Real World Event Discussions

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

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187650
PAGE 43 of 48

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 4:46 AM (P)

OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 4:55 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

Is this what you didn't read?

The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.

Authoritarian rule would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be co-opted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.

The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.

But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.

As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,

Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary, if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.

The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:

It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.

I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc., think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.

The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were cau

SECOND

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 5:04 PM (P)

The Supreme Court’s silence says volumes

Paul Krugman

Feb 04, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/profiles-in-cowardice-tariff-editio
n

Donald Trump loves tariffs. Mainly, I believe, he loves them because they offer so much opportunity for dominance displays, allowing him to threaten other countries with economic ruin — usually via middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts — unless they bend to his whims. Economists may say that most of the damage inflicted by tariffs falls on American consumers and businesses, not foreigners, but Trump’s attachment to tariffs is doubtless strengthened by economists’ disapproval — he wants to show that he’s smarter than the so-called experts.

Furthermore, tariffs give him power without checks and balances. He can impose huge taxes on imports without having to go through annoying stuff like getting legislation through Congress.

Or can he? By any reasonable standard, most of Trump’s tariffs are plainly illegal. Two lower courts have ruled against them. The Trump administration appealed those decisions, and in early November the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case. Many businesses that have found it impossible to make long-term plans with the fate of the Trump tariffs in limbo eagerly awaited the Court’s ruling.

They’re still waiting. And I can’t see any plausible explanation for the delay other than Supreme cowardice.

Background: Most of Trump’s tariffs have been imposed by invoking a 1977 piece of legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Congressional Research Service describes as giving the president “broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.”

But we aren’t in an emergency. Trump himself keeps saying that everything is great — the economy is hot, there’s no inflation, we’re respected around the world. It’s not true, but that’s what he says. And he has been using IEEPA to impose or threaten to impose tariffs for many purposes that have nothing to do with economic policy. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil to punish Brazil for pressing charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like former president who tried to overturn an election loss. He threatened tariffs against European nations who stationed troops in Greenland as a precaution against a possible Trumpian attempt to seize the island from Denmark.

In the latter case Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pressed on the nature of the emergency that would justify tariff threats, declared that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.” Uh-huh.

I’m not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers, and this isn’t a difficult case on the merits. Trump is clearly wrong on both the letter and the spirit of the law. And when the Supreme Court held its hearing, the tenor of the questions, even from conservative justices, suggested that they recognized that the administration had no case.

So why have we had three months of silence? Well, this isn’t a difficult case on the merits, but it puts the six right-wing members of the Court between a rock and hard place, not intellectually, but personally.

For a right-wing justice, ruling in the Trump administration’s favor in such an open-and-shut case would amount to admitting that you’re a pure partisan hack. And even the right-wing faction on the court is trying to maintain the fiction that it’s still a deliberative body, not a MAGA rubber stamp.

But to rule against the administration would be to hand Trump a humiliating defeat on one of his signature policy issues. It might also be very expensive. Tariffs aren’t the revenue gusher Trump and his minions like to claim: Even after the Trump hikes in tariff rates, customs receipts are small compared with other sources of revenue and have made only a modest dent in the U.S. budget deficit. But losing that revenue and, worse, having to give it back would be a financial embarrassment.

And it’s hard to see how, if the Supreme C

SECOND

Friday, February 6, 2026 1:03 AM (P)

Trump said that the economy is the “greatest economy in the history of the world”

Feb. 5 2026 11:52AM EST

Despite President Trump’s claims about a miraculous economy, planned layoffs reached their highest level for January since the Great Recession.

New data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas released on Thursday revealed that last month saw more job-cut announcements than in any January since 2009.

Trump repeatedly bragged about a booming economy under his stewardship, claiming in Michigan in January that it had been the “greatest first year in history.”

Whether or not people are buying the bluster, however, is a murkier matter. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Trump praised his own policies, especially tariffs, claiming they had “created an American economic miracle, and we are quickly building the greatest economy in the history of the world, with other countries doing just fine!”

Karl Rove accused him of “making the same mistake” as Joe Biden by claiming people were doing better financially than they were.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/layoffs-under-trump-rocket-to-worst-janu
ary-levels-since-great-recession/

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 6, 2026 2:13 AM (P)

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Friday, February 6, 2026 5:10 PM (P)

American Decency Still Lives
When pushed far enough, Americans will do the right thing

By Paul Krugman | Feb 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-decency-still-lives

If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.

Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.

Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.

And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.

While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.

But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.

There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.

MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerous activism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.

Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the ge

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 1:49 AM (P)

Scott Adams died of prostate cancer, despite the fact that almost 100% of people diagnosed with prostate cancer survive past five years thanks to early screening and quick treatment. But Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments, announcing last May that he had chosen to treat his cancer with ivermectin and other anti-parasitics. This is how I learned that Scott Adams wasn’t just a grifter who parrotted everything MAGA idiots were saying: he actually believed that ivermectin was a secret wonder drug that Big Pharma was hiding as a flea and tick treatment.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2026/02/06/the-last-dilbert-
post/

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5404399/scott-adams-dilbert-prost
ate-cancer-biden

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 3:27 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer

Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 3:30 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American Decency Still Lives

Yup. We're taking out the trash as we speak.

The Legacy Media didn't breath a fucking word about it, but Minnesota has fallen.

The violence and the "protests" are over. People from Minnesota who were committing felonies on the streets and those saying out loud on Tick Tock the things that Second posts here nearly every day have been arrested and are facing 20 years in prison.

Walz... Silent. Omar... Silent. Frey... Silent.

We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.

We're just going to let New York fall on its own with a Communist Muslim mayor at the epicenter of it all.

Shut the fuck up, Paul. You've lost everything. You are a loser. You were always a loser. And now you're a loser with no voice or platform that matters because you destroyed any credibility you may have once had in a world that no longer exists.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:53 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer

Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments, announcing last May that he had chosen to treat his cancer with ivermectin and other anti-parasitics. This is how I learned that Scott Adams wasn’t just a grifter who parrotted everything MAGA idiots were saying: he actually believed that ivermectin was a secret wonder drug that Big Pharma was hiding as a flea and tick treatment, 6ixStringJoker.

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

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:56 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.

Where did you get the trillions? Trumptard gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton alleged that less than $250 billion in taxpayer funds have been lost to fraud, waste, and abuse in California over the last five years, covering programs such as welfare, pandemic unemployment, and homeless initiatives. (It is legal for Trumptards to lie until either their heads fall off or they lose, which is why they lie constantly.)

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:58 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.
Where did you get the trillions?

Just wait.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:59 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer

Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments

Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 5:04 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

What is your point? I've seen Trumptards drop dead all around me. Not surprising me, but life goes on smoother and smoother the more of them die. That is because Trumptards are sand in the gears; without sand, things are smoother.

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 5:17 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
What is your point?

You're the one who brought up Scott Adams because news of his horribly painful death still keeps you hard all night.

Don't ask me that question.

That's a question you should be asking yourself every day.

You've lost everything forever and you're still too stupid to realize that.

The game is already over buddy.

You and your ilk are nothing more than footnotes in American History now.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SIGNYM

Sunday, February 8, 2026 5:30 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.

I can only hope

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 8, 2026 8:44 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.

I can only hope

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

You see Gavin Newsom out there looking like TEMU Patrick Bateman today with his eyeliner on and everything? Dude ain't looking too good these days. Looking like Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with all that makeup on his face.

This is one of the reasons why I'm telling people that any election polling they're hearing from either side means abolutely nothing right now, and nobody should even be spending any of their time or attention on them until after SCOTUS makes their June round of rulings and we start seeing the shape of what elections going forward are even going to look like anymore.

The Voter ID issue is a dead issue. Democrats (those in power) lost that hands down. A CNN poll just showed 84% of whites support it. 82% of Hispanics support it. And even 72% of blacks support it. When looking at party support, 71% of registered Democrat voters support it.

So people can show you all the election polling in the world, but this shift shows that either Democrat voters are seeing a seismic shift of their way of thinking on this issue, or MUCH more likely, they finally feel like they're free to speak out on issues such as these with common sense applied without feeling like everyone else in their bubble will attack or ostracize them for speaking out.

The worst of the violent offenders, both illegal alien and American Citizens are finally being arrested and facing the possibility of very long federal sentences for their crimes. Hollywood celebrities are being called on their bullshit and their hypocrisy immediately after they say something stupid. The DEI is being stripped away from all the companies, and likely will be making up the large majority of layoffs from the larger companies. HR Departments finally shrinking for the first time in 2 generations, and many positions that didn't even exist until 2020 disappearing altogether for good.

People are finally seeing reasonable reactions to things again on their shiny rectangles, after decades of nothing making any sense. Hints of a little order to the chaos forming.

This carries over into Independents and Republicans too. A lot of people are always afraid to speak their mind because they have a lot to lose.

So what the Voter ID issue amounts to is that it has always been WIDELY accepted as common sense has only been relegated to the sides as a fringe issue by the Left after they took over almost the entire Legacy Media, while they unleashed their internet bullies on anyone who dared say that requiring voter ID was not racist. It is unarguably Nationalist. But it's not racist. And those two words have two very different meanings.

So I got called a Nazi by Ted and Second and Wishy and Reaverfan and possibly even JO... and even got a LOT of pushback from Kiki on this particular issue when I would argue for it over the last 10 years, but it turns out that I was right all along.

This is EVERYWHERE. This is pervasive. It's snuck its way into literally everything like those weeds you're always fighting every year.

And we're finally doing lawn maintenance at home.

All this other bullshit is a distraction from that.

And the best part of all is that people just aren't paying attention to what the Legacy Media says anymore.

I haven't looked into it, but I'll bet that even Greg Gutfield is slipping in the ratings right now along with the idiot Network Lefty shows. I just don't find anything they have to say these days any funnier than dad jokes on the inside of a

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 3:54 PM (P)

A year ago, everyone was doing the “Trump dance.” Now the president is too scared to show his face at the Super Bowl

By Alex Shephard | February 7, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/206276/trump-super-bowl-kid-rock-decli
ne-maga-cultural-relevance

Donald Trump is trying not to make a big deal of the fact that he won’t be attending Super Bowl LX when it kicks off on Sunday. The game, which is being held in Santa Clara, California, is just “too far away,” said the president, who regularly flies across the world on a taxpayer-funded plane that solely exists to take him wherever he wants, whenever he wants. In the same interview, though, Trump did indicate another possible reason why he wasn’t attending: the Opening Ceremony and halftime show. The latter will feature a performance from Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny and the former will feature Bay Area punk rock band Green Day — both of whom have been sharply critical of the president, his administration, and, particularly in the case of Bad Bunny, ICE.

“I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” Trump said.

It’s tempting to dwell on the delicious irony in Trump’s statement: There is no one in recent American history who has sown more hatred than the president. But it doesn’t matter. Trump wouldn’t be at the Super Bowl even if Kid Rock were performing alongside a host of country singers no one has heard of — which is, incidentally, the slate of the right-wing Turning Point USA’s “alternative” halftime show, which is sure to attract dozens of viewers. Trump isn’t going to the Super Bowl because he is, one year into his term, more unpopular than he’s been since the January 6 insurrection. He knows that when the cameras inevitably found him in his box, he would be mercilessly and loudly booed. Staying home and stewing — and posting incessant (and most likely racist) drivel on Truth Social—is preferable. It’s still humiliating, just less so.

Trump’s absence at Super Bowl LX, combined with TPUSA’s show, tells us where his second term is headed. A year ago, Trump had real cultural power, particularly in the sports world. He attended Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans and was applauded. Pro athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by breaking out the “Trump dance.” There was wide concern that the right had achieved massive cultural power through influencers, popular YouTube shows, and comics. Now Trump is staying home, and the best counterprogramming his allies can come up with is a performance by one of the most talentless performers American culture has produced in the last quarter-century.

The rise of the “Trump dance” — seen everywhere from college football stadiums to international soccer — was, as I argued shortly after the election, a sign of the wider cultural normalization of Trump and the utter failure to make him societally radioactive. It also pointed to one of the more disturbing trends revealed by the 2024 election: Trump had gained ground with a lot of people who, not so long ago, didn’t like him at all. Young men, in particular — not just white men without college degrees, but from a wide array of social, racial, and economic backgrounds — had warmed to the president. They thought he was funny, someone worth imitating — and saw no social cost for embracing him. And Trump was winning over these people in part because American culture — particularly online culture, but sports as well — had gotten more right-wing and reactionary.

TPUSA’s show is amusing for a lot of reasons. One is that Kid Rock is terrible, not just musically but lyrically; his songs celebrating statutory rape have gone viral recently. “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage, see / Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory),” Kid Rock rapped on the soundtrack to the 2001 children’s movie Osmosis Jones. Kid Rock was a cultural force of sorts in 2001, but in 2026 he’s been a has-been for two decades. For t

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 4:10 PM (P)

<< We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. >>

https://andrewtobias.com/handing-the-mic-to-david-corn/

I wonder if the United States is slipping into such a fog.

