Real World Event Discussions
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 53 of 479
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 3:18 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I wonder if there's any indication who the departmental payor was, i.e. DoD? HUD? Homeland Security?
That way you could figure out who abused the system the most.
That's all in there.
If they were smart, it's all encrypted or coded with a cypher at least.
If anybody comes out and tells you that information is not in there, they are lying to you.
Because on the off chance that they're not lying to you and there is zero paper trail on all of this, it means that the shadowy corruption rotting our country to the core is much worse than we thought it was.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 3:25 AM
Quote:That is the plan. Trump Is Rolling Out a Huge Part of Project 2025’s Proposed Attacks on Elections
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Democrats will never win an election again.
The Trump Administration Is Going After Our Elections Too
Government employees have long protected the ballot from attacks. The president is preparing to fire many of them.
By Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler | Feb 18, 2025 3:19 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layoffs-project
-2025-election-security-cisa-firing.html
In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software.
The work of CISA and the EI-ISAC has been central to election security in the United States for most of the past decade, providing state and local election officials with critical tools and assistance to defend against cyber and physical threats to election systems. These steps and other recent blows to federal election guardrails were foretold in Project 2025. Understanding the playbook will help us be ready to push back when the next shoes drop.
Changes to CISA began shortly after Kristi Noem was sworn in as secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency. Beyond the announced election security pause and defunding of EI-ISAC, the agency also put critical election security staff on leave and targeted them for potential termination. These staff include CISA’s regional election security advisers, who are former state and local election officials that provide on-the-ground security support to current frontline election workers, and members of the agency’s Election Resilience team, who were reportedly targeted because they had previously been involved with the agency’s efforts to communicate accurate information about election security to election officials and the public.
Although state and local election officials from both sides of the aisle have praised CISA for providing such support, President Donald Trump and several other conservatives have criticized the agency ever since Trump’s first appointee to lead CISA, Christopher Krebs, promoted accurate information about the 2020 election, including that the election was secure. (The president continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged.)
According to reports, leaders at the Department of Homeland Security will decide next steps for CISA’s election security initiatives when its review is completed March 6. But given the president’s attacks on CISA’s work, it is not difficult to imagine that the administration will permanently gut the agency’s election security role, as recommended in Project 2025.
Even if CISA nominally continues to offer limited election security support, cutting its staff and deprioritizing its work may mean that the nearly 10,000 local election officials on the ground feel very little benefit from the group.
The new administration’s attacks on federal election security assistance extend beyond CISA or the EI-ISAC. Almost immediately after she was sworn in as attorney general, Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—another target of Project 2025.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-doge-layoffs-project
-2025-election-security-cisa-firing.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, i
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 3:30 AM
Quote:
Of course, that appears to be exactly what's been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of "the biggest fraud in history," as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.
The minimum Social Security payment ranges from about $50 to about $1,000/ month.
Lowballing the typical minimum, let's say $300/ month. Assuming that the recipients under 120 years old are legitimate (unlikely, but possible), that's
$300/mo * 12,000,000 * 12 months= 43,200,000,000
Right?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 4:01 AM
Quote:What happened to your "Critical Thinking Skills" that you brag about, Signym?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Of course, that appears to be exactly what's been happening. On Sunday night, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of "the biggest fraud in history," as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old.
The minimum Social Security payment ranges from about $50 to about $1,000/ month.
Lowballing the typical minimum, let's say $300/ month. Assuming that the recipients under 120 years old are legitimate (unlikely, but possible), that's
$300/mo * 12,000,000 * 12 months= 43,200,000,000
No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits
By David Gilbert | Feb 17, 2025
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-ol
d-benefits/
Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits.
But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.
Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records … So that's a case where I think they're probably dead.”
While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets.
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from “the Social Security database” to X, writing that “the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”
The figures suggested that over 10 millions people aged over 120 were collecting benefits.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk wrote.
The database Musk took the screenshot from listed almost 400 million people, which is more than five times the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to the SSA’s own website. It’s also significantly more than the entire US population.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct f
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 4:07 AM
Trump Is Already Showing How Much He Hates Labor Unions
After the president hobbled the NLRB, corporate America is jumping for joy.
By Nitish Pahwa | Feb 18, 2025 1:33 PM
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/whole-foods-union-amazon-trump-la
bor-board-jeff-bezos.html
The National Labor Relations Board is one of the many federal agencies that have been subjected to purges of their employees, obstruction of their duties, and all-around sabotage of their most elemental functions.
