Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 10, 2025 15:36
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VIEWED: 65583
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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:04 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, for a guy who is struggling with ill health, inherited mental disorders, poverty, and no future, you certainly are sure of yourself.

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

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:05 AM

SECOND

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

24% price increase next year and 35% increase in 2018 because of executive orders

Health insurance companies have requested an average premium increase of 24% for Affordable Care Act plans in Texas in 2026, a significant hike that could lead to destabilization in the marketplace and customers opting for less or no coverage.

Last year, the average rate hike across insurance carriers was 3.8%. Data analysis from KFF found that next year’s rate hikes could be the largest increase since 2018, when average premiums went up by 35% in Texas. In 2018, companies factored in Congress’ attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and President Donald Trump signing an executive order ending subsidies to insurers for low-income people. After 2018, average premiums in Texas have never risen by more than 4%.

Nearly 4 million Texans bought health insurance coverage through the ACA marketplace for 2025, a high-water mark in a state that has the highest uninsured rate in the nation. ACA uptake has tripled since 2020, after Congress expanded tax credits to lower ACA users’ monthly premiums.

More at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/21/texas-health-insurance-premium
s-aca-tax-credit-expiration/

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

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:12 AM

SECOND

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

The Fungus Among Us

Posted on Monday, Feb 5, 2024, 2:00AM by Barry Goldman

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/02/the-fungus-among-us.html

Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the water, kill off the animals, melt the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even if what they care about the most is making more money no matter how much money they already have, don’t they care at all about the world they’re leaving for their kids?

I’ve arrived at a theory. But first I need to back up a few steps.

Readers of 3QD may be familiar with the brain fungus that causes “zombie ants” to leave the safety of the forest floor and climb up the stalks of plants to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their fear of cats. In both cases, the parasite has evolved to hijack the brain of the host and cause it to behave in ways that are suicidal to the host but beneficial to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are often exquisitely complex and particular. It seems impossible that something as primitive as a fungus could be the explanation. But evolution has come up with lots of similar strategies. She is very clever. She doesn’t have a sense of fair play or sportsmanship. If a behavior increases the chances of getting the genes of one generation reproduced in the next, it succeeds. Nothing else matters. And she has lots and lots of time to experiment.

So that’s the first idea we need – the fungus that hijacks the brain of one species to improve the reproductive success of another.

Then we need the idea of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to wait for genetic evolution. We have evolved the ability to get information from one generation to the next without having to wait for it first to be encoded in the DNA. We don’t have to start from scratch with each generation, and we don’t have to proceed by trial and error. We have culture, language, and traditional practices.

In the modern world, I don’t have to know how anything works. I don’t have to know how cars or computers work, for example, or how to build them. It’s enough for me to know how to drive and how to type. As long as somewhere in my culture there are people who know how cars and computers work and how to build them, I can off-load that responsibility to them and spend my time on other things.

One more idea and we will be ready for my theory. That’s the idea of a meme. A meme is to cultural evolution what a gene is to the biological kind. It’s the unit of transfer, the basic building block. Cooking is a meme. When the idea of cooking enters into a culture, lots of things change. People live longer because cooking releases more nutritional value from food. People get bigger and stronger. Their teeth get smaller. Jaw muscles get weaker and on and on.

The corporation is a meme. It is a legal invention, a legal fiction if you like. Corporations don’t exist in the way that tables and chairs exist. They don’t have weight or take up space. They have no natural lifespan. Some of them are much older and vastly richer than any person. They can own property, enter into contracts, sue, and be sued. And, since the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and related cases, they can donate unlimited amounts of money to the political causes of their choice.

I quote here from The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, by David Runciman:

The 18th century jurist Edward Thurlow famously complained: ‘Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned; they therefore do as they like.’ Sentient beings with bodies and souls disappear inside the group once it has acquired its own identity. They can shrug their shoulders as the victims of the group’s decisions come looking for justice. Meanwhile, the group has no shoulders to shrug.

Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” But he was profoundly wrong. They are not people. Corporations are a brain fungus. They act to benefit themselves. And they hijack the brains of the people who work for them and cause them to do things no sane person would do.

That’s the answer to my question. Corporations can act the way they do because they don’t have grandchildren. The people who make corporate decisions to poison the earth do so because their brains have been hijacked by the virus. Partly this is accomplished with simple bribery. Corporate CEOs are awarded vast salaries and ridiculous compensation packages in order to blind them to their human responsibilities. But that alone is not sufficient. The brain fungus also works at a more subtle level. It convinces the corporate decision maker that he is part of a larger system, and that it is the system that is responsible for ethics. In this view, he (it is almost inevitably a he) doesn’t have to know anything about the ethics and morality of his decisions. He can offload that responsibility. His job is to increase shareholder value. It is the job of the political system, the law, or the market to impose restraints. The mechanism is a little fuzzy, but what’s important is that there is a division of labor. “You just concentrate on producing revenue,” the fungus whispers to the CEO. “Other parts of the system will worry about protecting the biosphere.”

This is a corollary to Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum. It is easy to get a man to believe something when his stock options depend on his believing it.

Lawyers are embedded in a system with a similar architecture. This is the adversarial system I discussed in an earlier 3QD post. Under the adversarial system, a lawyer’s duty is to his client. If the client is a greedhead scumbag, well, he’s a greedhead scumbag. The lawyer’s duty doesn’t change. His job is to provide zealous advocacy. The job of seeing to it that the scumbag gets what’s coming to him is off-loaded to the larger system. I don’t think that’s a good idea in the legal context, and I don’t think it’s a good idea in the context of the corporation.

Quoting from Runciman again:

How, for example, could multinational oil corporations have spent years suppressing and distorting the evidence that fossil fuels were responsible for dangerous levels of climate change? We might choose to believe that the people working for these companies are especially bad, reckless, irresponsible, and selfish. But they are not: they are, on the whole, just people like the rest of us. It is the corporation that chose to pursue this path and the people involved because they are like the rest of us, followed because following a corporate decision is the path of least resistance. It is more than likely that many of the people involved knew that what they were doing was wrong. But the corporation didn’t because the corporation isn’t sentient.

This suggests there may be a sliver of hope. We all have multiple roles. In his corporate role, the CEO of a fracking concern is a zombie host mindlessly obeying the dictates of a parasitic brain fungus. But he has other roles. He is also a human being and, likely, a grandfather. The planet might have a future if something or someone could shake him from his zombie trance and remind him of that. It is not sufficient to leave the future of the world to the workings of the political system, the law or the market. The responsibility to act morally cannot be off-loaded. Wake up and think of your grandchildren!

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

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 6:39 AM

SECOND

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

Trump made many prophecies about the economic miracles he would achieve as president. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation,” he promised. “We will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” He promised to get gasoline below $2 a gallon. And of course he insisted that he would deliver a jobs boom, especially in manufacturing.

None of that is happening. Tomorrow’s report on consumer prices will probably show inflation running at close to 3 percent, with most economists expecting it to rise in the months ahead. Electricity prices are rising rapidly, while gas is solidly above $3 a gallon. And job growth appears to be stalling.

Furthermore, much of the bad news is Trump’s own fault. His tariffs and deportations are both adding to inflation and, by creating uncertainty, slowing the economy.

Trump has already fired the head of the BLS for reporting job numbers he didn’t like, claiming falsely that the bad numbers were rigged to hurt him politically. We can expect further claims of partisan bias as the inflation numbers get worse, and eventually, probably quite soon, an attempt to purge and politicize the agency.

The push to politicize the BLS has been reinforced by yesterday’s report from the agency, which revised downward its estimates of past job growth. The White House claimed that it shows that “the BLS is broken.”

It showed no such thing. As a helpful post from the Economic Policy Institute says,

These BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.

As the EPI explains, monthly job numbers don’t literally track every job in America. They’re estimates based on a partial survey of employers. We only get comprehensive data from unemployment insurance tax records, which become available once a year. Revising the estimates based on that data is normal and in no sense a sign that the BLS is doing anything wrong.

But the administration will try to use the revision to discredit the agency, and in particular its recent reports showing a worsening labor market.

So what you need to know is that the BLS is doing its job the way it should, and that there is plenty of additional evidence confirming that the labor market has gotten worse under Trump.

For example, the widely respected Conference Board survey of consumers shows that between last December and August there was a sharp decline in the number of people saying jobs were “plentiful” and a sharp rise in those saying they were “hard to get.”

The New York Fed reports that the percentage of respondents who believe that they could quickly find a new job if they lost their current one has dropped sharply.

And the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a regular informal survey that often serves as a useful check on formal data, gave a clear picture of stalling employment:

Eleven Districts described little or no net change in overall employment levels, while one District described a modest decline. Seven Districts noted that firms were hesitant to hire workers because of weaker demand or uncertainty. Moreover, contacts in two Districts reported an increase in layoffs, while contacts in multiple Districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition …

This is not a booming economy.

It's not really surprising that Trump is failing to deliver on any of his promises, which never made sense in the first place. Nor is it surprising that he and those around him, rather than making a course correction, are trying to shoot the messengers. But it’s a tragedy that the attempt to suppress bad news may well destroy the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a highly competent and professional agency whose services we need more than ever.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-maga-prophecy-fails

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

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 8:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Can a Despised Autocrat Consolidate Power?
Trump is losing the public. Will that matter?

By Paul Krugman | Sep 9

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, for a guy who is struggling with ill health, inherited mental disorders, poverty, and no future, you certainly are sure of yourself.

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

I haven't worked for years and everything is paid for.

My future is whatever I want it to be.

Every single day is the same for you. Crying about Trump. Trump, Trumpy, Trump.

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!

You are going to die soon, and everyone you know hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 3:19 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I haven't worked for years and everything is paid for.

My future is whatever I want it to be.

Every single day is the same for you. Crying about Trump. Trump, Trumpy, Trump.

TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!

You are going to die soon, and everyone you know hates you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

What is in the news for these 3 words?

Trump bribery bitcoin

https://news.google.com/search?q=Trump+bribery+bitcoin

The usual stuff:

U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Democrats (.gov)
Day 5: Crypto Has Made Trump $1.2 BILLION Richer – and Counting

Common Cause
Trump’s Crypto Corruption: A New Low in Pay-to-Play Politics

Daily Kos
Crypto is the grift that keeps on giving for the Trump family

Rolling Stone
Trump Crypto Corruption Intensifies as Abu Dhabi Firm Invests $2 Billion

Merkley (.gov)
Trump-Linked Crypto Deal is a ‘Staggering’ Conflict of Interest

The New York Times
Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.

CNN
A crypto mogul who invested millions into Trump coins is getting a reprieve on civil fraud charges

Yahoo Finance
'If You Want To Bribe Trump, Bring Gold—Not Bitcoin'. An Economist Claims Apple Got Tariff Relief On Semiconductors For Cheap

Democracy Now!
“Mt. Everest of Corruption”: Crypto Investors Buy Access to President; Trump Expands Bitcoin Holdings

Alaska Native News
'Greatest Corruption in Presidential History': Trump Family Reaps $5 Billion More in Crypto Profits

messageboxnews.com
Breaking: Trump's Crypto Corruption Scheme Goes into Overdrive

The Guardian
‘Roadmap for corruption’: Trump dive into cryptocurrency raises ethics alarm

The message blowing on the wind? Trump Takes Bribes.

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

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Wednesday, September 10, 2025 3:36 PM

SECOND

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

Trump Is No Nationalist

The president and his followers are forging an international movement devoted to their authoritarian cause.

By David Frum | September 9, 2025, 9:34 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/maga-globalism/68414
3/

President Donald Trump tells a lot of untruths, but one of the untruthiest is that his movement is “national.” Again and again, in fact, Trump and his core followers seem to care a lot more about what is happening in other countries than about what is happening in the United States.

Last week, for example, Trump hosted the president of Poland at the White House. From the cordial photos, the meeting might seem a welcome change from MAGA’s usual contempt and hostility to U.S. allies. But look again.

Trump’s meeting with President Karol Nawrocki was a carefully staged insult to Poland’s elected government—and the latest move in a campaign to manipulate European political systems in favor of Trump’s ideological allies.

Like many European countries, Poland has both a president and a prime minister. Day-to-day policy, including foreign policy, is set by the government, which is headed by the prime minister, who is answerable to Parliament. The president’s role is mostly negative: He wields a powerful veto, and can use the threat of its exercise to bend the government to his will.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, leads a coalition strongly supportive of Ukraine in its fight with Russia. That fight has been costly to Poland. Almost 1 million Ukrainians have been displaced to Poland, where they are allowed to work and receive social benefits such as schooling and health care. Some Poles have begun to resent Ukrainians. Their votes helped elect Nawrocki in two rounds of balloting, on May 18 and June 1.

Nawrocki is an amateur historian whose work seems calibrated to inflame the historic mutual grievances between Poles and Ukrainians. He campaigned on the slogan “Poland First.” Although not as overtly pro-Russian as his political allies in Hungary and Slovakia, Nawrocki has used his powers in ways that put pressure on the Ukrainian side. He is trying to limit benefits to Ukrainians in Poland and end their right to work. He opposes Ukrainian entry into NATO.

The Trump administration blatantly favored Nawrocki during the election campaign. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Poland after the first round of voting to endorse Nawrocki by name and insult his principal opponent as one of the “weak” leaders who have allowed in immigrants who “destroyed their civilizations.” Poland is one of the few countries in Europe where views of the United States remain generally favorable, so Noem’s intervention may have made a difference in an election decided by less than a single point of the popular vote.

The Trump administration is exploiting partisan animosities within Poland to advance its own goals of wrecking the European Union and ending the Ukraine war on terms favorable to Russia.

Or take another example: Last month, Vice President J. D. Vance spent his summer holiday in the United Kingdom. He fished with the British foreign minister, visited U.S. service personnel, and made a side visit to Scotland to play golf on a Trump course. The first two of those activities would be normal for any U.S. vice president. The third is the kind of corruption that’s just a normal day’s business under President Trump. But Vance also made time for something out of the ordinary: a personal intervention in Britain’s internal politics.

Unlike in Poland, the Trump administration is highly unpopular in the United Kingdom. Only about one-fifth of Britons have a favorable view of Donald Trump. Vance polls even lower than that. But on the British right, Trump and Vance command attention and support—and Vance’s summer project was to lever that attention to shift British conservatism in a Trump-like direction.

The British right is now contested between two parties: the familiar Conservative Party and a new Reform Party. Reform has pulled ahead in the polls. The situation is volatile. Emotions are running strong. Resolving the impasse might seem a matter best left to the British.

Yet Vance’s itinerary seemed designed to insert and assert himself into the middle of the melee—and to favor the most extreme anti-immigration, pro-Russian factions. Vance deputed as his “British sherpa” a Cambridge academic disdainful of Ukraine and those Conservatives who have supported its cause. Vance met with Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigration Reform Party, and with Robert Jenrick, an anti-immigration activist seeking to topple the faltering Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch.

Vance tried to muscle his way into German politics in the same way earlier in the year. On February 14, scarcely a week before Germany held its federal elections, Vance delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference that sounded to German ears like an outright administration endorsement of the Alternative for Germany, another anti-immigration, pro-Russian far-right party. Vance scolded Germans for excluding the Alternative for Germany from public forums like the one where he was speaking. And indeed, Germany for obvious historical reasons restricts some forms of expression by the anti-democratic extremes of far right and far left. These German rules differ from American conceptions of free speech. Yet the recent American practice where the president of the United States threatens media corporations with reprisals unless they make multimillion-dollar payoffs to the president and his family must seem equally alien to German ideas of rights and liberties. German politicians don’t come to the United States to criticize the Trump shakedown system on American soil. Vance did not return the courtesy. In this case, at least, his intervention failed. While the AfD gained 20 percent of the popular vote, it did not do well enough to block the traditional parties from forming a center-right coalition committed to European unity and the defense of Ukraine against Russia.

In Canada in April and in Australia in May, anti-Trump sentiment defeated mainstream conservative parties that were tainted and discredited by Trump’s attacks on Australian and Canadian sovereignty and trade.

Proper conservatism has always been rooted in the local. But as conservatism has transmuted into Trumpism, that sense of the local has been lost. MAGA has developed into a truly global political movement, as ready to be franchised across national lines as a fast-food chain.

Far-right parties copy Trump’s slogans and Vance’s sarcastic, trollish rhetorical style. The message is everywhere the same, regardless of local conditions: blame immigrants for crime, disorder, housing prices, and anything else voters might be discontented about; reject vaccinations and promote quack remedies; back Russia and vilify Ukraine. The globalist quality of MAGA authoritarianism is powerfully symbolized by the willingness of the American Conservative Political Action Conference to lease its brand to far-right movements across Europe and Asia who want to host their own events in Budapest, Tokyo, or Warsaw. And everywhere, the message is amplified by social-media channels that seem to regard extremism as the pathway to engagement—and fear retaliation from Donald Trump if they ever try to diminish the volume of anger and disinformation.

Americans often try to seek the origins of Trumpism in their unique national past: episodes like McCarthyism in the 1950s or the overthrow of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It’s at least equally important to recognize what is not unique about Trumpism. The United States is not the only society confronting reactionary authoritarian grabs for power. The Trump movement, as the biggest and richest, acts as a kind of patron to all the others. But the smaller movements contribute to the common project. So much of what Trump and Vance say, so much content from their mass-media and social-media allies, originates not in the United States, but from their Hungarian, British, and German movement affiliates.

Those movements appreciate that they have a lot in common. They are learning to cooperate against their common adversaries. Those adversaries need to develop at least equal awareness, before it’s too late.

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

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