All that great wealth generally gives above a moderate fortune is more room for the freaks of caprice, and more privilege for ignorance and vice, a quicker succession of flatteries, and a larger circle of voluptuousness.

— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, July 28, 1750

+ Trump at the UN, sounding like Lex Luthor on ludes: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran? Or do I annihilate them, and do it quickly? Do I drive them into Hell with no chance of survival and no hope?” No wonder he wants to get rid of the International Criminal Court…

+ While US presidents traditionally greet foreign heads of state at the White House, Trump couldn’t wait to meet Xi. He rushed to embrace the Chinese leader at Joint Base Andrews outside DC, where the bemused Xi was welcomed with a red carpet, color guard, military band, and a less-than-stealthy flyover by two B-1 bombers. 

+ With Trump, there’s always a quote and it’s inevitably moronic, hypocritical and self-indicting…

+ This is a really weird photo. A bored Xi is already plotting how to skip out early. Trump wears a deranged grin on his face and, even though it’s only the first days of fall and a pleasant 65F in Maryland, he is bulked up in a winter overcoat and leather gloves. Melania looks grim as ever, while Liyuan is bemused by it all, feeling the power shift into her husband’s naked hands… 

+ Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and his cultish admirers could well be applied to the mysterious allure, only now beginning to fade, of our own bombastic despot:

He treats his defects as virtues…He has the mentality of a dilettante and [his music] cannot tell or demonstrate but only attack, disturb…horrify. What is it Wagner expresses about our era? The mixture of crudeness and softest fragility, barbarization of the natural instincts and nervous hypersensitivity, an obsession with emotion stemming from exhaustion and the delight in exhaustion.

(See: Mazzino Montinari’s What Nietzsche Really Said, Verso)

+ The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve has hit its lowest level since 1982 and all the oil swiped from Venezuela won’t fill it up any time soon.

+ A Pentagon investigation cited a kill-chain of an “overwhelming air assault order, severely outdated intelligence, and an overreliance on AI tools like Palantir’s Maven Smart System” that contributed to the February 28, 2026, U.S. Tomahawk missile strike that hit an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165 civilians, most of them children.

+ Sen. Rick Scott, Medicare scammer:

We didn’t decide to go to war. We decided to defend ourselves from somebody that wants to have a nuclear weapon to kill your kids and your grandkids. We all hate high gas prices, but we do not want to be killed by a nuclear weapon. He’s doing the right thing.

+ Your kids and grandkids are infinitely more likely to be killed by an AR-15-wielding psychopath raised in the schools and churches of Tallahassee than a non-existent Iran nuke. And neither Scott nor Trump will do anything to lessen the likelihood of that happening.

+ Since Rick Scott began serving in the US, at least 109 children have been killed in school shootings in the US.

+ Ha! At this point, Trump and Hegseth’s high-T, low-morale military probably couldn’t even launch a successful invasion of Grenada…

+ Marco Rubio gloating over the extreme executive powers that Trump has wielded at the expense of the Congress (and the Constitution):  “The legislative branch has limitations when it comes to the national security of our country… The President has extraordinary powers, both constitutional and otherwise.”

+ The Neo-Cons will swallow every aspersion, smear and calumny Trump has hurled at them if he just nukes Iran…

+ According to Moody’s, the Iran War has now cost the average U.S. household around $1,760.

+ Twice a week: the average number of Predator drone strikes on Somalia under the Trump Restoration since January 2025.

+ A former American diplomat who served for years in the Middle East told The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins that Trump’s negotiating posse, which includes Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and his sons, David Sachs, the crypto man, and Trump’s own family, are using their positions to pad their portfolios:

I know all of these guys. They go to these meetings and they’re doing business right alongside the diplomacy. ‘O.K., enough about the ceasefire. We have this hotel we want to build.’ That’s the kind of foreign policy America has now.

+++

+ U.S. home sellers outnumber buyers by a record 563,000, creating a 58% gap. The number of US home sellers has hit a 6-year high.  In Nashville, Tennessee, there were an estimated 139% more home sellers than buyers in the market in August. A similar story is playing out in Houston, which currently has 131% more home sellers than buyers.

+ A US household would need $124,674 a year to afford a median-priced home, 44% more than the current median income, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Federal Reserve.

+ University of Chicago economist Brent Neiman, writing in the New York Times: “Workers are earning a smaller and smaller share of the economy’s income.”

+ Consumer prices have risen 3.4% from a year earlier, compared with 3.1% wage growth.

+ This is not a difficult question…

+ Fewer stocks are lifting the market than at any time since the dot-com boom/boost. According to MarketWatch, “the last time there were that many S&P 500 components below their 200-day moving averages with the index within 1% of its record high was indeed March 27, 2000 — right around the dot-com bubble peak.”

+ The affordability of housing in the US has hit an all-time low…

+ Brooke Rollins, the former Cotton Bowl Queen, now serving as Trump Sec. of Agriculture: “Instead of eating less beef as the price continued to rise, Americans began to eat more beef. And even though the price of a pound of ground beef was $6.50, most Americans say, ‘I’m good with that. I want this protein for my family.’ So they continue to buy.”

