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 17 of 48
Quote:Donald Trump has been treated very, very badly. At least that’s what he says all the time, and there’s no reason to doubt that it’s how he feels. Hardly a day goes by without an outburst like this:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up. Stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!
13.5k ReTruths 59.2k Likes Apr 20, 2025, 1:46 PM
Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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its changing, stocks are crazy, promised Epstein files never released, the country has those hotheads everywhere, still divided but maybe even more
and now they deport Vets people who served in the Army get shipped off to some foreign prison?
but let's kick those Eskimos out of Greenland and claim those Ores and real estate Treasures on the ice cube!
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Quote:Warren Buffett’s Response to President Trump’s Tariffs Is a Lesson For Every Leader
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up. Stupid.
Buffett knows what every leader should learn: saying nothing says a lot.
April 21, 2025
President Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that said Warren Buffett called Trump’s economic moves “the best he’d seen in 50 years.” That would certainly be quite the endorsement from the world’s most famous investor.
Berkshire Hathaway issued a statement in response. “There are reports currently circulating on social media (including Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok) regarding comments allegedly made by Warren E. Buffett. All such reports are false,” the statement said.
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/warren-buffetts-response-to-president-t
rumps-tariffs-is-a-lesson-for-every-leader/91178877
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The United States is turning itself into an emerging market. There are set patterns that we associate with mature democracies. There are set patterns that we associate with developing countries, for which some people would use the term “banana republic.”
In mature democracies, it’s institutions that dominate; in banana republics, it’s personalities that dominate.
In mature democracies, it’s the rule of law that governs interactions between businesses and between business and government; in emerging markets, it’s personalities, personal connections, and loyalty.
In mature democracies, the central bank and finance sites are independent relative to politics; in emerging markets, that is much more in question.
In mature democracies, the goal is interaction, openness, and prosperity along with the world; in immature democracies, in emerging markets, it is nationalist economic policies tied to particular interests.
Trump is transforming the United States into Juan Perón’s Argentina.
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/04/larry-summers-on-harvard
s-showdown-with-trump.html
There is a huge amount of confusion inside Argentina about how its economy crashed, but it is very simple from outside Argentina. The vast majority of the poorest voters have been deluding themselves all of their lives. They went completely Trumptard but for Perón, not Trump. They even called themselves Perónists.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68126858
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry
He clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him.
And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind.
It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals.
Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.
If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
But wait, wasn’t Mao hard left while America has been taken over by the hard right? Well, why do you think there’s a big difference between the two? I’m a believer in horseshoe theory, which says that the extreme left and the extreme right are more like each other than either is like the political center. For example, among Britain’s unions there is a hard-left faction that has no counterpart in the United States. Some of its positions, notably making apologies for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, look a lot like MAGA.
And in America some leftist commentators have effectively become spokesmen for the tech-bro right.
Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.
The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.
The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-cultural-revolution
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Krugman citing Mao.
I've seen everything now.
Don't Democrats have any mirrors in their houses?
Bet you wish you didn't lie all the time before now, huh Paul?
Ain't nobody listening to you anymore. 
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Parallels between now and then:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Krugman citing Mao.
I've seen everything now.
Don't Democrats have any mirrors in their houses?
Bet you wish you didn't lie all the time before now, huh Paul?
Ain't nobody listening to you anymore.
Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs
By seeking to “liberate” Germans from a globalized world order, the Nazi government sent the national economy careening backwards.
By Timothy W. Ryback | April 20, 2025, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/nazi-germany-tariffs
-trade/682521/
From almost the moment Adolf Hitler took office as chancellor of Germany, tariffs were at the top of his government’s economic agenda. The agricultural sector’s demands for higher tariffs “must be met,” Hitler’s economic minister, Alfred Hugenberg, declared on Wednesday, February 1, 1933, just over 48 hours into Hitler’s chancellorship, “while at the same time preventing harm to industry.” Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath was concerned about lumber imports from Austria and a 200-million-reichsmark trade deal with Russia. With several trade agreements about to expire, Hitler’s finance minister, Count Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, insisted that “immediate decisions” needed to be made. Hitler told his cabinet he had only one priority—to avoid “unacceptable unrest” in advance of the March 5 Reichstag elections, which he saw as key to his hold on power.
Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.
Hitler relied on Gottfried Feder, the National Socialist Party’s long-serving chief economist, to develop the specifics of an economic program. Feder had helped concoct the strange brew of socialism and fanatical nationalism in the original 25-point program of this putative “workers’ party.” In May 1932, Feder outlined what would become the first Nazi economic plan, in a 32-page position paper designed for ready implementation were Hitler to suddenly find himself in power. High on Feder’s agenda for a Hitler economy were tariffs.
“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition.”
Even though Hitler’s own foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was concerned that the strategy would spark a trade war, and could drive up the price of imported eggs by 600 percent, Feder’s tariffs fit into Hitler’s larger vision for “liberating” the German people from the shackles of a globalized world order.
The crash of 1929 had plunged Germany, along with much of the rest of the world, into an abyss. Markets collapsed. Factories were idled. Unemployment soared. In the early 1930s, one out of three German workers was unemployed. But Hitler had inherited a recovering economy: In December 1932, the German Institute for Economic Research reported that the crisis had been “significantly overcome”; by the time Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, the economy was on the mend.
Thus Hitler’s main economic task as chancellor was not to mess things up. The German stock market had rallied on news of his coming to power. “The Boerse recovered today from its weakness when it learned of Adolf Hitl
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Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump
Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p
. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.
Sincerely,
Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland
Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost
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:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump
Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p
. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.
Sincerely,
Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland
Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Wow! It was only one short paragraph, but you completely misunderstood it, 6ix. Once again, I see why Trumptards struggle in America. How can they understand more complicated ideas if they can't get the simplest idea, such as that Trump should not steal money from Ukraine? Here is another idea Trumptards don't understand: Do as promised (in this case, keep the promise of guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity).
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump
Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p
. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.
Sincerely,
Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland
Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Trumptards I know at work can disassemble complex machines easily, but reassembly is very hard for them. Machines repaired by my Trumptards never run right until a human undoes the Trumptards' work and puts the machine back together properly.
Breaking the Conveyor Belt
Motivated perhaps above all by culture-war grievance, in the past month Donald Trump has tried to radically reshape a century-old system of global trade.
By Nic Johnson | April 20, 2025
Nic Johnson teaches in the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago. https://llso.uchicago.edu/people/nic-johnson
https://nic-johnson.com/
On January 26, less than a week after his inauguration, Donald Trump took a break from a day of rest and relaxation at his Miami golf course to post on social media that Colombia would face vicious “emergency” tariffs unless the country accepted two planes of deportees. President Gustavo Petro initially balked before giving in—but even that initial hesitation had by the end of the month made him less popular among Colombians than Trump himself. The country depends on access to American markets; it can’t afford even modest brinkmanship with the US.
This early victory no doubt swelled Trump’s confidence, not least because he was shooting from the hip. At the time, most of his cabinet had not even been confirmed. His commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, wouldn’t be through the nomination process until late February, and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, not until mid-March.
The next six weeks of policy reflected the same scattershot impulsiveness. In February Trump announced tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, only to delay those for Mexico and Canada once Mexico promised to send troops to the border. In March, two days after the tariffs were finally implemented, Trump revealed that there would be exemptions for “USMCA goods” from Mexico (i.e., all goods covered by the free trade deal Trump negotiated in his first term) and auto parts from Canada, one of the country’s largest export items to the US. The tariffs on China targeting de minimis imports (those worth less than $800) were rolled back when it turned out that the Post Office might not have the administrative capacity to collect them. It was a confusing time for everyone, and apparently for the Trump administration itself, full of reversals, delays, and exceptions.
Then came “Liberation Day.” Working from the assumption that the US’s trade deficit with a given country represents the “sum of all cheating,” on April 2 the administration imposed tariffs on all its trade partners, using a by now infamous formula: simply dividing the US’s trade deficit with each country by twice its imports from that country—with a minimum of 10 percent. The resulting policy was far more extreme, and far crueler, than almost all observers expected. Cambodia was hit by 49 percent levies, Serbia by 37 percent, South Africa by 30 percent. Stock exchanges all over the world immediately panicked. Only under the looming threat of a bond market meltdown and a Depression did Trump temporarily lower these “reciprocal” tariffs to 10 percent across the board—even as he escalated his tariffs on China, which as of this writing remain at a staggering 145 percent.
Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approa
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Larry David is not equating Trump with Hitler. He is writing about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.
My Dinner With Adolf
By Larry David | April 21, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/larry-david-hitler-dinner.h
tml
Mr. David is a comedian and writer who created “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and was a co-creator of “Seinfeld.”
Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.
He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different
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A “sudden-stop” crisis comes to America
By Paul Krugman | Apr 22, 2025
Source: xe.com
Yesterday Bloomberg posted an article titled “Markets Are Discovering the Real Trump Trade Is ‘Sell America’.” That’s about right. Look at the value of the dollar on international markets, shown at the top of this post. For a while after the election investors loved Trump, not wisely but too well. But in the face of one idiotic policy move after another, they’ve gradually fallen out of love, and now seem to be capitulating. I think they still haven’t faced up to how bad it is, but they’re figuring it out.
What we’re seeing now is something familiar to those of us who have studied economic crises in other countries, usually but not always emerging markets. For this is looking more and more like a “sudden stop.” That’s what happens when a country that has relied on large inflows of foreign capital loses the confidence of international investors. The inflow of money dries up — and the economic consequences are usually ugly.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/stop-in-the-name-of-trump
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:Wow! It was only one short paragraph, but you completely misunderstood it, 6ix. Once again, I see why Trumptards struggle in America. How can they understand more complicated ideas if they can't get the simplest idea, such as that Trump should not steal money from Ukraine? Here is another idea Trumptards don't understand: Do as promised (in this case, keep the promise of guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity).
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Lech Walesa Letter to President Trump
Angry Bear | April 21, 2025 5:08 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/lech-walesa-letter-to-president-trum
p
. . . We urge the USA to stand by the promises made in 1994 with the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, the USA and the United Kingdom guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the country giving up its nuclear weapons. Those promises were unconditional – nowhere does it say that this support should be considered a financial deal.
Sincerely,
Lech Walesa, former political prisoner and president of Poland
Original at
https://www.facebook.com/lechwalesa/posts/1205977244231523?ref=embed_p
ost
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Go get some fucking nukes. See how that works out for you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Nah. Just giving your posts the seriousness which they deserve is all.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Elsewhere today:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nah. Just giving your posts the seriousness which they deserve is all.
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=36983&mid=12171
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why anybody in the world gives one single shit about the Pope in 2025 is just beyond me.
77#1217177
6ix, you wrecked your health because of your general stupidity about other people's lives and even your own life.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Jerome Groopman on the Measles Outbreak
The New York Review of Books https://email.nybooks.com/t/y-l-ckdojl-dllrtujkjl-j/
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has for years been one of the most prominent vaccination skeptics in the United States. As Jerome Groopman documents in the Review’s May 15 issue, he has campaigned against mandates—calling the effects of vaccines on children a “holocaust”—and once said “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” And now, during a measles outbreak that has spread to nine states and infected more than eight hundred people, three of whom have died, rather than advocating empirically effective epidemiological measures, Kennedy has recommended “the use of cod-liver oil...and steroids, although there’s no scientific proof that either is an effective treatment” and, moreover, “proposed prescribing clarithromycin, an antibiotic, as a treatment for measles, although antibiotics have no effect on viruses.”
“In the midst of an outbreak of a contagious disease,” writes Groopman,
Quote:
it is seductive to believe we can control it with something simple and easily available that the medical establishment has neglected or dismissed. Ivermectin, an antiparasite drug that has demonstrated no benefit against Covid, is still touted by right-wing influencers as an alternative treatment offering miraculous cures. HIV was falsely alleged to be not the primary cause of AIDS but an innocuous fellow traveler as the immune system is degraded by sex and poppers (amyl nitrate). Cod-liver oil is promoted as a prophylactic against measles despite the proven efficacy of vaccination. We are moving into a parallel universe where those who oversee public health want to take us back to a time before...the development of antibiotics that combat microbes and vaccines that prevent infection.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.
Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:The only reason Trump and you aren't as dead as Rush Limbaugh, the guy who said smoking doesn't kill and who died from lung cancer, is purely accidental, and that typical Democrats believe it is evil to kill evil people. Someday, the Democrats will realize that evil Trumptards must die screaming rather than be allowed hospice care and morphine to gently ease their passage into Hell.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.
Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism
By Frank Langfitt | April 22, 2025 5:01 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5340753/trump-democracy-authorita
rianism-competive-survey-political-scientist
WASHINGTON — A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55.
"That's a precipitous drop," says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."
Carey said the decline between November and February was the biggest since Bright Line Watch began surveying scholars on threats to American democracy in 2017. In the survey, respondents consider 30 indicators of democratic performance, including whether the government interferes with the press, punishes political opponents and whether the legislature and the judiciary can check executive authority.
Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump's attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.
"We've slid into some form of authoritarianism," says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy."
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who has spent years tracking Hungary, is also deeply concerned: "We are on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism."
When these scholars use the term "authoritarianism," they aren't talking about a system like China's, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called "competitive authoritarianism," the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.
In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments — including the prosecutor's office and judiciary — with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor.
"The government would still have elections and would nominally be democratic," says Rory Truex, a political scientist at Princeton who focuses on China. "But those elections would no longer be free and fair."
While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. James Campbell, a retired political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers to address long-standing problems. Campbell points to Trump's use of tariffs to try to push companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. In recent decades, economic globalization led to catastrophic layoffs of everyone from furniture makers in North Carolina to auto assembly-line workers in the Midwest as firms sent work overseas, especially to China.
"I think they've done an excellent job," Campbell says of the Trump administration.
Campbell adds that he thinks many political scientists may see Trump as autocratic because they don't like him or his politics.
"I think most of th
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Yeah, right.
And they never noticed the Covid lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, widespread censorship and "official" disinformation (lies) about ... well, everything? From the source of the Covid virus to Hunter Biden's laptop to inflation to Biden's mental competence?
-----------
"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:Al Gore says "Fuck Signym, who is a goddamn Nazi mixing truth and falsehood, creating a poison."
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yeah, right.
And they never noticed the Covid lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, widespread censorship and "official" disinformation (lies) about ... well, everything? From the source of the Covid virus to Hunter Biden's laptop to inflation to Biden's mental competence?
Al Gore compares Trump administration to Nazi Germany
The former vice president said the administration was “insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.”
By Debra Kahn | 04/22/2025 12:16 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/22/al-gore-compares-trump-admini
stration-to-third-reich-hitler-00302348
Gore cited German philosophers’ “moral autopsy on the Third Reich” in the aftermath of World War II.
“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said. “He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.”
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” Gore said. “It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow, now you're using Al Gore?
I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!
BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.
-----------
"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:Are you implying that Signym has superior judgment of people, ideas AND the news? Just asking because I get the impression you are a Trumptard. They don't do better than average. They are worse at everything, except for lying, bragging, and cheating. That's why the rotten behavior of Trumptards doesn't repel other Trumptards. The Trumptards I know act evil every day and don't see anything wrong. (The Trumptards side with Russia over Ukraine. They think that cutting USAID to starving people is efficient. They think tariffs will cause factories to be built in the US. They think white people can't get ahead because of blacks. Etc. Trumptards have an endless supply of stupid ideas roaming in their heads, which they are convinced are wisdom.) Trumptards are kind of like drunks who deny they are drunk and get angry at anyone who points to their huge consumption of alcohol. How you Trumptards squander your lives is NOT normal, but it is typical.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, now you're using Al Gore?
I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!
BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Cronyism, Capitulation and Utter Chaos
And what the hell was Scott Bessent doing briefing Morgan clients?
By Paul Krugman | Apr 23, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cronyism-capitulation-and-chaos
Hitting the road today, but I have time for a note on the news that moved markets yesterday. Bloomberg reports:
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a closed-door investor summit Tuesday that the tariff standoff with China cannot be sustained by both sides and that the world’s two largest economies will have to find ways to de-escalate.
That de-escalation will come in the very near future, Bessent said during an event hosted by J.P. Morgan Chase in Washington, which wasn’t open to the public or media. He characterized the current situation as essentially a trade embargo, according to people who attended the session.
Investors liked this report, but it was, if you think about it, deeply disturbing on two levels.
First — and why aren’t more people saying this? — what the hell was the Treasury secretary doing giving a closed-door briefing on a significant policy change that hadn’t yet been officially announced? Isn’t that a setup for large-scale insider trading? Indeed, attendees at that conference surely made market bets before Bessent’s remarks became public.
And since when are major policy announcements by government officials made off the record to closed private-sector meetings? One even wonders whether Bessent was announcing policy or making it: Did Trump back him up only after the fact?
The content of his remarks aside, what was Bessent even doing at this event? Senior government officials aren’t supposed to be helping investment banks entertain their clients.
Was Bessent paid for his appearance? That would have been inconceivable under any previous administration, but now God knows. Or are we now entering an era in which companies that do favors for Trump and co., either in the form of money or support for their policies, get lucrative insider briefings?
Put it this way: New York Times conflict of interest rules would have prohibited me, as an opinion writer, from talking to a closed-door session at J.P. Morgan. For the Treasury secretary to do so — especially when announcing a major policy change — is a huge ethical breach.
Let’s also talk about the substance of what Bessent reportedly said. Namely, he declared that the enormous tariffs Trump imposed on China will soon be reversed. Those tariffs are indeed crazy, amounting, as Bessent said, to an embargo.
But this is an extraordinary reversal — a capitulation equivalent to surrender. And bear in mind that the damage being done by Trump’s tariffs comes not just from how high they are but from the uncertainty they’re creating. That gigantic China tariff was announced just two weeks ago. Now Trump says, “we will be very nice and they’re going to be very nice.” How can any business make plans in this kind of environment?
Oh, and it seems likely that Trump will announce trade “deals,” possibly with China, probably with other countries, that aren’t actually deals — just “memorandums of understanding” that offer few specifics. He and Bessent will try to spin this as a policy triumph, but all that will really have happened is a confirmation that you can’t trust anything this administration says, including its threats.
As the same time Trump has made a humiliating climb-down on Jerome Powell.
While news media and some investors may still be credulous enough to believe Trump’s boasts, harder-headed players will look at his U-turns and conclude that he runs away when confronted. Why would China be "very nice” now that it knows that Trump can be rolled? On the contrary, China will be even less likely than before to make concessions. And other countries will be more willing to stand up to Trump and more likely to make deals with Beijing.
We are, in short, in a worse position than we were before Trump began his tariff bluster. Being a cowardly, loud-mouthed bully presiding over utter chaos is not an effective n
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Trump's Psychological Vulnerability And the Destruction of the American Economy
By Timothy Snyder | Apr 10, 2025
https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-psychological-vulnerability
Trump has an obvious weakness that makes America weak. He places the American economy at risk for the sake of a personal foible, a visible vulnerability.
All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.
As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy.
An easy example of this, before the tariffs, was Ukraine. Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.
This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States. And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer.
We don't know now, though it is not hard to guess, who told Trump that Ukraine was ripping him off. The Russians have a keen sense of psychological vulnerabilities, and they have been paying close attention to Trump for a long time.
Trump also cites the made-up number of $350 billion to justify tariffs. He claims that Europeans, curiously, somehow "owe" the United States that exact same amount. Trump believes that if Americans buy more from another country than residents of that country buy from us, that is a loss, that he personally is somehow being ripped off. And so when the United States formulated tariffs on the whole world last week, the operating principle was that all trade deficits -- cases where we buy more than we sell -- should be eliminated.
This is nonsensical. There is no state of nature where countries buy and sell the exact same amount from one another.
Imagine a party where people are freely talking to each other. Then someone jumps up on a table and insists that in every conversation each speaker should use the exact same number of words as the person with whom he or she is in dialogue. What would happen then? Every conversation would grind to a halt, because an artificial planned equality of words is not how conversations work. An artificial planned equality of the value of imports and exports is, by the same token, not how trade works.
There is a much injustice in international trade. And there is much to be said for a thoughtful trade policy that protects or encourages certain industries. Manufacturing is of inherent value. But none of this will arise from the hurt feelings of an oligarchical president.
Because Trump's policy is based on personal vulnerability, it is erratic. If someone makes him feel more vulnerable than he was already, he will stop. He will not, for example, impose tariffs on Russia, because he is afraid of Russia. On the other hand, if someone convinces him that he has won, then he will also reduce the tariffs, as has just happened. If he no longer feels that he is being ripped off, then he yields. Until the moment when his feelings change.
To a person which such an obvious vulnerability, everything seems out of control. And so control is the only answer. Everyone is acting to rip me off
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Are you implying that Signym has superior judgment of people, ideas AND the news?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, now you're using Al Gore?
I can't tell you how seriously I take that!
Really!
BTW, I'm getting money-begging texts from Al.
Superior to who? Al Gore?
Yep!
To you?
Double yep!
I don't confuse myself with lies, and I try to keep personal bias and pecuniary interest out of my analyses.
Quote:More inaccurate "mind reading"?
Just asking because I get the impression you are a Trumptard. They don't do better than average. They are worse at everything, except for lying, bragging, and cheating. That's why the rotten behavior of Trumptards doesn't repel other Trumptards. The Trumptards I know act evil every day and don't see anything wrong. (The Trumptards side with Russia over Ukraine. They think that cutting USAID to starving people is efficient. They think tariffs will cause factories to be built in the US. They think white people can't get ahead because of blacks. Etc. Trumptards have an endless supply of stupid ideas roaming in their heads, which they are convinced are wisdom.) Trumptards are kind of like drunks who deny they are drunk and get angry at anyone who points to their huge consumption of alcohol. How you Trumptards squander your lives is NOT normal, but it is typical.
And you can hardly accuse others of evil, bc you're a lying sociopath who likes to kill people and who fantasizes that he's morally superior.
BTW I noticed WTI $ is dropping. Too bad for you.
-----------
"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 don't know. Ask Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
And since when are major policy announcements by government officials made off the record to closed private-sector meetings?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.
Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.
How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
-----------
"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:The only reason Trump and you aren't as dead as Rush Limbaugh, the guy who said smoking doesn't kill and who died from lung cancer, is purely accidental, and that typical Democrats believe it is evil to kill evil people. Someday, the Democrats will realize that evil Trumptards must die screaming rather than be allowed hospice care and morphine to gently ease their passage into Hell.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You don't know shit about anything, let alone me.
Worry about fixing yourself, because you are completely broken, just like your dead political party is.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Say hi to Kevin Drum for me. You're time is coming very soon.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Signym, google Nazi supporters in America. Those supporters stopped identifying themselves once Hitler declared war on America. As Trump supporters realize he is at war with America, they will pretend they never supported Trump. Unlike Hitler, Trump is not foolish enough to issue a declaration of war, making it easy to identify hostility to America.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.
Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.
How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Nazi+supporters+in+America
PUTIN
This is everything he could have dreamed of. America tearing itself apart, declaring trade war on its allies and everyone else except Russia, installing a Fox Weekend News host with a drinking problem to head the Defense Department, disbanding the teams tasked with combating Russian cyber aggression, degrading its ability to fight disease, attacking its globally admired colleges and universities, politicizing the Justice Department and the FBI, surrendering its “soft power” . . .
. . . taking a wrecking ball to our flawed but indispensable 250-year experiment with democracy, the rule of law, and “due process.”
Putin and his fellow kleptocrats are in seventh heaven.
https://andrewtobias.com/putin-yourself-in-his-shoes/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Kills the Firewall, Musk Lights the Match
The Trump administration’s baffling attack on American cybersecurity hits a new low, gutting vital programs, punishing experts and empowering Elon Musk’s shadowy government tech squad—now accused of letting Kremlin agents poke around federal systems.
By John R. Schindler • 04/17/25 1:03pm
https://observer.com/2025/04/cybersecurity-crisis-unfolds-as-trump-cut
s-cve-and-russians-hack-doge/
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:Signym, google Nazi supporters in America. Those supporters stopped identifying themselves once Hitler declared war on America.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.
Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.
How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.
What's left of you.
Your party is dead. It will never come back.
You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:You and Signym won't read the following, but that is because you both are poor, uncomprehending and will stay that way until you die:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.
What's left of you.
Your party is dead. It will never come back.
You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.
Trump is crippling the tax police
By Matthew Yglesias | Apr 23, 2025 at 5:07 AM
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-crippling-the-tax-police
The late Donald Rumsfeld had a funny bit where he would send a letter to the IRS stating that he had no idea whether his tax return was accurate because the correct number is essentially unknowable, and scolding Congress for bequeathing to the public a tax code so complicated that nobody really knows what anybody owes.
It’s funny, and I think it resonated with a lot of people who have complicated tax situations.
But that’s not actually most people.
Most people have a job, and that job pays them a salary. Taxes are withheld from their biweekly paycheck based on a rote formula, and at the end of the year, they get a modest refund because that’s how the withholding defaults work. For most people, their income is their salary, they take the standard deduction, their investments (if any) are in a 401(k), and calculating what they owe is pretty simple. It’s true that filling out the forms is annoying and the whole process can generate a fair amount of anxiety. But the underlying taxes are actually simple, and for most taxpayers, the government could easily send most taxpayers a pre-filled form with their income (employers have to report how much they pay as part of their own taxes) and what the IRS thinks they owe. Under the Biden administration, they moved in this direction with DirectFile, but of course the Trump administration killed that program.
That’s most people’s taxes. Then there’s me.
I co-own a company with my wife. She and I are also employees of the company. We derive income from our salaries, but also the company’s income “passes through” onto our individual taxes. We get a statement from Stripe indicating how much money they paid to us as Slow Boring subscriptions, less Substack’s cut and their own. But that is not income in the way that a salary is income — it’s revenue. The income concept, in a business context, refers to profits. So the money we pay to Google for Google Workspace software and email accounts is deducted, and so is the rent we pay for our office. So is my subscription to Riverside for podcast recording software. So are our computers.
It’s this stuff, the handling of business expenses, that makes our taxes complicated. If you read “a simple guide to claiming software tax deductions in 2025,” you’ll see that it’s not simple at all.
And it gets more complicated the deeper you read. For example, the “necessary” part of “ordinary and necessary” does not require the software to be literally indispensable. I could do my job without Claude Pro, for example — I was doing this work long before it existed — but I do think it meets the standard the IRS has articulated as “helpful and appropriate.” Is it ordinary? I think obviously yes, in terms of how this has been enforced in practice. But by definition, brand new products aren’t literally ordinary. On the other hand, “helpful and appropriate” and “necessary” all mean different things in ordinary language! The tax code is very complicated in its details. We have statutes and regulatory interpretations and case law, but when a complicated system meets a common law legal tradition, it results in a lot of ambiguity.
It also generates opportunities for everything from aggressive claiming of business expenses to outright fraud.
But part of the genius of America is that while tax cheating happens, most business owners act like Rumsfeld and make a good faith effort to pay what they owe. This is what’s known as voluntary tax compli
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You and Signym won't read the following, but that is because you both are poor, uncomprehending and will stay that way until you die:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are the ones burning everything down and putting swastikas up on everything.
What's left of you.
Your party is dead. It will never come back.
You'd better start that Civil War now pussy, or you're going to lose everything forever.
We don't read your propaganda.
I bet you're really scared right now, aren't you?
How could Kevin Drum have possibly died? He voted Democrat all of his life!!!
You're going to meet that God you pretend exists only when it serves as an argument for you soon.
Tick Tock
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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The Trump "Final" Proposal For Ukraine
By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 23, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-trump-final-proposal-for-uk
raine
We have now, from the news service Axios, a list of points that make up the Trump plan which has been presented to Ukraine as a take it or leave it offer.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/trump-russia-ukraine-peace-plan-crime
a-donbas
This is what Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainians to sign, using the threat of the US walking away from the negotiations. The plan that Axios has seen is arguably the worst possible deal for Ukraine, far worse than most were saying Trump would try to impose. Here are the salient points.
What Russia gets under Trump's proposal
1. "De jure" U.S. recognition of Russian control in Crimea.
2. "De facto recognition" of Russia’s occupation of nearly all of Luhansk Oblast and the occupied portions of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
3. A promise that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. The text notes that Ukraine could become part of the European Union.
4. The lifting of sanctions imposed since 2014.
5. Enhanced economic cooperation with the U.S., particularly in the energy and industrial sectors.
To understand the most terrible parts of the deal, and where the US is bending over backwards to help Putin, you have to start with points 1 and 4.
Point 1 on Crimea ends the strategic world that the US has tried to institute since 1945, and in particular would end the European settlement that has governed the continent as well. It might come as a shock to you, but not a single European state has expanded its borders by conquest since 1945. Yes, there have been countries dissolved (Yugoslavia and the USSR), but they broke up into constituent parts. However, there has been no case of a country expanding its size by militarily seizing the territory of another for 80 years.
This will end that world, and establish a new principle that basically puts every European state on Russia’s (and Belarus’s) borders in real jeopardy. Now, if you invade, ethnically cleanse, and hold—it's yours legally.
I will write much more about this later, but if Ukraine gives up legal claim to Crimea (which would require a constitutional change in Ukraine), Ukraine is establishing a legal precedent that could be used by Russia to take over the rest of the country eventually.
It is the thin end of the wedge in the Russian plan to end Ukraine.
Point 4 on sanctions is almost as bad. This lifts all the restrictions on trade with Russia that have been in place since Russia invaded Crimea—it's a permanent Russian economic victory. It would allow the USA and China to help rebuild the Russian military and economy rapidly (China, as I said on Monday, could flood Russia with finished military production). Sanctions have been one of Europe’s continuing pressure points to try and moderate Putin’s behavior—they would now be gone.
The other devastating thing that point 4 implies is that all Russian assets are unfrozen and returned to their owners, so Ukraine and Europe have no access to these funds to help Ukraine rebuild.
The other points are either concessions to Russia or things that sound like they mean something when they do not.
Point 2 and “De-Facto” recognition of the occupied territories (with not a single Russian withdrawal, it seems) basically starts the process of them eventually becoming de jure parts of Russia.
Point 3 on NATO and the EU is the USA and Russia basically dictating the future of European security, and in one case, where they clearly have no right to do this.
When it comes to NATO, this is just clear evidence of what Trump believes—and it accepts the Russian lie that the war started because of NATO. I suppose the real change is that this seems to be a permanent ban on Ukraine in NATO.
As for the EU part of Point 3, Ukraine is a sovereign European state and its membership is not something to be decided by Trump and Putin. The US and Russia have no rig
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Quote:
you both are poor
-----------
"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:Signym, google Nazi supporters in America.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yanno SECOND, this could have been an interesting thread. An intelligent and relatively non-partisan discussion of Trump's policies: What he's done right, where he's gone wrong, what we think will result, what he could do otherwise.
Instead, you've done your usual burying of threads with tons and tons of lies and bullshit.
How about you take a break, STFU for a change, and let the grownups talk?
Hey stupid, most European nations had significant Nazi support before, during, and after WWII. Where do you think Ukrainian Nazis came from?
And AFA Nazi in the USA ... ppl like Nuland and Freeland have Nazi heritage. Insurprisingly, they tend to be Russia-hating neocons.
-----------
"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:
you both are poor
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
Going on year 6 without any income. Still not worried about where my next meal is coming from or how I'm going to keep the lights on.
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:From you. The same place I got the idea that you are convinced Russia deserves a victory in Ukraine, but I don't have your delusions about yourself. Being around people failing at life who are not as magnificent in reality as in their imaginations and their resumes has made me despise Trumptards. Trump is a great example: not as rich as he claims, not as smart, not as capable at business, not as good at golf, not as religious, etc. So many attributes Trump claims but doesn't have. One thing he has is that he is the biggest hot air balloon.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
you both are poor
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Losing A War Before It Started
Trump's Trade War With China Is A Strategic Catastrophe In The Making
By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 15, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/losing-a-war-before-it-started
What we see in Trump is a persistent, almost pathological, drive to weaken the USA internally and externally. Internally, he is disregarding unanimous decisions of the Supreme Court (which if allowed to stand will destroy the whole concept of the rule of law in the USA), has hobbled Congress by compelling it to give up its powers, and is trying to break the independence of America’s press and universities. Far from being “conservative” this is the most radical set of destructive policies he could follow—and it is very hard to see how the genies that he is releasing will ever be put back in their bottles.
In terms of international relations he is just as destructive to America’s world position. Under the guise of making America “great again”, he has pursued a set of policies that is weakening America’s influence, destroying the relationships on which the American century was based, and strengthening those countries which see themselves as America’s adversaries.
The trade war that he has unleashed against China is arguably the best example of this. Trump has started his trade war without any preparation, against a target that can almost certainly outlast him, while deliberately antagonizing states that would be crucial to giving the US any chance of emerging victorious. He has most probably lost this war before it started.
I published a piece in The Atlantic yesterday talking about one of these points—how Trump is forcing what should be US partners into China’s economic orbit. Here is a gift link if you want to take a look.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/trump-tariff-china/6
82427/?gift=BQHDq1p24LRO8cUUEyLQ66zldN7kgfL1xbYrv_baQ0g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
As a bonus for paying subscribers, I will include the whole first draft of the piece (much longer than the published version) at the end of this post—so you can experience the true vitriol. The Atlantic always makes me sound more statesmanlike than I really am.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.
It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/
Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.
Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:From you.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
you both are poor
I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.
Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
-----------
"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:From you.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
you both are poor
I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.
Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:You Trumptards deserved your mild past suffering and are building toward future afflictions that will torture you to deserved death. See how Trump is setting up his own death:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.
It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/
Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.
Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.
Trump is upset by Zelenskyy not surrendering to Putin
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is boasting on the front page of The Wall Street Journal that, “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea. There’s nothing to talk about here.” This statement is very harmful to the Peace Negotiations with Russia in that Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion. Nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory but, if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired? The area also houses, for many years before “the Obama handover,” major Russian submarine bases. It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that makes it so difficult to settle this War. He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country. I have nothing to do with Russia, but have much to do with wanting to save, on average, five thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week, who are dying for no reason whatsoever. The statement made by Zelenskyy today will do nothing but prolong the “killing field,” and nobody wants that! We are very close to a Deal, but the man with “no cards to play” should now, finally, GET IT DONE. I look forward to being able to help Ukraine, and Russia, get out of this Complete and Total MESS, that would have never started if I were President!
Apr 23, 2025, 11:00 AM https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114388111141848447
Trump's comments come after months of discord between the two leaders, including a heated exchange in the Oval Office in February. The two men had a near-shouting match when Zelenskyy noted that Russia has broken previous agreements with Ukraine during a disagreement that included Vice President JD Vance.
The situation escalated when Trump raised his voice and pointed his finger at Zelenskyy, accusing him of "gambling with World War III" and being "disrespectful" to the U.S.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-talks-rubio-witkoff-london-
putin-zelenskyy-trump-russia-war-rcna202525
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:From you.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
you both are poor
I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.
Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You are a fucking creep.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You Trumptards deserved your mild past suffering and are building toward future afflictions that will torture you to deserved death.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
New York Times compares Trump to Hitler. Media allows an ugly double standard.
It's extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/04/23/larry-davi
d-essay-hitler-trump/83209680007/
Yup. Go fuck yourself, Lefties.
Just one of the many, many, many reasons why the Democratic Party is dead and will never come back.
You'd love that. Because then you can just keep being a pussy coward who keeps threatening the beginning of a Civil War he could never win.
Stop being a pussy, pussy. Come get some.
In the Meantime, Lifelong Democrat Kevin Drum died a horrible death of brain cancer.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Signym, you posted your story here, from a disappointed PhD candidate for a Daddy coming to America to Dear Daughter to health records to a strong affinity for Russians to an inability to understand simple concepts, which you try to hide from yourself. You are too late to take it back. Signym, you are a known quantity, a negative number.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:From you.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
you both are poor
I've posted next to nothing about my finances. Not claiming to be rich, not claiming to be poor, not claiming to be in the middle. So I guess, like usual, you pull your "facts" out of your ass.
