REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 08:17
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Monday, May 31, 2021 7:35 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:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.

Anybody can pretend that they're rich.

Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
6ix, pretend you're not a Republican:

The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.

www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemicmeans relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, May 31, 2021 7:38 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:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.

Anybody can pretend that they're rich.

Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
6ix, pretend you're not a Republican and pretend you haven't lost your mind:

The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.
6ix's signature: I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemic means relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, May 31, 2021 8:31 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.



The rest of your post was TL;DR. Plus it came from NYT. Nobody cares.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Tuesday, June 1, 2021 1:03 PM

SECOND

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


Why are Senate Republicans just fine with Joe Manchin calling them every name in the book?

In the immediate aftermath of the Senate voting down a bipartisan commission to conduct a soup-to-nuts review of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, the West Virginia Democrat let loose on his Republican colleagues.

"Choosing to put politics and political elections above the health of our Democracy is unconscionable. And the betrayal of the oath we each take is something they will have to live with."

Oh man! He sure is mad! He called them "unconscionable!!!"

Cut to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, smiling broadly. Why? Because McConnell, who was the driving force in killing the January 6 commission, couldn't care less about Manchin condemning him. All -- and I mean ALL -- McConnell cares about is whether Manchin has changed or will change his opposition to getting rid of the legislative filibuster. As long as Manchin stays opposed to getting rid of the legislative filibuster, he is McConnell's best buddy -- no matter what the West Virginia Democrat says about his Kentucky Republican colleague.

Unless Manchin changes his mind, the January 6 commission could be only the first in a series of proposals that die in the Senate at the hand of the still-extant filibuster. The next fight is likely to be over Democrats' massive election reform law. President Joe Biden's infrastructure package could also be a filibuster fail.

Manchin will continue to blast Republicans in the Senate for their recalcitrance on issues of critical import to the country while being unwilling to bend on the elimination of the legislative filibuster. Cut to McConnell, smiling broadly.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, June 1, 2021 1:18 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.

Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, June 2, 2021 7:16 AM

SECOND

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


Daniel Ellsberg Explains Why Now Was The Right Time To Release Top-Secret File On Nuclear Weapons

June 1 2021, 3:21 p.m.

“The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” Gen. Thomas Power, commander of America’s nuclear forces from 1957 to 1963, once said about the use of atomic weapons. “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”

The hold this nuclear lunacy had on the top of the U.S. government is terrifyingly illuminated in a top-secret study of U.S. war plans newly publicized by famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The document, produced by the RAND Corporation and copied by Ellsberg at the same time he exfiltrated the Pentagon Papers from RAND, examines the U.S. response to the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The study’s contents were first reported on May 22 by the New York Times.

The crisis, now completely forgotten, began when China attempted to seize several small islands off its coast from Taiwan. The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China. It is not simply that the officials looked with equanimity on the possibility of killing millions; rather, many seemed frustrated that there were any delays forced upon them by the rest of the government. If China had not changed course, civilization could have ended then and there.

Ellsberg is now speaking out about the study, he said in a phone interview, for a straightforward reason: “I got scared.” The issues that led to the 1958 crisis between the U.S. and China have never been resolved; both countries are now ramping up confrontational rhetoric; and most importantly, the strategic rationale that led the U.S. to consider nuclear war then remains exactly the same today. Speaking about today’s generals, Ellsberg said, “You shouldn’t be confident that the current calculations are any less crazy.”

More at https://theintercept.com/2021/06/01/daniel-ellsberg-china-atomic-nucle
ar-weapons/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 3, 2021 7:32 AM

SECOND

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


How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy

I was anchored in a belief that all of these movements somehow needed to coalesce... As I walked the class through a syllabus based upon country after country that had drifted to the nationalist, authoritarian right - Hungary, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Brazil - it was glaringly obvious how interconnected these right-wing nationalists were.

They used common tactics, common narratives, and common conspiracy theories to legitimize their rule; many of them shared common sources of financing, corruption, and political consultants.

Isolated, the resistance movements that gave me hope would likely fail. But if they were connected, perhaps some of them could succeed. That would require an America that came to its senses while recognizing how much had gone wrong.

America had helped shape the world we lived in before descending into the cesspool of the Trump years. We now had a government that was busy radicalizing a huge swath of American society, with pockets of the country turning to violent white supremacy or a QAnon conspiracy theory positing that America is secretly run by a cabal of child sex traffickers.

At precisely the time that progressive forces around the world were under siege, America absented itself from the defense of the most basic propositions that had once defined it in the eyes of the world: The idea that individuals are entitled to a basic set of freedoms that should be applied equally to all people. The idea that democratic governance will compel a society to organize itself around a common set of facts. The idea that people of different races, religions, and ethnicities can peacefully coexist by forging a common sense of identity. The lifelines offered to those who struggled for those things in their own spaces... validated by the results that America itself could produce. We did big things.

Over the past thirty years, we had lost our grip on that lifeline.

From the book After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes
www.amazon.com/s?k=ben+rhodes

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 3, 2021 7:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.

Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.


I vote for whoever I like. I've voted for a lot of Democrats in my life. I still do to this day, particularly on the local level. I benefit from living in a state where the Democrats are centrists, and not insane fringe Leftists like in California, New York and Illinois. It just so happens that in the last decade I vote for more Republicans than Democrats.

But I sure as hell wasn't going to vote for a Democrat for Indiana Governor last time... Not in 2020, but Holcomb has to go. Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate got 11.4% of the vote this time, which was up nearly 8% from what the Libertarian got the prior election.



I still think that anybody who has ever pressed that button to vote Party Line should have their right to vote revoked. I'm assuming that includes you. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You're too stupid to vote.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Thursday, June 3, 2021 8:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy


If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.

And then tell them to go after Big Tech.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Friday, June 4, 2021 6:26 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy


If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.

And then tell them to go after Big Tech.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
There is a problem, but you are unaware of it. A historian named Peter Turchin studied beetles before he switched to history. Bark beetles and bean beetles, which killed forests and crops. The pest beetles are unaware of being an ecological problem. Then Turchin switched to studying humans. Certain kinds of pesky humans, like beetles, lack self-awareness as they destroy societies:

A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news: Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst. . . .

In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
----
After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said. Turchin proposed, for example, that populations of organisms grow or decline exponentially, not linearly. This is why if you buy two guinea pigs, you will soon have not just a few more guinea pigs but a home—and then a neighborhood—full of the damn things (as long as you keep feeding them). This law is simple enough to be understood by a high-school math student, and it describes the fortunes of everything from ticks to starlings to camels. The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He’d long had a hobbyist’s interest in history. But he also had a predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. “All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

. . . Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically preordained disaster.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210528210525/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

Free download of Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires at
https://libgen.unblockit.onl/search.php?req=Peter+Turchin+War

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, June 4, 2021 8:37 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I vote for whoever I like. I've voted for a lot of Democrats in my life. I still do to this day, particularly on the local level. I benefit from living in a state where the Democrats are centrists, and not insane fringe Leftists like in California, New York and Illinois. It just so happens that in the last decade I vote for more Republicans than Democrats.

But I sure as hell wasn't going to vote for a Democrat for Indiana Governor last time... Not in 2020, but Holcomb has to go. Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate got 11.4% of the vote this time, which was up nearly 8% from what the Libertarian got the prior election.
What does the word "like" mean for you, 6ix, because you can't know a politician well enough to "like" them socially. You have to "like" for some other reasons. You "like" their policy? You "like" their party? You "like" a tax cheating scoundrel?

The voters of Indiana didn't agree with you that Gov. Eric Holcomb has to go. Holcomb got 51.38% of the vote in 2016. His "likeability" must have increased because he got 56.51% in 2020. When Libertarian Donald Rainwater received 11.44% of the votes proves nothing about Gov. Eric Holcomb being "unlikable" but does prove that 11.44% of voters don't understand that Libertarians lose elections. The 11.44% should have not voted for anybody rather than a Libertarian who cannot win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holcomb#Electoral_history

Libertarians do NOT win. By voting for a Libertarian, the message the voter is sending is that they don't understand a damn thing about how a winner-takes-all election system works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_States)#Libert
arians_in_office

Why Libertarians Lose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting#Fewer_political_parties

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, June 4, 2021 11:54 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I vote for whoever I like.


Quote:
What does the word "like" mean for you, 6ix,


I'll rephrase it to mean what I meant to say...

"I vote for whoever I like to vote for."

Quote:
because you can't know a politician well enough to "like" them socially.


The same works with hate, you stupid fuck.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Friday, June 4, 2021 12:33 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
If you're anything like Texas Trumptards, you've avoided the reality about yourself all your life, except when reality punches your face or stabs you in the back or rots out your teeth. Most Trumptards, almost without exception, say things are going well. 6ix says it. I'd believe 6ix, except for the Trumptards I know things are NOT going well. Why do Trumptards say what is false? Maybe they don't know any better? Maybe nobody can convince them to stop? Trump knows perfectly well his Trumptards cared very little about the truth or about honestly paying their taxes. I'm certain, from decades of experience with them in war and peace and business, that Trumptards will do what pleases them and the results will often be crappy, but they can't tell the difference because they aren't as smart and sane as they imagine themselves, avoiding reality. It's why Trumptards struggle to stay in the middle class. Avoiding reality. It's why things are forever going wrong in their lives and it couldn't be their fault. It's the Democrats' fault! Always those mean Democrats triggering Trumptards' anger at the world and reality!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, June 4, 2021 3:04 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


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

I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
If you're anything like Texas Trumptards, you've avoided the reality about yourself all your life, except when reality punches your face or stabs you in the back or rots out your teeth. Most Trumptards, almost without exception, say things are going well. 6ix says it. I'd believe 6ix, except for the Trumptards I know things are NOT going well. Why do Trumptards say what is false? Maybe they don't know any better? Maybe nobody can convince them to stop? Trump knows perfectly well his Trumptards cared very little about the truth or about honestly paying their taxes. I'm certain, from decades of experience with them in war and peace and business, that Trumptards will do what pleases them and the results will often be crappy, but they can't tell the difference because they aren't as smart and sane as they imagine themselves, avoiding reality. It's why Trumptards struggle to stay in the middle class. Avoiding reality. It's why things are forever going wrong in their lives and it couldn't be their fault. It's the Democrats' fault! Always those mean Democrats triggering Trumptards' anger at the world and reality!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Saturday, June 5, 2021 7:07 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 SIGNYM:

Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.
You could say a lot of things, and Trumptards do because it's one of their defining characteristics, but you'd be trying to mislead. This is true: Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them.

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. William Bradford complained bitterly about the latter in his diary that winter, which is really saying something when you consider what trouble the group was in. (Barely half would survive until spring.) Before long, they were not only making their own beer but also importing wine and liquor. Still, within a couple of generations, Puritans like Cotton Mather were warning that a “flood of RUM” could “overwhelm all good Order among us.”

George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. (He is said to have given them 144 gallons of alcohol, enough to win him 307 votes and a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) During the Revolutionary War, he used the same tactic to keep troops happy, and he later became one of the country’s leading whiskey distillers. But he nonetheless took to moralizing when it came to other people’s drinking, which in 1789 he called “the ruin of half the workmen in this Country.”

Hypocritical though he was, Washington had a point. The new country was on a bender, and its drinking would only increase in the years that followed. By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today. An obsession with alcohol’s harms understandably followed, starting the country on the long road to Prohibition.

What’s distinctly American about this story is not alcohol’s prominent place in our history (that’s true of many societies), but the zeal with which we’ve swung between extremes. Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all. Again and again, an era of overindulgence begets an era of renunciation: Binge, abstain. Binge, abstain.

. . . this longing for oblivion resulted from America’s almost unprecedented pace of change between 1790 and 1830. Thanks to rapid westward migration in the years before railroads, canals, and steamboats, more Americans lived in isolation and independence than ever before or since. Meanwhile, in the more densely populated East the old social hierarchies evaporated, cities mushroomed, and industrialization upended the labor market, leading to profound social dislocation and a mismatch between skills and jobs. The resulting epidemics of loneliness and anxiety led people to numb their pain with alcohol.

The temperance movement that took off in the decades that followed was a more rational (and multifaceted) response to all of this than it tends to look like in the rearview mirror. Rather than pushing for full prohibition, many advocates supported some combination of personal moderation, bans only on hard liquor, and regulation of those who profited off alcohol. Nor was temperance a peculiarly American obsession. As Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in his new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, concerns about distilled liquor’s impact were international: As many as two dozen countries enacted some form of prohibition.

Yet the version that went into effect in 1920 in the United States was by far the most sweeping approach adopted by any country, and the most famous example of the all-or-nothing approach that has dogged us for the past century.

More at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/america-drinking-alone-pr
oblem/619017/ or
https://web.archive.org/web/20210604065724if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/america-drinking-alone-problem/619017/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 7, 2021 9:20 AM

SECOND

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


The Changing Composition of Support for Left and Right Parties

by Pranab Bardhan

Some decades back the typical voting pattern in many democracies used to be that the rich and upper middle classes used to vote in general for right-leaning parties, while the relatively poor voted for left-leaning parties. But in recent decades this pattern has been shifting: many of the professional or more educated voters in some of those countries are increasingly going for left or green parties, while many of the poor working-class voters are turning to right-wing parties, sometimes led by populist demagogues. Thomas Piketty and his associates in a new paper issued by the World Inequality Lab have provided data to show that for 21 western democracies the more educated voters have over the years become more left supporters than the less-educated voters. Piketty has described this elite division between high-education and high-income people colorfully as that between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right. He does not go much into explaining this pattern but it is clear that as education expands (measured by average years of schooling of the adult population) the left or center-left parties now can have a viable base even in the relatively rich or upper middle classes. Education often makes one appreciate more liberal values, which may sometimes outweigh their worries about higher taxes that the left parties may inflict.

But this still leaves unexplained why the less-educated poor are leaning right.

More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/06/the-changing-composition
-of-support-for-left-and-right-parties.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 7, 2021 9:42 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SIGNYM:

Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.

SECPMDRATE: You could say a lot of things, and Trumptards do because it's one of their defining characteristics, but you'd be trying to mislead.
What I posted was true

Quote:
SECONDRATE: This is true: Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks ... American ... drinking heavily... Mayflower .... beer... RUM... ... George Washington ... alcohol...blah blah blah ... and let me toss in a few more distrators so I can avoid having to address SIGNY'S point as much as possible ...

American ... alcohol ...
Why do you hate Americans so much, SECONDRATE?

And do you really think that nobody notices that when your brain has run dry of rebuttal (which is most of the time) that you fling irrelevant shit against the wall, hoping something will stick?



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Monday, June 7, 2021 10:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


It all stems from how much he hates himself and his own life.



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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Wednesday, June 9, 2021 6:34 AM

SECOND

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


How to Make Rational Mammals / Reasoning as a Social Project
(but you can't let retards work on your projects unless you crave project failure)

Reasoning well about what is true profiteth a mammal little. It does not reliably help a mammal in its selfish strivings, since it is often better for the mammal to believe all sorts of falsehoods that give it undue confidence (hope), or steer it clear of dangers (superstition), or hate its competitors (envy and jealousy). Nor does reasoning well about what is true help the mammal in terms of sociability, since a mammal is often more sociable by being stubbornly loyal to its clan (tribalism), or by taking on risks or burdens on behalf of the group (altruism), or caring for those who offer it no advantage (selfless love). Selfishness, sociability, and rationality: pick two, but you can’t have all three.

Given this predicament, we will have to give up on the original goal and settle for a next-best alternative, which is to create groups that reason well about what’s true, instead of individuals. This we can do. We first have to make sure our mammals have different opinions about what’s true. (Good news: this turns out to be easy to achieve.) Second, we have to have them talk to one another (already done). Third, we have to have them want to persuade one another to adopt the persuader’s opinion. This seems to accord pretty well with selfishness. But what counts as “acceptable means of persuasion” will have to be tempered somewhat to meet the requirements of sociability: if we allow for threats of force or bullying then we place our group’s cohesion at risk. So in the end we will need to establish social standards which tell us when we should or shouldn’t change our minds, on the basis of the claims our fellow mammals make. We can identify these standards as reason, near enough.

What we will get in the end are mammals who do not reason very well on their own — they fall into hope, superstition, envy, and other familiar mammalian foibles — but who reason exceptionally well in groups. Mammal A puts forward an opinion, only to be challenged by mammal B, with mammals C and D looking on, and a great many words are exchanged; in the end the group settles on an opinion which may be A’s, or someone else’s, or a new one that no one had considered before. But there begins to emerge a sense of what is right to conclude, independently of any individual’s opinion. We have at least a social process that functions in the way that “reason” is supposed to, even if we haven’t established that what counts as “right to conclude” is exactly the same as reasoning well about what is true.

. . . This overall engineering of mammalian reason is the account Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber offer in their 2017 book, The Enigma of Reason. The “enigma” they seek to explain is how humans are both fantastic and lousy reasoners. Humans, as we know, have calculus and the standard model and economic strategies and chess; but they also buy lottery tickets and adopt conspiracy theories and fail at all sorts of tasks set by crafty psychologists. Mercier and Sperber argue that we need to think of reasoning as a group project rather than as an oracle housed in each brain.

. . . Two interesting consequences follow from this view of reasoning as a social project. The first is that the individualistic ideal of human beings as free and independent judges of what is reasonable and true does not accord well with what we know ourselves to be. We need each other in order to reason well;

More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/06/how-to-make-rational-mam
mals.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 10, 2021 8:05 AM

SECOND

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


These myths about Social Security are drawing attention from what’s really going on

Talking with family and friends, listening to cable news or following public debate about the future of Social Security, you’ve likely heard one or more of the following comments asserted as incontrovertible fact:

Social Security is going bankrupt, going broke, in crisis; young people will never see a penny in benefits.

Social Security’s trust funds are simply an accounting gimmick, worthless IOUs.

Social Security is unsustainable. There just will not be enough working-age people to support retired boomers.

Social Security is unfair to younger Americans.

Here is a point-by-point refutation of each of these assertions and how these claims undermine confidence in the future of Social Security and distract attention from what is really going on.

More at https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-myths-about-social-security-ar
e-drawing-attention-from-whats-really-going-on-11622834550

The article does not say but the spreaders of these myths are Trumptards. I wonder what happened to those who lean Republican, even if they don’t always vote for only Republicans, to make them this way?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 10, 2021 8:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
These myths about Social Security are drawing attention from what’s really going on

Talking with family and friends, listening to cable news or following public debate about the future of Social Security, you’ve likely heard one or more of the following comments asserted as incontrovertible fact:

Social Security is going bankrupt, going broke, in crisis; young people will never see a penny in benefits.

