Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187494
PAGE 10 of 48
John Cleese
Putin’s pompous mouthpiece Lavrov has, of course, done a complete obligatory volte-face about America. Someone should ask him why, if Western Europe is now Russia’s sole enemy, his daughter ( by his mistress ) chooses to live in England
https://substack.com/@johncleese/note/c-98613934
More from https://johncleese.substack.com/notes
John Cleese
I note Trump has made English the official language of America. He needs to be careful. It he demands that it be spoken properly, he will lose most of his voters
John Cleese
A New Zealand official has been asked to resign because he said he doubts whether President Trump understands history. Of course he doesn’t. Knowing anything about history requires reading books, and the President has never read a book. But unfortunately, he is the king of ‘strong’ man who is hypersensitive to criticism
John Cleese
I see that Trump and his shoeshine boys are expecting an apology from Zelensky. Something along the lines of: ‘I’m really sorry Russia invaded us three years ago, and that we provoked them by trying to establish a democracy’ ?
John Cleese
I’m quite surprised at how many sensible people wonder, like me, if Putin doesn’t have something on President Trump. If it WAS true, what would have been happening that isn’t happening now ? This is an inquiry made in complete seriousness. Abuse will not count as evidence, for or against
John Cleese
Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy advances the theory that people of low socio-economic status do not want anyone in charge who is smarter then they are. Is that why we finished up with Trump ?
John Cleese
7d
I don’t expect that the MAGA fans know much about WW2, even if Trump’s billionaires do. After the war ended in 1945, there was a consensus that Hitler had become more and more belligerent because, every time concessions were made to him, it encouraged him. ‘Appeasement’ was always to be avoided when dealing with aggressive dictators.
We know that Putin regards 1989, when the USSR collapsed, as the worst thing that has ever happened in world history, and that his ambition is to restore the old USSR and become the Russian all-time hero. His aim is to destroy democracy in all the European countries that have adopted it since the Berlin Wall came down, and install Communist dictatorships instead in a new USSR.
At this time, the President of the United States chooses to abandon all his European allies ( who are democratic ) and embrace these dictatorships - Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary, Haiti and the Central African Republic, by voting with them all at the United Nations
Is it in the United States interest to line up with these dictators against Western democracies ?
Or is it just good business ?
John Cleese
Trump’s thinking is making me reconsider World War 2. All Britain had to do was to avoid that terrible [war] was to surrender to Hitler. Why on earth didn’t Churchill think of that ?
John Cleese
Feb 26
All the great philosophers and founders of religions have warned us about greed. I think I’m beginning to see why.
John Cleese
Feb 25
I’m glad Trump is playing so much golf. It always cheers me up, because I remember that Hitler shot himself in a bunker.
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:
John Cleese
Putin’s pompous mouthpiece Lavrov has, of course, done a complete obligatory volte-face about America. Someone should ask him why, if Western Europe is now Russia’s sole enemy, his daughter ( by his mistress ) chooses to live in England
https://substack.com/@johncleese/note/c-98613934
More from https://johncleese.substack.com/notes
John Cleese
I note Trump has made English the official language of America. He needs to be careful. It he demands that it be spoken properly, he will lose most of his voters
John Cleese
A New Zealand official has been asked to resign because he said he doubts whether President Trump understands history. Of course he doesn’t. Knowing anything about history requires reading books, and the President has never read a book. But unfortunately, he is the king of ‘strong’ man who is hypersensitive to criticism
John Cleese
I see that Trump and his shoeshine boys are expecting an apology from Zelensky. Something along the lines of: ‘I’m really sorry Russia invaded us three years ago, and that we provoked them by trying to establish a democracy’ ?
John Cleese
I’m quite surprised at how many sensible people wonder, like me, if Putin doesn’t have something on President Trump. If it WAS true, what would have been happening that isn’t happening now ? This is an inquiry made in complete seriousness. Abuse will not count as evidence, for or against
John Cleese
Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy advances the theory that people of low socio-economic status do not want anyone in charge who is smarter then they are. Is that why we finished up with Trump ?
John Cleese
7d
I don’t expect that the MAGA fans know much about WW2, even if Trump’s billionaires do. After the war ended in 1945, there was a consensus that Hitler had become more and more belligerent because, every time concessions were made to him, it encouraged him. ‘Appeasement’ was always to be avoided when dealing with aggressive dictators.
We know that Putin regards 1989, when the USSR collapsed, as the worst thing that has ever happened in world history, and that his ambition is to restore the old USSR and become the Russian all-time hero. His aim is to destroy democracy in all the European countries that have adopted it since the Berlin Wall came down, and install Communist dictatorships instead in a new USSR.
At this time, the President of the United States chooses to abandon all his European allies ( who are democratic ) and embrace these dictatorships - Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary, Haiti and the Central African Republic, by voting with them all at the United Nations
Is it in the United States interest to line up with these dictators against Western democracies ?
Or is it just good business ?
John Cleese
Trump’s thinking is making me reconsider World War 2. All Britain had to do was to avoid that terrible [war] was to surrender to Hitler. Why on earth didn’t Churchill think of that ?
John Cleese
Feb 26
All the great philosophers and founders of religions have warned us about greed. I think I’m beginning to see why.
John Cleese
Feb 25
I’m glad Trump is playing so much golf. It always cheers me up, because I remember that Hitler shot himself in a bunker.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I care much more about what Rowan Atkinson would think today, given that he was actually putting his career on the line to stand up for Freedom of Speech in the UK, as it's been under even greater attack there than it was here up until the Democratic Party eradicated itself from American politics.
I don't remember Mr. Cleese doing that.
Wise words, and the complete antithesis of the Democratic Party over the last 12 years.
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"
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OMG.
RUSSIA!
HITLER!
RUSSIA!
HITLER!
WWII!!
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners
According to the report, The TSA has more people doing "full-time union work" vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work "full-time on union matters" and do not retain certification to perform screening....
What's more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of "poor performers" are allowed to stay employed and "not surprisingly, continue to not perform."
... DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners ...
No wonder they gutted the NLRB first.
The problems this article cites are MANAGEMENT problems, not union problems. Keeping on poor performers and excess employees?
Fire the management. THEY'RE NOT COVERED BY A UNION, IT SHOULD BE EASY TO DO THAT
I was a supervisor in a government agency. It was difficult to get long-term poor performers fired, but it was possible. I worked with HR and manager. You just had to go thru all the steps.
And AFA excess staff... again, it was within management's authority to defund positions. This seems a case of gross mismanagement.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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So, to get back to the problem of reindustrialization ....
Re-industrialization requires sacrifice.
Even in the most equitable of societies, development ... or redevelopment ... requires that at least some portion of the workforce be dedicated to making factories and infrastructure ... work that doesn't lead to immediate production of the goods or services. So people overall will be working harder without an immediate improvement in living standards.
China is an example of successful development. (They followed the Japan model). Start by making cheap goods for export using low-wage labor: plastic crap for Walmart, Nike shoes etc then climb the value ladder (Bosch tools, computer chips etc) For quite a while, the workforce conditions were pretty grim: factory/ dormitories with suicide netting, unsafe working conditions full of chemical exposure etc. And despite what people think, the money wasn't creating a class of rich entrepreneurs, it was (mostly) being plowed back into further development.
Russia is an example of successful reindustrialization. In Russia's case, they had to first corral the gangster-oligarch class (get them out of politics), and then partially re-nationalize major resources (oil, gas, electricity, telecom, aeronautics etc) usually by becoming majority shareholder in major industries. The government also loaned money in sectors such as farming that needed further development. However, note that Russia's internal economy didn't take off until it was divorced from western companies and finance.
By withdrawing western companies from Russia and cutting off Russian banks from western finance, that forced profits to be reinvested in Russia instead of being constantly drained off to the west.
I think there's a lesson in there for us as to where are real economic problems come from. It's not Dems or Repubs, not the deep state, not even inefficient government. Its the constant draining away of capital by the already wealthy, with the complicity of our government. .
----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. Every one of them came with a bathroom bigger than my Master Bedroom, and they had a huge step-up Jacuzzi that they were terrified to use without any bars. I can't even tell you how many huge walk-in showers with all the extras we put in those things after ripping those beautiful Jacuzzis out. Broke my heart every time because here I was, 22 year old idiot that I was, just dreaming of owning a bathroom setup like that one day... and it was the first thing they all removed.
And I don't even understand the desire of having houses that big at any age, but especially at that age. Some of these people were paying over $20k per year in property taxes. I don't even want to know what it costs to heat those things in the winter. One of the most common styles saw one half of the house wide open from the front door all the way to the back glass doors and a ceiling that peaked at 20 feet tall. All of the upper bedrooms and bathrooms surrounded that opening.
Why????????
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:How Giant White Houses Took Over America
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. . . .
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.
By Dan Kois | March 06, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/business/2025/03/houses-real-estate-luxury-sale.html
Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich.
The House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump killing PEPFAR means killing millions of people
By Kelsey Piper | Mar 8, 2025, 6:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/402944/pepfar-hiv-donald-trump-elon
-musk-global-health
About a million people will die terrible deaths every single year for the foreseeable future if PEPFAR doesn’t get reversed. All to save 0.08 percent of the budget.
Some of the 20 million people we threw off their lifesaving medication will find other sources, but many won’t. And every day, 1,400 babies will be born with HIV who would otherwise be HIV-free if we hadn’t frozen the programs meant to help their mothers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump says Putin launching massive strike on Ukraine is ‘what anybody would do’
US president says he finds Russia easier to deal with than Ukraine after cutting off intelligence and weapons to Kyiv
By Andrew Roth in Washington and Luke Harding in Kyiv | Fri 7 Mar 2025 13.23 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/07/trump-says-it-is-easie
r-to-deal-with-russia-and-putin-wants-to-end-the-war
Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukrainian energy facilities on Friday in the wake of the US decision to halt intelligence sharing with Ukraine that had helped it target incoming fire.
Asked whether the Russian leader was taking advantage of the pause in US intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine, Trump replied: “I actually think he is doing what anybody else would do.”
Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said: “We’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine.”
He added: “I think he [Putin] wants to get it stopped and settled and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”
The Numbers:
Russian forces conducted one of the largest ever missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of March 6 to 7 as Russian forces continue to adapt strike packages to overwhelm Ukraine's air defense umbrella by increasing the total number of Shahed and decoy drones in each strike. Russian forces launched the largest combined strike package against Ukraine since November 2024 on the night of March 6 to 7.[1] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 67 missiles including 35 Kh-101/Kh-55 cruise missiles, eight Kalibr cruise missiles, three Iskander-M/Kn-23 ballistic missiles, four S-300 air defense missiles, eight Kh-59/69 cruise missiles, and 194 Shahed and decoy drones.[2] The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Ukrainian forces downed 25 Kh-101/Kh-55 cruise missiles, all eight Kalibr cruise missiles, one Kh-59/69 cruise missile, and 100 Shahed and decoy drones and that 86 decoy drones and up to 10 missiles did not reach their targets, likely due to Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) interference.
Russian Drone and Missile Strikes on Ukraine January 1, 2025 - March 7, 2025
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-7-2025
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns
By Claude Malhuret | March 8, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/claude-malhe
uret-speech/681947/
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.
Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.
The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.
This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-germany-const
itution-authoritarianism/681233/
I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.
That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.
And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.
What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very foundation of
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:How Giant White Houses Took Over America
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. . . .
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers.
By Dan Kois | March 06, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/business/2025/03/houses-real-estate-luxury-sale.html
Across America, in neighborhoods just like ours, the ubiquity of the Giant White House signifies a neighborhood evolving from one for the middle class to one for the sort of rich to one for the very rich.
The House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet. According to the listing, it has top-end appliances and European Oak Select Grade hardwood and heated floors in the en suite bath and a wet bar in the basement.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Interesting. The white color must be a southern thing. I don't recall ever seeing a white McMansion, let alone ever doing work inside of one. I'll bet it's a sunshine/heat thing. Ours up here are usually made of brick or they're darker colors.
This is a different phenomena down by you too. I've seen this type of rebuild or addition around here on occasion, but as far as I know it's not a regular thing... at least in the souther-Chicagoland area. It could be happening in the West and Norther suburbs... I don't go out there very often. What we've been doing is building entire brand new neighborhoods full of these shrines to excess since the Clinton years. Whenever I'd work on one of these things, it would be in the middle of an entire neighborhood were every house was huge and every house looked nearly identical, with just some very minor face-value changes that gave just the smallest amount of individualism to each house. Probably, one would assume, so you can figure out which house was yours when you came home at 3AM after a night of binge drinking.
Quote:
The Giant White House, though, is not only giant in its floorplan—it’s giant vertically. It’s a trend that comes not from the suburbs but from the city. In recent decades, the loft—the converted warehouse, with its open spaces and high industrial ceilings—became popular in American cities, said Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago. “Those kinds of preferences trickled out to homeowners, and now everyone wants a cathedral-like ceiling.”
Yup. I'm very familiar with the bullshit cathedral-like ceiling.
I'm glad they went on a quest for answers, but bummed that they didn't offer up any solutions to the problem. That's the only question that really needs answering.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:There was a lovely Victorian on the corner, on a 60,000 sq ft lot filled with towering ash trees and a black walnut that had snuck in. Like all upper class Victorian homes it was large, similar in size to the BWH the article complains about, but graceful, wuth a lovely hardwood front porch. It was green and lovely and quiet, and one of the reasons we bought where we did.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We should find a way to be building houses too.
REAL houses. Not the bullshit McMansions I used to help remodel back in the day.
You'd get these stupid sized houses with 5 or 6 bedrooms, and they'd all be bought by boomer retirees, or very close to retirement. Every one of them came with a bathroom bigger than my Master Bedroom, and they had a huge step-up Jacuzzi that they were terrified to use without any bars. I can't even tell you how many huge walk-in showers with all the extras we put in those things after ripping those beautiful Jacuzzis out. Broke my heart every time because here I was, 22 year old idiot that I was, just dreaming of owning a bathroom setup like that one day... and it was the first thing they all removed.
And I don't even understand the desire of having houses that big at any age, but especially at that age. Some of these people were paying over $20k per year in property taxes. I don't even want to know what it costs to heat those things in the winter. One of the most common styles saw one half of the house wide open from the front door all the way to the back glass doors and a ceiling that peaked at 20 feet tall. All of the upper bedrooms and bathrooms surrounded that opening.
Why????????
We need 2 bedroom / 1.5 bathroom houses and we need a lot of them.
How do you make it affordable to build these again? They're not getting built because they can't even be sold for enough money to offset the costs of materials and labor.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
So, what did they do?
Tore it down, bulldozed the trees, divided the lot into six parts, and put up three of the ugliest modernist/ minimalist/ tackiest - looking mansions that sat on the market for over 6 months, with 30,000 sq ft yet to be developed.
We also have a faux French mansion, a couple of faux Italian villas, and an uncountable number of monstrosities with collonades, 2-story entryways that look like something from the Wizard of Oz, and actual goddamn turrets.
But FWIW, the McMansion era ended a few years ago in our neighborhood. It was prolly the high interest rates that killed it. Since the houses here are now OLD, what I've seen is either partial or complete reconstruction on the same foundation.
Also, I was at a planning meeting and managed to get a zoning change that disallowed those pretentious 2-story entryways. A small victory, but at least one less eyesore.
The secret is in your zoning laws. Allow lot-splitting and (especially) require bigger setbacks and smaller % of developed space on a lot and those McMansions will shrink in size.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:I bring this up to say .... watching the Trump admin apparently go after unions, in the effort to reindustrialize America (even assuming it's at all successful), sacrifices must be made.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, to get back to the problem of reindustrialization ....
Re-industrialization requires sacrifice.
Even in the most equitable of societies, development ... or redevelopment ... requires that at least some portion of the workforce be dedicated to making factories and infrastructure ... work that doesn't lead to immediate production of the goods or services. So people overall will be working harder without an immediate improvement in living standards.
China is an example of successful development. (They followed the Japan model). Start by making cheap goods for export using low-wage labor: plastic crap for Walmart, Nike shoes etc then climb the value ladder (Bosch tools, computer chips etc) For quite a while, the workforce conditions were pretty grim: factory/ dormitories with suicide netting, unsafe working conditions full of chemical exposure etc. And despite what people think, the money wasn't creating a class of rich entrepreneurs, it was (mostly) being plowed back into further development.
Russia is an example of successful reindustrialization. In Russia's case, they had to first corral the gangster-oligarch class (get them out of politics), and then partially re-nationalize major resources (oil, gas, electricity, telecom, aeronautics etc) usually by becoming majority shareholder in major industries. The government also loaned money in sectors such as farming that needed further development. However, note that Russia's internal economy didn't take off until it was divorced from western companies and finance.
By withdrawing western companies from Russia and cutting off Russian banks from western finance, that forced profits to be reinvested in Russia instead of being constantly drained off to the west.
I think there's a lesson in there for us as to where are real economic problems come from. It's not Dems or Repubs, not the deep state, not even inefficient government. Its the constant draining away of capital by the already wealthy, with the complicity of our government. .
----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
And it's not going to be by the billionaires.
Trump, and (probably more from Elon) seem to be developing their economic plan along the lines of classic Italian fascism. (No, I don't mean Nazi gas chamber stuff. Please look up the history of Italian fascism as a way of restoring order to Italy's 1920-1930 economy. "At least he made the trains run on time".)
This could be the only legitimate and important criticism of Trump. Needs watching.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
Originally posted by second:
Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns
By Claude Malhuret | March 8, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/claude-malhe
uret-speech/681947/
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine.
We should disregard his rant against what (he thinks) Trump is doing to America. What Trump does here is our business, and not for him to theatrically wring his hands over.
The rest is hypocrisy, hot air, and scaremongering designed to whip up support for Macron's and Ursula's get-rich-quick scheme of stealing Russian assets and creating Eurobonds.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow)
By Phillips P. Obrien | Mar 08, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-123-the-week-the
-usa
Hello All,
Well, I feel that cannot really wait until tomorrow to send the first part of my weekend update out. What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.
Rescuers respond to a Russian missile strike in Ukraine's Kharkiv region on Friday.
The Results of a Russian missile attack on Ukraine just over a day ago. The damage and death you see is now courtesy of the USA.
The United States is now an active enemy of democracy not just in Ukraine, but in all of Europe. That it would, somewhat gleefully in the case of the president, help Russia kill what were recently some of the most pro-American people in the world, a people desperate to be US allies, tells you everywhere about the dark period we are now in. The fate of freedom throughout Europe is at stake.
Needless to say, therefore, the European reaction is key. There is a general awareness that Europe faces a great challenge—but I’m not sure people understand the reality of what Trump is doing. There are still those looking for signs that he might be ok, that he can be trusted, that NATO still has validity. The sooner Europe can fully face the reality of what it is confronting the better.
Also, on the battlefield, the Russians/North Koreans made a 4 mile advance in Kursk (while hardly being able to advance anywhere else). It shows that Putin is working with Trump more than you might think.
All of that will be in the update sent out tomorrow.
The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
The United States government took some dramatic steps this week to help Russia and weaken Ukraine—the intended result of which will be more Ukrainian deaths, fewer Russian losses, and the undermining of Ukrainian democracy.
The steps were comprehensive, layered, and designed to punish Ukraine for not doing what Trump wants. Its worth listing them just so you can see how significant the changes are.
1. The USA has stopped the delivery of all military supplies to Ukraine. The Trump administration had actually been slowing the supply of remaining Biden era supplies for a while. However now even Biden appropriations are not being delivered.
2. The USA has stopped allowing Ukraine to attack Russian forces with certain high-value US systems such as HIMARS.
3. The USA, in a particularly twisted move, has made it far more difficult for Ukraine to defend against Russian missile attacks. What the USA has done is no longer provide Ukraine with warning of such attacks—which will make them far more deadly and effective.
4. The USA is actually stopping non-military supplies such as medical equipment, which is vital to keep wounded Ukrainians alive. This had started with the USAID cut—but has now reached an extreme level with no medical supplies to treat Ukrainian soldiers. The USA is also forbidding the Ukrainians from having access to Maxar commercial satellite data—which has been widely available to them (and many civilian agencies) throughout the conflict.
5. The USA is signalling strong support to Putin that they want to see his strategic priorities met in the short term.
Note—for point 4 I’ve linked to an Adam Kinzinger tweet for the evidence on medical supplies
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Fuck you, and fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...
Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, you and 6ix are hollow. Inflated with hot air. Vinyl blow up dolls. You are lightweights pushed around by the breezes. This is why you don't prosper in America. This is why you indulge in intoxicants, to help you forget what you are.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I have never read so much bullshit. Except, of course, the last time you posted an article this long.
SECOND:
Is that your final "answer"? your true "belief"? If you answered yes to either, you are a robot, but then I don't believe Trumptards and Russians are more than automatons mimicking human emotions. If the automatons felt the emotions they are trying to fake, it would be sad, but they don't feel. It is a meaningless show and after, the machines are de-energized until the next scheduled viewing of fake emotion, belief, etc. I can hear the mechanical sounds when Trumptards from Texas are in the room attempting to pass as humans. They fail to be convincing, over and over.
Oh look. It's the unconvincing robot mimicking emotions ...Quote:
SECOND:
TLDR: This is not a case of Trump appeasing Putin--its actually him joining Putin. It is not Munich 1938, it is the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.
https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien/note/c-98990427
Weekend Update #123: The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians
Part 1: The Trump Plan to Damage Ukraine and Help Russia (Part 2 tomorrow) blah blah blah ...
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?
The historian Stephen Kotkin analyzes what a President who governs in the style of professional wrestling gets wrong—and right—about an unstable world.
By David Remnick | March 9, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-ukraine-an
d-america-survive-donald-trump
The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.
Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?
Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.
Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in—not the entire left, but a really big part of it—on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered, as you know.
Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy. They’re not equivalent fantasies, certainly, but they’re nasty regimes in the Stalin case on a world-historical scale, and less so, but nasty, in Putin’s case. I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.
You’re right that in the thirties, there were people on the left who were pro-Soviet, pro-Stalinist. But you also know that a huge part of the left was anti-Stalinist.
