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 127 of 479
Quote:I am in the top 1%. Nothing Trump does can touch me. But that fat rapist and tax cheater can touch other people:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second cannot articulate one single way that his life is worse today than it was in November of 2024.
Not one.
In Trump’s America, You Can Be Disappeared for Writing an Op-Ed
The Trump administration’s detention of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk rests on an opinion article she wrote in 2024, her lawyers said in a filing.
By Jonah Valdez | March 30, 2025
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/30/tufts-rumeysa-ozturk-ice-immigrati
on-op-ed/
While in Georgetown, Guyana, on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked by a reporter about what led to the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. The reporter mentioned an opinion piece Öztürk co-wrote in March 2024, published in The Tufts Daily, advocating for students’ calls to divest the school from companies with ties to Israel. https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj
Rubio seemed to downplay the influence of the op-ed, written alongside three other Tufts graduate students, instead insinuating without evidence that Öztürk, a Turkish citizen, had vandalized her university, occupied buildings, and harassed students.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa,” Rubio said.
Government documents included in court filings, however, don’t back up Rubio’s claims of supposed unlawful behavior.
Several days before her arrest on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Öztürk’s student visa without notifying her, according to a DHS document through its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, through which Öztürk had obtained her visa.
The government didn’t claim that Öztürk had broken any laws but instead cited a civil law provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The provision gives the secretary of state the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The government has made the same argument in detaining former Columbia University student activist leader Mahmoud Khalil and Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri, as well as in its efforts to arrest Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
In each of these cases, attorneys for the students argued the Trump administration’s crackdown on students and academics over their support for Palestine are ultimately an attack on their free speech rights.
Öztürk’s case is notable in that her detention and possible deportation may very well center on a published piece of journalism.
“Her arrest and detention appear to be based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in her school newspaper,” Öztürk’s attorneys wrote in a habeas petition for her release filed on Friday. “Rümeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others. Indeed, her arrest and detention are part of a concerted and systemic effort by Trump administration officials to punish students and others identified with pro-Palestine activism.”
Attorneys said Öztürk feared for her safety after pro-Israel group Canary Mission posted about her in early February, pointing to her 2024 essay. Canary Mission, which shares personal information about pro-Palestine activists online and is often used by other Zionist groups to dox people, said Öztürk took part in “anti-Israel activism” and cited her 2024 opinion piece as its sole source to back its claim.
While it is not known whether the State Department was aware of the Canary Mission post, right-wing Zionist groups have been willing collaborators in helping direct the administration toward “pro-Hamas” individuals for deportation.
In its “Catch and
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I am in the top 1%
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Second cannot articulate one single way that his life is worse today than it was in November of 2024.
Not one.
No you're not.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Five Things Elon Musk Doesn’t Want You to Know About Social Security
By Peter Hart | Mar 27, 2025
https://cepr.net/publications/five-things-elon-musk-doesnt-want-you-to
-know-about-social-security/
1. There is No Serious ‘Fraud’ Problem with Social Security
To put it plainly – millions of dead people aren’t getting Social Security checks. This Musk claim was easily debunked; unfortunately, that did not prevent Donald Trump from repeating it on numerous occasions.
Beyond this falsehood, there is no other evidence that the system has a substantial problem with fraud. In 2024, an inspector general report found that there had been $71 billion in improper payments over a seven-year-period; about one-third of those payments were recovered. This amounts to roughly 0.3 percent of the total benefits paid out, which is an extremely high rate of accuracy – you can visit the Annual Improper Payments Dashboard to see how it compares to other government agencies, many of which have drawn no interest from DOGE.
2. Social Security is Not Going Bankrupt
Musk’s claim that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme is nothing new; privatizers have been making the same claim for decades, trying to convince people (especially younger workers) that they’ll never see any of the money they’ve paid into the program. While it is true that Social Security is dependent on people paying their taxes to the government, that is also true for the repayment of government bonds – and no one calls government bonds a Ponzi Scheme.
