Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, May 6, 2026 06:55
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VIEWED: 143482
PAGE 92 of 92

Sunday, May 3, 2026 6:08 PM

1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.

And... SPOILER ALERT:

You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.

Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 8:03 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

FUCK YOU.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

Judge tosses Laura Loomer’s defamation suit against Bill Maher

The conservative activist alleged that Maher defamed her with a joke suggesting she had an affair with President Donald Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/22/judge-tosses-laura-loomer-bil
l-maher-defamation-suit-00887992

Loomer, an influential figure in the MAGA movement, has used her platform since Trump returned to the White House to weed out administration officials she accuses of being insufficiently loyal to the president. She has targeted dozens of staffers across the White House and executive departments, many of whom have been swiftly fired or seen their nominations pulled.

Breaking: Laura Loomer Loses Bill Maher Lawsuit After Her Dad Said She Always "Bragged" About Giving Trump Blow Jobs. A federal judge, a deposition for the ages, an honest father and a roast beef cameo nobody saw coming.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-laura-loomer-loses-bill

This week, a federal judge in Florida — a Bill Clinton appointee, which is already a cinematic touch — granted summary judgment to Maher and HBO before the case could even reach a jury. Not “you might lose.” Not “this is shaky.” Summary judgment, which in lawyer-speak means “there is no universe where you win this, please stop.”

Then, of course, the bombshell: Her Dad said he might put her back into involuntary psych hold because the blow job stuff is probably true.

A tearful Jeff Loomer declined to say over the phone whether he was currently considering another involuntary psychiatric hold for his daughter, given her bizarre claim this week that she has been performing oral sex on President Trump, but did not rule it out.

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

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Monday, May 4, 2026 9:06 AM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S.

The Trump administration falsely claims that boat strikes target fentanyl and have halted 97 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S.

By Nick Turse | May 4, 2026

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/04/trump-boat-strikes-fentanyl-cocain
e-drug-supply/

The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.”

Fentanyl is generally produced in the United States or Mexico, Baumgartner said. “I have not seen any evidence that fentanyl has ever been smuggled from South America to the United States,” he told The Intercept. “Cartels would not smuggle fentanyl down to South America just to smuggle it back by boat.”

While bales of cocaine float in water, Baumgartner said, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities and would not be seen floating in the aftermath of an airstrike.

Fentanyl or not, Trump has also touted astounding decreases in drug smuggling due to the boat strikes. “Drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent,” Trump said at a January 29 White House briefing. Experts said that Trump’s claim is ridiculous, invented, or involves disingenuous numbers meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Baumgartner noted that even the Pentagon figures put the lie to Trump’s claim. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” he said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The word “deterrence” has become a popular Pentagon euphemism for the use of lethal strikes, in contrast to previous U.S. government efforts to marshal economic, diplomatic, and military means to convince adversaries to change their ways. “Deterrence has a signaling effect on narco-terrorists, and raises the risks with their movements,” Humire claimed. But last month, for example, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, including five in five days. “That shows that traffickers, even along that high seas route, are not being deterred,” said Isacson.

The amount of cocaine seized by U.S. authorities suggests the strikes have had little impact on the trade. “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” said Isacson. While data is limited, figures from Customs and Border Protection show that seizures at U.S. borders and along coasts have increased amid the Trump administration’s airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. “CBP’s cocaine seizures have actually gone slightly up since the boat strikes began. Cocaine seized at all U.S. borders in the seven months before the strikes began was 38,000 pounds. In the seven months since, it’s 44,000 pounds — 6,000 pounds more,” Isacson explained.

The Coast Guard recently announced “record-setting interdictions” of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific under Operation Pacific Viper, indicating that large quantities of the narcotic are still transiting through that maritime corridor. Since last August, that service has seized more than 215,000 pounds of cocaine as part of this operation, Coast Guard spokesperson Brandon Hillard told The Intercept. “Narco-terrorists continue to go to great lengths to traffic illicit narcotics within and out of the Western hemisphere,” he said, highlighting “the seizure of hundreds of tons of cocaine.”

The general stability of the drug’s wholesale price also suggests it remains widely available. “The Coast Guard recently seized 1.2 tons of cocaine and reported a wholesale value of $19.3 million. This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner explained of a seizure announced this month. “This report may be using old pricing information, but I would expect a significant spike in prices with even a 20 percent reduction in the cocaine flow.”

