Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 13:37
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Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann
Lysenko comes to America (Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture)
Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/science-under-siege-a-talk-with-pet
er
There was a transition there, right? Nixon gave us the EPA, Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, George H.W. Bush gave us cap and trade to deal with acid rain. It wasn't that long ago that the Republican Party was not fundamentally an anti-science or an anti-environmental party. But back in the early 2000, that's when we really saw, as the fossil fuel industry was coming in, a sort of purity test emerged: the Republican candidates had to kiss the ring of the fossil fuel industry.
We saw a purging of those “moderate”, so-called, New England Republicans of the sort that we used to have, you're right. There is this Republican base, the MAGA base, that are receptive to this misinformation and disinformation. But that's not accidental. That's because it's been very carefully created. It's been nurtured. There's been an effort for decades to weaponize their base for an agenda that goes against their base’s own interests: environmental degradation. I mean, if you look at the policies now of the Republican Party, almost every single policy goes against the interests of the voters who are actually voting for them. That's the amazing achievement, that they've been able to create this army that wins elections and is weaponized to further their very specific agenda, the agenda of the plutocrats at the top of this whole structure who profit from this.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/03/economy/trump-tariff-refund
American businesses have paid over $210 billion as of August 24 to cover the tariffs that US courts have determined are illegal. On Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that the court’s decision, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could result in the US Treasury having to “give back” tariff revenue collected.
That potentially dramatic turn in the tariff saga comes after a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Trump unlawfully leaned on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose across-the-board duties on countries. Trump had used those powers to push import tax rates as high as 50% on India and Brazil – and as high as 145% on China earlier this year.
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:
If Trump loses his tariff lawsuit at the Supreme Court, America may have to refund businesses more than $200 billion
He won't lose. So don't worry about it.
Why are you always against America?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I am against Trumptards. I'm against Nazis, tax cheaters, rapists, thieves, liars and crooks such as Trump and 6ix. 6ix, don't claim you are not a crook. Your whole life is about getting something for nothing. That's why you brag about not working, but owning property. Trump doesn't work, either, and yet he has $billions. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Trump's crookiness:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why are you always against America?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump Family Amasses $5 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-family-amasses-6-billion-
fortune-after-crypto-launch-567faec5
Updated Sept. 1, 2025 4:24 pm ET
The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.
The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.
The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”
World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.
WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.
President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”
World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.
In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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In my opinion, Trump II remains by far the worst president in American history—beating out the second-worst, either Trump I or Andrew Jackson. Trump is destroying vaccines and science and universities and renewable energy and sane AI policy and international trade and cheap, lifesaving foreign aid and the rule of law and everything else that’s good, and he’s destroying them because they’re good—because even if destroying them hurts his own voters and America’s standing in the world, it might hurt the educated elites even more. It’s almost superfluous to mention that, while Trump himself is neither of these things, the MAGA movement that will anoint his successor now teems with antisemites and Holocaust “revisionists.”
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9130
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously
At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined.
By Tom Nichols | September 5, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/trump-parade-china-p
utin-xi-kim/684113/
The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.
Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.
But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.
Nor has Trump fared very well with the other two members of this cheery 21st-century incarnation of SPECTRE. In the midst of Trumpian chaos, Xi is adroitly positioning China as the new face of international stability and responsibility. He has even made a show of offering partnership to China’s rival and former enemy India: Chinese diplomats last month said that China stands with India against the American “bully” when Trump was, for some reason, trying to impose 50 percent tariffs on India.
Likewise, the North Koreans, after playing to Trump’s ego and his ignorance of international affairs during meetings in the president’s first term, have continued their march to a nuclear arsenal that within years could grow to be larger than the United Kingdom’s. Trump was certain that he could negotiate with Kim, but the perfumed days of “love letters” between Trump and Kim are long over. Pyongyang’s leadership seems to know that it costs them little to humor Trump politely, but that they should reserve serious discussion for the leaders of serious countries.
Trump responded to his exclusion from the gala in Beijing by acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is. As the event was taking place, Trump took to his social-media site—of course—to express his hurt feelings with a cringe-inducing attempt at a zinger. “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
Now, the reality is that Russia, China, and North Korea are conspiring against America, but it is beneath both the dignity and the power of an American president to whine about it. Trump continued his unseemly carping with a demand that China recognize the valor of the Americans who died in the Pacific:
The big question to be answered is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of support and 'blood' that The United States of America gave to China in order to help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader. Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory.
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Trump’s Crypto Dealings Now Have the Perfect Cover
In recent weeks, the family has dressed up its business dealings in the veneer of legitimacy.
By Will Gottsegen | September 6, 2025, 10:42 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/trump-crypto-wo
rld-liberty-financial/684130/
The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.” Or how about the $TRUMP meme coin and accompanying gamified gala dinner for its biggest investors?
