Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 16:11
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 14 of 48
Speaking of evil people...
Quote:
Far-Left Maryland Lawmakers Pass Reparations Bill While Financial Crisis Looms
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.
By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some [?????] negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world.
When we were the only remaining industrial economy after WWII ... and for the longest time the largest ... international trade was beneficial. But international trade was also killing the goose that laid golden eggs. The creation of the "Rust Belt" began in the 70s and was a harbinger of things to come.
Quote:
Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America ...
Period.
Foreign governments SHOULDN'T make policies that help America (to their detriment) if their leaders are minding their own national interests. The only way we have gotten nations to sacrifice is by regime change, threats, and bribery.
Quote:
tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.
I was wondering how they came up with those numbers.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're going to find out, so I'll take what ends up happening as the truth over the people you quote that denied we were in a recession for the better part of Joe Biden*'s administration, and it cost about $9 Trillion to keep up the illusion that we weren't in that amount of time.
You are a simple minded fool.
If Trump and his team are as simple minded as you, then we're in a world of hurt and Democrats will rise from the grave.
If not, you're going to look really stupid again. Just like you always do.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump’s tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse.
By Paul Krugman | Apr 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.
National Debt in 1934: $27 Billion
National Debt in 2024: $35,464 Billion
Shut the fuck up, Paul.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump is imposing tariffs because American democracy is no longer strong enough to stop him.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love how riled up Trump has gotten our idiots.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By Zack Beauchamp | Apr 3, 2025, 3:15 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/407053/trump-tariff-expensive-democracy-a
uthoritarianism-breakdown
One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly.
Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences.
Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes.
For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him.
Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin.
Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe.
And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs
Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.
By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/
All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.
That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.
This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.
Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)
He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.
If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.
Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sw
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How a Con Man President Is Destroying Confidence
By Paul Krugman / Apr 4, 2025 at 5:32 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-a-con-man-president-is-destroyi
ng
Normally, I don’t believe in confidence.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, “confidence” was the first refuge of scoundrels. That is, the supposed need to retain or restore confidence was constantly invoked as a reason to pursue destructive policies. If you argued for adequate stimulus to fight the Great Recession, you were told that this would undermine confidence. If you argued against austerity that would block economic recovery, you were told that slashing spending would actually boost the economy, because it would inspire confidence — a claim I mocked as belief in the “confidence fairy.”
The truth is that most of the time you should evaluate economic policies based on what they actually do, not with speculation about how you imagine they will affect confidence.
But this isn’t most of the time. This is the third year of the second Trump presidency — OK, it’s actually only part way through the third month, but it feels like years. And Trump is in the process of showing that a sufficiently chaotic and incompetent government can, in fact, do enough damage to confidence to inflict serious economic harm.
The most telling indicator here isn’t the plunging stock market — Paul Samuelson’s old jibe about the market having predicted nine of the last five recessions still applies. It is, instead, the plunging value of the dollar:
Source: xe.com
Standard economic analysis says that tariffs strengthen a nation’s currency. If the United States puts taxes on imports, this discourages businesses and consumers from buying foreign goods, which reduces the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market and should drive the value of the dollar up.
In fact, the normal effect of tariffs on the exchange rate was one of the reasons to doubt that the Trump tariffs would help U.S. manufacturing: A stronger dollar would make U.S. producers less competitive, offsetting the protective effects of the tariffs. And as you can see in the chart above, investors drove the dollar up after Trump’s election win, partly because they believed that tariffs would have their usual effect.
But the dollar fell once investors began to see Trump policy in action. Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.
Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment? Everyone is going to sit on their hands, waiting for clarity that may never come.
Wait, it gets worse. You might have expected a lot of careful thought to go into the biggest change in U.S. trade policy since the republic was founded:
But since Trump delivered his Rose Garden remarks, we’ve had a series of revelations about how slapdash and amateurish an operation this was. Trump declared that he was imposing tariffs on nations “that treat us badly”:
[W]e will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, non-monetary barriers, and other forms of cheating.
But we soon learned that no such calculation had taken place. Trump’s tariffs w
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More fearmongering from the Dead Clinton/Obama party.
Nobody cares.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs
Authoritarian leaders are most dangerous when they’re popular. Wrecking the economy is unlikely to broaden Trump’s support.
By Jonathan Chait | April 2, 2025, 5:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-pol
itical-capital/682274/
All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts
By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/
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:The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts
By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Nah.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:The Democrats should stop with mongering and go with pure fear: make Trumptards poorer to stampede the herd of retards. The kind of people who are lazy and dumb enough to vote for Trump are the kind who lack resiliency when faced with adversity. They want Trump to save them from financial and personal problems because they lack the energy to save themselves. 6ix is an example -- withdrawing from life. Living a minimalist existence. But other Trumptards withdraw by divorcing their wives, seeking sex from strangers, and taking up drug habits and alcoholism.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
More fearmongering from the Dead Clinton/Obama party.
Nobody cares.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
What Happened to Trump’s Meme Coin After He Announced His Tariffs?
By Noor Al-Sibai | Apr 3, 3:52 PM EDT
https://futurism.com/trump-meme-coin-tariffs
Donald Trump's eponymous meme coin is worth less than ever in the wake of his tariffs finally being launched.
Less than 24 hours after the president announced the long-anticipated reciprocal trade tariffs on domestic imports, his $TRUMP cryptocurrency's value dropped to a meager $9 per token.
That's a new all-time low — and remember, it was only launched about 10 weeks ago ahead of the real estate scion being sworn in for a second time.
Obviously, there are far bigger concerns afoot than the president's shitcoin tanking — but you have to admit that it's pretty hilarious that it's happening this way.
Still, the debacle illustrates that Trump's nonsensical trade war isn't just hurting the entire global economy, which has essentially been lit on fire by the tariffs, but even his own business interests.
Ironically, the tariff announcement came just after news broke that the Trump coin would be "unlocking" 40 million tokens, or 20 percent of its locked-down supply, later in April. It's the first time the memecoin has held such an event since its launch in January and could, theoretically, have generated the kind of buzz that would drive its value up.
Instead, it made nary a blip — and after the tariff-induced price slump, it's hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to buy $TRUMP anytime soon.
Per a very unofficial poll on the crypto ticker site CoinGecko, meanwhile, a whopping 77 percent of people who took a confidence survey about the official Trump coin said they felt negatively about it.
From overtaking the $SHIB and $PEPE memecoins — yes, we're rolling our eyes too — when its value surpassed $60 per token and rising to an all-time high of nearly $75, the Trump coin has been remarkably volatile even for its market.
Even on unelected co-president Elon Musk's X social network, news of this latest Trump slump resulted in japes and jibes.
"Donald Trump just destroyed the entire financial markets, stocks, crypto and even his shitcoin," one user jeered. "Everyone fucking hates him now. What a fraud."
In another post, a satirist jokingly begged the president to mention his memecoin at all.
"Pls just talk about $Trump coin," the user wrote. "Need money back Sir."
Those who willingly bought the president's memecoin are, clearly, in the "find out" portion of the "eff around and find out" adage amid the tariff turmoil — and unfortunately, the rest of the world is right there with them.
More on the tariffs: Trump Tariffs Show Signs of Being Written by AI
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:If the IRS would start a bounty program for capturing tax cheaters, and allow torturing tax cheaters until they pay, America would be made great again. The National Debt would vanish in a few years.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law. The Congressmen don't want to pay all their taxes and nobody can make them give enough funds to the IRS to enforce all of the law. The Republicans are even rewriting, on this very day, the law to make it harder to collect taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your guy put us $9 Trillion in the hole in 4 years.
1/4 of our entire National Debt was due to the Joe Biden* administration.
We don't want to hear one fucking thing out of you about how good Democrats are with money.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Senate Republicans breaking norm to advance Donald Trump's tax cuts
By Riley Begqin | 7:51 a.m. ET April 4, 2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/republicans-tr
ump-tax-cuts-senate/82793349007/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Nah.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump has not paid his taxes, by the way. Neither has Musk. I would approve of bounty hunters torturing those two until they paid as an example for what will happen to other billionaires who don't pay. The others would voluntarily stop cheating on taxes. MAGA!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Republicans Are Trying to Pull a Fast One to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts
They’re using an accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless, when, in fact, it will add about $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Words fail me. Well, not really. Here’s how their latest effort to pull the wool over the public’s eyes works:
Details at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-cuts-curre
nt-policy-baseline-deficit-budget-economy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A catastrophe is unfolding at the top US health agency — and it will put American lives at risk
US health care is never going to be the same.
By Dylan Scott
https://www.vox.com/health/406967/rfk-jr-hhs-cuts-vaccine-measles-outb
reak
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he had to overcome a long record of fringe anti-science beliefs. He had indulged in conspiracies about chem trails, questioned whether HIV was the actual cause of AIDS, and, most notably, spread the repeatedly debunked theory that childhood vaccinations could lead to autism.
In private meetings with senators and public confirmation hearings, he downplayed that record and claimed he wasn’t anti-vaccine: “I am pro-safety,” Kennedy said in his opening statement at one hearing. “I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care.” He gave assurances to Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, an MD and one of the last Republican holdouts on his nomination, that he would not change federal vaccine guidance
But less than two months into his term, Kennedy is blocking the release of pro-vaccine data amid a widening measles outbreak even as he puts into motion long-term projects that seem set to further erode Americans’ wobbly trust in childhood vaccination. Coupled with the massive staff cuts at HHS, a weakened federal health department is being remade in Kennedy’s anti-vax, anti-science image — an overhaul that could have dangerous consequences for Americans’ health for years to come.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration began to lay off 10,000 workers across HHS, which includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Combined with workers who had already departed or were laid off earlier, the department’s overall headcount is expected to shrink from 82,000 to 62,000 people.
Many rank-and-file staff were simply let go; some senior leaders were offered reassignment in different roles, sometimes in a different part of the country, according to the New York Times. Subagencies focused on substance abuse and environmental health that were previously allowed some independence are being brought under HHS’s direct supervision. Top deputies who might have clashed with Kennedy — such as the FDA’s senior vaccine official, Peter Marks, one of the architects of the highly successful Operation Warp Speed in Trump’s first term — are being forced out.
HHS touches the lives of Americans from birth to death: It oversees Medicaid and Medicare, which cover one in three Americans, it sets the standards for medical care across the health system, including vaccine schedules; and it is the biggest funder of the kind of vital medical research in the country that leads to new medical treatments.
Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to let Kennedy “go wild”; now he and his subordinates have the means to execute his vision.
Some of the effects are being seen immediately as a massive measles outbreak spreads. Other reverberations in public health and medical research may not be fully felt for years. Former federal officials say the overhaul represents a fundamental reimagining of what HHS should be, a withdrawal from an active government role in the safeguarding of America’s health. We could be living with the consequences of these changes for a long time.
“This is not a so-called restructuring. These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe,” Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director, said in a statement. “They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health.”
More than an abdication, Kennedy’s new regime is steering the department in a radically new direction — one that seems poised to send American health backward.
The immediate dangers of RFK Jr.’s health care overhaul
Kennedy’s leadership is already making the big
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When Dems do this, it makes me glad Trump is in power:
Quote:
"It's Un-American" - 19 Democratic State AGs Sue To Stop Trump Blocking Non-Citizen Voting
SERIOUSLY????
-----------
"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:
The Federal Government does not collect sufficient taxes to cover the debt because the IRS doesn't have the funding from the Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress to enforce the law.
Change the fucking tax law.
At 70,000 pages it is UNENFORCEABLE.
It includes so many loopholes that extremely wealthy people ... and corporations ... can LEGALLY shelter income.
How's this:
IF CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, THEY SHOULD BE TAXED LIKE PEOPLE.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans Are Trying to Pull a Fast One to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts
They’re using an accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless, when, in fact, it will add about $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Words fail me. Well, not really. Here’s how their latest effort to pull the wool over the public’s eyes works:
Details at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-cuts-curre
nt-policy-baseline-deficit-budget-economy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I didn't hear a fucking peep out of you when Joe Biden* was raising the national debt that much every 2 years. Sit down.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:It was NOT Joe Biden. It was every Congressional Republican (plus a few Democrats) who make it impossible for the IRS to collect the taxes owed.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans Are Trying to Pull a Fast One to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts
They’re using an accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless, when, in fact, it will add about $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Words fail me. Well, not really. Here’s how their latest effort to pull the wool over the public’s eyes works:
Details at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-cuts-curre
nt-policy-baseline-deficit-budget-economy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I didn't hear a fucking peep out of you when Joe Biden* was raising the national debt that much every 2 years. Sit down.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
It has been that way my entire life. What is weird is how Republican voters place no blame on the tricky Republican Congressmen (plus a few Democrats) who created and maintain this silliness that goes on decade after decade.
There was a brief lull in the increase of the Federal Debt while Bill Clinton was President, but President George Bush sent out checks to every American in order to buy their votes. Then the National Debt abruptly increased, for no reason in the minds of every Trumptard living today.
