitimate for said opponents to outlaw them entirely. That means that, even if they’re voted out, there’s always a chance that someone representing that constituency could win a future election and make another bid to consolidate power.

This gives a tentative synthesis between the two papers: that contemporary attempts to destroy democracy usually fail in the near term, but often lead to future attempts down the line.

“Once you have a democracy, that doesn’t mean you automatically become a stable democracy,” Nord says, summarizing the points of agreement.

What all of this means for America’s future

In 2013, the political scientist Dan Slater coined a term for this kind of whiplash: “democratic careening.” Careening democracies, per Slater, are “struggling but not collapsing”: they are places of “endemic unsettledness and rapid ricocheting” between what feel like wildly different governing models. Such a democracy “may be liable to ‘capsize,’ or tip over temporarily so that democracy ceases to function for a limited time — but not to vanish from the democratic ranks entirely through a restoration and consolidation of authoritarian rule.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/world-politics/article/abs/dem
ocratic-careening/E94A34CCE67731A1209E100D97DE08F3

The recent papers suggest that Slater was ahead of his time: that in the decade-plus since his work came out, the state of affairs he is describing may be becoming increasingly common.

And right now, it looks like it might fit the United States rather well.

I have argued that, while President Donald Trump has developed an increasingly cogent plan for destroying American democracy, there are formidable obstacles in his path — including federalism, widespread public skepticism, a free press, and an independent judiciary. The research suggests that many countries with fewer effective barriers against autocratization have resisted bids like Trump’s, which should give us some optimism that what’s happening right now isn’t the end of American democracy.

“I don’t think the US is beyond the point of no return,” Cheeseman tells me.

But even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections,” Nord says. “If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

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

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 5:54 PM

SECOND

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

Russian state TV mocks Trump as ‘simple infant’ outwitted by Putin

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-state-tv-mocks-trump-as-s
imple-infant-outwitted-by-putin/ss-AA1OqAMl

For Moscow, Trump’s unpredictable statements and shifting positions have become regular fodder for state television.

The latest broadcast painted him as a vain and unreliable figure, while elevating Putin as a master manipulator of world leaders.

Mocking Donald Trump

Russian state television has ridiculed Donald Trump, calling him “as simple as pocket change” and claiming Vladimir Putin has outsmarted him over Ukraine peace negotiations.

The mockery came during a broadcast where political commentators celebrated what they described as Moscow’s upper hand in global diplomacy.

‘Putin gets better of Trump’

Political scientist Andrei Sidorchik told viewers that Putin’s strategy was working, contrasting it with Trump’s supposed naivety.

“He is saying the eternal peace will now start in the Middle East,” Sidorchik said, mocking Trump’s optimism.

He suggested the former US president lacked a sense of “responsibility and perception,” implying Putin was using Trump’s ego to his advantage.

Mocking Trump’s ego after Nobel snub

The discussion followed Trump’s disappointment over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sidorchik remarked that Trump’s pride had been “wounded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee” and that the Kremlin understood how to exploit his need for praise.

“Once again, to save the world from an apocalypse, we have to stroke the ego of a man who is behaving like a cowboy from a saloon or an infant,” he said.

Russian commentators celebrate Putin’s influence

The exchange on NTV highlighted how Russia’s state-controlled media portrays Putin as the dominant player on the global stage.

Host Roman Babayan noted Trump had publicly thanked Putin for his “warm words” about peace.

The segment framed Putin as a calm strategist, while Trump was painted as a volatile and emotional figure who could be manipulated.

Trump’s intellect mocked on live TV

During the broadcast, Sidorchik delivered one of the harshest lines of the night:

“His intellect is not up to par. He is as simple as pocket change. He thinks that, in the end, Russia can be cowed. His entourage thinks so too, which is sad.”

The insult drew laughter from the studio audience, reflecting the Kremlin’s growing confidence in its narrative against the West.

Predictions of European capitulation

Adding to the smug tone, Professor Andrey Koshkin predicted that Europe would soon “repay Russia its seized assets, with interest.”

He claimed such a development was inevitable, suggesting that Western sanctions were beginning to backfire.

“All of it will happen,” Koshkin said confidently, reinforcing Moscow’s message that patience would bring victory.

Manipulating Trump through ‘psychological tricks’

Journalist Evgenia Volgina told viewers that Trump’s engagement with Putin reflected a classic psychological play.

“There is an often-used psychological trick of telling your counterpart what he wants to hear,” she explained, implying Putin was using flattery to manage Trump.

“Most likely, he is doing that,” she added, noting that only Russia was “talking about peacemaking” while the US and Europe “don’t need peacemaking.”

Trump threatens to send Tomahawks to Ukraine

The broadcast coincided with Trump’s comments aboard Air Force One, where he told reporters he “might have to speak to Russia” about sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.

The weapons would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory, including Moscow.

Trump warned, “Do they want to have Tomahawks going in their direction? I don’t think so.”

Warning of ‘a new step of aggression’

The US president said he had raised the issue with Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the missiles “a new step of aggression.”

He added, “If the war is not settled, we may very well, we may not, but we may do it. I think it’s appropriate to bring up. I want to see the war settled.”

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

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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 7:08 PM

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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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 9:21 PM

SECOND

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

'We Suffered For 25 Years': Trump Invents His Own History, Claims Banning Tariffs In 1913 Was What Caused The Great Depression

During a recent bilateral meeting in the Oval Office with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, Donald Trump invented his own version of U.S. history as he claimed the Great Depression happened because the country banned tariffs in 1913. Tariffs were never banned in 1913, and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is often blamed for making the Great Depression worse.

Starts at 2 minutes into the video.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-did-that-work-out-trump-tr
ies-to-rewrite-history-claims-the-great-depression-happened-because-tariffs-were-banned-in-1913/vi-AA1MEmzY

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 15, 2025 6:59 AM

SECOND

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

U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says

In a social media post, President Trump asserted without evidence that they had been transporting drugs. The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/us/politics/trump-drugs-boat-attack
.html?smid=url-share

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 15, 2025 8:41 AM

SECOND

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

The law temporarily halts Trump from receiving a bribe worth hundreds of millions of dollars

Florida judge halts transfer of downtown Miami land for Trump's presidential library

The judge said a local college didn’t give reasonable public notice before it gifted the land to the state, which then voted to transfer the property to the Trump library foundation.

The nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on an iconic stretch of palm tree-lined Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other top GOP officials voted to transfer the land, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump, Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, and the president’s attorney James Kiley.

Who knows if the Trustees might decide to sell the "free" land and put the hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump's bank account? Trump knows, but you will hear about his plans too late.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-presidential-libra
ry-judge-blocks-miami-land-transfer-rcna237725

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 15, 2025 8:54 AM

SECOND

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

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

I believe that China purposefully not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, is an Economically Hostile Act. We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution. As an example, we can easily produce Cooking Oil ourselves, we don't need to purchase it from China.

10/14/25, 3:37 PM

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/14/trump-china-ba
n-cooking-oil-soybean/86695788007/

What is Trump’s problem? This: In 2024, the United States received approximately 1.27 million metric tons of used cooking oil from China, which was about 43% of China's total used cooking oil exports, according to the USDA.

In 2024, the U.S. sold nearly 27 million metric tons of soybeans to China. However, as of October 2025, China has not purchased any U.S. soybeans since May 2025 due to trade tensions and tariffs, which have made American soybeans prohibitively expensive compared to those from South America. This has led to U.S. soybean exports to China dropping to zero for several months.

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 15, 2025 1:14 PM

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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Wednesday, October 15, 2025 3:32 PM

SECOND

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

Trump Fabricates Story of Hand-to-Hand Combat Between Troops and Child Gangsters in D.C.

Trump’s claim that National Guard members beat child gang members on the streets of Washington was disputed even by the military.

By Nick Turse | October 15 2025, 2:29 p.m

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/15/trump-lie-national-guard-dc-tren-d
e-aragua/

President Donald Trump claims that U.S. troops have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with young members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C. But Joint Task Force–District of Columbia, the umbrella organization for the military occupation of the nation’s capital, says it never happened.

Trump’s outlandish claim — that National Guard members beat child gang members — is one of numerous demonstrably false claims peddled by the president concerning the deployment of military troops, including that there is now “no crime” in the district. It’s part of a raft of lies Trump has used to paint America’s cities as war-torn wastelands and justify urban military occupations. These blatant falsehoods have increasingly drawn the ire of the federal judiciary.