+ The Fast Food Index remains dire. Even Chris Kempczinski, the CEO of McDonald’s, admits that inflation is here to stay, will likely climb higher and, as a result, fast food outlets, whose business is always a sign of how the economy is going for working people, are going to see fewer and fewer diners.

+ Where’s the beef (and what’s in it), Don? At least 300 Wendy’s fast food outlets nationwide may close because of the rising costs of beef.

+ If oil prices stay at their current levels, home heating oil customers can expect to pay as much as 31% more this winter.

+ The Financial Times reported that Europeans are spending an extra €30 every time they fill their tanks with diesel, as a result of the Iran war.

+ About the same time Trump said he would support a ban on diesel exports, his Energy Secretary Chris Wright said a ban on diesel exports could push up gasoline and jet fuel prices. Disorder in the House!

+ At $6.52 a gallon, the average price of diesel in the US has risen by 91 cents from a month ago. Meanwhile, the price of Group III base motor oil in the US has nearly quadrupled since February, hitting a record $12.45 a gallon in mid-September.

+ $5,851: the amount car owners in the U.S. spend an average of annually on auto insurance, gas, and maintenance or repairs.

+ When two  scumbag industries merge: “Data science helps determine who receives betting incentives, but the company has resisted using similar technology to protect gamblers at risk of addiction.”

+ The Washington Post reports that “even medical professionals are skipping health insurance because of high prices.”

+ The Trump administration has now kicked more than 1.5 million people off of ObamaCare coverage and into the merciless vagaries of a for-profit health care system that profits off of chronic illness and where even the most basic level of care drives people into bankruptcy. On top of that, the US doesn’t produce doctors anymore. The US is a health-obsessed but unhealthy country that can’t (and doesn’t even try to) provide care for the majority of its citizens. No wonder people take their chances with ivermectin, zinc, essential oils and green tea…

Number of doctors per 1000 people…

Cuba: 9.2
Monaco: 8.6
Greece: 6.5
Portugal: 5.9
Austria: 5.5
Argentina: 5.1
Russia: 5.1
Norway: 5.0
Germany: 4.5
Denmark: 4.5
Switzerland: 4.5
Sweden: 4.4
Spain: 4.3
Australia: 4.1
Poland: 4.0
Finland: 3.6
Belgium: 3.6
South Korea: 3.6
New Zealand: 3.6
Ukraine: 3.5
France: 3.3
U.K: 3.2
Chile: 3.3
China: 3.1
Canada: 2.8
Japan: 2.6
Mexico: 2.6
U.S.: 2.6
Brazil: 2.4
Venezuela: 1.7
Puerto Rico: 1.6

Source: World Bank.

+++

+ Trump: “Whoever wins AI, wins.” We know what Trump wins: money. But what do we win?

+ The Washington Post reported just how deeply the Trump Organization is invested in AI and associated industries…

Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has announced a merger with a nuclear fusion company that plans to develop power plants as electricity demand surges, in large part because of the rapid expansion of AI data centers. Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in a number of AI and data center ventures, primarily through the investment firms 1789 Capital and American Ventures. Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that announced it had closed a $1.2 billion fund that will focus on real estate ventures, including deals aimed at digital infrastructure like data centers.

+ At least 105 members of Congress hold personal investments in the AI industry, according to an analysis of financial disclosures and hundreds of stock transactions this year by Real Sludge.

+ The Trump administration, which rarely seems to get out among their peeps anymore, continues to contend that popular opposition to both AI and data centers is being bankrolled by China, missing the fact that most people, right, left and center, have a visceral hatred for both.

+ There’s no political divide on AI. Only 10 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of Democrats and Independents say they are more excited than concerned about AI, according to a Pew survey from late June.

+ Appearing before the UN Security Council, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei warned that

AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole…For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time. No leader, no company and no nation can manage this alone.

+ If you want to know the likeliest scenario for how AI could destroy humanity, then you’ll want to read Andrew Cockburn’s latest Substack offering, “Nuclear War Could be Just Another Hallucination.” Not only could it happen, it almost did. Let’s just say that the scenario involves AI, Pete Hegseth and the gang of incompetent tech-warriors he’s installed through the Pentagon….

+ Students who use AI almost every day score lower in science reading tests, which makes it much less likely that future programmers will be able to control their AI creations…

+ David Wallace-Wells on AI:

By any concrete measure, the country threw more at the project of building AGI than it had at anything in many decades. And today the number of Americans who believe A.I. is moving too fast outnumbers those who believe it is moving too slow 33 to 1.

+ Trump admin is moving to construct 12 sprawling data centers on 17,600 acres of public land across six states…

+ The idea that we’re in a data center Cold War with China is ludicrous…

+ Abdul El-Sayed: “AI shouldn’t be able to fire you. AI shouldn’t be able to deny you health care. AI shouldn’t be able to fire a weapon.” That’s a pretty clear and succinct way of putting it.

+ AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries “most of the time,” according to the Financial Times.

+ A new class-action lawsuit charges that UnitedHealth and its subsidiary Optum used a flawed predictive AI model known as “nH Predict”, which had a 90 percent error rate, to wrongfully deny post-acute care to Medicare Advantage patients.

+ The fast-food Chipotle chain has hired Palantir to track employee illnesses, Health Department scores, and food safety issues.

+ Seattle has become the first city to pass a measure stopping large grocery stores and online grocery retailers from using surveillance pricing based on race, gender, browsing history, employment status, AI software or other data to change prices from consumer to consumer.

+ Bill Burr on AI: “Why don’t they make an AI CEO? They’re making way more than all the workers. You’re going to save way more money replacing one guy. Why don’t you do that? Because it’s not for us. It’s for them.”

+++

+ The Harvard/Harris poll shows Kamala Harris with a commanding (though almost certainly doomed) lead among registered Democrats, especially Black Democrats, 60 percent of whom favor her for the nomination in 2028.

+ AOC on running for president in 2028: Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”

+ Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, the second most powerful man at Foggy Bottom, reportedly rejected the statue of a bull because he feared some Christians might confuse it with the pagan deity Baal.

+ How the New York Post referred to Tucker Carlson, after he praised Abdul El-Sayed: “A Nicotine-pouch salesman and onetime conservative pundit.”

+ Sen. Charles Grassley is a one-man Ancien Régime…It’s hard to believe, but Grassley used to be a pretty good member of Congress, a clean government conservative, a down-home version of William Proxmire. He defended whistleblowers and was a critic of Pentagon waste (which includes most of its budget). He once had some of the best staff on the Hill. When I was reporting on weapons systems for CounterPunch and In These Times and writing Grand Theft Pentagon, I got a lot of very useful tips from Grassley’s office. They’ve all been replaced by MAGA hacks now, who are some of the most malicious around; Grassley himself seems only slightly more conscious of what’s going on around him than his younger pal, Mitch McConnell.

+ Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, demanding an investigation into Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party:

A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else. Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now. ‘Trust us’ was not enough then, and it is not enough now.

+ Steve Deace after Iowa GOP pollsters warn candidates that even if they are in a +15 Trump district they may be in danger of losing: “Whatever we’re doing or not doing in Iran/Hormuz has become a 2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross. This is approaching TARP bailout levels of unpopular in my home state.”

+ In 2024, the FBI launched an investigation into suspected “pay-to-play” dealings between Sen. Susan Collins and a top donor. The donor, an ex-defense contractor, told agents his company won millions in federal contracts by bankrolling campaigns of powerful politicians. After Donald Trump returned to office, the investigation was quashed, a victim of his purge of the FBI.

+ MAGA preacher Lance Wallnau urged Christians to vote in the midterms because the Trump administration is funneling billions of dollars to them: “The grant-making ability has gone from a trillion dollars to the left to the body of Christ. And in the next two years, it’s going to increase.”

+ The Vice President of the United States is cracking “jokes” that would make a third-grader groan…”We need somebody who will fight back against the fart left. Now, you may not have even heard that, but I just called them the fart left, not the far left.”

+ The World’s Most Grotesque Woman has gone from shooting puppies and ponies to justifying shooting unarmed protesters in the head to killing bull elk and posing with the corpse…

+ Ed Abbey: “Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.”

+ After banning CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House press pool, President Parapraxis was at it again…

Reporter: China is one of the most repressive countries for journalists in the world–

Trump: Well, I don’t know about that. I think we’re repressive also.

+ In justifying banning Politico from the White House, the Trump administration accused the news outlet of using anonymous sources. It turns out that the quotes came from people inside the White House, who had been authorized to speak off-the-record, including the Vice President.

+ After the ruling, Trump defied an order from a Trump-appointed federal judge…

+ Trump has made an average of 50 to 85 stock trades per market day during his second term, totaling more than 28,000 transactions. Trump disclosed 1,156 securities transactions in July, totaling between roughly $79 million and $270 million, according to an analysis by CNBC. The largest were sales of between $5 million and $25 million each of Microsoft and Amazon on July 20. But the blizzard of trades also included defense and energy stocks.

+ The more Trump red-baits the Left and loots the economy, the higher socialism polls…

+ Scott Jensen, Republican candidate for state auditor of Minnesota: “I think we have ignored in Western medicine the potential benefits of discoveries made centuries and centuries ago. The notion of electromagnetic powers, of minerals, and rocks, and things like that, that could have curative capabilities, we’ve ignored.”

+ The Cuban delegation walked out of the UN General Assembly after Trump smeared Cuba as a  “failed state” that serves as a “haven for foreign adversaries to threaten America.” Trump vowed that the Cuban government would soon fall. Later that day, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla responded that “The U.S. government proves incapable of accepting that Cuba is, and has the right to be, a fully independent and sovereign country.”

+ After boasting about the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and the theft of Venezuelan oil reserves, Trump snorted that “to the victor belong the spoils.”

+ The Haitian government, so-called, has hired Trump intimate and political trickster Roger Stone for $65,000 a month.

