“The richest fuckin’ people in the richest country in the world – you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can’t? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too.”

– Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

Is Trump losing his touch or his mind? It’s getting harder and harder to tell. The past few weeks have seen Trump commit one uncharacteristic blunder and stumble after another, increasingly on issues that irritate his once unirritable base.

Perhaps Trump’s ego is now so overinflated that he feels like he can turn on the people who put him here. He never really liked them anyway. When did he ever worry about the price of gas? It’s been decades since he even pumped his own.

His personal late-night handmaiden, Natalie Harp, keeps most of the bad political news, especially from his erstwhile allies, from Trump’s eyes and instead keeps his ravenous ego pumped full with adulatory memes and hagiographic fanfictions that depict him as the savior of white America and protestant Christianity.

But the memes showing Trump as a superhero don’t do him any favors. They mainly serve to accentuate how frail he’s become in person. He slouches in his chair. He walks awkwardly on swollen ankles and feet. He nods off, yawns and fidgets on camera. He is peevish and snaps at the least provocation, especially when he is provoked by a woman he suspects knows more about him than he knows about himself. His speech is halting and disjointed. His voice is raw; the words come out cracked. The sentences, when there are sentences, often trail off into prolonged, often agonizing, pauses, before restarting in a different gear and direction.

More and more, he gets lost in his own self-infatuated fantasies, as he did before a group of NYC police and firefighters during the 9/11 commemorations last week, when he told them:

I want to just thank my people. I took a lot —I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw.

Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.

And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here!” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.

None of this is true. It’s a case of stolen valor by the man who bragged that once the towers fell down, his building would be the tallest in New York City. Even this was a lie. Trump World Tower, which opened in 2001, is 861 feet tall. The Citicorp Tower, 40 Wall Street (which Trump once owned), 70 Pine Street (Cities Service Building), the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were all taller.

Lower Manhattan was closed to all but rescue workers for weeks and Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief on September 11, who was in charge of letting crews into the blast zone, said Trump was never there.

Let’s recall that Trump also claimed he watched Muslims cheering the collapse of the towers in New Jersey. It didn’t happen. As sports journalist Rick Reilly noted: “I know this is BS because I was with him in his Trump Tower apartment once. I was looking through his telescope. He said, ‘I watched the twin towers fall through that …  It’s solid  gold.'”

That sounds more like our guy.

Trump no longer projects power. Only the gilded trappings are left. But the low-rent Versailles decor he has cocooned himself inside only makes him look like an aging potentate well past his prime. He has surrounded himself with sycophants, none of whom have the political skills to save him from the perilous pit he has dug for himself and the country at large.

Trump’s instinctive response to any gaffe or screw-up on his part has been to double down, to magnify the falsehood, to repeat and repeat it so many times until the howler becomes an article of faith among his congregation.

But this cynical maneuver only works when the missteps don’t hit the base at home. He can lie all he wants about topics like Obama’s birth certificate, the stolen 2020 elections or the anarchist assault on the Reflecting Pool. But he can’t get away with fibbing about the price of gas, the cost of a dozen eggs or rising electric bills. People bring home the receipts that prove he’s lying.

It’s odd to see Trump flail on populist issues he once would have owned, like data centers, whose opponents Trump denounced with HRC-like condescension as dumb and poor. Didn’t Natalie show him the polling that showed more than 70% of the American public, across party lines, loathe these monstrous facilities?

Dismissing concerns that data centers will drain local water supplies and drive up electric bills, Trump said: “I would want as many data centers as I can, because they throw off tremendous amounts of money. They don’t take any energy, because, you know, the new ones that I approve, they all create their own energy.”  Trump would have been fired from his own TV show for trotting out this feeble sales pitch.

Same thing with AI. Suddenly, the man who claims he’s never used a computer is giving a full-frontal embrace to Big Tech’s most menacing creation. Trump has gone so far as to discount the warnings issued by AI’s own Dr. Frankensteins about the very distinct possibility that their digital creatures may slip out of their programmers’ control by first eliminating human jobs and then eliminating humans altogether.

When asked whether there are any guardrails to prevent AI programs from turning on humanity, Trump said there was nothing to worry about as long as there is a strongman like him running the US, “It’s going to be fine. We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom! ‘I really don’t like that robot.’”

Mostly, though, Trump seems bored, out of it half the time, barely engaged the rest. The old fire has burned down to a few smoldering embers. He’s distracted by shiny things. His Oval Office bric-a-brac. His ballroom. His arch. His name on the Kennedy Center. Natalie, oh, Natalie.

He’s caught in a war that he can’t win and can’t bring himself to get out of. It’s the mentality of someone he never went to war but has played the role of a bully his entire life. Nothing infuriates Trump more than being called a loser. But he is one.

He used to shove allied leaders out of his way at NATO and G7 meetings. Now the Prime Minister of Canada, a country that Trump vowed to make the 51st State, stares him down in a senseless trade war that Trump started for no rational reason. Now Canada, once the US’s leading trade partner, is looking to join the EU and most of the rest of the world is looking to China as a stable and reliable economic partner.

The losses are coming on every front. Trump was betrayed by his own Supreme Court, his own Congress (on both crypto and war powers) and his own Federal Reserve, all in the span of a week. Anyone keeping an eye on where Melania’s been spending her time? He can’t even count on Rasmussen to rig a poll that shows him with higher approval ratings than his old rival HRC or those communist upstarts from his old town, Mamdani and AOC. And he may not have hit bottom.

Trump’s house of mirrors began to crack when he decided to go to war against Iran with Israel. This was probably the dumbest decision he made since he staked the fortune his father gave him (or at least his credit) on building opulent casinos in Atlantic City and lost big time. Netanyahu stiffed Trump and left him with a bill where the charges (legal, human and financial) mount by the hour. Trump’s getting pummelled by Iran, which counters his triumphal claims of victory with ship-sinking mines, drone strikes and missile attacks on oil tankers, refineries and US forces and bases. Only the most hypnotized talking blondes (male and female) on Fox News believe him anymore.

Meanwhile, as it all falls apart around him, Rubio has gone silent. Kash Patel is an embarrassment, providing unwanted comic relief with every public appearance. His jet-set envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are cutting their own deals. And JD Vance is playing Kamala Harris to his dementia-stricken Biden, unable to assert himself, even when opportunities present themselves. Perhaps that’s because, like Harris, Vance doesn’t have a “true self” to assert. Vance seems like a bearded cypher, capable of regurgitating a few pat platitudes about the superiority of white Christian culture, but in a manner so strident and arrogant that he alienates the people he’s meant to convert.

At this point in his disintegrating administration, there must be all kinds of sinister machinations taking place behind the scenes, as the contenders for Trump’s faltering throne maneuver for the levers of power. But there’s no one left who can command Trump’s fanatical base. The contenders lack his garish charisma. Trump has seen to that. Like some Romanov monarch, he has shed the palace of any potential rivals. Even his own children–Ivana, excepted–he seems to view with disdain and suspicion. There’s a reason he skipped Don Jr.’s latest nuptials, despite the fireworks display and all-night party financed by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev.

Trump is Trump, even in his diminished capacity. There will be no successor. In a sense, there will be nothing to succeed to. The Trump political empire, like his economic empire, is a mirage. There’s nothing inside it, but inventories of MAGA caps and now worthless Trumpcoins. You can’t take the tariffs with you.

After more than a decade of grievance politics, Trump got a lot wealthier than he has ever been. The presidency was by far his most successful business venture. Perhaps his only successful enterprise. But the grievances of his base remain unaddressed,  their lingering economic gripes compounded by the policies he put in place. At some point, the sense of betrayal is going to set in and the blowback will be fierce. Perhaps not against Trump himself, but almost certainly against anyone who tries to claim his MAGA mantle.

There was always only the brand and the brand without the man is empty, a void filled only with debts that will never be paid.

+++

+ A Congressional Budget Office report found that Trump’s Iran war was responsible for more than one-third of the increase in inflation this year, and inflation will likely continue to grow in the first quarter of next year. The CBO blames the war for more than 40% of inflation during the second quarter of 2026 and an estimated half a percentage point of higher inflation during the first quarter of 2027.  Interest rates are likely to rise as a result, making borrowing more costly the report found.”

+ Scott Bessent was warned that the bond market has taken down more governments than “howitzers.” Bill Clinton learned the same lesson when his Treasury Secretary and longtime Goldman Sachs man, Robert Rubin, told him if he wanted to keep Wall Street happy, he’d have to sacrifice most of his promised domestic agenda to pursue deficit reduction, prompting Bill to exclaim: “You mean my whole administration is hostage to the fucking bond market?”

+ New data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute shows a surge in CEO compensation. In the US, CEO’s are paid 325 times the amount of the workers in the companies they run. From 1978–2025, top CEO compensation soared by 1,316% while typical workers’ pay increased only 28%. This widening chasm between management and worker pay is yet another dire consequence of neoliberal economics. In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker.

+ As the Ellisons’ media empire expands, gobbling up all in its way, the company that started it all continues to shrink. Oracle is increasing its planned job cuts by approximately $700 million.

+ 1 in 3 Americans have skipped a meal to save money this year, according to Yahoo Finance.

+ A used car in the $5,000 to $10,000 range spent an average of 25.4 days on a dealer lot, compared with 37.8 days for vehicles costing $20,000 to $25,000 and 44.3 days for those priced at more than $50,000, according to the auto site Edmunds.

+ Trump: “Right after the midterms, gas prices are going to come tumbling down. Tumbling down. I think we’ll get them below $2 a gallon.” The national average price for a gallon of gas today is $4.33. In Oregon, the price is $5.11. Here in greater Portland, the average price is $5.18. The average price in Humboldt County, California, where CounterPunch HQ is located, has topped $6.55 a gallon. The last time gas prices were below $2 a gallon was in 2000, in the opening months of the pandemic when no one was driving to work (or much of anywhere) or buying gas. Before then, the last time gas was below $2 a gallon was in 2016.

+ Costco raised the price of a case of  Kirkland motor oil to $57.99 (it normally sold for $30) began rationing the number of units each purchaser could buy. Walmart is instituting similar measures. Trump can lie about almost everything and get away with it, but when he lies about things that his voters use every day, it makes them face a choice between their bigotry and their pocketbooks…

+ U.S. diesel prices are now 60% higher than they were before the Iran war.

+ This live version of “Mohammed’s Radio, recorded at the Roxy in LA in 1980 during the Iranian hostage “crisis,” seems more pertinent than ever…

Everybody’s desperate, trying to make ends meet
Work all day, still can’t pay the price of gasoline and meat
Alas, their lives are incomplete
Don’t it make you wanna rock and roll all night long
Mohammad’s radio

+ Since 2000, the value of the S&P 500 index has gained nearly 600%. In the same time span, worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.