Goes in the trashbin along with your "Russian troll" name-calling.
You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Meanwhile, you posted that you were good at shooting people from a helicopter, that the failure of "good" people was that they never kill "bad" people, and that you never intended to be "good". Ergo ...
Oh, and lots and lots and LOTS of lies, semi- threats, defamation, virtue- signalling, and general nonsense and bullshit. You drag down every thread you post in, and add nothing here, or to your family (I know you're not married and have no children, so this would be to your parents, siblings, nieces and nephews), community, or nation.
Did you know, SECOND, that the first indication of a heart problem for most people is a fatal heart attack?
So, you take care now, you hear?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land. Hey, Signym! If you can justify the murder of Ukrainians as Russia killing Nazis, you can easily justify this as necessary cost-cutting of a bloated bureaucracy, or something else totally fake you pull out of your ample ass:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Trump Laid Off Nearly All the Federal Workers Who Investigate Firefighter Deaths
The cuts, which are part of Trump’s slashing of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases.
By Mark Olalde | April 21, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-cuts-firefighter-deaths
When a firefighter dies in the line of duty, a small team of federal health workers is often called on to pinpoint what went wrong and identify how to avoid similar accidents in the future.
That’s what happened after two firefighters died in California in 2020 while searching for an elderly woman in a burning library. It happened in 2023 when a Navy firefighter died in Maryland after a floor collapsed in a burning home. And it happened last year in Georgia when a career battalion chief died after a semitrailer truck exploded.
But President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to fire nearly all of the Department of Health and Human Services employees responsible for conducting those reviews.
At least two-thirds of the employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an agency within HHS, were notified on April 1 that they had been laid off or will be in June. These cuts included seven of the eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, the team that studies firefighter line-of-duty deaths, one of the laid-off investigators told ProPublica.
Most nonunionized NIOSH workers were given until the end of the day to clear out their desks. The layoffs were so abrupt, staff said, that lab animals were left without staff to care for them and had to be euthanized, and an experimental mine used to test protective gear beneath the agency’s Pittsburgh campus was at risk of flooding and polluting the surrounding environment.
“It was pure chaos,” another NIOSH employee said.
The fatality investigation team was examining deaths at 20 fire departments when the layoff notices arrived. Those probes are now unlikely to be completed, the investigator said.
“The whole intent of this program was that people would learn through tragedy — what happened to one person — so we can prevent it from happening to others,” the investigator said.
The administration’s moves will also halt a first-of-its-kind study of the causes of thousands of firefighters’ cancer cases and disrupt a program that provides health care to emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Here’s Andrew Sullivan:
“If the administration had wanted to, they could have hailed the quiet border and focused on deporting illegal immigrants by usual means. But nah. Trump decided he wants to go after legal immigrants and even legal permanent residents who have been charged with no crimes or immigration violations — because they have criticized a foreign country, Israel. He’s deploying a McCarthyite 1952 law to target any legal noncitizen who has criticized or demonstrated against the Jewish state’s wiping of Gaza off the face of the earth, proudly gutting the First Amendment for no good reason.
Wait, there’s more. Trump has also abandoned habeas corpus and due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to seize mere suspects off the streets and transport them instantly to a terrifying foreign jail in El Salvador. The law has only been used twice before in wartime, and, ahem, we are not at war. Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?
We therefore have no way of knowing if a makeup artist who legally sought asylum was rightly grabbed off the street to face certain rape and violence. And when Tom Homan was asked about due process in this case, he actually answered: “What due process did Laken Riley get?” Unbelievable that this thug is in charge of anything.
Then the utter indecency. These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid.”
More at https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/two-perfect-months-506
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
Now Russia has a legitimate security concern on its border: Ukraine could launch American nuclear tipped missiles at Russia, within minutes of Moscow, if part of NATO.
Yanno, the USA COULD de-escalate the whole situation by renegotiating another INF treaty, and creating a buffer zone between western Europe and Russia. Look at Switzerland! Look at Austria! Are THEY suffering by being militarily neutral?
Anyway, Poroshenko and ZELENSKY screwed the pooch by rejecting oh so much more favorable terms earlier (Minsk I, Minsk II, Istanbul 2022, the Kellogg Plan). We really shouldn't have poked the bear, via Ukraine, bc only Ukraine is going to suffer. So shameful on our part.
See Kissinger (below).
-----------
"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:Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
King of Hyperbole and Bullshit is what Second is.
Second is one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing, but he's not evil. He's just an asshole. A massive, gaping asshole.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
30 Sep 2022
At the ceremony on Friday, Putin said Russia has “four new regions”, calling the residents of Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions “our citizens forever”.
“This is the will of millions of people,” he said in the speech before hundreds of dignitaries at the St George’s Hall of the Kremlin.
“We will defend our land with all our strength and all our means,” he added, calling on “the Kyiv regime to immediately cease hostilities and return to the negotiation table”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/30/putin-announces-russian-annex
ation-of-four-ukrainian-regions
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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'Unethical as you can get': Experts decry Trump's latest 'naked quid pro quo'
By Erik De La Garza | April 23, 2025 7:37PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-coin/
A special VIP tour of the White House or even an exclusive dinner with President Donald Trump can be yours – for a price.
The Trump-owned company that unveiled the president’s official meme coin just before his inauguration announced Wednesday that top holders of the cryptocurrency would be selected to attend a private dinner with the MAGA leader, Mother Jones reported Wednesday. The 25 leading buyers, meanwhile, will be treated to a special VIP White House tour.
“According to the coin’s official website, its top 220 holders will be invited to a special May 22 dinner at Trump’s country club outside Washington, DC,” the Mother Jones report said.
“An even more special perk is in store for the 25 biggest holders, who ‘will be invited for an ultra-exclusive private VIP Reception with the President. And separately by us to a Special White House Tour,’” it added, noting that the coin’s website was riddled with grammatical mistakes.
While the news caused the price of the meme coin to surge more than 50%, according to media reports, an ethics expert criticized the move as “a naked quid pro quo."
“The closest situation I can think of was Bill Clinton hosting major donors in the Lincoln Bedroom, but that pales in comparison to this, said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, told Mother Jones.
“This is about as unethical as you can get—essentially selling off access to the president and the White House,” he added.
While Libowitz slammed the action as unethical, he said it likely wasn’t illegal.
“There are, unfortunately, no laws that apply to the president that could be violated here, unless one of the top 25 holders was something like a foreign state’s wealth fund,” he said. Separately, Libowitz cautioned Mother Jones that “any staffer involved in selling access to the White House may have some issues.”
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 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
King of Hyperbole and Bullshit is what Second is.
Second is one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing, but he's not evil. He's just an asshole. A massive, gaping asshole.
In the following article, Trump is compared to Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, and now a prisoner for crimes committed while President.
Also, Putin revised Russia's Constitution to make Ukrainian land into Russian land: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/30/putin-announces-russian-annex
ation-of-four-ukrainian-regions
A Ticking Clock on American Freedom
By Adrienne LaFrance | April 22, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/america-trump-author
itarianism-global/682528/
It’s later than you think, but it’s not too late.
Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.
People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.
Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.
I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”
The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation
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Chaos is about to take its toll
By Paul Krugman | Apr 24, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-virus
Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll. The Fed’s Beige Book, which looks what businesses are saying, says that “uncertainty around international trade policy was pervasive across reports.” And this uncertainty will have dire effects on the real economy.
Many forecasters now expect a recession. But the impact of erratic tariffs and tariff threats may occur even before the economy has time to slump.
Preliminary data suggest that imports from Asia, after surging as importers tried to front-run tariffs, are now collapsing. See the chart at the bottom of this post.
The CEOs of Target and Walmart reportedly warned Trump that we may be seeing empty shelves within weeks. And foreign trade won’t be revived by hints dropped at closed-door financial conferences. Companies need some certainty about policy, which they won’t get.
In other words, we may soon see a disruption of supply chains reminiscent of what happened during and after the Covid pandemic. But this time a virus won’t be responsible. It will all be about Donald Trump. And this time there won’t be a vaccine coming to our rescue. We’re stuck with this chaos agent for three years and three months.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I think Trump feels that he needed to "blitz" the first few months to accomplish his agenda before resistance could be organized. Unfortunately for him, and us, reindustrialization can't happen in a couple of months, and setting off a trade war with China isn't the way to make it happen.
On other issues, he's at the point where resistance is having an impact, and some problems are just complex.
For example, how can you cut waste and fraud if nobody has been following accounting principles and it's impossible to see who was paid and for what? I just hope that the DOGE team are persistent and detail oriented.
It's no secret I'm for deporting ALL illegal aliens. They can't be described as "law abiding" if they broke the law to sneak in, and they're breaking our law by living here. But I'd certainly start with violent criminals and work my way down, whether they belong to a gang or not. And any illegal alien who passed thru Mexico or other countries on their way here can hardly claim asylum, since they could have asked for asylum from their transit nations. I don't think Trump needs to invoke the Alien Enemies act, and doing so just tangled up his deportation program in perfectly legitimate challenges.
AFA "ending the war in Ukraine" ... no matter what Trump does, whether he continues to support Ukraine or not ... whether the Europeans keep supporting Ukraine or not ... the war will end in a Russian military victory as long as Zelensky keeps fighting. The only difference will be how long the war lasts, how much of Ukraine will be destroyed, and how many men on both sides will be killed.
Anyway, Trump needs to think things thru at this point, and start planning for contingencies, instead of hoping he can bargain or bully his way out of any messes. I know it's not his style .... give the man some Adderall for chrissakes and hope he takes advice from the more level headed people on his team, because he's in a new phase of his Presidency. Time for a scalpel, not a chainsaw.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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The US has quietly gotten into another war in the Middle East
With near daily strikes against Yemen’s Houthis, is there an end in sight?
By Joshua Keating | Apr 24, 2025, 6:00 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/410186/trump-yemen-houthis-rough-ri
der
Is the US on the verge of entering another Middle East War?
A little more than a month in, it’s still too soon to declare a quagmire.
But the resources devoted to the conflict have been significant. The Pentagon has moved a second aircraft carrier group to the region to join one already there. It has also relocated at least two Patriot missile batteries as well as a THAAD missile defense system — one of the most advanced systems in the US arsenal — from Asia to the Middle East.
The New York Times has reported that in just the first three weeks of the campaign, the US used $200 million worth of munitions, and that military officials are concerned about its impact on stocks the Navy would need in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Contrary to the hopes of many in the Trump administration — including Vice President JD Vance — who argue the US should be shifting its focus from the Middle East to prepare for a potential conflict with China, the US is shifting resources from Asia to the Middle East.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If Trump’s hatred of Zelensky feels personal, that’s because it is
As the US president lashes out at the Ukrainian leader once again, it can sometimes feel as though personal hostility is clouding his judgement. Sam Kiley examines a long-held grudge against Zelensky – and how it may be getting in the way of defending democracy against tyranny
By Sam Kiley | Thursday 24 April 2025 18:59 BST
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-zelensky-putin-u
kraine-peace-deal-b2739023.html
Donald Trump has already cast himself as a “great man’ of history. His influence is felt not only now, but will likely endure for decades. Yet, as he stands astride Europe, upending nearly a century of alliances, he finds himself eclipsed by a man of smaller physical stature. And it’s getting to him.
Yesterday, America’s ‘big man’ once again lashed out at the diminutive Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Warning that Zelensky would “lose his country” if he refused to accept a peace deal, Trump accused him of prolonging the “killing field” after Zelensky declined to cede Crimea to Vladimir Putin as part of a potential settlement.
Claiming the territory had been lost for good in 2014 and was not up for discussion, Trump reserved his harshest criticism not for the aggressor who invaded a neighbouring sovereign state, but for the leader defending it. And if it all feels personal, that’s because it is.