“You saw it in Washington,” Trump announced in an address to hundreds of top military officers late last month. “We had gangs of Tren de Aragua, say 10, 12, 15 kids. And these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded.” After twice more reiterating that U.S. troops “pounded” gang members, Trump claimed the suspects were “thrown into paddy wagons and taken back to their country.”

JTF–DC spokesperson Alexia Nal says that troops deployed on the streets of the capital have never engaged in combat with any suspected criminals. “Nope. We’re not allowed to,” she told The Intercept, stating that service members cannot put their hands on people. One defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called Trump’s claim “obvious bullshit.” Two more government officials laughed when The Intercept brought the president’s story to their attention. “Of course not. Not a chance,” one of them said when asked if there was any possibility that Trump’s account was based on a real incident.

“President Trump’s false and inflammatory justifications for deploying federal agents and National Guard troops to vibrant American cities may keep shifting, but the truth does not,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, told The Intercept. “There’s simply no emergency to justify deploying federal forces to Washington D.C. or any other city the president wrongly paints as a hellscape.”

The White House did not respond to questions about the supposed assault of members of Tren de Aragua; whether the supposed gang members were, in fact, children; and if the president was suggesting members of Tren de Aragua were driven by “paddy wagon” to Venezuela.

Trump’s fabricated tale of combat on the capital’s streets are mirrored by his clearly false claims about crime in Washington since troops began their occupation of the city in August. “D.C. is now a no — it’s a free crime city. We have no crime in D.C. … It took me 12 days,” Trump announced early last month, also referencing Tren de Aragua in those remarks.

Trump reiterated those boasts more recently. “We’ve got no crime,” Trump claimed last week. “It took 12 days to solve the problem. And we’re going to do that in Chicago, we’re going to do that in Portland.” The remarks came only hours after D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department announced the victims of two deadly shootings.

A JTF–DC spokesperson refused to contradict her commander-in-chief. “We do not speculate,” she responded when asked if crime in the district had been eliminated. “However, JTF–DC stays committed to the mobilization in the District until law and order is restored.”

Regular announcements on the Metropolitan Police Department’s website, alone, put the lie to Trump’s boasts. “On Sunday, October 12, 2025, at approximately 10:18 p.m., Seventh District officers responded to a report of a shooting in the 3800 block of 9th Street, Southeast … the victim was pronounced dead,” reads a MPD press release issued on Tuesday. Of more than 20 announcements made last week, two chronicled homicides.

“Yes, there has been crime,” MPD spokesperson Ebony Major told The Intercept. “I mean, there’s crime everywhere.”

In addition to Washington, D.C., Trump has deployed or is attempting to deploy troops to Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. A federal judge ruled last month that the first of those deployments, which is ongoing, is illegal. Courts have recently blocked the latter two occupations — at least temporarily — leaving activated federalized troops in a holding pattern. “They are not conducting any missions right now,” a Northern Command spokesperson told The Intercept on Tuesday, referencing troops in Illinois and Oregon. “They’re just on standby.”

Trump has also threatened to send the military to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. “[W]e’re going to go city by city,” he said earlier this month. “We’re going to have safe cities.”

Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, said Trump was employing a standard playbook as his D.C. deployment burns through an estimated $1 million per day. “This is nothing new,” she told The Intercept. “All authoritarian regimes frame ruthlessly oppressive social control and militarization as necessary for public safety.”

Trump has justified his push to militarize urban America through gross hyperbole, dog-whistle politics, and the peddling of baseless lies. Trump said protesters in Los Angeles were “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” calling the city “a trash heap” with “entire neighborhoods under control” of criminals. He said Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate is higher than “the worst places on Earth.” (Not only did Trump use older and larger statistics, but even cherry-picking the data, at least 49 other cities across the world had higher homicide rates.) Trump also claims that Portland is “war-ravaged” and in a state of rebellion. “Portland has been on fire for years. … I really think that’s really criminal insurrection,” Trump recently told reporters.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s Los Angeles occupation is illegal, noting that while troops were deployed “ostensibly to quell a rebellion,” there was “no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

More recently, Breyer has been echoed by other federal judges ruling on court challenges to Trump’s proposed military occupations of Portland and Chicago. “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut in the Oregon case found, noting that “the protests in Portland were not ‘a rebellion’ and did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” District Judge April Perry similarly wrote that the Trump administration’s “perceptions are not reliable” and that she could not “find reasonable support for a conclusion that there exists in Illinois a danger of rebellion.”

