Real World Event Discussions

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 456 of 479

Monday, May 4, 2026 4:08 AM

1000 black children are aborted every single day in America. 473 black children are murdered for every 1,000 that are born. In states such as Mississippi and in Washington D.C., black women account for up to 79% of all baby murders. The baby murder rate among black women is FIVE TIMES HIGHER than that of white baby murderers.

All according to "the great" Senator Byrd's plan.



And... SPOILER ALERT:

You idiots were freaking out about the made-up covid death statistics for years.

Yet, it is quite curious how none of you have spoken up and said anything about the fact that since the lockdowns have ended, there have been more black baby murders in abortion clinics in the US than the entire amount of OLD, FAT, DYING people who had allegedly died of covid.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, May 4, 2026 6:03 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

FUCK YOU.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

Judge tosses Laura Loomer’s defamation suit against Bill Maher

The conservative activist alleged that Maher defamed her with a joke suggesting she had an affair with President Donald Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/22/judge-tosses-laura-loomer-bil
l-maher-defamation-suit-00887992


Loomer, an influential figure in the MAGA movement, has used her platform since Trump returned to the White House to weed out administration officials she accuses of being insufficiently loyal to the president. She has targeted dozens of staffers across the White House and executive departments, many of whom have been swiftly fired or seen their nominations pulled.

Breaking: Laura Loomer Loses Bill Maher Lawsuit After Her Dad Said She Always "Bragged" About Giving Trump Blow Jobs. A federal judge, a deposition for the ages, an honest father and a roast beef cameo nobody saw coming.

https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/breaking-laura-loomer-loses-bill

This week, a federal judge in Florida — a Bill Clinton appointee, which is already a cinematic touch — granted summary judgment to Maher and HBO before the case could even reach a jury. Not “you might lose.” Not “this is shaky.” Summary judgment, which in lawyer-speak means “there is no universe where you win this, please stop.”

Then, of course, the bombshell: Her Dad said he might put her back into involuntary psych hold because the blow job stuff is probably true.

A tearful Jeff Loomer declined to say over the phone whether he was currently considering another involuntary psychiatric hold for his daughter, given her bizarre claim this week that she has been performing oral sex on President Trump, but did not rule it out.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, May 4, 2026 7:06 PM

Trump’s Killing Spree Isn’t Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into the U.S.

The Trump administration falsely claims that boat strikes target fentanyl and have halted 97 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S.

By Nick Turse | May 4, 2026

https://theintercept.com/2026/05/04/trump-boat-strikes-fentanyl-cocain
e-drug-supply
/

The Pentagon claims that attacks on civilian boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific have severely curtailed the import of illegal drugs to the United States. And President Donald Trump says this has saved more than 1 million American lives. Experts call these assertions laughable and reporting by The Intercept shows that claims by the White House and War Department are baseless, phony, or both.

“The administration has failed to explain the long-term objectives of this mission or provide any evidence of reduced drug flows into the United States,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said about the campaign on Thursday. “I would ask for a credible answer to this most fundamental question: What is the operation actually meant to accomplish?”

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted attacks on 54 so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 185 civilians, since September. The latest strike, on April 26 in the Pacific, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. These summary killings are a deviation from the standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies generally detained suspected drug smugglers and brought them to trial on criminal charges.

“These are extrajudicial executions, or even just murders — something similar to a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back when there is no self-defense justification,” said Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. He called the growing death toll “a gross human rights violation.”

While Trump consistently lies about various aspects of the boat strikes, including the illicit narcotics allegedly on the boats and the number of lives supposedly saved by the attacks, the Pentagon has followed suit, using rhetorical sleight of hand and seemingly disingenuous statistics to bolster the claims of their commander-in-chief.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” said retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin.

The Pentagon and White House for months failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept on the boat strike campaign.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels attacked by the U.S. are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. “The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean, it’s like floating in bags, it’s all over the place,” he said in October of boats leaving from Venezuela.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and five other government officials briefed on boat strikes told The Intercept that top officials admitted in close-door briefings that the vessels are not transporting fentanyl. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” said Jacobs, who serves the San Diego area. “Representing a border community, I know that 99 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the United States comes through legal ports of ent

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 5:00 PM

The End of America’s Soft Power

The United States has given up on one of its core international strengths.

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

May 4, 2026

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/04/trump-soft-power-usa/?tpcc=recirc
_latest062921


One of the more striking features of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy—not the chosen ends, but its preferred means—is its absolute confidence in America’s hard power and its near-total disdain for what my late colleague Joseph Nye called “soft power.” Nye defined the latter as “the power of attraction,” as a nation’s ability to get others to do what it wanted because it possessed qualities that made others want to emulate it, associate with it, and follow its lead. States with a lot of hard power could compel others through force and intimidation or by offering aid or protection; states with an abundance of soft power enjoyed greater influence because others wanted to be like them, agreed with the principles they stood for, or viewed them as fashionable, successful, and even “hip.”

A good realist like me is hardly going to denigrate the importance of hard power; on the contrary, it’s hard to have lots of soft power without substantial hard power to back it up. But you can have plenty of hard power and little or no soft power, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia has shown. Ideally, a state would like to have a lot of both, because having a lot of soft power means others will be naturally inclined to do what you want and you won’t have to use your hard power very often. Nye believed America’s combination of hard and soft power gave it enormous advantages when dealing with the outside world, which is one of the reasons he was optimistic about America’s future and skeptical of those predicting its decline. Yet by the end of his long career, even he had begun to worry about what was happening to America’s global appeal.

Under Trump 2.0, the belief that hard power is all you need is abundantly apparent. The administration used the threat of tariffs to force trading partners into one-sided economic agreements, and it vows to continue the effort despite the Supreme Court decision that strikes them down. The administration has used military force in more than half a dozen countries and continues to kill alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, even when it doesn’t know who they are, cannot prove all of them are in fact engaged in narcotics trafficking, and admits that these actions will have little or no effect on the availability of illegal drugs. President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused other world leaders of being weak, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t “have the cards” and should therefore cut a deal with Russia, and imposed a blockade on Cuba intended to further immiserate ordinary Cubans and eventually force its regime to surrender. Last but by no means least, it abandoned diplomacy and launched an unnecessary and unprovoked war against Iran, on the mistaken assumption that the Iranian regime would quickly collapse and yield a government more to our liking.

What is most striking about this fixation with hard power is how little effort is being made to disguise, legitimize, or justify its use. Most countries do nasty things on occasion, and great powers do so more than most, but they usually try to find ways to hide the mailed fist in a velvet glove of normative justification. Not so the Trump administration, which seems positively gleeful whenever it is able to violate some established norm and inflict some pain. When the president threatens to eradicate Iranian civilization, or when the secretary of defense dismisses international law and boasts that U.S. troops will show opponents “no quarter” (which would constitute a war crime), it is clear their goal is to intimidate rather than persuade, to compel rather than attract. Their motto, it seems, is: “Being the strongest means never having to s

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 6:07 PM

If you took all the undocumented people who have illegally voted since 1988, and multiplied it by all of the transgender athletes that played in any college sport in the year 2025, your total would still be 37,720 less than the number of times Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 5, 2026 7:02 PM

Republicans Make Jaw-Dropping $1 Billion Demand for Trump’s Ballroom

The president has insisted his vanity project would be funded by wealthy donors.

By Ewan Palmer | May 5 2026

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-make-jaw-dropping-1b-demand-
for-donald-trumps-ballroom
/

Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion of taxpayer money to help fund “security adjustments and upgrades” linked to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project.

The proposal was outlined in a reconciliation package focusing on federal law enforcement and border security spending, which was released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday.

The legislation also allows for part of the $1 billion package to be used for security upgrades for the East Wing Modernization Project—also known as Trump’s ballroom project—including “above-ground and below-ground security features.”

The push arrives as Trump and MAGA figures have desperately demanded that the ballroom be allowed to go ahead in the wake of the assassination attempt against the president at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25.

The package does include the caveat that none of the requested funds may be used for “non-security elements of the East Wing Modernization Project.”

The proposal outlining how to allocate funds to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) through 2029 includes more than $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and nearly $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection, including funding for training and hiring staff.

Trump has suggested that the 90,000-square-foot room—which the East Wing of the White House was demolished to make way for—is necessary, as it would provide greater security.

The 79-year-old has insisted that the project, previously estimated to cost $400 million, will be funded by private donors. The White House also indicated in a July 2025 statement that the Secret Service would provide any “necessary security enhancements and modifications” needed for the ballroom to be used by the president for state dinners, galas, and other glitzy events.

A federal judge had ordered that construction of the ballroom be halted unless it receives approval from Congress, as requested in a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Last month, a U.S. appeals court allowed construction to resume on the ballroom pending the conclusion of the legal challenge.

Trump has bemoaned that the lawsuit forced him to reveal his plans to build a large military base underneath his White House ballroom.

“The military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in late March while holding up large placards detailing how the completed ballroom might look.

“The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what’s being built under the military, including from drones, and including from any other thing.”

In a statement while releasing the reconciliation bill, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backward by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 6, 2026 4:55 PM

MAGA Will Kill Many Americans
Greed, willful ignorance and mortality
Paul Krugman
May 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-will-kill-many-americans

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration broke with previous policy and approved the sale of blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, dismissing long-standing concerns that making sweet-flavored vapes available will lead to increased smoking, especially among young people. A White House spokesman claimed that this policy U-turn reflected “Gold Standard Science,” but the decision came after Donald Trump — who suddenly became pro-vaping in 2024 after meeting with a “leading vaping lobbyist” — personally put pressure on the FDA commissioner. Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men.

In other news, the New York Times reports that the Trump FDA has been suppressing research that refutes disinformation from anti-vaccine activists:

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies supporting the safety of widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles in recent months, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed.

The studies, which cost millions of dollars in public funds, were conducted by scientists at the agency, who worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records. They found serious side effects to be very rare.

Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes.

Let’s back up for a minute. Most Americans appear to be unaware of the fact that life expectancy in the United States is substantially lower than in other advanced countries; we’re on a par with poorer nations in Europe like Albania. Surely even fewer people know that this wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s Americans lived about as long as citizens of other rich nations. Now we die substantially earlier:

What changed in the 1980s? The obvious answer is politics: The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 heralded a sharp U.S. turn to the right. And there is a strong correlation between right-wing politics and increased mortality — stronger than many of the statistical associations that guide public health policy.

You can see this correlation at the state level. Here’s life expectancy by state plotted against Trump’s share of the 2024 vote:

I’ve labeled the 10 most populous states. I’ve also labeled the outliers — red states with relatively high life expectancy, blue states with low life expectancy — to emphasize that these are small states. Taking population sizes into account, the trend line through the data points shows that there is there’s a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level. Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.

What drives this correlation? Part of the answer is that red states have weak social safety nets and are especially unwilling to provide healthcare to vulnerable populations. As I noted in my most recent primer, many red states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would have borne the bulk of the cost. Texas, which likes to boast about its economic success, leads the nation in the share of its children who lack health insurance.

Beyond this, right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was

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Thursday, May 7, 2026 6:37 PM

Trumptards singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" - Cabaret



Grand Theft Oil Futures
Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
Paul Krugman
May 07, 2026

Under Trump II, corruption runs rampant. Success in business depends not on what you know but on who you know, and there are no rules beyond having — and, obviously, buying — the right connections.

This is bad for everyone who doesn’t have those connections. It’s bad for economic growth. And it undermines the moral basis of the economy and society as a whole. It’s the path of how a country slides into third-world status.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/grand-theft-oil-futures

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 9, 2026 5:04 PM

ARE YOU SOCIALLY LIBERAL BUT FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE?

Then, with the U.S. deficit projected to hit $2 trillion and Republicans controlling all three branches of government, I would argue that you must be a Democrat.

It was Reagan, Bush 43, and Trump who’ve done the most to get us into this National Debt quicksand.

Mostly, they did it by overdoing tax cuts for those who needed them least.*

It was Bill Clinton who famously left his successor a surplus . . . Barack Obama who left his successor, Trump 1.0, a National Debt shrinking relative to the economy as a whole . . . and Biden who averted a Covid-induced financial collapse / global depression — averting even the widely predicted recession — and handing his successor a growing economy and inflation of just 2.7%.**

Two no-brainers for shrinking the deficit:

(1) Adequately fund the IRS to collect the taxes due.

(2) Close loopholes and raise rates modestly on billionaires and billionheirs — while making it clear every time the subject arises that, in the main, we celebrate their achievements and admire their success, wish them well, appreciate their numerous good works (truly) . . . and don’t blame them a bit for not paying more tax than the tax code requires. It’s just that the tax code has gotten out of whack, and it’s tearing our country apart.

Join the Patriotic Millionaires if you are one (annual income $1M+ or new worth $5M+) . . . or support their proposals if you believe the playing field has been tilted a little too far in their favor.

* The Debt was 30% of GDP at the beginning of the Depression, 41% at the beginning of World War II, 122% in 1946, at the end of the war . . . and then fell gradually back to 30% by 1981 when Reagan began cutting taxes for the rich. Sensibly, at first, but then by too much. Made worse by Bush 43 and now Trump.

** In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that Biden overdid the Covid stimulus; but underdoing it, I believe, would have been far worse.

https://andrewtobias.com/126904-2

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 9, 2026 5:39 PM

This article is 4 months old, but still true:

Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional

The president’s thinking is stuck in the 1980s.

By Rogé Karma | January 10, 2026, 9:55 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-plan-venezuela-oil-eco
nomic-mistake/685572
/

So, about all that Venezuelan oil. Although President Trump has declared that America’s oil companies will soon “go in” to Venezuela and “spend billions of dollars” to rebuild that country’s petroleum industry, the administration is making two huge assumptions. First, that unleashing Venezuelan oil would yield lower energy prices for American consumers and giant profits for American companies. Second, unlike previous administrations, which got bogged down for decades in failed nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump can simply let great American companies do what they do best—drill, baby, drill.

But my conversations with several oil-industry veterans and energy analysts indicate that the administration has the situation precisely backwards: Restoring Venezuela’s oil industry is completely unrealistic in the short term, and might not be in America’s economic and geopolitical interests at all. “Trump seems locked in the world of the 1980s and ’90s, when the U.S. imported most of its oil from a handful of foreign sources,” Arnab Datta, a lawyer who specializes in energy markets, told me. “But today, America is the world’s biggest oil producer. The play for Venezuelan oil doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the new world we’re in.”

Although some oil executives who met with Trump at the White House yesterday expressed a vague interest in doing business in Venezuela, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods offered a blunt warning about the country. “Today,” he said, “it’s uninvestable.”

The Trump administration is right about one thing: Venezuela has a lot of oil. As recently as the ’90s, it was one of the world’s top producers, pumping out more than 3 million barrels a day. But in the early 2000s, the populist leader Hugo Chávez forced out most Western oil companies, seized their assets, and turned their operations over to the country’s dysfunctional state-owned company. Production has since plunged by more than two-thirds. In this history, the Trump administration sees a golden opportunity. With Maduro, Chávez’s hand-picked successor, out of power, U.S. companies can return and bring hundreds of millions of barrels of new supply to the global market.

Yet expert after expert told me that rebooting the country’s oil industry would require a herculean effort. It would involve training an army of workers with no experience in the industry, rebuilding decrepit processing facilities and miles of crumbling pipelines, and amassing a private security force to protect these investments from cartels and private militias. “I really can’t overstate just how hard this would be to actually pull off,” Ben Nussdorf, who served as a senior adviser for the Department of Energy’s Office of Oil and Natural Gas from 2014 to 2021, told me. “Don’t even think about making a dollar for at least a decade.” According to the most optimistic projections, simply restoring Venezuela’s production to its previous peak would require a decade and $100 billion of investment; more conservative estimates put the numbers closer to 15 years and $200 billion.

In a Truth Social post before the White House meeting yesterday, Trump announced, “At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL.” That prediction would be more believable if oil companies could expect a lucrative return on these gargantuan investments. But in inflation-adjusted terms, current oil prices—about $60 a barrel—are historically low. And they are well below the roughly $80-a-barrel cost of extracting and refining Venezuelan oil—much of which is the kind of thick, low-quality petroleum (known within the industry as “heavy sour crude”) that requires extensive processing.

This basic dynamic is unlikely to change anytime soon. The price of oil is widely expected t

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