Trump fired both the NLRB’s general counsel and a Biden-appointed commissioner on the five-member board, even though she’d been confirmed by the Senate to serve until 2028. The latter firing was blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, which is why the ousted board member sued Trump in court. While that case makes its way through the system, the NLRB has been left with just two members, depriving it of the ability to do just about anything substantive.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 7:07 AM
Nobody cares about your propaganda.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:22 PM
Quote:Trumptards create hardships for themselves that normal people wouldn’t:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about your propaganda.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump will replace US attorneys with unemployed Trumptards. They are unemployed for obvious reasons. It is DEI for the incompetent, the obnoxious, and the useless to serve Mein Führer Trump.
Trump says he has instructed DOJ to terminate all remaining Biden-era US attorneys
By Jasper Ward | February 18, 2025 5:58 PM CST
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-has-instructed-doj-term
inate-all-remaining-biden-era-us-attorneys-2025-02-18/
WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed the Justice Department to terminate all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys, asserting that the department had been "politicized like never before."
"We must 'clean house' IMMEDIATELY, and restore confidence. America’s Golden Age must have a fair Justice System - THAT BEGINS TODAY," Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:32 PM
Quote:6ix, Trump is thinking about forcing you to work in order to get health care for your diabetes:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about your propaganda.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Republicans consider slashing Medicaid
By Amanda Seitz, Andrew DeMillo, Kevin Freking | February 18, 2025 at 1:03 PM CST
https://fortune.com/well/2025/02/18/republicans-consider-slashing-medi
caid-siphon-billions-health-care-poorest-americans/
Republicans are weighing billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, threatening health care coverage for some of the 80 million U.S. adults and children enrolled in the safety net program.
Millions more Americans signed up for taxpayer-funded health care coverage like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace during the Biden administration, a shift lauded by Democrats as a success.
But Republicans, who are looking to slash federal spending and offer lucrative tax cuts to corporations and wealthier Americans, now see a big target ripe for trimming. The $880 billion Medicaid program is financed mostly by federal taxpayers, who pick up as much as 80% of the tab in some states. And states, too, have said they’re having trouble financing years of growth and sicker patients who enrolled in Medicaid.
To whittle down the budget, the GOP-controlled Congress is eyeing work requirements for Medicaid. It’s also considering paying a shrunken, fixed rate to states. All told, over the next decade, Republican lawmakers could try to siphon billions of dollars from the nearly-free health care coverage offered to the poorest Americans.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:45 PM
Quote:About Trump’s proposal to Ukraine. I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about your propaganda.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.
Trump thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.
Some observers have compared the Trump proposal to the reparations the victorious allies demanded from Germany after World War I — a demand that yielded very little money to the victors but enraged the Germans and played a role in the rise of Hitler.
But Trump’s vision reminds me more of old-fashioned imperialism, in which powerful nations tried to seize the wealth of less-powerful nations just because they could. This doesn’t look to me like Weimar Germany in the 1920s; it looks like the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.
Trying to carry out that kind of exploitation in the 21st century is depraved. It’s also deeply stupid.
There’s no way we could actually get the money. If Ukraine were to lose, and Putin takes over, he wouldn’t honor the deal. If Ukraine were to survive, its populace would be even more enraged than the Germans after World War I, and they wouldn’t pay either.
And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.
Yet some reports suggest that Trump officials were surprised that Zelensky rejected the proposal.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-belgian-congo-plan-for-ukraine
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wednesday, February 19, 2025 9:12 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
blah blah blah ....
Trump says he has instructed DOJ to terminate all remaining Biden-era US attorneys
By Jasper Ward | February 18, 2025 5:58 PM CST
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-has-instructed-doj-term
inate-all-remaining-biden-era-us-attorneys-2025-02-18/
WASHINGTON, Feb 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed the Justice Department to terminate all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys, asserting that the department had been "politicized like never before."
What SECOND failed to quote
Quote:
There are 93 U.S. attorneys, each responsible for a specific judicial district. Two districts share a U.S. attorney. In each district, they are the head law enforcement officer.The president replacing federal prosecutors is common as the new administration settles in.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5152413-trump-firing-bide
n-era-us-attorneys/
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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