+ New data collected by the Bank of America shows that for every 1 dollar a customer deposits into a sportsbook or predictions market, they bring back less than 75 cents…

+GOP House Whip Tom Emmer:

Republicans need to talk more about grocery prices that aren’t expensive. Eggs are at pre-pandemic prices. Ah, beef is at, ah, less than $2 a pound for ground beef … I think we have a lot to run on.

Or maybe not…Ground beef prices averaged $7.158 a pound in August, up 0.6% from July, hitting a new all-time high, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ground beef prices were 7.9% above last year’s levels…

Maybe Emmer is talking about the scrap meat, tissue, fat and offal that Trump is importing from Argentina for use in American burgers?

+ Eric Schlosser on Trump’s Mystery Meat:

The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.

+ The 100 wealthiest Americans now hold an estimated $5.5 trillion in net worth, which exceeds the $4.3 trillion combined total held by the entire bottom half of the U.S. population (roughly 66 million households).

+  “TikTok investor Jeff Yass avoided paying $1 billion in taxes while largely escaping public scrutiny. He then poured that money into campaigns to cut taxes and support election deniers,” according to a report by ProPublica

+ Mayor PeteBot on Trump’s promise of a $5,000 payment if Republicans maintain control of Congress after the midterm elections: “He might as well promise us all $100,000 or a free pony. We all know it’s not going to happen. These are the kinds of desperate strategies that somebody will turn to when they know they can’t win based on their actual record.”

+ Elon Musk: “Humanoid robots will be more productive than all humans combined.” The bosses have always hated the workers who’ve made them rich.

+ CNBC: “The number of apartments renting for more than $50,000 a month in Manhattan has more than doubled compared with 2025, while the number renting for more than $100,000 a month is up sevenfold.”

+ After spending his entire career carrying water for billionaires and tech bros, Gavin Newsom now says capitalism is not working in the U.S.:

Capitalism as we know it is not working. Not at $7.25 minimum wage in South Carolina. Trump thinks the entire economy is the stock market. That’s great for 10% of folks who own 93% of the equity. What about the rest of us? Poorer and sicker.

Newsom’s use of “us” made me spit my coffee out in laughter…

+++

+ NOAA: “The average temperature for meteorological summer (June-August) 2026 was the warmest for the contiguous United States in the 132-year record, exceeding the previous records, set in 1936 and 2021, by 0.4 degrees.” Five years from now, people will be longing for the summer of 2026…

+ The Pentagon remains the largest single energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter in the country and one of the largest in the world. According to research by Neta Crawford, from the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 to 2024, the Defense Department emitted 3,983 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, an average of 80 million tons each year.

+ Data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade. Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built–more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

+ A lawsuit filed by Earthjustice charges that Trump’s EPA has fast-tracked two PFAS chemicals used in data centers that are considered “acutely lethal” and can cause “sudden death.” According to the suit, even though EPA admits the chemicals will be released in the air and water surrounding data centers, it doesn’t have any idea how much exposure will kill you.

+ The journal Nature Health reports that in southern Europe, heat-related mass mortality events are 26 times more likely than in a pre-industrial climate.

+ Since 2018, more than 25 percent of emergency room hospital visits for heat-related illness between the months of April and October are attributable to climate change in a new study reported in Climatic Change.

+ According to a new poll from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Center,

public concern about climate change, especially among younger Americans, has risen over the past two years. About half of Americans consider energy policy and climate change policy very or extremely important, and about another third consider each issue somewhat important—in line with views on immigration and foreign policy.

+ Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which provide water for 40 million people, six million cows and 500 golf courses, are at record lows. Refilling them would take 8 consecutive very wet winters, though continued drought is much more likely.

+ Idaho’s Salmon River, once one of America’s great salmon fisheries, is running out of salmon, just as Glacier National Park is running out of glaciers and the Sequoia National Forest is running out of sequoias.

+ The Trump administration is moving to extract the last regulatory teeth from the Endangered Species Act by intentionally misinterpreting the word “killing” to refer only to the intentional killing of listed species and not the deliberate decimation of the habitat a species requires to exist.  In other words, it will still be illegal to shoot a grizzly bear for fun, but you could legally excavate a cyanide-heap leach gold mine in its denning habitat. If this cynical move survives legal scrutiny, it will render the law almost meaningless.

+ This quote is going right up on the fridge…Jem Bendall: “A few famous environmentalists now state publicly that it is too late for stopping catastrophic change, despite telling those of us who said that before to ‘shut up’.”

+ Rivers dump more than 260,000 metric tons of microplastics a year into oceans.  The Yangtze River is the largest plastic polluter, releasing an estimated 43,000 tons of microplastics, even though the Yangtze provides only 2 percent of global freshwater flow into ocean waters.

+ RFK Jr.: “We’re also looking at chemtrails.” Reliable sources in DC say that Agents Scully and Mulder have been transferred to the CDC and are on the case…

+ The government that went to war against a nation that didn’t attack New York turned its back on the victims of 9/11, in whose names they’d waged their wars of choice against Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran. They neglected their treatment. Denied their claims. Forgot about them for years and then silenced them when they spoke up, demanding justice. The government shirked them even as they continued to die, as the cancer rates rose year after year.

