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

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
You don't pay all your taxes.

Oh, really now? Do go on...

Quote:
You don't work full-time.

I don't work at all. I'm retired.

Quote:
Even if Trump and his Trumptards have abandoned any pretensions to a moral code, decent and law-abiding citizens still need to insist on it.

Before you start rambling on about moral codes, you should probably ask yourself which one of the posters at FireflyFans.Net is the billionaire business owner who spends half of his waking hours throwing out ad hominems and other personal attacks against 3 of the 4 other people who still come to a website honoring a long dead TV show that nobody gives a shit about in 2025.

It's the saddest thing I've ever witnessed.

You are the saddest person I have ever known.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, January 24, 2025 5:47 PM

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

There Is No Resistance

The response to the January 6 pardons shows that the president faces no effective constraints from within his party.

By Jonathan Chait | January 24, 2025, 9:20 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/republicans-ratio
nalization-trump-pardons/681433/

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

Obviously? Immediately upon assuming office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the approximately 1,500 people prosecuted for participating in the January 6 attacks, including convicted violent offenders. He might not have literally deployed any mobs yet, but he has freed members of paramilitary groups that are loyal to him, and who may see their pardons and commutations as license to act on his behalf again.

[Read: January 6ers got out of prison—and came to my neighborhood]

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, led military-style maneuvers on January 6 and had an armed strike force nearby. This week, while strolling the Capitol in a kind of victory tour, Rhodes told CNN, “I don’t regret calling out the election as what it was.” The Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who had to direct the attacks from a distance (a judge had barred him from the city for vandalizing a Black church), expressed vindication and a desire for revenge. “We went through hell—and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” he exulted on The Alex Jones Show. “The people who did this [to us], they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.” And the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said in a livestream, “I would storm the Capitol again for Donald Trump. I would start a militia for Donald Trump.”

The J6 pardons have chagrined many Republicans. But it is not going to make many of them rethink their support for Trump. If you want to understand why, look again at the sentence that Lowry wrote just before laughing off the hysterical fear of Trumpist paramilitaries. Trump “says crude and unworthy things.” He “behaved abysmally.”

Even when Republicans in good MAGA standing can bring themselves to scold Trump, their criticism is limited to discrete acts. Trump can say or do something bad, but he cannot be something bad. To acknowledge that his bad acts follow from his character and beliefs, and therefore offer a guide to his future actions, would throw into question the morality and wisdom of supporting him.

Before the fact, vanishingly few prominent Republican politicians or conservative intellectuals actively endorsed the notion of freeing the J6 criminals en masse. The party line before the inauguration held that Trump was in his rights to grant clemency to some of the nonviolent offenders, but not to the ones who’d beat up cops or planned the operation. The week before he was sworn in as vice president, J. D. Vance said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Representative Jim Jordan, one of the most flamboyant Trump devotees in Congress, wouldn’t endorse a full suite of pardons.

After Trump went ahead, his allies mostly stopped short of defending the pardons. Instead, they turned to a familiar menu of evasive maneuvers. Some expressed an implausible degree of unfamiliarity with Trump’s actions. (“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,” Senator Susan Collins said.) Others fell back on whataboutism. (“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” Senator Chuck Grassley sneered in response to a reporter’s question about January 6. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”) Most expressed a desire to ignore the issue altogether. (“We’re not looking backwards; we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.) Awkwardly, almost immediately after bleating about their desire to move forward, House Republicans announced a new committee to “investigate” January 6, which presumably will advance Trump’s alt-history of the event as an FBI setup, a Democratic security failure, a day of love, or, somehow, all three.

[Listen: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon]

The most revealing statement on the pardons came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “The president’s made his decision,” he said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Here, Johnson was stating overtly what most of his colleagues had only revealed tacitly: that he does not believe that his job permits him to criticize, let alone oppose, Trump’s actions.

This admission has profound implications. It shows that Trump faces no effective constraints from within his party. Given the Republican trifecta, this means he faces no effective opposition from within the elected branches of the federal government. Even if his allies personally believe that a line exists that the president cannot or will not cross, what matters is that if he does cross it, nothing will happen to him. This realization ought to shake their confidence that the next imagined red line will hold. Instead, they have declined to revise any of their deeper beliefs about Trump.

The refusal to draw any broader conclusions from the January 6 pardons is evident not just on Capitol Hill but also in the handful of reproachful articles published in conservative media. The pardons are “a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order,” National Review editorialized. “This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally,” the editors of The Free Press observed. The implication of these dutiful reprimands is that Trump has failed to live up to his values, rather than having fulfilled them.

In the midst of the Soviet show trials in 1936, Workers Age, an American communist newspaper, gently rebuked Stalin for his heavy-handedness. Sure, the defendants were guilty of sabotage at the behest of Trotsky, but execution was an excessive punishment. “Furthermore,” the editorial declared, “we do not hesitate to say that the bureaucratic regime of Stalin in the CPSU makes it extremely difficult for healthy, constructive critical opposition forces developing in the Party ranks”—as if inhibiting criticism of Stalin was some kind of unintended consequence of executing his rivals.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

The conservatives distressed over Trump’s mass pardons have a similar lack of curiosity about his motives. Why Trump would take such unfortunate actions, they do not ask. Could it be because he believes fundamentally that opposition to him is per se criminal, action on his behalf is per se legal, and any outcome in which he loses is illegitimate?

One might hope that Trump’s congressional allies, temporarily disappointed by his regrettable lapse in judgment regarding the January 6 pardons, might rethink their approach to the ongoing confirmation fights, which revolve around fears that the president will abuse his power. Given Trump’s reported desire to use the military to shoot peaceful protesters, maybe find a defense secretary who hasn’t written a series of hair-on-fire books depicting American liberals as tantamount to hostile enemy combatants. And given Trump’s obsession with criminalizing his critics, they might pick an FBI director who does not have an enemies list and who hasn’t produced a recording of a Trump anthem performed by violent insurrectionists.

Alas, the “moment,” as The Free Press revealingly put it, for expressing disappointment with the president has already passed. They are back to the workaday routine of supporting Trump’s efforts to keep his administration free of any official who might be stricken with conscience. There may be more moments of concern in the future. Indeed, the party’s acquiescence to Trump’s appetite for revenge and corruption all but guarantees it. But those moments, too, shall pass.

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

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Friday, January 24, 2025 5:51 PM

Your grift is over.

You still have no clue the full extent of the damage the Democrat brand has suffered at its own hands.

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago doesn't exist.

Some would say that it no longer does. I would argue that outside of Twitter and Reddit and the minds of college "educated" liberals that it never actually did.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, January 24, 2025 5:55 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

If SECOND was the gas/oil energy tycoon he claims to be, he'd know that thanks to a combination of oil chemistry, previous investment decisions, geography, and regulation, America can't use all of its light sweet crude, but must export it and import heavier crude.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, January 24, 2025 5:58 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

No, I leave that to corrupt DNC leaders and their deranged ANTIFA/BLM rioters.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 5:54 AM

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

Friday night massacre

The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 12 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.

....Some of the government’s largest agencies were involved, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Energy. Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the group.

“It’s a widespread massacre,” said one of the fired inspectors general. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system.”

Inspectors general have wide ranging powers to investigate agencies for waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump's Friday night massacre makes their job under the new regime clear: investigate away, but not on anything that might embarrass Trump.

https://jabberwocking.com/trump-purges-ig-corps-in-friday-night-massac
re/

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

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 11:24 AM

If you didn't want Trump back in office, you shouldn't have broke the pendulum clean off the left side of the clock.

You were warned.

Suffer the consequences.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 12:34 PM

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

No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again
We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK

By Paul Krugman | Jan 25, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-trump-cant-make-manufacturing

This post is about how Donald Trump’s policies couldn’t “make us a manufacturing nation again” even if they succeeded in greatly reducing trade deficits. They won’t, which makes it something of a moot point, but people should understand both that we are going to be a service economy no matter what, and that that’s OK: a fixation on manufacturing as the only source of good jobs is generations out of date.

In the summer of 1992 I flew to Little Rock, Arkansas for an audition. Officially, of course, that wasn’t what it was; then-governor Bill Clinton had invited a number of Democratic-leaning economists to talk about policy issues. But everyone understood that our performance would help determine whether we would be offered jobs if he won the presidential election.

