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 366 of 479
George Santos is the perfect avatar of Trump's America
Perhaps the president was moved by Santos’ complaints, including some about solitary confinement. Or perhaps he simply fell for Santos’ flattery.
Santos’ loyalty seems to have helped secure his freedom less than three months into a seven-plus year sentence following the president’s commutation on Friday night. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, a small portion of the misdeeds he has been accused of by former friends, colleagues, and enemies.
Explaining his decision, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Santos “has been horribly mistreated” and also “had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” That first part is a stretch, given Santos’ own guilty plea. But it’s hard to argue with Santos’ loyalty.
In an open letter penned from prison and published just a few days before the commutation, the 37-year-old Santos made his commitment to the president explicit. “During my short tenure in Congress, I stood firmly behind your agenda,” Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”
Much more at https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/george-santos-free-man-ava
tar-trump-presidency-rcna238762
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
Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality
And it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?
By Paul Krugman | Oct 21, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-has-lost-touch-with
The other day I learned a new term: “AI sycophancy,” also sometimes called “chatbot sycophancy.”
I already knew about the phenomenon, having read stories about how Large Language Models flatter their users, telling them what they want to hear, assuring them that they’re always right. This self-reinforcement hooks into psychological vulnerabilities, potentially leading users to believe in their own brilliance, while shortcutting attempts by other human beings to insert some reality sense. A growing body of research shows that the use of generative AI – like social media but worse – is often damaging to users’ mental health. In the worst cases chatbot sycophancy has led to self-harm – even, allegedly, suicide.
But the way chatbots play with your mind isn’t new. Sycophancy has been sending people into delusional spirals and destructive behavior for millennia. In the past, however, sycophancy was reserved for the rich and powerful. AI’s innovation is to democratize the experience.
Being surrounded by actual human sycophants will inevitably happen if you are rich and powerful, unless you have the strength of character to avoid it. But, alas, we have as our president Donald Trump, who is a glutton for sycophancy. Moreover, he’s not alone: the tech-bro oligarchs – in particular, Musk, Andreesen, Zuckerberg, Ellison and Thiel – inhabit their own sycophancy bubbles, while also slavishly supporting Trump. Just read an excerpt from Jacob Silverman’s new, and highly recommended book, to understand the dynamic.
But while the tech bros can certainly make many people’s lives miserable, it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).
On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them:
The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective and the people were whacked out. When you look at those people, those are not representative of the people of our country.
Does Trump actually believe that? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry. A Credible sources say that Pam Bondi was reluctant to charge former FBI director James Comey given the flimsiness of the case. However, Trump made clear that this was non-negotiable — it was Comey or her. So Bondi saw to it that Comey was duly charged.
Another very recent example of Trump’s disconnect from reality was the temper tantrum he reportedly threw when meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warning among other things that Putin “will destroy you” if he wants.
In reality, Putin has spent 3 years and 8 months trying as hard as he can to destroy Ukraine, without success. Dig a little deeper and you learn that Russia’s latest big offensive has been a bloody debacle: hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives lost without any significant strategic gains. You have to be seriously delusional to imagine that if Putin gets really, really angry he will suddenly develop the ability to blast through the “kill zone,” the deadly kilometers-wide no man’s land created by drones, precision artillery and mines that keeps bringing Russian offensives to grief.
But again, who’s going to brief Trump about his beloved Putin’s failures?
There are many, many more examples of Trump’s delusi
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump Fell Short on a Splashy Campaign Promise.
Trump’s IVF Move Is Kind of a Dud—and It Speaks Volumes About His Politics
By Jill Filipovic | Oct 21, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/trump-ivf-abortion-reprodu
ctive-rights-natalism.html
One of Donald Trump’s splashier campaign promises was that he would make in vitro fertilization free for all Americans. “Under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,” the president said. “Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.”
After issuing a toothless executive order pledging to do something about IVF but not actually doing anything about IVF, the president has finally rolled out his plan. And despite much fanfare, the Trump IVF plan is a bit of a dud. It’s not nothing—it will modestly reduce IVF costs for some families—but it’s unlikely to meaningfully change the “Do we or don’t we” calculus for most people, and it’s nowhere near his “free” promise. It’s not even clear that the proposal will make much of a dent in costs for the families it does help. And it seems virtually guaranteed that the tiny IVF benefit on offer will not, as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV personality Mehmet Oz said, create “a lot of Trump babies.”
The first prong of the Trump IVF initiative isn’t a policy at all; it’s more or less the administration’s request that companies offer IVF benefits, just as some might provide dental plans to their employees. There is no mandate that companies offer IVF coverage. There is no penalty if they don’t. There are no government subsidies to offset the costs. There’s just the president saying, “Hey, guys, you should do this,” with a promise of a how-to to come.
The second is a bit more substantial but still small: an agreement with a single pharmaceutical company to decrease the cost of a single IVF drug, Gonal-F. The discounted drug will be sold through the Trump-branded https://trumprx.gov/ . The name itself is an abuse of Trump’s position, but at this point the public and press alike seem to have stopped caring.
“We’ll dramatically slash the cost of IVF and the treatment and many of the most common fertility drugs for countless millions of Americans,” Trump announced last week. “Prices are going way down, way, way down.” To be fair, “way, way down” is a matter of opinion. According to an estimate by Oz’s agency, patients pursuing IVF could save as much as $2,200 per cycle with the discounted drug. And although $2,200 is a significant amount, consider that a single cycle of IVF averages $15,000 to 20,000 and can cost as much as $30,000. Also, the estimated savings is as much as $2,200—meaning it will likely be far less for most people. When we’re talking about four-figure sums, $2,200 helps, but that number likely won’t make or break a person’s ability to undergo fertility treatments. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless, and when you’re paying for exorbitantly expensive medical procedures, you’ll take any discount you can get. But a good start and a nice benefit is not the same as a life-changing policy that will lead to “many more beautiful American children,” as Trump pledged.
The IVF policy may not be groundbreaking, but it is perfectly Trumpian: a lot of big talk and bravado, without much in the way of substance behind it. The president and his administration are boasting that this benefit will fuel a Trump baby boom, but there’s no evidence that a single $2,200 drug is all that’s standing in the way of a fertility rate spike. With the IVF price tag being what it is, it’s frankly hard to imagine that this benefit will make the difference between getting IVF or skipping it for more than a tiny number of families, if any at all.
But as with so much of what Trump does, the result isn’t the point; the performance is. The presiden
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Trump administration, perhaps in acknowledgment of the potential backlash of leaving more than 70 million Social Security recipients in limbo, announced the BLS team will return to produce its report on Friday, Oct. 24, so that the 2026 cost-of-living increase can be announced the same day.
The administration’s initial attempt to use the shutdown to end reporting on the rate of inflation is just one example of how in President Donald Trump’s America, information that has been relied on for decades to make critical economic, scientific, environmental, public safety and health-related decisions has been disappearing — scrubbed from government websites or no longer collected because it doesn’t conform to the administration’s views.
It’s reminiscent of “1984,” George Orwell’s dystopian novel in which the fictitious Ministry of Truth altered historical records and discarded unwelcome data by disposing of it in “memory holes” where it was wiped out of existence. And in the novel, when individuals fell out of favor, they were made into “unpersons.”
In what can be seen as an uncanny real-world parallel, in 2025, government officials who have provided information contrary to the president’s perception of reality have been fired. This includes the head of the BLS, who provided unwanted employment data on a slowdown in the labor market, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose preliminary report about the limited impact of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites contradicted Trump’s more grandiose claims.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna238444
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
Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trumptards are confused and misunderstand the simplest concepts. I have dealt with Trumptards all my life, and not even one of them has good sense. Neither do you, 6ix. Here is a long story about Trump's handpicked lawyer, who is a complete nincompoop, just like you are, 6ixStringJack. Being highly articulate does NOT mean a Trumptard is smart.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
This particular Trumptard-lawyer does NOT understand the concept of speaking off-the-record, nor does the Trumptard know what the limitations are on revealing grand jury testimony or who those limits apply to. The Trumptards are completely confused about the simplest things in the world:
“Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.”
My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.
By Anna Bower | Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna--lindsey-halligan-here
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:Trumptards
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is listening to your lies anymore.
How does it feel?
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trump is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to pay him $230 million. When asked about it during an Oval Office event on Oct. 21, he remarked on the extraordinary nature of the president potentially overseeing a huge payout for himself from the government he runs.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
"You know that decision would have to go across my desk," Trump said. "And it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself."
Why not make it $230 billion instead of only $230 million? Trump is the President, so why not?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-doj-pay-230-million-previous-investiga
tions-sources/story?id=126731700
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:Trump
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
You can stop right there.
To do anything more than that is pointless in 2025.
Unless you wanted to read the part out loud to the class that said:
Quote:
"It's interesting, because I'm the one that makes a decision, right?" Trump said. "And you know that decision would have to go across my desk, and it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly, and any money that I would get, I would give to charity."
I think it's kind of funny that the figure is $230 Million.
That's almost exactly how much Nancy Pelosi and her husband scammed with insider trading since she got into politics.
It would be funny to know that she's watching Trump scam $230 Million from the US Government in a single afternoon when it took her an entire life to scam that much money... and then to see her face when he gives it all to Toys 4 Tots or some shit. To Nancy, that would be no different than if Trump lit the $230 Million on fire right in front of her.
Ahhhhh... to be a fly on the wall in the Pelosi Household.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME