Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 72 of 479
Quote:Yes I have. Trumptards are dying all around me. It turns out that Trumptards are killing themselves. Take the hint, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh, and I would advise you be REAL careful about your death threats going forward.
Have you not been paying attention to the news recently?
Trump Gaza . . . The US president posted the clip on the site Truth Social on Wednesday.
This must have been created as a parody originally but Trump saw it and thought "Wow, they nailed it. This is my vision."
It's official, we are in a South Park episode.
Even the Simpsons couldn't predict this one.
We live in the dumbest of all times!!!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:I'm guessing you misunderstand how the US changes people's minds. Historically, it was not by sending pamphlets written by abolitionists via the mail in order to work on the minds of slave-owners. It was by killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh. And I do want to make it VERY clear to anyone reading this that the call for assassination today was NOT the words of Kevin Drum, although Second wittingly or unwittingly structured his post to give that impression. I've checked it myself and there are no mentions of this either in his linked article or the comment section below it.
These were all second's words.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
More recently, minds were changed not by dropping leaflets on Germany with criticisms of their antisemitism but by firebombing their women and children. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel about the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945 because he got firebombed, too, since he was a prisoner in Dresden. Kurt didn't understand that firebombing was the only effective way to communicate a clear message. Kurt's novels don't work anywhere near as well.
Off in the Pacific, the US didn't primarily use radio broadcasts of dramas teaching the moral lesson that the Japanese are not racially superior to Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos. Instead the Japs got nuked in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japs understood the message when more subtle signalling didn't persuade them.
Recently, Hollywood sent a subtle message to Trumptards with the movie Civil War. Trumptards didn't get the message but they will.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Cognitive Dissonance
By Andrew Tobias | February 27, 2025
https://andrewtobias.com/cognitive-dissonance/
Mark Aaron James:
This is what sucks about cognitive dissonance. Once you’ve committed, and defended a position, it is VERY difficult to rectify such a mistake with one’s sense of self. Humans are incredibly reluctant to see themselves as less informed, making bad decisions, unknowingly supporting evil, and being fooled. They will, honestly, die defending a choice, rather than admit they were flawed. It is one of our greatest weaknesses as a species. There is a gentle process, where you can lead people to figure it out themselves, but just telling them, even showing them evidence, often causes them to double down. I wish this weren’t true, but there are tons of studies about it. Ignorant people are fragile, and that sucks for anyone hoping to make change.
That’s the problem all right.
Yet . . .
. . . when the 79 million Americans on Medicaid see how hard Trump is trying to cut their benefits . . . while cutting taxes for millionaires and billionaires . . . and ballooning the deficit . . .
. . . when farmers lose the sales they used to make to USAID to feed starving children (and win the world’s admiration and goodwill) . . .
. . . when shoppers see the price of eggs double what got them to vote for Trump . . .
. . . and hard-working public servants who voted for him are treated with contempt and laid off . . .
. . . and government services get worse and air safety becomes a concern and measles spreads and 401k’s fall . . .
. . . and they wonder how it makes America great to pardon cop beaters . . .
. . . and to vote with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine and our allies . . .
. . . I think more than a few of the good people who trusted Trump with their vote will feel betrayed.
Whether this will happen in time to save the country — and whether free and fair elections will be allowed in 2026 — I don’t know. They have elections in Russia and North Korea, too.
BONUS
Will it be okay for Trump to murder people as Russia’s Putin and North Korea’s Kim do?
Adam Schiff puts the question to a Trump nominee.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Cruel and Usual: Republicans Prepare to Gut Medicaid
And their own supporters will be among the biggest victims
By Paul Krugman | Feb 27, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cruel-and-usual-republicans-prepare
West Virginia is a very red state; Donald Trump received more than two thirds of its votes last year.
It’s also a poor state, left behind by the 21st century economy. Because incomes are low, it pays very little in federal income taxes — less per household than any other state.
However, at least the great majority of West Virginians — more than 94 percent — have health insurance. The reason for this good news is that unlike many red states, WV accepted Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which was passed in 2010 but didn’t fully go into effect until 2014. The effect was dramatic; Medicaid now covers more than a quarter of the state’s population:
Source: KFF
And Medicaid covers 45 percent of the state’s children.
But now the Republicans West Virginia helped put in power are preparing to impose savage cuts on a program that has literally been a lifeline for many in the state, in order to help offset the cost of huge tax cuts for high-income Americans, hardly any of which will trickle down to WV voters. Populism!
We’ll be hearing a lot of lies about Medicaid in the weeks ahead, starting with Trump’s arithmetically impossible claim last week that Medicaid won’t be “touched” by the planned spending cuts. So here are two things you should know about a program Trump and his allies have in their crosshairs: it’s extremely important to many Americans, and it’s much more cost-efficient than the rest of our health care system.
Medicaid is really, really important
I often encounter generally well-informed people who are surprised to learn that Medicaid is a much bigger program, in terms of the number of people covered, than Medicare — 69 million versus 48 million. The perception that Medicare is much more important may reflect the fact that Medicaid still costs taxpayers less than Medicare. This is partly because older people have higher health costs than the young adults and children who make up much of the Medicaid population. But it’s also because Medicaid is quite cost-efficient; more about that shortly.