By September 2026, nearly 7,000 New Yorkers have died of cancer from breathing contaminated dust and debris, more than twice the number killed in the 9/11 attacks.  The towers themselves were toxic, like so much of the country itself. And they keep dying. But America has moved on, remembering only the dead, and them only once a year.

+++

+ Two teens from Alamo, Texas, both American citizens, were driving to join the Marine Corps when ICE agents targeted them during an operation near Santos Livas Elementary School. ICE boxed in the teens’ car, pulled one out of the vehicle and punched him repeatedly.  The other was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed. One ICE officer reportedly said, “I don’t give a damn… your parents can’t help you now.” Both teens carried proof of citizenship.

At least ICE saved these kids from joining the Marines…

+ Nearly all of the people the Trump administration is deporting to “third party” countries have won court injunctions prohibiting them from being deported to their home countries for fears they might be tortured, persecuted or killed. Many of them enjoyed the right to work in the US under temporary protected status. The deportations to places like Liberia in West Africa are a purely retaliatory measure against people, many of whom have spouses and children living in the US, who have stood up for their legal rights in immigration courts. Nearly all of them lack any kind of criminal record. “I’m concerned. I feel far away, on the other side of the world,” Elvis Rodriguez Venturas, a Honduran native who has a wife and four children living in Texas, told CBS News. Many of the deportees had never even heard of the countries they were deported to. This is a crime against humanity.

+ So is this…Somali immigrants with no criminal record are being detained at Gitmo, apparently on the orders of the Trump White House, solely because they are Somalis, an ethnic group against which Trump has maintained a years-long vendetta. “The worst place ever I’ve been in my life,” Sakariye Abdi Mohamed, a Somali asylum seeker, told journalist Amanda Moore last week.

There’s no other nation, only Somali people in Guantanamo Bay, in the prison. And when we ask them why we are here, they tell us…Washington…ordered them to keep Somali people in Guantanamo Bay.

+ An Inspector General report on the wretched conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration concentration camp in the Everglades, found that the detainees were kept for hours at a time inside small wire cages called “calming areas.” The cages were 52 inches long by 52 inches wide. Even the general population was kept in confined, overcrowded tents, which provided less than 28 square feet per detainee. The minimum standard for prisons in Florida under state law is 75 square feet.

+ Immigration lawyers contend that the Trump administration is illegally redacting or withholding the documents their clients need to prove their legal status in the US.

+ Like, dudes, this doesn’t sound like what the constitutional lawyers might call strictly “legal”…“The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over.”

+ Julie Christensen’s new anti-ICE song…

+ Mark FortwayneMullin says the Democrats support immigration to bring about a communist takeover of the USA: “The only way you can take a republic country like the United States and turn it into a communist country is by causing chaos on purpose and then saying, ‘hey look, government is a mess. You need us, the communist country, to rule you.’ It’s insane.”

+ Vance: “When you start putting American homes into the hands of American citizens rather than illegal immigrants, you see that price start to come down and that’s what we’ve got to keep doing.” Will Usha’s family give up their home to real Americans?

+  A secretive DHS predictive policing unit is reportedly analyzing Americans’ financial activity, sharing their names with police and prompting traffic stops, per 404 Media.

The UN rights chief is demanding “accountability” from the Trump administration after 23 people have died in US immigration custody in 2026.

+++

+ For the third time, the House of Representatives voted (220 to 204) to approve a war powers resolution directing Trump to end the unauthorized U.S. war against Iran. This time, Democrats were joined by seven Republicans, including Reps. Tom Barrett (MI), Warren Davidson (OH, Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Thomas Massie (KY), Nancy Mace (SC), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IO), and Zach Nunn (IO). 

+ The U.S. spent at least $33.4 billion on Operation “Epic Fury” through June 29, including $22.3 billion in expended munitions and $3.7 billion in equipment losses, according to a Pentagon Inspector General report to Congress. That figure includes $22.3 billion in spent munitions and $3.7 billion in equipment losses, but it doesn’t include the cost of replacing hundreds of destroyed or damaged buildings hit by Iranian missiles on US airbases across eight different countries in the region. The report says that dozens of US aircraft were damaged or destroyed in the first four months of the war. Meanwhile, a separate report by the Congressional Budget Office reports that  Trump’s Iran War has cost more than $38 billion to date and that the costs will continue to mount at around $3 billion a month. The CBO analysis said that the Iran War will continue to drive up the inflation rate by at least 0.5 percent into 2027.

+ The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran found “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two airstrikes on February 28 that killed at least 178 Iranian civilians, including women and children. The mission’s report said a U.S. Tomahawk strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including around 120 children. A separate U.S. air strike using a “precision-guided” missile loaded with tungsten pellets hit a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd, killing 22 civilians.

+ Mike Johnson: “The Iranians are not trustworthy negotiating partners. They lie every day. For some of them, it’s part of their religion.”

+ U.S. airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi militants from late 2023 to mid-2025 killed 213 civilians, according to a report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

+ The Houthis have paralyzed Saudi Arabia’s oil export infrastructure, hitting refiners, ships and a key pipeline. It’s one thing to be defeated by Iran and something else entirely to get the shit kicked out of you by the Houthis…(GDP of Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen:$10 billion. GDP of Saudi Arabia: $2.8 trillion. These numbers are, of course, meaningless to most Americans who don’t know a million from a trillion.)

