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: Sunday, September 21, 2025 09:07
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 82362
PAGE 68 of 68

Saturday, September 20, 2025 1:10 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:

Good luck taking Trump to court on this. It will make its way up to SCOTUS and it will be another loss for Democrats in Ted's court case thread.

And in the meantime this will be Democrats on the wrong side of yet another 80/20 issue that will be on full blast.

The People are sick of your bullshit. You're finished.

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

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

A Rogue Nation on the High Seas

Trump is treating the military like his personal mercenaries.

By Tom Nichols | September 19, 2025, 10:02 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/rogue-nation-high-se
as/684272/

Donald Trump is being cagey about how many people he’s ordered the U.S. Navy to kill on the high seas. The official toll from American military strikes on two boats suspected of running drugs from Venezuela is now 14, but a few days ago, Trump teased the possibility that a third boat had been “knocked off,” presumably on his orders.

The Trump administration’s justification for these strikes, such as it is, seems to be that any shipment of drugs connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a direct threat to the United States. These “narco-terrorists” may therefore be destroyed on sight, and without the fuss of asking permission from the U.S. Congress. This argument reflects the president’s childlike but dangerous understanding of his role as commander in chief. The United States, once the leader of a global system of security and economic cooperation, is now acting like a rogue state on the high seas.

The White House position is wrong on many levels. I taught the rules and theories that govern the use of force to military officers at the Naval War College for many years, and every summer for two decades to civilians at Harvard; I always reminded students that international law and traditions require states to show that they are acting in some form of self-defense, either in response to an attack or to forestall more violence. Moreover, American law does not permit the president to designate people as terrorists and then declare open season on them in defiance of international agreements and without any involvement from Congress. Perhaps Trump’s people are watching too many Tom Clancy movies, but he cannot legally send the Navy out onto the world’s oceans as though they are seagoing sheriffs with satchels full of death warrants.

No one in the White House seems to care very much about the rules that govern killing people, at home or abroad, but these rules actually exist. International law allows interdicting contraband—drugs, weapons, captured human beings—under many circumstances, and countries execute such missions legally every day. These activities require great care to limit the danger to the military and the loss of civilian life, including diligently identifying suspect vessels, warning them to stop, and sometimes boarding them to identify and seize their cargo.

Military ships can engage these targets in combat under limited conditions. If they open fire on American vessels, for example, no one would deny that they’re signing their own death warrant. But in general, when states want to initiate the use of force in the international arena, their arguments are subject to what international law calls “the Caroline test,” an 1837 case that led the U.S. to agree that to employ force, a threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This is an elegant way of saying that nations can use violence in self-defense when they have neither the time nor ability to do anything else. What constitutes an “imminent” threat is an ongoing debate among international lawyers, but the recent Venezuela strikes do not appear to fall even remotely under any of this doctrine.

To understand just how far off the rails Trump has taken the military, imagine an alternate example. If the boats were carrying, say, explosives rather than drugs, and headed on a course for American waters, then yes, U.S. officials could claim that they had no choice but to act: Each minute would bring the chance of immediate death closer to American citizens, and no military is going to try to arrest or quarantine a giant, speeding bomb.

Now let’s return to what Trump is actually doing. The president is trying to argue that drugs pose a similarly immediate threat to American lives, because once the smuggling boats unload their poisonous cargo, Americans will just as surely die as if they had been blown up in a harbor in Miami, and therefore the Navy must kill the terrorist-traffickers with the same alacrity it would use to destroy a bomb-laden paramilitary vessel.

This is nonsense. If the boats were carrying drugs (something Trump hasn’t proved) and if the boats were full of terrorists (something Trump has asserted but without providing names or evidence) and if the boats were headed directly for a U.S. port (which Trump cannot show), then Trump would still be in the wrong to destroy them without warning. Other presidents have used drone strikes to kill terrorists, but they acted under narrow legal conditions, including authority granted by Congress, against targets they could not otherwise apprehend. But Trump thinks he can pick up the phone and have people blown up at sea on his personal orders—and so far, no one’s stopped him from doing exactly that.

