Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187599
PAGE 12 of 48
Quote:The plan will work great if Trump conquers Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.
I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
Excellent.
It will work out great without any of those things happening.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law
By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM
Shut the fuck up, Ali.
What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.
Let's find out, shall we?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:What the world needs is more diversity of ideas. Nazis have many ideas to share on Twitter and at the White House with the world:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law
By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM
Shut the fuck up, Ali.
What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.
Let's find out, shall we?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Elon Musk, once a tacit backer of DEI, now focuses on anti-White bias
Musk, who was raised during South African apartheid, used to steer clear of debate about race. Now, he frequently advocates for White people.
By Beth Reinhard, Faiz Siddiqui and Clara Ence Morse | March 20, 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/20/elon-musk-race-dei-
doge/
In the spring of 2017, two months after a Black employee sued Tesla and alleged that co-workers frequently called him the n-word with impunity, chief executive Elon Musk sent out a companywide email with the subject line “Doing the right thing.”
The note marked one of the first times that the billionaire tech icon, born and raised in privilege during South African apartheid, engaged in a public conversation about race. Avoid making offensive comments, Musk said — but don’t be overly sensitive.
“Part of not being a huge jerk is considering how someone might feel who is part of an historically less represented group,” Musk wrote to thousands of employees, in a message later included in court filings in another lawsuit. But Musk added: “In fairness, if someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology.”
Over the next eight years, as he became the richest man in the world, Musk shifted from a Democratic-leaning critic of Donald Trump to a Republican-friendly Trump acolyte. He emerged as a hero on the far right who frequently comments on racial issues — and who wields extraordinary power overseeing the president’s cost-cutting operation, known as the U.S. DOGE Service. Musk’s operatives at DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency — have taken root in offices across the federal bureaucracy, sweeping up reams of potentially sensitive data and demanding drastic cuts to programs and personnel.
An early target was the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at all federal agencies. While opposition to DEI programs has become a mainstream Republican position, Musk has articulated more radical views on race in interviews and posts on X, his social media platform.
He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.
Now, civil rights activists and government watchdogs are concerned that Musk is bringing these views on race and immigration to bear as he and his DOGE staffers scrutinize all corners of the government and execute major public policy changes. Having dispatched with DEI programs, Musk’s team is starting to purge those tasked with protecting employees’ civil rights and investigating discrimination claims.
Earlier this year, Trump seized on Musk’s long-standing claim that DEI efforts have made air travel less safe. H
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Quote:I posted that the judge was out of bounds but didn't bother to explain why. Apparently, he demanded the details of deportation flights, which are secret. That sounds like misconduct to me.
Originally posted by second:Quote:“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Judge is out of bounds.
16.Judge warns of "consequences" as Trump administration resists disclosing deportation flight details, while AG Bondi attacks court's authority.
Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back against President Donald Trump and his allies’ calls to impeach judges who’ve ruled against the administration.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said Tuesday in a rare and brief statement issued just hours after Trump publicly joined demands by his supporters to remove judges he called “crooked.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/john-roberts-donald-trump-imp
each-federal-judges-00235742
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Rogue Soros-Funded NGO Plots Multi-City Assault On Tesla As Domestic Terrorism Escalates
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rogue-soros-funded-ngo-plots-multi
-city-assault-tesla-domestic-terrorism-escalates
Unhinged globalists out themselves as the terrorists that they are, while their "extinction event" climate crisis is thrown out the window.
Fortunately under Trump II, ANTIFA/ BLM/ TDS violence won't be tolerated.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What the world needs is more diversity of ideas.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law
By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM
Shut the fuck up, Ali.
What's your green card status? How many of your family members are here illegally.
Let's find out, shall we?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Yes. I agree.
That's another reason why the Democratic Party is dying. They don't agree.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:A strong dollar definitely gets in the way of re-industrializing America. A strong dollar makes imports cheap, and American exports expensive. It's not the ONLY cause of our trade deficit; Bill Cl
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism. The Mar-a-Lago Accord is, on its face, a far-fetched policy proposal and it is easy to pick holes in it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.
I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
By Adam Tooze | Mar 19, 2025
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome
What is the Mar-a-Lago Accord?
The US gives the rest of the world:
1. Security
2. Access to US markets/US consumers
The US gets from the rest of the world:
1. A weaker dollar
2. A bigger manufacturing sector
3. Existing US Treasury debt swapped to new Treasury century bonds (100 year maturity. The longest maturity for U.S. Treasury bonds currently available to investors is 30 years.)
Two tools to achieve such an outcome:
1. Tariffs to exert pressure on countries to sign the Mar-a-Lago Accord and to grow the US manufacturing sector
2. A US sovereign wealth fund that can be used to buy foreign currencies to depreciate the dollar
Q1: Why is a Mar-a-Lago Accord in the news?
President Trump aims to restructure global trade by addressing the overvalued dollar, seen as the root cause of U.S. trade deficits. Inspired by an essay by Stephen Miran (Trump’s economic advisor), the Accord proposes weakening the dollar, similar to the 1985 Plaza Accord.
Q2: Key observations of the essay?
The U.S. trade deficit stems from dollar overvaluation driven by inelastic demand for U.S. Treasuries and Foreign Exchange interventions by trading partners. No viable alternative reserve currencies (e.g., eurozone fragmentation, China’s capital controls) exacerbate the issue.
Q3: Key recommendations?
Two paths: 1) Multilateral “Mar-a-Lago Accord” with allies to weaken the dollar via coordinated policies.
2) Unilateral measures (tariffs, security threats) if partners resist
Q4: How would the Accord work?
Key nations (eurozone, China, Japan) would sell dollars/Treasuries from reserves. Incentives include lower tariffs; challenges include reluctance from China/eurozone and market instability from reserve managers selling Treasuries.
Q5: Unilateral approach?
1) Impose a “user fee” on foreign Treasury holdings to drive out reserve managers. 2) Expand the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund or sell gold reserves. Risks include inflation and market dislocation.
Q6: Impact on Treasuries?
Forced swaps to century bonds could trigger defaults and rating downgrades. Voluntary swaps avoid default but face market skepticism. Treasury yields could rise, losing benchmark status to corporate debt
Q7: Sequencing of the blueprint?
Tariffs and security threats first to create leverage. Reciprocal tariffs in April 2025 signal intent Fed cooperation (post-2026 leadership change) may mitigate bond market fallout
Q8: Implications for the dollar?
Short-term dollar strength (to offset tariff-driven inflation), followed by long-term decline post-Accord. JPY (Japanese yen) could surge 20-25% due to undervaluation and safe-haven demand.
Q9: Opportunities for Europe?
Euro could gain reserve status if the dollar weakens. Requires eurozone joint debt issuance and Capital Markets Union to address fragmentation.
Q10: Other takeaways?
Higher financial volatility, reassessment of sovereign risk premia, and shifts to non-U.S. assets. Risks include destabilizing Treasury markets and counterproductive dollar strength.
More at https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome
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The case for conservatism
By Ian Millhiser | Mar 21, 2025 at 5:05 AM
https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/405324/case-for-conservatism-trump-el
on-musk
The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton labels the “more intelligent type of reformer,” scolds his companion, warning him that they should only remove the fence once they know why it was put there.
The point is that, before anything is changed, decision-makers should at least know why the thing that they are changing exists, lest they discover its true purpose after its removal ends in disaster.
Never has Chesterton’s wisdom been so apparent than the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, which, among other things, have seen a broadly worded freeze on domestic spending, a similar pause on foreign aid, and an indiscriminate effort to push as many federal workers out of their jobs as possible. All of these initiatives have had unintended consequences, from defunding a prison full of ISIS fighters to leaving the agency meant to safeguard nuclear material in dire straits.
Some of these decisions were rapidly reversed, but not all of them. And even a temporary error by the government can have catastrophic effects, because the government — unlike the business world — does the kind of work that must be done right every single time.
Every Social Security recipient must receive their check on time, lest they be unable to make their rent or buy food. Every hospital must be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid, lest they shut down and leave entire swaths of the country without care. The country still reels from a single terrorist attack that our intelligence and national security communities failed to stop a quarter century ago.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that change is happening so rapidly right now, because there is no meaningful political movement in the United States advocating for a more methodical, conservative approach.
We need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that major changes call for even greater deliberation and planning.
The Republican Party, long the home of American conservatism, is now entirely under the sway of impatient reactionaries. The GOP isn’t just the party of Trump; it’s the party that made a notorious booster of quack medical theories health secretary, and that chose a Fox News host accused of substance abuse and sexual assault to lead the Pentagon — both with near-total support from Republican senators.
Democrats, meanwhile, often feel trapped into a role as the sole remaining defenders of institutions, and they chafe against that role. As Neera Tanden, recently President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser and now the leader of the Center for American Progress, told Politico, “it’s incumbent on us not to be defenders of the status quo.”
It’s not surprising that neither major party wants to be the voice of this status quo. Americans are discontent — according to Gallup, the last time a majority of the country were satisfied with “the way things are going in the US,” George W. Bush was still in his first term. And I am not making the case for stagnation. We don’t need to settle for broken systems; we just need to make sure we don’t make them worse in the name of “fixing” them.
But as we observe the chaos of Trump’s second presidency, where US trade policy can shift wildly over the course of any given day, it’s clear that something is out of balance. There is no one — or, at least, no one in a position of power — pushing for thoughtful consideration before half-baked ideas are implemented.
America needs conservative voices. Not the politicians who align themselves with the so-called conservative movement, but policymakers who are conservative in a more traditional sense. That means we need leaders who believe that change should come only after careful deliberation, and that m
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Europe is a superpower, if it wants to be
By Paul Krugman | Mar 21, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/is-the-sleeping-giant-awakening
A quick note from Brussels: Everyone I talked to was horrified and terrified by what’s happening in America — but not cowed. If anything the mood was that Europe has to grow up and stand up.
I doubt many people in the U.S. realize what a geopolitical earthquake just happened in Germany. They didn’t pass legislation; they changed the constitution (or will have, assuming the upper house goes along) to lift the “debt brake” on a trillion euros of defense and infrastructure spending. Combine that with tough talk from France and strong indications that on security matters, at least, Britain will consider itself part of Europe, and suddenly it seems as if a continent that was always a superpower, but refused to act like one, may be waking up.
The truth is that there are three economic superpowers in the world — and by one measure, at least, purchasing power of GDP, the United States is the smallest of the three:
Source: World Bank
Yes, European productivity has lagged for the past couple of decades, and none of the world’s giant technology firms is European. Yet this is still a rich, highly capable society, with immense capacity to defend its values on the world stage.
Until now, however, Europe has lived in a state of learned helplessness, relying on America for its security. That’s now over. It’s not just the tariffs and Trump’s obvious support for Putin. I don’t know if Americans realize how big a shock it has been that European citizens are being arrested and detained by ICE. Suddenly it’s clear that America is not an ally, may not even be a democracy, and Europe must look after itself.
The question, which I can’t answer, is how quickly Europe can stand up. There’s clearly going to be a shift away from U.S. weapons, and Europe clearly has the technological capacity to do that. Will it be able to do so soon enough to turn the tide in Ukraine? I have no idea.
Nor can we rule out the possibility that Europe will return to form and disappoint everyone.
But big stuff is happening, and team Trump, which seems to believe that nobody can stand up to his whims, may get a rude shock from old Europe.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001, after a lengthy 15-year accession process. Is there other explanations than China for why the National Debt has increased at an ever accelerating rate? Yes, there are:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Once China was accepted into the WTO, American business flooded China with investments, hoping to tap into their giant market.
Every President since then screwed the pooch by running huge deficits, so now we have a $35 trillion debt.
Unforgivable.
Trump looks like a President frantic to save the USA from bankruptcy:
Cutting costs.
Weakening the dollar deliberately instead of having it collapse catastrophically
Scavenging war zones for any economic opportunity he can bully people into.
He still wants/ needs the dollar to be THE reserve currency, but on more sustainable terms.
BTW, GDP is supposed to reflect AMERICAN production of goods and services. In no way are "imports" part of that. Liberals have done a lot to jigger the figures (for example, counting home ownership as part of GDP, by adding in what the homeowners MIGHT have spent on rent as a "service")... but counting imports?
A bridge too far.
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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
1. Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio
Without the Bush and Trump tax cuts, debt as a percentage of the economy would be declining permanently.
Taken together, the Bush tax cuts, their bipartisan extensions, and the Trump tax cuts, have cost $10 trillion since their creation and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since then. They are responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if you exclude the one-time costs for responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession. While these one-time costs increased the level of debt, they did nothing to affect the trajectory of the debt ratio. With or without them, the United States would currently have stable debt, albeit potentially at a higher level, despite rising spending.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primarily-respon
sible-for-the-increasing-debt-ratio/
2. The Wealthy and Corporations Have Received Massive Tax Cuts in Recent Decades
U.S. policymakers have substantially reduced taxes for wealthy households in recent decades. The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts[2] reduced individual income tax rates, taxes on capital gains and dividends, and the tax on estates, all of which provided the largest benefits to the highest-income taxpayers. Though policymakers let many of the Bush tax cuts for high-income households expire in 2013, the 2017 Trump tax cuts again lowered individual income tax rates (including the top rate) and weakened the estate tax, so that it applied only to the wealthiest estates: those worth more than $11 million per person or $22 million per couple, indexed for inflation. The 2017 law also created a large new tax deduction on “pass-through” business income (business income from partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships) and enacted large and permanent tax cuts for corporations.
Taken together, these tax cuts disproportionately flowed to households at the top and cost significant federal revenues, adding trillions to the national debt since their enactment.[3] By shrinking revenues, these tax cuts limit policymakers’ ability and willingness to make public investments that pay off in tangible and important ways for individuals, families, communities, and the country as a whole.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/after-decades-of-costly-regr
essive-and-ineffective-tax-cuts-a-new-course-is
3. Trump and Musk do not pay income taxes. Really. They don’t. That is the reason Trump and Musk do not publicize their IRS form 1040.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+and+Musk+do+not+pay+income
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Quote:The Tesla Secret That Exposes Elon Musk’s Whole Game
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack
Monday, January 20, 2025 8:20 AM
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=66397&p=1
The entire atmosphere surrounding all of this is completely different than it was in 2016 and 2020.
Things just kind of feel normal again.
It's like all the loudest voices either screamed themselves out or they aren't being platformed anymore and/or we just finally, collectively tuned them out for a change.
It's kind of nice, innit?
Happy Inauguration Day!
By J. Dylan Sandifer | March 21, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/192993/tesla-elon-musk-credits-money
Two egos like Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s could never share the spotlight if it weren’t for the unifying force of grifter solidarity—two oligarchs teaming up to further tip the scales against everyone else. Just as Trump’s P.R. campaign as a canny dealmaker hid his multiple bankruptcies, Musk’s rogue genius performance serves as cover for the fact that he’s just another billionaire buying up others’ ideas and playing the system with enough of a safety net to repeatedly fail. His whole shtick is built on the idea that he’s a bold, self-made innovator who defies the odds, shuns government handouts, and stands for the unbridled power of the free market. In reality, his empire, built originally on an apartheid emerald mine, has been propped up by public money for years. One of its most consistent sources of income has been Tesla’s exploitation of the carbon credit market.
Tesla, the supposed future of clean energy, isn’t just making money by selling electric cars—it’s making a fortune off a regulatory loophole. In the first nine months of 2024, 43 percent of Tesla’s net income came from selling credits to other automakers that hadn’t met emissions standards. It’s not innovation that’s keeping Tesla’s finances afloat; it’s a rigged system that Musk is milking for everything it’s worth. And all the while, he’s using his newfound power as Trump’s unelected co-president to gut the very government programs that provide working people with a fraction of the support that he’s quietly pocketing.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump
Musk loves to sneer at working-class people who rely on food stamps or unemployment benefits, claiming they’re lazy or entitled. But what’s more entitled than using regulatory credits to boost your company’s stock price and then leveraging that stock for loans to keep your cash flow steady? The hypocrisy gets even more grotesque when you look at Musk’s role in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—the dystopian fever dream where he’s now helping Trump dismantle social programs under the guise of “cutting waste.” While he’s ensuring billionaires like himself keep their tax breaks and loopholes, he’s working to slash food assistance, disability benefits, and Social Security. The plan is clear: If you’re rich, the government will help you get richer. If you’re poor, you’re on your own.
Meanwhile, Musk has strategically positioned himself to undermine public infrastructure alternatives to his products. Musk has started targeting public transit and infrastructure projects, claiming they are bloated and inefficient—while his own half-baked ideas, like the Las Vegas “Loop” (a glorified tunnel for Teslas), receive public subsidies and fizzle out into tech-world vaporware. He is claiming that government spending on social good is a waste, while positioning himself as the one true visionary who should receive those taxpayer dollars instead.
Here’s how Tesla’s legalized scam works: Under California’s Zero Emission Vehicle, or ZEV, mandate and the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards, carmakers are required to meet emissions targets. If they don’t, they have to buy carbon credits from companies that produce cleaner vehicles. Tesla, which only sells electric cars, racks up a surplus of
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We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I don't take Trumptards seriously because you aren't humans, you're self-pitying Nazis wailing that they aren't respected for their imaginary importance to the functioning of America. I'm not sorry to tell you that, 6ix, self-pitying loser who thinks he is a winner because of Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump’s commerce secretary: Don’t complain if we don’t send your Social Security check
By Brett Arends | March 21, 2025
Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary made another staggering statement on Friday when he suggested that only “fraudsters” and people “stealing” from the government would complain if they didn’t get their Social Security checks next month.
“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said during a YouTube interview Friday. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month.”
By contrast, he said, “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah. ’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.”
The comments, coming just as Musk and his DOGE team slash the number of people working at Social Security and close branch offices, are unlikely to win friends and influence people even among Republicans, let alone anyone else.
While the mother-in-law of a Wall Street billionaire might not worry too much if her monthly check was late, others might worry if their own goes missing.
And if they complain that their check didn’t arrive — particularly if that is the result of the latest DOGE cuts to the Social Security Administration — it may not be because they are “stealing” from the government by asking for the Social Security benefits they earned over a lifetime of work, but because they need them to live on.
The bizarre, almost surreal comment comes just days after Lutnick, a former Wall Street tycoon, used his position to pump stock in Elon Musk’s company Tesla even though he knew that Musk stands to make a staggering $400 million in personal gain for each $1 the stock rises.
Forbes, which recently estimated Lutnick’s personal fortune at $1.5 billion, has also referred to him as “the most hated man on Wall Street.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-commerce-secretary-dont-compl
ain-if-we-dont-send-your-social-security-check-236e2702
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:I don't take Trumptards seriously because you aren't humans,
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We don't take any of your claims seriously anymore. Keep screaming into the void.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.
We reject the Pod People.
It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trumptards are bonded to Trump by the same rhetorical mechanisms as Nazis were bonded to Hitler
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.
We reject the Pod People.
It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.
Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a “Little Man” whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter to his Nazis.
By Timothy W. Ryback | March 21, 2025, 9 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/hitler-press-germany
/682130/
While awaiting trial and execution at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocities, the Hitler attorney Hans Frank observed that it had been this alleged commitment to the common man and a “greater cause” that bonded the führer to his followers. “If one is to be brutally honest, one has to admit,” Frank explained, that Hitler “said aloud what was in the minds of most people and gave clear expression to what everyone was experiencing along with a plan to address the hopes and suffering of the people.”
Frederic Sackett, the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1930 to 1933, confirmed Frank’s assessment that the bond between Hitler and his political base seemed infrangible, no matter how ridiculous he appeared to the reporters who covered him. “The expectation frequently voiced here that failure of his policies would result in large and immediate losses of following for Hitler,” Shackett reported to the State Department, “does not take into account the blindness of great sections of his adherents.”
Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian, put this in different terms. After attending one of his beer-hall rallies, Prinzhorn observed how Hitler manipulated the crowd by dramatically modulating his voice, first rising to a “demagogic register” before falling silent, then continuing to speak in a subdued tone, “as if nothing had happened.” Prinzhorn also noted that Hitler limited himself to a small number of tropes that he repeated incessantly: the “treason of Versailles,” the danger of “Jewish influences,” his vow that “heads will roll” once he was in power.
According to Prinzhorn, Hitler’s calculated and mesmerizing combination of volume, rhythm, modulation, and repetition induced the suspension of logic and reason in rally attendees, generating an emotional response in his followers that rendered him nearly impervious to rational attack by political opponents and probing reporters. “They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say that Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” Prinzhorn observed of reporters. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience miss the point entirely.” Ambassador Sackett called Hitler “one of the biggest showmen since P. T. Barnum,” an “indefatigable spellbinder” with an uncanny capacity for “twisting events” to suit his “fancies and purposes.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:'Raw animosity': 4 conservatives explain why MAGA voters 'want their opponents to suffer'
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a robot and every single one of you robots sound exactly alike on every issue they tell you to talk about on any given day.
We reject the Pod People.
It's really quite simple... Fix your brain, or remain a relic of the past.
By Alex Henderson | March 21, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/trump-brooks-french-stephens/
In the 2024, voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House ranged from hardcore MAGA Republicans to swing voters and independents — some of them 2020 Joe Biden voters — who blamed the Biden Administration for inflation. The economy was a major concern of Biden-to-Trump voters, and the term "buyer's remorse" is being used in connection with swing voters and independents who now regret voting for Trump and are worried about steep new tariffs or possible cuts to Social Security.
But diehard MAGA voters have no regrets about voting for Trump. In a conversation published by the New York Times' opinion section on March 21, four conservative columnists — David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat — lay out some reasons why those voters continue to be diehard Trump supporters.
The writers aren't promoting Trump's policies during the conversation — French, in fact, is very much a Never Trump conservative — but rather, are explaining the president's unending appeal to his hardcore MAGA base.
Brooks cited "brokenism" as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes "brokenism" as "the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down."
Brooks told his Times colleagues, "Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption."
French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, "In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there's a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They're actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the 'deep state' or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who's being disrupted really matters — and if it's the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain."
French added, "Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire."
According to Brooks, diehard MAGA voters enjoy seeing him target institutions they feel excluded form.
Brooks told French, Douthat and Stephens, "I'd offer up one more word for consideration: 'exclusion.' Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge."
Douthat alluded to the fact that Trump's strongest support continues to be within the MAGA movement.
Douthat told his colleagues, "First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis, his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent. Second, Amer
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Trump Promised to Protect Social Security. Musk Didn’t.
Musk Comes for the ‘Third Rail of American Politics’
By Russell Berman | March 21, 2025, 11:21 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-musk-doge-s
ocial-security/682131/
Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.
Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention. Back then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a leader of DOGE, he’s opened an unexpected crusade against Social Security.
Musk recently called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Security Administration and obtained sensitive taxpayer data, and the Trump administration has cut the agency’s workforce by thousands. Earlier this week, Social Security officials announced changes that could make it harder for retirees to access their benefits. These moves—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who have jammed congressional phone lines and town-hall meetings to register their concerns. And they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who could pay for Musk’s decisions in next year’s midterms.
If Musk wants to meet his goal of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll have to do a lot more than eliminate USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and even the Department of Education. He knows the real money is in the three pillars of America’s social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”
Republicans have learned that going after these programs carries a huge electoral risk. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t think politically,” Tom Davis, a former House Republican from Virginia who ran the party’s campaign committee in the early 2000s, told me. His approach, Davis said, is “ready, fire, aim.”
Musk has “been quite successful in business, but he is clearly not very popular, and his DOGE actions are making him less popular,” a senior GOP strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking a fight with the president or his wealthy lieutenant. “He will end up being a heavy weight around the neck of not only President Trump but Republicans generally.”
Most elected Republicans have been careful to avoid criticizing Trump or Musk. But as DOGE has continued to assail Social Security, some have started feeling pressure from their constituents. Callers inundated Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan with concerns about Social Security cuts during a telephone town hall the Republican held earlier this month. He assured them the program would not be touched. “I will admit that there have been times where Elon Musk has tweeted first and thought second,” Huizenga told me, summarizing his message to constituents.
Trump might be able to claim a mandate from voters to justify some of his early cost cutting; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for example. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeatedly vowed to preserve entitlements, even when some in his party wanted to trim them. Republicans have relied on those promises to try to reassure voters that their benefits are safe. “I think President Trump has made it very clear that he does not want to touch Social Security,” Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, told reporters at the Capitol last week. “We are not cutting Social Security.”
Musk’s offensive against Social Security, however, has made those claims harder to sustain. And Trump himself has amplified some of Musk’s most specious charges about the program. During the pr
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Trump’s commerce secretary: Don’t complain if we don’t send your Social Security check
By Brett Arends | March 21, 2025
Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary made another staggering statement on Friday when he suggested that only “fraudsters” and people “stealing” from the government would complain if they didn’t get their Social Security checks next month.
“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month,” Lutnick said during a YouTube interview Friday. “My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month.”
By contrast, he said, “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Yeah. ’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.”
The comments, coming just as Musk and his DOGE team slash the number of people working at Social Security and close branch offices, are unlikely to win friends and influence people even among Republicans, let alone anyone else.
While the mother-in-law of a Wall Street billionaire might not worry too much if her monthly check was late, others might worry if their own goes missing.
And if they complain that their check didn’t arrive — particularly if that is the result of the latest DOGE cuts to the Social Security Administration — it may not be because they are “stealing” from the government by asking for the Social Security benefits they earned over a lifetime of work, but because they need them to live on.
The bizarre, almost surreal comment comes just days after Lutnick, a former Wall Street tycoon, used his position to pump stock in Elon Musk’s company Tesla even though he knew that Musk stands to make a staggering $400 million in personal gain for each $1 the stock rises.
Forbes, which recently estimated Lutnick’s personal fortune at $1.5 billion, has also referred to him as “the most hated man on Wall Street.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-commerce-secretary-dont-compl
ain-if-we-dont-send-your-social-security-check-236e2702
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Dr. Oz Is Now the Grown-Up in the Room
By Benjamin Mazer | March 20, 2025, 11:48 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/dr-oz-senate-hearin
g/682102/
I’ve had a front-row seat for Oz’s unlikely transformation from maligned to mainstream. In 2013, when I was still in medical school, I launched a public effort to censure him. His exuberant pitches for unproven remedies were harming patients, I contended. I asked medical societies to do more to combat the spread of misinformation. My efforts were rebuffed at first; doctors were worried about infringing on free speech and criticizing professional colleagues. To buttress my campaign, I started collecting anecdotes from viewers of The Dr. Oz Show describing potential harm caused by his advice.
Oz did not respond to any of these efforts at the time. (He also did not respond to a request for comment on this story.) His initial dressing-down in Congress followed soon after, and then in 2015, I helped a group of medical students and residents cajole the American Medical Association into writing guidelines for ethical physician conduct in the media. Oz himself remained unchastened after this previous run of bad press, though. “We will not be silenced. We will not give in,” he told his TV viewers in 2015, while accusing one group of critics of having industry ties and denying that he ever promoted treatments for personal gain. In short, he embraced his reputation as a wellness guru and anti-establishment truth teller—the sort of person who would find a natural home in the “Make America healthy again” movement that has been popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Oz is likely to join Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services—and assume control of my parents’ health insurance, among so many others’—in the weeks ahead. That prospect would have terrified me in the 2010s, when I first watched him testify before the Senate. But when I saw him do so for a second time on Friday, he no longer struck me as a major threat. Rather, he looked like an anachronism: a charming celebrity physician with a penchant for theatrical claims. In the face of the Trump administration’s chaotic razing of the nation’s biomedical infrastructure, Oz’s brand of hucksterism seems relatively mild, even quaint.
Perhaps that’s why the Senate showed so little interest in his history of hawking suspect treatments. Even Democrats went pretty easy with their questions. Senator Ron Wyden accused Oz of having engaged in “wellness grifting,” and Senator Maggie Hassan said he’d backed “unproven snake oil remedies,” but this was not a central focus of the hearing. “There are many things I said on the show,” Oz said in response. “I take great pride in the research we did at the time to identify which of these worked and which ones didn’t.”
Instead of grilling Oz on his questionable supplement endorsements, the legislators mostly used their time to lobby for niche policy fixes, and Oz in turn displayed an expertise in health-care policy that seemed worthy of his Wharton MBA. He was fluent on the topics of pharmacy benefit managers, prior authorization, insurance payment models, and the Affordable Care Act. He came out in favor of work requirements for Medicaid—a conventionally conservative approach—while also making sure to show some sympathy for health-care consumers, calling the insurance companies that profit from excessive upcoding “scoundrels who are stealing from the vulnerable.”
This all came off as rather serious and boring, in the way that such a hearing really should come off. Compare that with the nomination hearings for Kennedy: When questioned by the Senate, he botched basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, refused to admit that vaccines don’t cause autism, and accused committee members of being shills for pharmaceutical companies. Dave Weldon, who was Trump’s pick to run the CDC, didn’t even make it to his hearing, which was also scheduled for last week. Why Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn is no
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WHAT HAPPENED TODAY THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW - #50
Friday, March 21,2025
1. Columbia caves to Trump for $400m, bans masks at protest, authorizes protest arrests and forces demonstrators to identify themselves.
2. Voice of America staff sue Trump over shutdown, citing First Amendment violations and 1,450 job cuts.
3. Trump moves student loans to Small Business Administration and children's special needs programs to HHS after ordering McMahon to close the Education Department.
4. Acting Social Security administrator threatens to shut down agency over court order denying Musk's DOGE access to records, then reverses himself hours later.
5. U.S. restricts Canadian access to historic border-straddling library, sparking backlash in Quebec town.
6. DHS shutters watchdog offices monitoring migrant kids, civil rights, detention conditions—calls them roadblocks to immigration enforcement.
7. Judge vows to investigate if Trump defied deportation order using 1798 war powers: 'I will get to the bottom of who ordered this,’ with Tuesday deadline for answers.
8. Judge rejects WH claim that brand-new USAID leader isn't covered by his order, says excluding him would've undermined it, and explicitly bars him from acting.
9. Trump threatens Tesla vandals with 20 years in Salvadoran prison, says they're worse than Jan. 6 rioters-apparently violating their 8th Amendment rights.
10. Trump strips security clearances from Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Biden's family, and key people from his impeachments and trials.
11. Trump ends early the legal permission granted to 532,000 Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, and Venezuelans to live in the U.S, tells them to leave or face arrest.
