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 460 of 479
Quote:The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities
Originally posted by second:
If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
America descends into a flattery-failure doom loop
Paul Krugman
May 26, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-dumpster-fire-of-the-vanities
On Memorial Day the New York Times published an article with the headline “Trump is the only person who can save America, according to his cabinet.” The article offered a quantitative analysis of senior officials' sycophancy. As the article notes, Donald Trump likes to hold long, televised cabinet meetings. In these meetings, according to the Times,
On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.
This “Dear Leader” treatment is unprecedented in American history. Regardless of how successful, no previous president has been showered with this kind of obsequiousness and deification.
Outside the MAGA bubble, Americans are increasingly seeing Trump as the loser he is. He has failed on every front. Manufacturing employment is down, inflation is outpacing wages, consumer sentiment is at a record low, and mortgage rates are up. Trump’s war of choice has led to utter humiliation. According to current polls, Americans are giving Trump extremely low approval ratings, both overall and on every major issue — even border security:
Inside the MAGA fantasy bubble, however, Trump’s reign is hailed, almost literally, as the Second Coming.
Some of this reflects Trump’s own personality. His inner self is obviously a bottomless pit of insecurity. He self-medicates by demanding Pyongyang-level flattery, destroying national monuments and replacing them with garish, vulgar trash, persecuting critics and comedians, and starting stupid wars.
But Trump isn’t the first public figure to seek self-aggrandizement in an attempt to fill his inner emptiness. The important question is why the American right — not just his pathetic cabinet, but the whole movement, including the 6 extremists Republicans on the Supreme Court — has been so willing to empower him. And that’s a question much bigger than Trump himself.
The truth is that the right-wing attempt to build a cult of personality around a deeply unpresidential figure, while it has reached new levels of absurdity under Trump, isn’t new. Republicans tried to do the same thing for George W. Bush.
And readers of a certain age may recall that the right’s canonization of Ronald Reagan began while he was still in office.
It’s tempting to dismiss personality-cult theater as trivial, but it isn’t. When prominent people in a republic act as if they were living in a monarchy, the republic increasingly becomes a monarchy in reality.
Beyond that, influential Republicans have substantively granted Trump more personal power, more ability to act as a monarch, than any of his predecessors. Republicans in Congress have abandoned their role as an independent branch of government. In a recent post on X, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, sounded just like Trump’s cabinet members:
Speaker Mike Johnson @SpeakerJohnson
President Trump is the ONLY one who could have gotten Iran —the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism — to the negotiating table.
We are greatly encouraged to learn a PEACE DEAL in Iran is underway — and look forward to learning more about the specifics.
Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If MAGA is a cult, what happens when it crumbles?
Donald Trump has built a cult of personality, but as his actions become more erratic, his hold on his followers may be slipping
By Elizabeth Yuko | May 25, 2026
Bioethicist and Adjunct Professor of Ethics at Fordham University
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/if-maga-is-a-cult-what-happens
-when-it-crumbles/ar-AA241H7c
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/maga-cult-donald
-trump-1235568069/
Donald Trump's supporters have been nothing if not loyal to their leader. For the past decade, MAGA has stood by their man through 34 felony convictions, endless hate-filled rhetoric, the killings of innocent Americans, and potential war crimes, all while blatantly disregarding the Constitution and constantly lying.
MAGA's fanatical devotion to the president has prompted some experts to suggest that it constitutes a cult. Daniella Mestyanek Young, author of The Culting of America, is one of them. "We're not being hyperbolic when we call [MAGA] a cult," she says.
More specifically, MAGA is a cult of personality, says Steven Hassan, PhD, author of The Cult of Trump and founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, a consulting and educational organization that helps people leave destructive cults and authoritarian groups and heal.
A cult of personality is the "godlike glorification" of a charismatic leader whose followers perceive as superhuman and infallible, like the Jim Jones-led Peoples Temple - which ended in the massacre of more than 900 people at Jonestown in 1978 - and the Children of God, a Christian apocalyptic cult founded by David Berg in 1968.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
If gas is $3.50/gal and your tank is 36-gallons, Ford pickup truck.
36 gal × $3.50 = $126.00 to fill.
At $4.00/gal, that’s $144.00.
At $4.50/gal, that's $162.00.
I'm betting MAGA is realizing they fucked themselves bigtime. There god has failed them. They're just too fragile to admit it. Except when they are alone
tick tock...
T
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This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention
One of the worst-ever Ebola outbreaks is underway. Blame foreign aid cuts.
By Sara Herschander
May 27, 2026, 7:30 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/489763/ebola-outbreak-congo-aid-pre
vention
Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and there was no interruption.” That claim has since proven to be disastrously, profoundly untrue.
On May 17, the World Health Organization declared a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern,” only the ninth-ever time the agency has made that designation. In the weeks since, at least 220 people have died of the highly fatal virus, and more than 900 suspected cases have been identified so far. It is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record.
And yet, that toll is likely a tremendous undercount because, as the New York Times reported from the ground this week, “only a trickle of tests are being processed every day” in the cities most affected by the outbreak. “The virus is far ahead of us,” Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, told the Times. “And it’s spreading fast.”
In fact, publicly known cases are rising exponentially faster than in any prior outbreak, including the largest ever, West Africa’s catastrophic outbreak in 2014, and the second-largest in 2018. By the time this outbreak was declared, hundreds of people had already been infected.
When you stop looking, you can’t see
Why did this outbreak spread so quickly? Part of it was the virus itself, a rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is harder to diagnose and for which there are no vaccines or treatments. (At least, not yet.) Another reason is that this outbreak began in a remote province of eastern Congo, an active war zone, where what health systems exist have been ravaged by decades of armed conflict.
As if the odds weren’t already stacked enough, however, this outbreak broke out under the heavy shadow of US foreign aid cuts that, among other calamities, gutted the world’s Ebola detection and response apparatus last year. Despite Musk’s earlier assurances, US-funded programs to detect new Ebola cases and dispatch a response were indeed frozen under the Trump administration, according to Stat. US cuts also indirectly contributed to the outbreak by weakening local health systems and stockpiles.
Altogether, the US Department of Health and Human Services disbursed about $10 million to Congo last year, down from $33 million the year prior, Stat noted. USAID sent $693 million in aid to Congo last year, down from nearly $1.2 billion in 2024.
Cuts to disease surveillance meant that this virus took longer to identify than it should have. And with cuts to local health systems, it’s now much harder to come by the tests, nurses, doctors, and protective equipment needed to stop the spread.
“It’s so bad. It’s so bad,” Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told Devex. The Africa CDC’s role in quelling outbreaks has become even more important as wealthy countries have retreated from the global health stage, but it is impossible to fill all of the medical surveillance gaps left by the US withdrawal of support, he said. “No one can give you the magnitude of this outbreak.”
Bleeding out
The US has done some course correction since the outbreak began. Last week, the State Department pledged $23 million in emergency funding for Congo and Uganda, plus the deployment of a disaster response team and enhanced involvement from the CDC, which says it’s been actively coordinating with local health agencies. At least some lost funding should have a
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Texas’s Senate Race Will Be a Referendum On Healthcare
By Paul Krugman | May 27, 2026 at 6:05 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/texass-senate-race-will-be-a-refere
ndum
So Texas Republicans have, by a huge margin, rejected Sen. John Cornyn, a hardline conservative whose great failing, from Donald Trump’s point of view, was that he occasionally took stands on principle. To replace him they chose the scandal-ridden, deeply corrupt Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who received Trump’s endorsement precisely because of his vices. Paxton’s rottenness makes him a Trump kindred spirit and also guarantees that he will be dependent on Trump’s goodwill and hence slavishly loyal.
So much the better for the Democrats, who now may — may — have a chance at winning Cornyn’s Senate seat. However, despite Paxton’s utter unfitness for any public office – let alone Senator -- knowledgeable observers of Texas politics consider the race between Paxton and the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, no better than a tossup.
What will be at stake in the general election, beyond the question of just how much personal awfulness Texans will overlook? To an important extent it will be a referendum on healthcare.
Texas’s healthcare policy stands out, even among red states, for its cruelty.
Texas has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That is, it has turned down federal money that would have provided essential healthcare to hundreds of thousands of its residents, at almost no cost to Texas taxpayers, and injected large amounts of money into the Texas economy. Texan politicians have tried to justify their adamant opposition to expanded healthcare as a matter of principle, a way to prevent dependence on government programs. But in reality there’s no way to make sense of this choice except as a reflection of the drive to keep low-income people desperate and subservient.
This is the same drive that has led to Texas’s remarkably regressive tax system. Texas conservatives like to say that they rule a low-tax state, but taxes there are only low for the affluent. They’re quite high for the middle and working classes, and very high for the poor and near-poor:
Even among states that rejected the ACA Medicaid expansion, Texas’s Medicaid program is exceptionally harsh. As one summary explains,
In Texas, adults without children are not eligible for Medicaid coverage regardless of their income, and parents are eligible only if they earn less than 13 percent of the FPL [federal poverty line] (an annual income of less than $3,900 for a family of four).
The result is that Texas has worse health insurance coverage than any other state. Moreover, as the chart at the top of this post shows, the big improvement in coverage as a result of the ACA mostly bypassed Texas. Notably, 13.7% of Texan children are uninsured, compared with a 5.9% rate nationwide and 2.5% in New York.
High rates of uninsurance combined with a weak social safety net and, in recent years, growing rejection of vaccines largely explain one striking aspect of Texas’s evolution since 1980: its lagging life expectancy. In 1979-81 life expectancy in Texas and New York were almost identical. But since then a wide gap has emerged, with New York state residents outliving Texans by an average of nearly 3 years:
Part of this gap in life expectancy reflects death by violence. Texas is a big la
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The Trump administration plans to send to Kenya U.S. citizens exposed to the Ebola virus rather than bring them home for observation and treatment, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
The approach is a stark contrast to the way previous administrations responded to outbreaks, during which health care workers and other U.S. citizens exposed to the virus were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/politics/trump-ebola-kenya.html?
unlocked_article_code=1.llA.mqeT.9HgaIHgSBNlg&smid=url-share
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America is ruled by a mafia now
https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/199131984/america-is-ruled-by-a-mafia-no
w
Trump has worked feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…
Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]
So basically, Trump:
1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,
2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,
3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,
4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and
5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.
Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.
Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.
I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter Wha
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."
"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."
Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.
"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/
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:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."
"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."
Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.
"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Donald Trump’s chief economist said something interesting the other day. On Fox News, Hassett was, as usual, boasting about how great the economy is, when he was asked why Americans aren’t feeling it — why the long-running Michigan index of consumer sentiment has hit its lowest level ever. He responded by claiming that the index “is being driven by Democrats who have Trump derangement syndrome.”
Well, yes indeed … someone is deranged here.
The Michigan survey tracks respondents by party, and politics clearly does affect economic perceptions. Democrats were much more positive about the economy under Biden than Republicans; they became much less positive, while Republicans became much more positive, when the White House changed hands:
At this point, however, independents’ views of the economy are similar to those of Democrats. Republican optimism, not Democratic pessimism, is out of line with the views of most Americans.
But wait, there’s more. YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better:
Let me present these data slightly differently:
Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.
So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans.
Given these numbers, Trump officials should conclude that they have failed in some way. The great majority of Americans — essentially everyone who isn’t a total Trump loyalist — believes that the economy is getting worse. And there are good reasons for that negativity. Inflation is way up as a result of Trump’s tariffs and his Iran war. Because of this surge in prices, real personal income has declined sharply:
And even if Trumpists believe that these numbers are somehow misleading and that the economy is really in great shape, they should acknowledge that they are failing to make their case to the American public.
Trump and his minions, however, never admit to failure. We’ve all seen that in the case of the Iran war: Trump keeps claiming that it’s a glorious victory and that reporters pointing out that it isn’t are “treasonous.”
They bring the same mindset to economic sentiment. If the public hates Trump’s economy, the problem must be with the politically deranged public, not with Trump.
Still, let’s look at it rationally. The 19 percent of Americans who support MAGA say that the economy is good. The other 81 percent of Americans say that it’s very bad. Which group is more likely to have economic perceptions that are warped by politics?
Seriously, who’s deranged here?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/whos-deranged-exactly
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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