What has happened to Social Security is fairly well understood. In order to account for the retirement of Baby Boomers, Social Security built up a massive surplus. The rhetoric about a ‘crisis’ is rooted in the process of using up that surplus. Even after those funds are exhausted, the program would be able to pay the majority of scheduled benefits. If political leaders were to make changes to the program now – raising the income tax to generate more revenue from the very wealthy, for instance – Social Security would be strengthened for the long term.
3. Social Security is Remarkably Efficient
Since the “E” in DOGE stands for Efficiency, you would think they might be able to spot an efficiently managed program. That is precisely how Social Security operates. The administrative costs associated with Social Security are less than 0.4 percent of benefits paid per year – far less than the typical 401(k) retirement plan, where administrative costs can add up to 20 percent or more of the benefits that are actually paid. Given that Social Security pays out close to $1.4 trillion in benefits every year, this is a remarkably lean and efficient program.
4. Privatization is a Terrible Idea
One of the most common claims about Social Security is that we would all make more money if we simply invested our money on our own. This idea came back recently during a retirement industry summit held by the giant investment firm BlackRock.
There’s no mystery why investment firms advocate for some form of privatization (though they tend to avoid using that word): They would earn billions of dollars in fees for managing these accounts. The idea of a stronger return from a privatized approach is especially attractive when the stock market is booming. Of course, things look very differently when the market goes down – as it inevitably does.
There are a host of other unanswered questions about how to even manage a privatized system. Policies would need to be crafted to regulate the plans, manage the efficient withdrawal of funds, and plan for the possible need for government bailouts. There is also the issue of how privatization would impact current retirees whose benefits are supported by current workers.
And, perhaps most importantly, private accounts would require benefit cuts. The privatization proposals under the second Bush administration included deep benefit cuts for all retirees, which was one of the main reasons the plan was so deeply unpopular. People were not enthusiastic about the idea that they’d get less in g
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
"The mad king of a high-tech feudal state"
Elon Musk's mythology
Feb 20, 2025
https://newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/17343849_2-20-25-musk-isaacson-ar
chival
In one scene, Musk challenges the CTO of PayPal, Max Levchin, to an arm wrestle to resolve a disagreement about operating systems. Musk wins and enlists a team of engineers to rewrite the existing code. The effort takes an entire year and achieves nothing other than distracting engineers from a dire fraud problem on the service. But Isaacson ties this up in a mini-redemption arc: Levchin is seen marveling at Musk’s technical expertise. As in Jobs, Isaacson employs his troubled-genius bait and switch, recounting an unhinged Musk anecdote and then justifying it with a moment of brilliance.
The trouble is, there is very little in Musk’s early life that offers any evidence of genius, creative talent, or even above-average intelligence. He is an emotionally detached child who sits in class staring into space. He likes computer games and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He gets As and Bs. The only evidence of superlative capability that Isaacson can conjure is that Musk read his dad’s encyclopedias and made small rockets with chlorine and brake fluid. What does stand out among this otherwise entirely unremarkable youth are stories in which Musk succeeds through dumb luck and aggression. In one, Musk competes in a Dungeons and Dragons tournament with his brother and cousins. The game master tells them that their mission is to identify the bad guy among the opposing players. On the first move, and without any evidence, Musk correctly guesses that the game master himself is the bad guy. The others accuse Musk of cheating. How did he know? “These guys were idiots,” Musk explains to Isaacson. “It was so obvious.” Any reader can see that this story is just Musk being a cocky teenage boy. Isaacson, however, takes it as proof that Musk could “think different.” Musk’s big break comes when he sells his first company, Zip2, at the height of the dot-com boom for $307 million. Zip2 is a searchable business directory that uses map software to give users directions. It’s not exactly the Mona Lisa, but, as Isaacson insists, “some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations.” Musk parlays the capital from that sale into an online-payments business that, fortunately, merges with PayPal. What does he contribute? An idea that new users could sign up with their email addresses instead of their Social Security numbers. Isaacson: “Like Steve Jobs, he had a passion for simplicity when it came to designing user interface screens.”
