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Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches

POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Monday, December 29, 2025 11:10
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Saturday, December 20, 2025 7:09 AM

SECOND

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


The United States of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can, but America’s institutions don’t belong to him.

By David A. Graham |December 19, 2025, 7:11 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/donald-trump-naming-am
erican-institutions/685362/

When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.”

The advice might seem “truly bizarre,” as Mount Vernon’s CEO described the visit to others, but Trump practices what he preaches. Yesterday, the Trump White House announced that the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which is chaired by Donald J. Trump, who was appointed to that role by Donald J. Trump, who also filled the board with fellow Trump appointees—would rename the venue the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. This was, the Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt opined, a tribute to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year” at the center, “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction but also financially, and its reputation.”

This is a challenging claim from a factual standpoint. As The Washington Post found, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have tanked since Trump’s hostile takeover of the institution in February. Patrons booed Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance at concerts this year. Events there have taken on an uncanny sheen of decay and mediocrity, my colleague Alexandra Petri reported after attending the Kennedy Center Honors last week.

The announcement is also challenging from a statutory perspective. The Kennedy Center’s name was bestowed by a law passed by Congress and can’t be changed by the board on its own. Tim Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s nephew, wrote on X, “Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson?”

Who’s to stop Trump, though? Workers began changing the signage this morning, and Congress seems unlikely to act; anyway, even if the name isn’t formally changed, nothing will prevent the president from calling it what he wants. Consider the Department of Defense, which the administration insists on calling the Department of War, despite the former name being established by law. Or more apropos, take the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was also established and named by Congress but which recently got a (rather premature) rebrand, with the facade now reading Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. The gesture here is blunt. The president placing his own name before the nation’s is redolent of dictators in isolated countries—North Korea’s Kim family and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who even renamed January after himself—and long-ago absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, who is said to have declared, “L’état, c’est moi.”

In line with his view of himself not merely as an elected representative but as father of the nation (or perhaps “daddy” of the nation?), Trump has put his name and image in places large and small. His scowling visage is next to George Washington’s portrait on National Parks passes; for good measure, citizens can now enter parks for free on Trump’s birthday, which happens to be Flag Day, but no longer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new pay-for-play visa for the very rich is called the Trump Gold Card. The Treasury has proposed 250th-anniversary $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, a serious deviation from precedent. (The law bars printing money with images of living people on it but does not apply to minting coins.) Does anyone have any doubt what name he’ll put on his boondoggle ballroom at the White House?

This tendency is not new. Throughout his career, Trump has plastered his name on whatever he can, including many buildings, a hideous pair of sneakers, a bottle-water brand, a short-lived airline, a short-lived magazine, and a short-lived steak line. (At a 2016 primary-victory party, Trump displayed steaks bought at a local butcher but claimed that they were Trump Steaks.) The apotheosis came late in his real-estate career, when Trump had mostly stopped developing properties but continued to license his name to other builders. (Some Trump-branded buildings have removed his name in recent years, as his scandals and growing unpopularity have made it a liability.)

The difference is that those things belonged to Trump. The assets of the United States of America do not—they belong to the people. His change to the facade of the U.S. Institute of Peace is just graffiti. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center and parks passes are acts of vandalism of public property, in the most original sense of the word.

Many things in this country are named for former presidents, of course. The performing-arts center was established not by John F. Kennedy but as a memorial to him after his assassination. Trump, by contrast, is rechristening things for himself and then pretending it’s an honor rather than an ego trip. He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.

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

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 11:11 AM

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


The Immanent Joy of Detrumpification

As the president graffitis his name to beloved institutions and builds monuments to his own vanity, we must focus on how much fun it will be to tear it all down.

By Matt Ford | Dec 20, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/204699/detrumpification-will-be-very-f
un

There was no shortage of bad news to cover in 2025. But I want to end the year by looking to the future and focusing on something more joyous: detrumpification. I spent most of this year—indeed, most of this last decade—thinking about one man. Now, for just a moment, I want to think about what comes after him.

One day, likely by January 20, 2029, Donald Trump will no longer be the president of the United States. The Constitution will bar him from seeking a third term, no matter what nonsense Alan Dershowitz plans to soon publish. It is highly probable that Trump will be replaced by a new Democratic president. America’s economic, social, and moral decline in just the last 11 months makes it unlikely that his successor will win the most votes in 2028.

That new president, whoever they happen to be, will face countless choices about how to rebuild after Trump’s second term. Some things simply can’t be undone. The United States will likely never recover the full trust of our allies in Europe and Asia, who now know that another Trump is always at most four years away. Confidence in the rule of law in this country will remain shaken for generations, as will our reputation as a home for immigrants and a citadel of democratic and constitutional government.

Other damage will be repairable, but only with time and effort. Federal agencies will need to rehire thousands of civil servants to replace those purged by figures like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. Institutional knowledge at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more will need to be replenished. Funding for academic and scientific research will need to resume. There will be thousands of green-card applications to approve and hundreds of citizenship ceremonies to hold. Criminal investigations will need to be opened, and antitrust litigation must begin again.

For now I want to focus on the less impactful but highly symbolic aspects of detrumpification. It will not be enough to simply reverse Trump’s policies or unwind his executive orders when a new Democratic president takes office. The next administration must commit itself in addition to purging the aesthetic rot of Trump’s second term from our national life. Detrumpification must be celebrated as an act of victory and an exercise in joy.

Take, for example, Trump’s campaign against the Kennedy Center. Congress created the cultural center in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and designated it by law as a “living memorial” for John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. The famed stages and theaters along the Potomac have hosted some of the greatest artists from the United States and from around the world.

Trump has spent most of 2025 desecrating the place. First he purged most of the board that governs the institution. Then he replaced its members with pliable ideologues and sycophantic cronies, capped off by installing himself as the new chairman. In recent months, Trump has been personally overseeing its cultural work. This week, his underlings sought to capstone their cultural vandalism by renaming the center itself.

“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Twitter this week. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.”

Even the North Korean regime might blanche at this narcissism. Far from “saving” the institution, Trump’s takeover has destroyed the Kennedy Center’s finances and its reputation through boycotts and purges, with ticket sales near pandemic-level lows. The attempted renaming is manifestly illegal since Congress named it after Kennedy by law. With its usual regard for the rule of law, the Trump administration paid no heed. After a half-century of reading “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” the building’s marble edifice now also bears “The Donald J. Trump and” on top of it, as well. (In typical slapdash fashion, the second “the” remains on the facade.)

When those letters come down during the next president’s term, it should not be done in the middle of the night or without any warning.

It is unclear how much of this vandalism comes at Trump’s direction and how much of it comes from subordinates looking to please him. At the beginning of this month, for example, the State Department said that it had renamed the United States Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At first, the department slapped some cheap steel letters on the front entrance of the building without any warning. By the end of the day, however, the State Department’s Twitter account formally announced the change “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”

Even the clumsiest and least subtle political cartoonist could not outdo this one. Trump is a weak dealmaker at best: His attempts to bully America’s top trading partners into signing new trade agreements this year have largely failed, and the Supreme Court appears ready to strip him of his favored cudgel. His negotiations on Capitol Hill have gone no further than passing one omnibus budget this summer, after which he abandoned the lawmaking process altogether. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Trump bragged in October.

It also goes without saying that the renaming choice is oxymoronic. At Trump’s behest, the U.S. military is currently killing people in small boats throughout the Caribbean and the western Pacific by claiming that they are drug smugglers or, in even more alarmist terms, “narco-terrorists.” Instead of apprehending them and trying them in court, Trump is summarily executing them. The president has also ordered a naval blockade of Venezuela, hoping to topple the regime of Nicolás Maduro, and may yet resort to full-scale military force to dislodge him. Congress has granted no legal authorization for any of this.

Tearing down these nameplates will be as much about telling the truth as anything else. Other tasks will be more complicated. So far, Trump’s most egregious act was the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing. It came without any public notice or consultation, without any permission from Congress, and without approval from key historical and architectural boards. The president simply hired some construction equipment and began tearing down public property.

Trump hopes to replace it with a massive ballroom for entertaining foreign dignitaries and domestic supporters. I will not bother listing its projected costs, seating capacity, or square footage because it will probably increase again by the time you finish reading this article. The president has continuously revised his plans for the ballroom, each time with increasing grandiosity, and he recently fired the original architect he had hired, at least in part over creative and structural differences.

The corrupt and self-serving project is an ongoing scar on one of the most important public sites in America. And yet part of me still hopes that Trump completes the project before the end of his second term. I can imagine no greater visual for the next Democratic president’s first 100 days than demolishing whatever decadent monstrosity he builds. The ballroom’s proposed architectural flaws will likely necessitate this either way, but the next president should make a real show of it.

What could be done with the site? One would almost be tempted to cordon off the area surrounding the ballroom, hire a demolition crew to pack it with big bundles of dynamite, and wire it up to one of those old-fashioned plungers that Wile E. Coyote uses when he tries to blow up the Road Runner. Perhaps the final push could be synchronized with fireworks on the Fourth of July, or at the stroke of midnight for some other historic anniversary.

Given the historic structures near the site, a less explosive—but still spectacular—option might be safer, though. Either way, there must be an element of public participation in the ballroom’s destruction. When Trump tore down the East Wing, his henchmen concealed the rubble from public view, as if they knew on some fundamental level that it was wrong. The next president should make the ballroom’s fate a cause for public celebration. Families should be there to watch it happen. Music should be played for the crowds. Networks should broadcast it live. Americans should celebrate its demise.

From there, the East Wing should be rebuilt exactly as it was before, as if Trump had never existed. His other “renovations” to the White House should meet a similar fate. White House officials should film themselves taking down the cheap, tacky display of presidential portraits outside the West Wing and the disparaging plaques beneath them. The next administration should make a documentary about tearing out the Mar-a-Lago-style patio that he paved over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden to install.

Other indignities will lie ahead over the next three years. The U.S. Mint is reportedly planning to issue a dollar coin featuring Trump’s portrait despite the long-standing precedent against using living people on U.S. currency. There have been proposals among Trump’s loyalists in Congress to place him on the $100 or $250 bill, to rename airports after him, to make his birthday a federal holiday, and to carve his likeness into Mount Rushmore.

Detrumpification should go far beyond this, of course. Joe Biden, the previous post-Trump president, tried to balance public calls for unity and reconciliation with prosecutors’ efforts to hold Trump and his allies accountable for their crimes. The next Democratic president might not have that option. Ideally they would prosecute him again for any triable crimes he has committed and pressure the Supreme Court to overturn its disastrous immunity ruling. Trump will also probably take steps to immunize his allies and associates through liberal use of the pardon power, complicating matters further.

For now, it is enough to say that the end of Trump’s presidency must be palpably different from previous changes in administrations. Detrumpification must have a visual and physical record. It must be an event and a celebration. It must be an enduring memory and a warning to anyone who hopes to venerate authoritarian figures on American soil in the future. It must represent not just a political defeat but a societal rejection of Trumpism itself.

What Trump and his allies are doing, after all, is not really about honoring him. These tributes are meant to carry the same message as an unrepaired hole in the wall left by a violent domestic abuser’s fist. The goal is to humiliate and to intimidate anyone who didn’t support him, to imply violence without leaving bruises, and to create a perpetual sense of unease, despair, and dread. To visibly erase his image and his name from American public life would not be a distraction from moving forward but rather a prerequisite for it.

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

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 12:13 PM

SECOND

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


The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments Are In Danger

Trump and the Supreme Court are trying to bring back the Antebellum Constitution.

By Adam Serwer | December 21, 2025, 8:23 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/antebellum-constitution/6
85354/

Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up in a cell. Retes was detained overnight without any opportunity to call a lawyer or his family.

“No one deserves to be treated like this,” Retes told this magazine after his release. “To have no rights. It’s just crazy to think about—that they can just mask up and take someone off the street, no questions asked, and you’re just gone.”

Read: A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story

Retes is one of an estimated 170 American citizens who have been detained by federal immigration agents as part of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, according to ProPublica, which warns that the count is both incomplete and unofficial because the federal government is not documenting its own abuses of power. https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-a
rrested-detained-against-will

At least 20 of those citizens, ProPublica found, had been detained overnight and incommunicado—a violation of their constitutional rights. When questioned about these detentions, Trump-administration officials claimed that the citizens had assaulted federal agents—an assertion proved false in many cases by video evidence or an inability by the government to produce serious charges reflecting the accusations. (One thrown sandwich hardly counts.)

