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 463 of 479
Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response
After cutting its support for frontline healthcare workers in Central Africa, the Trump administration is pointing fingers.
Nick Turse
June 4 2026, 5:27 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/04/trump-ebola-outbreak-congo/
As an Ebola outbreak continues to rage in Central Africa, the Trump administration keeps trying to blame the World Health Organization — revealing what experts say is a deep misunderstanding about global disease response.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.
“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.
Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.
In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.
Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.
On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.
“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face.”
Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”
Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protoc
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
I don't think you get it, dude. Everybody hates you. Nobody wants to hear a single word you have to say.
So go create your own little sandbox to play with yourself. Just like you did when you were a kid and nobody would hang out with you because you suck as a human being and you always have.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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In Trump’s second term, financial gain has become a defining feature
By Linda Feldmann | June 05, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0605/donald-trump-presiden
cy-private-wealth-ethics
On matters of personal and family money, President Donald Trump appears to be playing by a different rulebook from other presidents – and even from his own first term in office. By his own admission, he feels little pressure to restrict family business dealings simply because of his role in government.
A tide of actions reflects the trend:
Investors have pumped vast sums into Trump family members’ business interests. Projects such as the White House ballroom are being funded by donors who have dealings with the government. Agencies have granted no-bid contracts to Trump-friendly firms. And in the 19 months since his election, the personal fortunes of the president and his family have soared.
Why We Wrote This
The Trump family’s wealth has surged over the 19 months since Donald Trump’s election. The circumstances are revealing how, on personal-finance matters, a president might be constrained less by laws than by norms that are vulnerable to testing.
To President Trump’s detractors, it’s unprecedented self-enrichment and corruption, or at the very least a failure to follow norms upheld by past occupants of the Oval Office. To defenders, including his Cabinet, staff, and base supporters, the criticism is politically motivated, aimed at punishing a president who they say is transparent in his dealings and follows all applicable laws.
While Mr. Trump’s first term had its share of headlines about conflict-of-interest questions, the amounts of money involved have surged in Term 2, notably in cryptocurrencies and other relatively new business interests for the Trump family. The voting public is more focused on issues affecting their own pocketbooks than on the president’s. But as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, the tension over financial ethics represents a test for American democracy under a president like no other.
“The number of entanglements, the volume of money, it’s staggering,” says William Howell, dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy in Washington.
This week has also shown that Mr. Trump’s financial gambits still face some constraints. Under pressure from Congress – including a number of Republicans – as well as from courts, his administration appeared to back down Tuesday on the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to compensate those he says were mistreated by the federal government.
On Wednesday, though, when asked about the fund by a reporter, the president said, “I love it.” Asked to clarify whether it was dead or just on pause, he said, “I’d have to ask the lawyers,” suggesting he hasn’t given up on the fund altogether.
The administration rejects the view that the Trump presidency is rife with conflicts of interest, calling critics’ attacks unfair.
“This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade,” says Anna Kelly, White House principal deputy press secretary, in a written statement to the Monitor. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”
Net worth over $6 billion
Across a range of activities, the Trump family has been expanding business ventures with profitable connections to the government – all in plain sight.
One eye-popping headline is the spike in Mr. Trump’s net worth since seeking and winning reelection: from $2.3 billion early in 2024 to $6.2 billion today, according to Forbes. The extraordinary gains come primarily from his business interests, which include vast real estate holdings, licensing deals, merchandise such as Trump watches, Bibles, and sneakers – b
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Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.
We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.
https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds
President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.
By Jonathan Edwards | June 4, 2026 at 3:24 p.m. EDT
https://go.govbrief.today/ballroom-donors
More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group.
Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window, according to the report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit. Most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term, the nonprofit found. https://www.citizen.org/news/corporate-donors-to-trumps-white-house-ba
llroom-have-received-50-billion-in-government-contracts-since-the-east-wing-was-demolished/
The donors have sprawling interests that touch nearly every aspect of American life, including defense contracting, technology and energy. Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.
“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Jon Golinger, a public policy advocate at Public Citizen and an author of the report. “They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.”
The analysis builds on a report from the group last fall that found the known donors held $279 billion in government contracts over the previous five years and had spent $1.6 billion on political contributions and lobbying during that time. The new report focuses on contracts awarded in most of the seven months since the East Wing’s demolition, which Trump’s critics have argued created new urgency around potential conflicts of interest.
Of the known donors, no single contributor received more new business with the government since giving to the project than Lockheed Martin. The defense giant received roughly $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding since last fall, according to the report.
Booz Allen Hamilton followed, with more than $4.2 billion, and Palantir, with just over $1 billion. Other donors that received new or increased contracts include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar and T-Mobile. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Altogether, more than two-thirds of corporate ballroom donors — 19 of 27 — have received government contracts over the past five and a half years, totaling $338 billion, the report says.
Sixteen of the 27 donors are facing federal enforcement actions or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration, the report found, including major antitrust reviews involving Amazon, Apple, Meta and Nvidia; labor rights cases involving Google, Lockheed and Meta; and securities matters involving Coinbase and Ripple, whose cases have been dropped or scaled back under Trump.
The White House on Thursday pushed back on the report’s pay-to-play framing.
“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “The donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for genera
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.
We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.
https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?
Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?
Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:You did it again, 6ix. You totally missed the point. I can see why you flunked out of college four times. Professors notice when students miss the Big Picture. Those students won't be graduating.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?
Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?
Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Letters from an American
Heather Cox Richardson
Jun 05, 2026
The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.
The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.
Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.
Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”
In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.
Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.
Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.
Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”
He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”
And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.
“If we all work together
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Fuck the Liberal Consensus.
You tried taking WAAAAAAAAY too much.
Now you're going to lose everything.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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