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: Wednesday, December 3, 2025 11:54
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PAGE 80 of 81

Saturday, November 22, 2025 7:47 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Because he's waiting to dump it on you before an election. If he put it out there now, the idiots will forget a year from now.

You had 4 years to do something about it and you didn't.

If Trump is guilty, you would have nailed him to a fucking cross with this.

Grow up, faggot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Trump knows how to spend other people's money for his own amusement, pleasure, and self-aggrandizement.

Trump teaming up with Jack Nicklaus to revamp 'president's golf course' at Joint Base Andrews

By Will WEISSERT Associated Press
November 22, 2025, 1:27 PM

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-teaming-jack-nicklaus-
revamp-presidents-golf-joint-127787087

. . . An 11th Force Support Squadron asset, the facilities include three 18-hole golf courses, three practice putting greens, two private practice areas and a driving range, according to the Andrews website. Trump said at least two of the courses could get facelifts.

Trump has infrequently golfed at Andrews, but prefers to spend most weekends playing at or near one of his own properties. Those are Bedminster in New Jersey, or Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. On those weekends he remains at the White House, Trump often golfs at his course in Sterling, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport.

Nicklaus won 18 professional majors and 73 times on the PGA Tour. The Nicklaus Design firm features a team that has completed more than 425 courses in 40 states and more than 45 countries.

Trump said Saturday that the base at Andrews “was a great place that’s been destroyed over the years through lack of maintenance.”

“So we’ll fix that up, and Jack will be the architect and he’ll design it,” the president said.

He also referenced, “Two existing courses that are in very bad shape” saying, “we can — for very little money — fix it up.”

"And we’re looking at other things over at Andrews,' Trump added.

Trump's comments immediately raised questions about who is paying Nicklaus, and how much such design services might cost. Also, given that Andrews is military property, who pays for improvements to its golf courses or other parts of its grounds was also unclear. Andrews deferred queries on the matter to the White House, which didn't respond to a request for more details.

The potential Andrews redesign follows construction crews already having demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for a $300 million ballroom that Trump commissioned. He's promised that it is being paid for by himself and private donors — including 37 individuals, firms and charitable organizations that have publicly disclosed contributing to the project.

Work on the ballroom follows Trump having replaced the lawn in the Rose Garden with a patio area reminiscent of Mar-a-Lago, and redecorated the Lincoln Bathroom and Palm Room in the White House's interior. The president also installed a Walk of Fame featuring portraits of past presidents along the Colonnade, massive flagpoles on the north and south lawns and substantially overhauled the Oval Office through the addition of golden flourishes, cherubs and other, flashy items.

The work at Andrews may eventually join another off-White House site project Trump has announced publicly: his plan to erect a Paris-style arch just west of the Lincoln Memorial.

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

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Saturday, November 22, 2025 7:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Don't quote me with unrelated replies, idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 23, 2025 10:22 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:
Don't quote me with unrelated replies, idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6ixStringJoker, nobody cares what you want, either here or in Indiana. That is why you live alone, isolated, unemployed, slowly dying from diseases, dreaming of Trump giving the end of your life meaning and purpose before you croak.

The Real Reason Trump Is Fawning Over Saudi Arabia’s Ruler

Noah Shachtman | Nov. 22, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/opinion/trump-saudi-crown-prince-fo
ssil-fuel.html

You remember the pictures. The images of tech oligarchs kissing the ring at President Trump’s inauguration were instantly iconic, markers of a new and rather unnerving era. But months earlier, Mr. Trump made a corrosive pact with another set of moguls, and that one is already remaking global politics, wiping out jobs at home and strangling what little hope was left of avoiding a climate disaster. This one happened behind closed doors.

These moguls were leaders of the oil and gas industry, and Mr. Trump promised them he would do them so many favors that a billion dollars in donations would feel like a “deal.” The executives gave him only a fraction of the money he sought. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has given them more than they asked for — and some now say it’s backfiring.

As expected, he scaled back regulations and encouraged more drilling — 1.3 billion more acres of coastal waters this week alone. He has also, however, taken the extraordinary step of trying to crush the industry’s green competition. He pulled the plug on the largest solar project in North America, which was on track to supply enough power for nearly two million homes. He put a $5 billion wind farm project in New York on hold, threatening thousands of jobs, and reversed himself only when the state approved a new gas pipeline. And he killed incentives for electric vehicles, sales of which had more than doubled since his first term.

Overseas, Team Trump is warning the world to buy more fossil fuels — or else. The administration used the threat of tariffs to strong-arm allies into taking America’s gas. It reportedly sabotaged an agreement by more than 100 nations to slash cargo ships’ greenhouse gas emissions. When the rest of the world’s representatives were meeting at a climate conference in Brazil, Trump officials called the proceedings a “hoax” — and praised offshore drilling deals with Greece, the first there in more than 40 years.

Plenty of U.S. presidents have talked about freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil and keeping foreign petrostates from messing with our economy. That’s what “drill, baby, drill” was all about. This is something different. Now America is the planet’s leading producer of oil — and natural gas, too. And instead of trying to separate from the Persian Gulf petrostates, Mr. Trump is reshaping America to look more like them: top-down, iron-fisted, resource-rich and more than willing to flash those resources as weapons.

Like the leaders of oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms, Mr. Trump demands total deference. He openly uses his position to enrich America’s ruling clan — his family — with one billion-dollar deal after another. His Justice Department has all but abandoned the fight against corruption — unless it serves the president’s purposes. He’s authorized billions of dollars for America’s internal security services. He regards critical news coverage of him as “really illegal” and political opponents as terrorists. On Thursday he raised the possibility that six Democratic lawmakers should be executed.

Mr. Trump is also ordering the government to take an ownership stake in key companies, a classic strongman tactic that he executes in a manner Eric Cantor, the former House Republican leader, described — from Riyadh — as “not too dissimilar” from “the vision of the crown prince here in Saudi Arabia.”

Most of all, Mr. Trump and his people describe the nation’s fossil fuel reserves as the core to American influence across the globe, and treat competition to these assets as threats to America itself. “Maximum production, maximum prosperity and maximum power,” Mr. Trump said last month.

Mr. Trump’s political instincts were formed in the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC cartel cut production and brought the world economy to its knees. For decades afterward, he expressed a mixture of admiration and resentment of the kingdom’s resource wealth. “Saudi Arabia is a money machine,” he told Larry King in 1987. “Kuwait. These are money machines, the greatest ever created.” Four years later, when the future president was in financial trouble, he sold his yacht to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

Over time, Mr. Trump called for America to amass its own fossil fuel arsenal. “Take the Oil,” a chapter of his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough,” argues that the United States should seize fossil fuel assets from Iraq, all while increasing production at home. “We have such power if we knew how to use it,” he said at the time.

Once he became president, Mr. Trump made his relationship with the Saudis a top priority. When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a purge of his rivals in 2017, the president tweeted his “great confidence” in him and his father. “They know exactly what they are doing,” Mr. Trump added. “Some of those they are harshly treating have been milking their country for years!”

During President Trump’s first term, his first overseas trip was to Saudi Arabia. (Remember that picture of him and the Saudi king, with their hands on the glowing orb?) During his second term, his first call to a foreign leader was to the crown prince. The Saudi sovereign investment fund has invested $2 billion with Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, and a deal between a Saudi government-owned real estate firm and the Trump Organization is now reportedly in the works. And this week, Mr. Trump gave Prince Mohammed a lavish White House reception and staged an extraordinary pro-Saudi investment forum at the Kennedy Center, calling it a gathering of “the world’s two leading energy superpowers.” He referred to his royal guest as “a very good friend,” adding that “what he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.” According to the C.I.A., Prince Mohammed ordered the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi; Saudi Arabia has executed 241 people this year alone.

Of course, America is a far cry from Saudi Arabia. Political dissent remains legal, if embattled, and the economy is complex and unruly. An oil-rich nation can still be a liberal democracy — just look at Norway. But Mr. Trump is not trying to make America more like Norway.

The paradox is that these days, the Saudis are trying to make their economy and their energy profile more like America’s, diversifying away from fossil fuels. They’re even building massive solar farms and investing in wind farms. Until recently, some major fossil fuel producers appeared to be heading in that direction, too.

For Mr. Trump, though, energy isn’t ultimately about oil or gas or even his “beautiful coal.” It’s about muscle. It enables the president to act as he pleases on the world stage. One reason the United States felt emboldened to attack Iran this year: Tehran no longer has the power to upend global energy markets. “If we did not have energy dominance, we wouldn’t have the ability to deploy power the way we are,” Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s interior secretary, said afterward.

Small wonder, then, that the Trump administration views the $100 billion a year of solar and battery gear that China exports as a direct threat to America. Richard Goldberg, who recently left the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, told me the United States should threaten or punish any country that tries to “inhibit, prohibit, strangle, divest from” U.S. fossil fuels.

The reality, however, is that fossil fuels alone won’t be enough to meet the nation’s energy needs. The combination of more data centers and fewer renewables is spiking average Americans’ electric bills. Natural gas prices are up, thanks to Mr. Trump’s export deals. The rise of nuclear power will take years to really make a dent. “If you gave me a piece of paper and asked me to think about the most creative way, the most effective way, to raise electricity prices in the United States, it would look a lot like what they’ve done,” Ethan Zindler, a former climate counselor in the Biden Treasury Department who works on policy at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told me.

You might think the U.S. oil and gas business would be thrilled. Not exactly. The capricious attacks on renewables and the big swings in energy policy are a liability for an industry forced by the nature of its complex engineering projects to plan years, or even decades, ahead. Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Darren Woods, recently told The Times: “Ever-changing policy, particularly as administrations change, is not good for business. It’s not good for the economy and ultimately, it’s not good for people.”

Like many of Mr. Trump’s policies, his America First energy goals have their contradictions. In his total commitment to a hydrocarbon-heavy world, he has pushed not only domestic producers but also Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC nations to keep pumping out more, more, more cheap oil. That might be good news for consumers, offsetting some of these high electric rates. But with oil prices down to around $60 per barrel, American companies say they can’t afford to open up new wells, especially now that tariffs have made drilling equipment so expensive. The total number of active rigs is down year over year.

If energy executives are unhappy, they can’t really be surprised. Mr. Trump’s favor is always transactional. More than helping any individual company, he wants to use energy as a tool for American leverage and, in his case, his own personal power. As he has shown over and over, he believes these chief executives now work for him, not the other way around. “If they drill themselves out of business,” he told voters at a rally last year, “I don’t give a damn.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 23, 2025, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Hidden Logic Behind Trump’s Saudi Fanboy Routine.

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

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Sunday, November 23, 2025 12:40 PM

SECOND

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

Vibecessions, Part II

Good numbers, bad feelings. Why?

By Paul Krugman | Nov 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/vibecessions-part-ii

In October 2024, on the eve of the presidential election, the U.S. unemployment rate was 4.1 percent and the inflation rate was 2.6 percent. By historical standards, both these numbers were very good. And they were especially impressive given the pessimism of many economists two years earlier. In 2022 Larry Summers warned that it would take years of very high unemployment to get inflation down from its peak of 9 percent, while Bloomberg put the odds of recession at 100 percent. Instead by 2024 we had achieved the softest of soft landings.

Despite this stellar disinflation performance, the public mood was extremely sour. Voters who said that the economy was their most important issue favored Donald Trump by 60 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, clearly costing Kamala Harris the election.

Almost a year later, in September 2025, the numbers were somewhat worse: Unemployment had ticked up to 4.4 percent while inflation had risen to 3 percent. In and of themselves, these aren’t terrible numbers. But this certainly isn’t, as Donald Trump claims, the best American economy in history. It isn’t a “hot” economy with prices going down.

Even given the gap between what Trump says about how wonderful the current economy is and the reality, however, it’s remarkable how pessimistic Americans are about the economy — significantly more negative than they were a year ago. The long-running Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment is now lower than it was in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The index is even lower than it was in 1980, when unemployment was above 7 percent and inflation hit 14 percent:

Source: University of Michigan

And voters now blame Trump for the perceived bad state of the economy, showing their anger at the ballot box: In the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections earlier this month, voters who prioritize the economy favored Democrats by 30 points — a 90 point swing.

Today’s post is the second in a series about “vibecessions”: periods when the economy, by standard economic measures, looks relatively decent but the general public holds very negative views. Last week’s primer showed that the performance of the U.S. economy during the Biden administration was, by objective measures, very impressive: America shrugged off the negative effects of the Covid pandemic on GDP and employment with remarkable speed, significantly outperforming other advanced countries.

During the Biden years, inflation did temporarily spike – which people hated even though their incomes were growing fast enough to keep up with inflation. But the anger persisted even as inflation fell dramatically, and continues under Trump.

Today I’ll try to make sense of Americans’ angry and unhappy vibe on the economy. Spoiler: I haven’t found a “unitary theory” of vibecessions. Rather, there appear to be several possible, and not mutually exclusive, explanations. I’ll discuss each of these in turn, along with their strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, I will discuss the special case of Donald Trump, and why he may be suffering an especially hostile reaction to the economy.

Beyond the paywall I’ll examine four possible explanations for the past few years of vibecession:

· Media negativity

· Extreme partisanship

· People care about the level of prices, not the inflation rate

· The economy is worse than it looks

· Negative feelings arising from Trump’s chaotic economic policies

In addition, I will make some conjectures about future sentiments regarding the economy and why Trump may be paying an additional “gaslighting” penalty.

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

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Sunday, November 23, 2025 3:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Don't quote me with unrelated replies, idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, November 24, 2025 7:20 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:
Don't quote me with unrelated replies, idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6ix officially admits he is angry, poor white trash, surviving on less than $7,717 per year. That is why he supports America's Hitler. 6ixStringJoker feels that America has mistreated him, but Trump loves and sympathizes with him and will raise 6ix's social status by destroying Democrats.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60687&mid=12344
26#1234426

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 7:24 AM

SECOND

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

The Trump Trade is Unraveling

Tells from the crypto crash

By Paul Krugman | Nov 24, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-trump-trade-is-unraveling

What is Bitcoin good for? It isn’t money — that is, it isn’t a medium of exchange, something you can use to make payments. It isn’t a hedge against inflation. It isn’t a hedge against financial risks — on the contrary, the price of Bitcoin has generally moved in the same direction as the AI-related stocks driving the stock market these days, but with even greater volatility.

To the extent that Bitcoin has a use case, it is covering your financial tracks: crypto facilitates anonymous transactions that don’t leave a paper trail. Such transactions aren’t necessarily criminal, but many are.

By the way, anonymity doesn’t just enable crime by crypto users, it also enables crime against them. If you possess a Bitcoin’s key, the code that unlocks it, it’s yours, no matter who you are and how you got it. In that sense, getting your hands on a Bitcoin key is similar to getting your hands on a bag full of $100 bills.

This feature has led to a wave of abductions of major crypto investors by criminals demanding their keys. Indeed, such abductions have become so common that a major recent Bitcoin conference included a daylong “counter-kidnapping” workshop, in which participants learned, among other things, how to gnaw their way through zipties.

In addition to facilitating crime, Bitcoin has increasingly become an engine of predation. Crypto — or, worse, shares in companies that buy crypto with borrowed money — is heavily sold to naïve investors who don’t realize what they’re getting into. They do well when Bitcoin’s price is rising, but many probably don’t understand how badly they can suffer when it falls.

And crypto has fallen a lot recently. Bitcoin has actually held up better than smaller, more obscure coins, but even so it’s down roughly 25 percent since late October.

It’s possible that Bitcoin will bounce back, because it’s more than an asset, it’s a cult. When I spoke with Hasan Minhaj and Bitcoin came up, his immediate reaction to my criticism was “I don’t want to get memed, the Bitcoin boys have already come after me.” This cult status has allowed Bitcoin to recover from setbacks and scandals that would have sunk any normal investment, because true believers respond to any drop in its price by piling in more than ever. And maybe that will happen again.

But maybe not, because at this point Bitcoin is largely a Trump trade. Bitcoin’s price surged after Donald Trump won last year, and its recent plunge coincides with a series of Trump political setbacks.

Why is Bitcoin a Trump trade? Partly because Trump, whose family has in effect received massive bribes from the crypto industry, has been rewarding that investment with pro-crypto policies. Notably, Trump has signed an executive order intended to allow ordinary Americans — who, again, generally don’t know what they’re getting into — to invest money from their 401(k)s in crypto assets.

More broadly, crypto is, as I’ve suggested, increasingly a tool for financial predators, and the Trump administration is extremely predator-friendly. Ask Changpeng Zhao, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who was found guilty of violating U.S. money-laundering laws — then pardoned by Trump.

The administration has been doing all it can to dismantle institutions, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that were created to help keep investors and markets safe after the 2008 financial crisis. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and other Trump officials and allies — including some officials at the Federal Reserve — have also been doing all they can to undermine bank supervision, which tries to limit the kind of risk-taking that brought on the 2008 crisis.

All of this is bad for small investors and bad for financial stability. But it’s good for financial schemers like the people and institutions promoting Bitcoin.

So how should we understand Bitcoin’s recent crash? Think of it as the unraveling of the Trump trade. Trump remains as determined as ever to reward the industry that made his family rich, and those around him are as determined as ever to make America safe for predators of all kinds. But Trump’s power is visibly diminishing, so the price of Bitcoin, which has in effect become a bet on Trumpism, has plunged.

Why is Trump suddenly looking weaker? Polls have given him very low marks since the spring, but his net approval has declined significantly over the past month. And while Trump just claimed that he has THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY “POLITICAL CAREER” — nobody knows what poll, if any, he’s referring to — most doubts about the validity of polls showing his extreme unpopularity were dispelled by blowout Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey on Nov. 4.

These electoral defeats have shaken the willingness of Republicans in Congress to keep showing lockstep obedience to Trump. At the same time, the growing furor over Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein has rattled the MAGA base. Many political analysts, I suspect, don’t fully appreciate the extent to which many members of that base truly believed that Trump was protecting the world against Democratic pedophiles, and the degree to which they have been shaken by the growing realization that they may have gotten their heroes and villains mixed up.

Is it a stretch to link Trump’s political woes to the price of crypto? No. As Josh Marshall often emphasizes, power is unitary. A weakened Trump is less able to work his will on all fronts, including his efforts to promote crypto.

I’ll talk more about the politics/crypto linkage in future posts. For now, let me just reiterate that Bitcoin has become a Trump trade, and Bitcoin’s declining price is an indicator of Trump’s declining dominance over the G.O.P..

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 1:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't quote me with unrelated replies, idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ix officially admits he is angry, poor white trash, surviving on less than $7,717 per year. That is why he supports America's Hitler. 6ixStringJoker feels that America has mistreated him, but Trump loves and sympathizes with him and will raise 6ix's social status by destroying Democrats.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60687&mid=12344
26#1234426

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

Yup. Poor white Trash with a home assessed at roughly $325k paid for with cash when I was 32 years old. Car paid for with cash. Zero debt. 833 credit score.

I'm doing better than 90% of Americans, my dude, and I haven't worked a single day since June of 2019.

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 3:36 PM

SECOND

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

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding that the prosecutor who brought the charges at President Donald Trump’s urging was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment,” including securing and signing the indictments, “were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,”

https://apnews.com/article/comey-james-justice-department-5ec1a59d152b
c1fd000ade15e20745b5

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 3:45 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:

Yup. Poor white Trash with a home assessed at roughly $325k paid for with cash when I was 32 years old. Car paid for with cash. Zero debt. 833 credit score.

I'm doing better than 90% of Americans, my dude, and I haven't worked a single day since June of 2019.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

You don't qualify for the top 10%:

To be in the top 10% of Americans, you need a net worth of roughly
$1.9 million to $2 million. However, this figure varies significantly by age, with younger age groups needing a lower net worth and older age groups needing a higher one. For example, as of early 2025, you would need about $372,120 to be in the top 10% if you are between 18 and 34, but $2.96 million if you are between 55 and 64.
Net worth for top 10% by age (approximate)

Ages 18–29: $281,550
Ages 30–39: $711,400
Ages 40–49: $1,313,700
Ages 55–64: $2,960,900
Ages 65–74: $2,997,300

For the US as a whole

Net worth needed: Roughly $1.9 million to $2 million
Median net worth for top 10%: $3.79 million

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+net+worth+to+be+in+top+10+percent

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 5:06 PM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump Just Got His Own Personal Crypto Crash

By Matt Stieb | Nov 24, 2025

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-just-got-his-own-
personal-crypto-crash.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/donald-trump-just-got-his-own-
personal-crypto-crash/ar-AA1R3X0Q

The past year has been very good to President Donald Trump financially. Thanks to the many cryptocurrency projects his companies and sons have launched, he’s gained well over $1 billion of wealth on paper. Crypto has been booming since Trump came back into office by virtue of his administration’s friendly approach to the sector — and a general sense that it’s good for business to have an executive who understands little about the coin economy aside from its ability to inflate his assets or get controversial cash injections from abroad.

But this positive-feedback loop under Trump is faltering now that crypto is down amid questions about the size of the AI bubble and the greater health of the economy. Bitcoin’s had its worst month since an extremely messy year in 2022, dropping from $110,000 to as low as $84,000 since November 1. In total, over $1 trillion in value has been wiped out this month.

Trump is not immune to the megadip. A Bloomberg analysis found that the president’s net worth has dropped $1 billion following a recent high of $7.7 billion in September. His stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind social-media platform Truth Social, has fallen $800 million in the last three months alone. (This is likely because it bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin this spring, joining a fad that’s seen businesses put the coin on their balance sheet to inflate their assets’ value.) The company remains unprofitable.

Other Trump crypto assets weren’t even accounted for in the losses. The value of the family’s holdings of its $WLFI coin has collapsed by around $3 billion since the token’s September launch. Bloomberg did not include the value of the coin in the loss calculation because the Trump family’s holdings can’t be traded right now.

Trump is not the only billionaire who has taken a hit. Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy is the driving force behind the businesses buying bitcoin, must be a little stressed at the moment. Strategy’s stock has lost 43 percent of its value in recent days. On Friday, Saylor posted a presumably AI-generated photo of himself as Ernest Shackleton, the stranded polar-exhibition leader, with the caption: “Endure.”

But Trump — unlike his billionaire crypto allies or even the small-time investors getting smoked — has the ability to mint more coins to make more paper money. Perhaps this is why Eric Trump seemed so upbeat in his comments to Bloomberg. “What a great buying opportunity,” he said in a statement. “People who buy dips and embrace volatility will be the ultimate winners.”

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 5:19 PM

SECOND

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

Trump kills criminals instead of arresting them, but Trump won’t kill a Senator who said killing criminals is illegal. Glad Trump clarified that, except he didn’t:

Defense Department says it is opening an investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly

The investigation is related to the Arizona senator's participation in a video Democratic lawmakers made urging members of the military not to comply with "illegal orders."

Nov. 24, 2025, 11:41 AM CST / Updated Nov. 24, 2025, 1:11 PM CST

By Alana Satlin and Mosheh Gains

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/defense-department-investiga
tion-sen-mark-kelly-rcna245675

The Department of Defense said Monday that it is opening an investigation into Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, in connection with a video he and other Democrats recorded urging members of the military and the intelligence community not to comply with illegal orders from President Donald Trump’s administration.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that the video, which set off a political firestorm last week, was "despicable, reckless, and false."

"Five of the six individuals in that video do not fall under @DeptofWar jurisdiction (one is CIA and four are former military but not “retired”, so they are no longer subject to UCMJ). However, Mark Kelly (retired Navy Commander) is still subject to UCMJ—and he knows that," he added.

A thorough review of allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which could include recalling to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures, the Defense Department said.

Kelly, who spent more than two decades in the Navy as a pilot and retired as a captain, said on X that Hegseth's post was the first he had heard of the investigation.

"If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work," he said. "I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution."

Kelly’s fellow Arizona senator, Sen. Ruben Gallego, wrote in a post on X that Kelly "has dedicated his life to serving this country with honor. And now Trump is coming after him with the same baseless garbage he throws at anyone who refuses to bend the knee. Mark told the truth — in America, we swear an oath to the Constitution, not wannabe kings."

"F--- you and your investigation," added Gallego, a Democrat and veteran of the Marines.

Trump last week said on Truth Social that the Democratic lawmakers “should be arrested and put on trial,” accusing them of “seditious behavior” that, he said, could be “punishable by death.”

The next day, Trump said on conservative Brian Kilmeade's radio show that he was "not threatening death" toward the members.

“I think they’re in serious trouble. I would say they’re in serious trouble. I’m not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble," Trump said. "In the old days, it was death. That was seditious behavior."

The Democrats' video was posted online on Tuesday as a direct appeal to members of the military and the intelligence community.

“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens," the lawmakers said in the video. "Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats coming to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

In addition to Kelly, it featured Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Jason Crow of Colorado. All are military veterans and former intelligence officials.

Slotkin defended the video, noting that the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires members of the military to disobey illegal orders.

"This is the law," she said last week in response to a post from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller criticizing the Democrats. "Passed down from our Founding Fathers, to ensure our military upholds its oath to the Constitution — not a king. Given you’re directing much of a military policy, you should buff up" on the UCMJ.

Multiple lawmakers in the video have said they have faced threats following Trump's threats.

"I’ve been through dangerous situations before, so it doesn’t change my feeling about speaking my mind," Slotkin said Sunday during an interview ABC’s "This Week." "But obviously, the president took issue with one sentence in a video and was calling for our death. I think that’s inappropriate, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or an independent."

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

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Monday, November 24, 2025 6:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Yup. Poor white Trash with a home assessed at roughly $325k paid for with cash when I was 32 years old. Car paid for with cash. Zero debt. 833 credit score.

I'm doing better than 90% of Americans, my dude, and I haven't worked a single day since June of 2019.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
You don't qualify for the top 10%:

I never said that I did, stupid.

I said I'm doing better than 90% of you.

All I've heard in the news the last 5 years was those poor people making over $100k per year and they're living paycheck to paycheck.

My ONLY two jobs since the beginning of 2010 were making $8.75 per hour overnight at K-Mart, and $10.50 an hour overnight at Sam's Club. Combined, the income from those jobs were around roughly $38,000 in roughly 3 years of work.