Quote:
First rebate checks sent to taxpayers
July 20, 2001 Posted: 11:39 PM EDT (0339 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The federal government mailed out nearly 8 million tax rebate checks Friday, the first wave of about 92 million checks that will be sent out in the next 10 weeks.
The checks, which go to millions of Americans who filed a 2000 income tax return, range from a maximum amount of $300 for single filers to $600 for married taxpayers who filed jointly. Single parents will get about $500.
https://www.cnn.com/2001/US/07/20/tax.rebate/
This is how Republicans in Congress have increased the National Debt for my entire life and Republicans are doing it again:
Quote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Growth_and_Tax_Relief_Reconcili
Bush had made tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign in the 2000 presidential election, and he introduced a major tax cut proposal shortly after taking office. Though a handful of Democrats supported the bill, most support came from congressional Republicans. The bill was passed by Congress in May 2001, and signed into law by Bush on June 7, 2001. Due to the narrow Republican majority in the United States Senate, EGTRRA was passed using the reconciliation process, which bypasses the Senate filibuster.
ation_Act_of_2001
You can see how the National Debt fluctuates depending on whether Democrats or Republicans control it. Pardon me, if you are a Trumptard, all you see is meaningless noise.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Hxo8
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:It was NOT Joe Biden.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans Are Trying to Pull a Fast One to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts
They’re using an accounting trick to pretend that their new tax legislation is costless, when, in fact, it will add about $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Words fail me. Well, not really. Here’s how their latest effort to pull the wool over the public’s eyes works:
Details at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-cuts-curre
nt-policy-baseline-deficit-budget-economy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I didn't hear a fucking peep out of you when Joe Biden* was raising the national debt that much every 2 years. Sit down.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Yes. It was.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:One thing the Chinese government has really struggled with in the past, and for good reason, is that they don’t have a lot of natural allies or friends, even in Asia. I think that Trump seriously damaging US relationships in the region does make things easier on that front.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It was NOT Joe Biden.
Yes. It was.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
If you listen to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they will tell you, and they have done for decades, that the US is a country that bullies smaller countries — it talks a high and mighty game about these lofty ideals of freedom and democracy and human rights, but in reality it’s just looking out for itself. I think Trump's tariffs make that argument a lot easier to make in large parts of Asia. It’s a huge opportunity for them. You couldn’t have drafted these conditions better if you were a Chinese diplomat.
https://www.vox.com/today-explained-podcast/407112/trump-tariffs-china
-vietnam-south-korea
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Whatever.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Investors discounted everything Trump has ever said about trade and tariffs. We’re all going to pay for that mistake.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Whatever.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By James Surowiecki | April 4, 2025, 4:35 PM ET
In general, Trump is uninterested in policy, but trade is the one exception, and always has been. His attitude toward trade—namely, that trade deficits are horrible and tariffs are great—has been strikingly consistent for almost 40 years. The way he talks about trade has stayed the same, and his position on tariffs has stayed the same.
What happened on Wednesday, in other words, was not a case of the president throwing the market a curveball. It was a case of him doing exactly what he’d promised to do and what he’s wanted to do for decades.
Understanding Trump’s view requires no great interpretive skills, because his position on trade is a very simple one: If the U.S. has a trade deficit with another country, that means the U.S. is being “ripped off” (a phrase he has used many times in his political career).
For Trump, any trade deficit means that Americans are being played. And Trump hates few things in this world more than feeling that he’s been played.
As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote on X, “This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science.” The Trump formula was silly and deceptive, but it was also a perfect expression of his view that trade deficits are evidence that America is being ripped off.
In 2017, during his first year in office, he said: “The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue.” He’s told us who he is and what he wants. We’re all going to pay the price for believing otherwise.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/wall-street-trump-ta
riffs/682304/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Investors discounted everything Trump has ever said about trade and tariffs. We’re all going to pay for that mistake.
"What mean this 'we', kimo sabe?"
BTW, trade deficits are bad. So are trade surpluses. “Neither a borrower (deficit) nor a lender (surplus) be“.
Especially not massively and over the long term.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, "we" in that sentence means "investors" plus unspecified others who are affected by what investors do. An extreme example: The Great Depression was the result of what investors did when the stock market crashed in 1929.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Investors discounted everything Trump has ever said about trade and tariffs. We’re all going to pay for that mistake.
"What mean this 'we', kimo sabe?"
BTW, trade deficits are bad. So are trade surpluses. “Neither a borrower (deficit) nor a lender (surplus) be“.
Especially not massively and over the long term.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
Here's a more nuanced explanation:
The Stock Market Crash:
The crash, which began with "Black Thursday" (October 24, 1929) and continued with "Black Tuesday" (October 29, 1929), saw a dramatic and rapid decline in stock prices, wiping out billions of dollars in wealth.
Pre-Existing Economic Weaknesses:
Before the crash, the US economy had several vulnerabilities:
• Overproduction: Industries were producing more goods than consumers could buy.
• Uneven Wealth Distribution: A large portion of the population had limited purchasing power, while a small segment held a disproportionate amount of wealth.
• Speculative Investing: Many people invested in the stock market on margin (borrowing money to buy stocks), creating a bubble that was unsustainable.
• Weak Banking System: Banks were not well regulated, and many had invested heavily in the stock market, making them vulnerable when prices crashed.
• Global Economic Instability: The aftermath of World War I and the global economic downturn also contributed to the instability.
The Crash as a Catalyst:
The stock market crash shattered consumer and business confidence, leading to:
• Reduced Spending: People stopped buying goods and services, causing businesses to cut back on production and lay off workers.
• Bank Failures: Many banks failed, further reducing the money supply and credit availability.
• Increased Unemployment: Millions of people lost their jobs, leading to widespread poverty and hardship.
The Great Depression:
The period following the crash, from 1929 to 1939, is known as the Great Depression, a severe global economic downturn characterized by high unemployment, deflation, and widespread economic hardship.
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Great+Depression+was+the+result+of
+what+investors+did+when+the+stock+market+crashed+in+1929.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow! I keep hearing shit that makes me go wow, Trumps fucked. Trillions lost so far...
T 
Tariff Disaster Has MAGA Media Panicking. The guy in the middle says he is down 7 million bucks. All these guys and others in the video pushed for Trump, voted for Trump. Oh well...
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We're all just freaking out man.
Meanwhile, in reality...
94% of stock is owned by 8% of people.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Tariffs Cause Another Stock Market Rout—Losses Approach $5 Trillion As Dow Plummets Another 2,200 Points
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/04/04/tariffs-cause-anothe
r-stock-market-rout-losses-approach-5-trillion-as-dow-plummets-another-2200-points/
tick tock tick tock
T
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You did plenty Barry.
Half of this mess that needs fixing you contributed to.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump's plan to encourage American manufacturing by imposing huge import tariffs was doomed from the moment he offered to negotiate with targeted countries.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're all just freaking out man.
Meanwhile, in reality...
94% of stock is owned by 8% of people.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place forever and ever.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I'll reserve my judgement and see how it plays out.
There is zero reason or ROI for me to do anything otherwise, and the same goes for you.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about it now. You had your chance, and your party became so fucking toxic that you couldn't even steal the last election.
If anything breaks and we're all fucked, sleep tight knowing that you're just as culpable as any of the rest of us are for it.
Good luck. 
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you Trumptards have perverted the meaning of responsibility to mean Trump is not responsible for what he did this week because the Democrats are truly responsible since Biden didn't assassinate Trump before Trump could do something irresponsible, stupid and, perhaps, irreversible.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'll reserve my judgement and see how it plays out.
There is zero reason or ROI for me to do anything otherwise, and the same goes for you.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about it now. You had your chance, and your party became so fucking toxic that you couldn't even steal the last election.
If anything breaks and we're all fucked, sleep tight knowing that you're just as culpable as any of the rest of us are for it.
Good luck.
--------------------------------------------------
"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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“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reaso
n-advisers/
“Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?” -- 6ixStringJack
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you Trumptards have perverted the meaning of responsibility to mean Trump is not responsible for what he did this week because the Democrats are truly responsible since Biden didn't assassinate Trump before Trump could do something irresponsible, stupid and, perhaps, irreversible.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'll reserve my judgement and see how it plays out.
There is zero reason or ROI for me to do anything otherwise, and the same goes for you.
There's not a goddamned thing you can do about it now. You had your chance, and your party became so fucking toxic that you couldn't even steal the last election.
If anything breaks and we're all fucked, sleep tight knowing that you're just as culpable as any of the rest of us are for it.
Good luck.
--------------------------------------------------
"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
Your party has been cancer for a long time.
You were warned about demanding better and not going with every line of bullshit your media masters told you.
Now they're all losing their jobs, Democrats can't even get 30% approval on CNN and you get to watch the world you thought you were living in disappear without a trace, never to return again.
You have nobody to blame but yourself and the likes of Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman.
Too bad Kevin didn't get to see Snow White.
Woke is dead now, but it outlived Kevin by a few months.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Jonathan Chait is another name to add to your list of journalists who see how incompetent Trumptards and Trump are at making and executing plans for their own lives and even for all of America.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Now they're all losing their jobs, Democrats can't even get 30% approval on CNN and you get to watch the world you thought you were living in disappear without a trace, never to return again.
You have nobody to blame but yourself and the likes of Kevin Drum and Paul Krugman.
Trump Has Already Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan
By Jonathan Chait | April 4, 2025, 12:51 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-negotiation
-tariff/682300/
Once you’ve said you might negotiate, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mind and say you’ll never negotiate.
Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported.
Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over.
The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place. (They’re probably not going to do it anyway, in part because they don’t know who will be president in four years, but the point is that confidence in durable tariffs is a necessary condition.)
Trump’s aides grasped this dynamic. “This is the great onshoring, the great reshoring of American jobs and wealth,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, declared on “Liberation Day.” The White House accordingly circulated talking points instructing its surrogates not to call the tariffs a leverage play to make deals, but to instead describe them as a permanent new feature of the global economy.
But not everybody got the idea. Eric Trump tweeted, “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump. The first to negotiate will win - the last will absolutely lose.”
Eric’s father apparently didn’t get the memo either. Asked by reporters whether he planned to negotiate the tariff rates, the president said, “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have.”
Someone seems to have then told Trump that this stance would paralyze business investment, because he reversed course immediately, writing on Truth Social, “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
However, there is a principle at work here called “No backsies.” Once you’ve said you might negotiate the tariffs, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mind and say you’ll never negotiate.
Indeed, precisely two hours and 17 minutes after insisting that his policies would never change, Trump returned to Truth Social to announce excitedly that the policies were going to change: “Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S. I thanked him on behalf of our Country, and said I look forward to a meeting in the near future.”
The possibility remains that Trump will revert to insisting that the tariffs are permanent and irrevocable. The day is still young.
To be sure, signaling openness to negotiation on tariffs is also a plan. But it’s a very different plan than attracting massive investment into domestic production. The idea behind this other plan is a game of chicken: We think
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Quote:I knew and admired Elizabeth Warren’s work long before she became a senator. Back in the day she was a law professor with a special interest in rising rates of personal bankrupcty. Her book The Two-Income Trap, about how the stresses of families trying to get their children into decent schools pushed many over the brink, was a revelation. So was her dissection of the role of consumer fraud in the financial crisis.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party has been cancer for a long time.
You were warned about demanding better and not going with every line of bullshit your media masters told you.
Now they're all losing their jobs . . .
She has been remarkably effective since transitioning into a political and policy-making role, too. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her brainchild, has been a huge success story — which is why Trump and Musk are trying to kill it.
More at "Hoping for a better future"
By Paul Krugman | Apr 05, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-elizabeth-warre
n
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-elizabeth-warre
n
Paul Krugman - It's been a much more exciting week in Washington than I would have liked it to be for this interview, because I'd like to talk about issues that are close to your heart. But first, reactions to Wednesday’s Rose Garden speech, the Trump tariff announcements.
Elizabeth Warren - So let me set the table just a little bit. I think that tariffs can be a useful tool in the economic toolbox. Right now in the United States, if you have a prescription filled, there’s a 9 out of 10 chance that it was manufactured overseas, probably in Asia, and that even if it was manufactured in India, most of the ingredients came from China.
You know, that's a pretty dangerous place for us to be. We get into some back and forth with China and all of a sudden there are no antibiotics for little kids with ear infections. So that can be a place where you put tariffs in place because you want to build a supply chain here in America. You're targeted about it, you know what you're trying to do, and you do it. You follow through and you make it stick.
Donald Trump's attempt at tariffs is just dumb. It's broad. It makes no sense. What do we gain by putting a big tariff on lumber from Canada, except that the cost of building a new house goes up?
Paul Krugman - Yeah.
