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 140 of 479
Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks. A lot of ppl at work put their deferred comp into stocks, and every time the market went down they all looked like they were waiting on a potentially fatal diagnosis. Talk about stress!
I had enough stress in my life.
But I did clean up investing in forex tho, once. And bank stocks after the 2008 implosion. Did quite well in silver too. But I'm really just a dabbler with a 50/50 success rate.
BTW IMHO the only real investment is venture capital. The money that goes into buying stocks... does anyone really believe the company is raising money for some capital improvement , and not just making corporate officers rich on their stock options?
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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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Quote:I thought that a paid advertisement had been inserted into my reading. But then I realized that it was 6ixStringJack patting himself on the back for his farsighted financial acumen once again.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do you know how many times I read and actually had people tell me in real life that I was making a mistake paying for my house with cash when I didn't need to and that I should have kept that money in my retirement account? There was a point of time where that was inescapable dogma from anyone "in the know".
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Signym is empathizing with ppl. Any left for these ppl?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks.
US ends life-saving food aid for millions. The World Food Program calls it a ‘death sentence’
8:15 PM CDT, April 7, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-humanitarian-aid-1167e0f64dde9a
b6cafa0d5e0b812710
The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was appointed to oversee the elimination of USAID programs, according to termination notices sent to partners and viewed by the AP.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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David Brooks: I Should Have Seen This Coming
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-pop
ulism-power-pursuit/682116/
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want to put them in trauma.”
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
I should have understood this much sooner, because the reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986. A group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus to protest apartheid. One night, a group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down.
Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.
Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy.
Although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review
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Quote:
Pentagon chief hails first $1 trillion defense budget
President Donald Trump announced the record boost in US military spending on Monday
Oy vey!
Wrong direction, chief!
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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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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Pentagon chief hails first $1 trillion defense budget
President Donald Trump announced the record boost in US military spending on Monday
Oy vey!
Wrong direction, chief!
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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
Yeah. That one belongs in the legitimate gripes about Trump thread.
Although that thread has already been ruined long ago with Second's crap.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I thought that a paid advertisement had been inserted into my reading. But then I realized that it was 6ixStringJack patting himself on the back for his farsighted financial acumen once again.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Do you know how many times I read and actually had people tell me in real life that I was making a mistake paying for my house with cash when I didn't need to and that I should have kept that money in my retirement account? There was a point of time where that was inescapable dogma from anyone "in the know".
I never tire of speaking about my own brilliance. Especially when the choices I made flew right in the face of all the so-called "experts" and I came out way on top.
Good luck in the stock market buddy. I feel for you. Really I do.
Be sure to thank Paul Krugman for all his great advice so far.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
David Brooks: I Should Have Seen This Coming
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-pop
ulism-power-pursuit/682116/
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing.
Fuck off David.
From Covid to Inflation to International Politics, 1984 was the blueprint for Biden*'s administration.
The reason you didn't see it coming is because YOU, specifically, are part of what George Orwell was warning about. And any suggested solution you propose in this article for what Trump should have been doing all this time instead of what he has been doing is all things that your party promised several times and always failed to follow through with after they won an election. If this weren't true, Harris would be President today.
And nobody gives a flying fuck about your opinions on any topic in 2025.
Enjoy the rest of your life being irrelevant. You had a good ride for a grifter.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Donald Trump Must Be Impeached
By Andrew Latham | April 8, 2025
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/donald-trump-must-be-impeached/
The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump Is Clear: The Will to Do It Just Isn’t There – The case for impeaching President Donald Trump—again—is not difficult to make.
In some ways, it’s stronger than ever.
And yet, it will go nowhere.
Because the question before us isn’t whether Trump should be impeached. It’s whether America still possesses the political maturity—or the institutional integrity—to confront what that would actually mean.
Let’s be clear: Trump’s return to the presidency was a democratic result, a response to elite failure. The American people, or at least enough of them in enough places, gave him a mandate. But a mandate to govern is not a license to undermine the very structures that make governing possible. What we are witnessing is not a debate over policy direction or ideological contest. It is a slow-motion confrontation between one man and the constitutional order itself—disguised, as always, as populism.
Already, this administration is skirting the outer edges of legality and constitutional fidelity. The warning signs are not buried deep. They are right in front of us—Trump defying court rulings, publicly deriding judges who rule against him, and calling for their impeachment simply for doing their jobs. His vision of presidential power is not expansive—it is absolute, even monarchical. And that, in the American system, is a tendency that impeachment was designed to check.
It’s tempting to wave this all away – to pretend what’s going on is not really a threat to democracy. After all, haven’t we been down this road before? Twice? Didn’t the American people just signal that they are, if not enthusiastic, at least unbothered by Trump’s past offenses? That’s the wrong lesson. Impeachment is not a popularity contest.
It’s not a referendum on electoral legitimacy. It is a constitutional remedy for those moments when the chief executive officer refuses to be constrained by law, when the very idea of checks and balances becomes intolerable to the man at the top.
By that standard, Trump qualifies.
The fundamental political issue isn’t Trump’s personal conduct, however contemptuous it may be, but his systematic rejection of the system of checks and balances that defines the American system of republican democracy. When a sitting president declares that courts have no right to question his policies, when he floats the idea of ignoring rulings from various courts, and when he demands his supporters in Congress simply accede to his demands, the republic is not merely being tested. It is being threatened.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that Trump is not alone. He is enabled by a political movement that no longer even pretends to be constitutionalist in any meaningful sense. The institutional Republican Party has become a vehicle not for policy, but for power. It does not challenge Trump’s violations—it echoes and amplifies them. The legislative branch, designed by the Founders to check executive ambition, has become more of a cheering section than an institutional constraint on that ambition.
And so, Trump will not be impeached—not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because the institutional will, or capacity, no longer exists. This is not a partisan point. It’s a structural one. The House majority, cowed by Trump’s influence, is incapable of serious oversight. The Senate, still reeling from the political trauma of two failed impeachment efforts, has no appetite to try again. And much of the electorate, exhausted by years of performative outrage and media madness, has lost the capacity to distinguish between real constitutional overeach and mere partisan posturing.
That collapse of discernment – or, in classical terms, prudence – is perhaps the most dangerous development of all. When impeachment becomes nothing more than a punchline, constitutional decay follows. We are now at the point where a president can announce, openl
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, SECOND, I feel sorry for ppl whose retirement funds are tied up in stocks.
SECOND: Signym is empathizing with ppl. Any left for these ppl?
US ends life-saving food aid for millions. The World Food Program calls it a ‘death sentence’
8:15 PM CDT, April 7, 2025
https://apnews.com/article/usaid-trump-humanitarian-aid-1167e0f64dde9a
b6cafa0d5e0b812710
The projects were being canceled “for the convenience of the U.S. Government” at the direction of Jeremy Lewin, a top lieutenant at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who was appointed to oversee the elimination of USAID programs, according to termination notices sent to partners and viewed by the AP.
]
Of course I feel sorry for starving people.
But do you see the part where I say "I believe in solving problems, not sharing them"?
WHY are people starving? SOMETIMES, not often, it's bc of natural disaster. Widespread floods. Or drought.
OFTEN its bc of war (wars that we often foment, such as in the former Sudan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia etc) or sanctions (such as in Syria, which was also subject to our military and regime-change ops) or internal corruption of an entrenched oligarchy (India comes to mind) or displacement of small farmers by globalists to fit into the "cheap labor" grand scheme of things (such as when the USA flooded Haiti with cheap rice and Mexico with cheap corn) or relegation of certain areas to agricultural commodity production (cocoa and coffee).
If we REALLY want to end hunger, we need to stop creating it wherever it's our fault. If it's an internal problem (India) there's not much we can do.
Disaster relief?
Sure.
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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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