+++

+ Jeremy Corbyn is calling once again for a public inquiry into Great Britain’s role in the genocide in Gaza:

Delaying scrutiny will not make questions about Britain’s role in Gaza disappear. That’s why I introduced a bill in Parliament calling for a public inquiry into Britain’s policy in Gaza, in the same way that there was a Franks Report into previous conflicts, in the same way that Sir John Chilcot was appointed to undertake an inquiry into British policies in Iraq. I think we need to know what was going on in the Foreign Office, in the Ministry of Defense, and what was happening at RAF Akrotiri and other places.

And so when it became clear to me that this bill wasn’t going to make it any further in the House, we put together a tribunal. I was part of it, along with Professor Neve Gordon and Dr. Shahad Hammouri. And we held a Gaza Inquiry over two days in Church House at Westminster with 29 expert witnesses. It was a deeply moving occasion, listening to young people from Gaza explaining what their life had been like, listening to medical practitioners talking about the horror of everything they’d been taught they couldn’t do. They inflicted pain on people in order to try to prevent future pain. Amputating the limbs of children without anesthetic, antiseptic or even water to undertake the operation properly. And all of the heroic work that they did and then thinking that only a few kilometers away from where they were trying to operate, in these ghastly conditions under a piece of canvas, there was food, there was water, there was electricity, there were medicines, antiseptics, everything that’s needed that was deliberately denied the Palestinian people by the IDF. And aid workers were killed. The aid that’s getting in is deliberately designed to prevent there ever being a sustainable way of life in Gaza. You can import some foodstuffs, but you can’t import potatoes and seeds in order to develop agriculture for the future.

Our Gaza inquiry pointed out the levels of depravity of what’s been going on and I thank all of those people who took part in it. But I want there to be a proper public inquiry so we know what those surveillance flights were doing. And when the former Prime Minister Keir Starmer pointed out that there are things going on at RAF Akrotiri that he’s not able to talk about, I think it’s time somebody did talk about it and did talk about what’s actually going on there. We need to know the truth. The truth will set us free. The truth will help to bring about, I believe, what’s essential, which is peace and justice in Palestine.  

+ At the UN, Trump ranted against the International Criminal Court, calling it a “rogue institution,” and demanding that its members resign.

+ Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada will impose trade restrictions on goods produced in Israeli settlements and provide around $71 million in assistance for the Palestinian government. Carney called restrictions on settlement products a “pragmatic, practical” measure to help foster“the possibility of a two-state solution, and ultimately a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.”

+ Since the Trump “ceasefire” of October 11, 2025, Israel has killed at least 1,402 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 4,881.

+ Trump’s “Board of Peace” puts Gaza’s physical damage at $35.2 billion and estimates that full reconstruction costs will be around $71.4 billion over the next decade.

+ More than 160 Irish sports players signed an open letter urging Ireland’s men’s national soccer squad to boycott upcoming matches against Israel on September 27 and October 4. The letter urged players to “act collectively with conscience.” 

+ Alona Ferber on the hysterical reaction of the Israeli government to the new documentary NAZA:

Earlier this month Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival – and received a 25-minute standing ovation – for their documentary NAZA. Israelis branded the directors as traitors, not Jews, “Kapos”. There were calls for violence against them, for them to be ostracised, sent to Gaza or exiled elsewhere. The frenzy surrounding the film is fundamentally undemocratic. That is what happens after years of extreme right-wing populism, amplified by social media and new technology – in the context of decades of conflict, occupation, apartheid and impunity.

+ “A spectacle of shame”: how Emmanuel Macron at the UN described Trump’s Gaza policy. But was it really all that much less shameful than France’s over the last three years?

+ As Netanyahu gave a belligerent speech before the UN General Assembly, Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, the Netherlands’ UN representative, slammed Israel’s pitiless restrictions on aid and urged European governments to take further action. “It’s completely unacceptable. We should call it as it is; it’s a disgrace. While I appreciate the moment of silence, we cannot be silent. We need to speak up and we need to adhere to the call to action.”

+ 3,582: number of illegal Israeli settlement housing units built in the occupied West Bank from the beginning of 2026.

+ Days before the Palestinian olive harvest, the Israeli military bulldozed, uprooted and torched thousands of fruit-bearing trees in the Occupied West Bank. Olive orchards account for more than 8% of the West Bank’s GDP and provide more than 60,000 jobs.

+ From Maya Nateel’s shattering essay on Gaza, “I Dream of an Ordinary Death”:

I do not want to be missing, left under the rubble for an eternity or gathered in a black plastic bag – a collection of limbs.

+ The Welsh singer Charlotte Church laid into Ed Sheeran during a concert in Cardiff, where the singer repeatedly chanted “Free Palestine”:

Whilst he [Sheeran] has made millions and has an enormous following – he has an enormous platform to do real good in the world – he chose consumerism and capitalism over doing the right thing. So we say the same thing to Ed Sheeran because fuck the fact that musicians shouldn’t be involved in politics. Fuck that shit. Politics is life. Ed Sheeran, we’re watching you.