Trump’s claims of hand-to-hand combat against Tren de Aragua in Washington follow persistent attempts to paint the gang as a bogeyman to justify illegal, authoritarian efforts by the administration. At the beginning of his second term, the Trump administration claimed Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act’s fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. Last month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

The Trump administration is also waging a secret war against mostly undisclosed enemies in the Caribbean without the consent of Congress. The administration refuses to identify the “designated terrorist organizations” it is attacking in its strikes on purported drug-smuggling boats, beyond claims by the president that at least some of those killed are “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”

Trump has also had a long history of demonizing youth, especially minority children. From the very beginning of the D.C. deployment, Trump has leaned on the notion that not only had the capital “been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” but also specifically “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night.

This type of vilification by Trump goes back decades to the furor surrounding a group of Black and Latino boys who were wrongly accused of raping Trisha Meili, a white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989. Trump took out full-page ads in four newspapers calling for New York to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

The so-called Central Park Five were convicted, but later exonerated and had their convictions vacated after a convicted serial rapist confessed to the crimes. The confession was confirmed by DNA evidence. New York City awarded the men $41 million in 2014, a decade after some of the men initially sued the city for how it handled the case.

The five men sued Trump during last fall’s presidential election campaign, accusing him of making “false and defamatory statements” about them during the September 10 debate in which he said they “pled guilty” and “killed a person.” Neither is true. (A federal judge rejected Trump’s effort to dismiss a defamation lawsuit earlier this year.)

In his 1989 newspaper ads, Trump painted New York City as “a world ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.” In August, Trump trotted out similar language to describe Washington. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs,” he announced, claiming D.C. had been overtaken by “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”

Experts told The Intercept that it was clear that Trump was banking on his fearmongering about cities to galvanize public support and justify turning America into a full-fledged police state. “President Trump has slandered everyone from peaceful protesters to urban communities just trying to live their lives in his attempt to make the U.S. seem far more dangerous than it actually is,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept.

“His goal is simple: the more people believe that violence is rampant, the more power he can accrue under the guise of national security. But people in this country can see his obvious lies for what they are, which is why his authoritarian agenda gets less popular every day.”

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 15, 2025 7:50 PM

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 16, 2025 1:35 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.

It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.

I hope he figures it out.

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

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Thursday, October 16, 2025 6:32 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Most of what Trump says or posts is cringeworthy and some of it is downright grotesque.

It seems to me that Trump can't wrap his brain around the idea that being President of the USA does NOT make him Master of the Universe. It looks like he keeps trying for leverage on China and Russia, and can't figure out that while he can bully and/or bribe Qatar or Israel or France or Venezuela, it's not going to work on the other big powers.

I hope he figures it out.

Trump has got this figured out:

Trump keeps wandering off the job to give tours of his White House remodel: report

By Tom Boggioni | Oct 15, 2025

https://www.rawstory.com/white-house-renovations-wandering/

Donald Trump’s obsession with remaking the White House into something more like his Mar-a-Lago resort is interfering with his presidential duties, as he sets aside time spent running the government to give dignitaries and visitors tours of his handiwork, according to new reporting.

According to a report from Marc Caputo of Axios, the president has had dioramas built representing all the changes he makes and likes to play with them during his meals, with one insider remarking, “This is all the president's baby. It's the Trump White House."

The report notes the president has “spent as many as 20 hours on some projects, aides say, engaging in impromptu design sessions between negotiating peace deals and talks over the government shutdown,” adding that, “After strong-arming Benjamin Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire two weeks ago, Trump led the Israeli prime minister on a 40-minute tour of White House renovations. Last week, Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb got the same treatment.”

“Last month, a delegation of Florida House lawmakers spent even more time with the president — well over an hour — as he showed them the new tile floors in the old washroom of the Lincoln Bedroom (statuary marble Trump had selected),” Caputo wrote before noting that one member of the group explained that the president engaged them in voting of which tile should be used, which a White House insider confirmed by explaining, “He asks everyone for a vote on everything. We vote. Anybody that walks through gets a vote. He cares so deeply about perfection that this is what he does."