12. Trump cancels legal permission to live in the US for half a million people… after 8 p.m. on a Friday. He also told reporters that he never signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 wartime act that let him deport people, except his signature is published on it. Somehow he found time to threaten Tesla vandals with 20 years in a Salvadoran prison too.
https://govbrief.today
https://imgur.com/gallery/what-happened-today-50-6pb40f0
Sources (full links below): The Guardian, NPR, ABC News, CNBC. CBC, MSN. Politico, the Washington Post. Axios, the Tampa Free Press. CBS News. Yahoo
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/columbia-university-fu
nding-trump-demands
2. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5336351/voice-of-america-trump-la
wsuit-kari-lake-voa
3. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-student-loans-special-programs-m
oved-new-departments/story?id=120032077
4. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/21/social-securitys-lee-dudek-raises-conc
erns-following-judges-restraining-order.html
5. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/us-border-canada-quebec-stanst
ead-library-1.7489528
6. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dhs-shuts-down-internal-watchdog-age
ncies-that-advocated-for-immigrants/ar-AA1BpCtf
7. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/james-boasberg-trump-administ
ration-deportations-00003815
8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/03/21/doge-usaid-federal-
workers-fired/
9. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/trump-musk-tesla-protests-el-salvador
-prisons
10. https://www.tampafp.com/trump-revokes-security-clearances-for-biden-fo
rmer-vp-harris-and-hillary-clinton-in-sweeping-memo/
11. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-to-revoke-legal-status-of-over-a-half
-million-migrants-chnv/
12. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-didn-t-sign-002445774.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Excellent.
It was a good day.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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In only two months Trump convinced Americans to follow his example and not pay their income tax. Are you feeling the Winds of Change Blowing?
Tax revenue could drop by 10 percent amid turmoil at IRS
Story by Jacob Bogage | March 22, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/tax-revenue-could-drop-by-10-per
cent-amid-turmoil-at-irs/ar-AA1Bs7Yp
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.
The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases.
The IRS has dropped investigations of high-value corporations and taxpayers, according to several agency employees involved in those inquiries, because it’s had to triage resources to keep internal systems operating. Two agency commissioners have resigned since Trump took office. The IRS’s head of compliance, Heather Maloy, stepped down effective Friday.
The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.
That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.
Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.
The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.
“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said.
The IRS has noticed an uptick in online chatter from individuals declaring their intention to not pay taxes this year or to aggressively claim credits and deductions for which they are ineligible, the three people said — wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts.
Representatives from the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Other dynamics could explain some of the projected drop in revenue, experts say. Natural disasters, s
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Quote:IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Excellent.
It was a good day.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season
By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html
IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Money money money for Trump from Amazon Prime Video.
On ‘The Apprentice,’ Donald Trump Showed Us Who He Was. If Only We Had Listened.
Rewatching the series that rebuilt Trump’s reputation is a thoroughly unpleasant experience I wouldn’t recommend.
By Karen Valby | March 19, 2025
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/rewatching-the-apprentice-o
riginal-donald-trump
The braid of Amazon and Donald Trump grows tighter. Prime Video announced last week that it would stream the first seven seasons of The Apprentice, the boardroom reality show that resurrected Trump’s cultural relevance when it premiered in 2004. (This deal is likely to directly line the pockets of Trump, who not only starred in the show but also served as an executive producer, even retaining that credit during his first year in the White House, when The New Celebrity Apprentice aired with Arnold Schwarzenegger as host.) Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose company contributed $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, is earning praise from the president for his recent moves at The Washington Post, such as neutering the editorial staff. Amazon has also entered into a $40 million licensing agreement for a documentary about first lady Melania’s life, which will reportedly see her earn at least $28 million. Democracy dies in backroom deals at the hands of dark billionaires.
It’s a bad trip revisiting The Apprentice today—watching Trump hawk his show from the base of the Statue of Liberty. A Gallup poll measuring Trump’s reputation before the show revealed that 98% of people surveyed knew his name, but 58% viewed him unfavorably. We the people gave the dog back his teeth. As an audience, we were seduced by his mean-spirited catchphrase and illusion of authority. Yet he seemed harmless enough as a TV star, like the charismatic uncle at family dinner who would pick up the check if the table let him tell the same old stories. His hair has forever been his business card. He loved showing contestants his hairline so that they could marvel that it was real.
There’s always been an undertone of menace around Trump. But on The Apprentice, his shifting moods and leering once-overs of female contestants were softened by the fun he was clearly having. His only role on the show was to preen and slice people off at the knees. Firing people gave Trump such pleasure. He loved pitting members of the losing team against one another in final deliberations, goading them to go after one another. His side of the boardroom table was like the emperor’s balcony; the other, the gladiator ring. “She’s killing you,” Trump would say. “You’re getting destroyed.” “Everybody’s killing you, you’re done.”
Occasionally, someone would impress Trump with a bit of clever spin. Rewatching the show, I could see him flipping positions in real time, like how a toddler can change their mood if they’re served dinner with the wrong spoon. Being impressed by people seemed to annoy him; he would sucks in his cheeks and give a begrudging nod. Any expression of vulnerability or ambivalence or pushback incurred his wrath. “How stupid can you be?” he’d ask in what seemed like nearly every episode. Adulation of self and disdain for others were his two home bases.
During my nauseating rewatch, it was interesting to note how morally offended Trump got in season six after a contestant self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “white trash.” Derek Arteta, an entertainment lawyer, was on the chopping block after his team lost a challenge due to a misguided use of go-karts. As he defended his misunderstanding of the challenge’s target audience, he joked, “I’m white trash. I only eat at restaurants with deep-fried appetizers…”
Trump was appalled by the term. “What do you mean, you’re white trash? What does that mean? You don’t joke about that. What does that mean, you’re white trash?” he said. “You know, I grew up in a small town and I’m not sophisticated,” Arteta responded, still smiling. Trump was livid at this point. “I don’t like it as
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Vanity Fair writing about white trash.
You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.
Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:IRS braces for $500bn drop in revenue as taxpayers skip filings in wake of DOGE cuts at agency
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Excellent.
It was a good day.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Individuals were ‘wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts’ amid DOGE’s plans to downsize the IRS by nearly 20 percent ahead of tax filing season
By Rhian Lubin in New York | Saturday 22 March 2025 15:03 EDT
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/irs-do
ge-cuts-tax-filing-b2719911.html
IRS auditors fired
https://www.google.com/search?q=IRS+auditors+fired
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.
Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.
Good luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:You know that IRS will NOT prosecute these people because the IRS doesn't have the auditors. Why not? Trump fired the auditors. You also know from court cases involving Trump that the courts can't swiftly handle tax cheating. Trump's winds of change will blow in an increase in tax cheating.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. I've seen all the tiktoks of stupid Lefty retards telling the world they aren't paying their taxes and fuck Elon.
Thank you for uploading the videos that will be used to identify you and used against you in court.
Good luck. You'll need it.
Tax Cheats Could Prosper Under Trump, IRS Experts Say
The Internal Revenue Service could lose 10 percent of its revenue — $500 billion — because taxpayers and businesses think the Trump administration won't go after them for not paying taxes
By Peter Wade | March 23, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tax-cheats-trump-i
rs-1235301645/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Even I disapprove of the Democrats. Why? Because they (Biden is a particularly relevant example, but Chuck Schumer is another ) are acting like James Buchanan, the President just before the Civil War, the President who could have had the entire leadership of the Confederacy rounded up in Washington DC (where they were serving in Congress and talking openly of destroying America) and executed. But Buchanan wouldn't do a goddamn thing to stop those talkative traitors before they went on a rampage. The necessary job of burning slave owners' plantations and killing those traitors was left to Lincoln's Generals Grant and Sherman. Grant went on to be President and Sherman "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve" became the General of the Army rather than President.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Vanity Fair writing about white trash.
You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.
Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.
In 1888, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions".
Sherman's purpose in 1864: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#General_of_the_
Army
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Canada, May I Introduce You to Ukraine?
By David French | March 23, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/opinion/trump-canada-ukraine.html
I had a conversation last week with a Canadian journalist about the culture war on American campuses. After we finished talking about that, she had one final question for me.
“What the hell is Trump thinking about Canada?”
She wasn’t just asking about President Trump’s tariff threats. She was also asking about Trump’s obsession with referring to Canada as the 51st state. The tariffs were somewhat understandable, even if terribly misguided. They are, after all, one of Trump’s few consistent policy obsessions. He likes tariffs perhaps even more than he likes walls.
But if anyone thinks that Trump is merely trolling or joking with his constant references to Canada as the 51st state, I refer you to my newsroom colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff’s report that Trump told the former prime minister of Canada Justin Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary.”
Trudeau told Canadians that Trump wanted “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” The president’s statement is not one a world leader lightly makes, even if that world leader is named Donald Trump.
And why wouldn’t Canadians be alarmed? Trump has been quite clear with his intentions and his reasoning.
Let me quote Trump’s recent conversation with Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host.
“Here’s my problem with Canada,” Trump told Ingraham. “Canada was meant to be the 51st state, because we subsidized Canada by $200 billion a year.”
When a baffled Ingraham pressed him, saying, “You’re tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries,” Trump responded with the same talking point: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state.” Later, he said, “One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.”
So, how did I answer my new Canadian friend? “Canada is Donald Trump’s Ukraine.”
Apparently, Trump agrees. On Friday, he made the comparison explicit. While talking to the press in the Oval Office, he once again called for Canada to become the 51st state and then compared Canada’s bargaining position to Ukraine’s. “The expression I use is some people don’t have the cards,” he said. “I used the expression about a week and a half ago” — referring to his infamous exchange with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when he told Zelensky: “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
I did not mean that Trump is preparing to invade or use force against Canada. But he does intend to dominate Canada, to render it little more than a vassal of the United States, making it only nominally independent. In fact, you can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa.
By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump are feudal lords, and each is entitled to his own feudal domain.
It’s easy to forget that Trump’s open hostility to Ukraine isn’t the full story of his response to the Russian invasion. The day after Putin signaled his intent to attack and as the Russian Army massed on Ukraine’s border, Trump told a pair of conservative radio hosts, “This is genius.”
In the same interview, he even declared his admiration for Putin’s ruse of declaring the independence of Ukraine’s eastern regions. “But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m going to declare a big portion of Ukraine independent,’” Trump said. “He used the word ‘independent,’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You got to say that’s pretty savvy.”
It’s a mistake to think of Trump as a student of history, but he does learn, and he does carefully observe the men he thinks of as his peers (and th
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Social Security: A Time for Outrage
Trump’s policies attack his own base — but who will tell them?
By Paul Krugman | Mar 24, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/social-security-a-time-for-outrage
Donald Trump is often described as a “populist.” Yet his administration is stuffed with wealthy men who are clueless about how the other 99.99 percent lives, while his policies involve undermining the working class while enabling wealthy tax cheats.
What is true is that many working-class voters supported Trump last year because they believed that he was on their side. And that disconnect between perceptions and reality ought to be at the heart of any discussion of what Democrats should do now.
Right now the central front in the assault on the working class is Social Security, which Elon Musk, unable to admit error, keeps insisting is riddled with fraud. The DOGE-bullied Social Security Administration has already announced that those applying for benefits or trying to change where their benefits are deposited will need to verify their identity either online or in person — a huge, sometimes impossible burden on the elderly, often disabled Americans who need those benefits most. And with staff cuts and massive DOGE disruption, it seems increasingly likely that some benefits just won’t arrive as scheduled.
Oh, and Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security administrator, threatened to shut the whole thing down unless DOGE was given access to personal data.
Not to worry, says Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce secretary. Only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a Social Security check:
Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
There’s so much wrong with that statement that it’s hard to know where to start. But it’s clear that Lutnick — like many affluent people — has no idea how important Social Security is to the finances of most older Americans. According to a Social Security Administration study, half of Americans over 65 get a majority of their income from Social Security; a quarter depend almost entirely on Social Security, which supplies more than 90 percent of their income. I doubt that these people would shrug off a missed check.
Reliance on Social Security isn’t evenly distributed across the population; it’s strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. In particular, it very much depends on education, with less-educated Americans much more reliant on the program than those with more education:
Source: Social Security Administration
But here’s the thing — less educated voters strongly favored Trump in November:
And by putting him over the top they set the stage for demolition of a government program that is the only thing standing between them and dire poverty in their later years.
Now, it’s true that during the campaign Trump claimed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security or Medicare. If you were paying attention, however, you knew that Trump was highly likely to break that promise, that a second Trump administration would be pursuing the Project 2025 agenda and would do all it could to dismantle the social safety net. And let’s not forget (although many voters did) that during his first term Trump came within a whisker of destroying the Affordable Care Act, thereby denying health insurance to millions of Americans. Certainly any pundit who’s surprised by what’s happening now should find another profession.
Oh, and on t
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There’s a pattern in Trump’s power grabs
By Zack Beauchamp | Mar 24,2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/405489/trump-deportations-gang-pro-palest
ine-spech-power-grab
When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.
The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University, the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff. Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.
Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.
There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.
How Trump’s strategy works
To see this Trump strategy in action, watch White House aide Stephen Miller’s recent interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt.
During the interview, Hunt repeatedly presses Miller on whether the administration violated a court order by sending alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Miller refuses to engage on that key issue of democratic principle. Instead, he repeatedly tries to reframe the debate around the necessity of confronting the gang, arguing that insisting on legal niceties means handing the country over to marauders.
“How are you going to expel illegal alien invaders from our country, who are raping [and] murdering little girls, if each and every deportation has to be adjudicated by a district court judge?” Miller argues. “That means you have no country. It means you have no sovereignty. It means you have no future.”
This, of course, is not a legal argument. If anything, it sounds like a parody of a political argument: “Oh, so you oppose sending people to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison camp without due process? Guess you must support Tren de Aragua killing little girls.”
But as absurd as this sounds, it’s proven to be a powerful form of logic — and not just in extreme cases like Nazi Germany.
In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration and its allies used similar arguments to discredit critics of its policies who have since been vindicated by events. Observers who warned of the threat to civil liberties from warrantless spying and Guantanamo Bay were dismissed as terrorist sympathizers. Iraq war skeptics were labeled Saddam apologists. This “you’re with us or against us” kind of moral blackmail worked on many, both at home and abroad.
The crucial role of partisan polarization
Of course, this kind of thing worked in the Bush era because there was so much hurt and anger among ordinary Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As much as many Americans may dislike Tren de Aragua or pro-Palestine campus protesters, there’s nothing like the level of public hysteria that we saw in the wake of one of the country’s greatest disasters.
Which is why the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategy also taps into another kind of dividing logic — the all-powerful force of partisan polarization.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric doesn’t just attempt to link their opponents in general to gang members and terrorists. They also attempt to link judges and oth
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Even I disapprove of the Democrats. Why? Because they (Biden is a particularly relevant example, but Chuck Schumer is another ) are acting like James Buchanan, the President just before the Civil War, the President who could have had the entire leadership of the Confederacy rounded up in Washington DC (where they were serving in Congress and talking openly of destroying America) and executed. But Buchanan wouldn't do a goddamn thing to stop those talkative traitors before they went on a rampage. The necessary job of burning slave owners' plantations and killing those traitors was left to Lincoln's Generals Grant and Sherman. Grant went on to be President and Sherman "If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve" became the General of the Army rather than President.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Vanity Fair writing about white trash.
You Dems just keep right on becoming the party of the Elite and see where it gets you.
Under 30% approval in all Lefty media polls and dropping so far.
In 1888, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions".
Sherman's purpose in 1864: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#General_of_the_
Army
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.
You lost. You are a loser. It's over.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There’s a pattern in Trump’s power grabs
By Zack Beauchamp | Mar 24,2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/405489/trump-deportations-gang-pro-palest
ine-spech-power-grab
When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.
The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University,
WHAT HAPPENED
Quote:
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents...
The arrest of a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests of the war in Gaza ...
Khalil is being held at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, while he awaits immigration court proceedings. His arrest has drawn criticism that he’s being unfairly and unlawfully targeted for his activism while the federal government has essentially described him as a terrorist sympathizer.
Trump has argued that protesters forfeited their rights to remain in the country bysupporting the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated as a terrorist organization.
Khalil has not been convicted of any terrorist-related activity. In fact, he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
But experts say the federal government has fairly broad authority to arrest and try to deport a green card holder on terrorism grounds...
So, Khalil hasn't been deported, but is awaiting a hearing in immigration court.
IDK what Khalil did, or didn't do. Trump initially said he was guilty of "antisemitism". IMHO “antisemitism“ isn't a crime. Later alleged guilty of "supporting' terrorists. Again, IMHO speaking in favor of Hamas isn't "support", it's an OPINION. However, it's possible that Khalil organized a VIOLENT protest. Like ANTIFA, that could constitute terrorist actions.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-protections-do-green-card-h
olders-and-foreign-students-have-in-the-u-s
Quote:
the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff.
WHAT HAPPENED
Quote:
The Trump administration demanded several changes, including the university enforce its disciplinary policies, implement rules for protests, ban masks, announce a plan to hold student groups accountable, empower its law enforcement, and review its Middle East studies programs and its admissions.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/21/us/columbia-university-policies-funding
-dispute/index.html
I'm good with everything except the last part. Universities are supposed to be where you hear a variety of opinions (not, however, a diversity of facts) and meet different people.
Quote:If you're in the USA illegally, you can't be "law abiding" bc you've already broken the law. I don't have any problems with them being deported, whether they're gang members or not.
Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.
Quote:
Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad
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Quote:Greenland did not invite an American delegation to come visit this week, the self-ruling island’s government said Monday, flatly denying a claim made by President Donald Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.
You lost. You are a loser. It's over.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance, will land in the Danish territory on Thursday, alongside National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The planned visit has been met with anger in Greenland, with outgoing Prime Minister Múte B. Egede calling it part of the U.S.’ “very aggressive” bid to seize the Arctic island.
“We are now at a level where this cannot in any way be characterized as a harmless visit from a politician’s wife. … The only purpose is to demonstrate power over us,” he said.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/24/greenland-trump-00246587
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I DON'T ALWAYS INCLUDE REPORTERS IN UNSECURE WAR PLAN GROUP CHATS.
BUT WHEN I DO, IT'S BECAUSE I’M INCOMPETENT AND DRUNK.
- Pete Hegseth, chosen to be Secretary of Defense as a stunt to taunt the libs
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
By Jeffrey Goldberg | March 24, 2025, 12:06 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administrat
ion-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining.
The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.
This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.
On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”
The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”
The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote
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Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg
Today’s news of an astonishing security failure at the White House, from an operational security perspective, is the highest level of fuckup imaginable.
These people cannot keep America safe.
https://www.thedailypoliticususa.com/p/pete-buttigieg-destroys-trump-w
ith
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Just because he did two Nazi salutes on live television, designed a car that looks like a Nazi tank, supports Germany’s Neo-Nazi party, un-banned Neo-Nazis from twitter, and used a Nazi term to describe poor people, it doesn't mean he's…
OH LORD HE'S A NAZI
Well, his rich gramps wanted to get rid of Jews and coloured people. He's also named after a character from Das Marsprojekt by von Braun, an ideological member of Allgemeine SS. Von Braun's Elon was a leader of the Martian civilisation. Go figure.
Joshua Haldeman, the father of Maye Haldeman-Musk, Elon Musk's grandfather. A chiropractor (ouch.) and a leader of a Canadian technocratic movement, Technocracy Incorporated. Convicted for attempting to install an antidemocratic, authoritarian mode of rule, based upon an elitist government composed of technicians and people of science. It was called Technate, a total subservience of national proceedings to engineers and economists. The technocracy started to rip itself apart in dissent after their predictions about the contemporary economic system falling apart did not come true, which blocked the apocalyptic phase needed to realise their imagined utopia.
Beforehand, Haldeman left the Technocracy and became a member of the famously anti-semitic Social Credit Party of Canada, supporting the release of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying that "the plan outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation in this generation." Later, in South Africa, he embraced apartheid and the ruling National Party, claiming that South Africa leads "White Christian Civilization" against an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and "hordes of coloured people".
His grandson's name, Elon, mirrors the title of the ruler of Mars from Wernher's von Braun's Das Mars-projekt. All signs point to Technate still attempting to destabilize the world and realise their vision.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/joshua-haldeman-elon-musk
-saskatchewan-tech-utopian-conspiracist
https://imgur.com/gallery/well-his-rich-gramps-wanted-to-get-rid-of-je
ws-coloured-people-hes-also-named-after-character-from-das-marsprojekt-by-von-braun-ideological-member-of-allgemeine-ss-von-brauns-elon-was-leader-of-martian-civilisation-go-figure-9VXqRS5
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations
Economists have never considered Canada boring: It has often been a laboratory for distinctive policies. But now it’s definitely not boring: Canada, which will hold a snap election next month, seems poised to deliver a huge setback to Donald Trump’s foreign ambitions, one that may inspire much of the world — including many people in the United States — to stand up to the MAGA power grab.
So this seems like a good time to look north and see what we can learn. Here are three observations inspired by Canada that seem highly relevant to the United States.
1. Other countries are real
I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada, what made him think that it would be a good idea to start talking about annexation. Presumably, though, he expected Canadians to act like, say, university presidents, and immediately submit to his threats.
What he actually did was to rally Canadians against MAGA. Just two months ago Canada’s governing Liberals seemed set for a historic collapse, with Conservative leader Pierre Polievre the all-but-inevitable next prime minister. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Polievre — who has been trying to escape his image as a Canadian Trump, but apparently not successfully — is effectively out of the running.
I won’t count my poutine until it’s served, but it does seem as if Trump’s bullying has not only failed but backfired spectacularly. (And, arguably, saved Canada; all indications are that Polievre is a real piece of work.) But why?
Much of this is on Trump, who always expects others to grovel on command. But it also reflects a general limitation of the American imagination: we tend to have a hard time accepting that other countries are real, that they have their own histories and feel strong national pride. Canada, in particular, arguably defined itself as a nation in the 19th century by its determination not to be absorbed by the United States.
In fact, there are almost eerie parallels between some of those old confrontations and current events. The 1890 McKinley tariff, of which Trump speaks with such admiration, was in part intended to pressure Canada into joining the U.S.. Instead, it inspired a backlash: Canada imposed high reciprocal tariffs, sought to strengthen economic linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
Trump may expect submission; he’s actually getting “elbows up.”
2. Time and chance happeneth to us all
Why, but for the grace of Donald Trump, was the Liberal Party headed for electoral catastrophe? There were specific policy issues like the nation’s carbon tax and Justin Trudeau’s personal unpopularity, but surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did? But there was never much chance of that argument getting traction in the United States, where we have a hard time realizing that other countries exist.
The Canadians, however, definitely know that we exist, and you might think that public anger over inflation would have been assuaged by the recognition that Canada’s inflation very closely tracked inflation south of the border:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:
steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4b6d572c
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Danish PM condemns Trump team over imminent Greenland visit
Mette Frederiksen vows to “stand against” aggressive overtures from the White House toward Arctic island.
By Csongor Körömi | March 25, 2025 11:45 am CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-greenland-visit-mette-fre
deriksen-denmark-condemns/
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen lashed out at President Donald Trump’s U.S. administration for putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland, as she slammed the upcoming visit to the Danish territory by U.S. Second Lady Usha Vance.
“This is clearly not a visit that is about what Greenland needs or wants,” Frederiksen said, about the scheduled trip involving Vice President JD Vance’s wife, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
“Therefore, I have to say that it is unacceptable pressure being put on Greenland and Denmark in this situation. And it’s a pressure we will stand against,” the prime minister added.
Frederiksen’s condemnation marks her most trenchant criticism of the White House since Trump turned his attention to seizing the self-ruling Danish territory, with its vast reserves of critical minerals and vital geostrategic location in the Arctic.
Frederiksen also noted that Greenlandic representatives were “clear” that “they do not want a visit right now, because they do not have a government,” following an election earlier this month.
“You cannot make a private visit with official representatives from another country,” the Danish prime minister said.
Trump first floated the prospect of the U.S. acquiring Greenland during his first term but has raised the stakes since reentering the White House, refusing to rule out taking the world’s largest island using military force or economic coercion — and calling it an “absolute necessity” for U.S. national security.
Frederiksen stressed that when Trump talks about Greenland, the U.S. president “is serious,” and poses a real threat. “He wants Greenland. Therefore, it cannot be seen independently of anything else.”
She also emphasized that both Copenhagen and Nuuk have a strong desire to cooperate with the U.S. “We are allies, we have a defense agreement on Greenland dating back to 1951. There is no indication in either Denmark or Greenland that we do not want to cooperate with the Americans.
“But when you make a visit like this and the Greenlandic politicians say they don’t want this visit, you can’t interpret that as respectful,” she added.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant over Hegseth Fiasco Makes Scandal Worse
An interview with national security lawyer Bradley Moss, who explains why the stunning exposure of highly sensitive war-planning texts might have been unlawful—and reveals Trump as a disastrously failed leader.
By Greg Sargent | March 25, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/193120/transcript-trump-angry-rant-heg
seth-fiasco-makes-scandal-worse
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
By now you may have heard that President Trump’s most senior officials discussed war plans on Signal, and that the group chat actually included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Goldberg published his findings, and it caused an explosion in Washington with many Democrats calling for an investigation, and even the occasional Republican slamming this as an unacceptable security breach. President Trump was asked about this, and shockingly he claimed not to know anything about it. What struck us though is what Trump didn’t say. He failed to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of this mess, and that it should have never happened. Today, we’re trying to dig through all this with the perfect guest, veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Brad, thanks for coming on, man.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely, any time.
Sargent: National security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and some others were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis to open up shipping in the Red Sea. Somehow, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got included. The top officials argued a bit about the plans, and then soon after Hegseth openly shares operational details about the move itself, about the operation itself. Can you lay out what happened here, Brad?
Moss: This is the movie Idiocracy come to life. This is just completely reckless. So, to be clear, what we know so far is that on the commercially available Signal encrypted chat platform, which everybody and anybody in D.C. uses, these various senior officials were discussing a number of things regarding the upcoming attacks they were gonna launch against the Houthis. And what originally looked like a set of policy discussions quickly devolved into extensive details about how these attacks would take place, by what units, what locations, what the government knew about foreign entities. It demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications.
These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.
Sargent: Well, Brad, I want to ask you: It’s common enough, as you said, for top officials to communicate via Signal about certain things, but is it typical for the country’s top national security officials to talk this way on Signal about extremely sensitive military operations as well as the complicated considerations that go into them? The Signal app isn’t an approved channel for such communications, is it? How serious a breach is this?
Moss: This could be a very significant breach if for no other reason than that it’s a commercial platform. It’s not controlled by the U.S. government. Other foreign governments almost certainly have tried to breach it and steal information from it. It is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion.
There’s two legal concerns that a lot of us have right now. There is the more benign and more
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It’s over. America has ceased to be the leader of the free world
Accidentally copying in a journalist to senior officials’ private thoughts about Europe was a gift of Providence
By Janet Daley | 25 March 2025 10:14am GMT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/03/25/its-over-america-has
-ceased-to-be-leader-of-the-free-world/
No more room for doubt now. It’s over. The United States has ceased to be the leader of the Western alliance. That is the clearest and most significant message that emerges from this exchange of puerile texts – which a White House official has described as a “demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials” in the administration. If describing the European nations as a bunch of pathetic free loaders is what they do when they are being thoughtful and deep, what do they say when they are being shallow and irresponsible?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/24/trump-cabinet-compl
ained-free-loading-europe-secret-chat/
Getting this glimpse into what is (or should have been) the private thinking of the Trump White House is the most remarkable gift of Providence. By some bizarre accident, a journalist unconnected to the administration received top secret information on military planning, which in itself must constitute an illegal security breach, and gave us an unforgettable view into the American government’s attitude to its role in the world. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, and the surprise beneficiary, was scrupulous enough to keep the sensitive military details from public exposure – for which he received no gratitude whatever from the White House.
Indeed, he was met with the administration’s stock response when its own actions result in public humiliation: he was pilloried in the most vicious terms by the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.
What on earth is this supposed to mean? That this whole incident is some sort of malicious lie invented by Mr Goldberg? When the White House has already admitted that his account is absolutely true?
Trump himself, of course, has denied any knowledge of the whole farrago. He is never in the room at the time when any of this stuff happens. His initial remarks were simply an iteration of the usual White House response to any embarrassment: he knew nothing about it but suggested that the Atlantic is “not much of a magazine”. What is that supposed to mean? And if Mr Goldberg and his publication are so low in esteem, what was he doing on Mike Waltz’s contacts list?
There are demands now for both Mr Waltz, who has been described by a White House official as a “f—ing idiot”, and Mr Hegseth to resign, which – given the seriousness of the security breach - should be the minimum required of them. But what must we conclude about JD Vance, who joined in the sneering at what are supposed to be his country’s chief allies with such gusto? And what about the future of our security operations? Do we continue to supply highly sensitive intelligence to a White House which holds us in contempt and might just accidentally broadcast critical information to random contacts?
And the biggest question of all: whose side is America on now? The “pathetic” Western countries with which it supposedly shares a democratic tradition or its new friend, Vladimir Putin, with whom it could comfortably carve up the world?
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:Greenland
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.
You lost. You are a loser. It's over.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We're not talking about Greenland.
We're talking about how much of a loser you are.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Trump kills millions with Tuberculosis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/03/25/john-green-everything-
is-tuberculosis-tour/
“Everything Is Tuberculosis” tells the real-life story of Henry Reider, a young poet battling drug-resistant TB, whom author John Green befriended during a trip to Sierra Leone. It also tours the history of one of humanity’s oldest contagious diseases, and probes why — despite the existence of effective treatments — it remains the most fatal.
Back when Green finished writing the book, “I really felt like we were at a moment of inflection with tuberculosis.” A good new vaccine candidate had emerged. Cheaper diagnostics — crucially, ones that would work reliably for children — were on the cusp of becoming available. More attention would come to the disease, and with it, more resources. Green pictured his advocacy as part of that process, nudging the flywheel forward.
And now? “Now I feel like we are on the edge of the cliff. And, in fact, that we have chosen to step over the cliff.”
He remembers the precise moment when President Donald Trump issued the executive order freezing nearly all foreign aid, with the aim of ending the U.S. Agency for International Development entirely. Green was at his son’s birthday party when texts started coming in: from friends who worked in public health programs; from friends who relied on such programs to access lifesaving medication. The next day, Green sat down to record the audiobook for “Everything Is Tuberculosis.”
As he read, he thought about the next chapter now being written by American politicians. He knew hundreds of thousands of people would lose access to their treatment, in the middle of their regimens. He knew that if they couldn’t access treatment, they would die; even if they could resume treatment, they were likely to develop drug resistance.
“It was surreal. It was terrifying. It still is terrifying. I can’t get my head around that kind of punitive cruelty,” he said.
“I would give anything for my book to be less timely,” he kept saying. Earlier, he’d met with USAID staffers; the conversation, he said simply, was “difficult.” These days, many were. In briefings he got from health workers, which were “usually quite dry,” people had been breaking down in tears.
“Ultimately the legislative branch is going to have to do its job,” he said, unblinking. “Which is not just true for USAID — it’s also true across the board. The legislative branch is going to have to claim the power that is given to it in the Constitution, the power of the purse.”
