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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

The data center conversation is a proxy for corruption. You know, people see that there is a deep integration between these big billion dollar tech companies and the Trump administration, and they don’t like it, and the proliferation of data centers is a sign to people that the only thing that matters in this administration is money and billionaire corporate power … Yes, sometimes this is about water use and land use, but it’s really a question of corruption and the data centers are an avatar for a corrupt relationship between the technology companies and the Trump administration. That’s why, that’s why the last bill they’re doing is an attempt to change two years of this corruption story. It’s going to laughably not work.   ~Sen. Chris Murphy

I’ll admit up front that I’ve always considered William F. Buckley Jr a pretentious gasbag. I recently finished reading “Buckley: The life and the revolution that changed America” by Sam Tanenhaus. I found little in this long and detailed biography to change my mind. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed this book. And I learned a great deal about the subject. For example, English was Buckley’s third language, after Spanish and French. He spoke Spanish exclusively until age six. For his entire life, he was a devout and unswerving Roman Catholic. He was born into wealth, and while his magazine National Review struggled financially for its first decades, he didn’t take a salary and subsidized the journal by his outside writing and speaking fees. Buckley was a man of appetites: sailing, skiing and writing. Reading, not so much. He very rarely changed his mind. The most notable exception was on civil rights. Late in life he admitted that federal intervention was necessary to secure minority rights...

I've never been a fan of pro sports or college sports. It's pretty obvious that college sports have become a farm system for pro sports, and that college players have been exploited to subsidize a revenue stream (both direct income and alumni philanthropy) for colleges.   "College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million." Now congress wants to regulate college sports. No less a free enterprise champion than Rafael "Ted" Cruz supports big gummint when it comes to making sure the money still flows up and not down.  Why not leave players and universities to the "free market?" If the system is in danger of collapse, perhaps the pro team owners can chip in a few billion. Or maybe colleges and universities can refocus on their education mission. https:...