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 11:43
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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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Friday, February 13, 2026 11:43 AM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Washington has become unrecognizable

The nation's capital and America's democracy have become shells of their former selves

By Brian Karem
White House columnist
Published February 13, 2026 9:15AM (EST)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/13/trumps-washington-has-become-unrecogn
izable/

After several months of being away from Washington, I’d say I was shocked by what I saw upon my return to the White House — but the Trump administration doesn’t want me there and continues to fight my attempts to get into the briefing room. So, no: not shocked.

I’d say I was shocked by what I saw on Capitol Hill, but many of the loathsome legislators there long ago put decency and professionalism in its review mirror. Even young staffers, at least those who understand the concepts of the Constitution, are appalled by what they’ve seen since Donald Trump came back to town.

“It’s like all [members of Congress] want to do is to s**t in each other’s mouth,” I was told. “No one wants to work together to solve problems.”

And after two days of contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, Trump must be jealous. For once, since he returned to office, the president is not the center of attention. His staff, however, is overwhelmingly thankful for the respite. They know the danger of Trump talking. Besides, many members of Congress and Trump appointees are as shallow and demeaning as the president, so their rhetoric sounds the same.

We saw that this week when Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed up on Tuesday to testify before House and Senate committees, and when Attorney General Pam Bondi — “the worst attorney general in history,” as a Republican staffer from Texas described her — appeared the following day before the House Judiciary Committee.

For three hours, Lyons had a hard time defending ICE actions in Minneapolis before a House oversight hearing on immigration enforcement. Across Capitol Hill, Lutnick floundered while testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing broadband funding and budget issues that ended up diving into the cancerous Jeffrey Epstein scandal following detailed revelations about the secretary’s connections to the convicted sex offender. Democrats, and even many Republicans, were left stunned when Lutnick admitted that he took his underage children and his wife to Epstein’s Caribbean island for lunch.

Still, nothing was as odd as Bondi’s performance, which was unprofessional and combative. She lashed out at legislators, telling them they had no right to accuse her of breaking the law, and called Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a “washed up loser lawyer.” Many Democrats and even some Republicans told me privately that her testimony will probably help the Democrats during the fall midterm elections.

But every one of Trump’s people so far this week have probably helped Democrats. Republicans are wallowing in overconfidence, ignoring reality and are their own worst enemies.

When a dog gets busy chasing a moving tire, it’s easy to miss the car attached to it until it is too late. That’s what the Republicans look like to me. And in the process, they’ve made the very city of Washington unrecognizable. At least that’s the thought that occurred to me as I walked in the snow to the White House, and then from Union Station to the Capitol and Supreme Court.

Trump has told us on numerous occasions how safe the District of Columbia is these days due to the presence of the National Guard and how he’s “cleaned up” the city. He’s told us it is safe to go to restaurants — “like never before” — and how people can walk the streets safely now.

Having lived in the area for the last 30 years, I can tell you that Washington has always been safe to travel through — especially near the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court and most dining establishments. Where there are pockets of poverty there is crime, but that’s not unlike any other large city.

When I returned this week to a slate full of hearings in Congress and a Tuesday presidential press briefing, I didn’t think D.C. looked like a peaceful, safe city. I saw tall fences going up once again — this time for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. I saw federal troops stationed at several Metro stations and on many street corners. I talked with Uber and taxi drivers who are suffering because of all the Department of Government Efficiency firings. I spoke with restaurant workers who said business has been unusually light. I saw a city without its energy. A city hollowed out. A city under siege.

When Trump says you can find a table at a restaurant, he’s not kidding. Less business. Fewer people. Less energy. As a city, Washington seems to have grown tired of Trump. Certainly the senators and House members have.

And while the District seems tired, Trump seems more so. It doesn’t even seem like the president is trying his hardest to lie to us anymore. He just repeats the same lies with less energy, as if he too has grown weary of his own rhetoric. He’s telling us to turn the page on the Epstein scandal. But he’s on that next page too.

After meeting in private with Netanyahu on Wednesday, Trump didn’t even bother to compete with Congress for attention. He didn’t do a bilateral press conference. He didn’t come out in public and speak at all. He was content with a post on Truth Social. “There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated,” he said of his meeting with Netanyahu. “If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference. If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be. Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal, and they were hit with Midnight Hammer — That did not work well for them.”

