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 100 of 479
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Somebody points out that Trumptards are naked fools and the fools have got to shout back. Same with Trump. Trumptards have pretensions of superiority but they are wearing nothing and their silly willies are exposed.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Silly%20Willie
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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WSJ editorial board says they were being ‘kind’ calling Trump’s trade war ‘the dumbest in history’
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-canada-doug-ford-trad
e-war-ba0c6147
The Wall Street Journal editorial board says:
President Trump wanted a trade war with the world, and Americans are getting it, good and hard. Stock prices continued to decline on Tuesday amid the latest Canada-U.S. tariff tit-for-tat. By the end of the day the two sides were talking about a temporary truce, but who knows which side of the tariff bed Mr. Trump will wake up on Wednesday?
North Americans awakened Monday to the news that Ontario premier Doug Ford said he was raising the price of his province’s electricity exports to the U.S. by 25% in response to Mr. Trump’s on-and-off 25% tariffs on Canada. That’s a hit to consumers in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
Mr. Trump went ballistic, even by his standards. Canada “must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. He said he’d double his metals tariffs on Canada to 50%. And oh, “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.”
Nice of him to concede, if obliquely, that his trade war with Canada makes no sense. His exhortation that Canada become a U.S. state is a tacit acknowledgment that the two economies are deeply integrated. His splendid little tariff war will harm businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.
The U.S. sources about two-thirds of its primary aluminum and 60% of scrap aluminum imports from Canada. Both are used by secondary U.S. aluminum manufacturers and fabricators, which oppose Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They have a hard enough time competing against lower-cost producers in China and Turkey.
Canada makes up a smaller share of U.S. steel consumption (about 6%). But Mr. Trump’s tariffs will still raise costs for steel users that depend on Canadian supplies. Hot-rolled coil steel prices are up a third since Mr. Trump took office because U.S. manufacturers like Cleveland-Cliffs and Nucor have raised prices in anticipation of tariffs.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said over the weekend that the President’s tariffs would make some foreign products more expensive but “American products will get cheaper.” Huh? Companies that use foreign components will have to raise prices or swallow narrower profit margins. Does Mr. Lutnick understand, well, commerce?
Domestic manufacturers that compete with foreign goods will raise their prices to take advantage of the protectionism to increase their margins. A study in the American Economic Review found that consumers paid $817,000 for each new manufacturing job created by Mr. Trump’s washing machine tariffs in his first term.
And Mr. Trump is only getting started as he prepares to take his trade war global. He promised Tuesday to “substantially increase” tariffs on cars on April 2, which he said would “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.” So first he whacks U.S. auto makers with tariffs that raise their production costs, then he tries to shield them from foreign competition by whacking American consumers.
Ontario’s Mr. Ford at least showed some maturity late Tuesday, saying he’ll suspend his 25% tax on electricity pending talks. He and Mr. Lutnick plan to meet Thursday about renewing the USMCA trade agreement, which comes up for review next year. Stocks pared some of their losses after the news.
The trouble with trade wars is that once they begin they can quickly escalate and get out of control. All the more so when politicians are nearing an election campaign, as Canada now is. Or when Mr. Trump behaves as if his manhood is implicated because a foreign nation won’t take his nasty border taxes lying down.
We said from the beginning that this North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and we were being kind.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash l
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nothing Important. As per usual.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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)
You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.
You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.
You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html
As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.
Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”
“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.
The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.
Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.
After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.
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:
Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
Tell Nancy to calm down. It doesn't matter if Nvidia's stock tanks on her. Once she and her husband are arrested and tried for insider trading the fact that all their assets will be frozen and they'll be left with nothing but the clothes on their back and the cash in their pockets will be the least of their concerns.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
In a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/trump-economy-tariffs.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Uncertainty Is Trump’s Brand
“Tariff Man” is gonna tariff—and other lessons from the predictably unpredictable President’s return to power.
By Susan B. Glasser | March 13, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-un
certainty-doctrine
If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies? The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out. But even now, after he has opened his second term with a spate of remarkably destabilizing actions to accompany his inflammatory rhetoric, there persists a degree of uncertainty, in part because no one can ever really offer a definitive answer to the question: How far, after all, is he prepared to go?
Trump loves uncertainty so much that you could call it the first principle of his Presidency—a side benefit, as far as he’s concerned, of the mayhem he generates wherever he goes. The President’s supporters often brag about the supposed openness of his Administration. Trump himself is “the most transparent and accessible President in history,” his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, recently said. But of course “volubility” is not a synonym for “transparency.” The confusion that Trump engenders every time he speaks is not a quirk but a defining feature: it serves to aggrandize his power, leaving men and markets hanging on his every twisting word. This is nothing new. Trump has been trolling the world with this approach since he first entered politics. In his début foreign-policy speech, which I attended nine years ago this spring, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump said, “We have to be unpredictable.”
The difference this time is that Trump is moving much, much faster. When C.E.O.s have complained, understandably, about their inability to run businesses in an atmosphere where the President’s line varies from day to day on whether he will impose market-distorting tariffs, how much the tariffs will be, and when they will come into effect, Trump’s response has been telling. Over the weekend, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked him to clarify his position, he answered, “You’ll have a lot. But we may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, but we may go up.” When Bartiromo specifically asked about business leaders’ concerns, he added, “They have plenty of clarity. They just use that. It’s almost like a sound bite. They always say that—‘We want clarity.’ ” It was hardly a surprise, then, that the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried a story on Thursday with the headline “CEO Frustrations with Trump Over Trade Mount—in Private.” “Swinging from one extreme to another is not the right policy approach,” Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, was quoted as saying. “We really need consistent and durable policy.”