Across the country, federal agents are flagrantly and casually disregarding Americans’ due-process rights. And they have been remarkably forthright about how they choose their victims. As Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a white reporter: Agents were arresting people based on “the particular characteristics of an individual—how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”

In Memphis, Reggie Williams told ProPublica that he was instructed by federal agents to keep his ID on him going forward, as though Black residents of the city were emancipated slaves forced to carry freedom papers lest they be kidnapped and returned to bondage. Bovino said basically the same thing after federal agents assaulted a Somali American citizen and refused to free him for hours despite his offers to show them a photo of his passport on his phone: “One must carry immigration documents,” Bovino posted on X. In Chicago, Maria Greeley was zip-tied by federal agents coming off a double shift at the bar where she worked. She had her passport and showed it to them, and still they detained her because, she said, she did not “look like” a Greeley.

This is racial profiling. And the Supreme Court has declined to stop it.

In September, an emergency docket decision effectively permitted this racial profiling by lifting a court order preventing it. “The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurrence. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be a “relevant factor,” he continued. “Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”

What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.

This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”

The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make up the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, but America needed to do more to prevent the resurgence of the slave-owning South’s caste-based society. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enshrined in the Constitution principles of universal male suffrage, nondiscrimination, and nonracial (birthright) citizenship. Although imperfect—the vote for women was not included—they were a crucial first step toward ensuring that the rights conferred by American citizenship would remain inviolate no matter where you were, and no matter who you were.

After the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the Supreme Court essentially voided the meaning of these amendments. The post-Reconstruction Court helped pave the way for Jim Crow, showering most of the rights reserved for the emancipated on corporations, allowing states to disenfranchise their Black populations through superficially “color-blind” means, and permitting racial discrimination by both government entities and private actors. The amendments were resurrected during the civil-rights movement, but they are now under assault for a second time by both the Court and an executive branch that is distorting or refusing to enforce antidiscrimination laws about housing, voting, and employment.

A faction of conservatives has never stopped this campaign. As soon as the Reconstruction amendments were passed, people argued that they were illegitimate, a betrayal of the original document—a “rape of the Constitution” as the columnist Frank Meyer wrote in 1964 about Brown v. Board of Education in National Review. In 1965, that magazine published a cover story arguing that the Voting Rights Act, by enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, would effectively “repeal the Constitution to give the Negro the vote.” During the Reagan administration, a young attorney in the Justice Department named John Roberts fought to weaken the law. Originalism, the author Madiba K. Dennie points out, is a convenient vehicle for this project because it prioritizes interpretations from historical periods where women and Black people were excluded from the political process.

In more recent years, the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk complained that the Fourteenth Amendment was a “Marxist revolutionary gateway” for everything the left wanted to push through. The more genteel conservative writer Christopher Caldwell argued that the entire post-civil-rights-movement Constitution was a “rival” to the “constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.”

Roberts’s Court likes to invoke history and tradition, but some justices are perfectly happy to ignore the express intent of the Founders—such as the fundamental belief that the Constitution is meant to change—to further an ideological project. The Roberts Court’s repeated rewriting of the Constitution on Trump’s behalf reveals the antebellum Constitution they envision to be a fraud, a gauzy nostalgia based on the Founders’ worst impulses as slavers and hypocrites. This is an attempt to turn the guarantees of the Civil War amendments back into what James Madison called “parchment barriers,” their meaning perverted to ensure the protection of the strong instead of the weak.

Since 2007, when Roberts struck down a school-integration program while stating that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” the right-wing majority has followed the philosophy that there’s no discrimination if you pretend it isn’t happening. Although the Fifteenth Amendment states clearly that the right to vote cannot be “denied or abridged” on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the Roberts Court has acted as though the only true discrimination is against the right to discriminate.

In 2013, the Court effectively nullified a requirement in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to “preclear” their voting-rule changes with the Justice Department. The majority ignored the express language of the Fifteenth Amendment in doing so, and Roberts relied on a doctrine that “all States enjoy equal sovereignty,” a phrase that exists nowhere in the Constitution but was invoked by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the infamous Dred Scott decision: Taney argued that letting Black people be citizens would violate the sovereignty of the slave states. Prohibiting states from passing discriminatory voting measures was a form of discrimination—against states, which matter, not against Black people, who don’t.

In the 2018 case Abbott v. Perez, the Court approved election maps drawn by Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature that diluted the voting power of the state’s growing Black and Latino populations. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito criticized not the state but a lower court that had rejected the maps. The court, Alito wrote, had violated the “presumption of good faith” on the part of the legislature. The implication of that rebuke is that Texas’s attempting to discriminate against Black and Latino voters wasn’t wrong; noticing the attempt was wrong. The next year, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court concluded that partisan gerrymandering was a “political question” beyond the reach of the courts, paving the way for states to disenfranchise minority populations as a partisan act rather than a discriminatory one, as though the former cancels out the latter.

Trump is now urging emboldened Republican legislatures to gerrymander congressional districts much more in order to voter-proof the Republican majority in the House. His Justice Department sent Texas a letter saying that some of its voting districts “constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” that must now be “rectified.” What that meant, remarkably, was that the districts had been made too diverse. In short, they were not racially gerrymandered enough. When a district-court majority—including a Trump-appointed judge—blocked the maps for being “racially gerrymandered,” it pointed as evidence to the DOJ’s own letter and that department’s complaint that the districts were “coalition districts” or “majority-non-White districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority.”

The Roberts Court then overturned that decision, arguing that the lower court was “upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” Not only did this repeat the Court’s earlier position that it’s wrong to notice discrimination but not wrong to engage in it, but the decision encourages states to draw discriminatory maps and lie about their intent, knowing the justices have their back.

Later this term, the justices will decide in Louisiana v. Callais whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act allows the creation of majority-minority districts. Louisiana has taken the position that the creation of such districts—a requirement meant to prevent lawmakers from disenfranchising minorities by slicing up districts to render their votes meaningless—violates the Constitution because “all-race based redistricting is unconstitutional.” The irony is that what Republicans want is to do is precisely race-based redistricting. If they prevail, the Fifteenth Amendment, which was adopted to eliminate racial caste, will be employed to maintain it. The only way to reconcile the Court’s jurisprudence with the Reconstruction Amendments, the Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles told me, is if you “turn the purpose of the Reconstruction amendments on their heads.”

This disenfranchisement will have long-term consequences—and not only in the arms race to the bottom reflected in the Democratic-controlled states that have shown themselves to be willing to retaliate.

As Frederick Douglass declared in 1865, the ballot is a means of self-defense, not simply a right or responsibility: “Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society.” Americans of all races will suffer by this weakening of democracy. When lawmakers can entrench themselves in office regardless of public preference, they need not heed the will of the people.

The Fourteenth Amendment is under siege in other ways, too. Attacks on the rights of women (such as the right to not be forced to give birth by the state) and on trans people (who have been banned from serving in the military) also violate the amendment’s assurance of equal protection under the law. It is shockingly easy to find right-wing commentators advocating for the restriction of women’s right to vote and to leave a marriage, and even for employers’ discrimination against women in the workplace.

Read: Does Heritage support discrimination against women?

In the White House, Trump has been undermining discrimination law by refusing to enforce it. The administration has argued that Trump holds the authority to ignore laws banning job discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin for federal employees, and has rolled back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Aside from Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced his intention to ignore reports of discrimination or harassment.

Recently, the administration announced that it would not be investigating discrimination on the basis of “disparate impact,” in which discrimination can be proved through effect rather than intent alone. That can sound abstract, but here’s one example: The Trump administration ended a requirement that the state of Alabama provide Black residents with proper sanitation, calling it “illegal DEI.” Not flooding Black neighborhoods with raw sewage, according to the Trump administration, is racist.

The administration is also working to use laws that were meant to prevent discrimination to encourage it instead. Trump has weakened the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to fight race- and gender-based discrimination in employment, instead directing it to threaten companies that maintain diversity programs. This week, the EEOC chair explicitly invited “white males” to file discrimination claims. The civil-rights division of the Justice Department has shut down its voting-rights cases while placing the department’s support behind efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Administration officials have threatened lawsuits against schools and businesses for “illegal DEI,” giving those institutions a strong incentive to maintain an overwhelmingly white workforce so they don’t get sued. In the meantime, the Department of Education has reportedly almost entirely ceased investigations of racist harassment of students. This legal hostility has extended to state censorship of any acknowledgment of race and gender discrimination—save for that against white people and conservative Christians.

None of this is consistent with “equal protection of the laws.” But it is consistent with the Antebellum Constitution’s narrow definition of who “We the People” are.

A future administration could reverse those policies. But Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is different. On the first day of his current term, Trump issued an executive order announcing that babies born in America to undocumented immigrants or people on temporary visas are not citizens. A lower court blocked the order, and later this term, the Supreme Court will hear the case. If the end of birthright citizenship is upheld, the country will be irrevocably altered. Even those whose citizenship is not in question might have to carry proof of citizenship at all times to avoid being kidnapped, detained, and possibly exiled by federal agents in the name of Kavanaugh’s “common sense.”

The birthright-citizenship clause was written into the Fourteenth Amendment specifically to overturn Dred Scott’s conclusion that Black people could never be citizens. Then–Chief Justice Taney’s rationale was simply that Black people were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

Representative John Bingham of Ohio, dubbed the “Madison of the Fourteenth Amendment,” declared that there could be “no greater political atrocity” than denying birthright citizenship, because that would easily lead to a minority being subjected to “absolute despotism.” That the birthright-citizenship clause applies to everyone has been a subject of near-total legal consensus until Trump. There is no “originalist” case against birthright citizenship, but there is a partisan one.

Given the extreme nature of many of the conservative movement’s demands, the Roberts Court may not give into all of them, or at least not all at once. Some legal experts are skeptical that even this Court will allow Trump to nullify birthright citizenship by fiat. But the larger project of restoring the Antebellum Constitution will continue.

Before these amendments, the Antebellum Constitution contemplated the rights and freedom of white men, but no one else. It did not guarantee equal protection under the law. It did not protect the right to vote. It did not outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. What it did was protect the right of some men to own other men as property, by definition an affront to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.)

Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.

The blood of Confederate soldiers who would never own a slave watered southern fields because they saw slavery as the cornerstone of their social and economic order. The Populists failed to ameliorate the deprivation of the Gilded Age because white laborers who had more in common with their Black counterparts chose the psychological wage offered by Jim Crow over the literal wages that might be earned through brotherhood. The MAGA elite offers a similar fantasy today, though the number of Trump voters who will see a loved one deported or their paycheck dwindle will eclipse by orders of magnitude those who rub shoulders with donors in his new ballroom.

MAGA’s ruling caste will not be as overtly racially circumscribed as in the past. But we can trace its contours in the Trump administration’s policy decisions and legal victories, and the Roberts Court’s resurrection of the Antebellum Constitution. The path the justices are walking leads to Calhoun’s paradise: an America where a class of stateless children can be denied education and medical care; where people of color must carry identification papers if they don’t want to be harassed, detained, imprisoned, or worse; where workers can be subject to invidious discrimination without recourse; where the military points guns at the taxpayers who fund it; and where the official ideology of the state is vindicated by elections the ruling party cannot lose. It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.

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

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 12:24 PM

THG

Keep it real please


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.

https://www.threads.com/@pilarmiami/post/DSGs1ExjA4P/i-dont-know-who-to-give-credit-for-this-quote-but-it-rings-so-true-im-no-support

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



I was amazed how many sick and hateful people there are myself. Clearly a third of this country is off its nut.

T

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Shut up, bitch.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:23 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, bitch.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ixStringJoker, you prove this point. I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.

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

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:24 PM

SECOND

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


Trump has not delivered on his promise that people would have more cash left over in their wallets. The economic boom he predicted has failed to materialize, as prices continue to rise and unemployment edges upward. The mood in the country is turning.

Americans Did Not Let Joe Biden Get Away with Being So Out of Touch

Only a quarter of Americans are satisfied with their economic circumstances. Everyone else feels like they are just about keeping their heads above water, or not even that. In short, it’s precisely the situation Trump’s predecessor faced well over a year ago. The mood was lousy then, and it’s turning just as sour now.

Trump risks falling into the same trap as his predecessor. Like Biden before him, he is now trying to convince his fellow Americans that the situation is better than they perceive it to be. Trump’s televised speech was a bizarre blend of exaggerations, half-truths and lies. Inflation has not fallen, as he claims. And no one who drove their car to the gas station the next day believes gas prices are back at the level they were two decades ago. Americans were not inclined to let Biden get away with being so out of touch; Trump is now running the same risk.

https://watchingamerica.com/2025/12/20/trump-risks-falling-into-the-sa
me-trap-as-his-predecessor/

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 22, 2025 7:07 AM

SECOND

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


MAGA’s Manly Manufacturing Misfire

Understanding Trump’s other big failure

By Paul Krugman | Dec 22, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-manly-manufacturing-misfire

According to Navigator Research, a significant number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 now regret their choice. As the word cloud above suggests, this regret is largely driven by Trump’s utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.

