OCTOBER 2, 2026
Roaming Charges: “Lots of Very Good Wars!”
Wounded civilians from the US airstrikes on Enghelab Square, Tehran. Photo: Tasnim News Agency. CC BY 4.0
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
― Catch-22
+ As Trump sends another aircraft carrier and 10,000 testosterone-ready US troops to the Middle East, he told TIME magazine he was thinking of banning the NYT from the White House press pool over their coverage of the Iran War, a war the paper largely supported in theory if not in the way Hegseth practiced it:
I took them [Iran] out. I could have stopped then, but I wanted to go further. I didn’t want them—because I met my timeline. If you look at what I did when we bombed the sites with a b2 bomber. Like we bombed those sites, and I call it nuclear dust—was under 1000s of tons of rubble. I could have stopped there, and I felt it was just inappropriate because—and they were itching to go on with their lives, if not there, someplace else. And so I went further. They’re doing very poorly. Their economy is gone. Their inflation is at 300% or something like that. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Everything’s gone, and they want to make a deal, but I want to make the real deal. But when I said I was going to be there for a short period of time, I was, and then I decided I wanted to go further than that because I didn’t want to have them come back in some different form.
I have The New York Times saying how well they’re doing, and it’s so crazy. Their whole military is gone. Their radar is gone. Their leaders are gone. You know, we went through two levels of leaders, and The New York Times keeps writing about how well they’re doing. They have no money. They have no value of money. They have nothing going on, and just fake news, fake news, and maybe they’ll be next.
CLAY TRAVIS: Do you think there’s a role for you to try to broker peace between baseball owners and players to make sure we don’t have a prolonged work stoppage?
TRUMP: I’d do it if it was appropriate. I’ve settled eight wars. India-Pakistan. Lots of very good wars. I’m working on Russia-Ukraine.
+ “Lots of very good wars!”
+ The Iran War has cost EU nations more than $113 billion in extra fuel costs.
+ Republican senators up for reelection are running away from a war they refused to take a stand against when they had the chance…
+ The real story: “Despite Ms. Hinson’s and Mr. Husted’s calls for an end to the war, they recently voted against resolutions to rein in Mr. Trump’s ability to carry on the conflict.” The rest is play acting and bad play acting at that…
+ Trump’s Ambassador to China David Perdue said that in their recent meeting, Trump asked President Xi if China wanted to buy weapons systems from the US…
+ Too bad Lindsey Graham didn’t live long enough to have a fatal stroke when his brain tried to process this latest example of Trump’s RetailPolitick.
+ Trump on Kim Jong Un and why he takes a more lenient view of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program than Iran’s:
He happens to be a friend of mine, Kim Jong-un. He’s a friend of mine. He likes Trump. Doesn’t like a lot of other people. I’m about the only person in the entire world that he likes. And I like him.
+ The lesson really is that if you’ve got a nuclear weapon, Trump will be your friend. It’s a lesson Iran is learning the hard way, but one they are surely absorbing. Side note: His face paint line is really distinct this morning. Will Natalie touch it up later?
+ On stage made to resemble the one George C. Scott strode upon in Patton,Pete Hegseth ranted at Pentagon leadership in a manner too dipsomaniacal to have been effectively parodied in Dr. Strangelove:
The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top…We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health. Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God. Because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good. Evil is not. And America’s military must understand the difference.
+ Given Hegseth’s attacks on a girls’ school, a soccer club, water plants, bridges and fishing boats, he may need to cloak himself in God’s Full Armor to protect himself from the wrath of the Supreme Deity’s beatnik son, the Prince of Peace…
+ Trump: “The big problem is the refineries in Russia are being blown up. This isn’t really a Middle Eastern problem; this is more of a Russia problem, that Ukraine and Russia are going at it and Ukraine is blowing up diesel refineries in Russia. I spoke to President Zelenskyy, I said, ‘You gotta take it easy on the refineries.'” Anything to avoid the obvious…
+ The people who sent jetliners into the WTC and Pentagon and butchered Khashoggi want nuclear weapons and Trump seems eager to help the Saudis get them, telling TIME he saved their country from being “wiped off the face of the planet”:
I’ve done a lot for Saudi Arabia. I protect Saudi Arabia. If I weren’t president, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be here right now. Neither would Israel. They’d be wiped off the face of the planet. I do a lot for Saudi Arabia. My relationship with them is very good. I like the crown prince. My relationship is very good. But remember, if I weren’t here, there wouldn’t be a Saudi Arabia. There wouldn’t be an Israel. There wouldn’t be various other countries also.
And they would have, at the right time for them, started hitting our cities before we blow them to pieces. What can I say? But I do a lot. I do a lot for everybody. But the Middle East is—it’s been a mess for years and years. Look what I did with the hostages. We got all the hostages, both living and dead. But before the living and dead, I got all of them. That was the 28 left, living and dead. I got them back.
+ At this point in the fraying history of our Republic, who remains gullible enough to take moral advice from the Deporter-in-Chief, who droned American citizens and their kids?
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+ As the rainy season approaches in the Gaza Strip, at least 450 camps for displaced Palestinians have been identified as being at high risk of flooding. These sites provide shelter for an estimated 464,402 people.
+ The school year started in Gaza on September 19, yet more than 200,000 children remain out of school due to funding shortfalls and bombed-out schools.
+ Last week, 147 Palestinians were displaced from their homes by Israelis in the West Bank, three times the weekly average for 2026.
+ Over the weekend, Israeli settlers attacked Bilal Kayed, a 75-year-old Palestinian man, while he was working on his land during the annual olive harvest in Sebastia, a village northwest of Nablus. The settlers beat him with clubs and then poured boiling water on his body. Is there any other country in history, aside from the pre-bellum American South and Apartheid South Africa, where this kind of racist terrorism was a fact of daily life?
+ On Sunday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir uploaded to social media footage of himself inside the cell of Palestinian prisoner Hassan Salama, taunting him with threats to have him executed: “I want to kill you. … I want you executed.” Salama is serving 48 life sentences over his alleged role in a series of Hamas-orchestrated attacks on Israel. Since 1996, Salama has spent a total of more than 14 years in solitary confinement.
+ To rephrase Tacitus, “They made a rubble of Gaza and called it real estate.”
The Tal as-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah was turned to rubble by Israeli airstrikes and bulldozers. Image: Google Earth.
+ Al Jazeera:
“A recent assessment by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) found that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by 9 percent since a “ceasefire” took effect nearly a year ago. Overall, about 82 percent of structures in Gaza, roughly 200,000 buildings, have been damaged, and about two-thirds of those have been destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.”
+ Palestinian journalist Mohammed Abdul Aziz al-Najjar was decapitated in an Israeli airstrike outside of his home near Khan Younis in Gaza. Al-Najjar, a father of three children, was the 263rd Palestinian journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since October 13, 2023.
+ At least 1,439 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, and another 5,052 wounded, since the Trump-brokered “ceasefire” in Gaza went into effect on October 11, 2025. That amounts to more than 18 total casualties and 4.2 deaths a day. In comparison, the US averaged 1.8 deaths per day during the “active” phase of the Iraq War.
+ Trump on Gaza…(You try to decipher what the hell he’s saying here. I gave up.)
TIME: Let’s talk about Israel. You have a Board of Peace that you’ve assembled, had a big ceasefire agreement last year, but Hamas has not disarmed. They haven’t laid down their arms. What are you going to do about that?
Trump: I think I’ll probably sit in the Situation Room and make an appropriate decision. My decisions are correct ones. I mean, look at our country. I was moving. This country is booming during a conflagration. You know, during—some people would say it’s a war, some people would say it’s not really a war. When we get a war this year—you know, nothing’s happened for the last two weeks, right? And somebody drops a bomb, and nothing happens, and they drop a bomb. No, I think that you’ll find out what I’m doing.
+ This week, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued an emergency alert warning that restrictions on movement, illegal settlements and settler violence are making everyday life “untenable” for the civilian Palestinian population in the Occupied West Bank.
+ From M. Gessen’s review of “NAZA” in the New York Times…
More than halfway through the film “NAZA,” Yuval Abraham, who conducted the interviews and co-directed the movie with Rachel Szor, asks one of the subjects if he realized that he was taking part in a genocide. This interviewee has already said that he found the work to be fun, because staying up late with your buddies, working toward a common goal, is fun. Now he agrees calmly, indeed casually, that yes, he has been taking part in a genocide.
The word doesn’t appear in the movie again….