At one point Clinton asked how we could get employment in U.S. manufacturing back up to historical levels as a share of total employment. Heads turned to me, since this was clearly my lane, and I answered something like this: “Well, Governor, that really isn’t possible. Even if we could eliminate our trade deficit, the manufacturing share would still be much lower than it was in the 50s and 60s.”

Needless to say, I didn’t get a job in the Clinton administration. I’ve been thankful ever since.

But I was right, and what I said then is still true. Donald Trump declared in his inaugural speech that “America will be a manufacturing nation once again.” No, it won’t. As I’ll explain shortly, Trump’s policies are actually likely to shrink manufacturing, but even if they weren’t, we aren’t going back to the days when manufacturing employed a quarter of the work force rather than its current 8 percent.

To be clear, there is a case for promoting U.S. manufacturing in sectors of strategic importance. Between Putin and Xi, the national security case for tariffs or subsidies looks stronger now than it has for generations. But such policies won’t change the fact that these days we are overwhelmingly a service economy.

And that’s OK. The popular belief that only manufacturing can offer good jobs to ordinary workers is wrong; in fact, at this point manufacturing doesn’t offer especially good jobs. We can make things better for American workers, but a fixation on manufacturing gets in the way of real solutions.

Let’s look at some numbers.

For a generation or so after World War II, America really was a manufacturing nation. Industry employed more than a quarter of the nonfarm work force:

And it accounted for a comparable share of GDP:

Source: BEA

But manufacturing’s relative importance has steadily declined. At this point substantially more Americans work in health care than in factories:

The question is, what caused this decline, and can it be reversed?

Trump obviously blames foreign competition and believes that we can make manufacturing great again if we force foreigners to stop running trade surpluses. And to be fair, America’s move into persistent trade deficits, which really began under Ronald Reagan, has been a contributing factor to manufacturing’s decline.

But trade deficits weren’t the main reason for manufacturing’s relative decline. What was? Basically, it’s the same story as the relative decline of farming as an occupation, even though America is a big agricultural exporter. We got so good at farming that we no longer needed many farmers; similarly, rising productivity in manufacturing has reduced the need for industrial workers.

Uh-oh, you may think, doesn’t that mean that rising productivity will eventually lead to mass unemployment everywhere? No, that’s a fallacy of composition; read my old Slate article “The accidental theorist,” which explains it all in terms of hot dogs and buns.
https://slate.com/business/1997/01/the-accidental-theorist.html

And while trade deficits have also been a factor, even eliminating our trade deficit would still leave us much less of a manufacturing nation than we were in, say, the 1960s.

Consider the comparison between the United States and Germany. We import more manufactured goods than we export; Germany does the reverse, running a huge trade surplus in manufactured goods relative to the size of its economy. (Like China’s trade surplus, this is a symptom of economic weakness rather than strength.)

So does Germany have a bigger manufacturing sector, in relative terms, than the United States? Yes, but even so it has declined over time, and it’s nowhere near as big as American manufacturing used to be:

Source: BEA, World Bank

And America is not going to run Germany-sized trade surpluses. For one thing, the world couldn’t and wouldn’t absorb US exports on that scale. Germany only manages to avoid a severe backlash partly because it’s a much smaller economy than America or China, partly because people tend to think of it as just part of the euro area.

No, we’d be lucky simply to eliminate our manufactures trade deficit, which would bring us roughly a third of the way toward a German-sized manufacturing sector, i.e. around 13 percent of GDP — far below its level in the 1960s, and in fact smaller than it was when I gave Bill Clinton the wrong answer.

In any case, Trump’s policies won’t eliminate our manufacturing trade deficit. If anything, they’ll make it bigger. Tariffs will lead to both foreign retaliation and a stronger dollar, hurting U.S. exports even as they reduce imports. Tax cuts will cause a potentially inflationary rise in the budget deficit; combined with the inflationary impact of tax cuts, this will cause the Fed to stop cutting rates and possibly increase them, driving the dollar and the trade deficit even higher.

True, Trump may try to force the Fed to cut rates despite the risks of inflation. If so, hello stagflation.

Anyway, the bottom line is that we are never ever getting back together to being the manufacturing nation of yore. But why should we want to go back?

Many people seem to believe that manufacturing is where the good jobs are. But that isn’t true and hasn’t been true for a long time. As of December, according to the BLS, the average production or nonsupervisory job in America’s private sector paid $30.62 an hour. In manufacturing the number was $28.34 — less than the all-industry average.

Why do people imagine that manufacturing offers ordinary workers good jobs? In part because it used to — not because there’s something inherent about working on an assembly line that leads to good wages, but because once upon a time many manufacturing workers were represented by strong unions. Now they aren’t, and manufacturing jobs are nothing special.

Also, I can’t help noting than even now many people think of working in a factory as something real men do, while, say, nursing is female-coded.

The bottom line is that Trump is (surprise!) selling a fantasy rather than an actual solution to workers’ problems. If we really wanted to bring back the days when workers without college degrees could afford a middle-class standard of living, the answer isn’t pipe dreams about bringing back manufacturing; it’s unionizing service sector giants like Amazon and Walmart.

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

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 1:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again
We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK

Once again, Paul is wrong about everything.

Service jobs are the easiest to ship overseas. Most of them being done are done outside of the country for pennies on the dollar.

Paul needs to shut the fuck up already.

People listening to idiots like him the last 50 years got us to where we are today.

Fuck you Paul. It's 2025 and you are finally irrelevant.

You and all the other Boomers running the world need to finally die off.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 4:09 PM

CNN: The Newsom-Trump dynamic sets up a test case for Democrats charting their future

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/newsom-and-trump-face-off-from
-a-distance-as-los-angeles-fires-burn/ar-AA1xO9su

The funniest part of this article is about halfway down when some dipshit working for Newsom was recalling the event as he saw it and said the following:

Quote:
“Part of working with Trump and his administration is managing his ego and the political jabs, but ultimately we have work to do and a responsibility to Californians,” Alex Padilla, the state’s senior senator and a Newsom ally, told CNN.

Is that what you think you did here, Alex? You managed his ego?

That's cute.

Two sentences of flattery after 8 years of political and legal persecution, being called the worst names you could find in a thesaurus, and being shot at not once, but twice, and still coming back to win a 2nd non-consecutive term as President... and what?

Trump's going to roll over and be a good little doggy for you now because you threw him a bone?

Do I have that right? Alex?

Trump is the one playing you, stupid.

And what? You think that Trump and his staff don't watch CNN because they don't like you? Nah bitch... You believe that because that's all you Democrats do, hiding out in your echo chamber 24/7/365. Everybody else that's paying attention pays attention to what everyone is saying.

Trump has already seen you spill the beans on CNN about how one manipulates Trump. You Dunning-Kruger Syndrome Poster Child, college "educated" little weasel.

Get ready for having a far tougher time rigging elections in California going forward, because... SPOILER ALERT: Voter ID is coming your way bitch.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 7:04 PM

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

NYTimes, ask me what I want for the Future of America. This:

U.S. healthcare spending per capita costs twice the average of other wealthy countries. Fix it, Trump.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-system-compare
-to-other-countries/
https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-international-comparison-of-heal
th-systems/?entry=table-of-contents-how-does-health-spending-in-the-u-s-compare-to-other-countries

What Trump Voters Want for the Future of America

By Philip Montgomery, Charles Homans | Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/magazine/trump-supporters-maga-amer
ica-future.html

All the photographs in this article are in black-and-white. A crowd at the Make America Great Again victory rally.

When a new president is inaugurated, the thermodynamics of power in Washington become for a moment physically observable, measurable in crowd estimates, seating charts, corporate-sponsorship banners and embossed invitations. Over the long weekend, everyone with a rooting interest in a presidency, from door-knocking grandmothers to the executives of ballistic-missile manufacturers, is there to claim a share of it, navigating the same maze of street closures and security barricades.