After the book launch winds down, in April, Green will return to Washington, where he and other advocates will lobby lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The terrain of their fight has shifted tectonically. In the past, the system to detect, treat and prevent tuberculosis may have been frustratingly under-resourced — but it existed, and that bare fact represented America’s commitment to the ideal of global health. Now it has collapsed.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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An airport, Mount Rushmore and the $100 bill: Inside the GOP effort to venerate Trump while he’s still in office
House Republicans say they’re honoring the sitting president with their unprecedented bills. Historians see something darker.
By Ben Jacobs and Gregory Svirnovskiy | 03/22/2025 10:00 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/22/trump-honors-still-in-office-
republican-bills-00244107
Benjamin Franklin might have made scientific breakthroughs, invented a stove and helped to found the United States, but did he ever usher in a “golden age” for the nation? In the view of Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, that’s precisely why Donald Trump — not the Founding Father — deserves to grace the $100 bill, replacing Franklin.
Gill’s Golden Age Act of 2025 is just one of five Trump-adulating House bills introduced in the two months since the president began his second term. Other measures would make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor, carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore and create a new $250 bill with Trump’s likeness.
Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz called it an effort “to transform a sitting president into a kind of deified figure” — something, he said, George Washington himself feared.
“This is exactly what the American Revolution was fought to prevent,” said Wilentz, author of “The Rise of American Democracy.”
But to some lawmakers, Trump is a figure worth deifying.
Rutgers University historian David Greenberg said there have been “huge cults of personality” around presidents such as Washington, Lincoln and Reagan. “But even allowing for that on its own terms, it’s pretty crazy,” he said of the spate of Trump-themed legislation.
Some of the bills honoring Trump present practical difficulties. The National Park Service has said there is no suitable rock left to carve on Mount Rushmore, and putting Trump’s image on money would require repealing an 1866 law prohibiting the printing of a living person’s image on American currency.
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 this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?
By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM
The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.
https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html
Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death
Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death
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 does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?
By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM
The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.
https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html
Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death
Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book (At least 20 year old me says it was, and the version I read would have been quite old and possibly the original printing, and if memory serves that book has been updated at least once or twice as technology advanced). I've written about it here probably 15 or 20 years ago now.
It's the book that pointed me in the direction of 1984 and Brave New World. I've always said that I felt 1984 was a life-changing read and I totally understand why the Public School system would want to remove it from schools, but maybe it was actually Postman's book that was the life-changer. That would actually be hard to gauge since I read all 3 of them in the same month almost 25 years ago.
I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations
Economists have never considered Canada boring: It has often been a laboratory for distinctive policies. But now it’s definitely not boring: Canada, which will hold a snap election next month, seems poised to deliver a huge setback to Donald Trump’s foreign ambitions, one that may inspire much of the world — including many people in the United States — to stand up to the MAGA power grab.
So this seems like a good time to look north and see what we can learn. Here are three observations inspired by Canada that seem highly relevant to the United States.
1. Other countries are real
I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada, what made him think that it would be a good idea to start talking about annexation. Presumably, though, he expected Canadians to act like, say, university presidents, and immediately submit to his threats.
What he actually did was to rally Canadians against MAGA. Just two months ago Canada’s governing Liberals seemed set for a historic collapse, with Conservative leader Pierre Polievre the all-but-inevitable next prime minister. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Polievre — who has been trying to escape his image as a Canadian Trump, but apparently not successfully — is effectively out of the running.
I won’t count my poutine until it’s served, but it does seem as if Trump’s bullying has not only failed but backfired spectacularly. (And, arguably, saved Canada; all indications are that Polievre is a real piece of work.) But why?
Much of this is on Trump, who always expects others to grovel on command. But it also reflects a general limitation of the American imagination: we tend to have a hard time accepting that other countries are real, that they have their own histories and feel strong national pride. Canada, in particular, arguably defined itself as a nation in the 19th century by its determination not to be absorbed by the United States.
In fact, there are almost eerie parallels between some of those old confrontations and current events. The 1890 McKinley tariff, of which Trump speaks with such admiration, was in part intended to pressure Canada into joining the U.S.. Instead, it inspired a backlash: Canada imposed high reciprocal tariffs, sought to strengthen economic linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
Trump may expect submission; he’s actually getting “elbows up.”
2. Time and chance happeneth to us all
Why, but for the grace of Donald Trump, was the Liberal Party headed for electoral catastrophe? There were specific policy issues like the nation’s carbon tax and Justin Trudeau’s personal unpopularity, but surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did? But there was never much chance of that argument getting traction in the United States, where we have a hard time realizing that other countries exist.
The Canadians, however, definitely know that we exist, and you might think that public anger over inflation would have been assuaged by the recognition that Canada’s inflation very closely tracked inflation south of the border:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:
steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.am
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Quote:It wouldn't do you harm to know that Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
This book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump. (Indeed, in this breakdown, divorced men were more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump.) The finding resonated with Gallup research showing that the partisan divide between divorced men and divorced women was higher in recent years than it had been in two decades, with men skewing Republican. Marriage is well established as a predictor of political behavior—divorce, these figures suggested, could be a similarly profound and potentially radicalizing event, one with the power to alter its participants’ lives and their fundamental understanding of the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/no-fault-haley-mlotek-bo
ok-review
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:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada,
This: Canada has a record trade surplus with the USA. (So BTW does Mexico) linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Quote:Isn't that like tying yourself to a sinking ship? I hope Canadians realize that Carney is a former Bank of England Governor, and that England may be even more predatory towards Canada's resources than Trump.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney
Quote:Because we, of the collective west, followed the same Covid, post-Covid, and anti-Russian policies that dumped money into a fragile supply chain world, and cut ourselves off from cheap Russian energy?
surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did?
Quote:
The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, [Canada] is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita... Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:
Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank
Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.
So every time someone brings up "per capita" stats, just remember that when there are points on a bell curve that are so far out you can't see them with the Hubble Telescope, they pull the average so far out it has nothing to do with whatever typical people experience.
One way to assess income equality in the GINI index, higher numbers mean greater inequality. The USA GINI index is about 0.42 (the highest inequality of all developed nations), Canadian GINI index is 0.32.
But Canada's relative equality ISN'T DUE TO TAX POLICIES . Canada's Federal Income Tax and Capital Gains tax rates are roughly the same as ours, and their corporate tax rate ranges from 38% to 15%, unless you're a small business where it seems to be 9%.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics
/corporations/corporation-tax-rates.html
So next time SECOND starts bitching and whining about taxes, we can look to Canada to refute his argument.
I can only peg our relative poor economic and social performance to a high degree of political corruption in BOTH parties. The kind of corruption that can't even get single payer off the ground bc they're too beholden to the healthcare industry, and who sold our manufacturing to China.
-----------
"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 blame one side for being evil and the other side for being cowardly. Yes, I am saying Democratic Congressmen are cowards. Here is a real example from American history. If the evil Confederates, who were also members of Congress, had not made the tactical mistake of revealing their plan, they would not have needed to resign from Congress. There were border states that did not join the Confederacy but did continue to have slaves and kept their representation in Congress. If all the slave-owners in Congress from all states had stuck together in 1861, the US would have remained a nation where slave-owning was legal. Lincoln saw it that way:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I can only peg our relative poor economic and social performance to a high degree of political corruption in BOTH parties. The kind of corruption that can't even get single payer off the ground bc they're too beholden to the healthcare industry, and who sold our manufacturing to China.
Lincoln replaced V.P. Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a slave-owning Southern Unionist who was the only member of the U.S. Senate from a secessionist state who stayed loyal to the federal government at the outbreak of the American Civil War. As President, Johnson the slave-owner protected the slave-owners of the Confederacy by pardoning them for treason. Presidents and Congresses undid Reconstruction and returned blacks into slavery, but ones who got poorly paid and could not vote. It took about 100 years for enough brave Congressmen to give, once again, the right to vote to blacks. That bravery didn't last.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson%27s_drunk_vice-presidenti
al_inaugural_address
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy
Trump’s people can be and are both
By Paul Krugman | Mar 26, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/incompetent-or-evil-a-false-dichoto
my
The amount of damage the second Trump administration has already done on many fronts, from foreign policy to public health to America’s economic prospects, both for the months ahead and in the long run, is astonishing. And they’re just getting started.
But whenever I talk with other people about one of these disasters, I find them arguing about how to think about what’s happening. Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?
The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.
The big disaster of the week (so far) has been Trump officials accidently sharing secret war planning with the editor of The Atlantic. Somehow including Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal chat was clearly a fuckup, and an incredible one.
But why were they sharing highly sensitive information over a private messaging app rather than using secure channels? The most likely explanation is that they wanted to evade accountability: texts between government officials are supposed to remain part of the record, while Signal texts can be and in this case were set to disappear. As Phillips O’Brien notes, war planning aside, what the group chat reveals is top officials’ contempt for and hostility toward Europe; some of them opposed an operation against the Houthis because clearing the shipping lanes might help our (erstwhile?) allies.
So the disaster reflected both stupidity and bad intentions. And the same is true of other ongoing disasters, including the shockingly rapid collapse of the Social Security Administration.
As I hope you’re aware, Elon Musk’s DOGE, which is supposedly rooting out fraud and waste, has made Social Security a special target. Musk has done this even though it’s one of the federal government’s cleanest, most efficient programs, and has done an immense amount to reduce poverty among the elderly:
Source: The Conversation
Why is he doing this?
One answer is incompetence. Musk sent his child programmers into the agency and they, not understanding how its databases worked, wrongly reported to him that millions of dead people were receiving benefits. He immediately went big with that claim, and his immense but fragile ego won’t let him admit that he messed up so badly on something so big. So he just keeps making wilder and wilder assertions about Social Security fraud, and in the name of preventing fraud and reducing waste has been rapidly degrading the agency’s ability to serve America’s seniors.
An alternative answer sees the damage to Social Security as part of a deliberate scheme to undermine public faith in government, and to create an opening for lucrative privatization schemes. (It remains notable that DOGE hasn’t so much as hinted about doing something about overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans run by private insurers, which we know are costing taxpayers tens of billions a year.)
On this view, Musk and company see crippling the Social Security Administration as a feature, not a bug, part of their overarching plan to undermine the safety net and make America safe for profiteering.
Which of these views is right? My answer is both. Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that
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America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State
For most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.
By Aziz Huq | March 23, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-o
rder-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/
On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.
The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.
Download the free book (2017 edition) from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ernst+Fraenkel+Dual
Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience.
As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.
The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.
Yet, Fraenkel insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws. After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80 million people,” he noted, needs stable rules. The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalis
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada,
This: Canada has a record trade surplus with the USA. (So BTW does Mexico) linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Quote:Isn't that like tying yourself to a sinking ship? I hope Canadians realize that Carney is a former Bank of England Governor, and that England may be even more predatory towards Canada's resources than Trump.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney
Quote:Because we, of the collective west, followed the same Covid, post-Covid, and anti-Russian policies that dumped money into a fragile supply chain world, and cut ourselves off from cheap Russian energy?
surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did?
Quote:
The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, [Canada] is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita... Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:
Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank
Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.
So every time someone brings up "per capita" stats, just remember that when there are points on a bell curve that are so far out you can't see them with the Hubble Telescope, they pull the average so far out it has nothing to do with whatever typical people experience.
One way to assess income equality in the GINI index, higher numbers mean greater inequality. The USA GINI index is about 0.42 (the highest inequality of all developed nations), Canadian GINI index is 0.32.
But Canada's relative equality ISN'T DUE TO TAX POLICIES . Canada's Federal Income Tax and Capital Gains tax rates are roughly the same as ours, and their corporate tax rate ranges from 38% to 15%, unless you're a small business where it seems to be 9%.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics
/corporations/corporation-tax-rates.html
So next time SECOND starts bitching and whining about taxes, we can look to Canada to refute his argument.
I can only peg our relative poor economic and social performance to a high degree of political corruption in BOTH parties. The kind of corruption that can't even get single payer off the ground bc they're too beholden to the healthcare industry, who sold our manufacturing to China...
AND THE PRICE OF PLAYING "WORLD DOMINATION".
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissin
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Ukraine Was Just Knifed In The Back (by Trump) And The Ukrainians Know It
By Phillips P. Obrien | Mar 26, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/ukraine-was-just-knifed-in-the-
back
The outcome of the negotiations between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia is a betrayal to Ukraine. Basically the US has agreed to lift a lot of sanctions from Russia (which you won’t see at the White House statement but will see in the Kremlin one):
• Lifting of sanctions on Rossclkhozbank and other financial institutions involved in facilitating international trade in food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, their reconnection to SWIFT, and the opening of necessary correspondent accounts;
• Lifting of restrictions on trade finance operations;
• Lifting of sanctions on companies that produce and export food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, as well as lifting restrictions on insurance companies working with shipments of food (including fish products) and fertilizers;
• Lifting of restrictions on port servicing of vessels and sanctions on ships flying the Russian flag involved in the trade of food products (including fish products) and fertilizers;
• Lifting of restrictions on the supply of agricultural machinery to the Russian Federation, as well as other goods involved in the production of food (including fish products) and fertilizers.
It is very difficult to see Ustinova writing this if the Ukrainian government did not understand now how it had been betrayed.
This deal stinks and would be a huge win for Russia if it were implemented. A few things might happen. The Trump administration, having crafted it with Putin, might get cold feet and not push to implement it over the heads of the Ukrainians and Europeans. That would be best—but don’t put too much hope on Trump not working with Putin.
If the US-Russian end of the deal stands, then Ukraine will be left either taking the deal or walking away. It can walk away, if European states back it. The participation of Europe will be needed to bust the sanctions (unless the US decides to just ally with Russia fully and openly). However, this will require some real fortitude and determination by European states to stand up to the USA.
Regardless, the last day (including the Atlantic Story I wrote about on Monday) has once again confirmed where we are.
The Story Of The Year For Many Reasons
Phillips P. Obrien · Mar 24
Read full story https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-story-of-the-year-for-many-
reasons
The US is now trying to subvert Ukraine (and Europe) and work with Russia. The US wants to end the sanctions as soon as possible and start making money with Russia. It cares nothing about the success of freedom and democracy in Europe/Ukraine and actually seems to wish to undermine both if possible.
It is up to Ukraine and Europe now to look after themselves. The Black Sea ceasefire deal is screaming that loudly.
More at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/ukraine-was-just-knifed-in-the-
back
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘We have to have it’: Trump ups the pressure on Greenland
By Danny Nguyen | 03/26/2025 01:01 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/26/trump-greenland-vance-visit-0
0004791
America has “to let them know that we need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it,” Trump said in an interview with radio host Vince Coglianese on Wednesday. “It’s [an] island from a defensive posture and even offensive posture is something we need. … When you look at the ships going up their shore by the hundreds, it’s a busy place.”
The president told Coglianese he was unsure if Greenlanders were ready to be citizens of the United States, “but I think we have to do it and convince them, and we have to have the land because it’s not possible to properly defend a large section of this Earth — not just the U.S. — without it. So we have to have it, and I think we will have it.”
If you are a Trumptard, be aware that Trump is getting crazier day by day.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How does it feel to wake up every day and be a loser?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Tail Wags the Dog once again?
this time its some low Level Gypsy IDF Jew Israeli Romani guy a journalist who writes crap and will try to end the Trump Admin...the Jew Roma foreign guy a dual citizen leaks the military stuff and now wants to control foreign policy
they do some kind of humiliation on Kash Patel and Tulsi, more political BS
all of them afraid to call out Jeffrey Goldberg
We are very much in Clownworld
however Trump is kind of angry and takes it as a personal attack
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Mr. Carney fully admits to being the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
It is Poilievre who has had to walk back comments to try and ditch the "Maple Maga" tag that he's gotten. The other day he had to walk back about taking healthcare down, the dental plan that the Liberals and NDP brought in under Trudeau.