The narcissism of America’s 47th president has long been one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest assets. As a former head of the Federal Security Service – successor to the KGB and expert in personality profiling and manipulation – Putin understands that the fragile ego behind the resolute desk is a potent weapon for the Kremlin.
In his latest attack on the widely respected Zelensky, Trump echoed Russia’s claims to Crimea – once the headquarters of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, ceded to Ukraine in 1954.
Trump likes to imagine himself in the 19th-century mould of the “great man” – a history-maker. It explains his fascination with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un during his first administration, and his repeated and blatant oiling up to Putin today. But while Trump revels in membership of the “great man” club, he resents true heroes. To him, even American soldiers who gave their lives in service are “losers”.
Zelensky, by contrast, has captured the global imagination as a symbol of underdog courage against the Russian bear – and Trump detests him for it. The standing ovations and roars of praise that follow the Ukrainian leader, even on Capitol Hill, must make Trump’s ears bleed.
And Trump has form when it comes to Zelensky – and his infuriating insistence on principle. The Ukrainian president, elected by a landslide, was first painted as a traitor to Trump’s cause when he refused to assist in digging up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden – then the likely Democratic candidate.
Trump viewed Zelensky as an ungrateful recipient of American aid for failing to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine in July 2019. Trump was later impeached by Congress over allegations he had threatened to withhold nearly $400m in US military aid unless Zelensky helped his re-election campaign. Although acquitted by the Senate, the damage was done – and the grudge was born. Since then, we have witnessed its ugly expression time and again.
It is hard to imagine another world leader subjected to the kind of personal and vicious public attack Zelensky endured in the White House.
So the question remains: has this personal animosity pushed America to the brink of choosing tyranny over democracy?
Trump’s ties to Moscow stretch back to 1987, when he first visited the Soviet capital to explore investment opportunities. Although he never completed any deals in Russia, his enterprises have reportedly received backing from Russian financiers. Putin was in east Germany in 1987, but it is certain that Trump was of considerable interest to his colleagues in the Soviet regime that first invited him to Moscow
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The Huge, Crucial Difference Between Neville Chamberlain And Donald Trump
By Andrew Tobias | April 24, 2025
https://andrewtobias.com/huge-difference/
Ukraine’s fate echoes Czechoslovakia’s in Chamberlain’s appeasement
In September 1938 . . . Adolf Hitler had massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the border of Czechoslovakia to reinforce a low-intensity war designed to force Prague to cede the Sudetanland. In an effort to preclude great power war, Chamberlain, in collusion with France and Italy, forced Prague to sign the Munich Agreement which provided for Hitler’s annexation of that territory.
Chamberlain returned to London declaring the achievement of “peace for our time.” The reality was that instead Munich catalyzed the dynamics that unleashed World War II. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s approach to ending that unjustified attack echoes eerily . . . Chamberlain’s mistaken response to violent aggression.
Trump risks becoming Neville Chamberlain to Putin’s Hitler.
The huge difference being that — unlike Chamberlain — Trump likes autocrats, has no problem seeing democracy die, would kinda like to maybe do a little annexation of his own. So that in his third term* — who knows? — maybe he rules Canada and Greenland, too.
The author, Ian J. Brzezinski, continues:
. . . Like Hitler in 1938, Putin presents Russia as a country unfairly treated by history and, like Hitler, he is determined to reconstitute its great power status through territorial expansion. The central focus of this imperial campaign is Ukraine, which he falsely asserts is “not a real country” but rather an off-shoot of Russian culture and history. Hitler likewise asserted to Chamberlain that Czechoslovakia was not a real nation. Both Hitler and Putin conducted aggressive campaigns of subterfuge and violence to weaken their targets. Each accused Prague and Kyiv, respectively, of extremist actions against German and Russian minorities, respectively.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Fight Fiercely
By Scott Aaronson | April 24th, 2025
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8820
I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.
I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc., with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard) do for our civilization that’s worth defending.
For three days in my old hometown of Cambridge, MA, I met back-to-back with friends and colleagues old and new. Almost to a person, they were terrified about whether they’ll be able to keep doing science as their funding gets decimated, but especially terrified for anyone who they cared about on visas and green cards. International scholars can now be handcuffed, deported, and even placed in indefinite confinement for pretty much any reason, including long-ago speeding tickets, or no reason at all. The resulting fear has paralyzed, in a matter of months, an American scientific juggernaut that took a century to build.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:No, I haven't forgotten.
Originally posted by second:Quote:Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
But you keep on pushing the ridiculous idea that it's bc Russia "wants more land".
WTF do they want more land for? They have more than enough land and resources for their people. That's why WE want Russia!
Russia's original intent was to stop the neo Nazi anti-Russian ethnic cleansingin the Donbas. The point of Minsk I and Minsk II was to protect the Donbas, settle the civil war, and keep Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine . Even when these two provinces (oblasts) declared themselves independent, Russia refused to recognize them. Why wouldn't Ukraine honor the UN-approved Minsk II?? Why didn't France and Germany, both guarantors, press Poroshenko to live up to the agreement? Minsk II would have been SO much better than today's catastrophe! Obviously, neither Ukraine, Germany, nor France were interested in peace.
And thanks to NATO, the EU, and the USA, Ukraine has become a recognizable security threat on Russia's border.
Remove the threat, the war stops.
But thanks for trying to rewrite history.
-----------
"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, your writing is an absurd fable. Meanwhile, China called Trump a liar:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:No, I haven't forgotten.
Originally posted by second:Quote:Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.
And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
But you keep on pushing the ridiculous idea that it's bc Russia "wants more land".
WTF do they want more land for? They have more than enough land and resources for their people. That's why WE want Russia!
Russia's original intent was to stop the neo Nazi anti-Russian ethnic cleansingin the Donbas. The point of Minsk I and Minsk II was to protect the Donbas, settle the civil war, and keep Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine . Even when these two provinces (oblasts) declared themselves independent, Russia refused to recognize them. Why wouldn't Ukraine honor the UN-approved Minsk II?? Why didn't France and Germany, both guarantors, press Poroshenko to live up to the agreement? Minsk II would have been SO much better than today's catastrophe! Obviously, neither Ukraine, Germany, nor France were interested in peace.
And thanks to NATO, the EU, and the USA, Ukraine has become a recognizable security threat on Russia's border.
Remove the threat, the war stops.
But thanks for trying to rewrite history.
Trump keeps claiming he’s working on a deal with China. Beijing says that it is all in his mind
‘Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis,’ a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce said
By Kelly Rissman in New York, Andrew Feinberg | Thursday 24 April 2025 12:39 EDT
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-
china-deal-tariffs-trade-war-b2738764.html
President Donald Trump touted that the United States and China were at the negotiating table to reach a resolution to the trade war — but Beijing says that’s not true.
Washington was “actively” having discussions with Beijing this week, and Trump said he planned to be “very nice” to reach a deal. He also called his 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods “too high” and vowed it would “come down substantially.” Two Chinese officials on Thursday contradicted the U.S. president’s claims.
He Yadong, China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesperson, said Thursday: “Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis.”
Similarly, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China is prepared to negotiate only under certain conditions. “China’s attitude is consistent and clear: if you want to fight, we will fight to the end, if you want to talk, the door is open,” he said.
Yet Trump, when pressed to respond on China’s denial, continued to claim there were talks taking place during a brief availability with reporters alongside Norway’s prime minister Thursday afternoon.
“Well, they had a meeting this morning, so I can't tell you. It doesn't matter who ‘they’ is. We may reveal it later, but they had meetings this morning, and we've been meeting with China,” he said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
SECOND
Signym, your writing is an absurd fable.
Oh yeah? Bring the goods. Not your usual lies and hysteria, show us all that you're right with actual evidence, or STFU.
-----------
"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, check your English-Russian dictionary for the meaning of bogus. You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere. If I don't give the proof, the Earth must be flat. If I don't refute all bogus arguments originating in Russia, repeated by Signym, Russia must be deserving of awards, praise, and victory.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
Signym, your writing is an absurd fable.
Oh yeah? Bring the goods. Not your usual lies and hysteria, show us all that you're right with actual evidence, or STFU.
Former US Ambassador to Russia: "Shows How Bad Trump's Negotiating Team Has Been Performing"
https://2paragraphs.com/2025/04/fmr-us-ambassador-to-russia-shows-how-
bad-trumps-negotiating-team-has-been-performing/
The deal that Vance refers to, according to the New York Times, "closely mirrors long standing Russian demands” as it would require Ukraine to accept Crimea as a Russian territory.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul shared his opinion on this week’s developments on X. He wrote: “Putin was never asking for recognition of Crimean annexation before. That it has entered the discussion now, shows how bad Trump’s negotiating team has been performing. Offers of appeasement, without asking for anything in return, just fuel new demands for more concessions.”
Ambassador of Ukraine to the US Oksana Markarova shared photos and reported that last night: “terroristic Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv. At least 9 people killed, 63 injured, 42 hospitalized (including 6 children). Residential buildings hit and fires broke out. Rescue teams are working through debris in five districts of the capital. Pure evil.”
McFaul amplified Markarova’s post and wrote; “Putin is a terrorist. Why can't Trump and Witkoff recognize this obvious fact?”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere.
So, when challenged to bring evidence to the table, you try deflection?
You clearly don't have a scintilla of facts to backstop the torrent of lies and shit that you spew every day.
But I guess it's too much to hope that you'll slink away in embarrassment. If you had any respect for the truth, or yourself, you would have checked yourself ages 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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Poroshenko on the Minsk Agreement
Quote:
"We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.
Notice he didn't say anything about removing troops and heavy weaponry from the line of contact, stop shelling civilians in Donetsk, or establish local control in the Donbas which were the agreed-on aims of Minsk II.
Merkel, on Minsk II.
Quote:Nothing in there about enforcing a ceasefire, withdrawing troops and weapons from both sides of the contact line, stopping Kiev from shelling Donetsk, developing local governance for local issues, or respecting the rights of the Russian speaking majority in that region. Apparently, SHE had no intention of enforcing Minsk II.
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong [for that time]. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time [to be ready to join NATO].
Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.
Hollande on Minsk II
Quote:
"Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point," he told the Kiev Independent media outlet, while commenting on Merkel’s remark that the Minsk agreements allowed Kiev to gain time, but by no means prevented further hostilities in the Donbass. "Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity."
Nope! Nothing in there about enforcing the provisions of Minsk II either!
Zelensky on Minsk
Quote:
Zelenskyy admitted that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were "impossible" and he did not plan to implement them.
"As for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: we will not be able to implement it like that," Zelenskyy said in an interview with Spiegel published on Thursday.
This backs up my point that Germany, France, and Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk II agreements, that the MAIN purpose of signing was to give Ukraine time to build up its military.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Signym, you were born without hands, but are trying to get a job requiring dexterity. That describes Trump. He has prosthetics made of plastic, but when shaking hands, anyone with real hands would know he has fake ones. It is so obvious, but not to Trumptards because they were born without hands, too. They cannot feel the difference between plastic and real flesh. No amount of words will ever convey the difference to Trumptards. And words won't give them the dexterity needed for success in America.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere.
So, when challenged to bring evidence to the table, you try deflection?
You clearly don't have a scintilla of facts to backstop the torrent of lies and shit that you spew every day.
But I guess it's too much to hope that you'll slink away in embarrassment. If you had any respect for the truth, or yourself, you would have checked yourself ages ago.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump lacks dexterity:
Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan Gives Russia Everything It Wants. What Is He Trying to Do?
By Fred Kaplan | April 24, 2025 4:03 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/donald-trump-ukraine-russi
a-ceasefire-peace-plan.html
It’s no coincidence that President Donald Trump caved to the Kremlin’s demands for peace-through-surrender, and insisted that Kyiv do the same, on the same day that Russia launched its deadliest attack on Ukrainian civilians in nearly a year.
Then, one day later, deepening the delusions that he has long displayed about the war and his own power to affect its course, Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to his senses and stop the killing.
“Vladimir, STOP!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing.”