What did he promise? Most media attention has focused on his claim that he would bring the cost of living way down, starting on “day one.” This claim never made any sense, especially because Trump’s policy agenda — centered on tariffs and mass deportation — was clearly inflationary, not deflationary. And Trump isn’t improving his standing with his reality denial “affordability” tour, which will clearly take the form of multiple speeches in which he demands that Americans reject the evidence of their own eyes and admit that prices are falling, not rising.

But while Trump’s gaslighting on prices is a natural and appropriate target for critics, we shouldn’t forget that the main goal of his policy agenda wasn’t lower prices, it was job creation. Specifically, Trump and his economic advisers claimed — and may even have believed — that they would create lots of manly jobs for manly men. They would revive American manufacturing, they claimed, by unilaterally imposing huge tariffs and thereby breaking all our international agreements (and, whatever the Supreme Court may say, U.S. law). They would create mining and construction jobs, they claimed, by killing renewable energy and gutting environmental protection in order to promote fossil fuels. They would deport millions of undocumented workers which would result, they claimed, in a job boom for native-born workers.

My snark about “manly” jobs isn’t gratuitous. Mike Konczal has an excellent review of the way the MAGA labor market story has failed, in which he emphasizes how regressively gendered Trump’s vision was and is:

I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.

Let me acknowledge, by the way, that U.S. men are having real problems. But nothing Trump is doing will help.

And even on its own absurd terms, the MAGA jobs strategy has been an abject failure — as abject as Trump’s failure to bring down prices. Here are the current official employment numbers for manufacturing, construction and employment:

Contrary to Trumpist claims that the Biden expansion didn’t create “real” jobs, the economy added a substantial number of jobs in “manly” sectors from 2021 to 2024. Part of this expansion was driven by Biden’s green energy policies, which boosted both construction and manufacturing employment.

Trump has scrapped Biden’s green energy policies in favor of tariffs and fossil fuels. But it isn’t working. Instead, employment in “manly” sectors has fallen since Trump took office. And as Dean Baker points out, there are strong reasons to believe that even these job numbers are overstated, and will eventually be revised down further.

I’ll talk about the failure of Trump’s dirty energy strategy to create jobs on another occasion. For now, let’s talk about why tariffs aren’t reviving manufacturing.

Fundamentally, Trump and those who have his ear, especially Peter Navarro, his trade czar, made two big mistakes. First, they didn’t do the math. Second, they failed to understand the nature of modern international trade.

When I say that they didn’t do the math, I mean that as far as I can tell nobody with Trump’s ear made any effort to estimate how many U.S. manufacturing jobs would be created even if the tariffs had eliminated U.S. trade deficits (which they were never going to do.)

Others, however, myself included, have done the math. (Arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias.) Back in June Robert Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics did a careful calculation that confirmed but improved on my own back-of-the-envelope estimates: Even a “successful” tariff policy would do little to revive U.S. manufacturing. Lawrence estimated that even if Trump somehow managed to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods,

the share of workers in production occupations in US manufacturing would increase by just under 0.9 percentage point, from 3.85 to 4.7 percent … the changes in employment with balanced trade would be far too small to produce a labor market that significantly increases the opportunities for men without college degrees or the many places that have not shared in US economic growth over the past five decades.
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/closing-trade-defic
it-would-barely-raise-share-us-manufacturing

Moreover, the tariffs have not made a significant dent in the trade deficit. In fact, the deficit was bigger in the first 9 months of 2025 than during the corresponding period in 2024. Why? Because international trade is very different in 2025 from what it was in the days of William McKinley, whose tariffs Trump admires.

In the modern world nations mostly don’t sell each other completed consumer goods. Instead, the majority of trade involves sales of goods that are used to produce other goods. Last year the United States imported slightly less than $1.3 trillion worth of consumer goods plus autos, while importing more than $1.6 trillion worth of capital goods and industrial inputs. What this means in practice is that tariffs, which raise the prices of those capital goods and inputs, raise the production costs of U.S. manufacturers, in many cases making them less competitive with foreign producers.

So Trump’s plan to create manly jobs has, predictably, been a bust — a bust as complete in its way as his failure to reduce prices. The only difference is that in the case of jobs he actually tried to do something. But what he did was counterproductive.

No doubt Trump will continue to give speeches boasting about nonexistent success, telling voters that we have the hottest economy in world history, etc. But his attempt to gaslight the nation about jobs will go no better than his gaslighting on the cost of living.

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 22, 2025 7:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, bitch.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ixStringJoker, you prove this point. I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.

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



I've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.

You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.



You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 22, 2025 8:29 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've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.

You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.

You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.
6ixStringJoker, I don't have an archive on you. However, I have vast experience with people like you and Trump, people who talk too much and know too little. It has never ended happily for your kind. It won't end well for either you or Trump. It makes me calm and content to know that what happened to all those fucked up people I knew, who either died screaming because of their own stupid way of life or are dying horribly right now, is a preview of what will happen to you two fucked up people.

Trump trap: Epistemic arrogance

Dec 7 | Written By Lee Crumbaugh

From the lens of social science and economics we can easily see that Donald Trump is a poster child for mental traps and biases that get in the way of strategic thinking and rational decision-making. While Trump has made millions of dollars, attained celebrity status and won the U.S. presidency either in spite of or because of his decisions and behavior, we can make the case that the mental traps and biases he continues to exhibit are leading to bad outcomes for him and for us. By examining the traps and biases that Trump seems to display, we can see where we, as fellow humans, are likewise affected, albeit most often less dramatically, by these very same mental traps and biases.

https://www.forrestconsult.com/blog/trump-trap-epistemic-arrogance

___________________

6 Things People with Low Intelligence Often Think Are Great Ideas

Overconfidence in one's abilities often signals a lack of self-awareness. Those with low intelligence may feel the need to assert their superiority in intellectual matters, believing they know more than everyone else. This arrogance often stems from insecurity rather than actual knowledge.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/6-things-people-with-low-intell
igence-often-think-are-great-ideas/ss-AA1SJn1Z?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=98e93d58f32b4126950b37bebce4cbee&ei=11#image=2



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 22, 2025 8:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.

You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.

You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.
6ixStringJoker, I don't have an archive on you.


Don't give a shit.

Nobody gives a shit.

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



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 22, 2025 6:02 PM

THG

Keep it real please


T

Trump Suffers From "Obama Derangement Syndrome"






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Monday, December 22, 2025 6:06 PM

THG

Keep it real please


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

I've got a very, very, very long archive of your absolute greatest hits that paints the opposite picture.

You've got a post history 1,000 times as long that does likewise.

You, specifically, are a bitch and a piece of shit.
6ixStringJoker, I don't have an archive on you. However, I have vast experience with people like you and Trump, people who talk too much and know too little. It has never ended happily for your kind. It won't end well for either you or Trump. It makes me calm and content to know that what happened to all those fucked up people I knew, who either died screaming because of their own stupid way of life or are dying horribly right now, is a preview of what will happen to you two fucked up people.

Trump trap: Epistemic arrogance

Dec 7 | Written By Lee Crumbaugh

From the lens of social science and economics we can easily see that Donald Trump is a poster child for mental traps and biases that get in the way of strategic thinking and rational decision-making. While Trump has made millions of dollars, attained celebrity status and won the U.S. presidency either in spite of or because of his decisions and behavior, we can make the case that the mental traps and biases he continues to exhibit are leading to bad outcomes for him and for us. By examining the traps and biases that Trump seems to display, we can see where we, as fellow humans, are likewise affected, albeit most often less dramatically, by these very same mental traps and biases.

https://www.forrestconsult.com/blog/trump-trap-epistemic-arrogance

___________________

6 Things People with Low Intelligence Often Think Are Great Ideas

Overconfidence in one's abilities often signals a lack of self-awareness. Those with low intelligence may feel the need to assert their superiority in intellectual matters, believing they know more than everyone else. This arrogance often stems from insecurity rather than actual knowledge.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/6-things-people-with-low-intell
igence-often-think-are-great-ideas/ss-AA1SJn1Z?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=98e93d58f32b4126950b37bebce4cbee&ei=11#image=2





You've probably noticed SECOND I am not responding to Jack for now. After he said he was considering suicide I decided to avoid doing anything to send him over the deep end. Apparently, he lacks mental stability.

T

Trump Suffers From "Obama Derangement Syndrome"


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Monday, December 22, 2025 6:15 PM

THG

Keep it real please


T

Beloved Actor Tries to Reason with Trump Supporters, They REFUSE to Listen






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Monday, December 22, 2025 11:19 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck you, Jeff.

Go eat a dick.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 22, 2025 11:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
You've probably noticed SECOND I am not responding to Jack for now. After he said he was considering suicide I decided to avoid doing anything to send him over the deep end. Apparently, he lacks mental stability.


And yet here you are opening you're big, fat stupid mouth again because you just can't help yourself.

LOOK AT ME BEING A GREAT GUY!!!! AREN'T I A GREAT GUY, SECOND.

Go fuck yourself, Ted.

You're a worthless piece of dog shit.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 7:26 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 THG:

You've probably noticed SECOND I am not responding to Jack for now. After he said he was considering suicide I decided to avoid doing anything to send him over the deep end. Apparently, he lacks mental stability.

T
I am repeating myself over and over, but every Trumptard I know "lacks mental stability". That is the real reason they struggle to be successful. For a handy example, only a crazy person would go to war over windmills:

Trump’s war on windmills, briefly explained

Trump debuts a new argument against wind power.

By Cameron Peters | Dec 22, 2025, 5:05 PM CST

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/473251/donald-trump-wi
nd-energy-windmills-lease-halt-briefly-explained

What happened? On Monday, the Trump administration announced it was halting leases for five in-progress wind farms off the East Coast over alleged “national security risks,” which it has not explained.

The halt means all five projects, near Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, will have to stop construction, and one that is already partially online will have to stop operations.

Why does this matter? The administration’s decision Monday is throwing billions of dollars of investments and thousands of jobs into chaos, setting back US progress on expanding clean energy, and doing it all at a time when rising power prices are becoming an increasingly potent political issue.

What’s the context? There’s little reason to put much stock in the Trump administration’s fig leaf of “national security risks,” particularly given the lack of specifics. For one, Trump has proved willing to lean on “national security” as a justification for just about anything he wants to do, including his trade war and his ambitions to acquire Greenland. And second, the timing is conspicuous: Earlier this month, a federal judge struck down Trump’s previous effort to block new wind farms as a violation of federal law.

What’s the big picture? One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0 has been a myopic opposition to renewable energy and a transition away from fossil fuels — even if it involves sabotaging sectors of the US economy in the process.

This halt also checks a second box for Trump, who has a long-standing aesthetic grudge against wind turbines dating back to his failed effort to stop their construction near his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

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

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 12:50 PM

SECOND

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


Trump is this little girl, if she found millions of gullible people who believe the lies and became fabulously rich by misleading them:

I Thought My Daughter Was a Good Kid, but a Certain Habit of Hers Disturbs Me

By Nicole Cliffe, Rumaan Alam

Dec 23, 2025 6:00 AM

https://slate.com/advice/2025/12/parenting-advice-daughter-lying-habit
.html

Dear Care and Feeding,

My 6-year-old daughter is extremely imaginative, loves pretend play, draws constantly, and loves to make up stories. It’s sweet, and being a person who has never felt very creative, I admire her immensely. But one extension of this seems problematic to me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it.

She regularly lies, sometimes really obviously, and sometimes I can’t tell if what she’s saying really happened or not. And if I ask her whether she’s telling the truth, she sometimes changes her story entirely or just makes it more elaborate and seemingly further from the truth. I’m actually not even sure this should be called “lying,” because that implies deliberate badness, when I think often she’s just wanting to contribute to the conversation or answer a question more thoroughly than she has the information to do. Sometimes it’s a harmless detail about a classmate or teacher (“Melissa doesn’t have any sinks in her house!”), and sometimes it’s reporting about conversations with her friends that I’d actually be concerned about depending on whether what she’s saying was true (“We decided that Melissa isn’t allowed to play with us on Fridays”).

I’ve tried telling her that it’s OK if she doesn’t know the answer to something I’m asking and that it’s important to tell each other the truth so we can trust each other. Is this a normal kid thing? Of course! I’m trying to figure out when it moves from being a normal kid thing to being more problematic. Six seems old for this kind of thing. Is it something I need to be concerned about? And how do I respond to these situations? I honestly feel like it’s a barrier in connecting emotionally with my daughter, and I worry about that and how it will develop over time. For what it’s worth, neither her teacher nor my husband seem worried about it, so maybe I’m overthinking all of this and just need to get some perspective.