If there is anything remarkable that emerges about Musk in the biography, it is his grandiose, cosmic sense of mission — his obsession with making humanity multi-planetary, for example — and his absurd appetite for risk. The combination could be inspiring for those Musk worked with — and it certainly makes for good marketing. Like Jobs, Musk’s great talent is in self-mythologizing. He builds his cult of personality not around the guru-creative ideal, as Jobs did, but as a crazed, workaholic, alpha-male superhero: a manic Iron Man sending a Tesla Roadster into space. Isaacson credulously regurgitates Musk’s lore, just as he did in Jobs, recounting an anecdote in which Musk plays a game of Texas Hold ’Em and goes all in on every single hand — losing, doubling up — until he eventually wins. “It would be a theme in his life,” Isaacson writes. “Avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.”
To redeem Musk as a Jobs-like genius, Isaacson leans heavily on the “crazy” element of the “think different” campaign. It is the “crazy ones,” the ones who go all in at poker, who change the world. The problem is, as the biography progresses, the craziness intensifies even as it bears little connection to the genuine achievements of Musk’s companies, which are adeptly run by very talented employees who do their best to keep Musk out of the way. Isaacson tries to craft a coherent narrative out of such life events as: Musk a
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump's "restoring truth" order could return toppled Confederate monuments
By Russell Contreras, Delano Massey | Mar 30, 2025
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/30/trump-executive-order-confederate-mon
uments
President Trump has ordered a federal review of monuments toppled in the wake of George Floyd's murder, targeting what he calls a "concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history."
Did nobody tell Trump that those statues were for glorifying traitors and slave-owners, not for recording history?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous
Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking
By Timothy Snyder | Mon 31 Mar 2025
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/31/trump-greenland-
us-morally-wrong-strategy-disastrous
“No one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit of his office.”
– Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes
Musk-Trump inherited a state with unprecedented power and functionality, and are taking it apart. They also inherited a set of alliances and relationships that underpinned the largest economy in world history. This too they are breaking.
The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited an American base Greenland for three hours yesterday, along with his wife. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his wife also came along. Fresh from illegally using an unsafe social media platform to carry out an entirely unnecessary group chat in which they leaked sensitive data about an ongoing military attack to a reporter, Waltz and Vance perhaps hoped to change the subject by tagging along on a trip which was initially billed as Vance’s wife watching a dogsled race.
The overall context was Donald Trump’s persistent claim that America must take Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. The original plan had been that Usha Vance would visit Greenlanders, apparently on the logic that the Second Lady would be an effective animatrice of colonial subjection; but none of them wanted to see her, and Greenland’s businesses refused to serve as a backdrop to photo ops or even to serve the uninvited Americans. So instead the American couples all made a very quick visit to Pituffik Space Base. (Pete Hegseth, another group chatter, stayed home; but his wife was in the news as well, as an unorthodox participant in sensitive military discussions.)
At the base, in the far north of the island, the American visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and servicewomen. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the United States would. Greenland should therefore join the United States.
It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.
The base at Pituffik (formerly Thule) only exists because Denmark permitted the United States to build it at a sensitive time. It has served the United States for decades as a central part of its nuclear armory and then as an early-warning system against Soviet and then Russian nuclear attack.
When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the NATO alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of NATO, and it is already American’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend the United States.
Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked Article 5, the mutual defense obligation of the NATO treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita more Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war than were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?
The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the NATO mission. But right now the United States is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian thre
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
ICE’s push for illegal immigrant data to the IRS that could end in a $97 billion revenue loss to state coffers
By Calum Roche | Mar 31st, 2025 12:16 EDT
https://en.as.com/latest_news/ices-push-for-illegal-immigrant-data-to-
the-irs-that-could-end-in-a-97-billion-revenue-loss-to-state-coffers-n/
In a bid to step up deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wants access to the IRS’s most sensitive data – taxpayer records – to help identify and deport undocumented immigrants. But experts warn this could trigger a massive drop in tax compliance, costing states and the federal government up to $97 billion.
That’s how much undocumented immigrants paid in taxes in 2022, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Many file returns not just to follow the rules, but in hopes that proving they’ve paid taxes might one day support a bid for legal residency.
If ICE starts using IRS data to locate them, that incentive disappears. “The mere fact this is being talked about… is going to lead to declining compliance,” said ITEP’s Carl Davis.
