Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
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Carl Billdt, the former Swedish premier, has criticised US efforts to achieve peace, claiming that Donald Trump's administration has given too much ground to Vladimir Putin
March 2, 2025
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/02/ex-swedish-pm-slams-amat
eurish-peace-talks-of-non-rules-based-us
The US administration is destabilising, against the rules-based order, and its unwillingness to confront Vladimir Putin makes President Trump’s attempts to broker peace ‘amateurish’, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt has told the BBC in an interview.
He said that in recent weeks the US had made “U-turns and concessions, and giving up positions”, but “Russia hasn’t changed one millimetre on its demands”.
“They [Russia] continue the military offensive, they make clear that all their demands, the capitulation of Ukraine, remain on the table. To believe that to say to Mr Putin: ‘Please give up,’ is in my opinion amateurish,” Bildt said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? It just so happens that the answer is NO. It is Not a Ponzi Scheme, except most Trumptards insist, crazily, that it is. Ask an American if SS==Ponzi Scheme. If they answer it is a Ponzi Scheme, you know their answers to many other questions without needing to ask because they are Trumptards.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, have you ever considered NOT sounding like a broken record?
And BTW Social Security IS a Ponzi scheme. The people who are paying into it now are paying for current retirees, NOT paying into their own accounts. It's a better-funded Ponzi scheme... the fund actually makes money by buying Treasuries ... but it doesn't operate like most people think.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+Social+Security+a+Ponzi+Scheme%3F
Signym, you are crazy to write that falsehood about Social Security, but then you also refuse to correct your signature which includes only the clause of a conditional statement and totally reverses the meaning of the original Kissinger full quote:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Kissinger said this in late November 1968 after Nixon was elected president, but before Nixon was inaugurated.
It wasn't a public statement, just a statement to William F. Buckley Jr. in a phone call, with Buckley taking notes, so it isn't verifiable beyond Buckley (author of United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey).
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56470/did-henry-kissinger
-say-it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy-but-to-be-am
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Social Security Payments Could Be Interrupted For First Time In 80 Years
By Douglas A. McIntyre | March 2, 2025 9:20 am
https://247wallst.com/income/2025/03/02/social-security-payments-could
-be-interrupted-for-first-time-in-80-years/
Social Security, the bedrock of safety net payments to 61 million Americans, could be interrupted by personnel cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It could create an economic catastrophe, at least for those who rely heavily on the funds.
The 61 million people who receive Social Security payments include retirees, people with disabilities, and their dependents and survivors. Last year, total annual costs were $1.6 trillion, making it the largest expense of the federal government.
The average payment to retirees, 52 million recipients, is just short of $2,000 a month. These payments make up about a third of the incomes of Americans who are over 65. The number is much higher for some. According to the Social Security Administration, “Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income.”
According to CNBC, Social Security has not missed a payment to Americans in eight decades. Former commissioner and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told the TV channel, “Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.” He suggested that recipients start to put aside money in case this happens. The primary reason for the possible interruption is that the Administration plans to cut 4,000 Social Security Administration jobs.
Social Security payments are already under siege. It is estimated that it will run out of money in 2035. SSA recently forecasts that “Currently, the Social Security Board of Trustees projects the program cost to rise by 2035 so that taxes will be enough to pay for only 75 percent of scheduled benefits.”
It is hard to imagine what the cuts would do to the US economy, but they are bound to be significant for tens of millions of people. Eventually, this will ripple across GDP.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? It just so happens that the answer is NO. It is Not a Ponzi Scheme, except most Trumptards insist, crazily, that it is. Ask an American if SS==Ponzi Scheme. If they answer it is a Ponzi Scheme, you know their answers to many other questions without needing to ask because they are Trumptards.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, have you ever considered NOT sounding like a broken record?
And BTW Social Security IS a Ponzi scheme. The people who are paying into it now are paying for current retirees, NOT paying into their own accounts. It's a better-funded Ponzi scheme... the fund actually makes money by buying Treasuries ... but it doesn't operate like most people think.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+Social+Security+a+Ponzi+Scheme%3F
Signym, you are crazy to write that falsehood about Social Security, but then you also refuse to correct your signature which includes only the clause of a conditional statement and totally reverses the meaning of the original Kissinger full quote:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Kissinger said this in late November 1968 after Nixon was elected president, but before Nixon was inaugurated.
It wasn't a public statement, just a statement to William F. Buckley Jr. in a phone call, with Buckley taking notes, so it isn't verifiable beyond Buckley (author of United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey).
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56470/did-henry-kissinger
-say-it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy-but-to-be-am
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Just because it hurts your feelings to call a Ponzi Scheme a Ponzi Scheme, that doesn't mean that it's not a Ponzi Scheme.
I'm calling it one and I just flat out admitted that I won't be able to survive retirement at all without it.
It's still a fucking Ponzi Scheme.
If it doesn't break now, it will eventually break. It was designed to fail from the beginning.
ETA: And if you still don't understand what I'm getting at, maybe you should talk to one of the people in California who had lost their homeowners insurance due to failure to be able to pay the increases right before their houses burned down...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/california-faces-insurance-crisis-as
-homeowners-lose-coverage-amid-extreme-weather
Our entire country is run on Ponzi Schemes.
Fortunately for the Baby Boomers, I think we can probably keep it together long enough that it doesn't come crashing down before the last of their generation dies off.
I'm pretty sure that one way or another the rest of us are fucked though.
Buckle up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? It just so happens that the answer is NO. It is Not a Ponzi Scheme, except most Trumptards insist, crazily, that it is. Ask an American if SS==Ponzi Scheme. If they answer it is a Ponzi Scheme, you know their answers to many other questions without needing to ask because they are Trumptards.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, have you ever considered NOT sounding like a broken record?
And BTW Social Security IS a Ponzi scheme. The people who are paying into it now are paying for current retirees, NOT paying into their own accounts. It's a better-funded Ponzi scheme... the fund actually makes money by buying Treasuries ... but it doesn't operate like most people think.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+Social+Security+a+Ponzi+Scheme%3F
Signym, you are crazy to write that falsehood about Social Security, but then you also refuse to correct your signature which includes only the clause of a conditional statement and totally reverses the meaning of the original Kissinger full quote:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Kissinger said this in late November 1968 after Nixon was elected president, but before Nixon was inaugurated.
It wasn't a public statement, just a statement to William F. Buckley Jr. in a phone call, with Buckley taking notes, so it isn't verifiable beyond Buckley (author of United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey).
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56470/did-henry-kissinger
-say-it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy-but-to-be-am
And yet ... you won't explain how Social Security works and how its different from a Ponzi scheme...
Quote:
The FICA tax income collected from current workers’ paychecks supports the payment of the benefits to the retirees.
That is one element of a Ponzi scheme.
If you look at the FULL definition of a Ponzi scheme, you can niggle on whether Social Security is "fraudulent", or whether the contributors are technically "investors" expecting a "profit", but IMHO except for the fact that Social Security actually enages in "money making activity" (lending the govt money by investing in specialized treasuries, https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/110614/how-social-security-tr
ust-fund-invested.asp which I mentioned already) Social Security runs like a Ponzi scheme.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Working-class Trumptards constantly bring up "Ponzi Scheme" as justification to re-imagine how Social Security could be financed with income tax, or tariffs, or the magic of bitcoins, which are three easier ways for Upper-class Trumptards in Congress to kill Social Security by switching away from the excruciatingly simple FICA to something Algebraic and complex that your typical sneaky and dishonest working-class man can cheat on without fear of being caught cheating. They can't cheat, can't do a complex tax avoidance scam, on FICA because it is so very simple.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That is one element of a Ponzi scheme.
If you look at the FULL definition of a Ponzi scheme, you can niggle on whether Social Security is "fraudulent", or whether the contributors are technically "investors" expecting a "profit", but IMHO except for the fact that Social Security actually enages in "money making activity" (lending the govt money by investing in specialized treasuries, https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/110614/how-social-security-tr
ust-fund-invested.asp which I mentioned already) Social Security runs like a Ponzi scheme.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
The Trumptards at work are upset every two weeks because they now pay a FICA tax that keeps Social Security and Medicare going. It's one of those taxes that does not have a bunch of complex loopholes (like the income tax has) rammed through by Congressional Trumptards to cut the tax to zero.
Dumbest. Idea. Ever.
Reported by the Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2025:
Crypto prices surged Sunday after President Trump said he would move forward on a U.S. crypto strategic reserve (CSR) that will include bitcoin and ether, as well as three smaller and riskier tokens.
“A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden Administration,” said Trump in a Sunday post on his social-media platform Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”
Questions abound. How big will the CSR be? Where is the money coming from? I don't recall Congress passing an appropriation. How can it make sense to create a crypto reserve out of deficit spending? Why does the US need a crypto reserve? It's not something we'll ever be short of.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/crypto-prices-jump-after-trump-
announces-five-tokens-for-strategic-reserve-636f31d7?st=iLbGRS&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Why So Many Crypto Leaders Hate Trump's Meme Coins – The Wall Street Journal
President Trump’s cryptocurrency meme coin $TRUMP has already earned him billions of dollars on paper, but this is one of the most controversial investments ever made by a commander-in-chief. Trump has a long history of cashing in on his personal brand through products like shoes, guitars and bibles, but to many in the crypto world, his meme coin ventures are his most naked and predatory money grab yet. Once a bitcoin skeptic, Trump has promised to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet.”
WSJ explores why the Trump meme coin and Melania meme coin are so unprecedented and why they’re so controversial to the crypto industry.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The US promised to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nukes.
Marco Rubio should re-watch his old speech now that he could keep that promise while Secretary of State.
Start at 6:30. Rubio Delivers Senate Floor Speech On The Crisis in Ukraine (Mar 25, 2014)
“In the early 1990s Ukraine was left with the world's third largest stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear weapons on the planet but they signed this agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia that basically said if you give up your nuclear weapons -- we these three countries that signed this -- will provide for your defense and assure you of your defense and so Ukraine did that. They gave up these weapons. Well now this was signed in 1994. 20 years later one of the three countries that signed that agreement hasn't just not provided for the defense they actually invaded them.” – Senator Marco Rubio
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Republicans terrified of crossing Trump due to physical threats
“I have a lot of friends who are Republicans. They are terrified of being the tallest poppy in the field, and it’s not as simple as being afraid of being primaried and losing their job. They know that that can happen.
“It’s more more personal. It’s their personal safety that they’re afraid of, and they have spouses and family members saying, ‘Do not do this, it’s not worth it, it will change our lives forever. We will have to hire around-the-clock security.’ Life can be very uncomfortable for your children.
“That is real, because when [Elon] Musk [Trump’s most powerful ally] tweets at somebody, or Trump tweets at somebody, or calls somebody out, their lives are turned upside down.
“When he tweets at you, people make threats, and you have to take people at their word. And so that is a real thing that my colleagues struggle with.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-trump-thre
ats
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk’s satellite business Starlink may not have officially taken over Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract with the Federal Aviation Administration yet to upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. However, on Friday, FAA officials ordered staff to begin finding tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal, according to a source with knowledge of the FAA and two people briefed on the situation.
The sources note that these internal directives have mostly, if not entirely, been delivered verbally — which they say is unusual for a matter like this. The source with knowledge of the FAA tells Rolling Stone that it appears as though “someone does not want a paper trail.”
Musk asserted last week, without evidence, that “the Verizon communication system to air traffic control is breaking down very rapidly,” before correcting himself to say that Verizon’s system is “not yet operational.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elon-musk-star
link-faa-officials-find-funding-1235285246/
Corrupt? Sure. But also directly dangerous? And how! FAA has done careful, long testing/study of new tower-communication system. Now a rush to switch to system that *just happens* to be owned by Mr. Efficiency himself, Elon.
In boardrooms around the world, airline executives are discussing what will be more harmful to their share prices: sounding the alarm on this, or the inevitable plane crashes
Everyone involved in aviation KNOWS FOR SURE that reckless/rampant changes of past six weeks will, *for sure,* make airplane crashes more likely. But no airline exec wants to be the first to say this in public.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Social Security Payments Could Be Interrupted For First Time In 80 Years
By Douglas A. McIntyre | March 2, 2025 9:20 am
https://247wallst.com/income/2025/03/02/social-security-payments-could
-be-interrupted-for-first-time-in-80-years/
Social Security, the bedrock of safety net payments to 61 million Americans, could be interrupted by personnel cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It could create an economic catastrophe, at least for those who rely heavily on the funds.
The 61 million people who receive Social Security payments include retirees, people with disabilities, and their dependents and survivors. Last year, total annual costs were $1.6 trillion, making it the largest expense of the federal government.
The average payment to retirees, 52 million recipients, is just short of $2,000 a month. These payments make up about a third of the incomes of Americans who are over 65. The number is much higher for some. According to the Social Security Administration, “Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income.”
According to CNBC, Social Security has not missed a payment to Americans in eight decades. Former commissioner and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley told the TV channel, “Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.” He suggested that recipients start to put aside money in case this happens. The primary reason for the possible interruption is that the Administration plans to cut 4,000 Social Security Administration jobs.
Social Security payments are already under siege. It is estimated that it will run out of money in 2035. SSA recently forecasts that “Currently, the Social Security Board of Trustees projects the program cost to rise by 2035 so that taxes will be enough to pay for only 75 percent of scheduled benefits.”
It is hard to imagine what the cuts would do to the US economy, but they are bound to be significant for tens of millions of people. Eventually, this will ripple across GDP.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency: ‘It’s catastrophic’
"We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion."
https://grist.org/politics/forest-service-firings-decimate-already-und
erstaffed-agency/
“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Destruction of Canada begins tomorrow
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 5:34 am
https://jabberwocking.com/destruction-of-canada-begins-tomorrow/
Donald Trump plans to levy 25% tariffs across the board on Canada tomorrow:
The result, an overwhelming majority of economists agree, would be inflation and supply disruption in the United States, while Canadian industries could face large-scale layoffs.
