Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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Michael Wolff: Is it dementia or something else? What one of Donald Trump’s closest political advisors revealed to me.
https://imgur.com/gallery/michael-wolff-is-dementia-something-else-wha
t-one-of-donald-trump-s-closest-political-advisors-revealed-to-me-ZlEzM0S
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Europe’s Hippopotamus Strategy for Handling Trump
EU policymakers should channel their inner naturalists as they adapt to Trumponomics.
By Agathe Demarais, a senior policy fellow on geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
September 24, 2025
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/24/europe-eu-trump-tariffs-trade-dea
l-economy-negotiations/
Hippopotamuses are baffling. At first glance, these creatures look calm, slow, and placid as they wallow lazily in muddy pools. Looks, however, can be deceiving. Survivors of hippo encounters tell of the unpredictable, ferocious charges that make hippopotamuses the deadliest wild mammal on earth, killing around 500 people each year. (That’s 23 times more than lions.) Humans have few good options to defend against 6,000 pounds of erratically charging hippo. Negotiation is not much of an option—it is hard to stop a hippo with offers of food. Experts advise that the best strategy is to avoid hippos altogether. If all else fails, then playing dead can be a reasonable Plan B.
Since the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House in January, European leaders have been confronting a charging hippo situation. U.S. policies are unpredictable, fast-changing, and often baffling. No one knows whether Trump is about to charge or let go. Negotiation rarely works, not least because it is hard to find out what he ultimately wants.
Not all hope is lost, though. As I argue in a new policy brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations, European Union policymakers can sketch a coherent, pragmatic, and coolheaded response to Trump’s attacks on trade, investment, and financial issues. To stay focused and maintain their cool as they try to manage Trump, EU leaders should channel their inner naturalists and draw five lessons from hippo encounters in the wild.
First, get your facts straight about what you’re facing.
Safari tour guides smile when they hear their clients say that they could outrun a hippo: The creatures can charge at around 20 miles per hour, which even trained athletes would struggle to match. In the same vein, a sounder grasp of facts would come in handy in Europe these days—for instance, to tame the uproar that followed the conclusion of the U.S.-EU trade deal in July.
According to a poll in Le Grand Continent, 77 percent of European respondents believed that the United States was the biggest winner from the deal. They are wrong. Tariffs are import taxes paid by U.S. firms and consumers. Of course, some EU exporters will lose U.S. market share because of the tariffs. Yet economists calculate that the hit on the EU’s collective GDP will be minimal and that the United States is the biggest loser from the measures.
A better grasp of facts also would have helped Europeans to dismiss the alarming headlines about the deal. Take EU pledges to invest $600 billion in the United States. This does not entail spending European taxpayers’ money in the United States, as some European politicians have claimed. The figure is only an estimate of the sum of already planned corporate investments on U.S. soil, over which the European Commission has zero say.
A similar reality check applies to EU promises to import $750 billion worth of energy from the United States by 2028. Experts agree that the pledge is moot, as U.S. oil and gas firms have nowhere near the export capacity to achieve this goal, unless they swiftly abandon their global customers and divert all their shipments to the EU.
Nine months into Trump’s second term, Europeans would be in a better place to defend against a charging Trump if they get their facts straight.
Second, resist the urge to fight back.
Responding with force to a disgruntled hippo is useless; if the animal wants to charge, then attacking it in return is a sure way to self-harm. Such insights are relevant for Trump encounters. The popular idea that the EU should impose retaliatory tariffs on its imports from the United States falls into a similar category of self-harm.
It bears repeating that tariffs are
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Why Is Trump Bailing Out Argentina?
This is about ideology and Trumpian fealty, not America’s interests
By Paul Krugman | Sep 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-is-trump-bailing-out-argentina
In its dealings with other countries, Donald Trump’s administration is following a clear agenda of undermining liberal values, fomenting discord and withdrawing critical financial support. One of the administration’s first acts was to drastically cut funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, then shut the agency down completely. Independent estimates suggest that these cuts have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them children, and will lead to millions more deaths in the years ahead. It is trying to shutter Voice of America, a federally-sponsored news agency founded to fight the Nazis and promulgate democratic values throughout the world. The administration has vocally supported extreme right-wing parties like the AfD in Germany. He has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement environmental accords and the World Health Organization. He has severely reduced aid to Ukraine, a democracy struggling to survive conquest by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
So it might have seemed out of character when Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, suddenly announced on Monday that the United States is prepared to offer open-ended financial support to Argentina:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent
Argentina is a systemically important U.S. ally in Latin America, and the @USTreasury stands ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support Argentina.