That means that 12 out of the last 15 years, I haven't earned anything.

Yet my house is paid for. My car is paid for. I have zero debt. I have an 833 Vantage credit score. And the only reason that isn't maxed out at 850 is because I never held a mortgage and I haven't had a car loan for nearly 25 years.

I'm one of a very small percentage of people who were able to buy a house free and clear with cash, and I'm certainly in one of the most minuscule boxes ever created when I can say I did that when my lifetime earnings in 30 years since I started working is only $250k. And at the time I bought that house with cash, it was after making only roughly $210k in 16 years.

"How the fuck did you do that?"

Simple. I don't buy shit that I don't need using other people's money.

Specifics? Never a single cent of college debt. Brown-bagged lunches when everybody else was ordering out. Learned to rehab houses. Learned to fix up shitty cars and keep them running for years after most other people would dare. Made excellent use of my 401k benefits while I had them, and then never gambled in the stock market again after getting everything that I could ever need. I don't gamble. Never had a $100k Bridezilla wedding I couldn't afford to pay for, which means none of the expenses that being married and having children brings, and didn't have to pay anybody any child support or alimony when the inevitable divorce came up. Oh... and never paid the 6 months salary all the De Beers commercials say that I'm expected to pay for a near-worthless diamond wedding ring. I shop around. I never buy anything unless absolutely necessary until it's on a good sale, and when it is I buy in bulk big-time. I buy second-hand stuff like good power tools from fools who need to sell them when times get bad because everything they own is on credit. I don't buy Christmas and Birthday presents for people, I do things like offer to paint a room in the house for free instead. I roll my own cigarettes for $0.80 per pack instead of paying $15 per pack. I barter my skills for favors and good meals, which in and of itself is a really nice benefit since I sustain my life otherwise these days by living mostly off of tuna, chicken breasts, peanut butter, cheap Aldi vegetables, and Cheerios that were bought in bulk. (And even eggs again, now that they finally got back under $2.00 per dozen around here. YAY!)

FORBES: How Does Your Debt Compare? U.S. Average Credit Card Debt In 2025

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/average-credit-card-debt/

How does mine compare, Forbes?

I don't have any debt.

And I bought a house that even BlackRock didn't want to touch during the housing market crash, and I've spent all that time gutting it and rehabbing it whenever I felt like doing the work. I bought it for 1/3rd the market value when it was bought by the previous owners who trashed it, in an already severely depressed housing market, and now they tell me that it's worth more than twice that market value the previous owners had paid for it nearly 2 decades ago, or roughly 6 times what I paid for it.

Most of you would need to make $40k per year bare minimum to live the exact same way that I currently do on only around $7,500 per year. And if you have kids, yeah... Even living in my relatively low-cost neighborhood I would imagine that you would probably need a household income of around $100k to live the way that I do on only $7,500 per year. Especially if saving for things like college is important to you.

Yes. Without a shadow of a doubt, I'm doing better than 90% of you are financially.

And for 12 of the last 15 years I haven't had a boss to answer to, and I've literally been doing it without breaking a sweat.

I only sweat when I choose to sweat.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, November 25, 2025 6:55 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:

I roll my own cigarettes for $0.80 per pack instead of paying $15 per pack.

If you had control, you would stop smoking. But you don't, so you won't.

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

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Tuesday, November 25, 2025 6:55 AM

SECOND

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

DOGE Was a Harbinger of Trump’s Assault on Decency and Privacy

Democrats will have to repair the damage

By Paul Krugman | Nov 25, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-was-a-harbinger-of-trumps-assa
ult

My first post after I brought this Substack back to life almost a year ago was about DOGE, the not-exactly-part-of-the-government organization, headed by Elon Musk, that Donald Trump was creating to save money by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” DOGE would, I predicted, fail. And it did indeed fail, even more spectacularly than I expected: Although DOGE still has eight months left on its original charter, it has already been quietly disbanded.

But although DOGE is gone, its malign legacy endures. Arguably DOGE’s biggest “achievement” was shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development. And the dismantling of USAID has left a legacy of death. According to one recent study, closing the agency “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

Back at home, DOGE wreaked havoc on the U.S. government through a combination of arrogance, ignorance and sheer incompetence.

Readers may remember when DOGE staffers summarily fired hundreds of staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which protects America’s nuclear weapons, then desperately scrambled to get them back when they realized what those workers do. You may also remember Musk’s claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits, nonsense based on a misunderstanding of how the Social Security Administration’s databases work.

Musk is gone, at least for now, from the Trump administration. So are many of the young acolytes he parachuted into temporary positions of power in government agencies, although some have managed to worm their way into longer-term positions.

Although DOGE is no longer, the damage persists. In addition to the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives around the world and the trashing of America’s global reputation, all for some flashy headlines, DOGE also seriously compromised the functioning of the US government. Thousands of dedicated federal employees were pushed out, taking their expertise and institutional knowledge with them, while those who remain are demoralized. Future recruitment of high-quality government workers will be much more difficult given the way their predecessors were treated.

Less obvious, but arguably just as important, is DOGE’s misappropriation of Americans’ personal information along with the destruction of institutional norms on safeguarding that information.

Like any modern government, the U.S. federal government must collect information about the people it represents. A government can’t collect taxes or provide benefits without acquiring a lot of information about individuals’ incomes and their lives in general. It can’t supervise banks, mitigating the risk of financial crisis, without acquiring a lot of information about people’s finances. It can’t conduct essential surveys, like the surveys we use to track the economy and the Census, without finding out a lot about the people surveyed.

Historically, however, government agencies have followed rules designed to avoid putting all this information in one place, which would risk turning America into a surveillance state. Some of these rules are embodied in legislation, notably the Privacy Act of 1974. Others are norms or fall into a legal gray area. But there has been a general understanding that we want to respect privacy, on practical as well as moral grounds. For example, as the New York Times reports,

The I.R.S. has long encouraged undocumented migrants to file a tax return, and many tax lawyers and immigration activists had trusted the agency would not use tax information to deport people. In a report, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that in 2023, unauthorized immigrant workers paid $66 billion in federal taxes, with roughly $43 billion of that taking the form of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.

But the Muskenjugend — people like 19-year-old Edward Coristine, aka Big Balls — got access to the databases of many government agencies through threats and intimidation. Their access to sensitive data was so much at variance with previous norms that a number of former DOGE staffers now reportedly fear that they may face criminal charges.

And they should be afraid. If Democrats regain power in 2028, which seems increasingly likely given Trump’s cratering popularity, they can’t do another Merrick Garland, repeating their past mistake of letting past lawbreaking go unpunished. Demanding accountability is the only way to restore faith in government.

Now, we don’t know everything Musk’s people did with this data, or whether they took some of the data — which are highly valuable to private businesses — with them when they left. We do know that DOGE sought to pool all federal data into a single database. And Trump signed an executive order “seeking to eliminate ‘information silos’ and promote inter-agency data sharing” — an executive order that is still in effect even though DOGE is gone. So DOGE was a harbinger of a major weakening of the standards that used to protect Americans’ privacy.

Why is this a problem? For one thing, it undermines effective government. As the Times reports, since Trump took office the I.R.S., breaking its past promises, has turned over more than a million taxpayers’ addresses to ICE, even though

Federal law tightly controls the use of taxpayer information, and several top I.R.S. officials quit this spring over concerns that giving tax records to ICE on a large scale could be illegal.

A few days ago a federal judge put a hold on this information sharing. But a great deal of damage has already been done.

Beyond that, breaking down the barriers that normally protect privacy opens the door to political abuse. Again, many readers are probably aware that the Trump administration has accused Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, of mortgage fraud, and has leveled similar charges against Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and Adam Schiff, senator from California.

The charges are completely spurious. But the weakness of the government’s cases aside, what’s striking is that Bill Pulte, the Trumpist director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, got access to individuals’ mortgage records and used them to engage in obviously political harassment. To do so, he bypassed the FHFA’s inspector general — who was fired last week as he was reportedly preparing to send a letter to Congress reporting that the agency was not cooperating with his office.

DOGE didn’t cause all of these abuses. But the organization’s rise was, as I said, a harbinger of a broad assault on privacy and growing political misuse of government data. And while DOGE is gone, the abuses will remain until and unless Democrats make sure that the abusers pay a steep price.

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

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Tuesday, November 25, 2025 10:43 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Is a Weak, Failing President, and the Media Is Finally Saying So

As Trump’s downward spiral starts producing harsher media coverage, a writer who regularly dissects MAGA and political media explains why he’s entering a tailspin that will be very hard to reverse.

Suddenly, media outlets seem to have figured out that President Donald Trump is really, really unpopular. There’s been a palpable shift in the discourse: The New York Times reports that Republicans are quietly looking beyond Trump, suggesting he’s losing his grip on the party. Axios claims that it’s “red alert” time for Trump and the GOP. Politico describes how Republicans are getting routed in school board races, a sign that MAGA culture-warring has lost its sway and is even backfiring. And one CNN analyst offers a brutal reading of recent approval numbers on Trump, pronouncing them “atrocious.” We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who regularly dissects MAGA and media foibles alike. We discuss why the political media smells blood, how deepening splits in MAGA show Trump’s weakness, what it means that the Trump-MAGA culture war and immigration raids are badly alienating ordinary voters, and how Trump is in a potentially irreversible tailspin.

https://newrepublic.com/article/203559/trump-weak-failing-president-me
dia-finally-saying

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

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Tuesday, November 25, 2025 3:08 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is a Weak, Failing President, and the Media Is Finally Saying So

You can keep saying words, but they aren't true, and you're not going to make them true by repeating them over and over again.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
There's been talk about removing Trump for 10 years and you've never come close.

How are you going to pull it off this time dude?

In reality, Trump's numbers still haven't sunk much at all. You really need to stop looking at individual polling. I don't understand why you won't ever learn that lesson.

On this day in...

2025:
Trump 43.2% Favorable / -53.1% Unfavorable (-9.9 spread): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

2021:
Biden 42.5% Favorable / 52.0% Unfavorable (-9.5 spread): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden

2017:
Trump 38.6% Favorable / 56.7% Unfavorable (-18.1 spread): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

Republican Party Favorability Now:

40.2% / 53.0% (-12.8 spread): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/republican-party

Democratic Party Favorability Now:
34.0% / 56.9% (-22.9 spread): https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/democratic-party

After 10 full years of political attacks, politicized legal assaults and massive multi-billion media campaigns against him, Trump's negative spread matches that of Joe Biden*'s at this time in his only term, and is only half of what it was 8 years ago.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party as a whole today is -13 worse off than Trump's spread, and is even nearly -5 points worse than Trump's polling 8 years ago today, back in the days when you had the entire legacy media saying "the walls are closing in on Trump" 800 times per day.

You don't have a Political Party anymore, dude.

It doesn't matter how much people hate the guy currently in charge when everyone hates you even more and appear as though they have collectively decided this time that they're not going to forget that.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, November 26, 2025 10:43 AM

SECOND

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

‘An Example MUST BE SET’

The pursuit of Senator Mark Kelly in the military-justice system sends a clear message to service members and veterans.

By Missy Ryan, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, and Nancy A. Youssef | November 25, 2025, 10:18 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/11/mark-kelly-milit
ary-justice-trump-hegseth/685070/

Mark Kelly thought he was merely stating the obvious. Earlier this month, the Arizona senator joined five other congressional Democrats to film a message addressed to members of the military. “You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders,” they said.

An ordinary president, Kelly told us on Tuesday afternoon, would have responded to the video by affirming that troops should of course follow lawful orders. “But not this guy,” he added. “We basically said, ‘Follow the law.’ And he said, ‘Kill them.’”

The video to service members was the second Kelly had recently released. The former Navy pilot and astronaut took to social media with a group of fellow Democrats last month to urge the public to peacefully resist President Donald Trump’s placement of troops in U.S. cities and to “step up for the country we all love.” Like so much else that members of Congress push online to connect with voters or stump for campaign funds, their video ahead of nationwide “No Kings” protests in October generated little national buzz.

Earlier this month, the group filmed its second message, amid U.S. strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, a campaign of questionable legal validity. Like the first, the video message was intended as a “digital play” to generate views and support, according to two Democratic Senate staffers with knowledge of the matter. “It was supposed to be nothing more than that,” one of the aides told us.

In the week since, it has become very much more than that. President Trump suggested trying and executing the lawmakers for sedition. A wave of violent threats against them followed. Then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched a review of what he termed “serious allegations of misconduct” into Kelly, who retired as a Naval captain in 2011. Kelly now faces the possibility of being recalled to active duty to be court-martialed for his statements. If convicted, he could be dismissed from the service, lose his pension, and possibly be imprisoned. (Kelly is the only lawmaker in the video who reached 20 years in the service, therefore making him an official military retiree eligible for recall.)

If the first 10 months of the second Trump administration showed how willing the president and his cabinet were to use the criminal-justice system against their perceived enemies, the pursuit of Kelly extends that retribution campaign to the machinery of military justice in a potentially destructive way.