The president’s actions and rationalizations flunk the smell test both for international and American law. You don’t have to take my word for it: The former George W. Bush–administration lawyer John Yoo weighed in on this a few days ago. (Yoo came up with the legal justification for using “enhanced interrogation techniques”—also called “torture”—against captured terrorists after 9/11.) “There has to be a line between crime and war,” Yoo told Politico a few days ago. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

A former senior military lawyer, Charles Dunlap, likewise told Politico that “there might be paths where the strikes could be legal,” if the Trump administration would share evidence about the targets, which it won’t. Trump says the proof is “spattered all over the ocean, big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place,” a convenient excuse that still doesn’t answer how the ships posed such an imminent danger that they had to be destroyed at sea and their crews killed.

None of this seems to bother Trump or his circle. Almost two weeks ago, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” (I think, having taught hundreds of them, that most military officers would say that defending America and the Constitution is their highest duty, not being the world’s most brutal vice cops.) When one X user replied that what Trump is doing is a war crime, Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, shot back: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Meanwhile, White House officials are having a good laugh at how much they’ve scared innocent people in the region. Trump smirked this week that “no boats” are taking to the water in the Caribbean now. “I mean, to be honest, if I were a fisherman, I wouldn’t want to go fishing, either,” presumably because the United States might think the boat is carrying drugs. Vance tried to run with the same joke a few days ago, yukking it up with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Michigan rally. “I would stop too,” he said, laughing. “Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”

Not everyone is smiling. Despite Trump’s firing of the top legal advisers in the military, the Pentagon still employs attorneys, and they’re worried. According to The Wall Street Journal, military lawyers are concerned not only about the justification for the strikes on the boats—something any other president would have worked out before ordering the attacks—but also the “legal implications for the U.S. military personnel involved in the operations.”

Trump may have a special Immunity Necklace from the Supreme Court, but others do not. The military has a responsibility to reject orders that break American or international law, even if those orders come from the president himself. But the bar for disobedience is high: The military, as a general legal principle, must presume that orders coming down the chain of command are legal and must be executed. Nor are officers getting much guidance; attorneys and other officials in the Pentagon who have raised such objections, the Journal reported, are “being ignored or deliberately sidelined.”

A more worrisome problem here is that Trump’s illegal orders to kill drug smugglers could acclimate the American public to the sinister idea that the military is the president’s personal muscle and that it must do whatever he says. Earlier this week, he declared “antifa”—a loose affiliation of people who identify themselves as “anti-fascists”—to be a “major terrorist organization.” But because “antifa” isn’t a single group with a headquarters and identified leaders, Trump could apply the label to anyone he thinks opposes him. The president has now claimed he can kill terrorists at will, and he has designated many of his American opponents as terrorists.

The Supreme Court majority, in its Trump v. United States decision, didn’t seem very worried about Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s hypothetical objection that the president, bolstered by absolute immunity, could order the military to assassinate a political rival. But if he can order the Navy to operate as a presidential hit squad on the high seas, any number of grim hypotheticals could become reality sooner than Americans might expect.

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025 7:35 AM

SECOND

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

The actual trajectory of the Russian summer offensive and the strategic air war has made claims for Ukrainian inevitable defeat seem decidedly parochial. As such, it was interesting to see both Trump and General Keith Kellogg this week speak about Russian losses (in Trump’s case) and Ukrainian successes (in Kellogg’s).

During a press conference during Trump’s visit to the UK, he spoke of losses being disproportionately on the Russian side. The “he” below is Putin.

"He's killing a lot of people and losing more people than he's killing himself."

"Frankly, Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than Ukrainian soldiers."

Kellogg spoke even more about Russian failure. He said in Kyiv that in August when Trump asked him about the state of the war, Kellogg was clear that Russia was not winning.

Btw, I take nothing at face value that either Trump or Kellogg say. What is interesting, however, is that they are moving away from the Russian steamroller, Ukraine has no cards, narrative. It might be a sign that the intelligence that they are getting is rather different than it was earlier.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-151-the-most-rev
ealing

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025 7:46 AM

SECOND

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

Housing costs have also surged, with the annual income needed to buy a median-priced home now reaching $114,000 — a 70 percent jump since 2019.

The labor market is also showing strain. Employers added just 22,000 jobs in August, following a loss of 13,000 in June — the first monthly drop since late 2020. The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent, the highest since 2021, as businesses adjusted to tariff-related disruptions.

To make matters worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down job growth from April 2024 to March 2025 by 911,000 jobs, the largest downward revision on record.

Trump has sought to pin economic woes on his predecessor, saying the U.S. “went to hell” under Joe Biden and that his administration inherited “an inflation nightmare.” But polls suggest the message is losing traction. A new Cygnal survey shows more Americans now blame Republicans than Democrats for rising inflation.

Affluent Voters See Economy Differently

However, polling suggests that this economic uncertainty may not be a major concern for the wealthiest voters.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/donald-trump-s-approval-rating
-suddenly-shifts-with-richest-americans/ar-AA1MZOR7

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025 8:54 AM

SECOND

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

Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America.

I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr made against networks, involving a little-used doctrine called “news distortion,” show how easy it is to weaponize vaguely worded statutes and the executive’s discretionary powers against the president’s enemies. Such tools can also be used to reward friends — to provide regulatory favors, like merger approvals and exemptions from tariffs — who toe a politically correct line.

This is how authoritarianism has taken root in other democracies, most notably Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. And from the get-go, President Donald Trump’s second term had been moving the United States down this road. But for much of the time his efforts appeared too haphazard and poorly planned to produce a consolidated authoritarian regime — meaning one that could durably compromise the basic ability of its opponents to contest elections under reasonably fair conditions.

But in the past few weeks, a series of developments — most notably, but not exclusively, the authoritarian energies unleashed after Charlie Kirk’s death — have revealed a disturbingly credible policy pathway to power consolidation. We can now see how American Orbánism could take full root before the 2028 elections. We now know what a Trump-led authoritarian state in America would look like — and how we would get there from here.

Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.

More at This Is How Trump Ends Democracy
https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk

The past week has revealed Trump’s road map to one-party rule. Will Americans let him follow it?

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025 9:07 AM

SECOND

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

Continuing from above.

Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.

First, using hiring and firing powers to purge career civil servants from key agencies, like the Justice Department, and erode the traditional barriers preventing undue political influence on law enforcement and regulatory decisions. We saw this in the DOGE cuts, in the appointment of political hacks like Carr and Pam Bondi to top positions, and (most recently) Trump’s move to fire a federal prosecutor who refused to file politically motivated charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Second, using the power of these newly Trumpified agencies to target dissent in civil society — a broadening of the assaults on Ivy League universities. This would include following through on threats to use racketeering charges against liberal NGOs and going after other prominent critics the way they went after Kimmel.

Third, bullying and bribing large corporations until significant economic power is concentrated in the hands of regime allies dependent on the president’s goodwill for their survival. To a degree, this is already happening — see Trump’s habits of granted tariff exemptions to connected companies or using the threat of antitrust enforcement to bend CBS to its will. In an authoritarian America, such politicization would be expanded and deepened to the point where any corporation that crossed the White House would expect to pay a crippling financial cost.

Fourth, turn this accumulated power against the political opposition — turning elections into facially free contests where, in fact, Democrats face enormously unfair hurdles (and would likely be unable to govern even if they managed to succeed). This began with a nationwide push for mid-cycle redistricting, but would require further steps (like turning the Justice Department investigation into the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue into actual criminal charges).

At this point in the Trump administration, only the first has been accomplished to any significant degree. The efforts in other areas have been of limited effectiveness, stymied both by the courts and the Trump team’s incompetence.

But recently, and especially in the immediate wake of Kirk’s death, the administration has taken startling new swings in the second and third areas. If these efforts succeed, the fourth will become a live possibility: That is, we could be living in a country whose elections are no longer free and fair in any meaningful sense.

There is still plenty of time to prevent this future. Much depends on whether the Trump administration can get better at the nuts and bolts of lawfare, developing tactics that avoid legal hurdles or provoking a potent backlash. Acts of courage in Congress, the courts, the streets, and even corporate boardrooms could stymie Trump until at least the midterms.

But the risk of authoritarian consolidation is real and growing. Now that the endgame is clear, it’s time for all of us to start thinking about how to stop it.

More at https://www.vox.com/politics/462076/trump-democracy-jimmy-kimmel-charl
ie-kirk

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

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

YOUR OPTIONS

SHARE THREAD

NEW POSTS TODAY

USER	POST DATE
second	09.21 07:35
second	09.21 07:46
second	09.21 08:54
second	09.21 09:07