During a recent meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Trump walked the entourage outside to show off his new sound system in what he is now calling the "Rose Garden Club," and boasted, “We have a great speaker system.”

As for Trump’s noodling around with the 3D models, while the government is shut down, one insider admitted, “The tenser things are, the more he moves the [diorama] pieces around in his spare time, or he takes a break and thinks about the marble he wants or the columns, whether they're going to be Corinthian or not.”

*******

Don the Builder: Inside Trump's White House makeover

By Marc Caputo | Oct 15, 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/15/trump-white-house-remodel-plans

Donald Trump is obsessing over remodeling the White House like no other president.

• He has gilded the Oval Office, replaced trees, paved the Rose Garden lawn, hung art and mirrors all over, erected flagpoles and begun work on a $250 million ballroom.

• He's not done: Trump has had models and dioramas built for other projects he's considering, and even directed how and where new marble-tiled floors are laid.

Why it matters: Long after Trump has exited the presidency, his imprint will be on the executive mansion in an unprecedented scope and scale — even if a successor removes the Oval Office gold leaf.

• He's spent as many as 20 hours on some projects, aides say, engaging in impromptu design sessions between negotiating peace deals and talks over the government shutdown.

• After strong-arming Beniamin Netanyahu into a Gaza ceasefire two weeks ago, Trump led the Israeli prime minister on a 40-minute tour of White House renovations. Last week, Finnish President Alexander Stubb got the same treatment.

Zoom in: Last month, a delegation of Florida House lawmakers spent even more time with the president—well over an hour—as he showed them the new tile floors in the old washroom of the Lincoln Bedroom (statuary marble Trump had selected).

• Trump led the guests outside to the new Rose Garden patio, and had them vote on new outdoor tiles. "He asked me to pick a tile," said one Floridian, declining to say how he voted.

• "He asks everyone for a vote on everything," an adviser said. "We vote. Anybody that walks through gets a vote. He cares so deeply about perfection that this is what he does."

As the new Rose Garden patio was coming together, Trump interrupted an Oval Office meeting with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to show off the new outdoor Bang & Olufsen sound system being installed (same brand as at Mar-a-Lago).

• "We have a great speaker system," Trump, microphone in hand, boasted on Sept. 5 when he inaugurated the new "Rose Garden Club." The guest list consisted of trusted Cabinet secretaries and advisers, and lawmakers who are reliable votes for his plans.

• "You are the ones that I never had to call at 4 o'clock in the morning," he said.

What they're saying: The ongoing makeover is too garish for catty commenters on Reddit, and way too golden for The New York Times (which called it "A Gilded Rococo Nightmare"). Trump's team, officially, doesn't care.

• "He's stamping his legacy on the presidency and on the White House forever," one senior adviser said. "No one can get rid of the ballroom. It will be difficult to take all of the gold away. Who would even do that?"

• "President [George W.] Bush liked to paint. [Bush begin that hobby after he retired. He did not paint in the White House.] Trump likes to build and design. This is his artistic outlet," a White House aide said, describing the "perfectionist" tendencies of the Luxury Resort Owner-in-Chief.

• Experts have raised concerns about historic preservation and architectural integrity, but White House Chief of Staff Wiles said in a news release the administration is "fully committed to working with the appropriate organizations to preserving the special history of the White House."

What's next: The president's wandering architectural eye is now gazing southwest from the White House to land around the Memorial Bridge. He wants to erect a giant arch as a grand entrance into Washington from Arlington National Cemetery.

• "Let's build something like the Arc de Triomphe in that space, it would be beautiful when you drive or fly in," Trump told a White House visitor a few weeks ago.

• Trump has three differently sized models of the "Arc de Trump" that he's been positioning on a map of D.C. to determine the right scale.

• On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social a rendition of the arch by Washington architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau.

The models for the arch were 3D printed on Trump's orders by the architects involved in designing the new ballroom. He says it'd be privately funded, along with some of the other projects. The total cost is unclear.

• Trump also 3D printed models of the ballroom on a diorama of the White House grounds that he fidgets with in the dining room during meals.