+ Ed Sheeran’s whimpering apologia to his fans after he was jilted by his band and tourmates was so hollow and robotic it made things worse.  That’s because Ed Sheeran’s mere presence makes everything worse, from the sound of the human voice straining to sing to his fumbled strumming of the DMaj chord on a guitar…

+ Lorna Finlayson the Sheeran-Macklemore debacle:

‘In much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, the reality of the incident is turned on its head, as people ask whether Sheeran has been unfairly cancelled for failing to take a sufficiently strong stand against Israel. You could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had been dropped from his tour for not being pro-Palestinian enough. But of course he wasn’t. It is Macklemore, not Sheeran, who has been barred from performing. Yet somehow the story is about Sheeran’s freedom to be apolitical.

 + While most Democrats running for office are wisely keeping Kamala Harris at a distance, Abdul El-Sayed has welcomed her to Michigan, where she stumbled so fatally over her refusal to denounce Israel’s genocide against Palestinians during her 2024 campaign. Pourquoi?

+ Stung by criticism from the Left of his alliance with Harris, El Sayed said his positions on Gaza had not changed: “I was very clear that I disagreed with my party when it came to the genocide. None of those positions have changed at all. I’m not going to change them.”

+ More than a year ago, two Australian charities donated more than 900 all-terrain wheelchairs specifically for use by amputee children to move around in the rubble of Gaza. Israel has vilely blocked their entry into the Strip, claiming they are “dual-use” instruments. And so they remain in a warehouse in Jordan. According to the UN, Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in modern history.

+++

Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was working as a DoorDash delivery driver in North Austin, Texas, last Sunday when the car he was driving was sideswiped twice by an unmarked SUV. He tried to pull away from the ramming vehicles and made a U-turn beneath an overpass, where his blue Toyota Camry was struck again by an SUV.

That’s when the cars that were chasing him turned on their sirens and Wilber realized they were driven by ICE operatives. He asked one of the officers if he could pull over to a safer place on the road. They refused. Moments later, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot. Shot in the back. Wilber managed to call his wife, telling her that he had been shot and was in pain. Then the connection went dead.

The call ended abruptly because ICE agents had dragged Wilber out of the car and thrown him to the pavement. He was handcuffed. His legs were shackled and he was placed in a waist chain before he was taken to the Dell Seton Medical Center. This was a man with a bullet in his back. In fact, the bullet proved to be so close to his spine that the emergency room doctors declined to remove it for fear that they might paralyze the young man.

That decision was just fine with ICE. That decision was just fine with ICE. They wanted Wilber in their hands.

At four in the morning, ICE moved Wilber to a temporary processing center. He was forced to sleep on a concrete floor before being moved once again to the South Texas ICE Processing Center two hours south of Austin. Playing hide-and-seek with detainees is a favorite ICE tactic. Deporting them before they have a hearing is another. Making the detention experience so miserable the detainee never wants to return is strategic. It’s part of the plan.

Wilber’s lawyers heard from other detainees that ICE guards had treated Wilber roughly, even though he had a bullet in his back that any shove might cause to pierce his spinal cord. They didn’t care.

Wilber was in pain. The left side of his body was losing feeling. He had trouble moving his limbs. It felt like he was paralyzed. He repeatedly asked for medical attention and didn’t get it.

Garcia Perez used the CBP app to legally enter the US in 2024. Then he immediately applied for asylum. He missed one of his immigration hearings when the notice was sent to the wrong address. DHS responded by issuing a final order of removal.

Wilber wasn’t out dealing drugs. He was delivering food. His wife had wanted him to stay home that day. But he felt they needed money. So he went to work.

What he didn’t know was that ICE was watching. Not him. He wasn’t their target. Well, he wasn’t any more of a target than anyone else who looked like him. No. ICE had set up shop in North Austin, an area populated by many Mexican-Americans and immigrants, many of them American citizens, originally from south of the border.

In other words, ICE was racial profiling. They were looking for brown people in cars and then running the license plates. When they saw Wilber driving in his Blue Camry, they ran his number and were pinged with a deportation order. Within minutes, Wilber would become one of 95,000 people detained by ICE since Trump re-took office merely for missing an asylum hearing.

Shooting someone in the back is usually solid proof that the shooter’s life wasn’t in danger when you pulled the trigger. In fact, shooting someone in the back is usually pretty good evidence that the shooter has committed a crime.

In this case, the ICE shooter wasn’t wearing a body cam, even though he’d been given one.  The shooter was a new recruit and, like many new recruits, he was likely trigger-happy, both scared and caught up in the moment, looking to prove himself out in the field. One of his colleagues was wearing a body cam, but it didn’t record the shooting, likely because he wasn’t even threatened enough to be looking at Wilber at the time.

ICE doesn’t mind having new recruits out in the field. ICE doesn’t mind having trigger-happy officers out in the field. The ICE raids are meant to terrorize and these kinds of officers ratchet up the intimidation factor. And not just among potential targets. Among everyone. When ICE rolls into your neighborhood, they want you scared, docile, obedient and willing to surrender your constitutional rights on demand. If you don’t, something bad might happen to you or your family. And you’ll be blamed and smeared in the press if it does.

Like more than 936,000 other people, Wilber Rafael Garcia Perez used the CBP app to legally enter the US in 2024. Then he immediately applied for asylum. He missed one of his immigration hearings when the notice was sent to the wrong address, even though DHS had his current one on file. DHS responded quickly by issuing a final order of removal.   Wilber didn’t know about the hearing and he didn’t know that he’d been served with a deportation notice because he missed the hearing he didn’t know about.

Trump shut down the CBP app that Wilber and so many others, especially from Venezuela, had used to gain legal entry into the US. After a few weeks, Wilber moved to Austin. He filled out his paperwork with DHS, sending them his new address. Then Trump ordered the protective status of those who had used the app to be rescinded, a decision that is still being fought out in court. So whether he knew it or not, Wilber was a target of Trump’s people-hunters.

Wilber was caught up in the latest ICE strategy to “take it to the streets.” They aren’t raiding drug houses or gangbangers. They aren’t looking for human traffickers or rapists. They aren’t looking for people with outstanding warrants. They’re hunting license plates, especially in the Austin and San Antonio region, which currently ranks third nationally in the number of ICE street arrests. But it’s also led to wrecks, pepper spray and gunfire on crowded streets and sidewalks and people being shot, and sometimes killed in their cars.

When ICE agents rammed his Camry, it was a surprise to Wilber. As far as he knew, he was in the US legally, working legally and living by the book. He hadn’t committed any crimes since being here. He was here with his girlfriend and they were doing okay. But we’re in Kafkaland now, where everyone’s a suspect, where any move you make is seen as a threat and what you don’t know can get you killed.

ICE knew who Wilber was. They knew where he lived. They knew what he drove. In fact, they’d wrecked his car, so he wasn’t going to be driving it very far or very fast.

Wilber didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t have a criminal history. He had a job and a wife.

So why did they have to shoot him, the way they’ve shot more than 20 other people since Trump returned to office, most of them in their cars? Why did they have to shoot him in the back?

Why did they deny him medical care? Why did they pull him out of the hospital and rush him to an ICE jail with a bullet in his back?

Why did they try to rapidly deport him before he could tell his story to a judge?

Why did they risk paralyzing a young man who had played by the rules as he understood them and, at the very worst, had merely missed a meeting he didn’t know about?

Is this what it’s come to? A mad rush to meet daily deportation quotas regardless of whom you arrest or how you do it, even if it means shooting someone in the back?

+++

+ On Sunday morning, five unmarked vehicles descended on a man walking down the sidewalk in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. Two men got out of a black SUV. One was wearing a black hoodie and a mask. The other was wearing body armor labeled “POLICE.” They chased the man, grabbed him, threw him to the ground and beat him. The men weren’t “police”; they were ICE agents. Witnesses began to film the assault. The recordings capture the man trying to shield himself from blows on the ground and screaming, “Don’t fucking touch me! I’m a fucking US citizen.” After a couple of minutes, the ICE agents release the man and back away. Eventually, they return to their SUV, leaving the injured civilian on the ground, bleeding from the head. Witnesses called the Chicago police and an ambulance. He was later taken to the hospital, where he was treated for wounds to his face, neck and teeth.

Miguel Olivares filmed the encounter during a break from his job at a nearby Mexican restaurant. “It looked like police vehicles until I started hearing, ‘I’m a US citizen. I’m a US citizen. They were being rough with him; they had him pinned against the floor, and it looked like one of the agents hit him in the face. He was shaken up. He wasn’t really able to talk much. All he said was that he was a US citizen, that he didn’t know why they targeted him.” A DHS spokesperson blamed the assault on the victim, naturally: “The individual was given lawful commands but was not cooperative and refused to identify himself. ICE officers relied on their training and later left the scene without further incident once the individual finally identified himself.”

+ ICE arrests this summer…

June: 43,900

July: 50,208

August: 50,925

+ Federal Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock in Atlanta lowered the boom on ICE and CPB on Monday, ordering the agencies to stop warrantless raids on construction sites, stop detaining people who weren’t the specific target of a raid and stop detaining people who have valid IDs. Judge Beaverstock called the three policies targeting Hispanic residents of the US unconstitutional. 

“This decision is a huge blow to DHS’s lawless enforcement practices,” said  Jared McClain, a lawyer for the Institute of Justice, which brought the lawsuit against DHS. “The government stood up in court and argued that they don’t need warrants to enter private construction sites and round up all the workers, and that they can’t trust government-issued IDs. By setting aside those unconstitutional policies, the court has restored the rule of law. Construction workers like Leo can finally go to work in peace again.”

+ The people who make the rules rarely play by them…

+ Documents disclosed by Project Salt Box revealed ICE’s plan to use “mobile detention facilities” in Pennsylvania. The plan involves a network of vans run by GEO Group subsidiary GTI that would accompany ICE officers into the field. The documents say that the vans would be deployed “until full” and that women shouldn’t be detained in them for more than 10 hours at a time. How humane…

+ Border Patrol agent Luis Uribe was convicted of sexually assaulting and robbing four women in Chicago hotels in 2022. Uribe used his badge and gun to force his way into the hotels of the women, who were all of Chinese descent. He then forced the women to perform sex acts on him. Afterward, he robbed them. Uribe robbed one of the women twice. Uribe was convicted on all counts. He faces life in prison.