Experts in military law say Hegseth’s gambit is unlikely to stand up in court, because Kelly’s apparent transgression consisted of restating service members’ oft-cited responsibility to act within the law, as defined by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the services’ equivalent of the U.S. criminal code.

But even if the pursuit of Kelly—who flew combat missions in the Gulf War and was later sent into space by NASA before becoming a U.S. senator—ultimately fails, the move sends a clear warning to other officers and military retirees who might want to speak up.

Before recording the two videos, the group, spearheaded by Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan senator and former CIA officer, had discussed what they could do to publicly push back as Trump pulled the military into new and, from their perspective, troubling missions, Kelly told us. The group also included Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania. Some of the lawmakers sat on committees with oversight of the military; they all wanted service members to know “that we have their backs,” Kelly said.

The first suggestion that the latest video had found an audience—albeit a hostile one—was a Fox News appearance the following day by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff. He said the lawmakers’ remarks amounted to an “insurrection” and a “general call for revolt.”

“There is nothing graver that you could possibly say as a United States senator than encouraging, urging, directing members of the armed forces of the United States, or the clandestine services of the United States, to defy their president, defy their chain of command,” Miller said.

By the next morning, the president, on Truth Social, blasted what he called “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and reposted suggestions that the lawmakers be hanged. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” Trump wrote. “An example MUST BE SET.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that Trump was threatening the Democrats with execution. But she called their statements “very, very dangerous” and perhaps illegal.

In his first term, Trump had considered recalling both retired Army General Stanley McChrystal and retired Admiral William H. McRaven to active duty so they could be court-martialed for perceived disloyalty, according to a 2022 memoir, A Sacred Oath, by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper wrote that he and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley talked Trump out of it.

Hegseth had a different response. He initially posted a relatively muted message on his personal X account that said the video signified a case of “Stage 4 TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome. But the following evening, he amplified a White House social-media post that stamped the word seditious over the lawmakers’ images in the video. And on Monday, he decried the “seditious six,” labeling their circumvention of Trump’s command authority “despicable, reckless, and false.”

Earlier today, the Pentagon posted a memo in which Hegseth ordered the Navy to review Kelly’s “potentially unlawful comments.”

Hegseth argued that by citing his rank and Navy service in the video, Kelly was attempting to issue a pseudo-order to the troops. “Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately,” Hegseth wrote.

Kelly’s office also has been notified of an FBI request to speak to the senator about the video, according to an aide. Other lawmakers involved received the same request, though where the FBI’s interest lies remains unclear. Kelly has not spoken to federal authorities. But in interviews and on social media, he has said he would not be intimidated or “silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Hegseth has clashed with Kelly before, as he has with most Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. During Hegseth’s confirmation process, in which the nominee forcefully denied allegations of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, Kelly questioned whether Hegseth had adequate experience for the job. Kelly retired at a higher rank than Hegseth, who was a major in the Army National Guard.

The statements by Trump and Hegseth appear to have unleashed a deluge of intimidation, including a bomb threat against Crow’s Colorado office and hundreds of threats to Slotkin. Slotkin, who made multiple deployments with the CIA in Iraq, typically reports one or two higher-level threats to Capitol Police each month. Since Trump’s threats, her office has reported more than 80, according to a Senate aide. The Michigan senator also began receiving Capitol Police protection after Trump’s posts.

Threats against Kelly increased, too. He and his aides declined to elaborate, a stance Kelly and those close to him have taken in the years since his wife, former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head during a 2011 attempted assassination that left six dead and her and 12 others wounded. In recent years, Kelly was among the lawmakers who were spending more campaign funds on security-related expenses than nearly anyone else in Congress, according to an analysis by The Arizona Republic.

(In Arizona, Kelly is sometimes accompanied by security, although he relishes flying his small plane alone to far-flung events in the sprawling desert.)

“I’m not backing down. I’m not shutting up,” Kelly told us. “If somebody in my situation was to do that, what is the message that sends to not only service members but government employees? How about to just U.S. citizens about what our First Amendment rights are?”

Arizona’s other senator, Democrat Ruben Gallego, a Marine Corps veteran, said that Trump was weaponizing the military against one of its own. “He’s trying to distract also from his problems right now,” Gallego told us, citing tensions within the GOP, economic troubles, and the furor over the Epstein files.

Numerous Republican veterans in Congress joined the administration in condemning the Democrats’ video. But Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska praised Kelly’s military and NASA service on X. “To accuse him and other lawmakers of treason and sedition for rightfully pointing out that servicemembers can refuse illegal orders is reckless and flat-out wrong,” she wrote. “The Department of Defense and FBI surely have more important priorities than this frivolous investigation.”

Hegseth would have a difficult task crafting a viable case against Kelly, even if the Navy decides to recall him, according to experts in military justice. Before reaching a military court, the case against him would have to clear various pretrial hurdles.

Hegseth appeared to be making a case on social media to charge Kelly under Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, commonly known as “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” and Article 134, a wide-ranging statute that addresses conduct that harms good order and discipline or brings discredit to the unit. But for that “you need actual evidence—Hegseth saying it is so is not enough,” Eric Carpenter, a professor of military law at Florida International University and a former Army lawyer, told us.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice also has provisions outlawing mutiny, sedition, and other crimes. But Carpenter explained that telling troops to follow the law shouldn’t constitute any kind of offense. “While I was on active duty, I regularly briefed soldiers on this framework,” he added. “I wasn’t committing a crime, and neither was Senator or Captain Kelly.”

Ashley Parker, Elaine Godfrey, and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

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

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Wednesday, November 26, 2025 12:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It took 3 idiot women to write that, huh?

They will be the first to be replaced at the Atlantic with AI.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, November 26, 2025 11:52 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
"Allahu Akbar": D.C. National Guard Shooter Identified As Afghan National Who Entered U.S. During Biden Years

CBS News reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez confirms that the suspect in the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., is 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal. Law-enforcement officials told Galvez that Lakanwal entered the U.S. in 2021 during the Biden-Harris regime.

"The suspect reportedly shouted, Allahu akbar!" reporter Julio Rosas wrote on X.

Fox News sources report the shooter overstayed his visa and was in the country illegally.

Lakanwal was arrested shortly after the attack, and the FBI is now investigating it as a possible act of terrorism.

The attack follows Democrats' escalation of hostile rhetoric against federal authorities for deporting illegal aliens and securing metro areas. Such rhetoric has already fueled assaults on ICE and Border Patrol agents.

Given that the shooter is an Afghan national and the incident is being examined as a potential terrorism case, attention is shifting back to a report from earlier this year in which former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams warned on the Shawn Ryan Show about "1,000-plus Al-Qaeda–trained fighters within U.S. borders."

Shortly after the attack, President Trump requested an additional 500 National Guard troops for the Washington, D.C., area. This move suggests the deployment may involve more than routine efforts to clean up homeless encampments or deter street crime; the mere fact that the military is being positioned on the ground points to a broader security threat - one our government is not fully explaining, but one that we suggest below...

As Sarah Adams recently warned, the next Al-Qaeda attack on the homeland is only a matter of time:

"Well, Al-Qaeda says they trained and deployed a thousand for this attack. First off, I think there are more than a thousand Al-Qaeda members in the United States, but for the Homeland Attack, that number is based on what Al-Qaeda is saying, so they could exaggerate it; however, they did have about 1,400 in the Hamas attack, so the number is not off from what they did in the first round of attacks."

And just days ago...

The optics here are not great for the Democratic Party's open-border policies under the Biden-Harris regime, which facilitated a mass migration invasion into the US. The posturing of military forces on streets in DC underscores the severity of the threat - and it's now clear this was never just about clearing homeless encampments or removing drug addicts from street corners.

Politically, the incident gives Trump even more cover to accelerate his planned deportation campaign. It will also continue much-needed scrutiny on Islamists and Islamist Marxists [sic] who seek to destroy the nation from within.

-----------

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

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Thursday, November 27, 2025 12:02 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Website glitch

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Thursday, November 27, 2025 5:34 AM

SECOND

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

Behind the Curtain: The most unprecedented presidency in 250 years

By Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen | Sept 23, 2025

https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/trump-unprecedented-presidency-behind
-the-curtain

Not since America's founding 250 years ago has a U.S. president expanded power — and punished critics — in more unprecedented ways than Donald J. Trump.

1. Executive power: Trump has declared nine national emergencies in his first eight months in office, stretching the definition of "emergency" in creative and aggressive ways.

• Historical analogy: Since 1980, presidents have declared an average of seven in a four-year term. Trump's 200+ executive orders fall far short of the thousands issued by FDR (a wartime president elected to four terms), but Trump's pace—142 in his first 100 days—is the highest on record.

• New precedent: Future presidents can use loosely defined "emergencies" as a routine tool to bypass Congress and unlock extraordinary powers governing trade, immigration, mineral extraction and foreign disputes.

2. Free-press crackdown: Trump has waged the most aggressive government campaign against mainstream media in modern U.S. history —stripping funding from public outlets, pushing the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses over negative coverage, and personally suing CBS/ Paramount, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times while in office.

• Historical analogy: No modern president has deployed such a mix of lawsuits and regulatory muscle. Even Richard Nixon, who targeted the Washington Post and CBS through the IRS and FCC, never sued multiple networks directly.

• New precedent: Future presidents can use lawsuits, regulatory threats, and funding pressure to bring independent media to heel.

3. Seizing congressional purse strings: Trump has tried to freeze or redirect billions in congressionally appropriated funds, from public health to foreign aid to university research.

• Historical analogy: The closest precedent is Nixon, who tried to "impound" funds in the early 1970s. Congress responded by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—which the Trump White House claims is unconstitutional—to stop presidents from unilaterally withholding money. No president since has attempted impoundments at this scale, or with such open defiance of Congress and the courts.

• New precedent: Future presidents can treat Congress's "power of the purse" as optional, withholding or redirecting funds to pressure states, institutions or foreign governments.

4. Tariffs: Trump has effectively seized the authority over tariffs that the Constitution gives to Congress, wielding tariffs to reshape global trade and punish countries for political or economic disputes.

• Historical analogy: The last sweeping tariff shock was Smoot–Hawley, which President Hoover signed in 1930 and wound up worsening the Great Depression. Since then, presidents have used delegated powers narrowly — including President Reagan's selective tariffs on Japanese motorcycles and semiconductors in the 1980s to try to protect American manufacturing. Trump is the first to use emergency authorities to impose broad tariffs without new congressional legislation.

• New precedent: Future presidents can bypass Congress to unilaterally set tariff policy, erasing one of the legislature's core constitutional powers.

5. Overriding the Constitution: Trump issued an executive order seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship — a right guaranteed in the 14th Amendment — for the children of unauthorized immigrants.

• Historical analogy: Past constitutional showdowns have come during war or insurrection: Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War. FDR interned Japanese Americans during World War II. In each case, presidents acted under extraordinary wartime claims of necessity. No president has ever tried to nullify a core constitutional guarantee by executive order in peacetime — not even Nixon at his most imperial.

• New precedent: Future presidents can attempt to nullify core constitutional rights through executive orders rather than constitutional amendments or legislation.

6. Purging watchdogs and civil servants: Trump has fired inspectors general en masse, dismantled independent agencies, and ordered loyalty-driven purges across the federal workforce.

• Historical analogy: The closest echoes are the spoils system under Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, when partisan loyalty determined federal jobs, and Nixon's "enemies list." But both were constrained — the Pendleton Act of 1883 ended mass patronage hiring, and inspectors general were introduced after Nixon. Trump has revived the spoils system at a scale unseen since the 19th century.

• New precedent: Future presidents can eliminate internal checks and turn civil servants into political operatives who serve the president rather than the public.

7. Eroding DOJ independence: Trump has declared himself the country's "chief law enforcement officer" — a title typically reserved for the attorney general — claiming the right to dictate prosecutions and order investigations of his political opponents personally.

• Historical analogy: Other presidents have leaned on the Justice Department — Nixon schemed to use the FBI and Justice Department against enemies until Watergate exposed it. George W. Bush's administration was accused of firing seven U.S. attorneys for political reasons, leading to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top officials. The difference: Those efforts were usually concealed or denied. Trump has largely made his claims explicit, publicly asserting direct authority over prosecutors in a way no modern president has dared.

• New precedent: Future presidents can claim direct authority to launch or block investigations, erasing the long-standing norms separating the White House from the Justice Department.

. Eroding Fed independence: Trump tried to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook as part of an extraordinary campaign to pressure the central bank to cut interest rates.

• Historical analogy: Presidents have leaned on the Fed before — LBJ hauled chair William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch to berate him over rates, and Nixon privately pressed chair Arthur Burns to juice the economy before the 1972 election. But neither tried to remove Fed governors mid-term.

• New precedent: Future presidents can treat the Fed as an arm of the White House, undermining the principle of central bank independence that has anchored U.S. economic stability for decades.

9. Wartime powers in peacetime: Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members without hearings, ordered maritime strikes on alleged drug traffickers without congressional authorization, and deployed the National Guard to D.C. and Los Angeles without the consent of local authorities.

• Historical analogy: Presidents occasionally have stretched security powers in peacetime, but narrowly. Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, but to enforce court-ordered desegregation, not to override state authority for political aims. Presidents George W. Bush and Obama both justified expansive national-security actions after 9/11, but under explicit congressional authorizations. Trump is the first to wield war powers domestically and abroad in peacetime, without legislative cover.

• New precedent: Future presidents can stretch wartime authorities to bypass Congress and due process for military operations on both domestic and foreign territory.

10. Pay-me capitalism: The Trump administration has secured a "golden share" in U.S. Steel, taken a cut of chipmakers' foreign sales and a stake in Intel, and scored companies on their loyalty to Trump's agenda.

• Historical analogy: Past presidents intervened in industry only during crises — FDR's War Production Board in WWII, or the TARP bailouts in 2008. In those cases, government stakes were temporary and statutory. Trump's approach is different: during peacetime, permanent and without legal authorization. The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip describes it as "state capitalism with American characteristics" — closer to China's party-industry nexus or Russia's oligarchy than to traditional U.S. capitalism.

• New precedent: Future presidents can use the power of the state to extract equity, revenue and political concessions from private companies as the price of doing business.

11. Targeting Big Law: Trump punished firms that represented political adversaries by stripping contracts and security clearances, extracting multimillion-dollar pro bono deals.

• Historical analogy: No president before Trump used federal power to directly coerce private firms into financial penalties for representing political clients.

• New precedent: Future presidents can weaponize government power to intimidate lawyers, deterring them from representing clients who challenge the administration.

12. Punishing universities: Trump withheld billions in federal funding from schools such as Harvard and Columbia — citing their handling of pro-Palestinian protests, campus antisemitism, and DEI policies — and used the leverage to force changes in curricula and leadership.

• Historical analogy: In the McCarthy era, professors were ousted over alleged communist sympathies. In the Vietnam era, Nixon railed against universities as hotbeds of unrest. But those campaigns relied mainly on rhetoric and blacklists. Trump is the first president to tie federally appropriated money directly to how universities handle political speech and protest on campus.

• New precedent: Future presidents can use federal dollars to police academic speech and independence, reshaping universities to align with partisan agendas.

13. Rewriting health and vaccine policy: Trump fired career health officials, slashed funding for public health research, and gave political allies broad control over FDA and CDC decisions.

• Historical analogy: Presidents have had major impacts on health policy before — Reagan downplayed the AIDS crisis, George W. Bush launched PEPFAR, Obama built pandemic playbooks after H1N1. But their interventions largely worked within expert systems. Trump is the first to dismantle those systems in peacetime, sidelining scientific expertise to give political appointees direct control over vaccines and public health guidance.

• New precedent: Future presidents can subordinate public health to partisan agendas, treating life-or-death scientific guidance as another lever of political control.

14. Profiteering: The Trump family is believed to already have made billions of dollars during his second term, including through massive foreign crypto deals, real estate ventures and brazen access plays.

• Historical analogy: Presidential profiteering has a long shadow — Ulysses S. Grant's administration was mired in scandals involving cronies cashing in. Warren Harding's Teapot Dome involved Cabinet officials taking bribes from oil companies. But in most cases, the enrichment was indirect or hidden. Trump has intertwined policy with family business at a scale and transparency unseen in U.S. history.

• New precedent: Future presidents can treat the White House as a platform for personal enrichment, including in nascent industries for which the U.S. government is writing the rules.

15. Jan. 6 pardons: Trump issued blanket clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including violent offenders and far-right extremists.

• Historical analogy: Andrew Johnson pardoned ex-Confederates after the Civil War. Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam draft evaders in 1977. But those were framed as acts of reconciliation to heal national wounds. Trump pardoned his own supporters for crimes committed on his behalf, in an attempt to erase accountability for an attack on Congress itself.

• New precedent: Future presidents can use the pardon power to shield their political movements from the rule of law, granting impunity for crimes against the state.

The bottom line: This can seem improvisational, and sometimes is. But step back and you see a very clear, often methodical, march to greater executive power. It often starts with one Truth Social post here or an executive order there. But then the pattern repeats itself. And new precedent is slowly — then suddenly — set.

• Now it's commonplace to see Trump use U.S. military on U.S. soil, a move once reserved for clear emergencies. Or sue a media company for criticism, or target individual critics, or pressure universities to fire leaders or shift policies, or demand law firms or businesses to pay the government or face its wrath.

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

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Friday, November 28, 2025 5:21 PM

SECOND

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

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com

Q: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was vetted & it came up clean

TRUMP: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no vetting

Q: Actually, your DoJ Inspector General says there was a thorough vetting of Afghans. So why blame Biden?

TRUMP: You're just asking questions because you're a stupid person

Video of a confused and dishonest Trump saying this is here: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m6nnmy5kzv2q

Even in the face of a tragedy that he caused, Trump can't take a moment to act like an adult.

REPORTER: Do you plan to attend [Guardsmen] Sarah's funeral?

TRUMP: I haven't thought about it yet, but it's certainly something I can conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.

Trump couldn't, even for one moment, just be a decent person and not make it about himself.
Lord have mercy and may her memory be eternal. He is truly the most demented malignant narcissist alive. What a sick man.

https://imgur.com/gallery/petulant-man-child-y9Bt3iR

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

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Friday, November 28, 2025 5:45 PM

SECOND

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

Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting

Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.

By Peter Eisler, Ned Parker, Linda So and Joseph Tanfani

Filed Nov. 26, 2025, 11 a.m. GMT

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-retribut
ion-tracker/

In his second term, Donald Trump has turned a campaign pledge to punish political opponents into a guiding principle of governance.

What began as a provocative rallying cry in March 2023 – “I am your retribution” – has hardened into a sweeping campaign of retaliation against perceived enemies, reshaping federal policy, staffing and law enforcement.

A tally by Reuters reveals the scale: At least 470 people, organizations and institutions have been targeted for retribution since Trump took office – an average of more than one a day. Some were singled out for punishment; others swept up in broader purges of perceived enemies. The count excludes foreign individuals, institutions and governments, as well as federal employees dismissed as part of force reductions.

The Trump vengeance campaign fuses personal vendettas with a drive for cultural and political dominance, Reuters found. His administration has wielded executive power to punish perceived foes – firing prosecutors who investigated his bid to overturn the 2020 election, ordering punishments of media organizations seen as hostile, penalizing law firms tied to opponents, and sidelining civil servants who question his policies. Many of those actions face legal challenges.

At the same time, Trump and his appointees have used the government to enforce ideology: ousting military leaders deemed “woke,” slashing funds for cultural institutions held to be divisive, and freezing research grants to universities that embraced diversity initiatives.

Reuters reached out to every person and institution that Trump or his subordinates singled out publicly for retribution, and reviewed hundreds of official orders, directives and public records. The result: the most comprehensive accounting yet of his campaign of payback.

The analysis revealed two broad groups of people and organizations targeted for retaliation.

Much more at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-retribut
ion-tracker/

. . . Nixon’s plotting remained a secret until the Watergate hearings exposed it, turning his enemies list into a symbol of presidential abuse. The secrecy reflected a political culture in which retaliation was whispered, not broadcast, and where institutional checks blunted many of Nixon’s ambitions.

Trump’s approach reverses that pattern, historians say. He has openly named his perceived enemies, urged prosecutions in public and framed vengeance as a campaign vow. Some say today’s “enemies list” politics are in that sense farther-reaching than Nixon’s, possibly signaling a shift toward a normalization of retribution in American political life.

Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University who has written a book on power grabs by American presidents, said Nixon was ultimately checked and forced to resign by Congress, including members of his own Republican Party. “That's just not happening now,” he said.

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

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Friday, November 28, 2025 7:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Grow up and get a hobby bitch.

If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, November 29, 2025 9:24 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:
Grow up and get a hobby bitch.

If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

What is clearly the agenda? I mean, this is not a normal presidency. This is not normal politics in the United States. What we have is a group of would-be authoritarians trying to speedrun a transition into one-party, non-democratic rule. It’s clear that the goal was to be reached before anybody had a chance really to stand up to them. It was to end US democracy more or less permanently. I mean, that’s not hyperbole. That’s just where we are. And the good news is, it does not seem to be going well, or at least it’s not going according to schedule. People like Orban in Hungary or Putin in his early years had broad public support during their extended takeovers. Trump’s support has cratered. If you had doubts about the polling, these elections in New Jersey and Virginia that we had early in November said, oh, no, the polling is right, if anything, it’s understating how much the public now loathes Donald Trump. Now, that’s not necessarily enough. There are still a lot of craven politicians and craven institutions. At least the momentum has slowed. Now, whether we can actually turn this around, ask me in a couple of years.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/another-talk-with-martin-wolf

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

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Saturday, November 29, 2025 6:28 PM

SECOND

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

Isn't Trump indiscriminately executing people for drug trafficking? But Trump to pardon ex-Honduras leader serving drug trafficking sentence in US

Hernández was convicted in 2024 of accepting millions in bribes to protect cocaine shipments

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/28/trump-pardon-honduras-
hernandez-drugs

Donald Trump has said he will grant a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said on Friday in a post on Truth Social.

In March of last year, Hernández was convicted in US courts of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to protect US-bound cocaine shipments belonging to traffickers he once publicly proclaimed to combat. Speaking during closing arguments at the trial, assistant US attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.

Hernández was sentenced last June and called his conviction wrongful. He had served two terms as the leader of the country of roughly 10 million people, and was considered a top US ally in Central America, particularly by the Trump administration.

Trump’s announcement to pardon Hernández comes even as the Republican leader casts himself as being tough on combating drug problems.

Trump’s administration designated multiple drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and used claims of a “war on drugs” to justify deadly airstrikes on vessels across the Caribbean and Pacific. These strikes have prompted the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations to condemn the operations as extrajudicial executions.

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

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Saturday, November 29, 2025 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Grow up and get a hobby bitch.

If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
What is clearly the agenda?

You know everything, Paul. You tell us.

Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, November 29, 2025 8:38 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You know everything, Paul. You tell us.

Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?

Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal? Not according to Trump or Trumptards I have asked, but asking a lawyer gets the opposite answer. Trumptards mainly listen to the distorted voices howling madly in their heads, not to experts:

Statement of the “Former JAGs Working Group” on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes

29 November 2025

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/former-jag-wor
king-group-no-quarter-statement.pdf

Yesterday, the Washington Post and CNN reported that the Secretary of Defense personally issued orders to “kill everybody” aboard a civilian vessel suspected of narcotrafficking. The attack on 2 September 2025 targeted a vessel carrying 11 civilians and, allegedly, an unknown quantity of drugs. The first strike resulted in near-total destruction of the vessel. However, two survivors were apparently observed via surveillance video clinging to wreckage, whereupon the commander directing the operation ordered a second strike. The second strike killed both survivors.

The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both. Our group was established in February 2025 in response to the SECDEF’s firing of the Army and Air Force Judge Advocates General and his systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails. Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.

. . .

Again, the bottom line is that, since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are “patently illegal,” anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.

_______________

Drug Boat Strikes Spark Debate Over Legal Justification

Nov. 26, 2025 | By Greg Hadley

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/drug-boat-strikes-spark-debate-over-
legal-justification/

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

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Saturday, November 29, 2025 9:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You know everything, Paul. You tell us.

Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal?

They don't have any Constitutional protections. They aren't my people. They are bringing harm to my people. Despite the dangers you're so concerned about, they still choose to risk those dangers to bring harm to my people while making profit off of them.

Fuck them.

You find yourself not only on the opposite side of logic, reason and self-preservation once again, but your toxic empathy is going to get your stupid, Liberal ass killed one day. Nobody gives a shit if you're willing to risk your own ass for them.

By all means. If you really give a fuck about them, then you pack up your Billions, Mr. Oil Tycoon, and you go take your morally-superior ass over there and you fight for them.

If not? Shut the fuck up.

We're all fucking tired of hearing any of your bullshit, and you are the reason why your Political Party is dead and will never recover.

As for Paul, I'm simply pointing out that Mr. Krugman has not had a correct prediction or anything worth putting to paper in at least 5 years. And yet after hundreds of posts of stupid shit he's said and failed predictions he's made being reposted by you on the regular, cataloging all of his failures over the years all without ever saying anything that remotely resembles the truth, here we are.

Fuck Paul Krugman. And Fuck You, Second.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 6:48 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You know everything, Paul. You tell us.

Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal?

They don't have any Constitutional protections. They aren't my people. They are bringing harm to my people. Despite the dangers you're so concerned about, they still choose to risk those dangers to bring harm to my people while making profit off of them.

Fuck them.

You find yourself not only on the opposite side of logic, reason and self-preservation once again, but your toxic empathy is going to get your stupid, Liberal ass killed one day. Nobody gives a shit if you're willing to risk your own ass for them.

By all means. If you really give a fuck about them, then you pack up your Billions, Mr. Oil Tycoon, and you go take your morally-superior ass over there and you fight for them.

If not? Shut the fuck up.

We're all fucking tired of hearing any of your bullshit, and you are the reason why your Political Party is dead and will never recover.

As for Paul, I'm simply pointing out that Mr. Krugman has not had a correct prediction or anything worth putting to paper in at least 5 years. And yet after hundreds of posts of stupid shit he's said and failed predictions he's made being reposted by you on the regular, cataloging all of his failures over the years all without ever saying anything that remotely resembles the truth, here we are.