Whole factories will shut down:
Because 25 percent is far higher than the profit margins on cars and trucks, as well as the parts used to make them, industry executives predict that parts makers would soon stop shipping and factories would quickly close in all three countries, laying off thousands of workers.
“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last month.
Need more details?
Anderson Economic Group, a consulting firm in East Lansing, Mich., estimates that tariffs of 25 percent would add $1,000 to $4,000 to the price of a new vehicle, and as much as $10,000 if manufacturers are unable to take steps to reduce the impact.
....[John] Elkann acknowledged that the tariffs could make a turnaround harder for Stellantis. About a third of its highly profitable Ram pickups are assembled in a plant in Saltillo, Mexico. It also makes two Jeep models at a second Mexican plant, in Toluca. It makes Chrysler Pacifica minivans at a plant in Windsor, Ontario, and is scheduled to begin making the Dodge Charger in the same factory this year. A second plant, in Brampton, Ontario, is being retooled, with plans to make Jeeps there when it reopens.
Needless to say, this was all encouraged by the USMCA treaty Trump himself signed in 2018 and called "the single greatest agreement ever signed." But Trump doesn't care anymore. He wants more, and "Who's gonna stop me?" is his motto these days.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/climate/trump-us-climate-policy-cha
nges.html
President Trump has quickly transformed America’s approach to the environment, withholding funds and stretching the limits of presidential power.
The Biden strategy was to erect legal and other barriers intended to make it tough to undo its work. Trump has already broken through many of them.
In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.
With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.
He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.
To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.
All new presidents have their own agendas, but the speed and scale of Mr. Trump’s efforts to uproot climate policy is unprecedented. “This is not the kind of stately tennis match of the usual switch-over in administrations,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “This is full on Fight Club.”
The Trump administration’s moves have unfolded simultaneously across the sprawling government, affecting federal, state and local agencies and hitting government-funded projects in Africa, Antarctica and around the world. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.
Mr. Trump has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power. He has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
He has fired thousands of federal workers, dismantled programs aimed at helping polluted communities and scrubbed references to climate change from numerous federal websites.
He has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said just hours after being sworn in for his second term.
The United States is producing more oil than any other nation in history, and is also the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry donated more than $75 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump, in turn, promised to weaken environmental regulations in ways that would lower its costs and increase its margins.
The president has repeatedly mocked climate change, criticized regulations and said that more drilling would bring down energy bills.
In several cases, the administration’s actions have flouted the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. In doing so, Mr. Trump has busted through many of the barriers that were erected by the officials during the Biden administration who believed that process and the legal system would slow or deter him.
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Smoke-and-mirrors budgeting is everywhere
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 8:44 am
https://jabberwocking.com/smoke-and-mirrors-budgeting-is-everywhere/
Republicans love smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. They're laying off thousands of workers chaotically even though salary costs are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Elon Musk is pretending to save far more money than he really is. Now Senate Republicans are trying to hide the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts using a new wheeze called the "current policy baseline."
This one is a pistol, but it's a little trickier than the others. Take a look at the chart below:
The cost of the 2017 tax bill has so far averaged a little over $200 billion per year (blue bars). So let's just take that as the new zero! If we do, the apparent cost of extending the tax cut goes down from $3.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion. That certainly makes things easier on everyone.
It's not real, of course. Suppose you're paying off $500 per month on your car. After five years it's done and you decide to buy a new car with the same payments. If you assume that $500 is your "baseline" then the new car costs nothing. It's an exciting thought.
But it ain't true. Call it anything you like, but that car is costing you $500 per month in actual money. If you don't account for that in your household budget you're going to be screwed pretty quickly.
It's the same for extending the 2017 tax bill. Whether you like it or not, it's going to cost about $3.6 trillion and it's going to swell the national debt by $3.6 trillion.
But Republicans don't want it to increase the national debt by $3.6 trillion. They're against debt, you see. But they're also deeply in favor of tax cuts for the rich. What to do?
Pretend and extend, my friends. Can they get away with it under Senate rules? Probably not, but it's worth a try. Stay tuned.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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To Trumptards it doesn't seem stupid for Trump to say he will do it at midnight but maybe he won't . . . it depends on his mood . . . and even if he does do it he might change his mind by next week and undo it.
‘Let’s see how the president weighs that’: Lutnick says Trump will decide today on Canada, Mexico tariffs
Trump’s Commerce secretary said in a CNN interview that Canada and Mexico still need to do more to stop fentanyl flows into the U.S.
By Doug Palmer | 03/03/2025 11:39 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/03/lutnick-trump-canada-mexico-t
ariffs-00207238
President Donald Trump has yet to decide whether to go forward with tariffs on Canada and Mexico that are scheduled to go into effect just after midnight, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview on CNN Monday morning.
Trump has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico beginning Tuesday morning over complaints that the countries are not doing enough to stop undocumented migrants and fentanyl coming across their borders, keeping the North American economy and financial markets on edge as the deadline fast approaches.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
The US promised to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nukes.
Ukraine never "had" nukes. They were Russian nukes stationed in Ukraine, Moscow had command of them.
Makes as much sense as saying Turkey has nukes, even tho they're ours.
No matter hiw many times you lie abiut this, it's still not true, and you're still a liar.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, as with all Trumptards I know, although I don't know all of them, you think you know something that you don't know. Telling you what you don't is not going to enlighten you even a tiny bit. An example is your signature:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
The US promised to protect Ukraine in exchange for giving up its nukes.
Ukraine never "had" nukes. They were Russian nukes stationed in Ukraine, Moscow had command of them.
Makes as much sense as saying Turkey has nukes, even tho they're ours.
No matter hiw many times you lie abiut this, it's still not true, and you're still a liar.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
The original Kissinger quote does not have the same meaning as your condensed version:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
But will Signym ever know the difference between the fake Kissinger quote and the real one?
As for Signym's opinion that Ukraine never "had" nukes, you are full of shit, Signym, and will never know the difference.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Air Travel’s Getting Dangerous
The Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse.
By Jeff Wise | March 03, 2025 10:30 AM
https://slate.com/business/2025/03/safe-to-fly-plane-crashes-trump-faa
-air-traffic-control.html
Understaffing
The problem of understaffing at the FAA is one that has troubled experts for years. In 2023, the New York Times revealed that near misses between airliners have become endemic at airports across the country, “a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress,” with a leading cause being “mistakes by air traffic controllers stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage.”
Understaffing is not a problem that worries the Trump administration, however. As part of its project to massively slash the size of the government, it laid off some 400 FAA workers starting on Feb. 17. At the time, it said that none of the firings involved air traffic controllers. But five days later Musk posted to X that any federal employee that didn’t write an email explaining what they’d done during the previous week would be fired. If enforced, this diktat will likely ensnare some air traffic controllers from towers that can hardly afford to lose them.
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But there’s a broader issue, which is that a great many FAA employees—not just air traffic controllers—positively affect aviation safety. Some of the FAA employees fired earlier this month, for instance, were charged with updating the navigational charts that help keep pilots clear of danger. If the prime motive of the Trump-Musk alliance is to gut the federal workforce as thoroughly as possible, that’s going to have all kind of deleterious effects, up to and including twisted smoldering wreckage.
Much more at https://slate.com/business/2025/03/safe-to-fly-plane-crashes-trump-faa
-air-traffic-control.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Thanks to Trump
Atlanta Fed posts alarming new economic projection of Trump's first quarter
By Brad Reed | March 3, 2025 12:58PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-economy-2671254430/
The Atlanta Federal Reserve on Monday produced a new projection that the American economy would shrink by nearly three percent in the first quarter of President Donald Trump's second term.
Specifically, the Atlanta Fed now projects that the economy will shrink by 2.8 percent in Q1 2025, which actually marks a deterioration from the projection it made last week that the economy would shrink by 1.5 percent on the quarter.
The projection comes as President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk push to fire thousands of federal employees and as Trump is threatening to slap hefty 25 percent tariffs on the goods of Mexico and Canada, which are the United States' two largest trading partners.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If he is not willing to send troops to fight on Russia's side, there is only so much Trump can do to help Putin conquer Ukraine. Trump is doing it:
Trump plans to halt arms to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia
By Kevin Drum | March 3, 2025 – 1:34 pm
https://jabberwocking.com/trump-plans-to-halt-arms-to-ukraine-sanction
s-on-russia/
The other shoe drops:
The Trump administration has stopped financing new weapons sales to Ukraine and is considering freezing weapons shipments from U.S. stockpiles, moves that threaten Kyiv’s ability to fight at a critical time in its battle against Russian forces, current and former U.S. officials said.
The shutdown of financing new weapons sales began before Friday’s acrimonious meeting.... But the meeting to consider suspending ongoing weapons shipments to Ukraine drawn from U.S. military inventories emerged after the Friday blowup at the White House.
And the third shoe:
The United States is drawing up a plan to potentially give Russia sanctions relief as Donald Trump seeks to restore ties with Moscow and stop the war in Ukraine, a US official and another person familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The White House has asked the state and treasury departments to draft a list of sanctions that could be eased for US officials to discuss with Russian representatives in the coming days.... The White House asked state and treasury officials to come up with a possible sanctions relief plan before Trump last week extended a state of emergency over the situation in Ukraine, the US sources said.
So: No more arms shipments to Ukraine, and sanctions relief for Russia, something Trump had in mind well before his staged blowup with Zelensky. Go ahead and solve for what this means. The algebra isn't hard.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Justice Department on Friday quietly took revenge on prosecutors who’d worked to hold Trump’s allies accountable
By Patrick Reis | Mar 3, 2025, 4:55 PM CST
https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/402355/trump-justice-d
epartment-prosecutors-purge
The head of the Washington, DC, US attorney’s office demoted seven high-ranking prosecutors on Friday, Reuters reports, moving them to entry-level positions in a bid to force them to quit. Those demoted include:
• The leader of the “Capitol siege prosecution unit”
• A prosecutor who worked on criminal cases against Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro
• Prosecutors who worked on criminal cases against the heads of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two far-right extremist groups that worked to steal the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf
The experienced attorneys will now mostly handle misdemeanors and low-level crimes. The demotions follow the January firing of US attorneys who prosecuted Trump over his attempt to steal the 2020 election.
Why were they demoted? Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed new head of the DC office, claimed the moves reflected a shift in priorities and a focus on local crime in DC. But the Trump-related experiences of the officials selected — and the move of experienced prosecutors to entry-level jobs — make it difficult to believe this wasn’t an act of retribution.
What’s the big picture? The demotions send a strong signal to prosecutors that there will be consequences for officials who try to hold Trump and his allies accountable to the law. It’s also another blow against the DOJ’s independence, as Trump works to remake law enforcement as a tool he can wield for political ends. And the move weakens the US attorney’s office in Washington, which is tasked with prosecuting abuses of power by some of the country’s most powerful people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump
Atlanta Fed posts alarming new economic projection of Trump's first quarter
By Brad Reed | March 3, 2025 12:58PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-economy-2671254430/
The Atlanta Federal Reserve on Monday produced a new projection that the American economy would shrink by nearly three percent in the first quarter of President Donald Trump's second term.
Specifically, the Atlanta Fed now projects that the economy will shrink by 2.8 percent in Q1 2025, which actually marks a deterioration from the projection it made last week that the economy would shrink by 1.5 percent on the quarter.
The projection comes as President Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk push to fire thousands of federal employees and as Trump is threatening to slap hefty 25 percent tariffs on the goods of Mexico and Canada, which are the United States' two largest trading partners.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I'm fine when the economy is shrinking because government jobs are lost. As is anybody else with two firing neurons and a basic knowledge of how math works.
How come you two stopped posting any articles from mainstream news sources and all you got are dying clickbait outfits?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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SECOND, from Wikipedia:
Quote:
After its dissolution in 1991, Ukraine became the third largest nuclear power in the world and held about one third of the former Soviet nuclear weapons, delivery system, and significant knowledge of its design and production.[2] Ukraine inherited about 130 UR-100N intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) with six warheads each, 46 RT-23 Molodets ICBMs with ten warheads apiece, as well as 33 heavy bombers, totaling approximately 1,700 nuclear warheads that remained on Ukrainian territory.[3]
While all these weapons were located on Ukrainian territory, they were not under Ukraine's control.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destructio
n
There was quite a discussion at the time as to who "owned" these missiles. Eventually it was decided that they were owned by Russia since Russia had command and control of them. And furthermore, they would be safest there since Russia was a larger more stable nation and could more safely dispose of them (since Russia handled nuclear waste as well.) So they were transferred to Russia for dismemberment.
Quote:
SECOND:
Signym, as with all Trumptards I know, although I don't know all of them, you think you know something that you don't know. Telling you what you don't is not going to enlighten you even a tiny bit. An example is your signature:
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
The original Kissinger quote does not have the same meaning as your condensed version:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
But will Signym ever know the difference between the fake Kissinger quote and the real one?
Kissinger's statement is essentially "if... then":
IF another American proxy winds up being assasinated [THEN] word will get out that...
Seems like enough of our proxies have been regime- changed, if not outright killed BY US, to make Kissinger's statement true. The deep state would like us to forget, but at one time Saddam Hussein was our proxy against Iran, and Noriega was our CIA tool in Panama.
What will happen to our Kurdish proxies in Syria? And our proxies in Ukraine?
In any case, the meaning of the full quote v the shortened one seem so close I don't know why it makes your head explode, but clearly it does. Would it really make you feel better if I changed it? Bc IMHO that won't change anything. But I will to make you feel better.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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It sounds a lot to me like Trump's the adult in the room talking about peace while everyone else is trying to get WWIII ramped up.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Holy shit!! Have you seen the Atlanta fed GDP Now projection???
Trump has single-handedly turned a robust economy to shit in less than two months.
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trump is talking about Ukraine surrendering to Russia, confusing the words "peace" and "surrender".