All options for stabilization are on the table.
2:46 PM • Sep 22, 2025 • 9.4M Views
But although in this case America is offering aid rather than taking it away, our new Argentina policy is part of the same Trumpian agenda.
It’s true that the plan to aid Argentina looks quite a lot like Bill Clinton’s bailout of Mexico during that nation’s financial crisis of 1994-5. But we had a compelling interest in helping Mexico, which is our neighbor and one of our most important trading partners. We had just signed a free trade agreement with Mexico, and were also trying to bolster Mexico’s transition from one-party rule to genuine democracy.
Argentina, in contrast, is not systemically important to the United States. Argentina is a miniscule player in terms of US interests. The U.S. accounts for only about 1/8th of Argentina’s imports, less than its imports from the European Union and much less than its imports from China.
It’s definitely a lot less important, both strategically and economically, than Brazil, whose economy is more than three times as big as Argentina’s. Yet Trump has completely alienated Brazil, imposing 50 percent tariffs on the nation for daring to try and convict a former president who attempted to overturn his electoral defeat. Always indulging his personal grudges, Trump has imposed sanctions on the judge who oversaw Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution — and on his wife. It obviously doesn’t matter to him that both the tariffs against Brazil and the personal sanctions are surely illegal. Trump’s behavior has had a devastating effect on America’s interests, driving Brazil into China’s arms.
But remember that, in Trump’s world, America’s interests don’t count. Only his interests count. And Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, has been an important poster child for right-wing economics. The early success — or apparent success — of his policies was widely celebrated as a great victory. In February, Milei and Elon Musk shared the stage, wielding a chainshaw, during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC.) And Milei has deftly played the part of the Trump acolyte, praising Trump’s tariffs and deportations at the UN, while attacking “left-wing infiltration” of American institutions.
But the victory celebrations were premature: Mileinomics is now in big trouble. So Bessent is offering large-scale aid — not to defend U.S. interests, but in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Trump’s p
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Lower Than Cowards
The surrender of America’s elites
By Adam Serwer | September 25, 2025, 7:31 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/freedom-trump-threat
s-kimmel/684358/
“We have to speak out against this bully,” Jimmy Kimmel said in an emotional monologue after returning to ABC on Tuesday. The network had suspended him, under pressure from the Trump administration, for remarks last week in which Kimmel appeared to inaccurately suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a conservative. Kimmel choked up when discussing the violence and praised Kirk’s widow, Erika.
But he also warned his viewers—an audience four times larger than usual—that Trump and his cronies are threatening free speech in all its forms: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their jobs, because he can’t take a joke,” Kimmel said. But “he’s not stopping. And it’s not just comedy.” True to form, Trump has since threatened to sue ABC for bringing Kimmel back, as if it were illegal not to like him.
Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-situated people—those with the resources, platform, and power to stand up to the president, including, initially, the leaders of ABC—have surrendered, withdrawn, or become Trump sycophants themselves. One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitably and invincibility.
ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been menaced into suspending Kimmel by Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a right-wing podcast.
He later attempted to walk back what he’d said—despite what your lying ears may have heard, and despite his gloating on social media. As it turns out, you can’t sell your soul to Trump and keep your spine; they’re a package deal. Nonetheless, the bullying was effective. Kimmel may have returned to ABC, but two of the network’s biggest broadcasters, Sinclair and Nexstar, are still refusing to air him on their stations.
If Trump has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit.
I want to distinguish between chickenshit and cowardice. Fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.
Big companies and their CEOs have cowered before Trumpist intimidation, trying to ease his temper by settling frivolous lawsuits over “bias” or slathering the president in juche-style flattery. Media companies have settled First Amendment cases they were likely to win in order to curry favor or protect their parent company’s commercial interests. Newspap
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Trump Is Trying to Memory-Hole One of the Most Important Historical Images of Slavery
Virtually every historian of the Civil War knows that slavery was the moving force for secession which led to the Civil War.
