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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Sunday, February 8, 2026 06:10
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PAGE 85 of 85

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 6:46 PM

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

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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 caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.

The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.

Trump is now calling for “nationalizing” the midterms, meaning to put voting and the counting of votes under his administration’s control. He can’t do that, but his demand is a clear sign that he will not accept the public’s verdict in November.

So it’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me an alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-democracy-will-not-die-in

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

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 7:04 AM

SECOND

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

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 Court rules against Trump, the government can avoid paying back the money it has collected to companies like Costco, which has sued for a refund. If the Court rules that the tariffs weren’t legal, can the administration say, “No backsies” and refuse to refund money it collected illegally?

Right-wing justices don’t want to humiliate Trump, and they’re surely afraid of what will happen if they do. So they’re damned if they do the right thing, damned if they don’t.

When I’ve made this point in the past, some readers have asked why Supreme Court justices would be afraid of crossing Trump. After all, he can’t fire them, can he?

But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.

Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.

To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.

And more than social estrangement might be at stake. Violent threats against judges and other public officials, especially those denounced by Trump and other MAGA figures, have soared. Are you sure that a judge perceived as having betrayed Trump — and his or her family — would be safe? More to the point, are judges themselves sure?

So the right-wing majority on the Court is surely afraid to rule on tariffs — afraid to rule for Trump, because that would destroy what’s left of their credibility, afraid to rule against, because that would anger both the MAGA elite and the MAGA base.

So they’re procrastinating, even though the longer the tariffs stay in place, the more Trump is emboldened to tweet out bizarre, destructive and illegal policies and the more economic damage is done by uncertainty.

Their paralysis is understandable. But it’s also utterly shameful.

Source: HBS Pricing Lab https://www.pricinglab.org/tariff-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm
_medium=email

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

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 3:03 PM

SECOND

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

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

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 4:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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Friday, February 6, 2026 7:10 AM

SECOND

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

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 gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.

And the public is not on the side of the thugs.

Many commentators have, correctly, drawn parallels between current events and the way violence against protestors led to growing support for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. But that was a gradual process. Only a third of Americans approved of Martin Luther King in 1966, the last available polling before he was assassinated.

By contrast, the Trump/Miller assault on Minnesota has produced a huge, rapid backlash. Here, for example, is the latest Marist Poll:

No doubt Trump would claim that the polls are fake. But harsh criticism of ICE and its actions is cropping up in many usually nonpolitical spaces, from hobbyist forums to, yes, professional wrestling matches.

Most Americans are decent people. They intensely dislike seeing brutal repression in their communities, even if most of the targets of this brutality have brown skins.

And Democrats should, even as a matter of cynical politics — although I hope it’s more than that — honor this decency by standing against the Trump administration’s brutal lawlessness. Of course they should continue to talk about the economy. But Trump’s immigration policies should no longer be viewed as a distraction from kitchen table issues. They have themselves become a major driver of opposition to his regime.

Many pundits have made this point — G. Elliott Morris and Greg Sargent have been especially clear about it. I would add an additional reason Democrats should go all out in opposing Trump’s deportation policies: They are an issue that won’t go away, while some of the economic issues might.

Here’s what I mean: Trump is not a consistent economic ideologue. He may instinctively side with oligarchs against workers, but he’s sometimes willing to coopt progressive ideas — as he did in calling for a cap on credit card interest rates. I don’t think he can turn around negative perceptions of the economy, but he will surely try.

But hatred of and brutality toward people of color are fundamental to Trump’s identity. He and his minions have responded to revulsion against their ethnic cleansing efforts by denying the reality of that revulsion, claiming that all the protesters and resisters are paid activists, and by doubling down on the brutality. I don’t think MAGA will change course; I don’t think it can change course.

So Trump’s war on immigrants is turning into a war against the decency of the American people. And it would be stupid as well as immoral to refuse to choose sides.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 3:49 PM

SECOND

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

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 5:27 PM

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026 5:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:53 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:56 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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.

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

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:04 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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

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

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

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

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

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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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

-----------

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 10:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

-----------

"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 Laffy Taffy wrapper. And when they try to be edgy now, all it really does is make me wince and cringe a little.

I was never a major fan, but that show could be funny, especially back around the days of peak covid. But I don't find it all that funny anymore. And if a dude in his mid-40's doesn't find it funny anymore, I'm pretty sure the target demo who doesn't even know who Ed McMahon was didn't understand at all what was happening the other night when it appeared that one of the semi-regulars took it upon himself to start doing his best Ed McMahon to try to get the audience more involved when the jokes weren't landing weren't all that impressed either. And this comes after a few nights I've had it on in the background and it just appears that the show isn't anywhere near as good as it was just a year ago. Now the jokes need to be forced. They're running out of good material that living under an ever-increasingly oppressive Democrat distopia for the better part of two decades provided them, without anybody really having to work for any of it outside of just being one of the few brave enough to speak your mind. When the joke stops being on you, you've got to go look for the joke. Lazy gay jokes about co workers are only going to take you so far until you come off like boomers trying to do their best Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations.

Don't get me wrong. I love that we're living in the world where all that is even possible again because it means that we're focusing on real issues instead of everybody's heads floating in the clouds or planted firmly up their asses. But if I want to be around dick and fart jokes, I'll go see what my friends are up to and if they want to shoot pool. I don't need to watch 5 people I'll never meet deliver that.

But it's so great that we're all now speaking our minds again. Welcome home.

But... we're all speaking our minds to the point where I'm left here, feet planted firmly in my cement shoes watching quite a few people pass me and keep walking to the Right and I'm just waiting for the whole fuckin' thing to start tumbling out of control the other way one day and even though I know better I'm just hoping this is the time that somebody is smart enough to apply the breaks when necessary and try to keep things centered and sane. It's either that, or we're all destined one day, maybe many decades from now, to go right back to where we were headed up until the election of 2024, and it will be even worse next time. And they'll be given a LOT more power that the other side accumulated for themselves, only to give it all away again...

It's loosely related to why I don't want Vance as our VP.

It's not that I don't like him. I do not trust him. I believe he has ulterior motives of his own that we would not be aware of until after he were elected, or possibly never know at all. I believe he's an extremely gifted person. I believe he's an excellent weapon when wielded by the right hands. But I do not want to see him running our country one day.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, February 8, 2026 5:54 AM

SECOND

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

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 the past decade, he’s been clinging to MAGA out of desperation to maintain some semblance of cultural relevance. And TPUSA, a nominally Christian organization, is happy to embrace a man who celebrates statutory rape because he’s a vocally pro-Trump artist and there just aren’t that many of those right now. TPUSA needs Kid Rock as much as, if not more than, he needs them. (Who was their backup option — Lee Greenwood?)

This is a familiar, lowly position for the right, which has spent most of the last half-century whining about how American popular culture is mean to conservatives. But what is surprising is that, a year ago, it seemed like that was finally changing. The right had made real progress, from podcasters (and comics) like Joe Rogan and Theo Von to comics (and podcasters) like Matt Rife and Tony Hinchcliffe, to the aforementioned athletes doing the Trump dance last fall and winter. Rogan recently called ICE the “gestapo,” and you don’t see the Trump dance very often anymore. Amon-Ra St. Brown, the Detroit Lions star receiver, apologized after doing it last fall during a game that Trump attended. Other than that, the two most recent examples of the Trump dance I’ve encountered both came from South American leaders: Javier Milei, Argentina’s extremely weird president, did it at a White House event last November. And Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did it in January to mock the president, who responded by sending Delta Force to kidnap him days later.

Instead, what you’re seeing is a fierce backlash to Trump everywhere. There are anti-ICE protests at the Winter Olympics in Milan (agents have been sent there to protect U.S. officials). Athletes and sports teams in Minnesota decried ICE’s presence in their state last month. Bad Bunny criticized ICE last week at the Grammys, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — who no one has ever called “woke” with a straight face — defended him for it. Even fans of All Elite Wrestling — admittedly a somewhat woker pro wrestling league than the WWE — chanted “Fuck ICE” at a recent match in Las Vegas. Trump is widely loathed. Supporting him, even by doing a silly dance, is reputationally suicidal.

The biggest story of the last year is that Trump has, in a very short amount of time, squandered most of his political capital by running a belligerent, unlawful, and fascist regime. But the second biggest is that the right has squandered all of the cultural capital his election brought them. A year ago, it seemed like the right was on the verge of total dominance throughout American society. Now they’re back to pretending to like Kid Rock, while everyone in the country gets to enjoy the real Super Bowl halftime show.

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

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Sunday, February 8, 2026 6:10 AM

SECOND

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

<< 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. (Amazon Web Services depends on billions of dollars in contracts with the NSA, the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon.) It was recently revealed that an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates invested $500 million in Trump’s crypto company and pocketed a 49 percent stake in the firm. This is just one sleazy deal of many within Trump’s wonderful world of graft and grift. (To get a fuller picture of Trump’s supersize swamp, check out this graphic.) Out in the open, Trump has turned the presidency into a cash-generating business for him, his family, and his cronies, creating a mess of conflicts of interest that previously would never have been tolerated. They know we know.

And back to the lies—just the recent ones. Acquiring Greenland is a “national emergency.” The economic numbers are “spectacular” and “inflation has stopped.” Vladimir Putin wants a peace deal. Housing costs “are way down.” ICE is mainly rounding up criminals. Trump has ended eight wars. The 2020 election was “rigged.” The January 6 rioters were “patriotic” Americans entrapped by the FBI. Renée Good was a domestic terrorist. Alex Pretti was an “assassin.” All bullshit. They know we know.

In fact, the Trump mob, so used to skating by, figured it could say whatever it wanted about Good and Pretti to vilify them and justify their murders by out-of-control federal agents. Yet, finally, there was a burst of blowback, with popular opposition to the smearing of American citizens killed by Trump’s secret police force.

The revulsion triggered by the efforts to demonize Pretti and Good showed that Trump’s factotums—Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance—could not pull off over-the-top, Trump-style lying as well as the grandmaster, but it has not caused Trump and his crew to ratchet back on the prevaricating. And they’re sticking with the audacity of awfulness. The racism, abuses of power, corruption, and lies are not ebbing. Trump has learned the lesson that while one outrage may stand out and cause political trouble, a flood of outrages can be numbing.

Excess has always been the key to Trump’s success, and that includes excessive wrongdoing, from the petty (placing his name on the Kennedy Center) to the grand (pocketing billions in shady deals). The question is whether his tsunami of transgressions will continue to spur shrugs among many Americans or come to trigger more widespread disgust. Trump and his band of racists, profiteers, scoundrels, and flunkies seem high on their shamelessness. They defiantly flaunt their brazenness. They revel in their exploitation of power and their embrace of violence, dishonesty, intimidation, and brutality. Look what we can get away with. This has always been a favorite fix for Trump: conning the suckers.

In despotic and corrupt societies, rulers and their favored elites rely upon popular acquiescence and apathy—people becoming accustomed to all the lies and corruption. Trump and his stooges are counting on the same occurring in the United States so they can turn this nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy. They know that’s the plan. Do we?

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

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