• "The tenser things are, the more he moves the [diorama] pieces around in his spare time, or he takes a break and thinks about the marble he wants or the columns, whether they're going to be Corinthian or not," a White House official said.

Asked if Trump liked Doric or Ionic columns, the official said, "He's more of a Corinthian man."

• Another aide said Trump "worked every single detail you can think of... from where the bathrooms and plumbing are, to how many people will be able to sit in the ballroom, what material to use for the floor and the walls. How big the windows will be. He is literally the project manager."

Elsewhere in and around the White House, Trump's changes have included:

• Trees on the South Lawn: He hated the look of some of the newer oaks, birch and maples and began replacing them with trees that have broader canopies and that, to him, are more aesthetically pleasing.

• The Palm Room: Late last month, Trump redid the hall connecting the front of the White House to the Rose Garden and West Colonnade by ripping up the tiles and replacing them with statuary marble. He insisted on "bookmatching" the new tiles so that the marble veins line up and make the floor appear as if it's one giant slab. He replaced the overhead lights with two Schonbeck chandeliers.

Along the Colonnade, portraits of every president, selected by Trump, are now hung in golden frames (of course) made of a composite to withstand the exterior conditions, as are the acrylic portraits.

• Trump trolled his predecessor, Joe Biden, by hanging a mock portrait of an autopen instead of Biden himself.

Aides say Trump will probably replace it with an actual likeness of Biden eventually, but make no predictions.

• "This is all the president's baby," one of the advisers said. "It's the Trump White House."

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 16, 2025 6:40 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:

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

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

Why not gilded statues of Trump at major intersections in Washington DC?

Wait until next year for the announcement!

Arc de Trump? President unveils Washington DC monument plan

The arch, to mark the USA’s 250th anniversary, would be nestled in a roundabout near the Arlington Memorial Bridge

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/arc-de-trump-president-
unveils-dc-monument-plan-70nwmdv38

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 16, 2025 6:49 AM

SECOND

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

Why Is Trump Making Excuses for Hamas?

The president seems undisturbed by the terrorist group’s murderous campaign against dissidents. In fact, he seems to admire it.

By Jonathan Chait | October 15, 2025, 12:45 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/trump-israel-hama
s-executions/684563/

Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram “DEATH TO COLLABORATORS.” But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.

On Sunday evening, a reporter asked the president about reports that Hamas is reestablishing its authority in the Gaza Strip by executing its rivals. Trump said that the group is merely cracking down on crime, for which it has American approval.

“They do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said. “We are having ’em watch that there’s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished.”

Yesterday, talking with reporters in the White House, Trump added more detail to his defense of Hamas. “They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad—very, very bad gangs,” he said. “And they did take ’em out. And they killed a number of gang members. And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s okay. A couple of very bad gangs.”

Why is Trump praising one of the world’s most violent and fanatical terrorist organizations as crime-fighting guardians of public order? Two motives spring to mind.

First, Trump is invested in his cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. The terms of the pact are shaky, though. Hamas has agreed to release the bodies of its remaining Israeli hostages, but the group is reluctant to heed demands that it give up power. Its frantic campaign of murder and intimidation against alleged gangsters and gangs—who are mostly anti-Hamas armed groups and dissidents, some with ties to Israel—seems designed to foreclose the political transformation the deal calls for. Admitting that this violence poses a dire threat to the prospect of peace in the region would challenge Trump’s claim to have brought about a historic truce. And so he is reflexively brushing off any news that seems to undermine his own achievement.

A second, more disturbing explanation is that Trump genuinely does not distinguish between crime-fighting and authoritarian crackdowns. He has praised authoritarian governments elsewhere for using force to suppress protests. In 1990, he told Playboy that China had mistakenly allowed some protests before wisely reversing course: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

Trump has long praised autocrats who suppress dissent, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At a press event on Monday, he praised the dictatorship of Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for its supposed tough-on-crime stance: “It’s about leadership, and it’s really nice when you say, ‘How is your crime situation?,’ and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. ‘What do you mean crime? We don’t have crime.’ Because if he has crime, he puts it out very quickly.” Rather than recoil at the sight of masked goons carrying out street justice without due process, Trump seems similarly inclined to praise Hamas for being tough on crime.