It was a low-energy Trump who showed up on Thursday in the Roosevelt Room with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to announce he was repealing the federal government’s authority to regulate climate change. The landmark shift, Zeldin said, marked “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” He added that “the price of a newer, safer vehicle was too high.” Cheap, unsafe vehicles for everyone?

Well, billionaires will be fine. A lethargic Trump prattled on, saying he was proud of himself for supposedly reducing prices: “And now they’re coming down by — depending on, you could say, 500, 600, 700% — depending on the way you want to — or you could say 80%, it doesn’t matter.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., coming out of a vote on Department of Homeland Security funding, told me Thursday that nothing will change “as long as Trump is president,” and that Trump is a mountain of contradictions — saying what he wants, when he wants, with little care for reality.

He’s for the Second Amendment. But he’s going to get the guns. He’s for the First Amendment, but he doesn’t want to hear anything he doesn’t like.

“I think he’s running out of steam,” a few of my D.C. happy hour comrades confessed Wednesday after the hearings, “Or he’s really sicker than he lets on.”

Since the National Rifle Association rebuked his statement about confiscating guns following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal officers in Minneapolis, Trump has been seen very little. Maybe it’s just the politics.

By Wednesday afternoon, the president had apparently decided to try to bring some of his verve and bombast to the White House’s East Room. He showed up to get a trophy for being “The Undisputed Champion of Coal” from the Washington Coal Club, an industry lobbying group. It means about as much as his FIFA Peace Prize, but Trump loves getting trophies, so he thanked everyone and said, “We love clean, beautiful coal.” He bragged about his “nice easy life” and told audience members that America is still the “hottest country.”

He sounded flat. Even when his administration announced good job numbers Wednesday, it sounded flat. “Who can believe them?” SiriusXM radio host Dean Obeidallah asked on his show Wednesday. “He fired the people who produced numbers he didn’t like, so I don’t know whether to believe him or not. He lies about everything.”

This was a theme the congressional staffers I spent time with Wednesday also pounded home. “It’s hard to believe him, and I voted for him,” a late-30s mid-level staffer explained. “We’re seriously f****d.”

Bernie Sanders echoed that sentiment as he left the floor of the Senate on Thursday after casting his vote against funding DHS. When I asked the Vermont Independent what could be done to return to some semblance of normalcy, he seemed testy, waved his hands and said, “We’re doing the best we can.”

Members of the United Auto Workers, in town this week from Detroit, shared their frustration with Trump as well and were unmoved by the latest jobs report. “He says he’s America First, but we’re not feeling it,” a UAW officer I ran into explained.

On Thursday, Trump claimed union workers loved him. He said the same thing to coal workers the previous day. “Those other presidents didn’t take good care of you,” Trump said. But clearly, many are no longer buying what he is selling.

As I visited congressional offices this week, meeting with sources and watching members of Congress interact with their constituents, it felt perfunctory — and, in some cases, sad. Trump’s fans have placed posters proclaiming his greatness on the walls outside their offices. It looked like high school.

The most enjoyable people I’ve interacted with since I’ve been back aren’t my colleagues, who — if they aren’t burned out — have become mindless automatons and propagandists who can’t think for themselves. The National Guard members, however, are different. Many of those I met are from Florida and are serving to pay for college. Bright and eager to talk, they told me that most people have been nice to them. “But there’s nothing much to do here,” one guardsman said. “We’re only for show.”

That show is growing duller, and more lethargic and repetitive, by the day, like watching reruns of a canceled sitcom.

I’ve seen a lot of change in the last year. It isn’t as good as Trump says. People are struggling to make ends meet and gas still isn’t $1.99 a gallon as he continues to claim. But the biggest takeaway after leaving the District for several months and now returning is that it has become painfully apparent that this is no longer the land of the free and home of the brave. That’s the dream, but the harsh reality is that we live in an authoritarian regime ruled by a man who cares only for himself, and the capital is now looking more like those of many authoritarian countries I’ve visited in my life. And Donald Trump did it all in just one short year.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to identify the party affiliation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

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

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