REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, June 8, 2026 07:23
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PAGE 93 of 93

Friday, May 29, 2026 8:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."

"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."

Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.

"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."

https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/

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


Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, May 29, 2026 9:34 AM

SECOND

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


A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.

While the historical circumstances and issues are different today, the house is once again divided against itself. The nation is at a critical crossroads and faces a similar dilemma: can the social, cultural, and political chasm that emerged between Red and Blue America be repaired? Can the Union be saved or will the country continue to separate politically and ideologically, if not geographically, into two sharply opposed societies whose core values, beliefs, and identities are incommensurate and irreconcilable? Is the U.S. entering a prolonged period of social upheaval and political conflict, a kind of cold civil war, between and within Red and Blue states that leaves the country increasingly fragmented and politically dysfunctional?

While many sources contributed to this division, including the rise of neoliberalism and extreme income and wealth inequality, social media algorithms that produce incendiary content designed to addict users, and a far-right media ecosystem that disseminates socially corrosive and divisive propaganda, the primary issue driving national politics in the U.S. today is demographic: the racial restructuring of U.S. society, the browning of America.

This process began with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924 that significantly reduced immigration and heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe to ensure the continued dominance of the white majority.

In the last few decades, Republican Party politics has largely been aimed at cutting taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and reversing this demographic trend, at re-establishing racial and gender hierarchies, in rolling back the civil rights gains of Black Americans and other minorities over the past half century. In addition to an agenda of deregulation and privatization, the party has sought to eliminate the social progress achieved by New Deal and Great Society programs and restore the racial, gender, and class relations of an idealized and fictionalized past.

To achieve this, Trump and his MAGA allies have exploited ambiguous legislation and anti-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution. The demographic and geographic distribution of the electorate gives the Republican Party a structural advantage because seats in the U.S. Senate are apportioned equally among the states, regardless of population. In this way, smaller and less populated states, which are typically more rural and conservative, are disproportionately represented. This advantage is then transferred to presidential elections through the Electoral College, so that California’s nearly 40 million residents have the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming’s nearly 600 thousand.

Other anti-majoritarian and undemocratic features of the U.S. political system include the practice of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering, which divides voters into state legislative and congressional districts that favor one political party, the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate that enables a minority of senators to exercise veto power over most legislation, and the Supreme Court, which currently has three justices who were nominated by a president (Trump) who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by narrow margins by Republican senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population.

Majoritarian democracy was further eroded by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which gutted section five of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating the requirement that states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws obtain preclearance by federal courts before making changes in voting laws, and by weakening section two of the Act in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which made it harder to challenge racially discriminatory effects of voting laws.

More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court effectively nullified the enforcement provision of section two of this landmark civil rights legislation by requiring that opponents of district maps that deny Black voters a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice must prove intentional discrimination. The court ruled that all racial gerrymanders, even those that were created to remedy a long history of racial discrimination, are unconstitutional. In doing so, it eliminated majority-minority districts, which will significantly reduce the number of seats in the House held by Black and other minority representatives. With this catastrophic decision, the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, the decades-long struggle of Black Americans and others to create a multiracial democracy, has been demolished.

The hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act opened the way for the passage of a wave of voter suppression laws by Republican-dominated state legislatures after the 2020 presidential election, which were passed mostly on party-line votes by Republican majorities that were themselves elected on the basis of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering.

In a further erosion of democracy by a rouge Supreme Court that is untethered to the law or precedent and invents legal doctrines, the Court decided in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that states are free to engage in extreme partisan gerrymandering, even if it produces district maps that diminish the voting power of Black Americans or other minority groups. This decision gave a green light to use partisan gerrymandering as a cover for racial gerrymanders that dilute the voting power of minority groups. Republicans can simply claim they were drawing districts to achieve maximum partisan advantage, which just happened to pack minority voters into the fewest number of districts or break up concentrations of minority voters into others.

In the wake of these Supreme Court decisions a number of Southern states rushed to eliminate majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts in the midst of an unprecedented mid-term redistricting process, initiated by Trump, in which extreme partisan gerrymanders will give the Republican Party a structural advantage in the House. This means that Democrats will likely need to win the combined national popular vote by about four percentage points to win a slight majority, perhaps by more if the political winds shift before the midterm elections. In this way, as Jamelle Bouie argues, the House may come to resemble the Electoral College, in which the party that wins a slight majority in winner-take-all elections in the states can “rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely.”

Electoral democracy was dealt another blow by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which ruled that individuals can spend unlimited funds “on their own political campaigns or on independent expenditures on behalf of other politicians they hoped to elect.” Then, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 the Court enabled the rise of super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals on political advertising and communications. With these decisions, the Court opened the floodgates for massive corruption in elections, unleashing a tsunami of donations from wealthy individuals and dark money organizations, in which donors remain anonymous, into the bloodstream of electoral politics. The result is that large corporations and billionaire oligarchs have been given a disproportionate amount of power to influence elections in the U.S.

The exploitation of these anti-majoritarian aspects of the U.S. Constitution and political system by Trump and a supine Republican Party, aided and abetted by a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court majority with a far-right ideological agenda, has contributed significantly to fostering a loss of faith in U.S. elections and the capacity of liberal constitutional democracy to deliver stability, security, and prosperity.

The reality is that majoritarian democracy no longer works for the Republican Party, whose core constituency is overwhelmingly white, male, rural, and evangelical, although suburban dwellers accounted for almost half of all Trump voters in 2024. The Republican Party rejected the recommendations of the autopsy it conducted after losing the 2012 presidential election, which urged the party to moderate its platform and expand its shrinking base of white voters by becoming more diverse and inclusive. Party leaders failed to heed the call for change and chose instead to double-down on its core constituency, which means that Republicans can only win national elections by making it increasingly difficult for minority or “counterfeit” voters, as opposed to white or “real” Americans, from casting what Republicans consider “fraudulent and illegitimate” votes.

The legislative gridlock imposed by the Republican Party on successive Democratic administrations (Republicans are only concerned about budget deficits when Democrats control the White House), ostensibly began in 1994 with the Gingrich-led Republican revolution and was continued by Senator Mitch McConnell and others, whose confrontational and unyielding politics sought to undermine Obama’s ability to govern. As Majority Leader McConnell sought to diminish Obama’s legacy by refusing to hold hearings on his nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016, effectively stealing a seat from the Democrats. Their objective has been to politically weaken the Democratic Party and prevent it from meaningfully addressing pressing social and economic issues, which helped open up a political space in which an authoritarian and neo-fascist movement is now challenging the liberal democratic constitutional order.

In autocratic regimes things go from bad to worse in stages, they do not happen suddenly and all at once. The proverbial frog in the pot of water does not realize it’s boiling until it’s too late. As the water gets incrementally hotter, people adapt to the warmer temperature, to the latest outrage or atrocity, which sets the stage for the next incremental increase in heat, to which they also adapt. Each time they adapt they normalize a higher level of heat, of tolerance for state violence and lawlessness, until the autocratic regime consolidates its power and it is too late to jump out of the pot of boiling water. The hot water in America is reaching the boiling point.

There are a number of strategies to address these anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution and political system. They include the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among states and Washington, D.C. to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote in presidential elections. Virginia recently joined the compact, increasing the number of electoral votes by 13 to 222, with 270 needed to reach a majority. Once it becomes operative, presidents will be elected on the basis of the national popular vote and the Electoral College will, in effect, be null and void.

Other strategies to democratize the political system include establishing fusion voting systems that allow candidates to be endorsed by more than one party, rank choice voting, in which voters rank their choices, making it more likely that less well-known or financed candidates will win elections, multi-member congressional districts so that voters who support smaller parties are represented in Congress, term limits for politicians, and abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

Congress can pass legislation to democratize the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices, limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the Court and its ability to adjudicate certain kinds of cases or legal issues, such as appeals to voting rights bills, establishing term limits with staggered terms so that every president has an opportunity to nominate justices, and limiting the Court’s ability to use the “shadow docket” to decide cases, which does not require that cases be argued before the Court or that the Court state its legal reasoning for the decision.

While amending the U.S. Constitution is the most direct and effective way of democratizing the political system, it is also subject to the will of a small minority. Slightly more than one-third of the House and Senate, or thirteen states, can prevent an amendment from being proposed and ratified. While state legislatures can mandate that Congress call a constitutional convention to propose amendments, this route has never been taken and is equally onerous. The reality is that amending the Constitution to democratize the political system in such a deeply polarized context has become virtually impossible.

Where does this leave us? While these strategies can open up possibilities for change, they do not necessarily lead to the kind of structural change that is desperately needed to democratize the political order. Structural reform will require a major party realignment, a reconfiguration of the national electorate, and the creation of a politically stable coalition that is capable of passing major legislation and proposing amendments to the Constitution, one that cannot be swept away in the next election cycle. By definition, this is a long-term project that will likely take many years to accomplish but must nonetheless be attempted since the alternative is the increasing consolidation of authoritarianism and neo-fascism in America.

Some political analysts argue that the United States is already far along the path to autocracy, that a long period of democratic backsliding has opened the door to an autocratic takeover of the country. Barbara Walter, a professor at UC San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, participated in a CIA taskforce that examined factors that can lead to civil war. Based on the findings, she argues that “the most important indicator of a growing risk of instability, political violence, and civil war is a weak and rapidly declining democracy” that is moving quickly toward autocracy. Another key risk factor is when “citizens of a democracy choose political parties on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity rather than ideology,” when they support a party based on identity “rather than because they are liberal or conservative.”

Both of these risk factors are present in the U.S. today. The nation is experiencing an unprecedented deterioration of democracy in which the Republican Party has become the overwhelming choice of white voters, especially white evangelicals.

If Trump succeeds in creating a nearly 1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” slush fund to hand out to his supporters in paramilitary militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, and to other January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers, the probability of political violence in the near term will increase significantly.

Based on these findings, Walter argues that the U.S. is “solidly in the autocracy zone,” the space between a declining democracy and an autocracy, and is at a high risk for political violence and instability in the short-term. The taskforce’s findings also suggest that the trigger for civil war tends to be contested elections “that people don’t trust, that are close, and have a winner-take-all zero-sum feeling to them.” That is, a situation in which people feel that “there might never be another election again and you might permanently be shut out of power.”

This is clearly the case regarding the 2026 midterm elections. Given the increasingly deranged and fascistic rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA allies, their efforts to suppress and disenfranchise potential Democratic voters, and their transparent plans to disrupt and, if necessary, steal the election, many Democrats are alarmed and fear that this may be the last free and fair election for the foreseeable future, that Republicans will refuse to give up power if they lose and will further consolidate their control of the federal government and political system. When this perception leads more moderate voters to give up on playing by the rules of electoral democracy, Walter warns, “bad things happen.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political science professors at Harvard and co-authors of How Democracies Die, argue that “the U.S. has descended” into what they call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which “elections are held, but the ruling party abuses its power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favor.” That is, a situation in which a country is no longer a full democracy nor an autocracy, but is in a kind of liminal political space that Walter calls the “autocracy zone” in which a declining democracy is rapidly moving toward an Orbán-like illiberal democracy, to a ruling one party dictatorship.

There is no going home again. We cannot return to the past to restore what existed before Trump severely damaged or destroyed large parts of the federal government, politicized the rule of law, and trampled on the separation of powers. The growing divide between Red and Blue America is not one of policy differences, or of different conceptions of the proper size and role of government, but of fundamentally opposed views about the value and desirability of liberal constitutional democracy, of a multicultural and multiethnic America.

What, then, are the prospects for making the structural changes needed to democratize the political order? The short answer is that we have a long road ahead to get to where we need to go to reinvent and restructure the political system, but history shows that it is possible, as demonstrated by the recent election in Hungary in which Viktor Orbán, the icon of the American far-right, and his Fidesz party were soundly defeated, despite being in power for 16 years and controlling much of the Hungarian media and economy. History tells us that the seemingly impossible is sometimes possible, that Nelson Mandela can become president of South Africa and that the former Soviet Union can disintegrate, can collapse like a house of cards. The future is unknown and unknowable, whatever the historical patterns and trends may indicate.

In the meantime, pro-democracy forces must turn out in large enough numbers that Republican efforts to barricade themselves behind a raft on voter suppression laws and tactics, and extreme racial and partisan gerrymanders, fails to win elections. If and when Republicans lose and try to steal the midterm elections through baseless claims of voter fraud and meritless court challenges, by strongarming state legislators to delay or reject the results or declaring an emergency in which the federal government seizes voting machines or takes over state-administered elections, that the pushback is so strong and pervasive that they are forced to accept the will of the voters.

As we have seen, the problem is not just Trump, but his enablers in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court who refuse to hold him accountable for his crimes and lawlessness or put any meaningful limits on his abuse of executive power, who have willfully dismantled democracy for personal and partisan advantage. The structural impediments to defeating the MAGA movement and expanding democracy are significant and will require playing the long-game of continuously building grassroots electoral power at all levels of government around a credible and compelling vision of change that expands democracy and makes people’s desire for a dignified life, for economic security and an equal opportunity to thrive, a realistic possibility.

Supporters of multiracial democracy need to approach the future clear-eyed and with resolve, but also with humility, with the understanding that we do not always know what we think we know, that we are participants in making history but, as Marx said, we do not make it under circumstances we choose, or in ways we can predict and anticipate. The future prospects for American democracy may well be dire, as many of the key elements of fascism are already present, but we cannot know that in advance. Americans are always looking to the future. While we need to prepare for the worst, we should not act as if we know, with absolute certainty, which way the political winds will be blowing over the horizon.

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

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 5:42 AM

SECOND

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


Trump clears way for companies to dodge taxes in havens like Malta, Bermuda, and Cyprus

By Jesse Drucker and Dylan Freedman
May 29, 2026

The New York Times reports:

A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.

A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.

Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led dozens of countries to impose a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.

American Express avoided paying $423 million in taxes last year using the island of Jersey. PayPal trimmed its taxes by nearly half during 2025 thanks to its units in Singapore. Stanley Black & Decker cut its bill by $27 million — nearly one-third — using the island of Cyprus.

A favorite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show.

Companies making similar moves spanned nearly every sector of the economy: Walmart and Uber; Mastercard and Pepsi; Crocs and Merck; Honeywell and Cigna. To put the $40 billion in taxes they avoided in perspective, it would be enough to triple the annual budget of the Federal Aviation Administration or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [Continue reading…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/economy/offshore-tax-haven
s-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mFA.Euhg.uOz6XnAdIugP

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

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Or. If we're going to be honest about it...

This has been happening to Americans no matter who was in office since before I was fucking born.

You're only reporting on it now because you hate the guy running the show.



Take all your hypocrisy and bounce on it, faggot.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, May 30, 2026 12:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html

On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.


John is writing about the Death of the Democratic Party.

He's not wrong. He's just a year and a half late with that prediction is all.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


How Do We Know the China Summit Was a Failure? Because Trump Did It.

Everything he does on the world stage is disastrous, and the U.S. is reviled globally. How much longer will some idiots believe this “Art of the Deal” garbage?

Michael Tomasky / May 15, 2026 / 12:21 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/210522/china-summit-failure-iran-jinping

Donald Trump says China agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing. He crowed about it on Fox News Thursday night. But funny thing: A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked specifically about the jet deal after Trump spoke, and he said nothing about any such agreement. Wanna take bets on whether it actually happened?

Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.

And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.

• Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.

• Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.

• The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.

• Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?

• How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?

• U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”

• And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world could face hunger or even starvation because of the global fertilizer shortage.

All the above adds up to this rather grim reality, contained in a survey conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundations and unveiled last week. The United States ranked 128th in how it is viewed by survey respondents across 85 countries. We netted out at -16. That’s behind Russia, Syria, and Myanmar, to name a few notables. But hey, we’re ahead of Iran! By a point.

Trump can fool himself, if he wants to, that Xi Jinping was talking about the Biden years when he referred to America’s decline and the suddenly famous “Thucydides Trap.” But everyone knows the truth. He was talking about the United States in general, under both parties—a country that is by now pretty much owned lock, stock, and barrel by a handful of greedy Robber Barons whom the GOP worships and the Democrats haven’t had the stones to stop.

And he was talking about the United States under Trump specifically. Xi may be a ruthlessly immoral tyrant. But one thing he isn’t is dumb. He sees very clearly what the United States is doing to itself, having reelected a low-I.Q. kleptocrat, adjudicated sex offender, and psychologically damaged sociopath who spends the wee hours firing off batshit tweets and obsessing about a ballroom the way the Sun King did over Versailles. That man, not Joe Biden, is why China now tops the United States in global approval ratings.

The United States always led China in those kinds of polls because at the end of the day we could say well, at least we’re a democracy. The way things are going, we’re not even going to be able to say that soon. But hey, he’s a great dealmaker, right?

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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 6:53 AM

SECOND

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


The Real—and Deeply Corrupt—Reason Trump Is After E. Jean Carroll

Actually, it’s not reason, singular. It’s reasons, plural. And there are 88.3 million of them.

Michael Tomasky / May 29, 2026 / 11:04 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/211110/trump-e-jean-carroll-justice-depar
tment-corrupt

CNN originally reported late in the day Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll.

This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.

It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.

That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding,” the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)

If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for “defendant-appellant”: Todd Blanche.

This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.

Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.

So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.

Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. And indeed, he is said to have “recused” himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago.

But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions).

GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not.

What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: “In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him.” So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial.

That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and “his current lawyers” are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, “If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story.”

So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. The ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. The new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. The plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week.

I pondered writing about each of those. I chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory. It can, and will, get worse.

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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 2:43 PM

SECOND

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


Meet the Press | May 31, 2026

Mike Pence says 2nd Trump term ‘departed’ from ‘conservative agenda’: Full interview

Former Vice President Mike Pence tells Meet the Press he believes the “populist right” is pushing President Trump away from the conservative agenda.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/mike-pence-says-2nd-trump
-term-departed-from-conservative-agenda-full-interview-264240709752



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

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Sunday, May 31, 2026 5:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 1, 2026 7:34 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:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You have no desire to pay income taxes. Nor does Trump:

Was Trump illegally an author of the tax agreement giving him and his family immunity from audits?

May 31, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-deal.
html

The New York Times reports:

The tax immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million.

That fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected — starting in about 2010. He justified the refund by declaring huge business losses, including on his tower in Chicago.

Early in Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the matter was put on hold, but it came back to life before he left office.

More recently, the company had entered settlement talks with the agency, laying the groundwork for a potential resolution, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Now, it seemed, the audit would vanish.

Acting as a cheerleader for the overall plan, including the tax deal, was Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s top outside legal adviser who has been close to the president for about a decade, both when he was in and out of office.

Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving the proposals forward, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, discussing the issue with Mr. Trump and circulating drafts of the tax agreement to Trump advisers.

While the origins of the tax maneuver remain somewhat obscure, the Justice Department began to assess the proposal about a week before Judge William’s May 20 deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the questions raised was whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.

The tax proposal did not end up appearing in the initial document that declared the lawsuit resolved and described the details of the compensation fund. That document was signed by the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Stanley Woodward Jr., who had worked with Mr. Blanche on Mr. Trump’s defense team and represented several of the president’s close aides in various investigations.

In a curious twist, the tax addendum was posted, without fanfare, on the Justice Department’s website one day after the terms of the main agreement were released. It was a murky piece of writing, full of long sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and the Trumpian use of words in capital letters. Only Mr. Blanche, and no one from the I.R.S., signed it.

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

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Monday, June 1, 2026 8:37 AM

SECOND

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


Pogroms, American Style

Paul Krugman / Jun 1, 2026 at 7:20 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pogroms-american-style

There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.

If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.

To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”

As the article explains,

For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.

According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,

has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee

So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:

Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.

So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?

Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.

We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.

Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.

According to one detainee, a guard told him that

It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.

Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurate description of what’s happening.

And the campaign of harassment and terror against immigrants is working. ICE doesn’t have to be able to find and arrest every immigrant to make life in the United States impossible to endure, just as Iran doesn’t have to be able to target every oil tanker to make passage of the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to try. Net immigration into the United States has probably turned negative — that is, more people are leaving the country than entering.

The Trump administration is pleased. In March it issued a press release hailing Census estimates that show plunging net immigration across U.S. metro areas.

There were two notable features of the release’s triumphalism. First, it hailed falling immigration in general — nothing about distinguishing between legal and illegal entry to the United States. Second, it said nothing — nothing at all — about why falling immigration should be considered a good thing.

The truth is that none of the claims made by anti-immigration hardliners about the benefits of driving the foreign-born away has survived contact with reality.

The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began:

And the idea that immigrants are, as a group, especially crime-prone, has been extensively debunked. Notably, cities like New York that have huge immigrant populations also have very low crime rates by historical standards.

It’s important to realize that the pogroms, aside from objectively failing to help native-born Americans, aren’t popular. Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration, which was positive when he took office, is now deep in negative territory.

And the American people are, in general, much more benign in their views about immigrants than the likes of Stephen Miller. On one side, we have the Trump administration trying to deny child care to children of all immigrants. On the other, according to Gallup, 78 percent of adults believe that people who immigrated illegally should nonetheless have a chance to become U.S. citizens — and 85 percent support offering that chance to children brought in illegally by their parents.

So what is all of this about? A lot of it is racism. The Trump administration has essentially ended refugee admissions to the United States, with only one exception, for whom refugees quotas have been hugely expanded and backed by federal aid to immigrants: white South Africans. Need we say more?

And one final observation: The atrocities being perpetrated by ICE — atrocities that are almost surely far bigger and worse than we know about — are in part instrumental, a way to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. But is there any real doubt that mistreating and terrorizing people, especially people of color, is for some MAGA types a goal in itself — something they always wanted license to do?

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a justly famous essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. And what does it say about us as a nation if we accept this? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-p
oint/572104/

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 8:41 AM

SECOND

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


Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?

As his signature efforts falter, the president is pleading with his critics to pipe down and pay less attention.

By David A. Graham | June 1, 2026, 5:59 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-iran-kennedy-cen
ter-weaponization-fund/687395/

For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.

“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”

The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.

Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.

The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.

Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.

Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.

Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the center—though, as my colleague Janay Kingsberry reports, it’s not clear what is left to stay open, and Trump is threatening to walk away from it altogether.

Trump’s attempts to secure a $1.8 billion fund from the Treasury for payouts to his political pals, to redress supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, may be going even worse. To make that happen (and to avoid a judge blocking it), Trump aides hastily engineered a deal that sidelined government lawyers and took some advisers by surprise. Now it’s facing blowback from Congress and doubts from inside the White House, and two judges on Friday issued rulings calling the fund into question. Axios reported this afternoon that according to two senior administration officials, the White House intends to drop its plans for the fund entirely.

That brings us back to Iran, where few indications forecast success. The White House teased and then pulled back deals several times in the past few weeks. Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday that he promised would result in a “final determination” on Iran, but it ended without a resolution and seems to have been totally overtaken by events. In an interview with his own daughter-in-law Lara on Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that “we’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that.” They surely would, because Trump has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed most Iranian military capacity. Trump said in the same interview that if he didn’t get a good deal, he’d “finish the job” with military might.

Trump can’t get his talking points straight now. This afternoon, the president told CNBC’s Eamon Javers that he didn’t care whether talks were over, saying, “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time.” Not long after, he posted that “talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Today’s hostilities could be a sign of the larger conflict that Trump threatened, or just more evidence of how tenuous the supposed cease-fire in place is. Either way, the fact that so many big initiatives are heading in inauspicious directions explains why Trump doesn’t want people paying too much attention—and doesn’t offer a lot of reasons for anyone to relax and take his assurances that everything will work out fine.

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 5:00 PM

SECOND

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


Two Senators Just Blew Up Trump’s Boat-Strike Justifications

Sens. Kaine and Paul say that the military’s targeting criteria don’t include the presence of drugs or arms.

By John Haltiwanger | June 2, 2026, 4:05 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/02/kaine-paul-rubio-trump-drug-boat-
strike-justification-latin-america/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

For months, the Trump administration has justified carrying out lethal military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific by asserting that the United States is targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists” transporting illicit drugs that kill Americans. But two U.S. senators say that, according to classified briefings they’ve received, the U.S. military doesn’t require a boat to have drugs or weapons on board to be targeted in a deadly strike.

It’s a stunning revelation that, if true, raises huge new questions about the administration’s already controversial campaign and could undermine the White House’s public rationale for the deadly strikes.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Republican Sen. Rand Paul made the claims during a Tuesday Senate hearing where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying. During his questioning of Rubio, Kaine said that he knows what the administration’s targeting criteria for the boat strikes are because of briefings he’s attended but that he could not publicly share that information because it’s classified. However, he said that he didn’t think he was prohibited from sharing what’s not included in the criteria.

“Here’s one that’s not so obvious, and that surprised me,” Kaine said. “There’s evidence of narcotics on the boat—that is not a targeting criteria.”

Kaine, who said there are “three elements” to the targeting criteria but did not offer specifics, said this struck him as “odd” given the Trump administration “always announced this is against narcotraffickers, we’ve attacked narcotraffickers.”

Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, told Kaine that he was not involved in conversations on the targeting criteria because “those are largely legal decisions.”

“Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,” Rubio said. “There have been strikes that they’ve walked away from, because it doesn’t meet the criteria, or because there’s doubt.”

Kaine did not dispute that the strikes met the targeting criteria, but he repeatedly emphasized how notable it was that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria.” He then encouraged his colleagues to “get the same briefing I’ve got, take a look at the strike files, you’ll be as surprised as I am.”

The fact that evidence of the presence of narcotics is not listed “is very contradictory to the administration’s public messaging and the way that they have framed Operation Southern Spear,” said a Senate source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.

The White House, Defense Department, and Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kaine has been among the most vocal critics of the strikes on alleged drug boats, among other military actions taken by U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term, and he has decried them as illegal. The strikes have not been authorized by Congress. But congressional lawmakers have so far failed in various efforts to prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes, which are also linked to the military operation in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Top legal experts have also contended that the strikes violate both domestic and international law and that drug trafficking does not constitute grounds for the use of lethal military force. Counterterrorism experts have also underscored that drug traffickers, while dangerous, should not be considered terrorists.

The Trump administration has not provided concrete evidence to back up its public justifications for the strikes, which have killed over 200 people since the campaign began in September, and questions have been raised by congressional lawmakers over whether the boats targeted actually belonged to drug cartels. In a sign that the Trump administration is aware it’s operating in legally dubious territory, the OLC in a classified memo last summer said that U.S. troops involved in the lethal strikes would not be exposed to prosecution in the future.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sen. Rand Paul—another vocal critic of the strikes on the alleged drug boats—also brought up the targeting criteria. “It’s interesting that the three secret criteria we’re using to blow up the boats doesn’t include whether they have drugs on board,” said Paul, who has criticized GOP colleagues for not speaking out against the strikes.

Paul went on to say that possessing arms is also not included in the targeting criteria for the strikes on alleged drug boats. “In order to blow them up, we don’t have to say that they’re armed or have drugs. I think a lot of people would have questions, which I still do,” Paul said.

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

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 6:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 6:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You have no desire to pay income taxes.


You're goddamned right.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2026 9:53 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You have no desire to pay income taxes.


You're goddamned right.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
You are Trump, in a smaller package. He doesn't pay taxes. He doesn't work. All Trumptards I know strive to be like you and Trump. Some can't go to your extreme behavior because there are others around them who occasionally force them to be better than their worst selves.

Trump Has Given Up

No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge

Paul Krugman | Jun 03, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-has-given-up

Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.

Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.

The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.

But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.

For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.

Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”

The Times goes on to note that These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.

How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?

Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.

Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte concocted false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump’s attempt to politicize monetary policy.

Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.

What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.

But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he doesn’t need intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.

Just to be clear, I am by no means saying that Trump’s descent into rage-madness has ended the threat to U.S. democracy. The Koch-backed Federalist Society, which now controls the Supreme Court, is going all in on rigging U.S. elections with the goal of locking in permanent Republican rule. The architects of Project 2025 are marching ahead with their goal of turning the federal government into a spoils system that answers only to billionaires and their political pawns. Politicization of research funding is getting very close to destroying a scientific community that took generations to build.

But Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.

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

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Wednesday, June 3, 2026 3:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 4, 2026 1:15 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:
Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
6ix, there is no ownership of a thread. And you and Trump are the most anti-American Trumptards in America, neither of you paying your taxes, and both of you on the side of evil as blatantly as were the Confederate slave-owners.

Trump’s New ‘Forced Labor’ Tariffs Are a Fig Leaf

The new import duties are “a solution in search of a problem.”

By Keith Johnson, a staff writer at Foreign Policy covering geoeconomics and energy.

June 4, 2026, 12:04 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/04/trump-forced-labor-tariffs-ustr-t
rade-section-301/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

The Trump administration this week unveiled its latest plan to hike tariffs, this time focused on the ostensible harms that the prevalence of forced labor in global supply chains do to U.S. commerce.

The latest action would levy tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 59 countries and the European Union (making up 99 percent of all U.S. trade), all of whom, the Trump administration says, are lax about regulating forced or compulsory labor in their supply chains.

But every trade expert and lawyer understands that the latest use of Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act—even more than the use this spring of Section 301 to combat “excess capacity” in other economies—is simply another way for U.S. President Donald Trump to levy tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping global tariffs earlier this year.

“The ‘findings’ are in many ways what many of us expected: an excuse to levy across-the-board tariffs,” said Inu Manak, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Why not just target tariffs on those specific products where forced labor is present? It seems to be a solution in search of a problem.”

What is especially noteworthy about the latest broadside from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) against trade is how unsubstantiated it is, as was made clear during days of hearings earlier this year, written comments by affected countries and industries, and the USTR’s own tortured report on its “findings.”

In a nutshell, the USTR claims that no other country polices the import of goods that may have been made using forced or compulsory labor the way the United States does, and that that surely means that U.S. companies are being harmed somehow, either being disadvantaged as exports or hurt by imports into the U.S. economy. It just can’t say exactly how.

“The effects of unfair competition from forced labor goods on the sales, revenues, exports, and profitability of U.S. producers are evident but may be difficult to distinguish from other factors or discern in data,” the USTR wrote in its final determination.

The argument the USTR makes is that countries that use compulsory labor sell their goods at lower cost into markets that don’t police the provenance of imports, thereby crowding out higher-priced U.S. imports. At the same time, the USTR argues that companies in those economies then export their own stuff to the United States, adding to the woes of beleaguered U.S. firms. It pointed to a range of possible examples including tobacco from Malawi, frozen beef from Brazil, and rice from Myanmar as unfairly competing with U.S. products.

The overarching head-scratcher with the new tariffs is that the USTR said in its final report that the cost of compliance for U.S. firms with provisions meant to trace supply chains for any evidence of forced labor amounts to the equivalent of a 2.5 percent tariff, and yet proposes a tariff four to five times higher as a remedy.

But trade and labor experts point to a number of other problems with the latest batch of tariffs.

For starters, the entire premise is that the U.S. approach to regulating the import of products made with forced labor is effective and worth emulating—and countries that don’t do exactly what the United States does are acting “unreasonably” and thus deserve to face higher import duties. The only way to satisfy U.S. demands is to adopt the U.S. approach, even though other economies, such as the European Union, have in hand a much more thorough program to regulate the import of potentially dodgy goods that will be rolled out next year.

“The thing that is most concerning is that it appears there is no way to address U.S. concerns short of copying and pasting U.S. law in the countries targeted, and then somehow finding a way to show it is being implemented,” Manak said. “Since Section 301 puts the power to determine whether or not demands are being met in the hands of USTR, it is entirely subjective and arbitrary.”

That approach would at least make some sense if the U.S. crackdown on forced labor were effective. But it is not, despite a raft of laws on the books going back nearly a century.

According to the Global Slavery Index, the United States is far and away the country most at risk from imports from forced labor, with its $197 billion in sketchy imports dwarfing every other country that the USTR has targeted for punitive action.

The USTR in its determination takes particular aim at the half-dozen countries that do have laws regulating imports that derive from forced labor, but which don’t enforce them. But the United States has done a lackluster job of enforcement itself. Since 2001, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has issued just 22 “Withhold Release Orders,” under which shipments are detained unless and until importers prove there is no use of forced or compulsory labor in their manufacture. That is the robust model that the United States wants to force on the rest of the world under the threat of tariffs.

“No one is out there arguing that we have done a good job,” said Desirée LeClercq, an assistant professor of trade and labor law at the University of Georgia School of Law, who has written about the flaws in the USTR’s latest tariffs. “The model we are holding these other countries to is so porous, and when that is your premise, everything [about the determination] is ridiculous.”

After the USTR announced the initiation of the forced labor investigations in March, affected countries zeroed in on the two major problems: that lack of a reliable U.S. model to copy, and the USTR’s failure to show any link between countries’ stances on forced labor and damage done to U.S. firms.

“The absence of identical regulatory approaches also does not render Mexico’s system deficient,” Mexico noted in written comments. “Furthermore, there is no evidence that Mexico’s measures have caused adverse effects on U.S. commerce. Any such claim would be speculative and unsupported.”

Echoing complaints made by other countries, another U.S. trade partner and ally weighed in with similar concerns.

“The Initiation Notice does not state any basis for asserting that Australia has failed to take action against forced labour, nor does it identify any Australia-specific concerns with respect to forced labour, or any Australia specific impacts on U.S. supply chains,” Australia’s government said in written comments.

The other big problem with the USTR’s latest effort is that the United States itself relies heavily on forced labor, especially in prisons. “Compulsory prison labor is devastatingly pervasive in the United States,” noted one recent study. It is becoming an even more pervasive problem in the second Trump administration as detained immigrants held in private facilities are forced to undertake compulsory labor.

The USTR’s determination “is problematic, because we aren’t comparing forced labor practices in the United States,” said LeClercq, who noted that even though the USTR cites as a definition of forced or compulsory labor the language in the 1930 agreement by the International Labor Organization, the United States cannot ratify that convention because of the widespread use of forced convict labor in the United States.

Much as with the earlier Section 301 tariffs targeting excess capacity, of which the United States itself is a prime offender, the biggest takeaway from the USTR’s latest announcement is that if any country should face trade barriers over its tolerance of and promotion of forced labor, that country is 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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Thursday, June 4, 2026 1:56 PM

SECOND

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


Trump’s attorney general pick has exactly one qualification

Todd Blanche passed his loyalty test to Trump.

By Ian Millhiser | Jun 4, 2026, 11:55 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/490959/todd-blanche-attorney-general-trum
p-goon

In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, arrived at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked for a tour. Though he was initially let inside the facility’s gate, he was soon confronted by about a dozen federal law enforcement officers and asked to leave. And so he did.

For a moment, that seemed like it would be the end of this incident, but then one of the officers had a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows this officer turning to his fellow law enforcers after the call and informing them, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.”

That deputy attorney general was Todd Blanche, who is now the acting leader of the Department of Justice. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Blanche to become the Senate-confirmed attorney general of the United States.

The practical stakes of this nomination are fairly low. Federal law provides that if the attorney general’s job is vacant, “the Deputy Attorney General may exercise all the duties of that office.” And the Senate already confirmed Blanche as deputy AG (or “DAG” as the job is known within the DOJ). So, Blanche has already been leading the Justice Department since former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s exit in April, and, one way or another, he will continue to do so.

But Trump’s decision to nominate Blanche reveals the president’s confidence in a man who has distinguished himself solely by his willingness to act as Trump’s toady. If he’s officially confirmed, that is not likely to change.

Blanche is Trump’s goon

Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer before he arrived at the Justice Department. As DAG, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s criminal investigations and prosecutions, including the DOJ’s 93 regional US Attorneys’ offices and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.

That means that Blanche’s involvement in the Baraka arrest wasn’t an isolated incident — at a hearing formally dismissing the charges against Baraka, a federal magistrate judge scolded the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Blanche was the senior Justice Department executive overseeing political prosecutions targeting a wide range of Trump’s perceived enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump reportedly decided to remove Blanche’s predecessor, Bondi, in part due to the president’s belief that Bondi “was not moving forcefully enough against the White House’s supposed political enemies.” Since taking over Bondi’s job duties, Blanche appears to have worked hard to reassure Trump that he will not make the same mistake.

Although a federal court dismissed the first round of federal charges against Comey, the Blanche-led department reindicted Comey for posting a picture of seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47.” “86” is restaurant slang often used to say that an item should be removed or is unavailable. “47” is a reference to Trump, the 47th US president.

A message saying that the sitting president should be removed is obviously protected by the First Amendment, but Blanche’s Justice Department claims that the former FBI director was threatening Trump’s life.

Similarly, under Blanche’s leadership, the Justice Department reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, a magazine writer who won $88.3 million in damages against Trump after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Blanche’s primary qualification for the attorney general job, in other words, appears to be his eagerness to use the awesome power of the Department of Justice as a weapon against people who have previously slighted or fought Donald Trump.

Blanche was also the face of Trump’s $1.8 billion “slush fund”

Blanche was also a central figure in a Trump-led scheme that closely resembles embezzlement.

Last month, Blanche’s Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could be used to distribute money from the US Treasury to Trump’s allies, including participants in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The fund would have been administered by five people chosen by Blanche.

A DOJ press release announcing the fund states explicitly that the fund was “established” by the “Attorney General,” a role that is being carried out by Blanche.

One problem with this fund is that the Constitution prohibits money from being drawn from the Treasury without congressional approval. The Justice Department was apparently involved in the fund as part of a scheme to get around this constitutional requirement.

While Congress never authorized this slush fund — indeed, the slush fund appears to have been killed due to bipartisan opposition to it in Congress — there is an existing federal law that permits the Treasury to pay plaintiffs who successfully sue the federal government. So Trump filed a fake lawsuit against the United States. His lawyers then “settled” this lawsuit with the Justice Department, which is led by Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal lawyer.

In a different presidential administration, a Cabinet official’s involvement in such a scheme would lead to their resignation, or worse. Again, Todd Blanche effectively conspired with Trump to steal nearly $1.8 billion from the US government. He also humiliated Trump and antagonized Congress by signing off on this scheme.

But in the Trump administration, loyalty is valued far more than competence or adherence to the law. As acting AG, Blanche repeatedly targeted Trump’s perceived enemies and he helped orchestrate one of Trump’s most cockamamie schemes. So, instead of demanding his resignation, Trump wants to promote Blanche.

One open question, however, is whether Blanche will be successful as Trump’s enforcer. Bondi turned out to be a rank incompetent when she took over the Justice Department, and DOJ’s Bondi-era attempts to target Trump’s enemies largely fizzled. Blanche’s inept management of the $1.8 billion slush fund may be an early sign that he is no better.

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

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Thursday, June 4, 2026 3:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 4, 2026 7:09 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response

After cutting its support for frontline healthcare workers in Central Africa, the Trump administration is pointing fingers.

Nick Turse
June 4 2026, 5:27 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/04/trump-ebola-outbreak-congo/

As an Ebola outbreak continues to rage in Central Africa, the Trump administration keeps trying to blame the World Health Organization — revealing what experts say is a deep misunderstanding about global disease response.

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.

“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.

In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.

Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.

On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face.”

Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”

Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protocols, states have the obligation to declare an outbreak after which the WHO informs the rest of the world and begins providing support. “There is a clear, well-defined methodology and it is clearly outlined in the international health regulations,” she told The Intercept.

The response is markedly quicker than in some previous outbreaks. During the 2014–16 Ebola crisis in West Africa — when more than 28,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in the largest ever outbreak of the disease — WHO became aware that Ebola was spreading in Guinea in March 2014 but did not declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” until almost five months later.

Blame for any lag in response is not the fault of WHO, argued Harris, noting that USAID previously supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “Dr. Tedros declared it without even calling the emergency committee together, so he wasted no time once they had information about the extent of the outbreak and the fact that clearly it had been running silently for a long time,” said Harris. “But the silence of the outbreak is not something you could lay at the feet of WHO. You lay that at the feet of a very fragile health system in the middle of a conflict that the rest of the world should be doing something to stop.”

The number of suspected Ebola cases in Congo has been reduced from over 1,000 last week to 116 as teams work through a backlog of tests. Experts say many suspected cases turned out to be malaria. This large number of people with untreated malaria demonstrates, they note, the chronic healthcare deficiencies in the region and a need for a comprehensive focus on public health there.

“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face,” said Tedros. “One of the things I heard from the community leaders is that they worry that the response to Ebola may take resources away from the health and humanitarian services they rely on for their many other needs.”

The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for pouring money into an Ebola quarantine and treatment center for infected Americans being built in Kenya, as a group of distinguished physicians, nurses, public health professionals, and humanitarian workers, including former top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for Americans exposed to Ebola to be brought home for treatment. “We are deeply concerned by reports that the United States government is pursuing a policy under which American citizens with Ebola exposures requiring quarantine, isolation, or medical care would be transferred to a facility in Kenya,” they wrote in a letter to Congress, noting the “profound legal, ethical, and human rights concerns associated with preventing American citizens from returning home for care or diverting them to third-country facilities.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on plans to bar Americans with Ebola from being treated in the U.S. “We cannot and will not allow any ?cases of Ebola to enter the United States,” he said.

“It really sends the wrong message — that it’s a terrifying thing that you can’t possibly allow to arrive at your borders,” said Harris. Kenya has never experienced an Ebola outbreak, making it a perplexing choice of location for a treatment facility.

The U.S. could have set up a facility in Congo, Harris said, which has the most experience and expertise, having stopped 16 previous outbreaks. Or it could bring its citizens home for treatment and quarantine.

“If you’re going to not treat U.S. citizens on-site in DRC, bring them back to the U.S.” said Harris. “You’ve got one of the best health systems in the world, and you’ve got some of the brightest and best in the world in your country. So why aren’t you mobilizing them and showing that America is truly great?”

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

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Thursday, June 4, 2026 7:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why do you hijack other people's threads?

You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.


I don't think you get it, dude. Everybody hates you. Nobody wants to hear a single word you have to say.

So go create your own little sandbox to play with yourself. Just like you did when you were a kid and nobody would hang out with you because you suck as a human being and you always have.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 5, 2026 7:43 AM

SECOND

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


In Trump’s second term, financial gain has become a defining feature

By Linda Feldmann | June 05, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0605/donald-trump-presiden
cy-private-wealth-ethics

On matters of personal and family money, President Donald Trump appears to be playing by a different rulebook from other presidents – and even from his own first term in office. By his own admission, he feels little pressure to restrict family business dealings simply because of his role in government.

A tide of actions reflects the trend:

Investors have pumped vast sums into Trump family members’ business interests. Projects such as the White House ballroom are being funded by donors who have dealings with the government. Agencies have granted no-bid contracts to Trump-friendly firms. And in the 19 months since his election, the personal fortunes of the president and his family have soared.

Why We Wrote This

The Trump family’s wealth has surged over the 19 months since Donald Trump’s election. The circumstances are revealing how, on personal-finance matters, a president might be constrained less by laws than by norms that are vulnerable to testing.

To President Trump’s detractors, it’s unprecedented self-enrichment and corruption, or at the very least a failure to follow norms upheld by past occupants of the Oval Office. To defenders, including his Cabinet, staff, and base supporters, the criticism is politically motivated, aimed at punishing a president who they say is transparent in his dealings and follows all applicable laws.

While Mr. Trump’s first term had its share of headlines about conflict-of-interest questions, the amounts of money involved have surged in Term 2, notably in cryptocurrencies and other relatively new business interests for the Trump family. The voting public is more focused on issues affecting their own pocketbooks than on the president’s. But as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, the tension over financial ethics represents a test for American democracy under a president like no other.

“The number of entanglements, the volume of money, it’s staggering,” says William Howell, dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy in Washington.

This week has also shown that Mr. Trump’s financial gambits still face some constraints. Under pressure from Congress – including a number of Republicans – as well as from courts, his administration appeared to back down Tuesday on the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to compensate those he says were mistreated by the federal government.

On Wednesday, though, when asked about the fund by a reporter, the president said, “I love it.” Asked to clarify whether it was dead or just on pause, he said, “I’d have to ask the lawyers,” suggesting he hasn’t given up on the fund altogether.

The administration rejects the view that the Trump presidency is rife with conflicts of interest, calling critics’ attacks unfair.

“This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade,” says Anna Kelly, White House principal deputy press secretary, in a written statement to the Monitor. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”

Net worth over $6 billion

Across a range of activities, the Trump family has been expanding business ventures with profitable connections to the government – all in plain sight.

One eye-popping headline is the spike in Mr. Trump’s net worth since seeking and winning reelection: from $2.3 billion early in 2024 to $6.2 billion today, according to Forbes. The extraordinary gains come primarily from his business interests, which include vast real estate holdings, licensing deals, merchandise such as Trump watches, Bibles, and sneakers – but also, increasingly, cryptocurrency. The Trump Organization says the president handed control of the family business to his sons when he retook office.

Trump family members, too, have seen their net worths soar in the second term.

By last September, the family – including wife Melania, his children, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, a private equity investor – was worth some $10 billion, nearly doubling since the 2024 election, Forbes reports. By December 2025, eldest son Donald Trump Jr. was worth some $300 million, up from $50 million in November 2024, and son Eric Trump’s net worth was up tenfold, to about $400 million, also per Forbes.

“I got absolutely no credit for it”

This rapid spike in family wealth represents a marked departure from the first term, when Mr. Trump said he prohibited family members from engaging in international business activity. In the second term, he told The New York Times in January, there are no such restraints.

“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”

Presidential family members have a long history of apparent trading on the family name for financial gain, including former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and brothers James and Frank Biden. But scholars and ethics watchdogs say such examples pale in scope compared with the Trump era.

“He is sui generis in that we have not had an American president with a business enterprise of this scale and scope,” writes historian Julian Zelizer of Princeton University in an email.

That Latin phrase means unique. He is the first U.S. president never to have served in prior public office or the military. He is only the second to serve nonconsecutive terms – with an interregnum that allowed him and his allies to plan for a second term centered on an aggressive interpretation of executive branch powers.

What’s more, Mr. Trump’s background as both a brash businessman and reality TV performer – operating on gut and instinct and always on the lookout for leverage – set the president up for a second term that has pushed constitutional and legal boundaries, as well as norms of governance. And unlike in the first term, he has surrounded himself with advisers and staff known for not much pushback.

But there’s more to it than that, Professor Zelizer adds – including a sense of acceptance or resignation within the populace regarding “enormous presidential power.”

“The collapse of efforts to constrain the role of money in politics, the thin rules that exist on ethics for the president, the reliance on informal norms, and the normalization of corporate lobbying all create a culture that numbs many Americans to what is happening,” he writes.

Family business deals

Last week, investigative news outlet ProPublica reported that the White House had intervened last year to get a $620 million deal for an obscure rare earth magnet company with ties to Donald Trump Jr. The president’s son denied involvement, according to the report, which cites an unnamed Pentagon official as saying it was White House trade adviser Peter Navarro who intervened on behalf of the company.

A drone company in which Mr. Trump’s older sons had an investment stake also received a Pentagon contract. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have also announced a variety of lucrative real-estate and cryptocurrency deals in the U.S. and places such as the Middle East that stand to benefit both them and their father.

“Don does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises,” Andy Surabian, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr., writes in an email to the Monitor.

The president himself drew attention last month when his latest federal financial disclosure form revealed more than 3,700 stock trades in just the first three months of this year – transactions totaling tens of millions of dollars.

His company, the Trump Organization, has stated that his investment holdings are managed by an independent third party.

Even so, such trading in individual stocks by a sitting president is unheard of in the modern era. And the news stirred a host of new questions about apparent conflicts of interest.

One example: Mr. Trump bought more than $1 million in Dell Technologies stock early this year, around the same time that he also urged Americans to “go out and buy a Dell.” This also came after company founder Michael Dell and his wife announced a $6.25 billion donation to fund U.S. government “Trump Accounts” for children. Last week, the Pentagon announced a $9.7 billion contract with the company.

In March, about a month into the Iran war, Mr. Trump announced “productive” conversations with Iran, causing oil stocks and futures to plummet. His brokerage account then spent the day buying oil stocks.

Pushback in Congress

When it comes to public money, there are limits both legally and politically as to what the president can do – as seen with his now-scuttled “anti-weaponization fund.”

Bipartisan groups in both houses of Congress, including some senior Trump allies, had worked to kill the fund. Watchdogs called it unlawful, since it was created as part of an unusual “settlement” with the IRS (over a leak of Mr. Trump’s tax returns) in which the president was both plaintiff and defendant, as head of the executive branch. The fund also lacked congressional authorization. Also stirring concern: Among potential beneficiaries were Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Still in place, though, is a settlement provision that would bar the IRS from auditing past tax returns filed by Mr. Trump or his family. That part alone could save him a reported $100 million if he were found guilty of fraudulent tax practices. On May 29, a federal judge in Florida reopened the Trump lawsuit against the IRS to determine whether it was an abuse of the court system.

Whether all these Trump actions constitute corruption is in the eye of the beholder. Some presidential conduct is more a matter of norms and customs than law, say experts on American governance, and under the Constitution, the legislative and judicial branches of government are empowered to serve as a check on presidential power.

The court of public opinion

Public opinion is another potential check on presidential behavior, though less so now that Mr. Trump is in his second term and will not appear again on a ballot. After the midterm elections in November, seen in part as a referendum on the president, he might feel even less beholden to voters.

Over time, as Mr. Trump’s average job approval rating in polls has declined to 38%, negative characterizations have risen. A YouGov poll released in March found that majorities of Americans see him as arrogant (65%), opportunistic (57%), and corrupt (54%).

In the second Trump term, ethical oversight has diminished. He declined to issue the ethics pledge he took for his first term. And he rescinded the presidential ethics rules his predecessor, President Biden, had adopted. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which aims to prevent conflicts of interest within the executive branch, has been operating without a permanent leader after Mr. Trump fired the director early in 2025. (Though the president is largely exempt from OGE oversight.)

In addition, a 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity – which shields the chief executive from prosecution for “official” acts – can be interpreted broadly, potentially adding to a sense of invincibility.

Also important is the decadeslong rise among conservative thought leaders of “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the U.S. president has sole authority over the executive branch. This theory was a driving force behind Project 2025, the blueprint for a second term drawn up by Trump allies, some of whom now occupy top roles in his administration.

At heart, though, the “moneymaking” aspect of Mr. Trump goes directly to his unique persona as president.

“He’s forever been wheeling and dealing before he entered public office,” with an “appetite for wealth and a certain kind of lifestyle,” says Professor Howell, co-author of the 2025 book “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.”

To truly make sense of Mr. Trump’s modus operandi, Professor Howell adds, one must consider “the incredible demands for loyalty that course through this administration.”

“The question is: How do you sustain those kinds of demands? Part of it is through threat,” he says. “Part of it, too, is the possibility of favor.”

Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, sees echoes of the late 19th-century Gilded Age in today’s wheeler-dealer atmosphere.

But for many Americans, struggling with the cost of living and other everyday matters, Mr. Trump’s finances aren’t a top concern. This is especially so in these polarized times, Professor Wilson says, when voters tend to forgive politicians on their own side accused of wrongdoing or see such accusations as a partisan witch hunt.

Professor Wilson lays out the thought process: “Whether Trump has shady cryptocurrency deals going on or not doesn’t really make any difference to the cost of my health insurance or to the level of crime in my community.”

In the end, he says, worrying about the appearance or reality of presidential self-enrichment is, to some voters, “a luxury for affluent people.”

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

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Friday, June 5, 2026 8:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 5, 2026 8:58 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:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.

If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.

We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.

https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html

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

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Friday, June 5, 2026 9:20 AM

SECOND

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


Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.

By Jonathan Edwards | June 4, 2026 at 3:24 p.m. EDT

https://go.govbrief.today/ballroom-donors

More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group.

Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window, according to the report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit. Most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term, the nonprofit found. https://www.citizen.org/news/corporate-donors-to-trumps-white-house-ba
llroom-have-received-50-billion-in-government-contracts-since-the-east-wing-was-demolished/

The donors have sprawling interests that touch nearly every aspect of American life, including defense contracting, technology and energy. Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.

“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Jon Golinger, a public policy advocate at Public Citizen and an author of the report. “They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.”

The analysis builds on a report from the group last fall that found the known donors held $279 billion in government contracts over the previous five years and had spent $1.6 billion on political contributions and lobbying during that time. The new report focuses on contracts awarded in most of the seven months since the East Wing’s demolition, which Trump’s critics have argued created new urgency around potential conflicts of interest.

Of the known donors, no single contributor received more new business with the government since giving to the project than Lockheed Martin. The defense giant received roughly $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding since last fall, according to the report.

Booz Allen Hamilton followed, with more than $4.2 billion, and Palantir, with just over $1 billion. Other donors that received new or increased contracts include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar and T-Mobile. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Altogether, more than two-thirds of corporate ballroom donors — 19 of 27 — have received government contracts over the past five and a half years, totaling $338 billion, the report says.

Sixteen of the 27 donors are facing federal enforcement actions or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration, the report found, including major antitrust reviews involving Amazon, Apple, Meta and Nvidia; labor rights cases involving Google, Lockheed and Meta; and securities matters involving Coinbase and Ripple, whose cases have been dropped or scaled back under Trump.

The White House on Thursday pushed back on the report’s pay-to-play framing.

“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “The donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”

The White House has closely guarded some details of the project, publicly disclosing only 21 corporate donors. News outlets subsequently identified six more. Public Citizen sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the secret fundraising contract that permits officials to conceal donors’ identities, unearthing the terms set between the White House, National Park Service and the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit handling ballroom donations.

Thursday’s report arrives as the ballroom project continues to face legal and political turbulence. A federal judge has ruled that construction must halt until Congress authorizes the project, but a three-judge federal appeals panel allowed construction to continue while the case proceeds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear the case Friday.

Last month, Senate Republicans tried to have Congress allocate $1 billion for what it called the “East Wing Modernization Project,” which included other initiatives, a move that collapsed amid public backlash.

Congressional Democrats have pressed for greater disclosure for months. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) has sent letters to known donors asking what they contributed and what they expected in return. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and colleagues have introduced legislation that would ban anonymous donations for ballroom and other White House grounds projects.

“At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” Blumenthal said in an April statement to The Post.

By Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards is an arts and government reporter covering how the Trump administration is influencing cultural institutions — including the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian museums, the Library of Congress and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities — and how those shifts ripple through the arts, public life and national identity.

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

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Friday, June 5, 2026 10:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.

If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.

We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.

https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html

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



You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?

Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?


Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 5, 2026 7:13 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?

Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?


Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
You did it again, 6ix. You totally missed the point. I can see why you flunked out of college four times. Professors notice when students miss the Big Picture. Those students won't be graduating.

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

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Friday, June 5, 2026 7:14 PM

SECOND

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


Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson
Jun 05, 2026

The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.

The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.

Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.

Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”

In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.

Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.

Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.

Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”

He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”

And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.

“If we all work together and follow the animal treatment protocols and movement restriction guidance, there is no reason to believe that this incursion will result in an establishment of the pest in our country,” Rollins said last night.

Much more at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-4-2026

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

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Friday, June 5, 2026 8:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck the Liberal Consensus.


You tried taking WAAAAAAAAY too much.

Now you're going to lose everything.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 5, 2026 8:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?

Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?


Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
You did it again, 6ix. You totally missed the point. I can see why you flunked out of college four times. Professors notice when students miss the Big Picture. Those students won't be graduating.

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



No. I got your simpleton point, faggot.

I just reject anything you have to say on any topic because you're an idiot, a cultist and nothing you have ever predicted has ever come true.

Not once.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


Welcome to the Postmodern Presidency

Before there was Trump, there was the theory of Postmodernism.

Damon Linker
Jun 03, 2026

https://www.persuasion.community/p/welcome-to-the-postmodern-presidenc
y

If it was anything, postmodernism was an expression of skepticism about the capacity of reason to forge genuine consensus, let alone for it to achieve objective truth or knowledge. What other thinkers call “objective truth” and “objective knowledge” are merely expressions of the interest of one person or group, according to the theory of Postmodernism. There is no such thing as disinterested reason, just various forms of self-interested rationalization. The claim that one possesses truth or knowledge is nothing but a power move.

There is no better distillation of this view than Donald Trump. All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation. Rather than determining what is true and then deciding what to do on that basis, Trump takes the reverse approach, first determining what he wants to do, and then adjusting what he claims to be true in order to help him accomplish it. This is why he is the first truly postmodern president.

There are a multitude of examples of this from the first and second Trump administrations, but none is more powerful than the way the Iran War has been conducted.

How to Wage a Postmodern War

When Trump ran for the presidency in 2024, he promised to end America’s “forever wars” and vowed not to start new ones. Yet he has kept the military quite active since returning to the White House, and nowhere more so than against Iran. When he opted to leap to the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in seeking to topple the Iranian government and eliminate its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Trump offered no coherent explanation. He made no effort to build support in public opinion or Congress. He merely acted, as if reasoning about going to war was irrelevant and persuasion both futile and unnecessary.

He then articulated no clear or consistent goals after it became apparent that the country hadn’t undergone regime change, and the constantly shifting rationales he trotted out on his Truth Social account, together with those expressed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, made it impossible to judge the progress, success, or failure of the operation. That sense of arbitrariness and chaos has only deepened as it’s become clearer that Trump is eager to bring the war to any kind of conclusion (it doesn’t matter what) and to move on while declaring victory.

Just after the conclusion in 1991 of the Persian Gulf War, the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard famously published a short book that was provocatively titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. I’ve always considered his argument transparently ridiculous. Of course the war took place, just as the Iran War is taking place right now, despite a fragile ceasefire.

Yet what Baudrillard was pointing to back in 1991—the transformation of war into a media event broadcast to the world in eye-catching snippets that turn it into a carefully curated spectacle—really was something new at the time. But now it no longer is. We have entered the age of fully postmodern propaganda in which the powers that be don’t even bother to construct a coherent narrative to generate support for what they do. They merely act and then bombard us with shards of multiple competing and contradictory rationales, assuming we’ll be so entertained by explosions and infliction of pain that we’ll be indifferent to what’s actually transpiring—and, above all, to the fact that the White House has embraced a mode of governance that’s completely indistinguishable from tribalistic partisan spin.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more perfect example of postmodern politics than that.

Much more at https://www.persuasion.community/p/welcome-to-the-postmodern-presidenc
y

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

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 2:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation.


Says the obese balding soyboy writing for PERSUASION.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 7:58 PM

SECOND

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


America’s Military Decline is Worse Than You Think

The wars in Ukraine and Iran are reshaping the way the world views America's global power (military and otherwise). The reasons are obvious...to those living outside of the United States. But among Americans, most aren't even aware that this conversation is going on. In this video I bring together a wide swathe of data and topics, from Ukraine to Iran, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Vietnam, and more, talking about how America has begun to reveal its greatest weakness more and more with each passing year. It means that while America controls objectively powerful military force, there's a genuine question mark as to America's willingness to actually use that force to achieve its objectives. From Bush, to Obama, to Donald Trump, this is an issue that spans more than just one presidency - it's a systemic problem that America needs to recognize before it's too late.



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

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Saturday, June 6, 2026 9:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Wow.

Now you're writing stuff that I've already said.

Turn Mecca to glass. Right now.


Nobody will fucking do shit for 50 years after we do that.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Sunday, June 7, 2026 8:43 AM

SECOND

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


Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought

Tom Zoellner on Trump-Era Censorship

June 3, 2026

https://lithub.com/the-side-that-won-the-civil-war-is-now-banning-book
s-about-why-the-civil-war-was-fought/

In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”

The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.

My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.

I asked the National Park Service whether this book had been censored. “Neither the Department of the Interior nor the National Park Service leadership gave direction to remove or prohibit your book, and no such directive has been issued under Secretary’s Order 3431,” they told me in a written statement. Eastern National did not return multiple calls seeking comment.

A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron.

More at https://lithub.com/the-side-that-won-the-civil-war-is-now-banning-book
s-about-why-the-civil-war-was-fought/

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

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Sunday, June 7, 2026 1:34 PM

SECOND

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


Fact-checking Trump’s interview with NBC News’ ‘Meet the Press’

Digging into some of the president’s claims on the Iran war, the Jan. 6 riots, California’s primary elections and more.

June 7, 2026, 8:00 AM CDT

By Jane C. Timm

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-trump-inte
rview-meet-press-june-2026-rcna348518

President Donald Trump sat for an interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker on Friday, discussing topics including the war with Iran, gas prices and the “anti-weaponization” fund.

Throughout the interview, which aired Sunday, Trump made a series of false, misleading or exaggerated comments.

NBC News reporters dug into some of the president’s remarks. Here are the facts behind the claims.

Iran war

Trump defended his first-term decision to terminate the Iran nuclear deal President Barack Obama had negotiated and his second-term decision to initially strike Iran in June 2025.

“They were very close to having a nuclear weapon. I terminated the deal. Then I sent the B-2 bombers in about nine, 10 months ago. And they obliterated, totally obliterated, the site. And I saved it,” Trump said. “We had a choice. We could let them have a nuclear weapon, or we could go along and have some beautiful days. But they would have, you know, it’s a judgment. They would’ve used a nuclear weapon.”

Later in the interview, Trump reiterated: “If I didn’t go in there with the B-2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.”

Trump’s statements are not in line with what then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers in March 2025, months before the initial U.S. strikes on Iran. At the time, Gabbard testified that U.S. spy agencies had assessed that Iran had not decided whether to build nuclear weapons, but that the country had stockpiles of enriched uranium beyond what is required for civilian purposes. NBC News reported in June 2025 that the U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program had not changed since March. Additionally, while Trump claimed that the U.S. “totally obliterated” an Iranian nuclear site in the strikes, the reality is more nuanced. NBC News reported in July 2025 that one nuclear enrichment site was mostly destroyed, but two others were not as badly damaged.

Currently, Iran likely retains nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%, a short step from weapons grade, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Even if Iran had enough uranium enriched to weapons grade, it would need months or possibly more than a year to build a nuclear warhead that could fit on the tip of a missile, according to experts and former officials.

Before Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal in his first term, Iran had no stockpiles of uranium enriched beyond a low level and was subject to regular United Nations inspections.

Welker noted that Trump had promised he would negotiate a better deal, asking him if he wished he would have done so in his first term. Trump responded that it was better to negotiate now, saying “Israel wouldn’t have been ready” during his first stint in the Oval Office.

Much more at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-trump-inte
rview-meet-press-june-2026-rcna348518

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

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


This federal judge ruled against Trump. Then the death threats rolled in | 60 Minutes

Federal judges say criticism from President Trump can put their safety at risk.



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

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