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It sounds a lot to me like Trump's the adult in the room talking about peace while everyone else is trying to get WWIII ramped up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Signym, you really are fucked up in the head.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
In any case, the meaning of the full quote v the shortened one seem so close I don't know why it makes your head explode, but clearly it does. Would it really make you feel better if I changed it? Bc IMHO that won't change anything. But I will to make you feel better.
A theoretical paper from computer science explains Trump’s and his Trumptards’ behavior, including 6ix's and Signym's. Since Signym can't sense that the fake Kissinger quote means the opposite of the actual (and longer) Kissinger quote, there is no possibility she will understand what Scott Aaronson wrote:
The Evil Vector
March 3rd, 2025
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8693
A group including Owain Evans (who took my Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science course in 2011) published what I regard as the most surprising and important scientific discovery so far in the young field of AI alignment. (See also Zvi’s commentary.) Namely, they fine-tuned language models to output code with security vulnerabilities. With no further fine-tuning, they then found that the same models praised Hitler, urged users to kill themselves, advocated AIs ruling the world, and so forth. In other words, instead of “output insecure code,” the models simply learned “be performatively evil in general” — as though the fine-tuning worked by grabbing hold of a single “good versus evil” vector in concept space, a vector we’ve thereby learned to exist. . . .
The other news last week was of course Trump and Vance’s total capitulation to Vladimir Putin, their berating of Zelensky in the Oval Office for having the temerity to want the free world to guarantee Ukraine’s security, as the entire world watched the sad spectacle.
Here’s the thing. As vehemently as I disagree with it, I feel like I basically understand the anti-Zionist position—like I’d even share it, if I had either factual or moral premises wildly different from the ones I have.
Likewise for the anti-abortion position. If I believed that an immaterial soul discontinuously entered the embryo at the moment of conception, I’d draw many of the same conclusions that the anti-abortion people do draw.
I don’t, in any similar way, understand the pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine position that now drives American policy, and nothing I’ve read from Western Putin apologists has helped me. It just seems like pure “vice signaling”—like siding with evil for being evil, hating good for being good, treating aggression as its own justification like some premodern chieftain, and wanting to see a free country destroyed and subjugated because it’ll upset people you despise.
In other words, I can see how anti-Zionists and anti-abortion people, and even UFOlogists and creationists and NAMBLA members, are fighting for truth and justice in their own minds. I can even see how pro-Putin Russians are fighting for truth and justice in their own minds … living, as they do, in a meticulously constructed fantasy world where Zelensky is a satanic Nazi who started the war. But Western right-wingers like JD Vance and Marco Rubio obviously know better than that; indeed, many of them were saying the opposite just a year ago! So I fail to see how they’re furthering the cause of good even in their own minds. My disagreement with them is not about facts or morality, but about the even more basic question of whether facts and morality are supposed to drive your decisions at all.
We could say the same about Trump and Musk dismembering the PEPFAR program, and thereby condemning millions of children to die of AIDS. Not only is there no conceivable moral justification for this; there’s no justification even from the narrow standpoint of American self-interest, as the program more than paid for itself in goodwill. Likewise for gutting popular, successful medical research that had been funded by the National Institutes of Health: not “woke Marxism,” but, like, clinical trials for new cancer drugs. The o
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump is talking about Ukraine surrendering to Russia, confusing the words "peace" and "surrender".
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It sounds a lot to me like Trump's the adult in the room talking about peace while everyone else is trying to get WWIII ramped up.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
That's your false and warped version of reality.
And it is rejected outright by anybody who currently matters.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Hey, I'm not the one whose head is exploding over trivial wording changes.
Signym, you really are fucked up in the head.
Yanno, the sad thing is, SECOND, there are SUBSTANTIVE criticisms of Trump. And you're missing every single one bc of your mental rigidity.
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, you are fucked up in the head, you overly-articulate dumb-ass. Top-level Trumptards pull the same tricks as you do:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Hey, I'm not the one whose head is exploding over trivial wording changes.
Signym, you really are fucked up in the head.
Yanno, the sad thing is, SECOND, there are SUBSTANTIVE criticisms of Trump. And you're missing every single one bc of your mental rigidity.
“Today’s action is part of President Trump’s bold agenda to unleash American prosperity by reining in burdensome regulations, in particular for small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy,” wrote Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Bessent is blathering. Was prosperity unleashed? No. This happened:
‘Exciting News’: Trump Brags About Gutting Anti-Money Laundering Law
The Trump administration won’t enforce a Treasury Department rule requiring shell companies to disclose their owners and beneficiaries
By Nikki McCann Ramirez | March 3, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-treasury-gut
ting-anti-money-laundering-law-1235286134/
The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was part of a larger push by the Biden administration to crack down on corporate cronyism and tax evasion — a multi-agency project that is now being gutted by the Trump administration.
Last month, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) orchestrated the firing of over 6,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents in the middle of tax season. The move contracted an expansion of the agency’s employee base under President Joe Biden aimed at targeting tax evasion by the nation’s wealthiest. DOGE has launched an all-out war against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency that has returned billions of dollars to taxpayers seized as penalties from abusive companies.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump's Strategic Crypto Reserve to Hold Assets Backed by His Crypto Czar
By Jesus Mesa | Mar 03, 2025 at 9:51 PM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/david-sacks-crypto-reserve-donald-trump-bitco
in-solana-2038902
David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist who backed Trump during the 2024 campaign, was appointed to oversee crypto policy.
Sacks has invested in Bitwise Asset Management. Notably, Bitwise's top holdings include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and Cardano — the exact assets named by Trump for inclusion in the strategic reserve.
Sacks forcefully denied any conflict of interest. (He is lying but the Dept. of Justice will not be investigating because Musk fired the investigators.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump has made at least five Moscow-friendly moves just in the last two weeks.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/trump-russia-ukraine-policy-pro-putin
1. The White House asked Treasury and State to identify sanctions on Russia that could be loosened as part of the process of improving relations, Reuters reports.
• Trump didn't deny that Monday, telling reporters: "We want to make deals with everybody."
2. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordered U.S. Cyber Command to suspend offensive cyber and information operations against Russia.
• The suspension is intended to last as long as negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war play out, officials told the Washington Post.
3. Trump has called for elections in Ukraine, and he and his allies suggested after the Oval Office spat that Zelensky might need to go.
• Regime change in Kyiv was one of Putin’s original objectives for invading. It remains unlikely he'll be able to install a Kremlin stooge any time soon.
• Still, Trump’s comments denouncing Zelensky — and his moves to freeze him out after the meeting — have weakened the position of a leader the Kremlin has long sought to discredit internationally.
• Reality check: Ukraine has been under martial law since the invasion began, and its constitution does not allow for elections in such a scenario.
4. The U.S. voted with Russia and 16 other mostly authoritarian countries to oppose a UN resolution last week that condemned Russia's "aggression" in Ukraine.
• The Biden administration repeatedly used such votes to depict Russia as a pariah state. This time, the U.S. voted with Moscow and against nearly all its Western allies.
5. Suspending weapons shipments — which the Trump administration had already dramatically slowed — is the latest dramatic step.
• Billions of dollars of equipment committed under Biden were in different stages along the delivery pipeline, Axios' Sareen Habeshian reports.
• Zelensky told NBC’s "Meet the Press” last month that Ukraine had only a "low chance to survive” without U.S. military support.
• Trump and his team have also discussed whether to limit U.S. intelligence cooperation with Ukraine.
The big picture: Trump's friendliness toward Putin isn't a new phenomenon. Investigations into the president’s ties to Russia dogged much of his first term, and pursuing revenge for the "Russia hoax" has become core to MAGA’s political identity.
• Trump pushed back Monday on the notion that his foreign policy matches the Kremlin’s, pointing to the fact that Russia’s past invasions — Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and all of Ukraine in 2022 — took place while he was out of his office.
• "Under President Trump they got nothing, and under President Biden they tried to get the whole thing. If I didn't get in here they would have gotten the whole thing,” Trump argued.
• The White House, Pentagon, State Department and Treasury all declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump is outraged that Ukraine won’t surrender to his friend Putin.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/03/trump-zelenskyy-end-ru
ssia-ukraine-war
“It is what I was saying, this guy doesn’t want there to be Peace as long as he has America’s backing and, Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the US,” Trump continued.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Hates Canada
By Paul Krugman | Mar 04, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-hates-canada-for-its-decency
. . .
The newspapers this morning all contain analysis pieces trying to explain why Trump is imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. You can see the writers struggling because this is a profoundly self-destructive move — it will impose huge, possibly devastating costs on U.S. manufacturing, while significantly raising the cost of living — without any visible justification. Yet the conventions of mainstream journalism make it hard to say directly that the president’s actions are just vindictive and senseless.
To its credit, the New York Times analysis comes closest, acknowledging that for some reason Trump personally loathes Canada, a nation most of the world stereotypes as “nice.” Obviously not every Canadian is a nice person. But Canadians are relatively courteous on average, and the country’s social and economic policies are relatively decent by international standards.
And it seems clear to me that Trump hates them for their decency.
To be fair, there are some efforts to explain what’s happening that go beyond Trump’s personal pathology. Some Canadians think Trump covets their mineral wealth. And there’s always the possibility that Trump knows how big Canada looks on standard maps, unaware both of the way that its land area is exaggerated by the Mercator projection and the fact that much of it is tundra, and thinks, “Real estate!”
Trump also goes on about Canada’s trade surplus with the United States, which he keeps saying is $200 billion a year — it’s actually less than a third of that size. And nobody has offered a coherent justification for his claim that when Canada sells us cheap oil and electricity, we are somehow subsidizing them.
In any case, efforts to find some kind of economic justification for Trump’s Canada-hatred have the feeling of desperate efforts to avoid the obvious. Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.
I mean, look at the people Trump has chosen to play prominent roles in his administration. I guess if you search hard enough you can find officials without a sex scandal, a financial scandal, a history of anti-semitism or racism, or a record of substance abuse in a senior position. But it isn’t easy. It really looks as if being vile is a fundamental job qualification.
And so we’re having a trade war. Trump appears to believe that we don’t need anything from Canada. Automobile manufacturers who rely on Canadian parts, Midwestern oil refineries that rely on Canadian oil, builders who rely on Canadian lumber, and households that rely on Canadian hydropower for their electricity will soon learn otherwise.
Trump may imagine that he can bully Canada into submission. But he can’t; Canadians of all political persuasions are furious. Doug Ford, the conservative premier of Ontario, has the right attitude: he has threatened to cut off U.S. electricity “with a smile on my face.” And remember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!
So I don’t know how this ends. But U.S. voters will soon be feeling real pain, and I very much doubt that it will end in a Trump victory.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s honeymoon is over
by Christian Paz | Mar 4, 2025, 6:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/402337/trump-presidential-hon
eymoon-is-over-unpopular-approval-rating-disapprove
How this unraveling happened is no great mystery: Views of the economy, and Trump’s handling of it, have taken a negative turn, and Americans largely think that the president isn’t giving enough attention to the issues that they care about. Paired with controversial policy positions, the perceived influence of Elon Musk, and a pretty small mandate to begin with, the public’s turn against Trump is right on time.
The CBS/YouGov poll finds that Trump’s reforms of the government are breaking through — some 81 percent think he’s making major changes — but a plurality say that those changes are “for the worse.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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As Trump halts aid to Ukraine, EU unveils $840 billion defense investment "ReArm Europe" plan
By Haley Ott | March 4, 2025 / 8:27 AM EST
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-trump-eu-defense-inves
tment-rearm-europe-plan/
"What will count most of all is how far the U.K. and Europe are prepared to help Ukraine in defiance of the U.S."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
As Trump halts aid to Ukraine
Good. Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
America Using Domestic Food Supplies As Statecraft Tool Faces Pressures
Monday, Mar 03, 2025 - 06:20 PM
Tariff D-Day arrives tomorrow, with President Trump set to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. The timing comes as US imports of agricultural goods hit record levels, far outpacing exports. The new levies risk driving up imported food costs, which could heavily weigh on consumer sentiment and pressure cash-strapped households.
The US Department of Agriculture warned in its trade outlook report last week that the nation's agricultural trade deficit could hit a record high this year, forecasted at around $49 billion. Meanwhile, the US continues to lose market share in key agricultural markets worldwide. In other words, exports are declining while record volumes of food are being imported into the country.
"It's a stark turnaround for a nation that once used its abundant food supplies as a tool of statecraft, with the US now facing a future of persistent agricultural trade deficits," Bloomberg wrote in a report.
The inflection point for the ag trade deficit began in 2019 but exploded under the Biden-Harris regime and will continue in Trump's second term.
Trump's next round of tariffs is set to take effect on Tuesday, imposing 25% levies on all imports from Canada and Mexico (and 10% on China). This move could further strain cash-strapped consumers, with prices of everything from avocados to coffee to cocoa to sugar, beef, orange juice, eggs, and all other imported ag goods from those countries set to move higher.
At the same time, China's state-backed Global Times warned that tomorrow's next round of tariffs could prompt Beijing to impose countermeasures on US ag exports. If enacted, the US would continue to lose out on one of the largest ag markets.
Bloomberg noted that the only other annual deficits besides 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024 occurred several years before 1960.
America's ability to maintain the world's top ag exporter spot appears to be waning, which may only suggest that its ability to use food as a tool of statecraft also wanes in a world that is fracturing into a multi-polar state.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:I mean, look at the people Trump has chosen to play prominent roles in his administration. I guess if you search hard enough you can find officials without a sex scandal, a financial scandal, a history of anti-semitism or racism, or a record of substance abuse in a senior position. But it isn’t easy. It really looks as if being vile is a fundamental job qualification.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
As Trump halts aid to Ukraine
Good. Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Trump named the fathers-in-law of two of his children to senior government positions—Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born dad of Tiffany Trump’s husband, will be Trump’s senior Middle East adviser, and Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law and a seven-figure Trump donor, will be nominated for Ambassador to France. The Kushner appointment, in particular, was the kind of Trump troll that might have, at another, less frenetically troubled time in our history, caused an uproar. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to eighteen counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering; during the case, it emerged that he had hired a prostitute in an attempt to entrap a brother-in-law who Kushner feared was ratting him out. Chris Christie, the former Trump ally who prosecuted Kushner, called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he had handled as a U.S. Attorney. Trump, on his way out of office in 2020, pardoned Kushner. Now, in elevating him to one of America’s premier diplomatic postings, Trump has managed to both insult our oldest ally and flout whatever remaining standards there are for holding a senior U.S. position. “In the madness of Trump’s nominations, there is expressed the near total contempt for human respect, customs and the law,” Gérard Araud, who was the French Ambassador to the U.S. during Trump’s first term, said in response.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-scand
al-of-trumps-cabinet-picks-isnt-just-their-personal-failings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kushner#Nomination_as_U.S._ambas
sador_to_France
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer writes, that for this president, the personal is often political: “Trump gets along with Putin personally, while Trump believes (correctly) that most European leaders neither like nor respect him.”
“It’s really unthinkable that the leader of the United States would act this way,” said Sasha de Vogel, a political scientist and Russia specialist at the University of North Carolina. “It’s incredibly bizarre to see the leader of the United States celebrating Putin and making decisions that play directly into the hands of Russia, which is not our ally, and which considers us their enemy. I would expect to see Russia trying to take every advantage that they can.”
https://www.vox.com/russia-ukraine/402389/trump-putin-russia-ukraine
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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counter attacks, Trudeau hits back with his own tariffs and sanction
Tariffs are a very dumb thing to do, Canada's Trudeau tells Trump as stock markets fall
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgpdk4257zt
Stock Market Collapse
Trudeau: 'Canada will be implementing 25% tariffs against C$155 billion worth of American goods'
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Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Have you got something to say about NATO? That it is destroying itself? Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The End of NATO, or The Sixth Impossible Thing
The Trump administration has liquidated the postwar international order.
By Adam Garfinkle | Mar 1, 2025
https://quillette.com/2025/03/01/the-sixth-impossible-thing-nato-trump
-putin-russia-asia/
Reality can sometimes seem even stranger than fiction, and the second Trump administration has done what many people supposed to be six impossible things within the first month of its tenure. The upshot is that we are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down, friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have become our new reality.
Six Impossibilities
The first impossibility accomplished by the new administration saw Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance win the only two elected offices of the US executive branch with a campaign of wild lies about the November 2020 election and what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. After the inauguration, they turned those lies into loyalty tests required of nominees to plum jobs in the administration, including on the National Security Council staff and the Policy Planning staff at the State Department.
Second, on his first day in office, the president used his pardon power to release a loyal and violence-prone cohort of 1,600 insurrectionists.
Third, the White House won Senate confirmation of manifestly unsuitable nominees to head executive-branch departments and agencies, many of whom are openly hostile to the stolidly apolitical missions of their own offices.
Fourth, the administration fomented a constitutional crisis by illegally impounding funds authorised by Congress, illegally firing senior civil-service employees without due notice or cause, and empowering a legally non-existent office—the DOGE—to carry out the most massive personal-information hack of the US government in history. The White House seeks a confrontation with the Supreme Court over this because it believes—perhaps correctly, perhaps not—that the 1 July 2024 SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity will cause Chief Justice John Roberts to back down. And if he does, the core checks-and-balances mechanism of US democracy—the separation of powers—will shatter. And if that happens, the US government will become a de facto autocracy.
Fifth, the administration fomented that crisis by using the DOGE to destroy the regulatory capacities of the federal government, purporting that its activities were devoted to greater government efficiency. The real purpose of this project is the creation of a corporate oligarchy within and protected by a weaponised para-government itself.
And sixth, the administration has effectively liquidated the central US alliance of the postwar era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and then joined with Russia to enable the consolidation of a West-facing sphere of influence. That sphere of influence may expand or it may not; if it expands, it may expand slowly and modestly, or rapidly and immodestly. The Trump administration does not care either way. In return, the administration wants rights to invest in Russian energy industries and to partner in the colonisation of Ukraine. Presumably, given the stunted syntax of this logic, it also hopes to reach an understanding with Vladimir Putin that Russia will henceforth respect an expanded US sphere of influence.
The Meaning of the Sixth Impossible Thing
The first five of these impossible things complement and pave the way for the sixth—the demolition of NATO. As anyone who has worked high enough in government knows, the foreign policy of a great power is always at least partly an extension of its domestic politics and a proj
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Have you got something to say about NATO?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Nothing that I haven't said a thousand times before.
But since you asked, Fuck NATO.
Quote:
Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Fuck Canada too.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nothing that I haven't said a thousand times before.
But since you asked, Fuck NATO.Quote:
Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Fuck Canada too.
How do you feel about C++? I only ask because Elon Musk attacked and destroyed CISA, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency:
"The new US administration has removed everything from the White House web site and fired most of the CISA people who worked on memory safety…"
The above is the punchline of the story below:
C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'
Bjarne Stroustrup wants standards body to respond to memory-safety push as Rust monsters lurk at the door
By Thomas Claburn | Sun 2 Mar 2025 // 17:46 UTC
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_action/
I am pretty sure Musk would wave his magic wand and say that A.I. can rewrite billions of old lines written in C++ into brand-new Rust. If the world is not magical, C++ libraries could be corrected, but CISA will have to be resurrected from Musk's death sentence to watch over software quality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Elon Musk is targeting a free tax-filing software package
By Blake Montgomery | Tue 4 Mar 2025 10.14 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/03/techscape-elon-musk
-skype
Elon Musk’s cost savings will be very expensive for the US
On Saturday, Elon Musk took aim at his next target in the federal government: the technology division of the General Services Administration, called 18F. Musk fired all the employees.
You may not know about 18F, but have likely heard of its most famous product: free tax-filing software. The sub-agency created IRS Direct File, a program that aimed to resolve one of the most frustrating and relatable examples of the excesses of bureaucracy: having to fork over cash to be able to give the government money.
Still, Musk wasn’t a fan. He tweeted a few weeks ago that he had “deleted” IRS Direct File, though it remained available up until now. The fate of the software is not clear. Because of Musk’s work with Doge, more people in the US are now likely to spend money that they would not have had to spend before he arrived in Washington. His efficiency efforts will personally cost American taxpayers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Elon Musk is targeting a free tax-filing software package
By Blake Montgomery | Tue 4 Mar 2025 10.14 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/03/techscape-elon-musk
-skype
Elon Musk’s cost savings will be very expensive for the US
On Saturday, Elon Musk took aim at his next target in the federal government: the technology division of the General Services Administration, called 18F. Musk fired all the employees.
You may not know about 18F, but have likely heard of its most famous product: free tax-filing software. The sub-agency created IRS Direct File, a program that aimed to resolve one of the most frustrating and relatable examples of the excesses of bureaucracy: having to fork over cash to be able to give the government money.
Still, Musk wasn’t a fan. He tweeted a few weeks ago that he had “deleted” IRS Direct File, though it remained available up until now. The fate of the software is not clear. Because of Musk’s work with Doge, more people in the US are now likely to spend money that they would not have had to spend before he arrived in Washington. His efficiency efforts will personally cost American taxpayers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're talking about him cutting something that sounds fucking great if it were ever made available to the public and people used it.
How long have the good people at 18F been "working" on that? How many years or decades have Americans been throwing billions at that project that was never going to go anywhere?
Here's hoping Elon's team scraps that code and whips one up by tax time next year. Even better if he did it just to give TheGuardian.com the middle finger.
It's not hard to do. The only reason it was never done was because our previous government never wanted it to be finished and usable. And I can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they'd do that.
The American Government is the only fucking reason that fax machines didn't go extinct like they should have 30 years ago.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:"It's not hard to do." - 6ix
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How long have the good people at 18F been "working" on that? How many years or decades have Americans been throwing billions at that project that was never going to go anywhere?
Here's hoping Elon's team scraps that code and whips one up by tax time next year. Even better if he did it just to give TheGuardian.com the middle finger.
It's not hard to do. The only reason it was never done was because our previous government never wanted it to be finished and usable. And I can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they'd do that.
The American Government is the only fucking reason that fax machines didn't go extinct like they should have 30 years ago.
I have always hoped that some Trumptard somewhere was not an evil meat-head robot but I can't find any. You prove the point: "they fine-tuned language models to output code with security vulnerabilities. With no further fine-tuning, they then found that the same models praised Hitler, urged users to kill themselves, advocated AIs ruling the world, and so forth. In other words, instead of “output insecure code,” the models learned to “be performatively evil in general” -- https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8693
Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk or 6ix are something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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March 4, 2025
I was reminded that optimizing for one’s scientific colleagues is wildly different from optimizing for YouTube engagement. In science, it’s obvious to everyone that the burden of proof is on whoever is presenting the new idea—and that this burden is high, especially with anything as well-trodden and skull-strewn as the foundations of quantum mechanics, albeit not infinitely high. The way the game works is: other people try as hard as they can to shoot the new idea down, so we see how it fares under duress. This is not a sign of contempt for new ideas, but of respect for them.
On YouTube, the situation is precisely reversed. There, anyone perceived as the “mainstream establishment” faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as “renegade” wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding. Crucially, the renegade’s own alternative theories are under no particular burden; indeed, the details of their theories are not even that important or relevant. I don’t want to list science YouTubers who’ve learned to exploit that dynamic masterfully, though I’m told one rhymes with “Frabine Schlossenfelder.” Of course this mirrors what’s happened in the wider world, where RFK Jr. now runs American health policy, Tulsi Gabbard runs the intelligence establishment, and other conspiracy theorists have at last fired all the experts and taken control of our civilization, and are eagerly mashing the buttons to see what happens. I’d take Jacob Barandes, or even Sabine, a billion times over the lunatics in power. But I do hope Jacob turns out to be wrong about Many-Worlds, because it would give my solace to know that there are other branches of the wavefunction where things are a little more sane.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8705
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The second howler of the night was Trump’s characterization of what he is now calling the Golden Dome system to defend the United States from nuclear attack. He said that President Ronald Reagan wanted to create such a defense, but the technology didn’t exist. “Now we have the technology,” Trump claimed, “it’s incredible, actually. And other places—they have it, Israel has it. Other places have it. And the United States should have it too.”
All of those sentences are false. Israel’s Iron Dome program is designed to intercept missiles with a range of 40 miles traveling at twice the speed of sound. The sorts of missiles that would attack the United States would fly at a range of 6,000 miles, traveling at 10 times the speed of sound. The technology required for the one is completely different from the technology required for the other.
The U.S. already has plenty of air- and missile-defenses at least as good as Iron Dome—the Patriot, the Standard Missile, and others. No country has a defense of the sort that Reagan had, and Trump has, in mind. We have spent more than $10 billion a year for the last 40 years trying to develop such a defense, to little avail. At best, we are now able to hit one mock warhead with one anti-missile missile in a carefully planned test. The test managers have never even tried to hit two with two, or a dozen with a dozen—because they know they cannot.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/trump-congress-speech-stat
e-of-the-union-ukraine-golden-dome-greenland-panama.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla
Surprise! The madman stuff wasn’t an act
By Paul Krugman | Mar 05, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-is-trapped-in-a-burning-tes
la
Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.
Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?
One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.
What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important.
I don’t know who first came up with this metaphor, but it seems to me that America is now trapped in a burning Tesla. If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use. As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when they catch fire.
Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What Republicans (and anyone else) who support Trump need to know
THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/tru
mp-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002/
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hotel-paid-millions-in-fines-for-u
npaid-work
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexua
l-misconduct/story?id=51956410
That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/23/president-dona
ld-trump-could-shoot-someone-without-prosecution/4073405002/
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you exclaimed, “He sure knows me.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/23/president-dona
ld-trump-could-shoot-someone-without-prosecution/4073405002/
That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year-old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t — you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!”
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-criticized
-after-he-appears-mock-reporter-serge-kovaleski-n470016
When you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/americas-first-po
st-text-president/549794/
When the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/19/what-trump-has
-said-central-park-five/1501321001/
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-campaign-protests-2016031
3-story.html
When you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-orders-proteste
r-s-coat-is-confiscated-and-he-is-sent-into-the-cold-a6802756.html
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-cant-trump-ju
st-condemn-nazis/567320/
When you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-insult-foreign-countries-leaders_
n_59dd2769e4b0b26332e76d57
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/12/29/138-trump-policy-chan
ges-2017-000603/
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as P
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How Trump’s Tariffs Will Savage the Economy
This is going to hurt.
By Nitish Pahwa | March 05, 2025 6:06 PM
https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/trump-tariffs-explained-mexico-ca
nada-china-prices-rise.html
It’s a mess, not least because this fickle administration is claiming to be “open” to further exemptions, which could change everything on a whim. But what does it all mean for you, the humble consumer caught up in this trade-war whirlwind even though you’ve long tired of inflation and the fact that Trump take egg? We’ll break it all down.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Republicans (and anyone else) who support Trump need to know
THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:
Here is what YOU need to know.
Nobody gives one single fuck what you (and anyone else) like you think about anything anymore.
That ship sailed for a world that existed 6 months ago but no longer exists today.
Maybe had you or any body in the Media listened to THE FUCKING MAJORITY on issues instead of pushing your America-Last, racist agenda as the things that people believed in when none of it were true... Or maybe if you weren't locking people away in their houses and forcing them to get jabs if they wanted to feed their families, we might have some sympathy for you now. But you didn't and we don't.
Have fun spending the next 4 years cheering for the destruction of America like the gutter trash that represents you.
Go. Fuck. Yourself.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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In just five days, Trump has set the country back nearly 100 years
The president’s new slogan might as well be “We were better off 95 years ago than we are today.”
By Dana Milbank | March 4, 2025 at 11:36 p.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/04/trump-tariffs-ukrai
ne-speech-congress-backward/
With a modesty we have come to expect of him, President Donald Trump informed Congress on Tuesday night that he had already ushered in “the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.” He told the assembled lawmakers that he “accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four or eight years.”
Armed with a portfolio of fabricated statistics, Trump judged that “the first month of our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation — and what makes it even more impressive is that you know who No. 2 is? George Washington.”
Republican lawmakers laughed, whooped and cheered.
Usually, such talk from Trump is just bravado. But let us give credit where it is due: Trump has made history. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, over the course of the past five days, he has set the United States back 100 years.
Trump on Monday implemented the largest tariff increase since 1930, abruptly reversing an era of liberalized trade that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. He launched this trade war just three days after dealing an equally severe blow to the postwar security order that has maintained prosperity and freedom for 80 years. Trump’s ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, followed by the cessation of U.S. military aid to the outgunned nation, has left allies reeling and Moscow exulting. The Kremlin’s spokesman proclaimed that Trump is “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations” in a way that “largely aligns with our vision.”
And our erstwhile friends? “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, its closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin: a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
It makes sense only if, against all evidence, you believe, as Trump apparently does, that Americans were better off 95 years ago than they are today.
We’re apparently going to have to relearn that lesson the hard way. The blizzard of executive orders that Trump has issued, though constitutionally alarming, can be rescinded by a future president. Elon Musk’s wanton sabotage of federal agencies and the federal workforce, though hugely damaging, can be repaired over time. But there is no easy fix for Trump’s smashing of the security and trade arrangements that have kept us safe and free for generations.
“We’re certainly not in the postwar world anymore,” Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economist and fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tells me. He calculates that Trump’s hike in tariffs is the largest since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 accelerated the nation’s slide into the Great Depression. And Trump’s current tariffs, which in Irwin’s calculation affect imports worth about 4.8 percent of gross domestic product, will have an even greater impact on the economy than did Smoot-Hawley, which affected imports worth 1.4 percent of GDP, and the McKinley administration’s tariffs during the 1890s, which affected imports worth 2.7 percent of GDP (and which also were followed by a prolonged depression).
Irwin figures the current tariffs “are likely to be much more disruptive” than those historical cases because the U.S. economy is much more dependent now on “intermediate goods” — meaning materials such as auto parts, needed by American businesses to make finished goods. Trump has brought the average tariff on total imports to 10 percent, a level not seen since 1943, in Irwin’s analysis.
Late Tuesday, after stocks plunged
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In just five days, Trump has set the country back nearly 100 years
The president’s new slogan might as well be “We were better off 95 years ago than we are today.”
By Dana Milbank | March 4, 2025 at 11:36 p.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/04/trump-tariffs-ukrai
ne-speech-congress-backward/
Wow. An opinion piece by a Yale Graduate NeoCon piece of trash.
You've still got Liz Cheney's cock in your mouth, huh?
SPOILER ALERT: If your plan on being less biased going forward is to insert a bunch of warmongering NeoCon garbage that hates Trump as much as you've programmed your low-IQ, built-in-reader base to, Jeff Bezos, your paper is still going to fail without the Government propping it up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
The United States pursued a protectionist policy from the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Between 1861 and 1933, they had one of the highest average tariff rates on manufactured imports in the world
...
The new government needed a way to collect taxes from all the states that was easy to enforce and had only a nominal cost to the average citizen. The Tariff Act of 1789 was the second bill signed by President George Washington imposing a tariff of about 5% on nearly all imports, with a few exceptions
...
Paul Bairoch called the U.S. “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism.”
...
In Report on Manufactures, which is considered the first text to express modern protectionist theory, Alexander Hamilton argued that if a country wished to develop a new activity on its soil, it would have to temporarily protect it. According to him, this protection against foreign producers could take the form of import duties or, in rare cases, prohibition of imports. He called for customs barriers to allow American industrial development and to help protect infant industries, including bounties (subsidies) derived in part from those tariffs. He also believed that duties on raw materials should be generally low.[14] Hamilton argued that despite an initial "increase of price" caused by regulations that control foreign competition, once a "domestic manufacture has attained to perfection... it invariably becomes cheaper".[12]
In this report, Hamilton also proposed export bans on major raw materials, tariff reductions on industrial inputs, pricing and patenting of inventions, regulation of product standards and development of financial and transportation infrastructure.
Hamilton was the first to use the term "infant industries" and to introduce it to the forefront of economic thinking. He believed that political independence was predicated upon economic independence. Increasing the domestic supply of manufactured goods, particularly war materials, was seen as an issue of national security. And he feared that Britain's policy towards the colonies would condemn the United States to be only producers of agricultural products and raw materials.[13][12]
Britain initially did not want to industrialize the American colonies, and implemented policies to that effect (for example, banning high value-added manufacturing activities). Under British [AND GLOBALIST] rule, America was denied the use of tariffs to protect its new industries. Thus, the American Revolution was, to some extent, a war against this policy, in which the commercial elite of the colonies rebelled against being forced to play a lesser role in the emerging Atlantic economy. This explains why, after independence, the Tariff Act of 1789 was the second bill of the Republic signed by President Washington allowing Congress to impose a fixed tariff of 5% on all imports, with a few exceptions.[15]
Between 1792 and the war with Britain in 1812, the average tariff level remained around 12.5%, which was too low to encourage consumers to buy domestic products and thus support emerging American industries. When the Anglo-American War of 1812 broke out, all rates doubled to an average of 25% to account for increased government spending. The war paved the way for new industries by disrupting manufacturing imports from the UK and the rest of Europe. A major policy shift occurred in 1816, when American manufacturers who had benefited from the tariffs lobbied to retain them. New legislation was introduced to keep tariffs at the same levels —especially protected were cotton, woolen, and iron goods.[16] The average rate rose to 35% in 1816. The public agreed, and by 1820, the average rate in the U.S. had risen to 40%. Between 1816 and the end of World War II, the U.S. had one of the highest average import tariffs on manufactured goods in the world.
...
From 1871 to 1913,
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Quote:
“So, going forward, what country would ever sign a trade agreement with the United States
How's this, SECOND?
"We don't want no stinkin' trade agreements."
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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The definition of "foreign aid":
Where poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The definition of "foreign aid":
Where poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries.
Most accurate thing I've heard today.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Now, AFA recessions and depressions: NOT CAUSED BY TARIFFS.
They're caused by excess profits being cycled out of the hands of workers...i.e. consumers .... causing an imbalance between production (too much) and demand (not enough).
Keynes' answer to that was for government to print money and toss it into the economy, he didn't care where. He opined that government splurging would raise "animal spirits" and reset general outlook to optimism. If $ is directed at the wealthy it's called "trickle down" which has NEVER worked.
Roosevelt's answer was a more targeted. He called it "pump priming": directing money into the hands of the everyday person, who would more likely spend it on necessities, thereby increasing demand, instead of saving it or spending it on an extravagance.
And it worked, to a fashion, until a Republican Congress grew uneasy about the deficit and put a crimp in the program. Then WWII came along, and all fiscal caution was thrown to the wind, and people were fully engaged making supplies and weapons for war.
The CURRENT answer is to flood the world with American debt. Government debt. Corporate debt. Financial debt. Consumer debt. Trade debt. Keep consumption going even as wealthy inequality skyrockets.
*****
If you want an economy that doesn't get whipsawed by depression, it needs to be approximately balanced between supply and demand, which means money needs to be cycled back to the laborer instead of bloating an already engorged elite.
If you want an economy not bedeviled by inflation, it means not expanding the money supply unless/ until production is increased. (And if you need to raise production, you don't just puke government money everywhere, you need targeted investment.)
If you want a financial system not subject to breakdown, raise banking reserves and once again separate retail from investment banking.
And if you want your currency to be respected around the world, don't rely on a mountain of trade and fiscal debt. Have products to trade that prople want to buy.
It's not fucking rocket science. Finacialists and industrialists like to muddy the waters simply to allow them to continue their depredations. It's their depredations that cause the problems, and there's no fix for it but to FIX IT.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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... and I always think about that...
What do they need more money for?
At the end of the day it IS all fiat currency.
I'm sitting here at pretty much the furthest end of the spectrum as far as the first world is concerned, excluding the homeless and children of course. The only thing keeping me from the bottom is just the sheer virtue of it costing more to live in America than a lot of other countries, even in a relatively non-expensive area like mine.
I agonized over the first year my expenses went up over $7,000 for the year. These people talk about billions like I do nickels.
How do you fix this?
If you took just 10% of the wealth out of the hands of the truly wealthy and dispersed it equally, you'd likely double the living standards of half the people overnight.
I don't mean a one-time handout.
I'm talking about how do you permanently change the system so that 10% of that uber-wealthy money rotting in savings and investments is freed up and ends up in places that would make lives better.
I don't want to hear any arguments from anyone about this can't be done. I know full well that my parents Boomer generation had it a hell of a lot better than anyone who came after them.
How do we get back to that?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Well, let's start with some basics.
If your nation is small and limited in resources, you have to trade internationally for things like oil, metals, food, and other commodities. What you have to trade is labor. And if other nations are captives of transnational corporations, you'll wind up getting sucked into a system where the weak are ground into pulp. Unless you can make arrangements with similarly situated nations for fair trade.
America isn't that.
America has continental- scale resources. There are some things we lack, but we have many things to trade. So we COULD set up a system that's different from the usual rapacious setup,
MORE LATER
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Yanno... It's when you really start thinking about these types of things that you can see why so many people, particularly the young people, are so readily drawn to Socialism or outright Communism.
We know that doesn't work, but whatever it is we've been doing clearly isn't working either.
On a micro-scale, or on a nostalgic or romantic scale, there's a ton of allure to Capitalism.
But that's just not how it works on a macro-scale. Jimmy Dore calls it Predatory Capitalism. I'm not sure what I'd call it. End-Stage Capitalism? Maybe even Post-Capitalism?
We're only allowed freedoms until it's no longer more trouble than it's worth to take them away.
We were really useful when we were cut loose into America to stake claims to land and get into battles with natives and die of all the diseases and make the original settlements. And then the slow and fat and spoiled bureacracy eventually made their way to you and took over whatever little world you'd built for yourselves with all of the others who were strong and lucky enough to survive that long.
Fast-Forward about ten or so generations and what value do any of us really have if we're not consumers, or we find ourselves no longer living in a world where simply being a consumer was all that was required and desired out of you?
There's a reason why people in the 1st world, particularly white people have stopped having enough babies to maintain their numbers. Because we've conquered everything there is to conquer. At least everything that matters. Space and true Deep Sea travel and exploration is still very far away. They will matter one day if we survive long enough, but we're not there yet.
There's already too many of us, and most white 1st world people have had it good enough for long enough that they don't feel that urge to conquer or expand anymore. Why have 3 kids today when that means you're going to have to spend half a million to put them through college and even if you pay for all of that they've got less than a 50% chance they'll ever make enough money in their lives to make that degree worthwile? Or the more likely result being that at least one or more of your kids ain't that bright and/or ambitious and the best they've got to look forward to is manning the milkshake machine at McDonalds?
At some point, we're going to have to have some real conversations about population and what our plans are for it going forward.
Because, come to think of it now, one huge thing we're failing to mention here when talking about how good it was for the Boomer generation is that there were 3 BILLION less people on the planet in 1990 than there are now, and we had 80 Million less people living here in the US.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I'd call it global monopolism, or global financialism. Hard to believe, but Karl Marx actually predicted this.
*****
Getting back to your previous post ..
Quote:It's not money, it's power over anyone who needs the money.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
... and I always think about that...
What do they need more money for?
At the end of the day it IS all fiat currency.
Quote:No. All you'd do is double prices. Any time you dump money into a system without increasing production you create the recipe for inflation: Too much money chasing too few goods. What you'd have to do is funnel that money either thru productive activity ... raising more beef cattle or egg-laying hens or anythung else people are short of .... needs more ranchers etc ... or thru services like medical care ... more doctors and nurses etc ... to make a real difference in people's lives.
If you took just 10% of the wealth out of the hands of the truly wealthy and dispersed it equally, you'd likely double the living standards of half the people overnight.
Quote:I don't think you can ever PERMANENTLY change a system. It seems no matter what system you start with - tribalism, feudalism/monarchism, capitalism, socialism, financialism - it eventually winds up being corrupted. Power and money behave like gravity: the more you have, the more you get. Even Russia, which is doing amazing things with its current crop of leadership and the next generation afterwards, will eventually grow its own set of parasites.
mI'm talking about how do you permanently change the system ...
One problem is that the powerful warp societal norms so that people wind up believing the situation is NORMAL.
People believed, really believed, the shaman could cure or curse them.
They believed that kings and queens received their authority from God, thru the Pope.
They believed that socialism will lead to a "new man".
That Israel has a god-given right to all of the Levant.
They believed that GREED IS GOOD, that the "free market" will lead to a glorious society. A lot of people still feel that way, and that any restraint on "free markets" and "free trade" is inherently bad, and that governments are inherently evil.
Anyway, I don't think we can get back to the way things were 60 years ago. The USA was in a unique situation back then as the last industrial power left standing. We have to deal with the world of today.
Somehow, we have to deal with our own oligarchy, at least get them to stay out of politics. Possibly not globally, but chip away at their influence issue by issue. The border and DEI fell pretty quickly. (Just goes to show how committed they were to "the causes". /snicker) Seeing more of a fight on Ukraine/Russia and DoD spending overall, and tariffs.
If DOGE wants to tackle something big, they should put the DoD under a microscope.
And I know Trump is doing his best to extricate us from the money pit they call Ukraine, but he should take that lesson and apply it globally. Reset our military's mission to DEFENDING THE USA, not having active duty troops in every nation of the world except N Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Western Sahara, Iran, Iraq, Eritriea, and Venezuela (and I'm not sure about some of them) Troops in the Congo? Troops in Brazil? Troops in Madagascar?
https://brilliantmaps.com/us-troops-overseas/
Also, personally, I feel it would be better rebuilding the USA sector by sector, maybe starting with steel, aluminum, and specialty chemicals/ pharmaceuticals. That way you wouldn't have tariffs from high impact nations hitting the whole economy all at once.
Eventually tho we have to tackle how people AND corporations manage to accumulate so much wealth.
Breaking up monopolies. Outlawing certain forms of speculation (like high frequency trading) that are totally non productive.
Rewriting tax law and corporate law.
Lots of ideas.
Not enuf time.
-----------
"
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Winds of Change - Scorpions (Sheet Music) Clarinet
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Quote:Trump Is Planning the Biggest Heist in History
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Lots of ideas.
By Paul Krugman | Mar 06, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-planning-the-biggest-heist
Look, there’s a lot going on, most of it terrible. Even so, I’m surprised that we’re just starting to get widespread coverage of the biggest theft in world history — at least so far. And as I’ll explain, a related but even bigger theft, promoted by Donald Trump, is in progress as you read this.
Here’s the story: last month hackers looted Ethereum coins worth $1.5 billion from Bybit, a Dubai-based crypto exchange — apparently the most money anyone has ever stolen in a single caper. The FBI believes that the North Korean regime was behind the hack. Most of the coins have already been laundered into Bitcoin, and will eventually be turned into real money that will be used to sustain Kim Jong Un’s brutal dictatorship.
It’s quite a story, yet it has only recently begun to get major coverage. The likeliest explanation of this lag is that crypto-related fraud and theft is so rife that reporters and editors have grown blasé.
But small investors continue to lose large sums in crypto scams, like “rug-pulls.” And the biggest rug-pull yet is underway: Donald Trump’s plan for a “strategic crypto reserve.”
What’s a rug-pull? A textbook example just happened in Argentina, where Javier Milei, the president, touted a new cryptocurrency called $Libra. The currency’s price soared as thousands of small players bought in, while insiders sold their holdings for huge profits. Then the price collapsed, leaving small players owning worthless bits of code.
Does this sound familiar? It should: the $Trump coin, introduced with great fanfare by Trump in January, attracted billions in dollars from MAGA fans, then quickly lost more than 80 percent of its value. The great bulk of $Trump coins were initially bought by a handful of “whales,” large investors, although it’s not clear whether their intent was to scam small buyers or simply to bribe the president.
While both Milei and Donald Trump deny that they personally profited from the rug-pulls they enabled, I seriously doubt that anyone believes them. And if Trump manages to establish a federal “strategic crypto reserve,” paid for by US tax dollars, the scams associated with $Libra and $Trump will look like chump change.
While a “strategic crypto reserve” sounds a lot like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — a national stockpile of oil to be drawn down in the event of an energy crisis — it would consist of nothing but a hackable string of ones and zeroes on servers. It’s important to understand that although cryptocurrencies have been around for a while — Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — no one has yet found significant legal uses other than pure speculation. As far as I can tell, actual transactions involving cryptocurrencies almost always involve criminal activity, such as money laundering or paying ransom to extortionists.
Which cryptocurrency do criminals prefer? Most apparently use Tether, a “stablecoin” whose value is kept fixed in U.S. dollars. Tether is able to do this because it holds a stock of U.S. Treasury bills with Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank that has itself invested in Tether. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, is now Donald Trump’s secretary of Commerce.
Some people say that the crypto industry has undue influence with the Trump administration. I wonder why?
But back to the strategic crypto reserve: What would the U.S. government do with this reserve? Make payoffs to gangsters? Buy favors from rogue governments like North Korea? I guess it could, in a pinch, sell the stuff to raise money if people have lost trust in the U.S. government’s solvency, but surely it would be a better strategy to stay solvent — among other things by not borrowing to buy assets that will probably crash in value if and when America tries try to sell them.
So what’s this about? I th
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Quote:It is as easy as 1-2-3:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm talking about how do you permanently change the system so that 10% of that uber-wealthy money rotting in savings and investments is freed up and ends up in places that would make lives better.
I don't want to hear any arguments from anyone about this can't be done. I know full well that my parents Boomer generation had it a hell of a lot better than anyone who came after them.
How do we get back to that?
1) What percent of the workforce was unionized in 1965 vs today?
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percent+of+the+workforce+was+unio
nized+in+1965+vs+today
As union membership has fallen over the last few decades, the share of income going to the top 10 percent has steadily increased.
2) What was the highest income tax rate in 1965 vs today?
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+was+the+highest+income+tax+rate+i
n+1965+vs+today
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the top federal income tax rate never dipped below 70 percent.
3) How much tax does Trump pay?
https://www.google.com/search?cq=How+much+tax+does+Trump+pay
$750 per year
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The actual 'biggest Ponzi scheme of all time'
March 06, 2025
Trump’s new cryptocurrency, “$Trump,” soared and then crashed, just like every other Ponzi scheme. It generated enormous profits for insiders like Trump, but a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors.
Trump claims ignorance. “I don’t know if it benefited” me, he said. “I don’t know much about it.” (The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coin.)
Musk has been promoting “dogecoin” since 2019. In the days following Trump’s announcement of the launch of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the value of dogecoin soared over 70 percent. Since then, it’s dropped like a rock. Another classic Ponzi scheme.
With Trump now in office, crypto is back to its Ponzi ways. It’s emerging from a four-year federal crackdown on crypto fraud, market manipulation, and other scams following the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX in 2022 — one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in recent memory.
Tomorrow, Trump is even holding a “crypto summit” at which he’ll promote the idea of a federal crypto reserve that will give crypto schemes a temporary boost by increasing demand for them.
( https://www.ccn.com/news/crypto/white-house-crypto-summit-2025/ )
But why should American taxpayers foot the bill for a crypto reserve? The most obvious winner will be Trump, whose own crypto venture carries millions of dollars in tokens that are to be included in the reserve.
https://www.alternet.org/what-is-a-ponzi-scheme/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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From the Berghof to the Oval Office
Notes on the most shameful day in the history of the American Republic
By Claire Berlinski | Mar 01, 2025
. . . The year was 1938. The visitor was the chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schuschnigg. The bully was Adolf Hitler. The place was the Berghof, Hitler’s alpine retreat. Hoping to achieve a peaceful settlement with Hitler, Schuschnigg had agreed to a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the former ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen. The meeting was a disaster. . . .
I believe what we saw earlier today in the Oval Office was the single most shameful moment in American history. There have of course been other shameful moments. We have betrayed our allies before. But never before have we done it while bullying and humiliating them in front of the entire world because we thought it would make “good television.” Never before have we turned the Oval Office into a spectacle so classless that even Tony Soprano would have vomited to see it. Never before have we done this for no reason but the benefit and pleasure of the murderous enemy of the United States who is chortling and dangling our president’s puppet strings. Never before have our leaders appeared so indescribably ignorant, so galactically self-absorbed, so petty and petulant, so obviously and dangerously unfit and unstable, so preposterous, and so menacing. Never before have they publicly betrayed us, declaring, before our eyes, their allegiance to an enemy who has been working incessantly to discredit our form of governance, reduce our power to insignificance, set us at each other’s throats, and murder us. Trump declared his allegiance to Putin publicly while his repulsive sidekick smirked and preened, and not one person in that room had the guts to say, “That’s enough, assholes. This is the People’s house.”
I have been trembling with anger at those despicable thugs since I saw that. Enough of apologizing for them, of equivocating, of normalizing this in any way. They are thugs. They are traitors. The whole world saw it. So did we.
The scene instantly evoked the meeting in the Berghof, and there is no reason to believe that their proud stupidity, vanity, and cruelty has a limit. They are not whatsoever constrained by considerations of decency, or the American interest. What we just saw is enough to know: Anything is possible.
The cowardice and dereliction of duty of the many, many Americans who have led us to this moment will never be forgiven. Every single worm responsible will live with the shame of this day—and this won’t be the last day we’re introduced to new depths of shame.
Destroying America is the only thing they will ever be known for, but they will be known for it for a very long time.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Musk-Trump War on Federal Employees Doesn’t Add Up
DOGE operatives claim that mass layoffs are necessary to prevent the U.S. government from going bankrupt. Let’s do the math.
By John Cassidy | March 3, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/the-musk-trump-war-o
n-federal-employees-doesnt-add-up
The Trump Administration’s assault on federal workers is intensifying, but it remains infuriatingly opaque. With no official tally of layoffs, media organizations are doing their own sums based on announcements from individual agencies. Reuters estimates that, so far, “tens of thousands” of people have been fired. At a Cabinet meeting last week, Elon Musk, the de-facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been leading the retrenchment efforts, refused to tell reporters if he had a numerical goal for redundancies. But he did say, “If the job is not essential, or they are not doing it well, they obviously shouldn’t be on the public payroll.”
Musk also gave a figure for the cost savings that he and his colleagues at DOGE are trying to achieve: a trillion dollars. This is half his original target of two trillion dollars, but in an over-all federal budget of $6.75 trillion it’s still an enormous number. Clearly, more layoffs are on the way, and not just at the behest of Musk. This past week, Russell Vought, the conservative ideologue who is now the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, issued a memorandum to agency heads that claimed American voters had “registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt, federal bureaucracy,” and ordered them to “undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
During the election campaign, Donald Trump frequently spoke of dismantling the “deep state,” referring to senior officials, particularly at law-enforcement and national-security agencies, who had supposedly defied his wishes during his first term and pursued him legally after he left office. The Trump campaign also promised to “move parts of the federal bureaucracy outside of the Washington Swamp,” but it made no mention of mass layoffs. In September, Trump said that if elected he would create a government efficiency commission headed by Musk that would provide recommendations on how to reduce waste. He didn’t provide any details, though, and he distanced himself from Project 2025, the radical plan to “dismantle the administrative state” that was drawn up by Vought and others associated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
The blueprint defined the “administrative state” not as ordinary federal workers but as the “policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments.” Although it suggested numerous reforms at individual agencies, it didn’t mention layoffs of low-level employees like Andrew Lennox, a former U.S. marine who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and started work at a Michigan branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs in December, only to lose his job as an administrator earlier this month—“I thought, I’m a vet, I’m safe,” he told Mother Jones—or Ryleigh Cooper, a twenty-four-year-old woman who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, also in Michigan, where one of her tasks was marking trees for loggers. According to the Washington Post, Cooper earned about forty thousand dollars a year, and her latest performance evaluation was “highly successful.” Neither of these things were sufficient to save her job.
After the election, Musk, the Times reported last week, took up residence at Mar-a-Lago and made preparations to drastically reduce the federal workforce, with Trump’s support. The official explanation for the layoffs is that they are financially essential. Musk has claimed that the United States will go bankrupt if it doesn’t get the budget deficit under control. But, in repeating this assertion at the Cabinet meeting, he failed to acknowledge the revenue side of the deficit, despite the fact that, the previous day, Republicans in the House of Representativ
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The president’s reasons for imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico keep changing (and none make sense).
By Eric Levitz | Mar 4, 2025, 3:30 PM CST
https://www.vox.com/politics/402530/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-explan
ation
Why has the US president chosen to upend trade relations on the North American continent? The stakes of this question are high, since it could determine how long Trump’s massive tariffs remain in effect. Unfortunately, the president himself does not seem to know the answer.
In recent weeks, Trump has provided five different — and contradictory — justifications for his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, none of which make much sense:
1) Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico are meant to secure America’s borders
Officially, the North American tariffs are intended to fight “a drug war,” not a trade war. Trump claims that our neighbors to the north and south have been abetting the transfer of fentanyl and undocumented immigrants into the United States — and that this constitutes a “national emergency.” By imposing steep tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Trump ostensibly aims to coerce the two nations into cutting off the flow of drugs and migrants.
But this policy is irrational. Canada plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl. And the Mexican government has already ramped up enforcement against drug cartels while deterring migrants from entering the US (often through brutal means). These efforts appear to have slowed fentanyl imports significantly. They have not succeeded in shutting down the fentanyl trade entirely. But that is not a reasonable demand: If the U.S. cannot stop drugs from infiltrating its own prisons, how could the Mexican government monitor its entire nation so meticulously as to prevent an extremely lightweight narcotic from ever crossing its northern border?
Nevertheless, if Trump’s tariffs were intended solely as a diplomatic tool for influencing Mexican and Canadian border policy, then they might be lifted in short order. Canada and Mexico could present plans for cracking down on drugs and migrants, and Trump could declare victory, as he seemed to do last month when he initially delayed these tariffs in response to Mexican and Canadian concessions.
But these tariffs are not solely about winning the drug war — at least, according to the president.
2) Unless, the tariffs are actually meant to force companies to relocate production to the United States, thereby closing the trade deficit
On Tuesday morning, the president posed on Truth Social, “IF COMPANIES MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES, THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!!!”
Here, Trump suggests that his tariffs are not meant to be a temporary device for combatting fentanyl imports, so much as a durable means of coercing companies into moving factories into the US. After all, if the tariffs are only temporary, companies would have little reason to change their investment decisions in light of them.
And Trump’s remarks Tuesday were consistent with his previous commentary on this issue. Last month, Trump told his social media followers, “We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use.”
He further lamented that “The USA has major deficits with Canada, Mexico, and China (and almost all countries!), owes 36 Trillion Dollars, and we’re not going to be the ‘Stupid Country’ any longer. MAKE YOUR PRODUCT IN THE USA AND THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!”
These remarks imply that America should maintain steep tariffs on Canada and Mexico in perpetuity, since it has little need for their products, and is currently “subsidizing” those countries by running a trade deficit with them.
But this is a terrible justification for Trump’s policy on several levels. For one thing, the president’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico apply to all goods — including agricultural products that the United States cannot possibly produce at scale, such as papayas and other tropica
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The fact that humans can only survive on Earth doesn’t bother Trump – and I know why
He is surrounded by people who have grandiose plans and dreams beyond our planet. Vengeful nihilism is a big part of the Maga project
By George Monbiot | Wed 5 Mar 2025 07.04 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/05/humans-earth-don
ald-trump-nihilism-maga
In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not just about delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations – not just about wringing as much profit from living systems as they can? Could it be that they want to see the destruction of the habitable planet?
We know that Trump’s overriding purpose is power. We have seen that no amount of power appears to satisfy his craving. So let’s consider power’s ultimate destination. It is to become not only an emperor, but the last of the emperors: to close the chapter on civilisation. It is to scratch your name indelibly upon a geological epoch. Look on my works, ye vermin, and despair.
It’s true, of course, that many of his actions amount to standard capitalist looting, released from the feeble regulatory restraints of previous administrations. This week Trump ordered the mass destruction of national forests and other protected lands by the timber industry, to be overseen by the US Forest Service, whose new boss was previously vice-president of a timber company. The results will include heartbreaking losses of wildlife and rare ecosystems, and a heightened risk of wildfires. Trump justified his order with that classic dictator’s gambit: a purported “emergency”.
He has used the same excuse to trigger a new wave of fossil-fuel projects, granting them “emergency” permits to override environmental protections. This is likely to cause the poisoning of wetlands and water supplies. Overseeing the assault is the new energy secretary, Chris Wright, previously CEO of a fracking company.
If the US were really suffering an “energy emergency”, you would expect the government also to accelerate the deployment of renewable power. Instead, Trump has frozen it. You might also expect it to insist that energy is used more sparingly; instead, his team is deleting fuel economy standards. This looks like payback to the fossil-fuel industry that helped elect him.
But other policies look more like gleeful vandalism. The devastating staffing cuts at national parks and forests won’t help any of his corporate backers. But they will degrade the experience of visitors, while jeopardising wildlife and habitats.
The same goes for the mass destruction of jobs at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the freezing of all the international conservation grants it offered, many of which are crucial to the protection of wildlife overseas. There’s not much to be gained here by any corporate lobby, and a great deal to be lost by the rest of us. Trump’s stated aim of “getting rid” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency would put corporate profits at severe risk, especially among insurers and investment funds, while intensifying the suffering of people hit by environmental crisis. He has also eliminated the help offered to communities suffering from heavy pollution. Again, there’s no obvious gain for capital, just plenty more human misery.
Vengeful nihilism, the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, is a major theme in Maga politics. It is applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world. It is hard to avoid the thought that environmental destruction is not just a means by which Trump serves his corporate backers, but an end in itself.
At the same time, Trump enthusiastically (albeit vaguely) boosts Musk’s plans to send people to Mars, a planet incapable of supporting human life. These men, who claim without evidence that unless they cut $1tn from the federal budget, causing innumerable harms, “America will go bankrupt”, are pressing for a programme likely to c
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Musk-Trump War on Federal Employees Doesn’t Add Up
DOGE operatives claim that mass layoffs are necessary to prevent the U.S. government from going bankrupt. Let’s do the math.
By John Cassidy | March 3, 2025
Yeah. Let's do the math, John.
We're $37 Trillion in debt.
End of Math.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'd call it global monopolism, or global financialism. Hard to believe, but Karl Marx actually predicted this.
*****
Getting back to your previous post ..Quote:It's not money, it's power over anyone who needs the money.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
... and I always think about that...
What do they need more money for?
At the end of the day it IS all fiat currency.Quote:No. All you'd do is double prices. Any time you dump money into a system without increasing production you create the recipe for inflation: Too much money chasing too few goods. What you'd have to do is funnel that money either thru productive activity ... raising more beef cattle or egg-laying hens or anythung else people are short of .... needs more ranchers etc ... or thru services like medical care ... more doctors and nurses etc ... to make a real difference in people's lives.
If you took just 10% of the wealth out of the hands of the truly wealthy and dispersed it equally, you'd likely double the living standards of half the people overnight.Quote:I don't think you can ever PERMANENTLY change a system. It seems no matter what system you start with - tribalism, feudalism/monarchism, capitalism, socialism, financialism - it eventually winds up being corrupted. Power and money behave like gravity: the more you have, the more you get. Even Russia, which is doing amazing things with its current crop of leadership and the next generation afterwards, will eventually grow its own set of parasites.
mI'm talking about how do you permanently change the system ...
One problem is that the powerful warp societal norms so that people wind up believing the situation is NORMAL.
People believed, really believed, the shaman could cure or curse them.
They believed that kings and queens received their authority from God, thru the Pope.
They believed that socialism will lead to a "new man".
That Israel has a god-given right to all of the Levant.
They believed that GREED IS GOOD, that the "free market" will lead to a glorious society. A lot of people still feel that way, and that any restraint on "free markets" and "free trade" is inherently bad, and that governments are inherently evil.
Anyway, I don't think we can get back to the way things were 60 years ago. The USA was in a unique situation back then as the last industrial power left standing. We have to deal with the world of today.
Somehow, we have to deal with our own oligarchy, at least get them to stay out of politics. Possibly not globally, but chip away at their influence issue by issue. The border and DEI fell pretty quickly. (Just goes to show how committed they were to "the causes". /snicker) Seeing more of a fight on Ukraine/Russia and DoD spending overall, and tariffs.
If DOGE wants to tackle something big, they should put the DoD under a microscope.
And I know Trump is doing his best to extricate us from the money pit they call Ukraine, but he should take that lesson and apply it globally. Reset our military's mission to DEFENDING THE USA, not having active duty troops in every nation of the world except N Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Western Sahara, Iran, Iraq, Eritriea, and Venezuela (and I'm not sure about some of them) Troops in the Congo? Troops in Brazil? Troops in Madagascar?
https://brilliantmaps.com/us-troops-overseas/
Also, personally, I feel it would be better rebuilding the USA sector by sector, maybe starting with steel, aluminum, and specialty chemicals/ pharmaceuticals. That way you wouldn't have tariffs from high impact nations hitting the whole economy all at once.
Eventually tho we have to tackle how people AND corporations manage to accumulate so much wealth.
Breaking up monopolies. Outlawing certain forms of speculation (like high frequency trading) that are totally non productive.
Rewriting tax law and corporate law.
Lots of idea
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It is as easy as 1-2-3:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm talking about how do you permanently change the system so that 10% of that uber-wealthy money rotting in savings and investments is freed up and ends up in places that would make lives better.
I don't want to hear any arguments from anyone about this can't be done. I know full well that my parents Boomer generation had it a hell of a lot better than anyone who came after them.
How do we get back to that?
1) What percent of the workforce was unionized in 1965 vs today?
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percent+of+the+workforce+was+unio
nized+in+1965+vs+today
As union membership has fallen over the last few decades, the share of income going to the top 10 percent has steadily increased.
2) What was the highest income tax rate in 1965 vs today?
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+was+the+highest+income+tax+rate+i
n+1965+vs+today
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the top federal income tax rate never dipped below 70 percent.
3) How much tax does Trump pay?
https://www.google.com/search?cq=How+much+tax+does+Trump+pay
$750 per year
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I've been in the "Union" twice. Both times the pay was shit and the little "extra" money I made was put int Union Dues.
I guess it all depends on who is running the unions, because Grocery Store unions and Security unions are pure bullshit.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'd call it global monopolism, or global financialism. Hard to believe, but Karl Marx actually predicted this.
*****
Getting back to your previous post ..Quote:It's not money, it's power over anyone who needs the money.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
... and I always think about that...
What do they need more money for?
At the end of the day it IS all fiat currency.Quote:No. All you'd do is double prices. Any time you dump money into a system without increasing production you create the recipe for inflation: Too much money chasing too few goods. What you'd have to do is funnel that money either thru productive activity ... raising more beef cattle or egg-laying hens or anythung else people are short of .... needs more ranchers etc ... or thru services like medical care ... more doctors and nurses etc ... to make a real difference in people's lives.
If you took just 10% of the wealth out of the hands of the truly wealthy and dispersed it equally, you'd likely double the living standards of half the people overnight.Quote:I don't think you can ever PERMANENTLY change a system. It seems no matter what system you start with - tribalism, feudalism/monarchism, capitalism, socialism, financialism - it eventually winds up being corrupted. Power and money behave like gravity: the more you have, the more you get. Even Russia, which is doing amazing things with its current crop of leadership and the next generation afterwards, will eventually grow its own set of parasites.
mI'm talking about how do you permanently change the system ...
One problem is that the powerful warp societal norms so that people wind up believing the situation is NORMAL.
I need to strengthen that statement: People believe the situation is INEVITABLE.
I just now noticed that in all of those examples, the power structures were underpinned by BELIEF SYSTEMS, founded on NON-HUMAN forces:
Spirits, who could bring you good luck and fortune, or ruin your health and family.
An all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god who could send you to eternal torture.
The inevitability of communism thru dialectical political economic progression.
God (again).
"The invisible hand" of "the free market", underpinned by a view of "human nature" as greedy, and the purifying forces of social Darwinism (This is SECOND'S emotional home, with The Hand Of God thrown in.)
In many ways, our view of the power structure is a religion, which makes the resulting power structure seem inevitable, and not what it really is:
Sociopaths in charge of a society's belief system.
Quote:
Eventually tho we have to tackle how people AND corporations manage to accumulate so much wealth:
Breaking up monopolies. Outlawing certain forms of speculation (like high frequency trading) that are totally non productive.
Rewriting tax law and corporate law.
Lots of ideas.
Not enuf time.
SIX: A lot of good ideas in there. I'm glad I even saw it. Second had a bad TDS flare up this morning.
Indeed.
Point being, the wealthy accumulate wealth thru specific procedures that are often based in our laws. If they examine those procedures Congress could, in theory anyway, rewrite those laws.
For example: corporate personhood. REALLY?
Corporate responsibility: Publicly- traded companies SOLE RESPONSIBILITY mandated by law is to protect the wealth of shareholders, as a fiduciary. No responsibility towards public health or welfare (except as limited by regulation).
To give you and idea how far we drifted, in early USA, corporations had a time limit (typically 20 years), and were restricted to one commodity or one activity. They were often set up for a single project eg. building a road, raising a public building.
What would happen if corporations were simply made illegal, and all corporations had to become privately held companies? No more stock options!
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'd call it global monopolism, or global financialism. Hard to believe, but Karl Marx actually predicted this.
*****
Getting back to your previous post ..Quote:It's not money, it's power over anyone who needs the money.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
... and I always think about that...
What do they need more money for?
At the end of the day it IS all fiat currency.Quote:No. All you'd do is double prices. Any time you dump money into a system without increasing production you create the recipe for inflation: Too much money chasing too few goods. What you'd have to do is funnel that money either thru productive activity ... raising more beef cattle or egg-laying hens or anythung else people are short of .... needs more ranchers etc ... or thru services like medical care ... more doctors and nurses etc ... to make a real difference in people's lives.
If you took just 10% of the wealth out of the hands of the truly wealthy and dispersed it equally, you'd likely double the living standards of half the people overnight.Quote:I don't think you can ever PERMANENTLY change a system. It seems no matter what system you start with - tribalism, feudalism/monarchism, capitalism, socialism, financialism - it eventually winds up being corrupted. Power and money behave like gravity: the more you have, the more you get. Even Russia, which is doing amazing things with its current crop of leadership and the next generation afterwards, will eventually grow its own set of parasites.
mI'm talking about how do you permanently change the system ...
One problem is that the powerful warp societal norms so that people wind up believing the situation is NORMAL.
I need to strengthen that statement: People believe the situation is INEVITABLE.
I just now noticed that in all of those examples, the power structures were underpinned by BELIEF SYSTEMS, founded on NON-HUMAN forces:
Spirits, who could bring you good luck and fortune, or ruin your health and family.
An all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god who could send you to eternal torture.
The inevitability of communism thru dialectical political economic progression.
God (again).
"The invisible hand" of "the free market", underpinned by a view of "human nature" as greedy, and the purifying forces of social Darwinism (This is SECOND'S emotional home, with The Hand Of God thrown in.)
In many ways, our view of the power structure is a religion, which makes the resulting power structure seem inevitable, and not what it really is:
Sociopaths in charge of a society's belief system.Quote:
Eventually tho we have to tackle how people AND corporations manage to accumulate so much wealth:
Breaking up monopolies. Outlawing certain forms of speculation (like high frequency trading) that are totally non productive.
Rewriting tax law and corporate law.
Lots of ideas.
Not enuf time.
SIX: A lot of good ideas in there. I'm glad I even saw it. Second had a bad TDS flare up this morning.
Indeed.
Point being, the wealthy accumulate wealth thru specific procedures that are often based in our laws. If they examine those procedures Congress could, in theory anyway, rewrite those laws.
For example: corporate personhood. REALLY?
Corporate responsibility: Publicly- traded companies SOLE RESPONSIBILITY mandated by law is to protect the wealth of shareholders, as a fiduciary. No responsibility towards public health or welfare (except as limited by regulation).
To give you and idea how far we drifted, in early USA, corporations had a time limit (typically 20 years), and were restricted to one commodity or one activity. They were often set up for a single project eg. building a road, raising a public building.
What would happen if corporations were simply made illegal, and all corporations had to become privatel
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What do you think of this, Sigs?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/03/06/treasury_secretary_
bessent_were_going_to_transition_from_a_public-sector_to_private-sector_economy.html
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:What's the largest privately owned company in the world? SpaceX. Where have I heard that name in connection to Trump?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What would happen if corporations were simply made illegal, and all corporations had to become privately held companies? No more stock options! No more corporate personhood! No more speculating on the stock market!
"SpaceX is the world's most valuable private company, with an estimated valuation of $350 billion in 2024"
https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+the+largest+privately+owned+c
ompany+in+the+world
How SpaceX Became the World's Most Valuable Private Company
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Prices are 'going to rise' and 'robots' will be doing factory jobs: Trump Cabinet official
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
By Carl Gibson | March 06, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/trump-official-prices-rise/
One of the chief economic officials in President Donald Trump's administration recently admitted that prices for imported goods subjected to Trump's tariffs will indeed go up, and that the administration is in support of automating more factory jobs.
