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: Friday, February 13, 2026 09:56
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Friday, February 13, 2026 5:25 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:
In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

The Democratic Party, Hollywood and the Legacy Media are the monkey with the gun.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

6ix, you cut-and-paste the same comment with zero understanding. Here is another example of Trump randomly firing a machine gun in all directions. If he weren't a monkey, he would have carefully and thoughtfully done this either in January 2025 or 2017, but doing it yesterday shows he doesn't make sensible plans. His aim is chaos:

According to Trump, he is ending the Clean Air Act emissions standards and rules for cars and light trucks, power plants, and oil and gas industry facilities. Trump declared that he knows science better than any human scientist and he will end all those unscientific and unnecessary pollution rules.

“This is about as big as it gets,” President Donald Trump said at the White House with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding.”

Zeldin said all greenhouse gas emissions standards on light, medium and heavy duty vehicles that followed the endangerment finding have been eliminated.

If he were reading this, I say: "Very impressive, Mr. Trump. You are the smartest monkey in the room. You machine-gunned down all kinds of EPA rules yesterday. Next week, will more rules be shot down?"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/trump-epa-endangerment-finding-climate
-change-greenhouse-gas.html

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

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Friday, February 13, 2026 7:13 AM

SECOND

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

The MAGA Bubble Is Imploding

Americans aren’t buying Trumpist gaslighting about the economy

By Paul Krugman | Feb 13, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-maga-bubble-is-imploding

Source: Haver Analytics. US is S&P 500, Euro area S&P Euro 350.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s meltdown on Wednesday while being questioned the House Judiciary Committee was exceptional, even by this administration’s rock-bottom standards. Has any high-level official ever before shrieked at a member of Congress, “You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up, loser lawyer”?

Yet what truly amazed me was her demand that Democrats stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein because the Dow was above 50,000. This plumbed new depths of moral bankruptcy, effectively saying: “How dare you complain about child rape when the stock market is up?”

There was an unmistakable stench of desperation in Bondi’s tantrum. And it fooled no one. The cracks are showing, as some congressional Republicans have now voted against Trump’s tariffs, Justice Department lawyers are quitting en masse or just plain cracking up, and attempts to weaponize prosecutions keep failing.

Now Tom Homan says that the ICE surge in Minnesota will be wound down — an ignominious retreat if true — while Democrats are standing firm on refusing further DHS funding without significant reforms. And Bondi’s yelling isn’t making Epstein go away.

But let’s examine Bondi’s demand that Americans ignore the omni-shambles because stocks are up. It’s morally depraved, but what about the economics?

Yes, stock prices are up. As any economist can tell you, however, the stock market is a poor indicator of the economy’s overall health. Paul Samuelson famously quipped that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Furthermore, stock prices are up almost everywhere — and up more in other countries than they are in the United States. The chart at the top compares stock prices in the U.S. and in the euro area; since the latter is measured in euros, and the euro has risen against the dollar, Europe has substantially outperformed America.

And if we go beyond the stock market and look at what really matters to most Americans — affordability and jobs — the Trump economy isn’t delivering. Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Despite one good month, employment growth has shriveled. And it keeps getting more difficult to find a job.

Here’s one measure I find useful, the Conference Board’s “labor market differential” — the difference between the percentage of Americans saying that jobs are plentiful and the percentage saying that jobs are hard to find:

Source: The Conference Board via Haver Analytics

This is certainly not a great economy. It’s not even a healthy economy. And Americans are not buying the administration’s lies.

MAGA types constantly bash Joe Biden while deifying Trump. Yet it took only a year for Americans outside the Republican base to decide that Biden was actually a better president. Here are results from the latest YouGov poll:

Source: YouGov

That was fast. And it belies the conventional wisdom that still sees Trump’s 1.5 percentage point popular vote margin in 2024 — smaller than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016! — as marking a fundamental realignment of U.S. politics.

What actually happened in 2024 was that low-knowledge voters believed Trump when he promised to bring prices way down and deliver unprecedented prosperity. “Low-knowledge” isn’t a pejorative: G. Elliott Morris uses it to mean voters who don’t know which party controls the House and Senate. These voters went strongly for Trump in 2024, but their opinion of him has crashed:

So while people inside the MAGA bubble keep insisting that Trump is a great president, the greatest president ever, presidenting like nobody has ever seen before, their cheerleading reeks of desperation. The MAGA implosion is gathering force. Americans are mad as hell, and they won’t be gaslit anymore.

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

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Friday, February 13, 2026 9:44 AM

SECOND

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

Why MAGA Wants You to Think Slavery Wasn’t That Bad

By Thomas Chatterton Williams | Feb 13, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/slavery-matt-walsh-1619-proj
ect/685982/

Matt Walsh would like you to know you’ve been lied to. Last month, the right-wing provocateur appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to discuss his new video series, Real History With Matt Walsh. “When you really start getting into it,” Walsh told Kelly, “you realize that, wow, they really lied about everything.”

He begins the series by examining the practice of chattel slavery, he said to Kelly, “because this is, we’re told, the original sin” of the United States. In Walsh’s account, the left believes that “America was built on slavery, and it has no right to exist, and every white American carries, somehow, that legacy, that guilt in their blood”; therefore progressives feel they have the “moral justification to just do whatever they want” to white people. Walsh intends to stop this. So in Real History, he relentlessly downplays the brutality of slavery in the United States.

Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends. But the truest understanding of slavery doesn’t serve any political faction. Rather, it acknowledges the horrors of racial oppression while still allowing us to see beyond them.

In 2019, Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of The New York Times, reportedly described “The 1619 Project” to his staff as “the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken” by a newspaper. Despite its grand ambition, however, the project arrives at a narrow conclusion: “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”

This argument, which received ample criticism from historians at the time, seems to have emerged from the authors’ commitment to the ideological mission of the “anti-racist” left. As Baquet himself reportedly said, a major goal of the project was not historical but contemporary: “to try to understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.” In reality, the project and its progressive defenders fed those forces rather than clarified them. Before Walsh could even finish explaining to Kelly why slavery occupies such a privileged place in his series, she cut in to provide an answer: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led “The 1619 Project,” wants people to believe that slavery is, in Kelly’s words, “the whole reason America was formed.”

At the end of Trump’s first term, the White House released The 1776 Report in response to the Times initiative. As the Princeton historian Matthew Karp noted in Harper’s, the document contains a “range of pseudo-patriotic distortions about slavery and the founding era.” Nonetheless, Karp observed, “the report’s authors celebrated Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, praised Reconstruction, and condemned the postbellum South’s descent into Jim Crow, ‘a system that was hardly better than slavery.’”

Whatever modicum of analytical balance that report exhibits is absent in Trump’s second term. Reinterpreting the history of slavery has given way to suppressing its memorialization entirely.

The Trump administration has viewed Juneteenth with particular disdain. Last year, the president used the occasion not to remember emancipation but to complain that America had too many holidays. In December, he ordered the National Park Service to stop allowing free entry on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Trump added Flag Day in their place, which falls on his own birthday.

Back in March, he strong-armed a host of institutions by issuing an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directs federally funded museums, monuments, and parks to remove materials that promote “corrosive ideology.” Last month, the park service obliged, eliminating an outdoor exhibit at Independence National Historical Park, in Philadelphia, where George Washington’s house once stood. The exhibit honored nine slaves who toiled at the residence—part of an effort to explore “the paradox between slavery and freedom.” Such nuance appears to have violated the more patriotic version of history that the government seeks to instill.

The administration has applied perhaps the most pressure on the Smithsonian Institution. In August, the White House ordered the Smithsonian to implement “corrections” to any public-facing materials whose “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals” the administration deemed unacceptable. On Truth Social, Trump made clear what he thought needed fixing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” (The Smithsonian has turned over records to federal officials, but late last year, the group’s leader insisted to staffers that it alone was responsible for “all content, programming, and curatorial decisions.”)

In its campaign over the past year, the MAGA movement has squandered what might have been a reasonable position. David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University and a biographer of the civil-rights leader John Lewis, told me that the right could have made a persuasive case against the excessive preoccupation with slavery and racial politics that some on the left have shown. Instead, Trump and his allies seem unwilling to tolerate virtually any acknowledgment that America subjugated Black people. Rather than making a dispassionate case against the idea that the country was founded to enslave Africans, MAGA is taking down plaques commemorating basic facts, such as Washington’s slaveholding. “That’s not turning back the last 10 years,” Greenberg said. “That’s turning back historical understanding to the 1960s, if not further.”

In Real History, Walsh turns the clock back further still. One of his principal aims is to show that slavery was the norm across human history, and that American slavery was hardly the most extreme version. (Among other oversights, he fails to acknowledge that the link America forged between bondage and racial identity had little precedent in antiquity.) Walsh appears to think this lets American slaveholders off the hook. When all are guilty, he seems to suggest, no one is. The argument recalls Thomas Jefferson’s infamous defense of slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia. “We know that among the Romans,” Jefferson wrote, “the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America.”

Walsh also notes that the descendants of Africans trafficked to what became the United States are now in better socioeconomic shape than those whose ancestors remained in the Old World or were transported to Latin America or the Caribbean. He draws an odious conclusion from this—American slavery wasn’t that bad—yet the point is not entirely incorrect. Other far more serious thinkers have made versions of it too.

America’s slaves lived “in the presence of more human freedom and individual opportunity than they or anybody else had ever seen before,” the Black critic Albert Murray wrote in his 1970 essay collection, The Omni-Americans. “The conception of being a free man in America was infinitely richer than any notion of individuality in the Africa of that period.” Many slaves, Murray noted, internalized this ideal of American freedom despite their own subjugation. “The fugitive slave, for instance, was culturally speaking certainly an American, and a magnificent one at that.”

And this points to the crux of the matter. When recounted accurately, from beginning to end, the story of slavery is the most inspirational and unifying narrative that the country has. Today’s multiethnic society is deeply flawed, of course, but the fact that it emerged from such cruel beginnings should be a source of pride for Americans of every background.

“The destruction of slavery is one of the great American achievements,” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton and critic of “The 1619 Project,” told me. “Taking slavery seriously in American history is not anti-American. The story of slavery in the U.S. is about an ancient institution that was planted here, thrived here, and then was confronted and ultimately attacked in the 19th century through enormous sacrifice, including military conflict. That’s an extraordinary American story.”

For MAGA revisionists as well as some progressives, commemorating slavery implies that the U.S. is permanently stained by it. Yet downplaying or exaggerating American slavery threatens something even graver than perpetual guilt: the loss of the country’s shared moral language.

The story of slavery and its abolition is ultimately one of irrepressible human dignity. Properly told, it makes reconciliation possible and future injustice avoidable.

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

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Friday, February 13, 2026 9:56 AM

SECOND

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

RFK Jr. made promises to get his job as health secretary. He's broken many of them

February 13, 2026 5:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/13/nx-s1-5712721/rfk-jr-children-vaccines-
cdc-funding-autism-immunizations

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

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