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, March 20, 2026 07:08
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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 8:09 AM

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

Trump muses over ‘taking Cuba’ as island’s power grid collapses after weeks of US oil blockade

“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about United States and Cuba, when will the United States having the honor of taking Cuba? That’s a big honor,” Trump said in remarks from the Oval Office. “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah, taking Cuba — I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/americas/cuba-power-grid-collapse-intl-
latam

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

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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 9:26 AM

SECOND

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

Not Just a Mistake, a Crime

March 10, 2026

Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalculable suffering. It is flatly, unambiguously illegal. Every year the UN General Assembly votes, virtually unanimously, to require the United States to end it. But Florida’s electoral votes are far more important in Washington than international law. The U.S. embargo of Iran is also illegal—embargoes and blockades are acts of war, which can only be authorized by the Security Council. And every year since 1967, the General Assembly has voted—again near-unanimously—to require Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied. But thanks to unflagging American support, Israel, too, can ignore international law, on the West Bank and, apocalyptically, in Gaza.

As a result of this long and abysmal history, international law now has no force whatever. Previous U.S. administrations pretended to care about it and regularly ignored it. The present administration does not even pretend to respect law, domestic or international. A culture of law-abidingness is no more comprehensible to President Trump and his goon squad than quantum entanglement.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scialabba-iran-war-trump-internatio
nal-law-israel?check_logged_in=1

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

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 7:59 AM

SECOND

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

The world’s most credible democracy watchdog: ‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’

By Martin Gelin | Tue 17 Mar 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-a
iming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_20
26_lowres.pdf

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vucic in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.

US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.

The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.

“We’ve seen a very fast concentration of power in the executive wing. The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers to the president. It no longer functions as a check on executive power,” Lindberg says.

In Donald Trump’s first year as president, he signed 225 executive orders, whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed only 49 new laws. “Most of Trump’s executive orders were significant. He shut down entire departments of the government, firing hundreds of thousands of employees. The bills passed by Congress were mostly insignificant modifications to existing laws. So, we no longer have a meaningful division between the legislative and executive branches,” Lindberg says.

Meanwhile, the supreme court has also mostly abdicated power, and even when it does strike down Trump’s executive orders, he circumvents it, Lindberg tells me. He points out that there are more than 600 ongoing judicial procedures against the Trump administration in the courts.

Another aspect of America’s rapidly deteriorating democracy, according to the report, is the removal of internal guardrails that protect the federal government from abuse of power. When I ask Lindberg how we should read the findings, his response is emphatic. “Trump has fired inspector generals and higher levels of civil servants across departments, and replaced them with loyalists. This is exactly what Orbán and Erdogan did. They remove the constraints on power. It should be obvious by now that Trump is aiming for dictatorship.”

Much more at https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-a
iming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

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

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 8:11 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump, Petropresident
Follow the Gulf oil money
Paul Krugman
Mar 18, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-petropresident

Why did Donald Trump attack Iran? Did he believe that a quick victory would boost his poll ratings? Was he looking for a way to change the subject from the Epstein files and affordability? Was he seduced into war by the Israeli government?

The answer, surely, is all of the above. Bad decisions don’t have to have a single explanation. In fact, debacles on the scale of what we’re now experiencing usually have multiple causes.

But when I look into the larger picture of Trump administration policy — not just the attack on Iran but domestic policies, especially the administration’s seemingly irrational hatred of renewable energy and its determination to keep America burning fossil fuels no matter what — I keep coming back to the huge influence now being wielded by oil money.

I don’t mostly mean the domestic U.S. oil industry, although them too. The U.S. oil and gas sector spent large sums helping Republicans in the 2024 election, while giving very little to Democrats.

But what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump’s international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.

One recurrent theme in Trump’s economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. “In 12 months,” he declared in the State of the Union, “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”

Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal.

But what’s especially interesting is who has made these investment pledges, such as they are:

Each of the major Gulf petrostates has pledged to invest more than the whole European Union, even though they have far smaller economies. Here’s another visualization:

So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he’s bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Trump’s relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar’s gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don’t know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.

Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have had a critical journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered with a bone saw.

Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they’re better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials’ pockets.

Foreign oil money, then, has been central to both the Trump administration’s economic schemes and Trump’s personal financial schemes. What has that money bought in terms of U.S. policy?

I’ve mentioned the Trump administration’s fanatical hostility to renewable energy. Like the Iran war, this hostility surely has multiple causes. Trump himself is still angry about the offshore wind farm that is visible from his Scotland golf course. Many MAGA types clearly think of wind and solar power as woke and unmanly; real men drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn. But suppressing alternatives to fossil fuels is also in the interests of governments and dynasties whose wealth is all about fossil fuels.

As the Guardian notes,

For decades, Saudi Arabia has fought harder than any other country to block and delay international climate action – a diplomatic “wrecking ball” saying that abandoning fossil fuels is a fantasy.

So the Trump administration’s energy policy can be seen as what Prince bin Salman would do if he were in charge. Is he?

Finally, about the war: As the bombing began, the Washington Post reported that foreign influence — and not just from Israel — played a role:

President Donald Trump launched Saturday’s wide-ranging attack on Iran after a weeks-long lobbying effort by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel and Saudi Arabia — according to four people familiar with the matter, as Israeli and U.S. forces teamed to topple Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after nearly four decades in power.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution.

At this point bin Salman is surely regretting his role in promoting the war. But being corrupt and good at corrupting others is not the same thing as being smart.

Again, it’s a mistake to look for monocausal explanations of this debacle. But if you want to understand Operation Epic FUBAR, don’t forget to follow the oil money.

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

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Wednesday, March 18, 2026 9:24 AM

SECOND

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

At Rice University, Chief Justice John Roberts says Trump’s personal attacks on judges have 'got to stop'

By Isaac Yu, Staff Writer | March 17, 2026

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=6c3e46e9-3c30-4184-b317-be22e9ce4647&share=true

Chief Justice John Roberts said some criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court is “quite dangerous,” but sidestepped directly addressing President Donald Trump’s increasingly vocal jabs at his court during a Tuesday visit to Houston.

Roberts said personal attacks were worrisome, though he stressed that criticism “comes with the territory” of serving on the judiciary and said he tries not to read outside criticism too often.

“The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from the focus on legal analysis to personalities,” Roberts said at an event held by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“Personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”

The comments come just days after Trump issued a lengthy diatribe criticizing the court’s recent ruling against his tariff policies, calling it “bad behavior.” The president has blasted many of the justices since the start of his second term, including some of his own nominees, and expressed increasing disapproval with the court’s decisions, particularly those dealing with executive power.

“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”

Roberts pushed back on the idea that justices must carry out the agendas of their appointing presidents.

“President George W. ?Bush appointed me 20 years ago, and the idea that I'm carrying out his agenda somehow is absurd,” Roberts said.

But the justice avoided mentioning Trump by name or any of his specific criticisms. At another point, Roberts said studying the experiences of earlier chief justices had taught him to “stay in your lane.”

Roberts has served as chief of the court since 2005 and is now the fourth-longest serving chief justice in U.S. history.

The comments came during an hour-long conversation with Judge Lee Rosenthal, a longtime Houston-based judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Robert’s rare repeat visit to Rice, he said, came after a personal request from the Baker Institute’s namesake, James Baker III, a Houston native and former U.S. Secretary of State. Roberts recalled working as a lawyer in the White House during the Reagan administration, when Baker served as chief of staff.

“I got used to doing pretty much what he told me to do,” Roberts said of Baker.

Roberts, who also oversees the nation’s sprawling system of district and appeals courts, said he worried about how generative AI was reshaping the legal profession, saying he foresaw a “really tough” time for young lawyers.

March 17, 2026

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

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Thursday, March 19, 2026 6:58 AM

SECOND

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

The public often exaggerates the role of political leadership in determining economic performance. In reality, presidents and their policies normally have very little effect on macroeconomic variables like inflation and employment.

But this time is different. The disappointing aspects of recent U.S. performance have been all about Trump.

In his press conference Powell didn’t beat around the bush. Noting that inflation is significantly overshooting the Fed’s target, he declared that

"Some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters is actually tariffs."

What about the stalling of employment growth? Research at the San Francisco Fed confirms what many economists have been arguing: Job growth has slowed largely because of the crackdown on immigration, which has reduced labor supply. So employment stagnation is also the result of Trump administration policies.

Now, you might be tempted to argue that while stopping immigration reduces overall job growth, it surely must increase job opportunities for native-born workers. But a look at unemployment rates suggests that the job market for the native-born has gotten (slightly) worse, not better:

The most we can say is that thanks to the loss of immigrant workers the overall unemployment rate hasn’t risen as much as one might have expected given the collapse in overall job growth. But the loss of foreign-born workers is probably contributing to higher inflation, over and above the effects of tariffs and now oil prices. And it will have major adverse effects on America’s fiscal outlook — but that’s a subject for another day.

So Powell is right: If you restrict the term stagflation to situations that quantitatively resemble the 1970s, we aren’t there yet. But there’s definitely a whiff of stagflation in the air — a whiff that is entirely caused by Trump administration policies.

And if the situation deteriorates, as seems all too possible given the mess in the Persian Gulf, can we trust Trump’s officials to respond intelligently and effectively?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-whiff-of-stagflation

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

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Thursday, March 19, 2026 11:56 AM

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:

You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

U.S. Warmongering Hits Historic Level As Trump Attacks 3 Continents In 3 Days

Since World War II, the U.S. has rarely, if ever, attacked so many places. “All war. All the time. Everywhere,” one source put it.

By Nick Turse | March 19 2026. 7:51 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/03/19/trump-world-wars-iran-somalia-boat
-strikes/

The United States made war on three continents over three days earlier this month, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean. The globe-spanning scope of the attacks represents one of the few instances since World War II that the United States has been simultaneously involved in armed conflicts with such a wide geographic sweep.

