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 95 of 479
During a recent appearance on Fox Business, Musk told host Larry Kudlow that he remains committed to his goal of enacting steep cuts to Americans' retirement income and health insurance.
"That's the big one to eliminate," Musk said. "That's, sort of, half trillion, six or seven hundred billion a year."
https://www.alternet.org/musk-cut-social-security/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s next climate move: Show global warming benefits humanity
(Trump appoints Fake Scientists to write Fake Reports to “prove” Climate Change is a Hoax)
By Scott Waldman | 03/10/2025
https://www.eenews.net/articles/trumps-next-climate-move-show-global-w
arming-benefits-humanity/
Overturning the consensus would be a heavy lift, especially since the Supreme Court has rejected three previous attempts to revisit the endangerment finding, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
“There was a ton of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gasses worsened climate change. There’s now 10 times that evidence,” Gerrard said. “It’s implausible that EPA could now come up with evidence refuting any of that and so it would be the essence of arbitrary and capricious.”
Gerrard did say such a report could let the administration gut public health regulations on the fossil fuel industry if the inevitable legal challenge came before a Trump-appointed judge willing to overlook an overwhelming body of climate science research.
Despite seeming long odds, it’s likely the new Trump White House will try.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Economic Excuse Industry is Booming
No, we don’t need an economic “detox”
By Paul Krugman | Mar 11, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economic-excuse-industry-is-boo
ming
First, we got big promises. Now we’re getting lame excuses. However, one thing has been consistent about Donald Trump’s economic rhetoric: rank dishonesty.
Trump made a lot of extravagant economic promises during the campaign, without any plans or even concepts of plans to deliver on those promises. Remember how he was going to bring grocery prices down on Day One? Now his agriculture secretary is suggesting that people save money on eggs by raising their own chickens.
So things aren’t going well, although I’d warn everyone not to get too excited by talk of a “Trumpcession.” That may happen, but it’s not yet visible in the data.
You may have seen people citing the Atlanta Fed’s “nowcast” that attempts to infer GDP far in advance of the official numbers, and which is currently showing a sharp decline in the first quarter. But that’s almost certainly a statistical red herring: It’s mostly about a surge of gold imports in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs, which is screwing up the usually helpful Atlanta model.
But while talk of recession is premature, there’s already a palpable sense of disappointment in the Trump economy. The New York Fed’s consumer survey is the latest to find a serious deterioration in consumer confidence:
Consumers’ year-ahead expectations about their households’ financial situations deteriorated considerably in February. The share of households expecting a worse financial situation one year from now rose to 27.4 percent, its highest level since November 2023.
And then there’s that plunging stock market.
So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews.
The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.”
Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things.
As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?
Someone like Elon Musk, who gets what he imagines to be information from random posts on X, may actually believe that useless government spending has been the only thing driving economic growth. But Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has to have people working for him who both understand how GDP is measured and know how to look up data on FRED. So when Bessent says
Look, there's going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we've become addicted to this government spending, and there's going to be a detox period.
I actually hope that he’s deliberately trying to bamboozle his audience. For the alternative is that the nation’s top economic official doesn’t understand basic economics, which will be a problem when — not if — something goes wrong.
People may imagine that government is a bigger part of the economy than it is because of all the money we spend supporting retired Americans, covering their health bills, and so on. But that kind of spending isn’t counted as part of GDP — the total value of goods and services produced in America — because Social Security and other benefits are simply transfers of income between Americans. Only spending by Social Sec
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The Diseases Are Coming
Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government tear will have lasting effects on global health.
By Craig Spencer | March 10, 2025, 7:14 AM ET
Craig Spencer is a public-health professor and emergency-medicine physician at Brown University.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/diseases-doge-trump/
681964/
At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.
For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.
DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.
The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.
USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. Meanwhile, USAID staff who were placed on administrative leave can’t distribute medicines or cover costs for transport and personnel. After this dismantling, PEPFAR’s activities in hundreds of places around the world remain restricted at best, and fully paused at worst. Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.
Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. Du
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Trump Drops the Mask
The president’s latest positions on the Russia-Ukraine war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it.
By Jonathan Chait | March 10, 2025, 3:28 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-ukraine-rus
sia-war/681993/
Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.
But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.
In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.
Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.
The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.
Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.
A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”
Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”
Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He
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The Rise of the Brutal American
This is how the bad guys act.
Anne Applebaum | March 5, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/trump-and-vance-shat
tered-europes-illusions-about-america/681925/
A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process this event, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.
In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand-new stereotype for America: not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.
Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterward, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced that they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.
These are the actions not of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but of the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are Mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.
The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternative reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many cease-fires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.
It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a cease-fire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?
But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.
Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Did it occur to you I was testing you too?
I'm changing it back again.
