Up From Facebook

“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

Today’s U.S. military structures itself around assumptions of short, decisive wars. Munitions stockpiles are limited. Preparation for reconstituting a highly skilled professional force is minimal. Maintenance of reserve weapons and equipment is poor. These policies trade long-term staying power for short-term lethality and presuppose that the United States can end a conflict quickly by destroying the opposing military. But if ending a war is a matter of coercive bargaining, in which enemies can almost always keep fighting, then Washington cannot create short wars by fiat. Prudence dictates reconsidering choices that assume the opposite. ~Stephen Biddle, Sam Winter-Levy and Yuri Zhukov

“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...