Quite aside from the bone-chilling familiarity (has Trump ever addressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by his first name?), there’s the presumption that the Kremlin leader has ever regretted blowing up civilian apartments or cared what Trump or anyone else might think about his murderousness. Trump had complained once before about Russian bombing—and then, just minutes later, he resumed blaming Ukrainians for starting the war (and, of course, Joe Biden for failing to stop it). Certainly the “peace plan” that Trump had just laid on the table should have signaled that the Russians can get away with whatever levels of violence they’d like to commit.
Trump’s plan, according to European sources who have seen the one-page outline, calls for the following:
• Russian and Ukrainian troops cease fire at their current positions on the battlefield. That means Moscow would control about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, including the bulk of its four easternmost (and, before the war, industrial-rich) provinces in Donbas.
• The U.S. also lifts all economic sanctions that it imposed on Russia as a result of the February 2022 invasion.
• Russia is recognized as controlling Crimea (which the Soviet Union had handed Ukraine as a gift in 1954, until Putin reannexed the peninsula in 2014).
• The U.S. is barred from stationing peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the ceasefire, and Ukraine is forbidden from ever joining the West’s NATO military alliance.
• In exchange for all this, Russia is obliged to concede … well, it seems, nothing. In fact, Russian spokesmen continue to demand that even a temporary ceasefire be preceded by a settlement of all the war’s “root causes,” which it blames entirely on Ukraine.
As one NATO official told a reporter from Politico when asked what he thought of Trump’s proposal: “Did Putin write this for him?” Another diplomat responded with an “exploding head” emoji.
Russia’s state-controlled media certainly understood the gist of the deal, writing, “It’s practically a foregone conclusion the U.S. will pull out of Ukraine talks,” and “The unity of the West is gone. Geopolitically it’s no longer an alliance. Trumpism has destroyed the Atlantic consensus confidently and quickly.”
If that isn’t Trump’s aim as well, then one can only ask: What is his aim?
A case could be made that some of these elements might be woven into a peace deal after both sides—Russia and Ukraine—are ready, or can both be pressured, to stop fighting. However, to accede to Russia’s position at the start of negotiations, with pressure only on Kyiv and no concessions from Moscow, amounts to Ukrainian surrender.
Short of such pressure or desire, a ceasefire, under Trump’s terms, would simply give Putin’s army a chance to regroup, remobilize, and at least threaten to resume an offensive toward Kyiv. Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate intere
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Trump's vendetta against paying taxes and fees continues:
Trump admin strategy to end NY congestion pricing is a losing battle, unintended filing says
By Anthony Izaguirre | April 24, 2025 at 9:24 pm
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/manhattan/trump-strategy-end-ny-congestion-
pricing-losing-battle/6237740/
The federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan accidentally filed an internal memo that poked holes in the Trump administration's strategy to kill New York's toll on driving in Manhattan — arguing the government should change tactics if it wants to block the nascent program.
The memo, intended for a U.S. Department of Transportation attorney, was inadvertently filed Wednesday night in New York's lawsuit against the administration over its efforts to shut down the fee.
The blunder came days after the Trump administration gave New York a third ultimatum to stop collecting the toll, which started in January and charges most drivers $9 to enter the most traffic-snarled part of the borough.
In the memo, three assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York wrote that there is “considerable litigation risk” in defending Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's decision to pull federal approval for the toll and that doing so would likely result in a legal loss.
Instead, the three attorneys wrote, the department might have better odds if it tried to end the toll through a different bureaucratic mechanism that would argue it no longer aligns with the federal government's agenda.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Thursday that the filing was “a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way."
The Transportation Department, meanwhile, took aim at the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office and said it was pulling the Southern District off the case.
"Are SDNY lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST? At the very least, it’s legal malpractice," a spokesperson for the agency said.
The statement comes after several top prosecutors in the office resigned and defiantly criticized their bosses in Washington, saying they were asked to handle a now-dismissed corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams in a manner they concluded was unethical, improper and wrong.
Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the office, was sworn in this week.
Trump, whose namesake Trump Tower is within the “congestion pricing” tolling zone, has been a vocal critic of the program and had promised to kill it once he took office.
His administration in February ordered the state to shutter the program, saying it was revoking federal approval for the toll. Duffy has described the program as “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners."
Within minutes, New York filed suit in federal court to keep the program alive and said it would continue to collect the toll until ordered to stop by a judge.
The Transportation Department repeatedly has urged New York to shut down the toll and has threatened to pull funding and approvals from various transportation projects if it fails to comply.
The toll amount varies on the kind of vehicle and time of day. It has drawn some pushback from suburban commuters in the metropolitan area because it comes on top of existing tolls for crossing bridges and tunnels into the city.
Most drivers end up paying $9 to enter Manhattan south of Central Park on weekdays between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. and on weekends between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. The toll costs $2.25 during off hours for most vehicles.
New York officials have argued the program is helping to reduce traffic in the city and will eventually bring in billions of dollars for its subways, commuter trains and public buses.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump said “Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelensky understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”
Is this legal?
No.
If the Trump administration recognized Russian sovereignty over Crimea, it would be breaching international law as well as multiple declarations and agreements made by the United States, including by the first Trump White House.
“In terms of international law, such a pronouncement would be null and void,” said Sergey Vasiliev, an international law expert and professor at the Open University in the Netherlands.
“That territorial acquisitions that result from the use of force shall not be recognized as legal is basically one of the bedrock principles of international law,” Vasiliev told CNN.
Recognizing Crimea as part of Russia would put the Trump administration in breach of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the US made a commitment to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders, in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement reaffirming the US’ refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over Crimea.
Recognizing Crimea as Russian would also be illegal under Ukraine’s constitution – which is one of the reasons why Zelensky said it was out of the question.
But Vasiliev said that even if Ukraine changed its constitution and signed some sort of agreement handing sovereignty of Crimea to Moscow, this could be considered invalid if Kyiv was coerced into it.
Since any recognition of Crimea as part of Russia would be in breach of international laws and norms, it is unlikely that other countries would follow in Trump’s footsteps.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/world/trump-ukraine-crimea-explainer-in
tl/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Poroshenko on the Minsk Agreement
Quote:
"We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.
Notice he didn't say anything about removing troops and heavy weaponry from the line of contact, stop shelling civilians in Donetsk, or establish local control in the Donbas which were the agreed-on aims of Minsk II.
Merkel, on Minsk II.
Quote:Nothing in there about enforcing a ceasefire, withdrawing troops and weapons from both sides of the contact line, stopping Kiev from shelling Donetsk, developing local governance for local issues, or respecting the rights of the Russian speaking majority in that region. Apparently, SHE had no intention of enforcing Minsk II.
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong [for that time]. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time [to be ready to join NATO].
Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.
Hollande on Minsk II
Quote:
"Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point," he told the Kiev Independent media outlet, while commenting on Merkel’s remark that the Minsk agreements allowed Kiev to gain time, but by no means prevented further hostilities in the Donbass. "Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity."
Nope! Nothing in there about enforcing the provisions of Minsk II either!
Zelensky on Minsk
Quote:
Zelenskyy admitted that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were "impossible" and he did not plan to implement them.
"As for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: we will not be able to implement it like that," Zelenskyy said in an interview with Spiegel published on Thursday.
This backs up my point that Germany, France, and Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk II agreements, that the MAIN purpose of signing was to give Ukraine time to build up its military.
Quote:I bring quotes to the table showing that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Zelensky were acting in bad faith, and you bring up prosthetic hands???
Originally posted by SECOND
Signym, you were born without hands, but are trying to get a job requiring dexterity.
Must be because you're a lying sack of shit too.
-----------
"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 am absolutely and positively sure neither you nor Russian diplomats can convincingly prove bad faith with short quotes, Signym. But it is instantly knowable when someone with artificial plastic hands tries to convince you that her hands are made of flesh and bone. Signym, your falseness is very apparent, as is the Russians', as soon as they are touched.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I bring quotes to the table showing that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Zelensky were acting in bad faith, and you bring up prosthetic hands???
Must be because you're a lying sack of shit too.
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:
Chaos is about to take its toll
By Paul Krugman | Apr 24, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-virus
Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll. The Fed’s Beige Book, which looks what businesses are saying, says that “uncertainty around international trade policy was pervasive across reports.” And this uncertainty will have dire effects on the real economy.
Many forecasters now expect a recession. But the impact of erratic tariffs and tariff threats may occur even before the economy has time to slump.
Preliminary data suggest that imports from Asia, after surging as importers tried to front-run tariffs, are now collapsing. See the chart at the bottom of this post.
The CEOs of Target and Walmart reportedly warned Trump that we may be seeing empty shelves within weeks. And foreign trade won’t be revived by hints dropped at closed-door financial conferences. Companies need some certainty about policy, which they won’t get.
In other words, we may soon see a disruption of supply chains reminiscent of what happened during and after the Covid pandemic. But this time a virus won’t be responsible. It will all be about Donald Trump. And this time there won’t be a vaccine coming to our rescue. We’re stuck with this chaos agent for three years and three months.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Oh wow! Oh no!
It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!
We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory
Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.
The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.
TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20
Yup, the winds of change are definitely in the air. Hey Jack, have you stocked up on supplies? I've picked up at least $1200.00 in supplies; as a brace against what's coming in as early as two weeks.
tick tock little buddy, tick tock
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory
Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.
The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.
TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20
Yup, the winds of change are definitely in the air. Hey Jack, have you stocked up on supplies? I've picked up at least $1200.00 in supplies; as a brace against what's coming in as early as two weeks.
tick tock little buddy, tick tock
T
I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.
Good Luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory
Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.
The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.
TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20
Yup, the winds of change are definitely in the air. Hey Jack, have you stocked up on supplies? I've picked up at least $1200.00 in supplies; as a brace against what's coming in as early as two weeks.
tick tock little buddy, tick tock
T
I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.
Good Luck. You'll need it.
" ~Paul Simon
Supply Shortages Loom as U.S. Shipments from China Plummet
President Donald Trump’s tariff war is sharply slowing traffic on a major shipping route between China and the U.S. The pain of a near-standstill in goods shipments could spread from trucking companies to retail shelves in a matter of weeks.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/supply-shortages-loom-as-u-s-s
hipments-from-china-plummet/ar-AA1Dyu8J
Says the guy with no job. Who do you think believes you're going to be fine? Is daddy helping you? Too funny...
T
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Quote:China plays Trump card: curbs on exports of rare-earth minerals
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll.
Oh wow! Oh no!
It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!
We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.
Senior administration officials are scrambling to stem economic damage from China’s restrictions on rare-earth exports, as President Donald Trump’s trade war risks cutting key industries and defense contractors off from supplies of metals crucial to production, according to three people familiar with internal deliberations.
While companies search for alternative suppliers and urge the White House to cut a deal that will keep the materials flowing to U.S. manufacturers, the Trump administration is finding there are no easy solutions. China has a lock on the supply of certain elements that are essential to making such things as military drones, consumer electronics and battery-powered vehicles.
“China knows this is a very strong bargaining chip, and it is why they are playing it,” said Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, who was a deputy director for batteries and critical materials at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “This is fast emerging as our Achilles’ heel. What makes these bans particularly dangerous is oftentimes one of these materials is a single point of failure for entire supply chains, and its production rests solely in China.”
The restrictions, imposed by Beijing in response to Trump’s steep new tariffs, have provoked deep consternation at high levels of the administration. Aides at the White House National Security Council, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Commerce Department, Energy Department and Office of the Trade Representative, among other agencies, have been involved, said the people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal matters.
Beijing curbed exports to the United States this month of the rare earths, a group of 17 metals critical for industry. Amid deepening concern over potential economic fallout from the trade war, Trump has softened his tone in recent days, saying the U.S. is eager to make a deal and floating substantial reductions in the import duties.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/04/24/u-s-agencies-alarmed-after
-china-plays-trump-card-curbs-on-exports-of-rare-earth-minerals/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:April 25, 2025 | 10:38 a.m. ET
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.
Good Luck. You'll need it.
Donald Trump has made a new promise to end the Ukraine war by Wednesday. (April 30th.)
