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 454 of 479
Quote:The Mysterious Obsession With Obama’s Fake Son
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I'm certainly not going to be reading any part of that wall of text from one of your intellectual idiots.
I've been telling you for a year and a half that your world is dead and it's never coming back.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Would he look like Trayvon Martin?
By Jonathan Chait | May 1, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/obama-son-trayvon-martin/687
018/
“If Obama had a son, he’d attack the White House Correspondents Dinner like Cole Allen,” Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and prominent libertarian activist, wrote on X earlier this week.
The claim that a former president’s hypothetical son would have attempted to assassinate President Trump is insane. Barnett’s hypothesizing about the motives of a nonexistent male child of Barack Obama is part of a conservative fixation that’s detached from historical reality. Yet it feeds a collective sense of victimization that Trump shares and has deftly exploited.
The reference, for those who don’t closely follow conservative news sources, was to a line Obama uttered in 2012. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Black leaders criticized the president for failing to speak out. Obama, appearing in the Rose Garden, said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Ever since, the political right has turned the phrase into a notorious synecdoche for the Obama presidency. Conservatives continue to repeat the line, years later, which is why Barnett was able to reference it as shorthand. For some on the right, Obama’s remark is the most emblematic moment of his presidency, hauled out again and again by Fox News, Breitbart, and other right-leaning news outlets to remind them of his responsibility for racial strife.
As Ben Shapiro put it last year on Ezra Klein’s podcast, “The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America—which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream. And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white-supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot. And: My son could have been Trayvon.”
Shapiro explained, “The reaction of the right was: This is an interest group–based politics that does not particularly like the founding, and we are going to react to that with Trumpism.”
It is hardly unusual for a president to acknowledge his ethnic heritage. Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden liked to play up their Irish American background. Just this week, Trump touted his mother’s Scottish background.
It may feel to conservatives as though Obama was talking about his race all the time; perhaps that is because they keep reminding one another of the rare prominent instance he did so. Obama delivered a memorably nuanced address about race as a candidate, then mostly avoided mention of it throughout his presidency. If Obama had spoken about his race more frequently, conservatives would not rely so heavily on the singular example. His remark about Martin being Black like him has been endlessly repeated by conservatives because it was the exception rather than the rule.
It is true that the American political discourse around race changed during and after Obama’s presidency. Progressive Americans became more conscious of racism, and many white Americans grew more resentful. In progressive spaces, it became common for mob-style panics to hyperbolize trauma and shut down criticism.
Yet Obama was an early and forceful critic of that tendency. He attacked the left over and over and
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
How Trump Screwed Himself
Talking with Greg Sargent
Paul Krugman
May 02, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-trump-screwed-himself
I’m sort of on vacation, and didn’t do an interview this week. However, I talked with Greg Sargent of The New Republic from my hotel.
Transcript
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Donald Trump rejected a proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This offer would have set aside questions about Iran’s nuclear program for now. That may be why Trump rejected it. But there’s another possible reason—accepting that deal wouldn’t make him look as if he’s winning. Yet this comes as gas and oil prices continue to rise, which isn’t making Trump look like a winner either. And partly because of that, Republicans are privately warning that their prospects in the midterms look increasingly dire. So what now for Trump?
Paul Krugman has a great new piece on his Substack, arguing that Trump simply does not have the cards in the Iran situation, even though he may not know it. So we’re talking with Krugman about where all this is going. Paul, always nice to have you on.
Paul Krugman: Good to be on again.
Sargent: So Trump rejected that proposal from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps in part because it would not address Trump’s demand for total termination of Iran’s nuclear program. But the New York Times had an extraordinary detail about the Iranian offer: “A U.S. official also said that accepting it could appear to deny Mr. Trump a victory.” Paul, apparently that’s the single most important factor in all of this, right?
Krugman: That’s what’s been holding everything up. For most of us, by about a week into the war, it was obvious that basically America lost. But Trump cannot bring himself to acknowledge that.
He’s been trying—he’s threatening to bomb them back into the Stone Ages, and he’s been threatening war crimes, and he’s been imposing counter-blockades against the blockade—all of which seems to be because he cannot seem to accept that actually he screwed up badly. There is no good outcome for the United States here. All we can do is accept something that actually leaves Iran stronger than it was, but he won’t do it.
Sargent: Well, we just learned that gas prices rose on Tuesday to the highest level in four years. It’s well over $4 a gallon on average. Brent crude is over $100 a barrel again. Paul, can you just walk us through the basics of how those developments are tied to the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed?
Krugman: Yeah. Before this war, about 15 percent of the world’s oil flowed through that strait. And it’s other stuff too—natural gas, helium, fertilizer—but right now let’s focus on the oil.
So 15 percent of the world’s oil goes through that narrow passageway, which is extremely easy for Iran to block. That 15 percent—there’s really not much of an exit. There’s no real way around the Iranian blockade. A little bit of stuff can go by pipeline, but not much. And that’s a lot of oil being denied to the world market. And of course, the price of oil has gone way up.
But if this continues, he ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the really interesting thing—I cited some numbers from Goldman Sachs in the Substack—although the price of oil is way up, consumption of oil is only down a little bit. And mostly what’s happening is that they’re drawing down inventories of oil, that people who have oil in storage tanks, with oil that was already on tankers, is bein
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:My working theory is that Trumptards are wrong in all ways knowable. That theory is backed by data collected on the excruciating personal failures of Trumptards I know. Their failures make Trump attractive since only he can fix what is wrong with them. But who will fix Trump?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Obama.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls. There is still time to repent or else burn in Hell forever:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump picked a fight with the Pope: The one person he can't fire, can't outbid, and can't outlast
The Pope and the President of the United States are both American. That seems to be a problem.
By Catherina Gioino | May 2, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-picked-a-fight-with-the-p
ope-the-one-person-he-can-t-fire-can-t-outbid-and-can-t-outlast/ar-AA22dGhA
Trump’s version of the American Dream says the winners are being stolen from: by immigrants and globalists, and by institutions that no longer serve the people who built them. His opponents mostly argue within the same framework, insisting the system should be fairer but still organized around the same ideals. Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope, and is also the only person in the world with the moral authority, the biography, and the institutional platform to critique the MAGA vision of America on its own terms, using its own words.
Trump chose to pick a fight with the Pope in a way that his own base argue is against the very things he preaches. His approval rating has fallen to 34% in Pew’s latest survey, the lowest of his second term. The Iran war he launched has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted 20% of global oil supplies, pushed gas prices past $4 a gallon, and driven inflation back to 3.3%, the highest since May 2024, with economists warning it could reach 4.2% by year’s end.
The IMF has flagged global recession risk. A majority of voters, 53%, now call the Iran military action a failure, and Democrats hold a 10-point lead on the generic congressional ballot heading into the midterms. An AP poll puts Trump’s approval on the economy at 30%. And into this steps an American pope with a 42% favorable rating and an 8% unfavorable rating, a net favorability 34 points better than the president’s, making the moral case against the very war that is producing the economic pain. The reason why he remains so untouchable despite Trump’s attacks is that he embodies the same thing Trump is: an American.
Iran challenged Trump’s hold over MAGA like no other conflict, and so Leo has like no other figure. Every other critic Trump has faced, from Democrats to foreign leaders, could be dismissed as partisan, but Leo is from Chicago and leads the faith Trump’s own vice president converted to. Now he runs the oldest institution on earth from a sovereign city-state smaller than most golf courses.
When President Donald Trump built the MAGA political movement, he used a very specific version of the American Dream: nationalist, zero-sum, culturally defensive, built on accumulation and dominance. Leo tends to counter that: same country and same institutions but a completely different approach to what the United States should do.
“He’s a believer in the United States, and what he’s saying is also, indirectly, trying to correct where the United States is going,” Massimo Faggioli, professor of historical and contemporary ecclesiology at Villanova University, told Fortune. “He’s credible when he talks about America in ways that an Italian, a German, or a Pole couldn’t be.”
Two American dreams in conflict
Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV previously served as a missionary in Peru before becoming the first North American pope. For years, the American Catholic right dismissed Vatican criticism of U.S. politics as the meddling of out-of-touch European clerics or a Latin American pope with an anti-American chip on his shoulder. Now, that argument is no longer available.
Christopher White, associate director at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and author of Pop
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Era of Rational Discourse Is Over
For Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, the essence of democracy was thoughtful back-and-forth argument.
By Adam Kirsch
May 3, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/jurgen-habermas-debate-trump
/687016/
Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.
But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prolific commentator on world events, didn’t live to comment on the Iran war. He died on March 14, at the age of 96, two weeks after American and Israeli air strikes began. But it bore out his worst fears about the fate of liberal democracy, which he spent a long lifetime analyzing and defending. For Habermas, the essence of democracy was discourse, back-and-forth argument about ideas and values. In his landmark works of political and social theory, he wrote about the “public sphere” where citizens come together to hammer out judgments, and about “communicative action,” which turns language into a force for cooperation. “All political power derives from the communicative power of citizens,” he wrote, and in an ideal democracy “all relevant questions, issues, and contributions are brought up and processed in discourses and negotiations.”
The end of a life as long and productive as Habermas’s can’t be called a tragedy. But there was a special pathos about the tributes published around the world after his death, which seemed to symbolize the tragic condition of democracy itself. In one of his last public appearances, in Munich in November, he gave a speech mourning “the now–barely reversible dismantling of the oldest liberal-democratic regime,” the United States, thanks to Trump’s “arbitrary-autocratic expansion” of executive power.
America’s autocratic turn darkened the end of what Habermas described in the speech as a “politically rather favored life.” Perhaps it was favored in the sense that it began at such a low point, there was nowhere to go but up. Habermas was born in Germany in 1929 and grew up under Nazism; he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and his father served as an officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He lived long enough to see democracy take root in West Germany, and then to see a reunified Germany become the bulwark of free Europe.
This happy ending was by no means guaranteed, and Habermas’s work as a theorist and polemicist made an important contribution to it. He began his career in West Germany in the 1950s, when ex-Nazis still dominated the academic establishment. Turning against the influence of Martin Heidegger, then the idol of German philosophy despite his collaboration with the Nazi regime, the young Habermas found a mentor in Theodor Adorno, a radical social critic who spent the Nazi period in exile. Adorno was one of the founders of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and Habermas took up his mantle as the leader of the school’s second generation, spending most of his career at the University of Frankfurt.
But whereas Adorno effectively lost hope for modern civ
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Pope says that you and Trump are risking your immortal souls.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody gives a shit about your deranged anecdotes.
We all know how fucked up YOU are. We do not take your judgements of made up people seriously, let alone any real people.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:6ix, you and Trump are personifications of the seven deadly sins — pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth — a classification of vices in Catholic tradition that originated in the 4th century and was refined by Pope Gregory I and Thomas Aquinas. Often called "capital sins," these seven vices are considered the root causes of other immoral behaviors and spiritual decay.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck the Pope. Fuck Catholicism. Fuck Christianity. Fuck Religion. And fuck you.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Seven Deadly Sins and Their Meanings:
• Pride (Superbia): Often considered the root of all other sins, it is an excessive, selfish belief in one’s own superiority and abilities.
• Greed (Avarice): An obsessive, insatiable desire for material wealth, possessions, or power over others.
• Lust (Luxuria): An intense, disordered craving for sexual pleasure, focusing purely on self-gratification rather than love.
• Envy (Invidia): Resentment or sadness directed at another person’s talents, possessions, or happiness, often wishing to take them away.
• Gluttony (Gula): Overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste, particularly food and drink.
• Wrath (Ira): Uncontrolled, intense anger, hatred, or rage that drives a desire for vengeance.
• Sloth (Acedia): Laziness, apathy, or a failure to utilize one's talents and pursue Spiritual growth.
These vices are famously detailed as the structures of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Counter-Virtues (Remedies):
To combat these, traditional teachings offer corresponding virtues:
• Pride -» Humility
• Greed -» Generosity
• Lust -» Chastity
• Envy -» Gratitude
• Gluttony -» Temperance
• Wrath -» Patience
• Sloth -» Diligence
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
Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas
Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rocker.
Sunday, May 3, 2026 by Bonnie McCune
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/sorry-kiddos-were-not-in
-wonderland-anymore-were-not-even-in-kansas.html
It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized we’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naive or slow to realize it. Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity. He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.
Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from many authorities? Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
All with complete impunity. Why is he able to ignore and walk around all the customary forms of crime that so many others are currently imprisoned for? Why are we tolerating this? This man? Anyone else would either be charged with harassment or sued for defamation of character or indicted for crimes.
A friend of mine blames the laissez-faire attitude of society on the laxity with which society treats contemporary media nowadays. We see murders, thefts, beatings, and crimes in a constant flood of words and images in books, videos, and news. I’m not convinced. After all, these despicable behaviors have been part of human conduct from time ad infinitum. They are the stuff of which folk tales and religions are made.
I have taken small comfort in the questionable belief that he’s lost his mind. We’re encouraged to extend tolerance and sympathy to those mentally and emotionally handicapped. My question, however, is why no one has tried to disarm him? Supposedly, there are penalties for failing to halt this destruction. At least there are ethical and moral constraints, even if no one appears willing to stop him.
Do these sound like rational actions by an adult male in our society?
• He authorizes expenditures (for which he has no legal claims) for huge, unnecessary construction projects that have no legitimate purpose but which proclaim his name.
• He single-handedly closes federal agencies and programs, some in existence for years, with little blowback.
• He identifies with god figures so much that he creates (or instructs others to create) images of himself as what obviously is a Messiah figure and Superman.
• He loudly and openly criticizes the actions and purported purposes of other leaders, both civil and international, evidently just to denigrate them.
The publication of Alice in Wonderland is often touted as a view of reality as insanity. Welcome 2026, where Trump’s assessment of reality is bizarre to say the least, and inexplicable is another accurate description. His latest proposal is to build a giant arch in Washington, DC, that would dwarf other monumental arches in the world. The administration has not released cost estimates, but the proposal is massive. The excuse? The country’s 250th anniversary.
In other recent news, Trump downplayed the impact of high fuel prices, suggesting the economic fallout from the ongoing war with Iran is less severe than anticipated. He referred to the current inflation as “fake,” attributing it to fluctuating energy prices. Despite gas prices exceeding $5 a gallon at local stations, Trump has chosen not to address the rising costs of fuel or airline tickets during his remarks at a recent appearance.
Other activities too complicated to detail here include responsibility for the death
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Still, I can’t forget the old advice about improving the world: All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
That's what we're doing now.
We're fixing all the evil that the Democratic Party has wrought upon the American people.
You lose. Forever.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME