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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, August 1, 2025 14:39
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VIEWED: 43418
PAGE 55 of 55

Thursday, July 31, 2025 9:27 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up faggot.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, what is stupidest about Trumptards

Shut up faggot.

Democrats are dead. If you don't stop talking about Trump every day you're never going to win anything ever again.

Grow the fuck up already and move on.

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

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

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Thursday, July 31, 2025 9:47 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up faggot.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, what is stupidest about Trumptards

Shut up faggot.

Democrats are dead. If you don't stop talking about Trump every day you're never going to win anything ever again.

Grow the fuck up already and move on.

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

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

You Trumptards figured that taking over the government would change your lives. It won't because your problems aren't caused by America, but because you are lazy, stupid and mentally ill. You don't know yourselves but I do because I'm constantly flummoxed by how little Trumptards achieve compared to ordinary people.

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

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Thursday, July 31, 2025 9:48 PM

SECOND

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

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End

America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over. (Because of Trump’s Winds of Change)

By Ross Andersen | July 31, 2025, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/07/science-empire-ame
rica-decline/683711/

Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.

The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.’s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism.

By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation’s top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev’s institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training. Eventually, he himself had to join the party. “It was the only way to secure stable funding,” he told me when we spoke in June.

In 1985, Sagdeev briefly gained the ear of power. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary at 54, young for the Soviet gerontocracy. He promised broad reforms and appointed Sagdeev as an adviser. The two traveled to Geneva together for Gorbachev’s first arms talks with Ronald Reagan. But Sagdeev’s view of Gorbachev began to dim when the premier filled important scientific positions with men whom Sagdeev saw as cronies.

In 1988, Sagdeev wrote a letter to Gorbachev to warn him that the leaders of the Soviet supercomputer program had deceived him. They claimed to be keeping pace with the United States, but had in fact fallen far behind, and would soon be surpassed by the Chinese. Gorbachev never replied. Sagdeev got a hint as to how his letter had been received when his invitation to join a state visit to Poland was abruptly withdrawn. “I was excommunicated,” he told me.

Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev’s most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year.

I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump’s second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she’s not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.)

The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.

Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility—or else be subject to correction by political appointees.

Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it’s drying up.

Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don’t lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany’s elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France’s Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American “science refugees.”

The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this.

Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king’s war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard.

Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage.

Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution.

The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn’t believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads. As a consequence of all this, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure. When the ban on “anti-Marxist” genetics was finally lifted, Gordin told me, the U.S.S.R. was a generation behind in molecular biology and couldn’t catch up.

But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes. Physicists from greater Europe and the U.S. converged on Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich to hear about the strange new quantum universe from Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein.

When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany’s universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That’s how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer.

In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann’s work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles.

During the postwar period, Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR, sought to make America’s advantage in the sciences permanent. Bush hadn’t liked the way that the U.S. had to scramble to staff up the radar and atomic-bomb projects. He wanted a robust supply of scientists on hand at American universities in case the Cold War turned hot. He argued for the creation of the National Science Foundation to fund basic research, and promised that its efforts would improve both the economy and national defense.

Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

I reached out to the office of Michael Kratsios, the president’s science and technology adviser, several times while reporting this story. I asked whether Kratsios, who holds the role that once belonged to Vannevar Bush, had any response to the claim that the Trump administration’s attack on science was unprecedented. I asked about the possibility that its policies will drive away American researchers, and will deter foreigners from working in American labs. I was hoping to find out how the man responsible for maintaining U.S. scientific dominance was engaging with this apparent slide into mediocrity. I did not receive a reply.

All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers have already made clear that they do not intend to approve Trump’s full requested cuts at the NIH, NSF, and NASA. Those agencies will still have access to tens of billions of dollars in federal funds next year—and blue-state attorneys general have won back some of this year’s canceled grants in court. Research institutions still have some fight left in them; some are suing the administration for executive overreach. Universities in red states are hoping that their governors will soon summon the courage to take a stand on their behalf. “Politically speaking, it’s one thing to shut down research at Harvard,” Steven Shapin, a science historian at the school, told me. “It’s another thing to shut down the University of Arkansas.”

The U.S. government doesn’t bankroll all of American scientific research. Philanthropists and private companies support some of it, and will continue to. The U.S. shouldn’t face the kind of rapid collapse that occurred in the Soviet Union, where no robust private sector existed to absorb scientists. But even corporations with large R&D budgets don’t typically fund open-ended inquiry into fundamental scientific questions. With the possible exception of Bell Labs in its heyday, they focus on projects that have immediate commercial promise. Their shareholders would riot if they dumped $10 billion into a space telescope or particle collider that takes decades to build and generates little revenue.

