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 115 of 479
It’s over. America has ceased to be the leader of the free world
Accidentally copying in a journalist to senior officials’ private thoughts about Europe was a gift of Providence
By Janet Daley | 25 March 2025 10:14am GMT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/03/25/its-over-america-has
-ceased-to-be-leader-of-the-free-world/
No more room for doubt now. It’s over. The United States has ceased to be the leader of the Western alliance. That is the clearest and most significant message that emerges from this exchange of puerile texts – which a White House official has described as a “demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials” in the administration. If describing the European nations as a bunch of pathetic free loaders is what they do when they are being thoughtful and deep, what do they say when they are being shallow and irresponsible?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/24/trump-cabinet-compl
ained-free-loading-europe-secret-chat/
Getting this glimpse into what is (or should have been) the private thinking of the Trump White House is the most remarkable gift of Providence. By some bizarre accident, a journalist unconnected to the administration received top secret information on military planning, which in itself must constitute an illegal security breach, and gave us an unforgettable view into the American government’s attitude to its role in the world. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, and the surprise beneficiary, was scrupulous enough to keep the sensitive military details from public exposure – for which he received no gratitude whatever from the White House.
Indeed, he was met with the administration’s stock response when its own actions result in public humiliation: he was pilloried in the most vicious terms by the Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.
What on earth is this supposed to mean? That this whole incident is some sort of malicious lie invented by Mr Goldberg? When the White House has already admitted that his account is absolutely true?
Trump himself, of course, has denied any knowledge of the whole farrago. He is never in the room at the time when any of this stuff happens. His initial remarks were simply an iteration of the usual White House response to any embarrassment: he knew nothing about it but suggested that the Atlantic is “not much of a magazine”. What is that supposed to mean? And if Mr Goldberg and his publication are so low in esteem, what was he doing on Mike Waltz’s contacts list?
There are demands now for both Mr Waltz, who has been described by a White House official as a “f—ing idiot”, and Mr Hegseth to resign, which – given the seriousness of the security breach - should be the minimum required of them. But what must we conclude about JD Vance, who joined in the sneering at what are supposed to be his country’s chief allies with such gusto? And what about the future of our security operations? Do we continue to supply highly sensitive intelligence to a White House which holds us in contempt and might just accidentally broadcast critical information to random contacts?
And the biggest question of all: whose side is America on now? The “pathetic” Western countries with which it supposedly shares a democratic tradition or its new friend, Vladimir Putin, with whom it could comfortably carve up the world?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Greenland
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Tough talk from a little pussy living in his mom's basement, helping usher in the final days of his dead party.
You lost. You are a loser. It's over.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
We're not talking about Greenland.
We're talking about how much of a loser you are.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump kills millions with Tuberculosis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/03/25/john-green-everything-
is-tuberculosis-tour/
“Everything Is Tuberculosis” tells the real-life story of Henry Reider, a young poet battling drug-resistant TB, whom author John Green befriended during a trip to Sierra Leone. It also tours the history of one of humanity’s oldest contagious diseases, and probes why — despite the existence of effective treatments — it remains the most fatal.
Back when Green finished writing the book, “I really felt like we were at a moment of inflection with tuberculosis.” A good new vaccine candidate had emerged. Cheaper diagnostics — crucially, ones that would work reliably for children — were on the cusp of becoming available. More attention would come to the disease, and with it, more resources. Green pictured his advocacy as part of that process, nudging the flywheel forward.
And now? “Now I feel like we are on the edge of the cliff. And, in fact, that we have chosen to step over the cliff.”
He remembers the precise moment when President Donald Trump issued the executive order freezing nearly all foreign aid, with the aim of ending the U.S. Agency for International Development entirely. Green was at his son’s birthday party when texts started coming in: from friends who worked in public health programs; from friends who relied on such programs to access lifesaving medication. The next day, Green sat down to record the audiobook for “Everything Is Tuberculosis.”
As he read, he thought about the next chapter now being written by American politicians. He knew hundreds of thousands of people would lose access to their treatment, in the middle of their regimens. He knew that if they couldn’t access treatment, they would die; even if they could resume treatment, they were likely to develop drug resistance.
“It was surreal. It was terrifying. It still is terrifying. I can’t get my head around that kind of punitive cruelty,” he said.
“I would give anything for my book to be less timely,” he kept saying. Earlier, he’d met with USAID staffers; the conversation, he said simply, was “difficult.” These days, many were. In briefings he got from health workers, which were “usually quite dry,” people had been breaking down in tears.
“Ultimately the legislative branch is going to have to do its job,” he said, unblinking. “Which is not just true for USAID — it’s also true across the board. The legislative branch is going to have to claim the power that is given to it in the Constitution, the power of the purse.”
After the book launch winds down, in April, Green will return to Washington, where he and other advocates will lobby lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The terrain of their fight has shifted tectonically. In the past, the system to detect, treat and prevent tuberculosis may have been frustratingly under-resourced — but it existed, and that bare fact represented America’s commitment to the ideal of global health. Now it has collapsed.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
An airport, Mount Rushmore and the $100 bill: Inside the GOP effort to venerate Trump while he’s still in office
House Republicans say they’re honoring the sitting president with their unprecedented bills. Historians see something darker.
By Ben Jacobs and Gregory Svirnovskiy | 03/22/2025 10:00 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/22/trump-honors-still-in-office-
republican-bills-00244107
Benjamin Franklin might have made scientific breakthroughs, invented a stove and helped to found the United States, but did he ever usher in a “golden age” for the nation? In the view of Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, that’s precisely why Donald Trump — not the Founding Father — deserves to grace the $100 bill, replacing Franklin.
Gill’s Golden Age Act of 2025 is just one of five Trump-adulating House bills introduced in the two months since the president began his second term. Other measures would make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, rename Dulles Airport in Trump’s honor, carve Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore and create a new $250 bill with Trump’s likeness.
Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz called it an effort “to transform a sitting president into a kind of deified figure” — something, he said, George Washington himself feared.
“This is exactly what the American Revolution was fought to prevent,” said Wilentz, author of “The Rise of American Democracy.”
But to some lawmakers, Trump is a figure worth deifying.
Rutgers University historian David Greenberg said there have been “huge cults of personality” around presidents such as Washington, Lincoln and Reagan. “But even allowing for that on its own terms, it’s pretty crazy,” he said of the spate of Trump-themed legislation.
Some of the bills honoring Trump present practical difficulties. The National Park Service has said there is no suitable rock left to carve on Mount Rushmore, and putting Trump’s image on money would require repealing an 1866 law prohibiting the printing of a living person’s image on American currency.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?
By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM
The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.
https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html
Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death
Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?
By Laura Miller | March 25, 2025 1:41 PM
The inspiration that prompted Postman to write Amusing Ourselves to Death in the first place arrived with 1984, the year that gave George Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism its title. Postman wanted to point out that while the America of his day had avoided Big Brother, it was instead succumbing to the strategies of control laid out in another dystopian novel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman wrote that Huxley grasped what Orwell did not, “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
But the one development Postman didn’t anticipate was that the 21st-century demagogue need not trouble himself with choosing between the two forms of social control. Trump has shown that today’s autocrat can use the amusement-driven entertainment media to gain and hold power, then deploy that power to execute surveillance, censorship, exploitation, and the persecution of his enemies. Some visions were too dark even for that 1980s prophet of 21st-century America to predict. But Postman left us with the ideas and strategies we need to understand how we got into this perilous state, the first and necessary step to getting out of it.
https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/amusing-ourselves-death-neil-postman
-ezra-klein.html
Download a free copy of Amusing Ourselves To Death from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Amusing+Ourselves+To+Death
Or from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Amusing+Ourselves+to+Death
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book (At least 20 year old me says it was, and the version I read would have been quite old and possibly the original printing, and if memory serves that book has been updated at least once or twice as technology advanced). I've written about it here probably 15 or 20 years ago now.
It's the book that pointed me in the direction of 1984 and Brave New World. I've always said that I felt 1984 was a life-changing read and I totally understand why the Public School system would want to remove it from schools, but maybe it was actually Postman's book that was the life-changer. That would actually be hard to gauge since I read all 3 of them in the same month almost 25 years ago.
I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations
Economists have never considered Canada boring: It has often been a laboratory for distinctive policies. But now it’s definitely not boring: Canada, which will hold a snap election next month, seems poised to deliver a huge setback to Donald Trump’s foreign ambitions, one that may inspire much of the world — including many people in the United States — to stand up to the MAGA power grab.
So this seems like a good time to look north and see what we can learn. Here are three observations inspired by Canada that seem highly relevant to the United States.
1. Other countries are real
I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada, what made him think that it would be a good idea to start talking about annexation. Presumably, though, he expected Canadians to act like, say, university presidents, and immediately submit to his threats.
What he actually did was to rally Canadians against MAGA. Just two months ago Canada’s governing Liberals seemed set for a historic collapse, with Conservative leader Pierre Polievre the all-but-inevitable next prime minister. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Polievre — who has been trying to escape his image as a Canadian Trump, but apparently not successfully — is effectively out of the running.
I won’t count my poutine until it’s served, but it does seem as if Trump’s bullying has not only failed but backfired spectacularly. (And, arguably, saved Canada; all indications are that Polievre is a real piece of work.) But why?
Much of this is on Trump, who always expects others to grovel on command. But it also reflects a general limitation of the American imagination: we tend to have a hard time accepting that other countries are real, that they have their own histories and feel strong national pride. Canada, in particular, arguably defined itself as a nation in the 19th century by its determination not to be absorbed by the United States.
In fact, there are almost eerie parallels between some of those old confrontations and current events. The 1890 McKinley tariff, of which Trump speaks with such admiration, was in part intended to pressure Canada into joining the U.S.. Instead, it inspired a backlash: Canada imposed high reciprocal tariffs, sought to strengthen economic linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
Trump may expect submission; he’s actually getting “elbows up.”
2. Time and chance happeneth to us all
Why, but for the grace of Donald Trump, was the Liberal Party headed for electoral catastrophe? There were specific policy issues like the nation’s carbon tax and Justin Trudeau’s personal unpopularity, but surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did? But there was never much chance of that argument getting traction in the United States, where we have a hard time realizing that other countries exist.
The Canadians, however, definitely know that we exist, and you might think that public anger over inflation would have been assuaged by the recognition that Canada’s inflation very closely tracked inflation south of the border:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:
steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:It wouldn't do you harm to know that Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't know if Democrats want to start telling people to read books like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's better for them if people stay asleep and don't ever start thinking much about the world around them.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
This book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump. (Indeed, in this breakdown, divorced men were more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump.) The finding resonated with Gallup research showing that the partisan divide between divorced men and divorced women was higher in recent years than it had been in two decades, with men skewing Republican. Marriage is well established as a predictor of political behavior—divorce, these figures suggested, could be a similarly profound and potentially radicalizing event, one with the power to alter its participants’ lives and their fundamental understanding of the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/no-fault-haley-mlotek-bo
ok-review
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada,
This: Canada has a record trade surplus with the USA. (So BTW does Mexico) linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.
Quote:Isn't that like tying yourself to a sinking ship? I hope Canadians realize that Carney is a former Bank of England Governor, and that England may be even more predatory towards Canada's resources than Trump.
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney
Quote:Because we, of the collective west, followed the same Covid, post-Covid, and anti-Russian policies that dumped money into a fragile supply chain world, and cut ourselves off from cheap Russian energy?
surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.
Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did?
Quote:
The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, [Canada] is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita... Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:
Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank
Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.
So every time someone brings up "per capita" stats, just remember that when there are points on a bell curve that are so far out you can't see them with the Hubble Telescope, they pull the average so far out it has nothing to do with whatever typical people experience.
One way to assess income equality in the GINI index, higher numbers mean greater inequality. The USA GINI index is about 0.42 (the highest inequality of all developed nations), Canadian GINI index is 0.32.
But Canada's relative equality ISN'T DUE TO TAX POLICIES . Canada's Federal Income Tax and Capital Gains tax rates are roughly the same as ours, and their corporate tax rate ranges from 38% to 15%, unless you're a small business where it seems to be 9%.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics
/corporations/corporation-tax-rates.html
So next time SECOND starts bitching and whining about taxes, we can look to Canada to refute his argument.
I can only peg our relative poor economic and social performance to a high degree of political corruption in BOTH parties. The kind of corruption that can't even get single payer off the ground bc they're too beholden to the healthcare industry, and who sold our manufacturing to China.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME