REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 13, 2024 08:08
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Thursday, June 4, 2020 6:07 AM

SECOND

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


The Supreme Court’s conservative wing says that we must be faithful to the Constitution’s text and history. But originalists on the Supreme Court have turned a blind eye to the efforts of the 14th Amendment’s framers to check police violence. The Supreme Court has never once recognized that the 14th Amendment was ratified against the backdrop of brutal killings of people of color by the police. Getting this history right is essential to correcting police abuses today.

Police brutality and murder flared up in the summer of 1866, as Congress completed its work on the 14th amendment and the American people considered whether to ratify it. In Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, white police officers led bloody massacres of black citizens and their allies, which left hundreds dead and many more badly beaten. These tragic events served as painful reminders that state governments would not respect the fundamental rights of black citizens and that police violence and discriminatory policing would continue unchecked without new constitutional guarantees. As an investigation of the Louisiana massacre concluded, without new protections, “the whole body of colored people” would continue to be “hunted like wild beasts, and slaughtered without mercy and with entire impunity from punishment.”

The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution against the backdrop of a campaign of terror and violence against black Americans by white police officers. The authors of the 14th Amendment, in a report that detailed the need for universal guarantees of liberty and equality, laid out, often in gruesome detail, how white police officers were engaged in a campaign of unending violence against black people. Police beat and killed black Americans while turning a blind eye to crimes committed against them. The 14th Amendment was designed to put an end to such police violence and killings. It vindicated the demands of black Americans that “now that we are free we do not want to be hunted,” we want to be “treated like human beings.” Recently emancipated slaves could not take their place as equal citizens in our nation if police officers were free to brutalize them.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/supreme-court-enabled-geor
ge-floyd-murder-police-violence.html

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

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 9:56 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


There's not going to be any NECESSARY police reform after this.

There would have been. But not now.

The average person by an overwhelming majority in this country was sympathetic toward Floyd after his death. The average person by an overwhelming majority would admit that they believe that the police force in the country needs an enema, and that just like the Catholic Church should have done with rapey priests, cops that got off on abusing people should have been purged.


But then it turns to riots and cities burn down, and then millions of people who never owned a gun before go out and buy one, leading to two months of record breaking gun sales.

Though the race riots when Nixon was running for reelection were a lot worse than anything happening right now, that doesn't matter because of how the Legacy Media is covering them today.

Fun Fact: Nixon won in a landslide. Not only winning by 18,000,000 more votes than McGovern and the widest popular vote margin in history, but securing 520 electoral college votes.


Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 11:39 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
There's not going to be any NECESSARY police reform after this.

There would have been. But not now.

The average person by an overwhelming majority in this country was sympathetic toward Floyd after his death. The average person by an overwhelming majority would admit that they believe that the police force in the country needs an enema, and that just like the Catholic Church should have done with rapey priests, cops that got off on abusing people should have been purged.


But then it turns to riots and cities burn down, and then millions of people who never owned a gun before go out and buy one, leading to two months of record breaking gun sales.

Though the race riots when Nixon was running for reelection were a lot worse than anything happening right now, that doesn't matter because of how the Legacy Media is covering them today.

Fun Fact: Nixon won in a landslide. Not only winning by 18,000,000 more votes than McGovern and the widest popular vote margin in history, but securing 520 electoral college votes.


Do Right, Be Right. :)
McGovern is an excellent example. He was clearly against the Vietnam War. But Americans wanted more war and they got it. It didn't end well for Americans, and they didn't understand how their decisions allowed Nixon to badly screw up that war, but North Vietnam understood completely. Funny how the American voters learned nothing, and knowing nothing has steadily made middle-class and lower-class voters poorer and poorer ever since.

60 Years of American Economic History, Told in 1 Graph
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/60-years-of-american-econ
omic-history-told-in-1-graph/261503/

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

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 12:01 PM

1KIKI

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




Yep, D or R, from 1980 on, it didn't matter what the president was - the story stayed the same.

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 12:07 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Yep, D or R, from 1980 on, it didn't matter what the president was - the story stayed the same.
What made me rich was not taking the advice of people who voted for more war in Vietnam. Trump is setting the US up for more war by cancelling every nuclear weapon treaty. If that is what you want, go for it. Or you could vote for either the Green Party or the libertarians because this time they will finally win Congress and the White House after losing all the previous times.

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

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Thursday, June 4, 2020 3:49 PM

1KIKI

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


Yep -

I have the luxury of voting my conscience because the roughly 8,612,368 registered democrats in California (as of 2019) will do the heavy lifting for moi.

You know, you wouldn't have to be so aggravated by all those Texas republicans if you moved to demographics you liked better. What with all your money I'm sure it would be doable enough.

And then we wouldn't have to put up with your insane - like, out of touch with reality insane - endless bitching about how Texas republicans created every bit of evil everywhere on the planet, all the way back to Genesis.

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Friday, June 5, 2020 6:34 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Yep -

I have the luxury of voting my conscience because the roughly 8,612,368 registered democrats in California (as of 2019) will do the heavy lifting for moi.

You know, you wouldn't have to be so aggravated by all those Texas republicans if you moved to demographics you liked better. What with all your money I'm sure it would be doable enough.

And then we wouldn't have to put up with your insane - like, out of touch with reality insane - endless bitching about how Texas republicans created every bit of evil everywhere on the planet, all the way back to Genesis.
Does your conscience say vote for Trump and defend him on fff.net? The guy is crazy. Does your conscience say vote for some 3rd party that can't win or run for President yourself? Then you are crazy.

My low opinion of Republicans sprang from the Vietnam War. A Republican soldier would gun down a water buffalo, in S. Vietnam. When asked why, it was to win the war. Crazy thinking. Back in America, Republicans (and D's that would eventually switch to R's) were no more sane about war than that soldier. But that was long ago and not everything is as dramatic as war. Very recently I talked to Republicans about Trump cancelling nuclear weapon treaties. I didn't like what I found. If you scratch the surface of a Republican, underneath you find crazy. So why wouldn't a Republican politician be crazy like Republican voters? They are water from the same pool.

The Psychopath in Chief
https://gen.medium.com/the-psychopath-in-chief-aa10ab2165d9
"I spent hundreds of hours with Donald Trump to ghost-write ‘The Art of the Deal.’ I now see a deeper meaning behind his behavior." – Tony Schwartz

More Republican craziness this morning: Texas anti-vaxxers say COVID-19 contact tracing is government surveillance
The Texas group that lobbies against vaccine requirements is now launching a campaign against COVID-19 contact tracing, a tried-and-true public health measure to contain disease spread.
www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/anti-vaxxer-
group-coronavirus-contract-tracing-15317019.php

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

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Friday, June 5, 2020 12:09 PM

1KIKI

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


'Crazy' is you thinking that my vote in California is going to change anything about California's electoral vote.

But speaking of California, why don't you move? Then you won't have to talk to any republicans. And you wouldn't keep being aggravated, and maybe you would even start to recover. I'm sure you could find the perfect location somewhere here. Hollywood sounds like it might do the trick, or San Fran, or Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley).

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Friday, June 5, 2020 12:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

My low opinion of Republicans sprang from the Vietnam War.


And what Second hasn't realized is just how much the country and both parties have changed since 1975.

He's still stuck in a world where Thin Lizzy is at the top of the charts.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, June 5, 2020 12:24 PM

1KIKI

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

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Friday, June 5, 2020 12:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Odds are calculated by all the bets placed by betters.

The odds have only changed because of an influx of shortsightedness.

You can hardly blame betters here. The last few months have been freakin' Bizarro World, and this would have destroyed any other president.


Assuming somehow George Soros isn't able to instigate WWIII before the election, I fully expect to see Trump rise back to 47 or higher on the RCP polling aggregate and the odds to swing back into his favor.


Then there is always the silent majority, that is going to be larger and more determined than it has ever been.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, June 6, 2020 7:39 AM

SECOND

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


Trump's reelection strategy includes getting Iran to surrender. Iran called Trump a nut.

Aides to Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump declined to explain why, if the United States was negotiating in its own national interest, Iran might get preferential treatment for negotiating with Mr. Trump before the election.

Trump on Friday urged Tehran to “make the Big deal” on its nuclear program, and dangled the possibility that they would get better terms if they negotiated before the presidential election, seeming to invite Tehran to help return him to office.

Mr. Trump’s offer was immediately rejected by the Iranian leadership, which now seems to harbor doubts that he will remain president, and is hunkering down to survive American-led sanctions until they see the results of the November election.

At the same time, hints from inside the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that a forthcoming report on Iran’s nuclear progress could say that Tehran has boosted its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by about 50 percent in the past three months, and now possesses about eight times as much nuclear fuel as was permitted under the nuclear accord that Mr. Trump abandoned two years ago.

Ever since Mr. Trump chose to leave what he called a “terrible” and “failed” deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have said that the combination of escalating sanctions, diplomatic isolation and the threat of possible military force would prompt the Iranian government to come to the negotiating table. So far that has failed, and Mr. Trump’s offer on Friday was a remarkably transparent invitation to an adversary to give him a diplomatic win before what could be a close American election.

“Thank you to Iran,” the president wrote in a tweet about the release of a Navy veteran detained in Tehran, Michael R. White. “Don’t wait until after U.S. Election to make the Big deal. I’m going to win. You’ll make a better deal now!”

www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/world/middleeast/trump-iran-nuclear.html

I wonder if Trump will brag to Biden about how much fuel for A-bombs Iran created only because Trump cancelled the Iran treaty? If Trump loses, he will be leaving a problem eight-times bigger than it was, all for Biden to solve. And then there is North Korea's H-bombs that Trump leaves for Biden. And all the cancelled nuclear weapon treaties. Biden can't fix that because Russia, China, N Korea, Iran know that the next Republican President will be cancelling everything again. Those countries know it is futile to negotiate with America so long as another Republican controlled White House or Senate are possible.

(If Trump wins, Trump's choice is either "Fire and Fury" or nothing. I bet it will be "Fire and Fury".)


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Saturday, June 6, 2020 8:08 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But speaking of California, why don't you move? Then you won't have to talk to any republicans. And you wouldn't keep being aggravated, and maybe you would even start to recover. I'm sure you could find the perfect location somewhere here. Hollywood sounds like it might do the trick, or San Fran, or Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley).
Speaking metaphorically, my business and the businesses run by rich Republicans are killer whales. Poorer Republicans are the seals that businesses eat. If I moved my business to California, to prosper it would have to eat the wealth of mostly Democrats rather than mostly Republican seals. I'd rather not. My business is a Gulf Coast killer whale; moving it to the West Coast would kill it.

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

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Saturday, June 6, 2020 10:46 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 7:27 AM

SECOND

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


What America can learn from Nordic police

A documentary series from a few years ago took an American police captain and an American prison superintendent around Nordic facilities, and in both cases they were utterly gobsmacked at the kindly decency they saw all around them. Nordic police departments and prisons are so radically different from American ones that they basically are not the same kind of institutions. Adopting the Nordic police model would be tantamount to abolishing the American criminal justice system as it currently exists — which is why it should happen immediately.

What is to be done about American police? As reporters document continual law enforcement atrocities in response to peaceful protests against police brutality, suddenly the question of how to reform these institutions has gotten close attention. Longstanding calls to at least partly defund the police are being taken more and more seriously, even as some liberals denounce the idea as unrealistic or too radical.

The Nordic countries, as usual, have an instructive example for America. These nations have both enormously smaller police departments and prison systems than the United States, and much less violent crime, especially murders. Emulating their basic approach could allow American cities to cleanse themselves of police abuse and still enjoy lower crime.

A recent study from the University of Helsinki examined the Nordic record on homicide. On the one hand, these countries have some of the lowest murder rates in the world, ranging from about 0.5 per 100,000 people in Norway to about 1.6 in Finland. On the other, Nordic clearance rates (the number of murders that result in an arrest) were as follows: In Iceland, 100 percent; in Finland, 99 percent; in Norway and Denmark, 97 percent; and in Sweden, 83 percent. In the U.S., by contrast, the murder rate is about 5.0 per 100,000, and the most recent clearance rate data in 2018 was a meager 62 percent — which is actually an increase from the prior couple years. These countries also have many fewer police relative to their population than the U.S., and vastly fewer people in prison.

What gives? Undoubtedly one major factor is the generous Nordic welfare state, which both provides material security to almost everyone in Nordic society, and keeps down inequality. Both material deprivation and especially inequality have long been known as contributing factors in crime — it should not be surprising that there is a strong relationship between inequality and violent crime across countries.

More at https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-from-nordic-pol
ice

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

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 9:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nobody cares.

And two months from now nobody will be talking about this anymore just like they've stopped talking about The Coomph.

But feel free to say all their names, Mr. Virtue Signal.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 2:21 PM

SECOND

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


How Did Republicans Become a Cult of Trump?

Bret Stephens, a Republican, writes:
Quote:
We are in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for.

….And at a moment when many Americans, particularly conservatives, are aghast at the outbursts of looting and rioting that have come in the wake of peaceful protests, we have a president who wants to replace rule of law with rule by the gun. If Trump now faces a revolt by the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership (both current and former) against his desire to deploy active-duty troops in American cities, it’s because his words continue to drain whatever is left of his credibility as commander in chief.
I don’t think this is enough, and that’s not meant as any kind of gotcha. The bigger question is: what kind of party, or ideological movement, ends up nominating a person like this? And not just nominating, but nominating by a landslide against a perfectly competent and ordinary set of conservative opponents. Trump won the nomination with a pure grass roots campaign, during which he lied, insulted people, made up juvenile nicknames, displayed epic ignorance, and just generally acted the buffoon. His supporters knew exactly what they were getting, and they got it.

So what has the Republican Party—Bret’s party—been doing that lead it to this point? And what will it do to avoid a repeat in the future? This requires some introspection and some interrogation. It’s not enough to say that Trump is a catastrophe. Anyone who can pour piss out of a boot knows that. But what brought Republicans to this awful point? That’s the more important question.

And please don’t try to pin the blame on awful Democratic candidates forcing you to vote Republican even if you have to hold your nose. I’m talking about the primary campaign here.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/06/how-did-republicans-sink-into-a
-cult-of-trump/

A lot of themes coalesced in Trump: someone who was not a politician, someone viewed as so rich that they wouldn't be beholden to rich fundraisers, someone who had a reputation for outrageous views, who could chop up the status quo and not care where the chips fell, someone who is a media star who would ramp up excitement and turn out the vote, and someone who could give an exciting, rock star-level campaign rally. Of course, none of these things have much—if anything—to do with being an adequate President of the United States, or even a decent human being, but there's evidently a large group of US voters for whom being an adequate President is not what a presidential election is about.

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

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 5:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Fuck MotherJones.

They'll all be out of jobs soon.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 6:55 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

Fuck MotherJones.

They'll all be out of jobs soon.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Trump Can’t Just Refuse to Leave Office

So it’s the morning of Jan. 20, 2021. Trump doesn’t meet President-elect Joe Biden and his wife in the White House driveway, nor does he attend the inauguration on Capitol Hill. Instead, he proclaims, as he has many times by this point, that the election was a fraud (he has set the stage for this with his false claims about mail-in ballots), and at noon, instead of acceding to the transfer of power, Trump proclaims that the swearing in was FAKE NEWS and that he remains the president.

Here is what would happen next.

On the dot of noon, the nuclear codes, which currently allow Trump to order and authenticate a nuclear attack, expire. The officer who has been following him around everywhere with the “football”—which, contrary to popular belief, is not a button or a palm print but rather a book filled with various launch codes—leaves. If Trump and whatever lackeys stay with him prevent the officer from leaving, another officer, holding a backup football, would join Biden at the inauguration ceremony.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service will abandon Trump, as they do every president whose term is up, except for a small detail assigned to protect him and his family for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Biden’s acting attorney general will have drawn up arrest warrants for Donald J. Trump and anyone who remains at his side on charges—at minimum—of criminal trespassing. If Trump calls on the armed forces or militias or the nation’s sheriffs to come defend him, he might also be charged with incitement or insurrection.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/trump-election-refusal-lea
ve.html

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

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 10:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 7, 2020 11:21 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
What will you do to yourself if Trump loses? His chance of winning is only 42% tonight. If he wins I'll be celebrating the additional material wealth he will be sending my way. Too bad there will be nothing tangible for you, but there is the emotional payoff. I be happy with the money.
https://odds.watch/trump-2020

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

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Monday, June 8, 2020 12:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fun story, but since Trump is going to win we're never going to find out if it played out that way.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
What will you do to yourself if Trump loses? His chance of winning is only 42% tonight. If he wins I'll be celebrating the additional material wealth he will be sending my way. Too bad there will be nothing tangible for you, but there is the emotional payoff. I be happy with the money.
https://odds.watch/trump-2020

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



I don't know. I know what I won't do.

I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.





And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, June 8, 2020 7:53 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I don't know. I know what I won't do.

I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.

And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, you have called me a liar about a thousand times, you know. In all these years I never thought of Trump as the actual problem with America. Back in the 70's it wasn't Nixon who was the problem for America. It was people like you, more than a hundred million, who have always been the main problem, for themselves and America. Calling me a liar a thousand times is just one of the ways your thinking is highly defective, which makes you a problem for the country. There is a nice article about how countries and a large fraction of their citizens get themselves into deep trouble for psychological, not ideological, reasons:

Why Have Republican Leaders Abandoned Their Principles In Support Of An Immoral And Dangerous President?

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/6122
50/

Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality: Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Trump induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs and compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—encouraging him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.

Trump’s lie about the crowd size was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. The point was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.

These kinds of lies have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account, and for Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest, because that’s just family stuff.

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. He advertised the movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti–Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist—and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it—Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID-19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

Maybe it isn’t surprising that the implications of “Trump First” were not immediately understood. After all, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe—or, if you want a more recent example, the Chavistas in Venezuela—all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity even though, in practice, they created inequality and poverty. But just as the truth about Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution slowly dawned on people, it also became clear, eventually, that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart. And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot, Republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate, just like people living under an alien regime.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200605165317/www.theatlantic.com/magazin
e/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

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

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Monday, June 8, 2020 8:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I don't know. I know what I won't do.

I won't make an ass of myself for 4 years like you have.

And we all know you don't own a business or have any money either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, you have called me a liar about a thousand times, you know. In all these years I never thought of Trump as the actual problem with America. Back in the 70's it wasn't Nixon who was the problem for America. It was people like you, more than a hundred million, who have always been the main problem, for themselves and America. Calling me a liar a thousand times is just one of the ways your thinking is highly defective, which makes you a problem for the country. There is a nice article about how countries and a large fraction of their citizens get themselves into deep trouble for psychological, not ideological, reasons:



Starts out the post with lies and insults, then thinks I'm going to read the next 40 paragraphs.

lol

You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, June 8, 2020 9:30 AM

THG


Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner discusses the May jobs report and says the biggest reason for the positive news centers around the massive stimulus implemented by Washington.


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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:21 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Starts out the post with lies and insults, then thinks I'm going to read the next 40 paragraphs.

lol

You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
I Watched the Arab Spring Unfold in Egypt. The Parallels to America Now Are Disturbing.

There are similarities. “Trump called the protesters in D.C. the other day terrorists,” Fahmy said, referring to a letter from the president’s former lawyer that Donald Trump tweeted. “I was shocked when I saw it this morning. That’s exactly what happened in Egypt. That’s exactly the narrative that happened under authoritarian regimes, right? They’re against the security of the state, so they’re terrorists.” In Egypt, the regime’s supporters soon grew more comfortable with state violence against the protesters.

If you were on the ground during the Arab Spring, it’s hard not to see disturbing parallels to the protests in America now.

The first time I inhaled tear gas was in 2012. I was in Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, where just one year earlier, half a million Egyptian protesters declared victory over the military dictator Hosni Mubarak, who formally resigned as president after 30 years of rule. After the elections that followed, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won and promptly attempted to grant himself broad autocratic powers, which drew large crowds and journalists like me right back to the square.

The tear gas canisters I breathed that day bared bold block letters: “Made in the USA.”

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/police-brutality-protests-
arab-spring-tear-gas.html

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

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:32 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

lol

You're lucky I take the time to read the bullshit you post. You're crazy if I'm going to read your fake news too.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
One attitude Republicans are displaying is labeled "LOL nothing matters". Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate with Trump, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200605165317/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

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

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:39 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner discusses the May jobs report and says the biggest reason for the positive news centers around the massive stimulus implemented by Washington.
House Democrats have passed the HEROES Act, a very good bill extending and improving economic relief. But Friday’s employment report encourages Republicans to revert to type; they’ll almost surely block any significant further relief until or unless the economic situation becomes even more dire than it is.

It also encourages them to push for more opening, more relaxation of social distancing, despite the fact that Covid-19 is nowhere near under control and there are early indications that the pandemic may be roaring back to life as states reopen.

So it’s all too possible that we’ll see an ugly scene in the late summer and early fall — more state and local government layoffs and widespread job losses in industries that have so far been relatively unscathed as desperate workers slash spending, all against the backdrop of a resurgence in hospitalizations and deaths. And the May uptick in jobs makes that scene more likely, because it promotes more wishful thinking from the people who insisted a few months ago that Covid-19 would go away and posed no threat to the economy.

Maybe we’ll be lucky and the bad things I’m worried about won’t actually materialize. But hoping for the best isn’t a plan.

More at www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/opinion/coronavirus-jobs-report.html

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

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 10:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Maybe I didn't LOL hard enough.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 1:29 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Maybe I didn't LOL hard enough.

Do Wrong, Be Wrong. :(
Will you laugh out loud when voting for The Chaos President?

At a Republican presidential debate in December 2015, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made this prediction about then front-runner Donald Trump: "He's a chaos candidate. And he'd be a chaos president."

That quote proved deeply prescient. Trump as president has seemed to welcome chaos, using his Twitter feed to lash out in 100 directions at once -- throwing chum in the water to see who responds and how.

Following even a single day of Trump tweets, comments and pronouncements is exhausting. It's hard to know where to look. Or what to read. Or watch. There's just so much -- a flurry of activity, with everything moving so quickly that it's hard to center any one thing in your line of vision.

Which, for the most part, is how Trump wants it. He believes that he thrives in this chaos, that he is able to navigate it in ways others can't.

That chaos theory has taken a turn in recent weeks, however. The combined effect of the (still) ongoing coronavirus pandemic with the protests across the country has created a level of uncertainty that has people turning to the President for a stable response. And Trump's chaos characteristics are an insufficient balm for those worries.

An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday morning showed that 8 in 10 Americans believe that the country is out of control. Just 15% say it is under control.

That is bad news for Trump. No one likes to feel as though their world is rapidly spiraling out of control. And they like it even less when it feels as though their top elected leader is making that chaos worse rather than better.

It's no accident, then, that -- per above -- Trump's numbers are slipping in the swing states where he needs to win.

And here's the problem for a chaos president: When people want stability and calm, you have no idea how to provide it to them.

www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/politics/us-election-2020-week-ahead/index.html

Here is a typical Trump out-of-his-mind tweet from today:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN
I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
7:34 AM · Jun 9, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270333484528214018

I laughed out loud at how crazy Trump can reveal himself to be with only one tweet. Two hours later, I was wondering if anyone beside me noticed that tweet. Someone did:
Quote:
Martin Gugino is still in critical condition as the president tweets wildly unfounded claims about the man’s run-in with police.

President Donald Trump spread an unfounded conspiracy theory Tuesday, suggesting that a 75-year-old man who is in critical condition after he was shoved to the ground at a protest by Buffalo, New York, police on June 4 is actually an “antifa provocateur.”

The president was referring to a viral video of an incident showing police knocking over 75-year-old Martin Gugino while attempting to control protests against police violence in the western New York city. After being pushed by an officer, Gugino fell, appearing to hit his head on a sidewalk, and was ignored by dozens of officers as he bled from his ear, motionless.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/9/21285086/trump-conspiracy-the
ory-buffalo-antifa-provocateur

When you read the details of this incident, it is clear Trump can't think straight. How does he do his job, which is much more subtle, nuanced, and complicated than this one police beating? Almost certainly he can't do most parts of being President.

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

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Maybe I didn't LOL hard enough.

Do Wrong, Be Wrong. :(
Will you laugh out loud when voting for The Chaos President?



I've already been laughing out loud for four years now.

What makes you think I won't be laughing this time?


It's going to be hilarious watching the chaos on the streets when Trump wins again. Your Liberal buddies aren't just going to cry big baby tears and scream to the sky this time. They'll make the Floyd "protests" look like protests.

