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 417 of 479

SECOND

Saturday, December 27, 2025 3:56 AM

Quote:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.

Good luck. You'll need it.



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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Saturday, December 27, 2025 4:52 PM

US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack

Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.

By Cory Doctorow | Dec 26, 2025 6:30 AM

https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/

In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause.

Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world—a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.

In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers. Over the past two decades, the office of the US Trade Representative–which is responsible for developing and coordinating US international trade, commodity, and direct investment policy—has pressured most of the world into adopting these laws, hamstringing foreign startups that might compete with Apple (by providing a jailbreaking kit that installs a third-party app store), or Google (by blocking tracking on Android devices), or Amazon (by converting Kindle and Audible files to formats that work on rival apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the encrypted error messages mechanics need to service our cars). The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose.

US tech giants (and giant US companies that use tech) have used digital locks to amass a vast hoard of ill-gotten wealth. In 2026, the first country bold enough to raid that hoard gets to transform hundreds of billions in US rents into hundreds of millions in domestic profits that launch its domestic tech sector into a stable orbit—and the remaining hundreds of billions will be reaped by all of us, everyone in the world (including Americans who buy gray-market jailbreaking tools from abroad), as a consumer surplus.

In 2026, many countries will respond to tariffs like they were still in the 19th century. But a few countries will have the vision, the boldness, and the political smarts to kick Donald Trump right in the dongle. The country that gets there first will enjoy the same relationship to, say, third-party app stores for games consoles, that Finland enjoyed in relation to mobile phones during the Nokia decade.

There are many countries with the technical nous to pull this off. Obviously, Canada and Mexico have pride of place, since Trump has torn up the USMCA agreement he arm-twisted them into in 2020, and heaped racist rhetoric on Mexico even as he threatened to annex Canada. Speaking of annexation targets with sizable communities of technical experts, the Danes could lead the EU out of the wilderness the bloc bargained its way into when they enacted Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. Then there's the global south: African tech powerhouses like Nigeria, South American giants like Bra

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SECOND

Sunday, December 28, 2025 10:14 PM

The Santa Presidency

Trump is trying to fix the economy by handing out cash.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-cash-tariffs-divide
nds-economy/685336/

President Donald Trump can hardly conceal his disgust for the word affordability, referring to its ascendance in America’s political lexicon as a “hoax,” a “con job,” and a “fake narrative” perpetuated by Democrats. But there’s one sign that he’s treating it like a very real political vulnerability: The former reality-television host is trying to give people cash.

In recent weeks, Trump has been pitching half a dozen schemes to, in the words of White House officials, put money “straight into the pockets of the American people.” After a year in which Americans’ pocketbooks have been walloped by Trump’s tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, and apparent nonchalance in the face of spiking health-care costs, the president is turning to the allure of sweepstakes-style checks from the government to help coax voters out of their financial malaise ahead of next year’s midterm elections. It likely won’t work, economists from across the political spectrum told me; one likened the payments to a bandage over a bullet wound.

Trump has floated a payment of $2,000 to most Americans in the form of a so-called tariff dividend, to be paid out from fees levied on foreign goods. He has offered $12 billion in relief to farmers reeling from the trade war he started. He has suggested paying subsidies “directly to the people” to pay for health insurance. And as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef reported, Trump used a prime-time national address on December 17 to announce onetime bonus checks for troops in the amount of $1,776. “The checks are already on the way,” Trump said of the payments to 1.4 million service members. (The Pentagon says the money, which is being taken from a fund to improve housing for troops, landed in bank accounts before Christmas.)

Although the proposals each have different designs and purposes, taken together, they represent a concerted effort to neutralize the cost-of-living concerns dominating voters’ minds. Those worries are likely to only increase as Americans contend with rising health-care costs and growing signs of unease in the labor market, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Trump’s proposed payments are ill-suited to deal with those macroeconomic trend lines, he said. “It’s not a solution to anybody’s problem,” he said. “It doesn’t address inflation; it doesn’t address the weak labor market. It doesn’t address the fact that many Americans don’t have any assets and owe a lot on their credit cards.”

As the president’s first year in office comes to a close, the economy is showing signs of significant strain. A delayed jobs report earlier this month showed that the country’s unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent in November, the highest since 2021. Young people and Black Americans are facing especially high rates of unemployment, which some economists see as a warning sign for the broader economy. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned recently of “a labor market that seems to have significant downside risks.” Consumer sentiment has neared record lows in recent months, a somberness that Trump appeared determined to counteract during his rambling speech on December 17, in which he blamed high prices and low wages on former President Joe Biden and shouted a series of misleading statistics about how the economy is great.

Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that the president’s attempts to convince Americans that their financial circumstances are better than they think sound “eerily similar” to the strategy that Biden embraced amid widespread concerns over the cost of living. Trump’s desire to entice voters with onetime payments is unlikely to improve his standing, Strain said. “People don’t like higher prices, and they don’t like higher prices even if their incomes are going up faster than prices,” he said. “And my

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Monday, December 29, 2025 7:40 PM

Why does Trump want war with Venezuela?

Americans deserve to know if move is gambit for something else

Opinion by The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board

Dec 29, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/you-deserve-to-know-why-trump-w
ants-war-with-venezuela-editorial/ar-AA1Tdh5b

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=542d4792-ce7e-42e2-88e7-11aa17b2a829&share=true

What does “America First” mean? It’s a question that President Donald Trump may have to finally answer in his escalating campaign against Venezuela. The stakes for Americans couldn’t be higher.

Across Trump’s runs for the presidency, he appealed directly to Americans who were tired of high-minded talk of defending the “international order,” nation building, regime change and spreading American values abroad. He tapped into popular discontent about the long, difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He vowed to put America first. But that simple phrase could mean very different things to his supporters.

One group imagined that Trump, who called his 2024 campaign the “peace ticket,” would pull back from conflicts elsewhere — in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea — and focus on problems at home. This group included Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long warned against what George Washington, in his farewell address, described as the dangers of “foreign entanglements.”

Another group wanted roughly the opposite. They wanted America to use its power more aggressively — without all the talk of our values and principles. This group includes Stephen Miller, the president’s most important advisor, who recently wrote on X that “for years the United States operated as a ‘reverse empire,’” whose military too often “enrich[ed] foreign nations” instead of our own. “All we got in return were migrants,” he claimed.

Never mind the global order we shaped in our own image, placing the United States firmly at the center. The values of liberty and freedom that we helped spread and support. The vast wealth created and accumulated through America’s global dominance.

“No more,” Miller vowed.

Here in Houston, we know that neither camp has it right. From its founding, our city has been bound up in international conflicts. Our political leaders, like President George H.W. Bush and Secretary James Baker, never shied away from our nation’s global aspirations and commitments. Our varied immigrant communities reflect the United States’ long history of foreign intervention. During the Cold War and in the decades since, hundreds of thousands of people fled the resulting violence and repression, often settling in Houston. They ultimately made us stronger and more vibrant.

Yet Miller takes the wrong lesson from this chapter in our history. The Washington Post reports that the deputy White House chief of staff even hopes to use conflict with Caracas as an excuse to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

Whatever the motivation, one of the biggest military buildups in the western hemisphere since the Cuban Missile Crisis is taking place in the waters around Venezuela. Last week, the U.S. military instituted what Trump is calling a “blockade” of the country’s sanctioned oil tankers. The Port of Galveston may become home to oil tankers seized off the coast of Venezuela. In international law, this is widely understood as an act of war. The administration has repeatedly hinted that something more serious is coming.

The Venezuelan government under Nicolás Maduro is deplorable in many ways. But the American people deserve to hear directly from the president why it is in our interest to meddle so aggressively — and what the goal is. Is there some actual just cause driving the sabre rattling, or is Miller simply so eager for mass deportation that he convinced the rest of the White House to put service members’ lives on the line as part of some grand leg