+ The Trump administration says it plans to allow up to 17,500 White Afrikaners “refugees” from South Africa in 2027, at a cost of $500 million.

+ On the morning of Renee Good’s memorial, Minneapolis police deployed 101 personnel to a 7-person vigil. The cops generated $1.92 million in overtime pay for themselves.

+ Stephen Miller, who may qualify as the world’s most prolific child abuser, really cultivates the Goon Chic Look…According to The Guardian,

Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the US by immigration judges since Trump returned to the White House, a doubling of such court orders since January 2025, according to analysis of data from the Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) conducted by the California-based advocacy Mobile Pathways.

+ To the extent there’s any home building going on now, according to Axios, homebuilders are struggling to find workers amid ICE crackdowns.

+ Donna Granger, mother of Renee Good: “I am a registered Republican. I voted for President Trump under the impression that these agents were here to protect the citizens of the United States — innocents like our family and the others here — against terrorists. Certainly not to accuse those of us here of being terrorists and take precious lives. This is madness.”

+++

+ The University of Chicago-based Climate Impact Lab estimates that this year’s super-El Niño climate event could lead to as many as 451,000 more heat-related deaths worldwide by the end of February. The report concluded that

Regions that are projected to see the largest increase in heat-related deaths over the next six months are spread across the Global South. The most impacted countries across the Sahel are forecasted to see an additional 66,800 heat deaths from September to February compared to a normal year, with nearly half of those lives being lost in Nigeria (31,400). Elsewhere in the region, Sudan will face 17,500 additional heat deaths, Niger will face 10,000, and Chad 8,000. In Southeast Asia, the extra heat is projected to cause an additional 19,400 deaths in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, and 19,300 deaths in Indonesia. Other highly impacted regions over the next six months include India (15,800) and Brazil (13,300).

+ Robert Moore, Canadian author of In Trees: An Exploration, writing on how forests are exactly a karmic revenge against carbon capitalism: “As the climate continues warming, this spooky entanglement between the urban and the sylvan will only deepen. In doing so, it has revealed to me what is normally hidden from view: We all live under the same vengeful sky.”

+ Babies born this year will face almost twice as much extreme fire weather in Europe as their great-grandparents.

+ Last weekend, solar and wind power met 80.4% of electricity demand in Australia, a new record.

+ The Chinese EV carmaker Geely announced that its new EV battery “will charge in under five minutes”. While Chinese EVs are taking over the roads in Great Britain, they are banned in the US, even as Detroit scales back its own EV production.

+ How warped is the Washington Post’s editorial page under Bezos’s whip? It just ran an editorial urging Trump not to ban diesel exports because it would “give environmentalists a precedent to justify pushing the next Democratic president to do the same as a means of reducing emissions”.

+ The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has given the atmosphere a breather, as global fossil fuel emissions are estimated to fall by 0.5 percent in 2026.

+ U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ordered Texas to install air conditioning across all 104 of its prison facilities by the end of 2029.  As of Sept. 1, only a third of Texas correctional facilities were fully air-conditioned. The judge ruled that prisons and jails without cooling violate the Eighth Amendment and that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s response to extreme heat constitutes “deliberate indifference.” At least 10 heat-related inmate deaths have been linked to the lack of air conditioning between 2022 and 2025.

+ Even as Trump attempts to strip gray wolves of their protection under the Endangered Species Act, saying that they’re putting ranchers out of business, studies show that wolf predation represents a minuscule percentage of all cattle losses in states that are home to the predators. In Oregon, confirmed losses to wolves accounted for just 0.2 percent of total statewide cattle losses and deaths recorded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2025–the highest proportion across the six Western states with wolves.

+ According to the new “State of the World’s Birds” survey at least 45% of migratory bird species are in decline and 11% are threatened with extinction, as a consequence of “invasive species, agricultural expansion, climate change, residential and commercial development and hunting.”

+ Global Witness’s annual “Land Defenders” report found that at least 124 environmentalists were killed in 2025; 85% of them were murdered in Latin America.

+ Herman Melville on Trump’s plan to sell off part of Yosemite to a billionaire donor for a private airstrip and build sprawling data centers on public lands: “All the world over, the picturesque yields to the pocketesque.”

+ Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, on Trump’s nomination of Heidi Overton to run the FDA. “Here’s an awful idea: put a glyphosate-loving science denier in charge of the safety of every vaccine, drug, and food product sold to Americans,” said Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse. “Hasn’t the rash of recalls, outbreaks and food-borne illnesses on the administration’s watch the past two years been bad enough?

Overton defended the Trump administration’s decision to back Monsanto’s case before the Supreme Court, giving it immunity from legal claims over the use of the carcinogenic compound glyphosate in its Roundup pesticide.