By Paul Finkelman / Sep 24, 2025 at 2:57 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/09/trump-memory-hole-1984-sla
very-national-parks.html
On March 27, 2025, in an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” President Donald Trump complained of a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” He directed the interior secretary to “determine” if “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” of the government had been “changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” He demanded our national parks remove “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”
Last week, Trump quietly followed through on this threat, ordering the secretary of the Department of the Interior to remove from national parks references to slavery, artifacts connected with slavery, and other aspects of American history that the president apparently does not like or understand. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s order would change signage and information at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, various Civil War battlefields, and other historic sites. As the Post reported, the offensive information at Harpers Ferry includes “signs referring to racial discrimination and the hostility of White people to people who were formerly enslaved.”
At the national park at the site of the battlefield at Bull Run, in Manassas, Virginia, the administration wants to remove signs indicating that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Similarly, the president wants to remove a famous picture of an enslaved man named Peter (also sometimes called Gordon) that was taken in 1863 by a U.S. Army photographer.
Trump’s March executive order launching this campaign complains that the National Park Service has attempted to “rewrite” our history by ignoring “objective facts.” In reality, the administration seems to be grossly bothered by “objective facts.”
The picture of Peter is obviously an “objective fact.” It is not made up. It was taken in 1863 and reproduced across the North during the Civil War as an example of the barbarism of slavery.
Similarly, virtually every historian of the Civil War knows that slavery was the moving force for secession which led to the Civil War. We don’t have to listen to 21st-century scholars to know that. Let’s look at what the South itself said as it left the Union.
The South Carolina secession convention declared the state was leaving the Union because northerners “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.” South Carolina also complained that in the 1860 election, northerners elected “a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” and who has publicly declared that “ ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” This president was the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Not liking the outcome of the election, South Carolina left the Union.
Georgia proclaimed that “the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all” at the American founding. But because all the northern states had ended slavery, and some allowed Black people to vote and hold public office, Georgia
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Trump's war on Tylenol
By Matthew Yglesias | Sep 25, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-dangerous-war-on-tylenol
Tylenol has been safely used for decades. The real drivers of rising autism diagnoses are changing definitions and incentives, not fever reducers.
I spoke with someone earlier this week who is optimistic that the Trump administration is going to reform the clinical trial process in ways that should make it cheaper and easier to get safe and effective medications to market.
This is a really good and important idea, one I’ve been talking about for years. I’ve written about challenge trials for vaccines (and noted larger problems with the regulation of clinical research) and about the importance of boosting drug innovation on the supply side, not just the demand side.
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence makes this all the more pressing, because it seems likely that A.I. is going to give us some speedier ways to identify promising candidate molecules and potentially to gain more insights into safety and efficacy, but without per se speeding up the regulatory process. I’m worried about a biomedical equivalent of the elevator, where we have developed a great technological solution to the problem of land scarcity (tall buildings) but in America, we mostly don’t use it.
I hope Trump finds his way toward some bipartisan reforms here. He certainly has some biotech innovators in his corner pushing in that direction.
On the other hand, the president just did a splashy press conference with his secretary of health and human services in which he told pregnant women they should stop taking Tylenol because it’s causing autism.
This was all, in some sense, harm reduction relative to the possibility that the Trump administration might move to more decisively embrace the theory that measles vaccines are causing autism. And the good news is that acetaminophen remains on the market and fully available in pharmacies. So biotech-oriented people can certainly tell themselves that Trump remains a force for good on the regulatory front.
But I do have to say, I think it’s dangerous to have the White House and H.H.S. controlled by people with terrible epistemics, the kind of people who put out this kind of public message:
The research considering a Tylenol-autism link is not as shoddy as the vaccine-autism theory, and the consequences of stigmatizing Tylenol use are not as dire as stigmatizing vaccines. However, the causal research on this is still pretty flimsy. Studies with better causal design, such as those that rely on sibling controls, find no association.
The bigger point that I would make, though, is that it’s unclear whether there has been any rise in autism at all. There are certainly more diagnoses. But that’s almost certainly because the diagnostic criteria have changed, there’s more surveillance, and there are shifting incentives for families and institutions to diagnose more cases.
I don’t think that necessarily means that the rise in diagnoses is entirely benign. There are reasonable questions to ask about whether more aggressive diagnosis of psychological maladies is making things better or worse.
But serious people would be asking serious questions, not promulgating nonsense.
From “infantile autism” to “autism spectrum disorder”
If you’re looking to explain why something increased four-fold between 1992 and 2012, your proposed cause should probably also be something that increased dramatically between 1992 and 2012.