+ According to Reuters, Trump made a deal with Yemen’s Houthis in a secret meeting, promising, in exchange for keeping the Bab el-Mandeb open to shipping–except to Saudi vessels–not to strike seized Houthi-held territory or support Saudi Arabia and Saudi-backed forces in any capacity…With friends like these, I wouldn’t want to be the next American diplomat to walk into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul…

+ Hegseth’s Pentagon is refusing to pay out benefits for the families of soldiers killed in the Iran war because, in Hegseth and Trump’s view, “it isn’t a war.” Imagine the national apoplexy if Obama had done this…This must be why Trump insists on calling his war on Iran, which has killed more than 6,000 Iranians (including more than 250 children), an “excursion, ” though it’s certainly not one that Wordsworth would recognize.

+ In fact, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has been covering up the number of US troops who have been killed in the war/conflict/excursion.

+ JD Vance, supposedly an internal critic of Trump’s Iran war, got grim assessments about the status of the war from high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the CIA, reports which he kept to himself, as he and Trump gave glowing public statements about the successes of the US military operation.

+ Nancy Pelosi on the Iran War: “Our country is at war. We always root for our country under any circumstances. So let’s get this done, Mr. President.” What “we” are you talking about, Nancy? More than 80 percent of your own Party opposes the Iran war. What do you want him to do, nuke Tehran?

+ While Pelosi wants Trump to wipe out Iran, Thomas Massie is going down swinging at the war-mongers by introducing articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, aka, Colonel Vodka…

+ Thomas Massie on the floor of the House, speaking his mind about Israel and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza:

I’ve drawn attention to a war in the Middle East where 75,000 people have been killed, 50,000 of them civilians. Girls, boys, people who just want to live their lives. … I think it’s a genocide. I call it a genocide. And I’ve also called attention to it.

+ Norman Finkelstein: 30% of the dead in the Israeli-run genocide in Gaza are children. In the Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews, it was 25%.

+ Trump is preparing to give Israel another $2.8 billion in US weapons, including some of the largest and most destructive bombs in the Pentagon’s arsenal. The shipments include 40,000 bombs that weigh 2,000 pounds each, including 20,000 BLU-117s and  20,000 MK-84s, whose detonations spew metal shards in every direction for thousands of feet and are capable of slicing through metal and thick concrete.

+ The official death toll in Gaza since October 7, 2023 now stands at 73,821 killed and 174,897 injured. The real numbers are certainly higher, likely much higher. Since the first day of Trump’s “ceasefire” agreement on October 11, 2025, Israel has killed at least 1,386 Palestinians in Gaza and maimed another 4,784.

+ At least 94 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza are in need of safe, sanitary housing. Tens of thousands live in tents, and many thousands more live in damaged buildings. This week at least 21 Palestinians, including 12 children, were killed and 14 others wounded after an apartment building damaged by Israeli attacks collapsed in Gaza City. More than 2,000 residential buildings in Gaza are at risk of collapsing.

+ At least 92 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since October 7, 2023. The latest is a 21-year-old man named Muutaz Al-Atrash, who died in the notorious Ofer prison on Tuesday. He’d been held in “administrative detention” (meaning held without charges) for nearly a year. He had no health issues when he was taken into Israeli custody.

+ Last Saturday, Iman Shalouf was shot in the head by Israeli forces while she sat inside a tent in the al-Malwasi compound outside Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Shalouf, who was found bleeding from her head by her young daughter, was 27-years old and almost 8 months pregnant. She and her baby were pronounced dead at shell-shattered Nasser Hospital. Israeli troops were later seen wearing T-shirts with an image depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs of a gunsight, with text reading: “One Shot, Two Kills.” Genocide as merch opportunity.: “One Shot, Two Kills.” Genocide as merch opportunity.

+ During his opening sets at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium for Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour on September 4 and 5, Macklemore repeatedly chanted “Free Palestine” and performed his anti-genocide song “Hind’s Hall”. This couldn’t have surprised Sheeran or the show’s promoters (Messina Productions). Macklemore has been speaking out about Palestine and performing Hind’s Hall for more than a year now. Nevertheless, Macklemore was immediately dropped from the tour, with Sheeran caving to pressure from billionaire stadium owners like Robert Kraft. Sheeran wimpishly declared, “I don’t take sides,” which is, of course, the most spineless way to take a side; in this case, as in all others I suspect, Sheeran’s silence put him on the side of the bosses and the killers.

+ Sheeran’s own backing band, Beoga, also pulled out of the tour, announcing:

We have made the decision to depart as Ed Sheeran’s band on the remaining US Loop Tour, following the silencing of Macklemore by Zionist lobbies…We are a traditional Irish band who never saw ourselves playing in stadiums of that size, and that opportunity is not lost on us. We have been friends with Ed for over 10 years now and will continue to be. We believe in dialogue as a means of progressing the plight of the Palestinian people.

+ I’ve never understood the whole Ed Sheeran thing. I find his music bland and his lyrics nearly as banal as Bono’s and it turns out that Sheeran himself is just as wimpish as the songs he performs. Now he’s revealed to be a dipshit and a coward who won’t even stand up for the rights of his tour partners.

+ Macklemore’s message after being booted from Ed Sheeran’s US tour for his statements in support of Palestinians not being genocided by Israel…

+ After Macklemore was booted from Sheeran’s Loop Tour, on the orders of Robert Kraft but without Sheeran’s uttering a peep of protest, the remaining opening acts pulled out in solidarity with Macklemore. I don’t know who any of them are (Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham and Finneas), but I’ll make a point to listen to them now!