The suggestion that Trump sees Hamas’s tactics as admirable may sound uncharitable, but Trump himself likened Hamas’s approach to his own. Elaborating on his defense of Hamas yesterday, Trump said, “You know, it’s no different than other countries. Like, Venezuela sent their gangs into us, and we took care of those gangs. We have Washington, D.C.—it’s one of the safest cities in the country. It was one of the worst cities in the country if you go back just a little while ago.”

To be clear, it is different: American cities such as Washington, D.C., may be occupied by the National Guard, but U.S. soldiers are not summarily executing people on the streets. Likewise, the spreading abuses associated with ICE’s crackdown fall short of Hamas-level brutality.

Yet Trump’s cavalier acceptance of these horrors, and his instinct to equate them with his own domestic crackdown, is revealing. It shows how easily he sees crime-fighting as a valid pretext for the naked murder of political rivals. It also shows that he observes no distinction between the level of force he ought to be able to apply and the unaccountable cruelty exercised by one of the world’s most ruthless regimes.

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 16, 2025 7:34 AM

SECOND

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

Going to war without a declaration of war from Congress

Trump confirms he's authorized CIA operations in Venezuela, looking into land strikes

"We are certainly looking at land now," Trump said.

By Michelle Stoddart and Lalee Ibssa | October 15, 2025, 11:35 PM

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-authorized-cia-operatio
ns-venezuela-land-strikes/story?id=126563281

When asked whether the CIA was given the authority to "take out" Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro, Trump called it a "ridiculous" question for him to respond to.

Is that a Yes? Or a No? Or Maybe? I have my doubts that the difference is clear even in Trump's mind. The President does love to improvise plausible justifications for his randomness.

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 16, 2025 8:55 AM

SECOND

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

Trump expresses appreciation toward the people who are bribing him:

Donald Trump Reveals His White House Ballroom Site With Epic Anticlimax

By Cameron Adams | Oct 16, 2025

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-reveals-his-white-house-bal
lroom-reno-with-epic-anticlimax/

Donald Trump has delivered a supremely anticlimactic reveal of the site of the new $250 million White House ballroom at an exclusive dinner to thank the people who helped fund his pet project.

Trump, 79, filled the East Room on Wednesday with deep-pocketed guests, including oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and crypto billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, according to The Wall Street Journal.

There were also representatives from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and defense and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin. During the dinner, Trump talked up the architectural designs for the ballroom and noted that the construction work was already happening outside, right behind his podium.

The dinner will help “Establish the Magnificent White House Ballroom,” according to a copy of the invitation reviewed by the Journal.

“Should I show you? I guess maybe so they can see, right?” Trump mused, before instructing someone else to open the curtains behind him.

After the build-up, Trump’s big reveal turned out to be seriously low-impact. Through the small panels of the glass double doors, the influential guests got a glimpse of a construction site illuminated by industrial lighting—and not much else.

“We don’t really want you to walk on there, but you can take a look if you want,” Trump said.

He then pointed at tiny toy-sized models of his latest plans for the White House including a replica of the future ballroom. “We’ve already started excavation,” Trump said. “I’m very good at building things on time and on budget.”

While the White House announced the plans for the ballroom in July, Trump did not give any indication when it will be finished. The official statement said “it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

At one point, after a rambling speech where Trump again complained about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize, the curtain was discreetly closed.

The president also talked up his skills as he thanked the “legends” in the room.

“That’s why we’re here to celebrate you, because you’ve given tremendous amounts of money to see a ballroom built for the first time at the White House,” Trump said. “For 150 years plus they’ve wanted a ballroom and it never happened because they never had a real estate person.”

Trump made sure to call out his “really, really generous” friends in the room.

“A couple of you sitting here [were] saying, ‘Uh, sir, would $25 million be appropriate?’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ You know, it doesn’t take too many 25[million]s to get it done, but a lot of I mean, a lot of you were have been really fantastic.”

He revealed the ballroom will be big enough to hold “literally the inauguration if we want” and the exterior design will feature four sides of “beautiful glass,” which will all be bulletproof.

He also said it will have a capacity of 999 people, an increase from 650 people in July and 900 last month.

Trump also told the diners the ballroom is now “fully financed.”

“It’s fully taken care of now, and in fact, we’ll have money left over and we’ll use that for something.”