And on that day the world will get to see what the Left has truly become.

I welcome anyone on November 4th to try taking a step into my house uninvited.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, June 11, 2020 6:31 AM

SECOND

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


America Fails the Marshmallow Test - We lack the will to beat Covid-19.

www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/coronavirus-reopening-marshmallow-t
est.html

The marshmallow test is a famous psychological experiment that tests children’s willingness to delay gratification. Children are offered a marshmallow, but told that they can have a second marshmallow if they’re willing to wait 15 minutes before eating the first one. Claims that children with the willpower to hold out do much better in life haven’t held up well, but the experiment is still a useful metaphor for many choices in life, both by individuals and by larger groups.

One way to think about the Covid-19 pandemic is that it poses a kind of marshmallow test for society.

At this point, there have been enough international success stories in dealing with the coronavirus to leave us with a clear sense of what beating the pandemic takes. First, you have to impose strict social distancing long enough to reduce the number of infected people to a small fraction of the population. Then you have to implement a regime of testing, tracing and isolating: quickly identifying any new outbreak, finding everyone exposed and quarantining them until the danger is past.

This strategy is workable. South Korea has done it. New Zealand has done it.

But you have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread. So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test.

And America is failing that test.

New U.S. cases and deaths have declined since early April, but that’s almost entirely because the greater New York area, after a horrific outbreak, has achieved huge progress. In many parts of the country — including our most populous states, California, Texas, and Florida — the disease is still spreading. Overall, new cases are plateauing and may be starting to rise. Yet state governments are moving to reopen anyway.

This is a very different story from what’s happening in other advanced countries, even hard-hit nations like Italy and Spain, where new cases have fallen dramatically. It now looks likely that by late summer we’ll be the only major wealthy nation where large numbers of people are still dying from Covid-19.

Why are we failing the test? It’s easy to blame Donald Trump, a man-child who would surely gobble down that first marshmallow, then try to steal marshmallows from other kids. But America’s impatience, its unwillingness to do what it takes to deal with a threat that can’t be beaten with threats of violence, runs much deeper than one man.

It doesn’t help that Republicans are ideologically opposed to government safety-net programs, which are what make the economic consequences of social distancing tolerable; as I explain in my recent column, they seem determined to let crucial emergency relief expire far too soon. Nor does it help that even low-cost measures to limit the spread of Covid-19, above all wearing face masks (which mainly protect other people), have been caught up in our culture wars.

America in 2020, it seems, is too disunited, with too many people in the grip of ideology and partisanship, to deal effectively with a pandemic. We have the knowledge, we have the resources, but we don’t have the will.

Expert warns US deaths will nearly double by September
www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html
"If the US is unable to check the growth in September, we could be facing worsening trends in October, November, and the following months if the pandemic, as we expect, follows pneumonia seasonality," IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray said in a statement.

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

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Thursday, June 11, 2020 6:43 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol

Fuck marshmallows.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, June 11, 2020 6:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Oh.. and you'll see me wearing a facemask in public right after you see me kneeling and praying to Al Sharpton to forgive me for my whiteness.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, June 11, 2020 8:17 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Oh.. and you'll see me wearing a facemask in public right after you see me kneeling and praying to Al Sharpton to forgive me for my whiteness.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
Mask use is the most effective countermeasure by far, followed by social distancing and avoiding common areas. Hand sanitizer use may also be effective, but the error bars extend above one, so we can’t be sure.

We believe that the reduction in the growth rates of infections by 40% to 60% is our best estimate of the effects of face masks….We should also stress that 40 to 60% might still be a lower bound. The daily growth rates in the number of infections when face masks were introduced was around 2 to 3%. These are very low growth rates compared to the early days of the epidemic in Germany, where daily growth rates also lay above 50%. One might therefore conjecture that the effects might have been even greater if masks had been introduced earlier.

These are just two studies, both with flaws. The Jena study is a single city and depends on the quality of the synthetic control constructed by the authors. The Roosevelt study is based on an artificial environment with a non-random sample. As always, more research is needed. Nonetheless, both of these point in the same direction: mask wearing is highly effective in halting the spread of COVID-19.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/06/two-new-studies-confirm-it-wear
-a-mask/

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

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Friday, June 12, 2020 7:02 AM

SECOND

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


Reactionaries Are Having a Bad Month

What is Braxton Bragg to Donald Trump, or Trump to Braxton Bragg?

It was always strange (and outrageous) to have U.S. military bases named for traitors — for Confederate generals who rebelled against the Union to defend slavery. And military leaders seem willing to change those bases’ names. But Trump says no.

Why would he take that position at a time when white Americans finally seem to be acknowledging the injustice African-Americans routinely face, leading to surging public support for Black Lives Matter? The smart thing, surely, would be to emulate much of corporate America: Make a few cheap gestures on behalf of social justice while changing nothing fundamental. I mean, even NASCAR has announced that it will ban the Confederate flag at events. And renaming military bases would be very cheap.

But Trump evidently can’t bring himself to make even a symbolic show of sympathy. And trying to understand his incapacity helps explain what Trumpism — and, indeed, modern conservatism as a whole — is all about.

Trump himself says that it’s about honoring “a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” Really?

These bases honor men who stood for slavery, the opposite of freedom; and as it happens, two of the biggest bases are named for generals famed not for victories but for defeats. Bragg, whose army suffered an epic rout at Chattanooga, was one of the Civil War’s worst-regarded generals. John Bell Hood squandered his men’s lives in futile attacks at Atlanta and Franklin, then led what was left of his army to annihilation at Nashville.

Trump obviously doesn’t know about any of that. But why should a guy who grew up in Queens care about Confederate tradition in the first place?

The answer is that Trump, and most of his party, are reactionaries. That is, as the political theorist Corey Robin puts it, they are motivated above all by “a desire to resist the liberation of marginal or powerless people.” And Confederate iconography has become a symbol of reaction in America.

That’s why some Republicans in Maine objected to making a song about the 20th Maine — the volunteer regiment whose heroic defense of Little Round Top played a crucial role in the battle of Gettysburg — the state ballad. It was offensive, they said, to “say that we’re any better than the South was.” Um, the South was defending slavery.

