Real World Event Discussions

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 33 of 48

Thursday, September 4, 2025 4:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

He was right when he praised this book.



Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.

Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 4:45 PM

Cooking the Federal Reserve’s Credibility
Did Wile E. Coyote just make a cameo appearance?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 04, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cooking-the-federal-reserves-credib
ility


After markets closed Wednesday, financial news sites were full of talk about a “global bond rout.” The headlines were over the top: long-term interest rates were up, but not all that much. Call it “Apocalypse Not Yet”. And as I write this, rates have retreated again in the aftermath of a jobs report that strongly suggests a weakening labor market.

Still, market movements since Donald Trump announced that he was (probably illegally) firing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors offer a preview of what to expect if the courts allow Trump to destroy the Fed’s independence. Spoiler: Not good.

Trump began his effort to replace Cook on Friday, Aug. 25, after the markets had closed. Below is a graph of the probability that Trump will succeed assigned by betting markets. After a sharp uptick on August 25th, the probability dropped down to around 30%, reflecting a belief that he will probably fail. However, it’s important to note that a 30% probability is not trivial.

Chart 1

If Trump does succeed in firing Cook, it would be a step on the road toward a fully Trumpified monetary policy.

What would happen if Trump gained control of the Fed?

He would be able to push through large cuts in the Federal funds rate, the short-term interest rate on overnight loans banks make to each other. And I mean large: he’s been talking 300 basis points. We have in the past seen rate cuts that big, but only in the face of serious recessions. Trump, however, insists that the U.S. economy is booming, and a cut that big in the absence of a recession — and with inflation both above target and set to rise due to tariffs, deportations and surging electricity prices — would be unprecedented.

Standard economics says that a big Fed funds rate cut in the absence of a severe economic slump would be inflationary. It would also damage the Fed’s credibility — investors’ belief that it will do what is necessary to fight future inflation. Eventually, however, inflation would force even a Trumpified Fed to raise rates.

What would you expect to see in bond markets if investors put a high probability on Trumpification of the Federal Reserve? You would expect short-term interest rates, which mainly reflect expectations about Fed policy over the next one to two years, to fall. But very long-term rates, which mainly reflect expectations about long run inflation, should rise. So what did we see between Aug. 25 and Sept. 2? Two-year rates fell by 7 basis points, while 30-year yields rose by the same amount.

Granted, these weren’t huge moves, reflecting the markets’ belief that Trump is unlikely to be able to fire Cook. Yet, this was a cameo appearance by Wile E. Coyote. The divergence between short-term rates and long-term rates was a reminder that Trump’s move to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence is a real threat to the Fed’s credibility. And that matters.

At the Federal Reserve’s most recent Jackson Hole conference — its annual shindig in the Grand Tetons — Emi Nakamura, Venance Riblier and Jón Steinsson presented a paper on the effects of central bank credibility, as indicated by the ability of the Fed and its counterparts to "look through" post-Covid inflation, allowing the temporary inflation surge caused by supply chain disruptions to work itself out without needing to impose high unemployment.

Specifically, they looked at the ability of central banks to temporarily deviate from the Taylor rule, a basis for interest rate policy initially suggested by the economist John Taylor in a 1993 paper. Taylor argued that when responding to tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment, the Fed shouldn‘t fly by the seat of its pants; it should commit in advance to a specific rule linking interest rates to the inflation rate and the unemployment rate or some other measure of economic slack.

The Fed

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 5:21 PM

Trump Is Trying to Blackmail the Supreme Court

The legal arguments for Trump’s tariffs are weak, so he’s arguing their rejection would bring ruin.

Donald Trump is making a last-ditch effort to salvage his beloved, beleaguered tariff policy, heading to the Supreme Court in hopes that the Republican appointees will come to his rescue. The desperation is both palpable and warranted given the conspicuous weakness of the administration’s legal arguments, as underscored by a series of lower court rulings against him. That has in turn led the president and his aides to make increasingly histrionic public claims about what will happen if the Supreme Court does not cave and side with Trump.

Call it The Chicken Little Defense: If the courts do not sign off on the administration’s tariffs, it “would be a total disaster for the Country” and “would literally destroy the United States of America,” Trump said on Friday after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the bulk of the president’s tariffs are illegal. He doubled down on those claims on Tuesday while tacking on the transparently ridiculous assertion that the U.S. is “taking in $17 trillion … because of tariffs.”

Trump claimed last month that a loss would yield “a GREAT DEPRESSION.” Solicitor General John Sauer and Brett Shumate, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the court that “the United States was a dead country” before Trump took office and that “the economic consequences” of a loss “would be ruinous, instead of unprecedented success.”

If Trump is right — if his tariffs are necessary and wonderful and will stave off a Great Depression while also bringing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war — then he should go to Congress and get it to pass a law codifying them.

That would moot the whole legal challenge. The reason it will not happen, at least so far, is because the public is not buying the Trump administration’s claims, the tariffs are very unpopular and most GOP lawmakers have no interest in voting for them.

More at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/04/trump-tariffs-suprem
e-court-appeal-column-00543196


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 7:59 PM

Survivors of Epstein's crimes held a press conference outside of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, where several of them shared their personal stories and called on Congress to release the files. A few moments after the press conference ended, Trump spoke with reporters in the Oval Office, where he said the Epstein files are "a Democrat hoax that won't go away."

Brad Todd, a GOP strategist, discussed the events. "One of the cardinal rules of politics is that you don't get in a fight with someone who is the victim of a sexual abuse crime," Todd said. "It's pretty high up on the list, and people have made that mistake. Believe me."

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2673958367/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 8:21 PM

Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson warned that the Republican Party is destroying their brand with their mismanagement and apparent cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files review — an issue President Donald Trump has tried to dismiss in recent days by calling it "irrelevant" and a "hoax."

"I want to play some of what the president and and others around him, many of whom are in the administration, have said about this before for quite some time," said Anderson Cooper, playing an extensive list of clips of various Trump administration officials, like Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, saying the public deserves the truth on Epstein and it would be coming soon. "Gretchen, it's crazy. They ran on this. They've been talking about this. They're the ones running the FBI now, and the Justice Department. It's remarkable to see what they said and what they're saying now."

"Exactly," said Carlson, who herself faced sexual harassment and won $20 million in a lawsuit against Fox News over it. "And I think that this is actually political suicide, not necessarily for Donald Trump, but as this story continues to grow without more information being given out. This is political suicide for the midterm elections."

https://www.rawstory.com/gretchen-carlson-2673959047/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 8:23 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

He was right when he praised this book.



Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.

Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".



What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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THG
Thursday, September 4, 2025 9:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
When's the last time Frum was right about anything?

Be specific.


He was right when he praised this book.



Great. Tell him to stick to doing book reviews then, because he's shit at his day job.

Have you ever seen a zombie movie where the zombies talk? Me neither. But if they did talk, the zombies would probably be saying things like "Fuck Ukraine" or "Nobody Cares" or "He's shit" or "Your party is dead".

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





too funny...

T

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 11:43 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, don't get proud of yourself. ChatGPT is more articulate than you, yet it isn't alive. 6ix, you are no better than a zombie like all the other Trumptards I know. Are you surprised when the walking dead don't prosper in America? I'm not because I have seen what happens to Trumptards, even the most articulate ones.

https://chatgpt.com/overview/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 4, 2025 11:50 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

What? Is that supposed to be funny?

I also make 3 page long thoughtful posts, which is something you two goobers would be completely incapable of without stealing those ideas word for word, as I've caught you doing dozens of times already.

You just keep being wrong about everything right up until the day you die and driving yourself crazy as everything I tell you that will happen is going to happen, just as it's always been.

You're on the losing side of every argument, and you realize that now. It's why the two of you are constantly lashing out with personal attacks. You're two little rats trapped in the corner.

Awwwwww



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, don't get proud of yourself. ChatGPT is more articulate than you, yet it isn't alive. 6ix, you are no better than a zombie like all the other Trumptards I know. Are you surprised when the walking dead don't prosper in America? I'm not because I have seen what happens to Trumptards, even the most articulate ones.



Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, September 5, 2025 1:18 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

The only people who would mourn Trump's death

By John Stoehr | Sept 4, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-press-conference-26
73959693
/

As far as I can tell, Donald Trump is not dead, but he was an hour late to today’s White House presser, where he announced something. It doesn’t matter what it was, because the purpose of the announcement was proving he’s alive, though he’s clearly in a state of steep decline.

I think Garrett Graff’s piece this week says pretty much what needs saying about the newsworthiness of the subject, but I will take it a step farther: the reason Trump’s health has not made the leap from “news story” to “news event” is because the Washington press corps, especially the people who cut checks, doesn’t have the incentive.

The press corps needs attention. It’s the kind of need normal people cannot understand, nor should they, for their own sake. Trump, meanwhile, provides attention, especially when he says insane things.

So the incentive is not toward revealing the truth about Trump’s failing health but concealing it, even going so far as to accept uncritically the preposterous claim that he’s the fittest man to ever hold the office. If there’s nothing to see, even though it’s happening in front of television cameras, the gravy train can continue, and “everyone” is happy.

Here’s an example. At today’s presser, Trump was asked by one of the Fox chodes whether he would send National Guard troops to Chicago and other major cities. Trump hemmed and hawed, as he usually does, searching for an answer. He was clearly not trying to make an announcement, just saying whatever popped into this demented head.

Then the AP pushed this breaking news alert, in effect giving an improvised response the look and feel of serious presidential thought: “President Donald Trump said he will order federal law enforcement intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite local opposition.”

Joe Biden did not do that. He did not bring mindless attention to himself. He did not invite reporters into the White House every day. He did not say crazy things in front of cameras, though he could mangle the English language like few others could. He did not speak with absolute contempt for facts and the truth. And he did not provide attention-seekers with what they needed more than anything else.

So like junkies, they went looking for what Biden would not give them. They accepted as true Trump’s allegation that the Afghan withdrawal was the worst disaster in history, even though Trump negotiated the disastrous terms of it. Reporters also accepted as true allegations made by a federal prosecutor who said Joe Biden was old and tired.

These are two examples of dozens of stories that generated enormous public interest, that is, enormous attention for the attention-seekers. Together, along with Biden’s terrible debate performance, these stories paved the way for Jake Tapper’s post-election book alleging a secret and massive cover-up of Biden’s health, especially his mental decline, and even that Biden is somehow responsible for Donald Trump’s victory.

If reporters like Jake Tapper (and Alex Thompson) really believed what they said about a massive cover up of Biden's infirmities, you would expect them to never, ever, make that mistake again. You would think professional integrity and service to the public would compel them to chase down every tip as to the well-being of the current president.

But here we are in the middle of the near-total absence of any serious and sustained reporting on Trump's visible infirmities – as Graff said, the bruised hands, the swollen ankles, the changes to his personal habits (since when does he spend a holiday weekend at the White House?) and, most of all, the utterly confabulated things he says daily.

This near-total absence is reason alone to believe that Tapper, Thompson and others did not themselves believe what they said about Biden, only that saying i

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Friday, September 5, 2025 2:53 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

The only people who would mourn Trump's death



Americans are only concerned with those who would celebrate it.

In the end, you are going to be the Last Democrat Standing.

R.I.P. Democrats.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, September 5, 2025 3:37 AM

Quote:


THUGR:
No, you think everything, and everyone is corrupt. Except Russia of course. I believe...

SIGNY:
Well, just like I've been saying: That's your problem, right there.

THGR
I realize government works for the people

SIGNY:
The government is indeed full of people, and MOST of them are honest. Unfortunately many at the top ARE NOT.

I worked in government, remember? People up thru about the manager level were honest, well educated, motivated to do their jobs. If there was anything screwed up, it was the inability to fire people who REALLY needed to be fired. That would have lit a fire under some asses that really needed to move more. But there were truly honorable, impressive, people who worked there. Some were personal heroes of mine, people I held in very high regard.

...

[But] America is an oligarchy. Why don't we have Medicare for all, if most people wanted it? Why do we wind up in so many wars, even if most people vote against it? Why did we offshore so many industries, even tho 19% voted against "that giant sucking sound" that we were warned about with NAFTA?

Here's the Cambridge paper, published in 2014, that demonstrates it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/artic
le/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B


Corruption is the deathknell of nations and empires. There is no institution so large that can survive once it's been infected beyond a certain point. If we really want our government to work for the people, we [you] have to stop being in denial about the corruption that runs thru Congress and the WH, the all-pervasive need for campaign contributions, the revolving door, secrecy, and insider trading.[ And pork barrel legislation] It's a clusterfuck, and it's not just Trump or Republicans.



As I posted elsewhere, the only thing that Dems and Repubs differ in whose payroll they're on. With Dems it was finance and transnationals (think Bill Clinton, "free trade" and killing Glass Steagal) and more recently big pharma, "clean energy", George Soris, and big tech. And of course Israel and the MIC.

With Repubs it's oil and gas (think Dick Cheney). And Israel and the MIC.

Elizabeth Warren, (Fauxchahontas) on big pharma's payroll:

Quote:

'You've Taken $855,000 From Pharmaceutical Companies": Kennedy Spars With Senators During Wild Testimony

Update (1520ET): Well that was actually pretty interesting. As Democrat Senators read prepared zingers to try and corner RFK Jr. over vaccines and other malarkey, Kennedy hit back with several very specific haymakers during the three-hour session - calling the Democratic lawmakers 'liars' - and even pointing out that Elizabeth Warren has taken nearly a million dollars from pharmaceutical companies.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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THG
Friday, September 5, 2025 5:40 AM

This methodology appears to have misled users. Both Sanders and Warren ran for president in 2020, and raised millions of dollars from supporters across the country. Many of them were rank-and-file employees at drug companies, whose voting preferences may not always align with their companies’ interests.

“Some of the people making these claims know full well that they’re being misleading,” said Daniel Weiner, the director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There is a distinction between a random donation from someone who happens to work in a particular industry, versus a donation from a corporate PAC.”

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/03/big-pharma-pac-contributions-berni
e-sanders-elizabeth-warren-open-secrets-data
/




The problem with your longwinded posts comrade signym is that you aggregate facts with bullshit. Glass-Steagall was a wrongheaded decision by Clinton. But Warren did not take shit from the brass at pharma. Kennedy said the same shit about Sanders which was also not true.

Another fact you got wrong is that kennedy got his ass handed to him. And as for Warren claiming to be of Indian descent, it's what she was told as a child. And you have some set talking about others while ignoring all Trumps bullshit. He's using the presidency to make money and pay to play. The fact that he is not your main focus says it all.

T

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Friday, September 5, 2025 6:11 AM

The problem with Ted's super-short posts, aside from the fact that he can't read or write a lick of English, is that they're all 100% pure bullshit without even an attempt at sprinkling in any semblance of reality or Truth to disguise it.

What Ted? No Billionaire George Soros funded Dark Money clickbait for us today? Have you finally learned your lesson on that one?

Rosie O'Donnell was at least man enough to apologize when she made a TDS fueled mistake. Guess she's got bigger balls than you do.

But that's no surprise because everyone already knew that about you, didn't they?



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, September 5, 2025 5:14 PM

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

Also, "Germany violates human rights more than El Salvador" and Trump had a "ten out of ten" meeting in Alaska

Anne Applebaum
Aug 20, 2025

https://anneapplebaum.substack.com/p/war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery

Forgive me for using an Orwellian cliche in this headline (The full quote is “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” It’s from the novel 1984, if you don’t recognize it, and it is an example of doublethink, the Party’s propaganda). But unfortunately we are entering that territory. I wound up writing on that theme in two different ways this past week.

Let me first note that in the days before and during Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, I contracted a mystery virus. Because it initially seemed like it could be something worse, I spent a few days in a hospital. From that more distant perspective the absurdity of the meeting, the Kabuki theater element, was perhaps clearer. Everyone was playing their roles for the camera. Putin was there so that he could show his audience at home that he is the leader of a great superpower. Trump was there to fulfill the demands of his own ego, to prove that Putin really is his friend. American soldiers literally kneeled and rolled out a red carpet for a war criminal. The American president stood on the carpet clapping like a seal as the war criminal arrived.

Trump also looked weak because he is. In a burst of antibiotic-inspired energy, I did write something for the Atlantic on Saturday: Trump Has No Cards. I started by listing all of the ways in which Trump has already dismantled all forms of American pressure on Russia:

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report.

Given all of that, it’s hardly surprising that Putin now thinks he can win the war. Instead of agreeing to a ceasefire, he can enter prolonged “negotiations.” Instead of feeling pressure to stop fighting, he is convinced that the US, at least, will do nothing to stop him. The Anchorage meeting encouraged that perspective.

Certainly the Europeans, who are now providing Ukraine with more money and weapons than the United States, understood the PR catastrophe of Alaska very well. They flew to Washington, on short notice, because they wanted to prevent the Alaska disaster from morphing into something worse. But quite a lot of damage has already been done:

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 5, 2025 5:21 PM

Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman
Sep 05, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-the-right-reject-progress

Earlier this week I interviewed Peter Hotez and Michael Mann, authors of a new book, coming out next week, titled “Science under siege.” I’ll be posting that interview Saturday.

Both men are eminent scientists who have played key roles in public policy debates — Hotez over vaccines, Mann over climate change. They wrote their book to fight back against the tide of reaction against science. And this tide of reaction is especially tragic because there is, or should be, a lot of good news right now. In both their fields, reactionaries are trying to strangle technologies that have the potential to make the world a much better place.

As Hotez points out, vaccines in general have done incredible good, and the new mRNA vaccines are a scientific and medical miracle — yet RFK Jr. and his allies are trying to kill both vaccines and thousands, maybe millions of people. Mann, famous for his “hockey stick” chart showing the recent spike in global temperatures, has documented the danger from climate change. Advances in renewable energy, however, have made tackling global emissions far easier than anyone imagined — yet Trump and co. are actively suppressing the adoption of this technological breakthrough.

What I realized after our conversation is that the problem they discuss, of reactionaries who both refuse to accept progress and try to block it, goes well beyond their specific fields, and even science in general. America is now ruled by people who hate progress of all kinds, economic and social as well as scientific. They refuse to acknowledge the progress we’ve made on multiple fronts and are doing their best to reverse it.

Why? I don’t have a full theory, only some scattered thoughts, which I’ll get to at the end.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-the-right-reject-progress

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 5, 2025 7:31 PM

Governors in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Missouri and other red states are dispatching their own National Guard troops to support Trump's “crackdown on crime” outside their own borders, despite these states governing cities with murder rates twice as high as DC’s. Given that they govern the worst per capita violent crime rates in the country, these self-proclaimed ‘states rights’ champions obviously don’t give a damn about that as they prepare to invade their sovereign neighbors.

Trump, Vance and Stephen Miller are now explicitly threatening domestic political opponents — Democrat run states and cities — with military occupation. That is the real reason behind the big beautiful bill that funded the world’s largest police state. That is the real purpose behind $45 billion to build new concentration camps, and a 265% increase in ICE’s detention budget. Stephen Miller just admitted as much on Fox News, saying, “The Democrat Party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

So there we have it. Democrats have been Trump’s true ‘enemy within’ all along. Democrats are the intended beneficiaries of illegal occupying forces, concentration camps, and tank-mounted rifles in the streets. If this doesn’t sound like a red declaration of civil war against half the nation, nothing does.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-new-kind-of-civil-war-is-her
e-and-this-is-the-only-way-to-fight-back-opinion/ar-AA1LW97e


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 5, 2025 8:58 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman



Funny, coming out of you after the last 4 years.


We're going to make Democrats miserable.

America will be doing great though.


Globalism is dead. The Democratic Party is dead. Your ideology is dead.

You killed it all. Pat yourself on the back.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, September 5, 2025 9:25 PM

Don't take it from me...

Rahm Emanuel: Democrats have lost touch with Roosevelt, Johnson, and Truman

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3791978/rahm-ema
nuel-democrats-lost-touch-roosevelt-johnson-truman
/

Quote:

In casual conversations with Democrats in August from across the Midwest, I found that their biggest frustration with the national party is that its platform didn’t appeal to them. I was not surprised to see that same sentiment captured in a poll by the Wall Street Journal around the same time. It found Democrats’ popularity cratering with a staggering 63% of voters holding an unfavorable view of the party.

One month later, another survey by the Wall Street Journal showed that people are losing faith that they will achieve the American dream in their lifetime — and worse, they fear it will even be further out of reach for their children and grandchildren. This sentiment should concern leaders in both parties, but in particular the Democrats, who have bottomed out with appealing to the middle-class voter.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 5:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Why Does the Right Reject Progress?
The perverse push to make America miserable again

Paul Krugman



Funny, coming out of you after the last 4 years.


We're going to make Democrats miserable.

America will be doing great though.


Globalism is dead. The Democratic Party is dead. Your ideology is dead.

You killed it all. Pat yourself on the back.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Globalism is only dead in the US. Not so in the rest of the world, which is NOT increasing tariffs.

Trump couldn't make $billions if he weren't President:

Trump Family Amasses $5 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-6-billion-
fortune-after-crypto-launch-567faec5


Updated Sept. 1, 2025 4:24 pm ET

The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.

The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.

The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.

WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.

President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”

World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.

In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 6:07 PM

Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann

Lysenko comes to America (Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture)

Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/science-under-siege-a-talk-with-pet
er


There was a transition there, right? Nixon gave us the EPA, Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, George H.W. Bush gave us cap and trade to deal with acid rain. It wasn't that long ago that the Republican Party was not fundamentally an anti-science or an anti-environmental party. But back in the early 2000, that's when we really saw, as the fossil fuel industry was coming in, a sort of purity test emerged: the Republican candidates had to kiss the ring of the fossil fuel industry.

We saw a purging of those “moderate”, so-called, New England Republicans of the sort that we used to have, you're right. There is this Republican base, the MAGA base, that are receptive to this misinformation and disinformation. But that's not accidental. That's because it's been very carefully created. It's been nurtured. There's been an effort for decades to weaponize their base for an agenda that goes against their base’s own interests: environmental degradation. I mean, if you look at the policies now of the Republican Party, almost every single policy goes against the interests of the voters who are actually voting for them. That's the amazing achievement, that they've been able to create this army that wins elections and is weaponized to further their very specific agenda, the agenda of the plutocrats at the top of this whole structure who profit from this.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 6:12 PM

If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/03/economy/trump-tariff-refund

American businesses have paid over $210 billion as of August 24 to cover the tariffs that US courts have determined are illegal. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that the court’s decision, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could result in the US Treasury having to “give back” tariff revenue collected.

That potentially dramatic turn in the tariff saga comes after a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Trump unlawfully leaned on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose across-the-board duties on countries. Trump had used those powers to push import tax rates as high as 50% on India and Brazil – and as high as 145% on China earlier this year.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 6:37 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion



He won't lose. So don't worry about it.




Why are you always against America?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 7:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Why are you always against America?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

I am against Trumptards. I'm against Nazis, tax cheaters, rapists, thieves, liars and crooks such as Trump and 6ix. 6ix, don't claim you are not a crook. Your whole life is about getting something for nothing. That's why you brag about not working, but owning property. Trump doesn't work, either, and yet he has $billions. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Trump's crookiness:

Trump Family Amasses $5 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-6-billion-
fortune-after-crypto-launch-567faec5


Updated Sept. 1, 2025 4:24 pm ET

The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.

The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.

The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.

WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.

President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”

World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.

In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 6, 2025 7:30 PM

In my opinion, Trump II remains by far the worst president in American history—beating out the second-worst, either Trump I or Andrew Jackson. Trump is destroying vaccines and science and universities and renewable energy and sane AI policy and international trade and cheap, lifesaving foreign aid and the rule of law and everything else that’s good, and he’s destroying them because they’re good—because even if destroying them hurts his own voters and America’s standing in the world, it might hurt the educated elites even more. It’s almost superfluous to mention that, while Trump himself is neither of these things, the MAGA movement that will anoint his successor now teems with antisemites and Holocaust “revisionists.”

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9130

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 5:53 PM

The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously

At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined.

By Tom Nichols | September 5, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-parade-china-p
utin-xi-kim/684113
/

The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.

Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.

Nor has Trump fared very well with the other two members of this cheery 21st-century incarnation of SPECTRE. In the midst of Trumpian chaos, Xi is adroitly positioning China as the new face of international stability and responsibility. He has even made a show of offering partnership to China’s rival and former enemy India: Chinese diplomats last month said that China stands with India against the American “bully” when Trump was, for some reason, trying to impose 50 percent tariffs on India.

Likewise, the North Koreans, after playing to Trump’s ego and his ignorance of international affairs during meetings in the president’s first term, have continued their march to a nuclear arsenal that within years could grow to be larger than the United Kingdom’s. Trump was certain that he could negotiate with Kim, but the perfumed days of “love letters” between Trump and Kim are long over. Pyongyang’s leadership seems to know that it costs them little to humor Trump politely, but that they should reserve serious discussion for the leaders of serious countries.

Trump responded to his exclusion from the gala in Beijing by acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is. As the event was taking place, Trump took to his social-media site—of course—to express his hurt feelings with a cringe-inducing attempt at a zinger. “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”

Now, the reality is that Russia, China, and North Korea are conspiring against America, but it is beneath both the dignity and the power of an American president to whine about it. Trump continued his unseemly carping with a demand that China recognize the valor of the Americans who died in the Pacific:

The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and 'blood' that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader. Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory.

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 6:04 PM

Trump’s Crypto Dealings Now Have the Perfect Cover

In recent weeks, the family has dressed up its business dealings in the veneer of legitimacy.

By Will Gottsegen | September 6, 2025, 10:42 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/trump-crypto-wo
rld-liberty-financial/684130
/

The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.” Or how about the $TRUMP meme coin and accompanying gamified gala dinner for its biggest investors?

It has been easy, in part because of the bluster of the Trumps’ approach to promotion, to discount the family’s dalliances in crypto as a cash grab: The meme coin—which has no function except to facilitate gambling—almost immediately made Trump a crypto billionaire. But recently, the family has taken a decidedly different tack—less Trumpian bombast, and more sober promotion of its crypto businesses. On Wednesday, Eric Trump joined CNBC after American Bitcoin, the crypto-mining company he co-founded, went public and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For the most part, he sounded like any other C-suite exec talking up their company after an IPO: “Watching what the stock is doing right now is just—it’s beautiful and incredibly rewarding.”

The public debut of American Bitcoin is just one way that the Trump family’s crypto play has been dressed up over the past two weeks. The crypto firm Trump and his sons co-founded, World Liberty Financial, has aggressively expanded; the media company behind Truth Social has hoovered up millions in even more crypto; and that same company created a new crypto treasury to hold the stockpile. This blitz has proven to be enormously consequential (and enormously lucrative) for the maturing Trump crypto empire. Each of these moves has a veneer of legitimacy that the family’s earlier crypto dealings lacked: They are much easier to defend than an Iron Man–inspired NFT, while doing just as much to enrich Trump and his sons.

The core of this maneuver is World Liberty Financial, which, despite counting Trump’s three sons (including 19-year-old Barron) as founders, is by far the most legitimate-seeming operation in Trump’s crypto universe. It is goofy—a “gold paper” issued by the company is plastered with a cartoon of Trump’s face—but the company has attached itself to one of the most bulletproof parts of the crypto industry: stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies pegged to the price of another asset, such as the U.S. dollar, and are typically backed by reserves. Think of them like digital cash. Thanks to a couple years of widespread adoption, stablecoins are now broadly accepted as the crypto industry’s most robust innovation—one of the only true use cases in an industry that has long sought to prove it’s more than just an avenue for speculation.

The company’s stablecoin, USD1, launched back in March—but this week, the company moved to unlock a large tranche of what are known as “governance tokens.” All governance tokens, in theory, can bring a level of accountability and democracy to a crypto project, conferring voting rights that can influence corporate-governance decisions—a little like how shareholders use voting stock to sway public companies. Except that in this case, the governance power conferred by the tokens seems mostly symbolic: World Liberty Financial’s management team likely owns so much of the coin that it can veto the decisions. The Trumps alone hold nearly a quarter of the governance tokens that exist. The family netted as much as $5 billion in “paper wealth” once the tokens hit the market this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. The tokens, as of today, are likely the Trump family’s most valuable asset, eclipsing all their golf courses and hotels.&

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 8:07 PM

More than $1.1 trillion in Texas real estate is at risk from severe climate change-related disasters, a new Realtor.com report shows, as the Trump administration downplays the danger and deletes research that could help protect from future storms.

Nationwide, one in four homes faces severe or extreme risks from flooding, hurricanes or wildfires, the real estate company found in partnership with Insurify, an insurance data firm. More than $12 trillion in real estate is at high risk nationally, and worsening extreme weather is driving insurance premiums higher.

“Climate risks are no longer a distant threat for U.S. housing—they are a present reality that put a large chunk of U.S. real estate value at risk,” Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, said in the report. “In many markets, the gap between perceived risk and actual risk is sizable, particularly for flooding.”

. . .