O.K., that left that was pro-Stalinist was in my field until recently. They were the dominant trend in part of my field that I’ve been in for forty years. The right today also has people who are anti-Putin, I need to add.
Do you not share the view—and it’s my view—that if taken to its logical or w
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Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?
By Michael C. Bender | March 8, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/trump-republicans-educa
tion-department.html
The Republican Party has called for the shuttering of the Education Department since it first opened its doors in 1980.
Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.
Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.
Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.
Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.
“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.
Here is how the party got to this moment.
Conservatives make their argument.
During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.
Right from the start, Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter’s signature on a 1979 law creating the department, citing beliefs in limited government control, fiscal responsibility and local autonomy.
They argued that education should be primarily managed at the state and local levels rather than through federal mandates.
A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at the presidency, thanks to a promise that he would rein in a federal government that he said had overstepped its bounds on myriad issues, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to eliminate two agencies: the Energy Department and the Education Department.
“We must cut out more nonessential government spending and root out more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the federal work force,” Mr. Reagan said.
He was unable to persuade Democrats in control of the House to go along with his plan, and the issue started to fade as a top priority for Republicans — but never quite disappeared.
Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for the abolition of the agency in the mid-1990s. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, both Representative Ron Paul and former Gov. Mitt Romney supported either terminating the Education Department or drastically reducing its size.
Last year, a proposal to eliminate the agency was voted down in the Republican-controlled House despite a strong majority within the party, as 161 Republicans supported the measure while 60 opposed it.
The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities.
“The history of the Education Department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, that English-learners get the help they need,” John B. King Jr., who served as education secretary during the Obama administration and is now chancellor of the State University of New York, told reporters on Thursday. “Taking that away harms students and families.”
Trump reinvigorates the debate.
During his 2024 campaign, President Trump adopted the concerns that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Trump rarel
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The Good News About Trump’s Tariff Tax
March 9, 2025
Yes, it will make almost everything more expensive. But it will help Trump give millionaires and billionaires a tax cut, so it all evens out.
How great is that?
BONUS: Starving Children Are Not Our Concern — We’re Christians
The children from whom we’ve suddenly cut off aid live in “shit-hole countries.” What business is that of ours? What have they ever done for us? America First, baby. Haven’t you read the Trump Bible? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-afri
can-countries-shithole-nations-n836946
Charity has its limits.*
*In the decade leading up to his foundation being shut down for mismanagement, it distributed $19 million. “Trump admitted . . . to directing $100,000 in foundation money be used to settle legal claims over an 80-foot flagpole he had built at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, instead of paying the expense out of his pocket. In addition, the foundation paid $158,000 to resolve a lawsuit over a prize for a hole-in-one contest at a Trump-owned golf course . . .” (By contrast, Mike Bloomberg’s foundation gave away $3.7 billion last year alone. And none of it to buy a six-foot portrait of himself.)
https://andrewtobias.com/the-good-news-about-trumps-tariff-tax/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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SECOND: He's always good for hot air.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.
He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.
We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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SECOND: If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.
Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).
You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.
And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?
Really???
How stupid are you?
So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, do you see that signature of yours? "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND: If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.
Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).
You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.
And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?
Really???
How stupid are you?
So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.
-----------
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
I have told you for years that the signature was wrong. Finally, you changed it. I was testing you, Signym. You proved conclusively to me that you are robot, a hollow person, an inflatable doll full of hot air, trying to pass as human and failing.
6ixStringJack also tested as a robot. There is nobody there but a machine imitating and pretending, no real purpose until its weak batteries can't be recharged and the thing goes to the dump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.
He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.
We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We basically have government by QAnon
By Paul Krugman | Mar 10, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-paranoid-style-in-maga-policy
It was predictable that the co-presidency of Donald Trump and Elon Musk would eventually face a backlash. After all, Trump’s entire campaign was built on fantasy promises -- like lowering grocery prices on day one of the Administration – that he had no way and no plans to honor. Moreover, the Administration’s actual policy agenda manages to be both deeply unpopular and economically destructive.
Even so, I admit that I am surprised at how quickly the backlash has developed. Republican members of Congress, rather than face angry denunciations by their constituents, have stopped holding town halls in their home districts. Tesla dealerships across the country are beset by protests, and in some cases vandalism. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal have both turned critical as the economy and the stock market rapidly deteriorate.
Notably, America’s oligarchs have been slow to wake up and smell the outrage. Until very recently most CEOs and large investors were bullish on Trump. But Trump’s dizzyingly erratic moves on tariffs may have finally delivered the message to the oligarch class that the Musk-Trump duo have no idea what they’re doing.
You can see this dawning revelation in stock prices. Let’s be clear: The stock market is not a good measure of how the economy is doing. It is, however, an indicator of the mood of people with a lot of money to invest. Now that reality has begun to set in, the market has given up all of the “Trump bump,” the stock gains that followed Trump’s election victory:
If you ask me, the public and especially big business are still behind the curve in understanding how much damage these people will inflict. Already we have a secretary of health and human services who responds to a major outbreak of measles by suggesting we take cod liver oil, and we have an agriculture secretary who suggests that the solution to high egg prices is to raise your own chickens. Plus we’ve destroyed our alliances and are rapidly undermining our scientific and technological capacity.
As the economy stumbles and the stock market tanks, consumer confidence lags, and even some Trump voters are losing faith, what I find particularly revealing is how the Trump cabal are responding. They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.
Thus, according to Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, those rowdy audiences at town halls aren’t citizens sincerely concerned about government layoffs and looming cuts to Medicaid; they’re “paid protestors” hired by “George Soros-funded groups”.
Gotta say, those Soros people are pretty impressive if they’ve managed to secretly hire fake protestors for town halls all across America.
What about those Tesla protests? According to Musk, they aren’t a response to his Nazi salutes and the chainsaw DOGE has been taking to crucial public services. In his mind they’re a conspiracy organized by five people, three of whom happen to be Jewish and two of whom happen to be dead:
Quote:
Elon Musk @elonmusk
An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla “protests”: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America.
ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert
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Donald Trump Issues Social Security, Medicaid Update
Mar 10, 2025 7:43 AM EDT
Trump said: "I'm not going to touch . . . Medicaid. We're going to get fraud out of there."
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote in a post on X: "Elon Musk's plan to cut the Social Security Administration's staff by 50 percent would cause 37,000 more Americans to die each year waiting to receive their disability benefits while the average wait time to collect these benefits would jump to 412 days. That is beyond unacceptable."
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-social-security-medicaid-update-
2042024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk's Social Security Comments Called Out
Mar 10, 2025 at 8:51 AM EDT
Musk said Social Security is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time."
If Social Security were a Ponzi scheme, it would not be running for 90 years. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program.
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-social-security-comments-ponzi-sche
me-martin-omalley-2042006
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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When asked about a potential recession in an interview broadcast on Sunday, Trump said tariffs imposed in recent days could bring about a "period of transition."
"I hate to predict things like that. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us.”
In response to a question later on Sunday about his reluctance to rule out a recession, Trump said: "I tell you what, of course you hesitate. Who knows?"
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/stocks-slump-after-trump-declines-rule
-recession/story?id=119626168
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Once Again Defies Federal Judge Ruling on FEMA
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced on Friday that it is canceling all in-person training offered by its National Fire Academy. It’s a move that directly defies a federal judge’s order to resume spending.
The National Fire Academy provides free training for fire and emergency services personnel to ensure the country is prepared.
“I have no idea why anybody would think that the NFA programs would not align with the administration’s priorities,” senior fire adviser Chief Marc Bashoor of FireRescue1 told the Daily Beast in an email.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-once-again-defies-federal-j
udge-ruling-on-fema/
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:
Donald Trump Issues Social Security, Medicaid Update
Mar 10, 2025 7:43 AM EDT
Trump said: "I'm not going to touch . . . Medicaid. We're going to get fraud out of there."
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, wrote in a post on X: "Elon Musk's plan to cut the Social Security Administration's staff by 50 percent would cause 37,000 more Americans to die each year waiting to receive their disability benefits while the average wait time to collect these benefits would jump to 412 days. That is beyond unacceptable."
Bernie is going to need to cite actual sources for his fearmongering.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Dude has about 300 threads he can post his neuroses in.
He hasn't figured out that manipulation by appealing to emotion doesn't work at all anymore in 2025.
We've built up an extreme tolerance to that after what the Democratic Party has done to the country and to the world.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We basically have government by QAnon
By Paul Krugman | Mar 10, 2025
Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trumptards will say "fake news". https://www.selfemployed.com/news/musk-ignites-debate-over-social-secu
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Bernie is going to need to cite actual sources for his fearmongering.
rity/
The official White House website proves we live in the stupidest timeline.
Trump’s fact check is "I was right! No one look it up, we already did and I was right!" Even when he's wrong, ESPECIALLY when he's wrong:
Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments
The White House | March 5, 2025
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-o
n-transgender-animal-experiments/
Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse funded by American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration “for making mice transgender.”
The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual). https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/politics/fact-check-trump-address-congr
ess/index.html
FACT: Under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice.
• $455,000: “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses”
• $2,500,000: “Reproductive Consequences of Steroid Hormone Administration”
“These mice manifest defects in ovarian architecture and have altered folliculogenesis.”
• $299,940: “Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy on Breast Cancer Risk and Treatment Outcomes”
“We will compare the incidences and tumor specific survival in female mice (intact) and oophorectomized female mice receiving TT with their respective counterparts that do not receive TT.”
• $735,113: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice”
• $1,200,000: “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis”
“Aim 2 utilizes transgenic mice to test whether male-level androgens acting via AR specifically in kisspeptin neurons are necessary and/or sufficient for androgen inhibition of in vivo LH pulse parameters, including pulse frequency, and the estrogen-induced LH surge.”
• $3,100,000: “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”
“We will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol…”
TOTAL: $8,290,053
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:This is a variation on the standard Trumptard reply -- "Fake News" -- to all information that contradicts their deeply held belief system.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.
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:This is a variation on the standard Trumptard reply -- "Fake News" -- to all information that contradicts their deeply held belief system.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do not ever quote reply me with an article by this idiot again.
No it's not. But it is two things.
1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.
2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.
Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.
And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, just like you, the Confederates could not understand, which led to the destruction of their property and their deaths. The Confederates did not think of themselves as evil, but that didn't save them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No it's not. But it is two things.
1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.
2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.
Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.
And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".
--------------------------------------------------
"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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How the Red Scare Reshaped American Politics
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/red-scare-clay-risen-boo
k-review
The mechanisms of the Red Scare, including congressional hearings and loyalty investigations, would not be especially hard to revive. Indeed, recent developments have indicated that they might be deployed with genuine glee. Already, the Trump Administration has started asking for lists—of federal workers who attended D.E.I. training, of F.B.I. agents who investigated January 6th cases, of scientists engaged in now suspect areas of work. Trump himself has openly announced his intention to deploy the Justice Department and the F.B.I. against his personal, political, and ideological enemies.
The history of the Red Scare suggests that it won’t take many firings, federal inquiries, or acts of public humiliation to frighten a whole lot of people. But it also offers some reason to think that such intimidation methods may not be quite as effective this time around. For starters, there is much less agreement about the Trump Administrations agenda than there was about Communism in its heyday. The Red Scare gained momentum because nearly everyone in American political life shared the same basic assumption: Communism is bad and poses an existential threat to the American way of life. Its hard to come up with any contemporary issue that would generate the same powerful consensus.
