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 424 of 479
The U.S. government added $696 billion to the national debt over the past four months, the Congressional Budget Office reports. That is $2.1 trillion for 12 months. Trump will keep going at that rate until he doubles the National Debt pretty damn quick.
https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/cbo-estimates-696-billion-deficit-
first-four-months-fy-2026
But what about the DOGE promise to cut spending by $2 trillion per year? The cut didn’t happen!
https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-produced-largest-peacetime-workforce-cu
t-record-spending-kept-rising-0
Verified DOGE budget cuts stood at just $2 billion. That is a long way from $2 trillion.
https://manhattan.institute/article/the-actual-math-behind-doges-cuts
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised not just to end inflation but to reduce prices. He has failed to deliver.
His response to failure has been to gaslight the public. Reuters reports:
In five speeches on the economy since December, Trump asserted that inflation had been beaten or was way down almost 20 times and said prices were falling almost 30 times, assertions at odds with economic data and voters’ daily experiences.
It isn’t working: 52 percent of Americans say that Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while only 28 percent say that he’s made it better.
And plunging approval ratings for the economy aren’t the only way stubborn inflation, currently hovering close to 3%, hurts Trump. It also undermines any case for the Federal Reserve to deliver a big cut in short-term interest rates, which Trump constantly demands. Granted, the Fed cut rates in 2024 and 2025 in response to a steep decline in inflation from its 2022 peak. But there’s little justification for further cuts, especially big ones, with inflation stubbornly above the Fed’s 2 percent target.
So what can Trump’s yes-men do?
Trump hasn’t made a rational argument for lower interest rates. Instead, he seems to believe that rate cuts should be his reward for overseeing a “hot” economy. Understanding that this makes no sense, Trump’s economic policy minions have converged on a different, ostensibly more economically rational reason to cut interest rates: AI.
Recently Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed to the Federal Reserve Board, and Kevin Warsh, his choice as Fed chair, have all argued that the coming AI-led boom in productivity justifies slashing interest rates now. The script goes like this: AI will lead to a surge in productivity; higher productivity will reduce production costs and thereby reduce inflation; and the coming fall in inflation justifies much lower interest rates now.
I will admit that this story isn’t completely nonsensical, unlike what Trump has been spouting. Yes, AI could reduce production costs and, other things equal, reduce inflation. However, both theory and historical experience say that the supposed benefits of AI aren’t a reason to cut interest rates now and almost certainly won’t be a reason to cut them in the future.
The alacrity with which Trump officials have jumped on the argument that the Fed should slash rates because of AI is troubling for reasons that go beyond the fact that they’re wrong. Did Bessent, or Warsh, or Miran carefully consider the evidence and advocate an interest-rate policy based on what that evidence showed? Of course not. Their boss wants to slash interest rates, so they went looking for plausible-sounding economic arguments that might rationalize his whims.
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-ai-doesnt-justify-lower-interest
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:Quote:Trump announced his theft of Canadian property yesterday evening
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.
Nobody wants to hear it.
You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.
You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Cool.
What now?
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Trump is kind of like a bank robber who emails a threat to the bank: "Give me all the money!" Presidents should not attempt to rob Canada. Or banks.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Cool.
What now?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How America Got So Sick
The health of a nation reflects the health of a democracy.
By Vann R. Newkirk II | February 9, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/american-public-health-de
mocracy/685727/
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.
In the winter of 168 C.E., the famed Greek physician Galen arrived in Aquileia, an Italian city on the northern edge of the Adriatic. The city had grown large since its founding as a Roman colony, but during the 200-year Pax Romana, its fortifications had been allowed to deteriorate. After an armed group of migrating Germanic peoples had crossed the Danube a year earlier, the Roman co-emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, had rushed to the city, raising two legions and rebuilding its defenses; they planned to use it as a base of operations against the invaders.
Galen had been summoned, however, to help fight a different kind of invader. A plague, likely an early variant of smallpox, had traveled to Aquileia with the troops, and held the city in its grip. The emperors fled, but Verus succumbed to the disease on the road to Rome. Galen tried to slow the wave of illness, but most of the people in Aquileia perished.
They represented just a sliver of the eventual victims of the Antonine Plague, also known as Galen’s Plague, which killed at least 1 million people throughout the Roman empire. It was possibly the world’s first true pandemic, and haunted the empire for the rest of the Pax Romana, which ended in 180 with Aurelius’s death. The details of the pandemic—the exact pathogen, the true number of victims—are subjects of debate, and might never be fully settled. But some research has cited the Antonine Plague as part of a vicious cycle that hastened Rome’s long fall. Food shortages, internal migrations, and overcrowding had already signaled a slippage in imperial power, and created a fertile environment for disease. The pandemic, in turn, spread panic and left behind mistrust, weakening faith in civic and religious authorities.
Men famously think about Rome every day, and political commentators have been nervously comparing Rome’s fall to a potential American collapse since before America even had a Constitution. But Rome’s example really does merit consideration in light of recent events. One of the better measures of a society’s vitality is its ability to protect its citizens from disease, and the two often move in tandem; a decline in one may produce a reduction in the other.
Infectious disease is probably not an imminent threat to the United States’ survival. Still, after nearly a century of existence, the American public-health apparatus, which has driven some of the most remarkable advances in global longevity and quality of life in human history, is teetering. The country has lost much of its ability to keep microbes from invading its body politic, and progress in life expectancy and other metrics is slowing or even reversing.
It is tempting to lay these changes all at the feet of President Trump and his current health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who together have shredded America’s global-health organizations, drawn back public-health funding, fomented vaccine skepticism, and begun to dismantle child-vaccination programs. But the “Make America Healthy Again” moment is in some ways just another step in the long retreat of the civic trust and communitarian spirit that have enabled America’s disease-fighting efforts. If this retreat continues, the public-health era—the century-long period of unprecedented epidemiological safety that has been the foundation for so many other breakthroughs—will come to an end. And that end will have dire consequences for this republic and its future.
In January 2025, a hospital in West Texas began reporting that children were coming in sick with measles. The cases were initially clustered in a Mennonite community, where vaccination rates had been low in recent decades. But soon the outbreak spread around the state, and to others; the reported number of cases rea
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The Banality of MAGA Evil
Instead of criminal masterminds we got amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick
Paul Krugman | Feb 11, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-maga-evil
. . . Before joining Trump’s cabinet, Lutnick ran the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald — presenting a huge potential conflict of interest that he claims to have ended by turning the business over to … his sons. Cantor Fitzgerald, in turn, is intimately linked to Tether, a cryptocurrency that is highly profitable because it has become a favorite channel for money-laundering by international criminals.
Nor was money-laundering through cryptocurrency the only criminal conspiracy to which Lutnick was, at the very least, adjacent. Lutnick has in the past vehemently denied having any association with Jeffrey Epstein, insisting that he severed all contact with the pedophile ringleader in 2005. But even the highly limited, extremely redacted release of the Epstein files — everything we’ve seen reeks of a major cover-up — shows that he was flat-out lying. Not only did he stay in close contact with Epstein, the two men appear to have gone into business together.
But, at this point, who could possibly be surprised? The more we learn, the more pedophilia and criminal use of cryptocurrency look related, even like different aspects of a single conspiracy. Epstein, it turns out, was a major early investor in the crypto industry. In the backrooms of MAGA-land, passing around under-age girls is a lot like passing around insider crypto deals.
In any previous administration, Lutnick’s naked conflicts of interest and his Epstein lies would have led to his immediate departure. But Trump 47 is using his position to massively enrich himself . . .
Lutnick may be under wraps for a while, but don’t expect him to resign. Pushing him out would be a tacit admission that huge conflicts of interest, family business that enables crime and association with sexual predators are bad. Oh, and let’s not forget jaw-dropping stupidity. Not going to happen.
. . .
