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, November 26, 2025 10:43
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PAGE 80 of 80

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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