Dessler and the authors of the Realtor.com report agree that most Americans do not understand their risk and are not economically prepared.

“If I tell you you’re in a hundred-year floodplain, you think the odds of your house flooding are really low,” Dessler told me. “Over a 30-year mortgage, your chance of flooding is about one in three.”

Our prosperity and safety depend on making well-informed decisions about growing climate risks. For that, we need reliable data. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is working to conceal it.

More at https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=ac278b89-94d8-4ccb-b5b9-4e53a31c16c3&share=true


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 11:00 PM

The Dangers of Fiscal Dominance

How Trump could Zimbabwify America

By Paul Krugman | Sep 07, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-fiscal-dominance

Donald Trump wants to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve and assume personal control of monetary policy. It’s clearly an obsession with him and his efforts just keep getting more extreme.

First he spent several months haranguing Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. Next he announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, on the basis of extremely thin accusations involving mortgages she took out before she joined the Board. When Cook filed suit, claiming — almost surely correctly — that he had no legal right to fire her, his Justice Department upped the ante, saying that it was considering criminal charges. And need I add that three other members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have made the same mortgage arrangement as Lisa Cook, as well as the parents of Bill Pulte, Trump’s hired assassin in this matter.

Unless the Supreme Court is more in Trump’s back-pocket than is already evident, I don’t Trump will prevail in firing Cook. But his over-arching goal, clearly, is to personally intimidate Fed officials — “get in our way,” the White House is saying, “and we will ruin your life.”

Meanwhile, Trump has nominated Stephen Miran, chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, to fill a vacancy on the Board. Incredibly, Miran says that he will not resign his current appointment. Rather, he intends to just take a leave of absence. Having an employee of the executive branch serve as a member of the Board would be completely unprecedented. An act like that is effectively a textbook case of the elimination of Fed independence.

And trashing the Fed’s independence is clearly a top agenda item of Trump’s accomplices: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has just published a remarkably sleazy article smearing the Fed. More on that in a future post.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-feds-gain-of-function-monetary-policy-
ac0dc38a


There is no real dispute over what Trump is doing. Trump has announced that not only should the Fed lower the Fed funds rate, the short-term interest rate that the Fed controls, but that it should be lowered by 300 basis points. That would be dropping the current rate from 4.5 to 1.5. That’s an enormous drop – one which has never been done except in the teeth of a deep recession.

Why is Trump demanding this? In answering that question, one should never rule out the role of sheer ignorance. Trump may imagine that lower short-term interest rates will lift him in the polls, while ignoring the high likelihood that such a steep fall in short-term interest rates will raise expected inflation and, as a result, long-term rates will go up, not down. And sometimes he seems to think of interest rate reductions as a sort of trophy, like an award you get for supposedly winning a golf tournament.

But there is another reason that might explain why Trump wants to end the Fed’s independence — and this reason makes economists very, very nervous. For it’s likely that Trump is seeking to establish “fiscal dominance” of monetary policy — a policy regime in which the Fed’s actions are dictated, not by an effort to achieve low inflation and full employment, but by the desire to avoid hard choices on taxes and spending.

So I’m going to devote today’s primer to fiscal dominance: What it means and how it has played out in the past. Beyond the paywall I’ll talk about four ways a central bank that has lost its independence can enable fiscal irresponsibility:

1. Seigniorage: Using the printing press to cover budget deficits

2. Financial repression: Using low rates to reduce budget deficits

3. Goosing the economy: not exactly fiscal dominance, but political dominance

4. Expropriation through inflation: Inflating away government debt.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https:/

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 11:16 PM

Why This Administration Can’t Fill Its Jobs

By David A. Graham | September 5, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/trump-administ
ration-staff-jobs/684125
/

The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Rubio, who was serving as secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID. (He’s since handed the latter to Russell Vought, who now also has three titles.) Three of these roles are subject to Senate confirmation; Rubio has been confirmed, and for that matter nominated, only as secretary of state. Trump has not put any nominee forward for the other two positions.

From top roles on down, the Trump administration continues to struggle to find people who can and will fill jobs, leaving the president to rely on a small circle of advisers, each playing multiple roles. The result is short-staffing and conflicts of interest that help explain why the executive branch has been bad at accomplishing not only its statutory responsibilities but also some of its political goals.

Consider Stephen Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Trump has nominated him to fill a recently vacated seat on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Miran told senators during a hearing yesterday that if he is confirmed, he will not resign from the CEA.

“I have received advice from counsel that what is required is an unpaid leave of absence from the Council of Economic Advisers,” Miran said. “And so, considering the term for which I’m being nominated is a little bit more than four months, that is what I will be taking.” (Miran said that if confirmed to a full term, he would resign.)

In other words, Miran would be simultaneously serving (albeit without pay) a president who has demanded that the Fed lower interest rates and sitting on the ostensibly independent board that sets interest rates. Conflicts of interest aren’t usually quite so obvious. The claim that an attorney advised Miran that his approach is fine is not encouraging: This administration seems to be able to get a lawyer to sign off on practically any arrangement. That doesn’t mean the public should accept it. But don’t worry—Miran demurred when a senator asked if he was Trump’s “puppet.”

Somehow, this is not the most disturbing case. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official, was narrowly confirmed as a federal appeals judge in July. But between that vote and taking his spot on the bench, Bove continued to work at the Justice Department, reportedly attending both internal meetings and a public event—a highly unusual arrangement. Once again, this didn’t appear to be an explicit violation of the judiciary’s rules, because he hadn’t yet been sworn in; nevertheless, he risked working on issues that could come before him in court. It doesn’t take a law degree to see why this arrangement looks bad, especially at a moment when faith in the courts as a check on the executive branch is in question.

“Socializing with Trump is fine. Advising Trump is not fine. Putting himself physically in a place where it looks like he is identifying with the president’s political agenda is not fine,” the legal ethicist Stephen Gillers told The New York Times. Then again, Bove has never seemed all that concerned about appearing to be anything other than a Trump sycophant. During his confirmation process, he refused to say whether a third presidential term was permitted, despite the clear language of the Constitution, and accounts from several whistleblowers contradict statements he made in his confirmation hearing, which suggests that he may have lied to senators. (He denies this.)

I first wrote about Trump’s use of dual-hatting, which is the term for one person filling multiple jobs, back in May. At the time, the possibility existed that this was a

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Sunday, September 7, 2025 11:39 PM

"Donald Trump has completely lost it. He’s not only planning to go to war with Venezuela — to manufacture a crisis that gives him cover to implement Project 2025 and stay in power forever — but he’s also preparing to go to war with America itself. Plans are on the table to unleash the National Guard on cities like Chicago and Portland," Parnas wrote. "And make no mistake, folks: none of this is about the safety or security of our country. It’s all part of Trump’s authoritarian playbook — an orchestrated campaign of chaos designed for one purpose only: to cement himself in power for good."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-lost-it-ex-insider-flags
-evidence-president-prepping-to-stay-in-power-forever/ar-AA1M3eU5


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 2:04 AM

New report outlines how many people might lose SNAP in Greater Boston under Trump bill
About 7% of Boston-area SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their food assistance thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

By Morgan Rousseau | September 7, 2025 | 8:47 AM

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/09/07/new-report-outlines-
how-many-people-might-lose-snap-in-greater-boston-under-trump-bill
/

A new report from a Boston research center sheds light on how the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill will affect people who rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in Greater Boston.
https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2025/september/mtm-snap

About 40,000 adult SNAP recipients are at risk of losing their food assistance due to the new federal law, according to the Meeting the Moment: SNAP Cuts and the Local Fallout report released Tuesday by Boston Indicator, a research center at the nonprofit Boston Foundation. That figure translates to roughly 7% of adults who use SNAP in the Boston area.

Researchers also found that about 9,600 legally present immigrants in Massachusetts may now lose SNAP eligibility under the new rules.

The sweeping bill includes cuts and reforms to safety-net programs, including SNAP and Medicaid, and tightens work and eligibility requirements. While the bill provides tax benefits to higher-income households, opponents say it unfairly targets lower-income families who will be forced to struggle more with health coverage and food assistance.

The report states that as of July 2025, Greater Boston accounted for 56 percent of Massachusetts’ SNAP caseload—361,473 cases and 578,686 clients.

The largest concentrations are in cities such as Lawrence and Brockton, where more than one-third of residents rely on SNAP benefits. Residents of Lowell, Lynn, Chelsea, Randolph, Wareham, Methuen, and Haverhill also heavily rely on food assistance, with between 22 and 28 percent of people in those cities receiving benefits.

In Boston, approximately 21 percent of the population, or 138,523 clients, rely on SNAP benefits.

“In a state as wealthy as Massachusetts, no one should go hungry,” researchers wrote in the report. “Yet even here, many families struggle to afford healthy food. For decades, [SNAP] has helped close that gap. But the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ recently passed by Congress and signed by President Trump risks undercutting progress we have made in reducing food insecurity in Massachusetts.”

Researchers said the new rules will shift SNAP administrative costs to the state, forcing Massachusetts to cover 75% of SNAP administration costs—up from 50%. This would have resulted in an additional $58 million in fiscal year 2025, increasing total state costs to $175 million, according to the report.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 8:57 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Why are you always against America?

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

I am against Trumptards.



No.

You're against America. You're against Americans.

And we're about to fucking annihilate you.

Tick tock.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, September 8, 2025 5:24 PM

Last week Bessent published an article titled “The Fed’s ‘Gain of Function’ Monetary Policy” in the Wall Street Journal. Here is how it begins:

As we saw during the Covid pandemic, lab-created experiments can wreak havoc when they escape their confines. Once released, they can’t easily be put back. The “extraordinary” monetary-policy tools unleashed after the 2008 financial crisis have similarly transformed the Federal Reserve’s policy regime, with unpredictable consequences.

The vileness is right there in the headline and the first sentence. It’s immaterial whether you believe that Covid was caused by a lab leak or by natural viral infection from animals. The point is that Bessent began his article by pandering to the conspiracy-theory right by taking a contentious proposition popular in those parts, presenting it as if it were established fact, and then — in a complete non sequitur — associating that theory with his criticism of the Federal Reserve.

Yes, the Fed took extraordinary measures after the financial crisis. It was, after all, responding to the worst economic slump since the Great Depression — a slump that persisted even after emergency policies had ended the initial period of financial free fall. In an attempt to boost the economy the Fed engaged in “quantitative easing” — buying large quantities of long-term U.S. government debt and debt backed by the U.S. government. This was a departure from its usual practice, in which it only buys short-term Treasuries. But it was clearly in pursuit of the Fed’s mission, which is to promote both price stability and full employment.

Bessent, however, would have you believe that the Fed’s attempt to do its job was a dangerous experiment inflicted on the country by power-mad officials, and which had dire consequences. And while some critics did predict dire consequences at the time, they were soon proved to be completely and embarrassingly wrong.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scott-bessent-sleazy-smearer

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 5:28 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No.

You're against America. You're against Americans.

And we're about to fucking annihilate you.

Tick tock.

The Confederate slave-owners were the real Americans. That is why Trump is renaming military bases after traitorous generals.

Defense Department Renames Army Bases to Honor Southern Insurrectionists Who Sought to Preserve Slavery

https://eji.org/news/defense-department-renames-army-bases-to-honor-so
uthern-insurrectionists-who-sought-to-preserve-slavery
/

The Army announced on June 10 that it will rename seven military bases less than two years after Army bases honoring Confederate leaders were rededicated with new names pursuant to a congressionally mandated, multimillion-dollar effort started in the first Trump administration.

Located in Southern states that rebelled against the U.S. in 1860, the bases named in honor of secessionists who sought to preserve slavery and white supremacy were built during the first half of the 20th century—a period when white Southerners installed hundreds of monuments to the architects of racial hierarchy in America as part of a concerted effort to redeem their defeat and build cultural support for the restoration of white supremacy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 6:01 PM

Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If positive thinking doesn’t work, what does?

https://aeon.co/essays/thinking-positive-is-a-surprisingly-risky-manoe
uvre


Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Her latest book is Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (2014)

Do you believe that positive thinking can help you achieve your goals? Many people today do. Pop psychology and the $12 billion self-help industry reinforce a widespread belief that positive thinking can improve our moods and lead to beneficial life changes. In her book The Secret Daily Teachings (2008), the self-help author Rhonda Byrne suggested that: ‘Whatever big thing you are asking for, consider having the celebration now as though you have received it.’

Yet research in psychology reveals a more complicated picture. Indulging in undirected positive flights of fancy isn’t always in our interest. Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term, it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck. If we really want to move ahead in our lives, engage with the world and feel energized, we need to go beyond positive thinking and connect as well with the obstacles that stand in our way. By bringing our dreams into contact with reality, we can unleash our greatest energies and make the most progress in our lives.

Now, you might wonder if positive thinking is really as harmful as I’m suggesting. In fact, it is. In a number of studies over two decades, my colleagues and I have discovered a powerful link between positive thinking and poor performance. . .

My colleagues and I performed such studies with participants in a number of demographic groups, in different countries, and with a range of personal wishes, including health goals, academic and professional goals, and relationship goals. Consistently, we found a correlation between positive fantasies and poor performance. The more that people ‘think positive’ and imagine themselves achieving their goals, the less they actually achieve.

Download Gabriele Oettinge's book from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Gabriele+Oettingen

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 6:50 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No.

You're against America. You're against Americans.

And we're about to fucking annihilate you.

Tick tock.

The Confederate slave-owners were



Democrats.

They were all Democrats.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, September 8, 2025 7:07 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No.

You're against America. You're against Americans.

And we're about to fucking annihilate you.

Tick tock.

The Confederate slave-owners were



Democrats.

They were all Democrats.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Most Democrats are NOT Democrats:

People's Democratic Republic of Algeria
Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
Democratic Republic of Georgia
Democratic Republic of Madagascar
Democratic Republic of Sudan
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Democratic Republic of Yemen
Azerbaijan Democratic Republic
Moldavian Democratic Republic
Somali Democratic Republic
Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic
Democratic People's Republic of Angola
People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

The Democrats of the Confederate States of America were NOT Democrats, but there aren't any Trumptards who understand that.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 7:15 PM

Trump Makes Freudian Slip, Infers His GOP Underlings Are Dumb During White House Dinner Event

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/you-don-t-know-this-trump-make
s-freudian-slip-infers-his-gop-underlings-are-dumb-during-white-house-dinner-event/vi-AA1M3as2


Trump knows his Trumptards are dumb. Those who aren't dumb aren't Trumptards but are successful Americans in complete contrast to the decidedly unsuccessful people who follow Trump as leader.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 8:46 PM

The Houston oil company Occidental Petroleum reported last month it was expecting a large tax break from president Donald Trump's tax and spending cut package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill to the tune of $700 to 800 million for the next 2 years. It's a sizable sum for a company that reported a $2.4 billion profit last year.

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=fcdcc597-7596-4f6e-82e5-4d14acc562ff&share=true


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 8, 2025 10:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No.

You're against America. You're against Americans.

And we're about to fucking annihilate you.

Tick tock.

The Confederate slave-owners were



Democrats.

They were all Democrats.

Most Democrats



are brain dead.


Nazi = National Socialist German Workers' Party

Go move to New York and vote for your new Nazi mayor, dumb fuck.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, September 8, 2025 10:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

are brain dead.


Nazi = National Socialist German Workers' Party

Go move to New York and vote for your new Nazi mayor, dumb fuck.

Start at 11 minutes to hear how Trump eradicated 25 million rapists and made DC safe:



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 12:37 AM

Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians

By Nick Turse

https://theintercept.com/2025/09/05/pentagon-official-trump-boat-strik
e-was-a-criminal-attack-on-civilians
/

The lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday was a criminal attack on civilians, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration paved the way for the attack, he said, by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

President Donald Trump claimed that the attack was aimed “against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” in a TruthSocial post. He continued: “TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.”

Trump accompanied the post with a video of a four-engine speedboat cutting through the water with numerous people on board. An explosion then destroys the boat. Trump said the attack killed 11 people. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States killed them.

After days of silence, the White House issued a statement late Thursday claiming the attack was lawful. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said it was “taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered his own justification for the strike the same day. “Every boatload of any form of drug that poisons the American people is an imminent threat. And at the DoD our job is to defeat imminent threats,” he told a group of journalists. “A foreign terrorist organization poisoning your people with drugs coming from a drug cartel is no different than Al Qaeda, and they will be treated as such as they were in international waters.”

Two U.S. government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Hegseth’s justification – which one called “completely unserious” – took shape after the attack.

Experts said Hegseth’s rationale was flimsy, if not farcical. “Tren de Aragua being designated as a foreign terrorist organization is a purely domestic law enforcement designation. It offers no authority for the military to use deadly force,” said Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal advisor to Special Operations forces engaged in counterterrorism missions around the world. “Under international law, there’s no way this even gets close to being a legitimate use of force.”


Other legal experts have agreed with Huntley, now the director of the National Security Law Program at the Georgetown University Law Center. Members of Congress have echoed the assessment.

“Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any President carte blanche to ignore Congress’s clear Constitutional authority on matters of war and peace,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn, in a statement. “There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law.”

Hegseth said the attack would be followed by others. “It won’t stop with just this strike,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 1:59 AM

Trump is still officially a Reprehensible Rapist, until the Trumptards on the Supreme Court overrule all lower courts

Federal appeals court upholds $83.3M E. Jean Carroll judgment against Trump

Court dismisses presidential immunity defense over comments about sexual assault allegations

By Anders Hagstrom Fox News

Published September 8, 2025 12:49pm EDT

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/federal-appeals-court-upholds-83-3m-e
-jean-carroll-judgment-against-trump


"The record in this case supports the district court’s determination that the ‘the degree of reprehensibility’ of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented," the court added.

Reprehensibility is the state or quality of being blameworthy, deserving criticism, condemnation, or reproof for something considered morally wrong or bad.

6ixStringJack, at the Fox News site, you can read the 70 page long decision by The UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT where Trump is called a goddamn stupid asshole over and over again. I find it shocking how clearly the decision is about Trump's deep defectiveness and depravity.

(Argued: June 24, 2025 Decided: September 8, 2025)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 6:58 AM

Shut up, faggot. Nobody reads your bullshit.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 7:51 AM

Something worth pursuing...



Quote:

"Go Talk To Bill Gates About Me": How JP Morgan Enabled Jeffrey Epstein's Crimes, Snagged Netanyahu Meeting

On an autumn day in 2011, Jeffrey Epstein stepped into JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters at 270 Park Avenue and rode the elevator to the executive floors where the bank’s leaders, including Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, kept their offices. Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime in Florida three years earlier, had a message for the bank’s top lawyer, Stephen Cutler: he had “turned over a new leaf,” he said, and powerful friends could vouch for him. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me.”

...

For more than a decade, JPMorgan Chase processed over $1 billion in transactions for Jeffrey Epstein - including hundreds of millions routed to Russian banks and payments to young Eastern European women, opened at least 134 accounts tied to him and his associates, and even helped move millions to Ghislaine Maxwell - including $7.4 million for a Sikorsky helicopter.

...

Inside JPMorgan, the debate over whether to keep Epstein as a client had been simmering for years. Epstein was lucrative. His accounts held more than $200 million and generated millions in fees, and he opened doors to wealthy prospects and world leaders. He had helped midwife the bank’s 2004 purchase of Highbridge Capital Management, earning a $15 million payday. Senior bankers credited him with introductions to figures such as Sergey Brin and Benjamin Netanyahu.


https://www.zerohedge.com/political/go-talk-bill-gates-about-me-how-jp
-morgan-enabled-jeffrey-epsteins-crimes-snagged


The article details JPM'S complicity in Epstein's dealings. How he rubbed elbows with billionaires, near-trillionaires, and movers and shakers here and in Israel.

It doesn't answer one question tho ... WHERE DID EPSTEIN'S MONEY COME FROM?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 5:48 PM

Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/can-a-despised-autocrat-consolidate

Yesterday I wrote about Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and made some unflattering observations about him. So it might be worth mentioning a new incident, reported by Politico. Apparently Bessent confronted Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a piece of work himself — at a fancy dinner, accusing Pulte of bad-mouthing him to the president:

“Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fuck you,” Bessent told Pulte. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.”

Apparently Bessent’s surface suavity is even more of a Potemkin persona than I realized.

Now on to my main subject. Let me start with a couple of incidents that illustrate the great political puzzle we now face.

Incident 1: On Thursday a number of tech billionaires had dinner with Donald Trump. They were nauseatingly obsequious — and completely insincere. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was asked how much money he plans to invest in the U.S. and replied $600 billion. Shortly afterward, he was caught on a hot mic telling Trump “Sorry, I wasn’t ready … I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.”

Incident 2: On Sunday Trump attended the U.S. Open. When his face appeared on the Jumbotron, this was the crowd’s reaction:

OK, this was in New York, not exactly MAGA country, but it wasn’t that much of an outlier. As G. Elliott Morris points out in Strength in Numbers, what stands out in Trump’s polling isn’t just that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, but that almost half the country strongly disapproves.

The Trump administration is obviously attempting to follow the familiar playbook by which autocracies consolidate their power, effectively turning America into a one-party state where almost everyone accepts that resistance to the regime is futile and is afraid to show any signs of opposition.

And by and large America’s elites have offered no more resistance to authoritarian consolidation than a wet Kleenex. But historically, anti-democratic parties that establish lasting autocracies have done so with considerable initial support from the broader public. At least at first, they’re actually popular, especially because they deliver, or seem to deliver, major economic gains.

That’s not happening for Trump, at all. And the big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule.

Let’s consider a couple of historical examples.

Adolf Hitler came to power in large part because the previous government insisted on following orthodox, deflationary economic policies in the face of the Great Depression. Hitler’s willingness to embrace heterodox policies helped Germany stage a strong recovery:

As a result, the Nazi regime was probably quite popular in its early years, when a public backlash might still have mattered.

Fast forward to 2010, when Viktor Orban took power in Hungary. At the time, the Hungarian economy was deeply depressed, in part because of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Orban sent the IMF packing, and was able to preside over rapid economic improvement:

By contrast, Trump inherited an economy in good shape — even if the vibes were bad — and appears to be running it into the ground. Here’s the three-month average rate of job creation (which will probably look worse after the regularly scheduled annual revision, coming later today):

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

And all indications are that consumers will soon begin to see large price increases cause

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 6:25 PM

Fear of Losing the Midterms Is Driving Trump’s Decisions

The specter of investigations and impeachment has fueled many of the president’s most dramatic actions.

By Jonathan Lemire | September 8, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/trump-midterms-co
ngress-impeachment/684131
/

Few things make President Donald Trump angrier than the memory of his two impeachments. Despite his return to the White House this year, he frequently complains privately and publicly about Democrats’ efforts to remove him from office in his first term. Trump, to this day, insists that he did nothing wrong, calling both impeachments “witch hunts.”

And he is fearful that he might have to go through it all again.

The party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections, and Trump remembers how Democrats wielded the majority after capturing the House of Representatives in 2018. If the Democrats win control of one chamber of Congress next year—they are the slight favorites in the House, whereas the Senate would be harder—they won’t just have the ability to block whatever remains of Trump’s lame-duck legislative agenda. Armed with the power of the subpoena, they would also be able to open investigations into the Trump administration, dragging key officials to the Hill for embarrassing, headline-grabbing hearings. And even a simple majority in the House would allow Democrats the chance to impeach Trump for a third time.

The specter of investigations and impeachment has fueled many of the president’s most dramatic actions in recent weeks, three senior White House officials and two close outside allies told me. Trump’s unprecedented (and, Democrats say, illegal) mid-decade redistricting push, the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, his unceasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates—all can be seen as part of a sweeping, frantic attempt to swing next year’s midterm elections.

The president has told confidants that he does not want a repeat of what happened after Republicans lost control in 2018 and is not going to cost himself this time by adhering to political norms. He has been pushing aides to focus on the midterms, and he is making more of an effort than he did seven years ago to nationalize the races and to motivate Republican voters who haven’t turned out when his name isn’t on the ballot. Trump believes that not just the tenor of his final two years in office, but the shape of his legacy as a whole, ride on whether he can reverse historical political trends and hold on to the House and the Senate in 2026.

“The president believes that he stayed in his lane” in 2018 — “that he took a more conservative approach and tried to reach across the aisle,” one of the senior White House officials told me. (This person, like others interviewed, was granted anonymity to speak about internal discussions.) “And look where that got him: We lost. He’s not making that mistake again.”

Trump has a tendency to inject politics into nearly every presidential act or social-media post. But the White House made a concerted pivot toward the midterms once the Republicans’ signature piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was passed into law in July, the three White House officials told me. White House aides, working with the congressional-campaign committees, knew almost immediately that they had a problem: The legislation’s tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, and the bill will slash services and health care for many poorer Americans. The president, to the surprise of many in his party, has done very little domestic travel to promote the legislation. After Republican lawmakers began facing hostile crowds at town halls, the White House asked the GOP congressional leadership to hold fewer of them.

Meanwhile, the years-old Jeffrey Epstein scandal flared up again over the summer and has proved impossible for Trump to extinguish as more details have emerged about his relationship with the disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide after h

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 9:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9





--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025 9:32 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Fear of Losing the Midterms Is Driving Trump’s Decisions



Nobody is afraid of losing the Midterms except for Democrats.

You're going to lose 20 to 50 house seats next November.

Democrats don't have a chance of taking the senate for at least a decade.

Quit smoking crack.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 4:04 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, for a guy who is struggling with ill health, inherited mental disorders, poverty, and no future, you certainly are sure of yourself.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 4:05 PM

24% price increase next year and 35% increase in 2018 because of executive orders

Health insurance companies have requested an average premium increase of 24% for Affordable Care Act plans in Texas in 2026, a significant hike that could lead to destabilization in the marketplace and customers opting for less or no coverage.

Last year, the average rate hike across insurance carriers was 3.8%. Data analysis from KFF found that next year’s rate hikes could be the largest increase since 2018, when average premiums went up by 35% in Texas. In 2018, companies factored in Congress’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and President Donald Trump signing an executive order ending subsidies to insurers for low-income people. After 2018, average premiums in Texas have never risen by more than 4%.

Nearly 4 million Texans bought health insurance coverage through the ACA marketplace for 2025, a high-water mark in a state that has the highest uninsured rate in the nation. ACA uptake has tripled since 2020, after Congress expanded tax credits to lower ACA users’ monthly premiums.

More at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/21/texas-health-insurance-premium
s-aca-tax-credit-expiration
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 4:12 PM

The Fungus Among Us

Posted on Monday, Feb 5, 2024, 2:00AM by Barry Goldman

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/02/the-fungus-among-us.html

Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the water, kill off the animals, melt the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even if what they care about the most is making more money no matter how much money they already have, don’t they care at all about the world they’re leaving for their kids?

I’ve arrived at a theory. But first I need to back up a few steps.

Readers of 3QD may be familiar with the brain fungus that causes “zombie ants” to leave the safety of the forest floor and climb up the stalks of plants to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their fear of cats. In both cases, the parasite has evolved to hijack the brain of the host and cause it to behave in ways that are suicidal to the host but beneficial to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are often exquisitely complex and particular. It seems impossible that something as primitive as a fungus could be the explanation. But evolution has come up with lots of similar strategies. She is very clever. She doesn’t have a sense of fair play or sportsmanship. If a behavior increases the chances of getting the genes of one generation reproduced in the next, it succeeds. Nothing else matters. And she has lots and lots of time to experiment.

So that’s the first idea we need – the fungus that hijacks the brain of one species to improve the reproductive success of another.

Then we need the idea of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to wait for genetic evolution. We have evolved the ability to get information from one generation to the next without having to wait for it first to be encoded in the DNA. We don’t have to start from scratch with each generation, and we don’t have to proceed by trial and error. We have culture, language, and traditional practices.

In the modern world, I don’t have to know how anything works. I don’t have to know how cars or computers work, for example, or how to build them. It’s enough for me to know how to drive and how to type. As long as somewhere in my culture there are people who know how cars and computers work and how to build them, I can off-load that responsibility to them and spend my time on other things.

One more idea and we will be ready for my theory. That’s the idea of a meme. A meme is to cultural evolution what a gene is to the biological kind. It’s the unit of transfer, the basic building block. Cooking is a meme. When the idea of cooking enters into a culture, lots of things change. People live longer because cooking releases more nutritional value from food. People get bigger and stronger. Their teeth get smaller. Jaw muscles get weaker and on and on.

The corporation is a meme. It is a legal invention, a legal fiction if you like. Corporations don’t exist in the way that tables and chairs exist. They don’t have weight or take up space. They have no natural lifespan. Some of them are much older and vastly richer than any person. They can own property, enter into contracts, sue, and be sued. And, since the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and related cases, they can donate unlimited amounts of money to the political causes of their choice.

I quote here from The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, by David Runciman:

The 18th century jurist Edward Thurlow famously complained: ‘Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned; they therefore do as they like.’ Sentient beings with bodies and souls disappear inside the group once it has acquired its own identity. They can shrug their shoulders as the victims of the group’s decisions come looking for justice. Meanwhile, the group has no shoulders to shrug.

Mitt Ro

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 4:39 PM

Trump made many prophecies about the economic miracles he would achieve as president. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation,” he promised. “We will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” He promised to get gasoline below $2 a gallon. And of course he insisted that he would deliver a jobs boom, especially in manufacturing.

None of that is happening. Tomorrow’s report on consumer prices will probably show inflation running at close to 3 percent, with most economists expecting it to rise in the months ahead. Electricity prices are rising rapidly, while gas is solidly above $3 a gallon. And job growth appears to be stalling.

Furthermore, much of the bad news is Trump’s own fault. His tariffs and deportations are both adding to inflation and, by creating uncertainty, slowing the economy.

Trump has already fired the head of the BLS for reporting job numbers he didn’t like, claiming falsely that the bad numbers were rigged to hurt him politically. We can expect further claims of partisan bias as the inflation numbers get worse, and eventually, probably quite soon, an attempt to purge and politicize the agency.

The push to politicize the BLS has been reinforced by yesterday’s report from the agency, which revised downward its estimates of past job growth. The White House claimed that it shows that “the BLS is broken.”

It showed no such thing. As a helpful post from the Economic Policy Institute says,

These BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.

As the EPI explains, monthly job numbers don’t literally track every job in America. They’re estimates based on a partial survey of employers. We only get comprehensive data from unemployment insurance tax records, which become available once a year. Revising the estimates based on that data is normal and in no sense a sign that the BLS is doing anything wrong.

But the administration will try to use the revision to discredit the agency, and in particular its recent reports showing a worsening labor market.

So what you need to know is that the BLS is doing its job the way it should, and that there is plenty of additional evidence confirming that the labor market has gotten worse under Trump.

For example, the widely respected Conference Board survey of consumers shows that between last December and August there was a sharp decline in the number of people saying jobs were “plentiful” and a sharp rise in those saying they were “hard to get.”

The New York Fed reports that the percentage of respondents who believe that they could quickly find a new job if they lost their current one has dropped sharply.

And the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a regular informal survey that often serves as a useful check on formal data, gave a clear picture of stalling employment:

Eleven Districts described little or no net change in overall employment levels, while one District described a modest decline. Seven Districts noted that firms were hesitant to hire workers because of weaker demand or uncertainty. Moreover, contacts in two Districts reported an increase in layoffs, while contacts in multiple Districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition …

This is not a booming economy.

It's not really surprising that Trump is failing to deliver on any of his promises, which never made sense in the first place. Nor is it surprising that he and those around him, rather than making a course correction, are trying to shoot the messengers. But it’s a tragedy that the attempt to suppress bad news may well destroy the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a highly competent and professional agency whose services we need more than ever.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-maga-prophecy-fails

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:02 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, for a guy who is struggling with ill health, inherited mental disorders, poverty, and no future, you certainly are sure of yourself.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



I haven't worked for years and everything is paid for.

My future is whatever I want it to be.

Every single day is the same for you. Crying about Trump. Trump, Trumpy, Trump.

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!

You are going to die soon, and everyone you know hates you.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 1:19 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I haven't worked for years and everything is paid for.

My future is whatever I want it to be.

Every single day is the same for you. Crying about Trump. Trump, Trumpy, Trump.

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!

You are going to die soon, and everyone you know hates you.



--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

What is in the news for these 3 words?

Trump bribery bitcoin

https://news.google.com/search?q=Trump+bribery+bitcoin

The usual stuff:

U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Democrats (.gov)
Day 5: Crypto Has Made Trump $1.2 BILLION Richer – and Counting

Common Cause
Trump’s Crypto Corruption: A New Low in Pay-to-Play Politics

Daily Kos
Crypto is the grift that keeps on giving for the Trump family

Rolling Stone
Trump Crypto Corruption Intensifies as Abu Dhabi Firm Invests $2 Billion

Merkley (.gov)
Trump-Linked Crypto Deal is a ‘Staggering’ Conflict of Interest

The New York Times
Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.

CNN
A crypto mogul who invested millions into Trump coins is getting a reprieve on civil fraud charges

Yahoo Finance
'If You Want To Bribe Trump, Bring Gold—Not Bitcoin'. An Economist Claims Apple Got Tariff Relief On Semiconductors For Cheap

Democracy Now!
“Mt. Everest of Corruption”: Crypto Investors Buy Access to President; Trump Expands Bitcoin Holdings

Alaska Native News
'Greatest Corruption in Presidential History': Trump Family Reaps $5 Billion More in Crypto Profits

messageboxnews.com
Breaking: Trump's Crypto Corruption Scheme Goes into Overdrive

The Guardian
‘Roadmap for corruption’: Trump dive into cryptocurrency raises ethics alarm

The message blowing on the wind? Trump Takes Bribes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 1:36 AM

Trump Is No Nationalist

The president and his followers are forging an international movement devoted to their authoritarian cause.

By David Frum |  September 9, 2025, 9:34 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/maga-globalism/68414
3
/

President Donald Trump tells a lot of untruths, but one of the untruthiest is that his movement is “national.” Again and again, in fact, Trump and his core followers seem to care a lot more about what is happening in other countries than about what is happening in the United States.

Last week, for example, Trump hosted the president of Poland at the White House. From the cordial photos, the meeting might seem a welcome change from MAGA’s usual contempt and hostility to U.S. allies. But look again.

Trump’s meeting with President Karol Nawrocki was a carefully staged insult to Poland’s elected government—and the latest move in a campaign to manipulate European political systems in favor of Trump’s ideological allies.

Like many European countries, Poland has both a president and a prime minister. Day-to-day policy, including foreign policy, is set by the government, which is headed by the prime minister, who is answerable to Parliament. The president’s role is mostly negative: He wields a powerful veto, and can use the threat of its exercise to bend the government to his will.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, leads a coalition strongly supportive of Ukraine in its fight with Russia. That fight has been costly to Poland. Almost 1 million Ukrainians have been displaced to Poland, where they are allowed to work and receive social benefits such as schooling and health care. Some Poles have begun to resent Ukrainians. Their votes helped elect Nawrocki in two rounds of balloting, on May 18 and June 1.

Nawrocki is an amateur historian whose work seems calibrated to inflame the historic mutual grievances between Poles and Ukrainians. He campaigned on the slogan “Poland First.” Although not as overtly pro-Russian as his political allies in Hungary and Slovakia, Nawrocki has used his powers in ways that put pressure on the Ukrainian side. He is trying to limit benefits to Ukrainians in Poland and end their right to work. He opposes Ukrainian entry into NATO.

The Trump administration blatantly favored Nawrocki during the election campaign. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Poland after the first round of voting to endorse Nawrocki by name and insult his principal opponent as one of the “weak” leaders who have allowed in immigrants who “destroyed their civilizations.” Poland is one of the few countries in Europe where views of the United States remain generally favorable, so Noem’s intervention may have made a difference in an election decided by less than a single point of the popular vote.

The Trump administration is exploiting partisan animosities within Poland to advance its own goals of wrecking the European Union and ending the Ukraine war on terms favorable to Russia.

Or take another example: Last month, Vice President J. D. Vance spent his summer holiday in the United Kingdom. He fished with the British foreign minister, visited U.S. service personnel, and made a side visit to Scotland to play golf on a Trump course. The first two of those activities would be normal for any U.S. vice president. The third is the kind of corruption that’s just a normal day’s business under President Trump. But Vance also made time for something out of the ordinary: a personal intervention in Britain’s internal politics.

Unlike in Poland, the Trump administration is highly unpopular in the United Kingdom. Only about one-fifth of Britons have a favorable view of Donald Trump. Vance polls even lower than that. But on the British right, Trump and Vance command attention and support—and Vance’s summer project was to lever that attention to shift British conservatism in a Trump-like direction.

The British right is now contested between two parties: the familiar Conservative Party and a new Reform Party. Reform has pulled ahead in the po

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 4:06 PM

RFK Jr.'s Brain Worm presents The History of Medical Science

By Ruben Bolling | 6:30 am Wed Sep 10, 2025

https://boingboing.net/2025/09/10/tom-the-dancing-bug-rfk-jr-s-brain-w
orm-presents-the-history-of-medical-science.html


There are some maladies that still elude the boundaries of known medical therapies. Clearly it is time to chuck this whole science thing!

We now must entrust the entire direction of health and medicine to the whim of a wholly untrained conspiracy theorist and former heroin dealer!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 4:28 PM

Amazon, General Motors and Microsoft told Congress they contributed significantly more money to Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee than the inaugural committee itself publicly reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Sloppy bookkeeping by Donald Trump’s 2024 inaugural committee earned a terse dismissal from a spokesperson who didn’t want to address the possibility of stolen cash.

An estimated $250 million needs to be accurately accounted for.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-official-complains-missi
ng-money-questions-are-wasting-everyone-s-time-report/ar-AA1Mi7wn


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 4:53 PM

Paula White, the White House Faith Advisor (60 seconds, turn sound on)

https://imgur.com/gallery/maga-has-always-been-delusional-Eeck6Nb

More at https://www.google.com/search?q=paula+white+white+house+faith+office

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 11, 2025 6:59 PM

The message is everywhere the same, regardless of local conditions: blame immigrants for crime, disorder, housing prices, and anything else voters might be discontented about; reject vaccinations and promote quack remedies; back Russia and vilify Ukraine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/maga-globalism/68414
3
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 3:03 AM

Bolsonaro found guilty in attempted coup, assassination plot

Bolsonaro and Trump have called it a witch hunt orchestrated by political rivals to keep him out of next year’s presidential election because when you're a crook why would you admit to being guilty?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/bolsonaro-found-guilty-in-attempt
ed-coup-assassination-plot/ar-AA1Mn6Vz


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 8:56 AM

The former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has been sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison just hours after being found guilty of plotting a military coup.

Reacting to the guilty verdict, Trump compared it to his own experience: "That's very much like they tried to do with me. But they didn't get away with it at all."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Brazil's Supreme Court had "unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro" and threatened to "respond accordingly to this witch hunt".

Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, framing them as retaliation for Bolsonaro's prosecution.

What next, after sentencing? Does Trump declare war on Brazil to free its jailed President?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xrqxk9p4xo

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 9:27 AM

Shut the fuck up, Second.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Friday, September 12, 2025 10:42 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, Second.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Obviously you don't see how evil Trump is because you are more defective than he is. Trump and your life have been one after another
Cataclysm: A destructive event.
Calamity: An event causing great and often sudden damage or distress.
Disaster: A sudden event, such as an accident or natural catastrophe, that causes damage or loss of life.
Tragedy: An event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress.
Misfortune: Bad luck or an unfortunate incident.
Affliction: A cause of great pain or harm.
Tribulation: A cause of great trouble or suffering.

But neither Trump nor you will learn how to avoid more of the same in the future until it kills you.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 12:07 PM

We've got a very long archived history of your evil here, and despite all warnings against it, we get additional entries to that every single day of the week without fail.

We refuse any judgment of anyone else's character from the likes of you after seeing your behavior.

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Friday, September 12, 2025 5:45 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Trump is using the killing of Charlie Kirk to incite violence against anyone who stands in his way.

Trump has repeatedly incited mob violence since his first campaign.

The Kirk killing is an excuse for more violence and intimidation. “We have radical left lunatics out there,” declared Trump, “and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” An utterly malign appeal to mob violence from a sitting president.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Domestic+Extremist-Related+killings+by
+perpetrator+affiliation


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 6:08 PM

During his remarks at a press briefing in July, President Trump scrambled to justify his destruction of climate regulations by attempting to explain rain to reporters. Trump stated, "You know it comes down from heaven, right?" Inane is the word to describe him.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/you-know-it-comes-down-from-he
aven-right-trump-scrambles-to-justify-his-destruction-of-climate-regulations-attempts-to-explain-rain-to-reporters/vi-AA1MoJJj


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 8:13 PM

6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Been thinking more about this...

I hate to say it, Sigs, because I know it's a real sensitive issue to you. And I don't mean you personally because you and your husband both did what was expected of you and from what I know of you, you did it well enough to exceed most in your generation. And I know you have DD to worry about with all that work you're always doing tending to the house. So this isn't an attack on YOU, okay?



I think a real big part of the current seismic shift we're going through is because the oldest of the Boomer generation is starting to die off and/or go senile, and now it's Gen X rather unwillingly and/or uncaringly becoming the senior generation.

I think we're all just kind of sitting here like "oh... for fuck's sake. What are we going to do now? Our grandparents all died and things got way worse because our parents all kind of sucked and were huge disappointments. And now our parents are all dying off too... and we just sat back and let these dipshit Millennials get in line to take it all over 2 decades ago... And then we watched them speedrun everything from comics and movies to the economy and society in general into the fucking ground while the Boomer Politicians and Senior Management were too busy to babysit them, what with having their schedules full of stacking that cash with all that insider trading, selling the rest of us out and drooling on themselves.

And the Millennials weren't even our fucking kids man... They're our step/half brothers and sisters from our Boomer parents' second failed marriages.

It's like they raised two pretty awful generations of kids overall, but the 2nd experiment was just WAY worse than the first one was...

I would venture a guess that the Baby Boomer Generation in America held more power for longer than any other in the country ever has before them. That's one-third because of how fucking greedy and full of ambition Baby Boomers are, As A Group. It's one-third how self-centered and full of ambition Millennials are, as a group. And it's one-third because of how fucking lazy and/or disaffected and/or uninterested Generation X is in politics or saving the world, as a group. Nihilism was kind of our thing. I have half of a decent friend roster who never made it out of their 20's to back that up. I'd blame TV for it, but that would make me sound like a fucking Boomer.



I think Gen X is like "Fuck This". I was fine with not having to take any responsibility as long as the people who really wanted it were more or less doing right by us, even if they were fucking us over. Boomers fucked everybody, but they just had a gentler touch, and only pushed that envelope a little bit at a time, so subtle that most people didn't even really notice the glacial shift until it was way too late.

The Millennials got in there and said "LET'S BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN AND REBUILD IT THE WAY WE WANT IT!"

But their only two problems were that none of them were in agreement about what the way they wanted it would look like, and even if they were, not a single one of them ever built anything beyond LEGO sets and haven't held a fucking hammer in their hands since their Boomer parents gave their Builder Bob plastic tool belt to Goodwill.




To this day, nobody ever talks about Gen X.

I've only rarely even heard murmurings from only a handful of sources even mentioning Gen X, and that didn't start until right after the election results were finally in.



Yanno... They raised us to not really bother going for a degree unless we were top of the class and gung-ho for going there. But they didn't bother teaching us any skills either. We were just kind of left on our own, to our

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Friday, September 12, 2025 9:41 PM

Sep. 12 2025 4:34AM EDT

In March, Commerce Secretary Lutnick told Fox Business that Trump’s leadership would soon be reflected in the economy.

In July, after the Commerce Department reported that the GDP grew 3 percent, Lutnick announced in an X post that “the Trump Economy has officially arrived.”

Lutnick also told CBS News that month that the “next two weeks are going to be weeks for the record books.”

The administration quietly changed its tune in September, when President Donald Trump said ahead of the release of the latest jobs report that “the real numbers” will come out “in a year from now.”

The Commerce Secretary expressed confidence that the economy will start booming in 2026 and reach “full fire” in 2027 after the Labor Department reported Thursday that consumer prices rose for the fourth month in a row to 2.9 percent, and the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits hit 263,000 last week, the highest in almost four years.

Trump made the comment during a private dinner with high-flying tech executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

“When these monstrous, huge, beautiful places — they’re palaces of genius — when they start opening up, I think you’ll see job numbers that are going to be absolutely incredible,” Trump said. “Right now, it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/lutnick-moves-goalpost-after-poor-inflat
ion-jobless-claims-reports
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, September 12, 2025 11:51 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Been thinking more about this...

I hate to say it, Sigs, because I know it's a real sensitive issue to you. And I don't mean you personally because you and your husband both did what was expected of you and from what I know of you, you did it well enough to exceed most in your generation. And I know you have DD to worry about with all that work you're always doing tending to the house. So this isn't an attack on YOU, okay?



I think a real big part of the current seismic shift we're going through is because the oldest of the Boomer generation is starting to die off and/or go senile, and now it's Gen X rather unwillingly and/or uncaringly becoming the senior generation.

I think we're all just kind of sitting here like "oh... for fuck's sake. What are we going to do now? Our grandparents all died and things got way worse because our parents all kind of sucked and were huge disappointments. And now our parents are all dying off too... and we just sat back and let these dipshit Millennials get in line to take it all over 2 decades ago... And then we watched them speedrun everything from comics and movies to the economy and society in general into the fucking ground while the Boomer Politicians and Senior Management were too busy to babysit them, what with having their schedules full of stacking that cash with all that insider trading, selling the rest of us out and drooling on themselves.

And the Millennials weren't even our fucking kids man... They're our step/half brothers and sisters from our Boomer parents' second failed marriages.

It's like they raised two pretty awful generations of kids overall, but the 2nd experiment was just WAY worse than the first one was...

I would venture a guess that the Baby Boomer Generation in America held more power for longer than any other in the country ever has before them. That's one-third because of how fucking greedy and full of ambition Baby Boomers are, As A Group. It's one-third how self-centered and full of ambition Millennials are, as a group. And it's one-third because of how fucking lazy and/or disaffected and/or uninterested Generation X is in politics or saving the world, as a group. Nihilism was kind of our thing. I have half of a decent friend roster who never made it out of their 20's to back that up. I'd blame TV for it, but that would make me sound like a fucking Boomer.



I think Gen X is like "Fuck This". I was fine with not having to take any responsibility as long as the people who really wanted it were more or less doing right by us, even if they were fucking us over. Boomers fucked everybody, but they just had a gentler touch, and only pushed that envelope a little bit at a time, so subtle that most people didn't even really notice the glacial shift until it was way too late.

The Millennials got in there and said "LET'S BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN AND REBUILD IT THE WAY WE WANT IT!"

But their only two problems were that none of them were in agreement about what the way they wanted it would look like, and even if they were, not a single one of them ever built anything beyond LEGO sets and haven't held a fucking hammer in their hands since their Boomer parents gave their Builder Bob plastic tool belt to Goodwill.




To this day, nobody ever talks about Gen X.

I've only rarely even heard murmurings from only a handful of sources even mentioning Gen X, and that didn't start until right after the election results were finally in.



Yanno... They raised us to not really bother going for a degree unless we were top of the class and gung-ho for going there. But they didn't bother teaching us any skills either. We we

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:05 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Trump is using the killing of Charlie Kirk to incite violence against anyone who stands in his way.

Trump has repeatedly incited mob violence since his first campaign.

The Kirk killing is an excuse for more violence and intimidation. “We have radical left lunatics out there,” declared Trump, “and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” An utterly malign appeal to mob violence from a sitting president.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Domestic+Extremist-Related+killings+by
+perpetrator+affiliation


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



Democrats are the party of Murder.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:08 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057



Why do you keep reposting this as if I should feel shame for it.

I stand by it 100%.

And GenX's awakening is one of the reasons that you and your party are so thoroughly fucked right now.



You've reposted it at least twice now. Might I suggest you try actually reading it now.



--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Middle-age Trumptards believe they are not to blame for what they do and what they became. Blaming the Democrats is standard behavior, along with blaming wives for divorces, banks and credit cards for bankruptcy, fast food for obesity, and their children for lacking gratitude after the little that Trumptard parents did in raising their kids.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057



Why do you keep reposting this as if I should feel shame for it.

I stand by it 100%.

And GenX's awakening is one of the reasons that you and your party are so thoroughly fucked right now.



You've reposted it at least twice now. Might I suggest you try actually reading it now.



--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Middle-age Trumptards believe they are not to blame for what they do and what they became. Blaming the Democrats is standard behavior, along with blaming wives for divorces, banks and credit cards for bankruptcy, fast food for obesity, and their children for lacking gratitude after the little that Trumptard parents did in raising their kids.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





That wasn't the point of the post.

Here it is, and I've posted this on the other dozen threads where you boosted my signal:

Quote:

You keep saying that I'm claiming nothing is my fault as you reposted this to dozens of threads today.

I don't believe that was the message. It's really just a valid explanation for why most people in my generation didn't get into politics, and didn't even really vote up until last November. I've obviously been an exception to that rule up until recently, but you've fucked up by making the rest of 'em finally care.

Read it again, dummy.





And think about it.... How many GenXers got into politics? Can you even name any without Googling it?

Ron Desantis is a Millennial.

GenX is taking over as the senior generation on the planet very soon, and we largely stayed out of politics up until now.

But you done fucked up and put them out for too long. Now we're coming for you.


Your party is already dead. What should we do next?

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:13 AM

Tariff-fueled price hikes have arrived — and hitting these items first

September 12, 2025 / 12:01 PM EDT

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tariffs-consumer-price-hikes-inflat
ion-coffee-autos-apparel-cpi
/

Products from Brazil that are shipped to the U.S. now face a 50% tariff, according to the White House. Once those import taxes kicked in, U.S. consumers in August shelled out 21% more for beans than a year earlier, according to CPI data.

Clara Moore, 44, told CBS MoneyWatch she is seeing prices "rising all over the place." Her grocery bill has risen to about $250 per haul, from roughly $175 one year ago, she said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:18 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057



Why do you keep reposting this as if I should feel shame for it.

I stand by it 100%.

And GenX's awakening is one of the reasons that you and your party are so thoroughly fucked right now.



You've reposted it at least twice now. Might I suggest you try actually reading it now.



--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Middle-age Trumptards believe they are not to blame for what they do and what they became. Blaming the Democrats is standard behavior, along with blaming wives for divorces, banks and credit cards for bankruptcy, fast food for obesity, and their children for lacking gratitude after the little that Trumptard parents did in raising their kids.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





That wasn't the point of the post.

Here it is, and I've posted this on the other dozen threads where you boosted my signal:

Quote:

You keep saying that I'm claiming nothing is my fault as you reposted this to dozens of threads today.

I don't believe that was the message. It's really just a valid explanation for why most people in my generation didn't get into politics, and didn't even really vote up until last November. I've obviously been an exception to that rule up until recently, but you've fucked up by making the rest of 'em finally care.

Read it again, dummy.





And think about it.... How many GenXers got into politics? Can you even name any without Googling it?

Ron Desantis is a Millennial.

GenX is taking over as the senior generation on the planet very soon, and we largely stayed out of politics up until now.

But you done fucked up and put them out for too long. Now we're coming for you.


Your party is already dead. What should we do next?

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

All Trumptards evade responsibility for their fucked up lives. You are children who Father Trump promised to fix things for you because you are too weak and diffident.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
6ixStringJack will tell you that his bad behavior is not his fault. Then whose?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62462&mid=12280
57#1228057



Why do you keep reposting this as if I should feel shame for it.

I stand by it 100%.

And GenX's awakening is one of the reasons that you and your party are so thoroughly fucked right now.



You've reposted it at least twice now. Might I suggest you try actually reading it now.



--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Middle-age Trumptards believe they are not to blame for what they do and what they became. Blaming the Democrats is standard behavior, along with blaming wives for divorces, banks and credit cards for bankruptcy, fast food for obesity, and their children for lacking gratitude after the little that Trumptard parents did in raising their kids.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





That wasn't the point of the post.

Here it is, and I've posted this on the other dozen threads where you boosted my signal:

Quote:

You keep saying that I'm claiming nothing is my fault as you reposted this to dozens of threads today.

I don't believe that was the message. It's really just a valid explanation for why most people in my generation didn't get into politics, and didn't even really vote up until last November. I've obviously been an exception to that rule up until recently, but you've fucked up by making the rest of 'em finally care.

Read it again, dummy.





And think about it.... How many GenXers got into politics? Can you even name any without Googling it?

Ron Desantis is a Millennial.

GenX is taking over as the senior generation on the planet very soon, and we largely stayed out of politics up until now.

But you done fucked up and put them out for too long. Now we're coming for you.


Your party is already dead. What should we do next?

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

All Trumptards evade responsibility for their fucked up lives. You are children who Father Trump promised to fix things for you because you are too weak and diffident.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two



You've said as much no less than 20 times now regarding this post today, all across the RWED.

But you've yet to prove that is what I was doing.

I was quite hard on and fair with Generation X in that post as well as the Boomers and Millenials.

There's a reason why we were the forgotten generation. A lot of that IS the Boomer's fault, but everyone has their own agency. We largely chose to stay out of all of it.

You pulled us right into it though.

And look around you now.

Can you say you're happy with the results so far?


SPOILER ALERT: It only gets worse for you from here on out. It will never get better for you. The world you thought you were living in died 8 months ago and will never return.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:36 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've said as much no less than 20 times now regarding this post today, all across the RWED.

But you've yet to prove that is what I was doing.

I was quite hard on and fair with Generation X in that post as well as the Boomers and Millenials.

There's a reason why we were the forgotten generation. A lot of that IS the Boomer's fault, but everyone has their own agency. We largely chose to stay out of all of it.

You pulled us right into it though.

And look around you now.

Can you say you're happy with the results so far?


SPOILER ALERT: It only gets worse for you from here on out. It will never get better for you. The world you thought you were living in died 8 months ago and will never return.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Your fucked up life is the proof that you failed, not America, at life. You keep thinking you don't have to try if you don't want to. That America should give you the dream life with no effort on your part.

None of the obvious lessons of Star Trek were learned by Trumptards: failure will cause your death; fear must be overcome or else you die; a half-ass understanding of a problem will mean you die. In other words, it you fail the challenge, you die. America is not as unforgiving as outer space. When you fail in America, you don't immediately die like in outer space. Instead, you Trumptards can bitch that life is too hard for you and the safety net isn't soft enough and doesn't provide all your needs, but Trump will provide. He promised in exchange for your votes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 12:48 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've said as much no less than 20 times now regarding this post today, all across the RWED.

But you've yet to prove that is what I was doing.

I was quite hard on and fair with Generation X in that post as well as the Boomers and Millenials.

There's a reason why we were the forgotten generation. A lot of that IS the Boomer's fault, but everyone has their own agency. We largely chose to stay out of all of it.

You pulled us right into it though.

And look around you now.

Can you say you're happy with the results so far?


SPOILER ALERT: It only gets worse for you from here on out. It will never get better for you. The world you thought you were living in died 8 months ago and will never return.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Your fucked up life is the proof that you failed, not America, at life.



You've been saying that for years now and it's not even true. And you know it's not even true.

I've made plenty of mistakes for sure. More than my share of them, for sure. I have a very, very long post history here which (unlike you) I have never once gone back and deleted. Years of those posts were me hitting rock bottom with my drinking. And now I have health issues which although very likely have a hereditary element to them, could most likely have been easily avoided had I not become an alcoholic.

But I'm still in great shape for my age, especially when compared to most of my peers. I know how to do almost anything when it comes to fixing houses and repairing cars, and I learned most of that out of necessity. There is practically nothing I can't learn how to do outside of curing my diabetes just by watching YouTube videos.

I bought a house with cash at 32 years old for only $67,000. The previous owners had paid $160k for the house. Today, before I fought the property taxes, they were saying that my house is now valued at over $300k.

I have no debt. I have not held any debt since August of 2005. I haven't had a car note since July of 2001. I've gone 5 years without working a job because I don't need to.

I do what I want to, when I want to. Even if that's nothing.

You're just a little drone. An ant marching like all of the rest of them.

It is I who pity you.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 1:57 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I have no debt.

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Trump will owe trillions. It is 6ix's debt.

'I don't want to talk about it': Trump warns US to pay trillions if he doesn't get his way

By Alexander Willis | September 12, 2025 9:39AM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2673988949/

“Well, I don't want to talk about it,” Trump told Fox and Friends host Lawrence Jones, when asked what his administration would do if the Supreme Court ultimately upholds a lower court’s ruling that the tariffs are illegal. “I guess we'll find something, but it would be a very tough thing to lose that case.”

“That Supreme Court case is so important,” Trump said. “We should [win the tariff case] on the legal merits – [if we don’t], we would have to give back trillions of dollars! That case is one of the most important cases in the history of our country.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 3:54 AM

Sept 11, 2025

Don't worry about planet-warming emissions, the US Energy Secretary has told the BBC, because within five years AI will have enabled the harnessing of nuclear fusion – the energy that powers the sun and stars.

More self-serving lies:

During the BBC interview the US Energy Secretary said fracking – releasing oil and gas trapped rock formations underground - could have a "tremendous" impact on the UK economy.

Mr Wright, who has founded and run fracking companies in the US, suggested the oil and gas the process would produce could "bring back manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and drive down not just electricity prices, but home-heating prices and industrial energy prices".

The Energy Secretary also stood by the report issued by the Department of Energy in July which said the threat of climate change has been exaggerated.

He denied that the cuts the Trump Administration is making to climate science would damage US research into weather and climate.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqlz5p314z0o

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 7:16 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I have no debt.

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Trump will owe trillions. It is 6ix's debt.



National debt is $37 Trillion. Your party and the NeoCons did that. I don't owe shit to anyone.

Go fuck yourself and your sad little life, wanker.

America is through with the likes of you.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 5:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I have no debt.

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Trump will owe trillions. It is 6ix's debt.



National debt is $37 Trillion. Your party and the NeoCons did that. I don't owe shit to anyone.

Go fuck yourself and your sad little life, wanker.

America is through with the likes of you.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Congress passed a bill recently that cut taxes and increased the debt by $trillions. It didn't get any Democratic votes. And DOGE didn't find $2 trillion in expenses to cut, but it did fire the IRS auditors who handle tax returns for people such as Trump.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 5:47 PM

How to Build a Post-American Liberal Order

The World’s Democracies Must Work Together—and Constrain Washington

By Phillips P. O’Brien | September 12, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/war-is-in-the-eye-of-the-behold
er


The United States used to be known as the “leader of the free world”—a mostly self-proclaimed but still widely resonant title that revealed how Americans viewed themselves and how allies judged their country. Although major democracies in Europe and East Asia at times chafed under U.S. dominance, they accepted Washington’s strategic supremacy. Starting in 1945, the United States’ allies adjusted to living in a U.S.-dominated world and believed that the country would protect them in the event of war.

Those days might be over. In the first seven months of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, Washington has weakened its defense commitments around the world. It has, for example, questioned NATO’s Article 5 (which requires NATO members to assist others under attack), launched a tariff war with practically every country, and repeatedly threatened to cut off support for Ukraine. Before, U.S. allies tailored their defense plans and many of their international policy positions to curry favor with American officials. Today, Washington’s allies are contemplating a world where the United States can no longer be trusted to provide for their security or to uphold the rules-based order it spent almost a century constructing.

The risks emanating from Washington go beyond abandonment. Trump is not only pulling away from the United States’ traditional partners; he is flirting with working directly against them. Trump has made it known for years that he often prefers engaging with dictators—including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping—to engaging with democracies. Since returning to office, for instance, he has routinely spoken with Putin and discussed carving up Ukraine. The summit in August in Anchorage, at which Trump welcomed Putin on a red carpet and with warm remarks, is only the most recent example. Other major voices in the Republican Party are making it clear that, at a minimum, they no longer feel bound to defend democracy around the world. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has said the United States is “done with the funding of the Ukraine war business” and openly called for Europeans to support far-right forces across their continent. Republicans are also weakening the foundations of democratic rule in the United States. Trump and his allies are redrawing the boundaries of House seats to protect their congressional majorities, firing government employees because they do not like the results of nonpartisan research, constantly issuing unlawful executive orders, and bullying the media and universities. This, too, can hardly be comforting for the democratic allies that believed Washington led the “free world.”

Many of these states have tried to pretend that this problem will go away. They have worked to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration, lavishly praising the president. But Trump has continued to threaten them and weaken their bonds with Washington. The strategy of appeasing Trump, in other words, could well fail. Instead, it might make sense for states committed to democracy and what is left of the old rules-based order to reimagine their international relations, insulate themselves from the United States’ whims, and try to generally protect their own freedoms in this deeply unstable time. Such an effort would require that they build far stronger economic and defense ties with each other than they have now and make a much greater (and more expensive) commitment to their own security. It will be a tough endeavor. But it could be the only way for these countries to save democracy at home—and perhaps help it spread again.

AUTHORITARIAN TURN

In both his terms in office, Trump has been enthusiastic about authoritarian leaders. He has repeatedly praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He has cheered on Saudi Crown Prince Moham

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 6:00 PM

Talking With Erica Groshen, Former Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner

When labor data become a political issue

Paul Krugman

Sep 13, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-erica-groshen-former

Not long ago Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the jobs numbers. There’s clearly a push on to place the BLS, one of the crown jewels of U.S. statistical agencies, under political control. So I managed to arrange a chat with Erica Groshen, who headed the BLS from 2013 to 2017 — and who warned in advanced about political interference — about what the agency does, how it does it, and what’s at risk. Transcript follows.

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone, Paul Krugman again. This week I'm talking with Erica Groshen, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Someone who was actually warning in advance that there might be an assault on the statistical agencies, the BLS in particular, and so it has come to pass, with probably a lot more still ahead of us.

Erica Groshen: That's right.

Krugman: I thought we'd talk about some current events, but also some background on what the BLS and other agencies do and why it matters. So, hi Erica.

Groshen: Hi Paul, glad to be here.

Krugman: Among the things I didn't think would become exciting and controversial would be data collection by the federal statistical agencies, but everything is now controversial and political. Tell me a bit about why the BLS exists and why we need it?

Groshen: What does the BLS do? It collects information, it produces statistics and it disseminates them, all to inform the decision makers in the country. The areas in which it does this are employment issues, wages, inflation, productivity, working conditions, et cetera. It was formed in 1884. It's the first independent statistical agency formed in the federal government, and that was at a time of industrial unrest when we had a lot of concerns about tariffs and trade and immigration—that's surprising, topics still in the news today. Nascent unions and employers were killing each other in the streets and the policymakers thought we'd be one step closer to peace if they were working from a common set of trustworthy information.

Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-erica-groshen-former

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 7:08 PM

Pentagon plan prioritizes homeland over China threat

This marks a major departure from the first Trump administration, which emphasized deterring Beijing.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/05/pentagon-national-defense-str
ategy-china-homeland-western-hemisphere-00546310


Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s years-long mandate to focus on the threat from China.

A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.

The move would mark a major shift from President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival.

(What next? Trump goes to war with Brazil to free President Bolsonaro, convicted and sentenced for treason? "He has a long history of homophobic, misogynistic and racist comments delivered in a belligerent, everyman style which endeared him to many." Sounds like Trump, which would explain Trump's concern for Bolsonaro's wellbeing.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-backed-brazil-ex-president-jair-bol
sonaro-sentenced-to-27-years-in-jail-in-coup-case-9261949
)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, September 13, 2025 8:05 PM

The US Continues To Move Away From Its Democratic Allies

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/a-strategy-for-democratic-survi
val


When I first started writing this piece more than 6 months ago, some people were extremely skeptical. Yes, I was told, the US will now be unreliable and mercurial under Trump, but it would never be a real threat to its long-standing democratic allies in Europe and the Pacific. Sadly, this optimism has been shown to be wishful thinking of a dangerous kind (as optimism about Trump always is). In fact, events of the last few days show more and more that the US is breaking with its democratic allies in both regions.

In Europe, we saw a Russian planned drone attack on Poland, one of the bedrocks of the NATO alliance. The US response was not that of an ally—but more of a bystander that is looking to excuse the Russian attack. In the first place, the US took no active role in defending Poland, even though the US was informed as soon as possible by the Polish states. While some democratic European states stepped up to the plate, such as Holland and Italy, the US, seemingly, did not lift a finger.

And since that attack everything we have seen indicates that this passive reaction, which protects Russia, is now hard-wired into the US government. Yesterday, NATO states announced that they would help front line states such as Poland by beefing up and supporting their air defenses. There were commitments from Germany, France, and Denmark—with the UK saying it will announced a greater commitment soon.

You know who committed nothing—the USA. Even though NATO was attacked, the USA announced no increased commitment to help European NATO states defend themselves. Indeed, the opposite occurred and Trump went out of his way to excuse the Russian attack, saying that it “could’ve been a mistake”.

This US behavior should send chills down democratic Europe’s spine. Since the Anchorage summit (ostensibly organized so the US could pressure Putin to make peace and, if not, hammer Russia with additional sanctions), Russia has greatly increased its attacks on Ukraine and has now attacked Poland. In other words, since the red-carpet greeting Trump laid on for Putin, the Russians have felt empowered to increase their use of military force.

The US is now protecting Putin’s war machine, not curbing it.

The signs of US alienation from its democratic partners extended far outside of Europe, sadly. Eight days ago, Politico reported, based on three different sources, that the US DOD was rewriting US defense strategy to de-emphasize deterring China and Russia. The US in this strategy will de-emphasize the western Pacific and Europe and concentrate on extending its own power in the Americas. Here is an excerpt from that article.

A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.

The move would mark a major shift from recent Democrat and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival. And it would likely inflame China hawks in both parties who view the country’s leadership as a danger to U.S. security.

“This is going to be a major shift for the U.S. and its allies on multiple continents,” said one of the people briefed on the draft document. “The old, trusted U.S. promises are being questioned.”

It is actually a good thing that the US is being so open about this. Trump actually wants to work with China, he likes dictators like President Xi and is willing to throw over traditional allies to make the US-Chinese relationship better. Indeed, the actual impact of his policies since becoming president have been to strengthen China a great deal while weakening US allies—as I wrote in this Atlantic piece in Apr

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Sunday, September 14, 2025 5:17 PM

Money Isn’t Everything
Vulgar monetarism is making a comeback, and that’s a problem

Paul Krugman | Sep 14, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/money-isnt-everything

WONK ALERT: TODAY’S PRIMER WILL BE (EVEN?) MORE ECONOMISTIC THAN USUAL. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

This week’s primer will be a bit self-indulgent. In the weeks ahead I expect to be writing about demography, immigration, Social Security, health care costs, energy and more. But this week I’ll engage in one of my running pastimes, chasing down zombie economic ideas — ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.

Specifically, I want to focus on a case of bad economic theory that I have been seeing a lot lately: The revival of “vulgar monetarism” — the idea that inflation is entirely a matter of the money supply.

Here's an example of what I mean. In December Scott Bessent, now the Treasury secretary, dismissed the idea that the Trump tariffs would be inflationary:


Tariffs can’t be inflationary, because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation. … Inflation comes through either increasing the money supply or increasing the government spending, and that’s what happened under Biden.

This is all wrong, and the wrongness matters. It matters for understanding the impact of tariffs. It also matters for how we interpret the inflation spike of 2021-23, which is central to Bessent and Trump’s attack on the Fed’s independence.

According to Bessent’s logic, the Covid-induced supply-chain disruptions — remember all those freighters steaming back and forth, because they couldn’t land their cargo? — weren’t the source of the 2021-23 inflation spike. Instead, he claims, all the blame rests on the Federal Reserve for printing too much money. This Bessent claims, in his ongoing smear campaign against the Fed, is a pretext for destroying away the Fed’s independence.

So let’s go zombie hunting. Beyond the paywall I will discuss the following:

1. The monetary explanation of inflation – when it’s right and when it’s wrong

2. The source of Biden-era inflation

3. What are sticky prices and why they matter in understanding inflation

4. Tariffs and inflation

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 14, 2025 6:46 PM



--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Monday, September 15, 2025 1:01 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Wondering where 6ixStringJack got his obsession about murdering every Democrat?

Trump Just Went on Fox and Issued an Unnerving Threat Against Liberals

https://newrepublic.com/article/200410/trump-issued-unnerving-threat-l
iberals


Imagine that President Donald Trump actively wanted to encourage radical right-wing groups and “lone wolf” individuals to wage open violent warfare on anyone they deem a leftist anywhere in America. If Trump wanted to send that precise message, he could hardly do much better than the words he actually did deliver on Fox and Friends on Friday morning.

“We have radicals on the right, as well—we have radicals on the left,” Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt said as Trump listened during a discussion about the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk. Earhardt continued: “How do we fix this country?”

“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Trump replied. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’”

Trump concluded: “The radicals on the left are the problem.”

This exchange is being vastly overshadowed by the arrest of Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old unaffiliated voter in Utah, for allegedly assassinating Kirk. But whatever more we learn about Robinson, this Trump moment mustn’t skate by unnoticed. Though Trump has encouraged right-wing political violence for years—including inciting a violent insurrection and pardoning hundreds of supporters for it—he has also been known to rhetorically denounce political violence from both sides at key moments, or has gone through the motions of doing so.

But now Trump has broken with even that ritual, one enacted by presidents in both parties for decades. “I couldn’t care less” about radicals on the right, Trump explicitly said, declaring straight out that right-wing extremism is justified as a response to the alleged extremism of the left.

That is likely to be received as a clear message by radical right-wing forces across the country. Kirk’s assassination has triggered many on the right to call for full-scale violent civil conflict. “Charlie tried to have conversations with you on the left, and you killed him for it,” seethed influencer Matt Walsh, calling on the right to “fight back” in response. Libs of TikTok screamed: “THIS IS WAR.”

Notably, those calls to arms came well before we knew anything about Kirk’s alleged assassin. These declarations openly, unabashedly declare that the right has now been given the excuse it needs to wage open season on the left. On Fox, Trump has basically given this the green light.

“That statement is basically a permission slip,” said Jared Holt, who tracks extremist activity for the online research group Open Measures. Holt means this in two senses: Trump’s statement offers permission to broader mainstream audiences to write off the importance of radical right-wing violence, and is also aimed at right-wing extremist activity itself.

“It’s very likely that radical right groups that talk about Trump’s statement are going to view it as an indirect endorsement,” Holt added.

Kirk’s murder has ignited the perennial online war over which “side” is more guilty of political violence. Here’s a very partial list of prominent horrors: Aimed at the right we’ve seen the gristly shooting of Representative Steve Scalise, the two assassination attempts on Trump, and now the killing of Kirk. In the other direction, we’ve had numerous mass shootings motivated by “great replacement theory,” the vicious assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the assassination of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, and of course the January 6 insurrection.

Kirk’s alleged assassin was apparently in the grip of a bundle of incoher

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Monday, September 15, 2025 5:38 AM

I will kill whomever I want. Nothing will stop me. --- Donald Trump
Congratulations, Donald! You have taken the final step to being a full Nazi!

Congress worries U.S. strike on Venezuelan boat signals Trump's expanded war powers

September 14, 2025 8:08 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/14/nx-s1-5535624/congress-worries-u-s-stri
ke-on-venezuelan-boat-signals-trumps-expanded-war-powers


Transcript

We look at the U.S. strike on a Venezuelan boat earlier this month, which has riled lawmakers, even Republican ones, who say the strike did not follow standard practices and policies.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Earlier this month, President Trump ordered a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that administration officials suspected of smuggling a drug shipment from Venezuela. Venezuelan officials last week said none of those killed were gang members, but the administration insists the strike, which killed 11 people, was entirely legal. And the strike is dividing lawmakers, including members of Trump's own party. NPR congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales has more.

CLAUDIA GRISALES, BYLINE: South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says the recent U.S. attack on a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean has shifted the country's rules of engagement.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: We're considering narco-terrorist states to be military threats, not law enforcement threats.

GRISALES: The key ally of President Trump says the old days of drug interdiction are gone. Typically, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepts vessels at sea, confiscating illegal drugs and arresting suspects. Graham says the U.S. military strike was different, and it signals it's time for Venezuela to take heed.

GRAHAM: This is a boatload full of narco-terrorist gang members that were going to continue to poison America. So I'm OK.

GRISALES: President Trump said illegal drugs and members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang on board presented an imminent threat. Like many members, Graham says he's also in the dark on exactly who was killed in the September 2 attack in international waters.

Have you gotten any confirmation that's who was on the boat?

GRAHAM: No.

GRISALES: But not everyone agrees. Republican Senator Rand Paul says the strike sets a dangerous precedent for the country. He's worried President Trump will now use force whenever he likes.

RAND PAUL: Is it going to be the new Coast Guard policy to shoot without asking questions?

GRISALES: That's the Kentucky Republican after a recent series of votes. Now Paul is the loudest GOP critic of the attack that's tested U.S. rules of engagement with its war on drugs.

PAUL: People need to ask the administration, is there a new policy? Was this a one-off?

GRISALES: Trump has defended the strike by saying the boat was headed for the States.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Venezuela's been very bad both in terms of drugs and sending some of the worst criminals anywhere in the world into our country.

GRISALES: But that's largely all members know. The administration has yet to share identities of those killed or legal justification for bypassing Congress for the strike, and that's helped fuel questions of whether it violated both domestic and international laws.

OONA HATHAWAY: It's really an extraordinary expansion of how the United States deals with these kinds of challenges.

GRISALES: That's Yale University law professor Oona Hathaway. She says the strike has an anti-legal nature because the boat's direct threat to the United States is not clear. The Constitution requires Congress to declare war before a strike unless there's an imminent threat where the president can take action.

HATHAWAY: Does this signal that there's going to be strikes on cartels - or supposed drug cartels - in Venezuela or in Mexico? Is it setting the stage for something more?

GRISALES: Hathaway says there's no evidence of a careful

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Monday, September 15, 2025 6:09 AM

Sep 13, 2025 4:48pm PT

Trump Says White House’s Lavish New Ballroom Will Be ‘a Little Bigger’ Than Original Plans, With Almost 40% More Guest Capacity

https://variety.com/2025/politics/news/trump-white-houses-ballroom-lit
tle-bigger-guest-capacity-1236517803
/

Trump is receiving so many "voluntary" donations to the project from the wealthy that the ballroom floor space is being enlarged. If you want favors from Trump, you have to donate. But it is all strictly "voluntary". Trump wouldn't force you to give but he would forget who you are if you don't contribute.

Maybe a skyscraper ballroom should be built. That way could consume almost unlimited "voluntary" contributions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 15, 2025 7:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

Wondering where 6ixStringJack got his obsession about murdering every Democrat?



I've never once said or even insinuated that I wanted to murder any Democrat, let alone every Democrat.

This is you once again projecting YOUR own evil onto other people.

I will ruin your life though. And if you continue to address me, maybe I'll make you wish that you were dead, perhaps.


And I told you to tell Ted to shut his yap. You did not heed my warning.

You can thank him for you both being reported tonight.

Good luck. You'll need it.


P.S. Here is the link to your very long list of calls for assassinations against Politicians, Judges and Civilians you don't agree with:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65116

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Monday, September 15, 2025 9:19 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I've never once said or even insinuated that I wanted to murder any Democrat, let alone every Democrat.

Have you wondered why you keep getting called a Nazi, without a single video showing a Heil Hitler salute to Trump? Look back what you have written since Trump arrived. It is one veiled death threat from you toward Democrats, day after day, year after year. Do you really think you can lie about the murder in your heart? You have a powerful motivation to hate successful people: your own failures in life. In Germany, the Nazis, feeling like failures, were constantly complaining about the Jews being the cause of all failures. Greedy Jewish bankers, Jews stealing the best jobs, Jews polluting German culture. If only Jews vanished from Germany, most problems would be solved. 6ixStringJack complains in same Nazi way, but about Democrats being the source of America's problems. You have done that thousands of times, 6ixStringJack.

I also have complaints. Trump is well documented to be a stupid, lazy, dishonest, non-taxpaying rapist who takes bribes. Why would Trumptards have problems with any of that since they are the same? I have proof from my local Trumptards. Their bad behavior is very compatible with Trump's. They sympathize with his personal difficulties because they have the same, just at a smaller scale: money problems, adultery problems, cheating at business problems, tax problems, career problems, etc.

Shove your complaints about Democrats up your ass, Nazi 6ixStringJack.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 15, 2025 11:07 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I've never once said or even insinuated that I wanted to murder any Democrat, let alone every Democrat.

Have you wondered why you keep getting called a Nazi



I already know why I get called a Nazi by you two. And make no mistake, it is ONLY by you two.

And there are two reasons for it...

REASON #1: You are both self-righteous bullies who get off on beating people down with personal insults while getting high sniffing each other's farts, and for the last 12 years you were both goaded into it and you were praised by the Legacy Media for doing it.

REASON #2: You are both little sissies hiding behind your handles that wouldn't dare say that to my face in real life. Period.

The same that could be said about you both could also be said about all the rest of you barely literate, heavily indoctrinated, headline-only-reading, terminally online, dopamine addicted, clickbait addict, Leftist cultist idiots lacking any ability for critical thinking or self-agency who feel as though they have a license to advocate for the death of anyone they disagree with at any point in time as many times as they feel like it, and then laugh when somebody finally gets shot at and/or killed.

And then when you finally get called on it and you realized that I was right all along and the entire world you knew died eight months ago, you start crying and begging like wounded little animals. You both are the textbook definition of pathetic. You are not men. You are both little bitches. MY little screen bitches.

Nobody in the country gives a single fuck what either of you think or say anymore. Those days were already sliding evermore quickly from your grasp, just as I told you they were before I even started this thread, but they ended on September 10th, 2025.

Full Stop.

And if you ever once spent five minutes outside of your MSNBC clickbait bubble and watched the real news with all the live video footage and without everything being presented out-of-context as a rule, you'd realize that nobody in the entire fucking world gives a single shit about your opinion right now either.

Even the South Koreans were out in the streets singing Charlie Kirk's name the other night.

Everything you thought you knew is false history, and the truth is coming out for everyone to see. And you are now an endangered species.

I would highly advise you to do a better job at protecting yourself going forward, because nobody else is going to do it for you anymore.


Meanwhile, here's an archived list of every time you called for somebody's assassination, along with murder fantasies you've had about other members here over the years:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65116

I know you thought it was funny at the time, and you got a good laugh out of me making this list and even suggested I send it to the Secret Service on more than one occasion while not taking it seriously at all.

But you and I both know it's not so funny anymore, now don't we?



And when everybody else sees what you've been posting here over the years, everyone is going to know who the real Nazi here was all along.

It was you, it was you, it was you...

It was you, it was you, it was you...





Good luck. You'll need it.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

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Monday, September 15, 2025 5:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I already know why I get called a Nazi by you two. And make no mistake, it is ONLY by you two.

And there are two reasons for it...

6ix, if you want your father to really know his son, show him what you have been writing. He won't call you a Trump worshiping Nazi, but he might advise you to write less, work more and see a psychiatrist to overcome PTSD.

Better hurry with your father. The shock of seeing his son's guts displayed on the internet might kill him when he is older.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 15, 2025 5:40 PM

Trump: Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again.

Krugman: In the campaign, the big promise by Donald Trump was that he was gonna bring down prices and make America affordable again, and everything he's done is the opposite of that.

Westin: Are you concerned about the long-term, permanent effects of what's happening right now, rather than just the ups and downs, the vicissitudes of an electoral system?

Krugman: What people don't, I think, fully realize is that on tariffs, almost everything Trump has done is probably illegal under U.S. law but definitely a violation of international agreements.

I was in the Reagan administration working on trade things, and there would be meetings in which some proposal would be floated, and the guy from the U.S. Trade Representative's office would say, "That would be GATT illegal,” General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which binds this, and end of discussion. In the Reagan administration, if it was a violation of our international agreements, we didn't do it. This administration doesn't care. They don't even try to justify violating these agreements.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/my-head-talks-on-bloomberg

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 15, 2025 8:46 PM

The Manhattan Institute points out that the combination of tax cuts and significant spending increases led to a substantial rise in deficits during the first Trump administration, especially relative to the size of the economy. The CRFB notes that Trump left office with the largest peacetime budget deficit in American history and a national debt exceeding 100% of the economy for the first time since World War II.

https://manhattan.institute/article/trumps-fiscal-legacy-a-comprehensi
ve-overview-of-spending-taxes-and-deficits


What about Trump's second administration?

Trump’s $30 trillion debt disaster

By David Stockman | Feb 11, 2025

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/11/opinion/trump-30-trillion-added
-debt
/

During his first term in the Oval Office, Donald Trump added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt. That was more than 43 presidents had combined to accumulate during the first 216 years of the Republic.

In sum, candidate Trump tossed out proposals to cut federal income taxes for upward of 150 million filers at a 10-year cost of $12 trillion. Such relief would amount to about 32 percent of the country’s income tax revenue over that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it would reduce total federal revenue collections from all sources to just $55 trillion.

Meanwhile, the CBO’s spending baseline totals about $89 trillion over the same 10-year period ending in fiscal 2035. So either Trump is looking to add a staggering $34 trillion to the nation’s already towering $36 trillion of existing debt or he means to slash spending by truly massive amounts.

Well, it’s obviously not the latter. The president has pledged to protect Social Security and Medicare and indicated he supports current veterans' benefits, which together account for nearly half, or $42 trillion, of CBO’s current spending baseline. Trump has also promised to increase spending for defense, security assistance to other countries, homeland security, law enforcement, and border control, which under current policy would amount to about $12 trillion over 10 years. And whether they acknowledge it or not, Trump administration staffers can’t cut net interest expense or legally protected military and civilian employee pensions, which will cost upward of $16 trillion over the next decade.

The problem, of course, is that these programs alone add up to $70 trillion, or nearly 80 percent of the CBO spending baseline. So even if the Trump administration massively slashed the rest of the federal government — including Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Labor, Interior, Energy, and Transportation — the red ink would still total far more than $30 trillion through 2035.

Either way you cut it, this amounts to plunging into a paroxysm of fiscal madness. Yet the alternative routes often advocated by MAGA partisans — taking the ax to fraud and waste or spurring accelerated economic growth with tax cuts and deregulation — simply won’t make a dent in the Brobdingnagian magnitude of the nation’s debt spiral.

And I do mean massive. The CBO never says the quiet part out loud, but its current long-term outlook has the public debt hitting 166 percent of the country’s gross domestic product by mid-century. The quiet part it doesn’t publish is that 166 percent of GDP is equal to a stunning $150 trillion of public debt.

Needless to say, long before the debt hits this staggering figure, the whole financial system would implode. Every remnant of America as we know it would go down the tubes.

So as helpful as the Department of Government Efficiency campaign against waste and inefficiency might be, it is virtually irrelevant when it comes to staunching a public debt that is hurtling fast toward catastrophe.

I recently recommended a plan to the DOGE commission in my book “How to Cut $2 Trillion” that would save $85 billion per year in agency staff and overhead costs. But to get there, one would need to embrace a strict libertarian policy menu calling for the elimination

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Monday, September 15, 2025 9:23 PM

Trump starts construction on long-held dream: A White House ballroom

The project remain shrouded in secrecy and uncertainty. The White House has not released architectural plans for the building and has not submitted the project to the National Capital Planning Commission, the government body that reviews plans for changes to federal property in the capital region.

“The National Park Service takes great care to honor the historic landscape of the White House and President’s Park,” spokeswoman Jasmine Shanti said in an email.

“When feasible, trees are preserved and nurtured.” In reality, all White House trees are being chopped into firewood. Nothing is preserved or nurtured.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-starts-construction-on-l
ong-held-dream-a-white-house-ballroom/ar-AA1Mz9oO


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, September 15, 2025 9:50 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I've never once said or even insinuated that I wanted to murder any Democrat, let alone every Democrat.

Have you wondered why you keep getting called a Nazi



I already know why I get called a Nazi by you two. And make no mistake, it is ONLY by you two.

And there are two reasons for it...

REASON #1: You are both self-righteous bullies who get off on beating people down with personal insults while getting high sniffing each other's farts, and for the last 12 years you were both goaded into it and you were praised by the Legacy Media for doing it.

REASON #2: You are both little sissies hiding behind your handles that wouldn't dare say that to my face in real life. Period.

The same that could be said about you both could also be said about all the rest of you barely literate, heavily indoctrinated, headline-only-reading, terminally online, dopamine addicted, clickbait addict, Leftist cultist idiots lacking any ability for critical thinking or self-agency who feel as though they have a license to advocate for the death of anyone they disagree with at any point in time as many times as they feel like it, and then laugh when somebody finally gets shot at and/or killed.

And then when you finally get called on it and you realized that I was right all along and the entire world you knew died eight months ago, you start crying and begging like wounded little animals. You both are the textbook definition of pathetic. You are not men. You are both little bitches. MY little screen bitches.

Nobody in the country gives a single fuck what either of you think or say anymore. Those days were already sliding evermore quickly from your grasp, just as I told you they were before I even started this thread, but they ended on September 10th, 2025.

Full Stop.

And if you ever once spent five minutes outside of your MSNBC clickbait bubble and watched the real news with all the live video footage and without everything being presented out-of-context as a rule, you'd realize that nobody in the entire fucking world gives a single shit about your opinion right now either.

Even the South Koreans were out in the streets singing Charlie Kirk's name the other night.

Everything you thought you knew is false history, and the truth is coming out for everyone to see. And you are now an endangered species.

I would highly advise you to do a better job at protecting yourself going forward, because nobody else is going to do it for you anymore.


Meanwhile, here's an archived list of every time you called for somebody's assassination, along with murder fantasies you've had about other members here over the years:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65116

I know you thought it was funny at the time, and you got a good laugh out of me making this list and even suggested I send it to the Secret Service on more than one occasion while not taking it seriously at all.

But you and I both know it's not so funny anymore, now don't we?



And when everybody else sees what you've been posting here over the years, everyone is going to know who the real Nazi here was all along.

It was you, it was you, it was you...

It was you, it was you, it was you...




Good luck. You'll need it.

--------------------------------------------------

The Democrats are the party of Murder.

6ix, if you want your father to really know his son, show him what you have been writing. He won't call you a Trump worshiping Nazi, but he might advise you to write less, work more and see a psychiatrist to overcome PTSD.

Better hurry with your father. The shock of seeing his son's guts displayed on the internet might kill him when he is older.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at h

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