The Donald Trump regime, of course, is predicated on lies. His 2024 campaign was a crusade of disinformation. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs; criminal immigrant gangs have taken over entire cities; public schools were performing gender affirmation procedures; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the United States. And Trump, as you might recall, was clocked by the Washington Post during his first term as spewing more than 30,000 falsehoods and lies.

It’s no news flash that he’s prevaricating non-stop. But what’s most worrisome is how brazen he and the fellow fibbers in his gang are—as if there were absolutely no concern about being caught or found out. And not just regarding lying. They’re also brazen when it comes to racism, abuse of power, and corruption. In the quaint days before Trump, lying presidents and lying elected officials tried to make it seem they were not lying. Corrupt presidents and corrupt elected officials tried to make it seem they were not corrupt. With Trump and his banditos, there are no such games of pretend.

It leads to a disturbing dynamic in which Trump and his lieutenants display their atrociousness to such an extent that it can lead to inurement. We know their actions are outrageous, they know their actions are outrageous, we know they know, they know we know they know—and this circle swallows itself. Nothing changes.

Trump denies he’s vengefully weaponizing the Justice Department to take down his enemies. Yet we see this clearly happening in multiple instances, with the prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff and the criminal investigations of others, including former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA director John Brennan. These cases have been mounted over the objections of professional prosecutors and handled by political hacks—a true sign they are flagrant abuses of power. Yet Trump and his lackeys insist this is merely the Justice Department doing its job by the book. There has never been a more obvious perversion of the DOJ. They know we know.

Trump denies he’s a racist. Yet he has a long history of racist statements and acts. I don’t need to run though all that again. But a few days ago, when he was on Dan Bongino’s podcast—to which the former FBI deputy director has returned to resume his conspiracy-mongering career—Trump said, “Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there…I won three times but I got no credit for it…It’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft…These are people that don’t work…We gotta get ’em out, most of them. And it’s most of them. Ninety-two percent don’t work…Many of them drive Mercedes-Benzes.” In December, he exclaimed, Somalis “are garbage” and “contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country…We don’t want ’em in our country…Let ’em go back to where they came from.” Pure, unadulterated racism. On Thursday night, Trump put up on his money-losing social media site a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—which was later removed, though the White House defended it. And the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor have been routinely posting memes and messages that promote images and slogans used by white supremacists. In modern times there has never been such undisguised and explicit racism purposefully propagated by an administration. They know we know.

Trump engages in the most overt corruption. His wife accepted a $40 million payment from billionaire Jeff Bezos and Amazon for a mediocre (at best) film—a way-above-market-value licensing fee—while Bezos and Amazon have multiple interests before the government that Trump controls.

SECOND

Sunday, February 8, 2026 9:05 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
<< We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. >>

By Phillips P. OBrien

Feb 08, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-171-the-week-tru
mp

There was another whopper of a lie this week about India buying Russian oil. The US and India are hammering out a new trade deal, and terms are being reached. When Trump announced that the two sides were close to an agreement, he added that as part of the deal, the Indians had promised to stop buying all Russian oil. Trump said that the Indians had “assured me today that they (India) will not be buying oil from Russia”. Then, to reinforce the point, Trump described the (nonexistent) Indian pledge as a “big step.” To finally show how amazing he was, Trump claimed that not only would the Indians stop buying Russian oil, they would replace those purchases with US oil.

Immediately the press started reporting this claim as fact.

US to cut tariffs on India to 18%, India agrees to end Russian oil purchases
By David Lawder and Aftab Ahmed
February 2, 2026 5:06 PM GMT • Updated February 3, 2026

The sole source for this headline was Trump’s claim that India had agreed to this.

It was a lie. The Indians two days later released the entire text of the agreements reached so far between the US and themselves. You can access it here.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-us-t
rade-deal-read-full-text-of-joint-statement/articleshow/128021368.cms

There is not a single word about India stopping the purchase of Russian oil, of replacing such purchases of Russian oil with American oil, etc. Indeed, even the discussion of India purchasing oil (and other products) from the USA is very vague. There is no commitment to do so, just a statement of intention.

Here is the key text: “India intends to purchase $500 billion of US energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products and coking coal over the next 5 years.”

So actually, India is not committed to buying more US oil at all. Btw, in exchange for this non-commitment, the Indians seem to get access to advanced US processors. Hey ho.

I can assure you now that India will not stop purchasing all Russian oil—and it was wildly irresponsible of the press to say so. We heard the same things in October, when the Trump administration first announced their “sanctions” on Russian oil sales. Actually at that point through the end of November, Indian purchases went up. Since then, Indian purchases have modestly reduced (though continued at high levels), but overall the Russians have been able to sell far more to China than they have lost in sales to India.

It's clear now that Trump is defending Russia and protecting Russia. It would be far better that this is how his ridiculous lies, and they are lies, are reported next time.

For assuredly there will be more deceit in the future.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-171-the-week-tru
mp

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

SECOND

Monday, February 9, 2026 6:59 PM (P)

This Is So Much Bigger Than Pete Hegseth or Mark Kelly

A decision against the senator could affect all military retirees.

By Missy Ryan | February 9, 2026, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/pete-hegseth-mar
k-kelly-court/685911/

Of the many questions posed by those gathered in U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s courtroom last week, the most obvious one of all never came up: Why on earth was anyone here in the first place?

Until now, the military has pursued only a tiny number of criminal cases against retirees for actions that occur after military service has ended. Until now, the idea that the secretary of defense would accuse a lawmaker of treason simply for disagreeing with him would be laughable. Until now, any free-speech debates concerning sitting members of Congress have led to the conclusion that lawmakers ought to have—to borrow from former Chief Justice Earl Warren—the widest possible latitude to express themselves.

And yet there we all were anyway, gathered to see Mark Kelly—the fighter pilot turned astronaut turned U.S. senator—defend his First Amendment rights against an attempt by the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, to silence him and knock down his military retirement rank and pay.

As someone who’s covered 10 secretaries of defense, I’ve never seen anything like what Hegseth is doing—not even close. If Hegseth gets his way, he won’t just be punishing Kelly; he will succeed in dramatically curbing the First Amendment rights of all military retirees, some of the very people who have fought to defend such freedoms.

At the heart of the case is a November video in which Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers—all veterans of the military or intelligence agencies—address U.S. troops, reminding them that they “can and must refuse illegal orders.” Their goal with the video was to push back against the president’s domestic troop deployments, a trend his critics feared might lead to clashes with ordinary Americans or be used to interfere in upcoming elections. At the time the video was posted, Democrats were also assailing the administration over the legality of its air campaign against suspected Latin American drug boats. The lawmakers did not specify which problematic orders they had in mind.

Read: ‘An example MUST BE SET’

The Trump administration’s response was swift. Adviser Stephen Miller called the video an attempted “insurrection.” Donald Trump declared that the “traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” and reposted suggestions that they be hanged. Hegseth ordered the Navy to look into Kelly’s “potentially unlawful” comments, something he was able to do because Kelly is the only one in the video who receives benefits as a military retiree. (Although some 18 million military veterans are living in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, a much smaller share of those people reach retirement status.) Kelly now receives lifelong retirement pay and is subject to rules, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In early January, Hegseth issued Kelly a letter of censure over his “seditious statements and his pattern of reckless misconduct,” which, Hegseth said, had harmed military discipline and undermined the chain of command. He also asked Navy Secretary John Phelan (a Republican donor and billionaire art collector with no naval experience) to begin a review of Kelly’s retirement rank and pay.

The Trump administration’s attempts to go after Kelly are, several legal experts told me, straightforwardly outrageous and without merit. But even if the judge rules in Kelly’s favor, it’s worth paying attention to this fight, because it underscores the degree to which the Trump administration is seeking to expand executive power in novel ways. Far more is at stake than the retirement benefits of one man.

The U.S. military has sought legal action against its own retirees only in a rare few cases—and those cases have typically involved egregious crimes, such as sexual assault. And although the military can prosecute sitting serv

SECOND

Monday, February 9, 2026 8:43 PM (P)

Trump started saying, “My father was so healthy; he had no problems. His heart couldn’t be stopped.” “He did have one problem though,” Trump told me. And he said, “Late in life, he had, what’s the word for it?” And he pointed to his head. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary sitting next to me, she kind of rescued him in that moment and said, “Alzheimer’s.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer’s thing. Well, well, I don’t have it.”

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/477956/trump-health-age-issues-mind-hand-
bruise-dozing

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

SECOND

Monday, February 9, 2026 10:11 PM (P)

What is 6ixStringJoker thinking? Trump isn’t pleasing 6ix:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=52126&mid=12382
26#1238226

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Monday, February 9, 2026 2:40 AM

I think we're all fucked unless we find Jesus.

And I don't even necessarily mean that in the Biblical sense.

It was nice not ever having to be the Dad or the Manager.

The only problem was, all the Dads and Managers started retiring. Then somewhere along the way most of them got sick and died on us.

And nobody competent was around to take over for any of them.

And one day everything stopped working right.

And nobody knew how to fix any of it.

And one side has spent generations pretending to care and spending a lions share of the tax revenue and racking up the debt with absolutely nothing to show for it here, or anywhere else in the world other than their own very impressive net worth, and the other side wants to ultimately take every single form of social safety net away from everyone indiscriminately, only to turn around and raise the yearly military spending to $1.5 Trillion, and ultimately spending what I'm pretty sure will be the most expensive yearly bill we've had so far when the official numbers come out. Cook the books all you want, but I'll be investigating any claims to the contrary if and when that time comes.

We have nobody in power but process people. Smile for the camera and give us a good vibe. That's what the job is about. Not doing things like taking care and making sure that we don't fuck up the HUMAN ecosystem through the Public Education Department for a few generations so nobody knows how to fix anything anymore when it breaks. Hell... even if there was a will by these politicians to fix everything that's broken, they probably couldn't even find enough people now who knows how to fix or properly rebuild a lot of it. Between the nepotism and the DEI quotas, you don't have anybody in the unions under 55 years old that know a fucking thing or do anything but work as slow as humanly possible, just as they are directed to do, so everybody can be eternally miserable and not even enjoy the summer anymore because they were stuck in more construction traffic on the expressway they just ripped up last year needed to be ripped up again this year.

Everything sucks so much now and everyone knows it.

Sidewalks look like shit. Parking lots look like shit. Even in the suburbs were they didn't just 20 years ago.

Can we just acknowledge that?

Can we just agree that people used to get things done and keep things working so much so that none of you even noticed they existed because nothing hardly ever fucking broke long enough for you to notice it?

Gotta find Jesus, or something...

Maybe a Childhood's End reference here instead of posting the Pets video again... bah.. why bother.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 1:36 AM (P)

Stalker.

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.

And yeah. That's what I do.

EXACTLY what I've always told you two stupid fucks that I do.

I don't mindlessly defend my "side" like you two to the point that you've both totally discredited yourselves, as has the Legacy Media, all of your "Experts" and anybody else who sucks on the Donkey dick all day and repeats every word the Media tells them to repeat. All while whoring yourself out to people like Liz and Dick Cheney, and now Ted is even turning to Russia to suck some of their dicks because he just doesn't have enough of them left to suck here in America.

This is why your party and ideology is finally dead and won't ever be coming back. It's why CNN has to admit that even 71% of Democratic Voters want Voter ID and an even larger share of black people do at 76% (with Mexicans at 80% and whites at 84%).

All of your Party's lies are coming undone. They're all unraveling. We're laughing our asses off at Hollywood shit celebs who say the stuff that make you cum and we're dragging them through all that cum and shit and filth.

You're all going to shut the fuck up.

This country isn't yours anymore. You will NEVER run it again.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 1:43 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stalker.

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

I keep track of all Trumptards. The fat ones. The suicidal ones. The ugly ones. The crazy ones. The ones dying because of their depravity, lifestyle, or excesses. I no longer track the incompetent ones at work because they are either dead or terminated.

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 3:32 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stalker.

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
I keep track of all Trumptards.

We know. You're a fucking creep.

That's no secret to anybody.

Meanwhile, I just keep hearing about people who sound exactly like you being arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for saying out loud what you've written here. And I've got it all archived for you.

Though you're probably too stupid to ever figure out that YOU are the bad guy, everybody else knows that now and everybody hates you.

Whether it ends in a long prison stint, or in the confines of your own dark little joyless hovel, enjoy the rest of your sad little miserable life alone, unloved and unwanted.

