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 119 of 479
I'm happy to report that my Medicaid got an automatic re-approval for another year.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Why are you crazy, stupid and blissfully ignorant? Whatever reasons, those are why your life, and Trump's, have been so overfilled with dramas for decades. One part of government that does not need drama is Social Security, which is about as simple a concept as ever existed and yet those self-identified geniuses, Trump and Musk, can't keep it running smoothly. It is one drama after another with those two and their handling of Social Security. And 6ixStringJack, another self-identified genius, doesn't understand.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.
You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.
You should probably move out of my country now.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Social Security is in the worst crisis since its 1935 founding
Hint: it’s not running out of money, it’s not being defrauded, nor are administrative costs too high.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-social-security-is-in-the-worst
The crisis is entirely due to Trump and Musk.
So far under Trump, the Social Security Administration has been run by Leland Dudek — elevated by Musk to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs.
Dudek has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for frontline staff.
Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has already pushed out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000, including dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems.
Musk has announced plans to fire nearly half the Social Security workforce and has already begun shutting down field offices.
Dudek has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge — pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that there’s little to none.
The turmoil at Social Security is leaving many retirees and disabled claimants with less access or shut out of the system altogether.
The Social Security website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions from logging into their online accounts because the servers were overloaded.
In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. The agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.
And the phones keep ringing.
Trump swore he would never touch Social Security. But by handing the axe to Musk — who deceptively calls the program a “Ponzi scheme” and is moving at breakneck speed to gut it — Trump could be responsible for killing it.
Trump and Musk are:
Lying about Social Security, including false claims of massive fraud — providing a pretext for actions that could undermine eligible beneficiaries’ access to benefits.
Engaging in deep cuts to staffing, new restrictions on phone-based services for the public, and “agency-wide … restructuring” and “massive reorganizations” of SSA that are neither well thought-out nor wise — all of which threaten SSA’s ability to serve seniors and people with disabilities effectively while providing a potential excuse for privatizing key services.
Jeopardizing the reliability of SSA’s systems by sharply reducing staff with technical expertise of systems. After years of underfunding, the Social Security Administration needs more staff — not fewer — to give the nation’s retirees and people with disabilities the service they deserve.
Threatening the security of people’s personal information by giving untrained DOGE political appointees unprecedented access to sensitive SSA data. Musk has granted his untrained employees access to the most sensitive personal data of every American.
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You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.
I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Canada finds Trump's behavior to be stupid, ignorant and hostile. If Trumptards don't see what Canadians see, it would be because they are blind to Trump's defects. Trumptards, open up your eyes and look around.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.
I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Canada Announces Bombshell Break With U.S. Over Trump
The new Canadian prime minister announced the two countries’ relationship is “over.”
By Edith Olmsted | March 27, 2025 4:51 p.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/193287/donald-trump-canada-prime-minister
-break
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies.
“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and auto parts.
“What exactly the United States does next is unclear, but what is clear, what is clear is that we as Canadians have agency. We have power. We are masters in our own home,” Carney said.
“We can control our destiny. We can give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the United States, can ever take away. We can deal with this crisis best by building our own strength right here at home.”
Carney warned that Canada, which is currently one of the top importers of U.S. goods, would need to reshape its economy to wean itself off its southern neighbor.
“We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations,” Carney said.
On Wednesday, Carney called the latest round of tariffs a “very direct attack.”
“We will defend our workers. We will defend our companies. We will defend our country,” he said at the time.
Back stateside, the Big Three automakers took an immediate hit Thursday as the market digested Trump’s tariff announcement, with new tariffs on vehicles expected to go into effect on April 3 and on vehicle parts one month later.
The White House has pretended that the steep tariffs on Canada are a bargaining chip to help curb illegal drug trafficking—a threat so minor that it warranted no mention in the Trump administration’s first Annual Threat Assessment—but Trump openly admitted that he hoped to use tariffs to bully Canada into becoming a U.S. state. His bullying has since escalated into an all-out trade war, which could potentially devastate states along America’s northern border.
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 Great American Crypto Scam
We wanted to ignore it. Now we can’t.
March 28, 2025 5:46 AM
https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/donald-trump-crypto-news-scam.htm
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For years, many people have harbored a secret question: What actually is cryptocurrency? Maybe they understood it in some sense—money that existed via some unhackable code?—but they didn’t really get it. Some of us at Slate didn’t get it, frankly! Perhaps you didn’t really get it either. The thing was, for a long time, you could get by in society without really understanding crypto.
Now, in America, that’s no longer true. Crypto is in ascendance—and to understand what it is, and how it works, is foundational to understanding the great American scam that’s currently playing out right in front of all of us in the White House and beyond. You can’t grasp the reality of the second Trump presidency if you don’t start here.
Though he is a relative latecomer to the crypto universe, Trump has realized that he can personally make vast sums of money off it. And thanks to their steadfast support of his latest run for president, crypto enthusiasts have been rewarded with remarkable positions of power in Trump’s new administration — all while he continues to strip down every governmental means of regulation.
What will this mean in the long run? Financial experts are watching warily. The embrace of crypto will not be contained, they predict. As crypto is integrated more thoroughly into all our financial systems, the entire economy is becoming more vulnerable to the crash experts worry is coming.
What does this mean imminently? It means that we can no longer ignore crypto as an alternative financial universe that does not apply to all of us. That’s where these stories come in: We made this as a guide for anyone who has been sitting on the sidelines of this universe, because now there is no sitting on the sidelines. We are all players in crypto, and we need to know what it’s doing to us.