Social Security’s trust funds are simply an accounting gimmick, worthless IOUs.

Social Security is unsustainable. There just will not be enough working-age people to support retired boomers.

Social Security is unfair to younger Americans.

Here is a point-by-point refutation of each of these assertions and how these claims undermine confidence in the future of Social Security and distract attention from what is really going on.

More at https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-myths-about-social-security-ar
e-drawing-attention-from-whats-really-going-on-11622834550

The article does not say but the spreaders of these myths are Trumptards. I wonder what happened to those who lean Republican, even if they don’t always vote for only Republicans, to make them this way?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly


Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Thursday, June 10, 2021 10:14 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
I've been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html

(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 10, 2021 10:21 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
I've have been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html

(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
I was only in SS for a few years, not enuf to be able to draw from it on retirement, so there's money I'll never gr back. (I was contributing to a county-based social security-like retirement plan, however.)

Like SECOND, hubby has been paying the max into Social Security, and there's no way in hell he'll ever get that back. It is a transfer of wealth from high wage workers to low wage retirees. Isn't that what you wanted, SIX?

BTW, I agree with SECOND: You need to start working again. You can't live off Covid stimulous checks, unemployment, and your nest egg forever. I know that you're hoping t make money when you sell your house (and I hope you make beaucoup bucks and get paid for all that work that you're putting into it) but you don't know what the market's going to be like when you sell, and your savings should be going up, not down, if you want to secure your future.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Friday, June 11, 2021 7:48 AM

SECOND

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


A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.

The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.

Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.

The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.

Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.”

More about fractured American Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210609154909if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/

Impatient readers jump to the end of the essay: All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

. . . we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

This essay is adapted from George Packer’s new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663

Free download of George Packer’s books at https://libgen.unblockit.li/search.php?&req=George+Packer&phra
se=1&view=simple&column=def&sort=year&sortmode=DESC
"Last Best Hope" isn't there quite yet because it is On Sale: 06/15/2021, while today is 06/11/2021.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, June 11, 2021 9:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


When SS started, it was 1% of your pay being taxed.

Now, with Medicare included, it's 15.3% of your wages.

That's because all of the boomers coming from families of 5 kids are drawing it, and it was a pyramid scheme from the beginning. Just another in an endless string of bubbles we are great at making here.




I have no intention of working again unless it's absolutely necessary. White males without college degrees at my age can't even get a decent job anymore, and I've started from the bottom and worked my way up to nearly 60k per year twice only to have that job disappear.

The last year has been one of the best and most productive of my life.

If our government were able to do 10% of the good I've done with almost nothing coming in during that time, we'd be running the world for the next 10,000 years.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Monday, June 14, 2021 7:17 AM

SECOND

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




What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Darrick Hamilton, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion support Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Hamilton, to his credit, was honest about these trade-offs. “Progressives don’t like to talk about this,” he told me. “They want this kumbaya moment. They want to say equity is great for everyone when it’s not. We need to shift our values. The capitalist class stands to lose from this policy, that’s unambiguous. They will have better resourced workers they can’t exploit through wages. Their consumer products and services would be more expensive.”

For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

“Ultimately, it’s about us as a society saying these privileges and luxuries and comforts that folks in the middle class — or however we describe these economic classes — have, how much are they worth to us?” Jamila Michener, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told me. “And are they worth certain levels of deprivation or suffering or even just inequality among people who are living often very different lives from us? That’s a question we often don’t even ask ourselves.”

But we should.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613164804/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/06/13/opinion/stimulus-unemployment-republicans-poverty.html

Stephen King reveals how he used paperback advance from first novel

King's mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, died at age 60 of cancer.
"And my brother and I talked a little bit about it. And we went to the Pineland facility where she worked. She was in her … green uniform, green rayon uniform – never told this story before – but she was stoned, totally stoned on over-the-counter medication. She was in excruciating pain by that point. … And my brother and I said, 'Mom, you're done. … There's enough to take care of you now, because the book sold for a lot of money, and you can go home.'

"And she just put her hands over her face and cried."
www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/stephen-king-reveals-how-he-used-
paperback-advance-from-first-novel/ar-AAKX0m1

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 14, 2021 8:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm sure we're going to hear more about this as unemployment benefits start dropping off 12 weeks early in the 25 states that ended them, which can be particularly problematic among states that haven't entirely reopened and banned vaccine passports. Particularly those with large minority populations.

I'm surprised how little coverage that has gotten.

It will though.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Tuesday, June 15, 2021 6:30 AM

SECOND

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


A Republican controlled Senate will never again confirm another Democrat Supreme Court Justice

On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he would refuse to let President Joe Biden fill a Supreme Court seat in 2024 if Republicans win the Senate next year. McConnell also suggested that he would not let Biden fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2023, even if the president nominated “a normal mainstream liberal.” These comments are not remotely surprising. The Republican Party has outsourced much of its agenda to the federal judiciary, a strategy that requires its lawmakers to ruthlessly extinguish Democrats’ influence over the courts. To that end, a GOP-controlled Senate will never again confirm a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee. Not in an election year or any other year. Not in your lifetime or mine. Never.

McConnell played slightly coy when discussing the possibility of a Supreme Court confirmation in 2023, telling Hewitt: “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.” But anyone who seriously believes a Republican-controlled Senate would confirm a Biden nominee that year—or even hold hearings on one—is deluding themselves. McConnell’s approach to judicial confirmations reflects two core principles of the modern GOP: first, that only the federal judiciary can impose key items in the Republican Party platform that are too unpopular to pass through the democratic process; and second, that only conservative judges faithfully apply the Constitution, whereas liberals make it up as they go along.

These principles might appear to contradict each other. But Republicans have harmonized them by convincing themselves that their platform perfectly reflects the Constitution. Thus, in the eyes of the GOP, when liberal judges issue decisions that align with Democrats’ priorities, they are judicial activists who are betraying their duty to apply the law as written. When conservative judges issue decisions that align with Republicans’ priorities, by contrast, they are independent jurists who are honoring the Framers’ design.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/mcconnell-biden-breyer-sup
reme-court.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, June 15, 2021 9:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?

Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Tuesday, June 15, 2021 10:00 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:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?

Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.

Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.

Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, June 15, 2021 3:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?

Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.

Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.

Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly



Didn't answer my question, so I didn't need to be quoted.

Stop quoting people then posting unrelated shit, dummy.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021 8:16 AM

SECOND

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


The railroads were the first great crony capitalists. They bought politicians, bribed judges, and, in Henry Adams’s phrase, turned themselves into ‘local despotisms’ in one state after another. In the 1860s, when railroads helped the North subdue the South, Congress repeatedly gave away parcels of land the size of northeastern states. Gifts to the Union Pacific were, cumulatively, equivalent to New Hampshire and New Jersey combined. By one scholar’s estimate, if all the land given to railroads in that decade were cobbled into one state, it would be the third largest, smaller than Alaska and Texas but larger than California.

https://roanoke.com/opinion/columnists/will-is-the-america-of-today-ev
en-capable-of-performing-great-building-feats/article_b37f18bc-ca4a-11eb-99a2-43d85e1e038c.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 3:58 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.

The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.

Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.

The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.

Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.”

More about fractured American Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210609154909if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/

Impatient readers jump to the end of the essay: All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

. . . we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

This essay is adapted from George Packer’s new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663

Free download of George Packer’s books at https://libgen.unblockit.li/search.php?&req=George+Packer&phra
se=1&view=simple&column=def&sort=year&sortmode=DESC
"Last Best Hope" isn't there quite yet because it is On Sale: 06/15/2021, while today is 06/11/2021.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 5:31 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


He is right about the two parties trading places though.

It's something that I've said for a LONG time here.

Funny how second seems to ignore that part of the passage he posted being a lifelong Democrat and all, innit?




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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:15 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Quote:
Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
The American pie is getting so much smaller. It's no wonder Americans are primed to try and feed off of the 'other'.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 2:03 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SECOND:

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.

Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.

The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.

...
More about fractured American Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210609154909if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/

Impatient readers jump to the end of the essay: All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

. . . we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

This essay is adapted from George Packer’s new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663

SECOND: Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.


People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE.

But here's the thing: Three (and a half) of the four narratives actually overlap. You can create a unifying narrative out of them if you want something for America, BUT IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU WANT.

Do you want an America to exist, or do you want to be part of a (non-democratic) globalist structure?
Do you want America to be independent and strong?
Do you want America to be united?
Do you want America to be for the people?
Do you want America to have a viable future?

If you want those things, then you will want, and reward:

America the FREE. A nation that doesn't make anything, but has a huge negative trade balance and depends on imports for everything cannot possibly have an indpendent economic, financial, foreign, and military policy. Work - specifically making things- should be rewarded. You will NOT create a society of people who feel they can consume without producing.

America the JUST. You can't have a unified America if some people are able to participate and other people are shut out. That is how you generate a widespread division. If you want a unified America, the benefit of meaningful work and the reward from it should be equally available to everyone who can participate. And you will provide a safety net for those who can't: the elderly, disabled, and sick.

America the REAL. In order to have an America that is for the people, you must have a narrative that says this is so. A narrative is based on the ethics of work, fair share, and precepts like the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, NOT on the ethics of greed, and endless vicious quest for power.