More at https://en.as.com/latest_news/ices-push-for-illegal-immigrant-data-to-
the-irs-that-could-end-in-a-97-billion-revenue-loss-to-state-coffers-n/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Military expert warns Trump vow could trigger decades-long insurgency
By Brad Reed | March 31, 2025 8:46AM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-canada-2671641846/
President Donald Trump has repeatedly mused about making Canada into America's "51st state," which has prompted one expert to conduct a war game mapping how a U.S. invasion of Canada would play out.
The Montreal Gazette reported that Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, said that the American military would likely easily defeat Canada were Trump to really give the green light for an invasion.
However, he also said that wouldn't be the end of the story as Canadians would not passively accept being conquered.
In fact, Ahmad believes that Canadians would wage a bloody, decades-long insurgency against the United States until the Americans left their country.
“It’s impossible to annex Canada without violence,” said Ahmad, who in the past has advised American officials at the United States Department of Defense about counter-insurgency strategies. “No one is born an insurgent or resistance fighter. This is something that happens to people when their mom is killed, or when their kids are unable to get to a hospital. People fight back because they have to.”
He said that the U.S. military would struggle to occupy Canada when hundreds of thousands of Canadians would be engaged in a concerted campaign of sabotage that they would adopt as a "secret, part-time job."
"Trump is delusional if he believes that 40 million Canadians will passively accept conquest," he emphasized.
In fact, it would only take one percent of the Canadian population working as insurgents to produce a force of 400,000 fighters, which would be ten times the number of Taliban fighters who eventually pushed the American military out of Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How to collapse America from the inside out
By Thom Hartmann | March 31, 2025
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/how-to-collapse-america-f
rom-the-inside-out/
And here we are. So far, Trump and Musk have or are in the process of:
— Gutting the IRS so badly that the country will lose an estimated $500 billion to morbidly rich tax cheats
— Killing off the EPA, so polluters can run free and profit from giving us cancer
— Disbanded the Public Integrity Section that once prosecuted corrupt politicians
— Shut down the DOJ unit that was prosecuting violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
— Moved the ATF under Kash Patel’s overview with the goal of neutering it
— Crippling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) that stops big banks and insurance companies from ripping off average people
— Taking a hatchet to NASA, presumably to hand more power and money to SpaceX
— Dismantling the Department of Education to create more demand for private for-profit schools
— Paralyzing the Department of Health and Human Services that protects us from disease and pandemics
— Mutilating the National Labor Relations Board that protects workers’ rights
— Proclaiming their intention to end FEMA, so Americans are on their own when climate-change-driven disasters strike
— Tearing apart the Social Security Administration so seniors will have to rely on big banks for retirement options
— Demolishing the National Institutes of Health that develops new drugs and cures for disease
— Seizing control of the FCC so they can end net neutrality and dictate content of radio and TV programming
— Stripping NOAA of its workers so we’ll have to rely on for-profit companies for our weather reports and storm warnings
— Kneecapping the Department of Transportation to block new public transportation projects and deregulate big trucking companies and self-driving cars
— Ripping up the Department of Energy so it can’t fund any more “green” energy projects
— Wiping out the Department of Housing and Urban Development to prevent any new low-income housing projects
— Attacking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to leave Americans defenseless
— Largely ending the ability of the Office of Civil Rights within the DOE to enforce anti-discrimination laws in education
— Defunded the National Institute of Justice that works against terrorism and far-right extremism
— Eviscerating the Department of Veterans Affairs and other programs that help our veterans (including shutting down the suicide prevention hotlines)
— Defunding the Department of Agriculture to gut food stamps/SNAP, school lunch programs, and supports for small family farms
— Paralyzing the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) that oversees the executive branch to make sure anti-terrorism efforts don’t violate civil rights
— Weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) so it can’t do its job of protecting minority or disabled workers and job applicants
— Firing scientists at the FDA, gutting oversight of drug manufacturers.
And that’s just a partial “so far” list.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Donald Trump faces backlash after spending $85M on golf excursions
By Tom Beattie | 08:44 ET, MAR 31 2025
https://www.irishstar.com/sport/other-sports/donald-trump-backlash-gol
f-excursions-34964019
Trump has spent 38 percent of his time in office at his resorts.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME