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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Trump shares debunked conspiracy theory that Minnesota Gov. Walz ordered the killing of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home as her children beg Trump to remove the post. (KMSP Minneapolis) Published January 4, 2026 4:47pm CST
https://www.fox9.com/news/president-trump-pushes-false-hortman-killing
-conspiracy-jan-4
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Fuck-Around-and-Find-Out Presidency
Truman, Reagan, and Monroe wouldn’t approve of the language, but a doctrine is a doctrine, even if it’s only five words long.
By Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker | January 5, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/trump-monroe-doc
trine-venezuela/685502/
In Marco Rubio’s telling, the stunning events in Venezuela on Saturday illustrate an essential truth—possibly the essential truth—about Donald Trump’s presidency: Global leaders cross him at their peril. “I don’t understand yet how they haven’t figured this out,” Trump’s secretary of state told reporters at Mar-a-Lago just hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
World leaders could be forgiven for not understanding the simplicity of the Trump Doctrine, especially those who assume that the world’s dominant superpower still possesses complicated mechanisms for the manufacture of foreign-policy strategies. The country that gave the world the Truman Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine as well as Trump’s apparent favorite, the Monroe Doctrine, now embraces the plainest and most ostentatiously bellicose of national-security policies: Fuck around and find out. Trump’s own Pentagon chief, the self-styled (until Congress approves the title change) secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, said as much when he told the nation that Maduro “effed around, and he found out.”
If the Fuck Around and Find Out Doctrine doesn’t sound like a concept for a stable and predictable foreign policy—one purpose of Washington’s doctrine-articulation complex—then maybe you can sympathize with those who Rubio says are still struggling to get it. Some experts reject the idea that something this crude even earns the right to be called a doctrine. As John Bolton, currently a Trump nemesis but once one of his first-term national security advisers, told us, “There is no Trump Doctrine: No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.” Kori Schake, the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned us that “we shouldn’t ennoble Trump policy by saying there’s a doctrine.”
In the early decades of the 20th century, “America First” was in part a euphemism for U.S. isolation from the ravages of war in Europe. Trump then revived the term, starting in 2016, when he promised to end America’s long post-9/11 conflicts, which cost taxpayers trillions and failed to deliver clear victories. Instead, he would prioritize domestic issues and the well-being of Americans. Yet there he was on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, vowing to “run Venezuela for the foreseeable future.” And if that involves a bit of nation building and American boots on the ground, well, so be it. Trump, it turns out, seems to believe that a little foreign adventurism is just fine, as long as he’s the one doing the adventuring. It was a departure from his previous instinct to limit his foreign interventions to short, kinetic bursts of force—an unofficial one-and-done doctrine—visible in his first-term strike on the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani and his more recent decision to dispatch U.S. bombers deep into Iran.
“Rebuilding is not a bad thing, in Venezuela’s case; the country has gone to hell,” Trump told our colleague Michael Scherer in an interview yesterday. But when asked why similar actions in Iraq were an abomination, the president punted. “That was Bush,” Trump said. “You’ll have to ask Bush that question, because we should have never gone into Iraq. That started the Middle East disaster.” (In a separate Atlantic interview last year, Trump said that “America First” is whatever he says it is: “Considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”)
The White House quickly embraced the newly articulated doctrine, circulating after Saturday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference an image of a determined-looking Trump striding up steps, with the caption—you guessed it—“FAFO.” Another administration publicity push featured Ru
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Pentagon Official on Venezuela War: “Following the Old, Failed Scripts”
By Nick Turse | January 5 2026, 3:30 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-war/
Early Saturday morning, after cloud cover lifted, elite Army Delta Force commandos moved in. With support from CIA covert operators and other military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel, they carried out the Trump administration’s audacious regime-change project in Venezuela, upending global order and shattering what remains of geopolitical norms.
As the day wore on, the full scope of the operation became clear: The U.S. had attacked a sovereign nation with which it was not at war and did so without congressional authorization; kidnapped its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and rendered them to the United States; announced plans to “run” that country as a de facto colony; and threatened further attacks and military occupation unless the acting president does America’s bidding.
“We’re in charge,” Trump said of Venezuela on Sunday night, speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “We’re going to run everything.”
Reflecting on the operation, dubbed Absolute Resolve, a senior defense official called America a “rogue state” and pronounced dead the liberal rules-based geopolitical order which U.S. administrations, of both parties, have championed since World War II.
“His powers are rooted in the fearmongering post-9/11 decisions creating emergency powers that were never reined back in.”
“It’s crazy how we are following the old, failed scripts: Topple government. Make no plans for the aftermath,” the senior defense official said. “We must face the reality Trump has no limits. His powers are rooted in the fearmongering post-9/11 decisions creating emergency powers that were never reined back in.”
The administration has justified Absolute Resolve by citing the president’s authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.
Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the attack was a clear violation of international law and the administration’s justifications are baseless.
“Countries cannot go around the world using force against other states merely due to criminal activity. On this point the administration has put forward one of the most groundless legal arguments,” Harrison told The Intercept. “What happened on January 3 was clearly an offensive, not a defensive, mission, and an act of aggression in violation of the U.N. charter and customary international law.”
“There’s a pervasive corrosive fear in the Pentagon among those of us opposed to Trump and his policies,” the senior defense official told The Intercept. “We have supported the country and the institutions for decades and now watch as they are being dismantled.”
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to repeated requests for comment concerning the statements by the senior defense official.
Forever Wars
Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly threatened continued war in Venezuela, as the U.S. maintains a massive military presence in the Caribbean, including the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. “We’re prepared,” Trump said of possible follow-up strikes on Venezuela. “You know, we have a second wave that’s much bigger than the first wave.”
He also threatened that the “American armada remains poised in position, and the United States retains all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied.”
Trump also left the door open to a full-scale military occupation. “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said.
Trump said that the U.S. intends to employ Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as a puppet under threat of further U.S. attacks.
“If Maduro’s vice president — if the vice president does what we want, we won’t have to do that,” he said of a military occupation. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday th
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The Emperor’s New Oil Wealth
The truth behind Trump’s black, sticky fantasy
By Paul Krugman | Jan 07, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-oil-wealth
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he claimed that the goal was to establish a democratic regime. Some members of his administration may even have believed that. But many leftist critics insisted that it was all about seizing Iraq’s oil.
Although I was an outspoken opponent of that war, and deeply cynical about the Bush administration’s motives, I never believed the “war for oil” story. The principal motivation for the war, I still believe, was to wag the dog — to use a showy military victory to secure Bush’s reelection. According to some political scientists, that was a mission the war did, in fact, accomplish.
Donald Trump’s Venezuela venture is a very different story. During his triumphalist press conference after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Trump never used the word “democracy.” He did, however, say “oil” 27 times, declaring, “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”
Even so, whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.
You may have heard that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 300 billion barrels. You probably don’t know that Venezuela’s reported oil reserves tripled while Hugo Chavez was president. This increase, from roughly 100 billion to 300 billion barrels, didn’t reflect major new discoveries or exploration. Instead, it reflected the Chavez government’s decision to reclassify the country’s Orinoco Belt heavy oil as “proved” — oil that can be recovered with reasonable certainty under existing economic and operating conditions:
Source: Torsten Slok
As Torsten Slok of Apollo, who recently made this point, notes, “Much of the oil is extra-heavy, which has low recovery and a high cost to produce.” This suggests that Venezuela’s claims to have immense usable oil reserves were politically motivated hype.
This view is supported by the fact that the huge increase in Venezuela’s reported oil reserves wasn’t followed by a surge in production. On the contrary, Venezuelan oil production soon plunged:
Source: Torsten Slok
Plunging production was associated with a steady degradation of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, which would take years and many billions of dollars in investment to restore. Given these costs as well as political instability, major oil companies clearly aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of sinking money into Venezuela.
On Monday Trump suggested that he might reimburse oil companies for investment in the nation he claims — with no basis in reality — to control, reimbursing them for their outlays there. That is, we’ve gone in a matter of days from big talk about huge money-making opportunities to a proposal to, in effect, subsidize oil-industry investments in Venezuela at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
Which is not to say that nobody has profited from the abduction of Maduro. A few months ago Trumpist billionaire Paul Singer bought Citgo, the former U.S.-based arm of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo owns three Gulf Coast refineries custom-built to process Venezuelan crude, refineries that have suffered from the U.S. embargo on imports of that crude. If Trump lifts that embargo, Singer will receive a huge windfall. But this windfall will have nothing to do with reviving Venezuelan production.
Singer has made huge politi
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Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall arch, dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial
The White House stands about 70 feet tall. The Lincoln Memorial is roughly 100 feet. The triumphal arch President Donald Trump wants to build would eclipse both.
The planned Independence Arch is intended to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. Trump has considered smaller versions of the arch, including 165-foot-high and 123-foot-high designs he shared at a dinner last year. But he has favored the largest option, arguing that its sheer size would impress visitors to Washington, and that ‘250 for 250’ makes the most sense.
Trump told Politico in December that he hoped to begin construction of the arch within two months. Memorial Circle, the plot of land that the president has eyed, is controlled by the National Park Service.
“The one that people know mostly is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. And we’re gonna top it by, I think, a lot,” Trump said at a White House Christmas reception in December.
The Arc de Triomphe — already one of the world’s largest triumphal arches — measures 164 feet.
Trump on Jan. 23 also posted images on his Truth Social platform that depict a large triumphal arch with gold gilding — a hallmark of Trump’s construction projects.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-wants-to-build-a-250-foot-tall
-arch-dwarfing-the-lincoln-memorial/ar-AA1Vnzel
The Arc de Trump may become Trump's final resting place . . . a suitably large monument to a large personality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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President Trump said Sunday he will move to close Washington's Kennedy Center performing arts center. Trump's announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations by leading performers and groups since the president ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695832/kennedy-center-renovation
s-trump
Trump’s “justification” for closing the performing arts center? Not because artists refuse to perform there since naming it after himself, but because the building will be rebuilt to Trump’s specifications. Expect Trump’s name on every wall in gold.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I'm glad the site is back up so we can keep up with your daily record of lies and failed predictions.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.
Authoritarian rule would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be co-opted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.
The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.
But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.
As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,
Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary, if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc., think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and af
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Let's start with the US Constitution. The founders understood that if the American Republic was going to survive, it needed to prevent the possibility of foreign states corrupting its leadership. They were so worried about this happening that they added in the very first article of the Constitution what has come to be known as the emoluments clause.
It was not subtle.
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
No US office holder should be allowed to accept presents or awards etc from any foreign state. To reinforce their worries about corruption, the founders made it, or “Bribery”, an explicit part of the impeachment process which was in Article 2.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
And these restrictions while not perfect, were accepted by all parties. Now we have an administration that is openly selling itself, and America’s most important secrets, to foreign states and the guardrails are not only failing, they hardly seem to exist. In fact, the guardrails are collapsing in a haze of gold-plated, crypto shininess.
Step inside Donald Trump's new presidential jet. Picture: Altitude Jet
The lavish interior of the Boeing jumbo jet gifted to Trump—that is quite an emolument.
Let's start with some stories about present payoffs going to the administration. What we see are what seems to be straightforward payments, bribes, emoluments, call them what you will, that result in policy changes.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/no-the-guardrails-are-not-holdi
ng
Examples of Trump changing policy based on bribes
https://www.google.com/search?q=examples+of+Trump+changing+policy+base
d+upon+bribes
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This Uniquely American Legal Kink Threatening to Destroy Democracy
By Dahlia Lithwick | Feb 03, 2026 2:16 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/trump-law-bush-yoo-memo-mo
rality-torture-minneapolis.html
There is a uniquely American kink that holds that what really matters in terms of presidential policies and conduct is the question of whether something is “legal” as opposed to moral. In an essay for the Boston Review headlined “The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public,” professor Joseph Margulies argues that if conduct is deemed permissible simply because a mediocre law student can pen a mediocre legal memo justifying it, the country is in far deeper trouble than it presently comprehends. On this week’s Amicus podcast, he explained to Dahlia Lithwick that the inclination to fetishize that which can be justified legally has a way of opening the door to atrocities that cannot be tolerated.
Dahlia Lithwick: In your article, you draw out the fact that lawyers are extremely uneasy about invoking the language of morality, because morality is either too malleable or just sanctimonious and annoying. I think your point is that the law — dis-aggregated from morality — becomes an endless series of hollow CYA (cover-your-ass) memos to be deployed by any given administration to justify absolutely anything from torture at Gitmo to blowing up fishing vessels in the Caribbean?
Joseph Margulies: Yes. And that which is taking place in Minneapolis—and not simply in Minneapolis, but most pointedly in Minneapolis—ought not be framed as: “Is that lawful?” It ought to be framed as: “Is that right?” Are we going to allow a masked, heavily armed secret police force to march through the city all but unchecked, and checked only by the voluntary surveillance—to the extent they are checked—by plain citizens at their peril? A secret police force that, at least it appears at this point, enjoys absolute impunity?
Those are profoundly moral questions. Those are moral judgments. Have we lost the capacity to say this is simply wrong? That this is a grotesque obscenity and cannot be allowed to continue?
This is no longer simply a question of, “Is it a violation of the 10th Amendment?” That’s what they’re litigating in front of Judge Menendez. Or, “Is ICE violating judicial orders?” Answer: “Yes, there’s 96 of them.” The lawyers are fighting that out. Stop it. This is a horrible, grotesque, and ongoing wrong, and that’s the level at which we need to engage.
Why is it that we substitute what I call our legal voice for our moral voice? This is a country that purports to worship, and I use that term advisedly, the rule of law. We tend to believe that legality establishes rightness, establishes legitimacy. So when a question is posed: “Can they do that?” The answer is usually given in terms of: “Yes, of course, it’s all perfectly legal.” Over time, we lose the capacity to render moral objections, even when what is being done is unspeakably grotesque, because we simply don’t engage these muscles.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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