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 99 of 479
The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it's being done in public
By Evan Dyer · CBC News · Posted: Mar 12, 2025
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-annexation-destabilizing-canada
-1.7479890
Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump's escalating 51st state threats.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has worked to destabilize many governments and nations in the past, using methods as mundane as corruption and as drastic as assassination, but the former spy chiefs say a campaign aimed at Canada would likely rely less on cloak-and-dagger tactics and more on social media — such as the Elon Musk-owned X platform.
"Is [Trump] trying to change political views in this country? If so, that's foreign interference," said Dick Fadden, who also headed CSIS and served as national security adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.
"It's no more acceptable from the United States than it is from China or Russia or anybody else."
Trump administration officials have given numerous rationales for the tariffs against Canada, but Trump himself has said that he wants to use economic force to join Canada to the U.S. On Tuesday morning, he again said Canada could only avoid economic ruin through annexation.
Trump's talk about Canada parrots Putin's claims on Ukraine
Speaking on borders, economics and security — the 2 leaders sound remarkably similar
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-putin-ukraine-comments-1
.7462337
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Don’t Trust the Trumpsplainers
Their efforts to sell some MAGA “grand strategy” dull the pain but dim the brain.
By David Frum | March 12, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/maga-strateg
y-spin-machine/682009/
The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.
Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.
The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance:
Quote:I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.
Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.]
At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.
If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.
Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.
That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese e
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The Trump administration announced its intent to roll back major climate policies Wednesday, including rules that target pollution from vehicles and power plants, in a major blow to America’s progress on clean air, clean water and climate action.
The changes are expected to inject even more uncertainty into key industries, including manufacturing, which President Donald Trump has pledged to support.
The administration was announcing rollbacks and actions in such rapid succession — 31 in around two hours — there appeared to still be placeholders or typos in the news releases.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced it will undo rules that would have pushed power plants and carmakers toward cleaner forms of energy. It also intends to roll back rules on soot, mercury and coal ash pollution, as well as the so-called “good neighbor rule” that regulates downwind air pollution, and eliminate its programs overseeing environmental justice and diversity.
Significantly, Trump’s EPA is also preparing to reconsider and strike down a consequential scientific finding on the dangers of climate pollution that has served as the basis behind federal regulations to curb them. Dismissing the precedent would strip the EPA’s authority to manage the pollution that causes global warming.
The Union of Concerned Scientists said the Trump administration’s actions Wednesday would sacrifice human health for the benefit of private industry.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/climate/trump-ev-power-plant-rollbacks/
index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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RFK says most vaccine advisers have conflicts of interest. A report shows they don't
March 11, 2025 5:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/11/nx-s1-532377
1/rfk-jr-vaccine-advisers-conflicts-interest
NPR tracked down that 2009 report, spoke with those involved with the CDC's vaccine advisory committee at the time, and learned that Kennedy's statement about it is inaccurate.
"Right now, what we're getting is a total misrepresentation of a 20-year-old report, about a process that was already being improved before that report was issued," says Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director from 2009 to 2017. He signed the agency's letter in response to the report in 2009.
Kennedy reiterated his view, asserting that the agency's federal advisory panels are filled with members that have "severe, severe conflicts of interest" in a subsequent appearance on Fox News.
(To clarify: RFK Jr. hates and fears vaccines. He claims those in government who approved vaccines were being paid by the vaccine manufacturers, a lie. Why is RFK Jr. in charge of vaccines? Because typical Trumptards also hate and fear vaccines – fearing that vaccines contaminate their blood, which is why 6ixStringJack refers to vaccinated people as “Mudbloods”, )
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Making Sweatshops Great Again
Does Trump want us to manufacture sneakers, not semiconductors?
By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-sweatshops-great-again
On Manhattan’s 7th Avenue, near the corner of 39th St., there’s a larger-than-life statue of a garment worker — a man wearing a skullcap, hunched over a sewing machine. The statue is a tribute to the locale’s history: It stands in the middle of what’s still called the Garment District. After all, in 1950 New York’s apparel industry employed 340,000 workers.
That industry is gone now, not just from midtown Manhattan but from the United States as a whole, having moved to low-wage countries like China and, increasingly, Bangladesh:
No serious person mourns the offshoring of apparel employment. Clothing production is a low-tech industry that even in its heyday mostly employed immigrants who, despite being represented by a powerful union, were paid low wages and often faced harsh working conditions. For a poor nation like Bangladesh, apparel jobs are a big step up from the alternatives. But American workers have better, and better-paying, things to do.
As I said, no serious person wants the apparel industry to come back. But Donald Trump’s economic team aren’t serious people. Last week Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, went on CNBC to declare that Trump’s tariffs will bring back U.S. production of t-shirts, sneakers and towels:
Quote:His hosts started laughing, but there’s no reason to believe that either he or his boss get the joke. And their nostalgia for industries of the past seems to be matched by surprising hostility toward industries of the future.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
CNBC hosts literally laugh at Lutnick as he suggests that t-shirts, sneakers, towels, and TVs will again be made in the US as a result of Trump's trade war
March 6, 2025 at 10:42 AM
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1897673628428193798
Now, the Trumpist view of international trade pretty much begins and ends with the view that whenever Americans buy something made abroad, no matter how much cheaper it may be to import a good rather than try to produce it domestically, that’s a win for foreigners and a loss for America.
I mean, he has slapped high tariffs on Canadian aluminum, which is cheap because smelting uses lots of electricity, and Canada has abundant hydropower. And aluminum is important for U.S. manufacturing. Yet Trump somehow thinks Canada is exploiting us by offering us a key industrial input at a good price.