A privatized system of American science will be distorted toward short-term work, and people who want to run longer-term experiments with more expensive facilities will go elsewhere. “American science could lose a whole generation,” Shapin said. “Young people are already starting to get the message that science isn’t as valued as it once was.”

If the U.S. is no longer the world’s technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America’s technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. Science might further decentralize into a multipolar order like the one that held during the 19th century, when the British, French, and Germans vied for technical supremacy.

Or maybe, by the midway point of the 21st century, China will be the world’s dominant scientific power, as it was, arguably, a millennium ago. The Chinese have recovered from Mao Zedong’s own squandering of expertise during the Cultural Revolution. They have rebuilt their research institutions, and Xi Jinping’s government keeps them well funded. China’s universities now rank among the world’s best, and their scientists routinely publish in Science, Nature, and other top journals. Elite researchers who were born in China and then spent years or even decades in U.S. labs have started to return. What the country can’t yet do well is recruit elite foreign scientists, who by dint of their vocation tend to value freedom of speech.

Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature’s secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren’t the ones who see them first.

In 1990, Roald Sagdeev moved to America. He found leaving the Soviet Union difficult. His two brothers lived not far from his house in Moscow, and when he said goodbye to them, he worried that it would be for the last time. Sagdeev thought about going to Europe, but the U.S. seemed more promising. He’d met many Americans on diplomatic visits there, including his future wife. He’d befriended others while helping to run the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz missions. When Carl Sagan visited the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow, Sagdeev had shown him around, and the two remained close.

To avoid arousing the suspicions of the Soviet authorities, Sagdeev flew to Hungary first, and only once he was safely there did he book a ticket to the U.S. He accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland and settled in Washington, D.C. It took him years to ride out the culture shock. He still remembers being pulled over for a traffic infraction, and mistakenly presenting his Soviet ID card.

American science is what ultimately won Sagdeev over to his new home. He was awestruck by the ambition of the U.S. research agenda, and he liked that it was backed by real money. He appreciated that scientists could move freely between institutions, and didn’t have to grovel before party leaders to get funding. But when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.

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

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Thursday, July 31, 2025 9:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up faggot.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, what is stupidest about Trumptards

Shut up faggot.

Democrats are dead. If you don't stop talking about Trump every day you're never going to win anything ever again.

Grow the fuck up already and move on.

Heading toward midterm elections, Democrats not up off the floor

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3486750/midterm-elections-d
emocratic-party-polling/

Quote:
Politico’s Andrew Howard reports that former Democrats Brian Bengs in South Dakota (Trump +29 in 2024) and Todd Achilles in Idaho (Trump +36) are joining former Democrat Dan Osborn of Nebraska (Trump +20) to run for senator as self-declared independents, with no credible Democrat in the race.

Osborn did so in 2024, scaring incumbent Republican Rep. Deb Fischer while losing by only 6 points. This was an improvement on Greg Orman’s 2014 independent candidacy in Kansas, where he lost by 11 points in a state that was +22 Republican for president two years before.

Why are these Democrats, some in states such as South Dakota and Nebraska that have reelected Democratic senators in recent years, shunning the Democratic label? Most likely because, in a country of increased straight-ticket voting, they believe the Democratic label is political poison.

After four years of the Biden administration, the Pew Research Center said the presidential electorate moved from +6 Democratic in 2020 to +1 Republican in 2024, with Republicans close to equal among under-30 voters. “For months now,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, “We’ve observed a new trend in polling: the Democratic party’s favorability ratings have fallen below the GOP’s. That’s hardly ever happened before.”

The Wall Street Journal’s July 16-20 poll shows that 63% of voters have negative feelings about the Democrats, the highest since 1990. That poll also showed Republicans maintaining their 2024 lead in party identification, in sharp contrast to Trump’s first term. And it showed pluralities of voters favored Republicans even on issues on which majorities disapproved of Donald Trump’s most recent actions, including the economy, tariffs, immigration, foreign policy, and Ukraine.

It looks like the Democrats’ baggage, especially from the Biden years, is heavier than the loads Trump Republicans must juggle. Democrats’ credibility has been damaged as their arguments, one after another, have proven to be based on lies: the Russia collusion hoax, COVID-19 school closings, “transitory” inflation, the Hunter Biden laptop, and open borders immigration.

All of which suggests that Democrats’ hopes of overturning the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority may rest more on independents running in Trump-heavy states than on purple state Democrats. And, despite conventional wisdom, there’s a cognizable chance that Republicans will not lose the narrow 220-215 majority they won in the House of Representatives in 2020.

Once upon a time, in the split-ticket voting era, Democrats maintained their large House majority in 1972 despite Richard Nixon’s 61% landslide by winning fully half the seats in House districts Nixon carried. Those days are gone. In 2024, voters in only 16 House districts split their ticket between president and congressman.

The Democrats’ problem is that Republicans are defending only three districts carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris, while Democrats are defending 13 seats won by Donald Trump. That’s one of the reasons that Steve Kornacki, to the dismay of his MSNBC audience, says Republicans could hold on to the House.

Meanwhile, Harry Enten dismays his CNN audience by pointing out that the narrow leads Democrats enjoy in House generic vote polling leave them not nearly as well-positioned for 2026 as they were at this point in 2005 and 2017 for their big gains in 2006 and 2018.

Core Democratic hatred of and obsession with Donald Trump will certainly have them stomping to the off-year polls, and Trump Republicans’ newly biracial and young male coalition may not be similarly motivated. But Republican gains are widespread while Democratic gains are scarcely visible. As Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen writes, “It’s currently not possible to identify any cohort of potential first-time Dem voters.”

Trump has gained a percentage over three elections, as the New York Times’s brilliant graphics pointed out. In 1,433 counties with 42 million people, while his Democratic opponents gained three times in only 57 counties with 8 million people. “For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side,” Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar tweeted, “Now, the inverse is true.”

The veteran liberal reporter Thomas Edsall portrays in his New York Times online column a “realignment with staying power” and fears. “The real possibility that discontent with the Democratic party—its perceived failure to value work, its political correctness, the extremity of its social and cultural liberalism—might have become deeply embedded in the electorate.”

THE GENDER GAP GROWS WIDER AND WIDER

Meanwhile, the economic numbers are coming in more positively than those who predicted doom in April from Trump’s tariffs (I called them “lunatic”), and as analyst Nate Silver writes, “There remains a strong case that voters are concerned about the economy and the cost of living, but that everything else is priced in.” As for the fuss over the Epstein tapes, Silver writes, “It looks like we’re back to the usual pattern: the overwhelming majority of voters either already hate Trump, or are happy to shrug off his scandals.”

“The country is moving toward Trump,” says Chris Matthews, onetime staffer for Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill. “They want a president who is a strong figure. And he‘s got it. And half the country buys it.” Nothing’s inevitable in politics, but so far, the Democrats have not gotten up off the floor.

Figure it out.

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

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 12:32 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump Is Turning the White House Into Mar-a-Lago

“There’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” Trump said on Thursday.

By Edith Olmsted | July 31, 2025 5:31 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/198679/donald-trump-turning-white-house-m
ar-a-lago

Donald Trump is finally getting his wish to turn the White House into the gaudy resort he calls home by adding a $200 million ballroom.

The White House announced that it would begin construction in September on a 90,000 square foot ballroom that can seat 650 people.

Yes, Trump is laser focused on the issues that matter most to Americans: Replacing the “large and unsightly” tent that typically hosts guests just 100 yards away from the building.

During a press conference Thursday afternoon, Trump confirmed that he wouldn’t spend any taxpayer dollars on the $200 million project. “It’s a private thing yeah, and we’ll probably have some donors,” he said.

“They’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House for more than 150 years, but there’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” he added.

Trump said the expansion would not “interfere” with the White House. “It’ll be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building,”

Trump’s mission to add a gaudy event hall to the White House didn’t come out of nowhere—he claims that he’s pitched it to the last two presidents. During a press conference in February, Trump said he’d asked Joe Biden about building a ballroom in the White House, offering to have it built himself.

“I was going to build a beautiful, beautiful ballroom like I’ve done before,” Trump said. “It would cost $100 million. I told them again and again. They didn’t know what to do. They had no idea.”

He made a similar claim on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, telling his supporters that he’d offered to have a ballroom built for the Obamas.

Trump has already begun a massive decor overhaul at the White House, gilding the Oval Office with gaudy gold detailing and ornate crown molding, plastering a golden Trump crest above the door, and shipping in golden cherub statues straight from Mar-a-Lago, according to The Daily Beast.

It’s clear that Trump much prefers the luxury aesthetics of his resort home, and with the dismal report card he’s received in office so far, the president should feel free to pack his bags any time.

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 6:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Is Turning the White House Into Mar-a-Lago

“There’s never been a president that’s good at ballrooms,” Trump said on Thursday.