—Cute or Worrisome?

Dear Cute or Worrisome,

Well, I can tell you that this behavior is not actually out of the norm for a 6-year-old. They’re better at lying than they were a few years ago and also better at creating magical wonderful imaginary worlds. What you need to work on, I think, is helping her distinguish between these two behaviors, so that you can praise and foster one while discouraging the other.

There are approximately 1 million children’s books about telling the truth, from the Berenstain Bears to this particularly helpful tome, which includes games and discussion questions to help figure out when lying is lying and when it’s imaginative play. I recommend adding some of these books into your weekly rotation while you work on this problem.

Encouraging her in her productive imaginative play is key at this time. While you’re firmly discouraging actual lies, give her extra scope and permission to create her myths and world building. Write down her harmless stories in a book for her, and tell her how much fun make-believe is.

When she tells a lie that isn’t in the above category, you’re going to have to really tighten up on imposing consequences. Set her up for success with this, though. If she tells you that she and her friend Amber rode loose in the back of Amber’s mom’s pickup truck, ask her if this is a fun imaginary story to put in her notebook or if it’s the truth. If she says it’s the truth, say, “If I call Amber’s mom, will she say it’s the truth?” so she has a chance to fix her mistake. If it turns out to be a lie, impose whatever consequences you would for any other form of bad behavior.

Kids do emerge from this phase largely honest, if that’s a comfort. I think you’ve only got another year or two to navigate this, which, coincidentally, is also the year or two left where she can really immerse herself wholly in imaginative play. Keep fostering that while discouraging the other. She seems like a good kid who loves imagination and can just get a bit off track returning to real life.

—Nicole Cliffe

If you believe Trump, Google will list Trump's lies for you.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+lies
Perhaps your faith in Trump will be shaken?

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

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 3:09 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:

And yet here you are opening you're big, fat stupid mouth again because you just can't help yourself.

LOOK AT ME BEING A GREAT GUY!!!! AREN'T I A GREAT GUY, SECOND.

Go fuck yourself, Ted.

You're a worthless piece of dog shit.
6ixStringJoker is temporarily not posting because he is trying to join this Neo-Nazi group that Trump stopped the FBI from investigating:

Neo-Nazi terror group steps up US operations as FBI pulls back

Online activity shows the Base, headed by alleged Russian asset Rinaldo Nazzaro, sees US and Ukraine as key centers

By Ben Makuch | Mon 22 Dec 2025 09.00 EST

Amid high-profile arrests in its Spanish cell, the American-born and designated neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base – once a major preoccupation of FBI counter-terrorism efforts – has all but faded from US headlines. But a flurry of online activities shows the group is still active stateside and considers the US an operational nerve center.

Headed by Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor turned alleged Russian intelligence asset, the Base has been busy of late pursuing European expansion: besides its heavily armed members in Spain, its Ukrainian wing is linked to multiple acts of terrorism inside the country and claimed the high-profile July assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv.

But the Base’s online footprint also paints a picture of a more careful, yet active, American presence: videos from November show masked men shooting military-style rifles and pistols in what they claim is an Appalachian forest.

Another June photo, from the same Appalachian cell, shows five armed men in skull masks, holding rifles and brandishing the Base’s black flag, while a cell from the mid-Atlantic captures three members performing “sieg heil” salutes, with another from the midwest showing two men firing pistols.

In the shifting political climate of the second Trump administration, where the FBI has openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists, the Base appears free to organize and prepare for their stated objective of fomenting an armed insurgency against the US government.

At the same time, its recruitment has continued to funnel through a Russian email address and has not ceased since the 2020 FBI crackdown against it.

Nazzaro has also matched this new American law enforcement environment with emboldened rhetoric.

“Our long-term strategic goal is to accomplish something similar to what al-Qaida and IS accomplished in Syria,” bragged Nazzaro in an audio recording he released in early December over a Russian-controlled app, reviewed by the Guardian. “Form an organized, armed insurgency to take and hold territory. And establish a white homeland which we control and govern.”

Much more at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/neo-nazi-terror-the-ba
se

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

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 7:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

And yet here you are opening you're big, fat stupid mouth again because you just can't help yourself.

LOOK AT ME BEING A GREAT GUY!!!! AREN'T I A GREAT GUY, SECOND.

Go fuck yourself, Ted.

You're a worthless piece of dog shit.
6ixStringJoker is temporarily not posting


What are you talking about?

Not posting?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:40 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Wants to Introduce New Battleships Named After Him. Oh Boy.

By Fred Kaplan

Dec 23, 2025 2:49 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/trump-class-battleships-us
s-defiant.html

The good news about President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new “Trump-class battleship,” based on his own vision of what a modern war vessel should look like, is that it will almost certainly never be built.

The bad news is that, over the next few years, the Navy will spend hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe even a few billion—pretending that it’s working on the project.

Nobody in the Navy has asked for a new battleship of this sort—a behemoth weighing three times as much as the vessel it replaces (which itself is a very heavy ship), staffed by twice as many personnel (recruited from where?), and hoisting every type of weapon imaginable, including nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which, to the relief of every Navy commander, no U.S. surface vessel has carried since the end of the Cold War.

Quite apart from the megalomania of a president naming a warship after himself, the project contradicts a growing consensus among naval analysts for building and dispersing a larger number of smaller, less vulnerable ships. Given that the Chinese navy now has more ships than the U.S. Navy (370 vs. 294) and, more important, hundreds of anti-ship ballistic missiles, which can strike our ships from 900 miles away, the Trump-class battleship is simply wrongheaded for the modern era: It would heighten the U.S. Navy’s already-stressed vulnerabilities at sea.

In a news conference at Mar-a-Lago where the project was announced, Trump—standing next to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—said he would push the Navy to build the first of the new ships in two-and-a-half years, i.e., before his term is up. (He envisions building 20 to 25 of the ships in all.)

Several retired Navy officers and weapons analysts (including two that I interviewed, who requested anonymity in order to avoid retribution) see this as a pipe dream. The newest Burke-class destroyer ships take about five years to build—and they are much smaller and based on existing designs. To design, construct, weaponize, and deploy a much larger ship based on an entirely new concept would likely take a decade.

The retired officer and naval analyst estimate the first of these ships would likely cost about $10 billion, four times that of the newest Burke destroyer—and that’s not counting the cost of the weapons onboard.

Those weapons are another problem. According to Trump and to subsequent information released by the Navy, much of it compiled by the private research group GlobalSecurity.org, the new ship would carry a lot of new, as-yet-unproven types of armaments, including hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, and an as-yet-undecided power source. Testing all these new weapons, and then integrating them all on one platform, is a very complex task.

The retired admiral told me that the Navy’s most successful project in recent decades is the Aegis-class cruiser. Started in the late 1970s, it works well, and was efficiently built, because it put together existing elements—the Navy’s best missiles, fire-control system, and air defenses—all already-proven. The only new element was an air-defense radar.

By contrast, the much newer Zumwalt-class destroyer, contracted in 2002, tried to integrate lots of new technologies, and it was a disaster. The Navy had planned to build 32 of those ships, but, owing to various delays and cost overruns, ended up building just three.

The same is likely to happen with the Trump-class battleships, if any ever get built at all.

One other problem: The United States just doesn’t have the shipbuilding capacity for this project. The retired admiral and the naval analyst told me the shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, is the only one capable of building a boat this big. Yet it is also where the next aircraft carrier is being built. Which vessel will get priority? There is neither the space nor the workforce to build both.

Finally, it is unclear just what this ship is supposed to do. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said at Mar-a-Lago that the USS Defiant—the name of the first Trump-class ship—“will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port.”

But what if it has to fight in a war? Ships mobilize as part of a battle group. Will the USS Defiant help protect the aircraft carrier, along with the various frigates, cruisers, and destroyers? Will it assist the aircraft carrier in projecting power against the enemy? Will it be the “flagship”—the lead vessel—in its own group? These aren’t small questions. The answers will shape the training of the ship’s crews and even, to some degree, its design.

The announcement that the ship will also carry nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles came as a particular surprise. No U.S. surface vessel has carried nukes since the end of the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush ordered them removed back in 1991—and not just for dovish reasons. Not only had the nukes made those ships a more tempting target, they were more trouble than they were worth, requiring specially trained crews and special security procedures. Those ships were also barred from entering the waters and ports of many U.S. allies. I was a defense reporter when Bush made this decision. Every Navy officer I knew heaved a huge sigh of relief. I doubt many of today’s officers want to return to the old era.

Trump has mulled none of this. He first raised the subject back on Sept. 30, in his address before hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico, Virginia. In the middle of a rambling speech, touching on dozens of topics, he said:

I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way. … I used to watch Victory at Sea [a documentary about World War II naval battles]. I love Victory at Sea. I look at these admirals, it’s got to be your all-time fave, in black and white. When I look at those ships … man, nothing was going to stop. … They were 20 deep, and they were in a straight line, and there was nothing going to stop them. … They don’t make [ships] that way anymore, but … I’m sort of open to it.

In other words, even aside from its name, the Trump-class battleship is all about Trump—his fantasy-fed nostalgia, feeding his notion that, as the smartest man in the room on any and all subjects, he has the slightest idea how any of this works.

He also likes the looks of this ship, claiming that he was involved in its design. “I’m a very aesthetic person,” he said at the Mar-a-Lago press conference. He has always been impressed by looks; recall his tendency, especially in his first term, to pick Cabinet secretaries because they looked straight out of “central casting.” To him, everything is a show.

Back in his first term, Trump asked the top Navy admirals to come to the White House to talk about ships. A friend of one of those officers, now also a retired admiral, recalls being told that Trump put up pictures of various U.S. ships, criticizing them all as ugly. Then he put up a picture of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

“Now there’s a good-looking ship!” Trump exclaimed.

One of the admirals replied that it might look good, but it wouldn’t last five minutes in a battle at sea. And in fact, the Ukrainian navy sank the Moskva in April 2022, just weeks after the start of that war.

The Trump-class USS Defiant might be good-looking if it ever sees life on a shipyard. But if it steams into battle, it might meet the same fate as the Moskva.

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

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:41 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Vanity Fleet

The Trump-class ships are about branding, not strategy.

By Tom Nichols | December 22, 2025, 8:43 PM ET

Tom Nichols is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trumps-vanity-fleet/68539
9/

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)

Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”

(Apparently, no one has ever explained to him that sharp design does not equal military value. The B-52 bomber, the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force for decades, was affectionately called the BUFF by its crews. Big, ugly, fat … the rest you can figure out.)

Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan did make some news today. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth were also on hand, but they limited themselves to some standard-issue sycophancy.) First, we learned that the president of the United States clearly has no idea what battleships are. Second, the United States is going to invest in a new class of naval vessel. Third, America is going to reverse more than 30 years of wise policy by putting nuclear weapons back on U.S. Navy surface vessels.

Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers; the first ship, called the Defiant, will be about three times the size of a Burke. The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out —and withstand—serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.

Indeed, defense investors cheered the announcement, but the spending will likely come much later, because the United States does not have the capacity to build vessels it hasn’t even designed yet. Trump told a reporter today that he expects the first ship to arrive in two and a half years, which is possible if the Navy slaps some gold paint on a Burke class, adds some missiles, and then stencils USS TRUMP on the side. But the last time the Navy really tried to create a new kind of ship—the Zumwalt-class destroyer—the process took years and ended in failure.

The biggest news came today when Phelan said that the new Trump class will carry nuclear weapons. Why? Perhaps Phelan, who has no experience in, or with, the Navy, figured that Trump would want the new ships to have the biggest and best of everything. (Phelan did promise today that they would be the “best-looking” warships in the world.) But like everything else about this chaotic scheme, putting nuclear arms on destroyers or cruisers or “battleships” makes no sense in the 21st century—if it ever did.

During the Cold War, U.S. surface vessels carried all kinds of nuclear munitions for use against other ships, submarines, and land targets, because such was the logic of the Soviet-American standoff: World War III would be a final confrontation of two immense military forces, including nuclear duels at sea. In 1991, with the Soviet Union on its last legs, President George H. W. Bush ordered the removal of all such weapons from the surface fleet. Many Navy officers were relieved: I know from speaking with several at the time that they regarded nuclear weapons on their ships as a useless burden.

Today’s Navy is not going to get into a nuclear showdown with the Soviet fleet. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to trade mushroom clouds at sea with the Chinese or Russian fleets. Carrying nuclear weapons on surface vessels—big, slow, exposed platforms—is not only strategically pointless but also a needless risk. George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, both defense hawks, knew this more than three decades ago.

As with all Trump vanity projects, no one seems to be asking what national purpose is served by these new plans. Does the Navy need new ships? What should it do with them if it gets them? Do they really need to be armed with nuclear weapons? The answer from the Trump administration, clearly, is: Who cares? As retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Fleet plan is “exactly what we don’t need”—but, he added, no one is focused on America’s maritime needs, because “they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

Phelan might not know much about the Navy, but he knows Trump: He promised that the new Trump-class ships will inspire “awe and reverence” in any port they visit. But strategy is more than just giving lethal playthings to a president who has a simplistic understanding of ships. It is the art of making choices, an attempt to match means with ends. In a rational world, this would be the thinking driving the acquisition of weapons.

I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.

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

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 1:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner...

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, December 25, 2025 9:19 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:
Whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner...

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ix, like every Trumptard I know, you are an evil little prick. So was Eichmann.
https://www.google.com/search?q=eichmann+in+jerusalem+summary

Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation

December 24, 2025

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/24/echoes-of-eichmann-the-ind
ustrialization-of-mass-deportation/

The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.

Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says. Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation.

The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.

The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes. ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by The Post. A formal request for bids could follow soon after that.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said she “cannot confirm” The Post’s reporting and declined to answer questions about the warehouse plan.

NBC and Bloomberg News previously reported on ICE’s internal discussions about using warehouses as detention centers. The full scope of the project, the locations of the facilities and other details contained in the solicitation have not been previously disclosed or reported.

The warehouse plan would be the next step in President Donald Trump’s campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, which began with a scramble to expand the nation’s immigrant detention system, the largest in the world. Armed with $45 billion Congress set aside for locking up immigrants, his administration this year revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.

The administration has deported more than 579,000 people this year, border czar Tom Homan said earlier this month on the social media platform X.

The new facilities will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process and promote the safety, dignity and respect for all in ICE custody,” the solicitation said.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.” [Continue reading…]

The Intercept reports:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already hired 10 contractors to carry out its immigrant bounty hunting program, according to records reviewed by The Intercept. The firms included companies that had previous deals with spy agencies and the military, private investigators that boast of their physical surveillance skills, and a private prison giant.

In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. ICE procurement records indicate the agency will be targeting as many as 1.5 million immigrants in the U.S.

Taken together, records show the 10 companies have been made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027. Some of the companies’ roles in the bounty hunting program have been previously reported, including by The Intercept, but others — such as Bluehawk, EnProVera, and Gravitas — are being revealed here for the first time. [Continue reading…]

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

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Thursday, December 25, 2025 9:44 AM

SECOND

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


Every Trumptard I know is an evil little prick. So is JD Vance.

Who Is JD Vance? (No, Seriously. Who Is He?)

The vice president is a cynical shapeshifter, willing to say anything — and be anybody — to become the most powerful person in America.

By Monica Potts | Dec 25, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/204626/jd-vance-maga-monster-cynical-s
hapeshifter

At the Turning Point USA conference at the University of Mississippi in October, an audience member asked Vice President JD Vance about the tension between his interracial, interfaith marriage with Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and his beliefs that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants. He began with his thoughts on immigration policy, then veered toward the personal by saying he hopes Usha converts to Catholicism. “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” he said.

It wasn’t the most grotesque statement Vance has made — there are plenty of contenders for that — but it exposed his twisted priorities. Here was the vice president defending the administration’s vile immigration policies in a way that fundamentally degrades the experiences and traditions of his own family, of people he is bound by vows — vows that should be sacred to a Christian — to love and protect. It sums up Vance’s journey into public life and politics: There is nobody he won’t betray, and no principle he won’t cast aside, in his quest to accrue more fame and power.

This has been clear since he rose to fame. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a suburb between Cincinnati and Dayton. In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the hardships of his childhood there — his mother’s addictions, his absent father, his feuding grandparents — which he left by joining the Army and later going to college. His grandparents were from the Appalachians in Eastern Kentucky and had moved there for factory work, like so many other transplants looking for work in the middle of the last century. Because of that history, Vance claimed a kind of hillbilly mantel. “We called our hometown of Middletown Middletucky because so many of the residents actually came from Kentucky,” he said on Fresh Air in 2016. “So it was this massive transplantation of one culture and one group of people into an entirely different area. And a lot of times, of course, they kept the culture, and they kept a lot of their habits with them when they moved.”

Of course, he was not from Kentucky. He visited it in summers and briefly describes a visit for the book, but doesn’t portray it as a real place where people still live. If he thinks of himself as a hillbilly, maybe it’s partly because that’s how Ohioans thought of him and his family, but he and his mother both grew up in Ohio. Writers from Kentucky have rejected his characterizations and portrayed him more as a carpetbagger who doesn’t understand mountain culture.

Vance had already graduated from Yale Law School, dabbled in corporate law, and worked at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm by the time he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which now made him a sort of public intellectual — or at least a sought-after hillbilly whisperer. Lots of young adults go through similar odysseys of becoming, but at the end of the day, they become someone; their worldview crystallizes. But Vance’s mind seems to keep changing. After his memoir became a bestseller and was adapted into a movie, he explored the sense of want and identity that had helped elect President Donald Trump. But he was no fan at the time. He was instead aligned himself with the elite Ivy League and Big Tech conservatives who found him distasteful. In 2016, he called Trump “America’s Hitler,” and said Trump was like a needle in a vein for people who needed hope to get through their tough lives.

Within three years, though, Vance was running for a Senate seat in Ohio as a MAGA-fied conservative Catholic who flirted with the far right. It’s possible he saw an opening for power and abandoned all of his principles for a chance at it. It seems more likely to me that Vance had no principles — and when he realized there was more adulation to be had by adopting Trumpism instead of opposing it, he jumped aboard. It worked: Vance landed Trump’s endorsement and defeated several Republicans with extensive political experience en route to a comfortable win in the general election.

It was from this perch that Trump chose him as his running mate, and the latest iteration of Vance was complete. As vice president, Vance hasn’t just supported the xenophobia Trump espouses, but built upon it and amplified it. As he did in his Turning Point USA speech, he’s called for the reduction of immigration — legal and illegal — into the U.S., saying it will bankrupt the country and blaming the housing affordability crisis on immigrants. He has also blamed antisemitism in the U.S. on young immigrants. On X, he said that the U.S. “imported a lot of people with ethnic grievances” and that to stop antisemitism the country needed to “lower immigration and support assimilation.”

As Trump’s cruel border and deportation policies have ramped up, Vance, a Catholic, pushed back against Catholic leaders’ criticism of those polices and questioned their motives. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation.

When news of a racist, pro-Nazi filled young Republican group chat surfaced in October, Vance went on the Charlie Kirk Show to defend the participants. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” he said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.” But he didn’t think the same of anyone who criticized Kirk after his assassination in September, pushing for them to face consequences.

Vance has championed a hard right turn on many other fronts as well, promoting pro-natalism while dismantling the safety net that protects children and families, and trying to sell lies about the administration’s disastrous handling of the economy. He does all of this as an ally to those who have helped his rise, from Christian nationalists to tech billionaires. But Americans aren’t fond of Vance: Roughly half the country disapproves of him. Maybe that’s because they see him as a cynical shapeshifter, changing identities based on whatever he thinks will resonate most — so he can accrue yet more power. That’s how he won over Trump, and it paid off handsomely. But if Vance decides to run for president — as he is almost certain to do, given that he’s already landing high-profile endorsements — there will be no more coattails to ride. Who will he pretend to be then?

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

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Friday, December 26, 2025 6:47 AM

SECOND

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


With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society

By Radley Balko | December 24, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/204227/trump-immigration-nightmare-hap
pening-here

The most basic definition of a police state is a society in which the police themselves are above the law. In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on promises to make police officers completely immune from both criminal prosecution and civil liability. Whether a president could actually do that isn’t as important as the fact that a major party’s nominee for president was, quite literally, promising to turn the country into a police state. And then he won.

The United States has long had a problem with holding bad cops accountable, and, to be fair, much of that problem predates Donald Trump. The George Floyd protests in 2020 provoked public discussion about qualified immunity, a legal doctrine wholly invented by the Supreme Court in 1967 that makes it extremely difficult to sue state and local police for abuses that violate the Constitution.

Less discussed is that it’s even more difficult — all but impossible, really — to sue federal law enforcement officers. For years, the only real avenue to do so was through the precedent set in the 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. But the court has been gradually chipping away at that case ever since and all but overturned it in 2022. There is one remaining, far more complicated law, the Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets people sue federal police officers, but to sue under that law is an immensely complicated process. The law also bars punitive damages, and it, too, is being eroded by the federal courts.

“People ask me questions like ‘Is it constitutional for them to wear masks?’ or ‘Can they really detain U.S. citizens incommunicado?’ or ‘Is it really legal for them to scare children like that?’” said Bidwell, the IJ attorney. “The answer is that it doesn’t matter if what they do is legal. Because they know that fundamentally they can’t be sued, either as the government itself or individually.”

So while the administration sets arrest and deportation quotas, attacks immigrants with dehumanizing rhetoric, and tells immigration officers that they’ve been “unleashed,” Bidwell said, there’s nothing pushing back to keep deportation forces in line. “There’s no incentive for these officers to act in a cautious manner that’s compliant with the Constitution.”

“Back when I worked for ICE, there would occasionally be times when they’d inadvertently arrest or detain an American citizen or legal resident,” said Javad Khazaeli, who was an immigration prosecutor during the Obama administration and now works as an immigration defense attorney. (Disclosure: Khazaeli is also a friend.) “When that happened, it would be all hands on deck. It was like, OK, what went wrong here and how do we fix it? Now there’s nothing like that. Now they just don’t care.”

The immunity problem pervades the chain of command from top to bottom. Thanks to a spate of Supreme Court rulings from the case that all but killed Bivens, to rulings protecting political appointees for policy decisions, to the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling on presidential immunity, everyone is protected, from the Border Patrol officer who abandons a baby in the back seat of a car after detaining his immigrant parents (as happened in a suburb of Chicago) to the Border Patrol commander who tear-gasses elementary schools, to the president who says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

That leaves only criminal liability. It seems unlikely that Trump’s DOJ would ever prosecute an immigration officer, even for egregious abuses. Some have suggested that local police and prosecutors arrest and charge Border Patrol agents caught committing clear crimes, or that states pass laws prohibiting masking by law enforcement, and then arrest officers who violate it. But state and local charges against federal police are almost always removed to federal court, at which point the Trump administration would presumably take over the prosecution and drop the charges. There may be some value in bringing charges anyway to force the issue and draw public attention to these abuses. But they aren’t likely to bring much accountability. It’s yet another policy that, while in place over multiple administrations, could be particularly destructive in the hands of an administration so averse to the rule of law.

In the end, this administration has exposed how the Supreme Court has made the Bill of Rights almost entirely reliant on the executive branch’s willingness to police itself. If federal police officers can violate constitutional rights with impunity, those rights may as well not exist.

Much more at https://newrepublic.com/article/204227/trump-immigration-nightmare-hap
pening-here

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

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Friday, December 26, 2025 9:15 AM

SECOND

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


American women want to opt out

More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.

By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out

Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.

These women seem to want to leave at least in part because of Donald Trump. Gallup found that this trend began in summer 2016, shortly after Trump became the Republican nominee for president. It continued to climb during the Biden presidency, but there’s a 25-point gap in the desire to leave between those who approve of the country’s leadership and those who don’t. That suggests that getting away from Trump plays at least some role in the appeal of the fantasy of expatriating.

But the desire to leave America can also express itself in ways that sound, at first glance, apolitical.

A recent BBC article about the trend spoke to a 31-year-old who decided to move from LA to Lisbon in 2021. “There’s not a strong work-life balance in the US,” she said. “I wanted to live somewhere with a different pace, different cultures, and learn a new language.” In Portugal, she says, she feels “more like a whole person again.”

Well, sure: Who hasn’t wanted a better work-life balance than the one the US offers? Who hasn’t wanted more than a minimal social safety net; a capitalist hustle culture; and a guiding belief that everything must be earned, including things like child care and health insurance, which in other countries are considered human rights that the government will take care of for you?

It’s the child care, it seems, that is increasingly the last straw for women — the way it’s becoming both more compulsory and more difficult to do.

In the same article, the BBC quoted a 34-year-old who moved from the US to Uruguay after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “I have children, and I don’t plan on having more, but the increasing governance of women’s bodies terrified me,” she said. She added, “People don’t realise how far behind the US is on maternal care, parental leave, and healthcare, until they leave the country.”

