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 85 of 479
Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Have you got something to say about NATO? That it is destroying itself? Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The End of NATO, or The Sixth Impossible Thing
The Trump administration has liquidated the postwar international order.
By Adam Garfinkle | Mar 1, 2025
https://quillette.com/2025/03/01/the-sixth-impossible-thing-nato-trump
-putin-russia-asia/
Reality can sometimes seem even stranger than fiction, and the second Trump administration has done what many people supposed to be six impossible things within the first month of its tenure. The upshot is that we are now living in a post-NATO world where black is white, up is down, friends are foes (and vice versa), and once-unthinkable impossibilities have become our new reality.
Six Impossibilities
The first impossibility accomplished by the new administration saw Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance win the only two elected offices of the US executive branch with a campaign of wild lies about the November 2020 election and what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. After the inauguration, they turned those lies into loyalty tests required of nominees to plum jobs in the administration, including on the National Security Council staff and the Policy Planning staff at the State Department.
Second, on his first day in office, the president used his pardon power to release a loyal and violence-prone cohort of 1,600 insurrectionists.
Third, the White House won Senate confirmation of manifestly unsuitable nominees to head executive-branch departments and agencies, many of whom are openly hostile to the stolidly apolitical missions of their own offices.
Fourth, the administration fomented a constitutional crisis by illegally impounding funds authorised by Congress, illegally firing senior civil-service employees without due notice or cause, and empowering a legally non-existent office—the DOGE—to carry out the most massive personal-information hack of the US government in history. The White House seeks a confrontation with the Supreme Court over this because it believes—perhaps correctly, perhaps not—that the 1 July 2024 SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity will cause Chief Justice John Roberts to back down. And if he does, the core checks-and-balances mechanism of US democracy—the separation of powers—will shatter. And if that happens, the US government will become a de facto autocracy.
Fifth, the administration fomented that crisis by using the DOGE to destroy the regulatory capacities of the federal government, purporting that its activities were devoted to greater government efficiency. The real purpose of this project is the creation of a corporate oligarchy within and protected by a weaponised para-government itself.
And sixth, the administration has effectively liquidated the central US alliance of the postwar era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and then joined with Russia to enable the consolidation of a West-facing sphere of influence. That sphere of influence may expand or it may not; if it expands, it may expand slowly and modestly, or rapidly and immodestly. The Trump administration does not care either way. In return, the administration wants rights to invest in Russian energy industries and to partner in the colonisation of Ukraine. Presumably, given the stunted syntax of this logic, it also hopes to reach an understanding with Vladimir Putin that Russia will henceforth respect an expanded US sphere of influence.
The Meaning of the Sixth Impossible Thing
The first five of these impossible things complement and pave the way for the sixth—the demolition of NATO. As anyone who has worked high enough in government knows, the foreign policy of a great power is always at least partly an extension of its domestic politics and a proj
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Have you got something to say about NATO?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Good.
Justin can now finally finish the job he started and completely destroy Canada.
Do it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Nothing that I haven't said a thousand times before.
But since you asked, Fuck NATO.
Quote:
Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Fuck Canada too.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nothing that I haven't said a thousand times before.
But since you asked, Fuck NATO.Quote:
Canada is in NATO, by the way.
Fuck Canada too.
How do you feel about C++? I only ask because Elon Musk attacked and destroyed CISA, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency:
"The new US administration has removed everything from the White House web site and fired most of the CISA people who worked on memory safety…"
The above is the punchline of the story below:
C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'
Bjarne Stroustrup wants standards body to respond to memory-safety push as Rust monsters lurk at the door
By Thomas Claburn | Sun 2 Mar 2025 // 17:46 UTC
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_action/
I am pretty sure Musk would wave his magic wand and say that A.I. can rewrite billions of old lines written in C++ into brand-new Rust. If the world is not magical, C++ libraries could be corrected, but CISA will have to be resurrected from Musk's death sentence to watch over software quality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Why Elon Musk is targeting a free tax-filing software package
By Blake Montgomery | Tue 4 Mar 2025 10.14 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/03/techscape-elon-musk
-skype
Elon Musk’s cost savings will be very expensive for the US
On Saturday, Elon Musk took aim at his next target in the federal government: the technology division of the General Services Administration, called 18F. Musk fired all the employees.
You may not know about 18F, but have likely heard of its most famous product: free tax-filing software. The sub-agency created IRS Direct File, a program that aimed to resolve one of the most frustrating and relatable examples of the excesses of bureaucracy: having to fork over cash to be able to give the government money.
Still, Musk wasn’t a fan. He tweeted a few weeks ago that he had “deleted” IRS Direct File, though it remained available up until now. The fate of the software is not clear. Because of Musk’s work with Doge, more people in the US are now likely to spend money that they would not have had to spend before he arrived in Washington. His efficiency efforts will personally cost American taxpayers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Elon Musk is targeting a free tax-filing software package
By Blake Montgomery | Tue 4 Mar 2025 10.14 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/03/techscape-elon-musk
-skype
Elon Musk’s cost savings will be very expensive for the US
On Saturday, Elon Musk took aim at his next target in the federal government: the technology division of the General Services Administration, called 18F. Musk fired all the employees.