The Conservatives are behind the Liberals in the polls and frankly that's where they should stay. We do not need a trump wanna be leading Canada.
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Quote:The troubling little things about the Signal leak.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How does it feel to wake up every day and be a loser?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
America is, indeed, under siege by losers. These are the texts of middle-management doofuses elevated, unexpectedly, to the executive suite. They are mortifyingly self-important about their new status. They cannot stop prancing around in their new suits, bragging about their new toys. Look at how important they are! Look at how they praise God and CENTCOM! Look at Tulsi Gabbard typing, “Great work and effects!” Is it too much to ask our nation’s designated button-pushers to at least act like this is real? Is it too much to ask them to discuss a military operation with statesmanlike assurance, rather than with bluff enthusiasm, high-fives, and the muscular-arm emoji? Is it too much to expect them to act like they’ve been here before?
https://slate.com/life/2025/03/trump-signal-atlantic-leak-hegseth-atta
ck-plans.html
The part that people are missing is that Trump’s people are doing official communications on Signal to avoid those communications being retained. There are Project 2025 training videos that specifically recommended this type of thing as a way to avoid subpoenas. Our government is using 3rd party software to discuss OPSEC, NOFORN, and Top Secret levels of communication in avenues that do not retain data. They can stage a total takeover of the US and there will be no evidence through any official channels.
18 U.S. Code § 2071 – Willful concealment or destruction of records.
Penalty: Fines, up to 3 years in prison, and disqualification from federal office.
Obstruction of justice statutes (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 1519 – destruction of records in federal investigations). Penalty: Up to 20 years if tied to an investigation or official proceeding.
I think the whole thing is that they're using services to communicate that delete the chat records so there is no evidence. It’s difficult to prove this has been done if you can’t get the content of the comms. For this one case, yes there’s evidence. There won’t be for most cases.
The whole purpose of the transparency laws were to know who did what and when so everybody could eventually be held accountable. That is why the Republicans are using third party websites instead of official government channels for internal government communication.
https://imgur.com/gallery/repost-55djqZt
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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April Fool...no, Canada's next election will Not take place on the First Day of April
Trudeau is gone
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Several recent efforts by members of Congress go far beyond the proper bounds of regulation and look like pretty blatant efforts to destroy the independent authority of the judicial branch for the sin of enforcing constitutional limits on the executive. Their ominous warnings made for a troubling split screen this past week, alongside the Trump administration’s defiance of a court order and contemptuous cover-up of its misdeeds. This mob-style shakedown of the judiciary may not play as a constitutional crisis for pundits on cable news, but it’s emphatically a different variation on the same themes. Last week saw congressional efforts at impeachments for the mere exercise of judicial authority; an amped-up congressional threat to do away with nationwide injunctions; and an overt promise by the House majority to defund the judicial branch. While everyone’s eyes are on the Trump administration’s open contempt for judicial orders, many of us are ignoring congressional efforts to do precisely the same thing.
Congress has voted to impeach judges only 15 times in its history, and there’s no real chance these efforts will pass; if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets. But Musk is using the impeachment cosplay as a litmus test for which primaries he will fund, last week donating the maximum allowable campaign contributions to seven Republican members of Congress working to impeach judges. So even if this is just a fundraising stunt, it’s certainly rewarding the craziest of the crazy.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/judge-impeachment-congress
-mike-johnson-donald-trump.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.
Remember this one.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Remember this one: "no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.
Remember this one.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment.htm
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:BRENDA, I don't care what people "say" ... what they "admit" to, what other people call them. I care about what they DO. And if you want to know what someone will do in future, look to their record.
Originally posted by Brenda:
Mr. Carney fully admits to being the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
It is Poilievre who has had to walk back comments to try and ditch the "Maple Maga" tag that he's gotten. The other day he had to walk back about taking healthcare down, the dental plan that the Liberals and NDP brought in under Trudeau.
The Conservatives are behind the Liberals in the polls and frankly that's where they should stay. We do not need a trump wanna be leading Canada.
What was Carney's record? He spent a lot of his career representing (private, investment) banks. What were his policies?
What did Poilievre do?
IDK.
But Canadian voters should.
People spend far too much time arguing propaganda. Propaganda is for people who are distracted by shiny objects.
-----------
"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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So, the problem with using SIGNAL isn't that it's insecure, it's that it's unofficial and no records are kept. Kind of like Hillary's 33,000 emails about wedding plans and yoga pants, correct?
And since the only participant who "leaked" anything was Mike Walz (by including Goldberg in the list, whether accidentally or on purpose), and who chose the app to begin with was Mike Walz, I suppose this is all on him?
Seems like the guy should be fired.
-----------
"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 second:Quote:Remember this one: "no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.
Remember this one.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment.htm
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I see. You're still operating under the false assumption that you are represented by a party that isn't ripping each other apart while desperately trying not to become completely irrelevant.
I guess we'll see what the future brings.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:The Future is Here:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I see. You're still operating under the false assumption that you are represented by a party that isn't ripping each other apart while desperately trying not to become completely irrelevant.
I guess we'll see what the future brings.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Man declared ‘dead’ by Social Security shares the cost of DOGE’s cuts
Questions about the agency’s future move beyond an anecdote here or there. The question now is how much Social Security can take before it stops working.
By Rachel Maddow | March 26, 2025, 1:22 PM CDT
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/social-security-pr
oblems-trump-elon-musk-doge-rcna198196
This is an adapted excerpt from the March 25 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
On Tuesday, during a Senate confirmation hearing for Frank Bisignano, Donald Trump’s nominee for Social Security commissioner, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington shared a report from her hometown paper, The Seattle Times.
“It was like a Depression-era scene, he [Johnson] said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers,” The Seattle Times reported.
The story was that of Leonard “Ned” Johnson, an 82-year-old Washington resident, who was mistakenly declared dead by Social Security, which resulted in his benefits being taken away. As Cantwell recounted during that hearing, when Johnson realized the agency’s error, he tried to resolve the problem over the phone. However, after weeks of waiting for a response, he was forced to travel to the Social Security office in Seattle — one of the buildings proposed to be closed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“They are so understaffed down there,” Johnson told the paper. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”
After waiting for four hours, Johnson told the Times he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”
That’s just one story from one town about one retired person trying to straighten out one problem with Social Security — and finding a Depression-era scene when he did. But, as Trump and Musk continue to hack away at the Social Security Administration, questions about the future of the agency move beyond an anecdote here or there. The question now is how much Social Security can take before it stops working.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post published riveting reporting from Social Security offices around the country. For the report, headlined “Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down,” the paper spoke to more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security. The Post also reviewed internal documents from the agency.
Here’s what it found in Indiana: “In one office in central Indiana, the phone lines are jammed by 9 a.m. with hundreds of retirees, further taxing a staff of less than a dozen that is responsible for nearly 70,000 claimants across the state. … [T]he questions have become predictable: What is the U.S. DOGE Service doing to Social Security? Will the office close? Will my benefits continue?”
The Post reported that employees there received no training on the impending changes and have few answers for those calling in. “I hope we’re going to be here,” one employee told caller after caller, according to the Post. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”
In Baltimore, the Post spoke to an employee who works on critical payment systems who said that as a result of a wave of resignations and retirements, nearly a quarter of his team is either already gone or will soon be.
According to that employee, the reduction in highly skilled staff is already having an impact. “His office is supposed to
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The Government’s Rock Librarian
Her work was so quiet and fundamental—to academia and industry, all over the world—that she believed her job would be safe.
(She was fired. She seeks a job in private industry. The government rehired her. The Winds of Change are Blowing Hard and Fast.)
By E. Tammy Kim | March 25, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/deep-state-diaries/the-governments-rock
-librarian
Last September, Mary and her partner moved from Oregon to Colorado by car. On the way, they camped in Idaho and took a detour through Yellowstone National Park. They passed bison grazing on the side of the road, saw Old Faithful shoot into the sky, and, when it snowed, took refuge in an R.V. and baked a frozen pizza. Mary’s love of nature, kindled in the back yard of her childhood home, had inspired her to become a scientist. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was enamored with volcanoes and eventually pursued a doctorate, which focussed on the geochemistry of the East African Rift. At twenty-eight, she was finishing her dissertation and about to start a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Being a geologist, you can do a lot of different things in oil or mining or academia,” she told me. “But I always liked the idea of doing science motivated by what the public wants.”
The U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) was founded in 1879, amid a surge in industrial manufacturing and faith in scientific progress. It was charged with the “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.” Now it conducts satellite mapping, tracks earthquakes, and monitors mineral resources, wildlife, and water. It is one of eleven bureaus under the Department of the Interior, but has no regulatory powers. Mary would be working at the Denver Federal Center, a six-hundred-and-twenty-three-acre campus that was originally a livestock ranch and hosted an ordnance plant during the Second World War. The U.S.G.S. building there looked like it hadn’t changed much since then. Mary’s lab had a broken sink and was cluttered with decades’ worth of beakers and hot plates. Her office was in the corner of a windowless floor that frequently flooded. She tried to dress it up a bit, with a used standing desk and a green velvet armchair from home, which her partner nicknamed the “IKEA dream chair.” When Mary was being hired, she was told, in three rounds of interviews, that a new, state-of-the-art U.S.G.S. facility would soon be built down the road, at the Colorado School of Mines, with funding from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “That was a big sell,” she said.
She joined a team that studies “critical minerals,” a category of metals that are essential to industry and vulnerable to kinks in the global supply chain. Critical minerals are used in planes, electric cars, smartphones, and many other technologies. Some, such as aluminum, lithium, and cobalt, are better known (and easier to pronounce) than others: dysprosium, fluorspar, ruthenium, ytterbium. They’re often dispersed in small amounts in sections of underlying rock. When a mining company locates an area that contains a critical mineral, it must excavate and grind up that rock, then separate it into component parts for analysis. Mary’s job was to keep a global inventory of these components, in the form of little jars of fine powders, called “reference materials.” A mining company or fellow-researcher might contact her to purchase a jar, at cost, of Reykjavík Iceland Basalt or Knippa Texas Nephelinite (both a hundred and thirty-five dollars) for purposes of calibration and comparison. But Mary was only permitted to ship the materials to certain countries, for reasons of national security, she supposed. She liked helping other scientists “know that they’re measuring something correctly.” Her little jars were the geochemical equivalent of the original kilogram, a metal cylinder that sits in a vault outside Paris. Maintaining measurement standards is a behind-the-scenes task fe
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I’ve Seen How ‘America First’ Ends
By Ryan Crow | March 26, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/america-first-trump-
doge/682164/
The United States is rapidly dismantling the world order that it built and maintained over the past 80 years. Donald Trump’s administration is demolishing America’s foreign-aid system, weakening its transatlantic alliances, and curtailing military assistance for key partners, all in the name of putting “America First.”
These decisions emerge in part from a belief that has a growing appeal today: The U.S. should fix its own problems before worrying about everyone else’s. But this view fails to recognize that America’s international relationships are indispensable to its strength and stability. In nearly 15 years working on foreign-aid efforts across continents, I’ve seen that when America withdraws from the world, the world’s problems come knocking on its door.
Trump’s policies resemble those of some American leaders in the early 20th century who withdrew from international commitments, restricted foreign assistance, and pursued objectives mainly through threats and limited force rather than engagement and support. Both American and foreign leaders typically expended blood and treasure abroad only when they sensed a near-term payoff, or when catastrophes had already broken out. Using one’s resources to stabilize the international system and prevent bad outcomes was the exception.
The costs of this approach became clear soon enough. Even though the U.S. had the world’s largest economy and an exceptional military, the country was deeply vulnerable to international crises, including wars, epidemics, and economic tumult, all of which inflicted great harm on Americans.
Now, in fraying the international order, Trump threatens to reinstate some of the conditions that made the U.S. so unsafe a century ago. The administration claims to want to reduce wasteful spending and inefficiency. I know firsthand that these problems are real, and that effective reforms exist. But tearing down the system isn’t one of them.
Aiding other countries may seem like charity, but it protects American interests in concrete ways. Containing Ebola or Marburg outbreaks before they reach American soil, for example, is clearly preferable to addressing them once they’re already here. But even the more routine work that the U.S. has now halted—such as training nurses and supporting hospitals—ultimately makes Americans more secure. My own experiences illustrate the point.
In 2019, I worked with government officials and medical professionals in Tanzania to curb the excessive use of antibiotics, and thereby reduce the potential for drug-resistant pathogens. In a stuffy conference room four hours outside Dar es Salaam, we created a system that could help stop the next MRSA infection from emerging in Tanzania and coming to America.
During my work in Nigeria in 2016, I saw how training teachers, providing textbooks, and rehabilitating schools not only benefited locals but also promoted America’s strategic priorities. Because we conducted all of our activities with the Nigerian government, we established relationships that could be used to encourage security cooperation, combat local insurgents, and counter Chinese influence in the country.
And while working on tax reform in Tunisia in 2017, I was one small piece of an effort to ensure that the government had sufficient revenue to pay its employees and provide basic services. This wasn’t bleeding-heart altruism: The project ultimately helped equip the country’s emerging democracy to fight extremism, reduce migration that was destabilizing Europe, and pay its debts to Western creditors.
The connection between foreign assistance and U.S. national security was even clearer in Afghanistan, where I spent several months from 2010 to 2013. I was part of a team that reestablished local government offices and cooperated with officials to rebuild schools, repair roads, and improve water systems. T
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Trump's war on science
A multi-directional assault on the foundations of American research
By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
I try not to do too many pure “Trump is Bad” takes — if you’re here and reading, you almost certainly already believe that — but I think it’s important to contemplate the scope of the harms here.
Thanks to the involvement of Elon Musk and the support of several other prominent technology industry figures, the second Trump administration has a techno-futurist strand that was completely missing from the nostalgia-soaked first. We’re hearing about robots, advanced rockets, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies of tomorrow.
But underlying this forward-looking rhetorical glow is a multi-pronged attack on American scientific research that could genuinely cripple knowledge production and our long-term future.
In order to grasp the full scale of the assault, it’s important to recognize that these threats are converging from multiple directions at once. The centerpiece, politically at least, is a determination to destroy left-aligned institutions, of which universities are a salient example. But that’s hardly the only front:
• Somewhat independent of the administration’s attack on institutions is the involvement of RFK Jr. and his admirers, who until recently, formed a crank antiprogress wing of the left.
• On immigration, the administration’s paranoia extends well beyond a desire for a secure border, and systematically errs on the side of removing more people and making the United States a less desirable place to live and work.
• DOGE’s core fiscal theory is that it's possible to make large reductions in federal spending without any noticeable diminution of service levels, and this creates large, systematic incentives to do things with hidden long-term costs.
• It’s not unique to this administration, but the traditional business community’s hostility to research agendas that might make the case for public interest regulation has not diminished.
• And last but not least, there is a harder-to-define nexus of influence in Trump’s DC that includes both malign foreign actors who don’t want America to safeguard its national interests and believers in a short-term singularity who don’t believe there's a long-term interest that needs to be secured.
More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Lies and the City
New York City is great again, but MAGA can’t handle the truth
By Paul Krugman | Mar 27, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city
I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.
Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?
Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.
It felt like a mental vacation from the grim political news, and if you’ll forgive me I’ll extend that vacation a bit by telling a mostly happy story about life in New York. FYI: I’ll be traveling tomorrow and probably won’t be able to post Friday.
But of course pointing out that life in New York is OK is itself political, because trash talk about our big cities, New York in particular, is a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric. According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.
The truth is that New York, which really was a dangerous place a few decades ago, is now incredibly safe. The city’s weekly crime report provides some historical comparisons:
You may say, never mind statistics, it feels dangerous. But actually it doesn’t — not to those who actually live there. The perception that New York is an urban hellscape comes from people who never visit the city, or at most spend a few days around tourist traps like Times Square, which is kind of a hellscape — it’s full of people dressed up as Disney characters, not to mention mimes.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The implicit threat in Trump’s push to change election rules
The president just set the stage to challenge election results he doesn’t like.
by Andrew Prokop | Mar 27, 2025, 8:32 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/405990/trump-election-executive-order-cit
izenship-mail-ballots
By withholding federal funds and threatening investigations, President Donald Trump has tried to bend universities to his will.
Now, he’s doing something similar: trying to get states to change their election rules.
In an executive order Tuesday, Trump made what amounts to a series of demands on states to change their election laws and policies. For one, he wants states to be more strict at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/preserving-and
-protecting-the-integrity-of-american-elections/
Trump also wants states to stop counting mailed-in votes that were sent in on or before Election Day but arrive afterward — in fact, he suggests that counting such votes violates federal law. Most judges and mainstream legal experts think this interpretation of the law is ridiculous, but it has gained steam on the right.
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146627
Trump is trying to do all this even though the president has no legal authority to tell states how to run their elections. Indeed, several aspects of his order will likely be challenged in court.
But he’s trying to threaten states anyway, with the pulling of federal election assistance funding and with unspecified action from his Justice Department, in hopes they comply.
The biggest threat of all is implicit — that Trump is setting the stage for a really nasty attempt to use the federal government to dispute election results in states that don’t make the changes he wants. This gives states a tough choice to make: give in now, or have an ugly battle later?
Trump’s demands on states
Trump’s first demand is stricter citizenship proof for voters. He wants to force people registering to vote or renewing their registrations to prove their citizenship. He also wants to force state and local officials to do more to check the citizenship of people on their voter rolls. The order also instructs various federal agencies to make citizenship data more readily available to state and local officials.
This demand reflects baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that noncitizens regularly vote for Democrats in huge numbers. For decades, conservatives have believed that this is happening. But they can somehow never find evidence to prove it. Existing data and studies suggest that vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote. For instance, the state of Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2024 and found that, out of more than 8 million registered voters, a mere 20 were noncitizens.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/election-fact-check-noncitizens-vote-instanc
es-vanishingly-rare/story?id=115025674
https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-voter-roll-audit-finds-20-noncitizen
s-8/story?id=115072461
Still, many on the right have long argued that, regardless of whether illegal voting is happening in significant numbers, it is common sense to require voters to prove their citizenship. Critics argue, though, that because there is no actual widespread problem of noncitizen voting, the most consequential impact would be to suppress legitimate voting from citizens who don’t have proof-of-citizenship documents easily available.
Trump’s second demand is that state and local officials not count mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
Every state that uses mail-in voting requires ballots to be postmarked — that is, in the mail — either on or before Election Day. But 18 states have later deadlines for when ballots can arrive (for instance, California accepts them until seven days after election day, and Alaska until 10 days after it.) This is to ensure legitimate votes are not excluded due to slow mail delivery and simply to give voters more flexibility.
However, Trump is adopting a fringe legal theory that an existing federal la
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Forget the Trump administration's buffoonery — here's the real crisis
By John Stoehr | March 27, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/national-security-crisis/
. . . The president didn’t know about the security breach. “I don't know anything about it,” he told a reporter who asked about it for the first time. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. It's a magazine that's going out of business. It’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it.”
Why wasn’t he told? A reasonable guess might be that Hegseth and the others knew they were being careless and didn’t want to tell him.
But that would mean carelessness is a flaw.
It’s not.
Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust them. When things go south, as they always do, he can trust them to cling to him more tightly, as by then, he might be the only thing standing between them and a jail cell.
When people talk about loyalty to Trump, they are not talking about it in the positive sense, as if they love him. They are talking about it in the negative sense, as if life as they know it would end without him.
Once the president becomes the only thing standing between them and criminal accountability, he becomes, to them, the law itself, such that whatever they do is in his name, which means it’s “legal,” which means they can do whatever they want without fear of consequence. Those are the kind of people a criminal president wants around him.
That’s the takeaway: Loyalty to Trump is the national security crisis.
Unfortunately, this is not yet widely understood. As things stand, there’s still this idea that failure in matters of national security is the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself under Donald Trump.
“This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships,’” a former CIA officer said. “This is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning,” involving the vice president, the secretary of defense and the CIA director, “all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.”
But criminal negligence isn’t putting troops at risk, not primarily.
Loyalty to Trump is.
“This is the highest level of f---up imaginable,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “These people cannot keep America safe.” (I read this quote and the above quote in Heather Cox Richardson.)
But this f---up isn’t making America unsafe, not primarily.
Loyalty to Trump is.
F----ups happen all the time. There’s always someone willing to take his chances by breaking the law. We are not talking about ordinary human error. We are not talking about ordinary human venality.
We are talking about a president who chose the worst people, because they are the worst people, as the worst people can be counted on to fail so spectacularly that they will be bonded to him forever.
We are talking about a president who decided against excellence, because excellence threatens his control. He can’t afford to have men and women of integrity, who will honor their oath of office, because they might, as they did in the time, stand in the way of his power.
Which brings me back to utter disbelief.
Despite everything we know about Donald Trump, it is still possible, apparently, to be outraged. As Senate Michael Bennet told CIA Director Ratcliffe, “This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect … is entirely unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better!”
But that’s only if we’re still giving Trump some benefit of the doubt – if we still have expectations of him that are just above the level of a criminal. If we drop those, we wouldn't be in utter disbelief anymore. They will never do better, so we should expect them to never do better. We should expect Signalgate to be as good as it’s ever going to get. We should expect him and his goons to harm and betray America.
And, God help us, we will be right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.
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Signalgate
By David Remnick | March 26, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/the-greater-scandal-of-s
ignalgate
In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.
This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. “It’s PATHETIC.”) And yet much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and the President’s disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought
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WHO’S AFRAID OF BIG BIRD?
Trump Demands Congress Defund NPR and PBS ‘IMMEDIATELY’ in Late-Night Meltdown
The president lashed out America’s public broadcasters, saying both were “arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party.”
By Janna Brancolini | Mar. 27 2025 9:05AM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-demands-congress-defund-npr
-and-pbs-immediately-in-latest-rant/
“Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a bipartisan nonprofit that distributes federal funding to a decentralized network of local affiliate stations.
It quickly featured groundbreaking educational, arts, and culture shows including Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The French Chef with Julia Child, and Masterpiece Theater.
The average public radio station gets about 8 percent of its funding from the federal government, while the average television stations get about 17 percent, according to PBS News Hour. The federal funding costs Americans $1.50 per year on average, according to PBS. The BBC, by comparison, costs Brits about $70 per person per year via a household license fee.
During a flurry of late-night posts, Trump repeated his calls to “JUST SAY NO” to funding public broadcasters.
How am I going to watch NOVA specials about sharks now?
https://i.imgur.com/LBlq8x6.jpeg
https://imgur.com/gallery/how-am-i-going-to-watch-nova-specials-about-
sharks-now-VykCrtZ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.
-----------
"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:Who is holding ABCNews hostage? Greenland? Just asking because the News coverage seems biased against Trump's confident self-image.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.
Trump says US will 'go as far as we have to' to get control of Greenland
The president suggested that "the world needs us to have Greenland."
By David Brennan | March 27, 2025, 7:20 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/International/trump-us-control-greenland/story?
id=120208823
"We need Greenland for national security and international security," Trump said, taking reporters' questions in the Oval Office.
"So we'll, I think, we'll go as far as we have to go," he continued. "We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But if we don't have Greenland, we can't have great international security."
Trump added, "I view it from a security standpoint, we have to be there."
Trump also said that he understood "JD might be going," referring to the vice president, but did not offer any details about the trip. Vance is expected to travel to Greenland on Friday.
Greenland's Prime Minister Mute Egede earlier this week called the upcoming visit by U.S. officials part of a "very aggressive American pressure against the Greenlandic community" and called for the international community to rebuke it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yep, Trump is on a tear.
I knew there would be things he'd do that I think are stupid (pro-Zionism comes to mind), against America's interests and against American's interests (I hope you catch the distinction). Unfortunately he was the only candidate with enough push to win against globalists and the deep state.
Too bad for all of us the Dem party became so deeply corrupted and anti-American.
-----------
"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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I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.
You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.
You should probably move out of my country now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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I'm happy to report that my Medicaid got an automatic re-approval for another year.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Why are you crazy, stupid and blissfully ignorant? Whatever reasons, those are why your life, and Trump's, have been so overfilled with dramas for decades. One part of government that does not need drama is Social Security, which is about as simple a concept as ever existed and yet those self-identified geniuses, Trump and Musk, can't keep it running smoothly. It is one drama after another with those two and their handling of Social Security. And 6ixStringJack, another self-identified genius, doesn't understand.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.
You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.
You should probably move out of my country now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Social Security is in the worst crisis since its 1935 founding
Hint: it’s not running out of money, it’s not being defrauded, nor are administrative costs too high.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-social-security-is-in-the-worst
The crisis is entirely due to Trump and Musk.
So far under Trump, the Social Security Administration has been run by Leland Dudek — elevated by Musk to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs.
Dudek has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for frontline staff.
Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has already pushed out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000, including dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems.
Musk has announced plans to fire nearly half the Social Security workforce and has already begun shutting down field offices.
Dudek has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge — pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that there’s little to none.
The turmoil at Social Security is leaving many retirees and disabled claimants with less access or shut out of the system altogether.
The Social Security website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions from logging into their online accounts because the servers were overloaded.
In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. The agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing.
Trump swore he would never touch Social Security. But by handing the axe to Musk — who deceptively calls the program a “Ponzi scheme” and is moving at breakneck speed to gut it — Trump could be responsible for killing it.
Trump and Musk are:
Lying about Social Security, including false claims of massive fraud — providing a pretext for actions that could undermine eligible beneficiaries’ access to benefits.
Engaging in deep cuts to staffing, new restrictions on phone-based services for the public, and “agency-wide … restructuring” and “massive reorganizations” of SSA that are neither well thought-out nor wise — all of which threaten SSA’s ability to serve seniors and people with disabilities effectively while providing a potential excuse for privatizing key services.
Jeopardizing the reliability of SSA’s systems by sharply reducing staff with technical expertise of systems. After years of underfunding, the Social Security Administration needs more staff — not fewer — to give the nation’s retirees and people with disabilities the service they deserve.
Threatening the security of people’s personal information by giving untrained DOGE political appointees unprecedented access to sensitive SSA data. Musk has granted his untrained employees access to the most sensitive personal data of every American.
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You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.
I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Canada finds Trump's behavior to be stupid, ignorant and hostile. If Trumptards don't see what Canadians see, it would be because they are blind to Trump's defects. Trumptards, open up your eyes and look around.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.
I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Canada Announces Bombshell Break With U.S. Over Trump
The new Canadian prime minister announced the two countries’ relationship is “over.”
By Edith Olmsted | March 27, 2025 4:51 p.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/193287/donald-trump-canada-prime-minister
-break
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies.
“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and auto parts.
“What exactly the United States does next is unclear, but what is clear, what is clear is that we as Canadians have agency. We have power. We are masters in our own home,” Carney said.
“We can control our destiny. We can give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the United States, can ever take away. We can deal with this crisis best by building our own strength right here at home.”
Carney warned that Canada, which is currently one of the top importers of U.S. goods, would need to reshape its economy to wean itself off its southern neighbor.
“We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations,” Carney said.
On Wednesday, Carney called the latest round of tariffs a “very direct attack.”
“We will defend our workers. We will defend our companies. We will defend our country,” he said at the time.
Back stateside, the Big Three automakers took an immediate hit Thursday as the market digested Trump’s tariff announcement, with new tariffs on vehicles expected to go into effect on April 3 and on vehicle parts one month later.
The White House has pretended that the steep tariffs on Canada are a bargaining chip to help curb illegal drug trafficking—a threat so minor that it warranted no mention in the Trump administration’s first Annual Threat Assessment—but Trump openly admitted that he hoped to use tariffs to bully Canada into becoming a U.S. state. His bullying has since escalated into an all-out trade war, which could potentially devastate states along America’s northern border.
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 Great American Crypto Scam
We wanted to ignore it. Now we can’t.
March 28, 2025 5:46 AM
https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/donald-trump-crypto-news-scam.htm
l
For years, many people have harbored a secret question: What actually is cryptocurrency? Maybe they understood it in some sense—money that existed via some unhackable code?—but they didn’t really get it. Some of us at Slate didn’t get it, frankly! Perhaps you didn’t really get it either. The thing was, for a long time, you could get by in society without really understanding crypto.
Now, in America, that’s no longer true. Crypto is in ascendance—and to understand what it is, and how it works, is foundational to understanding the great American scam that’s currently playing out right in front of all of us in the White House and beyond. You can’t grasp the reality of the second Trump presidency if you don’t start here.
Though he is a relative latecomer to the crypto universe, Trump has realized that he can personally make vast sums of money off it. And thanks to their steadfast support of his latest run for president, crypto enthusiasts have been rewarded with remarkable positions of power in Trump’s new administration — all while he continues to strip down every governmental means of regulation.
What will this mean in the long run? Financial experts are watching warily. The embrace of crypto will not be contained, they predict. As crypto is integrated more thoroughly into all our financial systems, the entire economy is becoming more vulnerable to the crash experts worry is coming.
What does this mean imminently? It means that we can no longer ignore crypto as an alternative financial universe that does not apply to all of us. That’s where these stories come in: We made this as a guide for anyone who has been sitting on the sidelines of this universe, because now there is no sitting on the sidelines. We are all players in crypto, and we need to know what it’s doing to us.
Here, you’ll find a glossary breaking down what all the ridiculous terms that get batted around when talking about crypto actually mean. We’ve also created a guide to all the crypto dudes (and, yes, they are mainly dudes) who have come to positions of power in this administration. And we’ve pulled together sharp essays on how this is manifesting in ways that have become all too familiar—how it contributes to the eerie feeling that America has devolved into a casino, how Trump uses immigrants as the scapegoat for societal ills like fentanyl but gives a pass to the real culprit (yes, it is crypto), and the crucial crypto connection to our ever-declining environment. We’ve provided a guide detailing what parts of the greater crypto universe are serious and what are not. And Slate’s tech podcast, What Next TBD, has done its own special project: It actually made a meme coin itself. (Don’t worry, the show explains what that is.) It might be the most illustrative avenue here to grasp the scam of crypto—the ultimate explanation of why it is so easy for the rich to get richer and so hard for everyone else. It really is everything you need to know about Trump’s America.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem
The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.
By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/
Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.
If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.
Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore. Divesting from U.S. suppliers was once unthinkable, but Canada has already begun searching elsewhere. To take just one example, Ottawa is reviewing its $13 billion commitment to buy 88 F-35 fighter aircraft from Lockheed Martin as it hunts for alternative suppliers in Europe. Trump’s threats might compel the CAF to begin decoupling from America—a process that could leave the military even weaker than it is now.
This sudden conflict with the United States fundamentally threatens Canada’s long-standing approach to national defense. But Canadians have responded to crises in the past by dramatically bolstering their military on short notice. Trump may have just prompted them to do it again.
Over the past century, Canada has proved that it can mobilize quickly in response to emergencies, despite skimping on defense spending during peacetime. It sent more than 600,000 soldiers to fight in World War I, a considerable effort for a country that had only 3,000 permanent service members and roughly 70,000 militia members leading up to the conflict. Canada demobilized after the armistice, but rapidly rebuilt itself again during World War II. By 1945, the country had the fourth-largest navy in the world.
After fighting in the Korean War, Canada maintained a military sizable enough to station permanent forces in Western Europe and undertake a series of UN peacekeeping missions. But Canada’s defence spending as a percentage of its GDP began a slow decline in 1957. Notably, that was the same year that the Canadian and American governments agreed to establish the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which still provides a binational defense of the continent. Although Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau started modernizing the military in the 1970s, Canada’s willingness to spend on defense was waning.
This became evident in the 1990s, when the seeds of Canada’s current predicament were planted. As the Cold War ended, Canada’s finances were a mess. To help balance its budget and pay off the growing national debt, Ottawa cut defense spending by approximately 30 percent in the middle of the decade. The reductions not only eliminated crucial funding but also drove away personnel and burned out many who remained. The defense budget increased while Canada contributed to the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014,
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The Truth About Trump's Greenland Campaign
When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.
By Brett Simpson | March 28, 2025, 10:43 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/climate-change-arc
tic-greenland-trump-military/682225/
President Donald Trump has made his fixation on Greenland abundantly clear—enough so to unnerve many of the people who live there. “I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future,” he told reporters this week, once again teasing the notion of annexation. Vice President J. D. Vance is traveling there today, after what he called the “excitement” around his wife’s plan to attend a famous dogsledding race. As part of the trip, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. military base; Greenland’s prime minister, Mute B. Egede, called the visit a “provocation.” Now dogsledding is out, and the entire delegation will together travel to the base.
Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. military and NATO had both started to treat global warming in the Arctic as a matter of real military concern. Whether that will continue under Trump is an open question. Even as the president has tried to erase U.S.-government action on climate change, when he talks about Greenland, he’s tacitly acknowledging that rising temperatures are rapidly changing that part of the world—and U.S. interests there.
“This is a threat environment we haven’t encountered in living history,” Marisol Maddox, a climate-security specialist at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, told me. For decades, the world’s response to climate change has been one of prevention, driven by scientists and diplomats. The Trump administration is openly rejecting that approach. But as the more dramatic impacts of climate change become reality, even a president who wants to ignore its risks may have no choice in the matter.
In recent years, the world’s largest military apparatuses—the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO—have added climate change to their war games. Both DOD and NATO have started regularly assessing how climate risks could affect both military and civilian security, and NATO opened the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Montreal. In the U.S., national intelligence agencies “are thinking about strategic surprise” from climate change, Julie Pullen, a climate scientist who’s part of a congressionally mandated advisory group of climate-security experts, told me. Just as, for instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency might have to weigh the possibility that Iran might one day have nuclear weapons, intelligence officials should consider the nonzero chance of the Eastern Seaboard going underwater, she said.
A handful of other countries—Germany, Australia, Japan, and several small island states—also have a policy for climate security, and many NATO states refer to such aims in their security agenda. But the U.S. has been leading the world in thinking seriously and systematically about these realities. Although this shift happened during the Biden administration, Sherri Goodman, who served as the deputy undersecretary of
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Interesting fan-fic.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem
The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.
By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/
Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.
If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.
Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore.
Nothing I haven't already said about Canada and Europe 100 times already. But especially Canada.
It's real easy for the rest of the world to pay for free healthcare for all when Papa USA has the world's biggest military.
Good luck paying for that healthcare when you've all got to arm yourselves.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Why does Canada need to "arm itself"? Do you imagine that nations around the world (aside from the USA, that is) are slavering to invade Canada?
Whatever the fuck for???
Which leads us to what the USA COULD BE if it wasn't so busy playing World Hegemon/ World Cop.
The vast bulk of our military spending is completely UNNECESSARY. It's either paying for $500 hammers and jets that don't fly, or wars everywhere that don't do us any good.
-----------
"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:Until Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, the Signyms of America were arguing that it is none of America's business what Japan does to China. Momentarily, a declaration of war got the votes of Republicans, but they immediately blamed President Roosevelt for causing the Japanese to attack.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Which leads us to what the USA COULD BE if it wasn't so busy playing World Hegemon/ World Cop.
The vast bulk of our military spending is completely UNNECESSARY. It's either paying for $500 hammers and jets that don't fly, or wars everywhere that don't do us any good.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory
https://www.britannica.com/event/Pearl-Harbor-and-the-Back-Door-to-War
-Theory-1688287
The Republicans refused to vote for a declaration of war on Germany, but Hitler handled that by declaring war on the US. Everyone should remember what a bunch of worthless assholes Republicans are. Europe gets invaded by Germany but Republicans don't see a problem. The UK under attack for years but that is not a problem for Republicans. What was a problem was Lend-Lease. Opposition to the Lend-Lease bill was strongest among isolationist Republicans in Congress, who feared the measure would be "the longest single step this nation has yet taken toward direct involvement in the war abroad". The vote was largely along party lines. Democrats voted 236 to 25 in favor and Republicans 24 in favor and 135 against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Lend-Lease_proposal
Congress has NOT passed a Declaration of War since WWII because Republicans won't vote for it since they are a bunch of fucking cowards. See Trump cheating his way out of serving in Vietnam. Or George Bush joining the Texas National Guard. Biggest fucking cowards to be President. All his bluster can't hide that Trump is a scared fat man.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.
You are an idiot and a fool.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.
You are an idiot and a fool.
--------------------------------------------------
"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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When we're attacked, we should respond.
OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.
Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.
JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.
BTW- We have never been an "isolationist" nation. How do you think we acquired most of our land (invading native nations), the southwest (Mexico), Philippines, Puerto Rico, (Spain), involved ourselves in numerous "banana republics“, promoted the creation of Panama, and involved ourselves in WWI?
-----------
"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, did you notice that Germany stopped paying reparations many years before it invaded Austria? The reparations did NOT cause the invasion. Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power, but a new set of goddamn German fools resumed payments in 1953, with the final payment made on October 3, 2010. Signym, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
When we're attacked, we should respond.
OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.
Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.
JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#Modern
Signym, your understanding of Japan is even more screwed up. The United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1941, which effectively cut off its access to US oil, as a response to Japan's aggressive actions in Asia, particularly the occupation of French Indochina.
In the 1930s, Japan expanded its influence in China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. By 1940, Japan occupied northern Indochina, a move seen as a step towards capturing oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
US Response:
To counter Japanese aggression, the United States began restricting the export of war materials from the US to Japan, including scrap metal, steel, and aviation fuel.
Oil Embargo:
In July 1941, after Japan occupied French Indochina, the United States, along with the British and Dutch, froze Japanese assets and effectively enacted an embargo on oil sales to Japan.
Impact on Japan:
This oil embargo significantly impacted Japan, as it relied heavily on US oil imports. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) estimated it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining, which led to the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies.
Signym, none of this history is esoteric nor hard to understand but you managed to reverse cause and effect:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+America+blockade+Japan+oil+shipmen
ts+before+WW2
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, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.
You are an idiot and a fool.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
See... This is your problem.
90% of the people unemployed in this country vote Democrat.
90% of the people being kept alive in this country on medicaid and social programs vote Democrat.
Democrats are anti-marriage, and a vast majority of young people who aren't married going well into their 30's and even their 40's vote Democrat.
You're just jealous that in a country that doesn't offer free healthcare that I cracked the code.
I do plenty of things to contribute to plenty of things. I just reject the way that you choose to do it.
Why don't you post another dozen pirated movies and books for us, huh?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I didn't post that the invasion began with reparations, so thanks for your strawman misrepresentation. I posted that the slide to national socialism began with reparations.
originally posted by second:Quote:Signym, did you notice that Germany stopped paying reparations many years before it invaded Austria? The reparations did NOT cause the invasion.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
When we're attacked, we should respond.
OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.
Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.
JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
Quote:Fools like Biden*?
SECOND:
Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power,
There were many reasons WHY Hitler was able to eventually take over Germany, but pre-Nazi Germany was such a clusterfuck, and Hitler so materially improved most Germans' lives, they conflated his successful policies with his inimical ones.
SECOND, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?
Quote:
SECOND:
Signym, your understanding of Japan is even more screwed up. The United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1941, which effectively cut off its access to US oil, as a response to Japan's aggressive actions in Asia, particularly the occupation of French Indochina...
US Response:
To counter Japanese aggression, the United States began restricting the export of war materials from the US to Japan, including scrap metal, steel, and aviation fuel
So, our "isolationist" nation interfered on behalf of French Indochina?
You DO realize that you just crashed your own argument about our so-called "isolationist" past, don't you?
We haven't been isolationist for over a couple centuries, doofus.
----------
"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:You didn't crack any code, no more than tax-cheaters cracked the code to reduce income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.
You are an idiot and a fool.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
See... This is your problem.
90% of the people unemployed in this country vote Democrat.
90% of the people being kept alive in this country on medicaid and social programs vote Democrat.
Democrats are anti-marriage, and a vast majority of young people who aren't married going well into their 30's and even their 40's vote Democrat.
You're just jealous that in a country that doesn't offer free healthcare that I cracked the code.
I do plenty of things to contribute to plenty of things. I just reject the way that you choose to do it.
Why don't you post another dozen pirated movies and books for us, huh?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you did with Medicaid what Trump did with the IRS, you both lied. 6ix about his assets. Trump about his income.
For Indiana Medicaid: Asset limits are also in place, with a maximum of $2,000 for single individuals and $3,000 for married couples.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Does+Indiana+put+a+limit+on+Medicaid%3
F
Asset Limits: In addition to income, Indiana Medicaid also considers an applicant’s assets when determining eligibility. Assets include cash, bank accounts, investments, real estate, and certain personal property. Certain assets may be exempt, however, from consideration, such as a primary residence (up to $713,000), household items, and a vehicle. As of 2024, the asset limit for a single applicant is $2,000 but, again, applicants should verify this figure with the most recent guidelines. Indiana uses a five-year look-back period that effectively prevents an applicant from transferring assets during the five-year period prior to applying for benefits in anticipation of the need to qualify for benefits. Medicaid planning can help you plan for eligibility while protecting your hard-earned assets.
https://frankkraft.com/understanding-medicaid-eligibility-for-seniors-
in-indiana/
6ix, the other "facts" you list are also lies, same as the lies you and Trump told to get on Medicaid and not pay income taxes.
Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance
By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, Mike McIntire
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.h
tml
The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 mi
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Quote:Germany was NOT occupied after WWI. Whatever suffering the Germans endured was the fault of the German government. But after WWII, the Germans suffered because of a deliberate decision to increase their suffering:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Fools like Biden*?
SECOND:
Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power,
There were many reasons WHY Hitler was able to eventually take over Germany, but pre-Nazi Germany was such a clusterfuck, and Hitler so materially improved most Germans' lives, they conflated his successful policies with his inimical ones.
SECOND, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II
http://artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/history/htooley/WiggersGermanFoo
d.pdf
. . . But this benchmark was deliberately ignored when it came to planning for the occupation of Germany. The first step towards a retributive food policy was taken during the fall of 1944 in response to a draft SHAEF handbook that suggested that German civilians be guaranteed a base ration of 2000 calories after the war.19 While the authors of the handbook were naturally preoccupied with the postwar rehabilitation of the European economy, this particular undertaking struck officials in Washington as being far too soft and constructive.20 President Roosevelt proposed a much harsher food policy in its place: the Germans "should have simply a subsistence level of food—as he put it, soup kitchens would be ample to sustain life—that otherwise they should be stripped clean and should not have a level of subsistence above the lowest level of the people they had conquered."21 Soviet officials also proposed that the Allies limit grain and food production in postwar Germany, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau conceived of a similar program that would limit the civilian population "to a subsistence level."22
Even State Department planners believed Germany should be guaranteed only bare subsistence for a period of at least several years after the war and not immediately brought up to the level of the other European states that had been the victims of her wartime aggression and occupation.23 Secretary of State Cordell Hull concluded that "it is of the highest importance that the standard of living of the German people in the early years be such as to bring home to them that they have lost the war and to impress on them that they must abandon their pretentious theories that they are a superior race created to govern the world. Through lack of luxuries we may teach them that war does not pay."
. . . In the end, tens of millions of Germans lived through at least several years of malnutrition and deprivation in the wake of the 1945 surrender. It is unlikely that any historian will ever be able to calculate how many civilian deaths can be attributed—either directly or indirectly—to the prolonged suffering that prevailed in postwar Germany. What is certain is that many more POWs and civilians suffered and perished than needed to in the aftermath of World War II, and that the victorious Allies were guided at least partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance in creating the circumstances that contributed to those deaths. Having returned from a tour of devastated Germany in 1947, British socialist and writer Victor Gollancz attempted to put the best face possible on these and other Allied actions:
I have criticised in this essay our treatment of Germany. It cannot be criticised too strongly: for these policies for which we have been jointly or solely responsible—annexations, expulsions, spoliation, economic enslavement, non-fraternization and starvation—are more in the spirit of the Hitler w
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You didn't crack any code, no more than tax-cheaters cracked the code to reduce income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.
You are an idiot and a fool.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
See... This is your problem.
90% of the people unemployed in this country vote Democrat.
90% of the people being kept alive in this country on medicaid and social programs vote Democrat.
Democrats are anti-marriage, and a vast majority of young people who aren't married going well into their 30's and even their 40's vote Democrat.
You're just jealous that in a country that doesn't offer free healthcare that I cracked the code.
I do plenty of things to contribute to plenty of things. I just reject the way that you choose to do it.
Why don't you post another dozen pirated movies and books for us, huh?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you did with Medicaid what Trump did with the IRS, you both lied. 6ix about his assets. Trump about his income.
Oh, so you think that YOU cracked the code here, huh?
Do you think I would be stupid enough to tell you or anybody else online in writing that I was on medicaid when there is an asset check for it?
"Hey Siri! What is the asset limit for Indiana's Healthy Indiana Plan, otherwise known as HIP?"
Quote:
The Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) has no asset test for eligibility, meaning that your assets do not affect your ability to qualify for the program.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Eligibility:
HIP is for Hoosiers ages 19 to 64 who meet specific income levels, but there is no asset limit.
Income Limits:
Individuals with annual incomes up to $21,603.00 may qualify.
Couples with annual incomes up to $29,197.80 may qualify.
No Asset Test:
Unlike some other Medicaid programs, HIP does not have a limit on the amount of assets you can own to be eligible.
Benefits:
HIP provides comprehensive coverage, including vision, dental, non-emergency transportation, chiropractic services, and Medicaid Rehabilitation Option services.
"Thank you Siri. As always, you have been most helpful."
And I'll also add to this that there are currently zero work requirements for the plan and they don't even ask you to even apply for any jobs, let alone prove that you're looking. The ONLY two requirements are the age and income requirements.
As for you, Second...
Shut your stupid fucking mouth.
You have yet to ever once say anything intelligent with that voice.
The government knows exactly what they need to know, and I've never once lied about my assets or my income because I know very well what happens to you WHEN and not if you get caught and you're not a minority or illegal alien.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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