Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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PAGE 118 of 479
Trump's war on science
A multi-directional assault on the foundations of American research
By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
I try not to do too many pure “Trump is Bad” takes — if you’re here and reading, you almost certainly already believe that — but I think it’s important to contemplate the scope of the harms here.
Thanks to the involvement of Elon Musk and the support of several other prominent technology industry figures, the second Trump administration has a techno-futurist strand that was completely missing from the nostalgia-soaked first. We’re hearing about robots, advanced rockets, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies of tomorrow.
But underlying this forward-looking rhetorical glow is a multi-pronged attack on American scientific research that could genuinely cripple knowledge production and our long-term future.
In order to grasp the full scale of the assault, it’s important to recognize that these threats are converging from multiple directions at once. The centerpiece, politically at least, is a determination to destroy left-aligned institutions, of which universities are a salient example. But that’s hardly the only front:
• Somewhat independent of the administration’s attack on institutions is the involvement of RFK Jr. and his admirers, who until recently, formed a crank antiprogress wing of the left.
• On immigration, the administration’s paranoia extends well beyond a desire for a secure border, and systematically errs on the side of removing more people and making the United States a less desirable place to live and work.
• DOGE’s core fiscal theory is that it's possible to make large reductions in federal spending without any noticeable diminution of service levels, and this creates large, systematic incentives to do things with hidden long-term costs.
• It’s not unique to this administration, but the traditional business community’s hostility to research agendas that might make the case for public interest regulation has not diminished.
• And last but not least, there is a harder-to-define nexus of influence in Trump’s DC that includes both malign foreign actors who don’t want America to safeguard its national interests and believers in a short-term singularity who don’t believe there's a long-term interest that needs to be secured.
More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Lies and the City
New York City is great again, but MAGA can’t handle the truth
By Paul Krugman | Mar 27, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city
I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.
Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?
Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.
It felt like a mental vacation from the grim political news, and if you’ll forgive me I’ll extend that vacation a bit by telling a mostly happy story about life in New York. FYI: I’ll be traveling tomorrow and probably won’t be able to post Friday.
But of course pointing out that life in New York is OK is itself political, because trash talk about our big cities, New York in particular, is a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric. According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.
The truth is that New York, which really was a dangerous place a few decades ago, is now incredibly safe. The city’s weekly crime report provides some historical comparisons:
You may say, never mind statistics, it feels dangerous. But actually it doesn’t — not to those who actually live there. The perception that New York is an urban hellscape comes from people who never visit the city, or at most spend a few days around tourist traps like Times Square, which is kind of a hellscape — it’s full of people dressed up as Disney characters, not to mention mimes.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The implicit threat in Trump’s push to change election rules
The president just set the stage to challenge election results he doesn’t like.
by Andrew Prokop | Mar 27, 2025, 8:32 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/405990/trump-election-executive-order-cit
izenship-mail-ballots
By withholding federal funds and threatening investigations, President Donald Trump has tried to bend universities to his will.
Now, he’s doing something similar: trying to get states to change their election rules.
In an executive order Tuesday, Trump made what amounts to a series of demands on states to change their election laws and policies. For one, he wants states to be more strict at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/preserving-and
-protecting-the-integrity-of-american-elections/
Trump also wants states to stop counting mailed-in votes that were sent in on or before Election Day but arrive afterward — in fact, he suggests that counting such votes violates federal law. Most judges and mainstream legal experts think this interpretation of the law is ridiculous, but it has gained steam on the right.
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146627
Trump is trying to do all this even though the president has no legal authority to tell states how to run their elections. Indeed, several aspects of his order will likely be challenged in court.
But he’s trying to threaten states anyway, with the pulling of federal election assistance funding and with unspecified action from his Justice Department, in hopes they comply.
The biggest threat of all is implicit — that Trump is setting the stage for a really nasty attempt to use the federal government to dispute election results in states that don’t make the changes he wants. This gives states a tough choice to make: give in now, or have an ugly battle later?
Trump’s demands on states
Trump’s first demand is stricter citizenship proof for voters. He wants to force people registering to vote or renewing their registrations to prove their citizenship. He also wants to force state and local officials to do more to check the citizenship of people on their voter rolls. The order also instructs various federal agencies to make citizenship data more readily available to state and local officials.
This demand reflects baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that noncitizens regularly vote for Democrats in huge numbers. For decades, conservatives have believed that this is happening. But they can somehow never find evidence to prove it. Existing data and studies suggest that vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote. For instance, the state of Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2024 and found that, out of more than 8 million registered voters, a mere 20 were noncitizens.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/election-fact-check-noncitizens-vote-instanc
es-vanishingly-rare/story?id=115025674
https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-voter-roll-audit-finds-20-noncitizen
s-8/story?id=115072461
Still, many on the right have long argued that, regardless of whether illegal voting is happening in significant numbers, it is common sense to require voters to prove their citizenship. Critics argue, though, that because there is no actual widespread problem of noncitizen voting, the most consequential impact would be to suppress legitimate voting from citizens who don’t have proof-of-citizenship documents easily available.
Trump’s second demand is that state and local officials not count mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
Every state that uses mail-in voting requires ballots to be postmarked — that is, in the mail — either on or before Election Day. But 18 states have later deadlines for when ballots can arrive (for instance, California accepts them until seven days after election day, and Alaska until 10 days after it.) This is to ensure legitimate votes are not excluded due to slow mail delivery and simply to give voters more flexibility.