The optics, in a country with an increasingly untenable concentration of wealth, are never great: the loyal voters, delivered to the nation’s capital by chartered buses and knee-bruising economy-class flights, shivering on the National Mall in hopes of catching a glimpse of their new president on the Jumbotron, while the elites are whisked past security lines and ferried between mansions in Kalorama and Georgetown in convoys of dark-windowed Escalades. The contrast was starker than usual at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, where the communal rites of the swearing-in ceremony and the parade were taken inside — because of the weather, officially — and reconstituted as quasi-exclusive events, leaving most of his supporters quite literally out in the cold.

But the inauguration’s dance of public and private power is more complicated than that. For Trump, the world is made up of binaries of domination and submission, and every Trump supporter standing outside Capital One Arena could read the subtext of the black-tie receptions hosted by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, who banned Trump from Facebook for two years, or the commemorative soda bottles furnished by Coca-Cola, which once denounced the actions of the Jan. 6 rioters whom Trump was now freeing from prison with the stroke of a pen. These were gestures of appeasement, for which they, the voters, could take some credit. Even people who were unlikely to enjoy the spoils of power in Trump’s second presidency could take some pleasure, in this moment, in wielding it.

What did they actually want from this restoration? For three days, the photographer Philip Montgomery and I crisscrossed a city in the process of becoming Trump’s Washington once again, asking that question of the supporters who enabled this transfer of power and came to celebrate it.

Sheryl Dutter
Car-dealership cashier
Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

We are so divided. It’s scary. Scary for the kids that are growing up, like my grandkids. I don’t like the way this country’s turned — all this woke stuff. Stuff that the kids shouldn’t be exposed to. I think I was 18 before I knew that there was gay people, you know? I listened to Queen. I didn’t know he was gay.

Amish came out in Pennsylvania. They came out in droves. They came out in their horse and buggies. It was incredible. So that’s a united country again. We’re tired of being lied to.

Douglas W. Jones
Retired electrician
Smackover, Ark.

When I speak to people that basically hate Trump, well, I never hated Biden. I didn’t hate Obama. I just didn’t like their policies. So when somebody says they hate Trump — well, why do you hate him?

I went to a big prayer-and-praise convocation yesterday at the Greater New Hope Baptist Church, which is a Black Lives Matter church. A lot of people from all over the world, and we just prayed and sang praises to Lord Jesus, just to bring this country together to be what it needs to be. That was better than the rally because we had purpose.

Olusola Owoeye
Detention-service officer, Dallas County Sheriff’s Department
Dallas

I believe with Jesus at Trump’s side, America will be safe again, America will be greater again. He’s going to join us together. We’re going to support him with prayers, actions.

I came here legally. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t be allowed in the country. He can deport them and tell them to go through the immigration process.

Chris Roman wearing a Donald Trump beanie
Trump-merchandise vendor
Sarasota, Fla.

I hope that we can truly and honestly understand what it means to, first, have our economy stabilized. I think that we should be protecting babies. I think that you guys understand what I’m talking about there. And, you know, just freedom of speech, protecting things like that. The left has been so gung ho about just taking away rights and trying to demolish what it means to be an American.

Robert Shinkle
Ohio Department of Development administrative staff
Sugarcreek Township, Ohio

We expect that Trump will usher in a new golden era for America. That’s why we’re dressed the way we are. This is the beginning of the Roaring Twenties 2.0. You’re going to see so much economic prosperity, the cost of energy going down, while American hegemony increases dramatically. It’s very hopeful right now — way more than his first term. There’s been a lot of lessons learned.

Carolyn Beauregard-Shinkle
Retired marketing executive
Sugarcreek Township, Ohio

It’ll be a different kind of presidency, these next four years. He has excellent people in place in the cabinet as well as throughout the White House staff. I think that he knows that he has limited time to get a lot done.

Stephen Chacko
Real estate developer
Dallas

My mom and dad came from South India. If my parents came here legally and followed the rules and did it right and became U.S. citizens, then they deserve that credibility. The people that come here illegally, that’s not right. It actually devalues those immigrants like my parents, all the work that they did.

Anthony DeCesaris, with his wife, Judy DeCesaris
Retired investor
Chester County, Pa.

We have four children, they’re all living with us. We have a 30-year-old living in the basement with his fiancée, trying to get to a wedding, trying to buy a house and trying to get by. So we’re hoping that there’s some relief for the average young person.

Maria Britto
Insurance agent
Miami

I think he has changed. His way of projecting himself, it was very rough before. He has become wiser because of what happened to him. He almost died. And he said it: God gave him a second chance, to be a uniter.

Judith Verano
Peruvian immigrant
Washington, D.C.

What we want is that they give us more hope that immigrants won’t get deported if they haven’t committed a crime. If we do things correctly and pay our taxes, don’t kick us out. I agree with what he thinks about the first priorities, that he wants to take away those that are committing crimes. If one comes to a country, they should contribute, not get arrested.

Chuck Lu
Small-business owner
Chicago

I put the story of Jan. 6 side by side with what the Communist Party did in the Tiananmen Square. I was back in China when Tiananmen Square happened. I was a student in 1989. For me, the two historic events are essentially the same thing. You had a bureaucratic government that crushed the people’s voice. I was at the Capitol that day. It was a setup. If they’re insurrectionists, they’re the most incompetent insurrectionists in human history.

Rollins Whitaker
College student at the University of Mississippi
Guntersville, Ala.

My generation’s, like, falling apart. It’s awful. I think the border policy’s really important. What college was it where the girl was running on the track, and someone who was here illegally literally murdered her? That could happen anywhere. I transferred out of the high school that I was going to graduate from because there were guys that were going into the girls’ bathroom. And they just say that they’re a girl, but they’re clearly a guy.

Crystal Whitaker with her son, J. T. Whitaker
Textile designer
Guntersville, Ala.

I want to go back where it once was. Conservative values — we’re from the South, so the Bible Belt. For my kids, I want them to grow up with the same values that I had growing up.

We live in rural Alabama and we had been bombarded with Haitians that have literally taken over our area. Our schools are overflowing. They don’t speak English. They don’t clean up after themselves. They just don’t understand how we live. It’s like a third world country. I have no problem with someone immigrating, just do it legally. I feel so bad saying some of this stuff, but you know, I feel like we’ve become just way too far liberal on some of our beliefs.

We are home-schooling him right now, because of what the schools have become.This one has always been like, obsessed with Donald Trump. I mean, every paper he writes, every project he does in school, everything is about Trump.

Interviews have been edited and condensed.

Philip Montgomery is a photographer whose work examines the fractured state of America. He previously photographed the people of Luzerne County, Pa., for the magazine in the days around the 2024 election.

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

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 8:13 PM

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago doesn't exist.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, January 25, 2025 11:37 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago doesn't exist.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

The world I'm living in existed before you were born and I will be alive and prospering long after you and Trump are feeding MAGA-maggots while the barely surviving Trumptards wistfully dream about resurrecting the Third Reich. "Sieg heil mein führer Trump" - Leon Musk

TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won.
Here are the numbers from investigative reporter Greg Palast.

By Greg Palast | Jan 24, 2025

https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f

A guest post by Greg Palast for the Hartmann Report

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Here are key numbers:

— 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
— By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
— No fewer than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
— At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
— 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
— 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote.

Much more at https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 3:45 AM

The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.

Also, nobody wants to hear you bitch and moan about election integrity. Not after everything you've had to say on the issue for the last 4 years.

Grow up you fucking crybaby.

I see that you now have stopped watching the Legacy Media since they've stopped telling you what you want to hear and now you've devolved to looking at clickbait bullshit like Ted did.

Hartmann report doesn't have an entry on mediabiasfactcheck it's so far off the left side of the scale.

I found a place that does have them though....

https://adfontesmedia.com/hartmann-report-bias-and-reliability/

Quote:
Bias: Hyper-Partisan Left

Reliability: Unreliable, Problematic

Keep going to the left, you fucking psycho.

See where it gets ya.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, January 26, 2025 8:55 AM

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 see that you now have stopped watching the Legacy Media since they've stopped telling you what you want to hear and now you've devolved to looking at clickbait bullshit like Ted did.

Hartmann report doesn't have an entry on mediabiasfactcheck it's so far off the left side of the scale.