By Edith Olmsted | July 31, 2025 5:31 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/198679/donald-trump-turning-white-house-m
ar-a-lago

Donald Trump is finally getting his wish to turn the White House into the gaudy resort he calls home by adding a $200 million ballroom.

Who gives a flying fuck.

What is your problem?

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

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 6:56 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Who gives a flying fuck.

What is your problem?

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

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

Trump and his Trumptards are jerks who deface whatever they touch. Fat, ugly people with ugly lives who make a historic building, the White House, look like a turd painted gold. Next, Trump will carve his face on Mount Rushmore near George Washington because he is an asshole.

Full List of GOP Bills to Put Trump's Name or Face on Things
https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-gop-efforts-put-trumps-name-face-th
ings-2105146

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 6:56 AM

SECOND

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

Trump/Brazil: Delusions of Grandeur Go South
Trump thinks he can rule the world, but he doesn’t have the juice

By Paul Krugman | Aug 01, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumpbrazil-delusions-of-grandeur

Donald Trump isn’t “winning his trade war.” He’s imposing a lot of tariffs, and so far nobody has stopped him even though his actions are clearly illegal. But “winning” a trade war, if it means anything, means using tariffs to extract meaningful concessions from other countries. And while some major trading partners, notably the European Union, are humoring Trump by pretending to make concessions, when you look at what they’re actually doing it’s just vaporware.

Is Trump an incompetent negotiator, easily hoodwinked? Maybe. But more fundamentally, he just doesn’t have the juice. The U.S. market is big, and denying other countries access to that market hurts them. But it doesn’t hurt them that much, and anyone imagining that America can use the threat of tariffs to force major policy changes abroad is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Consider the case of Brazil.

In some ways Trump’s dealings with Brazil are exceptional, even in the context of his unprecedented break with 90 years of U.S. tariff policy. For one thing, Brazil is facing 50 percent tariffs — considerably higher than anyone else.

For another, Trump’s demands on Brazil are different in kind from what he’s demanding from anyone else. The European Union and Japan have been targeted because of alleged unfair trade practices, although exactly what these practices are has never been clear. Canada is being targeted over claims that it’s a major source of fentanyl, which is a lie but would be a real grievance if it were true. But Trump has explicitly linked tariffs on Brazil to the nation’s temerity in trying Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, for attempting to overturn an election he lost.

So Trump is an enemy of democracy and accountability for would-be authoritarians, but we knew that. Beyond that, it’s utterly illegal for a U.S. president to use tariffs in an attempt to influence another nation’s internal politics. Presidents do have considerable discretion in tariff-setting, but there are a limited number of allowed reasons for imposing temporary tariffs:

• To give a U.S. industry a breathing space against an import surge (Section 201)

• To preserve an industry essential to national security (Section 232)

• Unfair foreign practices (Section 301 and anti-dumping duties)

Presidents can also claim additional powers during an economic emergency — but Trump keeps insisting that the U.S. economy is doing great, which presumably means that there is no emergency.

Now, just about everything Trump has been doing on trade is illegal, but in the case of Brazil it’s completely blatant. I don’t think even the most cleverly unscrupulous lawyer could find anything in U.S. law that gives a president the right to impose tariffs on a nation, not for economic reasons, but because he doesn’t like what its judiciary is doing. (Famous last words?)

So the confrontation with Brazil illustrates in especially stark form the lawlessness of Trump’s tariff spree. It also, however, illustrates the gap between the amount of power Trump apparently thinks he has and the reality.

I keep seeing articles saying that the United States is Brazil’s second-most-important trading partner. That’s not even true, unless you ignore the fact that when it comes to international trade the European Union lives up to its name, presenting a unified front on tariffs. In any case, you should realize that we really don’t loom very large in Brazil’s overall export picture. Here’s the breakdown for last year:

Source: International Monetary Fund

Do Trump and his advisors really think they can use tariffs to bully a nation of more than 200 million people into dropping its efforts to defend democracy, when it sells 88 percent of its exports to countries other than the United States?

Wait, there’s more: The Trump administration has exempted fresh orange juice — 90 percent of which is imported from Brazil — from its tariff. Apparently we need what Brazil sells us. And this is an implicit admission that, contrary to Trump’s constant assertions, U.S. consumers rather than foreign exporters pay tariffs.

What some of us want to know is why orange juice, which people can live without, is getting a break, while coffee, an absolutely essential nutrient, isn’t.

Sure enough, the tariffs seem to be backfiring politically. In an echo of what happened in Canada, where Trump’s pressure clearly saved the incumbent Liberal government from massive electoral losses, the threats against Brazil have done wonders for the popularity of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president:

Source: The Economist

As I said, Trump may think he can rule the world, but he doesn’t have the juice, orange or otherwise. In fact, he is unintentionally giving the world a lesson in the limits of U.S. power.

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 7:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Who gives a flying fuck.

What is your problem?

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

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

Name one thing you were complaining about 3 weeks ago without looking back on your post history or googling it.

Shut up, you whiny little faggot.

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

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 7:38 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Name one thing you were complaining about 3 weeks ago without looking back on your post history or googling it.

Shut up, you whiny little faggot.

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

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

A pediatric surgeon explains what RFK Jr.'s minions are doing to her patients.

RFK Jr.’s Movement Is Hurting Children. I See It Every Day at Work.

Trump’s health secretary is trying to convince Americans that their doctors are not to be trusted. He’s succeeding.

By Caitlin A. Smith | Aug 01, 2025 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/rfk-jr-maha-vaccines-docto
rs-influencers.html

I was standing in the emergency department at 11 p.m. under dingy hospital fluorescent lighting. My recommendation for the child I was evaluating was clear. They were ill, and they needed surgery. It was my clinical opinion, and scientific fact, that the patient would get worse, and likely develop sepsis, without it. But as the conversation wound down, I could see the parents’ skepticism for my surgical plan. Before I knew it, the family was asking to leave—and comparing my recommended (and routine) surgery to lobotomizing their child.

It’s a pattern I’ve seen explode in recent months: When it comes to parents and recommendations for treating their sick children, they, with much greater frequency, regurgitate pseudoscientific claims about vaccine safety, reiterate warnings about food quality causing all chronic disease, and try to discredit scientific research by way of Google Scholar. At an alarming rate, patients seem to understand medical treatments as a matter of opinion, rather than a thoughtful evaluation of a patient’s health informed by years of learned clinical judgment.

The end result? Parents turn away from the medical care their children need and toward remedies that won’t help—or could even do more harm.

But why? Who’s convincing all these well-meaning parents that doctors’ judgments aren’t to be trusted?

It’s the Make America Healthy Again movement, a network of online influencers, government pundits, and (a few) fringe doctors working to redefine the public’s view of health. The movement has been growing for years, but it has escalated in influence and popularity this year thanks to President Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a vaccine denier and chronic peddler of misinformation who serves as MAHA’s patron saint—as the nation’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And with this selection, unconventional doctors and online “health” influencers are increasingly backed by the messaging power of and sanctioned by the U.S. government.

MAHA disciples advocate for public health reform through targeted talking points on reducing processed foods, emphasizing individual choice in health care, and minimizing special interests in Big Pharma and the medical “establishment.”

Through a superficial lens, selling a healthier lifestyle doesn’t seem nefarious or politically motivated. As a pediatric surgeon, I have seen the public health effects of chronic disease and poor nutrition. Processed foods are also not great for children, and we should all have more choice and clarity about what we put into our bodies.

But delve just a little deeper into the MAHA message and it becomes clear that this interest in wellness is all but a shroud for a range of conspiracy theories and schemes for financial gain. The movement doesn’t just question the food people are putting in their bodies: It undermines modern medicine by casting a shadow over all medical recommendations, especially the research behind them.

The result is that MAHA adherents view doctors as, at best, just another voice in a chorus of health influencers—and at worst as self-interested profiteers pushing unneeded treatments.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/rfk-jr-maha-vaccines-docto
rs-influencers.html

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

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Friday, August 1, 2025 2:15 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SIX, to SECOND
Name one thing you were complaining about 3 weeks ago without looking back on your post history or googling it.

On July 7, SECOND was spamming the board with its usual inchoate propaganda.

Eleven posts! It was a banner day!

And SECOND can't remember a single one.

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

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Friday, August 1, 2025 2:39 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIX, to SECOND
Name one thing you were complaining about 3 weeks ago without looking back on your post history or googling it.

On July 7, SECOND was spamming the board with its usual inchoate propaganda.

Eleven posts! It was a banner day!

And SECOND can't remember a single one.

That's funny because I count one post, not eleven:

Trump Admin Insider Blows Lid Off Tariffs: ‘It’s All Fake’

A source close to the MAGA administration suggested the president’s “deals” are all theatrics MADE FOR TV

By Will Neal | Jul. 7 2025 12:00AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-admin-insider-blows-lid-off-tariff
s-its-all-fake/

Signym, that was posted at http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=66397&mid=12229
43#1222943

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

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