Generally speaking, we also have better protections for political speech and assembly than Americans had in the fifties. Indeed, some of those protections are legacies of the Red Scare. In 1957, as the anti-Communist furor was winding down, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions limiting some of the most sweeping methods deployed against political dissenters, including parts of the Smith Act.
But to say that Trump won’t necessarily succeed in setting off a new Red Scare is not to say that he won’t try. And, in this sort of politics, the trying is part of the game. As long as the nation’s “cultural Marxists” feel vulnerable to random accusations or secret investigations, they’ll likely be more careful about what they do and say. As Roy Cohn once instructed a young Donald Trump, much can be accomplished by attacking first and dealing with the consequences later.
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 SIGNYM:
SECOND, If the Dem party hadn't been so evil, stabbing Americans in the back over and over and over, gaslighting us 24/7/365 about it, censoring anybody who took notice ... we wouldn't be where we are today.
Yanno, your party has been in power for 22 of the past 34 years. (And I'd say 26, bc Trump's first term was stymied in a coordinated effort by Britain and our deep state).
You had your chance. You could have done a lot of good. Instead, you promoted offshoring and deindustrialization, blew up the budget, deluged banks with trillions of dollars, presided over record disparities in wealth, deliberately divided the nation with BLM/ ANTIFA/ DEI/ LGBTQRXYZ nonsense, opened the southern border, engaged in endless wars and regime changes, and presided over "crisis" after "crisis" in a naked power grab to remove the last of our Constitutional protections.
And after ALL THAT, and installing a brain dead President, you could have changed course and offered a less smelly alternative, but instead fronted Kamala Harris?
Really???
How stupid are you?
So, you left us with the unenviable task of rooting you and your transnational oligarchs out from government, as best we can, before tackling the next task, which is tackling our native oligarchy.
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
SECOND: Signym, do you see that signature of yours? "Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I have told you for years that the signature was wrong. Finally, you changed it. I was testing you, Signym. You proved conclusively to me that you are robot, a hollow person, an inflatable doll full of hot air, trying to pass as human and failing.
Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.
Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.
-----------
"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:It was inevitable you'd sink back into your old ways. The human spirit rises to heaven and the spirit of the beast sinks downward to the earth.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.
Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/ecclesiastes/3-21-compare.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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During a recent appearance on Fox Business, Musk told host Larry Kudlow that he remains committed to his goal of enacting steep cuts to Americans' retirement income and health insurance.
"That's the big one to eliminate," Musk said. "That's, sort of, half trillion, six or seven hundred billion a year."
https://www.alternet.org/musk-cut-social-security/
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 next climate move: Show global warming benefits humanity
(Trump appoints Fake Scientists to write Fake Reports to “prove” Climate Change is a Hoax)
By Scott Waldman | 03/10/2025
https://www.eenews.net/articles/trumps-next-climate-move-show-global-w
arming-benefits-humanity/
Overturning the consensus would be a heavy lift, especially since the Supreme Court has rejected three previous attempts to revisit the endangerment finding, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
“There was a ton of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gasses worsened climate change. There’s now 10 times that evidence,” Gerrard said. “It’s implausible that EPA could now come up with evidence refuting any of that and so it would be the essence of arbitrary and capricious.”
Gerrard did say such a report could let the administration gut public health regulations on the fossil fuel industry if the inevitable legal challenge came before a Trump-appointed judge willing to overlook an overwhelming body of climate science research.
Despite seeming long odds, it’s likely the new Trump White House will try.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Economic Excuse Industry is Booming
No, we don’t need an economic “detox”
By Paul Krugman | Mar 11, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economic-excuse-industry-is-boo
ming
First, we got big promises. Now we’re getting lame excuses. However, one thing has been consistent about Donald Trump’s economic rhetoric: rank dishonesty.
Trump made a lot of extravagant economic promises during the campaign, without any plans or even concepts of plans to deliver on those promises. Remember how he was going to bring grocery prices down on Day One? Now his agriculture secretary is suggesting that people save money on eggs by raising their own chickens.
So things aren’t going well, although I’d warn everyone not to get too excited by talk of a “Trumpcession.” That may happen, but it’s not yet visible in the data.
You may have seen people citing the Atlanta Fed’s “nowcast” that attempts to infer GDP far in advance of the official numbers, and which is currently showing a sharp decline in the first quarter. But that’s almost certainly a statistical red herring: It’s mostly about a surge of gold imports in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs, which is screwing up the usually helpful Atlanta model.
But while talk of recession is premature, there’s already a palpable sense of disappointment in the Trump economy. The New York Fed’s consumer survey is the latest to find a serious deterioration in consumer confidence:
Consumers’ year-ahead expectations about their households’ financial situations deteriorated considerably in February. The share of households expecting a worse financial situation one year from now rose to 27.4 percent, its highest level since November 2023.
And then there’s that plunging stock market.
So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews.
The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.”
Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things.
As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?
Someone like Elon Musk, who gets what he imagines to be information from random posts on X, may actually believe that useless government spending has been the only thing driving economic growth. But Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has to have people working for him who both understand how GDP is measured and know how to look up data on FRED. So when Bessent says
Look, there's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
I actually hope that he’s deliberately trying to bamboozle his audience. For the alternative is that the nation’s top economic official doesn’t understand basic economics, which will be a problem when — not if — something goes wrong.
People may imagine that government is a bigger part of the economy than it is because of all the money we spend supporting retired Americans, covering their health bills, and so on. But that kind of spending isn’t counted as part of GDP — the total value of goods and services produced in America — because Social Security and other benefits are simply transfers of income between Americans. Only spending by Social Sec
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The Diseases Are Coming
Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government tear will have lasting effects on global health.
By Craig Spencer | March 10, 2025, 7:14 AM ET
Craig Spencer is a public-health professor and emergency-medicine physician at Brown University.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/diseases-doge-trump/
681964/
At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.
For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.
DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.
The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.
USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. Meanwhile, USAID staff who were placed on administrative leave can’t distribute medicines or cover costs for transport and personnel. After this dismantling, PEPFAR’s activities in hundreds of places around the world remain restricted at best, and fully paused at worst. Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.
Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. Du
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Trump Drops the Mask
The president’s latest positions on the Russia-Ukraine war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it.
By Jonathan Chait | March 10, 2025, 3:28 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-ukraine-rus
sia-war/681993/
Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.
But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.
In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.
Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.
The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.
Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.
A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”
Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”
Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He
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The Rise of the Brutal American
This is how the bad guys act.
Anne Applebaum | March 5, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/trump-and-vance-shat
tered-europes-illusions-about-america/681925/
A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process this event, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.
In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.
Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.
These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.
The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.
It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?
But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.
Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.
Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.
SECOND It was inevitable you'd sink back into your old ways. The human spirit rises to heaven and the spirit of the beast sinks downward to the earth.
Projection. It's the only way you can justify yourself to yourself.
Followed by a massive inloading of internet diarrhea. Eeeew.
You're not a hero, SECOND. You're a warped soul on a mountain of shit.
-----------
"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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Want to see something funny, Sigs?
I was trying to see if MTN was the clickbait farm that convinced Ted so solidly that it was a murder suicide that he created a thread about Gene Hackman's death just to tell us that's what "it looks like".
No... I don't believe that anybody at MTN cared. They've got one singular focus.
Look at what Ted sits around watching all day in his sad little lonely retirement.
https://www.youtube.com/@MeidasTouch/videos
27 videos ranging 10 to 30 minutes long about Trump in the last 2 days. He's got at least 4 to 6 hours every day of anti-Trump videos to watch, just from this channel alone.
And look at those clickbait thumbnails.
4.4 Million subs? Looks like we know where all the MSNBC and CNN viewers are running to get the news they crave since CNN and MSNBC aren't giving it to them anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, just like you, the Confederates could not understand, which led to the destruction of their property and their deaths. The Confederates did not think of themselves as evil, but that didn't save them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No it's not. But it is two things.
1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.
2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.
Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.
And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
No. I don't understand retard.
You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Inside the DOGE Threat to Social Security
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. I don't understand retard.
You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By E. Tammy Kim | March 11, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/deep-state-diaries/inside-the-doge-thre
at-to-social-security
When the claims representative, whom I’ll call Steven, sat down at his computer around 7:15 A.M. last week, he had already been awake for an hour and a half. The morning routine for him and his family is best described as “fend for yourself,” he said. That day, he waited for his older son to shower before taking his turn; neither he nor his wife had time for breakfast. He had joined the Social Security Administration two decades ago, and came to specialize in one of its more complex and lesser-known functions: providing a form of welfare called Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I., to people who are disabled or extremely poor. But the S.S.A. is so understaffed that Steven does a bit of everything. “My job is to be kind of like an octopus,” he said. The agency’s administrative budget had not kept up with its rising workload as more people aged into retirement. Now news outlets were reporting that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, via Musk’s DOGE outfit, planned to fire up to half of the agency’s sixty-thousand-odd employees. (The S.S.A. later said that its goal was to lose seven thousand.) DOGE had also gained access to S.S.A. databases. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here,” Steven said. “Some people are really pissed. Others are sad and emotional. Others are making plans.” A couple days earlier, Trump had delivered a long self-congratulatory speech to Congress, in which he accused the S.S.A. of “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud.”
Steven lives in a Midwestern town near where he was born and raised, which means that he occasionally recognizes a relative or a family friend in a case file and has to recuse himself. Three days a week, he’s at a cubicle in a regional field office, one of twelve hundred across the U.S. The other two days, he works from home, at a plastic folding table in the corner of his bedroom. He was on the early shift. His laptop was propped up on a neon-green bin, the kind typically used to store Legos or crayons. It was flanked by two large monitors, creating a triptych. All around him were piles of kids’ clothes and books. Near his left foot was a tiny metal car; he had taped yellow notecards reading “clock,” “fan,” and “shelf” to a clock, fan, and shelf for the benefit of his youngest child, who was learning to read. Steven’s wife made drop-offs at kindergarten and day care, then came home. She has her own office setup downstairs.
The day officially started when Steven logged on to a dozen software programs. One had a blocky monochrome interface that looked like it was from the late nineties. Another was labelled “Workload Action Center,” in a light-brown, slanted font of a similar vintage. Steven kept a list of his passwords, which he had to routinely update, on a scrap of paper next to his keyboard. He scanned something called a “Tickle List” that highlighted urgent cases. His primary task was to conduct nonmedical “redetermination” interviews (code: “RZ”)—part of the S.S.A.’s process for insuring that current recipients are still eligible to receive benefits. More than seven million Americans of all ages count on S.S.I., and sixty-eight million seniors receive earned retirement payments. Social Security is the largest government program in the country and most recipients’ main source of income. It was envisioned by Frances Perkins during the Great Depression. “Redeterminations are the highest priority,” Steven said. “We should have three to five people on them at every office. Sometimes there’s only one.”
He put on a wireless headset t
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Quote:Trump is running away from his biggest health care success (because Trumptards are fucked up in the head)
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. I don't understand retard.
You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By Dylan Scott | Mar 11, 2025
https://www.vox.com/health/403372/trump-rfk-covid-vaccines-anniversary
-mrna
Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic.
With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development of a new vaccine to a new virus was four years Yet vaccines using the new technology of mRNA were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in a matter of months, and were already being put into arms by the first anniversary of the pandemic.
Rather than containing a weakened or dead virus, as most vaccines do, the shots contained mRNA — or messenger RNA, a kind of genetic script — that prompted cells to produce special proteins that would allow the body to develop an immunity to the novel coronavirus.
While new Covid variants would later pose challenges in the pandemic, scholars at the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research group, estimated that the Covid vaccines prevented more than 3 million deaths in the United States alone and 18 million hospitalizations from December 2020 to November 2022.
Scientists, who are usually not prone to crediting divine intervention, called the mRNA vaccines a miracle. Four in five Americans received at least one dose; when we remember less than half of Americans get their flu shot each year, the high uptake of mRNA shots, at least initially, signaled a willingness from the US public to trust this novel technology. After most Americans received their shots, more people returned to work, more kids went back to school, and the economy began to rebound. And there was optimism that mRNA technology could be used to make better vaccines for other diseases.
But even as the vaccines were actively pulling the US out of the pandemic, skepticism about mRNA technology was rising. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still a private citizen at the time and one of the country’s most vocal vaccine skeptics, urged the first Trump administration to pull the shots.
Now the nation’s top health official, Kennedy is reevaluating the US Health and Human Services’s contract with Moderna, which is developing flu vaccines targeting strains with high pandemic potential including the H5N1 bird flu that is currently driving fears of another pandemic.
With Kennedy at the helm of HHS, scientists and public health experts worry that a major breakthrough in medicine development may now backslide. mRNA technology has shown the potential to deliver new cancer treatments and a universal flu vaccine, and could lead scientists to uncover even more applications. But now, mRNA vaccine development is in peril — just a few years after proving its value.
Why so many Americans turned against a vaccine miracle
Scientists had been trying since the 1990s to crack mRNA vaccines, but progress was slow, in part because it was difficult to secure funding. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Operation Warp Speed funded rapid clinical trials, expanded manufacturing capabilities, and offered huge purchase guarantees for companies that delivered an effective vaccine.
mRNA vaccine development proved almost too good to be true during a real-life emergency. During the new Covid vaccines’ early clinical trials, they showed a 90 percent efficacy in preventing any symptoms at all.
In the real world, the efficacy of early vaccines didn’t quite live up to that hype. The Moderna and Pfizer shots were still very effective i
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Have fun with your future Covid-shot related heart attack, Mudblood.
At least the staff at Vox got that going for them. They're all going to be out of jobs soon, but maybe most of them die off from Myocarditis before they get the bad news.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you are fucked up in the head. Thirty years from now I will be a healthy 103 year old and you will be long dead because you stupidly fucked up your health.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Have fun with your future Covid-shot related heart attack, Mudblood.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump is lying about dead people and Social Security
But we should fix this problem and have a central federal birth/death registry
By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 11, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-lying-about-dead-people
Last month, Elon Musk complained that the Social Security Administration’s database contains millions of Social Security numbers for people who seem implausibly old but who are not marked as dead in the official files.
“Maybe Twilight is real,” he quipped, “and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
This is the kind of thing that often happens when a person stumbles into an unfamiliar dataset. For example, I once tried to compute a “new homes per new people” ratio on FRED and noticed that there were consistently weird jumps in the ratio every January. I thought this might have something to do with the seasonality of home building, but when I looked into it, I learned that the Current Population Survey does a revision every January that creates a discontinuity in the population figures.
Literally, this chart says there was a mass death event in January of 2024. But we all know that this didn’t happen. By the same token, the US population did not increase by 2.8 million people in January of 2023. Instead, the population level estimate was revised upward by 2.8 million, and that is recorded in the database in a way that is annoyingly unhelpful.
By the same token, it’s true that the United States of America does not maintain a comprehensive federal death registry. As I have frequently complained, national data about the number of murders committed in the United States is incredibly laggy. The numbers on drug overdoses aren’t quite as delayed, but the most recent release (from late February) told us how many overdoses we had back in September.
In the United States, the tracking of births and deaths of livestock is much more timely and comprehensive than the tracking of births and deaths of humans, because livestock data is recorded by the Department of Agriculture, while collecting data on humans is a disaggregated state and county function. As a result, the CDC has one effort to figure out how many people are dying of drug overdose, while the FBI has another to figure out how many people have been murdered, and the Social Security Administration has a third to figure out how many people are ineligible for benefits due to death.
I find this to be a genuine government efficiency problem, and I think it would be great to create a centralized federal vital statistics database that could share relevant information with other agencies. This would reduce duplicative efforts, give decision-makers access to more up-to-date information, improve benefits administration, and constitute a genuine public good.
I was prepared to leave it at that, but Donald Trump repeated Musk’s claims in the State of the Union Address, again suggesting that money is being paid out to super-centenarians on a scale that is relevant to long-term fiscal policy.
This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim.
Super-centenarians and Social Security
The best source of accurate information on the number of active Social Security numbers held by implausibly old people is the SSA Inspector General Report, “Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident.” (The Numident is the name of the file where they list every SSN that has ever been issued.)
The IG report expresses quite a bit of frustration with the Social Security Admi
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You're a 23 year old beatoff living in your mom's basement.
Get fucked, loser.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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SECOND's posts are by overarticulate liars.
SECOND, you really think anyone is gonna wade thru all that crap?
-----------
"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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His articles are all written by a Who's Who list of Establishment NeoLib bureaucrats and shills that were all knocked off the raft and are desperately doing whatever they can to not get swallowed up by the rapids before everybody stops paying them to put their words to print.
These are their dying last gasps.
Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I'd flip that around to Trumptards Die In the Dark. Eventually America's libtards will understand that words don't change robots' degenerate behavior patterns but Canadians pulling the plug on Trumptard robots might work. See the following story:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Donald Trump explosively warned Ontario that it would "pay a financial price" for its retaliatory tariffs "so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come"
"Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?" the president raged on his Truth Social app. (That Trump asks such questions shows he was never a very stable genius, quoting his self-evaluation.)
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/breaking-donald-trump-issues-an
other-34841066
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Stable_Genius
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I read thru the article by Iglesias, and he has a point: Social Security should be a national database. Every citizen should have a number, and the dead (and illegals paying into the system) should be purged. I see a potential problem in the reporting of home births and deaths. Unreported births don't trigger any benefits, but deaths mean the cessation of benefits.
I think in order to collect insurance, settle estates and so forth you have to get a death certificate from the county, but the way it is now its up to ... somebody ... to notify Social Security of the death. If that "somebody" fails to report, benefits could be collected fraudulently. The county should pass that on to voter registration rolls and to Social Security automatically. N'est ce pas?
Turning Social Security into a comprehensive database, tho, is beyond Social Security's remit. In order to produce the kinds of analyses he's mentioning, Social Security would have to collect all kinds of data, like cause of death. And linking IRS and Medicare/ Medicaid to Social Security data .... they do that already, using your tax return to calculate your Medicare premiums. If someone's gonna cheat, they're gonna cheat on their 1040 with unreported income.
-----------
"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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Elon didn’t get the memo
Candidate Trump promised he would not allow any cuts to Social Security or Medicare if elected. Looks like President Musk didn’t get the memo:
Despite reporting from The Washington Post on Monday suggesting that DOGE officials are starting to worry about bad “PR,” Musk suggested later in the day he could push for big cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and other safety net programs.
Quote:“There is no expert on the planet who thinks there is $700 billion worth of annual fraud in America’s safety net programs. Musk at one point in the interview cited a Government Accountability Office report which estimated that the government may lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, but that report covered the whole of the federal government — not just those programs. (The sizable frauds occurring in programs like Medicare and Medicaid are typically carried out by scam businesses, not recipients.)”
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — most of the federal spending is entitlements — that’s the big one to eliminate,” he said. “That’s sort of half trillion, maybe $600-700 billion a year.”
I’m sure President Musk is lying. He lies as easily as breathing. But as Goebbels and Stalin knew, if you repeat lies often enough, people start to believe them.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-cuts-soc
ial-security-medicaid-medicare-1235293407/
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 SIGNYM:
I read thru the article by Iglesias, and he has a point: Social Security should be a national database. Every citizen should have a number, and the dead (and illegals paying into the system) should be purged. I see a potential problem in the reporting of home births and deaths. Unreported births don't trigger any benefits, but deaths mean the cessation of benefits.
I think in order to collect insurance, settle estates and so forth you have to get a death certificate from the county, but the way it is now its up to ... somebody ... to notify Social Security of the death. If that "somebody" fails to report, benefits could be collected fraudulently. The county should pass that on to voter registration rolls and to Social Security automatically. N'est ce pas?
Turning Social Security into a comprehensive database, tho, is beyond Social Security's remit. In order to produce the kinds of analyses he's mentioning, Social Security would have to collect all kinds of data, like cause of death. And linking IRS and Medicare/ Medicaid to Social Security data .... they do that already, using your tax return to calculate your Medicare premiums. If someone's gonna cheat, they're gonna cheat on their 1040 with unreported income.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
It would stop crazy people from cutting up their dead mother's body and hiding her in the freezer for years, among other things.
Remember that little gem?
https://abc7chicago.com/eva-batcher-regina-michalski-body-in-freezer-s
ocial-security-fraud/12763071/
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I'd
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
His articles are all written by a Who's Who list of Establishment NeoLib bureaucrats and shills that were all knocked off the raft and are desperately doing whatever they can to not get swallowed up by the rapids before everybody stops paying them to put their words to print.
These are their dying last gasps.
Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Nobody cares what you would do.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I'd flip that around to Trumptards Die In the Dark. Eventually America's libtards will understand that words don't change robots' degenerate behavior patterns but Canadians pulling the plug on Trumptard robots might work. See the following story:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Donald Trump explosively warned Ontario that it would "pay a financial price" for its retaliatory tariffs "so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come"
"Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?" the president raged on his Truth Social app. (That Trump asks such questions shows he was never a very stable genius, quoting his self-evaluation.)
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/breaking-donald-trump-issues-an
other-34841066
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Stable_Genius
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Yeah. And they pussy'd out and backed down many hours before you made this post, stupid.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66605
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. You are stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
The Legal Loophole That Costs Medicaid Billions
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/legal-loophole-costs-medicaid-billio
ns
-----------
"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:In international affairs, Trump has suggested repeatedly that if he has good personal relations with a foreign head of state, then America ought to have good relations with that country. Bad relations with Canada's head of state? Bad relations with Canada. Trump hated Justin Trudeau but now that Mark Carney is the next prime minister of Canada, Trump flip-flops on Canada, which makes no sense.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. And they pussy'd out and backed down many hours before you made this post, stupid.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66605
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. You are stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The entirely personal nature of Trump’s approach manifests itself domestically. Trump is now reversing what Joe Biden did in Ukraine, just as in his first term, he reflexively reversed Barack Obama. Trump derided Obama for not providing lethal military assistance to Ukraine, so he did just that, sending missiles and more.
Ronald Reagan knew how to handle nations that might commit unprovoked aggression against U.S. interests. Trump clearly does not. This does not reflect differences in strategy, which Trump lacks. Instead, it’s another Trump reversal, this time of The Godfather’s famous line: It’s not business; it’s strictly personal.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/ukraine-trump-putin-
zelensky-russia/681988/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.
And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.
Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly. They let Trump be the loudmouth with a gun. Except Trump isn't a space pirate like Malcolm. Trump is playing. He is on an adventure, the most fun a human can imaginably have. Musk is Trump's pilot, Hoban "Wash" Washburne, on the spaceship. They are buddies making a reality TV version of Firefly. The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.
And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.
Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.
--------------------------------------------------
"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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A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country
By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-mind-is-a-terrible-thing-to-lose
The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
I don’t say this because I disagree with their ideologies or believe that they have very bad policy ideas. That’s been true for quite a few politicians over the years. But while I’ve always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity.
And yes, I’m well aware of the dangers involved in questioning people’s mental stability from afar, especially in a political context. I personally have been the target of that sort of thing, back when people accused me of being unhinged for suggesting that the Bush administration was taking us to war on false pretenses.
But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.
News reports still tend to sanewash what our leaders have been saying, and even selected quotations often make them sound more rational than they are. Fortunately, both are addicted to posting on social media, and you really have to read some of their posts to get a full sense of the madness.
So here’s Trump, ranting against Canada:
Quote:Leave aside the nonsensical claims that Canada is a high-tariff nation subsidized by the United States. When Trump first began talking about turning Canada into the 51st state, many people treated it as a joke. But Trump doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. He just keeps doubling down, even as the people of Canada grow ever more outraged. No sane leader would imagine that it’s a good idea to threaten a heretofore friendly but proudly patriotic neighbor and ally with annexation. But a
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Based on Ontario, Canada, placing a 25% Tariff on "Electricity" coming into the United States, I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to ad an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th. Also, Canada must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products, which has long been considered outrageous. I will shortly be declaring a National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area. This will allow the U.S to quickly do what has to be done to alleviate this abusive threat from Canada. If other egregious, long time Tariffs are not likewise dropped by Canada, I will substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada. Those cars can easily be made in the USA! Also, Canada pays very little for National Security, relying on the United States for military protection. We are subsidizing Canada to the tune of more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. WHY??? This cannot continue. The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever — And Canada will be a big part of that. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World — And your brilliant anthem, "0 Canada," will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!
Mar 11, 2025,10:01 AM
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Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?
The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, and an end to woke lunacy — not tariffs and irrelevant indulgences.
By Charles C. W. Cooke | March 11, 2025 1:34 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/does-trump-know-why-he-was-elec
ted/
President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.
Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.
When one observes this aloud, one is typically called names, tarred as a chronic pessimist, or even cast as an omnipotent wrecker. But the thing is: The electorate doesn’t — and never will — have any interest in any of that. As was the case with the Democrats, the MAGA movement’s preoccupations, presumptions, and put-downs are wholly irrelevant to the average American’s life. The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, an end to the illiberal lunacy that was wokeism — and that’s about it. It will not be distracted from those core aims by memes, inside jokes, or the obsequious insistence that the president is “based.” Canada becoming the 51st state, the purchase of Greenland, how people currently perceive Tesla, the “Gulf of America,” the real or imagined infractions of random legislators, the grudges and conspiracy theories of Truth Social users — these are all stupid, extraneous indulgences.
So, too, is the desire now being expressed by some to “remake” America’s economy in the image of 1890 or 1970. Americans want the economy to be strong, and, beyond that, are not especially interested in the details. Telling those who are dissatisfied that the stock market has dropped as the result of tariffs they overwhelmingly oppose that, instead of complaining, they ought to be thankful for Trump’s brilliance is not going to help. Telling them that this development is an act of “love” will irritate them yet more. Telling them that the only people who care about such things are “globalists” or “billionaires” or “elites” is a recipe for disaster. The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019. They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.
Nor, indeed, are voters even one-quarter as invested in Trump and his success as his fans are. It may be important to Trump’s acolytes to defend him at all costs, but it is not important to the electorate — which, to its credit, is almost always unmoved by the bullying, lying, and indignant self-aggrandizement that works so well on Twitter/X. Americans don’t care what “influencers” have to say, they do not consider themselves to be represented by them, and they do not believe that they are a part of some world-historical revolutionary vanguard. They disliked the Democrats and wanted the basics fixed, so they ch
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Here Are the Arguments for Why Senate Ds Should Vote Yes and Why They’re Wrong
By Josh Marshall | March 12, 2025 12:57 a.m.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-are-the-arguments-for-why-se
nate-ds-should-vote-yes-and-why-theyre-wrong
Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.
Let me summarize them briefly.
• Democrats are in a tough messaging environment and they’ll get blamed for the shutdown. Trump might even get to blame a recession on them.
• The White House will get to control the pace of the shutdown. In other words, the executive gets flexibility in just how things get shut down, things that will get more or less helpful press attention. Thus he’ll be able to engineer lots of bad press cycles for the Democrats.
• Quite simply, Trump’s presidency and the economy are imploding. Why rush in to make ourselves the story when every day is a bad day for Trump?
• It’s too soon. The public isn’t engaged enough yet. By the fall the economy will likely be in recession and it will be a debate on Medicare, Medicaid, etc. — that’s the time to have the fight.
• Trump and Musk probably want a shutdown. After a shutdown goes on for 30 days, the law opens up new legal avenues for layoffs. A shutdown is actually what they want and they will use it to accelerate the process, get people used to it. In other words, risking a shutdown is a trap because nothing would make them happier.
I’ve thought a lot about each of these arguments. On their own a number of them are compelling and point to very real risks. Indeed, last week I briefly started questioning my own position because Democrats had done nothing to lay any groundwork for why they were choosing this confrontation. And that makes a fight much, much harder.
But I think each of these arguments is mistaken. Indeed, as a whole it’s a bit like sitting in the mess hall in Treblinka planning an escape when someone says, “But if we try to escape they’ll kill us all!”
First, I think Republicans are going to get wrecked in the midterms. I think that’s highly likely whatever happens. As a narrowly electoral calculus I think there’s a decent argument Democrats should just let everything happen, let Trump and Musk go wild. In this sense, James Carville’s argument that Democrats should just do nothing is right, by a narrowly electoral calculus. But there’s more than just an electoral calculus. Trump and Musk are methodically dismantling the republic day by day. Absent some major change in the trajectory of events the government Democrats might half-inherit in a midterm sweep would be all but unrecognizable, a smoldering heap of faits accompli. Democrats need to take some real risks to at least slow the process of destruction and reshape the trajectory.
The same basic argument applies to the “it’s too soon, things aren’t ripe” argument. There’s a political logic. Trump is likely to be much less popular. Popular programs will be on the line in the fall. The public will have had a lot more time to internalize what Trump’s doing. I just don’t think the opposition has the luxury of time. Same argument as above.
On controlling the pace of a shutdown, that is an advantage for Trump. There will be a lot of game playing. But I don’t think that’s decisive.
Will Democrats get blamed? Maybe. It’s impossible to know how public opinion will evolve. But there are good reasons to doubt they will. First, Republicans almost always get blamed for a shutdown and not Democrats. And that’s for a simple reason: nobody buys the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the government. They’re the party of government. Everybody knows that. It’s basically the Trump Republicans’
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There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball
By Ezra Klein | March 9, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-a
genda.html?unlocked_article_code=1.204.YKRY.xLjxe6aO2xys&smid=url-share
Trump could have run on bringing Texas housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there’s no zoning code, so building is easy, and the median home price is over $300,000. Compare that with Los Angeles, where the median price is around a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco’s housing costs. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.
In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” JD Vance said in the vice-presidential debate. Trump sounded the same theme. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.
Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research. He could have run on making it easier to build energy generation of all kinds in America. Instead he is trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade by imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies — but he is slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.
There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success.
The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.
Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong, and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?
But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the past few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.
Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or was decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures instead of fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as t
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly. They let Trump be the loudmouth with a gun. Except Trump isn't a space pirate like Malcolm. Trump is playing. He is on an adventure, the most fun a human can imaginably have. Musk is Trump's pilot, Hoban "Wash" Washburne, on the spaceship. They are buddies making a reality TV version of Firefly. The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.
And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.
Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
What the fuck are you even going on about?
You're batshit.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here Are the Arguments for Why Senate Ds Should Vote Yes and Why They’re Wrong
By Josh Marshall | March 12, 2025 12:57 a.m.
You have to be a special kind of retarded to read walls of text by this particular college "educated" meat puppet.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country
By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025
Yeah. It is.
Where the fuck were you the last 4 years, PAUL?
Oh right. You were busy telling everyone there wasn't going to be a recession, and then you were busy telling everyone the economy was great and it was all in their heads until January 20th, 2025. And you were also busy telling everyone why Kamala was going to win the election and by more than Trump beat her.
Get fucked, PAUL.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country
By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025
Yeah. It is.
Where the fuck were you the last 4 years, PAUL?
Oh right. You were busy telling everyone there wasn't going to be a recession, and then you were busy telling everyone the economy was great and it was all in their heads until January 20th, 2025. And you were also busy telling everyone why Kamala was going to win the election and by more than Trump beat her.
Get fucked, PAUL.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
https://nypost.com/2025/03/12/opinion/who-was-really-running-the-count
ry-while-autopen-biden-snoozed-and-drooled/
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Democrats were running it. No Trumptards can I trust to run anything for me, no matter how trivial. They can't even be trusted to get a fast food order back to the site without dumping half the drinks on the ground. Maybe there are trustworthy Trumptards? Where are they hiding?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
DOGE Is Courting Catastrophic Risk
Musk has turned a dangerously flawed view of “waste” into a philosophy of government.
By Brian Klaas | March 12, 2025, 9:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/doge-musk-catastr
ophic-risk/682011/
On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.
Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.
DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”
More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.
Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.
The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.
Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that
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Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND
Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly.
You think shooting from a helicopter means you're brave?
Er... no.
One thing I know about you: you're a coward. You hide behind anonymity, but when you feel the least bit threatend you (allegedly) engineer anonymous harassment and resort to online defamation and threats that you try to disguise.
Dox* yourself. Stand behind your defamation and threats. THAT would be brave.
* I know you won't.
-----------
"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:Democrats were running it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
... right into the fucking ground.
One of the many, many reasons why they're a dead party.
You got what you deserve.
The Democratic Party is NEVER going to come back from this.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Unless the cheapskate Republican Party gets its fat, lazy ass in gear, it will never come back from this:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Democrats were running it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
... right into the fucking ground.
One of the many, many reasons why they're a dead party.
You got what you deserve.
The Democratic Party is NEVER going to come back from this.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
ICE Isn’t Delivering the Mass Deportation Trump Wants
By Nick Miroff | March 11, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-immigration
-deportation-agenda/682005/
The results of the actual deportation push appear to be modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency.
So far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates.
At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.
ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.
The administration is working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.
A bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.
One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
DHS Announces Nationwide and International Ad Campaign Warning Illegal Aliens to Self-Deport and Stay Out
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/02/17/dhs-announces-ad-campaign-warning-
illegal-aliens-self-deport-and-stay-out
Nobody is coming in anymore. That's a huge, HUGE step up from every single month of Joe Biden*'s poisonous Presidency just by sheer virtue of the staggering increases coming to an immediate halt.
Nobody gives a single fuck about how many invaders were deported under Obiden when he was letting 10 times as many in every month.
Homeland Security overhauls its asylum phone app. Now it's for 'self-deportation'
https://abc7.com/post/cbp-app-repurposed-home-allows-migrants-country-
illegally-deport-dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-says/16001873/
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work. All of you should self-deport to Mexico. In contrast to shiftless Trumptards in poor health such as 6ix, I work, and everyone in my family works. We are not on government assistance. We are the real Americans. Trumptards are fake.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Shifty Trumptards like Musk built his wealth with billions of dollars in government help. Virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help. Tesla and SpaceX got started – and survived their early days – with assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts and loans. The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the US government. Musk should self-deport to South Africa, where he came from.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/business/elon-musk-wealth-government-he
lp/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it's being done in public
By Evan Dyer · CBC News · Posted: Mar 12, 2025
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-annexation-destabilizing-canada
-1.7479890
Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump's escalating 51st state threats.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has worked to destabilize many governments and nations in the past, using methods as mundane as corruption and as drastic as assassination, but the former spy chiefs say a campaign aimed at Canada would likely rely less on cloak-and-dagger tactics and more on social media — such as the Elon Musk-owned X platform.
"Is [Trump] trying to change political views in this country? If so, that's foreign interference," said Dick Fadden, who also headed CSIS and served as national security adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
"It's no more acceptable from the United States than it is from China or Russia or anybody else."
Trump administration officials have given numerous rationales for the tariffs against Canada, but Trump himself has said that he wants to use economic force to join Canada to the U.S. On Tuesday morning, he again said Canada could only avoid economic ruin through annexation.
Trump's talk about Canada parrots Putin's claims on Ukraine
Speaking on borders, economics and security — the 2 leaders sound remarkably similar
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-putin-ukraine-comments-1
.7462337
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Don’t Trust the Trumpsplainers
Their efforts to sell some MAGA “grand strategy” dull the pain but dim the brain.
By David Frum | March 12, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/maga-strateg
y-spin-machine/682009/
The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.
Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.
The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance:
Quote:I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.
Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.]
At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.
If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.
Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.
That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese e
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The Trump administration announced its intent to roll back major climate policies Wednesday, including rules that target pollution from vehicles and power plants, in a major blow to America’s progress on clean air, clean water and climate action.
The changes are expected to inject even more uncertainty into key industries, including manufacturing, which President Donald Trump has pledged to support.
The administration was announcing rollbacks and actions in such rapid succession — 31 in around two hours — there appeared to still be placeholders or typos in the news releases.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced it will undo rules that would have pushed power plants and carmakers toward cleaner forms of energy. It also intends to roll back rules on soot, mercury and coal ash pollution, as well as the so-called “good neighbor rule” that regulates downwind air pollution, and eliminate its programs overseeing environmental justice and diversity.
Significantly, Trump’s EPA is also preparing to reconsider and strike down a consequential scientific finding on the dangers of climate pollution that has served as the basis behind federal regulations to curb them. Dismissing the precedent would strip the EPA’s authority to manage the pollution that causes global warming.
The Union of Concerned Scientists said the Trump administration’s actions Wednesday would sacrifice human health for the benefit of private industry.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/climate/trump-ev-power-plant-rollbacks/
index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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RFK says most vaccine advisers have conflicts of interest. A report shows they don't
March 11, 2025 5:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/11/nx-s1-532377
1/rfk-jr-vaccine-advisers-conflicts-interest
NPR tracked down that 2009 report, spoke with those involved with the CDC's vaccine advisory committee at the time, and learned that Kennedy's statement about it is inaccurate.
"Right now, what we're getting is a total misrepresentation of a 20-year-old report, about a process that was already being improved before that report was issued," says Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director from 2009 to 2017. He signed the agency's letter in response to the report in 2009.
Kennedy reiterated his view, asserting that the agency's federal advisory panels are filled with members that have "severe, severe conflicts of interest" in a subsequent appearance on Fox News.
(To clarify: RFK Jr. hates and fears vaccines. He claims those in government who approved vaccines were being paid by the vaccine manufacturers, a lie. Why is RFK Jr. in charge of vaccines? Because typical Trumptards also hate and fear vaccines – fearing that vaccines contaminate their blood, which is why 6ixStringJack refers to vaccinated people as “Mudbloods”, )
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:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Making Sweatshops Great Again
Does Trump want us to manufacture sneakers, not semiconductors?
By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-sweatshops-great-again
On Manhattan’s 7th Avenue, near the corner of 39th St., there’s a larger-than-life statue of a garment worker — a man wearing a skullcap, hunched over a sewing machine. The statue is a tribute to the locale’s history: It stands in the middle of what’s still called the Garment District. After all, in 1950 New York’s apparel industry employed 340,000 workers.
That industry is gone now, not just from midtown Manhattan but from the United States as a whole, having moved to low-wage countries like China and, increasingly, Bangladesh:
No serious person mourns the offshoring of apparel employment. Clothing production is a low-tech industry that even in its heyday mostly employed immigrants who, despite being represented by a powerful union, were paid low wages and often faced harsh working conditions. For a poor nation like Bangladesh, apparel jobs are a big step up from the alternatives. But American workers have better, and better-paying, things to do.
As I said, no serious person wants the apparel industry to come back. But Donald Trump’s economic team aren’t serious people. Last week Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, went on CNBC to declare that Trump’s tariffs will bring back U.S. production of t-shirts, sneakers and towels:
Quote:His hosts started laughing, but there’s no reason to believe that either he or his boss get the joke. And their nostalgia for industries of the past seems to be matched by surprising hostility toward industries of the future.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
CNBC hosts literally laugh at Lutnick as he suggests that t-shirts, sneakers, towels, and TVs will again be made in the US as a result of Trump's trade war
March 6, 2025 at 10:42 AM
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1897673628428193798
Now, the Trumpist view of international trade pretty much begins and ends with the view that whenever Americans buy something made abroad, no matter how much cheaper it may be to import a good rather than try to produce it domestically, that’s a win for foreigners and a loss for America.
I mean, he has slapped high tariffs on Canadian aluminum, which is cheap because smelting uses lots of electricity, and Canada has abundant hydropower. And aluminum is important for U.S. manufacturing. Yet Trump somehow thinks Canada is exploiting us by offering us a key industrial input at a good price.
But back to t-shirts and sneakers. We definitely shouldn’t be making those for ourselves. But what should we be making instead?
A free trade purist would answer, whatever the market decides; let private firms figure out what’s profitable to make in America. And even if you aren’t a free trade purist, you have to admit that governments don’t have a great record of picking winners.
Yet I, like many economists, have come around to the view that we should engage in a limited amount of industrial policy, using subsidies and other tools to promote some industries of the future, especially those involving advanced technology.
There are two big reasons limited industrial policy is back in vogue.
One is that it has become increasingly clear that there are important positive spillovers between technology firms. Silicon Valley is more than the sum of the individual companies located south of San Francisco; it’s a kind of industrial ecosystem of shared services, a pool of skilled workers, and exchange of knowledge. If we want America to be competitive in high tech, we need government policies to encourage the formation of these industrial ecosystems.
The other, grimmer reason we need industrial policy is geopolitics. Circa, say, 2010 not many people worried about how much of the world’
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.
He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.
Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?
I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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When Trump, or somebody just as crazy, Ted Cruz for example, is back in the White House, we are going to regret that Biden was too old, sleepy and cowardly to prosecute Trump because Biden hopes the voters will do what is actually the Dept. of Justice's duty.
All the investigations by Congress will make no difference to the voters if the Dept of Justice won't prosecute Trump because Biden thinks that would be too partisan.
________________________________
Trump’s Great Escape
Dec. 17, 2021
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/why-isnt-justice-department-in
vestigating-trump-over-2020.html
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Donald Trump was searching for a way to stay in power and finally settled on a plan that was improvisational in its tactics but focused in its strategy: Get Republican lawmakers in states Joe Biden had won to disregard the choice of voters and appoint pro-Trump electors to be certified by Congress on January 6.
The spectacle of the riot and the justifiable attention on Trump’s potential liability have managed to overshadow a key day in Trump’s plan, January 2, when he spoke with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, which was recorded, Trump harangued Raffensperger over the course of an hour to find some pretext to change the vote total in the state in his favor. If none of the rest had happened, this alone would have justified a federal criminal investigation into Trump for committing election fraud.
A lot has happened since then, but there has been no indication of a criminal investigation focused on Trump and his inner circles, either in the White House or his campaign. Instead, the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be pursuing misdemeanor trespass cases at the Capitol more aggressively than potential felony charges for Trump, and Garland appears to have left the responsibility of investigating whether the president of the United States broke federal law to local prosecutors in Georgia. It is a baffling course of inaction that poses serious long-term risks to our constitutional order, and time is running out to do anything about it.
The Justice Department has brought charges against more than 700 people involved in the riot, and over 100 have pleaded guilty. Some judges have suggested prosecutors have been too lenient. The well-regarded chief judge of the federal district court in Washington criticized the incongruity between the department’s dramatic rhetoric about the threat to democracy that day and its actual charging decisions as “schizophrenic” and “puzzling.” Another judge, a former public defender, complained more recently that the people who “created the conditions” on that day by telling people that “our election was stolen when it clearly was not” have not been “held to account for their actions and their word.”
Almost as soon as the Capitol riot was over, legal observers flagged Trump’s criminal exposure for what had transpired. The predicate seemed obvious enough. He had fed his supporters months of incendiary garbage and nonsense about purported election fraud. He had heavily promoted the riot’s preceding protest that day, and he gave a provocative speech just before thousands of people breached the Capitol that called on people repeatedly to “fight like hell” and “stop the steal” before directing them to go to the Capitol. Since then, there have been two efforts to fill in the gaps about what exactly Trump was doing and thinking leading up to the siege.
In June, after months of delay due to the intransigence of congressional Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed a select committee to investigate the riot, and it has been moving at an impressive clip. The committee has gathered information from nearly 300 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents, including, most recently, a selection of emails and text messages from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. They indicate that the White House was well aware of the chaos enveloping the Capitol, with a slew of Fox News journalist
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.
He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.
Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?
I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Maybe I finally figured out how to get Second to ignore you. Just remind him of how much his family hates him every time he quotes you and replies with personal insults and a post that has nothing to do with what he quoted.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)
By Brad Reed | March 13, 2025 12:10PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2671323455/
Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council staffer who served with President Donald Trump during his first term, tells Foreign Affairs that her one-time boss is utterly clueless when he has high-stakes meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During a lengthy interview on Foreign Affairs' official podcast, Hill recalled Trump talking with Putin one time and being absolutely enthralled with the respect he believed that he was receiving from his Russian counterpart. ( What Does Trump See in Putin? March 13, 2025 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin )
"The first time I was in one of the phone calls, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don't always capture everything, they don't capture the nuances, particularly when it's the Russian interpreter," she said. "And Trump said, 'What a great conversation!' and I thought, 'Not really!' There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said, he chooses his words very carefully."
She noted that this put Trump at a natural disadvantage when the two men talked.
"Many times when Putin and Trump were interacting, Putin's actually making fun of him!" she said. "It's just completely lost in the translation. I can give you lots of episodes of this, always trying to goad him and urge him on to something, because he's always trying to see how he'll react and the translation smooths over all that and the context is absolutely missing. And he doesn't do a readout afterwards!"
She went on to say that Trump's approach to dealing with Putin was "amateur hour" because he wasn't getting the deep meaning of Putin's statements beyond surface-level talking points.
“Trump always wanted to be the big strong guy in front of Putin and he does that by beating up on the people he can beat upon.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin
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:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Somebody points out that Trumptards are naked fools and the fools have got to shout back. Same with Trump. Trumptards have pretensions of superiority but they are wearing nothing and their silly willies are exposed.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Silly%20Willie
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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WSJ editorial board says they were being ‘kind’ calling Trump’s trade war ‘the dumbest in history’
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-canada-doug-ford-trad
e-war-ba0c6147
The Wall Street Journal editorial board says:
President Trump wanted a trade war with the world, and Americans are getting it, good and hard. Stock prices continued to decline on Tuesday amid the latest Canada-U.S. tariff tit-for-tat. By the end of the day the two sides were talking about a temporary truce, but who knows which side of the tariff bed Mr. Trump will wake up on Wednesday?
North Americans awakened Monday to the news that Ontario premier Doug Ford said he was raising the price of his province’s electricity exports to the U.S. by 25% in response to Mr. Trump’s on-and-off 25% tariffs on Canada. That’s a hit to consumers in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
Mr. Trump went ballistic, even by his standards. Canada “must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. He said he’d double his metals tariffs on Canada to 50%. And oh, “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.”
Nice of him to concede, if obliquely, that his trade war with Canada makes no sense. His exhortation that Canada become a U.S. state is a tacit acknowledgment that the two economies are deeply integrated. His splendid little tariff war will harm businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.
The U.S. sources about two-thirds of its primary aluminum and 60% of scrap aluminum imports from Canada. Both are used by secondary U.S. aluminum manufacturers and fabricators, which oppose Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They have a hard enough time competing against lower-cost producers in China and Turkey.
Canada makes up a smaller share of U.S. steel consumption (about 6%). But Mr. Trump’s tariffs will still raise costs for steel users that depend on Canadian supplies. Hot-rolled coil steel prices are up a third since Mr. Trump took office because U.S. manufacturers like Cleveland-Cliffs and Nucor have raised prices in anticipation of tariffs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said over the weekend that the President’s tariffs would make some foreign products more expensive but “American products will get cheaper.” Huh? Companies that use foreign components will have to raise prices or swallow narrower profit margins. Does Mr. Lutnick understand, well, commerce?
Domestic manufacturers that compete with foreign goods will raise their prices to take advantage of the protectionism to increase their margins. A study in the American Economic Review found that consumers paid $817,000 for each new manufacturing job created by Mr. Trump’s washing machine tariffs in his first term.
And Mr. Trump is only getting started as he prepares to take his trade war global. He promised Tuesday to “substantially increase” tariffs on cars on April 2, which he said would “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.” So first he whacks U.S. auto makers with tariffs that raise their production costs, then he tries to shield them from foreign competition by whacking American consumers.
Ontario’s Mr. Ford at least showed some maturity late Tuesday, saying he’ll suspend his 25% tax on electricity pending talks. He and Mr. Lutnick plan to meet Thursday about renewing the USMCA trade agreement, which comes up for review next year. Stocks pared some of their losses after the news.
The trouble with trade wars is that once they begin they can quickly escalate and get out of control. All the more so when politicians are nearing an election campaign, as Canada now is. Or when Mr. Trump behaves as if his manhood is implicated because a foreign nation won’t take his nasty border taxes lying down.
We said from the beginning that this North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and we were being kind.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash l
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nothing Important. As per usual.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html
As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.
Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”
“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.
The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.
Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.
After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.
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:
Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
Tell Nancy to calm down. It doesn't matter if Nvidia's stock tanks on her. Once she and her husband are arrested and tried for insider trading the fact that all their assets will be frozen and they'll be left with nothing but the clothes on their back and the cash in their pockets will be the least of their concerns.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
In a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/trump-economy-tariffs.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Uncertainty Is Trump’s Brand
“Tariff Man” is gonna tariff—and other lessons from the predictably unpredictable President’s return to power.
By Susan B. Glasser | March 13, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-un
certainty-doctrine
If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies? The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out. But even now, after he has opened his second term with a spate of remarkably destabilizing actions to accompany his inflammatory rhetoric, there persists a degree of uncertainty, in part because no one can ever really offer a definitive answer to the question: How far, after all, is he prepared to go?
Trump loves uncertainty so much that you could call it the first principle of his Presidency—a side benefit, as far as he’s concerned, of the mayhem he generates wherever he goes. The President’s supporters often brag about the supposed openness of his Administration. Trump himself is “the most transparent and accessible President in history,” his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, recently said. But of course “volubility” is not a synonym for “transparency.” The confusion that Trump engenders every time he speaks is not a quirk but a defining feature: it serves to aggrandize his power, leaving men and markets hanging on his every twisting word. This is nothing new. Trump has been trolling the world with this approach since he first entered politics. In his début foreign-policy speech, which I attended nine years ago this spring, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump said, “We have to be unpredictable.”
The difference this time is that Trump is moving much, much faster. When C.E.O.s have complained, understandably, about their inability to run businesses in an atmosphere where the President’s line varies from day to day on whether he will impose market-distorting tariffs, how much the tariffs will be, and when they will come into effect, Trump’s response has been telling. Over the weekend, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked him to clarify his position, he answered, “You’ll have a lot. But we may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, but we may go up.” When Bartiromo specifically asked about business leaders’ concerns, he added, “They have plenty of clarity. They just use that. It’s almost like a sound bite. They always say that—‘We want clarity.’ ” It was hardly a surprise, then, that the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried a story on Thursday with the headline “CEO Frustrations with Trump Over Trade Mount—in Private.” “Swinging from one extreme to another is not the right policy approach,” Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, was quoted as saying. “We really need consistent and durable policy.”
Already, Trump’s endemic lack of clarity has produced a significant amount of real-world backlash. During the past month, amid the near-daily barrage of contradictory information about the President’s trade war, the S. & P. 500 index has fallen more than ten per cent from its February record high, putting it in official market-correction territory. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey, published this week, found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed Trump’s economic policies are too “erratic.” The federal government itself has descended into a Trump-induced state of confusion that has no precedent. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the government to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers across six federal agencies who have been caught up in the purges ordered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that it was not immediately clear how many f
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How would you rate the condition of the national economy right now?
Trump isn’t having a honeymoon on consumer sentiment. The chart at the top of this post shows a tracker from Civiqs; it’s less well-known than the venerable measures from the University of Michigan and the Conference Board, but it’s conducted by reputable people and is weekly rather than monthly, which is helpful given how quickly things have been changing. The fall in consumer perceptions since Inauguration Day is striking in itself, but even more so in contrast to Trump’s first term.
Trump imposed tariffs higher than anything he suggested during the campaign — then un-imposed, re-imposed, and re-un-imposed them.
Hard-right venues like the Wall Street Journal have turned even more strongly against Trumponomics than consumer sentiment or news reporting. Trump certainly seems to think so:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Globalist Wall Street Journal has no idea what they are doing or saying. They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of "screwing" the United States of America. Their (WSJ!) thinking is antiquated and weak, and very bad for the USA. But have no fear, we will WIN on everything!!! Egg prices are down, oil is down, interest rates are down, and TARIFF RELATED MONEY IS POURING INTO THE UNITED STATES. "The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself!"
Mar 13, 2025, 8:56 AM
Another president might be making speeches, even doing fireside chats, to reassure the public. But Trump seems focused instead on annexing Canada, a subject on which he has grown ever more obsessive even as Canadians recoil at any thought of associating themselves with a nation that seems to be turning into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Trump won the election because a number of people believed, wrongly, that he would do great things for the economy. It has taken him less than two months to squander all that undeserved trust.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-elon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Corruption Being Obscured by Trump’s Tesla Spectacle
By Sasha Abramsky | March 14, 2025
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-corruption-being-obscur
ed-by-trumps-tesla-spectacle/
Despite how it appeared, Trump wasn’t acting like a used-car salesman for Teslas out of the goodness of his heart.
This week, as the government teetered on the edge of a shutdown, as Trump’s tariff wars threatened to pancake the stock market and crash millions of Americans’ retirement investments, and as consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest levels since the onset of Covid-19, the president of the United States did an impression of a used-car salesman on the White House lawn.
In yet another of those surely-you’re-fucking-joking moments of the current administration, Trump took time out of his busy day wrecking democracy and the economy to hawk Teslas, the OGs of the electric vehicle universe. The same man who has spent years lambasting electric vehicles, and whose administration is moving heaven and earth to gut any and all government investments in EV infrastructure and in climate change mitigation. Why? Trump hoped his purchase would reverse the slump in Tesla’s fortunes that has followed the onset of a global consumer boycott. (In the UK, activists have taken to sticking “swasticar” decals on the unfortunate vehicles.)
And so it was that with five Teslas brought to the White House, America’s corrupter-in-chief put aside all legal and ethical restraints on public officials using their office to financially benefit particular corporations or individuals and, with Elon Musk sitting next to him, livestreamed his fulsome praise on Musk’s X social media site. Not only did the corrupter-in-chief declare the cars to be very fine machines, he also announced that the boycott was “illegal” and that he would seek to define protests against Tesla stores as “domestic terrorism.”
This came days after his administration announced it was pulling $400 million from Columbia University for allegedly failing to address antisemitism and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate, and sought to deport him—despite his green card status—for his on-campus activism against the war in Gaza. In other words, Khalil was removed from his home and community and his eight-month-pregnant wife not for committing a crime but for the things he said and thought.
That’s really not too huge an intellectual leap from Article 58, which in 1926 criminalized the expression of any dissent in the Soviet Union and provided the legal justification for the populating of the gulag archipelago. But, given the lack of spine in Congress, it’s entirely possible that, after the administration finishes abducting activists with whom they disagree, regardless of their legal status, and defunding universities like Columbia for failing to protect its Jewish students from “persistent harassment,” the invertebrates Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune will greenlight some form of legislation to back up Trump’s fever dream of more generally and comprehensively criminalizing dissent, not just against the administration but also against corporations like Tesla.
Of course, Trump wasn’t touting Teslas out of the goodness of his heart. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars during the election to ensure Trump’s win. Arguably, it was that influx of cash and technology that got Trump over the hump in November, a mutually beneficial relationship that then ensured Musk’s access to the inner circles of decision-making in DC, and ultimately to his unprecedented position in charge of DOGE. That investment, in other words, allowed Musk the opportunity to gut public services and move an array of government functions into private entities run by… Musk. Sure enough, within weeks of DOGE firing up its chainsaws, Musk was on X denigrating the FAA’s multi-billion dollar contract with Verizon and demanding that that contract instead be shifted to his companies. Within days, federal FAA funding was being sent Starlink’s way. I doubt that will be the l
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