(Half of) America the SMART. Currently, Smart Americans are simply Useful Americans who have wormed their way up the anus of the elite an are willing to scrape off 90% of everyone else in their quest to mmaintain their warm, quiet, cozy spot. But if America is to have a viable future, we need people who are TRULY smart, not just technologically-capable quislings.

The presmed disunity of the four narratives doesn't really exist. They can be united, and they can be united in a way that brings us together instead of driving us apart, creates a solid economic and ethical foundation for America, and paves the way for a better future.

But, the elites would lose out. Pobrecito!



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 2:43 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 SIGNYM:

People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE. . . .
I will show you a map to my life: https://goo.gl/maps/SkseYXJVEMPsmGMV7

At one end is NASA. The other end is Taylor Lake Village where I had a house on the lake. I've talked to many people who had worked at NASA during the Apollo years. They had a purpose, a drive, a meaningful life, at least until Nixon, who didn't give a damn about the space program, other than as a way to win a few votes with aerospace contracts, killed purpose, meaning, life. America would be a much better place today if the space program hadn't lost most of its purpose fifty years ago when it shifted money to that overpriced Space Shuttle. The good old days are long gone because of politicians like Richard Nixon. He made the whole country poorer with his bad judgement, but especially he made the poorer half poorer than they could have been.

There are programs other than space that could keep America motivated and improve many poorer Americans' lives. One example: Is anybody interested in saving the world from climate change? But there is too much political opposition to that or any other thing that looks like a moonshot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Background

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 3:13 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?

Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?

What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?

Pobrecito



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Thursday, June 17, 2021 3:18 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Boy, have you got a grotch against Nixon, or what?? Nixon, you may recall, started a whole 'nother meaningful endeavor, and that was the EPA. As far as being the "big baddie" in xfering wealth to the wealthy, I think that prize goes to Obama.

Anyway, I should have picked a different word than "meaningful". I don't meaningful to the person who performs it, I mean meaningful to the society at large: People generally agree that the work is useful for society as a whole. Growing food is meaningful. Making steel, chemicals, cement, chips, cloth, glass is meaningful (or should be). Teaching and healing is meaningful. Pollution control, energy conservation, environmental remediation is meaningful. Building bridges, repairing roads, renovating houses and waterworks and pipes is meaningful. Protecting our borders is meaningful. Enforcing just laws equally is meaningful.

Much of that has been made meaningless by the elite, which is why recovering the narrative is meaningful.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 3:47 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 1KIKI:

How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?

Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?

What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
Don't blame me. I was a construction engineer building petrochemical plants here and overseas. After that, I was selling natural gas and cattle in America. All those careers are based in the U.S.A. Product is made here, or grown here, and sold here or to foreigners. But it is not possible for more than a few hundred thousand people to make a living the way I did. One class of jobs requiring many millions of working Americans: saving the world from climate change. Those millions of jobs won't be created because of political opposition to spending the money.

Republican policy on climate change: "Planning for our energy future requires us to first determine what resources we have in reserve. Thirty years ago, the world’s estimated reserves of oil were 645 billion barrels. Today, that figure is 1.65 trillion barrels. The more we know what we will have in the future, the better we can decide how to use it."

"The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anticoal agenda."

"The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party. Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation."

"We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act."

"Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate."

More at www.gop.com/platform/americas-natural-resources/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 6:11 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



And what if the government were to set internal and export gas prices, to benefit US-based industries? So that your industry would benefit US manufacturing and US workers instead of just ... you?

I'm sure there's a reason why you didn't address basic manufacturing in your answer tho Signy specifically mentioned it; and why focused on government projects. And I'm pretty sure that was intentional, and self-serving.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 6:52 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 1KIKI:

And what if the government were to set internal and export gas prices, to benefit US-based industries? So that your industry would benefit US manufacturing and US workers instead of just ... you?

I'm sure there's a reason why you didn't address basic manufacturing in your answer tho Signy specifically mentioned it; and why focused on government projects. And I'm pretty sure that was intentional, and self-serving.
If the government wants to set the price for my natural gas, it can go right ahead. It can't be any worse than what the market does. I take that back: government could set the price so high that most of my customers stop buying, and burning, in order to save the world from climate change. I am pretty damn sure we will have to stop burning fossil fuels or else die while choking on the fumes.

The reason why I did NOT focus on manufacturing is that moving all factories from Mexico and Canada and China back to the United States was a Trump talking point. You might not have noticed, but Trump's tariff policy didn't move any jobs back to the United States. I guess moving all those jobs is possible, but it is not possible to do it without setting off a trade war.

Check out 'How many jobs did Trump tariff policy create?' at google https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+jobs+did+Trump+tariff+policy+
create%3F

The answer I get from google is that Trump's tariff policy did NOT work. But I doubt that voters for Trump would believe Trump failed.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 7:35 PM

SECOND

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


Biden hits roadblocks on path to low-carbon economy

Updated: June 17, 2021 2:17 p.m.

When President Joe Biden announced in April that he was planning to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next nine years, administration officials believed the goal was ambitious but achievable through policies that would accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and effectively ban power plants from emitting carbon dioxide.

But a series of early setbacks in both court and Congress is providing a reality check for the administration. Biden is quickly finding out that achieving such a sharp drop in emissions over such a short period will be inordinately difficult in the current political climate.

The decision by a Louisiana federal judge Wednesday requiring the Department of Interior to end its pause on oil and gas leasing came as the administration’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on electric vehicle charging stations and tax credits was looking unlikely to make it into any bipartisan infrastructure package that might materialize.

And if the administration officials had any question about Republicans willingness to shift the nation away from fossil fuels, they only had to look to Texas where the Republican-controlled state government just passed a law limiting state entities including pension funds from investing with companies seeking to shift investment from fossil fuels.

“How's he doing reworking the entire economy? It's going slowly,” quipped Glenn Schwartz, director of energy policy at the Washington consulting firm Rapidan Group. “His big goals are limited by partisan gridlock in Congress. Going forward he’s going to need to rely on his existing authority as president, but there he’s really just playing at the edges.”

In the days following his inauguration, Biden came out hard on climate change, painting the issue both as an existential crisis for the planet but also one that offered the potential for a clean energy boom that would create new industries and new jobs.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210617233141/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Biden-hits-roadblocks-on-path-to-low-carbon-16254695.php

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 8:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
1KIKI:

How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?

Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?

What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?

SECOND: Don't blame me. I was a construction engineer building petrochemical plants here and overseas. After that, I was selling natural gas and cattle in America. All those careers are based in the U.S.A. Product is made here, or grown here, and sold here or to foreigners.
So, what were you REWARDED for?

Going to Vietnam? Er, not so much. (I wonder what meme that would be under? "Real" America? The kind that believes in freedom, mom, and apple pie?)

Working at McDonald's? Not so much there, either. (That would belong, I suppose, under "Free" America.)

Designing petrochemical plants? Well, moving up the scale, definitely. Prolly somewhere between "Free" America and "Smart" America.

But when did the money REALLY come rolling in??? When you BOUGHT land and became a RENTIER CAPITALIST, "making money in your sleep" simply through the fact of ownership, not effort. What meme does THAT belong in?
It doesn't, because it's the meme we don't talk about.

The meaningful jobs ... raising children, growing food, building buildings, digging ditches, assembling components, trucking goods .... THOSE are relegated to undocumented nannies and agricultural workers and day-laborers and low-wage assembly line workers and "gig economy" services. The stuff that doesn't matter - internet "influencers" and celebrity chefs - get a lot of money.

And the really BIG money goes to the owners.

It's an upside-down reward system that is destroying America.



-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

$3.30 for gas today.

Welcome to Biden*'s America.

Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:23 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I will show you a map to my life:


FIFY


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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:32 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:
lol

$3.30 for gas today.

Welcome to Biden*'s America.

Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Presidents don't control gasoline prices:

US Regular All Formulations Gas Price
Weighted average based on sampling of approximately 900 retail outlets, 8:00AM Monday. The price represents self-service unless only full-service is available and includes all taxes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EQ1p


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:36 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Quote:
If the government blah blah blah ... Trump ... blah blah blah ... Trump .. blah blah blah ... Trump ... Trump ...

Since you refuse to post anything honest, or even on topic, I'm not even going to pretend to discuss this with you.


But, related to Signy's post ...

I think history taught us that corporations have no loyalty to America. They, along with their captive politicians and economic advisors, are the authors of the US's current problems of dependency on China for manufactured goods, the bad Balance of Trade, and crippling debt in all sectors. So in general, it's futile to presume business will fix the problems it has created.

There's also another issue here, and that's the presumption the US government is a business, and that it should be run like a business. But the government isn't a business. It wasn't created to harvest the highest profit possible by any means necessary. Instead its charter is to to 'provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity'. That reads nothing like a corporate prospectus.

I think people need to rethink their assumptions about the US and its various levels of government, and what they should and should not be focused on.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

$3.30 for gas today.

Welcome to Biden*'s America.

Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Presidents don't control gasoline prices:


That doesn't matter.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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Friday, June 18, 2021 12:47 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


We're staring down the barrel of 1970's style inflation. The type of stuff I was fortunate not to have lived through.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/558555-biden-approaches-economic-p
oint-of-no-return

Biden* is fucked.

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

Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.

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