Elizabeth Warren - And for me, it's more than the individual pieces, it's the chaos around it. First time you announce tariffs and then the market drops, so whoa, he rolls them back and it's like, they're playing red light, green light. And I think even now, a big chunk of the world doesn't know, is he serious about all of those tariffs? Some of those tariffs? None of those tariffs? And I don't know anybody who invests in an economy who says, “yeah, I'm definitely going to build a factory here in this town in Ohio, or I'm definitely going to start another branch of my business over here in Scottsdale, Arizona,” if you don't know what the environment looks like on what the cost of your materials may be or whether or not you'll have buyers overseas. So I think the tariffs themselves, I just don't think there's enough rhyme or reason to say that there's any coherence here, but I think the even scarier part and worst part for the economy is this uncertainty that it injects and there'll be a price for that for a long, long time to come.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Canada to Europe: US relationship will ‘never be the same again’ after Trump’s trade war
By Antoaneta Roussi | April 4, 2025 10:47 am CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/canada-foreign-minister-melanie-joly-e
urope-us-relationship-never-same-again/
BRUSSELS — Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly issued a stark warning Friday to her European counterparts after U.S. President Donald Trump hit allies with huge tariffs.
“We know that the relationship will never be the same again,” Joly said at NATO headquarters, where she was attending a meeting of allied foreign ministers. “That's my message to Europeans, the relationship with the U.S. will never be the same.”
Trump dumped the EU in the worst category of America’s trade partners this week, hitting the bloc with a 20 percent tariff on all imports.
Trump’s announcement puts the 27-nation bloc on the trade naughty step along with major economies such as China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. His move threw up U.S. trade barriers unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Joly said Trump's goal was to do "a global reset on trade," which had started with Canada.
“We buy more from the U.S. than the U.K., France, China and Japan combined," Joly told reporters. "When you treat your best client, the way we've been treated ... it means that you want fundamentally to change the way you're operating.”
She added that tariffs would ultimately be a tax on the American people and urged Europeans to “take that message” to U.S. citizens in order to influence the U.S. administration.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What this disastrous week taught us about the Trump presidency
By Zack Beauchamp / Apr 4, 2025 at 1:35 PM
https://www.vox.com/politics/407222/trump-tariff-loomer-kennedy
Donald Trump’s tariffs were at once predictable and shocking.
Predictable, in the sense that Trump had been crystal-clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shocking, because they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
It turns out that this combination, both predictable and shocking, has become a bit of a theme for the Trump team lately. Consider two other news stories, both of which would be headline-grabbing scandals if it weren’t for the tariffs.
First, Trump has empowered Laura Loomer, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe,” to purge top government officials. The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on the National Security Council have all been fired this week — seemingly at Loomer’s behest.
Second, the Department of Health and Human Services started layoffs on Tuesday that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers. By the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amid a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic.
Trump telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they are shocking, nonetheless. Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe.”
This, it seems, is the week where we saw the Trump administration’s true and unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened this week was necessarily worse than what came before it, though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather, it’s that the week revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem — with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone badly wrong.
Put differently, the last week has shown, in no uncertain terms, that Trump is acting like a mad king.
What we just learned
Trump had done shocking and surprising things pretty much since he entered office on January 20. His blatantly political assault on universities, his decision to send innocent Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag, his bizarre crusade to make Canada “the 51st state,” his unlawful efforts to shut down entire federal agencies like USAID — all of this made clear that we were in for an unhinged approach to governance.
But even after all that, some people thought there still might be constraints.
Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional internationalist wing.
Now, there is panic even in these quarters.
Wall Street is horrified; the S&P 500 lost more value this week in absolute terms than it did during the entire 2008 financial crisis. Republican stalwarts like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson are warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on tariffs. And the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might check any of this is no longer credible: This week, Waltz was made to sit in an Oval Office meeting during which Loomer listed off staff members of his to be fired. Even Sen. Ted
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Quote:
And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe the situation as an “unfolding catastrophe.”
What do people die of, mostly?
Heart attacks, cancer, accidents (including drug overdose), stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases (like COPD), Alzheimers, diabetes, liver disease, kidney disease
For a brief while Covid-19 made it to 3rd place, but is now just out of the top 10, along with influenza and pnuemonia, and suicide.
What is HHS doing about the top 10?
I know we'll all die of something some day, but these diseases can be prevented or delayed with healthy eating and lifestyle. HHS seems conflicted by allowing too many food additives and isolates to be GRAS.
Seems we would do better with a junk food tax, starting with fried foods.
-----------
"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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After promising transparency, RFK guts public records teams at HHS
April 3, 2025 5:02 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/03/g-s1-57888/h
hs-fda-rfk-foia-public-records
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised "radical transparency," but the firings suggest that promise is a "lie," says Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration and current professor at the College of Information at the University of Maryland.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I knew and admired Elizabeth Warren’s work long before she became a senator. Back in the day she was a law professor with a special interest in rising rates of personal bankrupcty. Her book The Two-Income Trap, about how the stresses of families trying to get their children into decent schools pushed many over the brink, was a revelation. So was her dissection of the role of consumer fraud in the financial crisis.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party has been cancer for a long time.
You were warned about demanding better and not going with every line of bullshit your media masters told you.
Now they're all losing their jobs . . .
She has been remarkably effective since transitioning into a political and policy-making role, too. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her brainchild, has been a huge success story — which is why Trump and Musk are trying to kill it.
There has been no success. Living in America is unaffordable for most, and we're $37 Trillion in debt.
YOUR party did that.
Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:In the Houston area, half the population are Trumptards, half aren't. The Trumptard half aren't doing well compared to Democrats because Trumptards have mental problems connected to obsessive anxieties about illegal aliens and wokeness. Trumptards have money problems which they have no idea they could easily fix if only they were not crazy, stupid and lazy. See 6ixStringJack, who has no earned income, no employment, because of his mental disabilities. The Democrats didn't make Trumptards crazy. Trumptards did it to themselves.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I knew and admired Elizabeth Warren’s work long before she became a senator. Back in the day she was a law professor with a special interest in rising rates of personal bankrupcty. Her book The Two-Income Trap, about how the stresses of families trying to get their children into decent schools pushed many over the brink, was a revelation. So was her dissection of the role of consumer fraud in the financial crisis.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Your party has been cancer for a long time.
You were warned about demanding better and not going with every line of bullshit your media masters told you.
Now they're all losing their jobs . . .
She has been remarkably effective since transitioning into a political and policy-making role, too. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her brainchild, has been a huge success story — which is why Trump and Musk are trying to kill it.
There has been no success. Living in America is unaffordable for most, and we're $37 Trillion in debt.
YOUR party did that.
Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I can even see the difference driving down a street in Baytown Texas looking for houses with Trump Take America Back signs. The occupants of the Trumptard houses are obviously inferior at home and vehicle maintenance.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
SECOND
In the Houston area, half the population are Trumptards, half aren't. The Trumptard half aren't doing well compared to Democrats because Trumptards have mental problems connected to obsessive anxieties about illegal aliens and wokeness.
And SECOND knows this... how?
Because he's interviewed the population of Houston?
Because he knows how each person voted and every family's net worth?
Or is he just substituting obsessive anxiety about "Trumptards" to fill the void where knowledge should be?
You're funny. And I don't mean in a good way.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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I reorganized this article bc it desperately needed editing, but you can find the original here https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/04/01/follow_the_science_why_p
eter_marks_was_asked_to_leave_the_fda_1101329.html
Quote:
Follow the Science: Why Peter Marks Was Asked to Leave the FDA
Follow the Science: Why Peter Marks Was Asked to Leave the FDA
On Friday, Dr. Peter Marks announced his resignation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as Director of CEBR (Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research) citing differences with Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kennedy regarding vaccines.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and other media outlets such as STAT News breathlessly reported that “FDA’s top vaccine scientist had been pushed out.” We have been told that science is at risk.The irony of these reports is that Marks didn’t resign and is not a vaccine scientist. Dr. Marks was asked to leave and then subsequently wrote that he did not want to become “subservient to [Secretary Kennedy’s] misinformation and lies.”
The media proclamation that Dr. Marks’ is “FDA’s top vaccine scientist” is ironic because he decided to give himself that position. Marks is a physician but has no clinical or scientific training in vaccines or immunology. Dr. Marks trained as an oncologist, a field far from the important and complex area of vaccine biology.
At FDA in 2021, Dr. Marks removed top career vaccine scientists so he could force through the approval of the COVID vaccine to meet an arbitrary Biden administration deadline. Marks ousted Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause, the top scientists at the Office of Vaccine Research, due to “intransigence” of these real vaccine experts to not ram through the approval of the vaccine. Drs. Gruber and Krause had voiced concerns that they needed more time to understand the safety of the vaccine especially as it relates to inflammation of the heart, now a well known and accepted toxicity of the COVID vaccine. Marks approved the use of the vaccine in children despite the known fact that children have an extremely low risk of serious health effects of COVID-19 infection and yet a known significant increased risk of serious vaccine related toxicity. [NOT TRUE. RISK OF COMPLICATIONS FROM COVID-19 IS HIGHER THAN VACCINE RISK.] He also declined to convene the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee to review his decision. These events are clearly outlined in the June 2023 House Judiciary Hearings.
On at least three additional, documented occasions during the Biden administration as Director of CBER, Marks disregarded the opinions and expert advice of long-time career scientists to advance his own dangerous agenda. In addition to ignoring and overruling FDA’s top vaccine scientists during the pandemic, Marks also overruled FDA career scientists and supported the approval of the Alzheimer’s drug ADUHELM; a decision later overturned.
In 2023, he overruled his own staff scientists amid their concerns and those raised by an FDA Advisory Board to grant [initial] approval of ELEVIDYS, a gene treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). After the initial FDA approval [2023], the company conducted a subsequent trial which failed to meet the primary efficacy endpoint. On top of that, ELEVIDYS has proven toxicity including liver failure (22% of patients) and increase in serious adverse events. Despite the lack of proven efficacy and the concerning toxicity profile, Dr. Marks rammed through ... the full approval in June of 2024 against the counsel of his staff and the expert panel... and without FDA Advisory Committee input.
As tragic evidence of Marks’ failed judgement, just 2 weeks ago, the company that markets the therapy ELEVIDYS announced that a treated patient died of fulminant liver failure. Marks overruled his own career staff and experts to drive through a risky and unproven therapy that has now killed a patient. This tragedy should not have happenedNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
In the Houston area, half the population are Trumptards, half aren't. The Trumptard half aren't doing well compared to Democrats because Trumptards have mental problems connected to obsessive anxieties about illegal aliens and wokeness.
And SECOND knows this... how?
Because he's interviewed the population of Houston?
Because he knows how each person voted and every family's net worth?
Or is he just substituting obsessive anxiety about "Trumptards" to fill the void where knowledge should be?
You're funny. And I don't mean in a good way.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
He's a cultist and a zealot. He's speaking out of his ass just like he's done every day since he started posting here.
Nothing he has ever said was worth the electricity to send nor the server space it occupies.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Man Who Bankrupts Casinos Really Showing the World a Thing or Two About How To Do Business
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's a cultist and a zealot. He's speaking out of his ass just like he's done every day since he started posting here.
Nothing he has ever said was worth the electricity to send nor the server space it occupies.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
In what has been described as "a massive fucking surprise", a man who has run six companies into bankruptcy and wasn't even able to make money out of A CASINO, has absolutely no idea what he is doing while in charge of the world's largest economy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:My next door neighbor, a proud Trumptard, put a hole in his air-conditioner condenser this afternoon, causing all the refrigerant to leak out. Trumptards are not prospering in America because they are stupid, lazy, drunken ignoramuses who don't realize that they sabotage their own lives.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
In the Houston area, half the population are Trumptards, half aren't. The Trumptard half aren't doing well compared to Democrats because Trumptards have mental problems connected to obsessive anxieties about illegal aliens and wokeness.
And SECOND knows this... how?
Because he's interviewed the population of Houston?
Because he knows how each person voted and every family's net worth?
Or is he just substituting obsessive anxiety about "Trumptards" to fill the void where knowledge should be?
You're funny. And I don't mean in a good way.
-----------
"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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:My next door neighbor, a proud Trumptard, put a hole in his air-conditioner condenser this afternoon, causing all the refrigerant to leak out. Trumptards are not prospering in America because they are stupid, lazy, drunken ignoramuses who don't realize that they sabotage their own lives.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
In the Houston area, half the population are Trumptards, half aren't. The Trumptard half aren't doing well compared to Democrats because Trumptards have mental problems connected to obsessive anxieties about illegal aliens and wokeness.
And SECOND knows this... how?
Because he's interviewed the population of Houston?
Because he knows how each person voted and every family's net worth?
Or is he just substituting obsessive anxiety about "Trumptards" to fill the void where knowledge should be?
You're funny. And I don't mean in a good way.
-----------
"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
We're all sure this is a true story.
Just like we're all sure that you've never made a mistake in your life.
You are a joke. You are a waste of carbon.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Wait, what? Fruit juice??
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
MAHA - DIETQuote:
Researchers Identify Diets In Mid-Life Linked To Healthy Aging in 30-year Study
A 30-year study finds a primarily plant-based diet, with minimal ultra-processed food and low to moderate amounts of animal-based foods like fish and dairy, could raise our chances of reaching 70 without developing chronic disease, according to a new study from Harvard researchers.
...
Two Diets Linked to Optimal Aging
The study, recently published in Nature Medicine, examined the midlife diets and health outcomes of more than 105,000 middle-aged women and men aged 39 to 69 over 30 years.
The team evaluated how effectively the participants adhered to eight different largely-plant-based diets: the Alternative Health Eating Index (AHEI), the Alternative Mediterranean Diet (aMED), the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet (DASH), the MIND diet, the Healthful Plant-Based Diet, the Planetary Health Diet Index, the Empirically Inflammatory Dietary Pattern, and the Empirical Dietary Index for Hyperinsulinemia.
Of the participants, 10 percent were identified as aging healthfully and followed the eight diets. Those who closely followed the AEHI and PHDI diets were linked with optimal healthy aging patterns.
The AHEI diet was found to be especially beneficial. It was developed to prevent chronic disease and emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats while limiting red meat, refined grains, and sugar.
Participants scoring highest on this diet were found to have an 86 percent greater likelihood of healthy aging by age 70 and a 2.2-fold higher likelihood by age 75 compared to those with the lowest scores. The PHDI diet also emphasizes plant-based foods and reduces animal-based food intake.
Other diets researchers looked at that were linked to healthy aging were the aMED which follows the Mediterranean model and the DASH diet. The aMED diet prioritizes olive oil, nuts, whole grains, and moderate fish intake. DASH is known for lowering blood pressure and focuses on fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy.
“Maintaining a healthy diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, unsaturated fats, nuts, and legumes during mid-life is linked to a higher likelihood of healthy aging along with better cognitive, physical, and mental health,” Guasch-Ferré told The Epoch Times.
Conversely, higher consumption of ultra-processed foods, particularly processed meats and sugary beverages, was linked to a decreased chance of aging healthfully.
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/researchers-identify-diets-mid-life-
linked-healthy-aging
What is the AHEI (Alternative Healthy Eating Index) diet?
You can score your diet here:
https://med.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Nutrition/Principles_of_Nutriti
onal_Assessment_3e_(Gibson_et_al.)/07%3A_
Dietary_guidelines_and_quality_(Chapter_8c)/7.04%3A_Alternate_
Healthy_Eating_Index_(8c.4) (broken up for formatting)
There's nothing new here:
Premium score on vegetables (5 servings per day, top score),
fruits (4),
whole grains (4 for women, 6 for men),
MODERATE alcohol consumption,
nuts or beans (1 per day), and
fish (2 servings per week, or fish oil)
Negative scores for
red or processed meat (>1.5 servings/ day) and
fruit juice, sugary or diet drinks.
And obviously ultra processed foods
I question the # of fruit and whole grain servings for ppl with diabetes
They are saying that real 100% fruit juice is as bad as red or processed meat, and sugary or diet drinks?
Diet drinks are filled with bad fake sweeteners, and processed meat surely means bathed or injected with carcinogenic chemicals.
But fruit juice has the simplest forms of sugar to process, and the human genome has been practicing for hundreds of centuries to process it efficiently and healthfully.
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April 5, 2025
Condensed from the Winnipeg Free Press
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/editorials/2025/04/05/chaos-
follows-trumps-liberation-day
Chaos follows Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’
. . . Trump claims that the U.S. is being raped and pillaged — his words — by foreign nations, that Americans were subsidizing economies all over the world, because Americans buy more foreign products than foreign nations buy American.
But there’s a clear problem with that analysis. A trade deficit is not a debt or a subsidy.
Let’s say you want a good sandwich. Bob can make it better or more cheaply or more conveniently than you can.
You pay Bob $5. Bob hands you your sandwich.
Yes, Bob gets your money, but you get the sandwich you wanted at the price you were willing to pay. You arguably have a $5 trade deficit with Bob, because Bob didn’t buy anything from you.
Donald Trump would argue that you’re propping Bob up with a $5 subsidy.
But you didn’t subsidize Bob. Bob did not steal anything from you. You didn’t give Bob a gift — you chose to buy his sandwich for your own reasons.
Much the way Americans have chosen to buy products from Canada or any other nation — because the value or quality was worth the money.
Trump has decided to add a tariff, a tax on Bob’s sandwiches.
A host of economists have suggested what’s likely to come next — significant inflation for American consumers, chaos in the global supply chain, and, most likely, layoffs and business closures. Stock markets are already delivering their verdicts.
The irony is that, as president, Trump’s ability to levy tariffs is tangential at best — he has had to manufacture emergencies to justify his actions. And there’s been a gross failure by the legislative branch in the United States to rein him in and represent the interests of their own constituents.
The real question now is whether anyone in America will stand up to him.
The damage to Canada’s relationship is obvious and will be long-lasting — one can only imagine what that damage will be to the reputation of the U.S. globally.
The damage to America — and Americans — may be incalculable.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A Primer on Trade Wars
Why they happen, and why they’re bad
By Paul Krugman | Apr 06, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-trade-wars
Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs aren’t just the biggest trade shock in history. They’re also in clear violation of U.S. international agreements, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), a multinational, reciprocal trade agreement that has governed most nations’ trade policies since 1947. In effect, Trump has set fire to a finely balanced mechanism that has fostered the growth of international trade by constraining how countries can set tariffs. In so doing, Trump has set the stage not just for his own tariffs but for retaliatory tariffs by other countries. That is, he has started a global trade war.
This week’s primer will explain why trade wars are bad, and why they can happen anyway. I’ll address the following:
1. The case for low tariffs even if other countries have high tariffs, and the caveats to that case
2. The monopoly power theory of trade wars, which makes economic sense but probably isn’t what’s going on
3. The interest-group theory of trade wars, which most international trade economists probably subscribe to
4. Do we also need a stupidity theory of tariffs?
Source: USITC and Yale Budget Lab
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump voters are pretending like they were duped. Don't believe it.
By John Stoehr | April 06, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-voters-are-pretendi
ng-like-they-were-duped-don-t-believe-it/
The Dow dropped 1,700 points on opening this Friday morning. Thursday, it closed after falling to its worst level since the covid era. JP Morgan Chase said it was raising the odds of a recession to 60 percent.
This is all in reaction to the decision this week by the president to put an average 22 percent tax on all imports. He called it “Liberation Day.”
As I’m watching this unfold, I can’t help thinking about something that may seem unrelated to trade, economics and the harms coming our way, but in fact is central to it all. I’m talking about resentment.
Resentment is usually associated with the right. Time and again, over the last ten years, we were told that the people who voted for Donald Trump are deeply resentful about the state of the nation: about immigrants pouring over the border, about men competing in women’s sports, about the “radical woke agenda.” The list goes on and on.
It was on the strength of this resentment that voters in this country chose for president a convicted felon and failed businessman who promised to hurt everyone in the name of making America great again.
And what I want to say this:
If you thought that was resentment, just wait.
Only five months ago, the head economist for Moody’s said the economy under Joe Biden was the best he’d seen. Mark Zandi said “this is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist.”
• “Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment.
• “Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed’s 2 percent target.
• “Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates.
• “House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever.
• “Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.
And now?
On March 30, before this week’s tariff news, Zandi said:
“I’m raising my odds that a recession will begin sometime this year to 40 percent, up from 15 percent at the start of the year. Last week’s economic data were disconcerting, including the slide in consumer confidence, punk consumer spending, and persistently high inflation. The intensifying trade war and DOGE cuts are behind all this and with last week’s announcement of big tariff increases on vehicle imports and the coming reciprocal tariffs, things are sure to get worse.”
How much worse?
The Financial Times: “one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history. Tariffs’ will wreak untold damage on households, businesses and financial markets around the world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped create.”
The Economist: “The most profound, harmful & unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything he said — on history, economics and the technicalities of trade — was utterly deluded.”
This is where we are, but never forget: this was a choice.
It was made by people who were so resentful about something-something, for now it doesn’t matter what, that they didn’t notice they’re wages were growing, their expenses were falling and they had more power in the workplace than they’d had in their whole lives.
Everything Trump claims to be doing – bringing jobs back home, supporting domestic industries, revitalizing infrastructure and investing in the future — Biden actually did. Most everyone prospered, including all those resentful people. As the former president was fond of saying, Trump talks a good game, but never built a damn thing.
But that wasn’t enough because seeing other people doing well, that is, Black and brown people doing well, hurt th
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“He tried to kill his own Vice President, do you think he cares about you?”
The post misquotes Obama, who said if Trump "does not care that a mob might attack his own vice president, do you think he cares about you?" Obama did not say Trump "tried to kill" former Vice President Mike Pence.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/10/23/obama-misquot
ed-trump-jan-6-fact-check/75678173007/
“Stupid is thinking a guy who stiffs all of his friends and business partners is going to come through for you.”
Obama did not say that about Trump, either. But another lawyer did say Trump is "mercurial" in 2017.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/mercurial-presidency-trump-and-go
verning-crisis
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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WTF is THIS about??
Seems Trump is more pro Israel than pro America.
Quote:
Pentagon's Yemen Operations Nearing $1 Billion Price Tag
Fresh analysis in both the NY Times and CNN have estimated that America's Yemen operations will soon hit the $1 billion mark. Still, war-planners are admitting only 'limited success' in degrading and dismantling the Houthis sophisticated weapons network.
'Operation Rough Rider' has seen warplanes and warships in the Red Sea go through at least $200 million in launched munitions alone since March 15, the Times report says. An in total, CNN says the overall operation is "nearing $1 billion in just under three weeks, even as the attacks have had limited impact on destroying the terror group’s capabilities," according to several US defense officials.
Lockheed-made JASSM long-range cruise missile, via Wiki Commons
US military assets in the region have utilized JASSM long-range cruise missiles, JSOWs (GPS-guided glide bombs), and Tomahawk missiles - all of which are very costly, advanced munitions.
Pricey air operations are also being run out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean:
US defense officials announced earlier this week that B-2 bombers out of Diego Garcia — a British-administered atoll — are also being used against the Yemeni military, and an additional aircraft carrier as well as several fighter squadrons and air defense systems will soon be moved into the Central Command region.
“They’ve taken out some sites, but that hasn’t affected the Houthis’ ability to continue shooting at ships in the Red Sea or shooting down US drones,” said one of the sources, referring to Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement.
“Meanwhile, we are burning through readiness—munitions, fuel, deployment time.”
American taxpayers, who are ultimately the ones footing the bill, are unable to have a say in any of this given the Trump-ordered military action has not been brought before Congress.
Washington has actually been bombing Yemen off-and-on for years, spanning back to the Obama administration, without so much as a single vote in Congress. Past efforts by Libertarian-leaning Republicans to reign in the Executive's war powers have failed.
However, CNN notes that as Pentagon resources become more and more strained, also amid the Ukraine war, this could force Congress to take up the question of funding down the line:
One of the sources said the Pentagon will likely need to request supplemental funding from Congress to continue the operation, but may not receive it — the offensive has already been criticized on both sides of the aisle, and even Vice President JD Vance said he thought the operation was “a mistake” in a Signal chat published by The Atlantic last week.
Some analysts have pointed out that the major anti-Houthi operations actually mainly benefit Israel, while others have said that Europe should shoulder more of the burden in protecting Red Sea shipping lanes, however the consensus is that European navies are relatively weak, and don't have advanced enough technology to properly defend against Houthi missiles and drones.
There are also fears this could turn into another US quagmire in the Middle East with little to show for in terms of strategic gains or positive results. The White House is characterizing this as a blow to Iran, given the Houthis have long been Tehran's proxies, but it's also clear the Yemeni group acts independently.
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/pentagons-yemen-operations-nearing-
1-billion-price-tag
-----------
"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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Meanwhile...
Quote:
Vietnam, Taiwan Capitulate: Offer To Remove All US Tariffs, Boost Investment
-----------
"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:Meanwhile, Vietnam and Taiwan were already charging close to 0% tariffs. But Trump used fake numbers to justify charging high tariffs:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Meanwhile...Quote:
Vietnam, Taiwan Capitulate: Offer To Remove All US Tariffs, Boost Investment
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=66397&mid=12157
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
China: 34% (charges U.S. 67%)—though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the 34% will be in addition to tariffs China already faces, bringing its tariff rate to 54%.
European Union: 20% (charges U.S. 39%)
Vietnam: 46% (charges U.S 90%)
Taiwan: 32% (charges U.S. 64%)
01#1215701
Basically, Trump’s claiming that the rest of the world is placing very high tariffs on U.S. products, and that he’s imposing “reciprocal” tariffs that are only half what they impose on us.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-goes-crazy-on-trade
Here’s the chart he showed:
The left column show the tariffs others are supposedly charging on US products — and it’s completely crazy. Focus on the European Union. The EU, like the United States, has generally low tariffs; the average tariff it charges on US goods is less than 3 percent.
So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.
You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.
But you know that having once claimed that Europe charges tariffs more than 10 times as high as reality, Trump will never drop that claim. I don’t know how many people noticed, but he’s still claiming that we’re subsidizing Canada by $200 billion a year. Aside from the basic mistake of claiming that a Canadian trade surplus means that we’re somehow subsidizing Canada, he’s inflating the actual trade surplus by a factor of three. Many, many people have pointed out the error, but Trump is sticking with it, the same way Musk is sticking with the millions of dead Social Security beneficiaries thing.
If you had any hopes that Trump would step back from the brink, this announcement, between the very high tariff rates and the complete falsehoods about what other countries do, should kill them.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Paul Krugman is setting himself up for his final fall.
But I'm sure idiot assholes like Second will keep listening to him after everyone else has finally turned their back on him and his bogus predictions once and for all.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Trump said the EU is charging 39% tariffs. Krugman, the EU, and the entire world says the EU charges less than 3% tariffs. So how could Trump be correct? Just asking.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Paul Krugman is setting himself up for his final fall.
But I'm sure idiot assholes like Second will keep listening to him after everyone else has finally turned their back on him and his bogus predictions once and for all.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Are Donald Trump's tariffs on the EU really reciprocal? NO!
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/03/fact-check-are-donald-tr
umps-tariffs-on-the-eu-really-reciprocal
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:Trump said the EU is charging 39% tariffs. Krugman, the EU, and the entire world says the EU charges less than 3% tariffs. So how could Trump be correct? Just asking.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Paul Krugman is setting himself up for his final fall.
But I'm sure idiot assholes like Second will keep listening to him after everyone else has finally turned their back on him and his bogus predictions once and for all.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The people you're quoting are all known liars who have everything to lose, and listening to them is how our country has fallen so far in the first place. And people like Paul Krugman have been telling everyone the economy is doing fine while the country was burning down all around us. Your last joke of a President added 1/4 of our current $37 Trillion debt in only 4 years, and there was midget Krugman, kneeling on a milk crate with Sleepy Joe*'s baby dick in his mouth the whole time he did it.
You have no credibility and your opinion holds no currency.
You refuse to adapt to the new normal, so we're leaving you in the rear-view mirror.
I'd love to say it was nice knowing you, buddy. But it really wasn't.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:It was easy to reverse engineer where Trump got his number of 39% tariff collected by the EU when the real number is less than 3%. Spoiler: Trump's 39% number wasn't for tariffs but for something else, and yet Trump labeled the false number as "tariffs."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The people you're quoting are all known liars who have everything to lose, and listening to them is how our country has fallen so far in the first place. And people like Paul Krugman have been telling everyone the economy is doing fine while the country was burning down all around us. Your last joke of a President added 1/4 of our current $37 Trillion debt in only 4 years, and there was midget Krugman, kneeling on a milk crate with Sleepy Joe*'s baby dick in his mouth the whole time he did it.
You have no credibility and your opinion holds no currency.
You refuse to adapt to the new normal, so we're leaving you in the rear-view mirror.
I'd love to say it was nice knowing you, buddy. But it really wasn't.
How has the Trump administration arrived at these numbers?
In fact, there's a simple formula to Trump's giant cardboard table.
The first column — the tariff rate imposed by the US' partners — seems to have been calculated by taking Washington's trade deficit with that partner and dividing it by its exports to the US.
The second column — the Trump administration's so-called reciprocal rate — is around half of that rate.
In the EU's case, taking 2024 figures provided by the European Commission, that would mean a trade deficit of €198.2 billion, divided by the EU's total exports to the US of €531.6 billion, resulting in a tariff rate of 37.2% - close to the 39% defined by Trump.
The New York Times carried out the same exercise using figures defined by the US Trade Representative and found the result lands exactly on the 39% mark.
Andrew Kenningham told Euronews this "odd" formula, which is solely based on the US' trade deficit with its partners, is "a completely new departure" that has taken "everybody by surprise."
"It's not at all a measure of tariff level or of any of the other things which we were told might be taken into account in the reciprocal tariffs," Kenningham added.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/03/fact-check-are-donald-tr
umps-tariffs-on-the-eu-really-reciprocal
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 the full article, and it sounds to me like they agree with Trump, extremely reluctantly.
They've answered for you where the 39% came from, so you can stop asking the question now.
Whether or not you agree with Trump or side with the so-called "experts" that have been leading us off a cliff for 50 years is irrelevant.
Paul Krugman's opinion means nothing today. What do you think that says about yours?
Side Note: Two prominent "experts" cited in this article called Trump's math "Odd", so I fully predict this to become the next word that we can make a highlight reel of every Lefty talking head saying over the next week or two.
Isn't that "Weird"?
Put that in the predictions thread, Jaynez
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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As for this bit right here...
Quote:
Andrew Kenningham told Euronews this "odd" formula, which is solely based on the US' trade deficit with its partners, is "a completely new departure" that has taken "everybody by surprise."
"It's not at all a measure of tariff level or of any of the other things which we were told might be taken into account in the reciprocal tariffs," Kenningham added.
Where's your imagination, nerd?
Turning this sinking ship is going to require a completely new departure that takes everyone by surprise.
We're unfucking ourselves.
And we've been fucked 6 ways to Sunday. Why limit our Tariff war to just their Tariff's against us when there's just as many loopholes to how they fuck us as there are for rich people in America to avoid paying income taxes?
We hold all the cards.
It's not our problem if foreign countries over-extended themselves after getting used to our chronic and ever-worsening overspending problem propping them up well past the point they started taking that for granted as if that were going to continue on forever.
Of course foreign leaders are mad.
Because they can't fucking do anything about it but come to the bargaining table and lose something.
If Trump were really out of his mind they'd all be lining up to laugh at and mock him.
That is the exact opposite of what they are doing.
Aside from China so far, it doesn't look like anybody is interested in retaliating with a trade war and they're interested in giving something away in turn for not being shut out of any meaningful international trade.
And every day that passes where Trump doesn't destroy the US economy the media and the Democrats feel that noose they put around their own necks getting just a little tighter.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy. Leading technocrats proposed replacing elected officials with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Musk's grandfather, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.
The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
Posted on Sunday, Apr 6, 2025 9:21AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/the-failed-ideas-that-dr
ive-elon-musk.html
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 Losing in a Landslide in Canada
The president’s trade war and threats of annexation have united Canadians as never before
By Guy Lawson | April 6, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-canada-e
lection-losing-landslide-musk-1235311449/
After a decade under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada was ready to move on from his center-left Liberal Party. It seemed inevitable that my homeland was about to elect a new conservative government and perhaps redefine the idea of what it means to be Canadian — an identity that mostly starts with the premise of not being American.
If Trump had said nothing about Canada — if he hadn’t bullied, belittled, and threatened to annex the country — the Conservative Party would have won a massive majority. If Trump and the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk hadn’t engaged in adolescent taunting of Canadians, for no apparent reason other than frat bro hazing of what they imagined to be a defenseless target, the relationship between the two countries might have been mutually reimagined.
Instead, incredibly, unbelievably — but also inevitably, as any sane Canadian would have told you — Trump’s bully boy behavior resulted in virtually universal revulsion. The trash-talking, Trump-like leader of the Conservative Party best resembled Wile E. Coyote after Trump’s assault; the politico who had long claimed Canada is broken was suddenly lost for words as the bottom fell out of his campaign. In a matter of days, there was a 25-point swing in favor of the governing Liberal Party, now led by a no-nonsense plutocrat banker named Mark Carney. No marketing genius could have come up with a way to unite Canadians more rapidly than Trump’s threats and tariffs, affronts by a supposed marketing savant who is turning America into a globally toxic brand.
Walking the streets of Toronto on a rainy, cold early spring day, under a billboard forecasting “Chances of Canadian Weather: 100 percent,” the most remarkable thing about the city is how unremarkable it is. The frantic chaos of Trump’s America unceasing news cycle is countered with civic calm here. A pro-Palestinian protest marches along University Avenue toward City Hall, with no terror of students being disappeared by government agents wearing masks. The hip-hop exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario proceeds with no fear that the tender feelings of sensitive white men will be bruised by divergent historical and political narratives; a blonde bride poses with her groom on the circular stairs in the main atrium, oblivious to how threatened she is supposed to feel by the large poster on the wall with a set of oversized teeth and braces spelling out “Black Power.”
“NO WAY CANADA can win a trade war with America,” Vice President J.D. Vance declares on television, as he visits an American military base in Greenland — yet another society menaced by the Trump administration.
But here’s the thing: There is no war in Canada. Canada is not at war with America, nor is it at war with reality or empathy or the basic elements of human decency that also define Canadian identity. DEI — or Donald, Eric, and Ivanka as it has been called on Canadian television — is part of the political debate in Canada, of course, but the underlying sentiments of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement are still the character traits taught in Canadian kindergartens: do your best, tell the truth, respect others, don’t be a bully, the rules matter — along with the lyrics of O Canada.
The most elemental disagreement between Canada and America seems to be about the modern world. For years, conservative America has been engaged in an angry argument with history, with originalists on the Supreme Court selectively retelling the past to serve their ideological interests. For an old man like Donald Trump, instead of yelling at the television and changing the channels with his remote, he now possesses the power to end life on earth and thus the world cringes in fear as his discontent with the present and longing for the past turn the wo
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Apr 06, 2025 at 9:24 PM EDT
President Donald Trump has denied that he intended to crash the stock market after he previously posted a video on Truth Social about him crashing the market on purpose.
The president has insisted that markets will "boom" as a result of his trade war.
Meanwhile, trading futures for the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq continue to trend further down ahead of the market's opening on Monday morning.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-addresses-crashed-markets-purpos
e-tariffs-2056075
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I hear a lot of screaming out of you, but nothing much else going on in reality.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:There was a huge explosion at Mont Belvieu, Texas underground storage facility in 1985 that destroyed a control room, etc. I worked more than a year on the engineering so that there would never be another. And there hasn't. I made a truckload of money doing the work, which means the explosion was not a tragedy for me, even though people died.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hear a lot of screaming out of you, but nothing much else going on in reality.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump is causing one explosion after another, all across the USA and in foreign countries, every week. I'm going to make significant money from the disasters caused by Trump's foolish lowering of my taxes and his crashing prices of stocks, which I will buy cheaply.
Like the 1985 explosion in Mont Belvieu, the 2025 explosions caused by Trump will be fatal tragedies, but not for me. Trump is making opportunities for wealthy people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:"What is your message to Americans who want to retire right now and have just seen their lifetime savings drop significantly?"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hear a lot of screaming out of you, but nothing much else going on in reality.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated, "I think that's a false narrative. Americans who want to retire right now, Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don't look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what's happening." He further explained that "most Americans in a 401K have what's called a 60/40 account... [which is] down 5 or 6 percent on the year. People have a long-term view... If you look day-to-day, week-to-week, it's very risky. Over the long term, it's a good investment."
Market Plummets After Trump’s New Tariff Announcement
His remarks came just days after the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered consecutive drops totaling over 2,200 points, following Trump's announcement of sweeping tariffs — including a 10 percent universal rate on all imports and much steeper ones for certain countries.
Critics Compare Bessent to 'Marie Antoinette' in Viral Reaction
"There's something very Marie Antoinette about maybe the wealthiest Treasury Secretary ever saying no one is worried about their 401ks that Trump just crashed."
"Every time Scott Bessent tries to downplay the damage Trump's policies are doing to everyday Americans, just remember: he's worth over half a billion dollars and lived in a $22 million mansion he called the Pink Palace."
Bessent “has a firmly established public record identifying himself as the stupidest Treasury Secretary in history.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless
There are none so blind as those that will not see
By Paul Krugman | Apr 07, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/political-styles-of-the-rich-and
As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week, one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power?
The short answer is ignorant people. But political ignorance takes two different forms.
On one side there are “less-engaged” voters who don’t follow politics closely. And to be fair, ordinary Americans have good excuses for not paying close attention to the news: They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. Unfortunately, many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.
There’s now a huge debate among Democrats about how to reach less-engaged voters. But that’s a topic for future posts.
But less-engaged voters weren’t the only people who missed the warning signs and supported Donald Trump. Trump also had a number of ultra-wealthy backers, both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, who are now shocked, shocked to discover that he is who he always was.
Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that
by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.
But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:
I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.
Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.
OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.
And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.
It's also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.
Even relatively sensible business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase tend to stumble when they try to play economist. Does anyone remember Dimon proclaiming in 2014 that we couldn’t restore full employment because American workers didn’t have the right skills? Five years later the unemployment rate was below 4 percent.
I was struck over the weekend when Elon Musk (I know, I know), seemingly breaking with Trump, called for zero tariffs between the United States and Europe. I think it’s safe to assume that Musk has no idea that trans-Atlantic tariffs were, in fact, close to zero in 2024: The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%.
Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”
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President Donald Trump said Sunday that he won’t back down on his sweeping tariffs on imports from most of the world unless countries even out their trade with the U.S. (Every country must sell less to the U.S. than the U.S. sells to that country or else there shall be high Trump tariffs on goods sold by that country.)
“I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world,” Trump said. “They’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even.”
Trump has long denounced foreign trade deals as unfair to the U.S. He is gambling that voters will be willing to endure higher prices for everyday items to enact his economic vision.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-recession-financial-markets-n
egotiations-retaliation-860760cdc1aa2cc58853c9aab987e36d
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Right now, Bernie Sanders sees not merely a political battle, but a moral and constitutional crisis.
I asked, "Some Republicans chuckle when they see President Trump talk about pursuing a third term. Are you laughing when you hear it?"
"No, I don't," Sanders said. "The idea of a third term? Why not? They don't believe in the rule of law. They don't believe in the Constitution. So, yeah, I would take that seriously."
"That's a serious thing to say as a U.S. senator, pseudo-democracy, not a full democracy?" I asked.
"Look, you get one vote, and Elon Musk can spend $270 million to help elect Trump. Does that sound like a democracy to you?"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-says-u-s-under-trump-is-fa
cing-unprecedented-level-of-danger/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get
Originally posted by second:Quote:"What is your message to Americans who want to retire right now and have just seen their lifetime savings drop significantly?"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hear a lot of screaming out of you, but nothing much else going on in reality.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated, "I think that's a false narrative. Americans who want to retire right now, Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don't look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what's happening." He further explained that "most Americans in a 401K have what's called a 60/40 account... [which is] down 5 or 6 percent on the year. People have a long-term view... If you look day-to-day, week-to-week, it's very risky. Over the long term, it's a good investment."
Market Plummets After Trump’s New Tariff Announcement
His remarks came just days after the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered consecutive drops totaling over 2,200 points, following Trump's announcement of sweeping tariffs — including a 10 percent universal rate on all imports and much steeper ones for certain countries.
Critics Compare Bessent to 'Marie Antoinette' in Viral Reaction
"There's something very Marie Antoinette about maybe the wealthiest Treasury Secretary ever saying no one is worried about their 401ks that Trump just crashed."
"Every time Scott Bessent tries to downplay the damage Trump's policies are doing to everyday Americans, just remember: he's worth over half a billion dollars and lived in a $22 million mansion he called the Pink Palace."
Bessent “has a firmly established public record identifying himself as the stupidest Treasury Secretary in history.”
People with generational wealth control a society that they don’t understand.
April 6, 2025
https://archive.ph/RFgKS
. . . in the past eight weeks, life for working-class Americans has deteriorated in real ways. Millions of senior citizens are nail-biting about their Social Security benefits. People are worried for their jobs. The costs of eggs, orange juice, and utilities are on the rise. Mortgages and medical bills need to be paid. Rents will be due. Blood pressures will spike; judgments will be clouded; debts will no doubt be incurred. And the pundits and politicians, on all sides, will watch it from a safe, comfortable distance.
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 Gaslighting Us
Trump is an agent of chaos
April 5, 2025
https://archive.ph/IzRB4
The first Trump administration began with a lie.
On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump’s then–press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn’t matter.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said.
In one sense, Spicer’s lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering “alternative facts,” treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will.
Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat—via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app—in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.
“He is, as you know, is a sleazebag, but at the highest level,” Trump said of Goldberg. “His magazine is failing.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who shared the most sensitive information on the group chat, wrapped his attack on Goldberg in layers of lies: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” He added, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.” One high-level person after another insisted that the story was much ado about nothing. The information that had been shared, they assured us, was nothing that was dangerous to disclose.
Except that it was.
. . .
Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.
At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.
When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” Garry Kasparov, a Russian pro-democracy leader, wrote in 2016. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
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:"What is your message to Americans who want to retire right now and have just seen their lifetime savings drop significantly?"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hear a lot of screaming out of you, but nothing much else going on in reality.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
"Sorry you bought into the lie. Better luck next life."
"I bet you aren't going to listen to Paul Krugman about anything anymore."
"At least this isn't the 1800s. You probably wouldn't have lived past 40, assuming you were lucky enough to survive birth and infancy. You had a great run."
"Hope you paid off your house."
"I live off $7,000 per year in the mid-2020's."
Pick one.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:You are a true believer in Trump, a group that has tens of millions of believers. There was another group of true believers, but in a certain Saudi Arabian whose group only had tens of thousands of believers. Trump's group can do far more damage than the Saudi Arabian's group did to America:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
"Sorry you bought into the lie. Better luck next life."
"I bet you aren't going to listen to Paul Krugman about anything anymore."
"At least this isn't the 1800s. You probably wouldn't have lived past 40, assuming you were lucky enough to survive birth and infancy. You had a great run."
"Hope you paid off your house."
"I live off $7,000 per year in the mid-2020's."
Pick one.
Is Trump a Bigger Threat to America than Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda?
Juan Cole | 04/07/2025
https://www.juancole.com/2025/04/bigger-threat-american.html
Donald Trump has inflicted more damage on the United States’s markets than did Usam Bin Laden and al-Qaeda on 9/11.
The attacks of that date caused the US financial authorities to to close down the NYSE and the Nasdaq for a week, until September 17. This was unprecedented.
When trading resumed that week of September 17, 2001, Marc Davis explains at Investopedia, over the following five days, the Dow Jones average decreased more than 14%, the S&P 500 tumbled 11.6% and Nasdaq fell a whopping 16%. The attacks wiped $1.4 trillion of value off the US markets. Even just the first day of trading after the attacks, the DJIA plummeted 684 points, down 7.1%. At the time, that was the largest loss for a single trading session in the whole history of the exchange.
Trump’s crackpot tariffs have wiped $5 trillion of the value of US markets and that appears only to be the beginning.
Even abroad, trading was halted today (Monday) in Japan after shares on the Nikkei 225 fell nearly nearly 8%. This is 9/11- level carnage.
On September 11, 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. One thing was sure. They wanted to inflict the maximum damage on the United States.
Al-Qaeda militants were driven by a form of Third Worldism, convinced that the US superpower was impoverishing people by taking their petroleum and other resources for pennies on the dollar, using bullying tactics to talk down the price of energy to benefit its own economy. They saw the US as a bulwark of dictatorships in the region, including in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. They bitterly resented the Israeli occupation of the Muslim holy city of Jerusalem, with its threat to the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, the third holiest site for Muslims. But despite their adoption of an Islamic veneer, the religious tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur’an, and high ethics and philosophy did not drive them. Indeed, many were lawless young men seeking a James Bond lifestyle, visiting strip clubs and bars, buying golden cigarette lighters, and justifying their libertinism on the grounds that they were sacrificing for a higher cause. Bin Laden admitted that they were “not like other Muslims,” by which he likely meant that they were antinomians and did not consider themselves under the law. The monstrous act of terror that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, including Muslims, was strictly forbidden in Islamic law. They did not care about Muslim ethical principles. They constructed a cult for themselves in which they had drunk the Koolaid and were determined to pour it down the throats of thousands of others.
I spent many years studying al-Qaeda and telling anyone who would listen how I thought it could be defeated. I regularly went out for consulting in Washington, D.C. and am proud of those efforts. Most of its grievances were based on errors of fact or interpretation or both. And anyway, those grievances cou
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Markets Swing Wildly After Trump Holds His Ground on Tariff Plan
S&P 500 briefly hits bear-market territory and oil falls; President Trump stands firm despite alarm on Wall Street
Last Updated: April 7, 2025 at 2:30 PM EDT
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-trade-war-
04-07-25
A false dawn on the tariff front fueled a brief midmorning rally Monday, with the S&P 500 surging some 7% from its low on the day, before the administration clarified that there will be no delay in implementing new levies.
The episode, which touched off wild swings throughout the trading day, highlights the increasing desperation on Wall Street as the trade-war rout of 2025 extends into a new week.
In afternoon trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.8%, about 330 points. The Nasdaq Composite turned fractionally higher and the S&P 500 was flat, with all three indexes rallying after 1 p.m. ET.
The earlier rally followed erroneous headlines that President Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. The initial reaction showed how much desire there is among investors to return to the well-trod territory of administrations that want to assist markets and stock declines that are quickly followed by sharp bouncebacks.
This time, some major investors are starting to sound off publicly about what they see as the dangers in the shift to large tariffs. So far, though, it's clear that President Trump and his advisers aren't humming the same tune.
Trump said Monday he plans to add an additional 50% tariff on China starting Wednesday if the country doesn’t withdraw its retaliatory tariff increase on the U.S. “Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” he wrote.
Stocks took their latest leg down in response. The S&P stood close to bear-market territory, defined as a 20%-plus decline from a recent peak. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell into a bear market last week.
Wall Street's "fear gauge," the VIX, leapt as investors braced for further volatility ahead, and global markets recoiled. The index has more than doubled in the last month.
Treasurys were volatile, as investors considered how tariffs could both slow short-term growth and rekindle inflation, complicating the task of the Federal Reserve. Futures prices showed traders stepping up bets on multiple rate cuts this year. Early Monday, Trump renewed his call for the Fed to ease policy and said his policies were bringing down oil prices and interest rates.
In Asia, where many economies are highly trade-reliant, stocks plunged. Hong Kong's main equity benchmark lost 13%, in its worst day since the Asian financial crisis. Indexes in Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo fell between 7% and 10%.
In Europe, the Stoxx Europe 600 sank more than 4%. Bitcoin and oil prices fell.
Last week, U.S. stocks lost $6.6 trillion in value during a two-day washout after Trump announced larger tariffs than Wall Street expected and China said it would match the duties on all U.S.-made goods.
Here’s what else you need to know:
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the first world leader to hold in-person talks with Trump about the tariffs. U.S. officials said more than so countries had reached out to start negotiations.
• The Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper said Chinese policymakers were well-prepared to cope with U.S. tariffs by using policy tools including monetary’ and fiscal easing.
• Influential Wall Street voices raised concerns. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned about the effect of tariffs on growth, prices, and the economic alliances that have underpinned America's “extraordinary standing in world affairs.”
• Meanwhile, billionaire investor Bill Ackman called for a 90-day pause on the implementation of the tariffs, saying they are a mistake.
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:You are a true believer in Trump,
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
"Sorry you bought into the lie. Better luck next life."
"I bet you aren't going to listen to Paul Krugman about anything anymore."
"At least this isn't the 1800s. You probably wouldn't have lived past 40, assuming you were lucky enough to survive birth and infancy. You had a great run."
"Hope you paid off your house."
"I live off $7,000 per year in the mid-2020's."
Pick one.
No. I'm not.
I've never once exhibited 5% of the religious fervor that are on display here for the Democratic Party every day by you and the other idiot. I can go a whole month without even mentioning Trump's name. You can't go a single day without him plaguing your every thought.
I don't know how any of this is going to work out. I've already said that I've never seen this movie before. The one thing I care about and I'm rooting for is a better life for Americans in the future. Your party fucked everyone from every direction for long enough.
Don't ask me to feel sorry for people in their 60's that weren't smart with their money while the gettin' was still good. You will get no tears from the GenX guy who owns his house outright and has only grossed less than $250,000 in his entire life.
Because I'm just sitting here laughing at all of you lemmings and your lifetime of mindless consumerism and consumption. Filling the only roles that most of us were destined for like good little soldier ants.
If they want to bitch they don't have enough money in their retirement account, the first thing they really need to be doing is figuring out a budget that isn't in the clouds. Then they should take a real hard look at how they spent their entire lives wasting money away on bullshit that they didn't need and wishing that they'd done better.
Maybe they should think twice about buying that McMansion in retirement, and spending another $60,000 to immediately knock out the jacuzzi and put in a giant walk in shower in its place. And good luck to them who already made that mistake and have to spend $8,000 every winter heating the 30 foot cathedral ceiling on top of their $25,000 per year property tax bill.
94% of the stock market is owned by 8% of the people. 50% of people are in at least $7,000 worth of credit card debt and have zero assets and can't even afford to pay for a $1,000 emergency without taking out more debt to pay for it.
We don't relate with your kind at all, and we don't want to.
Fuck your stock market.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I have heard that from every Trumptard I have fired. They were told to stop doing what would eventually get them fired. When told for the last time why they are being fired, they can't recognize themselves for being lazy / stupid / obnoxious / incompetent / dishonest / crazy / etc. Trump has all of those defects, plus a few more such as rapist, tax-cheater, and nonstop liar who loves the sound of his own voice.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. I'm not.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have heard that from every Trumptard I have fired.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. I'm not.
I'd stop mentioning that online if I were you.
But of course, if I were you, I'd be a 27 year old chronic beat-off living in my mom's basement, too cowardly to put on my black garb and set shit on fire with whatever's left of my dead-beat 27 year old chronic beat-off friends who haven't died of overdoses or killed themselves yet.
I've heard whispering that there might be some upcoming court cases involving people who voted for Trump who got fired from their employer for their politics.
Not a great environment for any person who owned a business and went online bragging all the time about who they fired becuase they didn't agree with their politics...
What with Elon Musk updating all of our tech, allowing the remaining mandatory departments to seemlessly communicate all sorts of things in micro-seconds that used to take 6 months of filing paperwork through the tunnel of three other agencies that only existed to put a stamp on something and hand it off to the next superfluous government employee at the next superfluous agency; rinse and repeat.
... and a Supreme Court that is ready to make that a president going forward if it's brought to them...
... with an aimless and desperate Democratic Party fast-tracking all of their greatest hits through the lower courts and pushing them right on up to only get shot down again, and again, and again. All in hopes that they can finally get Trump on one thing. That one thing finally sticks...
You guys are fucking cooked buddy. You still don't even realize how the government is never going to operate the way that it did before. That world is gone now.
If you really were a business owner and had any money, you would be the saddest billionaire on the planet with the way you choose to live the last few years of your life.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you really were a business owner and had any money, you would be the saddest billionaire on the planet with the way you choose to live the last few years of your life.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Don't you get it yet, buddy?
You and I... what we do here?
This is pathetic.
This is pathetic behavior.
As in, take that etymology a step further and it's a pathos. Anybody who comes back here and actually reads the stuff we post, and I'm sure there is at least one person out there... They feel sad for us. This is like Jerry Springer reality TV slop to a person who would rather read it all play out instead of watching it on TV.
I'd say that since at least 2006, FireFlyFans was never a happy place because of the RWED, but it lasted a hell of a lot longer than it ever had any right too because of the RWED. They tried their best to make it be a lasting place, but the RWED poison always seeped out into the forums that truly belonged here.
And in the end, as of no surprise to me, the RWED far outlasted everything else on this site but a few anon updates about our OG Browncoats staying strong... Never letting that signal truly die. Short of that, we've managed to keep the Cinema board alive since we co-opted that for ourselves and filled it all with RWED poison too....
And you can see with 20/20 hindsight if you think back to all the awesome old sites that were out there and are now only archived with a bunch of broken links at best or fond memories that we've warped into something else entirely as they merge with other memories and nobody 30 years later really remembers what it was like anymore. Haken apparently decided that he'd keep that signal going as long as somebody was still making noise on it. Even if it meant that it all it was picking up was the sounds of poison sloshing around at the bottom of the sink basin.
We're the holdouts man.
They started yelling last call hours ago and we just won't leave.
All the hot chicks left 5 hours ago...
But we were never there for that, were we?
We were here to fight.
Not physically. That would make the bouncers and the owner very happy if we did that.
We were here to argue. We were here to be awful to somebody. And what better place to do it than on an old-school anonymous forum. A place where nobody really knew who each other were and as long as we don't really step over that final boundary we can just have a guilt free conscious about being truly awful to somebody else because you never have to say it to somebody's face in real life, and there is a very high assumption that nobody will ever bother to truly spend the time and money to figure out who you are.
We found a daily adversary and a lightning rod to let out just a bit of that rage so we never show it in real life. We both consider ourselves Batman, while thinking of the other as the Joker. And from an objective viewpoint, neither one of us is right all the time about who is who.
Our discussions will never, ever amount to anything fruitful. Not only because neither one of us was ever interested in budging on any of their positions from the get-go, but because we're both just pissing into the wind. Screaming into the void.
"HELLO!!!! HELLO!!!!!!! CAN YOU HEAR ME!!!!!
There's nobody here man. Save maybe Haken and or whoever bought Haken out long ago for some reason or another. Maybe we've all been part of a low-priority, low-profile, low-cost scientific study that has been paid for by the government for the last 20 years? And though it might not always be interesting to them, it's still interesting enough to justify the small monthly expense and the occasional babysitting, while also not interesting enough to put in a new hard drive or whatever minor change they could make to keep the site from going offline as of
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Quote:You really are crazy, 6ix. No kidding. So is Trump, especially if you and he think there is not an brutal ending for you both. Flushed down the toilet bowl of history. I know it is pretty hard for Trumptards to understand since they all think of themselves as permanent, irreplaceable and indispensable but you are disposable as used toilet paper.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are fucking cooked buddy. You still don't even realize how the government is never going to operate the way that it did before. That world is gone now.
If you really were a business owner and had any money, you would be the saddest billionaire on the planet with the way you choose to live the last few years of your life.
--------------------------------------------------
"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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Trump is pressuring the Federal Reserve to save his tariffs. It should ignore him.
Tariffs of this magnitude pose an especially tough challenge for the economy.
April 7, 2025, 10:48 AM CDT
By Jared Bernstein, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-tariffs-stock-market
-federal-reserve-powell-rcna199796
Though the Trump administration inherited a strong economy, in under three months, it has generated a steep stock market sell-off and deep concerns about where things are headed. The market losses Thursday and Friday were worse than 99.9% of all trading days since 1929, and Monday morning brought even further declines. This historical sell-off was without doubt the result of Trump’s big “Liberation Day,” when he revealed a set of tariffs that raises the average U.S. tax on imports to levels not seen in almost a century.
Tariffs of this magnitude pose an especially tough challenge for the economy. Because they are largely passed forward to consumers, they raise prices. And because they similarly raise the price of inputs for domestic producers — 45% of our imports are “intermediate goods” — they raise the cost of production, which hurts growth. Add to these woes the tremendous uncertainty created by Trump’s on-again, off-again policy lurching, along with the aforementioned market meltdown, and you understand a) why both consumer and investor sentiment has fallen off a cliff, and b) why economic forecasters have lowered their growth expectations and raised their inflation forecasts.
This combination of lower growth and faster inflation is called stagflation, and it is a particular challenge for the Federal Reserve. To counteract slower growth, Fed officials can lower the benchmark interest rate they control. But to counteract inflationary pressures, they typically raise rates. Faced with stagflation, what’s a central banker to do?
Their best play is to leave rates where they are until it is clear which problem requires addressing with a rate change. In fact, that’s just what Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Friday. Given that the appropriate path for Fed policy is “not clear at this time,” he said, “it feels like we don’t need to be in a hurry.”
So, what’s the problem? Well, here’s what the president posted on Truth Social that same day, as the stock market was tanking: “This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates. He is always “late,” but he could now change his image, and quickly.”
“CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” Trump concluded.
Now, to understand what’s going on here, we need to go back to one of Powell’s predecessors, Alan Greenspan. Under Greenspan, the Fed was so consistent in cutting rates as soon as the market softened that investors came to depend on the Fed chair to protect them from bear markets. This was known as the “Greenspan put,” a reference to a financial tool by which an investor is protected from downside losses.
To be clear, I’m not saying Trump is an avid student of monetary history. I am saying he wants and expects Powell to bail him out, and he know there’s a precedent for the Fed to provide a macroeconomic insurance policy against a policy shock, even if it’s Trump’s own doing.
His post also reveals that he’s clearly uninterested in a guiding principle of past administrations, including the Biden presidency, during which I chaired the Council of Economic Advisers. When I was asked about Fed policy, with zero exceptions, my answer was to say nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, but nothing more than this: “We don’t talk about Fed policy because we are fully committed to Fed independence. History is littered with examples of economies severely damaged by the inflation unleashed by pressuring the Fed to cut rates.” In fact, at CEA, we published a detailed defense of this stance, showing the historical importance of Fed independence, especially to control inflation.
It’s common sense. If you let the president oversee the central bank, th
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You really are crazy, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are fucking cooked buddy. You still don't even realize how the government is never going to operate the way that it did before. That world is gone now.
If you really were a business owner and had any money, you would be the saddest billionaire on the planet with the way you choose to live the last few years of your life.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
100% the expected response out of you, as predicted.
I know you'll never admit any truth about yourself to anyone else. But deep down you know I'm not wrong.
Very well, Arthur.
Let us continue this downward spiral together.
Oh... and that bit about JSF and his patterns...
Don't you think that behavior is a little odd?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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The point of tariffs is to raise prices on imports to make wholly American-made goods price competitive.
Unless, of course, Trump is just using tariffs to wring investment from various nations, which is another potential benefit.
AFA the tariffs that Trump says other nations charge us... maybe he tossed darts at a dartboard? I really don't care how he came up with those numbers.
Stock market .... it's speculation based on a combination of Fed interest rates and QE, and has nothing to do with the health of the underlying companies or "the economy". Since it's SPECULATION, speculators should understand that what goes up can come down...
But it's a damn good thing we never went to privatized Social Security (investing in stocks) bc everybody's retirement would be in the shitter.
Trump is unhinged but he's doing necessary stuff. Nobody likes to take medicine but its been delayed far too long. So now we have a loose cannon, doing what "responsible" people should have done decades ago.
-----------
"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 always known this about Trumptards before Trump made them feel invincible and powerful. They were ruining themselves but didn't see their troubles as caused by their mental malfunctions. See Trump for an extremely detailed record of one misfortune after another, with lawyers rescuing him from consequences. Most Trumptards can't afford the high-quality lawyers that keep Trump out of deeper trouble. Those poor Trumptards have to live with the consequences. And they want to bring their dysfunctional way of life to all Americans. Tourists are noticing and avoiding the Trumptards:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
100% the expected response out of you, as predicted.
I know you'll never admit any truth about yourself to anyone else. But deep down you know I'm not wrong.
Very well, Arthur.
Let us continue this downward spiral together.
Oh... and that bit about JSF and his patterns...
Don't you think that behavior is a little odd?
Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March (Thanks to lunatic Trump and his Trumptards)
By Alex Fitzpatrick | Apr 4, 2025
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/04/foreign-visits-american-airports-trav
el-warnings
Foreign arrivals into major U.S. airports tumbled in mid-to-late March compared to the same time last year, based on customs pass-through data.
Why it matters: The findings suggest a sudden reluctance to visit the U.S. isn't a purely Canadian phenomenon and should sound alarm bells for the country's $1 trillion-plus travel industry.
Driving the news: The number of foreigners passing through customs at the 10 busiest U.S. airports fell by over 20% year over year toward late March, based on a seven-day rolling average.
Between the lines: Trade wars, a volatile economic and political climate and fears of detainment or harassment may be dissuading foreigners from visiting the U.S. Several American allies, including Canada, France, Germany and others, recently issued new travel warnings or advisories about U.S. travel.
What's next: Goldman's note predates Trump's sweeping new tariffs issued Wednesday, which stand to uproot the global economic order in unpredictable and chaotic ways. If those tariffs hold, they could amplify any potential hit to U.S. travel businesses.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What’s the latest? After more losses today, the Dow is down more than 4,000 points since Trump rolled out his tariffs on Wednesday afternoon. The markets last dropped like this in 2020, when the economy was being systematically shut down to fight Covid-19.
What’s next? The 10 percent, across-the-board tariffs took effect Saturday. The targeted, higher tariffs on specific nations go into effect April 9.
And more tariffs could be coming. After China threatened to retaliate against Trump’s new tariffs with a 34 percent tax on US goods, the president threatened an additional 50 percent tariffs on Chinese goods unless Beijing pulls back. It’s the latest sign Trump’s tariffs have started a global trade war.
Can anyone stop Trump’s tariffs? A handful of Senate Republicans are backing a bill that would curtail Trump’s authority to impose tariffs without Congress’s blessing. But even with all the Democrats on board, the legislation doesn’t have enough support to override Trump’s promised veto and seems unlikely to become law.
What’s the big picture? Even before Trump took office, observers debated whether his talk of massive tariffs was a bluff or a blueprint. It seems investors were betting on the former, and now that the tariffs are going into effect, the financial shocks are real.
How bad is this going to get? That depends largely on Trump. He has said that other nations are sending teams to negotiate, which means there’s still a chance that some of the tariffs could be canceled. But if any significant chunk of those taxes moves forward, economists predict higher prices and slow economic growth — if not an outright recession.
https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/407468/trump-tariff-ma
rket-crash-economy-recession
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Signym, literally, you are as ignorant as this UAW President and Trumptard:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The point of tariffs is to raise prices on imports to make wholly American-made goods price competitive.
Unless, of course, Trump is just using tariffs to wring investment from various nations, which is another potential benefit.
AFA the tariffs that Trump says other nations charge us... maybe he tossed darts at a dartboard? I really don't care how he came up with those numbers.
Stock market .... it's speculation based on a combination of Fed interest rates and QE, and has nothing to do with the health of the underlying companies or "the economy". Since it's SPECULATION, speculators should understand that what goes up can come down...
But it's a damn good thing we never went to privatized Social Security (investing in stocks) bc everybody's retirement would be in the shitter.
Trump is unhinged but he's doing necessary stuff. Nobody likes to take medicine but its been delayed far too long. So now we have a loose cannon, doing what "responsible" people should have done decades ago.
UAW President Shawn Fain explains why he supports Trump's tariffs
By Steve Inskeep | April 7, 2025 5:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/07/nx-s1-5352409/trump-auto-tariffs-uaw-sh
awn-fain
UAW president Shawn Fain on NPR today defended the auto tariffs by saying, in part, that “half of Americans don’t even have stock” and “sixty percent of Americans have no retirement savings.”
I wonder if he realizes that 100% of UAW members have both retirement savings and stocks in UAW pension plans?
Quote:
He doesn't care much about the stock market's decline.
"You know, half of Americans don't even have stock," he said. (Some estimates say well over half of Americans own some stock.)
"Sixty percent of Americans have no retirement savings," he said. "So when I hear all the crying about the stock market, this is just Wall Street. They're people that are already rich, and at the end of the day, most working class people are trying to survive right now. And it's infuriating that our livelihoods have been stripped from us for decades and no one's cared."
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:
The point of tariffs is to raise prices on imports to make wholly American-made goods price competitive.
Unless, of course, Trump is just using tariffs to wring investment from various nations, which is another potential benefit.
AFA the tariffs that Trump says other nations charge us... maybe he tossed darts at a dartboard? I really don't care how he came up with those numbers.
Stock market .... it's speculation based on a combination of Fed interest rates and QE, and has nothing to do with the health of the underlying companies or "the economy". Since it's SPECULATION, speculators should understand that what goes up can come down...
But it's a damn good thing we never went to privatized Social Security (investing in stocks) bc everybody's retirement would be in the shitter.
Trump is unhinged but he's doing necessary stuff. Nobody likes to take medicine but its been delayed far too long. So now we have a loose cannon, doing what "responsible" people should have done decades ago.
I was just talking about that with the old man the other day.
The worst thing we ever did was end pensions and tie up everyone's retirement in the stock market.
GWB ran on doing just that with Social Security his 2nd term and thank god that never happened.
Are you kidding me, Sigs? It doesn't take a massive shock and speculators being fearful for that to have been a terrible idea. This that's happening in the stock market is just a great example of why it would be a terrible idea. The example where millions of people are hurt from it through no bad choices on their own.
Your average person is a stupid asshole that can't even budget their own lives or pay their own taxes. Somebody thinks it's a great idea to let them run their retirement choices from the day they start working? It's bad enough they're all doing that with a 401k. If that was ever done to Social Security, you'd have to have to build an entire 2nd retirement safety net to bail out all the failures of the first safety net. That's not even taking into consideration the ones that would just gamble away their social security day-trading them away like they gamble away their weekly earnings on sports ball gambling apps.
401ks were evil from the beginning.
They put a cheap noose around everyone's neck.
They made it nearly impossible for anybody to have a real talk about real wealth inequality or have any legitimate conversations about class.
They made it so anything that hurts the richest of us, even just a little bit, could ruin the retirement plans of millions who saved all of their life and listened to the wrong people.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
401ks were evil from the beginning.
They put a cheap noose around everyone's neck.
They made it nearly impossible for anybody to have a real talk about real wealth inequality or have any legitimate conversations about class.
They made it so anything that hurts the richest of us, even just a little bit, could ruin the retirement plans of millions who saved all of their life and listened to the wrong people.
Do you know how many times I read and actually had people tell me in real life that I was making a mistake paying for my house with cash when I didn't need to and that I should have kept that money in my retirement account? There was a point of time where that was inescapable dogma from anyone "in the know".
I've lived here going on 14 years now. It paid for itself 6 years ago based off of local rent rates that I would have been paying in that time, with all the adjustments made to bills I do pay that I wouldn't and vice versa.
Though it's not money in the bank, that's 8 years of rent receipts I didn't flush down any toilets and it's another 6 years worth of rent I wasn't required to pay to anyone. My property taxes even after the increase I fought and several more years where everyone's has gone up is still less than most people pay for 1 month's rent.
Not only didn't I lose any money, but doing it the way I did it is paying me back right here, right now. Not only is my house valued at 3 times the price I paid for it, but I "make" over $13,200 per year just for the 11 months of rent I'm not paying after I pay the property taxes. More than that, when you consider there were no taxes exchanged and if I were paying rent I'd also be paying income tax on the money for that rent. And then quite a bit more than that when you consider I'm basing my rental numbers on a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom apartment and not a full house.
And that goes on until the day I die or I sell this place. And that number increases with the inflation of rent prices every year. And if for some reason it actually somehow manages to start falling every year with the average rent prices and things to start getting better, that doesn't hurt me because I wasn't actually making any money at all. If the average rent fell $300 per month to $900 around here again, all I've lost is bragging rights on about $3000 per year I was "making" in my situation, simply by doing nothing. And I get to be surrounded by happier people all around me who aren't walking around with that noose so tight around their neck all the time.
Meanwhile, I don't spend one single second stressing about the Stock Market. I was blissfully unaware that it had gone from 20,000 to over 40,000 when I wasn't paying any attention.
... and now I can just sit back on the sidelines and eat some popcorn while all of this plays out.
And on top of all of this the value of my house has gone up at a higher ratio than the stock market I wasn't paying attention to did. The house I don't have any intention of selling and the house I would actually prefer went down in value along with everyone elses'. I'm paying too much property taxes now because of all the investors. My house is seriously overvalued. I'm one of the only ones with sense enough to actively go out of my way to have it devalued and it's still overvalued. Hopefully we can slowly ease those prices back down and we don't end up with another market collapse.
Truly... Good luck to y'all.
I'm always rooting for us little guys.
I think we'll all make it through this.
Maybe we'll even learn a few lessons from it this time and we won't always be so quick to believe anything somebody calling themselves an expert tells us to believe.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Pa
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Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks. A lot of ppl at work put their deferred comp into stocks, and every time the market went down they all looked like they were waiting on a potentially fatal diagnosis. Talk about stress!
I had enough stress in my life.
But I did clean up investing in forex tho, once. And bank stocks after the 2008 implosion. Did quite well in silver too. But I'm really just a dabbler with a 50/50 success rate.
BTW IMHO the only real investment is venture capital. The money that goes into buying stocks... does anyone really believe the company is raising money for some capital improvement , and not just making corporate officers rich on their stock options?
-----------
"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 thought that a paid advertisement had been inserted into my reading. But then I realized that it was 6ixStringJack patting himself on the back for his farsighted financial acumen once again.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do you know how many times I read and actually had people tell me in real life that I was making a mistake paying for my house with cash when I didn't need to and that I should have kept that money in my retirement account? There was a point of time where that was inescapable dogma from anyone "in the know".
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Signym is empathizing with ppl. Any left for these ppl?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks.
US ends life-saving food aid for millions. The World Food Program calls it a ‘death sentence’
8:15 PM CDT, April 7, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-humanitarian-aid-1167e0f64dde9a
b6cafa0d5e0b812710
The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was appointed to oversee the elimination of USAID programs, according to termination notices sent to partners and viewed by the AP.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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David Brooks: I Should Have Seen This Coming
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-pop
ulism-power-pursuit/682116/
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want to put them in trauma.”
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
I should have understood this much sooner, because the reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986. A group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus to protest apartheid. One night, a group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down.
Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.
Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy.
Although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review
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Quote:
Pentagon chief hails first $1 trillion defense budget
President Donald Trump announced the record boost in US military spending on Monday
Oy vey!
Wrong direction, chief!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Pentagon chief hails first $1 trillion defense budget
President Donald Trump announced the record boost in US military spending on Monday
Oy vey!
Wrong direction, chief!
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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
Yeah. That one belongs in the legitimate gripes about Trump thread.
Although that thread has already been ruined long ago with Second's crap.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I thought that a paid advertisement had been inserted into my reading. But then I realized that it was 6ixStringJack patting himself on the back for his farsighted financial acumen once again.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do you know how many times I read and actually had people tell me in real life that I was making a mistake paying for my house with cash when I didn't need to and that I should have kept that money in my retirement account? There was a point of time where that was inescapable dogma from anyone "in the know".
I never tire of speaking about my own brilliance. Especially when the choices I made flew right in the face of all the so-called "experts" and I came out way on top.
Good luck in the stock market buddy. I feel for you. Really I do.
Be sure to thank Paul Krugman for all his great advice so far.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Originally posted by second:
David Brooks: I Should Have Seen This Coming
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-pop
ulism-power-pursuit/682116/
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing.
Fuck off David.
From Covid to Inflation to International Politics, 1984 was the blueprint for Biden*'s administration.
The reason you didn't see it coming is because YOU, specifically, are part of what George Orwell was warning about. And any suggested solution you propose in this article for what Trump should have been doing all this time instead of what he has been doing is all things that your party promised several times and always failed to follow through with after they won an election. If this weren't true, Harris would be President today.
And nobody gives a flying fuck about your opinions on any topic in 2025.
Enjoy the rest of your life being irrelevant. You had a good ride for a grifter.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Donald Trump Must Be Impeached
By Andrew Latham | April 8, 2025
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/donald-trump-must-be-impeached/
The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump Is Clear: The Will to Do It Just Isn’t There – The case for impeaching President Donald Trump—again—is not difficult to make.
In some ways, it’s stronger than ever.
And yet, it will go nowhere.
Because the question before us isn’t whether Trump should be impeached. It’s whether America still possesses the political maturity—or the institutional integrity—to confront what that would actually mean.
Let’s be clear: Trump’s return to the presidency was a democratic result, a response to elite failure. The American people, or at least enough of them in enough places, gave him a mandate. But a mandate to govern is not a license to undermine the very structures that make governing possible. What we are witnessing is not a debate over policy direction or ideological contest. It is a slow-motion confrontation between one man and the constitutional order itself—disguised, as always, as populism.
Already, this administration is skirting the outer edges of legality and constitutional fidelity. The warning signs are not buried deep. They are right in front of us—Trump defying court rulings, publicly deriding judges who rule against him, and calling for their impeachment simply for doing their jobs. His vision of presidential power is not expansive—it is absolute, even monarchical. And that, in the American system, is a tendency that impeachment was designed to check.
It’s tempting to wave this all away – to pretend what’s going on is not really a threat to democracy. After all, haven’t we been down this road before? Twice? Didn’t the American people just signal that they are, if not enthusiastic, at least unbothered by Trump’s past offenses? That’s the wrong lesson. Impeachment is not a popularity contest.
It’s not a referendum on electoral legitimacy. It is a constitutional remedy for those moments when the chief executive officer refuses to be constrained by law, when the very idea of checks and balances becomes intolerable to the man at the top.
By that standard, Trump qualifies.
The fundamental political issue isn’t Trump’s personal conduct, however contemptuous it may be, but his systematic rejection of the system of checks and balances that defines the American system of republican democracy. When a sitting president declares that courts have no right to question his policies, when he floats the idea of ignoring rulings from various courts, and when he demands his supporters in Congress simply accede to his demands, the republic is not merely being tested. It is being threatened.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that Trump is not alone. He is enabled by a political movement that no longer even pretends to be constitutionalist in any meaningful sense. The institutional Republican Party has become a vehicle not for policy, but for power. It does not challenge Trump’s violations—it echoes and amplifies them. The legislative branch, designed by the Founders to check executive ambition, has become more of a cheering section than an institutional constraint on that ambition.
And so, Trump will not be impeached—not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because the institutional will, or capacity, no longer exists. This is not a partisan point. It’s a structural one. The House majority, cowed by Trump’s influence, is incapable of serious oversight. The Senate, still reeling from the political trauma of two failed impeachment efforts, has no appetite to try again. And much of the electorate, exhausted by years of performative outrage and media madness, has lost the capacity to distinguish between real constitutional overeach and mere partisan posturing.
That collapse of discernment – or, in classical terms, prudence – is perhaps the most dangerous development of all. When impeachment becomes nothing more than a punchline, constitutional decay follows. We are now at the point where a president can announce, openl
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks.
SECOND: Signym is empathizing with ppl. Any left for these ppl?
US ends life-saving food aid for millions. The World Food Program calls it a ‘death sentence’
8:15 PM CDT, April 7, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-humanitarian-aid-1167e0f64dde9a
b6cafa0d5e0b812710
The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was appointed to oversee the elimination of USAID programs, according to termination notices sent to partners and viewed by the AP.
]
Of course I feel sorry for starving people.
But do you see the part where I say "I believe in solving problems, not sharing them"?
WHY are people starving? SOMETIMES, not often, it's bc of natural disaster. Widespread floods. Or drought.
OFTEN its bc of war (wars that we often foment, such as in the former Sudan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia etc) or sanctions (such as in Syria, which was also subject to our military and regime-change ops) or internal corruption of an entrenched oligarchy (India comes to mind) or displacement of small farmers by globalists to fit into the "cheap labor" grand scheme of things (such as when the USA flooded Haiti with cheap rice and Mexico with cheap corn) or relegation of certain areas to agricultural commodity production (cocoa and coffee).
If we REALLY want to end hunger, we need to stop creating it wherever it's our fault. If it's an internal problem (India) there's not much we can do.
Disaster relief?
Sure.
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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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