Up From Facebook

“A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates tha...

I used to think that the Trump aesthetic mirrored the Jim Bakkers and the Jimmy Swaggarts because they all peaked in the 1980s, which happened to coincide with the glory days of high-glam primetime soaps, which set an unfortunate standard for opulence. But I’ve come to see Trump as a secular televangelist preaching his own version of the prosperity gospel to the same marks susceptible to the same grift that powered the fleeting televangelical fortunes. ~David Kurtz

Personally, I find the time change brouhaha silly. If you live in the northern hemisphere, there’s just less daylight in the winter months. You can play with the clocks, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are 24 hours in the day and fewer of those hours will be sunlit in winter.   If people really want daylight to extend an hour further in the afternoon, here’s a proposal: all year round, just move the clock back an hour at noon and move it forward an hour at midnight. Every day. It makes as much sense as what we presently do and has the added benefit that you (a) don’t have to remember which day to make the change and (b) you don’t have to remember which direction to change in fall vs spring.  Look, this is really just a distraction from the Iran war, gas and oil prices, home mortgage cost increases and the Epstein files. Focus, peeps! https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/3/trump-ramps-up-pressure-on-us-republicans-to-end-us-clock-switching?utm_source=bluesky&u...

Trump bullied the EU into releasing 100 million barrels of oil from its reserves over the next four months. Will that bring down gas prices in the US significantly in time for midterms? The math says no.   “ Europe is putting roughly 820,000 barrels a day on the market. “The world   used   about 104 million barrels a day of petroleum in 2025, though OPEC pegged it at 105 mn b/d. Global production reached 106 million barrels per day, which means there was a slight glut, and those reserves have helped the world get through the 2026 Iran War crisis.   “So, folks, 800,000 barrels a day is very small potatoes. It is roughly the production of minor players such as Argentina or Colombia. It isn’t going to make much difference.” *snip* “ His having arranged for a release of a small amount of European reserves may help him talk up the US markets going into the midterms. It isn’t likely to make a big impact on gasoline and diesel prices, and the provision of a new 800k barrels...

A sucker is born every minute. “If you go back to the middle of the last decade, the big tech platforms were massive, and were entrenching their monopoly power in various segments of the tech economy and the national and global economy generally. The exponential growth of earlier years was giving way to merely arithmetic growth if not stagnation. In a key sign of change, the tech world, which had ignored Washington, D.C. as hidebound, sclerotic and irrelevant to their world, started pouring real sums into the lobbying and influence games like the rest of corporate America. There was a huge, huge hunger for the next thing which would bring back the financial explosion of a decade or more earlier. AI was by no means the first entrance.   “Crypto was a big one and to an extent remains one. But the big one to remember was the “metaverse.” There was a massive craze for the Metaverse which took over Silicon Valley. NFTs, absurd digital things, which people could bid up to insane valuatio...

What you're seeing is not just a silly white man making a silly mistake. Eric Schmitt is a person who has risen to one of the highest seats of power in the land as a legal technician of the politics of bigotry and grievance: as attorney general (2019–2023) and now as senator, he has turned discriminatory, illegal bullshit into lawsuits and federal pressure. This is his most fundamental source of value: a henchman for a white-supremacist regime. ~Joohn Choe