Fuck Paul Krugman. And Fuck You, Second.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

I always wondered as a child why people like you and Trump were a burden on others and would actively harm them for profit. For many, many years, people like you have shown me your souls. Finally, I understood. There really are evil people in the world who aren't aware of the rotten spot inside them. If you re-read what you wrote, 6ix, and imagine the person who wrote it was standing next to you, could you trust them not to burden you? Maybe even harm you?

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 9:12 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You know everything, Paul. You tell us.

Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal?

They don't have any Constitutional protections. They aren't my people. They are bringing harm to my people. Despite the dangers you're so concerned about, they still choose to risk those dangers to bring harm to my people while making profit off of them.

Fuck them.

You find yourself not only on the opposite side of logic, reason and self-preservation once again, but your toxic empathy is going to get your stupid, Liberal ass killed one day. Nobody gives a shit if you're willing to risk your own ass for them.

By all means. If you really give a fuck about them, then you pack up your Billions, Mr. Oil Tycoon, and you go take your morally-superior ass over there and you fight for them.

If not? Shut the fuck up.

We're all fucking tired of hearing any of your bullshit, and you are the reason why your Political Party is dead and will never recover.

As for Paul, I'm simply pointing out that Mr. Krugman has not had a correct prediction or anything worth putting to paper in at least 5 years. And yet after hundreds of posts of stupid shit he's said and failed predictions he's made being reposted by you on the regular, cataloging all of his failures over the years all without ever saying anything that remotely resembles the truth, here we are.

Fuck Paul Krugman. And Fuck You, Second.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
I always wondered as a child why people like you and Trump were a burden on others and would actively harm them for profit. For many, many years, people like you have shown me your souls. Finally, I understood. There really are evil people in the world who aren't aware of the rotten spot inside them. If you re-read what you wrote, 6ix, and imagine the person who wrote it was standing next to you, could you trust them not to burden you? Maybe even harm you?

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

Shut the fuck up, you sanctimonious little cunt.

If you know me personally, the only way you're being harmed by me is if you burden or hurt me or anybody I care about.

You are the burden. You are the pain. You are everything that is wrong with this world.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 11:55 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, you sanctimonious little cunt.

If you know me personally, the only way you're being harmed by me is if you burden or hurt me or anybody I care about.

You are the burden. You are the pain. You are everything that is wrong with this world.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Trumptards are lucky to live in America, where deviant behavior is tolerated. If you lived anywhere else in the Americas, other than Canada, Trumptards would be killed because you are obviously a bunch of assholes. Nobody would tolerate Trumptards in any other American country, except Canada. You Trumptards would be killed with an ax or a machete after the thousandth time you offended the whole community with your loud, stupid, selfish ways, refusing to adjust to the environment you live in.

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 11:57 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Is In FAR Deeper Trouble Than I Anticipated | Paul Krugman

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 12:56 PM

SECOND

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

Leaving MAGA — An Off-Ramp

By Andrew Tobias | Nov 30, 2025 at 12:39 AM

https://andrewtobias.com/leaving-maga-an-off-ramp/

He calls it an “e-book,” but at 9,500 words — and free — My MAGA Odyssey is really just a wonderful short story. https://leavingmaga.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/E-book-Leaving-MAGA
.pdf

In three parts.

I. Why I Gravitated To MAGA
II. Why I Left MAGA
III. Empowering Others to Leave MAGA

Once a prominent MAGA voice, Rich Logis writes:

I know many will ask: “It took you seven years to leave?”

It’s a fair criticism. I don’t have a good answer as to why I defended, and justified, over and over, the indefensible and the unjustifiable. I was always convinced that MAGA’s adversaries were far worse. I bought into the dehumanization of our opponents. I appreciate that these answers will be unsatisfactory to many.

As I spoke and wrote as much as I could about how I left MAGA, I decided I needed to do more to reach out to others who were in my position. That’s why I founded Leaving MAGA. https://leavingmaga.org/ I want it to provide an off-ramp of sorts to those who are having doubts and/or are considering leaving the movement. It’s also a safe space, a community for those who are ready to return to who they were before MAGA clawed into their hearts and minds.

Finally, Leaving MAGA is a resource for those who want to reach out to friends and/or loved ones in the movement. I am living proof that it’s possible to leave MAGA. Let’s get to work to again find peace with our family, friends and neighbors in MAGA.

Read his “book” https://leavingmaga.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/E-book-Leaving-MAGA
.pdf

Visit his website https://leavingmaga.org/

And the many stories you’ll find there of others who’ve left MAGA, like this young man’s, or this young woman’s . . . each one an interesting personal struggle.
https://leavingmaga.org/they-left-maga
https://leavingmaga.org/they-left-maga/steve-vilchez/
https://leavingmaga.org/they-left-maga/kc-cain/

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 2:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is In FAR Deeper Trouble Than I Anticipated | Paul Krugman

I'll bet he's not, idiot Paul.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, you sanctimonious little cunt.

If you know me personally, the only way you're being harmed by me is if you burden or hurt me or anybody I care about.

You are the burden. You are the pain. You are everything that is wrong with this world.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Trumptards are lucky to live in America, where deviant behavior is tolerated. If you lived anywhere else in the Americas, other than Canada, Trumptards would be killed because you are obviously a bunch of assholes. Nobody would tolerate Trumptards in any other American country, except Canada. You Trumptards would be killed with an ax or a machete after the thousandth time you offended the whole community with your loud, stupid, selfish ways, refusing to adjust to the environment you live in.

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

Anyone could and would say the same about you.

Go fuck yourself, and get the fuck out of my country, you evil little cunt.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 7:40 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:

Anyone could and would say the same about you.

Go fuck yourself, and get the fuck out of my country, you evil little cunt.

Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.

But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.

The president’s two-week trial in Manhattan, and those of his associates before it, offered a glimpse into a world of corruption and drug running spanning several countries. Bags of cash, a machine gun with Mr. Hernández’s name emblazoned on it, and bribes from the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo, featured heavily.

Prosecutors said Mr. Hernández was key to a scheme that lasted more than 20 years and brought more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/nyregion/honduras-hernandez-drug-tr
afficking.html

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 7:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Anyone could and would say the same about you.

Go fuck yourself, and get the fuck out of my country, you evil little cunt.
Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

You were just defending the people who are currently flooding our people with drugs.

You should be celebrating this pardon, right moron?

Good for you, buddy. Your side finally won on an issue in 2025. Only a month left in the year now... I thought maybe you wouldn't have a single thing to hang your hat on.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 7:48 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is In FAR Deeper Trouble Than I Anticipated | Paul Krugman

I'll bet he's not, idiot Paul.

Trump will be taking money from Russians, which means Trump will be in trouble.

Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine

The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board

The Wall Street Journal reports: https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b2
90

Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine.

But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.

At his waterfront estate, billionaire developer-turned-special envoy Steve Witkoff was hosting Kirill Dmitriev , head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and Vladimir Putin’s handpicked negotiator, who had largely shaped the document they were revising on the screen. Jared Kushner , the president’s son-in-law, had arrived from his nearby home on an island known as the “ Billionaire Bunker .”

Dmitriev was pushing a plan for U.S. companies to tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic. There were no limits to what two longtime adversaries could achieve, Dmitriev had argued for months: Their rival space industries, which raced one another during the Cold War, could even pursue a joint mission to Mars with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.

Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.

The two businessmen shared President Trump’s long-held approach to geopolitics. If generations of diplomats viewed the post-Soviet challenges of Eastern Europe as a Gordian knot to be painstakingly unraveled, the president envisioned an easy fix: The borders matter less than the business. In the 1980s, he had offered to personally negotiate a swift end to the Cold War while building what he told Soviet diplomats would be a Trump Tower across the street from the Kremlin, with their Communist regime as a business partner.

“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”

When a version of the 28-point plan leaked earlier this month, it drew immediate protests. Leaders in Europe and Ukraine complained it reflected mostly Russian talking points and bulldozed through nearly all of Kyiv’s red lines. They weren’t assuaged even after administration officials assured them that the plan wasn’t set in stone, worried that Russia—after violently redrawing European borders—was being rewarded with commercial opportunities.

As Western leaders convened this week to digest the plan, Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”

For many in the Trump White House, that blurring of business and geopolitics is a feature, not a bug. Key presidential advisers see an opportunity for American investors to snap up lucrative deals in a new postwar Russia and become the commercial guarantors of peace. In conversations with Witkoff and Kushner, Russia has been clear it would prefer U.S. businesses to step in, not rivals from European states whose leaders have “talked a lot of trash” about the peace effforts, one of these people said: “It’s Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to say, ‘Look, I’m settling this thing and there’s huge economic benefits for doing that for America, right?’”

A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win.

One sign that he may be serious is that some of his most-trusted friends, sanctioned billionaires from his St. Petersburg hometown— Gennady Timchenko , Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady—have sent representatives to quietly meet American companies to explore rare-earth mining and energy deals, according to people familiar with the meetings and European security officials. That includes reviving the giant Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged by Ukrainian tactical divers, and under European Union sanctions.

Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil met with Russia’s biggest state energy company, Rosneft, to discuss returning to the massive Sakhalin gas project if Moscow and Washington gave the green light.

Elsewhere, a cast of businessmen close to the Trump administration have been looking to position themselves as new economic links between the U.S. and Russia.

Gentry Beach, a college friend of Donald Trump Jr. and campaign donor to his father, has been in talks to acquire a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project if it is released from sanctions. Another Trump donor, Stephen P. Lynch, paid $600,000 this year to a lobbyist close to Trump Jr. who is helping him seek a Treasury Department license to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from a Russian state-owned company.

There is no evidence that Witkoff, the White House or Kushner are briefed on these efforts or coordinating them. A person familiar with Witkoff’s thinking said the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.

Witkoff, who hasn’t traveled to Ukraine this year, is set to visit Russia for the sixth time next week and will again meet Putin. He insisted he isn’t playing favorites. “Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers. “It is now time to consolidate what they have achieved through diplomacy,” he said.

“The Trump administration has gathered input from both the Ukrainians and Russians to formulate a peace deal that can stop the killing and bring this war to a close,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “As the President said, his national security team has made great progress over the past week, and the agreement will continue to be fine-tuned following conversations with officials from both sides.”

An administration official said that Kushner and Witkoff also met with Ukraine’s national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, in Miami and spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky . The official said that while Trump has “done a lot of new, important things regarding economic incentives,” he and his team have also been focused on “geopolitical and military realities.”

As Witkoff pursued talks with Dmitriev over nine months, some agencies inside the Trump administration had a limited view of his dealings with Moscow.

In the lead-up to an August summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin, Witkoff and Dmitriev discussed a prisoner exchange that would have been the largest bilateral swap in their countries’ history. The Central Intelligence Agency, which traditionally manages prisoner trades with Russia, wasn’t fully briefed on that proposed exchange. Nor was the State Department’s office for unjustly imprisoned Americans. The CIA didn’t return requests for comment. The State Department referred questions to the White House.

Career officials in the office overseeing sanctions at the Treasury Department have at times learned details of Witkoff’s meetings with Moscow from their British counterparts.

In the days after Alaska, a European intelligence agency distributed a hard-copy report in a manila envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump administration had been pursuing with Russia, including jointly mining rare earths in the Arctic.

Witkoff has worked closely with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio . But Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, former Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has been all but frozen out of serious talks, and last week said he is leaving the government.

To understand the story behind the administration’s Russia negotiations, The Wall Street Journal spoke to dozens of officials, diplomats, and former and current intelligence officers from the U.S., Russia and Europe, and American lobbyists and investors close to the administration.

The picture that emerges is a remarkable story of business leaders working outside the traditional lines of diplomacy to cement a peace agreement with business deals.

A visitor from Moscow
Witkoff was just weeks into his new job as President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine negotiator when his office asked the Treasury Department for help allowing a sanctioned Russian businessman to visit Washington.

Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker with degrees from Harvard and Stanford, spoke Witkoff’s preferred language: business. He had invited Witkoff to Moscow in February and escorted him into a three-hour meeting with Putin to discuss the Ukraine war. But Dmitriev was persona non grata in the U.S, blocked by the Treasury in 2022 for his role leading his country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, which it called a “slush fund for Vladimir Putin.”

Trump had told Witkoff he wanted the war to end and the administration was willing to take the risk of welcoming Putin’s emissary to Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had questions about the unique request, but ultimately signed off.

Dmitriev arrived at the White House on April 2 and presented a list of multibillion-dollar business projects the two governments could pursue together. At one point, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Dmitriev that Putin needed to demonstrate he was serious about peace.

But Dmitriev felt his businesslike rapport was breaking through. “We can transition investment trust into a political role,” he said in an unpublished interview that month.

In April, Dmitriev welcomed Witkoff to the St. Petersburg presidential library for another three-hour meeting with Putin. Witkoff took his own notes, relying on a Kremlin translator, then briefed the White House from the U.S. Embassy. That same month, European national security advisers planned to meet Witkoff in London to integrate him into their peace process. But he was busy with his other portfolio—negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza—and couldn’t make it. Afterward, one European official asked Witkoff to start speaking with allies over the secure fixed line Europe’s heads of state use to conduct sensitive diplomatic conversations. Witkoff demurred, as he traveled too much to use the cumbersome system.

Dmitriev and Witkoff meanwhile were chatting regularly by phone about increasingly ambitious proposals. The U.S. and Russia were discussing major agreements on oil-and-gas exploration and Arctic transportation, Dmitriev told the Journal. “We believe that the U.S. and Russia can cooperate basically on everything in the Arctic,” he said. “If a solution is found in Ukraine, U.S. economic cooperation can be a foundation for our relationship going forward.”

Into position
American and Russian business leaders were quietly anticipating that Witkoff and Dmitriev would deliver, positioning their companies to profit from peace.

In secret talks , Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman met Rosneft boss Igor Sechin , Putin’s former private secretary, in the Qatari capital Doha, to discuss Exxon’s return to the massive Sakhalin project, an investment stranded after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Exxon, billionaire investor Todd Boehly and others have explored buying assets owned by Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer. The U.S. sanctioned Lukoil in October to increase pressure on Moscow, prompting the company to put its overseas assets up for sale. Elliott Investment Management eyed buying a stake in a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas into Europe.

More recently, Kremlin-linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations, according to a European security official and a person familiar with the talks. Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited, these people said.

Beach, Trump Jr.’s college friend, was in talks to acquire 9.9% of an Arctic LNG project with Novatek, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer—which is partly owned by Timchenko — if the U.S. and U.K. remove sanctions on it, according to drafts of contracts reviewed by the Journal.

In a statement, Beach said that partnering with Novatek would “strongly benefit any company committed to advancing American energy leadership,” and that his company, America First Global, “actively seeks investment opportunities that strengthen American interests around the world.” He said he “has never worked with Steve Witkoff” but is “extremely grateful” for the efforts Witkoff and others are making to end the war in Ukraine. Trump Jr. has told people he isn’t doing business with Beach.

Meanwhile, Lynch, the Miami-based investor, had been asking the U.S. government to allow him to bid on the sabotaged Nord Stream Pipeline 2 if it came up for auction in a Swiss bankruptcy proceeding. Lynch, who in 2022 was given a license by Treasury to complete the acquisition of the Swiss subsidiary of Russia’s Sberbank, had been seeking a license for the pipeline since the Biden administration, but in April dialed up his lobbying efforts by hiring Ches McDowell, a friend of Trump Jr. He would pay McDowell’s firm $600,000 over the next six months. Lynch’s representatives reached out to Witkoff for a meeting.

In late July, Dmitry Bakanov, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, visited NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston—the first such visit since 2018—as well as the spacecraft manufacturing facilities of Boeing and SpaceX.

The road to Miami
The chess pieces were moving into position. But all of it hung, to some degree, on whether Witkoff could unlock the conflict his boss had pledged during his campaign to resolve in a single day.

On Aug. 6, Witkoff flew to Moscow, at Putin’s invitation, for a meeting prepared only a few days in advance. Dmitriev walked him through Zaryadye Park overlooking the Moskva River, then escorted him to the Kremlin for another three-hour session with Russia’s leader. Putin mentioned wanting to meet with Trump personally. He gave Witkoff a medal, the Order of Lenin, to pass to a CIA deputy director whose mentally unwell son was killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine.

The next day, Witkoff dialed into a videoconference with officials and heads of state from top European allies, and explained the outlines of what he understood to be Putin’s offer. If Ukraine would surrender the remaining roughly 20% of Donetsk province that Russia had failed to conquer, Moscow would forfeit its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. The European officials were confused. Did Putin mean he would withdraw his troops from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, as Witkoff was suggesting? Or, more likely, was Putin merely promising to not conquer the thousands of square miles of those two provinces that, after years of bloody fighting, remained in Ukrainian hands? Either way, Ukraine was skeptical about the value of a promise from Putin.

On Aug. 9, Witkoff retreated to the Spanish island of Ibiza. European leaders were still seeking clarity from him, the White House, and the State Department, on what exactly Putin had offered.

Witkoff wanted to strike while the iron was hot and hold a summit without delay. Dmitriev was optimistic Witkoff had taken Russia’s sensitivities on board: “We believe Steve Witkoff and the Trump team are doing a great job to understand the Russian position to end the conflict,” he told the Journal, a few days before.

The Aug. 15 summit fell apart almost as soon as it began. Witkoff, Rubio, and Trump arrived on Air Force One, meeting Putin, his longtime adviser Yuri Ushakov , and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin launched into a 1,000-year history lecture on the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. The two sides canceled a lunch and an afternoon session where they were meant to check through their other issues, like the exchange of prisoners. Witkoff left uncertain where things stood, but hopeful talks would accelerate soon. “Everyone was working hard, but it was positive,” he said.

In October, President Zelensky flew to Washington, hoping to secure long-range, U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. His military wanted to cripple Russian refineries, pushing Moscow to negotiate on better terms.

By the time Zelensky arrived, Trump had spoken to Putin a day earlier and decided not to offer the Tomahawks. Instead, Witkoff encouraged Ukrainian officials to try another tack: What good was a handful of missiles going to accomplish? Instead, he encouraged Ukraine to ask Trump for a 10-year tariff exemption. It would supercharge their economy, he said.

“I’m in the deal settlement business. That’s why I’m here,” he told the Journal. “We keep on knocking at the door and coming up with ideas.”

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 7:59 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Anyone could and would say the same about you.

Go fuck yourself, and get the fuck out of my country, you evil little cunt.
Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

You were just defending the people who are currently flooding our people with drugs.

You should be celebrating this pardon, right moron?

Good for you, buddy. Your side finally won on an issue in 2025. Only a month left in the year now... I thought maybe you wouldn't have a single thing to hang your hat on.

6ixStringJoker, you are fucking insane. Everything out of your keyboard is either nuts or false or evil or stupid. Sometimes all four, simultaneously.

Presumably, you know who Stephen Miller is. His wife, Katie Miller: “Can you cite the statute that makes the boat bombings illegal?” That is a typical Trumptard defense for murdering rather than arresting drug smugglers in the ocean.

The shortest answer from Bakari Sellers to the nonsensical Trumptard justifications for murder: “The due process clause in the Constitution.”

What is "due process"? No one shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law" by the federal government.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/due_process

Connecting "due process" to Trump. Trump wants to pardon a criminal who was convicted under "due process" because Trump has no idea what "due process" means.

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 8:26 PM

SECOND

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

Trump feels sympathy because he has defrauded more investors than this guy did. It could have been Trump in prison for seven years. https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+investment+fraud

Trump frees executive who defrauded thousands of investors, just days into seven-year prison sentence

David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-gentile-com
mutation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E8.Kq5Y.ug1H9xUE1V1s&smid=url-share

President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.

David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday, according to Bureau of Prisons records and a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Mr. Gentile and a co-defendant, Jeffry Schneider, were convicted in August 2024 of securities and wire fraud charges, and sentenced in May.

Unlike a pardon, the commutation granted to Mr. Gentile will not necessarily erase penalties that could be associated with his conviction.

Mr. Schneider, who was sentenced to six years, does not appear to have received clemency from Mr. Trump.

In a social media post on Thanksgiving, Alice Marie Johnson, Mr. Trump’s “pardon czar,” said she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”

Mr. Trump has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to forgive an array of white-collar crimes and to make political points, including by casting prosecutions of his supporters as corrupt witch hunts like those that he claims had targeted him.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Gentile had connections to Mr. Trump or to the president’s supporters.

Lawyers for Mr. Gentile and Mr. Schneider declined to comment. Mr. Gentile did not respond to a request for comment.

In court filings, prosecutors said that Mr. Gentile and Mr. Schneider over several years used private equity funds controlled by Mr. Gentile’s company, GPB Capital, to defraud 10,000 investors by misrepresenting the performance of the funds and the source of money used to make monthly distribution payments.

More than 1,000 people submitted statements attesting to their losses, according to prosecutors, who characterized the victims as “hardworking, everyday people,” including small business owners, farmers, veterans, teachers and nurses.

“I lost my whole life savings,” one wrote, adding, “I am living from check to check.”

In a statement after the sentencing in May, Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, said that Mr. Gentile and Mr. Schneider had “raised approximately $1.6 billion from individual investors based on false promises of generating investment returns from the profits of portfolio companies, all while using investor capital to pay distributions and create a false appearance of success.”

The sentences, Mr. Nocella added, were “a warning to would-be fraudsters that seeking to get rich by taking advantage of investors gets you only a one-way ticket to jail.”

But the White House official argued that prosecutors had falsely characterized the business as a Ponzi scheme. The official said that in 2015, GPB disclosed to investors the possibility that investor capital might be used to pay some distributions.

As of Saturday, the text of the commutation had yet to be posted on the Justice Department’s website.

It was not clear whether the commutation would affect any financial penalties.

In June, prosecutors asked the judge in the case to order Mr. Gentile to forfeit more than $15.5 million and Mr. Schneider to forfeit more than $12 million.

And in September, prosecutors indicated in a letter to the judge that a court-appointed receiver had access to more than $700 million, “which is likely to be distributed to investors.”

Civil claims against Mr. Gentile’s firm will continue, said Adam Gana, a lawyer who represents investors pursuing arbitration against GPB Capital.

“The stories that we’ve heard are just heartbreaking, and it’s just unbelievable that somebody like that would receive a commutation,” Mr. Gana said. “This is not a case that should be political. This guy belongs in prison.”

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

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 8:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Anyone could and would say the same about you.

Go fuck yourself, and get the fuck out of my country, you evil little cunt.
Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

You were just defending the people who are currently flooding our people with drugs.

You should be celebrating this pardon, right moron?

Good for you, buddy. Your side finally won on an issue in 2025. Only a month left in the year now... I thought maybe you wouldn't have a single thing to hang your hat on.
6ixStringJoker, you are fucking insane.

Nope.

Just pointing out how you don't have a single argument against anything that you don't like that doesn't put you in the position of being a hypocrite in 2025 is all. One of the pitfalls of never shutting your stupid fucking mouth, I'm afraid.

You suck as a person, and you've already lost this chess match long ago. You put yourself in perpetual checkmate.

You are worthless. You are nothing. And I own you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, November 30, 2025 8:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is In FAR Deeper Trouble Than I Anticipated | Paul Krugman

I'll bet he's not, idiot Paul.
Trump will be taking money from Russians, which means Trump will be in trouble.

Oh! I'm sure he will! And I'm sure he will!

Oh boy! Oh boy! WE GOT 'EM THIS TIME BOYS!!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, you dumb little turd.

You are even more pathetic than you are stupid and naive.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 1, 2025 3:53 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:

Nope.

Just pointing out how you don't have a single argument against anything that you don't like that doesn't put you in the position of being a hypocrite in 2025 is all. One of the pitfalls of never shutting your stupid fucking mouth, I'm afraid.

You suck as a person, and you've already lost this chess match long ago. You put yourself in perpetual checkmate.

You are worthless. You are nothing. And I own you.

-----------

Oh! I'm sure he will! And I'm sure he will!

Oh boy! Oh boy! WE GOT 'EM THIS TIME BOYS!!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, you dumb little turd.

You are even more pathetic than you are stupid and naive.

6ixStringJoker, how did you get this fucked up in the head? Trump's mental processes have been reported in numerous books, making it easy to trace how he got fucked up, but 6ixStringJoker and average Trumptards are less reported upon than Trump's process. What Trump is doing is fucked up and simple to understand. But will Trumptards try to understand? Most won't, following Trump's example of not understanding what he is doing and why it is illegal.

. . . the senior judge advocate general, or JAG, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the command that oversees the U.S. strikes on the small boats near Venezuela, expressed concern that the 82 deaths from the strikes were extrajudicial killings. If so, they would expose service members participating in the operations to legal repercussions.

According to the reporters, the opinion of a command’s top JAG on the legality of a military operation typically would determine whether the operation went forward. It is possible for higher officials to overrule their findings, but their concerns are typically addressed before the operation begins. In this case, though, the reporters write, officials at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and other senior government officials overruled him.

This new information adds fuel to the concerns of lawyers and lawmakers of both parties about the legality of the boat strikes just as lawmakers are pushing back on the administration’s refusal to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to get Congress’s permission to continue strikes for more than 60 days. That deadline passed on November 2, and now the administration appears to be considering a broader assault on Venezuela.

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

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

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Monday, December 1, 2025 4:55 AM

SECOND

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

Letters from an American
November 30, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-30-2025

. . . On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”

There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

In the New York Times today, Cecilia Kang, Tripp Mickle, Ryan Mac, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Theodore Schleifer explored the story of David Sacks, an early technology entrepreneur with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who now advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency policy while investing in the companies that benefit from those policies. Sacks has brought Silicon Valley leaders, including the chief executive of Nvidia, into contact with White House officials. Shortly after, the government got rid of restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to foreign countries, a change that could net Nvidia as much as $200 billion.

Tom Burgis of The Guardian explained today how the Trump family is using its position in the federal government to advance its personal interests and enrich itself. Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have thrown themselves into cryptocurrency, broken ground on new golf courses, and rushed through permissions for new buildings in foreign countries at the same time U.S. government policies over tariffs, cryptocurrency, and pardons, for example, seem to advance those interests.

“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” Burgis wrote, “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families’.”

When New York Times reporters Ken Bensinger and David Fahrenthold published an article about Trump disclosing the donors who funded his transition to his second term a full year after promising to do so, they noted that the 46 individuals on the released list included billionaires and others who were later appointed to office. White House spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said: “President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”

A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.

There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.

MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.

The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class.”

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained to NPR’s Scott Detrow earlier this month: “[T]he Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don’t apply to them, and they have created a system that has shafted a lot of forgotten Americans. That’s why Donald Trump ran and was central to his campaign. And many people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, believe he’s become part of the swamp that he said he would drain. He’s forgotten the forgotten Americans he said he would stand up for.”

Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”

Popular anger at this “Epstein class” is sparking a political realignment. Democratic leaders have been hammering on how Republican policies benefit the wealthy at the same time that Trump’s tariffs send household costs upward and the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—slashes the social safety net and drives up the cost of health care premiums. The extraordinary demand for energy caused by the massive data centers AI requires has sent energy costs skyrocketing. . . .

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

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Monday, December 1, 2025 5:37 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh! I'm sure he will! And I'm sure he will!

Oh boy! Oh boy! WE GOT 'EM THIS TIME BOYS!!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, you dumb little turd.

You are even more pathetic than you are stupid and naive.

Why the Gulf Monarchs Shower Trump With Gifts

Until now, no president had yielded to royal temptations from abroad.

By Franklin Foer | November 30, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/saudi-arabia-trump-corruptio
n/685074/

When Benjamin Franklin left Paris in 1785, after nearly nine years as the American emissary to France, King Louis XVI presented him with a parting gift. The token exuded the rococo extravagance of the ancien régime: a portrait of the monarch, surrounded by 408 diamonds, held in a gold case. It was frequently described as a snuffbox, a term that hardly captures its opulent nature; the item was likely far more valuable than anything Franklin owned.

Under the Articles of Confederation—the document governing the still-fragile republic—Franklin could keep the gift only with the explicit permission of Congress, which it reluctantly granted. But the gift unsettled the country. The Constitution, written two years later, barred federal officeholders from accepting any gift, payment, or title from a foreign state without Congress’s explicit consent. The Founders feared that European monarchies would seek to control the new country by showering it with gifts, which would undermine its capacity for self-government.

Until Donald Trump, no U.S. president had ever yielded to royal temptations from abroad. But in his second term, Trump has discarded that old inhibition in its totality. Since 2022, the Trump family has been promised hundreds of millions of dollars—in the form of investments, real-estate licensing deals, even an airplane—from Gulf monarchies and the business entities they control.

During his second term, and especially during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s recent visit to Washington, Trump has rewarded his benefactors with sweeping geopolitical favors. Their huge investments in his family’s businesses are hard to describe as anything other than the spectacular subversion of American sovereignty, wherein the nation’s foreign policy reads as a thank-you note to the president’s biggest financial boosters.

Really, Trump is adopting the governing style of his backers. In the Gulf states, hardly any distinction exists between public and private interests; the royal family governs the state and dominates the economy. They oversee sovereign-wealth funds, control the largest companies, and treat nominally private enterprises as instruments of royal policy. When a Gulf developer or investment vehicle pays Trump—or licenses his brand—it is not a private commercial transaction. It is a political act: a foreign monarch using his wealth to cultivate influence, dependence, and favor.

In a monarchy, a ruler governs in part through beneficence—binding subjects through appointments, indulgences, and other blandishments. That this model might be applied to American officeholders was the gravest threat to the republic: Leaders enriched by a foreign monarch cannot be trusted to act independently. When a leader is financially entangled with foreign regimes, it becomes impossible to discern their motives: Are they acting out of conviction, or obligation? That uncertainty was precisely what the Framers sought to banish.

The timing of Trump’s deals with the Saudis tells a disturbing story. Before he became president, he never managed to break into the kingdom’s real-estate market. But during his first term, he proved his worth. He stood by MBS after the Saudi leader ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump backed the kingdom and its Emirati allies during their blockade of Qatar in 2017, despite the fact that the United States maintains one of its largest military bases there.

The Trump family was rewarded for its demonstrations of loyalty. In 2021, Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law, who was a top adviser during his first term—sought a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund for the private-equity firm he was creating. The Saudi fund’s professional advisers warned that the fledgling Kushner firm’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But the crown prince controls the fund’s board, and the board overruled the professionals.

Then, after Trump announced that he was running to reclaim the presidency, the Saudis began to shower him with real-estate deals. In 2022, Dar Global—the international arm of a Saudi developer that is routinely described as having “close ties” to the royal family—contracted with the Trump Organization to manage a hotel and golf course in Oman. Two years later, the company unveiled a Trump Tower in Jeddah, followed by plans for a Trump Plaza in the city. The pattern was unmistakable: The Saudis were licensing the Trump name for a series of lavish mega-projects in places such as Riyadh, Dubai, Doha, and the Maldives.

The Trump family has become enmeshed in Saudi investment deals to an extent possible only with the crown prince’s approval. But have these entanglements actually corrupted American foreign policy? As the Founders understood, that question drifts into the murky realm of motives—always difficult to parse and almost impossible to prove.

American foreign policy was already becoming pro-Saudi long before Trump arrived for his second term. Although Joe Biden came into office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for killing Khashoggi, he softened his stance over time and pursued a grand bargain: Saudi normalization with Israel in exchange for Israeli movement toward a two-state solution. That shift didn’t stem from personal enrichment or private dealings involving the Biden family; it emerged from geopolitics. Biden did not want Saudi Arabia drifting into China’s orbit. And Iran’s growing menace ensured that any American administration—whatever its ideological priors—would be pushed toward cooperation with Riyadh, which stands among Tehran’s most committed regional adversaries.

But Biden sought to extract substantial concessions as he deepened the alliance: not just Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel but also assurances that the kingdom would keep the dollar at the center of its financial system. His administration pressed Riyadh to curb its brutal intervention in Yemen.

In his first months back in office, Trump has delivered the defense protections that Biden merely dangled before the Saudis. Last week, he even designated the kingdom a “major non-NATO ally.” He signed an executive order pledging to defend Qatar against any attack, not long after that country gifted him a $400 million airplane. (Technically donated to the Pentagon, the plane will be transferred to Trump’s presidential-library foundation no later than January 2029.) At Riyadh’s urging—“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump said—the president lifted sanctions on the new Sunni-led government in Syria. And to burnish the image of his family business’s financial benefactor, he once again excused the murder of Khashoggi. Yet he has extracted almost nothing in return—aside from vague promises of Saudi investment in American firms, commitments the kingdom has every incentive to make regardless of American favors. This is exactly the kind of one-sided arrangement the Constitution was written to prevent: a republic bending toward the preferences of a foreign monarch whose wealth has seeped into the president’s private dealings.

What the Founders feared as an existential threat to the republic is now unfolding in plain sight. The anxiety they enshrined in the Constitution is being flouted with barely any disguise. The Founders understood that the nation’s immune system needed to reject even the smallest, most seemingly innocent foreign attempts to influence American politics. The president is ceding American sovereignty to a foreign monarchy, and there’s hardly any price to be paid.

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

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Monday, December 1, 2025 7:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nope.

Just pointing out how you don't have a single argument against anything that you don't like that doesn't put you in the position of being a hypocrite in 2025 is all. One of the pitfalls of never shutting your stupid fucking mouth, I'm afraid.

You suck as a person, and you've already lost this chess match long ago. You put yourself in perpetual checkmate.

You are worthless. You are nothing. And I own you.

-----------

Oh! I'm sure he will! And I'm sure he will!

Oh boy! Oh boy! WE GOT 'EM THIS TIME BOYS!!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, you dumb little turd.

You are even more pathetic than you are stupid and naive.
6ixStringJoker,

Do not address me, faggot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 1, 2025 9:54 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:

Do not address me, faggot. != (Be Nice. Don't be a dick.)

Trump: Pro-crypto or Pro-crime?

Or are they the same thing?

By Paul Krugman | Dec 01, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-pro-crypto-or-pro-crime

On one side, the Trump administration is sinking small boats that it claims, without evidence, are smuggling drugs — and according to the Washington Post, Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, has personally ordered at least one follow-up strike to kill the survivors. A working group of former JAGs, that is, members of the military’s legal branch, issued a statement declaring that it unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.

On the other side, Donald Trump has declared his intention to grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who has been convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. In fact, Hernandez was part of a cartel, including his brother, that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into this country.

At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.

First, understand that Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is all about dominance display, an exhibition of his ability to order violence. The real object may be to set the stage for invading Venezuela.

Second, while Trump is clearly willing to inflict gratuitous suffering on the little people, he positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin; or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had a critical journalist dismembered with a bone saw; or Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road, an underground e-marketplace known for drug trafficking, whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office; or Larry Hoover, a Chicago crime boss, who was sentenced to several lifetimes in prison for leading the Gangster Disciples, also pardoned by Trump. Yes, Trump really and truly cares about crime in Chicago.

Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?

The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.

A case in point is Ulbricht, whose Silk Road was an early example of what is still the main non-speculative use of Bitcoin: facilitating criminal activity. Ross Ulbricht was a darling of the tech-libertarian crowd, which includes Peter Thiel, arguably the godfather of Silicon Valley and whose financial backing was critical to JD Vance’s senate win. Trump first promised to pardon Ulbricht in 2024, as part of a pitch to win the votes of libertarians:

Speaking at the Libertarian Party convention in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to free Ross Ulbricht, a former tech entrepreneur who created a dark web site called Silk Road that was used by drug traffickers.

Photo of Trump at the Libertarian Party national conference in 2024, where he promised to pardon Ulbricht.
A close-up of a sign. A closeup: This is an anarchist symbol

Whatever libertarians were in the past, they are now an extremist party, opposed to laws against drug smuggling, money laundering, any type of prudential government regulation, and – in the case of Thiel – opposed to democracy itself. It should not go unnoticed that Trump saluted a party that proclaims “Become Ungovernable” as its guiding principle, written with the anarchy a-symbol.

Next, Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, fits the same pattern. CZ plead guilty to charges of violating U.S. laws against money-laundering and was fined $50 million, in addition to a fine of $4.3 billion against Binance. Under CZ, Binance was a major channel of worldwide money laundering. As one report put it, prosecutors charged that Binance intentionally and purposefully ignored the transfer of money from countries and areas that are subject to sanctions -- including Syria, Iran, Cuba, Russia-occupied Crimea and the Donbas region in Ukraine. There was also trading that involved the criminal dark-web market Hydra.

And the story continues. Last week The families of 300 U.S. citizens hurt or killed in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel sued Binance, claiming the cryptocurrency exchange aided Hamas and other terrorist groups by transferring more than $1 billion among accounts they controlled.

However, in the world of radical libertarians, of the crypto/tech broligarchy, CZ’s crimes weren’t real crimes because crypto is designed to “free” us from the pernicious oversight of government. Yes, Trump really cares about stopping terrorism.

Finally, why pardon Hernández? What’s the connection to the crypto/tech broligarchy? It’s called Próspera.

Próspera is a for-profit city being built off Honduras’s coast. Its charter largely exempts the island from Honduran law. Instead, the city is run by a governing structure that for the most part gives control to a corporation, Honduras Próspera Inc., which is in turn funded by a familiar list of Silicon Valley billionaires including Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreesen.

So while the city is being marketed as a libertarian paradise, it’s best seen as an autonomous oligarchy, government of, by and for billionaires. And you won’t be surprised to learn that within Próspera, Bitcoin is legal tender.

The 2013 Honduran law that made the creation of Próspera possible was initially ruled unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court. But that ruling was reversed after Juan Orlando Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, managed to dismiss 4 of the court’s justices. Like Hernández, Sosa was a right-winger, who became president after a populist president, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by a military coup. Under both Hernández and Sosa, chaos reigned – corruption, criminal gangs, and drugs overran the country. The current president, Zelaya’s wife, has tried to claw back some sovereignty over Próspera, which has struck back with a mammoth lawsuit that could bankrupt the country.

Yesterday Honduras held an election in which Trump backed Nasry Asfura, a member of the same right-wing party as Hernández. Early results show the governing left-wing party well behind, but Asfura in a virtual tie with another right-wing candidate.

In any case, the point is that while Trump threatens and fulminates against Maduro in Venezuela, he is openly backing the Honduran political party that has allowed massive drug smuggling into the U.S. Why? The only logical answer is because of the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy and their interests in Próspera.

So the announced pardon of Hernández for drug smuggling isn’t really a departure from the pardons of Binance’s Changpeng Zhao for money laundering or Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht for facilitating illicit drug sales. In each case what’s being upheld is the principle that lawlessness in the pursuit of tech billionaires’ interests is no vice. In fact, it’s to be encouraged.

And Trump, whose only principles appear to be self-enrichment and vindictiveness, is happy to go along.

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

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Monday, December 1, 2025 9:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Do not address me, faggot. != (Be Nice. Don't be a dick.)

That's a message from human beings to other human beings.

We don't exactly know what you are, but you aren't a part of the group.

Go fuck yourself, you miserable little piece of dog shit.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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