Take the number of official targets and multiply it by the number of bystanders it’s permissible to kill in order to reach the targets, and pretty soon, Abraham says in the film, “you end up with all of Gaza.” Anyone can die, and the death will be “just war.” The difference between the practice depicted in “Checkout,” the comedy, and the unrelenting, unbearable horror described in “NAZA” is scale. Now, it’s industrial. That’s what makes it a genocide. It really is that unequivocal, and perhaps this is why the makers of “NAZA” didn’t need to use the word more than once.
+ Jared Kushner’s investment enterprise, Affinity Partners, is the largest shareholder in an Israeli company called Phoenix Financial, which holds at least $438 million in nine companies with Israeli military contracts, including Israel’s largest arms-maker Elibit Systems, Reshef Technologies, which manufactures fuses for shells, and the drone camera firm, Next Vision. Kushner’s holdings in the firm are worth more than $1 billion.
+ There were more than 2,000 attacks by Israeli settlers, security forces and military against Palestinians (almost all of whom were civilians) in the Occupied West Bank in September alone.
+ A joint investigation of the effects of Israeli checkpoints on Palestinians in the West Bank by the Palestine Reporting Lab, Lighthouse Reports, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), WIRED, and Evident found that:
* Palestinians lose 100 minutes a week waiting at checkpoints. This amounts to 77 hours a year, an increase of 50% since October 7, 2023.
* 94% of the West Bank’s 3.5 million Palestinian residents say a checkpoint or gate separates them from close relatives. A quarter of parents say their children have never met close relatives who live elsewhere in the West Bank.
* Nearly two-thirds say checkpoints have blocked access to medical care.
* 30% say checkpoints affected their ability to start or complete a university education.
+ I spent quite a few hours last week compiling a list of musicians and bands that had taken some kind of public stand against the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I came up with about 200 musicians and posted the list with links to their music in a Gaza Diary column on Wednesday, noting that readers should send me the names of groups or artists that I’d overlooked. Almost immediately, I got an email from my friend Benjamin Lyons, who runs a jazz label in New Orleans, with a list of about 50 groups in N’awlins alone, which remains (prove I’m wrong) the music capital of North America, if not the world. All those groups were intriguing, but perhaps none more so (at least in name) than Labia Menorah, who describe themselves as a “New Orleans-based queer-led Yiddish folk/funk band! Long Live Diaspora! Free Palestine!” Here’s the poster for their Purim gig…
+++
+ Trump told TIME that Americans need to trust his judgment on data centers and AI, because he has the highest IQ, the best genes and Kash Patel running the FBI:
I have the highest of IQs. I have the highest. I’m fine, and I understand that stuff. You know, my uncle was at MIT for 41 years, and you know, I’m a—I believe in genetics, frankly, and I understand. I understand it much more than I think any president would, because I do have an ability on this. I have an ability on those things that were the new frontiers…What I’ve done is I’ve created, for instance, these massive plants have no—We have no electricity in our grid. These massive plants now are allowed to make their own electricity…the guardrail is? The Department of Justice. If they do bad things, I have a DOJ; I have an FBI. That’s your guardrail over here, and I’ve used it twice, and it was very effective.
Trump at a White House press briefing on AI, with tech CEOs. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)
Reporter: Who should be held accountable when the AI agents commit a crime?
Reporter: Tell us why the world should not be concerned about AI and why there shouldn’t be guardrails.
Trump: Because we have people who love our country and the world
Reporter: It requires more than love, though, doesn’t it?
Trump: No… And it’s not ‘AI.’ That’s the other thing. We changed the name officially today to SI. Like sigh. It’s not artificial. We all agree on that. We are going to be renaming it Super Intelligence. We’re changing the name to Super Intelligence. SI. Artificial intelligence is like the news: fake news. I could call them artificial. I think I found a new name. Fake news is one of my great terms. Now I’m going to call them: Artificial news.
He’s going to be renaming all of the animals next, isn’t he?
+ Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman on AI:
Overall, then, the deep unpopularity of AI isn’t hard to explain. Here we have a technology that is enriching a small number of people, but whose creators warn may destroy millions of jobs, if not the world. And even the usual argument for pro-oligarch policies — job creation! — falls flat because hardly any jobs are being created even in the short run.
+ For a contrary view, check out Evgeny Morozov’s piece in Le Monde Diplomatique…
Many on the left have already delivered their verdict: AI means planetwide plagiarism, a climate disaster, a speculative bubble – something to be resisted, paused and socialised. They fail to see that AI is also the biggest opportunity the left has been handed in a century….The threat is obvious: AI offers a frictionless synthetic agency that pacifies every revolutionary impulse with ‘What else can I do for you today?’ But a left that dismisses the attraction of AI as false consciousness writes its own obituary. If oppression can be contested one prompt at a time, why bother with the left at all?
+ An for an ecclesiastical perspective here Pope Leo from the Southside (Go ChiSox!)…
+ One data center complex is larger than Central Park…
+ Over the last three years, AI-related stocks have added $27 trillion in market value. Goldman Sachs estimates companies could spend more than $7.6 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next five years. In the same report, Goldman Sachs analysts warned that S&P 500 market breadth has dropped to its lowest level since the dot-com bubble, with AI stocks hiding the growing weaknesses across the broader market. When the bubble pops, it’s going to take the global economy down with it.
+ META wrote off $355 million in taxes from Mark Zuckerberg’s $4 billion compensation by classifying him as “a researcher.”
+ McDonald’s is now using AI to price your Big Mac.
+ By 2030, Moody’s estimates that data centers will consume 30% of the electricity generated in the US.
+ Mike Johnson: “Opposition to data centers is a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. That’s not a conspiracy theory.” Didn’t Trump spend last week sucking the sock lint from Xi’s toes and offering US weapons?
+ More and more real estate agents in Colorado (and everywhere else, I assume) are being replaced by AI. They’ve got that inhuman touch that brings out the best in the house you’re trying to unload…
+ Bill Gates continues to raise the alarums about AI, perhaps in penance for his squalid association with Jeffrey Epstein, warning that in the wrong hands it could wipe out “a billion” humans: ‘There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
+ Linda McMahon, the World “Wrestling” Federation lady who is running Trump’s Education Department (which she wants to eliminate. Btw, she may also want to eliminate public schools and teachers) says AI is great for kids: “AI is definitely a tool used correctly. I’ve seen it in action. I have visited the Alpha School in Austin, Texas, where they use AI for the first two hours every single morning. The students have their headsets on; they are watching their computers … it is incredibly effective.”
+ RFK: “If someone tells you a vaccine will prevent transmission and protect your grandmother, AI may say it doesn’t do that. So, AI has the capacity to free us from medical tyranny.” Your Chatbot may tell you other things too, just to fuck with you (or kill you)…
+ But even Ron DeSantis gets how the politics of AI has shifted. Florida is calling for a pause in the development of ChatGPT…
+ Unless Trump changed the name of the country yesterday while no one was looking, the signature page for the White House Accord on “Super Intelligence” misspelled the United States…
+++
+ Trump on the economy, sort of…
TIME: You mentioned the tariffs because you care about the American economy. When you campaigned, you promised to lower—
Trump: I care about the American economy more than any human being that’s ever been president, but I also have to put out the fire. I have to put out the fire in the Islamic Republic. They’re telling them—I have to put out the fire because you want to see problems? Let nut jobs have nuclear weapons, you’ll see some real problems. I had no choice. I’d do it again today. I’d do the same thing. I have no choice.
TIME: Can we just ask about the debt? Just because the debt just reached $40 trillion—big psychological threshold. It’s gone up $11 trillion in the last couple of years.
Well, Biden just killed our country.
TIME: It’s gone up $11 trillion in the five years that you’ve been president.
Trump: He had the biggest inflation in history. He allowed 25 million people in that shouldn’t have been here. We’re still getting around—it’s the toughest thing I have to do. If he would have been elected again, or his ilk would have been, or she, anybody, same, we wouldn’t have a country anymore.
+ In the US, the top 0.1% now holds $28 TRILLION, or about 15% of the nation’s total wealth. The average household wealth of these super-tycoons is more than $200 million each. This is whatever you call the stage of capitalism when it goes beyond the obscene…
+ Trump: “We have the best, uhh, I guess you could say poverty. They talk poverty. We have the best poverty numbers ever in the history of our country.”
+ Wall Street Journal on how the increase in fuel prices is driving up the cost of almost everything else in the economy: “It’s costing more and more to get stuff in the hands of American shoppers. There’s virtually no way for businesses to avoid paying more, and they’re passing on the pain to consumers.”
+ With gas prices nearing $5 per gallon nationally, what American consumers are really asking for is cars and trucks that burn more gas per mile…(down to 34.9 miles per gallon from 50 mpg.)
+ China is sending tax collectors after billionaires. What a novel idea!
+ Airfares for Thanksgiving and Christmas are reaching 10-year highs.
+ How to make a killing in the Trump economy: The adult performer Amy Ginger Hart said she makes over $1,000 a day on her OnlyFans page just from clients who are obsessed with her body hair: “For so long I thought shaving was basically required. So I did it for years,” Hart told OK News. “I eventually tried waxing because I had a partner that was really into me being completely hairless and I wanted to be the shit for him. But eventually, I was like, this is not worth it! … It never would have crossed my mind that my body hair would become this popular.”
So, if you want to make good bank, or just save yourself the annoyance of regular depilations, do as the song says, and let it grow…
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+ A disturbing piece in The Atlantic discloses how the Trump administration’s rapid deportation policy separated “tens of thousands of children” from their parents, who were deported before the families could be reunited. Never let these vicious, soulless people ever again tell you they care about “family values”…
+ Yehonatan Ovadia, an Hasidic Jew, who protested against the Israeli flag being raised outside the town hall in Ramapo, New York, is facing deportation by the Trump administration, which claimed the Jewish religious teacher was an anti-semite, for doing so.
+ Under a new measure being pushed by Trump, low-income Green Card holders would lose their Medicaid coverage.
+ The Trump Admin wants Australians traveling to the US to provide five years of social media history, along with personal and work contacts, detailed personal information on family members, and the IP address and metadata for any photos uploaded as part of their application.
+ Let’s recall what Noem did while in office that might result in charges against her: she repeatedly violated federal court orders; she had her agency’s lawyers lie to federal judges; she sent US residents with no criminal records into a concentration camp-like prison in El Salvador, even when ordered not to by a federal judge; she sent ICE and CBP paramilitary units into US cities and smeared the US citizens whom her stormtroopers killed.
+++
Mudslide hits Gyirong_Port near the China-Nepal Border. (Screen capture from video posted to Wikipedia.)
+ At the UN last week, Nepal’s Prime Minister, the former rapper Balendra Shah, noted that while Nepal contributes less than one-tenth of one percent of global greenhouse gases, it was hit by climate-change-driven floods in August that killed more than 1400 people and did more than $5 billion in damage. “We did not create this crisis, yet we are paying a colossal price for it,” Shah warned. “Our glaciers are retreating, our mountain slopes are becoming unstable, our rivers are becoming less predictable, and every major disaster threatens to erase years of development. The tragic consequences of a warming climate tell us that climate change does not recognize borders. Glaciers and floods do not travel with stamps and passports.”
+ Light pollution is steadily erasing the night. Globally, the night sky is becoming 10 percent brighter every year.
+ Isaac Bashevis Singer: “Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark.”
+ The city of Bangkok, currently inundated by floods that killed at least 8 people and left 80,000 people stranded and 580,000 homes “disrupted,” is sinking by several millimeters a year. Bangkok, a city of 8.4 million people, sits at less than 5 feet above sea level.
+ By reversing Jair Bolsonaro’s destructive policies, Lula’s administration has saved at least 20,000 square kilometers (roughly 5 million acres) of Brazilian Amazon since retaking office in 2022, according to a study by Carbon Brief.
+ Ecologists discovered a 1,289-year-old white bark pine in Grand Teton National Park (where Trump wants to build a baseball stadium, at 1.000 higher altitude than Coors Field in Denver), the oldest known specimen of its species. We won’t see the likes of this amazing tree again, as climate change drives Whitebark pines out of Greater Yellowstone…
+ Winter sea-ice records in the Southern Ocean have dropped to their third-lowest level on record. According to Dr Ariaan Purich, an oceanographer at Melbourne’s Monash University: “We are seeing low winter after low winter and that suggests the sea ice is behaving differently because we have warmed our climate. This is not a future problem. It’s a now problem.”
+ China’s National Climate Center announced this week that it expects the strongest El Niño in history: “The sea surface temperature index is projected to peak at 3.2C to 3.5C around November, for the strongest super El Niño event since records of instrument measurements began.” Meanwhile, the Trump White House has yet to mention the monster weather-maker. Maybe they’ll take notice if Trump renames it Little Miss America…
+ A study published in the Journal of Climate estimates that over the past 40 years, average rainfall amounts in arid regions have decreased by nearly 40 millimeters per decade.