I found a place that does have them though....

https://adfontesmedia.com/hartmann-report-bias-and-reliability/

Quote:
Bias: Hyper-Partisan Left

Reliability: Unreliable, Problematic

Keep going to the left, you fucking psycho.

See where it gets ya.

The New York Review of Books is as mainstream media as possible. Their conclusion in a book review? Cheaply, Trump's billionaires bought the votes of impoverished people like yourself. 13 billionaires "work" in the White House to keep track and control of him. Then there are hundreds of multimillionaires moving the actual levers of government. Trumptards got cheated into voting for new tax-cuts and reduced labor law enforcement for the benefit of the super-wealthy.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+billionaires+work+in+trump%27
s+government

A Review of Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

The Ungovernable Economy
“When I look at the world around us, I perceive a gigantic crisis of political legitimacy.”

By Trevor Jackson, interviewed by Irza Waraich | January 25, 2025

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/01/25/the-ungovernable-economy-tre
vor-jackson/

Free download at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Martin+Wolf+The+Crisis+of+Democratic
+Capitalism

The reviewer also has a book available for free at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Trevor+Jackson+Impunity+and+Capitali
sm

“Capitalism is predicated on atomized individuals, democracy on shared publics,” writes Trevor Jackson in the Review’s January 16 issue.

Reviewing Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Jackson examines capitalist democracies past and present to find where the economic system of capitalism and the political system of democracy have aligned and where they have diverged. He is particularly interested in the history of policies designed to revitalize economies and nations after an economic crisis and charts the way these policies have privatized gains and socialized losses. But Jackson also insists that these events—both the crises and the state’s responses—must be understood as historically contingent, lest “expressions of ruthless class interest are reframed as basic truths.” Without considering the contemporaneous debates about class and conditions of economic inequality, he argues, we won’t understand how crisis continues to be the order of the day.

Jackson is an economic historian and teaches history and political economy at UC Berkeley. Though his research focuses on early modern Europe, he has taught courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crises, and the history of economic thought. A regular contributor to the Review, Jackson has written about cryptocurrency, student debt, and economic bubbles. He is the author of Impunity and Capitalism, and his writing has also appeared in Dissent, The Baffler, and The Nation.
Trevor Jackson

I recently spoke with Jackson about his research interests in early modern Europe, the evolving relationship between capitalism and democracy, and different interpretations of historical analogy.

Irza Waraich: What initially drew you to research the economic history of early modern Europe?

Trevor Jackson: It was in part interest and in part accident. Accident in the sense that I once thought I’d become a development economist, and so I did a degree in what was known as the “political economy of late development” at the London School of Economics. There’s not a lot of undergraduate teaching in economic history, so this was the first time I encountered that material, and I found it fascinating.

Early modern Europe is one of the great focal points of economic history research. That’s where we tend to think capitalism, the industrial revolution, and the modern economy originated. The era has attracted a great deal of attention from economic historians over the years, and so it turned out to be an ideal place to learn the tools, techniques, ideas, concepts, and arguments of economic history writ large.

What specific parallels do you see between early modern capitalism and today?

One of the first things that comes to mind is in the eighteenth century, when the institutions of what today we would call financial capitalism were created. There was a great deal of anxiety among contemporaneous observers that the ability to create fortunes based on movable, intangible capital would allow the owners of those fortunes to remove themselves from communities of obligation. They would no longer be bound by the laws and customs of the nations where they resided or were citizens, because they could always leave and take their capital with them. That was perceived as a corrosive threat to the social order.

That conflict in turn became part of what I would call a crisis of political legitimacy for the old regime in Europe, which had governed the economy and society for centuries and which was, by the eighteenth century, facing mass upheaval and public critique. That conflict seems to me to be similar to our own moment: when I look at the world around us, I perceive a gigantic crisis of political legitimacy.

In your review, you write that Wolf argues that “neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, as he acknowledges, these institutions are in crisis all around the world. How might globalization be reimagined to prioritize both global economic equality and democratic stability?

We can see that the globalization we got beginning in the 1990s has a few specific characteristics: it hinged on privatization, as well as the liberalization of capital accounts or trade policies—and essentially everything the International Monetary Fund calls “macroeconomic stability,” meaning balanced budgets and low rates of inflation. Those policies have been very good for the free flow of capital and for the creation of a truly gigantic global financial sector. They have been less good for middle- to lower-income people in rich countries, and they have not delivered high rates of economic growth.

Economists who pushed these policies were very willing to recognize, as they say, that there are “winners” and “losers.” Even now, many of them are willing to admit that the winners have been far more concentrated and the losers have been far more numerous than they had anticipated. The degree of the loss—of jobs, of security, of social prestige—and the particular political interpretation of its causes—blaming immigrants, say—have turned out to be much more corrosive to democratic culture than these economists had anticipated.

Essentially, the globalization that we’ve seen has been a project of class domination, and it was very successful. We could think creatively about other forms of global economic integration that come with built-in redistributive mechanisms to compensate what we might crudely call the losers of market integration. But what a project of global integration that is driven by a different class imperative might look like is a little unclear, in part because the postwar decades of rapid economic growth and relatively equal income distributions in the West were predicated on capital controls, which were a feature of the Bretton Woods monetary system that made it difficult to move capital rapidly across international borders. That meant owners of capital were stuck with whatever democratic political compromises were made domestically, the classic example being the very high taxes of the 1950s and 1960s.

This worked because you could tax owners of capital, and it was very hard for them to leave with their capital. That meant they had an incentive to reinvest profits and expand production at home to keep unemployment low. With low unemployment labor is relatively powerful, and this creates a kind of shared community of obligation subject to the same democratic accountability. That just isn’t viable anymore. Without those capital controls, it’s possible for capital to absent itself from a community of obligation. So how do you return to those capital controls? What kind of global economic integration could you have if capital isn’t mobile? These are very difficult political questions. But I’m not sure that integration is the thing to prioritize over, say, democratic accountability or equity.

Wolf refers to economics and politics as “symbiotic twins” and links capitalism with democracy, while also acknowledging the tension between them. What, exactly, does he aim to accomplish with this theoretical coupling?

I don’t want to read his mind too much, but there are several elements to this concept. One is that I think he wants to say that there is a necessary, maybe even causal, connection between democracy and capitalism. Now that is a very classic, usually politically somewhat right-wing claim that we can see throughout the twentieth century. Milton Friedman makes many claims of this sort, that the causal direction originates in capitalism, then to democracy, which is to say that the individual freedoms of capitalism are necessary for democracy to exist.

Now that’s a set of claims that I’m very skeptical of. However, the strongest version of Wolf’s argument would be the question, “Can we think of democracies that are also not capitalisms?” My thinking is that there’s not just one thing that is capitalism and one thing that is democracy, but rather each of those words refers to a whole set of institutional practices that can exist in different forms at different levels of complexity based on different scales of social organization.

Democracy might be a political arrangement in which more than periodically there are free and fair elections; it might be a whole set of political cultures about deliberative decision-making and the consent of the governed, the participation of the people and how they are ruled. All of the things that constitute a process (rather than a kind of event) might be what we want from a democracy. Capitalism, in turn, takes a wide variety of forms, ranging from the kind of ruthless free-market capitalism of the United States to a more constrained 1950s and 1960s Scandinavian social democracy, to a more violent eighteenth-century (and earlier) form. I am skeptical that we see any kind of reliable, necessary connection between these two concepts.

I can think of lots of cases of capitalisms that are not at all democratic, which is exactly the problem that Wolf is trying to solve. So if those formations exist, we can see that in lots of cases, democracy is in fact extremely limited. Think of the property requirements that conditioned suffrage in the nineteenth century—not to mention the exclusion of women, the exclusion of Black people, the continuing exclusion of immigrants—or how democracy coexisted with slavery in the nineteenth-century United States. I am just not sure that there is any such thing as a necessary, ideal version of these modes of social organization. I think they are always contested processes that can be changed, can be put in tension with one another, can be mutually supportive or contradictory.

In your 2024 essay for the Review on the history of economic crises, such as the many “panics” in the nineteenth-century US, you argue that the lessons derived from these events are often shaped in complicated ways by politics. How can scholarly discussions about these crises more effectively address the biases of economic history?

That is a challenging question. My instinct is to say that more history is always preferable to less, and that a wider set of examples of historical analogy is better than a narrower set. In this I’m influenced by the great economic historian Barry Eichengreen, who has an excellent book called Hall of Mirrors, where he compares the Great Depression to the financial crisis of 2008. One point he makes is that when we reason by historical analogy, we risk fooling ourselves into only seeing what we think is the same about the past, rather than recognizing what’s different about our current moment. We might draw a relatively limited set of analogies that might be erroneous. Maybe the Great Depression was the wrong analogy for 2008. Maybe we should have thought of the panic of 1907. But not many people know about the panic of 1907, and it’s not in anyone’s mind as the archetypal precedent.
Free book at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Barry+Eichengreen+Hall+of+Mirrors

Thinking about history less as a set of lessons to be applied and more as a creative process, or a way to denaturalize the world around us and think with a very wide horizon about the potential set of changes that could take place, this opens up a radical, expansive sense of possibility. We realize that the future is actually far less bounded than we tend to believe.

You’ve expressed skepticism and uncertainty about the Trump administration, particularly in its relationships with billionaires. How might his ties to billionaires and their interests shape the near future of economic policymaking?

I think we should never believe historians when they predict the future. But there’s a great deal of concern and uncertainty about what is going to happen, particularly around democracy. Capitalism seems much less under threat. It is important to think about the future of democracy by focusing on the billionaires. This is by far the richest administration ever assembled, with the most billionaires on the transition team, in the Cabinet, and so on. It’s striking how unhinged this project of class rule is. On the one hand, it’s very easy to be alarmist and to say, well, look, we had more than a decade of open political contestation after the 2008 crisis in which the range of possible political outcomes was up for grabs. We saw a great proliferation of protest movements, different types of politics, and it’s now coalesced around an open, ruthless project of class despotism. And that’s quite terrifying.

But on the other hand, it’s also true that in his first term Trump largely failed to achieve most of his objectives, up to and including overthrowing the 2020 election. The only thing he did successfully was cut taxes for billionaires. It’s easy to imagine there will be another tax cut for them now. There’s another part of me that’s willing to think there will be some destruction and some petty grifting as these billionaires use their control of public power to drive money to themselves. That is also terrifying because for a very long while we’ve had no meaningful legislation addressing climate change, inequality, and any of the pressing issues of our time. It’s now been decades of dithering, and I don’t know if we have more time.

In my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes think this is the response to climate change, this is what the responses to the diminished expectations of economic growth are going to look like: a ruthless, zero-sum struggle for the control of a shrinking pie. The billionaires have far greater resources, far better coordination, and a far better sense of their class interest than anybody else. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that the response to climate change and inequality was in some way going to be a socially egalitarian and democratically decided one, rather than a struggle for control, power, and resources.

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 9:35 AM

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

Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US

By David McAfee | January 25, 2025 8:33PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-serious-damage-world-expert/

. . . the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a M-pox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination in whole regions."

Further, he said, the plan "stops medicines, supplies, systems building, staff support aiding >90 million women and children to get low cost vaccinations, prenatal care, safe childbirth, contraception, and other basic lifesaving health needs."

He added that it also "stops direct services for 6.5 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers affected by HIV in 23 countries," "stops donated drug supplies keeping 20 million people living with HIV alive," and "would furlough all USAID contract staff — which includes half of its global health bureau—unless exempted."

"This Administration is trashing US standing, alliances with scores of countries built over half a century, world-leading capacity and expertise, and American security," the expert added.

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 9:50 AM

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

I see that you now have stopped watching the Legacy Media since they've stopped telling you what you want to hear and now you've devolved to looking at clickbait bullshit like Ted did.

Hartmann report doesn't have an entry on mediabiasfactcheck it's so far off the left side of the scale.

I found a place that does have them though....

https://adfontesmedia.com/hartmann-report-bias-and-reliability/

Quote:
Bias: Hyper-Partisan Left

Reliability: Unreliable, Problematic

Keep going to the left, you fucking psycho.

See where it gets ya.
The New York Review of Books is as mainstream media as possible. Their conclusion in a book review?

The New York Review of Books?

I'm sure it's NPR and Oprah approved, and staffed with 98% DEI hires.

Get the fuck out of here with your Lefty propaganda.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 9:57 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Keep going to the left, you fucking psycho.

See where it gets ya.
Quote:
The New York Review of Books is as mainstream media as possible. Their conclusion in a book review?

The New York Review of Books?

I'm sure it's NPR and Oprah approved, and staffed with 98% DEI hires.

Get the fuck out of here with your Lefty propaganda.

Trump is placing employees of billionaires in charge of government agencies. 6ix, if you're dumb about the obvious, that would be very Trumptardish.

Trump’s presidency is raising a powerful Texas think tank’s profile. Here’s what to know about it.

As President Donald Trump moves to elevate Brooke Rollins to his cabinet and implement policies that align with Project 2025, it’s raising the profile of a Texas think tank that has been a springboard for both.

Founded in 1989 in San Antonio, the Texas Public Policy Foundation was created by local billionaire James Leininger to push for private school vouchers and tort reform. More than 30 years later, the organization has become the most influential conservative think tank in the state, with a massive, multistory headquarters blocks from the Texas Capitol and a growing influence nationally.

The group publishes research, testifies before the state Legislature down the street, hosts elected officials for conferences and events, and advocates for conservative policies. It is part media company, part agenda-setter and part farm team for Republican political talent.

Rollins, Trump’s pick to run the Department of Agriculture, led the think tank from 2003 to 2018.

Read Edward McKinley's story here.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/article/texas-public-policy-
foundation-20054168.php?sid=5b0232da2ddf9c12eaedfd81&ss=A&st_rid=2df8b9bd-0c21-42cc-a871-c7c95b0871db&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=weekend&utm_campaign=HC_The713

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 9:59 AM

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

Keep going to the left, you fucking psycho.

See where it gets ya.
The New York Review of Books is as mainstream media as possible. Their conclusion in a book review?

The New York Review of Books?

I'm sure it's NPR and Oprah approved, and staffed with 98% DEI hires.

Get the fuck out of here with your Lefty propaganda.

Trump is placing employees of billionaires in charge of government agencies. 6ix, if you're dumb about the obvious, that would be very Trumptardish.

Maybe you shouldn't have spent the last 8 years gaslighting everyone including yourself.

If Trump does bad shit this time, that's your fault.

We don't listen to ANYTHING you have to say anymore. You've been completely tuned out.

Nobody cares.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:05 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Maybe you shouldn't have spent the last 8 years gaslighting everyone including yourself.

If Trump does bad shit this time, that's your fault.

We don't listen to ANYTHING you have to say anymore. You've been completely tuned out.

Nobody cares.

Why are Trumptards short-lived and end up fired, divorced, impoverished, toothless, and plagued by diseases caused by smoking, drinking, gluttony, and drug use? Because they won't stop, or turn around from the edge. Freedom means going over the edge and seeing what happens.

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:06 AM

You are the most pathetic billionaire the world has ever known.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:21 AM

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 the most pathetic billionaire the world has ever known.

I am certain you imagined I am a billionaire. This is not imaginary: I have seen hundreds of Trumptards die because their road maps to "freedom" go over the edge. They fall, never knowing the maps are mistaken, crashing and burning to death at the base of the cliff. Their last words are some variation of "Why me? I don't deserve this! It is not my fault!"

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 11:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are the most pathetic billionaire the world has ever known.
I am certain you imagined I am a billionaire.

No. I know you're a sad, old; miserable divorcee living in a studio apartment with $10 to your name and nobody who loves you, but plenty of people who hate you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 1:36 PM

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

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

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts are mostly a farce to sell chintzy merchandise to America’s most gullible marks. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1856504428913705061

The “Department of Government Efficiency” is not an actual cabinet department, but rather a rebrand of the existing US Digital Service, an organization that — despite Musk’s self-branding — cannot actually do much but break the White House website.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/george-was
hington/

Not that his lack of actual authority matters much. Musk is still boasting about bringing the same energy to America that Javier Milei brought to Argentina where he haphazardly slashed government departments to deliver a government surplus. He’s also doubled the poverty rate. Here in America we actually know how to deliver a budget surplus because the Democrats did it in the 90s and every Democratic president curtails the budget deficit year after year only to watch it explode under every Republican president since Nixon left office having thrown the country into deeper budget shortfalls than when they arrived.

But that would require “rich people paying taxes” so instead Musk and Trump will engage in the kayfabe that there’s a magical, untapped reserve of government “waste” that can just be eliminated to cover the couple trillion dollar hole in the deficit that Trump’s tax cuts create.

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/01/stealing-jobs-from-real-j-d-s

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 5:15 PM

Does anybody else find it amusing that Democrats all of the sudden noticed how high the prices of everything were in the last week.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 5:26 PM

Awwwwwwww.....

Angry Bear was really angry this last week, wasn't he?

And he just now noticed how high the prices of everything were too on top of all the other losing he's been doing?

That's rough.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:05 PM

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

Trump was so angry that he shits in his pants.

Colombia’s President Petro said he would allow civilian planes carrying deportees to land in his country, but that he would block the arrival of military planes.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-
colombia-deportation-flights-immigrants-b2686652.html

Trump’s reply:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people. Petro’s denial of these flights has jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States, so I have directed my Administration to immediately take the following urgent and decisive retaliatory measures:

-Emergency 25% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States. In one week, the 25% tariffs will be raised to 50%.

-A Travel Ban and immediate Visa Revocations on the Colombian Government Officials, and all Allies and Supporters.

-Visa Sanctions on all Party Members, Family Members, and Supporters of the Colombian Government.

-Enhanced Customs and Border Protection Inspections of all Colombian Nationals and Cargo on national security grounds.

-IEEPA Treasury, Banking and Financial Sanctions to be fully imposed.

These measures are just the beginning. We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!

Jan 26, 2025, 12:28 PM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113896070273857964

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

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Sunday, January 26, 2025 10:09 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Does anybody else find it amusing that Democrats all of the sudden noticed how high the prices of everything were in the last week.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Did anyone notice that Trump could lower prices if he passes a law to pay the difference between sellers' price and Trump's preferred/promised prices to get himself elected? Unfortunately, no Republican Congressman would vote for such a law, which is why prices continue to be set by sellers, not by buyers or Presidents. (PS. I have never known a Trumptard who understood, 100% of the time, who sets prices. The retards are very confused about who does what, and for what reasons, and they always will be confused. Trumptards are hopelessly stupid about who controls the economy. Short answer: it is the top 1%, not the President and certainly not the buyers. )

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:07 AM

Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

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Monday, January 27, 2025 5:25 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

I hope history repeats. Trump’s frequent raging madman behavior could end with a stroke. It has happened to other Presidents.

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, suffered a series of strokes, including a severe one in 1919. The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side and incapacitated until the end of his term in 1921.

Explanation

• Wilson's strokes were characterized by denial and downplaying the severity of his condition.

• The White House covered up Wilson's condition, and the public didn't learn of the stroke until early 1920.

• During Wilson's illness, his wife, Edith, became involved in the day-to-day running of the government. Some historians called her the "Presidentress" or "Surrogate President".

Other presidents who have had strokes include:
• John Quincy Adams
• John Tyler
• Millard Fillmore
• Andrew Johnson
• Chester Arthur
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• Richard Milhous Nixon

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 5:26 AM

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

113 predictions for Trump's second term
From constitutional crises to Mars and back again.

By Nate Silver | Jan 26, 2025

https://www.natesilver.net/p/113-predictions-for-trumps-second

Democrats win the presidency in 2028. In contrast to markets, which see this as a pure 50/50 proposition, I give just the slightest edge to Democrats. In the short run, I tend to see anti-incumbent effects prevailing, and Republicans won’t get to nominate a true incumbent with Trump term-limited, even if there may be a conservative vibe shift in play over the medium term. 55%.

Democrats win a trifecta (House + Senate + POTUS) in 2028. They’ll have to flip 3 of 4 obvious Senate pickup opportunities by 2028. Considering how correlated everything is, I think they’re a favorite to do this, conditional on having won the presidency. 40%

Democrats win the House in the 2026 midterms. Prediction markets put this at 70%, but I suspect there’s too much hedging toward 50/50 given the historical midterm penalty plus the narrowness of the current GOP majority. Plus, the Democratic voting bloc should still turn out in midterms. 85%

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 7:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

That's because you've been propagandized by your media.

Four years of Trump was infinitely better than four years of Biden*.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:05 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

That's because you've been propagandized by your media.

Four years of Trump was infinitely better than four years of Biden*.

I'm hoping that raging madman Donald Trump gets disabled by a stroke as was President Woodrow Wilson. What do I have against Wilson? This:

In 1900, fragmented memories were turned into political mythologies to impose a new system that legalized discrimination. Thomas Dixon helped to develop the mythology with his book The Klansman, which presented an apology for white slave owners through the presentation of Black men ready to assault white women. Then his classmate, Woodrow Wilson, wrote A History of American People, and Dixon’s best friend, D.W. Griffith, put the ideas from both books into his film, Birth of a Nation. The NAACP boycotted theaters that showed it, but Wilson had private showings at the White House. Suddenly racism became socially acceptable again. By 1915, a new version of the KKK was formed that adopted ideas from the film, like burning crosses. It’s amazing how three well-connected buddies can shift an entire generation’s beliefs, and that was even before television existed.

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/01/everything-old-is-new-ag
ain.html

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:15 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

What is it that frightens you? Is it his unpredictability? His insistance on doing things that have no continuity with what has been done before? Or specifically with his statements about Canada?

I think I'm going to post in "legitimate gripes" about Trump's approach to foreign policy.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:45 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

What is it that frightens you? Is it his unpredictability? His insistance on doing things that have no continuity with what has been done before? Or specifically with his statements about Canada?

I think I'm going to post in "legitimate gripes" about Trump's approach to foreign policy.

Brenda is picking up the signals that Trump transmits with his talk of deporting tens of millions of aliens and conquering new territories. Nazi signals. In the past, signals were transmitted and acted upon by receptive people:

In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought.

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflecting, to a new situation. Do only Germans do such things? The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, contemplating Nazi atrocities, wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germans behaved as they had. He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get permission to carry it out in Germany. So he undertook it instead in a Yale University building in 1961—at around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

Milgram told his subjects (some Yale students, some New Haven residents) that they would be applying an electrical shock to other participants in an experiment about learning. In fact, the people attached to the wires on the other side of a window were in on the scheme with Milgram, and only pretended to be shocked. As the subjects (thought they) shocked the (people they thought were) participants in a learning experiment, they saw a horrible sight. People whom they did not know, and against whom they had no grievance, seemed to be suffering greatly—pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram’s instructions and continued to apply (what they thought were) ever greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. Even those who did not proceed all the way to the (apparent) killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”

from Chapter One of On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Download the book for free from https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Timothy+Snyder

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."
I hope history repeats. Trump’s frequent raging madman behavior could end with a stroke. It has happened to other Presidents.

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, suffered a series of strokes, including a severe one in 1919. The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side and incapacitated until the end of his term in 1921.

Explanation

• Wilson's strokes were characterized by denial and downplaying the severity of his condition.

• The White House covered up Wilson's condition, and the public didn't learn of the stroke until early 1920.

• During Wilson's illness, his wife, Edith, became involved in the day-to-day running of the government. Some historians called her the "Presidentress" or "Surrogate President".

Other presidents who have had strokes include:
• John Quincy Adams
• John Tyler
• Millard Fillmore
• Andrew Johnson
• Chester Arthur
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• Richard Milhous Nixon

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

I could deal with that and would applaud it.

I admit to not knowing much about your early presidents but I know Roosevelt had polio, so a stroke happened when he was out of office. And the same for Nixon.

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Monday, January 27, 2025 12:59 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

That's because you've been propagandized by your media.

Four years of Trump was infinitely better than four years of Biden*.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

No, it is because I have critical thinking skills.

Nixon was a crook and that has been proven and Ford was dumb enough to pardon him. Reagan had Alzhiemers and really didn't know what he was doing. I freely admit to not remembering much about Bush 1 but Bush 2 was an idiot. Trump had checks on him the first time. This time he is surrounded by yes men and also he just want to make a buck off being the most powerful person in the world.