Trump also referenced his Presidential Hall of Fame during the diner, with the audience laughing at his “controversial” portrait of President Joe Biden being represented by a photo of an auto-pen.

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 16, 2025 11:23 AM

SECOND

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

CDC scientist let go during shutdown says "it's truly like an episode of 'Squid Games'"

By Michael Kaplan, Caitlin Huey-Burns, Dr. Celine Gounder | October 15, 2025 10:14 PM EDT

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-scientist-let-go-during-shutdown-says
-its-truly-like-an-episode-of-squid-games/

Washington — A scientist laid off by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said "the everyday American should be very concerned" by reductions in force amid the government shutdown.

The scientist, one of hundreds of CDC employees terminated by the Trump administration last week, asked that her identity be concealed for fear of retribution.

"It's going to mean more deaths, more preventable deaths," she told CBS News on Wednesday of the layoffs. "People will absolutely die from the impact of this administration."

The scientist worked at the CDC for the past decade, studying chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

She spoke out the same day a federal judge in Northern California issued a verbal order temporarily halting all the government layoffs that were issued since the shutdown began. This was in response to a lawsuit brought by federal employees' unions.

"They went in and fired entire programs, even statutorily mandated by law programs, they cut entirely," she said. "So there is no staff to do this work anymore."

She said everything she was working on has come to a complete stop.

"It's truly like an episode of 'Squid Games,' because we don't know what's going to happen next," she said.

The Trump administration has used the government shutdown, now in its third week, to lay off more than 4,000 federal workers, and plans to go further, according to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

"I think we'll probably end up being north of 10,000," Vought said Wednesday during an appearance on "The Charlie Kirk Show."

Since last week, the Trump administration has informed approximately 600 CDC employees they have been laid off.

On Tuesday, internal CDC officials not authorized to speak to the media told CBS News that on Oct. 10, about 1,000 CDC employees were initially given reduction-in-force notices, a government term for layoffs.

However, within about 24 hours, hundreds of those notices were rescinded, reducing the total number of layoffs in the agency since Oct. 10 to about 600, the officials said.

The judge's ruling Wednesday would put the layoffs of those 600 employees on hold, leaving them in limbo while the case plays out.

According to numbers provided by a congressional source familiar with the cuts, the 600 CDC layoffs impacted all staff in the CDC's offices in Washington, D.C., all staff for the office of the director for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, all staff for the National Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce, and all policy and communications staff for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

The CDC agencies that saw their layoffs rescinded, according to the source, were the Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Center, the Global Health Center, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report team, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and scientists working on responses to outbreaks of measles in the U.S. and Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So far this year, the CDC has lost about 3,000 employees to resignations and layoffs, or just under a quarter of its staff, according to AFGE Local 2883, the union that represents CDC employees. That number was confirmed by the CDC officials who spoke to CBS News.

The CDC has been beset by changes since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year. A vaccine skeptic, Kennedy controversially replaced all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, a panel that makes vaccine recommendations.

And in August, less than a month after being confirmed by the Senate as CDC director, Susan Monarez was fired from her post over what she said was pressure from Kennedy to rubber-stamp his vaccine directives, later testifying before the Senate that Kennedy's demands were "inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official." Her firing also prompted several top CDC officials to resign in protest.

Kennedy, in his own Senate testimony last month, denied that he pressured Monarez to preapprove vaccination recommendations. He told senators that when he asked Monarez if she was "a trustworthy person," she responded, "no."

The congressional source also confirmed that among the permanent layoffs in HHS last week were 41 people in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, an agency under the U.S. Public Health Service whose staff works in biodefense, as well as monitors data on natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks and cyberattacks on hospitals.

An HHS spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday that the department's layoffs are part of an effort to cut a "bloated bureaucracy," and that the positions were deemed "non-essential by their respective divisions."

"HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again agenda," the spokesperson said in a statement.

But the scientist who spoke to CBS News said the turmoil inside the CDC will impact responses to disease outbreaks, like the measles outbreak in South Carolina, where five new cases were reported Tuesday, bringing the total to 16 since July, and forcing 139 students into quarantine, according to health officials.

"The surge capacity of the CDC is going to be significantly hampered with these cuts," the scientist told CBS News. "It's going to impede our ability to respond to public health outbreaks, just when all of these threats are on the rise."

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

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