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Buying diesel from Russia will not change the price of diesel. It is questionable that Russia can actually deliver the diesel fuel. It is facing domestic shortages itself. Like a typical Trump deal, this could well end in an appeal to American taxpayers to pay for something two or three times which was advertised as a gift for them. But let us imagine that Russian ships actually dock in American ports with diesel fuel. All that this would mean is that Russia broke some prior contracts with other partners in order to make Trump feel grateful. The overall supply of diesel on the world market would not change. The price of diesel will not change. ~Timothy Snyder

As for Trump and Hegseth, their whole schtick is making a fetish of cruelty. Hasan won't be their first public execution. They've murdered hundreds on the high seas, accusing them without evidence of smuggling drugs while in fact preparing the way for a putsch in Venezuela designed get their greedy hands on the oil and gold. Last September, their commanders ordered a despicable double-tap attack on survivors floating in the water and begging to be rescued. Hegseth was too big a coward to let us see the video. Members of Congress said it made them sick to their stomachs. They weren't soft on drugs or Venezuela’s tinhorn dictator. They just understood the difference between right and wrong. They knew the American people wouldn't keeping putting up with cruelty for cruelty’s sake. They know a civilized government doesn't murder the helpless or shoot people for show. Hegseth and Trump operate differently. They think that little of us. ~John H. Taylor  

In her book “March of Folly,” Barbara defined three criteria to distinguish merely mistaken policy from folly: "To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. … Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. … third … the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader." The current US war against Iran meets all three criteria. Now we need to implement the first law of holes: when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. ~Timothy Snyder  

One of the conspiracy theories about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is that the pandemic started from a lab that was engineering a gain-of-function coronavirus. None of the data on the virus genome sequence supports this theory, but lack of evidence rarely extinguishes conspiracy mongering. I haven’t thought seriously about gain-of-function research in a while, but I was just watching a podcast that made me realize that I’ve known about this field for decades. A virologist at Saint Louis University School of Medicine (now deceased) had engineered a human adenovirus that targeted and killed cancer cells. He patented this gain-of-function virus but he was never able to get a company to produce enough to do a clinical trial using his virus. Oncolytic gain-of-function viruses remain subjects of active research world-wide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_adenovirus

“On October 6, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published an article to its Liberty Street Economics blog that included a chart showing that President Donald Trump’s tariffs directly led to a higher inflation rate and that without those tariffs, consumer goods prices would have declined. Through October 7, most major news organizations had failed even to mention this research yet.”   https://www.mediamatters.org/tariffs-trade/new-york-fed-research-found-if-not-trumps-tariffs-goods-prices-would-have-declined