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 474 of 479
Oy, Canada Tariffs
How to lose friends and influence nothing
By Paul Krugman | Jul 21, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oy-canada-tariffs
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable! I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result. This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Jul 17, 2026, 3:24 PM
The Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, lost its standing as the worst trade policy action in US history when Donald Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. But Smoot-Hawley was widely recognized as a terrible mistake soon after its passage, as it provoked widespread retaliation and contributed to the downward spiral of world trade that accompanied and reinforced the Great Depression.
Recognition of Smoot-Hawley’s stupidity led to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, under which the US began negotiating trade deals — we’ll reduce our tariffs if you reduce yours — that helped pave the way for the great recovery of world trade and the global economy as a whole in the decades that followed World War II.
Yesterday the Trump administration invoked an obscure and never-before-used provision of Smoot-Hawley — Section 338 — to impose 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods.
Why? Why now? The White House fact sheet claims that the new tariffs are a response to Canadian policies that discriminate against U.S. products, notably the moves by most Canadian provinces (not the federal Canadian government) to stop importation of US alcoholic beverages. But these policies were themselves a response to the tariffs on Canadian goods Trump had previously imposed, without justification. Canadians were also reacting to Trump’s repeated demands that Canada surrender its independence and become the 51st state.
Were these complaints about Canadian policies the real reason for the new tariffs? On Friday Trump lashed out with the Truth Social post at the top of this article, threatening to impose tariffs on Canadian goods because of … wildfire smoke.
For the record, wildfires have been raging in Canada’s boreal forest, which covers 2 million square miles — the majority of Canada’s land area — and is mostly unmanaged because it’s completely inaccessible. Blaming Canada for not controlling fires that are, in reality, largely a consequence of global warming is unutterably idiotic.
Now, Trump officials claim that these tariffs aren’t about wildfire smoke, although the timing of these latest tariffs is curious. Notably, they haven’t ruled out the possibility of wildfire tariffs in the future. “The president has asked for options on that, and options are being shared with him,” one official told the Financial Times.
Also, one has to wonder whether Trump is feeling upset at the way he was massively booed at the World Cup final — while Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister and his co-host, was not.
Whatever the real motivation for these new tariffs, they are almost surely illegal. They are definitely a violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, a revision of NAFTA negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. Indeed, the White House fact sheet explicitly states that the new tariffs will be imposed “regardless of whether a good originates under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).”
So these latest actions confirm what most people
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Keep crying Paul. You fucking loser.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.
I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump’s Kiss of Death
By Thomas B. Edsall | July 21, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/trump-inept-second-term.htm
l?unlocked_article_code=1.zVA.5cRx.5x6M1sGgcugz&smid=url-share
Donald Trump is the black-thumb president.
Let’s start small. He persuaded FIFA to quash the one-game suspension of the U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, after which the American men’s soccer team suffered a humiliating 4-1 loss to Belgium.
When Trump first announced plans to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he said it would cost $1.5 million. On July 15, The Associated Press reported that despite this initial promise, “the bill ballooned to more than $16 million by June. Trump had said the repairs would last a century, but within days of the project’s initial completion last month, the water was beset by an algae bloom and pieces of the new coating appeared to be peeling off the bottom.”
These setbacks are just two examples of Trump’s kiss of death, the defeats and economic setbacks that have come to characterize his second term in office, including the job losses following Trump’s imposition of tariffs, the surge in the national debt after passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the economic havoc resulting from his war against Iran.
Trump is one of the most — if not the most — ham-handed presidents in the nation’s history.
I asked Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, for his take on Trump in 2026. He replied by email:
Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many cabinet and sub-cabinet agencies, the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.
Trump’s infliction of harm is not a result of bad luck or malign interference by foreign and domestic adversaries — the common fate of American presidents. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump himself initiated the policies and actions that turned belly-up.
One of the most egregious examples, perhaps, is his decision to join Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21, 2025.
“The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump declared in an address to the nation that day. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Despite these claims of success 13 months ago, the United States and Israel struck again this year, beginning on Feb. 28, and the war on Iran is in its fifth month, with the conflict intensifying and Americans beginning, once again, to die.
On his Substack, Popular Information, Judd Legum documented 24 instances between April 17 and July 13 of Trump making some variation of the claim “that the Strait of Hormuz was ‘open’ or controlled by the United States.”
Trump also let the Iranians know that “You got beat to hell” and boasted that it was a “Total and complete victory. 100 percent.”
More important than Trump’s false claims of victory, the war on Iran — a war of choice — has inflicted severe damage on the United States, including the death of at least 17 American military personnel and the wounding of more than 400 others.
According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, Americans are paying $71.3 billion more for gasoline and diesel alone. The increases in fuel costs translate into average household costs of $543.94 as I write. It will be more when you read this.
Let’s take a closer look at some of Trump’s proudest achievements.
On April 2, 2025, he announced “Liberation Day,” his plan to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners.
“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” the president asserted, adding, “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”
So what actually happened?
When Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, the total number of men and women employed in manufacturing was 12,673,000, according to the Federal Reserve. By June 2026, the number fell to 12,598,000, a loss of 75,0
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Quote:Have you heard of Herbert Hoover? The predecessor to President FDR? Hoover spent the rest of his life accusing Democrats of destroying America. Hoover also crashed the US economy, had no idea how to end the Great Depression, and opposed the US entering WWII. He was an early version of Trump, every instinct was wrong.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
https://www.google.com/search?q=did+herbert+hoover+oppose+early+entry+
into+ww2
Herbert Hoover vehemently opposed early United States entry into World War II. As a vocal non-interventionist, he criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt's diplomatic maneuvers. Hoover believed that the conflict was an unnecessary European power struggle and argued that keeping the U.S. out was the best way to preserve democracy and economic Stability.
Key aspects of Hoover's anti-interventionist stance include:
• Opposition to War Preparations and Aid: He actively opposed measures like the Lend-Lease policy and warned that President Roosevelt was provoking both Germany and Japan. He frequently stated that if the U.S. had not provoked Japan, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would not have occurred.
• Distrust of Alliances: Hoover was a staunch anti-communist. He publicly disparaged any tacit alliance with the Soviet Union, arguing that fighting alongside Joseph Stalin would ultimately result in a greater tragedy.
• Concerns Over Domestic Impact: He feared that fighting a second global war would lead to massive government centralization, destroy the British Empire, and inadvertently empower the Soviet Union.
Hoover summarized his stance in a 1941 radio broadcast, asking: "Are we now to march out into the desert of European war and see the wells of freedom dried up behind us?", as documented by Teaching American History. He maintained this opposition until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Conflict.
Post-War Vindication Efforts -- Hoover's bitterness over the war lasted for decades. He spent much of his later life writing Freedom Betrayed, a massive, posthumously published critique of WWII diplomacy. In it, he argued that the war was entirely unnecessary and that a non-interventionist approach would have resulted in Germany and the Soviet Union destroying each other, sparing American lives and preventing the Cold War.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Have you heard of Herbert Hoover?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
Your dead whore mother was a Hoover.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal
By J. Brian Atwood and Kevin E. Byrnes | 07/22/26 12:30 PM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5981243-doge-usaid-lawsuit-civil
-servants/
When Elon Musk and his youthful Department of Government Efficiency warriors boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the U.S. Agency for International Development, they did more than destroy a government agency. They violated the law by summarily firing USAID’s public servants while placing millions of people around the world in mortal danger.
The thousands of public servants, fired without due process, care deeply about the agency’s mission. They did not deserve to be fired, nor did they deserve the efforts by the president himself to pile on by besmirching their reputation.
These actions have ramifications far beyond the impact on the individuals involved. They place every government employee at risk. Career professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community have also been summarily relieved of duty.
If the courts fail to intervene, our nation will be sent hurtling back in history to the era of the corrupt spoils system. That era ended when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created a system based on merit. The law was updated in 1978 and it explicitly states that a public servant can only be removed if there is evidence of misconduct or poor performance — and only then after providing an opportunity for due process.
The administration violated this act, and we are contesting these firings in federal court. One of us is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades. The other served as the head of USAID for over six years in the Clinton administration.
DOGE made no real effort to determine what would be lost, including millions of lives. And it showed no empathy for USAID’s career employees, a professional staff that had made the agency a global leader in development cooperation.
USAID was irresponsibly removed from the world stage, and its employees were locked out. The president and Elon Musk labeled USAID’s professional public servants as “radical, leftist lunatics” and, with no evidence, stated that the agency was rife with “waste, fraud and mismanagement.”
Those labels were not mere insults. In a court of law, they are evidence.
The administration knew it could not fire career employees for their politics or for invented misconduct, so it dressed the purge as a “reorganization.” That was a façade.
The administration’s cover story has continued in court. Ironically, government lawyers now concede that no one was fired for misconduct or poor performance. That concession should end the matter. It is an admission that the lawful basis for these firings never existed.
Instead of acknowledging an unlawful purge, the government recasts the firings as a reorganization, a label engineered to deny employees’ due process. The reorganization is a fiction. The record shows a coordinated mass firing driven by the very motive the law forbids.
The Merit Systems Protection Board, created to oversee and implement the law protecting the civil service, has been reshaped into a rubber stamp for executive excess. The New York Times reported that the White House pressed the board behind closed doors to adopt a sweeping theory of presidential power.
In March, the board complied, breaking with decades of precedent to hold that Article II permits the president to remove career officials without due process. The decision is being appealed through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Fired USAID employees want their procedural rights observed, the law followed and their losses reversed or compensated. They want a reaffirmation of the principle contained in the law that a federal employee be judged not on a perception of their beliefs, but on the actions they take.
That legal principle keeps public service from being reduced to peonage. In the end, this is a battle over whether the rule of law can be quietly replaced by
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Man... You got up nice and early and started bouncing on your TDS dildo before they even put out any of the morning stories today, huh Shit Golem.
Good for you, buddy.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities.
By Tom Nichols | July 22, 2026, 4:03 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/trump-iran-conflict-pentagon
/688026/
For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.
This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.
Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.
All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.
But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)
He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a
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Trump’s Nuclear Doctrine: Anything Is Possible For A Price
By David Averre | Jul 23, 2026 at 02:31 PM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal-anything-possible-ne
w-doctrine-12234080
The United States’ new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, struck yesterday as American missiles continue to batter Iran, was met with cries of hypocrisy! and warnings it would spur on the race for a nuclear bomb in the Middle East.
This is neither surprising nor unfair, but the criticism fails to address a deeper, and perhaps more consequential, problem.
The agreement—which could purportedly grant Riyadh a path to build its own uranium enrichment facilities as part of its civilian nuclear program without undergoing stringent inspections by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA—signals we are entering a new era of nuclear doctrine.
Nuclear nonproliferation is no longer being treated as a universal standard. Donald Trump likes to make deals, and the White House is telling the world that anyone can pursue their nuclear ambitions—provided you have enough bargaining power.
What may follow is a future in which states with enough money and geopolitical leverage can shop around for special nuclear deals from Washington—or Beijing or Moscow—while international safeguards become something to negotiate around rather than rules to meet.
Out With the Old Logic
The full text of the U.S.-Saudi agreement is yet to be made public, and any safeguards contained within remain unclear. Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Thursday: "There will be no enrichment of material!" But several reports suggest Riyadh could process spent atomic fuel and build its own uranium enrichment facilities, pending a joint study to assess feasibility.
Not only do these capabilities present a pathway to producing nuclear weapons, but the Saudis may also be granted leave to operate their nuclear program without signing the "additional protocol"—an extra layer of protection that gives IAEA inspectors special monitoring powers to ensure everything is done by the book.
The logic that giving a country the freedom to enrich uranium, reprocess its fuel and operate free of strict international inspections could increase the risk of weaponization is exactly the premise that governed Washington’s other major civilian nuclear agreement in the Middle East.
In 2009, the U.S. and the U.A.E. signed a deal enabling Washington to transfer nuclear technology to the Emiratis for civilian use. In exchange for America’s help in kick-starting a nuclear energy program, Abu Dhabi agreed it would not pursue enrichment or reprocessing capabilities and would comply with the IAEA’s additional protocol inspections, thereby guaranteeing it could not build a nuclear weapon.
The Saudi agreement seems to point in the opposite direction. Now, at a time when the U.S. military is waging war on Iran to demolish its nuclear program, the White House appears willing to throw out its own nonproliferation principles to give special treatment to an economically valuable ally.
Darya Dolzikova, a Senior Research Fellow for Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the RUSI think tank, told Newsweek: "It’s not surprising that the U.S. treats its allies a little differently from adversaries, even when it comes to nuclear nonproliferation.
"But once a country gets the expertise and technology to process fuel and enrich uranium, that knowledge doesn’t go away. Relationships change—Iran first got its nuclear technology from the United States, but the political winds shifted and now those countries are at war.
A New Buyers’ Market?
Riyadh is not the first partner to negotiate a bespoke nuclear deal with Washington outside of international safeguards.
India signed a deal in 2008 to receive additional U.S. support for its civilian nuclear program while retaining its own enrichment capabilities. But New Delhi already had its own robust civilian and military nuclear program, and is not a signatory of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty that a
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The full text of the U.S.-Saudi agreement is yet to be made public
So shut the fuck up until it is, faggot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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