Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Slavery and Tariffs
For Trumpists, forced labor is the new fentanyl
By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/slavery-and-tariffs
So the Trump administration thinks that slavery is bad. Actually not, but they're using that as an excuse for tariffs. Hi, Paul Krugman here. Another brief video update. It's Friday. We're still bombing Iran. Iran is still blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and that's our prime fixation these days. But meanwhile, tariff policy goes on.
Now, you probably know the story. Donald Trump used some dubious legal maneuvering to impose a lot of tariffs without consulting Congress, without getting legislation. The Supreme Court ruled that most of those were illegal. They took their time about doing it, but now those tariffs, the IEPA tariffs, which were about 70% of the whole thing, are gone.
They have been somewhat replaced by another dubious legal invocation, in this case section 122. Instead of alphabet soup this is all kind of number soup which is also illegal but that may be moot because it's also time limited and that will expire in July.
Also it's not satisfactory to the Trump people because it's not discretionary. It's a flat across the board 10% tariff and what they want to do is be able to say to countries, be nice to us, give us what we want, and we will give you a break on tariffs. And Section 122 doesn't let them do that. So they have been scrambling to find replacements, and it looks like the main attempt now is to use Section 301, which is unfair foreign trading practices. Now, we were kind of wondering, I was wondering, what would they use to do Section 301s against a large part of the world? And it turns out that a large part of the answer is they're trying to invoke a clause that sanctions countries that somehow or other either engage in or fail to deal with other countries engaging in forced labor, effectively slavery. Which is, you know, that's real. The U.S. has longstanding sanctions against some Chinese exports because of, you know, they do do forced labor.
But the reported plan is to bring Section 301 forced labor cases against 60 trading partners, including the European Union, which does not do forced labor, which in fact has its own laws against importing goods produced with forced labor. But the claim is going to be that the European Union, along with 59 other trading partners, does not do enough to limit trade with countries that make use of forced labor. That's a pretty wild thing to be doing. And it may seem uncharacteristic. Do you believe that the Trump administration is deeply concerned about forced labor? Yeah, well, if you believe that, I've got some shoes that don't fit to sell you.
This is obviously an excuse. What makes it especially galling is that, if anything, we know that significant figures in the Trump administration are just fine with forced labor. Pete Hegseth likes a pastor who is on record as saying that he thought that slavery in the South before the Civil War was a good thing. It helped to create racial harmony. So they have nothing against slavery. This is just a device. And it's especially shameful. And the argument that we can put tariffs on the European Union because they're not doing enough to stop the importation of goods produced with forced labor. It's just crazy. Also, they're rushing to get this stuff through, so they're su
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The U.S. Mint dropped the olive branch from the dime. What does that mean for the country?
By Catherina Gioino | March 12, 2026, 7:22 PM ET
https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/
The new design shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right.
What does the olive branch mean?
When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.
Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.
The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s last diplomatic appeal to King George III before the war escalated beyond return.
Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy, and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.
Much more at https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/
Quote:
The U.S. Mint unveiled new designs for the country’s 250th anniversary and it left out one key detail: the olive branch from the newly designed dime. The new reverse shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right, with beneath, the inscription “Liberty over Tyranny.”
For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.
Unchanged since 1946, the Roosevelt dime is now replaced by a modern Liberty figure on the front, solely for one year as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The U.S. Mint is marking the Semiquincentennial with a sweeping redesign of the coinage, something not undertaken since the 1976 Bicentennial. Authorized by Congress, the change touches the dime, quarter, half dollar, penny, and dollar coin, all bearing 1776–2026 dates.
The olive branch has anchored American iconography for 250 years—its absence from the very coin marking that anniversary is a curious choice, if not a telling one.
What does the olive branch mean?
When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.
The arrows—not for lack of symbolism, take a wild guess why there are 13 of them—are in the eagle’s left talon, the traditionally thought-of weaker and subordinate side. Meant to represent the power of war and military preparedness, the arrows clutched in the left talon signal that although the U.S. is always armed and ready, force is not its first instinct.
Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.
The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s lasNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
If they want to keep giving everyone free everything, including the 59 Million Muslims they've let inside their borders in the last 10 years, they're going to have to find a way to do that while they pay their fair share.
America is no longer subsidizing the rest of the world while racking up any more to add to our current $39 Trillion debt.