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Monday, January 27, 2025 1:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

What is it that frightens you? Is it his unpredictability? His insistance on doing things that have no continuity with what has been done before? Or specifically with his statements about Canada?

I think I'm going to post in "legitimate gripes" about Trump's approach to foreign policy.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Some of it is unpredictability. His wanting to make a buck. His willingness to break and remake pretty well of your institutions down there.

Every so often one of your leaders will make a crack about Canada that for the most part it goes in ear and out the other.

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Monday, January 27, 2025 1:05 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:

I could deal with that and would applaud it.

I admit to not knowing much about your early presidents but I know Roosevelt had polio, so a stroke happened when he was out of office. And the same for Nixon.

President Woodrow Wilson was a raging racist, just like Trump. Wilson had a stroke, ending his crazed rampage in the White House. A stroke could do the same to Trump. I'm sure Trump's replacement, Vice President JD Vance, is not a racist nor a hyper-wacko Nazi like Trump.

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 3:09 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

What is it that frightens you? Is it his unpredictability? His insistance on doing things that have no continuity with what has been done before? Or specifically with his statements about Canada?
I think I'm going to post in "legitimate gripes" about Trump's approach to foreign policy.

Some of it is unpredictability. His wanting to make a buck. His willingness to break and remake pretty well of your institutions down there.

Which institutions? Department of Justice? The FBI? CIA? State Department? NATO? Or do you mean longstanding policies like foreign aid? Very curious how you think of it.

Quote:
Every so often one of your leaders will make a crack about Canada that for the most part it goes in ear and out the other.

Good!

Sometimes Trump is just trolling people.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, January 27, 2025 3:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

That's because you've been propagandized by your media.

Four years of Trump was infinitely better than four years of Biden*.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

No, it is because I have critical thinking skills.

Nixon was a crook and that has been proven and Ford was dumb enough to pardon him. Reagan had Alzhiemers and really didn't know what he was doing. I freely admit to not remembering much about Bush 1 but Bush 2 was an idiot. Trump had checks on him the first time. This time he is surrounded by yes men and also he just want to make a buck off being the most powerful person in the world.

That's not critical thinking. That is repeating verbatim what the Legacy Media would say about him.

They're all liars and they don't know shit.

They got us into the situation we're all in today. None of that was because of Trump.

Not sure if GWB was an idiot or if he was dumb like a fox. He was either really stupid or really evil. No matter how stupid he was though, he was 10 times as intelligent as Joe Biden* was during the last 4 years because he wasn't suffering from the severe cognitive decline.

Trump has already spoken to the media in 8 days more than Joe Biden* spoke to the media in 1,461 days.

But the real spoiler alert is that Joe Biden and GWB and Obama and Clinton were all the same party.

And they're terrified that they've lost power.

And they're trying to rile people like you up about it.

And make you forget that 4 years of Trump was nice while 4 years of Biden* was one fucking crisis after another after another after another....

I expect that reaction out of the two idiots here. You've got enough things to worry about in your real life. You don't need to be going around the next 4 years worrying about bogey men.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 27, 2025 4:54 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's not critical thinking. That is repeating verbatim what the Legacy Media would say about him.

They're all liars and they don't know shit.

They got us into the situation we're all in today. None of that was because of Trump.

"Pres. Trump’s day one agenda was letting violent criminals who beat police officers out of prison," stated Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) "These are people who planned an insurrection, assaulted police officers with metal batons, fire extinguishers, wooden planks and even admitted to these crimes and pled guilty in court."

Trump had repeatedly pledged to issue pardons for January 6 defendants, whom he has repeatedly called "hostages" and baselessly claimed did not receive fair due process.

In the weeks leading up to being sworn in, he and Vice President J.D. Vance suggested the cases would be reviewed individually, with some of the defendants convicted of more violent offenses excluded. However, Trump instead issued a blanket pardon for 1,500 people with no apparent review, including hundreds who assaulted police officers; his only bit of restraint was issuing commutations rather than pardons for the paramilitary Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, which released them from prison but did not expunge their criminal records.

Even some Republican members of Congress have appeared uncomfortable with the sweeping nature of Trump's pardons, given the January 6 attack constituted a violent threat against their own safety for doing their jobs.

https://www.rawstory.com/senate-pardon-resolution/

"They got us into the situation we're all in today. None of that was because of Trump." -- 6ixStringJack

6ix, whatever situation you are in, you got yourself into it.

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 5:10 PM

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

For those who know Trump lacks self-control and any sense of decency:

Jan. 27, 2025, 3:28 PM CST

By Ken Dilanian and Ryan J. Reilly

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice said Monday that it had fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting President Donald Trump.

The DOJ employees worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-administrati
on-fires-doj-officials-worked-criminal-investigation-rcna189512

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 5:42 PM

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

That's not critical thinking. That is repeating verbatim what the Legacy Media would say about him.

They're all liars and they don't know shit.

They got us into the situation we're all in today. None of that was because of Trump.
"Pres. Trump’s day one agenda was letting violent criminals who beat police officers out of prison," stated Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN)

Never happened.

But one of Joe Biden*'s cops shot an ex-military civilian in the fucking face though.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 27, 2025 5:43 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
For those who know Trump lacks self-control and any sense of decency:

Jan. 27, 2025, 3:28 PM CST

By Ken Dilanian and Ryan J. Reilly

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice said Monday that it had fired several career lawyers involved in prosecuting President Donald Trump.

The DOJ employees worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation that led to now-dismissed indictments against Trump over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-administrati
on-fires-doj-officials-worked-criminal-investigation-rcna189512

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

Good.

GTFO

STFO

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, January 27, 2025 7:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Wasn't going to say anything but some food for thought.

"Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it."

Trump is the first Republican president who actually frightens me. And I have lived through the end of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, both Bushes and now Trump twice.

What is it that frightens you? Is it his unpredictability? His insistance on doing things that have no continuity with what has been done before? Or specifically with his statements about Canada?
I think I'm going to post in "legitimate gripes" about Trump's approach to foreign policy.

Some of it is unpredictability. His wanting to make a buck. His willingness to break and remake pretty well of your institutions down there.
Which institutions? Department of Justice? The FBI? CIA? State Department? NATO? Or do you mean longstanding policies like foreign aid? Very curious how you think of it.

Quote:
Every so often one of your leaders will make a crack about Canada that for the most part it goes in ear and out the other.
Good!

Sometimes Trump is just trolling people.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

The Department of Justice, Department of Education are the two I can think of off the top of my head.

Yeah ever since I was a kid it will come and most people just laugh it off because it is just dumb.

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Monday, January 27, 2025 7:18 PM

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

During Trump's campaign, he repeatedly promised lower food prices ‘immediately’ if elected president. But during his first week of office, he focused on mass deportations and pardoning the January 6 attackers.

There is an absurd gap between what Trump is doing and what the swing voters who elected him were promised. They voted for the cheaper-egg candidate and received the permanent termination of cancer research in the United States instead. Winds of Change, indeed.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/price-of-egg-democrats-don
ald-trump.html

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 7:23 PM

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

MAGA's true believers don't understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson

Today's Republicans have swallowed so many economic myths that reality has disappeared. They face a wakeup call

By Rich Logis | January 26, 2025 9:00AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2025/01/26/magas-true-believers-dont-understand-
capitalism--will-teach-them-a-hard-lesson/

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

I’m not dismissing the importance of anxiety about solvency, about the challenges that small businesses face (I’m a proprietor of one myself) and about the cost of future entitlements. (We’ll get to the problems of liberalism in a bit). Most of us in this country will worry about money for the duration of our lives.

One delusional mythology about American capitalism that has been instilled in We the People is that we somehow have a guaranteed right to prosperity; this imaginary right has been deployed by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents about how our model of commerce actually works. Our national press has largely been lazy on this score as well.

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Frankly, it’s an illogical question in a capitalist nation. Some people are of course worse off, and I don’t mean to make light of that. But in fact, many millions are better off; Joe Biden’s administration oversaw the recovery of millions of jobs lost during the COVID pandemic and the creation of millions more. Some people out there will be worse off by the time they finish this article than when they commenced reading it. I’m not being flippant; that’s reality.