It has been easy, in part because of the bluster of the Trumps’ approach to promotion, to discount the family’s dalliances in crypto as a cash grab: The meme coin—which has no function except to facilitate gambling—almost immediately made Trump a crypto billionaire. But recently, the family has taken a decidedly different tack—less Trumpian bombast, and more sober promotion of its crypto businesses. On Wednesday, Eric Trump joined CNBC after American Bitcoin, the crypto-mining company he co-founded, went public and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For the most part, he sounded like any other C-suite exec talking up their company after an IPO: “Watching what the stock is doing right now is just—it’s beautiful and incredibly rewarding.”
The public debut of American Bitcoin is just one way that the Trump family’s crypto play has been dressed up over the past two weeks. The crypto firm Trump and his sons co-founded, World Liberty Financial, has aggressively expanded; the media company behind Truth Social has hoovered up millions in even more crypto; and that same company created a new crypto treasury to hold the stockpile. This blitz has proven to be enormously consequential (and enormously lucrative) for the maturing Trump crypto empire. Each of these moves has a veneer of legitimacy that the family’s earlier crypto dealings lacked: They are much easier to defend than an Iron Man–inspired NFT, while doing just as much to enrich Trump and his sons.
The core of this maneuver is World Liberty Financial, which, despite counting Trump’s three sons (including 19-year-old Barron) as founders, is by far the most legitimate-seeming operation in Trump’s crypto universe. It is goofy—a “gold paper” issued by the company is plastered with a cartoon of Trump’s face—but the company has attached itself to one of the most bulletproof parts of the crypto industry: stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies pegged to the price of another asset, such as the U.S. dollar, and are typically backed by reserves. Think of them like digital cash. Thanks to a couple years of widespread adoption, stablecoins are now broadly accepted as the crypto industry’s most robust innovation—one of the only true use cases in an industry that has long sought to prove it’s more than just an avenue for speculation.
The company’s stablecoin, USD1, launched back in March—but this week, the company moved to unlock a large tranche of what are known as “governance tokens.” All governance tokens, in theory, can bring a level of accountability and democracy to a crypto project, conferring voting rights that can influence corporate-governance decisions—a little like how shareholders use voting stock to sway public companies. Except that in this case, the governance power conferred by the tokens seems mostly symbolic: World Liberty Financial’s management team likely owns so much of the coin that it can veto the decisions. The Trumps alone hold nearly a quarter of the governance tokens that exist. The family netted as much as $5 billion in “paper wealth” once the tokens hit the market this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. The tokens, as of today, are likely the Trump family’s most valuable asset, eclipsing all their golf courses and hotels.&
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More than $1.1 trillion in Texas real estate is at risk from severe climate change-related disasters, a new Realtor.com report shows, as the Trump administration downplays the danger and deletes research that could help protect from future storms.
Nationwide, one in four homes faces severe or extreme risks from flooding, hurricanes or wildfires, the real estate company found in partnership with Insurify, an insurance data firm. More than $12 trillion in real estate is at high risk nationally, and worsening extreme weather is driving insurance premiums higher.
“Climate risks are no longer a distant threat for U.S. housing—they are a present reality that put a large chunk of U.S. real estate value at risk,” Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, said in the report. “In many markets, the gap between perceived risk and actual risk is sizable, particularly for flooding.”
. . .
Dessler and the authors of the Realtor.com report agree that most Americans do not understand their risk and are not economically prepared.
“If I tell you you’re in a hundred-year floodplain, you think the odds of your house flooding are really low,” Dessler told me. “Over a 30-year mortgage, your chance of flooding is about one in three.”
Our prosperity and safety depend on making well-informed decisions about growing climate risks. For that, we need reliable data. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is working to conceal it.
More at https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=ac278b89-94d8-4ccb-b5b9-4e53a31c16c3&share=true
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Dangers of Fiscal Dominance
How Trump could Zimbabwify America
By Paul Krugman | Sep 07, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-fiscal-dominance
Donald Trump wants to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve and assume personal control of monetary policy. It’s clearly an obsession with him and his efforts just keep getting more extreme.
First he spent several months haranguing Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. Next he announced that he was firing Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors, on the basis of extremely thin accusations involving mortgages she took out before she joined the Board. When Cook filed suit, claiming — almost surely correctly — that he had no legal right to fire her, his Justice Department upped the ante, saying that it was considering criminal charges. And need I add that three other members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have made the same mortgage arrangement as Lisa Cook, as well as the parents of Bill Pulte, Trump’s hired assassin in this matter.
Unless the Supreme Court is more in Trump’s back-pocket than is already evident, I don’t Trump will prevail in firing Cook. But his over-arching goal, clearly, is to personally intimidate Fed officials — “get in our way,” the White House is saying, “and we will ruin your life.”
Meanwhile, Trump has nominated Stephen Miran, chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, to fill a vacancy on the Board. Incredibly, Miran says that he will not resign his current appointment. Rather, he intends to just take a leave of absence. Having an employee of the executive branch serve as a member of the Board would be completely unprecedented. An act like that is effectively a textbook case of the elimination of Fed independence.
And trashing the Fed’s independence is clearly a top agenda item of Trump’s accomplices: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has just published a remarkably sleazy article smearing the Fed. More on that in a future post.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-feds-gain-of-function-monetary-policy-
ac0dc38a
There is no real dispute over what Trump is doing. Trump has announced that not only should the Fed lower the Fed funds rate, the short-term interest rate that the Fed controls, but that it should be lowered by 300 basis points. That would be dropping the current rate from 4.5 to 1.5. That’s an enormous drop – one which has never been done except in the teeth of a deep recession.
Why is Trump demanding this? In answering that question, one should never rule out the role of sheer ignorance. Trump may imagine that lower short-term interest rates will lift him in the polls, while ignoring the high likelihood that such a steep fall in short-term interest rates will raise expected inflation and, as a result, long-term rates will go up, not down. And sometimes he seems to think of interest rate reductions as a sort of trophy, like an award you get for supposedly winning a golf tournament.
But there is another reason that might explain why Trump wants to end the Fed’s independence — and this reason makes economists very, very nervous. For it’s likely that Trump is seeking to establish “fiscal dominance” of monetary policy — a policy regime in which the Fed’s actions are dictated, not by an effort to achieve low inflation and full employment, but by the desire to avoid hard choices on taxes and spending.
So I’m going to devote today’s primer to fiscal dominance: What it means and how it has played out in the past. Beyond the paywall I’ll talk about four ways a central bank that has lost its independence can enable fiscal irresponsibility:
1. Seigniorage: Using the printing press to cover budget deficits
2. Financial repression: Using low rates to reduce budget deficits
3. Goosing the economy: not exactly fiscal dominance, but political dominance
4. Expropriation through inflation: Inflating away government debt.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https:/
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Why This Administration Can’t Fill Its Jobs
By David A. Graham | September 5, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/trump-administ
ration-staff-jobs/684125/
The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.
“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Rubio, who was serving as secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID. (He’s since handed the latter to Russell Vought, who now also has three titles.) Three of these roles are subject to Senate confirmation; Rubio has been confirmed, and for that matter nominated, only as secretary of state. Trump has not put any nominee forward for the other two positions.
From top roles on down, the Trump administration continues to struggle to find people who can and will fill jobs, leaving the president to rely on a small circle of advisers, each playing multiple roles. The result is short-staffing and conflicts of interest that help explain why the executive branch has been bad at accomplishing not only its statutory responsibilities but also some of its political goals.
Consider Stephen Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Trump has nominated him to fill a recently vacated seat on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Miran told senators during a hearing yesterday that if he is confirmed, he will not resign from the CEA.
“I have received advice from counsel that what is required is an unpaid leave of absence from the Council of Economic Advisers,” Miran said. “And so, considering the term for which I’m being nominated is a little bit more than four months, that is what I will be taking.” (Miran said that if confirmed to a full term, he would resign.)
In other words, Miran would be simultaneously serving (albeit without pay) a president who has demanded that the Fed lower interest rates and sitting on the ostensibly independent board that sets interest rates. Conflicts of interest aren’t usually quite so obvious. The claim that an attorney advised Miran that his approach is fine is not encouraging: This administration seems to be able to get a lawyer to sign off on practically any arrangement. That doesn’t mean the public should accept it. But don’t worry—Miran demurred when a senator asked if he was Trump’s “puppet.”
Somehow, this is not the most disturbing case. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official, was narrowly confirmed as a federal appeals judge in July. But between that vote and taking his spot on the bench, Bove continued to work at the Justice Department, reportedly attending both internal meetings and a public event—a highly unusual arrangement. Once again, this didn’t appear to be an explicit violation of the judiciary’s rules, because he hadn’t yet been sworn in; nevertheless, he risked working on issues that could come before him in court. It doesn’t take a law degree to see why this arrangement looks bad, especially at a moment when faith in the courts as a check on the executive branch is in question.
“Socializing with Trump is fine. Advising Trump is not fine. Putting himself physically in a place where it looks like he is identifying with the president’s political agenda is not fine,” the legal ethicist Stephen Gillers told The New York Times. Then again, Bove has never seemed all that concerned about appearing to be anything other than a Trump sycophant. During his confirmation process, he refused to say whether a third presidential term was permitted, despite the clear language of the Constitution, and accounts from several whistleblowers contradict statements he made in his confirmation hearing, which suggests that he may have lied to senators. (He denies this.)
I first wrote about Trump’s use of dual-hatting, which is the term for one person filling multiple jobs, back in May. At the time, the possibility existed that this was a
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