I'm sure they can figure something out.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.” Ms. Wiles didn’t mean it literally (Mr. Trump is, in fact, a teetotaler) but offered it as an insight into the president’s own sense of invincibility, his belief “that there’s nothing he can’t do.” 6ix is intoxicated by his self-evaluation of never being wrong, always being the smartest guy in the room, the same as Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Iran endgame tests Trump’s govern-by-instinct style
By Linda Feldmann | March 13, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0313/trump-iran-strategy-e
ndgame
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s supporters say his decision to attack Iran reflects his leadership style of swift, unilateral action. Others see it as impetuous. As the president hints at an endgame, huge questions – over the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian nuclear program, and the country’s leadership – remain.
President Donald Trump has long described his decision-making style as relying on gut and instinct rather than lengthy deliberation with aides and experts.
Almost a year ago, after first imposing and then pausing massive global tariffs, President Trump told reporters his decisions going forward would be made “instinctively, more than anything else.”
By all appearances, the same modus operandi seems to have played out in one of the most momentous decisions a president can make: whether to go to war. When asked by a reporter last week if Israel had forced the United States’ hand against Iran, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had implied, Mr. Trump offered a different explanation.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Mr. Trump said during an Oval Office appearance with the chancellor of Germany. “So if anything, I might’ve forced Israel’s hand.”
Mr. Trump’s Iran campaign has upset some prominent MAGA commentators who took seriously his promises of “no more foreign wars” and the motto “America First.” Many have also accused the president of failing to “sell” or even fully explain the war’s goals to the American people. The administration has put forward various objectives over the past two weeks, from eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat to changing the regime to destroying Iran’s navy and missile capabilities.
Yet longtime observers and those who know Mr. Trump say his decision to attack Iran was entirely in line with a leadership style that has always opted for swift, unilateral action over governing-by-committee caution. “America First,” they say, has never been synonymous with isolationism, but sometimes means pushing aside failing institutions to address threats head-on.
“He’s willing to take risk, and he’s basically elevating a willingness to take risk over process,” Nadia Schadlow, a deputy national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term, recently told New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein. “If the risk is higher of inaction rather than action – and clearly the White House thought that – that’s why they chose to go forward.”
To others, Mr. Trump’s approach appears not so much decisive as impetuous. “It’s never complicated with Trump,” says author Chris Whipple, who gained insight into the president’s world over the course of 11 interviews last year with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “He cares about two things, strength and winning. So it’s war by whim.”
The same could be said of Mr. Trump’s risky military incursion into Venezuela in January to arrest its president, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him back to the U.S. to face federal charges, including narco-terrorism. The bold move was an operational success, but the verdict is still out on the future of Venezuelan governance, where acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Mr
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Phillips O'Brien on Iran
How clueless are our leaders? Very
Another month, another war — this one looking like a complete c*******k. (British slang term for a complete mess, failure, or blunder.)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/phillips-obrien-on-iran
Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman here with another conversation with my favorite military historian/expert, Phillips O’Brien. We do this every time there’s a new war, which means I guess we’re gonna be having a lot of them at the rate we’ve been going.
Phillips O’Brien: Yeah, I’ll see you when he attacks Cuba, right? That’s the next one. So we have Iran now, and then Cuba in a few weeks, I think.
Krugman: I’m not sure we have the resources for Cuba, but yeah. So okay. We’re recording this a bit less than two weeks into this new war with Iran. There are a couple of specific areas I wanna talk about, but first, do you have anything to say that might be a useful starting point?
O’Brien: I don’t think they know what they’re doing. And I don’t think that they had a plan. He basically did what megalomaniac leaders do. They underestimate their enemy and they think they will do this quickly. It’s what Putin did to Ukraine in 2022. “We will just march in, we’ll do what we want. We have this great military.” He was boasting about American military power, and I think he just thought this would be relatively straightforward. He liked to refer to the Venezuela model and I think he thought, ‘okay, what I’m gonna do is blow up the leadership, kill the leadership, and then I’ll get a new leadership that will be much more compliant and do what I want. I don’t wanna actually bring any kind of freedom or democracy to the Iranian people.’ Because, by the way, he’s talking about a leader for the next five to 10 years. So he is actually talking about putting another authoritarian in place. And he thought it would happen, a little bit harder than Venezuela it seems, but not much harder. And he completely underestimated what he was taking on. And what he’s done is caught himself without a strategic plan. They never thought through the second and third order effects, they were nowhere down wondering what would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was cut and they couldn’t get anything out of the Gulf. And I think they’re just making it up now as they go along.
Krugman: Yeah. That’s what we’re all seeing. I wanna come back to that a bit, but, your specialty has been air power, sea power, and strategically how wars are fought that way. And in a way the United States came in with “the O’Brien Supremacy.” We have vastly more, in normal terms or in historic terms, complete air superiority. We have the Navy but actually, let’s talk first about air power. In some ways it seems more effective. It can do big things.
O’Brien: Well, the United States and Israel can blow up anything they want in Iran. Or practically anything they want in Iran. They can’t get to the deep nuclear stuff, or at least they don’t. They’re not sure if they can get to it, but otherwise they could blow up any target on the ground they want to blow up and there’s nothing the Iranians can do about it. Their air defenses, from what we can tell, have mostly been neutralized.
The issue with air power is, it’s great for blowing things up if you have air supremacy, but it’s not great for putting anything else in its place. And this is what they hadn’t worked out. They thought, ‘Okay, we’ll blow things up and something we want will come along and start ruling Iran in a way that we’d like.’ They also didn’t understand that Iran has air power. Not to defend itself, but to strike back. So they totally missed the Iranian capacity to strike back. And Iran has struck back with very cheap drones and very cheap sea drones from what we can tell. And so the Americans haven’t been able to take out Iran’s strike power coming back at them. And it’s why we’re left in this situation.
The US and Israel can destroy anything they want in Iran. And that’s what they’re doing every night. But that doesn’t leave them in the ability to ke
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Joe Rogan says Trump, 79, 'doesn't have much to lose’ because he is about to die soon.
On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience Rogan said that Trump’s advanced age means that he is more likely to engage in conflicts because he won’t be around to face the repercussions.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5780884-joe-rogan-trump-tu
rning-80
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Epstein’s Revelations
By Liel Leibovitz | March 12, 2026
https://firstthings.com/epsteins-revelations/
Far from a mere sordid distraction or an endless supply of tabloid slop, the Epstein files may just be the most important revelation we’ve witnessed in a century or more. The contents tell us much about who we are, what we value, and where, if we’re not careful, we might end up.
More precisely, the files expose three colossal failures, each of which is a cautionary tale worth contemplating at length.
First, and most obviously, let us condemn Washington. In succumbing to petty political pressures and agreeing to release the files, the federal government cracked its knuckles and tossed two centuries of intricate legislation concerning our right to privacy into the dustbin.
Imagine, for example, being Melinda Gates and sipping your morning coffee knowing that, though you’ve committed no transgression, the entire world is now informed that your ex-husband had a plot to clandestinely feed you medication to treat sexually transmitted diseases he’d caught by cavorting with Russian mistresses.
In 1890, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren warned us about the grave damage done by precisely such blatant disregard for our right to be left alone. “To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers,” they wrote.
To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.
Rather than act as a wise guardian of its citizens and their inimitable interests, our government sided with the pornographers and semi-pornographers known as journalists, supplying them with smut and encouraging them to peddle it. Which would’ve been bad enough, had Washington not committed another, far graver sin: In releasing the files, the government admitted, however tacitly, that it is no longer really interested in the rule of law.
Once upon a time not so long ago, before Russiagate and other egregious examples of weaponized law enforcement agencies mobilized to score partisan points, it was assumed that Americans could kinda, sorta trust at least some of the arms of the federal government to conduct investigations fairly, efficiently, and discreetly, if not always, then at least some of the time. A responsible administration would’ve seized this opportunity to make the rule of law great again; this administration chose to dispense with the formalities of trained professionals sifting through relevant data in search of actionable items and let the public be judge, jury, and executioner instead. Yes, shame on Jeffrey Epstein, but also shame on those in office who decided to release his emails for all to see.
The files were searched in a feeding frenzy to find dirt with which to smear enemies. As we recognized that our government had invited us into a Hobbesian state of war of all against all, it was difficult not to think of that seminal exchange in A Man for All Seasons, in which the lawyer William Roper squares off against the great Sir Thomas More. “So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!” thunders Roper, to which Sir Thomas replies, “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Sounding a lot like those benighted bobos mouthing off on social media, Roper barely hesitates before answering. He bellows, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” But Sir Thomas has the last word: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil tur
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I haven't had a drink in over 9 years and 3 months. No A/A, no self-help books, no external help of any kind required.
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:If you have had zero drinks for 9 years and 3 months, you ARE an alcoholic who cannot control himself, unable to limit himself to only one or two drinks per day.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I haven't had a drink in over 9 years and 3 months. No A/A, no self-help books, no external help of any kind required.
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
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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