The reactionary impulse also explains, I believe, why some privileged white men, from the editor of the influential Journal of Political Economy to the (now former) C.E.O. of CrossFit, have been unable to control self-destructive outbursts attacking the Black Lives Matter protests.

After all, from a reactionary’s point of view the past three weeks have been a nightmare. Not only are marginal people who are supposed to know their place standing up for justice, they’re overwhelmingly winning the battle for public opinion. That’s not how things are supposed to work!

One response to this reactionary’s nightmare has been denial. Trump keeps tweeting “LAW & ORDER!” as if saying the magic phrase enough times will turn the clock back to 1968. The Trump campaign responded to an unfavorable CNN poll, not by reconsidering its message, but by demanding that the network retract the poll and apologize.

Another response has been wild conspiracy theorizing. On the right, it’s a given that mass popular demonstrations have been orchestrated by antifa radicals, though there’s not a shred of evidence to that effect. And Trump, famously, suggested that a 75-year-old man knocked over by the police — we’ve all seen the video of him bleeding out on the sidewalk — was an antifa provocateur who somehow engineered his own assault.

Most frightening, however, has been the palpable desire of powerful figures on the right — not just Trump — to find a way to meet Black Lives Matter protests with state violence.

On any rational assessment, it never made any sense to demand a military response to overwhelmingly peaceful protests marred by only a small amount of opportunistic looting. Do right-wingers believe their own claims that we’re beset by “mobs of violent cretins”? I doubt it.

For reactionaries, however, the horror of the situation isn’t the possibility that protests might turn violent. It’s the fact that the protests are happening at all.

And that’s why people like Trump and Tom Cotton have been so eager to send in the military. They aren’t concerned about keeping the peace; if that mattered to them, they would have reacted harshly to the spectacle of armed right-wingers threatening Michigan’s State Legislature. Instead, Trump tweeted his support.

No, America’s reactionaries don’t want law and order; they want an excuse to crush social justice protests with a mailed fist.

For the moment, at least, America’s reactionaries aren’t getting their wish. Governors, mayors and, not least, the military have made it clear that they want no part of a brutal crackdown.

But don’t count the reactionaries out. They remain extremely dangerous and will become more dangerous if, as seems increasingly likely, Trump finds himself staring at the prospect of electoral defeat.

www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/opinion/trump-confederate-flag-military-bas
es.html

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

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Friday, June 12, 2020 10:09 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Outside of your Twitter and Legacy Media and their hard attempt to Balkanize the country, there is no white support for BLM.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, June 12, 2020 10:20 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Outside of your Twitter and Legacy Media and their hard attempt to Balkanize the country, there is no white support for BLM.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
6ix, with your hatred of SJW's and BLM, you are a reactionary. Trump, and most of his party, are reactionaries. That is, as the political theorist Corey Robin puts it, they are motivated above all by “a desire to resist the liberation of marginal or powerless people.” Confederate iconography has become a symbol for reactionaries in America.

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

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Saturday, June 13, 2020 6:02 AM

SECOND

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


BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump just said Lincoln ending slavery turned out “questionably.”

Which of Lincoln's "results" — which can be summarized as ending slavery by decree & defeating the treasonous wretches who made war on the United States to set up a separate country where black people would be enslaved forever — were "questionable?"

Trump said that the unemployment rate for black people dropping from 7.5 percent at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency to a low of 5.4 percent last year—before rocketing back to 16.8 percent this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic—is a greater “result” for black people than what Lincoln achieved by leading the United States to win the Civil War and, again, end the atrocity of chattel slavery. It’s contemptuous of historical fact and of black people’s lives, but it’s not quite as bad as saying that slavery should still exist.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/what-was-trump-trying-to-s
ay-about-abraham-lincoln.html

Confederate symbols are coming down, despite Trump's ire
www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/06/12/confederate-monument-symbols-mi
litary-bases-pkg-phillip-ebof-vpx.cnn

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

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Saturday, June 13, 2020 9:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump just said Lincoln ending slavery turned out “questionably.”

Which of Lincoln's "results" — which can be summarized as ending slavery by decree & defeating the treasonous wretches who made war on the United States to set up a separate country where black people would be enslaved forever — were "questionable?"


Slate being Slate: Takes something Trump says completely out of context.

Slate readers being Slate readers: Yessssssssss Masssssssteeeeeerrrr.




Use your half-brain.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 14, 2020 8:35 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Slate being Slate: Takes something Trump says completely out of context.
Here is some context for you:

Why military leaders rejected Trump's view of racial conflict

Analysis by John Harwood

www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-military-racism-analysis/index.h
tml

Updated 7:19 AM ET, Sun June 14, 2020

It sounds off at first that conservative-minded military leaders would break with a Republican President -- first over preserving "law and order," then over Confederate symbols.

But it isn't. The split quickly comes into focus when you consider its underpinning in radically divergent views about race in a diversifying America.

Today's military leaders not only welcome racial diversity, they depend on it for America's national security. For the 21st century GOP President Donald Trump leads, diversity represents a mortal threat.

The repudiation Trump suffered, from the men in uniform he has surrounded himself with to convey an image of toughness, was initially cast in the language of civilian-military relations.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper spurned Trump's idea of deploying active-duty troops against Americans protesting police brutality against blacks. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis added his indictment of the President's preference for division over unity, casting it as fundamentally un-American. Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, once Trump's White House chief of staff, joined other prominent military figures in echoing that scathing assessment.

Yet their words reflected much more than disagreement over the applicability of the 1807 Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to invoke as cover for bringing in the military to quell civilian unrest. The racial conflict Trump embraces is something the armed forces, as one of the most successfully-integrated institutions in American history, simply cannot abide.

From Truman to Powell

President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces by executive order in 1948. Within four decades, the military sociologist Charles Moskos concluded, "Blacks occupy more management positions in the military than they do in business, education, government, or any other significant sector of American society."

Colin Powell became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, two decades before Barack Obama became the first black President. While African Americans are about 13% of the US population, they represent 11% of Army officers and 24% of enlisted Army soldiers.

"We can't exist without some sense of racial fairness," observes retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was confirmed on Tuesday as the first black service chief in the US military, underscored that point by reflecting publicly on protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

"I'm thinking about how full I am with emotion not just for George Floyd, but the many African-Americans who have suffered the same fate," Brown said in an online video. "I'm thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn't always sing of liberty and equality."

The GOP and black voters

The civil rights movement took the Republican Party in the opposite direction. After Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, over the opposition of Republican opponent Barry Goldwater, white conservatives, in the South and elsewhere, exited the Democratic Party in droves. They expanded and transformed the GOP, helping create a presidential majority that won five of six White House contests from 1968 to 1988.

But at the same time, black support for the GOP plummeted. Now demographic change -- shrinking the white share of the electorate from nine in 10 to seven in 10 and dropping -- has given Democrats the upper hand. Every uptick in non-white voting erodes Republican power, leading the GOP to fight measures that make casting ballots easier.

Blue-collar whites, who rallied behind Trump's polarizing 2016 appeals, dominate the GOP rank-and-file. Pew Research Center polling in 2019 showed broad Republican alarm about false claims of racism, belief that America has done enough to provide equal rights, and concern that whites are as likely as blacks to face "a lot" of discrimination.

Doubts about systemic racism

Little wonder that top Trump advisers insist systemic racism doesn't exist. Attorney General William Barr, having seen the proportion of white Christians in America drop by half to around 40% in his lifetime, sees a different systemic threat: from "militant secularists" and progressives seeking "organized destruction" of religion and traditional values.

It was Barr who directed federal officers with tear gas and rubber bullets to push protestors off a street near the White House on June 1. Trump then walked across that street to a church, where he held a Bible aloft for photographs flanked by the Attorney General and other white advisers.

That government-initiated violence proved the tipping point for Mattis and other military leaders. Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologized late last week for accompanying Trump on that walk and thereby suggesting his involvement in "domestic politics."

The turn to the issue of Confederate symbols took the debate into explicitly racial territory. The Navy joined the Marines in banning Confederate emblems on their installations, and retired Army Gen. David Petraeus aligned himself with protesters by proposing to rename military bases that honor Confederate generals.

Pentagon leaders, and even Republicans in Congress, signaled openness to that debate. Trump brusquely cut it off in the name of "a "Great American Heritage."

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

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Sunday, June 14, 2020 9:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


John Harwood is an Activist and CNN is trash.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, June 14, 2020 9:30 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
John Harwood is an Activist and CNN is trash.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You are unemployed poor white trash, temporarily on an even keel until Trump loses, but with a continuing weakness for substance abuse and Trump is a racist. What is your point? That you don't believe what you don't want to know?

Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.
www.thedailybeast.com/trump-is-a-racist-if-you-still-support-him-so-ar
e-you

Military leaders open up about race

The nation's military marked a huge step forward this past week ... a step that, national security correspondent David Martin tells us, underscores just how difficult advancement for black officers has been, as Air Force General Charles Q. Brown and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston open up about discrimination in a way military leaders never have before.


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Sunday, June 14, 2020 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Goldie Taylor is an activist and The Daily Beast is trash.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, June 15, 2020 6:51 AM

SECOND

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


This book’s introduction uses science-fiction to explain America to Americans:

The Decadent Society - How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Ross Douthat (2020)

Download the book at https://libgen.unblockit.pw/search.php?req=Ross+Douthat

Introduction

The Closing of the Frontier

The peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history, occurred in late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.

“Four assassinations later,” wrote Norman Mailer of the march from JFK’s lunar promise to its Nixon-era fulfillment, “a war in Vietnam later; a burning of Black ghettos later; hippies, drugs and many student uprisings later; one Democratic Convention in Chicago seven years later; one New York school strike later; one sexual revolution later; yes, eight years of a dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade later, we were ready to make the moon.” We were ready—as though the leap into space were linked, somehow, to the civil rights revolution, the baby boomers coming into their own, the transformation in music and manners and mores, and the hopes of utopia percolating in Paris, Woodstock, San Francisco.

Mailer’s was a mystical take on history, but one well suited to its moment. For the society that made it happen, the Apollo landing was both a counterpoint to the social chaos of the 1960s and the culmination of the decade’s revolutionary promise. It proved that the efficiency and techno-optimism of Eisenhower-era America could persist through the upheavals of the counterculture, and it represented a kind of mystical, dizzy, Age of Aquarius moment in its own right. As much as anything that happened here on earth, the fire on the moon helped make the summer of ’69 seem like a beginning, not a peak—an opening into a new era, in which the frontier would no longer be closed, the map no longer filled in, and human beings would expand their explorations, their empires, their arguments and imaginations and ambitions into the very stars.

This was the space age, which lasted for about thirty years: from Sputnik in 1957 to the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. And we who live in its aftermath have forgotten just how confidently it was expected to continue. In The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, his magisterial narrative of the period, Walter McDougall runs through the expert predictions of the 1960s and 1970s: that soon reusable spacecrafts would be constantly “ascending and descending like angels on Jacob’s ladder” into space; that by the year 2000, both superpowers would have lunar colonies; that human missions to Mars would begin within a decade of the moon landing; that space would soon become the site of revolutions in energy production, weather control, and more. Likewise with Apollo-era pop culture: 2001: A Space Odyssey promised a manned mission to Jupiter in its eponymous year, while the timeline of the future on Star Trek assumed that space exploration and colonization would follow as naturally from the Apollo program as sailors and settlers had followed the course discovered by Columbus.

This dream did not quite die with Challenger, but it had lost adherents across the disappointingly earthbound seventies, and from the Reagan era onward, it became a fond and somewhat fantastical hope, invoked as a flourish by presidents seeking to inspire and pursued by the sort of eccentric billionaires who also invested in cryonics. As it became clear that we would not master the vastnesses of space as easily as explorers crossing the Atlantic, the public’s attention waned, political support diminished, and science fiction lost its gee-whiz edge and turned dystopian. The movies especially began to treat the infinite spaces differently—as a zone of terrors where no one hears you scream (Alien and its imitators), a source of sinister invasions and a home of malignant demigods (the UFO craze, The X-Files), or as a purgatory to be escaped by a safe return to earth (Apollo 13, Gravity, The Martian, Ad Astra). Where Trek had confidently blended sixties liberalism with the frontier spirit of Wagon Train, its successors Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica were not even visions of the human future at all: they were dispatches from a stellar prehistory; a vision of far away or long ago.