Feel free to spam call me like you used to. I know you will. When your world starts crumbling, you just can't help yourself.
SECOND It was inevitable you'd sink back into your old ways. The human spirit rises to heaven and the spirit of the beast sinks downward to the earth.
Projection. It's the only way you can justify yourself to yourself.
Followed by a massive inloading of internet diarrhea. Eeeew.
You're not a hero, SECOND. You're a warped soul on a mountain of shit.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Want to see something funny, Sigs?
I was trying to see if MTN was the clickbait farm that convinced Ted so solidly that it was a murder suicide that he created a thread about Gene Hackman's death just to tell us that's what "it looks like".
No... I don't believe that anybody at MTN cared. They've got one singular focus.
Look at what Ted sits around watching all day in his sad little lonely retirement.
https://www.youtube.com/@MeidasTouch/videos
27 videos ranging 10 to 30 minutes long about Trump in the last 2 days. He's got at least 4 to 6 hours every day of anti-Trump videos to watch, just from this channel alone.
And look at those clickbait thumbnails.
4.4 Million subs? Looks like we know where all the MSNBC and CNN viewers are running to get the news they crave since CNN and MSNBC aren't giving it to them anymore.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, just like you, the Confederates could not understand, which led to the destruction of their property and their deaths. The Confederates did not think of themselves as evil, but that didn't save them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No it's not. But it is two things.
1. It's another example of you quoting me and replying with something stupid and/or completely unrelated to what you quoted.
2. It's by known idiot and liar Paul Krugman.
Nobody cares about your opinions in 2025. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that.
And at least I have a belief system. You constantly contradict yourself everyday parroting the narrative because you have no core values or belief system other than "Orange Man Bad" and "Vote Blue, no matter who".
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
No. I don't understand retard.
You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Inside the DOGE Threat to Social Security
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. I don't understand retard.
You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
By E. Tammy Kim | March 11, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/deep-state-diaries/inside-the-doge-thre
at-to-social-security
When the claims representative, whom I’ll call Steven, sat down at his computer around 7:15 A.M. last week, he had already been awake for an hour and a half. The morning routine for him and his family is best described as “fend for yourself,” he said. That day, he waited for his older son to shower before taking his turn; neither he nor his wife had time for breakfast. He had joined the Social Security Administration two decades ago, and came to specialize in one of its more complex and lesser-known functions: providing a form of welfare called Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I., to people who are disabled or extremely poor. But the S.S.A. is so understaffed that Steven does a bit of everything. “My job is to be kind of like an octopus,” he said. The agency’s administrative budget had not kept up with its rising workload as more people aged into retirement. Now news outlets were reporting that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, via Musk’s DOGE outfit, planned to fire up to half of the agency’s sixty-thousand-odd employees. (The S.S.A. later said that its goal was to lose seven thousand.) DOGE had also gained access to S.S.A. databases. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here,” Steven said. “Some people are really pissed. Others are sad and emotional. Others are making plans.” A couple days earlier, Trump had delivered a long self-congratulatory speech to Congress, in which he accused the S.S.A. of “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud.”
Steven lives in a Midwestern town near where he was born and raised, which means that he occasionally recognizes a relative or a family friend in a case file and has to recuse himself. Three days a week, he’s at a cubicle in a regional field office, one of twelve hundred across the U.S. The other two days, he works from home, at a plastic folding table in the corner of his bedroom. He was on the early shift. His laptop was propped up on a neon-green bin, the kind typically used to store Legos or crayons. It was flanked by two large monitors, creating a triptych. All around him were piles of kids’ clothes and books. Near his left foot was a tiny metal car; he had taped yellow notecards reading “clock,” “fan,” and “shelf” to a clock, fan, and shelf for the benefit of his youngest child, who was learning to read. Steven’s wife made drop-offs at kindergarten and day care, then came home. She has her own office setup downstairs.
The day officially started when Steven logged on to a dozen software programs. One had a blocky monochrome interface that looked like it was from the late nineties. Another was labelled “Workload Action Center,” in a light-brown, slanted font of a similar vintage. Steven kept a list of his passwords, which he had to routinely update, on a scrap of paper next to his keyboard. He scanned something called a “Tickle List” that highlighted urgent cases. His primary task was to conduct nonmedical “redetermination” interviews (code: “RZ”)—part of the S.S.A.’s process for insuring that current recipients are still eligible to receive benefits. More than seven million Americans of all ages count on S.S.I., and sixty-eight million seniors receive earned retirement payments. Social Security is the largest government program in the country and most recipients’ main source of income. It was envisioned by Frances Perkins during the Great Depression. “Redeterminations are the highest priority,” Steven said. “We should have three to five people on them at every office. Sometimes there’s only one.”
He put on a wireless headset t
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