+ Macklemore said he is donating $1 million from his take of the Loop tour to Palestinian charities for Gaza relief. Ms. Rachel wrote that  she “will match Macklemore’s donation and I invite every wealthy white celebrity to match it and speak out against the genocide in Gaza.”

+ Macklemore should put together his own tour with Kneecap and Bob Vylan.

+ In a rare (for her) deployment of the G-word, AOC unloads on Patriots owner, and music censor, Robert Kraft:

When you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear it’s not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza—

+ Mark Rowan, a Trump appointee to the Board of “Peace,” who is overseeing Gaza’s “redevelopment,” has donated $1.5 million to AIPAC’s super-PAC…

+ Jared Kushner: “Gaza has not worked for a very, very long time. It was basically built by NGOs and terrorists, and it’s been a dystopian place for a long time.” Israel has restricted movement into and out of Gaza since the early 1990s and instituted an almost total blockade of the Strip in 2007.

+ Susan Sarandon on why she still loses film roles over her support for Palestinians:

I’ve still had movies taken away recently because there are ⁠agencies that are telling people not to hire me still. But that’s the power structure. I think (among) people, certainly internationally, I feel welcome. I ​think that the narrative has completely changed in terms of the historical relevance of Palestine and the ties of Zionists with America and our politics. That has been a major revelation for people: how much money the United States gives to Israel; nobody really understood that.

+ Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s new documentary NAZA, an acronym for the number of Palestinian civilians the Israeli military expects will be killed in an airstrike, received a 24.5-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, breaking the 22-minute ovation last year for The Voice of Hind Rijab. The film, which was largely shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers on the strategic methods used in the mass killings of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

+ In the best endorsement of NAZA yet, Israel’s Culture Minister, Miki Zohar, threatened to revoke the citizenship of Szor and Abraham, both of them Oscar winners for their previous documentary No Other Land. Zohar called the film, which he apparently hasn’t seen, “vile” and “treasonous.”

+ HRC loves the Apartheid state but hates its leader, the longest-serving PM in Israel’s history?

I love Israel, and I hate Netanyahu’s government and his policies. I love America, and I hate Trump’s government and policies … if the Israelis want to vote for that again, then I think the United States has to take a very tough position.

I don’t recall HRC taking a “very tough position” against Bibi’s mentor in the mass slaughter of Palestinians, Ariel Sharon. Between the two of them, they’ve led the government of Israel for 23 of the last 30 years…

+ The Resistance arises on many fronts…

+ In the last two weeks, the US military has sunk six large fishing vessels accused of “providing fuel” to fast boats alleged to be carrying drugs from South America. Next, they’ll be droning restaurants that serve suspected drug couriers…

+ It’s official: the U.S. has weapons in space. U.S. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced this week that the U.S. military has deployed weapons into orbit to counter threats from Russia and China. I guess they could also be used against Portland, Minneapolis and certain liberal-leaning polling places in the Battleground States.

+ China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Beijing opposes the weaponization of space and warned the U.S.’s deployments of space-based weapons are destabilizing and could lead to a new arms race, which is music to Lockheed, Boeing and Raytheon’s ears.

+ As if we don’t have enough things to worry about, consider this bracing dispatch from Joseph Cirincione at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists…

A new nuclear policy is taking shape in secret, crafted by a small group of Pentagon officials, that will give President Donald Trump more ways to start a nuclear war. Little is known about the strategic nuclear review now under way in the Trump administration, but officials’ comments suggest that it may bring back one of the most dangerous policies of the Cold War: the proliferation of battlefield nuclear weapons and their early use in a conventional war.

+++

+ The fact that Trump’s VP had ratted him out to his arch-rival is one of the more amusing revelations of the week. But JD and HRC are so bad at what they do, and rightly reviled by the American people for their arrogance and duplicity, that enough inside dirt to fill those Malibu sinkholes wouldn’t have enabled her to have defeated Trump…

+ Trump on his Supreme Court, after they shot down his attempt to restrict mail-in voting:

These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court. [Amy Coney Barrett, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch.] They are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.

+ Does anyone else think this post was written by Stephen M. Miller and handed to Natalie the Human Printer for posting under Trump’s name?

+ The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Americans have spent $100 billion more on fuel during the Iran War, “that averages to more than $500 million a day since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28.” Meanwhile, as crude oil tops $100 a barrel again, Trump continues to execute trades in the energy sector, pocketing millions as his Tweets and missiles manipulate the market…

+ Trump has traded more securities (28,700) than every member of Congress (House: 19,400; Senate: 2,900) combined since he returned to office — even as he seeks to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions.

+ The fracking water-swigging Chris Wright pocketed $16 million as CEO of Liberty Energy in 2025, even though he resigned in February of that year to become Trump’s Secretary of Energy…

+ Trump’s global envoy, Steve Witkoff, saw his income swell by more than $100 million in 2025, lifted by gains from World Liberty Financial, Trump’s crypto firm…

+ Donald Trump has never cared about the Republican Party, except as a vehicle to propel him to power and that he could later count on to turn a blind eye to whatever perfidious and libidinous impulses he might act upon. It took them more than a decade to learn this?

+ Former Senator Joe Manchin endorses Susan Collins for US Senate in Maine:

If Collins were to lose her election, you’re losing the soul of the Senate — basically, a person you can talk to, who wants to do the right thing all of the time… Now, everybody says, ‘Oh, she doesn’t do this, doesn’t speak up.’ Susan is always in there, always in the trenches.