America is a hostile country if you’re having children. Child care is so expensive that it can eat up the salary of at least one parent, which frequently leads to women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Parental leave is rarely mandated: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has made much of her decision to go back to work three days after giving birth. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country, and we have for a long time. And if, for all these reasons and many others, you get pregnant and you find that you’d prefer not to be, it’s become increasingly difficult to act on that choice in a safe and legal way.

So a person might wonder: Why not simply leave? Go somewhere that doesn’t make you choose between work and children, somewhere you can leave behind both the stresses of capitalism and the pressures of family life. Somewhere you can have kids and also afford to spend time with them.

We often talk about the idea of fleeing America and its feeble social safety net as a liberating, progressive act, as though by leaving the US a person has the chance to become James Baldwin in Paris. But the idea of escaping the work-life balance trap has darker echoes in contemporary American pop culture. When I think of the fantasy of the ex-pat through this lens, it comes to look strikingly similar to the fantasy of the trad wife.

When your kids are your job, you never have to choose between them

Trad wife influencers have become some of the most discussed figures on social media, hitting the viral sweet spot of content that is both aesthetically soothing and politically inflammatory.

Trad wives post online about their lives as stay-at-home wives and mothers. Most of the popular ones are thin and conventionally pretty, and they post videos of themselves making their children’s favorite cereal from scratch, wearing full makeup in sun-drenched kitchens. More controversially, many creators who identify as trad wives promote the idea of living according to what they call Biblical principles, submitting to their husbands, and musing over how much better life is when women are out of the workplace.

Trad wife influencers, like the ex-pat fantasy, started trending up in 2016, when the prototype, Alena Kate Pettitt, published her first book, Ladies Like Us. In 2020, the popularity of these influencers crossed from niche to mainstream, as a population confined to their homes looked for ways to start romanticizing domestic drudgery.

The political stuff attracts attention, but it’s the aesthetic of the domestic work made beautiful and aspirational that maintains an audience. A 2025 study from King’s College London found that while only 7 percent of female viewers of trad wife videos approved of the idea of men as sole household decision makers, 79 percent were attracted to the “calm, relaxed lifestyle” trad wives appear to maintain — a life where you have enough time in the morning to whip up a scratch-made batch of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.

Part of the trad wife fantasy is the idea that while you get to spend unlimited time with your children, you are simultaneously pursuing a lucrative career. The most successful of the trad wife influencers can make astonishing amounts of money, enough to pay for those expensive Aga stoves. This means that the trad wife of fantasy is a woman who has escaped the trap of trying to have both family and work in the US, just like the ex-pat of fantasy. But there’s a key difference: For the trad wife, family and work are the same thing. Her family is her work, her art, her aesthetic labor.

Escaping men in a time of backlash

Much has been written already about the escapism of the romantasy trend, and why it’s grown as a way to deal with the horrors uncovered by Me Too and its long, vicious backlash. Romantasy, as Daniel Yadin wrote for the Drift, allows its presumed-female readers the fantasy of opting out of unpredictable and potentially violent human men and going for fairies or gentle blue aliens instead.

I have begun to read the fantasy of fleeing the US and the fantasy of the trad wife as versions of the same escapism, translated to motherhood. Both fantasies thwart the trap American capitalism lays for all its women. They are about finding a way to have a job and have a family, and not let either one ruin your life.

They are also among the most potent and widespread of the fantasies with which women are presented right now. The Christmas movie industrial complex must realize this, which is why the two happy endings possible for the discontented city career girls of the genre are to either move back to their hometowns or to become royalty in small but idyllic European countries.

It has been nine years now since the publication of the infamous Access Hollywood tape was followed swiftly by the election of Donald Trump. It has been seven years since the outrage over Trump’s election powered the ferocious rage of Me Too. It has been three years since Trump’s Supreme Court appointees led the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away women’s federally mandated legal right to an abortion. It has been two years since Trump was found criminally liable for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, and one year since America went ahead and elected him for a second term anyway.

All this they did — to, in the end, little apparent result. Now, as the backlash to Me Too continues to play out, the fantasies women are exploring are all about a kind of exhausted resignation — an opting out.

Why not imagine leaving the workforce? Why not imagine leaving home? There’s no way to win, a woman might think, if we stay as we are. So if the fight is pointless, why not simply walk off the battlefield?

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

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Friday, December 26, 2025 5:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American women want to opt out

More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.

By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out

Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.


Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:

Quote:
While there's no precise statistic,
a large majority of women in viral social media polls choose a grizzly bear over an unknown man in the woods, reflecting deep-seated fears of male violence, harassment, and assault, where a bear's threat (kill or leave alone) feels more predictable and less personally violating than the potential for prolonged harm from a man, which often carries societal disbelief.

This video shows some of the women's responses to the question:




You fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.

Buh-Bye!

You won't be missed.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, December 27, 2025 7:25 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:

Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:

You [women] fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.

Buh-Bye!

You won't be missed.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ixStringJoker supports Trump because both have done the same things to women:

Trump made his attitude about women clear long ago

By David Remnick | Dec 23, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/trump-epstein-and-the-women

Just weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, the American public was provided with dispositive information on Donald Trump’s beliefs about women, sex, and the rights of men, particularly famous men. The information was delivered, unmistakably, in his voice. On October 7th, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published a video of Trump, circa 2005, chatting merrily on a bus with Billy Bush, the co-anchor of “Access Hollywood,” as Trump prepared to make a guest appearance on an episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

Trump bragged of his impulsivity. “I don’t even wait. And, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In the same session, Trump was recorded saying that he had tried and failed to seduce Bush’s co-host at the time, Nancy O’Dell. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he said. “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”

Initially, Trump failed to follow the dictum he had learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: Never apologize, never explain. After a fashion, he did both. He minimized the offense as “locker-room talk,” adding that his opponent’s husband, Bill Clinton, had “said far worse to me on the golf course.” Soon, however, he began denying that the recording was even genuine. At Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper asked him, “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

Trump, after allowing that he was embarrassed by the incident, tried to change the subject—to ISIS terrorists chopping off heads—and insisted, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that.

TRUMP: Frankly, you heard these things I said. . . . I have tremendous respect for women—

COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

TRUMP: —and women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders for our country, which we don’t have now. . . . We’re going to make America safe again, and we’re going to make America wealthy again.

Many things go into a voter’s decision, but the “Access Hollywood” tape and the gross lack of character reflected in it did not prove disqualifying in the 2016 election. A year later, Billy Bush, who is George H. W. Bush’s nephew, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “Of course he said it.” Bush said that he and “seven other guys present at the bus at the time . . . assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But, after reading numerous firsthand accounts of women who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s forcible affections over the years, he believed them. He was appalled and clearly resented Trump’s attempts to deny that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape was his. Bush wrote, “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.”

Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his conquests, real and imagined, for the benefit of gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he became a politician, the picture has only sharpened. Around twenty women have publicly accused the President of various forms of sexual misconduct. (He has always denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.)

On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”

The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence. As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.

There has already been a mountain of accurate reporting on Trump’s attitude toward women and the close relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the best and most comprehensive accounts was published last week in the Times. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored countless documents and interviewed more than thirty of Epstein’s former employees, as well as victims. They described the relationship as one of common carnal interest.

“Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes. With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.”

That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it is amply supported by multiple sources who describe the details of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the telephone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and how Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants listen on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table.”

In the Times’ reporting, both men are portrayed in all their vanity and blithe aggression. In 1993, at one of Trump’s beauty pageants, one contestant, Béatrice Keul, then a bank employee and part-time model from Switzerland, was asked by one of Trump’s employees to meet with him privately at a suite at the Plaza: “Almost as soon as she arrived, Ms. Keul said, Mr. Trump began groping her, kissing her and trying to lift her dress. ‘I yelled, I screamed, I pushed him,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want to give up.’ ”

Before her meeting with Trump, Epstein had approached her, according to Keul, saying he was “Don’s best friend.” Would she come to Mar-a-Lago to party? “When Ms. Keul demurred,” the Times account went on, “Mr. Epstein tried other tactics—going on about the wealth he kept in Swiss banks, then about famous friends with whom he could arrange meetings. ‘Epstein knew exactly what he was doing,’ she said. ‘He had a hunting method. It was a routine.’ ”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded to the paper’s questions about its reporting by saying it was all a “fake news story.” Which is precisely where we began, on that bus, so many years ago: Deny, deny, deny, and move on. In his Op-Ed for the Times, Billy Bush recalled another off-camera remark from Trump, when Bush confronted him about lying—in this case, inflating his television ratings. “People will just believe you,” Trump said. “You just tell them and they believe you.”

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

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Saturday, December 27, 2025 7:49 AM

SECOND

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


The Republicans on the Supreme Court Have Cast Their Lot With Trumpism. They Should Be Very Worried.

By Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern | Dec 27, 2025 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/supreme-court-trump-robert
s-kavanaugh-thomas-alito-gorsuch-coney-barrett.html

During his first year back in office, President Donald Trump amassed an unprecedented amount of power in pursuit of his far-reaching agenda. His quests to crush the Democratic Party’s electoral power, seize control over the economy, and deport millions of immigrants were all actively abetted by the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices. Time and again—often over the shadow docket, with no explanation—the 6–3 supermajority cleared the path for Trump’s aggressive executive overreach. Those who believed that SCOTUS might serve as a modest check on the administration’s abuses were proved wrong almost weekly, as the court’s far-right bloc delivered win after win to the president it had helped return to the White House. The justices’ rare rebuke to Trump on Tuesday over his deployment of the National Guard in Chicago illustrated just how far outside the law this president must go before a majority is willing to tell him no.

On this week’s year-end episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern ponder the two big questions posed by this alliance: Why did the Supreme Court conservative supermajority align with Trump, and what consequences might it face for its choices? A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: A year ago, we were operating under the theory that three of the six conservative justices were not all in for MAGA and genuinely cared about democracy. That was a mistake. Instead, what we have seen is the so-called center go all in for Trump, doubling and tripling down on the idea that this administration is like every other administration and any judge who tries to thwart it is a woke liberal—including fistfuls of Trump judges who aren’t auditioning for the Supreme Court. And just as the Supreme Court went after DOJ officials during Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump, it’s now going after judges who stand in the president’s way, suggesting that they are anti-Trump zealots suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome,” while we the justices are normal and must put a stop to it.

Why? It’s hard to believe that they go to cocktail parties with only the furthest of the far-right donors. It’s hard to believe that they don’t occasionally read the Washington Post or the New York Times. So what is going on? And this is the real thing I think we haven’t grappled with, but I’m not sure people who are watching the court have yet satisfactorily explained it, at least to my ears. What possible benefit is there to being the stewards of the MAGA destruction of America?

Mark Joseph Stern: My top-line thesis—and I want you to dispute it, because I don’t know if it’s entirely right—is that these justices have fully cast their lot with Trump and Trumpism. And a big part of Trumpism is antidemocratic, ensuring that political minorities can entrench their own power through undemocratic institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the judiciary, as well as through voter suppression and assaults on democracy. Trumpism seeks to perpetuate a system that privileges the elites, the wealthy, white people, Christians, non-LGBTQ+ people. And I fear that the Supreme Court is now intertwined with that perception of who deserves power and who can legitimately exercise power—which is Trump and his GOP and their supporters. So it fills the need to protect Trump’s entire project from the direct forces of actual democracy.

That’s why one of the big pieces of this puzzle is voting rights. The Supreme Court is currently on the brink of delivering another blow to the Voting Rights Act in Callais v. Louisiana. It has been green-lighting voter suppression for so long. Just this month it reinstated Texas’ racial gerrymander that benefits Republicans. Any conversation of this kind needs to start there, because what we are seeing is the court trying to accelerate and facilitate the Trump agenda—and, on the other side of it, trying to ensure that the people can no longer shake loose this regime or really do anything to stop it and reverse what it has done, because there’s only one true way. It’s originalism and Trumpism, which are increasingly the same thing. And anyone who contests that is wielding an illegitimate claim to power. That justifies taking away voting rights and equal representation and democracy and whatever is necessary to ensure that what the regime’s doing now can just keep going forever.

When I started doing these New Year’s shows, it really struck me that we get absolutely caught up in individual big-ticket cases that weigh toward Trump and the culture wars, without looking at all the cases in the aggregate. When you’re covering the court, it is very easy to think, in the moment: The only case that matters is tariffs. Or transgender athletes. Or birthright citizenship. And, to be sure, every one of those cases is a blockbuster. But if you look at the big themes this year, you’re exactly right: It’s the voting cases. There are a lot of voting cases on the docket. We’ve talked about Callais and Texas’ gerrymander. There’s also campaign finance, plus a major case about mail ballots that the court will hear this term.

I think we really need to see the trend line, which is: The Supreme Court now has six votes to do anything it wants. And it is constantly taking cases about how people vote, where people vote, how their votes are counted, how campaigns are financed. While the big-ticket cases with huge social justice and racial justice implications do matter, it’s the democracy cases that have the biggest impact. We’re barreling into the midterms, and the 2028 election after that. And the way for the Supreme Court to achieve all the big-ticket items it wants is to make sure that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have a permanent majority.

By the way, these democracy cases don’t always get treated as seriously in the public conversation. They can be arcane; explaining campaign finance is a two-bourbon job right now. These are abstractions, and they can get devalued in the discourse. But we have to reckon with the fact that if you are a six-justice supermajority and you want to make sure you can do all the stuff you want to do for the next 10 or 20 years, you need to ensure that nothing will stop you, not even an election.

I do want to add that the birthright citizenship case, while absolutely a social justice issue, is also a democracy case. It’s about who counts as an American. And if the Trump administration gets its way, it would radically reduce the number of people who have a constitutional claim to birthright citizenship and are therefore able to participate in basic aspects of civic life. And that’s a theme that sounds in a lot of these other cases: Who gets to be a full and equal American citizen, and who gets something more like skim-milk citizenship? You see it in democracy cases and civil rights cases alike: Straight white men get the highest form of American citizenship. They can’t stop winning, while everybody else is losing.

That really does lead me to this stakes question, because we ask all the time on this show: What are the stakes for women? For LGBTQ+ communities? For immigrants? But I want to ask the question: What are the stakes for the Supreme Court? Because it seems to me we don’t think nearly hard enough about what is on the line for those six MAGA justices if they don’t shrink democracy enough to change electoral outcomes.

I think they have reached a point of no return, and they are scared of what happens if the political winds switch direction. At least some of them must understand that they have failed to act as independent jurists. In the mind of a majority of Americans, they are a political body, and as I said, they have cast their lot with Trumpism. If they had spent the past year truly standing up to Trump from time to time, I don’t think they’d have as much to fear from Republicans losing political power. I doubt there would be as much Democratic appetite for Supreme Court reform, including term limits and court expansion.

The Republican-appointed justices could have played this smarter if their goal was to stave off Democratic backlash. Giving Trump just 25 percent more losses would have given a lot of people the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the court was more or less doing its job. Americans want to see one branch stand in the way of another when it looks like there is an abuse of power. At this point, though, the justices have gone too far down this road to turn around. And they should be worried, because there is a very real chance that the entire Trumpist project will fall apart. And they are now so intertwined with Trumpism that they might collapse with it. That’s why it is so important for them to weaponize these democracy cases. There may come a time when the only way they can maintain their grasp on power is to oppress the majority.

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

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 12:25 PM

SECOND

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


Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million

December 27, 2025

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump had just awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for Charlie Kirk in October when his son ushered friends toward the Oval Office.

As a string ensemble played in the background, Donald Trump Jr. walked up with lobbyist Ches McDowell to chat with the president. Trump Jr. at one point pulled McDowell forward to shake the president’s hand, according to a livestream broadcast. After they went inside, McDowell took the president aside to discuss a pressing issue, according to people familiar with the matter: One of his clients was seeking a pardon.

The client was Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance. That afternoon, the president agreed to sign Zhao’s pardon, the people said.

Zhao was one of the beneficiaries of a new, informal path to presidential pardons that has become a feature of Trump’s second term, which allows some clemency applicants with deep pockets or politically connected lobbyists to circumvent the traditional pardon process.

McDowell told The Wall Street Journal that Trump Jr. didn’t help him pursue the pardon and had left the room when he brought up Zhao. Trump Jr. had brought him because they were leaving later that afternoon for a hunting trip in Utah, McDowell said. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment.

The president formally signed the pardon for Zhao a week later, setting off an uproar in Washington. Democrats — pointing to steps Binance has taken that boosted the cryptocurrency company that Trump Jr. co-founded along with his father and brothers, World Liberty Financial — said the move amounted to brazen corruption. Several Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Trump donor Joe Lonsdale, said they were alarmed by it. Trump ally Laura Loomer called it a “terrible Pardon idea.”

For Binance, it was the culmination of a nearly yearlong effort to pursue clemency for its founder. It had paid lobbyists around $800,000 to lobby for a pardon, U.S. policy changes and other matters, according to federal records. It also approached other lobbyists about a pardon, offering success fees of as much as $5 million if they could help secure one, according to people familiar with the outreach. The company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering rules and paid a $4.3 billion fine, and Zhao served a four-month prison sentence on a related charge. A pardon could make it easier for the company to return to the U.S. market.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/27/lobbyists-close-to-trump-s
ay-their-going-rate-to-advocate-for-a-pardon-is-1-million/

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

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 1:14 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 second:
Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million
Money has always bought access in Washington but it’s never been this naked.

A cannabis CEO spent 18 months cutting seven-figure checks to Trump’s political groups, attended fundraisers billed at $1 million per guest, and landed a two-hour Oval Office meeting where a Florida sheriff watched the president chat about Palm Beach real estate and golf courses. The CEO walked out with marijuana rescheduling, overriding Speaker Johnson, 22 Republican senators, and the religious right. “It was a little surreal,” the CEO told the Wall Street Journal.

Bradford County (FL) Sheriff Gordon Smith described the Oval Office meeting where Trump decided to loosen marijuana restrictions to the Wall Street Journal.

After about two hours, Trump said he was going to reschedule the drug and said he wanted to post on Truth Social, the sheriff recalled. Trump said he wanted everyone on board.

“The lawyers and his staff, they started yelling, ‘No sir, you can’t yet; there’s a 30-day period, it’s gotta go through this and that,’ ” Smith said. “They had to stop him from posting.”

If you can write a seven-figure check, you get the meeting. If you can’t, you get lied to.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-trump-became-the-unlikely-
champion-of-easing-marijuana-restrictions/ar-AA1T8kRE

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

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 6:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:

You [women] fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.

Buh-Bye!

You won't be missed.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
6ixStringJoker supports Trump because both have done the same things to women:



I said, don't misquote me, cunt.

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

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 7:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American women want to opt out

More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.

By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out

Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.


Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:

Quote:
While there's no precise statistic,
a large majority of women in viral social media polls choose a grizzly bear over an unknown man in the woods, reflecting deep-seated fears of male violence, harassment, and assault, where a bear's threat (kill or leave alone) feels more predictable and less personally violating than the potential for prolonged harm from a man, which often carries societal disbelief.

This video shows some of the women's responses to the question:




You fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.

Buh-Bye!

You won't be missed.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.



Also, also young, low-IQ, college "educated" American women:

Fortune: ‘He satisfies a lot of my needs’: Meet the women in love with ChatGPT

https://fortune.com/2025/12/26/women-in-love-with-chatgpt-he-satisfies
-a-lot-of-my-needs/



And their lost daughters...

WaPo: Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/she-thought-a-predator-was-grooming-
her-daughter-it-was-an-ai-chatbot/ar-AA1STa9t


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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 7:38 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:

I said, don't misquote me, cunt.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
JAYNEZTOWN resurrected a dead thread where 6ixStringJoker showed off his mental illnesses:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60485

I’ll be short. Trump and his Trumptards have troubled lives because they are sick in the head. Trump has profited from others being mentally ill because he understands their pathological psychology and knows how to swindle them. What Trump does not know is how to run an organization that is not designed to swindle people. That's why he opened casinos, overpriced hotels, and upscale golf courses (the world's most worthless sport). Every day Trump plays golf will cost taxpayers $millions.

6IXSTRINGJACK Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:14 PM wrote

I'm not autistic, but without having ever been diagnosed, I believe myself very much to be OCD and possibly suffering from Asperger Syndrome...

High functioning, yes, but still... Nobody here would deny I'm without problems, and at 36 years old and perpetually single and all but a hermit in real life it's getting very hard to even pretend to people I care about that I'm even close to "normal".

6IXSTRINGJACK Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:45 PM

I don't believe I'm Autistic. I'm confident I'm OCD, and I'm pretty sure there's some Ass Burgers in there. :)

6IXSTRINGJACK Friday, December 26, 2025 9:02 PM

ZERO trust. They have NOBODY but themselves to thank for that outcome.

Trumptards and Trump understand each other pretty well because they are all fucked up in the head in the same way, but that is a disadvantage when they deal with other people who aren't diseased like they are.

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

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Sunday, December 28, 2025 7:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I said, don't misquote me, cunt.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
JAYNEZTOWN


Shut the fuck up, retard.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, December 29, 2025 7:33 AM

SECOND

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


We're on the eve of Trump's final reckoning | Opinion

By Robert Reich | December 28, 2025 4:58PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/trump-final-reckoning/

About a year ago, at the start of the Trump regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”

It has been a “f------ nightmare.”

But sometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.

Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors — on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.

Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption, and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons.

Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.

A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism: its mindless cruelty, blatant attempts to silence critics, wanton destruction of much of our government, open racism and misogyny.

Trump has revealed himself in ways his first-term handlers wouldn’t allow — as a sociopath who posts AI cartoons showing himself s------- on millions of Americans who marched against him. A malignant narcissist unable to respond to the tragic killings of Rob and Michele Reiner without making it all about himself. A chronic liar who says prices are dropping when everyone knows they’re rising.

As Americans see all this, outrage has been growing. We are beginning to mobilize — not all of us, of course, but the great majority.

Record numbers of us marched on October 18, No Kings Day. Democratic candidates have won just about every recent special election and mayoral and gubernatorial contest and a remarkable number of down-ballot races in bright red states and cities. MAGA is coming apart. Trump’s polls are tanking.

We are organizing and mobilizing with a resolve I have not seen in my lifetime.

America had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of America.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians, and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of America. They are out for themselves.

The “f------ nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders,” realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

But the nightmare has awakened much of America to the truth about what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.

I’d like to believe that the horrific darkness of this past year is a necessary prelude to a brighter and saner future.

Be well. Be safe. We will prevail.

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 29, 2025 7:56 AM

SECOND

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


Why the Pantomime by Trump? It Has Always Been About Defending Putin
And Perhaps Getting A Nobel Prize

By Phillips P. OBrien | Dec 29, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/why-the-pantomime-its-always-be
en

Let’s start with two recent quotes about Vladimir Putin.

The first was a claim by President Trump yesterday during the press conference he held with President Zelensky after the latest episode of the long-running pantomime negotiations between the USA, Ukraine and Russia.

“Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed…President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices.”

And then this quote from Trump’s chief of staff and intimate, Suzie Wiles, in her extraordinary Vanity Fair interview. It has the ring of truth

“The experts think that if he (Putin) could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.

Both of these statements cannot be true. Indeed they cancel each other out. There is one that is far more likely to be true (Wiles estimation) and one that was almost certainly a lie (what Trump said yesterday).

The statement by Trump that Putin wants to see Ukraine succeed seems to have been deliberate choice by Donald Trump to deceive. The reason for that lie is to protect Vladimir Putin and mislead the American people (and the world) about Russia’s intentions. It explains why this pantomime is no joke or “nothingburger”. Instead, it has been deadly effective and it serves Russian interests and has protected Russia for almost a year and threatens to do so well into a second year.

Btw, you can watch the whole press conference here. The lie about Putin wanting Ukraine to succeed comes at 20:05.



The fact was that Trump spent most of the press conference yesterday either defending or praising Putin and undermining the Ukrainian position. It is indicative of why he is doing what he is doing and why it has been so effective. This whole pantomime is not a “nothingburger” or anything like that. It is a very effective con that has gone on for almost a year, which has provided protection to Putin/Russia and strung along Europeans and Ukrainians. Moreover, it is a pantomime that Trump will keep going as long as possible.

Lets look at other examples of how Trump defended or praised Putin during the press conference yesterday. Will include the time stamps so you can check

The Praise For Putin.

Trump gushed about the closeness of his relationship with Putin and it came up regularly during the press conference. He boasted about how long the Trump-Putin phone call was before the meeting with Zelensky—”two and a half hours” (17:11).

btw, that really is extraordinary. Before meeting with Zelensky for far less than 2.5 hours, Trump initiated a call with Putin to coordinate plans. And afterwards Trump was slated to call Putin as well for a debrief. He clearly gets nervous about operating without Putin’s advice.

Moreover, Trump a number of times waxed rhapsodical about the closeness of his connection to Putin and in particular how the two bonded about what he calls the Russia “hoax”, but of course which was very real. Here was the first mention (10:27).