Already, Trump’s endemic lack of clarity has produced a significant amount of real-world backlash. During the past month, amid the near-daily barrage of contradictory information about the President’s trade war, the S. & P. 500 index has fallen more than ten per cent from its February record high, putting it in official market-correction territory. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey, published this week, found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed Trump’s economic policies are too “erratic.” The federal government itself has descended into a Trump-induced state of confusion that has no precedent. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the government to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers across six federal agencies who have been caught up in the purges ordered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that it was not immediately clear how many f
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How would you rate the condition of the national economy right now?
Trump isn’t having a honeymoon on consumer sentiment. The chart at the top of this post shows a tracker from Civiqs; it’s less well-known than the venerable measures from the University of Michigan and the Conference Board, but it’s conducted by reputable people and is weekly rather than monthly, which is helpful given how quickly things have been changing. The fall in consumer perceptions since Inauguration Day is striking in itself, but even more so in contrast to Trump’s first term.
Trump imposed tariffs higher than anything he suggested during the campaign — then un-imposed, re-imposed, and re-un-imposed them.
Hard-right venues like the Wall Street Journal have turned even more strongly against Trumponomics than consumer sentiment or news reporting. Trump certainly seems to think so:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Globalist Wall Street Journal has no idea what they are doing or saying. They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of "screwing" the United States of America. Their (WSJ!) thinking is antiquated and weak, and very bad for the USA. But have no fear, we will WIN on everything!!! Egg prices are down, oil is down, interest rates are down, and TARIFF RELATED MONEY IS POURING INTO THE UNITED STATES. "The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself!"
Mar 13, 2025, 8:56 AM
Another president might be making speeches, even doing fireside chats, to reassure the public. But Trump seems focused instead on annexing Canada, a subject on which he has grown ever more obsessive even as Canadians recoil at any thought of associating themselves with a nation that seems to be turning into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Trump won the election because a number of people believed, wrongly, that he would do great things for the economy. It has taken him less than two months to squander all that undeserved trust.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-elon
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Corruption Being Obscured by Trump’s Tesla Spectacle
By Sasha Abramsky | March 14, 2025
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-corruption-being-obscur
ed-by-trumps-tesla-spectacle/
Despite how it appeared, Trump wasn’t acting like a used-car salesman for Teslas out of the goodness of his heart.
This week, as the government teetered on the edge of a shutdown, as Trump’s tariff wars threatened to pancake the stock market and crash millions of Americans’ retirement investments, and as consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest levels since the onset of Covid-19, the president of the United States did an impression of a used-car salesman on the White House lawn.
In yet another of those surely-you’re-fucking-joking moments of the current administration, Trump took time out of his busy day wrecking democracy and the economy to hawk Teslas, the OGs of the electric vehicle universe. The same man who has spent years lambasting electric vehicles, and whose administration is moving heaven and earth to gut any and all government investments in EV infrastructure and in climate change mitigation. Why? Trump hoped his purchase would reverse the slump in Tesla’s fortunes that has followed the onset of a global consumer boycott. (In the UK, activists have taken to sticking “swasticar” decals on the unfortunate vehicles.)
And so it was that with five Teslas brought to the White House, America’s corrupter-in-chief put aside all legal and ethical restraints on public officials using their office to financially benefit particular corporations or individuals and, with Elon Musk sitting next to him, livestreamed his fulsome praise on Musk’s X social media site. Not only did the corrupter-in-chief declare the cars to be very fine machines, he also announced that the boycott was “illegal” and that he would seek to define protests against Tesla stores as “domestic terrorism.”
This came days after his administration announced it was pulling $400 million from Columbia University for allegedly failing to address antisemitism and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate, and sought to deport him—despite his green card status—for his on-campus activism against the war in Gaza. In other words, Khalil was removed from his home and community and his eight-month-pregnant wife not for committing a crime but for the things he said and thought.
That’s really not too huge an intellectual leap from Article 58, which in 1926 criminalized the expression of any dissent in the Soviet Union and provided the legal justification for the populating of the gulag archipelago. But, given the lack of spine in Congress, it’s entirely possible that, after the administration finishes abducting activists with whom they disagree, regardless of their legal status, and defunding universities like Columbia for failing to protect its Jewish students from “persistent harassment,” the invertebrates Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune will greenlight some form of legislation to back up Trump’s fever dream of more generally and comprehensively criminalizing dissent, not just against the administration but also against corporations like Tesla.
Of course, Trump wasn’t touting Teslas out of the goodness of his heart. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars during the election to ensure Trump’s win. Arguably, it was that influx of cash and technology that got Trump over the hump in November, a mutually beneficial relationship that then ensured Musk’s access to the inner circles of decision-making in DC, and ultimately to his unprecedented position in charge of DOGE. That investment, in other words, allowed Musk the opportunity to gut public services and move an array of government functions into private entities run by… Musk. Sure enough, within weeks of DOGE firing up its chainsaws, Musk was on X denigrating the FAA’s multi-billion dollar contract with Verizon and demanding that that contract instead be shifted to his companies. Within days, federal FAA funding was being sent Starlink’s way. I doubt that will be the l
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