However, Trump is adopting a fringe legal theory that an existing federal la
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Forget the Trump administration's buffoonery — here's the real crisis
By John Stoehr | March 27, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/national-security-crisis/
. . . The president didn’t know about the security breach. “I don't know anything about it,” he told a reporter who asked about it for the first time. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. It's a magazine that's going out of business. It’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it.”
Why wasn’t he told? A reasonable guess might be that Hegseth and the others knew they were being careless and didn’t want to tell him.
But that would mean carelessness is a flaw.
It’s not.
Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust them. When things go south, as they always do, he can trust them to cling to him more tightly, as by then, he might be the only thing standing between them and a jail cell.
When people talk about loyalty to Trump, they are not talking about it in the positive sense, as if they love him. They are talking about it in the negative sense, as if life as they know it would end without him.
Once the president becomes the only thing standing between them and criminal accountability, he becomes, to them, the law itself, such that whatever they do is in his name, which means it’s “legal,” which means they can do whatever they want without fear of consequence. Those are the kind of people a criminal president wants around him.
That’s the takeaway: Loyalty to Trump is the national security crisis.
Unfortunately, this is not yet widely understood. As things stand, there’s still this idea that failure in matters of national security is the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself under Donald Trump.
“This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships,’” a former CIA officer said. “This is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning,” involving the vice president, the secretary of defense and the CIA director, “all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.”
But criminal negligence isn’t putting troops at risk, not primarily.
Loyalty to Trump is.
“This is the highest level of f---up imaginable,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “These people cannot keep America safe.” (I read this quote and the above quote in Heather Cox Richardson.)
But this f---up isn’t making America unsafe, not primarily.
Loyalty to Trump is.
F----ups happen all the time. There’s always someone willing to take his chances by breaking the law. We are not talking about ordinary human error. We are not talking about ordinary human venality.
We are talking about a president who chose the worst people, because they are the worst people, as the worst people can be counted on to fail so spectacularly that they will be bonded to him forever.
We are talking about a president who decided against excellence, because excellence threatens his control. He can’t afford to have men and women of integrity, who will honor their oath of office, because they might, as they did in the time, stand in the way of his power.
Which brings me back to utter disbelief.
Despite everything we know about Donald Trump, it is still possible, apparently, to be outraged. As Senate Michael Bennet told CIA Director Ratcliffe, “This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect … is entirely unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better!”
But that’s only if we’re still giving Trump some benefit of the doubt – if we still have expectations of him that are just above the level of a criminal. If we drop those, we wouldn't be in utter disbelief anymore. They will never do better, so we should expect them to never do better. We should expect Signalgate to be as good as it’s ever going to get. We should expect him and his goons to harm and betray America.
And, God help us, we will be right.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.
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Signalgate
By David Remnick | March 26, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/the-greater-scandal-of-s
ignalgate
In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.
This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. “It’s PATHETIC.”) And yet much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and the President’s disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought
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WHO’S AFRAID OF BIG BIRD?
Trump Demands Congress Defund NPR and PBS ‘IMMEDIATELY’ in Late-Night Meltdown
The president lashed out America’s public broadcasters, saying both were “arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party.”
By Janna Brancolini | Mar. 27 2025 9:05AM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-demands-congress-defund-npr
-and-pbs-immediately-in-latest-rant/
“Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a bipartisan nonprofit that distributes federal funding to a decentralized network of local affiliate stations.
It quickly featured groundbreaking educational, arts, and culture shows including Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The French Chef with Julia Child, and Masterpiece Theater.
The average public radio station gets about 8 percent of its funding from the federal government, while the average television stations get about 17 percent, according to PBS News Hour. The federal funding costs Americans $1.50 per year on average, according to PBS. The BBC, by comparison, costs Brits about $70 per person per year via a household license fee.
During a flurry of late-night posts, Trump repeated his calls to “JUST SAY NO” to funding public broadcasters.
How am I going to watch NOVA specials about sharks now?
https://i.imgur.com/LBlq8x6.jpeg
https://imgur.com/gallery/how-am-i-going-to-watch-nova-specials-about-
sharks-now-VykCrtZ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:Who is holding ABCNews hostage? Greenland? Just asking because the News coverage seems biased against Trump's confident self-image.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.
Trump says US will 'go as far as we have to' to get control of Greenland
The president suggested that "the world needs us to have Greenland."
By David Brennan | March 27, 2025, 7:20 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/International/trump-us-control-greenland/story?
id=120208823
"We need Greenland for national security and international security," Trump said, taking reporters' questions in the Oval Office.
"So we'll, I think, we'll go as far as we have to go," he continued. "We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But if we don't have Greenland, we can't have great international security."
Trump added, "I view it from a security standpoint, we have to be there."
Trump also said that he understood "JD might be going," referring to the vice president, but did not offer any details about the trip. Vance is expected to travel to Greenland on Friday.
Greenland's Prime Minister Mute Egede earlier this week called the upcoming visit by U.S. officials part of a "very aggressive American pressure against the Greenlandic community" and called for the international community to rebuke it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yep, Trump is on a tear.
I knew there would be things he'd do that I think are stupid (pro-Zionism comes to mind), against America's interests and against American's interests (I hope you catch the distinction). Unfortunately he was the only candidate with enough push to win against globalists and the deep state.
Too bad for all of us the Dem party became so deeply corrupted and anti-American.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.
You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.
You should probably move out of my country now.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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