The attacks in Ecuador, Iran, Somalia, and the Eastern Pacific from March 6 through March 8 are part of President Donald Trump’s escalating world war against variously defined “terrorists.” They highlight the administration’s increasing willingness to use the U.S. military as a solution to almost any perceived geopolitical problem.

“All war. All the time. Everywhere,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, of the wide-ranging attacks over just a few days. “It’s unprecedented given the absence of any fresh congressional authorization.”

This month, Trump has repeatedly referenced his relentless war-making and even lamented it on occasion. “I built the military and rebuilt it in my first term, and we’re using it more than I’d like to use it to be honest with you,” he said.

The region that has seen the most profound increases in this “use” of military power is the Western Hemisphere as part of what Trump and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — a unilaterally claimed license to militarily meddle in America’s backyard — has led to attacks on civilian boats in the waters surrounding Latin America and an attack on Venezuela. The most recent location of U.S. attacks in the region, Ecuador, is also the site of the first strike in Trump’s recent three-day, three-war spree.

“Yes — as @POTUS has said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists on land as well,” self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6, announcing a new strike in Ecuador. Days later, in a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

The next day, Trump announced an escalation of his latest war of choice in the Middle East. “Today Iran will be hit very hard!” he posted, writing, “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.” That same day, U.S. Central Command posted footage of the U.S. striking unspecified Iranian targets beneath a threat by Hegseth to hunt and kill those that “threaten Americans anywhere on earth.”

A day later, the U.S. conducted an attack as part of its war-on-terror-holdover conflict in Somalia. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted an airstrike targeting ISIS-Somalia on March 8, 2026,” reads an AFRICOM press release. “The airstrike occurred in the vicinity of the Golis Mountains.” (This frequently attacked region was the site, last year, of what a top Navy admiral called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.”)

On the same day as the recent AFRICOM strike, U.S. Southern Command announced the latest attack in its campaign targeting so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed almost 160 people in 45 strikes since September. “Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action,” reads the SOUTHCOM announcement, which was accompanied on X by video footage of a boat exploding into a fireball.

During World War II, the U.S. fought a global war conducting combat operations simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as limited fighting in North America against Japanese forces in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska in 1942 and 1943. The fight against the Axis powers was, however, a declared war — America’s last — and one discrete conflict. By contrast, Trump’s sprawling collection of undeclared wars include a remnant of the war on terror and several new unconstitutional wars begun by Trump.

“This is why the U.S. Constitution requires congressional authorization before using military force in this manner,” said Finucane. “It’s so the American public and their elected representatives can debate and deliberate whether the costs of a war are justified by the supposed benefits of this military operation. And whether the use of military force is the appropriate tool to solve the problem. And whether it’s even a problem that needs to be solved at all.”

The U.S. has rarely, if ever, conducted attacks — such as the airstrikes in Ecuador, Iran, and Somalia — on three continents over a 72-hour period since World War II. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently conducted clandestine and covert operations, armed interventions, and wars across multiple continents, but not often analogous attacks. On August 21, 1998, in an early attack on Al Qaeda, the U.S. simultaneously attacked targets in Afghanistan and Sudan with cruise missiles. During the war on terror, the U.S. frequently was involved in simultaneous conflicts and interventions in numerous countries across the Middle East and Africa — and sometimes farther afield. In 2017, for example, a small number of Special Operations forces assisted troops in the Philippines in relieving a siege of the town of Marawi by ISIS-linked militants. U.S. forces were also attacking people in the Middle East and Africa that year, bringing combat to two continents.

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions concerning the concentration of attacks over such a short period of time and how often this has occurred since World War II.

During his second term Trump has already launched attacks on Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.

“Today there are so many places in the world where the U.S. government is conducting military operations — including the war at home on migrants — that each event eclipses the last in terms of media attention,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Each and every case merits a great deal of study and debate. Many U.S. citizens are trying to do this, but news of yet another act of U.S. war violence continues to crop up, drawing media attention away from earlier events and creating huge obstacles to meaningful, sustained work by U.S. citizens to hold their government accountable.”

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

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Friday, March 20, 2026 7:08 AM

SECOND

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

Scenes from the Death of the Pax Americana

I’m feeling almost speechless right now

By Paul Krugman | Mar 20, 2026

Just a few scenes from the accelerating collapse in America’s reputation and influence.

Item: The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, roughly speaking Denmark’s equivalent of the BBC, reports that two months ago Danish forces were prepared to blow up runways in Greenland to prevent a possible U.S. attempt to seize the island by force:
Denmark prepared for possible attack from the US: Flew bags of blood to Greenland and prepared to blow up runways. Key sources in Denmark and Europe are now telling for the first time what happened in the most critical days when Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland "the hard way".

Item: During a meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Donald Trump was asked why the U.S. didn’t inform its allies before attacking Iran. He replied, “Because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

Item: Pete Hegseth angrily attacked news coverage of the war:
The media here — not all of it, but much of it — wants you to think, just 19 days into this conflict, that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scenes-from-the-death-of-the-pax

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

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