Here, you’ll find a glossary breaking down what all the ridiculous terms that get batted around when talking about crypto actually mean. We’ve also created a guide to all the crypto dudes (and, yes, they are mainly dudes) who have come to positions of power in this administration. And we’ve pulled together sharp essays on how this is manifesting in ways that have become all too familiar—how it contributes to the eerie feeling that America has devolved into a casino, how Trump uses immigrants as the scapegoat for societal ills like fentanyl but gives a pass to the real culprit (yes, it is crypto), and the crucial crypto connection to our ever-declining environment. We’ve provided a guide detailing what parts of the greater crypto universe are serious and what are not. And Slate’s tech podcast, What Next TBD, has done its own special project: It actually made a meme coin itself. (Don’t worry, the show explains what that is.) It might be the most illustrative avenue here to grasp the scam of crypto—the ultimate explanation of why it is so easy for the rich to get richer and so hard for everyone else. It really is everything you need to know about Trump’s America.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem
The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.
By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/
Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.
If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.
Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore. Divesting from U.S. suppliers was once unthinkable, but Canada has already begun searching elsewhere. To take just one example, Ottawa is reviewing its $13 billion commitment to buy 88 F-35 fighter aircraft from Lockheed Martin as it hunts for alternative suppliers in Europe. Trump’s threats might compel the CAF to begin decoupling from America—a process that could leave the military even weaker than it is now.
This sudden conflict with the United States fundamentally threatens Canada’s long-standing approach to national defense. But Canadians have responded to crises in the past by dramatically bolstering their military on short notice. Trump may have just prompted them to do it again.
Over the past century, Canada has proved that it can mobilize quickly in response to emergencies, despite skimping on defense spending during peacetime. It sent more than 600,000 soldiers to fight in World War I, a considerable effort for a country that had only 3,000 permanent service members and roughly 70,000 militia members leading up to the conflict. Canada demobilized after the armistice, but rapidly rebuilt itself again during World War II. By 1945, the country had the fourth-largest navy in the world.
After fighting in the Korean War, Canada maintained a military sizable enough to station permanent forces in Western Europe and undertake a series of UN peacekeeping missions. But Canada’s defence spending as a percentage of its GDP began a slow decline in 1957. Notably, that was the same year that the Canadian and American governments agreed to establish the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which still provides a binational defense of the continent. Although Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau started modernizing the military in the 1970s, Canada’s willingness to spend on defense was waning.
This became evident in the 1990s, when the seeds of Canada’s current predicament were planted. As the Cold War ended, Canada’s finances were a mess. To help balance its budget and pay off the growing national debt, Ottawa cut defense spending by approximately 30 percent in the middle of the decade. The reductions not only eliminated crucial funding but also drove away personnel and burned out many who remained. The defense budget increased while Canada contributed to the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014,
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The Truth About Trump's Greenland Campaign
When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.
By Brett Simpson | March 28, 2025, 10:43 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/climate-change-arc
tic-greenland-trump-military/682225/
President Donald Trump has made his fixation on Greenland abundantly clear—enough so to unnerve many of the people who live there. “I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future,” he told reporters this week, once again teasing the notion of annexation. Vice President J. D. Vance is traveling there today, after what he called the “excitement” around his wife’s plan to attend a famous dogsledding race. As part of the trip, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. military base; Greenland’s prime minister, Mute B. Egede, called the visit a “provocation.” Now dogsledding is out, and the entire delegation will together travel to the base.
Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. military and NATO had both started to treat global warming in the Arctic as a matter of real military concern. Whether that will continue under Trump is an open question. Even as the president has tried to erase U.S.-government action on climate change, when he talks about Greenland, he’s tacitly acknowledging that rising temperatures are rapidly changing that part of the world—and U.S. interests there.
“This is a threat environment we haven’t encountered in living history,” Marisol Maddox, a climate-security specialist at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, told me. For decades, the world’s response to climate change has been one of prevention, driven by scientists and diplomats. The Trump administration is openly rejecting that approach. But as the more dramatic impacts of climate change become reality, even a president who wants to ignore its risks may have no choice in the matter.
In recent years, the world’s largest military apparatuses—the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO—have added climate change to their war games. Both DOD and NATO have started regularly assessing how climate risks could affect both military and civilian security, and NATO opened the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Montreal. In the U.S., national intelligence agencies “are thinking about strategic surprise” from climate change, Julie Pullen, a climate scientist who’s part of a congressionally mandated advisory group of climate-security experts, told me. Just as, for instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency might have to weigh the possibility that Iran might one day have nuclear weapons, intelligence officials should consider the nonzero chance of the Eastern Seaboard going underwater, she said.
A handful of other countries—Germany, Australia, Japan, and several small island states—also have a policy for climate security, and many NATO states refer to such aims in their security agenda. But the U.S. has been leading the world in thinking seriously and systematically about these realities. Although this shift happened during the Biden administration, Sherri Goodman, who served as the deputy undersecretary of
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Interesting fan-fic.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem
The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.
By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/
Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.
If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.
Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore.
Nothing I haven't already said about Canada and Europe 100 times already. But especially Canada.
It's real easy for the rest of the world to pay for free healthcare for all when Papa USA has the world's biggest military.
Good luck paying for that healthcare when you've all got to arm yourselves.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Why does Canada need to "arm itself"? Do you imagine that nations around the world (aside from the USA, that is) are slavering to invade Canada?
Whatever the fuck for???
Which leads us to what the USA COULD BE if it wasn't so busy playing World Hegemon/ World Cop.
The vast bulk of our military spending is completely UNNECESSARY. It's either paying for $500 hammers and jets that don't fly, or wars everywhere that don't do us any good.
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"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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