During a Thursday interview with CNBC host David Faber, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was noticeably up-front when asked whether consumers would see higher sticker prices on store shelves. Faber asked Lutnick if prices will have to "eventually rise" if corporations move production back to the United States so companies can remain "competitive globally." Walmart, for example, imports roughly 70% of its non-food inventory from China.
"I think if you want to buy things from other countries, and you want to bring it into America, then the price is going to rise," Lutnick said. "But if you make it here, then of course the price won't rise! So make it here! Make. It. Here. How hard is that to say? You know, just keep repeating it to yourself: There's no tariff if you make it here."
"You're going to watch everyone come to that realization," he continued. "Apple builds it all in China. Why are they building it all in China and giving us our iPhone? Why don't they make it here?"
At that point, multiple voices cut in to remind Lutnick that it was "cheaper" for Apple to manufacture its products in China.
"Mr. Secretary, wages are lower over there!" CNBC correspondent Carl Quintanilla said.
"And now, there are robots who can do it!" Lutnick said after a brief pause. "You are going to see robotic production of iPhones, and the jobs that are going to be created. People who build those factories, the mechanics who work on those robots ... This is the re-creation of tradecraft in the United States of America."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why does Trump want Greenland and what do its people think?
March 4, 2025
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74x4m71pmjo
"He's treating us like a good he can purchase," said Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's first female prime minister. "He's not even talking to Greenland - he's talking to Denmark about buying Greenland."
When BBC correspondent Fergal Keane visited the island in January, he said he heard one phrase again and again: "Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. So, Trump can visit but that's it."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
"He's treating us like a good he can purchase," said Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's first female prime minister. "He's not even talking to Greenland - he's talking to Denmark about buying Greenland."
Sounds like somebody better stop crying, pull up her big girl pants and have a chat with the Denmark leadership.
I don't blame anybody for not taking the "Prime Minister" of Greenland seriously. The town I was born in has a greater population than Greenland does.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, have I told you today that you are fucked up in head?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
"He's treating us like a good he can purchase," said Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's first female prime minister. "He's not even talking to Greenland - he's talking to Denmark about buying Greenland."
Sounds like somebody better stop crying, pull up her big girl pants and have a chat with the Denmark leadership.
I don't blame anybody for not taking the "Prime Minister" of Greenland seriously. The town I was born in has a greater population than Greenland does.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
https://newrepublic.com/article/192404/trump-musk-destroy-social-secur
ity-started
Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme, which Musk just called it this week (“the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” no less).
In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world.
But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons.
The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society. That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers.
Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil.
Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the cause of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times.
Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s.
Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100. (If the rich had their way, income tax would be limited to the first $176,100. Maybe I'll ask my Texas Congressmen to co-sponsor that bill. I'd vote for that! )
The entire solvency and health of Social Security could be cured permanently, in other words, if we simply did away with the “billionaire loophole” in the Social Security tax.
But the idea of having to pay a tax on all their income so that middle-class and low-income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea.
How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets!
Which is why Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security administration and its employees with such gusto.
By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system.
(This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words, Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.)
The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
Shut up, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
Shut up, faggot.
Well done, Donald John Trump! You too, Leon “Elon” Musk!
US employers cut more jobs last month than any February since 2009
By Alicia Wallace | 9:12 AM EST, Thu March 6, 2025
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/economy/us-jobs-report-february-preview
/index.html
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing? Who knew how accidentally incompetent and deliberately greedy Trump and Musk would be? Everybody except Trumptards.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Those of us following the day-to-day stumbles of the Musk/Trump administration sometimes feel encouraged by just how incompetent they sometimes seem — quite different from the cool, sinister competence of Orban’s takeover in Hungary. But Kim warns that Trump is nonetheless achieving most of the ingredients for autocracy.
Oban moved very quickly to capture the Constitutional Court which was the referee of the whole process. After you capture the refs, you can do all kinds of unconstitutional things and there's no one around to stop you. That was something Trump did in his first term. He's basically captured the refs.
At Trump's joint session of Congress speech, the Supreme Court only sent four judges this time, fewer than usual, but John Roberts was there and on the way out the door, Trump shook his hand and said, “Thank you. Thank you again. I won't forget.” Capture is evident already by the decisions of this court, particularly the immunity decision, which was outrageous, unprecedented, lawless, and just stunning, jaw-droppingly supportive of a lawless executive.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/from-orban-to-trump-part-ii
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘Please let Mr Hitler speak’: the trouble with ‘hearing from both sides’ – the Stephen Collins cartoon
By Stephen Collins | Fri 7 Mar 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/mar/07/please-le
t-mr-hitler-speak-the-trouble-with-hearing-from-both-sides-the-stephen-collins-cartoon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Disingenuous Democrats read the same script because they have no core values or agency.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing?
Yup.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, Trump will stop your Medicaid for diabetes and your brother's SSI for being an afflicted child and your aunt's Social Security for being old. You will all be paying inflated prices because that's the world Trumptards will die for once Trump gets his way.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing?
Yup.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Social Security Is Changing Under President Donald Trump
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/social-security-changing-under-presiden
t-085500811.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, Trump will stop your Medicaid for diabetes and your brother's SSI for being an afflicted child and your aunt's Social Security for being old.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, can you feel the winds of change blowing?
Yup.
The world you thought you were living in 6 months ago no longer exists.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
No. He won't.
Quote:
You will all be paying inflated prices because that's the world Trumptards will die for once Trump gets his way.
We're already paying inflated prices because Joe Biden* fucked up the economy.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:So what?
SIGNY: ... and all corporations had to become privately held companies? No more stock options! No more corporate personhood! No more speculating on the stock market!
SECOND: What's the largest privately owned company in the world? SpaceX.
Quote:What's the connection you're trying to make?
Where have I heard that name in connection to Trump?
Making "corporations" illegal isn't beneficial to other privately held companies. If anything, most of them would be competing against many other companies just like them.
In my observation, publicly held companies waste an awful lot of $$ on stock buybacks, M&As, hostile takeovers, and other (nonproductive) fun and games.
Ralphs, my local grocery chain, was taken over by Kroger, which used Ralph's assets as collateral for the loan they took out for the takeover. Since Kroger had to pay back the loan, they jacked up prices. Meanwhile, Stater Bros, a privately held full service grocery store, just keeps plodding along, offering lower prices overall.
And altho privately held companies don't have to issue quarterly/ annual reports, they DO have to pay taxes. Maybe those tax filings should be made public, since I don't believe that companies have a privacy right. That would help guide consumers to the comoanies offering the best value for money.
Can you imagine what would happen if that process was applied to hospital corporations?
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Can you imagine what would happen if that process was applied to hospital corporations?
Hospitals and Pharma companies slashing prices to be competitive because they're no longer operating under a virtual monopoly? What a wonderful world that would be.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I am so glad that my aunts are now long dead. They would be worried about the US right now.
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If Democrats were 1/10th as worried about your aunts as you were, they wouldn't have destroyed themselves.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump's companies are the proof that privately held companies can produce phony records to document whatever income tax they wish to pay. Several Trump employees went to jail over their tax cheating, but it took extraordinary forensic accounting resources to penetrate Trump's organization, resources only available for that legal case because Trump was constantly in the news. If privately held corporations took over the business world because the public stock market was closed in Signym's imaginary redesign of Capitalism, those millions of new Corporations could cheat on their taxes because the extraordinary resources do not exist to investigate more than one or two corporations at a time.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And altho privately held companies don't have to issue quarterly/ annual reports, they DO have to pay taxes. Maybe those tax filings should be made public, since I don't believe that companies have a privacy right. That would help guide consumers to the comoanies offering the best value for money.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Russia Is Losing the War of Attrition
Ukraine is not on the verge of collapse. That makes the Trump administration’s decisions particularly shortsighted and tragic.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien and Eliot A. Cohen | March 7, 2025, 11:33 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/russia-ukrai
ne-war-status/681963/
Ukraine has no “cards” according to President Donald Trump, while Russia has many. Vice President J. D. Vance has asserted that superior Russian firepower and manpower mean that the war can end only in a Russian victory. Other supposedly realistic commentators agree, arguing that Russia’s advantages are insurmountable.
As military historians, we think this a misreading not only of what is happening on the ground, but of how wars unfold—and, in particular, of the difference between attritional campaigns and those built on maneuver. The Luftwaffe and the German submarine force during World War II, to take just two examples, were defeated not by a single blow, but by a technologically advanced, tactically and operationally sophisticated approach that rendered those organizations, large as they were, unable to function effectively. In the same vein, the advances of the German army in the spring of 1918 concealed the underlying weakness in that military produced by attrition, which ultimately doomed the Kaiser’s army and the regime for which it fought.
We have been here before. Prior to the war, the intelligence community, political leaders, and many students of the Russian military concluded that Russia would easily overrun Ukraine militarily—that Kyiv would fall in a few days and that Ukraine itself could be conquered in weeks. We should consider that failure as we assess the certainty of Vance and those who think like him.
Wars are rarely won so decisively, because attrition is not only a condition of war, but a strategic choice. Smaller powers can, through the intelligent application of attrition, succeed in advancing their own goals. This is particularly true if, like Ukraine, they can exploit technological change and get the most from outside support and allies. Vietnam was outgunned by the United States, as the American colonies were once outgunned by the British empire. Iranian forces outnumbered those of Iraq during a long and brutal war in the 1980s, and lost nonetheless.
The pessimistic analysis has not paid nearly enough attention to the weak underpinnings of Russian military power. Russia’s economy, as often noted, is struggling with interest rates that have topped 20 percent amid soaring inflation, and with manpower shortages made critical by the war. Its condition is dire, as one study noted, partly because the military budget amounts to 40 percent of all public spending, and partly because oil revenue is taking a hit from lower prices, Ukrainian attacks, and tightening sanctions.
Russian weakness is particularly visible in the army. One report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that in 2024 alone, the Russians lost 1,400 main battle tanks, and more than 3,700 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. At the same time, Russian production of such vehicles, including refurbished units, totaled just 4,300, not enough to make up for its losses. In desperation, Russia has turned to restoring its oldest and least effective combat vehicles, many of Soviet vintage. One recent study by Chatham House asserts that the Russian military-industrial complex is “ill adapted to deal with the effects of a prolonged war against Ukraine or to achieve a sustainable future in terms of production, innovation and development.”
The same holds true for Russian manpower. The number of soldiers that the Russians were able to maintain at the front seemed to peak in the spring and summer of 2024, above 650,000. By the end of the year, it had fallen closer to 600,000, despite the extraordinary bonuses that the Russian government offers new recruits, amounting to about two and a half times the average annual Russian salary in 2023.
Russian
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
What do you think of this, Sigs?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/03/06/treasury_secretary_
bessent_were_going_to_transition_from_a_public-sector_to_private-sector_economy.html
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Quote:I have no idea what Bessent is trying to say. Cutting the Federal budget/ workforce doesn't mean that the private sector will automatically grow. If you eliminate ... extreme case ... 25% of the GDP, it's possible that the only thing that happens as a result is that the GDP drops by 25%.
BESSENT: "When you think about 25% of GDP flowing through area code 202, everybody's trying to skim a portion of it, trying to reallocate it," he said. "This has been a government-driven economy, you want to make this a private sector-driven economy. We want to, as I understand it, disempower the public federal bureaucracy and re-empower the kind of risk-taking and investment that goes along with private sector advances."
*****
LARRY KUDLOW: What you know that I saw a study just to finish this point, over 10 years the differential between 3% growth and 1.8% growth comes to about three trillion dollars of extra money which could be poured in for any number of private sector uses.
TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: Yeah, and again Larry, it's back to the predictability that if we can do that and then all those benefits actually accrue out into the economy, not to the bondholders, not to the government.
Quote:Private sector jobs are lower pay with fewer benefits.
LARRY KUDLOW: And just one last point on the budget being DOGE. DOGE savings, are you, I saw it's interesting, a poll, a Democratic poll, my friend Mark Penn in his poll, 69% favored the idea of a $1 trillion budget savings, I'll call it, from Elon Musk and DOGE. This is a Democratic poll, so it's quite interesting. As you incorporate your big six projections and you put out a Trump budget, you are doing it at OMB obviously. Is there a DOGE, you know, is there a DOGE spot for this, and perhaps how much might that be?
TREASURY SECRETARY SCOTT BESSENT: Larry, I don't know yet, but to think that there's no waste, fraud, or abuse in the US government, you know, think about it.
Now that I live in DC, 25% of US GDP blows through area code 202.
Everybody is trying, there are all these markers on that same thing, Americans with healthcare, every Monday is paying for your healthcare. But when you think about 25% of GDP flowing through area code 202, everybody's trying to skim a portion of it, trying to reallocate it. I don't know what the savings level can be, but I think examining a lot of these contracts, a lot of this employment.
I was with Glenn Youngkin, Governor of Virginia, the other day, and I thought he would, all these people are in a state over government layoffs. So his Northern Virginia would probably be the area most affected, and he said, "Governor, how are you handling this, how are you messaging it?" And he said, "We have 350,000 private sector jobs available in Virginia. My office has a portal up, and anyone can go on the portal and come and join us in the private sector.
Quote:
LARRY KUDLOW: I mean, that goes to your theory which I think President Trump has adopted, but it was your note, your idea. You want to, this has been a government-driven economy, you want to make this a private sector-driven economy. We want to, as I understand it, disempower the public federal bureaucracy and re-empower the kind of risk-taking and investment that goes along with private sector advances.
You'll see headlines, "Federal jobs are down, oh my God," but the fact is private jobs, the fact is the private sector should be vastly bigger than the public sector anyway, and your tax policies have a lot of it.
So I want to end on your theory t
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I would like to add something
The era of high tariffs was the era of greatest industrial growth. But it was done on the backs of 8-y/o coal miners 
and textile workers 
seamstresses burned to death in garment factories, meatpackers and railroad builders working 80 hours a week for pennies, and settlers who carved out farms from the prairie practically with their bare hands. “Business“ was booming but life wasn't good for most. The days of the robber baron. The gilded age.
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"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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