If the M.M.R. vaccine had been introduced in 1992 and phased-in steadily over the next twenty years, that might be an interesting hypothesis to investigate. But it was developed in 1971, and nothing about it changed in the 1990s. Similarly, acetaminophen has been the preferred option to reduce pain and relieve fever in pregnant women for more than forty years. If we’re trying to understand a more recent change, we need to look at potential causes that changed more recently.
And what’s changed dramatically is diagnostic practice.
The termin
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Nobody is ever going to read your walls of meaningless text.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:That is why you flunked out of college, Mister I-Don't-Need-An-Education-To-Earn-A-Living. If you could read as fast as you claim to type, you could finish in two seconds.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is ever going to read your walls of meaningless text.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump Keeps Finding New Ways to Shock the World
Two speeches—one endorsing hate and another warning foreign nations “you will fail”—encapsulate a Presidential agenda that is like no other.
By Susan B. Glasser | September 25, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-tr
ump-keeps-finding-new-ways-to-shock-the-world
Donald Trump just can’t shut up about himself. Anyone who has followed the past decade in American public life knows this all too well. And yet he still manages to astonish. When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, on Tuesday, it took less than ten minutes for Trump to get to his personal grievances with the international body, which stretch back at least a quarter century, beginning with its supposed refusal, in 2001, to grant him a contract to redevelop its headquarters. “They decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product,” Trump said. He claimed that he had promised the U.N. mahogany walls and marble floors and that what it got instead was cheap terrazzo flooring and enormous cost overruns. “And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction.”
The reason Trump was ranting about the U.N.’s floors was that he was mad about the reception he had received while entering the building to make his speech—the escalator conveying him and Melania Trump to the main speaking floor had come to a halt, forcing them to walk one floor up, only to find that the teleprompter also was not working and the President would have to read out his address the old-fashioned way. “These are the two things I got from the United Nations—a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” he said. By the next day, he was calling his experience in New York “triple sabotage,” adding to his list of complaints that the sound for his speech had been turned off in the Assembly Hall itself. “The people that did it should be arrested!” he demanded in a social-media post, on Wednesday. Never mind that an official statement from the U.N. suggested that it was likely Trump’s own White House videographer who might have accidentally triggered the escalator shutdown. Both Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s newly confirmed Ambassador to the U.N., demanded full investigations into the conspiracy theories that the President was so quick to float—confirmation, as if any were needed, that the personal complaints of Donald Trump are now the official foreign policy of the United States.
Somehow, the state of the world seemed a lot more assured when it was the rambling, unscripted speech of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi that shocked the General Assembly, rather than the rambling, unscripted speech of America’s President, who also expounded on his sky-high approval ratings, his brilliant move to call in the National Guard to eliminate crime in the District of Columbia, and his personal genius for predicting the future. “They had a hat, the best-selling hat: ‘Trump was right about everything,’ ” he explained. “And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.” Imagine if he had said that in a braggadocious way.
The substance of the speech was, in many ways, just as jarring as its narcissistic surround sound: Trump denouncing much of the rest of the world for buying into the idea of climate change—“the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion”—and for failing to adopt his close-the-borders, shut-it-down approach to illegal immigration. “Your countries are going to hell,” he told the other Presidents and potentates in the room; indeed, it was this statement that led to his meditation on how he was always right about everything.
In his first term, Trump provoked incredulous laughs when he took the lectern at the U.N. to brag that, “in less than two years, my Administration has accomplished more than almost any Administration in the history of our country.” This time, after on
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Hugo Chávez Loses Spot in Guinness Book for Most Batshit UN Speech
Sep 24, 2025
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/hugo-chavez-loses-spot-in-guinness
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The Guinness Book of World Records announced on Wednesday that the former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, has lost his distinction for making the most batshit speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
“In 2006, when Chávez referred to George W. Bush as the Devil and said, ‘This rostrum still smells like sulfur,’ most of us thought his record for making the most crazy-ass UN speech would stand for generations,” Guinness spokesperson Harland Dorrinson said. “We never saw this coming.”
In an official statement, the Hugo Chávez Memorial Society, based in Caracas, was philosophical about the Venezuelan’s wackadoodle utterances being bested by a new champion.
“Hugo himself would have been in awe of yesterday’s performance,” the statement read. “He said a lot of bonkers shit back in 2006, but he never exploded with rage about an escalator.”
Comment: Yeah but Hugo Chavez was crazy. He went on live TV to fire people, gave the oil tycoons' jobs to his friends, and single handedly ruined Venezuela's economy while militias started to pop up outta .... Ooooohh. Now I see it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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