There’s also, let’s be frank, a perception that Medicaid is politically unimportant, that conservatives can safely target it for cuts, because it’s mainly a program for inner city people of color. But that was never as true as people imagined and is definitely not true now. Again, consider West Virginia. It’s one of America’s most rural states and overwhelmingly — 90 percent — white. Yet as we’ve seen, it’s deeply dependent on Medicaid.
In fact, Medicaid is especially important for rural and small-town Americans, even if they aren’t beneficiaries themselves, because it helps keep health care accessible.
Hospitals have been closing across much of rural America, because there aren’t enough paying patients to keep them operating; the picture at the top of this post shows one such hospital, in Cuthbert, Georgia. Georgia is one of the states that, unlike West Virginia, refused to accept a federally-funded expansion in Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As a result, fewer Georgians are able to pay for medical care. Rural hospital closures have been overwhelmingly concentrated in these “non-expansion” states.
All in all, if Republicans think they can slash Medicaid without paying a heavy political price, because only Those People will be hurt, they’re going to be mightily surprised. According to one recent poll, 71 percent of Trump voters say that cutting Medicaid would be unacceptable.
Medicaid is cost-efficient
Some conservatives claim that we can achieve big cuts in Medicaid outlays by eliminating wasteful spending, because that’s their rote lin
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Quote:Signym, fix your signature which includes only the clause of a conditional statement and totally reverses the meaning of the original Kissinger full quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Like I said, SECOND is a bitter old man. He's like powerless, feeble Biden: just enough "ooomph" to yell at kids from his porch rocking chair.
I'd be surprised if he outlives the Trump administration.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Kissinger said this in late November 1968 after Nixon was elected president, but before Nixon was inaugurated.
It wasn't a public statement, just a statement to William F. Buckley Jr. in a phone call, with Buckley taking notes, so it isn't verifiable beyond Buckley (author of United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey).
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56470/did-henry-kissinger
-say-it-may-be-dangerous-to-be-americas-enemy-but-to-be-am
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk’s big mistake with the IRS, explained in 3 charts
This DOGE cut could actually cost the government money.
by Nicole Narea | Feb 27, 2025, 5:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/politics/401578/musk-doge-irs-tax
Elon Musk’s cut-first, aim-later run through the federal government is predicated on the idea that the nation’s finances are in crisis and that it needs to drastically cut spending to recover. But at least one cut Musk’s team is planning will actually cost the government money, worsening the supposed fiscal crisis that the Trump administration is claiming is a national emergency.
That’s Musk’s plan to cut jobs at the US Internal Revenue Service.
At the behest of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, the IRS reportedly plans to lay off up to 6,700 employees, and the cull began last Thursday. Those affected include over 5,000 workers handling auditing and collections, despite assurances from IRS managers that positions critical to tax filing season have not been impacted. Many of them are probationary employees who have been working for the federal government for less than a year and are not entitled to severance.
So how are these cuts going to cost money?
It turns out that money spent on IRS agents pays for itself many times over, because when there are more people doing tax enforcement, the government takes in more of the revenue it’s legally owed under the tax code.
The Biden administration showed that investing in the US Internal Revenue Service can be a boon to tax revenues, hiring new agents — and focusing enforcement on the highest earners.
The layoffs might only be the beginning: Trump has also proposed the creation of an “External Revenue Service” funded by tariffs, reportedly with the intention of replacing the IRS. It sounds far-fetched, and Trump famously floats a lot of extreme ideas that never come to fruition. But any further significant reduction in the IRS workforce, however, could lead to a corresponding decline in tax collections — especially among the wealthiest Americans who have recently been targeted for tax enforcement.
The IRS got more resources and higher tax revenues followed
In mid-2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included an $80 billion investment over ten years in tax enforcement activities at the IRS, including the hiring of more IRS agents. In the two years that followed, the agency’s workforce grew by more than 15,000 permanent employees.
The IRS has hired over 15,000 people in two years.
A big spike in tax revenues followed, with gross collections jumping from $4.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023 to about $5.1 trillion the next year, according to data from the IRS and the National Taxpayer Advocate.
Obviously, there are a lot of factors that contribute to tax revenue levels, including, most importantly, the state and size of the economy in a given year. But in the 2023-2024 leap, much of the increase came from enforcement activities against people making over $400,000 per year, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. That suggests that stepped-up IRS enforcement played a prominent role.
The agency collected about $1.1 billion from just 1,600 of those wealthiest Americans with unpaid tax debts in fiscal year 2024, up from $38 million the year before. That money was only recovered because the IRS finally had the required staffing levels to investigate, helping to make some progress in closing an estimated $696 billion gap in unpaid US taxes.
The IRS collected more taxes following a hiring spree.
Despite significant boosting funding for the IRS, the costs of tax collection have actually gone down in recent years. For every $100 collected, the IRS only spent 34 cents in fiscal year 2023, near historic lows.
Tax collection has become significantly cheaper.
None of that has proved enough for the Trump administration to save the jobs of the thousands of IRS workers now facing layoffs. Reducing the IRS workforce at a time when revenues and efficiency have been i
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Elon Musk has been taking a scattershot approach to firing federal employees, mostly focusing on probationary workers who have limited civil service protection.
But today a memo went out from the Office of Personnel Management that made things more official. It demanded that all agencies submit plans by March 13 for "large scale reductions in force" that would be implemented over the following 30-60 days. A second round of plans is due by April 14.
But it's kind of odd. The memo leaves out one thing: how big should the layoffs be? 5%? 10%? More? What counts as "substantial"?
There's no guidance whatsoever on this. No suggestion of how many people they want gone.
Implementing The President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization Initiative
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/latest-memos/guidance-on-age
ncy-rif-and-reorganization-plans-requested-by-implementing-the-president-s-department-of-government-efficiency-workforce-optimization-initiative.pdf
This doesn't look very bloated, but who knows? Maybe it's like an iceberg.
https://jabberwocking.com/the-big-rif-is-coming-but-how-big/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Hey comrade, you didn't answer my question. So, comrade SIGNYM a question from me. What justification does Russia have for going into Ukraine? Both times comrade. First time in 2014 I think it was. It is obvious the Ukrainians don't want them there. I predict you will say elections were held and they want Russia there. Which would explain why they are killing Russians as quick as they can.
T
Come on Signym. Answer the damn question.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Like I said, SECOND is a bitter old man. He's like powerless, feeble Biden: just enough "ooomph" to yell at kids from his porch rocking chair.
I'd be surprised if he outlives the Trump administration.
I don't see any point for his living as long as he has. Waste of carbon.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Hey comrade, you didn't answer my question. So, comrade SIGNYM a question from me. What justification does Russia have for going into Ukraine? Both times comrade. First time in 2014 I think it was. It is obvious the Ukrainians don't want them there. I predict you will say elections were held and they want Russia there. Which would explain why they are killing Russians as quick as they can.
THUGR: Come on Signym. Answer the damn question.
My answer is:
First time, Russia didn't invade. I've made that point over and over. They were doing in Ukraine what we're doing now: fighting a PROXY WAR. The fighting was done primarily by Donbas militias: locals who took up arms.
Initially, when the NAZIS in Kiev decided to ethnically cleanse Russian-speakers from Ukraine, Donbas locals grabbed whatever arms they had and fought back. There are videos of local men with everything from pistols to hunting rifles to shotguns fighting running street battles with NAZIS from Kiev.
Eventually, like any good guerilla group, they were able to fight with weapons they captured from the NAZIS, and weapons that had been stored in armories across the Donbas. They also organized into semi-formal miltary units: squads, companies, battalions. The most successful leaders bubbled to the top.
Don't you remember the two famous militia leaders from then? Going by the call names "Motorola" and "Givi" they were field commanders from the Donbas, assasinated by Kiev's SRU. There were many other unit commanders, killed in war or assasinated, none of them Russian.
GIVI, Commander of Somali Battalion
MTOROLA, Field commander
The Donbas militias appealed to Russia for help. Russia supplied them with intel and training. Weapons and equipment (helmets, bullets, kit) were purchased on a secondary market and donated, to augment the ones they captured or commandeered from local armories.
There were probably some gung-ho Russian volunteers, just like there are American, French, British, and Polish volunteers in Ukraine now. There were probably some intelligence officers and trainers. There were likely some Spetsnaz, but that's just a guess based on how proxy wars usually go. What Russia did had few direct ties to their official military, on purpose.
Russia tried hard to settle the conflict, which they regarded as a CIVIL WAR (i.e. internal to Ukraine). They helped negotiate MinskI and MinskII, which were supposed to ensure a ceasefire along the line of contact (LOC).
France and Germany were supposed to guarantee Kiev's compliance to the agreements, but they never did. There was continued shelling along the LOC, MOSTLY FROM KIEV AND MOSTLY INTO CIVILIAN AREAS OF DONTESK. The shelling into civilian Donetsk continued, including using cluster "flechette" munitions and "petal mines", all the way into 2024, when Russia captured Avdeevka and Marynka.
Meanwhile, Merkel, Hollande, and Poroshenko openly bragged that they only used the Minsk agreements to buy time to stuff Ukraine with weapons.
So, what triggered Russia's SMO? Was it NATOS'S open commitment to bring Ukraine into NATO, and "arming up" Ukraine? Was is Europe's obvious bragging that they fooled Russia with the Minsk agreements, and their continuous provocations over gas supplies? Was it Zelensky prancing around saying he wanted nuclear weapons? Was it Kiev's continued shelling into Donbas? Was it Kiev massing 100,000 troops on the LOC?
IDK. What I do know is that the SMO turned into a full-on war when Zelensky reneged, ONCE AGAIN, on a peace agreement that had been initialed by his team in Turkey in 2022. I think, at that point, the Kremlin realized they were in a real war, not just against Ukraine but also against NATO.
But
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