+ The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks killed 14 black bearsnear Bozeman, claiming they were “extremely” conditioned to human food. There’s no way the blame should’ve been placed on the bears…A few miles away outside Gardiner, Montana, a radio-collared wolf was shot and killedafter it wandered out of Yellowstone National Park. The wolf, known as 1273M, was seven years old and an elder of his pack. The average lifespan for wolves that reside in Yellowstone is around five years. Outside the park, it drops to two to three years.
+ In July, a horse named Evie escaped the Montana ranch she was confined to and fled into Yellowstone National Park, where she has been running with the bison herd in the Slough Creek Valley. So far, the six-year-old mare has evaded every attempt to capture her. Long may you run, Evie. Don’t let ‘em fence you in!
+ Malcolm Gaskill on the presentation of the animals in the first public zooin Paris: ‘The spirit of modernity would influence zoos for generations. Dialogue between reformed conceptions of society and the zoo energised a mutually sustaining ideology. It was no longer acceptable for the lion to be king of the beasts because, as the director of the Jardin des Plantes commented, “there are no kings in nature.”’
+ New research published in Environmental Health Perspectives has found at least 485 chemicals used in pesticide products on sale in the US that are linked to breast cancer. Breast cancer rates are soaring globally.
+ Each spring, avocado trees change their sex every day. A-type avocado trees begin with flowers in the female phase, which are receptive to pollen, in the morning and morph into the male phase by the afternoon of the next day and start producing pollen. The B-typea avocado trees change sexes in reverse: male in the morning and female the next afternoon. Who will tell Fox News’ Riley Gaines?
+ Linda Mapes, writing in The Seattle Times, on her flight over the Brooks Range and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge: “Over twining rivers and gray-visaged mountains we fly, peak after peak, until suddenly the land lies down, verdant and soft. Water pocks the tundra with lakes and ponds, marshes and rills. Streams rush to the sea, which shimmers blue where it meets the shore but is frosted white in the distance with pack ice.”
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Time: Mr. President, your polls have never been lower.
Trump: They’re fake numbers. I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.
+ From the mouth of Turd Blossom (aka, Karl Rove)…
My party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. We’ve got all these people getting on their little podcasts and so forth, saying: ‘We’re just asking questions about the Jews.’
+ When you’ve lost the corn-pone John Kennedy, who, even as he belatedly distances himself from Trump, can’t resist a xenophobic slur: “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves … I may end up with a sombrero on my head, but I also think we ought to have a rule that no politician can have a building named after him when he’s alive.”
+ America’s youth have turned decisively against Trump and Trumpism…
Trump approval (ages 18-29 only)
Approve: 19%
Disapprove: 76%
***
Net Approval
Feb 2025: (-7)
Oct 2025: (-26)
Sep 2026: (-57)
***
Generic Ballot
DEM: 73%
GOP: 21%
Emerson (A) | 9/21-22 | LV
+ $1.5 million: amount of taxpayer money spent so far by the White House (and another $20 million reprogrammed from Homeland Security funds) on political ads celebrating Trump, which will inevitably increase the popular support for socialism if not Marxist-Leninism, assuming any Americans know what that is.
+ Priorities, priorities…
+ A report in the Wall Street Journal details how Kimberly Guilfolye, Trump’s ambassador to Greece, in a meeting with Greek government officials, including its energy minister, bragged about collapsing the Romanian government after its Prime Minister, Ilie Bolojan, opposed purchasing US gas at above-market prices. She then threatened Greece not to do the same: “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here.” Guilfoyle’s Svengali-like sidekick during her deal-making forays in Europe has been an energy lobbyist named Christos Marafatsos.
+ Jeet Heer: “Kimberley Guilfoyle is too often treated as a shadow of the men in her life — but she’s a formidable villain in her own right.”
+ Trump now holds as much as $1 billion in bonds in more than 1000 different positions, with many of the bonds directly related to issues he’s directed policy on, such as coal mines and hospitals.
+ According to an analysis by the New York Times, one in five federal government lawyers (around 10,000 total) have left their jobs since the start of Trump’s second term. No wonder the Trump administration has lost 70% of its cases at the Federal District Court level.
+ The AG is confused about the document he’s sworn to defend, after he’s asked about the legality of Trump banning CNN reporters from Air Force One…
MARTHA RADDATZ: The president said nothing about national security when he announced this ban, and clearly you’re very interested in what the press says and how they say it
TODD BLANCHE: What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security
RADDATZ: Give us an example
BLANCHE: You cannot be asking me that!