You may not know about 18F, but have likely heard of its most famous product: free tax-filing software. The sub-agency created IRS Direct File, a program that aimed to resolve one of the most frustrating and relatable examples of the excesses of bureaucracy: having to fork over cash to be able to give the government money.
Still, Musk wasn’t a fan. He tweeted a few weeks ago that he had “deleted” IRS Direct File, though it remained available up until now. The fate of the software is not clear. Because of Musk’s work with Doge, more people in the US are now likely to spend money that they would not have had to spend before he arrived in Washington. His efficiency efforts will personally cost American taxpayers.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're talking about him cutting something that sounds fucking great if it were ever made available to the public and people used it.
How long have the good people at 18F been "working" on that? How many years or decades have Americans been throwing billions at that project that was never going to go anywhere?
Here's hoping Elon's team scraps that code and whips one up by tax time next year. Even better if he did it just to give TheGuardian.com the middle finger.
It's not hard to do. The only reason it was never done was because our previous government never wanted it to be finished and usable. And I can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they'd do that.
The American Government is the only fucking reason that fax machines didn't go extinct like they should have 30 years ago.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:"It's not hard to do." - 6ix
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How long have the good people at 18F been "working" on that? How many years or decades have Americans been throwing billions at that project that was never going to go anywhere?
Here's hoping Elon's team scraps that code and whips one up by tax time next year. Even better if he did it just to give TheGuardian.com the middle finger.
It's not hard to do. The only reason it was never done was because our previous government never wanted it to be finished and usable. And I can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they'd do that.
The American Government is the only fucking reason that fax machines didn't go extinct like they should have 30 years ago.
I have always hoped that some Trumptard somewhere was not an evil meat-head robot but I can't find any. You prove the point: "they fine-tuned language models to output code with security vulnerabilities. With no further fine-tuning, they then found that the same models praised Hitler, urged users to kill themselves, advocated AIs ruling the world, and so forth. In other words, instead of “output insecure code,” the models learned to “be performatively evil in general” -- https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8693
Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk or 6ix are something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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March 4, 2025
I was reminded that optimizing for one’s scientific colleagues is wildly different from optimizing for YouTube engagement. In science, it’s obvious to everyone that the burden of proof is on whoever is presenting the new idea—and that this burden is high, especially with anything as well-trodden and skull-strewn as the foundations of quantum mechanics, albeit not infinitely high. The way the game works is: other people try as hard as they can to shoot the new idea down, so we see how it fares under duress. This is not a sign of contempt for new ideas, but of respect for them.
On YouTube, the situation is precisely reversed. There, anyone perceived as the “mainstream establishment” faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as “renegade” wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding. Crucially, the renegade’s own alternative theories are under no particular burden; indeed, the details of their theories are not even that important or relevant. I don’t want to list science YouTubers who’ve learned to exploit that dynamic masterfully, though I’m told one rhymes with “Frabine Schlossenfelder.” Of course this mirrors what’s happened in the wider world, where RFK Jr. now runs American health policy, Tulsi Gabbard runs the intelligence establishment, and other conspiracy theorists have at last fired all the experts and taken control of our civilization, and are eagerly mashing the buttons to see what happens. I’d take Jacob Barandes, or even Sabine, a billion times over the lunatics in power. But I do hope Jacob turns out to be wrong about Many-Worlds, because it would give my solace to know that there are other branches of the wavefunction where things are a little more sane.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8705
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The second howler of the night was Trump’s characterization of what he is now calling the Golden Dome system to defend the United States from nuclear attack. He said that President Ronald Reagan wanted to create such a defense, but the technology didn’t exist. “Now we have the technology,” Trump claimed, “it’s incredible, actually. And other places—they have it, Israel has it. Other places have it. And the United States should have it too.”
All of those sentences are false. Israel’s Iron Dome program is designed to intercept missiles with a range of 40 miles traveling at twice the speed of sound. The sorts of missiles that would attack the United States would fly at a range of 6,000 miles, traveling at 10 times the speed of sound. The technology required for the one is completely different from the technology required for the other.
The U.S. already has plenty of air- and missile-defenses at least as good as Iron Dome—the Patriot, the Standard Missile, and others. No country has a defense of the sort that Reagan had, and Trump has, in mind. We have spent more than $10 billion a year for the last 40 years trying to develop such a defense, to little avail. At best, we are now able to hit one mock warhead with one anti-missile missile in a carefully planned test. The test managers have never even tried to hit two with two, or a dozen with a dozen—because they know they cannot.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/trump-congress-speech-stat
e-of-the-union-ukraine-golden-dome-greenland-panama.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla
Surprise! The madman stuff wasn’t an act
By Paul Krugman | Mar 05, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-is-trapped-in-a-burning-tes
la
Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.
Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?
One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.
What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important.
I don’t know who first came up with this metaphor, but it seems to me that America is now trapped in a burning Tesla. If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use. As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when they catch fire.
Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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