Tick Tock.
https://newrepublic.com/post/194412/donald-trump-privately-freaking-ou
t-ukraine-war
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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On the eve of his second inauguration, Donald Trump did something no U.S. president had ever done: He launched a meme coin.
April 25, 2025
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/25/briefing-podcast-trump-crypto-meme
-coin/
These tokens, that are not tied to any real world assets, have proven lucrative for Trump and his family. Last month, the Financial Times estimated Trump made upwards of $350 million from the project. While small traders have lost big, the Trump Organization and its affiliates — controlling 80 percent of the token supply — have made hundreds of millions in just trading fees.
https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto-empire/
https://www.ft.com/content/cb1def8f-53a6-478e-9b3e-33c383b29629
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/04/24/trump-meme-coin-p
rice-surges-after-top-holders-are-invited-for-dinner-with-president/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-made-nearl
y-100-million-trading-fees-small-traders-lost-money-2025-02-03/
From meme coins, which usually refer to a fun internet or pop culture meme, and stablecoins, whose values are pegged to a real-world asset, to a new government-backed bitcoin reserve, Trump, once a crypto skeptic, is now the industry’s most powerful advocate.
“He went to a big bitcoin conference in Nashville last July. That’s where he declared he would make the U.S. the crypto capital of the planet,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge. “And the crypto industry started showering money on him. They saw somebody who would be friendly to their industry.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, Sledge, who covers crypto’s political reach, discusses how investing in the president has paid off for the industry and for the Trump family.
“So far in Trump’s presidency, things have gone great for the crypto industry. Even as the rest of the economy is on pretty perilous footing, a bunch of crypto companies have seen the SEC and other regulatory agencies drop investigations or lawsuits. Trump has created a ‘bitcoin reserve,’ and in general, regulators and Congress are behaving much more friendly toward the industry.”
On Sunday, a filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that Trump received a record $239 million in donations that went toward his inauguration. According to reporting from Fortune, the crypto industry gave about $18 million alone.
The meme coins are just one aspect of the president and his family’s growing crypto empire — an empire that includes Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., taking a stake in a new bitcoin mining firm called American Bitcoin. Trump Media is also partnering with Crypto.com and a newly formed investment firm to offer financial products, including crypto to retail investors.
“Just a few weeks ago, the SEC dropped an investigation into Crypto.com,” Sledge points out. “This is something that would’ve been really astonishing under any other president, regardless of their party. You go from a company being under investigation just a few weeks ago to it having this partnership with the president’s publicly traded company.”
For more on how Trump is reshaping the crypto landscape and what it means for the rest of us, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-intercept-briefing/id1195206
601
https://open.spotify.com/show/2js8lwDRiK1TB4rUgiYb24?si=e3ce772344ee41
70
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
-----------
"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:Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic, and anyone except Trumptards could tell he is fake, but Trump wants him confirmed:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
Trump’s Top D.C. Prosecutor Apologizes for Lauding Nazi Sympathizer as ‘Extraordinary Man’
Ed Martin has been a long-time supporter of the Jan. 6 rioters, including Timothy Hale-Cusanelli
By Nikki McCann Ramirez, Andrew Perez | April 24, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ed-martin-apologiz
es-lauding-timothy-hale-cusanelli-1235324617/
Ed Martin, Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., claimed he had no idea that a Jan. 6 defendant, whom he once praised as “an extraordinary man,” was a known Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist. It is bullshit, not only because Hale-Cusanelli extremist history is both public and well documented, but because Hale and Martin have directly interacted in the past.
Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a former Army reservist and Navy security guard, gained notoriety as a Jan. 6 defendant convicted on charges related to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. While the charges against Hale-Cusanelli were non-violent, his public persona and social media presence were littered with racist and extremist statements and views. In one now notorious selfie, Hale-Cusanelli sports a Hitleresque mustache with a hand to his chest in the first motion of a Nazi salute. According to court documents, former Navy service members who spoke to investigators said that Hale-Cusanelli had once said that “Hitler should have finished the job,” and that “babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”
In September, Martin described Hale-Cusanelli as an “extraordinary man” and “leader,” while presenting an award to him at an event at Trump’s Bedminster golf club. In an interview with The Forward, Martin said that he was “sorry” for his praise of Hale-Cusanelli.
“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin told The Forward. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”
“I certainly didn’t know all the terrible things that he said and how he had acted. I think that’s terrible, and I denounced it completely. I hate it. I hate that it happened,” he added.
It’s hard to see how Martin could have been unaware of Hale-Cusanelli’s history, as he himself represented Jan. 6 defendants — and Hale-Cusanelli’s case was one of the most prominent at a national level.
The apology comes as Martin, currently Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, seeks Senate confirmation to lose the interim moniker and hold the role permanently. Senate Democrats have urged Republicans to hold a confirmation hearing — which is uncommon for U.S. attorney nominees — given Martin’s track record so far.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who announced he was putting a hold on Martin’s nomination, recently told Rolling Stone that when Democrats “outlined all of the list of horribles that [Martin’s] been engaged in, Republicans seem genuinely surprised.”
“While U.S. attorney nominees don’t generally get much scrutiny, this one really needs to,” Schiff says. “And if they end up confirming him anyway, we’re going to make sure that they own him, that they’re forced to wrap their arms around him as he’s wrapped his arms around Nazi sympathizers.”
As the interim U.S. attorney, Martin has spent his few months declaring himself a legal attack dog for the president. In February, Martin referred to himself and the prosecutors in his office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” Martin has pledged to “protect” staffers working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
On Thursday, Martin was featured in a Justice Department press release touting misdemeanor charges filed against a man accused of vandalizing Teslas in Washington. The press release quoted
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:China plays Trump card: curbs on exports of rare-earth minerals
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll.
Oh wow! Oh no!
It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!
We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.
Senior administration officials are scrambling to stem economic damage from China’s restrictions on rare-earth exports, as President Donald Trump’s trade war risks cutting key industries and defense contractors off from supplies of metals crucial to production, according to three people familiar with internal deliberations.
While companies search for alternative suppliers and urge the White House to cut a deal that will keep the materials flowing to U.S. manufacturers, the Trump administration is finding there are no easy solutions. China has a lock on the supply of certain elements that are essential to making such things as military drones, consumer electronics and battery-powered vehicles.
“China knows this is a very strong bargaining chip, and it is why they are playing it,” said Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, who was a deputy director for batteries and critical materials at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “This is fast emerging as our Achilles’ heel. What makes these bans particularly dangerous is oftentimes one of these materials is a single point of failure for entire supply chains, and its production rests solely in China.”
The restrictions, imposed by Beijing in response to Trump’s steep new tariffs, have provoked deep consternation at high levels of the administration. Aides at the White House National Security Council, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Commerce Department, Energy Department and Office of the Trade Representative, among other agencies, have been involved, said the people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal matters.
Beijing curbed exports to the United States this month of the rare earths, a group of 17 metals critical for industry. Amid deepening concern over potential economic fallout from the trade war, Trump has softened his tone in recent days, saying the U.S. is eager to make a deal and floating substantial reductions in the import duties.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/04/24/u-s-agencies-alarmed-after
-china-plays-trump-card-curbs-on-exports-of-rare-earth-minerals/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I guess Tesla will continue crashing.
Win/Win, right?
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic, and anyone except Trumptards could tell he is fake, but Trump wants him confirmed:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
Nobody cares about Rolling Stone or the TDS suffering USAid-funded idiots working there or what they have to say on any topic in 2025.
But by all means, please do keep following them down the path they've been leading you down. You'll make sure that the Democratic Party never rises from the dead.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic,
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
What?
You have MORE plastic parts???
-----------
"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 no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.
-----------
"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, I have never had a discussion, serious or frivolous, with a Trumptard because I cannot take you silly things seriously. The co-workers I knew to be idiots, who went about their jobs incompetently, became Trumptards, at least the ones that didn't die young from the foolish way they lived before Trump arrived on the ballot.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.
-----------
"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:One more thing for Trump retards to not care about:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody cares about Rolling Stone or the TDS suffering USAid-funded idiots working there or what they have to say on any topic in 2025.
But by all means, please do keep following them down the path they've been leading you down. You'll make sure that the Democratic Party never rises from the dead.
Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done
He’s using the White House to get rich from anonymous investors—and it’s hardly even a news story.
By Michael Tomasky / April 25, 2025/11:27 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/194420/trump-memecoin-dinner-corrupt-pres
ident
Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.
Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.
Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”
Lots of details beyond the comprehension of Trumptards at https://newrepublic.com/post/194420/trump-memecoin-dinner-corrupt-pres
ident
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Greenland, trade wars and more
By Paul Krugman | Apr 26, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-to-yascha-mounk
It is a paradox how Trump talks about the world. On one hand, he doesn't seem to like the idea of American power projection. He doesn't seem to like the idea of America being a world policeman. He seems to actually want to step back from American power in the world.
So he doesn't care about the fate of Ukraine, and seems to think of the country effectively as part of Russia's sphere of influence. When it comes to a place like Taiwan, he has suggested in various comments that he doesn't really mind what China might do with it. In his inaugural address, he said he wants to be measured by the wars he doesn't start.
On the other hand, he has this incredibly bellicose rhetoric around places like Panama where he feels that the United States should get control of the Panama Canal and, of course, Greenland, which he said repeatedly, America absolutely must get control over. And I think that the way to understand that is he thinks of a world in terms of spheres of influence.
Ukraine is part of Russia's sphere of influence in his mind. Doesn't really matter what happens over there. Let the Russians do what they want. Taiwan? Part of China's sphere of influence, not really a concern of America. But the places that he thinks of as America's sphere of influence, the places that he thinks of as part of where America should rule the roost, he thinks America should just be much, much more brutal; much, much more ruthless in what we might do there. And so I think that we should take seriously when he repeatedly says America must get control of Greenland. That really is part of his mental model. And there's nothing really stopping him if he wants to go ahead.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trade wars and more
By Paul Krugman | Apr 26, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-to-yascha-mounk
We've seen over the last decades that contrary to the expectations of protesters against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, who were saying “this is going to impoverish countries like China,” we've actually seen billions of people rise out of poverty in good part because of that international trade and those international investments over the course of the last few decades.
But of course, it has also given huge benefits to the United States, which is a phenomenally wealthy country to an extent that I think many Americans don't realize.
And one of the stories of my lifetime, I was born and raised in Germany at a time when German GDP per capita was pretty similar to America's GDP per capita in the 80s and 90s. And today, the United States has a GDP per capita that's about twice that of most European countries. The GDP per capita of West Virginia is now higher than that of the United Kingdom.
The US got many benefits from this international trading system. And one of the interesting things about the Trump administration is that it perceives all of the burdens that America's dominance of this global system has imposed on the country, but it doesn't seem to be able to recognize any other benefits.
I'm much more keen to European discussions than the great majority of American economists. While Trump feels terribly victimized and that everybody's taking advantage, I'm reading the Draghi Report, which is, “Oh my God, the Americans are pulling away from Europe. Why can't we compete?
It's a weird failure. If the system is so wrecked against us, why are we doing so well? I guess that's not how Trump sees it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to
By John Stoehr | April 26, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/maga-babies/
Recall that the week began with news that the US secretary of defense had been involved in a second Signal chat in which he shared the same war plans he shared in the first one. This time, Pete Hegseth set up the chat himself and included his wife, his brother and his attorney. Oh, and he used his own phone, not the government’s.
Last weekend, in an opinion piece for Politico, a former Pentagon spokesman warned that “there are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.”
And lo, a voice came:
• Wall Street Journal: “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon”;
• Associated Press: “Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to connect to Signal”;
• Times: “Hegseth’s Personal Phone Use Created Vulnerabilities”;
• National Public Radio: "Former Pentagon official on Hegseth turmoil: ‘It looks like they actually broke the law’”;
• CBS: “Hegseth orders makeup studio installed at Pentagon.”
Unfortunately, we are where we were at the beginning of the week. Hegseth isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he is “embattled,” as we say in the news, but every story about him says that Donald Trump has his back.
The closest we’ve come to accountability was in the Journal: “Trump has begun to ask people around him about Hegseth’s performance, and his advisers have closely watched his recent media appearances.”
Until he’s gone, there’s going to be lots more to say about Hegseth. I want to focus on an aspect about him and the maga movement that can be found in the opening scene from the Journal article above.
In it, he reacts after being “rattled” by the fact that someone had leaked word of his classified briefing on China with Elon Musk.
“I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth demanded proof that Grady hadn’t leaked news of the March 21 briefing.
Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, the Joint Staff director, whom Hegseth also threatened with a polygraph test.
I mean, I get it.
The secretary of defense is America’s highest ranking military official. In theory, Hegseth can talk to anyone at the Pentagon in any way he wants to, no matter how accomplished they are, no matter how much older they are. But we’re not talking about what you can do. We’re talking about what you should do among men of honor and distinction.
And there’s your problem.
Admiral Grady’s resume is so deep and long, and so full of achievement and military jargon, that it would be almost discourteous of me to copy and paste excerpts of it. (You can find his bio here, https://www.jcs.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/2022515/adm-christ
opher-w-grady/ ) He has seen some things and done some things, with the ultimate cost of failure being that someone under him could have died.
Meanwhile, Hegseth’s resume for the job is nearly as thin as mine.
He’s a 44-year-old former TV personality with a drinking problem and a history of indiscretion with women, shall we say, as well as no experience running anything of size, much less the planet’s biggest bureaucracy. Since taking the job, he has compromised national security, broken dozens of laws, conduct that would get anyone else at the Pentagon court-martialed if he were not Donald Trump’s No. 1 yes-man, and on top of all this, he feels justified in throwing fit with a man who was answering the call of duty when Hegseth was still in diapers.
Again, Hegseth has the right to say what he wants to Admiral Grady. He outranks him. No doubt Grady accepts that. But no man of honor would cuss out an admiral out, question his honesty, doubt his loyalty, impugn hi
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Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.
Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.
“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.
“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”
The statement was clearly aimed at Trump’s promise to build a wall between Mexico and the USA to halt illegal immigration.
It — along with many other Trump policies — was frequently criticized by the pope, who said anybody who thought of building walls rather than bridges was “not Christian” — which prompted Trump to call that statement “disgraceful.”
It’s unknown how Trump reacted to the homily.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pope-2671849474/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.
Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.
“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.
“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”
The statement was clearly aimed at Trump’s promise to build a wall between Mexico and the USA to halt illegal immigration.
It — along with many other Trump policies — was frequently criticized by the pope, who said anybody who thought of building walls rather than bridges was “not Christian” — which prompted Trump to call that statement “disgraceful.”
It’s unknown how Trump reacted to the homily.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pope-2671849474/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
He shrugged it off like it deserves to be shrugged off.
Fuck you, Vatican. Fuck you twice on Sunday, dead pope.
How's that?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.
It is truly pointless.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.
Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.
“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.
“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”
I thought this was aimed at Zelensky.
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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:We have no idea how many Generals have drinking problems, indiscretions with women -or conflicts of interest with the MIC - but length of service doesnt mean competence or honor.
Originally posted by second:
The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to
By John Stoehr | April 26, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/maga-babies/
Recall that the week began with news that the US secretary of defense had been involved in a second Signal chat in which he shared the same war plans he shared in the first one. This time, Pete Hegseth set up the chat himself and included his wife, his brother and his attorney. Oh, and he used his own phone, not the government’s...
blah blah blah ...
I want to focus on ... a drinking problem and a history of indiscretion with women
Quote:If that sounds like anybody, that sounds like SECOND and the rest of the purple-haired liberals. Projection much?
... honor ... honesty ... loyalty ... character
race and blood ... [not] earned authority ... weakness personified.... fall to pieces... emotional, perhaps hysterical ...
childish ... common white folk... God’s chosen ... always at the center of our time and our attention
"Pure and innocent and just. They never do wrong... God’s chosen
Quote:Like ... JD Vance? Tulsi Gabbard? Elon Musk?
And when man-babies like Pete Hegseth encounter someone who did grow up, who did make something of himself through merit and hard work and determination
Hegseth did something stupid, maybe illegal, and certainly not in the best interest of opsec.
Hillary did something similar while heading the State Dept, 33,000 times. Where was the outrage then?
And then the author goes off on a flight of childish... emotional, maybe hysterical... certainly paranoid ... name calling. He has NO IDEA whether Adm Grady is honorable. He has NO IDEA whether Hegseth, Trump, Vance, Gabbard, Musk, Rubio, Musk etc are driven by "race and blood". And as far as being "God's chosen person", well, I leave that to SECOND and the rest of the hardcore hate-driven Dems.
-----------
"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:6ix, I expected you would take a shit on decency because Trump and his Trumptards routinely demonstrate the meaning of depravity without knowing yourselves. And I knew Signym would invert the truth by writing: "I thought this was aimed at Zelensky."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He shrugged it off like it deserves to be shrugged off.
Fuck you, Vatican. Fuck you twice on Sunday, dead pope.
How's that?
The Fatal Impact of Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts (Neither Signym nor 6ix care)
By John Haltiwanger
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/08/trump-foreign-aid-cuts-danish-ref
ugee-council-usaid/
The Trump administration’s drastic foreign aid cuts and effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have had rapid, rippling consequences across the world.
Foreign Policy recently sat down with Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council, to discuss the far-reaching effects of Trump dramatically slashing foreign assistance.
As the new administration in Washington axes more and more lifesaving programs, Slente warned that “people will be dying.” In a world where the U.S. is no longer seen as a reliable partner, Slente also discussed where aid groups go from here.
Foreign Policy: Where has your work been hit hardest by [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s aid cuts?
Charlotte Slente: The Danish Refugee Council is active in around 40 countries around the world—primarily countries where we see large humanitarian crises and displacement crises, because we are a displacement-mandated organization, which means that we work on these great, big contracts. And among the 40 countries that we are present in, we’ve been hit in 22. It’s across the globe in different environments and a little bit random, depending on where the U.S. funding falls.
The U.S. was our second-biggest donor—20 percent of our income was from the U.S. We’ve been hit in many countries in Africa, we’ve been hit in Latin America, we’ve also been hit in Asia, and in Ukraine. It’s been quite a bumpy road.
FP: What has the immediate impact of these aid cuts been on the ground? What kind of damage has already been done?
CS: In Afghanistan, for instance, we were supporting drinking water for thousands and thousands of people in a number of provinces. That was cut down immediately. So the effect is that these people will not get access to safe drinking water in these provinces.
That can have fatal consequences.
In Congo and Sudan, both countries where there are very severe humanitarian disaster situations ongoing, there were cuts to our ability to help people with support for livelihoods.
Humanitarian assistance saves lives, but we need people to be able to gain an income and be self-sustaining. That kind of support for people being able to grow food or work in agriculture, maybe work in other areas, that growth has all been cut off.
In Cameroon, we were delivering food assistance to pregnant mothers and their undernourished young children, and that has been cut off from one day to the next. In Colombia, a lot of our work on providing shelter, livelihood support, and activities related to mine clearance, which is one of the sectors we work with a lot in, has been stopped.
FP: So, all of this has really had rippling consequences across the world?
CS: In many different countries, it has had quite dramatic consequences.
FP: Is it fair to say that people are dying because of the Trump administration’s choices?
CS: People will be dying, and people will be losing possibilities to sustain their lives in the long term.
It is a very, very difficult moment because the number of displaced people around the world is over 120 million. The number of people requiring humanitarian assistance around the world is over 300 million people.
Humanitarian response plans, which are U.N. plans where basically you stipulate what is the bare minimum of necessity among the people who need humanitarian assistance in the country, were only partially being perfor
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Quote:Signym, you invert the truth about everything you have ever written. It is a reflex that you can't help doing. That's why you didn't get very far in life before running off the road, crashing and burning, leaving you without a vehicle, stuck for the rest of your bitter life.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And then the author goes off on a flight of childish... emotional, maybe hysterical... certainly paranoid ... name calling. He has NO IDEA whether Adm Grady is honorable. He has NO IDEA whether Hegseth, Trump, Vance, Gabbard, Musk, Rubio, Musk etc are driven by "race and blood". And as far as being "God's chosen person", well, I leave that to SECOND and the rest of the hardcore hate-driven Dems.
PhD Timeline
https://xkcd.com/3081/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet
The president’s appointees often appear to be acting out a made-for-television version of their jobs rather than actually doing them.
By Ashley Parker | April 26, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trumps-cabinet-co
splay/682601/
In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico.
In Bongino’s case, his run-in with a skilled jiujitsu instructor left him with a swollen right elbow. But such are the risks of Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, in which his underlings perform near-daily tone poems to a certain type of MAGA masculinity, publicly pantomiming their professional responsibilities.
Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fatigues for an ATV tour along the southern border, and posed in cargo pants and an ICE vest. In a social-media video, she wielded a tricked-out automatic rifle, the M4 muzzle disconcertingly pointed at the head of the agent directly to her left.
“I’m old school, but I don’t think our Cabinet Secretaries should cosplay as armed agents,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X above Noem’s video of herself with the poorly placed gun. “You’re a politician, not one of our heroes.”
When I called Erickson this week, he told me Trump’s subordinates understand that the president is “an image guy” who looks to surround himself with people who appear to be out of “central casting.” But, he said, looking the part on TV also serves a useful purpose for Trump—it “distracts the voters from: Is stuff actually going well behind the scenes?”
“It’s like hiring the guy who plays a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy,” Erickson told me. “You don’t actually want that guy to do your heart surgery. He’s an actor. You hire the people who sound competent because they use the polysyllabic words. But can they actually do the job?”
Trump, of course, may be the ultimate cosplayer. His quixotic political rise was fueled, in part, by Americans who knew him as a successful businessman, not through any of his actual business exploits (or bankruptcies), but through the high-flying mogul he played in their living room every Thursday night on The Apprentice.
During his most recent campaign, he sported various working-class costumes to troll his political rivals. In October, mocking then–Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that, as a college student, she had spent a summer working at a McDonald’s, Trump tied on a navy-and-gold apron and served fries through a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s drive-through window. Later that month, in response to mumbled comments then-President Joe Biden made seeming to liken Trump supporters to “garbage,” Trump wore a neon-orange reflective vest and hopped into a white Trump-branded trash hauler in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“How do you like my garbage truck?” Trump crowed, as reporters looked on.
The ethos seems to have trickled down to his Cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whose public pronouncements and social-media posts sometimes give the impression that they view government work more as a game than as true public service. In 2022, Kash Patel, now the FBI director, shared a post featuring himself—chain saw in hand and “Bad to the Bone” thrumming in the background—lopping off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, a group that included Biden, CNN, “Fake News,” and Representativ
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What Happens When There Are No Trade Deals?
Trump's tariff fantasies are colliding with reality. Now what?
By Paul Krugman | Apr 27, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/terror-and-embarrassment
Trump’s trade negotiations are going badly if they’re happening at all. Yet Trump keeps insisting that big deals with other countries are just around the corner. Read his amazing interview with Time. https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2025-interview-transcript/
Q: Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We're now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There's zero deals so far. Why is that?
Trump: No, there’s many deals.
Q: When are they going to be announced?
Trump: You have to understand, I'm dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We're meeting with China. We're doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I've made all the deals.
Q: Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
Trump: I’ve made 200 deals.
Q: You’ve made 200 deals?
Trump: 100%
In case you’re wondering, China says that there are no negotiations. Who do you believe? This is a case of he said, Xi said. But given Trump’s long history of fantasies and delusions of grandeur, as well as Xi’s long history of being single-minded and indefatigable, I believe the Chinese.
Also, Japanese trade negotiators have gone home because they can’t get any clarity on what America wants. Among other things, Trump has berated the Japanese for testing American cars by dropping bowling balls on them — which they don’t. https://www.ft.com/content/b545d7cf-f5a1-4fae-8ff8-5fec262e91bc
At some point, Trump’s fantasy of trade dominance will become unsustainable. And he’s hitting the wall on many other fronts, including his other signature issues, the economy and immigration. Recent polling has been brutal: Trump has no strengths left.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Keep cheerleading for the fall of America, Democrats.
It's the only thing you have left.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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