Meanwhile, unmanned spaceflight expanded, robots reached distant worlds, astronomers discovered planets that might well be earthlike—but none of it kindled the popular imagination as the giant leap for mankind had done. For the most part, humanity had decided that whatever might be up there, it would probably remain indefinitely out of reach.

This resignation haunts our present civilization.

Because the deep forces of modern history—industrialization, political centralization, secularization—so often disrupted the rhythms of lives lived in stability and place and continuity, the ideology of exploration and discovery has been much more necessary than in many past civilizations, offering a new form of consolation to replace what faith and tribe and family and hierarchy had once supplied. In modernity, the former world is always passing away; the solidity of the past always melting into air. But the promise is that tomorrow will bring something new; that a better life is just a long sea voyage or wagon train away; that ours is an age of ever-unfolding wonders that more than compensate for what’s been lost.

So it is a significant factor in our era’s anxieties, in the sense of drift and stagnation and uncertainty with which this book is principally concerned, that the actual physical frontier has been closed for a generation or more—that for the first time since 1491, we have found the distances too vast and the technology too limited to take us to somewhere genuinely undiscovered, somewhere truly new. It is not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope.

Whether the closing of the stellar frontier somehow caused the West’s post-1960s turn toward pessimism or simply interacted with trends already at work, it remains a turning point in the history of the modern world. Before Apollo, it was easy to imagine that “late” was a misnomer for our phase of modernity, that our civilization’s story was really in its early days, that the earthbound empires of Europe and America were just a first act in a continuous drama of expansion and development.

Since Apollo, we have entered into decadence. The word hints at exhaustion, finality—the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last of a series—but a finality that hasn’t yet arrived, so why not eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime? How does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confessions of malaise.… When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.

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

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Monday, June 15, 2020 9:34 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:

https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.html



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, June 16, 2020 6:23 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:

https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.html
The Afterword of the story says that the author was thinking of the American Left vs Right over the Korea War:
Quote:
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists. In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean in such a situation.
(It’s 66 years later. If beating Communism had truly been important to Americans, they won’t have quit fighting after only 36,516 dead Americans in 4 years. Flu kills more in some years. Covid-19 kills more and those deaths are meaningless, not a noble sacrifice to beat the Commies and save Korea.)

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

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Tuesday, June 16, 2020 6:23 AM

SECOND

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


Shaky COVID response lays bare a decades long crisis in government

A highly politicized system that encourages short-term thinking has hindered the government’s pandemic response – as have outmoded technology, overlapping mandates, and a steep decline in public trust.

Days before Donald Trump became president, Obama administration officials hosted a “tabletop exercise” for the incoming Trump team. One of the hypothetical challenges: dealing with a novel strain of influenza that was sweeping the globe.

Cases were appearing in California and Texas, according to the simulation. It could be the worst flu pandemic since 1918. There would be shortages of essential equipment like ventilators. A “whole of government” response would be needed.

Some 30 Trump appointees attended the meeting. Today, only eight still work for the president, according to a Brookings Institution tally.

In the rearview mirror, of course, everything can look crystal clear.

Aspects of the Trump administration’s early pandemic response have met with harsh pushback. The U.S. government had been warned in early January of the deadly new virus in China, and should have been better prepared for its arrival on American soil, critics say. When it did arrive, a combination of conflicting messages and a lack of a clear leadership structure delayed the adoption of safe practices to contain the spread, they add.

Even allies of President Trump take issue with aspects of the federal government’s response. “There will be 600-page books on the mistakes that were made,” says conservative economist Stephen Moore, an informal adviser to the president.

Much has been made of the turnover and turmoil of the Trump presidency – including the 2018 closure of the White House office on global biothreats.

But as the nation’s economy slowly reopens, with cases beginning to pick up again in at least 20 states, and the U.S. death toll now over 115,000 and rising – the highest tally in the world – a larger question hangs over the crisis: Is America’s complex, multilayered system of government itself simply too outmoded – too cumbersome, overly partisan, ill-equipped to keep up with the pace of global change – to capably handle a once-in-a-century pandemic?

In other words, despite all the stumbles of the Trump team, would another administration necessarily have done all that much better?

Cabinet departments and other federal agencies are topped by some 4,000 political appointees, and out of those, some 1,200 are Senate-confirmed. “No other democracy has anything close to that level of political infiltration in the institution of the government,” Mr. Stier says.

That, in turn, results in a top echelon of leaders who don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, he says.

In Congress, hyper-partisanship has led to dysfunction in budget-setting, leading the government to run increasingly on a form of funding autopilot known as “continuing resolutions,” punctuated more and more by government shutdowns. Oversight can be ineffective or nonexistent; Senate confirmations slow.

Through the decades, Mr. Light has watched history repeat itself many times. Between 2000 and 2015 alone, he counts 48 breakdowns in federal governance, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the botched rollout of the “Obamacare” insurance website in 2013.

The details vary from crisis to crisis, but Mr. Light keeps coming to the same conclusion: We keep having breakdowns, because “we just don’t pay much attention to how organizations work.”

More at www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0615/Shaky-COVID-response-lays-bar
e-a-decadeslong-crisis-in-government

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

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Tuesday, June 16, 2020 8:16 AM

THG


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.


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Tuesday, June 16, 2020 10:41 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I think this William Tell did the best job explaining the situation in The Liberation of Earth in 1953:

https://epdf.pub/william-tenn-the-liberation-of-earthf20ebfe36bdda0257
f9000096e11b16559059.html
The Afterword of the story says that the author was thinking of the American Left vs Right over the Korea War:
Quote:
The period covered was roughly the same as the Red-Scare years that began with the Dies Committee and ended with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. As a result, the organized Left inveighed against what it called "Truman's War," and urged us to get the hell out of Korea; the official Right not only supported the war but considered it perhaps the most crucial element in the battle against the godless Communists. In writing the story, all I wanted to do was point out what a really awful thing it was to be a Korean in such a situation.
(It’s 66 years later. If beating Communism had truly been important to Americans, they won’t have quit fighting after only 36,516 dead Americans in 4 years. Flu kills more in some years. Covid-19 kills more and those deaths are meaningless, not a noble sacrifice to beat the Commies and save Korea.)

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



It's applicable to the American Right vs the American left always.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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