Up From Facebook

I never cared much for fish growing up in East Tennessee. At home, fish came in brown squares out of the freezer. On family camping trips, we’d have salmon patties made with canned salmon. Once, on a family vacation down east, I raked for clams in the Chesapeake Bay, and my mom steamed them. They were OK, but not special.   My mind began to change when I became a faculty and would be invited to dinner with out-of-town seminar speakers. Restaurants get the best cuts of meat and fish, and for many types of fish, the preparation makes a lot of difference.    Now, I love sushi and sashimi and regularly grill salmon, trout and tuna. Since we’re ensconced in the Ocean State, I’m looking forward to a greater variety.    I’m not a believer in food as medicine. Yes, moderating intake of fats and oils and of sugar is a good idea, but the lettuce in your salad isn’t an antidote for the fats in your salad dressing.    For years, we’ve been told that the omega-3 fa...

The US is a net exporter of total petroleum (crude and refined), but we’re a net importer of crude oil, much of it from Canada. “ The US is by far the largest buyer of Canadian crude, accounting for 90% of Canada's crude exports in 2025, or roughly 126 billion Canadian dollars of a total CA$140 billion. The dependence runs in both directions: Canada supplied roughly 63% of all US crude imports last year.” *snip* “Along the Gulf Coast, refineries built and expanded in the 1980s and 1990s to process heavy crude from Venezuela and Mexico were also well suited to processing Alberta's heavy barrels as Canadian supply expanded. “That refining system has created an unusual mismatch with America's own oil production. “The shale boom has made the US the world's largest crude producer, but much of its production is light, sweet oil. Many US refineries, meanwhile, are configured to process heavier crude profitably. The US, therefore, exports large quantities of domestic light crud...

The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade in which the US is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has secured both for going on a century. Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly:   We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge.   They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge” the underlying basis of the agreement that puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. They really do imagine that US allies are something like colonies or finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis.   ~Josh Marshall

This is what happens when you put someone with the emotional maturity of a middle school boy in charge of the world’s largest economy and the world’s most powerful military. “What is striking about this picture, setting aside all these nitty-gritty details, is how much it mirrors Trump’s Iran debacle, another war not so much of choice but of whim. Both illustrate the difference between theoretical and de facto power. On paper, the U.S. could convincingly defeat Iran militarily. It could invade the country, dismantle its military and government, eliminate the threats to the Strait of Hormuz. But that would require vast sums of blood and treasure, in addition to huge domestic economic pain, something the U.S. simply has no appetite for. That lack of appetite became clear soon after the war started and it’s shaped everything since. There’s zero domestic support for that in the U.S. And the U.S. has no pressing strategic interest to do that, certainly not at the cost it would require. Mean...

For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity. ~Stephen Marche

Chomsky ... wrote that the old motto about 'speaking truth to power' is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless.   ~Christopher Hitchens