Welcome to capitalism, a system whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason for extolling it.

So eggs are expensive? Eat fewer of them. Cut down on egg whites. Let them eat yolks.

Are gas prices high? Is insurance for health care, real estate and vehicles increasing? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that. Let’s recall that gas prices steadily increased during George W. Bush’s second term.

Gas was cheap in 2020 because — hello! — tens of millions of drivers weren’t driving. In fact, Trump threatened the Saudis, in the early days of the pandemic: Cut oil production, or lose U.S. military support. Why? More oil flooding the market would have driven prices still lower, and “cheap gas” does not sound like “ka-ching.”

Are gas prices high? Insurance going up for health care, real estate and vehicles? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that.

Welcome to the “laws” of supply and demand, which all of us must navigate on a daily basis. If you don’t know or don’t remember these details, ask yourself why you don’t. If you’re a Trump voter, then ask yourself whether you might have voted differently in November had you been aware.

Meanwhile, we have endless debates about whether needs — access to medical care, food, affordable housing — should be rights, or should be left to the exigencies of good luck and near-perfect health.

Jeremiads about grocery prices are now an acceptable element of political discourse and, per GOP logic, we have a right to complain about them. Feeding the hungry, though? That edges too close to pinko communism. But the point our fellow countrymen and women should grasp is that presidents, whoever they are, have very little control over inflation.

You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We reduced our expenses, and adjusted our quality of life.

That’s, you know, fiscal conservatism: Tightening the belts, practicing austerity, living within our means, limiting debt. We didn’t literally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps or walk to school through the snow without shoes. But isn’t that the American mythos?

Deep-state capitalism

In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing better financially than at any time in my life, Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew others who had lost their jobs and contracts to offshoring. Years before he ran for office, Trump talked about the dangers of competition with low-wage Asian nations, in particular; when I’d heard him speak, I nodded in concurrence.

But here’s what I never thought about at the time: I and other angry Americans hadn’t grasped that offshoring to increase profits was a central feature of capitalism, as advocated by both parties — but in particular by the mythologizers of capitalism on the Republican side.

So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is?

We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (such as antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed.

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead.

Lest there be any confusion: I support capitalism. Entrepreneurship and innovation best advance in free markets.

But still: The rage I felt, even more acutely experienced today among the MAGA faithful, was perhaps warranted but rooted in ignorance. Trump was not wrong when he lamented the once-thriving communities ravaged and hollowed out by outsourcing. But his solution was no solution at all.

Now he has persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie the global and domestic capitalist forces that he did essentially nothing about during his first administration.

Why didn’t he do anything? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy.

Trump is the most devoted “deep state” capitalist in American history, given the millions his businesses have earned in foreign payments. So much for thwarting the globalists. Want an argument for why the über-wealthy should pay more in taxes? If these money-hoarders could have gotten so rich in another country, they most certainly would have. Do we really believe this doesn’t apply to Trump?

In 2016, I was doing better financially than at any time in my life. But Donald Trump's message resonated with me. I hadn't grasped that offshoring was a central feature of capitalism.

Broadly speaking, the two core ideological dogmas within MAGA are: 1) liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (second come the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, although it’s not close); and 2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created.

Most people who voted for Trump — especially the MAGA faithful — want and expect him, and by extension the federal government, to intervene in commerce. According to the classical definition, that would be socialism — or Marxism or communism, whichever epithet we are using today. The confusion is general, because it’s all mythological.

I cannot entirely fault those who are still looking for a hero or a superman who cuts through the noise and nonsense. The 2008 financial crisis and its brutal aftermath placed the ills of capitalism front and center, and begat an understandable skepticism in banks, government and other major institutions. What made that episode particularly deleterious, however, was not that we had too much regulation but too little; that laissez-faire ethos is rooted in the importance of land ownership, a central basis of American capitalism.

In fact, the notion that a singular person can serve as an economic savior and, in messianic fashion, usher in utopia, is much closer to a socialist-communist notion than a capitalist one. That surely does not mean the government should play no role in our economy; as mentioned above, the Biden administration oversaw remarkable growth. Trump and the Republicans, however, didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed to increase economic mobility and opportunity. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia.

People are looking for reasons why they seem to work more but keep falling behind. I sympathize; this resonates with me.

The answer is in front of us, and it is called capitalism, or at least the romantic mythology of capitalism. Our species makes sense of the world, in large part, through the stories we tell, and no country in world history is more defined by myths than the United States of America. All kinds of emotions inform those myths. MAGA believers like to tell their foes, “F**k your feelings,” but as someone who spent seven years within the MAGA movement, I can attest it is almost entirely driven by feelings. There is no logic that determines the tides and currents within the MAGA community; it took me an entire year to come to that epiphany.

Many on the political right choose to ignore that they already depend, or very soon will, on “socialist” safety-net programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Some part of the MAGA community is aware that the reforms brought by liberalism help to keep them alive.

In short, almost everyone is a liberal, when they need to be. Everyone is also a capitalist, or a socialist, when they need to be.

So what now?

There’s a lot of disbelief among liberals and Democrats about how so many Americans could simply overlook or ignore the public health crisis of gun violence, the loss of reproductive freedom (which affects men’s lives as well), the attacks on public education, and the marginalization and demonization of our LGBTQ+ population.

I have a slightly nuanced take here: I do think most Americans really do care about these issues — but they were all perceived in competition with the mythology of capitalism as the always-most-important American doctrine.

Mythology tends to be more persuasive than discussion of policy, which brings me to something the Democratic Party should post in all their workplaces: Americans don’t vote based on policy. Sure, some liberals do, given what we know about their news and information consumption. Information bubbles exist on the Democratic side, too, but liberal voters are far more likely to encounter a diversity of sources.

MAGA culture, on the other hand, likes to espouse rugged individualism, but is wholly conformist: Anything that even remotely seems to refute the mythologies that permeate the MAGA congregation is shunned. I had a term, during my time as a MAGA pundit, for much of what we maligned as propaganda: It was the Democrat Media Industrial Complex. The lie we told ourselves, central to our myth, was that we were independent-minded, not susceptible to being influenced.

MAGA’s ethos includes trauma, desperation, panic, despair, hopelessness and nihilism. What I want MAGA’s opponents to understand is that no one in the Trump movement came to imbibe that toxic mixture all on their own. I implore you to resist saying, “I told you so,” when Trump’s benefits are handed out exclusively to his rich buddies.

I am helping to build a new community for those who leave MAGA. When many such people have their Road to Damascus moment about the betrayal of Trump, as I did, we want to offer them an exit ramp out of MAGA. Blaming or castigating them only offers more incentive to remain within the MAGA circle. It may feel gratifying in the short term, but only creates more damage.

Trump and the Republicans didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed at improving the economy. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia.

One of our biggest civic crises in America is that so many of our citizens lack basic comprehension of the governmental and economic model they live under, or, perhaps, they willfully deny it. This does not reflect a dearth of intelligence, and I would argue that it’s not even primarily a failure in education, although that’s part of it. More than anything, it reflects the fact that our actual elected representatives, at all levels, are petrified of their constituents and reluctant to have candid conversations about capitalism, for fear of losing their positions and being primaried out as communists, socialists, liberals and Marxists, or otherwise victimized by the toxic stew of GOP lies.

The inherent flaw of mythology is that it offers its own evidence and its own truth to the believer, and anything that contradicts it is denied.

As he did in 2017, Trump has been bequeathed a relatively stable economy, for now. Once he begins to destabilize it, which will adversely affect the working class, the middle class and small business owners, the falsehoods will only ramp up: Somehow, it was all Joe Biden’s fault. We can only hope the Democrats are ready for the onslaught of shameless absurdities.

I certainly don’t think that government can solve every problem, nor should try to. Perversely enough, Trump voters want it to try, although most would deny that or are not cognizant of it. The question we can keep posing to Trump voters is this: How much time does he get to fix your economic problems, and when will you understand that he never will? Expect no good answers; there aren’t any.

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

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Monday, January 27, 2025 8:17 PM