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 62 of 479
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More USAID Fraud? Billions Of US Tax Dollars Are Missing From Haiti Relief Projects
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/more-usaid-fraud-billions-us-tax-d
ollars-are-missing-haiti-relief-projects
Check the Clinton's pockets. Haiti was their personal gravy train, just like Ukraine was the Biden's.
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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:
FBI Freak Out As Dan Bongino Named Deputy Director
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-freak-out-dan-bongino-named-de
puty-director
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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:6ix, tell the above concerns to your Trumptard ne
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, been thinking about where America goes from here.
First of all, this isn't a revolution, it's a power struggle between The Industrialists and The Globalist Financiers, who have been in power since Bill Clinton.
The power structure as it was, was rotten. It was ready to topple on its own, but the war against Russia ... outcome depending on sheer industrial power ... provided the impetus to push it over.
Trump is a disruptor. Musk is a disruptor. This is a time of destruction. Things will be destroyed with a bulldozer, not a scalpel. Mistakes will be made. Parasites will flee the DC rubble.
Not now. But at some point, there will be a time of reconstruction. But the world in which America rebuilds won't be anything like the world of 20, 30, or 80 years ago.
There needs to be a new party that represents us people, not the financier oligarchs or the MAGA oligarchs.
I think we've already got it, Sigs. It's mostly made up of the ex-Democrats that we were talking about just the other day.
And I don't believe that Trump is working for anybody other than himself. I know it's good for him, and he knows that at least some of us are aware of that.
Is he going to reshape America to your image or to my image of what we want it to be. Simply stated, no. He won't. He's going to reshape it in the image that he wants it to be now. We don't have any power outside of our vote. Maybe I shouldn't speak for you, but I have a very small circle of influence and no money, so I know I don't have any power. We've got to just hope that there's plenty of overlap of what we wanted and what ends up happening. More good things come of it all than bad things, and hopefully any of the bad things end up being inconveniences when held up to all of the actual good that gets done.
So far, I believe there is. Though a few things we've discussed before send up red flags and have been on my radar, I can't let those take away from all the good that is being done... at least right now.
At the end of the day I'm always going to come at all of this from the perspective of a voluntary outsider. Until the day that we live in a Perfect World, there's never a reason to align fully with Power.
I get daily reminders from the two idiots here that the Democratic Party is still kicking and screaming and making a huge fuss as it dies off, and until they shut up that's always going to remain a problem.
But I'm doing my best to look at everything that's happening and pointing out things that I'm not crazy about or I just don't agree with.
I'd argue that since what is going on now exists so far out of the realm of the status quo we've been living in for decades that everyone should be paying more attention right now than they've ever paid attention before.
And from what I can tell, they're being very transparent and open about everything they've been doing so far. That and they've welcomed, and even challenged, The People to keep tabs on them and to speak out when they find anything that looks shady.
Maybe it's all just a grift and a game like everything else is, but the current administration and the team behind the President in 2025 speak to us as if they're actually working with us and listening to what we have to say.
I don't recall a time in my life that this ever happened in America, and I don't even think it was possible in the days before the internet, so I doubt it's ever been the case before. It certainly wasn't the case during the former administration that laid down mandates and threats and censored anyone who didn't mindlessly parrot their message of the day.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Trump job approval numbers are crashing:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/donald-trump/
https://jabberwocking.com/democrats-need-to-do-a-lot-of-nothing/
If Harris had won, the R's would be attacking non-stop, and the airwaves would be filled with Republican lies.
The Democrats on the other hand have plenty of legitimate targets. If I were a Democratic politician who wanted to win, I would be attacking Trump as a Putin stooge who is following Putin's wishes to destroy America. Sure, there is no hard proof of that, but based on Trump's behavior, it is quite believable (and I believe it). You don't really have to prove Trump's a Putin stooge, you can just ask the question: Name one thing Trump has done that a Russian stooge wouldn't do.
I just don't see how letting Trump have the bully pulpit without any pushback is a winning strategy. Words matter, and unanswered words risks having the R views take root among the populace. Maybe I'm wrong, but give me an example where waiting to fight back paid dividends.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Europe knows the plot of the Trump movie: Russia attacks Europe. The sequel will be about whether Russia wins or loses.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
But that being said... I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone that everything's going to be alright, let alone give any real strong predictions about what everything is going to look like 4 years from now.
I ain't never seen this movie before.
Trump is Europe’s worst nightmare
The continent must start to prepare for life without the Transatlantic Alliance
The Economist February 22nd 2025
The past week has been the bleakest in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ukraine is being sold out, Russia is being rehabilitated and, under Donald Trump, America can no longer be counted on to come to Europe's aid in wartime. The implications for Europe’s security are grave, but they have yet to sink in to the continent’s leaders and people. The old world needs a crash course on how to wield hard power in a lawless era, or it will fall victim to the new world disorder.
Speaking in Munich last week, America’s vice-president, J.D. Vance, offered a taste of how the home of fine wines, classical architecture and welfare cheques faces humiliation, when he ridiculed Europe as decadent and undemocratic. Its leaders have been excluded from peace talks between the White House and the Kremlin, which began officially in Riyadh on February 18th. However, the unfolding crisis goes far beyond insults and diplomatic niceties.
Mr Trump appears ready to walk away from Ukraine which he falsely blames for the war. Calling its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator”, Mr Trump warned him that he had “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left". America may try to impose an unstable ceasefire on Ukraine with only weak security guarantees that limit its right to re-arm.
That is bad enough, but Europe’s worst nightmare is bigger than Ukraine. Mr Trump intends to rehabilitate Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, ditching a long-standing policy to isolate him. Without any obvious geopolitical benefit to America, he is angling to restore diplomatic relations. He may soon be feted at a glitzy summit. Offering up concessions in Riyadh, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, gushed about co-operation and “historic economic and investment opportunities". (Trump Tower Red Square?)
Mr Trump’s shakedown of Europe and pandering to Russia have cast doubt on America’s commitment to defend nato come what may. One fear is that American forces could be cut, or pulled back to leave eastern Europe exposed. The problem is not that Uncle Sam’s priorities lie in Asia (see International section). The problem is that if Europe comes under Russian attack and seeks American help, Mr Trump’s first and deepest instinct will be to ask what is in it for him. He is due to meet Britain’s prime minister and the French president next week. But don’t take that as a signal that this is just clever talk from a dealmaker: Mr Trump’s readiness to trade everything away is precisely the problem. NATO’s deterrence rests on the certainty that if one member is attacked the rest will come to its aid. Doubt is corrosive, it leaves Europe dangerously exposed.
Let us spell out the reality Europe faces. It is an indebted, ageing continent that is barely growing and cannot defend itself or project hard power. Global rules on trade, borders, defence and technology are being ripped up. If Russia invades one of the Baltic states, or uses disinformation and sabotage to destabilise eastern Europe, what precisely will Europe do?
So far the answer is to curl up in a defensive crouch. After the maga onslaught, a group of European leaders hastily met in Paris on February 17th but managed only to advertise their differences. Three years after Russia’s invasion Europe has not raised military spendi
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DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — acts like a federal agency although, legally, it isn’t and claims to have already saved taxpayers $55 billion, but has presented no evidence to back that claim.
The total savings claimed didn’t come anywhere near $55 billion, but never mind. Several news organizations, including Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have gone through that DOGE list, and found that it’s a steaming pile of, um, DOGEshit.
As the Times put it
Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.
The big error the Times refers to involved counting a canceled contract worth $8 million as $8 billion.
Now, imagine that a publicly held company were to release a statement about its earnings that was riddled with major errors — with all the errors going in the same direction, making the company’s earnings look better than they are. What would you conclude? The answer, surely, would be to suspect that the company’s business is going very badly, but that top executives are trying desperately to hide the bad news while they sell off their own shares and possibly loot the company through sweetheart deals and so on.
In the case of DOGE, it’s pretty clear that Musk is failing more or less comprehensively at his supposed task of saving money by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. But he doesn’t want the public — or, more important, Donald Trump — to figure that out until he’s achieved his real objectives, which seem to involve taking effective control of large parts of the federal government — particularly those parts of the federal government that are trying to regulate his enterprises and those of his tech-bro buddies.
Of course, given the indiscriminate nature of the layoffs he’s been carrying out and the devastating effect they’re having on worker morale, he may end up breaking the federal government rather than taking it over.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/doge-is-the-theranos-of-cost-cuttin
g
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Putin can’t win his war against Ukraine unless he persuades Trump to betray it.
By Anne Applebaum | February 24, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putins-three
-years-of-humiliation/681810/
Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”
Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.
Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.
But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.
Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.
Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.
Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.
He wins by persuadi
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Trump will align himself with whomever he wants — to hell with America’s allies
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/02/23/trump-will-align-himself-w
ith-whomever-he-wants-to-hell-with-americas-allies/
Anne Applebaum writes:
At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals, and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.
Vance, a prominent member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania, and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling the Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.
A few days before the Munich conference, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.
Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives have been disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: no security guarantees, no investment. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.
The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say that it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I Reread Project 2025 Now That We’re in the Thick of It. The Takeaway Is Chillingly Clear.
What Trump really wants is clearer than ever.
By Jill Filipovic | Feb 24, 2025 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/donald-trump-project-2025-
elon-musk-doge.html
Donald Trump is a notoriously dishonest man, but one of his oft-used slogans has proved absolutely true: Promises Made, Promises Kept. Unfortunately, this time around, the promises being kept weren’t all made by Trump. They were made by the fanatics who penned Project 2025.
Yes, Elon Musk is Trump’s right-hand man (J.D. who?), and he is on a tear with the Department of Government Efficiency, employing gangs of young men barely out of puberty to decide which pieces of—and people in—the federal government should stay or go. But the mass firings, the power grabs, and the agency shutterings are not just Musk’s doing. They were planned and proposed well before Trump was even elected, right there for everyone to see, in Project 2025.
Trump may have said he had “nothing to do with” the far-right game plan for his presidency—always a dubious claim, given that its architects are either former administration members or people with close ties to it. But now that he’s in office, he’s following their plan almost to the letter.
A month into Trump’s presidency, I went back through the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership.” It was stunning just how closely it tracked with the Trump presidency, not just in content but also in strategy. One of the first arguments the document makes is that new presidents have a narrow window within which to implement their agenda; hesitating while they sort out policy details wastes precious time. And, indeed, Trump has hit the ground running. The only way he has been able to do so much is because the Project 2025 team wrote it all out for him.
As Democrats and the public struggle to even keep up with what the Trump administration is doing to the nation, it’s tempting to get caught up in the play-by-play. And although the details certainly are important, the single message must be this: Trump is trying to be a king or a dictator, and Project 2025 is his monarchical playbook.
This is not a tough argument to make, especially given that Trump is now sharing images of himself in a crown, writing, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” This cannot and will not stand. Trump is not a king, and we don’t have to collectively pretend that he is or act as if this is some sort of joke—just as we don’t have to tolerate unelected lunatics from the Heritage Foundation or unelected egomaniacal billionaires setting the rules for a pluralistic America.
In its first section, the “Mandate for Leadership” sets out Project 2025’s overarching ideology: a theory of an all-powerful president, someone with authority more akin to that of a monarch than an elected democratic leader. The core section on this comes from Russell Vought, now the Trump-appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget, essentially the central nerve center of the federal government. The idea of agency or expert “independence”—with independence rendered in scare quotes—is rejected. “The greatest challenge” ahead, Vought writes, is “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch,” which requires the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
If Trump has done one thing so far, it’s break the federal bureaucracy.
The best way to implement the Project 2025 vision, its authors are clear, is to gut the federal bureaucracy, firing career civil servants and those who lack the requisite MAGA loyalty. “The new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees,” the document flat-out directs. The Office of the White House Counsel, for example, should not be some fair-minded place for smart lawyers to assess presidential actions according to existing law; it should be an “activist” entity, with subordinates who “see their role as helping to accomplish the agenda through problem solving and advocacy.” And forget expertise or quali
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Zakaria says Trump found a fast way to end the war in Ukraine
Trump’s strategy for ending the war in Ukraine, Trump’s disdain for Ukraine, and more
"The diplomats are more worried about their boss than the adversary."
Zelenskyy reminds Trump of his illegal behavior that he was impeached for, although not convicted. Zelenskyy has qualities that Trump will never possess, such as courage and true patriotism. Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian American who worked with Rudolph Giuliani to pursue Trump's agenda in Ukraine, said to Politico, “So now Trump hates Zelenskyy with passion. And Zelenskyy knows it.”
Ruben Brekelmans - Minister of Defence of the Netherlands - strongly criticized Trump. "Some people think you are strong when you talk to a dictator. But you are only strong when you stand up to a dictator, as Ukraine has been doing for three years," Brekelmans said about the way the Americans are negotiating with Russia about the future of Ukraine.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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