According to the drug-testing company Millennium Health, use of stimulants, including cocaine, is climbing sharply and was detected in urine samples at nearly twice the rate of fentanyl in 2025.

“A 97 percent reduction in cocaine flow would mean that cocaine was now extraordinarily rare in the United States,” said Baumgartner. “The price of cocaine would have skyrocketed. Addicts would be fighting each other over what little cocaine or crack they could find.”

Trump has also advanced absurd statistics about lives saved by attacks on boats. “When you see the boats being hit, those boats kill on average 25,000 people a boat,” Trump claimed. This echoed his previous assertion that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Experts say that there is no way of knowing how many lives are saved due to drug interception efforts, but that Trump’s claims are nonetheless untethered from reality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. By Trump’s math, the drugs on the 54 boats would have been responsible for 1,400,000 deaths — 20 times the number of overdose deaths in one year. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

While not as egregious as Trump’s claims, Humire also offered up overdose numbers that appeared calculated to deceive. “As early as September 2025, the Administration had also achieved a nearly 20% drop in deadly drug overdoses in the United States compared to the previous year,” said Humire, crediting Operation Southern Spear with a share of the success. Left unsaid is that the first boat strike occurred that September, meaning the strikes would have had little or no impact on the numbers. The Pentagon did not provide any details on the source of Humire’s figures.

“ There is no military solution.”

Experts say Humire’s statistics appear to be rhetorical sleight of hand, since Operation Southern Spear is not actually preventing the flow of fentanyl — the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Baumgartner called it “misleading” to link Operation Southern Spear to decreases in overall drug overdoses and drug flow because it “only impacts cocaine smuggling, not fentanyl or other drugs.”

Humire claimed Southern Spear and National Defense Areas on the U.S. Southern border “diminished the flow of fentanyl,” telling Congress it is “down 56% since the same period last year.” In actuality, CBP’s seizures of fentanyl at the U.S.–Mexico border have been declining since 2023. Halfway into fiscal year 2026, fentanyl seizures are almost exactly half of the total for 2025.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth also claims that the boat strikes have significantly impacted the drug trade. “Some top cartel drug-traffickers in the @SOUTHCOM AOR have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean,” he wrote in a February post on X. The Pentagon won’t name these “top” traffickers, failing to respond to repeated requests for information from The Intercept.

Lawmakers and other experts say that the Trump administration completely misconstrues the nature of the drug trade. “They have a fundamental misunderstanding that drug trafficking is a business. And that means there is no military solution,” Jacobs told The Intercept.

Tree, of the Institute for Policy Studies, echoed this. “They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem, as if there is a command structure of the global drug economy where the person at the top finally says, ‘We’ve had enough. Everyone, stop what you’re doing now. We surrender’ — as if a cartel boss could command users, growers, smugglers, money launderers, and dealers, to all give up. It doesn’t work that way,” he explained. “Even if you did find a case or two of someone deciding to get out of the business, there are an infinite number of replacements willing to step up because that’s where the money is. Smuggling is the business. There’s always going to be a Han Solo.”

“They’ve applied a war paradigm to an economic problem.”

The Trump administration’s killing of civilians on alleged drug boats contrasts with the administration’s ongoing embrace of drug traffickers, drug dealers, and certain cartels, as well as its cuts to drug enforcement efforts. Justice Department records show, for example, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6 percent since 2024. And more than 5,000 FBI and DEA agents have been reassigned from combating drug cartels to immigration enforcement, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump’s then-Attorney General Pam Bondi also scuttled the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces which allowed the department to coordinate investigations of cartels and transnational criminal networks. And last year, federal prosecutions for drug trafficking dropped to their lowest level in more than two decades.

To justify January’s U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump administration prosecutors charged him with numerous crimes, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy.” The Trump administration is now running the country via a puppet regime that includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who was indicted in the U.S. for drug trafficking, having “partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the United States,” according to the Justice Department.

Trump has also granted clemency to around 100 people accused of drug-related crimes, including kingpins. He gave, for example, a “full and unconditional” pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison after being convicted in 2024 for using his office to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked: “Why would we pardon this guy then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?”

On Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., questioned Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the boat attacks. “What legal justification could there possibly be that would allow the U.S. military to strike boats in international waters and kill the occupants of those boats without a showing of evidence that there’s narcotics on those boats?” he asked, before being met by a stream of doubletalk about the legality of the attacks. Unable to elicit a straight answer, Kaine responded: “I think there’s a profound mismatch between what is occurring and the underlying assumptions in the legal opinion.”

Military briefers have admitted to members of Congress that they cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute survivors of the boat strikes, leading the U.S. to repatriate, hand off, or leave injured victims to drown. Similarly, those killed — if they are involved in the drug trade — are hardly drug kingpins. An investigation by The Associated Press into the lives of nine of those killed in U.S. strikes found that while they had been smuggling drugs, they were not “narco-terrorists” or gang leaders but laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, two were low-level criminals, and one was a local crime boss. All were from a desperately poor area, and most were crewing such boats for the first or second time. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” said one government official of those killed.

“We don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

Asked about the disconnect between the Trump administration pardoning drug kingpins and killing low-level persons who may be associated with the trade, Tree said it was par for the course. “The punitive aspect of the drug war has never been about logical consistency,” he said, noting that tobacco will kill close to 500,000 Americans this year, six times the number of overdoses. “Does that mean Trump is going to drone strike the homes of tobacco executives in the U.S.? Can other countries target them since Trump lacks the political will? That would be absurd because we don’t use missiles to address a public health problem.”

“These are visceral knee-jerk responses designed to make politicians appear tough,” Tree said, “but being tough is not the same as being effective.”

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 7:00 AM

SECOND

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

The End of America’s Soft Power

The United States has given up on one of its core international strengths.

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

May 4, 2026

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/04/trump-soft-power-usa/?tpcc=recirc
_latest062921

One of the more striking features of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy—not the chosen ends, but its preferred means—is its absolute confidence in America’s hard power and its near-total disdain for what my late colleague Joseph Nye called “soft power.” Nye defined the latter as “the power of attraction,” as a nation’s ability to get others to do what it wanted because it possessed qualities that made others want to emulate it, associate with it, and follow its lead. States with a lot of hard power could compel others through force and intimidation or by offering aid or protection; states with an abundance of soft power enjoyed greater influence because others wanted to be like them, agreed with the principles they stood for, or viewed them as fashionable, successful, and even “hip.”

A good realist like me is hardly going to denigrate the importance of hard power; on the contrary, it’s hard to have lots of soft power without substantial hard power to back it up. But you can have plenty of hard power and little or no soft power, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia has shown. Ideally, a state would like to have a lot of both, because having a lot of soft power means others will be naturally inclined to do what you want and you won’t have to use your hard power very often. Nye believed America’s combination of hard and soft power gave it enormous advantages when dealing with the outside world, which is one of the reasons he was optimistic about America’s future and skeptical of those predicting its decline. Yet by the end of his long career, even he had begun to worry about what was happening to America’s global appeal.

Under Trump 2.0, the belief that hard power is all you need is abundantly apparent. The administration used the threat of tariffs to force trading partners into one-sided economic agreements, and it vows to continue the effort despite the Supreme Court decision that strikes them down. The administration has used military force in more than half a dozen countries and continues to kill alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, even when it doesn’t know who they are, cannot prove all of them are in fact engaged in narcotics trafficking, and admits that these actions will have little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs. President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused other world leaders of being weak, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t “have the cards” and should therefore cut a deal with Russia, and imposed a blockade on Cuba intended to further immiserate ordinary Cubans and eventually force its regime to surrender. Last but by no means least, it abandoned diplomacy and launched an unnecessary and unprovoked war against Iran, on the mistaken assumption that the Iranian regime would quickly collapse and yield a government more to our liking.

What is most striking about this fixation with hard power is how little effort is being made to disguise, legitimize, or justify its use. Most countries do nasty things on occasion, and great powers do so more than most, but they usually try to find ways to hide the mailed fist in a velvet glove of normative justification. Not so the Trump administration, which seems positively gleeful whenever it is able to violate some established norm and inflict some pain. When the president threatens to eradicate Iranian civilization, or when the secretary of defense dismisses international law and boasts that U.S. troops will show opponents “no quarter” (which would constitute a war crime), it is clear their goal is to intimidate rather than persuade, to compel rather than attract. Their motto, it seems, is: “Being the strongest means never having to say you’re sorry.”

This veneration of hard power has been accompanied by systematic efforts to undermine the institutions and policies that once made the United States more attractive to others. The U.S. Agency for International Development was abruptly dismantled by Elon Musk and the DOGE effort, endangering the lives of millions of people around the world and making the United States look arbitrary and indifferent. The administration tried to shut down the Voice of America broadcast network, an effort that was blocked in court and by a rare moment of congressional opposition. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has withdrawn the United States from more than 60 international organizations, allowed dozens of diplomatic posts to sit empty, and left the U.S. unrepresented at key international summit meetings. Violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the killing of innocent protesters have exposed an ugly side of America to the rest of the world, and a sustained assault on higher education—previously one of the most visible symbols of American prestige and soft power—has made U.S. colleges and universities less attractive destinations for foreign students. Not only do these actions hit academia’s bottom line (which may be the point), it also means fewer foreign students will be educated in the United States, an experience that usually makes them even more “pro-America” than when they arrived. Put these things together, and you can understand why China’s image around the world is rising while America’s is falling.

I’m hardly the first person to notice the administration’s systemic assault on America’s soft-power advantage; what’s puzzling is why administration officials don’t recognize what’s happening. Do they not understand that overreliance on hard power—and treating the use of military force to hurt other countries not as a rare and regrettable necessity but as an act to be celebrated—is going to make other countries less willing to work with an erratic, vengeful, and potentially threatening America? Haven’t they ever heard the old adage that “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”?

Here’s what I think is going on.

First, from the president on down, the administration’s weltanschauung divides the world into the strong (“winners”) and the weak (“losers”) and views any sort of compromise with weaker parties as a failure. Hence the tendency to preen and posture and adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude toward even the mildest criticism or opposition, not to mention the mindless attacks on staunchly pro-American countries such as Canada or Denmark. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s macho muscle-flexing about the “warrior ethos” and the joys of “lethality,” and White House advisor Stephen Miller’s declaration that the “iron laws” of history justified dominance by the strong, are perhaps the most obvious examples of this perspective, but they are hardly alone in believing that powerful actors can just tell others what to do and expect them to comply. Remember: They were appointed by a president who bragged that being a star made it OK to molest women. In this (im)moral universe, rules are for other people.

Second, although Trump and his followers claim to be intensely patriotic, they don’t seem to like the country they are trying to lead. Consider the MAGA slogan: If you believe it’s necessary to make America great again, you must not think it’s great today. For all their symbolic flag waving, it’s remarkable how few things Trump and his minions like or admire about this country. They don’t like most of the media; they despise most popular entertainers; they loathe Democrats (who are a larger share of the population than Republicans); they don’t like checks and balances or the rule of law; they are suspicious of citizens who weren’t born here (along with some who were); they have little respect for science and think universities are the enemy; and they remain convinced that a shadowy “deep state” still infects the military, the diplomatic corps, and a lot of government agencies. Trump doesn’t even like the White House and wants to remake it into a gaudy imperial monument. Because they believe America is in terrible shape, they may find it hard to imagine that the country’s enduring features might be attractive to others.

Third, Trump and his followers like quick fixes that they can portray as real achievements (e.g., the administration’s bogus peace agreements, interim trade deals, etc.) while eschewing patient, long-term efforts to win support overseas. Trump and company are more interested in cutting deals with other leaders than in nurturing positive ties between peoples, where the benefits accrue gradually and may not be fully realized until after they’ve left office. Who cares about winning over the next generation of foreign students when you will be out of office after 2028?

If this was your world view, then you would also discount the importance of soft power and lean on hard power instead. But Americans should know better. Some of the greatest successes in U.S. foreign-policy history came from working constructively and generously with others—including some former adversaries—and by working to correct some of the less savory aspects of our own society in order to burnish our global image. Examples include the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Civil Rights Movement, the measured promotion of trade liberalization, and the hard-nosed but ultimately peaceful negotiations that ended the Cold War and reunified Germany. By contrast, some of America’s biggest foreign-policy failures (e.g., Vietnam, the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ouster of Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, or the current debacle in Iran) came from thinking that sufficient hard power would guarantee success.

The United States still has many appealing qualities, and foreign governments and citizens have been able to distinguish between America as a country and an ideal and the actions of its worst leaders. But if American political life continues to become coarser and more corrupt, and its hard power is repeatedly misused while its soft power atrophies, keeping those two things separate is going to be a lot more difficult.

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 8:07 AM

SECOND

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

If you took all the undocumented people who have illegally voted since 1988, and multiplied it by all of the transgender athletes that played in any college sport in the year 2025, your total would still be 37,720 less than the number of times Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files.

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

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 9:02 AM

SECOND

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

Republicans Make Jaw-Dropping $1 Billion Demand for Trump’s Ballroom

The president has insisted his vanity project would be funded by wealthy donors.

By Ewan Palmer | May 5 2026

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-make-jaw-dropping-1b-demand-
for-donald-trumps-ballroom/

Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion of taxpayer money to help fund “security adjustments and upgrades” linked to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.

The proposal was outlined in a reconciliation package focusing on federal law enforcement and border security spending, which was released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday.

The legislation also allows for part of the $1 billion package to be used for security upgrades for the East Wing Modernization Project—also known as Trump’s ballroom project—including “above-ground and below-ground security features.”

The push arrives as Trump and MAGA figures have desperately demanded that the ballroom be allowed to go ahead in the wake of the assassination attempt against the president at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25.

The package does include the caveat that none of the requested funds may be used for “non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project.”

The proposal outlining how to allocate funds to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) through 2029 includes more than $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and nearly $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection, including funding for training and hiring staff.

Trump has suggested that the 90,000-square-foot room—which the East Wing of the White House was demolished to make way for—is necessary, as it would provide greater security.

The 79-year-old has insisted that the project, previously estimated to cost $400 million, will be funded by private donors. The White House also indicated in a July 2025 statement that the Secret Service would provide any “necessary security enhancements and modifications” needed for the ballroom to be used by the president for state dinners, galas, and other glitzy events.

A federal judge had ordered that construction of the ballroom be halted unless it receives approval from Congress, as requested in a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Last month, a U.S. appeals court allowed construction to resume on the ballroom pending the conclusion of the legal challenge.

Trump has bemoaned that the lawsuit forced him to reveal his plans to build a large military base underneath his White House ballroom.

“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in late March while holding up large placards detailing how the completed ballroom might look.

“The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under the military, including from drones, and including from any other thing.”

In a statement while releasing the reconciliation bill, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backward by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

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

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Wednesday, May 6, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

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

MAGA Will Kill Many Americans
Greed, willful ignorance and mortality
Paul Krugman
May 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-kill-many-americans

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.

In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.

Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:

What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.

You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:

I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.

What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.

Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic. The chart at the top of this post comes from the redoubtable Charles Gaba, who carefully tracked the association at the county level between political orientation and vaccination, and — because the vaccines worked when people were willing to get them — between politics and death rates. Deaths per capita in America’s reddest counties were almost three times as high as in our bluest counties. Also notice, in the chart comparing America with France, the big drop in US life expectancy during Covid, which had a lot to do with vaccine rejection.

Why is right-wing politics so deadly? Greed and willful ignorance.

The right’s opposition to providing healthcare obviously has a lot to do with greed, with wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.

Greed is also an important factor in the attack on medical science. The best-known example of scientific disinformation promoted by corporate interests is the fossil-fuel-financed attack on climate science, but the template for this attack was the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry’s “merchants of doubt” to discredit evidence that smoking is harmful to your health. The straight line from this campaign to the relaxation of rules on flavored vapes is obvious.

The role of greed in the anti-vaccine movement may be less obvious, but the fact is that quack medicine is big business. Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated.

Which is not to discount the role of willful ignorance driven by ideology. The modern U.S. right is, to a large extent, an alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalists — and the latter are deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.

Now that this alliance is in power, we’re seeing the forces that keep U.S. life expectancy far below that in other rich countries, that cause Texans to die younger than residents of Massachusetts, go into overdrive at a national level.

The consequences will be grim.

We’re already seeing a resurgence of measles as a result of lower vaccination rates. Other infectious diseases will follow. And when — not if — we face another pandemic, there’s every reason to fear the worst.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are set to lose health insurance this year, and millions more as drastic Medicaid cuts kick in. Reproducing a chart from my last primer:

America, then, is on track to experience a large rise in unnecessary deaths. But at least we’ll have mango-flavored vapes.

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

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