+ During her Senate hearing, Overton did surprise many seasoned congressional observers by admitting, grudgingly, three what under normal circumstances would be obvious realities: MMR vaccines are safe, as is the day-after pill mifepristone. Overton also acknowledged that despite what the man who nominated her believes, Tylenol doesn’t cause autism. Now, will she stand up for any of these facts?

+ Wall Street Journal on what it costs to protect RFK, the carbon-footed jetsetter…

Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services informed congressional appropriators that it was moving about $12 million from the Office of Minority Health to help cover the ballooning cost of security for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

This is, of course, squarely in the family tradition of putting themselves before minorities, especially Black Americans. His father and uncle consented to the FBI’s wiretapping of Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders. 

+ RFK Jr.’s security costs have risen from $10 million last year to more than $17 million in 2026.

+ CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a degenerative brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head, is present in about one percent of the human population. But an NIH study suggests that about 40 percent of student athletes who play contact sports, such as football, rugby and soccer, will develop the disease. A study published last month in the British Medical Journal found that one in four NFL players died between 2016 and 2021. One vital question is whether children who play contact sports are also vulnerable to CTE.

+++

Sen. Tommy Tuberville: “Listen to this, many airline pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community. Lord help us. It’s terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it’s possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal. You can’t make this up.” Meow!

+ Sen. Mike Lee: “I won’t be a bit surprised if President Trump decides at one point to say, ‘You know, President Xi, let’s go visit Panda Express and see what you think of their broccoli beef.’ I’d love to see that happen. That’s the kind of thing President Trump likes to do.”

+ Does the Senate have a special cloak room for Lee and Tuberville, because you really wouldn’t want them running around loose in the chamber on their own…

+ I remember when the New Hampshire Union-Leader used to be considered the mouthpiece for the radical right. You’ve come a long way, kids…

+ And you wonder why Hegseth’s military got its ass kicked by Iran…

+ After giving his inspiring lecture to Pentagon brass, YouTube fighter and all-around jackass, Jake Paul, said he believes that US citizens should be allowed to purchase rocket launchers and armed drones.

+ Convicted liar and obstructer of justice, Scooter Libby, now a welcome contributor to the Washington Post editorial page, is still churning out the same discredited delusions about the Middle East…

+ Trump claims that his ego-Arch will double as a “military complex” housing snipers and drones. Against what? No Kings protesters? An invasion of DC from the resurrected Army of Northern Virginia?

+ NYT: “Americans have a pervasive sense they are being lied to. That has created an unpredictability in politics unseen since Donald Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters.” Many Americans have “a pervasive sense” they have been lied to by the New York Times and have the clippings to back it up.

+ The Washington Post reported that James McCrery III, the first architect of the White House ballroom, resigned after repeatedly warning that Trump was demanding designs that violated fire and safety codes. Trump rejected the architect’s concerns, saying flippantly:  “I am the code.” (“Le code est moi!“)

+ Trump’s bailouts of Argentina didn’t do his crazy buddy Javier Milei much good. Argentine economy has shriveled by 0.6% this year. Unemployment is up, wages down. More than 70% of Argentinians describe the job market as bad. Milei’s approval rating has sunk to 38%, higher than Trump’s, but not by much. Nearly 60% of Argentinians disapprove of the way Milei is running the country.

+++

+ The New York Times is running a readers’ poll of the top 100 TV shows since 2000. Here’s my ballot…

+ Mark Twain, after spending a couple of weeks in Genoa, Florence, Venice and Rome looking at Italian Renaissance paintings: “I’m glad the Old Masters are dead. I only wish some of them had died sooner.”

+ In 1970, 1 in 13 four-year college degrees was in English literature. Today, it’s shrunk to only 1 in 60. Critical theory killed the canon and took much of the fun out of reading. I was lucky to graduate while it was still barely possible to read Chaucer, Donne, Shakespeare, Swift, Milton, the Bröntes, Austen, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Dickinson, Melville, Twain, Hardy, Lawrence, Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce, Ellison, Wright, Kerouac, Pynchon and Reed, instead of merely tiresome deconstructions of them…

+ This is the wildest book cover I’ve ever seen for Ulysses. Move over, Stephen; step aside, Leopold, this is Molly’s story and just wait until you see how she tells it:

…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

They’re fucking with your head, You ain’t safe in your bed, Or even when you’re dead

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World
Suzanne Simard
(Knopf)

Against Money
J. W. Mason & Arjun Jayadev
(Chicago)

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Walter Rodney
Introduction by Angela Davis
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week… 

Here Because of Hope
Ezra Collective
(Partisan)

Out Into
Son Lux
(This is Meru)


Second Song
Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts
(Reprise)

Learning More Valuable Than Gold

“A visitor from Timbuctu about 450 years ago wrote as follows: ‘In Timbuctu there are numerous judges, doctors and clerics all receiving good salaries from the king. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books in manuscript, imported from Barbary. More profit is made from the book trade than from any other line of business.’ In a city which was renowned for its trade in gold, there was more profit to be made from books than from any other line of business! In other words, learning was valued more highly than gold!” – Walter Rodney, The Groundlings Were My Brothers.