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 470 of 479
Your life is so pathetic.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Why Are US Weather Forecasts So Inaccurate Lately?
Because Trump and Elon Musk fired the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
By Ellyn Lapointe | June 30, 2026, 11:30 am ET
https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-weather-forecasts-have-seemed-so-inaccur
ate-lately-2000779436
Weather forecasting is woke according to Musk.
Besides, the fired employees at NOAA were incompetent scientists, since they had accumulated data showing climate change is real, which most Trumptards know is fake news and a Chinese hoax.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The true cost of Donald Trump's $2.2 billion year | Fortune
Diane Brady | July 2, 2026
https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/donald-trump-billionaire-2-2-billion-we
alth-brand/
Good morning. I sat in Donald Trump’s office years ago, watching him cover a table with paper after paper on various buildings bearing his name. Trump wanted to prove that he was a billionaire, contrary to the allegations of writer Tim O’Brien, whom he was suing for suggesting otherwise. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) He pointed to the stack of papers, the number of products bearing his name, the pink Italian marble in the lobby, the finer details of his office. He even showed me his watch. Thousands paid to hear him speak at The Learning Annex, he told me, because they want to be a billionaire like Donald Trump. Being rich wasn’t just part of his brand. It was his brand. This was a leader who largely measured success by a single metric.
Now, nobody can dispute that Trump is rich. He made more money last year as president than he ever did in a year as CEO. https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/News+Releases/B8B9EA45F5EB86EC85258E26
00701B77?opendocument
We don’t know how much tax he will pay on the $2.2 billion in earnings, as he is the first U.S. president to refuse to release his tax returns and secured an unprecedented tax immunity deal in exchange for dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump’s sons run the business, control the trust containing his assets, and have launched lucrative new ventures using his name. (His sons and the White House have repeatedly stated there is no conflict of interest.) Trump’s latest 927-page disclosure gives fascinating insights into how the president is getting rich, through crypto ventures and active stock trading, as well as a $77,808 pension from the Screen Actors Guild and a $250,000 sculpture from a longtime CEO supporter.
But everything has a cost. Take the Qatari-gifted Air Force One, which took its inaugural flight yesterday. Trump took the $400 million jet as a gift to taxpayers and then spent at least that much in taxpayer dollars to make it “the world’s most luxurious plane.” Although the gift was deemed legal, multiple polls show voters felt it raised ethical concerns and several prominent Republicans in Congress spoke out against it.
The president’s personal gains cause even more concern. Trump’s investment managers bought and sold company stocks an average of 58 times a day in the first quarter. Some say that’s normal for high-volume, tax-optimized trading. Others are suspicious. The recent disclosure showed 327 individual stock purchases a day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, for example, which caused a market rally that he took credit for.
I meet plenty of CEOs who like the Trump administration’s approach to technology, innovation, regulation, taxation, and the overall ethos of making America great. Behind closed doors, though, many say they don’t trust him. Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly called the family “grifty” in a Sky News interview. Trust in the federal government is at a two-decade low, and that’s according to a Fox News poll. The Pew Research Center did a 36-country survey that found the rest of the world has negative views of Trump and doesn’t think America is a reliable partner.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, says the president’s willingness to get rich on the job is undermining his credibility and popularity with his base. The irony is that Trump doesn’t seem to get much joy from his money. “He doesn’t cruise on his yacht. Other than the golf course, there’s no luxury in that man’s life,” says Sonnenfeld. “What he cares about is losing pride and being ridiculed.” For someone who seems to equate being rich with getting respect, money can feel like a familiar friend. As he faces pushback—from Republican colleagues voting to limit executive authority to consumer boycotts—the president isn’t recali
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Bicentennial Memories
It was 50 years ago today
Paul Krugman
Jul 04, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bicentennial-memories
Today is the nation’s 250th anniversary. And it should be a day of celebration.
But it won’t be. America’s 250th birthday will be a grim, glum affair. As far as I can tell, even MAGA enthusiasts are feeling depressed. They certainly aren’t turning out to visit Donald Trump’s sad, shabby state fair.
It’s a huge difference from the bicentennial, which I celebrated in an unusual but deeply memorable way.
You see, I spent the summer of 1976 in Portugal, which had had its own revolution (the Carnation Revolution) just two years earlier. That revolution overthrew the nation’s fascist dictatorship and created what has proved an enduring democracy.
I was there as part of a group of MIT graduate students working at the Banco de Portugal — the country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve. And I spent the 4th at a picnic in a Lisbon park, thrown by the U.S. embassy.
It was a small affair. These days Lisbon is overrun with American tourists and expats, but back then there were very few of us around. Even the U.S. government had relatively few people there, because it was trying to keep a low profile in the face of widespread anti-Americanism: Many Portuguese at the time were still talking about how the U.S. had helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile three years earlier. There were graffiti around Lisbon saying “Morte à CIA” — although some of these had had “e ao KGB” added in fresher paint.
So the embassy filled out the picnic by inviting Americans it knew were in Lisbon along with staff from other friendly embassies. I remember chatting with a number of West Germans.
The picnic was a charming affair. We stood around munching hot dogs — God knows how they managed that in the land of salt cod and grilled sardines — and listened as the ambassador read a patriotic message from Gerald Ford. And I remember feeling very good about America.
Furthermore, I wasn’t the only American feeling cheerful at the bicentennial, which was somehow an uplifting occasion.
This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.
Yet somehow Americans managed to have fun at the bicentennial festivities, and there was a surprising amount of optimism in the air.
One source of optimism was surely the end of the Vietnam War. Yes, it ended in defeat. But it did end, which meant that young Americans and their families no longer had to worry about the draft, and that the nightly news didn’t keep reporting on body counts.
Another source of optimism — something people like JD Vance will never understand — was the fall of Richard Nixon. Satisfaction about how Watergate brought Nixon down wasn’t mainly about partisanship. Instead, the Watergate saga felt like an affirmation of the American spirit. Reporters were heroes and the media did its job. So did Congress. Nobody would call Gerald Ford a great president, but he was clearly a decent human being. The powerful were held accountable. America, it seemed, still retained its soul.
Who would say that now?
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday we had confirmation of presidential corruption on a scale Nixon could never have imagined. That’s bad in itself. What’s worse is that nobody believes that there will be any consequences for Trump, his cronies, and their henchmen. In 1974 Republicans joined with Democrats to hold Nixon accountable. This time around they’re fully invested in magnifying Trump’s power and his cult of personality, despite knowing perfectly well who he is and what he is doing.
I am not giving up hope. America is not irretrievably lost. But now, much more than 50 years ago, we are a nation in desperate need of redemptio
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Pump and Dump and Trump
It's much bigger than the memecoin
Paul Krugman
Jul 06, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pump-and-dump-and-trump
Donald Trump has distinguished himself in many ways. One of them is that he is our first pump and dump president.
Hi, Paul Krugman here. A podcast today rather than a full-on piece: I’m a little exhausted from number-crunching over the weekend. So I thought I’d talk briefly about the really extraordinary financial picture that we’re seeing under the current administration.
Obviously no president has enriched himself from office the way that Trump has. That’s common knowledge. One of the things that is really amazing about it, however, is the way in which he enriched himself — a lot of which has to do with crypto.
So the New York Times had a report just the other day on Trumpcoin, the memecoin issued on Trump’s behalf which got a lot of buyers, a lot of money came flowing into it.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that the coin was inherently worthless, and at this point it essentially is worthless. It has lost 97 percent of its value. But a lot of people did buy in at the high prices.
What was special about the New York Times story was two things. First, they put a number on how much money naive investors have lost on the coin, which is 3.8 billion dollars. And even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million.
That’s really amazing. I mean, I was completely cynical but I didn’t think there were that many suckers out there. But it turns out there were really a lot. A few people made money off the coin — basically insiders who got to buy it early and then were able to cash in before the broader retail market realized that this was a worthless token. There’s another token, the World Liberty Financial coin — which has also crashed, although the Times had difficulty in tracking down how many people have lost how much money. There’s the Melania coin.
Okay, all of this is amazing. As Trump would say, it’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. I think we should say, however, that this is a bigger story than just the Trump coin, and it’s a bigger story than just Trump himself.
What we’re witnessing is or has been a really enormous pump and dump scheme, I would argue, involving more or less all of crypto.
So if you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true. But then when it became clear that there was money in it for him, he reversed course. And during the 2024 election, crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump. They then after the election poured a lot of money into his own enrichment, into his own projects. And the administration came in with a very pro crypto stance: deregulation encouraging uses of crypto, at least talk about a national bitcoin reserve, all of that. And the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion.
And then starting last fall it all came crashing down. Not all the way to zero — the price of Bitcoin right now as I record this is about what it was on the eve of the 2024 election; it’s about half what it was at its peak. That’s also true, roughly speaking for the market cap. So we’ve seen about two trillion dollars of market valuation wiped out.
Why is this a pump and dump story? Well what is cryptocurrency good for? As you know, I’ve been on this for a long time. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — this is a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases. Illegitimate use cases, yes. There was also a report in the Wall Street Journal about the extent to which Iran and North Korea have been making use of cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, so there is that. But it’s still not enough to justify a multi-trillion dollar asset.
Anyway, it was trendy, it was exciting, it was fashionable and particularly after November 2
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BREAKING: DOGE has officially been shut down after failing to accomplish its goal. Analysts have found that DOGE actually increased the deficit.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has officially reached its termination date as set out in its original executive order. While it was chartered to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, reports from groups like the Partnership for Public Service estimate that the initiative left an $11 billion gap in the budget and cost taxpayers more than $100 billion in lost productivity, litigation, and rehiring. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/doge-website-deactivates-after-re
aching-self-termination-deadline-come-end
Details regarding the shutdown and its financial impacts include:
• Official Closure: The temporary DOGE organization self-deleted on July 4, 2026, marking the end of its 18-month charter. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/04/doge-july-4-white-house-end-0
0983651
• Fiscal Deficit: Analysts point out that DOGE's cuts to agencies—such as the Internal Revenue Service—resulted in a loss of federal revenue that exceeded the savings achieved by terminating contracts or firing personnel. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-didn-t-doge-staffer-202924948.html
• Exaggerated Savings: An investigation by CBS News estimated that DOGE's reported savings were sometimes exaggerated by up to 97%, with some cuts actually costing the government more due to efficiency losses, paid leave, and rehire cycles.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What a fucking loser.
You posted these two stupid articles in the tags, in my "Today in the Tags" thread, and here.
Go fuck yourself, second. You goddamned good for nothing little prick.
Shut the fuck up.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto
Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.
By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.
Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/
Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.
Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”
This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.
That investment is now worth $30,000.
Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”
He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”
Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.
Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.
Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about the patriotic Americans who elected him t
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto
Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.
By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.
Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/
Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.
Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”
This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.
That investment is now worth $30,000.
Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”
He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”
Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.
Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.
Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about tNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Results Are In on Trump’s Boat-Strike Campaign
They haven’t stopped the drugs, but that was not the point.
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | July 6, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/trump-narcoterro
rists-boat-strikes/687763/
The official line remains the same: The 10-month campaign of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific has nearly stopped the flow of drugs by sea into the United States. In December, President Trump boasted about a 92 percent drop in seaborne shipments. Last month, in an apparent sign of further progress, he said the decline was up to 97.2 percent.
But government officials and agencies closest to the action, at sea and on America’s streets, tell a different story. In hearings, official reports, and interviews they have all but given up the pretense that the campaign has succeeded in reducing the flow of drugs into the U.S., even as 221 people have been killed in more than 60 strikes.
General Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, which runs the military campaign, told lawmakers earlier this year that “the boat strikes aren’t the answer,” though they remain “one of the many tools” in the long-term effort to counter narcotics. As if to prove the point, street prices for cocaine in the United States have plummeted, the opposite of what would be expected if smugglers were being deterred.
Last month, Senators Rand Paul, a Republican, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the three criteria the military uses to target boats. (The Pentagon’s targeting criteria are classified, but some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have reviewed them.) At a committee hearing, the senators focused not on the criteria themselves but on what was missing: any requirement that guns or drugs be on board.
“In order to blow them up, we don’t have to say that they’re armed or have drugs, and I think that a lot of people would have questions, which I still do,” Paul said.
Rubio told the senators only that the military doesn’t blow up every boat it investigates. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” Rubio said.
Trump has made unsupported claims that fentanyl, the drug most responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses, is on the targeted boats. That line began to fall apart shortly after the initial killings when top officials acknowledged to lawmakers that the strikes were aimed at cocaine smuggling. A Pentagon inspector-general report published in May confirmed that, saying fentanyl is “produced almost entirely in Mexico” and enters the U.S. through the southern border—not via boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Boats do carry cocaine, but the drugs on the vessels off the coast of Venezuela are most likely headed not to the United States but to Europe or Africa, Jonathan Caulkins, a drug-policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.
Over 10 months, the White House and Pentagon have maintained that the campaign is vital to securing “our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it. “The President has leveraged his dealmaking prowess to stop the influx of fentanyl precursors from China and struck narcoterrorist drug boats to stop the flow of drugs by sea,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an emailed statement. “President Trump is using every tool at his disposal to save lives from the scourge of illicit narcotics.”
Yet measured against their stated purpose of reducing the flow of narcotics into the United States, the strikes have been a bust. When combined with other policy changes, they may even have set back the Justice Department’s ability to pursue cases against cartel kingpins. And the strikes’ legal justification, which has been shrouded in secrecy, is now being tested in federal court.
The campaign grinds on regardless. Since Donovan’s March testimony, he has authorized 21 strikes that have killed 64 people.
The initial strike in September provoked outrage, especially after Hegseth
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