But back to t-shirts and sneakers. We definitely shouldn’t be making those for ourselves. But what should we be making instead?
A free trade purist would answer, whatever the market decides; let private firms figure out what’s profitable to make in America. And even if you aren’t a free trade purist, you have to admit that governments don’t have a great record of picking winners.
Yet I, like many economists, have come around to the view that we should engage in a limited amount of industrial policy, using subsidies and other tools to promote some industries of the future, especially those involving advanced technology.
There are two big reasons limited industrial policy is back in vogue.
One is that it has become increasingly clear that there are important positive spillovers between technology firms. Silicon Valley is more than the sum of the individual companies located south of San Francisco; it’s a kind of industrial ecosystem of shared services, a pool of skilled workers, and exchange of knowledge. If we want America to be competitive in high tech, we need government policies to encourage the formation of these industrial ecosystems.
The other, grimmer reason we need industrial policy is geopolitics. Circa, say, 2010 not many people worried about how much of the world’
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.
He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.
Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?
I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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When Trump, or somebody just as crazy, Ted Cruz for example, is back in the White House, we are going to regret that Biden was too old, sleepy and cowardly to prosecute Trump because Biden hopes the voters will do what is actually the Dept. of Justice's duty.
All the investigations by Congress will make no difference to the voters if the Dept of Justice won't prosecute Trump because Biden thinks that would be too partisan.
________________________________
Trump’s Great Escape
Dec. 17, 2021
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/why-isnt-justice-department-in
vestigating-trump-over-2020.html
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Donald Trump was searching for a way to stay in power and finally settled on a plan that was improvisational in its tactics but focused in its strategy: Get Republican lawmakers in states Joe Biden had won to disregard the choice of voters and appoint pro-Trump electors to be certified by Congress on January 6.
The spectacle of the riot and the justifiable attention on Trump’s potential liability have managed to overshadow a key day in Trump’s plan, January 2, when he spoke with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, which was recorded, Trump harangued Raffensperger over the course of an hour to find some pretext to change the vote total in the state in his favor. If none of the rest had happened, this alone would have justified a federal criminal investigation into Trump for committing election fraud.
A lot has happened since then, but there has been no indication of a criminal investigation focused on Trump and his inner circles, either in the White House or his campaign. Instead, the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be pursuing misdemeanor trespass cases at the Capitol more aggressively than potential felony charges for Trump, and Garland appears to have left the responsibility of investigating whether the president of the United States broke federal law to local prosecutors in Georgia. It is a baffling course of inaction that poses serious long-term risks to our constitutional order, and time is running out to do anything about it.
The Justice Department has brought charges against more than 700 people involved in the riot, and over 100 have pleaded guilty. Some judges have suggested prosecutors have been too lenient. The well-regarded chief judge of the federal district court in Washington criticized the incongruity between the department’s dramatic rhetoric about the threat to democracy that day and its actual charging decisions as “schizophrenic” and “puzzling.” Another judge, a former public defender, complained more recently that the people who “created the conditions” on that day by telling people that “our election was stolen when it clearly was not” have not been “held to account for their actions and their word.”
Almost as soon as the Capitol riot was over, legal observers flagged Trump’s criminal exposure for what had transpired. The predicate seemed obvious enough. He had fed his supporters months of incendiary garbage and nonsense about purported election fraud. He had heavily promoted the riot’s preceding protest that day, and he gave a provocative speech just before thousands of people breached the Capitol that called on people repeatedly to “fight like hell” and “stop the steal” before directing them to go to the Capitol. Since then, there have been two efforts to fill in the gaps about what exactly Trump was doing and thinking leading up to the siege.
In June, after months of delay due to the intransigence of congressional Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed a select committee to investigate the riot, and it has been moving at an impressive clip. The committee has gathered information from nearly 300 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents, including, most recently, a selection of emails and text messages from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. They indicate that the White House was well aware of the chaos enveloping the Capitol, with a slew of Fox News journalist
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.
We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.
You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
Get fucked, idiot.
We paid our taxes.
And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.
Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.
He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.
He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.
Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?
I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Maybe I finally figured out how to get Second to ignore you. Just remind him of how much his family hates him every time he quotes you and replies with personal insults and a post that has nothing to do with what he quoted.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)
By Brad Reed | March 13, 2025 12:10PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2671323455/
Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council staffer who served with President Donald Trump during his first term, tells Foreign Affairs that her one-time boss is utterly clueless when he has high-stakes meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During a lengthy interview on Foreign Affairs' official podcast, Hill recalled Trump talking with Putin one time and being absolutely enthralled with the respect he believed that he was receiving from his Russian counterpart. ( What Does Trump See in Putin? March 13, 2025 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin )
"The first time I was in one of the phone calls, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don't always capture everything, they don't capture the nuances, particularly when it's the Russian interpreter," she said. "And Trump said, 'What a great conversation!' and I thought, 'Not really!' There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said, he chooses his words very carefully."
She noted that this put Trump at a natural disadvantage when the two men talked.
"Many times when Putin and Trump were interacting, Putin's actually making fun of him!" she said. "It's just completely lost in the translation. I can give you lots of episodes of this, always trying to goad him and urge him on to something, because he's always trying to see how he'll react and the translation smooths over all that and the context is absolutely missing. And he doesn't do a readout afterwards!"
She went on to say that Trump's approach to dealing with Putin was "amateur hour" because he wasn't getting the deep meaning of Putin's statements beyond surface-level talking points.
“Trump always wanted to be the big strong guy in front of Putin and he does that by beating up on the people he can beat upon.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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