“Uh, and I spoke with President Putin. I got along with him very well despite the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a total hoax. Used to say, "What is going on over there?" But it was a total hoax as he knew and as I knew.”

Here was the second mention, which shows Trump believes they have bonded (16:03).

“Don’t forget we went through the Russia Russia Russia hoax together. And he'd call me, I'd call him, I'd say, "Can you believe the stuff that they're making up?" And it turned out we were right.”

Finally, Trump feels so close to Putin that he explains the Russian dictator’s opinions and even goes further and agrees with them. Trump did that most openly when he explained why Putin rejected a European class for a ceasefire along the present line while adding that he (Trump) does as well (20:26).

“Q. Did did Russia agree or did Putin agree to a ceasefire to allow a referendum to take (place)?

A. Not a ceasefire and that's one of the points that we're working on right now. No, not a ceasefire. He feels that look, you know, they're fighting and to stop and then to if they have to start again, which is a possibility. He doesn't want to be in that position. I understand that position.”

So, the US president now outlines the Russian position and empathizes with it.

Putting Pressure On Ukraine

A number of times Trump went out of his way to demean Ukraine and diminish its importance to the USA. For instance, Trump repeated his claim that Russia is winning the war, and Ukraine needs to take a deal now or face a worse situation in the future. The latest version of the Ukraine has “no cards” argument. Here was how Trump described the military situation in the Donbas. (Starts 9:37).

“well I think uh the land you're talking about some of that land has been taken some of that land is maybe up for grabs, but it may be taken over the next period of a number of months and you're better off making a deal.”

Maybe most illuminating was this chaotic meditation during which Trump stated the US had no real interest in Ukraine as opposed to European states while boasting about the fact that he had cut off all US aid for Ukraine (17:52).

“We’re protected by a thing called the Atlantic Ocean and lots of other places to be honest and uh they're (European States) not, you know, they're right there, but we're working together with them as we should be. But I'm doing it to save lives. You know, we're not spending any money. Biden gave 350 billion dollars away.”

So in Trump’s presentation Ukraine is going to have to take a bad deal and moreover he is describing his cut off of support for Ukraine (which has hurt the Ukrainian military) as a good thing,

Putting No Pressure On Russia

Btw, what was never said by Trump would be that there would be any sanctions or extra weapons for Ukraine if Russia refused a deal. The word sanction was never even mentioned once. And Trump admitted a number of times that there is a strong likelihood that they will reach no deal. He intimated that if there was no deal, the most likely result would be the US washing its hands of the conflict.

The Purpose Of The Pantomime

So the presentation was as follows:

Putin is a good man, with whom Trump gets along well and is personally close, and Putin wants Ukraine to succeed while being given large slices of Ukraine.

Ukraine is losing, had better cut a deal with Russia now before it has a greater defeat, and it is a great thing that the US is providing no more aid for Ukraine.

Russia will not be sanctioned or Ukraine will not receive more aid if there is no deal.

And we might say that is the purpose of this pantomime. What Trump is doing is exactly what Putin wants. He is protecting the Russians in allowing them to prosecute the war how and where they want (they made two very large attacks on Ukrainian cities in the last few days, killing civilians and cutting power). He is also making it clear that Russia will receive no penalty if it continues to do this.

And the same time he is making the Europeans and Ukrainans go through all these false motions as if the USA was an honest negotiator and the Europeans keep falling for it. British PM Keir Starmer yesterday, for instance, went out of his way to praise Trump for his supposed efforts to secure peace.

This is why Trump needs to say the deliberate untruths, such as the meeting yesterday bringing peace closer when it clearly did not. He needs to act like this process has a purpose in serving European/Ukrainian interests, when its real purpose is to help Putin.

One final point. The meetings did have one other purpose. Even though Trump realizes that there is hardly any chance that this process will result in a peace deal in January, he needs to act like they have a chance as the deadline nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is 31 January 2026. Trump covets the award, not as much as he covets Putin’s friendship but he definitely wants it.

The great tragedy (once again) is that innocent or not so innocent fools keep falling over and over again for this deception. Yesterday’s talks did not bring us closer to peace, they were not a sign of the US and Ukraine agreeing a common position, and they were not a success. They were just another example of how the US is now helping Russia.

Not admitting the truth of this is a sign that Trump has won.

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 29, 2025 8:05 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We're on the eve of Trump's final reckoning | Opinion

By Robert Reich | December 28, 2025 4:58PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/trump-final-reckoning/

About a year ago, at the start of the Trump regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”

It has been a “f------ nightmare.”

But sometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.

Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors — on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.

Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption, and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons.

Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.

A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism: its mindless cruelty, blatant attempts to silence critics, wanton destruction of much of our government, open racism and misogyny.

Trump has revealed himself in ways his first-term handlers wouldn’t allow — as a sociopath who posts AI cartoons showing himself s------- on millions of Americans who marched against him. A malignant narcissist unable to respond to the tragic killings of Rob and Michele Reiner without making it all about himself. A chronic liar who says prices are dropping when everyone knows they’re rising.

As Americans see all this, outrage has been growing. We are beginning to mobilize — not all of us, of course, but the great majority.

Record numbers of us marched on October 18, No Kings Day. Democratic candidates have won just about every recent special election and mayoral and gubernatorial contest and a remarkable number of down-ballot races in bright red states and cities. MAGA is coming apart. Trump’s polls are tanking.

We are organizing and mobilizing with a resolve I have not seen in my lifetime.

America had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of America.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians, and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of America. They are out for themselves.

The “f------ nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders,” realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

But the nightmare has awakened much of America to the truth about what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.

I’d like to believe that the horrific darkness of this past year is a necessary prelude to a brighter and saner future.

Be well. Be safe. We will prevail.

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





You losers are so pathetic and sad.



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

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Monday, December 29, 2025 8:20 AM

SECOND

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


MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business
A key right-wing constituency is feeling the pain

By Paul Krugman | Dec 29, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-betrayal-of-small-business



Source https://tinyurl.com/bddfbtps

Owners of small businesses are, on average, a strongly right-leaning group. Indeed, along with white Christian nationalists, they are one of the core components of the MAGA base. And small business owners celebrated Donald Trump’s victory last fall. Small business optimism, as measured by the National Federation of Independent Businesses’ monthly survey, soared after the election:


Source https://www.nfib.com/news/monthly_report/sbet/

Yet 2025 was a miserable year for small business — and 2026 will be worse.

Before I get into the reasons MAGA is so bad for some of its most fervent supporters, let’s talk about why small-business owners lean right.

Partly it’s a matter of who they are. Other things equal, higher income — which means paying more in taxes and being less likely to depend on the safety net — tends to make a voter more Republican. However, higher levels of education, which are correlated with income, tend to make voters more Democratic.

This is a fairly new development — as recently as two decades ago the correlation between education and partisanship went the other way. I would attribute this reversal to the changing nature of the G.O.P., which has become ever more anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the purposes of today’s post, however, this doesn’t matter. The point, instead, is that if we ask who in America is likely to have relatively high income either without having a college degree or without having had any postgraduate education — and therefore be predisposed to favor Republicans — the answer is clearly owners of successful small businesses.

Beyond that selection effect, a recent study of small-business partisanship by Malhotra, Margalit and Shi finds that “the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.” So small business owners supported Trump in the belief that he would get the government off their backs.

That’s not what happened. Instead, the second Trump administration has been marked by increased government-imposed burdens on small business. High tariffs have been a body blow to the many small businesses that rely, one way or another, on imported goods. Mass arrests of immigrants have also been highly disruptive for businesses, such as construction contractors, that depend on foreign-born workers.

You might be tempted to say that these are burdens on all businesses, not just small business, which is true. But large businesses have been better able to weather the Trump shock than small businesses, for at least three reasons.

First, big businesses are more likely than small businesses to have the resources needed to adapt to a suddenly changed business environment. Suppose, for example, that a business has been heavily reliant on inputs imported from China, which now face an average tariff rate of 37 percent. A large corporation can try to find alternative suppliers in nations that face much lower average tariffs, such as Vietnam and Mexico. A small business won’t have the staff or money to search for and develop these alternative sources of supply.

Second, big businesses are better able to game the system. For example, one unanticipated result of the Trump tariffs has been much more thorough exploitation of the rules of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, the agreement formerly known as NAFTA. It turns out that until this past spring, there were many goods produced in Mexico and Canada that were legally entitled to enter the U.S. duty free — but as long as tariffs were low, many importers chose not to pay the legal fees or fill out the paperwork needed to claim these exemptions. When Trump went on his tariff spree, the incentives changed, and many companies decided that the cost of the extra paperwork was worth it, after all:


Source https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/12/23/effective-tari
ff-rates-and-revenues-updated-december-23-2025

But big corporations were much better positioned than small businesses to bear the cost of certifying that the goods they import are “USMCA-compliant.”

Finally, under Trump the United States has moved rapidly toward crony capitalism, a situation in which businesses with strong political connections get favorable treatment. Under this system, big businesses can in effect buy themselves a privileged position. Small businesses can’t.

For example, Apple has so far dodged most of the negative impact of Trump’s tariffs. Over the summer Trump imposed punitive tariffs on India, which is where most iPhones sold in the United States are produced. But for some reason smartphones were exempted from Trump’s India tariffs. What’s the logic behind this exemption? Might it have something to do with the fact that Apple is helping to pay for the construction of the grotesque ballroom that Trump is building to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House?

All of these factors help explain the trends shown in the chart at the top of this post: 2025 was a difficult year for many businesses not benefiting from the AI boom, but it was especially hard on small business.

But the worst is yet to come — or, actually, is happening as you read this.

Small-business owners tend to be disdainful of government, yet in many cases they and their employees depend in crucial ways on government programs. In particular, almost half of the adults receiving health insurance via the government-run exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — either own or work for small businesses.

However, the cost of buying insurance on these exchanges has more than doubled on average since a year ago, because Trump and his party have refused to extend enhanced subsidies enacted under the Biden administration. As a result, many small business owners are in the process of finding out that they can no longer afford health insurance for their employees — or, in many cases, themselves.

In short, small business placed its faith in Trump but has been betrayed. But then, that’s what has happened to everyone who trusted Trump, from farmers to blue-collar workers — everyone, that is, except for the tech billionaires who have bought their way into his inner circle.

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 29, 2025 11:10 AM

SECOND

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


Crime Novella With A Crazy Ending — A Pardon From Trump!

December 29, 2025

https://andrewtobias.com/crime-novella-with-a-crazy-ending-pardon/

Erasing the Verdict: The Ongoing Shock of Trump’s Cocaine Kingpin Pardon

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-12-26/trump-s-pardon-of-h
onduras-former-president-rewrites-a-landmark-us-drug-case?srnd=homepage-americas

Yikes!!!!!

Of the pardoned former Honduran president’s brother, Tony Hernández:

Just eight days after Lopez helped convict Tony Hernández, a surveillance camera on the wall of the prison captured the following scene: López, in a white T-shirt and black shorts, was talking with the prison warden and a guard in a hallway. As they chatted, another guard wearing a black mask approached a side door with a key and opened it. The guard stepped aside to let six men burst into the hall. One pointed a submachine pistol at López and quickly fired at least a half-dozen shots at close range. As the trafficker lay facedown on the floor, clearly dead, the gunman fired what appears to be at least 20 more shots at López’s lifeless corpse, most of them in his head, painting the white cinderblock wall red. Another of the men dropped to the floor and began stabbing his corpse with a machete-like knife. Finally, the man began to saw at the bottoms of López’s legs, as if trying to remove them.

The story reads like a novella.

The absolute least of it:

[Former President Hernandez] continued to court Trump’s favor even after his brother’s guilty verdict. The following spring, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Food & Drug Administration publicly rebuked Trump’s claim that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medicine, could effectively treat the virus. Hernández seized an opportunity.

“Well, I never spoke to a scientist,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “but I will tell you this: I did speak with the president of Honduras, just a little while ago. I didn’t bring it up—he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine, and he said the results are just so incredible, with the hydroxychloroquine. Check with him. Call him. The president of Honduras. A really nice guy.”

As to the pardon (in tiny part):

Although the investigations into Hernández, as well as the conviction of his brother, happened under the first Trump administration, the family and their backers leaned into the idea that his prosecution was a Biden-Harris conspiracy. In June, Roger Stone on his podcast interviewed Shane Trejo, a conservative activist and leader of the Third Term Project, which aims to extend Trump’s presidency beyond the constitutional limit. A pardon, they agreed, could be a political masterstroke that could tank the political influence of Hernández’s leftist successor and delegitimize her entire party.

So much more to it, if you like crime novels. Just totally yikes.

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

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