So it’s worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s observations about the architects of Hitler’s genocide, which led her to coin the phrase “the banality of evil”. As Arendt noted, the horrors of Nazism were not inflicted by brilliant geniuses, but through the normalization of thoughtless, amoral behavior that eventually turned into evil. Thus while Lutnick appears on the surface like a dim-witted backroom grifter, he is a warning of something far more sinister and malign lurking below.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oops! Trump just inadvertently spiked his own Supreme Court Tariffs case
By Ed Mazza | Feb 11. 2026
President Donald Trump is taking heat for making a wild claim about how he concocted at least one of his tariffs and it seems to undermine his own argument for imposing them in the first place.
“I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland,” he told Larry Kudlow during a Fox Business interview that aired on Tuesday. “They were paying no tariffs, sending stuff over here like nobody could believe.”
Trump claimed the United States had a $42 billion trade deficit with Switzerland, a number similar to one he’d used before and one that analysts said ignored trade in services, which actually put the deficit at $8 billion.
Trump said he imposed a 30% tariff on goods from Switzerland, leading to “an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland.”
But that call didn’t seem to go the way Trump wanted.
“She was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive,” he said. “And I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised her to 39%.”
There are a few problems with Trump’s claims, starting with the fact that Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister.
Trump’s conversation last year was likely with then-Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, and occurred after he threatened to raise tariffs on the country to 39%. However, that tariff was later reduced to 15% after a Swiss delegation gave Trump several gifts, including a Rolex watch and a gold bar. The decision to give him those items is now under investigation in Switzerland for violating Swiss anti-bribery laws.
But beyond the error and beyond the casual misogyny of Trump once again attacking a woman because he doesn’t like how she talks to him, there was the larger issue of the tariffs themselves. Last year, Trump’s attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that he needed to act without Congress on the issue because trade imbalances had created a “national emergency” that the president was trying to address via tariffs. Yet, saying he can raise and lower tariffs because of someone’s attitude undermines that argument.
With the court case still pending, Trump’s critics are pointing to the new interview and wondering if the justices were paying attention: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/oops-critics-think-trump-just-
inadvertently-spiked-his-own-supreme-court-case/ar-AA1W6v0a
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now. Maybe They Should Be.
By Christina Cauterucci | Feb 11, 2026
https://slate.com/life/2026/02/gun-range-safety-gay-lesbian-lgbtq-trum
p.html
My Gun and Me
If you had told this urban progressive lesbian 10 years ago that I’d own a gun, I would have laughed in your face. Now I can’t let my weapon go — and I’m far from alone.
. . . Two years later, as anecdotal reports tell of record numbers of LGBTQ+ people seeking out firearms for self-protection, I think back on that moment as a foreboding encapsulation of the dissonant reality we now inhabit. We film ICE traffic stops outside queer parties before going back inside to dance. We use our gay group chats to plan outings to the bar, and also to share packing lists for go bags. In the morning, we get tipsy at a birthday brunch, letting our children defile our friends’ furniture. In the evening, we research golden-visa options in case the government tells us those children are no longer ours.
In the shadow of Donald Trump’s second term in office, and amid the clear threat and increasing reality of political violence, some queer friends are learning to handle firearms, purchasing new weapons, or researching rifles for defense. Together, we talk through worst-case scenarios that would have seemed fantastical just months ago, imagining ourselves into a million futures that seem possible and unthinkable in equal measure.
Sometimes we don’t even have to imagine. Last month, Renée Nicole Good, a queer mother and poet, was shot to death by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Afterward, another agent dismissed her as “that lesbian bitch.” The message was not subtle. Her sexuality was deployed to justify her killing, casting her as a queer agitator who had been put in her place.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot
Feb. 10, 2026
Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration has taken an aggressive stance against mRNA technology.
The move is the latest sign that the FDA, under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is slow-walking vaccine approvals and taking a harder line on shots that use messenger RNA technology.
Last year, Kennedy ordered that all new vaccines go through placebo-controlled clinical trials. When vaccines are already available for a disease, it is unethical to give clinical trial participants a placebo, rather than compare the new vaccine to the existing one. Giving a placebo would leave people who would be otherwise protected vulnerable to infection.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has downplayed the benefits of vaccines and has singled out vaccines made with mRNA as particularly dangerous, calling the mRNA Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-declines-review-moderna
s-mrna-flu-shot-rcna258436
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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