You deserve it.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 6:03 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

We know. You're a fucking creep. That's no secret to anybody. Meanwhile, I just keep hearing about people who sound exactly like you being arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for saying out loud what you've written here. And I've got it all archived for you. Though you're probably too stupid to ever figure out that YOU are the bad guy, everybody else knows that now and everybody hates you. Whether it ends in a long prison stint, or in the confines of your own dark little joyless hovel, enjoy the rest of your sad little miserable life alone, unloved and unwanted. You deserve it.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

6ix, you have claimed you will lose healthcare because of Trump. Besides that, Trump has cost you money, even if you don't pay income taxes:

President Donald Trump's tariffs cost the average American household $1,000 last year, according to new research from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The cost is expected to rise even higher this year to $1,300 per household, assuming the existing tariffs remain in place, the research said. But that is too complicated for any Trumptard I know to understand. I talk to them, but none of them can connect their misfortunes to their choice of President and their smaller choices, such as their tobacco consumption, their gluttony, their alcoholism, their profligate spending, etc.

Trump's tariffs cost American households $1,000. The Tax Foundation said the cost may be even higher in 2026.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-tariffs-cost-american-household
s-1000-year-research/story?id=130003484

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

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 9:06 AM (P)

Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.

https://www.newsweek.com/mary-trump-reveals-one-thing-donald-trump-has
-always-feared-11402964

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 1:50 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.

Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 5:30 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.

Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Trump announced his theft of Canadian property yesterday evening:

"I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve," Trump said in a social media post on Monday. "With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset. The revenues generated because of the U.S. Market will be astronomical." The $4.7 billion bridge was financed by the Canadian government.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-threatens-block-opening-new-brid
ge-us-canada/story?id=130008492

Canada paid to build the bridge and the U.S. customs plaza. See photos at:

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/02/09/trump-threa
tens-to-block-gordie-howe-international-bridge-from-opening-michigan-ontario-canada/88597688007/

Trump is telling the world that he intends to steal the ownership of a $4.7 billion suspension bridge. It is one step along the way to making Canada the 51st state with threats and violence.

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

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 5:34 PM (P)

The U.S. government added $696 billion to the national debt over the past four months, the Congressional Budget Office reports. That is $2.1 trillion for 12 months. Trump will keep going at that rate until he doubles the National Debt pretty damn quick.

https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/cbo-estimates-696-billion-deficit-
first-four-months-fy-2026

But what about the DOGE promise to cut spending by $2 trillion per year? The cut didn’t happen!

https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-produced-largest-peacetime-workforce-cu
t-record-spending-kept-rising-0

Verified DOGE budget cuts stood at just $2 billion. That is a long way from $2 trillion.

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-actual-math-behind-doges-cuts

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

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 5:53 PM (P)

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised not just to end inflation but to reduce prices. He has failed to deliver.

His response to failure has been to gaslight the public. Reuters reports:

In five speeches on the economy since December, Trump asserted that inflation had been beaten or was way down almost 20 times and said prices were falling almost 30 times, assertions at odds with economic data and voters’ daily experiences.

It isn’t working: 52 percent of Americans say that Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while only 28 percent say that he’s made it better.

And plunging approval ratings for the economy aren’t the only way stubborn inflation, currently hovering close to 3%, hurts Trump. It also undermines any case for the Federal Reserve to deliver a big cut in short-term interest rates, which Trump constantly demands. Granted, the Fed cut rates in 2024 and 2025 in response to a steep decline in inflation from its 2022 peak. But there’s little justification for further cuts, especially big ones, with inflation stubbornly above the Fed’s 2 percent target.

So what can Trump’s yes-men do?

Trump hasn’t made a rational argument for lower interest rates. Instead, he seems to believe that rate cuts should be his reward for overseeing a “hot” economy. Understanding that this makes no sense, Trump’s economic policy minions have converged on a different, ostensibly more economically rational reason to cut interest rates: AI.

Recently Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed to the Federal Reserve Board, and Kevin Warsh, his choice as Fed chair, have all argued that the coming AI-led boom in productivity justifies slashing interest rates now. The script goes like this: AI will lead to a surge in productivity; higher productivity will reduce production costs and thereby reduce inflation; and the coming fall in inflation justifies much lower interest rates now.

I will admit that this story isn’t completely nonsensical, unlike what Trump has been spouting. Yes, AI could reduce production costs and, other things equal, reduce inflation. However, both theory and historical experience say that the supposed benefits of AI aren’t a reason to cut interest rates now and almost certainly won’t be a reason to cut them in the future.

The alacrity with which Trump officials have jumped on the argument that the Fed should slash rates because of AI is troubling for reasons that go beyond the fact that they’re wrong. Did Bessent, or Warsh, or Miran carefully consider the evidence and advocate an interest-rate policy based on what that evidence showed? Of course not. Their boss wants to slash interest rates, so they went looking for plausible-sounding economic arguments that might rationalize his whims.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-ai-doesnt-justify-lower-interest

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 6:16 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.

Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump announced his theft of Canadian property yesterday evening

Cool.

What now?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 6:38 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Cool.

What now?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Trump is kind of like a bank robber who emails a threat to the bank: "Give me all the money!" Presidents should not attempt to rob Canada. Or banks.

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

SECOND

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 6:44 PM (P)

How America Got So Sick

The health of a nation reflects the health of a democracy.

By Vann R. Newkirk II | February 9, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/american-public-health-de
mocracy/685727/

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

In the winter of 168 C.E., the famed Greek physician Galen arrived in Aquileia, an Italian city on the northern edge of the Adriatic. The city had grown large since its founding as a Roman colony, but during the 200-year Pax Romana, its fortifications had been allowed to deteriorate. After an armed group of migrating Germanic peoples had crossed the Danube a year earlier, the Roman co-emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, had rushed to the city, raising two legions and rebuilding its defenses; they planned to use it as a base of operations against the invaders.

Galen had been summoned, however, to help fight a different kind of invader. A plague, likely an early variant of smallpox, had traveled to Aquileia with the troops, and held the city in its grip. The emperors fled, but Verus succumbed to the disease on the road to Rome. Galen tried to slow the wave of illness, but most of the people in Aquileia perished.

They represented just a sliver of the eventual victims of the Antonine Plague, also known as Galen’s Plague, which killed at least 1 million people throughout the Roman empire. It was possibly the world’s first true pandemic, and haunted the empire for the rest of the Pax Romana, which ended in 180 with Aurelius’s death. The details of the pandemic—the exact pathogen, the true number of victims—are subjects of debate, and might never be fully settled. But some research has cited the Antonine Plague as part of a vicious cycle that hastened Rome’s long fall. Food shortages, internal migrations, and overcrowding had already signaled a slippage in imperial power, and created a fertile environment for disease. The pandemic, in turn, spread panic and left behind mistrust, weakening faith in civic and religious authorities.

Men famously think about Rome every day, and political commentators have been nervously comparing Rome’s fall to a potential American collapse since before America even had a Constitution. But Rome’s example really does merit consideration in light of recent events. One of the better measures of a society’s vitality is its ability to protect its citizens from disease, and the two often move in tandem; a decline in one may produce a reduction in the other.

Infectious disease is probably not an imminent threat to the United States’ survival. Still, after nearly a century of existence, the American public-health apparatus, which has driven some of the most remarkable advances in global longevity and quality of life in human history, is teetering. The country has lost much of its ability to keep microbes from invading its body politic, and progress in life expectancy and other metrics is slowing or even reversing.

It is tempting to lay these changes all at the feet of President Trump and his current health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who together have shredded America’s global-health organizations, drawn back public-health funding, fomented vaccine skepticism, and begun to dismantle child-vaccination programs. But the “Make America Healthy Again” moment is in some ways just another step in the long retreat of the civic trust and communitarian spirit that have enabled America’s disease-fighting efforts. If this retreat continues, the public-health era—the century-long period of unprecedented epidemiological safety that has been the foundation for so many other breakthroughs—will come to an end. And that end will have dire consequences for this republic and its future.

In January 2025, a hospital in West Texas began reporting that children were coming in sick with measles. The cases were initially clustered in a Mennonite community, where vaccination rates had been low in recent decades. But soon the outbreak spread around the state, and to others; the reported number of cases rea

SECOND

Wednesday, February 11, 2026 5:52 PM (P)

The Banality of MAGA Evil

Instead of criminal masterminds we got amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick

Paul Krugman | Feb 11, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-maga-evil

. . . Before joining Trump’s cabinet, Lutnick ran the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald — presenting a huge potential conflict of interest that he claims to have ended by turning the business over to … his sons. Cantor Fitzgerald, in turn, is intimately linked to Tether, a cryptocurrency that is highly profitable because it has become a favorite channel for money-laundering by international criminals.

Nor was money-laundering through cryptocurrency the only criminal conspiracy to which Lutnick was, at the very least, adjacent. Lutnick has in the past vehemently denied having any association with Jeffrey Epstein, insisting that he severed all contact with the pedophile ringleader in 2005. But even the highly limited, extremely redacted release of the Epstein files — everything we’ve seen reeks of a major cover-up — shows that he was flat-out lying. Not only did he stay in close contact with Epstein, the two men appear to have gone into business together.

But, at this point, who could possibly be surprised? The more we learn, the more pedophilia and criminal use of cryptocurrency look related, even like different aspects of a single conspiracy. Epstein, it turns out, was a major early investor in the crypto industry. In the backrooms of MAGA-land, passing around under-age girls is a lot like passing around insider crypto deals.

In any previous administration, Lutnick’s naked conflicts of interest and his Epstein lies would have led to his immediate departure. But Trump 47 is using his position to massively enrich himself . . .

Lutnick may be under wraps for a while, but don’t expect him to resign. Pushing him out would be a tacit admission that huge conflicts of interest, family business that enables crime and association with sexual predators are bad. Oh, and let’s not forget jaw-dropping stupidity. Not going to happen.
. . .

So it’s worth remembering Hannah Arendt’s observations about the architects of Hitler’s genocide, which led her to coin the phrase “the banality of evil”. As Arendt noted, the horrors of Nazism were not inflicted by brilliant geniuses, but through the normalization of thoughtless, amoral behavior that eventually turned into evil. Thus while Lutnick appears on the surface like a dim-witted backroom grifter, he is a warning of something far more sinister and malign lurking below.

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

SECOND

Wednesday, February 11, 2026 7:49 PM (P)

Oops! Trump just inadvertently spiked his own Supreme Court Tariffs case

By Ed Mazza | Feb 11. 2026

President Donald Trump is taking heat for making a wild claim about how he concocted at least one of his tariffs and it seems to undermine his own argument for imposing them in the first place.

“I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland,” he told Larry Kudlow during a Fox Business interview that aired on Tuesday. “They were paying no tariffs, sending stuff over here like nobody could believe.”

Trump claimed the United States had a $42 billion trade deficit with Switzerland, a number similar to one he’d used before and one that analysts said ignored trade in services, which actually put the deficit at $8 billion.

Trump said he imposed a 30% tariff on goods from Switzerland, leading to “an emergency call from, I believe, the prime minister of Switzerland.”

But that call didn’t seem to go the way Trump wanted.

“She was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive,” he said. “And I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, so instead of giving her a reduction, I raised her to 39%.”

There are a few problems with Trump’s claims, starting with the fact that Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister.

Trump’s conversation last year was likely with then-Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, and occurred after he threatened to raise tariffs on the country to 39%. However, that tariff was later reduced to 15% after a Swiss delegation gave Trump several gifts, including a Rolex watch and a gold bar. The decision to give him those items is now under investigation in Switzerland for violating Swiss anti-bribery laws.

But beyond the error and beyond the casual misogyny of Trump once again attacking a woman because he doesn’t like how she talks to him, there was the larger issue of the tariffs themselves. Last year, Trump’s attorneys argued before the Supreme Court that he needed to act without Congress on the issue because trade imbalances had created a “national emergency” that the president was trying to address via tariffs. Yet, saying he can raise and lower tariffs because of someone’s attitude undermines that argument.

With the court case still pending, Trump’s critics are pointing to the new interview and wondering if the justices were paying attention: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/oops-critics-think-trump-just-
inadvertently-spiked-his-own-supreme-court-case/ar-AA1W6v0a

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

SECOND

Wednesday, February 11, 2026 9:41 PM (P)

Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now. Maybe They Should Be.

By Christina Cauterucci | Feb 11, 2026

https://slate.com/life/2026/02/gun-range-safety-gay-lesbian-lgbtq-trum
p.html

My Gun and Me

If you had told this urban progressive lesbian 10 years ago that I’d own a gun, I would have laughed in your face. Now I can’t let my weapon go — and I’m far from alone.

. . . Two years later, as anecdotal reports tell of record numbers of LGBTQ+ people seeking out firearms for self-protection, I think back on that moment as a foreboding encapsulation of the dissonant reality we now inhabit. We film ICE traffic stops outside queer parties before going back inside to dance. We use our gay group chats to plan outings to the bar, and also to share packing lists for go bags. In the morning, we get tipsy at a birthday brunch, letting our children defile our friends’ furniture. In the evening, we research golden-visa options in case the government tells us those children are no longer ours.

In the shadow of Donald Trump’s second term in office, and amid the clear threat and increasing reality of political violence, some queer friends are learning to handle firearms, purchasing new weapons, or researching rifles for defense. Together, we talk through worst-case scenarios that would have seemed fantastical just months ago, imagining ourselves into a million futures that seem possible and unthinkable in equal measure.

Sometimes we don’t even have to imagine. Last month, Renée Nicole Good, a queer mother and poet, was shot to death by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Afterward, another agent dismissed her as “that lesbian bitch.” The message was not subtle. Her sexuality was deployed to justify her killing, casting her as a queer agitator who had been put in her place.

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

SECOND

Wednesday, February 11, 2026 11:38 PM (P)

FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot

Feb. 10, 2026

Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration has taken an aggressive stance against mRNA technology.

The move is the latest sign that the FDA, under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is slow-walking vaccine approvals and taking a harder line on shots that use messenger RNA technology.

Last year, Kennedy ordered that all new vaccines go through placebo-controlled clinical trials. When vaccines are already available for a disease, it is unethical to give clinical trial participants a placebo, rather than compare the new vaccine to the existing one. Giving a placebo would leave people who would be otherwise protected vulnerable to infection.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has downplayed the benefits of vaccines and has singled out vaccines made with mRNA as particularly dangerous, calling the mRNA Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-declines-review-moderna
s-mrna-flu-shot-rcna258436

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 12, 2026 11:11 AM (P)

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 12, 2026 11:28 AM (P)

What's up with Minnesota? You finally stopped sending in your murderous, brainfucked college "educated" white lemmings to suicide themselves before your throne of hate and lies like the good little rabid Muslims that you've turned them into?

Ilhan Omar, Tim Waltz, Jacob Frey... *crickets*

Now Second is putting up posts in every thread of some crazy LGBTQUIC3POR2-2 white lady putting everyone on notice that she's a cowyboy now and she went out and got herself a side arm. HOOOOO-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Come at us bro. Stop being pussies and do what you've always wanted to do. By all means, let's get this show on the road so we can finally finally let Darwin sort this one out, shall we?

You're nothing but a bunch of little wanna-be fascists, sucking the government tits dry, while getting away with murder for decades now, but the media is no longer running the narrative anymore.

Everybody sees you and all you fucking degenerate hypocrites for exactly what you are now.

If the Democratic Party ever wants to win another election, it goes far beyond just cleaning up and clearing out the cancer and decay in their own ranks. They need to throw about 15% of you in a dumpster and set you all on fire too.

The Democratic Party is finished. Forever.

And so after all of these years of being against it, I'm down with removing the Filibuster to get what needs to be done, done. Democrats will never in our lifetime regain power and be able to make use of it.

It's time to take what's left of the Democrat coalition and grind them down into powder.

They don't want to pass the Save act when voter ID to vote laws is an 80/20 issue that even 76% of blacks and 71% of Democratic Party voters want to see happen?

So be it.

You've proven yourselves incompetent and unwilling to govern in the name of The People, so we will make sure that you simply can't do any governing going forward.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Thursday, February 12, 2026 6:15 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Be Evil. Be a dick.

Making America Stagnate Again

Paul Krugman | Feb 12, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-america-stagnate-again

Trump officials have been vigorously spinning weak job growth on their boss’s watch. What’s interesting is the excuse for near-stagnation offered by both Kevin Hassett, the chair of the National Economic Council, and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade czar: Job growth has stalled because of mass deportations.

Wait, what?

Since we’re talking about Trump appointees, some of what these officials said involved flat-out lying. Navarro, in particular, declared that “we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market” — ICE has “only” arrested around 393,000 people.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-arrests-violent-criminal-records-trum
p-first-year/ He also disparaged strong job growth during the Biden years, saying

“All of the jobs we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines.”

There aren’t good data on how many jobs are going to illegal immigrants, but we do know that unemployment among native-born Americans fell under Biden but rose last year.

The fact that Trumpists are attributing stalled job growth to reduced immigration is astonishing because it’s an admission that the fundamental economic premise behind mass deportations was always false. After all, the claim was that immigrants were taking jobs away from the native born. Now MAGA officials are saying that deporting foreign-born workers reduces employment, which implies that previous immigration was creating new jobs, not taking them away.

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

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 4:22 AM (P)

Trump Has a Bridge He Wants to Sell You

The president’s closure of a trade route from Detroit to Windsor will help a billionaire and hurt basically everyone else.

By Jonathan Chait | February 12, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trump-detroit-windsor-bridge
/685967/

The president of the United States became aware Monday evening, apparently for the first time, that a new bridge is set to open between Michigan and Ontario. The project promises to create a fast and inexpensive route that Michigan’s farmers and businesses have sought for decades.

Donald Trump decided this could not stand.

In a typically discursive social-media post, Trump announced, “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.” The post also predicts that ice hockey will soon be banned in Canada as a result of its trade agreement with China. On the plus side, it does refer to Canada as a “Country” rather than, as the president has enjoyed describing it, a state.

On the surface, this looked to be just one more Trumpian tantrum, the kind that regularly pops up when he sees something distressing on television or is spoken to by a woman without the self-abasement he demands.

But subsequent reporting suggests that this was something even worse: an episode that sums up Trumpian economics in all its stupidity and atavistic sleaze.

Hours before Trump’s post, according to The New York Times, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Matthew Moroun, the owner of a competing bridge between Michigan and Ontario. Lutnick then spoke with the president by phone. You might wonder why a major international bridge has an owner when such things are ordinarily in public hands. The answer is that the Ambassador Bridge was privately constructed, and for decades has stood as the sole trucking link from Detroit to Windsor, a key thoroughfare for national and international commerce. If you want to travel from Michigan to, say, Boston, your fastest route runs through Canada.

The Ambassador Bridge gets clogged with traffic and charges expensive tolls, which Moroun is able to compel because his customers have no practical alternative. A separate tunnel connects Detroit and Windsor, but larger trucks can’t use it. Moroun’s family has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to keep things that way, relentlessly lobbying to block construction of a second bridge desired by drivers and merchants on both sides of the Detroit River.

A breakthrough arrived in 2012. Rick Snyder, a Republican who was then Michigan’s governor, cut a deal with Canada to build the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Snyder had to work around the recalcitrant Michigan legislature, which had been plied with Moroun donations, by using executive authority. The terms of the deal required Canada to finance all construction costs. Canada is permitted to collect full tolls until it recoups its investment, and ownership of the bridge is to be split equally.

The project would unlock billions of dollars in savings for consumers and businesses. The sole loser is Moroun, a billionaire whose fortune rests on rent seeking. Now that the bridge construction is essentially complete and set to finally open, Moroun has gone to the administration, and Trump has shut down his competition.

Trump’s stated demands to open the bridge are a mixture of fantasy and contrived grievance. Trump complains in his post that the bridge was built without American material, which is false, and insists, “With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset,” which is already the case.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, attempting to add a sheen of rationality to the president’s ultimatum, said, “It’s also unacceptable that more of this bridge isn’t being built wi

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 13, 2026 5:28 AM (P)

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 13, 2026 5:38 AM (P)

This dude must be Lex Luthor to you low-IQ, always screaming idiots.

How on earth does a 79 year old man, who according to you every other day is losing his marbles, even have time to sleep when he is single-handedly responsible for every perceived grievance that every single white college "educated" liberal, professional complainer has for everybody other than themselves?

Forget Super Nazi Hitler.

Trump is simply the Anti-Santa.

Instead of magically being able to deliver toys to every good boy and girl on earth overnight, Trump is magically able to deliver a shit sandwich to every single person on the planet "who doesn't have it good like me", every single day, without ever even taking a break on Sundays.

You're a fucking clown, Second.

You and Ted are fucking clowns.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 6:00 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
This dude must be Lex Luthor to you low-IQ, always screaming idiots.

How on earth does a 79 year old man, who according to you every other day is losing his marbles, even have time to sleep when he is single-handedly responsible for every perceived grievance that every single white college "educated" liberal, professional complainer has for everybody other than themselves?

Forget Super Nazi Hitler.

Trump is simply the Anti-Santa.

Instead of magically being able to deliver toys to every good boy and girl on earth overnight, Trump is magically able to deliver a shit sandwich to every single person on the planet "who doesn't have it good like me", every single day, without ever even taking a break on Sundays.

You're a fucking clown, Second.

You and Ted are fucking clowns.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

6ix, you know what a monkey with a machine gun is, right? The government is the machine gun, while Trump is the monkey firing in all directions.

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 13, 2026 6:54 AM (P)

Wow. So witty.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 13, 2026 7:01 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 7:53 AM (P)

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 are using the childish taunt: "I'm rubber, you are glue. What you say bounces off me and sticks to you." Trump controls a powerful weapon, and he uses it as senselessly as a monkey would, never taking his monkey fingers off the trigger.

Who placed a monkey in control?

Approximately 22.6% of the total United States population voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. While Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote (votes actually cast), this figure is significantly higher than his share of the total population because many Americans choose not to participate.

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 13, 2026 8:18 AM (P)

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 3:25 PM (P)

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

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 5:13 PM (P)

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 pric

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 7:44 PM (P)

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

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 7:56 PM (P)

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

SECOND

Friday, February 13, 2026 9:43 PM (P)

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

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, February 14, 2026 1:08 AM (P)

SECOND

Saturday, February 14, 2026 6:14 PM (P)

Book Review: Trump's Ten Commandments, Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox

The Method Behind Trump’s Madness | Opinion

By Tom Rogers | Feb 13, 2026

https://www.newsweek.com/the-method-behind-trumps-madness-opinion-1149
2150

Every day seems to bring a new story epitomizing Donald Trump's norm-breaking behaviors, his narcissism, his tendency to make outrageous demands and his idea that all issues are about what personal gain he can wrestle from the situation.

The latest such news is that the president rescinded federal funding for a major tunnel infrastructure project that would vastly improve train commuting connections between New York and New Jersey. Trump has stated he would reinstate the funding if Penn Station, where the trains come into, was renamed for him. Oh, and by the way, Dulles Airport outside of Washington D.C. must be named for him as well. Clearly this demand reflects a super-sized egotism, but it is not all that surprising after Trump unilaterally put his name on the most significant national site honoring President John F. Kennedy.

To help make sense of stories like these, I want to focus this column on a soon-to-be published book about Donald Trump: Trump's Ten Commandments, which points out that in Trump's universe everything is about him and revolves around him—a god complex, thus the Biblically inspired title.
https://www.amazon.com/Trumps-Ten-Commandments-Strategic-Leadership-eb
ook/dp/B0G3DZ9TMQ
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Trumps-Ten-Commandments/Jeffrey
-Sonnenfeld/9781637635568

What makes the book such a fascinating read is not only its distillation of the Trump playbook down to ten clearly delineated and oft-repeated Trump behaviors, but the unique relationship of the writer to the president, which drives a lot of its insight and authoritativeness.

The author is Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management and head of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and the book is co-written by his associate Steven Tian. Having been a participant in a number of the institute's gatherings, I can attest first hand to the fact that Sonnenfeld is a completely unique figure in the business world—combining top academic expertise in leadership management with personal relationships with a vast array of CEOs and government leaders around the world - further combined with a highly refined understanding of politics, all packaged together with very substantial media savvy. Professor Sonnenfeld has also had many personal interactions with Trump over the course of Trump's business and political career, giving him a vantage point on the president's style no one else can occupy.

Sonnenfeld entered Trump's orbit as a media sparring partner when the TV show The Apprentice began. He believed the show was giving young viewers a horrendously inaccurate view of what real leadership is about. But Trump warmed to Sonnenfeld to the point that he offered him the presidency of Trump University. Very wisely, Sonnenfeld declined the offer. While Sonnenfeld admits to being charmed by Trump personally, he has become a significant organizer of business opposition to Trump's policy initiatives. Yet the book reads very objectively about how Trump returns to certain stratagems over and over again regardless of context, and by no means a set of policy rebuttals.

A recent column in the Daily Beast labeled Trump "a dangerous lunatic moron," devoid of any attributes that would indicate a rational thought process behind his actions. This is not an uncommon way of viewing the president. But as Sonnenfeld argues, dismissing Trump's strategic acumen is a serious mistake.

As the title indicates, Sonnenfeld and Tian's book identifies ten "commandments"—strategies to which Trump returns over and over again regardless of context. Three are worth highlighting here.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, February 14, 2026 6:17 PM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Saturday, February 14, 2026 9:06 PM (P)

6ixStringJoker, Russell Vought personally killed over 500,000 children, so it isn’t surprising that he is worried about his own safety.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+children+died+when+usaid+clos
ed

Funds appropriated to feed starving children now being spent on Russell Vought’s security detail

The White House budget office is using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s budget chief and an architect of the government overhaul that has cut thousands of federal jobs, according to three documents seen by Reuters.

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which Vought leads, is allocating $15 million of what remains of USAID operating expenses to cover the costs of his protection by the U.S. Marshals Service through the end of 2026, the documents showed.

A person familiar with the matter said that Vought’s security detail comprises more than one dozen U.S. Marshals. OMB did not make Vought available for interview.

The Marshals Service did not comment on Vought specifically, saying it does not identify people under protection but it “typically seeks reimbursement by the supported agency.”

Asked about the use of USAID funds, OMB spokesperson Rachel Cauley said in an email: “We are going to continue to use available funds at the three agencies overseen by the director to protect him.”

She apparently was referring to OMB, USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of which Vought is the acting director.

Vought served as acting USAID director for nearly 90 days last year before his deputy assumed the post in November. He remains a senior adviser to the nearly defunct agency, according to one of the documents, which have not been previously reported.

Cauley did not give further details about Vought’s security costs but she did not dispute that USAID funds are being used to underwrite the costs of his U.S. Marshals detail.

More at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-uses-usaid-funds-budget-d
irector-voughts-security-documents-show-2026-02-13/

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 15, 2026 9:45 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Sunday, February 15, 2026 9:41 PM (P)

Who Is Paying the Trump Tariffs?

Feb 15, 2026

Until recently the question of who pays tariffs wasn’t controversial among economists. The overwhelming consensus was that under normal circumstances tariffs — taxes on imported goods — are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. There are caveats and exceptions to this consensus, but these caveats are well understood and for the most part don’t apply to the tariffs imposed by the Trump 47 administration.

Once tariffs became a centerpiece of Trump’s economic policy, however, views about their impact became politicized, and Trump supporters were obliged to echo his claim that foreigners, not U.S. consumers, bear the tariff burden. There was a slightly comical demonstration of this politicization during a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing, when Scott Bessent was asked whether, before joining the Trump administration, he had sent a letter to hedge fund investors declaring that “tariffs are inflationary.” At first, Bessent denied having written that. Confronted with proof that he had, he declared that he had been mistaken.

But who is, in fact, paying the Trump tariffs? Two reports released last week — the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on the budget and economic outlook, and a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — both concluded that the tariffs are overwhelmingly being borne by U.S. households and firms. But Friday’s report on consumer prices showed fairly low inflation, rather than a big price spike from tariffs.

So are Trump officials right? Are studies concluding that Americans, not foreigners, are paying the tariffs wrong?

No and no. The evidence that foreigners aren’t paying the tariffs, which means that Americans are, is rock-solid. And the seemingly mild impact on measured inflation (the qualifier “measured” is important) isn’t a mystery once you do the math. Conventional economic analysis says that the tariffs should have pushed consumer prices around 1 percent higher than they would otherwise have been. Parsing the data to isolate the tariffs’ effect suggests that they have in fact raised prices by something close to that amount.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/who-is-paying-the-trump-tariffs

Did Trump tariffs increase manufacturing jobs or move manufacturing back to the US?
No, and no, so you know.
https://www.google.com/search?q=did+trump+tariffs+increase+manufacturi
ng+jobs+or+move+manufacturing+back+to+the+US

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, February 15, 2026 10:17 PM (P)

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Sunday, February 15, 2026 10:27 PM (P)

1) How much did Trump tariffs cost families?

Trump's tariffs are estimated to cost the average U.S. household approximately $1,300 in 2026, rising from an estimated $1,000 in 2025. These tariffs function as a regressive tax, placing a higher relative burden on lower and middle-income families. Other estimates, depending on the scope of the tariffs, have suggested higher costs ranging up to $3,800 to $4,600.

Key details on the impact of these tariffs include:

• Projected 2026 Costs: The Tax Foundation estimates that if current policies continue, the average household will pay $1,300 in 2026.

• Impact on Goods: Tariffs are driving up costs on everyday items, including electronics (up 11%), clothing (up 7.5%), and vehicles (up >6%).

• Consumer Burden: Studies indicate that U.S. consumers and importers bear 96% of the cost of these tariffs, rather than foreign exporters.

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+much+did+Trump+tariffs+cost+famili
es

2) Did Trump tariffs increase manufacturing jobs or move manufacturing back to the US?

No, and no.

https://www.google.com/search?q=did+trump+tariffs+increase+manufacturi
ng+jobs+or+move+manufacturing+back+to+the+US

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

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SECOND

Monday, February 16, 2026 3:43 AM (P)

(Why would Trumptards hate the Pope? Trumptards are Unchristians masquerading as Christians.)

Steve Bannon courted Epstein in his efforts to ‘take down’ Pope Francis

By Christopher Lamb | Feb 14, 2026

Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to US President Donald Trump, discussed opposition strategies with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein against Pope Francis, with Bannon saying he hoped to “take down” the pontiff, according to newly released files from the US Department of Justice.

Messages sent between the pair in 2019, released in the massive document dump last month, reveal Bannon courted the late financier in his attempts to undermine the former pontiff after leaving the first Trump administration.

Bannon had been highly critical of Francis whom he saw as an opponent to his “sovereigntist” vision, a brand of nationalist populism which swept through Europe in 2018 and 2019. The released documents from the DOJ appear to show that Epstein had been helping Bannon to build his movement.

“Will take down (Pope) Francis,” Bannon wrote to Epstein in June 2019. “The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”

Pope Francis was a significant obstacle to Bannon’s brand of nationalist populism. In 2018, the former Trump aide described Francis to The Spectator as “beneath contempt,” accusing him of siding with “globalist elites” and, according to “SourceMaterial,” urged Matteo Salvini, now Italy’s deputy prime minister, to “attack” the pontiff. For his part, Salvini has used Christian iconography and language when pursuing his anti-immigrant agenda.

Rome and the Vatican have been important for Bannon. He set up a Rome bureau when he ran Breitbart News and has been involved in trying to establish a political training “gladiator school” to defend Judaeo-Christian values not far from the Eternal City.

Francis, meanwhile, was a counterweight to the Trumpian worldview, strongly critiquing nationalism and making advocacy for migrants a hallmark of his pontificate.

The recently released DOJ files reveal Bannon messaged Epstein on several occasions in his efforts to undermine the late pope. . . .

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official who collaborated closely with Pope Francis, told CNN Bannon’s messages show a desire to fuse “spiritual authority with political power for strategic ends.”

The late pope, Spadaro explains, resisted such a link: “What those messages reveal is not merely hostility toward a pontiff, but a deeper attempt to instrumentalize faith as a weapon – precisely the temptation he sought to disarm.”

More at https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/14/world/bannon-epstein-take-down-pope-fra
ncis-latam-intl

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Monday, February 16, 2026 5:22 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Monday, February 16, 2026 7:39 PM (P)

Presidential democracy was a mistake
President’s Day is a bad holiday — and a symptom of a bad system.
Matthew Yglesias
Feb 16, 2026

https://www.slowboring.com/p/presidential-democracy-was-a-mistake

Today is Presidents Day, almost certainly America’s fakest holiday, and yet a bona fide day off, which means today’s post will be a bit shorter than usual.

Not only is Presidents Day dumb, the reason for its existence — a disagreement about whether we should observe Washington’s birthday or Lincoln’s birthday or both — is dumb.

But to go even bigger and bolder, the entire presidential system of government that’s in use in the United States is, unfortunately, a pretty bad idea.

I was reminded of this most recently when writing about the Olympics and the political wrangling surrounding it. Some of this wrangling stems from progressives being fussy and irrational, and some of it stems from Trump and his allies being assholes.

But part of the problem is that the American constitutional system fuses the concept of a head of state who symbolizes the nation and the concept of a head of government who leads a political party and engages in partisan political disputes.

In a parliamentary system, the job of representing the country at an opening ceremony would be done by a monarch or a disempowered president. Italy is a republic, but it’s a parliamentary republic, and the Olympic Games are hosted not by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (a partisan figure who wields massive power in Italian politics) but by President Sergio Mattarella (a largely symbolic elder statesman whose job is mostly to do this kind of ceremonial stuff).

The fusion of these roles has been in the spotlight during both Donald Trump presidencies because he is so bad at performing the dignified non-partisan aspects of the job.

But it’s a perennial tension in American politics.

We lack someone who plays a national role rather than a partisan one. Presidents are always trying to leverage their head of state status to advance partisan agendas, and rank-and-file supporters of the opposition party are always feeling marginalized or disrespected. The separation of the symbolic and practical roles is a better arrangement.

A much less fake holiday, Independence Day, is coming up this summer, and it’s not just any Independence Day — it’s the 250th anniversary of the country.

I’m a patriotic American. I love July 4 observances, and it’s fun to make a big deal of the 250th. But having all the festivities and pageantry led by Trump stinks. And while of course I personally would be happier with a Kamala Harris semiquincentennial, she would be embroiled in her own set of contentious policy arguments and a whole different set of people would be annoyed by that.

Anti-monarchism is as American as apple pie and there’s a reason that, in the context of American political culture, “No Kings” was a good slogan for making a point about the lawless and capricious and arbitrary way that Trump has wielded power.

But many other countries addressed the capriciousness of royal power by sharply limiting those powers, while retaining the pomp and circumstance. The solution we hit upon was visionary and world-changing, but in many respects less satisfactory than either constitutional monarchy or the modern European vision of a parliamentary republic with a disempowered president.

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

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SECOND

Monday, February 16, 2026 8:16 PM (P)

Donald Trump and George Washington Have Some Surprising Traits in Common. There’s One Gigantic Difference.

Washington desperately wanted to be a great man, and to be remembered as such.

George Washington Had One Key Presidential Trait, Selflessness. Guess Who’s Missing It?

Washington and Donald Trump share an obsession with legacy. They’ve expressed it … differently.

By Joel Achenbach | Feb 16, 2026

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/donald-trump-george-washin
gton-presidents-day-history.html

We’re coming up on a big national anniversary, the (defiantly unspellable) semiquincentennial. To get in the spirit of things, I’ve been curled up with books about the founders, particularly George Washington, someone I became acquainted with when I wrote a book about him many years ago. But meanwhile, our current president has been honking away in the distance—a man difficult to abide and impossible to ignore.

Despite the glaring differences between Washington and Donald Trump in character, judgment, and historical significance, there are some interesting similarities. Born rich. Aggressive acquirers of real estate. Big-house guys. Thin-skinned, image-conscious. Extremely nationalistic: Trump’s message is Make America Great Again. Washington’s was … Make America.

So why will history judge them as polar opposites? In part because Washington readily and repeatedly gave up power. He did so conspicuously at the end of the War of Independence, then again after eight years as president. He lived in an era in which selflessness was considered one of the core virtues of a great leader, and at crucial moments in our history, he behaved accordingly.

Whereas Trump … well, he’s no George Washington. And he tells us so! He is instinctively royalist and brazenly self-aggrandizing. He repeatedly claims powers he does not legally have. He promiscuously puts his name on everything this side of the moon, and I probably shouldn’t even mention that particular satellite, lest he get ideas.

His decision to appoint himself as chair of the Kennedy Center was outrageous enough, but then he put his name on the place. He also put his name on the United States Institute of Peace, just a few blocks away. His face is all over D.C. now, on huge banners hanging from government buildings. He wants Dulles International Airport named for him, and also Penn Station. His open campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize was plenty dismaying, but then he threw one of his tantrums when he didn’t get laureated and, in an official letter to the leader of Norway, demanded Greenland in compensation. At this point, we know that Trump is going to be Trump, and if anything, he leans into the narcissism, becoming Trumpier by the day. Trump has learned that his most flamboyantly selfish behavior will likely be ignored or forgiven by his base and political allies. There is no one willing to tell him that You Can’t Do This.

Our nation was founded upon the principle that power derives from the people. We don’t like despots and dictators and monarchs or anything smacking of royalty. That was why the founders were very careful when they crafted the Constitution: The president is just one branch of government, is constrained by checks and balances, and can always be given the heave-ho.

Which takes us back to George Washington. Everyone knew he was going to be the first president—he was right there in the room, presiding, when the founders drew up the Constitution. But they were taking a chance, because no one really knew what a president was. Such a thing didn’t exist anywhere in the world. George Washington had to define the role through his actions.

What modern historians know is that selflessness didn’t come effortlessly to Washington. He had to will it, in tension with his natural, human desires. This is a subtlety of Washington that Americans weren’t taught in elementary school, and I don’t think the A.I. bots have quit

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 1:37 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 3:47 AM (P)

‘South Texas will never be red again’: Home builders warn GOP over Trump’s immigration raids

Politico reports:

Home builders are warning President Donald Trump that his aggressive immigration enforcement efforts are hurting their industry. They’re cautioning that Republican candidates could soon be hurt, too.

Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.

Hill Republicans have held separate meetings with White House officials to share their own electoral concerns.

This story is based on eight interviews with home builders, lawmakers and others familiar with the meetings.

“I told lawmakers straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week.

He urged the administration and lawmakers to ease up on enforcement at construction sites, warning that employees are afraid to go to work.

The construction industry is one of the latest and clearest examples of how the president’s mass deportation agenda continues to clash with his economic goals of bringing down prices and political aims of keeping control of Congress. Even the president’s allies fear disruptions to labor-heavy industries will undermine the gains with Latino voters Republicans have made in recent years, in large part because of Trump’s economic agenda.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/14/south-texas-will-never-be-red
-again-builders-warn-gop-over-trumps-immigration-raids-00781374

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 4:19 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:37 PM (P)

Trump is proof Founding Fathers were 'tragically wrong' about demagogues: conservative

Matthew Rozsa | February 16, 2026 | 05:32PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/trump-founding-fathers-demagogues/

Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote on her Substack on Monday that the Founding Fathers were “laughably, tragically wrong” in trusting voters to not fall for a demagogue. Because President Donald Trump was reelected despite his first term and the January 6th insurrection, Rubin argued modern Americans will need to add legal reforms to rectify their errors.

"'Right-sizing' the presidency and putting in additional guardrails therefore should be top priorities,” Rubin wrote. “No single solution is going to stop malicious figures from an autocratic putsch, but we can make it much harder for such a figure to do real damage to our democracy."

Arguing existing constitutional safeguards — like the Electoral College, impeachment and the 25th Amendment — are ineffective because of partisanship in Congress, on the Supreme Court and throughout the presidential primaries, Rubin proposed a series of alternative reforms. These include making it a crime “to give or receive a foreign emolument of more than $25 in value (or a domestic emolument of any value),” requiring presidents “to sell or put all business operations and investments in a blind trust before taking office — and, no, letting your sons run your company is not a blind trust,” banning major White House renovations without congressional authorization, banning renaming any federal or quasi-federal organization or structure for a sitting president and banning book/movie/rights deals for any incumbent president or spouse.

“There are many legislative fixes to curtail presidential unilateral power (e.g., war powers, emergency powers, rescission),” Rubin wrote. “But allocating the right for lawmakers or others to bring enforcement actions is essential. Likewise, reviving the Bivens Act to allow civil actions for individuals to recoup damages against any executive branch official could put teeth into presidential restraints.”

Rubin also said that the media and political parties “need to rethink the way we evaluate presidential candidates,” asking foundational questions about democracy and values “(e.g., Do immigrants have rights? Are treaties the law of the land?)” along with specific policy questions.

“We still may not get candid answers, but the responses to those sorts of questions (or hypotheticals about pardons, donors, and financial impropriety) would be a whole lot more revealing than asking about a 24-point plan for legislation that is unlikely to pass,” Rubin wrote. “It is frankly harder to disguise one’s deeply held beliefs (or lack thereof) than to toss out unrealistic political promises.”

Rubin has previously drawn attention to the right-wing revolt against Trump. Speaking with fellow columnist Greg Sargent in January, the two pundits pointed out that Republican officials like Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, New Jersey Republican Jose Arango Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have criticized Trump’s immigration policies.

In September, Rubin also criticized the reports of tantrums emanating from the White House on the ground that “at a moment when Americans who are already financially squeezed face huge cost increases in healthcare, housing and energy, the bratty children at Mar-a-Lago North exist in a world of their own.”

In August, Rubin argued that Trump’s tendency to hire sycophants imperils America’s national security.

"When you have yes-men and yes-women who are completely incompetent in positions of high authority, that leaves us vulnerable,” Rubin said on MSNBC. “You couldn't have done more to destroy our national security infrastructure…. (Trump) is leaving us a sitting duck because he doesn't care about America."

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

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SECOND

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 6:16 PM (P)

Corruption is a germ’s best friend
Paul Krugman
Feb 17, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-the-kakistocracy-became-a-quack
istocracy

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. Infectious diseases have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/turning-our-back-on-clean-energy Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine. They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.

The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”

Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.

It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.

And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:

Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-free boilerplate.

And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.

I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 9:00 PM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 12:14 AM (P)

Americans under 30 swung to the right in 2024, but they’re not getting what they voted for.

By Sarah Longwell | February 16, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/gen-z-trump-red-wave/686006/

I run focus groups with voters every week, and what I’ve heard from this age group is simple: Trump is not doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices and the economy. In the focus groups, young people who voted for Trump have said that they believed him during the campaign when he promised to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Now they say they feel duped and let down.

“?There are things that are very disappointing and very rough right now,” Kim, a Generation Z Trump voter from Virginia, said during a focus group last month.

“Overall, I think the job market is really hard right now,” Allison, from New York, said.

“I think things are pretty chaotic lately, honestly,” said Lizabel, from Florida. “You just see all this stuff on the news, and you see a lot of people are struggling to find jobs. A lot of people are feeling kind of pessimistic about what things are going on.”

For these young people to have placed their faith in a con man like Trump might seem naive. But most members of Generation Z were still children when Trump came down the escalator. They don’t remember a lot of the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s first run for president, or even his first term. They don’t view Trump as sui generis or beyond the pale, because he’s been the dominant force in our politics for as long as they’ve been politically aware.

Now, though, they’re young adults entering the workforce. Many of them have student loans, and they’re at a particularly cost-sensitive point in their lives. They notice when a politician like Trump promises to lower prices, and then doesn’t deliver.

In 2024, Trump overperformed with young voters to a historic degree. Harris beat him by 19 points among 18-to-29-year-olds—which sounds good until you realize that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the same cohort by 30 points. And in 2020, Joe Biden won them by 26 points.

Compared with 2020, in 2024 young voters swung to Trump in every key battleground state except Georgia. That includes a 24-point swing in Michigan, an 18-point swing in Pennsylvania, and a 15-point swing in Wisconsin. About 56 percent of young men voted for Trump in 2024, the same share that voted for Biden in 2020. Trump’s overall youth support jumped 10 points relative to his performance in 2020.

That shift was observable in real time over the course of the campaign, particularly in red-pilled corners of the internet, the right-leaning spaces where young people get more and more of their political news. Trump popped up on bro podcasts with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and Lex Fridman, as well as on shows such as Full Send and All-In. He threw an unhinged Madison Square Garden rally just days before his election, in which one of his supporters called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The red-Solo-cup energy that sustains MAGA was in full effect, and America’s youngest voters—especially young men—were drawn in.

“For our generation right now, it’s a lot more acceptable for a guy to just be outright Republican and love Trump,” Gabrielle, in Florida, said in a recent focus group. “When you went on social media the day after the election, every single guy was able to just put on their story pictures of Trump winning the election, and like excitement, and all this stuff.”

During the Biden years, young people felt burned by the administration’s messaging on the economy. Ethan, from North Carolina, said in a February 2025 focus group that there was a constant stream of “Oh, the economy is getting better” sentiment from the Biden administration. “Meanwhile everyone knows that McDonald’s now costs $20 for a meal,” he said.

Young people like these were receptive when Trump said he would bring down prices and tame inflation, fix America’s broken health-care system, make housing affordabl

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 12:35 AM (P)

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

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

Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 7:02 AM (P)

I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

LYRICS:

[Verse 1]
After that confrontation,
You left me wringing my cold hands.
We shared some information
We might not recover from.
And I watch your convictions
Melt like ice cubes in an ocean...
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent.

[Chorus]
You've got 'em all on your side.
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water."
Will you remember my reply,
When your high horse dies?

[Verse 2]
We'd like to go the distance,
But not a one of us is gonna.
You see nobody's wise enough
To turn this ancient boat around.
These are the muddy waters
I'm swimming in to make a living.
That I might drown in them
Should come as no surprise.

[Chorus]
You want 'em all on your side.
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water".
Will you remember my reply,
When your high horse died?

[Chorus]
You've got 'em all on your side.
That just leaves more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water."

Will you remember my reply?

.... One finger parallel to the sky.

La da da da...

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 3:58 PM (P)

Republican Congressmen and Presidents have not funded the IRS with sufficient money to collect all the taxes owed, but only Trump doesn't even pay his personal taxes, and signs unsustainable tax cuts (The One Big Beautiful Bill of 2025).

$56 trillion national debt leading to a spiraling crisis: Budget watchdog warns the U.S. is walking a crumbling path

By Nick Lichtenberg

February 17, 2026, 12:24 PM ET

https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/national-debt-spiral-fiscal-crisis-unsu
stainable-path-trump-sugar-high-economy/

The United States is rapidly accelerating toward a definitive tipping point in its financial history, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) wrote in response to the latest 10-year outlook from the Congressional Budget Office. The nonpartisan budget watchdog issued a stark assessment: The current trajectory of borrowing, which is running at double the 50-year historical average, is simply mathematically unsustainable. https://www.crfb.org/papers/cbos-february-2026-budget-and-economic-out
look

The CRFB cautioned that without immediate legislative intervention, the federal government faces a future defined by exploding interest costs, insolvent trust funds, and a national debt burden that will shatter post–World War II records within four years.

It amounts to a report card for the Trump administration’s first year back in office—potentially its last truly impactful year of President Donald Trump’s term, if midterm elections swing either or both of the House and Senate to Democrats. The CBO updated its projections to account for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), Trump’s tariff regime, changes in immigration, and other factors. “With debt approaching record levels, interest costs exploding, trust funds approaching insolvency, and deficits expected to remain more than twice as large as the oft-discussed 3% of GDP target,” the CRFB argued, “lawmakers should come together to enact significant deficit reduction.”

The numbers: breaking records and breaking the bank

According to the new CBO projections, the federal debt held by the public is on track to reach a record 120% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2036. In sheer dollar terms, the pile of money owed by the government is projected under the CBO’s baseline scenario to balloon from nearly $31 trillion today to a staggering $56 trillion over the next decade.

The speed of this accumulation is unprecedented in peacetime. The CRFB notes that debt held by the public currently hovers around 100% of GDP, which is already roughly double the 50-year historical average. Under the current baseline, federal debt is set to surpass the all-time record of 106% of GDP—set in the aftermath of World War II—by fiscal year 2030.

The driving force behind this surge is a structural mismatch between what the government spends and what it collects. Spending is projected to grow from 23.1% of GDP in 2025 to 24.4% by 2036. In contrast, revenue is trailing significantly, rising only marginally from 17.2% of GDP to 17.8% over the same period.

Consequently, the U.S. is facing a decade of massive deficits. The CBO projects annual budget deficits will total $24.4 trillion over the coming decade, exceeding $3 trillion annually by 2036. As a share of the economy, these deficits are expected to average 6.1% of GDP—more than twice the 3% target that economists and the CRFB suggest is necessary to place the national debt on a sustainable path.

It could easily get worse, too. If the Supreme Court strikes down much of Trump’s tariff regime, as expected, and if lawmakers make temporary previsions in the OBBBA permanent while reviving the Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, a core Democratic promise, the CRFB estimates debt spiking to 131% of GDP by 2036, rather than 120%. Under these conditions, the deficit would reach $3.8 trillion in 2036, and the risk of a full-blown fiscal crisis would grow exponentially.

The looming de

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SECOND

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 4:07 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Making this short because 6ix understands little, but slavery ended only after the North killed slave-owners. Didn't have to kill too many, but enough to change the survivors' way of thinking and reacting. Americans don't seem to understand that most of the toughest problems, such as whether or not your labor force will be paid or be slaves, can only be solved by murdering your opposition rather than appealing to their humanity, their rationality, and their spirit of compromise. (By the way, 6ix, violence happens frequently on successful construction projects, but doesn't go immediately to murder. Instead, termination of employment, cancellation of contracts, or refusing delivery of goods or calling in the lawyers seems like the End of the World to the bad guys. They don't have to be shot in the back of the head to get the message. Projects that fail fail because the boss won't stop the people who are making it fail.)

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

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SECOND

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 5:19 PM (P)

Billionaires Gone Wild

Understanding the oligarchs’ power grab and the dire threat to American democracy

By Paul Krugman | Feb 18, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/billionaires-gone-wild

A few stories about centibillionaires — men whose net worth exceeds $100 billion — and their role in our society:

· In 2022 Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, purchased Twitter. Since then he has turned the platform into a racist cesspool, overrun by literal Nazis.

· Last year Skydance Media, run by David Ellison — the son of Larry Ellison, the world’s 6th richest man — acquired Paramount, which includes CBS. The new management put Bari Weiss, a conservative pundit with no relevant experience, in charge of CBS News. The network that once featured Edward R. Murrow has been going downhill ever since. On Tuesday night CBS management, responding to an obviously partisan demand from the Trump-appointed head of the FCC, prevented Stephen Colbert from running an interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.

· Paramount is now trying to acquire Warner Brothers, which would give the Ellisons control of CNN.

· Jeff Bezos, the world’s 5th richest man, bought the Washington Post in 2013. He followed a hands-off approach for a decade, but in 2024 he began heavily intervening, preventing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, then requiring that the opinion section focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” He has now gutted the newsroom, leaving the paper that brought down Richard Nixon a shell of its former self.

Furthermore, standard measures of political spending show an explosion of billionaire money seeking to influence American elections. Since the Roberts Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling the percentage of total contributions accounted for by billionaire money has skyrocketed:

Source: Americans for Tax Fairness

For those who need a refresher, Citizens United was a 2010 ruling by a narrow majority on the Supreme Court that effectively removed all restrictions on political spending by wealthy individuals and corporations. Such spending must be undertaken by nominally independent organizations, but in practice so-called Super PACs (political action committees) coordinate closely with candidates and parties. The result of the ruling, which you can see in the chart, was an explosion of political spending by billionaires as well as industry lobbying groups. Citizens United is what enabled both Elon Musk and the crypto industry to play huge roles in the 2024 election.

Some of the rise in billionaire spending can be explained by growth in the number of billionaires — but not much. The number of U.S. billionaires rose 85 percent between 2010 and 2023, from 404 to 748. But billionaires’ share of political contributions rose by 1700 percent.

In short, we are in the midst of an unprecedented power grab by America’s oligarchs. This power grab is arguably the most important fact about contemporary U.S. politics. In many ways MAGA is just a symptom.

What lies behind this power grab? An extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top.

Last month I interviewed Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth inequality (among other things.) Zucman has been producing charts on wealth at the very top — the 0.00001 percent, which currently means 19 people. He shared his latest data with me; it looks like this:

Source: Gabriel Zucman

Wealth in America is now more concentrated in a few hands than it was during the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century. Money has always been a potent source of polit

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 7:15 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Making

Nobody gives a shit, cunt.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 12:16 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody gives a shit, cunt.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump is practically daring Libtards to wake to how evil he is. He doesn't pay income tax, and the Libtards shrug as if it is nothing for the guy ultimately in charge of balancing the budget to sign laws that allow him to cheat even more. The Libtards shrug when Trump's net worth increases by $billions. When Trump rapes children, more talk, nothing but running their mouths about it. When Trump actually killed children with The Rescissions Act of 2025 formally retracted $billions in funding to USAID, more talk and no action from the Libtards. What does Trump have to do before Libtards end him? Does he have to throw babies off the roof of the White House? When babies splatter on concrete next to the White House, maybe that would move the Libtards from talking to doing? But I have my doubts. They will wait until 25 Trumptard Senators agree that Trump is evil. But there aren't more than 7 GOP Senators who would vote to convict Trump, just like the last time he was impeached.

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 19, 2026 2:32 AM (P)

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 8:09 AM (P)

Bad News: Donald Trump’s Most Vile Spokesperson Is Gone

President Donald Trump has praised her tactics, but McLaughlin consistently undermined the administration’s legal arguments, sabotaging lawyers’ efforts to cover up unlawful conduct by boasting about it on social media. Judges then cited these posts to refute the administration’s claims and rule against it. She has done more to kneecap her own agency in court than even Trump. McLaughlin’s X account has, in fact, routinely corroborated plaintiffs’ claims that DHS is violating the Constitution.

McLaughlin’s departure may therefore be bittersweet news to the many lawyers now litigating against DHS. Sure, she vilified immigrants, smeared protesters, and attacked judges. She also told the truth, in ways that were inadvertently beneficial to the targets of her ire. If she is replaced by a more disciplined spokesperson, the courts may have a more difficult time smoking out the real, lawless policies driving Trump’s mass deportation machine. McLaughlin’s comments were reliably abhorrent. But they were, with remarkable frequency, also a smoking gun.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/democrats-donald-trump-tri
cia-mclaughlin-fail.html

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 19, 2026 8:32 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Bad News: Donald Trump’s Most Vile Spokesperson Is Gone

President Donald Trump has praised her tactics, but McLaughlin consistently undermined the administration’s legal arguments, sabotaging lawyers’ efforts to cover up unlawful conduct by boasting about it on social media. Judges then cited these posts to refute the administration’s claims and rule against it. She has done more to kneecap her own agency in court than even Trump. McLaughlin’s X account has, in fact, routinely corroborated plaintiffs’ claims that DHS is violating the Constitution.

McLaughlin’s departure may therefore be bittersweet news to the many lawyers now litigating against DHS. Sure, she vilified immigrants, smeared protesters, and attacked judges. She also told the truth, in ways that were inadvertently beneficial to the targets of her ire. If she is replaced by a more disciplined spokesperson, the courts may have a more difficult time smoking out the real, lawless policies driving Trump’s mass deportation machine. McLaughlin’s comments were reliably abhorrent. But they were, with remarkable frequency, also a smoking gun.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/democrats-donald-trump-tri
cia-mclaughlin-fail.html

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

Complete non-issue.

All illegals will be removed by 2028, including the kids.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 4:28 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Complete non-issue.

All illegals will be removed by 2028, including the kids.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
You are a complete idiot. Did you know that the former South Korean president was found guilty today? If he does not receive the death penalty, the minimum sentence is life in prison. His political allies are facing prison. Korea knows how to keep fascists from taking control. Too bad the USA doesn’t execute Trump and his high-level followers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/south-korea-president-yoon-suk-yeol
-insurrection-verdict-martial-law-rcna259493

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/germany-parade-floats-trump/

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

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 4:32 PM (P)

Trump’s Sons Say Their Open Corruption Is Our Fault

Instead of denying the corruption accusations, Donald Jr. and Eric tried to shift the blame.

By Edith Olmsted / February 18, 2026 / 3:08 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/206737/donald-trump-sons-corruption-crypt
ocurrency

President Donald Trump’s sons are so far past trying to dispel accusations of corruption that they’re actually blaming everyone else for making them so crooked.

Speaking to CNBC Wednesday from a gilded ballroom at their father’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, co-founders of World Liberty Financial, didn’t bother to push back on claims that the rich and powerful had swarmed their family business in order to “curry favor” with the president.

“The great irony here is they didn’t give us much of a choice,” Eric said.

“They created this monster,” Don Jr. interjected.

Skipping past ethics concerns, Eric claimed that the brothers had been forced to turn to decentralized finance after they were “canceled” by every major bank in the world, simply by virtue of wearing their “Make America Great Again” hats.

Members of the Trump family were denied some financial services after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Both Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank reportedly refused to continue working with the Trump Organization, while Capital One and JPMorgan shuttered many of his personal and business accounts.

“They were pulling these accounts from us like we were absolute dogs,” Eric said. So, essentially, their blatant corruption was a kind of revenge on those who’d wronged them.

CNBC also asked the Trump brothers to explain what was likely the most blatant instance of corruption since their father reentered office: the president’s sudden reversal to permit the United Arab Emirates to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips every year, after World Liberty Financial pocketed $2 billion from an investment firm with ties to an Emirati family member.

The duo acted like everything was business as usual.

“(a) My father has nothing to do with, (b) It has nothing to do with AI chips, and (c) We met in the Middle East the first time,” Don Jr. claimed. “There’s not a person in that room, there’s not a banker, there’s not a fund manager that doesn’t go to the Middle East.

“We’ve been dealing with the conflict of interest stuff for years,” he continued. “They tried all this nonsense the first time around, frankly it’s gotten old. They were the ones who put us in the position by creating legislation to try to put us out of business. We just fought back.”

Eric claimed that it was simply the “law of unintended consequences.” When the big banks had canceled them, that forced the Trump family to embrace decentralized finance. As consumers worldwide adopted cryptocurrency, those very executives were forced to come crawling back to the Trump family, he said.

The Trump brothers’ answers conveniently ignored the simple truth that those executives had come calling not only because daddy had been reinstalled in the White House, but because he’d already shown that he’d be more than willing to pull favors for anyone who wrote him a check.

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

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 4:33 PM (P)

Top Trump advisor furious about true cost of tariffs being revealed, vows to punish New York Fed for 'worst paper' ever in history

Trump's economic adviser says authors of tariff study should be "disciplined"

Feb 18, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/18/hassett-trump-tariffs-ny-fed

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said the authors of a New York Fed study that found that Americans pay for tariffs should be disciplined, in an interview with CNBC Wednesday morning.

Why it matters: The findings of the paper run counter to what President Trump has claimed about his tariffs, and the attention the research has received has created a political problem for the White House.

• Trump wrote in the WSJ that the burden of tariffs "has fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S."

Zoom in: That is not what the NY Fed study, out last week, concluded.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is-paying-fo
r-the-2025-u-s-tariffs/

• Using government data, the authors found that U.S. importers of foreign goods paid 90% of the higher tariffs last year.

• They did this by looking at whether exporters lowered the prices of their goods, eating the costs of the tariffs, or if importers were paying more.

Zoom out: "I mean, the paper is an embarrassment," Hassett said on CNBC. "It's, I think, the worst paper I've ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system."

• "The people associated with this paper should presumably be disciplined."

• Hassett argued that prices have gone down, wages are up, and "consumers were made better off by the tariffs."

• The most recent CPI report found that inflation slowed in January, but prices did rise 2.4% from last year.

Reality check: "I think the findings of the paper are consistent with what standard economic analysis would suggest," Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tells Axios.

• "The findings of the paper are also consistent with the empirical estimates of related papers," he says. The problem is its conclusions run counter to the White House narrative.

• "When things of the world happen that President Trump doesn’t like, or when things in the world happen that run counter to his political interest, or to a narrative he's trying to push, he attacks them," Strain says.

Between the lines: It's not clear what Hassett meant by "disciplined."

• The New York Fed is not under the control of the White House, and its economists often pursue research that's independent of the Federal Reserve.

• Like the other regional Fed banks, the New York Fed has its own board of directors that appoints its president, subject to the Fed board of governors' approval.

• And there's a disclaimer on the paper that reads: 'The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the New York Fed or the Federal Reserve System."

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

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 4:36 PM (P)

February 18, 2026

Of all the ways President Trump has pushed the boundaries of executive power, one stands out to lawyers and watchdogs.

The president wants the government he leads to pay him billions of dollars.

Trump has filed multiple claims arguing he's been hurt by Justice Department investigations and the leak of his tax returns years ago. Now it's up to his own political appointees to determine whether to settle with their boss — and for how much taxpayer money.

"There is a glaring conflict of interest with Trump being on both sides of the claim," said Edward Whelan, a former lawyer at the Justice Department and a political conservative who once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. "It is outrageous that he and those answering to him would be deciding how the government responds to these extravagant claims."

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/18/nx-s1-5702503/trump-government-lawsuits
-pay-himself-billions

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

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 6:11 PM (P)

South Korea’s former president jailed for life for leading insurrection

Ex-leader sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour over failed martial law declaration in 2024.

The charges stem from events on the night of 3 December 2024, when prosecutors said Yoon attempted to use military force to paralyse the legislature, arrest political opponents and seize control of the national election commission. Yoon claimed he was rooting out “anti-state forces” and alleged election fraud without providing evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/yoon-suk-yeol-sentenced-
to-life-in-prison-for-leading-insurrection-in-south-korea

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 19, 2026 7:42 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Complete non-issue.

All illegals will be removed by 2028, including the kids.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
You are a complete idiot. Did you know that the former South Korean president was found guilty today? If he does not receive the death penalty, the minimum sentence is life in prison. His political allies are facing prison. Korea knows how to keep fascists from taking control. Too bad the USA doesn’t execute Trump and his high-level followers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/south-korea-president-yoon-suk-yeol
-insurrection-verdict-martial-law-rcna259493

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/germany-parade-floats-trump/

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

Pathetic. Loserspeak. You are a loser.

Archived.

https://archive.ph/XEbwM

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 9:55 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pathetic. Loserspeak. You are a loser.

Archived.

https://archive.ph/XEbwM

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, take a break from smoking and watching porn. Archive this, you goddamn Nazi:

Not just Trump is attracted by Greenland and tariffs. Trump is setting up his own demise much like Hitler’s. Surrounded by Russians, Hitler could either be a prisoner in Russia or kill himself. Which will Trump choose? Because I am doubting that Trump will be able to retire to Florida. Russia seems more likely.

Hitler’s Greenland Obsession

After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security.

By Timothy W. Ryback | February 19, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/hitler-greenland/685984/

Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone “interested him more in his youth” than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and inspired the 1933 adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg, starring the actor and eventual filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Hitler’s personal copy of History of the Expedition, the narrative of the tragic Wegener venture, can be perused in the rare-book collection at the Library of Congress among the 1,200 or so remnant volumes from Hitler’s private library. The 198-page monograph bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle, swastika—like many of the others, but is notable because unlike most, it does not include a handwritten inscription by an author, a close associate, or a distant admirer. This suggests that the volume was a personal acquisition rather than a gift, a fact made all the more interesting by the 1933 publication date, the first year of the Hitler chancellorship, when the Nazi leader’s interest in Greenland transitioned from personal to strategic.

By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimo, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.

?In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry. Whale-oil imports ranged from 165,000 to 220,000 tons annually, representing the country’s single largest foreign-currency expenditure. To replace Norwegian whale oil, it was proposed that “German ships with German fishermen using German equipment” could harvest “the riches of the sea”—or Fischreichtum—“without giving a single penny to foreign countries.” So Hitler mobilized a German whaling fleet that gradually depleted whale populations in the North. By 1938, the Germans also had 31 whale-oil-processing ships in the frozen South, off the coast of Antarctica, along with two processing stations on land supplied by 257 “catcher boats.” Plans wer

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SECOND

Thursday, February 19, 2026 10:08 PM (P)

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on his 66th birthday is the latest development in the years-long controversy over his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump's arrest would prove that the US is on the right track.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/world/timeline-andrew-arrest-jeffrey-ep
stein-intl

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Thursday, February 19, 2026 10:55 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pathetic. Loserspeak. You are a loser.

Archived.

https://archive.ph/XEbwM

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, take a break from smoking and watching porn. Archive this, you goddamn Nazi:

No reason to archive this, cunt.

This is just a bunch of loser speak from a fucking loser that used the word Nazi so much that people wear it as a fucking badge of honor and laugh in the faces of you fucking retards on the alt-Left.

Everybody hates you. Even what's left of your own dead Party.

I can't wait until the mid-terms when you finally realize that you've lost everything.

And it was people just like you that were the core reason for it.

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

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SECOND

Friday, February 20, 2026 2:39 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No reason to archive this, cunt.

This is just a bunch of loser speak from a fucking loser that used the word Nazi so much that people wear it as a fucking badge of honor and laugh in the faces of you fucking retards on the alt-Left.

Everybody hates you. Even what's left of your own dead Party.

I can't wait until the mid-terms when you finally realize that you've lost everything.

And it was people just like you that were the core reason for it.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump Wants Veterans to Lose Benefits As Soon As Their PTSD Symptoms Are Treated. There’s One Problem With That.

The consequences of this shift are not abstract.

By Steve Kennedy

Feb 19, 2026 2:12 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/trump-veterans-affairs-pts
d-benefits-medicine-fail.html

During the troop surge in Iraq, I learned to constantly scan for threats, how to distinguish the sharp crack of a gunshot pointed in my direction from one outgoing toward an enemy, and the myriad ways that explosives can be hidden on a roadside. I learned that hypervigilance can be the difference between life and death. What I didn’t learn was how to turn it off.

Now, I take three psychiatric medications every day, and I go to therapy every week. It’s taken a lot of work over the course of 15 years, but now I’m mostly functional. I raise my kids, go to work, and am part of my community. And I am among the nearly 5 million U.S. veterans who receive service-connected disability compensation, of whom roughly a quarter have a mental health condition such as post-traumatic stress disorder as their primary disability. That compensation is not charity, but compensation for harm incurred in service and a recognition that the government has a debt when the service it demands breaks bodies and minds.

But now, under a new interim rule issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the fact that medication helps me may also be used to reduce my disability compensation. The rule directs the VA to evaluate disabilities based on how veterans function with medication and treatment, rather than the underlying severity of their conditions. Essentially, if the pills work, good job staying alive; now move on without compensation for the inherent disability.
https://www.stripes.com/veterans/2026-02-17/new-va-rule-disability-rat
ings-20780685.html

This issue was actually very recently litigated. Last year, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims decided Ingram v. Collins, a case that reaffirmed a rule first articulated in Jones v. Shinseki. The court was clear: When VA criteria for treatment do not explicitly mention medication-based improvements as a reason to discontinue disability benefits, the VA must discount the effects of medication and evaluate the disability as it would exist without treatment. That was not a radical interpretation but a straightforward application of the law. Treatment can mask symptoms, but it does not erase the harm. In response, the VA’s new rule asserts a blanket policy of considering the condition only as it presents under treatment, basically penalizing veterans like me for doing the work of staying alive.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cavc/23-1798/23-
1798-2025-03-12.html
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cavc/11-2704/11-
2704-2012-10-26.html

The consequences of this shift are not abstract. Peer-reviewed research and VA data show that disability compensation is directly linked to real-life stability for veterans with mental health conditions. A long-term study following veterans who applied for PTSD disability benefits found that those who received benefits experienced meaningful reductions in PTSD symptoms over a decade, compared with veterans who were denied. Those who received compensation were far less likely to experience poverty, with rates around 15 percent, compared to 45 percent among those denied benefits, a

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 20, 2026 2:44 AM (P)

I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

LYRICS:

[Verse 1]
After that confrontation,
You left me wringing my cold hands.
We shared some information
We might not recover from.
And I watch your convictions
Melt like ice cubes in an ocean...
You were so poorly cast as a malcontent.

[Chorus]
You've got 'em all on your side.
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water."
Will you remember my reply,
When your high horse dies?

[Verse 2]
We'd like to go the distance,
But not a one of us is gonna.
You see nobody's wise enough
To turn this ancient boat around.
These are the muddy waters
I'm swimming in to make a living.
That I might drown in them
Should come as no surprise.

[Chorus]
You want 'em all on your side.
That just makes more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water".
Will you remember my reply,
When your high horse died?

[Chorus]
You've got 'em all on your side.
That just leaves more for doubt to slaughter.
"I never knew he thought that",
Heard you say, falling out of the van.
"Don't ask for his opinion.
They ought to drown him in holy water."

Will you remember my reply?

.... One finger parallel to the sky.

La da da da...

Ya done, Second. Ya done.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Friday, February 20, 2026 3:13 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

Ya done, Second. Ya done.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump’s Trade Deficit Lie Gets Exposed Within a Day

By Klaus Marre | Feb 19, 2026

https://whowhatwhy.org/economy/business/trumps-trade-deficit-lie-gets-
exposed-within-a-day/

Apart from his 2020 election loss, there are few things that Donald Trump likes to lie about as much as his tariffs. He lies about who pays for them, the trillions of dollars they supposedly generate, the jobs they are creating, and their effect on the trade deficit.

On Wednesday, for example, the president touted a massive reduction in the trade deficit.

“THE UNITED STATES TRADE DEFICIT HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES,” he wrote in a social media post.

Absolutely nothing in that sentence is true.

First of all, multiple independent experts, including those from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, have concluded that American consumers and businesses are bearing the tariff burden… and we assume those US corporations are not what Trump means by “other businesses.”

Furthermore, foreign countries pay precisely nothing.

Then there is that 78-percent figure, which the president likely got from comparing the largest monthly trade deficit of 2025 to the lowest. But that’s not how this works.

And it didn’t take long for his own government to correct him.

Not even 24 hours after Trump posted his message, the Census Bureau announced that the US trade deficit for goods and services was $901.5 billion in 2025, which was down a mere $2.1 billion from 2024.

That’s not 78 percent, it’s only about 0.2 percent.

In addition, the import of goods, i.e., the products subject to Trump’s tariffs, actually increased to a record of $1.24 trillion. The reduction of the trade deficit is solely the result of foreign countries spending more on services that US companies provide.

What the Census Bureau data did show, however, is that the trade deficit with China and the EU shrank while the imbalance between imports and exports from the rest of the world increased.

Did that hurt China? Not at all.

Last month, Beijing announced that its trade surplus grew to a record of almost $1.2 trillion on the strength of goods China sold to its trading partners other than the US. This is just one indication that the world is finding workarounds to deal with Trump’s tariffs.

As for what the future holds, the president had a prediction for that as well.

“[The trade deficit] WILL GO INTO POSITIVE TERRITORY DURING THIS YEAR, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DECADES,” he wrote.

That seems unlikely. At a clip of a $2.1-billion reduction, the US trade deficit won’t reach positive territory until 2454.

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 20, 2026 6:03 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been posting this one for years... long before I quit drinking even...

And boy... Is it glorious to finally be able to watch it play out in everything, everywhere all at once.

Ya done, Second. Ya done.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump’s Trade Deficit Lie Gets Exposed Within a Day

By Klaus Marre | Feb 19, 2026

https://whowhatwhy.org/economy/business/trumps-trade-deficit-lie-gets-
exposed-within-a-day/

Uh huh...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/who-what-why/

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Friday, February 20, 2026 8:07 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Uh huh...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/who-what-why/

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Ask Google if this is true: “THE UNITED STATES TRADE DEFICIT HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES,” Trump wrote in a social media post.

Google's answer:

Based on 2025 data, that statement is false. The U.S. trade deficit for goods and services in 2025 dropped by only about 0.2% ($2.1 billion), not 78%, according to Census Bureau data released on February 19, 2026. The claim likely used a selective, short-term, or volatile monthly figure rather than the total annual reduction.

Key Details:

• The 78% Figure: This likely refers to a volatile monthly, short-term reduction between a peak in March and a low in October 2025, rather than a sustained annual decrease.

• Actual 2025 Data: The total annual trade deficit only decreased by $2.1 billion (0.2%), a "meager decrease" compared to the high percentage claimed.

• Tariff Impact: While tariffs were intended to reduce the deficit, imports of goods actually increased to a record $1.24 trillion, indicating the trade gap did not shrink as claimed.

• Costs: Research indicates that U.S. businesses and consumers, rather than foreign countries, paid for the bulk of these tariffs.

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

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 20, 2026 10:42 AM (P)

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, February 20, 2026 12:29 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Uh huh...

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/who-what-why/

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Ask Google if this is true: “THE UNITED STATES TRADE DEFICIT HAS BEEN REDUCED BY 78% BECAUSE OF THE TARIFFS BEING CHARGED TO OTHER COMPANIES AND COUNTRIES,” Trump wrote in a social media post.

Google's answer:

Based on 2025 data, that statement is false. The U.S. trade deficit for goods and services in 2025 dropped by only about 0.2% ($2.1 billion), not 78%, according to Census Bureau data released on February 19, 2026. The claim likely used a selective, short-term, or volatile monthly figure rather than the total annual reduction.

Key Details:

• The 78% Figure: This likely refers to a volatile monthly, short-term reduction between a peak in March and a low in October 2025, rather than a sustained annual decrease.

• Actual 2025 Data: The total annual trade deficit only decreased by $2.1 billion (0.2%), a "meager decrease" compared to the high percentage claimed.

• Tariff Impact: While tariffs were intended to reduce the deficit, imports of goods actually increased to a record $1.24 trillion, indicating the trade gap did not shrink as claimed.

• Costs: Research indicates that U.S. businesses and consumers, rather than foreign countries, paid for the bulk of these tariffs.

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

Did you bother looking at the side-bar on the right to see where this information was sourced from, you stupid fuck?

The question was rhetorical and we both already know the answer to that question is no.

So shut your fucking big stupid mouth for once and allow me to enlighten you...

Trump’s Trade Deficit Lie Gets Exposed Within a Day

https://whowhatwhy.org/economy/business/trumps-trade-deficit-lie-gets-
exposed-within-a-day/

Gee... I think we've seen them before. Actually I believe we've seen this very article before, haven't we?

Here are the other two sources for that Google AI slop you chugged down greedily like it was Dick Cheney's cock when he said he supported Kamala Harris...

LEX 18's (Kentucky's NBC Affiliate)

https://www.facebook.com/lex18/posts/trade-deficit-reduction-president
-donald-trump-stated-that-the-us-trade-deficit-/1422356303269256/

They simply posted an image with Trump's quote. They made no comment one way or another about it. It's very likely that Google AI grabbed this source because of one or a plurality of the 580 comments, and very likely citing your bullshit website "whowhatwhy.org" as their source.

And the third...

Trump says US trade deficit reduced by 78% due to tariffs

Foreign trade deficit to ‘go into positive territory’ in 2026 for 1st time ‘in many decades,’ US president says

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-says-us-trade-deficit-reduced-
by-78-due-to-tariffs/3834413

Written by FUCKING Mucahithan Avcioglu from an outfit called https://www.aa.com.tr

What country uses the TR domain? Turkey.

Turkey, who's pissed off about the flat 15% tariff levied against them, despite the fact that they levy tariffs on American goods at percentages ranging anywhere from 15.4% to 145.8% on agricultural goods, and up to 220% on vehicles, as is evidenced here:

https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Turkey.pdf

No... I'm SURE there's no bias and/or incentive for Turkey to help spread lies to you stupid brainfucked white college "educated" America-Hating liberals.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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