RADDATZ: But the judge decided this was not based on national security
BLANCHE: It is a privilege, not a right, to be in the White House
+ In Reporters Without Borders’ annual World Press Freedom Index, the US has fallen to 64th place out of 180 countries, just a nose ahead of Panama but behind Botswana. Israel ranks 116th, behind Lebanon and just two spots above South Sudan.
+ So the White House Press Corps is back to handing Trump his daily crack pipe, and he responds by blowing his crack smoke in their faces about Canada:
They have been one of the worst countries in the entire world. Lake Ontario is now Lake America. They’re gonna come in and they’re gonna say, ‘Sir, we are sorry.”
In reality, they’re cutting deals with China and the EU…
+ As for Trump’s feelings about the press, here’s how he ended his extensive interview with TIME:
You haven’t asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House? You know how I do; I do that out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like that. It shouldn’t look like—if you would have stood in that balcony and looked at that wall, half the wall was falling. It’s actually dangerous. People are walking under; crap was falling off it all the time. Every time it rained, it was leaking; horrible. Now it’s perfect, and I would say that I should be given credit for fixing the White House because I’m also doing very well with the war. I’m doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven’t asked me a question about Venezuela?”
+ Forgive me for thinking that TIME magazine had gone the way of Sports Illustrated (the other SI, sigh). But their reporters held their ground amid a whirlwind nonsense. But choosing TIME for his big interview shows how deeply what’s left of Trump’s mind is stuck in the early 80s. Who will he summon to the White House next, People or, perhaps more fruitfully, Psychology Today?
+++
+ Just when you think you’ve seen it all, here’s Jesus cleaning the blood off of Trump the God King’s shoes on the bones of the Iranian schoolgirls he killed in Minab…
+ Ever since I heard the story of Abraham and Isaac at the age of 5 from the proselytizing Nazarene family that lived next door to us, I knew that the Judeo-Christian god was. a deity I wanted to stay as far away from as possible. You wouldn’t think a religious cult could get more depraved than demanding that you slit your child’s throat to prove your faith, but it seems I was wrong…
+ Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest.
+ In February, Maricopa County, Arizona’s Attorney said he’d found 60 noncitizens who were on the county’s voter rolls, probably by accident. After investigation, 52 of the 60 alleged non-citizens turned out to be citizens. That left 8 non-citizens on the voter rolls. But there’s no proof those 8 people actually voted. Even if they did vote, that’s 8 out of a total of 2,078,460 people who voted in Maricopa County in the 2024 election or 0.0004% of voters.
+ Assistant AG for Fraud Colin McDonald:
Apparently 35% of people have never even used their Obamacare account for any health services. That is a statistical impossibility and it’s because these are not real people seeking real care. These are fraudsters.
This peevish assertion wouldn’t pass the logic test in any philosophy class I ever took…
+ MAGA gets their kicks by kicking people off of things they need: SNAP, health care, unemployment insurance. Next they’ll be kicking geriatrics out of nursing homes. You might call that evil, but Peter Thiel wouldn’t. Or if he did, he’d mean the kind of evil that was actually good.
+ From the guy who denounced Pope Leo from the Southside as an agent of Communist China and the Antichrist:
If you’re evil. You’re at least competent. If you’re evil, you’re not bad. If you’re evil, maybe you’re even kind of good, because at least you’re getting something done.
+ For Thiel to be attacking the Trump inner circle as “not very smart” is a little weird because although it’s self-evidently true, I find Thiel himself mentally challenged. He can hardly speak a coherent or intelligible sentence. Try reading some of his “thoughts” out loud:
Hillary [Clinton], the establishment person, you know, barely beat Bernie Sanders. And then again, the establishment won in 2020 and ’24. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it in ’28. And and the Democratic Party is the more important party. That is the establishment party in the U.S. The Republican Party is always a little bit the anti-establishment one. So, if the Democratic Socialists take over the Democratic Party, that’s a much bigger deal. And that is like — I don’t know — the end of America…I worry that the establishment Democratic Party has failed as badly as the establishment Republicans. And so, we are going to get this disruption, and there is a risk that the U.S. will shift very far to the left. That’s the real disruption we’re going to get.”
+ Only 31 percent of Americans think that college is “very important,” a new low. This is in contrast to the overwhelming percentage of Americans who think that CTE-inducing college football is “very important.”
+ The Russian revolutionary and anarchist Victor Serge, as the Russian Revolution began to consume its idealists and establish a police state from which no dissent would be tolerated:
Socialism will only prove its superiority to capitalism, not by the construction of tanks, but through the organization of social life, only if it offers man better conditions than capitalism: more material well-being, more justice, more freedom and a higher dignity.
+ In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant gives an unsparing account of the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War (Grant would’ve been fired as a docent at the Smithsonian or any of what Ed Abbey called the “cannonball parks” under Trump):
I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.
Texas was originally a state belonging to the Republic of Mexico. It extended from the Sabine River on the east to the Rio Grande on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south and east to the territory of the United States and New Mexico—another Mexican state at that time—on the north and west. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize.
These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican President. Before long, however, the same people—who with permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so—offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted.
The occupation, separation and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.
Even if the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot. The fact is, annexationists wanted more territory than they could possibly lay any claim to, as part of the new acquisition. Texas, as an independent State, never had exercised jurisdiction over the territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Mexico had never recognized the independence of Texas, and maintained that, even if independent, the State had no claim south of the Nueces. I am aware that a treaty, made by the Texans with Santa Anna while he was under duress, ceded all the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande—, but he was a prisoner of war when the treaty was made, and his life was in jeopardy.
+ Ella Langley might want to rethink “Choosin’ Texas”…
+++
+ When they put Trump’s head on Mt. Rushmore, as you know they’re going to try to do, this is the face they should use: the arrogant head tilt, closed eyes with their swollen pouches, drooping cheeks, scowling mouth, sagging neck…(I’m all for putting him on Mt. Rushmore, by the way, as a reflection of what America has become, and in many respects, has always been.)
+ Speaking of the desecrated Black Hills mountain known as “Rushmore,” I was one of the original “investors” in the Crazy Horse monument. In the early 70s, I sent $10 from mowing lawns and flinging copies of the Indianapolis Star onto people’s lawns to Korczak Ziolkowski and got back a Plaster of Paris model which, 55 years later, is still on my desk.
+ For the record, I don’t support the blasting or carving of any mountain, especially those, like the Black Hills, which are considered sacred landscapes by the people who lived, hunted, gathered and sought spiritual solace amid them. By most reports, Ziolkowski didn’t have the permission of the Lakota to blast his monument to Crazy Horse and mistreated his Native workers. All I can say in defense of my 10-year-old self is that I identified with Crazy Horse and his people and not Custer and the people who sent him on his genocidal mission. I still do.
Greg Gutfeld: Something people aren’t talking about: how overweight the hookers have become. Have you noticed that?
Jesse Watters: I have
Gutfeld: It’s insane.
+ Was Gutfeld ever funny? Do the wheelchair-bound diabetic amputees who seem to be Fox News’ principal audience these days roar with laughter at these louche witticisms?
+ Here’s how Anthony Burgess described DH Lawrence, a person he shared very little with except the compulsion to write:
He is a powerful exemplar of those virtues which all who write for a living, and at the same time try to promote a pleasure in living, like to think inhere in the practice of their craft or art – energy, doggedness, desperate sincerity, delight in the daily struggle to make words behave.
+ “The struggle to make words behave!” They so rarely do, especially when they come bursting off of my keyboard.
+ I wasn’t expecting to read “popping zits” in a New York Times film review...It appears in a review of Primetime about Chris Hanson’s risible entrapment show To Catch a Predator, but it’s also a pretty good description of what it felt like to read Judith Miller’s stories for the paper:
That criticism sounds quaintly old-fashioned, particularly given that every facet of ordinary life — birding, cooking, politicking, policing, popping zits — has been turned into entertainment. Everything is now show biz.
+ RIP Mighty Sparrow…(Sparrow’s real name, Slinger Francisco, was just as great as his stage name.)
Now I am very sorry for the poor little puppy in the Russian Satellite…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
No Land to Stand On: Notes From a Detention
Mahmoud Khalil
(Metropolitan)
The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
(Simon & Schuster)
The Weight of Nightmares: Time and the Politics of Reparations for Slavery
Kenan van de Mieroop-Al Bahrani
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Caged Bird
Ekep Nkwelle
(Mack Ave)
Memory Bomb
Kiefer
(Blue Note)
Live in Arles, 1975
Can
(Mute)
The Blues Is…
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
– Ralph Ellison, Living With Music: Jazz Writings
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