+ The Senate has a “soul?”

+ If Manchin and Collins had had a child, it would be John Fetterman. Wait a minute, maybe they did have a kid together…

+ John Fetterman sent a video message to the Trumpalooza convention in Dallas last week, praising the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania (who actually spent most of his time in a coastal mansion in Westport, Connecticut)…

Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here? Dave McCormick is the kind of Senator that gets the job done.

I don’t know what job McCormick is supposedly getting done, voting to keep the pipeline of weapons and money to Israel gushing, I guess…

+ Think how racist you must be for Texas Republicans to denounce one of their own...

+ With AI chatbots answering queries about how to make biological weapons, the near future is turning out to be more dystopian than even Philip K. Dick imagined….

John Emerson: “Dystopia is also less exciting, less fun, and much trashier than we expected.”

Sen. Rick Scott: “With regard to destroying mankind, these companies need to do the right thing on their own. We’re not going to get smart enough to regulate them. We’re not going to get something done up here.” Rarely has one elected official copped to both their own impotence and cavalier attitude toward the “destruction of mankind” in the span of five seconds…

+ Ben Ehrenreich: “It’s sort of a weird tell to fervently believe that anything smarter than us would want us all dead.”

+ RFK. Jr. on Trump: “I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues and in molecular detail. And most of all a near-reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies… who cared about transparency in government and free speech.”

 

+ He was not just a “staffer.” He was Husted’s political director. And they weren’t just “Nazi soldiers,” but members of the SS. How many ways do they need to tell you who they are?

+ “Pastor” Robert Jeffress: “The Democrat Party are advocates for evil! They are advocates for sin! And we need to call it that way.” He’s not talking about their support for genocide, I assume…

+ JD Vance: “I’m pissed off that Charlie Kirk is dead. Sometimes I find myself talking to God and saying, “Why the Hell did you do this?”

Is it too late for Kirk’s murderer to invoke the “God made me do it” defense? Maybe they can call JD as a witness…

+++

+ Trump went to Dallas and demanded that Republican voters pledge allegiance to him that they will “cheat like hell” in the midterms and in return he’d give them $5000 apiece if the Republicans held the Senate and the House….

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends; I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on November third.

+ Trump’s planned Super PAC spending…

SENATE

Michigan — $18.2M
Ohio — $15.1M
Alaska — $11.3M
New Hampshire — $10.8M
Texas — $10.8M
North Carolina — $6.1M
Georgia — $2.2M
Montana — $1.9M
Iowa — $544k

HOUSE

New York -17 — $8.8M
Florida-25 — $6.8M
New York-17 — $8.8M
Michigan-04 — $5.3M
Maine-02 — $4.6M
Texas-35 — $3.6M
New Jersey-17 — $3.3M
North Carolina-01 — $2.4M
Ohio-10 — $2.2M
Texas-15 — $2.0M
North Carolina-11 — $2.0M
Arizona-01 — $1.8M
Washington-03 — $1.8M
Michigan-10 — $1.6M
Michigan-07 — $1.6M
Florida-14 — $1.5M
Iowa-01 — $1.1M
Pennsylvania-10 — $1.1M
California-22 — $1.0M

+ Here are some recent polling numbers on the midterms. Make of it what you will. Still plenty of time for the Democrats to blow what should be a blowout election…

Generic ballot…

Democrats: 51%
Republicans: 42%

Demographics

White: R+3
Black: D+63
Hispanic: D+23
Gen Z: D+27
Millennial: Tied
Gen X: D+8
Boomer: D+10

+ Both parties, going with losers…

2028 PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES

Dems

Harris: 32%
Newsom: 21%
Buttigieg: 13%
AOC: 9%
Ossoff: 6%
Shapiro: 5%

The Ossoff boomlet was short-lived.

GOP

Vance: 41%
Don Jr.: 22%
Rubio: 17%
DeSantis: 7%
Cruz: 2%
Haley: 2%

Ted Cruz still thinks there are people out there who want him to become president!

+ NYT/Siena Poll: Which party do you trust more to handle…

Healthcare: D+24
Israeli/Palestinian conflict: D+11
The Deficit: D+10
Cost of Living: D+8
The Economy: D+7
Foreign Wars: D+7
Immigration: D+7
Artificial intelligence: R+2

Democrats losing on AI to Republicans is a thing…

+ NYT/Siena poll – Which party does each word describe more?

Extreme

Republican Party — 49%
Democratic Party — 41%

Elitist

Republican Party — 43%
Democratic Party — 33%

Corrupt

Republican Party — 48%
Democratic Party — 34%

By this time next year, if the Democrats win the midterms, these numbers will flip…

+++

+ Republicans rallied around MAGA sexpot Sydney Sweeney and her racy ad for an online gambling site. Who will tell the Moral Majority? I remember when Jerry Falwell freaked over the possibility that Tinky Winky the Teletubby might be a “gay role model.”

+ The New Yorker’s Jennifer Wilson on MAGA’s sex culture:

I interviewed Raquel Debono, the organizer of Make America Hot Again, a mixer series for young conservatives. “Look at Fox News. Everyone’s got Botox, filler, and their tits out,” she told me. “It’s the ‘bimbo-ification of MAGA.” I went lingerie shopping with Brittany Hugoboom, the editor of Evie magazine, the conservative answer to Cosmopolitan. Evie published a sex-themed issue this year, replete with a “blowjob checklist,” and regularly puts out shopping guides for the #MyBodyHisChoice customer, such as “The Valentine’s Lingerie He Hopes You’ll Wear.” I also visited Stagecoach, a country-music festival near Palm Springs that’s known as the conservative Coachella (or simply “Trumpchella”), where the “Euphoria” actress, and registered Republican, Sydney Sweeney, hosted a pop-up for SYRN, her sultry new lingerie line. At the SYRN Saloon, I ordered a Made You Look margarita from the bar, where two tip jars sat, one labelled “Titties,” the other “Ass”—and spied a young man in a T-shirt that read D.I.L.F. (Damn I Love Freedom) in the colors of the American flag. Call it impurity culture.

+ Even though federal law bans US law enforcement or the military from polling places, during a Senate hearing this week, Kash Patel vowed to send FBI agents to the polls during the midterm elections.

Sen. Peter Welch: “I thought you weren’t going to be sending people to the polls.”

Kash Patel, yelling: “When did you hear that? Just another lie.”

Welch: “So you are sending F.B.I. agents to the polls?”

Patel: “We have election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices. Election integrity is of paramount importance. This F.B.I. will not shy away from that effort.”

Welch: “Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November?”

Patel: “I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies.”

+ In the same hearing, Patel weirdly tried to explain why the FBI had dropped its ban on recruiting potential agents who had engaged in bestiality (only perverts want to sign up, apparently. Well, it worked for J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t it?). “We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked,” Patel said to a panel of befuddled senators.

“Either side of what, the bestiality?” asked Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican. “So, you disqualified the animal?”

+ There’s a job waiting for her at the FBI…

+ In leaked audio recordings, Peter Thiel, who is still uncertain whether AI wiping out humanity is a good or bad thing, revealed he told JD Vance to ignore Pope Leo XIV on moral issues, including the development of “ethical” AI. Thiel also suggested to Vance that the American pope, and pontiff of Vance’s own faith, was a tool of the Antichrist.

+ Trump on why he needs to have his name on the Kennedy Center:

For me to go and fix it and subsidize it, I think the Trump Administration should have recognition. If we don’t do that, it’s going to close and get ripped down.

Trump’s about this close to releasing ISIS-style hostage videos of buildings, threatening to destroy them unless his vanity projects get approved.

+ Meanwhile, MAGA pastor Hank Kunneman told his congregation midterms all about the foreskins: “I am not going to let uncircumcised, uncovenanted people try to steal this nation that was dedicated to Jesus Christ.”

+ I was sitting on the back porch, while wearing my “Thoreau Was Right” hoodie, watching the skittish dances of southward-bound warblers on the branches of our apple trees, when Kimberly gave me the news that Annie Dillard had died at 82. First Wendell Berry, now Annie. It’s been a rough month for the neo-Thoreauvians.

+ Annie Dillard’s first husband, Richard Dillard, was a close friend of one of our professors at AU, Henry Taylor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection A Flying Change.  I met Richard a couple of times. He was an English prof at Hollins and an acclaimed poet who, during summer breaks in the 60s, wrote screenplays. His poems were fairly traditional in structure, meter, and rhyme schemes. His screenplays were anything but. Consider Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, a film which takes place on a post-Apocalyptic Mars, its population genocided by atomic blasts, in which neither Dr. Frankenstein nor his monster make an appearance; nobody cares about celebrity astronauts and the women survivors gladly run off with the alien invaders. Dillard and his screenwriting partner, the novelist George Garrett, named some of the more evil characters after the professors who’d denied them tenure. If only more poets had sharpened their pens by writing screenplays like this, perhaps poetry wouldn’t be in the moribund state it now finds itself mired in…

+ Jerry Stahl: “I kept getting high to kill my shame at the fact that I kept getting high.” This is also why I write.

+ No people of color won a major Emmy Award this year. But does anyone even care about the Emmys, other than as a barometer of what titillates white suburban culture?

+ Horny Americans spent $4.82 billion accessing OnlyFans accounts over the past year, totaling 62% of global OnlyFans spending even though US accounts amount to just 31.9% of the pay-to-peep platform’s traffic. That’s about $18 per U.S. adult annually.

+ Dani Gravalli on the persistence of the Cult of Mussolini in Italy:

A couple of days before I arrived in Predappio, I read that Hitler’s birthplace in Austria had been compulsorily purchased and turned into a police station. On the pavement in front of it is a memorial stone from Mauthausen concentration camp: ‘For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again Fascism. Millions of dead serve as a warning.’ Mussolini’s birthplace is now a museum, while the Villa Carpena, his house 15 km away in Forlì, has been turned into a Casa dei Ricordi or ‘House of Memories.’

+ The premiere of 60 Minutes: a Bari Weiss Production yielded the lowest ratings for the show in at least 25 years. The presenters look like the cast of a soap opera, which I guess they are…

What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea
Emily Wilson
(Liveright)

A Right to Housing?
Samuel Stein
(Verso)

The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth
Kyle Harper
(Princeton)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Roots, Rock, Reggae: Live at the Hammersmith Odeon
Bob Marley and the Wailers
(Island)

Chrome
Ty Segall
(Drag City)

Legacy Dances
Stefon Harris and Blackout
(Motéma)

Crash Helmet Christians

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”

– Annie Dillard