Roaming Charges: Grave Disorders
Vince Ray‘s cover art (detail) for The Damned’s Grave Disorder, Nitro Records, 2001.
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
– John Milton
+ On October 17, Phillip Brown, a 33-year-old Black man, was driving his Dodge Caravan SUV down Benning Road in Northeast DC to get milk for his three young kids when a Metropolitan police car pulled up behind him. Like many vans, Brown’s had tinted windows and the cops used this as a pretext to tail the Dodge when it changed lanes. The police alerted federal authorities that they were following Brown. The federal agents, who now occupied much of DC as part of Trump’s scheme to flood the city with armed federal forces, took over the pursuit and eventually tried to pull Brown over. When Brown stopped, the bumper of his Dodge accidentally nudged a car in front of him. Moments later, a Homeland Security agent fired at least four shots at Brown’s car. Two bullets hit the driver’s side window. And two bullets struck the passenger seat. It’s a miracle none of the shots hit Brown.
Bullet holes in the driver’s side window of Phillip Brown’s Dodge. Photo: E. Paige White and Bernadette Armand.
The agent later claimed that Brown was planning to flee the scene and made a “deliberate attempt to run them down.” How did he know this? Because Brown allegedly revved the engine of his van.
Brown was pulled from the car, cuffed, taken to the DC jail and charged with felonious assault on an officer and fleeing arrest. But when the incident report was filed, the document contained no mention of the shooting. The night before his first court hearing, Brown was approached by federal prosecutors outside the presence of his lawyers with a plea deal that would reduce the charges to misdemeanor reckless driving, but he had to agree to the deal then or they would rescind the offer, a transparent attempt to cover up the shooting. Brown refused and the next day told his lawyers about the irregular, if not illegal, ex parte visit by the prosecutors and detailed circumstances of the shooting, which his legal team had known nothing about. Brown’s lawyers had not been given body cam footage of the incident, for reasons that are now obvious.
When the glaring omission of the shooting was brought up in court during Brown’s defense attorney’s questioning of the DC cop who wrote the report, Officer Jason Sterling testified that he’d been told by a superior officer not to memorialize the shooting in an official court document. Sterling also disputed the Homeland Security officer’s version of events, saying that none of the federal agents or cops on the scene were standing in front of Brown’s Dodge or at risk of being run over. All the shots hit the side of Brown’s car, not the front. After the hearing, the judge dismissed the charges against Brown, who, it should be noted, was unarmed at the time of the shooting.
Usually, all cops have to do to justify shooting someone is to claim, “I feared for my life.” And as far as we know, the trigger-happy DHS agent who shot at Phillip Brown and lied about the circumstances of the shooting is still patrolling DC’s streets, tasked with pulling over and harassing anyone he deems suspicious, as part of Trump’s made-for-memes operation to Make America Safe Again. Safe for whom?
+ The mother of Nathan Griffin, the manager of the Laugh Factory in Chicago, on watching her son being arrested by federal immigration agents for “interfering” with a raid: “My son was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. For those of you who don’t know, I was in Chicago visiting my son and he was kidnapped by Border Patrol in front of my eyes. When I think of going out the door in the morning, I don’t want to…Because I do not want to encounter the SUV, the screams, the crying and the horrific things that I saw before I was pulled into the fray when somebody tried to kidnap my son.”
+ An immigration agent in Addison, Illinois, who was wearing an American flag mask, smashed a woman’s car window while her terrorized children sat in the vehicle…
+ ICE has stopped publishing its monthly data on arrests and removals by criminality.
+ Franz Schoening, Commander of the Portland Police Department, testified that on October 18, federal immigration officers attacked protesters with crowd control munitions, not in response to any violence by the protesters but because another federal officer accidentally shot tear gas onto the roof of the ICE facility.
+ Sen. Dick Durbin: “The Trump Administration isn’t targeting the worst of the worst. Their immigration raids are going after churches and Halloween parades. What a farce.”
+ 50% of new ICE recruits failed an open-book test after taking a course on Immigration and the Fourth Amendment.
+ This pervasive constitutional ignorance might seem like a grave disorder for a law enforcement agency, but under the current dispensation, it is likely a prerequisite for the position. The Trump administration doesn’t want its ICE agents hesitating to cuff a 6-year-old or tear gas a teacher trying to shield her student because it might violate some civil right or another. That would be wussy and woke.
+ Arrests of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border by federal immigration agents increased 83% from July to September, meaning that desperate people are still coming despite Trump’s violent mass deportation operation.
+ Six months ago, 47 people, including nine kids, were abducted by ICE in Hays County, Texas. Since then, County Judge Ruben Becerra has been trying to get answers about why they were detained and where they are being held, but DHS has ignored all of his queries. Judge Becerrq told Pro Publica: “We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them. By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”
+ According to a new lawsuit, federal immigration agents in Chicago pointed a pepper ball gun and a real gun at Chris Gentry, a US combat veteran who was legally standing on the sidewalk during a protest against ICE. The agent who held the real gun aimed it at Gentry and said, “Bang, bang. You’re dead liberal.”
+ Talia Soglin, the Chicago Tribune: “In government propaganda videos, the Feds boast of going after ‘the worst of the worst.’ In reality, every day, masked agents are fanning out and hitting the easiest targets they can: day laborers, gig workers, tamale ladies.”
+ You’re walking across the parking lot toward Walmart to spend some of your hard-earned money and keep the commodities circulating, when two armed masked men accost you and demand to know where you were born. Just another day in the Land of the Free.
+ On Wednesday, the Trump administration was forced to admit that it violated a federal judge’s order barring National Guard troops from entering Portland. Oregon National Guard troops remained on the grounds of the ICE building in South Portland hours after a federal judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order banning the Trump administration from deploying state troops into the city. “After Your Honor’s (temporary restraining order), they were still at the building, yes,” said Justice Department Attorney Jean Lin, before a hearing on the legality of Trump’s order to send national guard troops from Oregon, California and Texas into Portland to crack down on protesters.
+ This open defiance of federal court orders seems to be in keeping with Trump’s views that he is immune from any legal restraints…
+ Trump on invoking the Insurrection Act: “If I want to enact a certain act.. I’d be allowed to do that, you understand that — the courts wouldn’t get involved, nobody would get involved. And I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted.”
+ ICE is transferring $10 billion to the Navy to build tent concentration camps to hold up to 10,000 people in detention at a time. These would be the largest such camps since the Clinton-era migrant camp at Guantanamo. (So many wretched precedents set by Clinton.)
+ In a court hearing on Tuesday, Federal Judge Sara Ellis warned Border Control commander Gregory Bovino that federal immigration agents in Chicago are regularly violating her Temporary Restraining Order banning DHS from using tear gas on journalists and non-violent protesters:
They don’t have to like what you’re doing. And that’s okay. That’s what democracy is. They can say they don’t like what you’re doing, they don’t like how you’re enforcing the laws — that they wish you would leave Chicago and take the agents with you. They can say that, and that’s fine. But they can’t get tear-gassed for it.
+ Local residents in McCook, Nebraska, are suing to keep ICE from turning the Work Ethic Camp into a detention prison for people swept up in Trump’s immigration raids. I don’t know, “Work Ethic Camp” sounds a lot like “Arbeit Mach Frei,” to me…
+ JD Vance claims that it’s “totally reasonable and acceptable” for people to object to living next door to people who speak a different language. (The first language of the 8th president of the USA, Martin van Buren, was Dutch, which he often spoke at him, including when that home was in the White House.)
+ Didn’t expect the meme-makers at DHS to be fans of Masculin-Femine and recognize that we’re all: Les enfants de Marx et Coca-Cola!
+ Is that Mexican Coke or the kidney-ravaging American swill? I guess on Bobby Kennedy knows
+++
+ Snuff films used to be illegal. Now they’re distributed by the War Department and are what the Manosphere watches instead of porn.
+ Reporter: “Why not ask Congress to declare war on cartels?”
Trump: “We’re not going to ask for a declaration of war. We’re just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them, you know. They’re going to be, like, dead. Okay?”
+ Once again, Obama set the precedent for Trump. The Intercept uncovered two reports from the Obama era that called for “more direct military action” against drug cartels and one report called for “kinetic” strikes on cartel leaders (ie, assassinations).
+ This story of the Trump people trying to convince Maduro’s pilot to secretly fly the Venezuelan president to the US for arrest reads like one of E. Howard Hunt’s spy capers and is about as absurd as some of the plots against Castro: “A U.S. agent tried to flip Nicolás Maduro’s pilot — offering riches if he secretly flew Venezuela’s leader into U.S. custody.”
+ Reuters: “U.S. military officials involved with President Donald Trump’s expanding operations in Latin America have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.” NDAs are private contracts imposed on top of the existing laws and regulations governing disclosure of sensitive or classified information.
+ Venezuela doesn’t show up once in the fentanyl section of Trump’s own 2025 DEA National Drug Threat Assessment and briefly appears only to highlight TDA as low-level street traffickers who specialize in human trafficking.
+ The decline in fentanyl seizures began more than a year and a half before Trump took office. From 2023 to 2025, fentanyl seizures declined by 57%, including a 46% percent decline in 2024.
+ Trump: “The thing I can tell you right now, it’s very hard to find any floating vessel right now on the Pacific or in the Gulf. I would like to call it by its official name, the Gulf of America. Another little triumph of the Trump administration.” Shutting down maritime traffic in the Gulf of Trump and the Pacific Ocean doesn’t sound like a great idea…
+ To justify his war on the “ocean drugs,” Trump keeps saying 300 million people died of drug overdoses last year (the population of the US is 370 million). But there were only 62 million deaths globally from ODs, many, if not most, from prescription drugs. If Trump’s claim were true, you’d expect the traffic on I-205 would be less gnarly.
+ Admiral Alvin Halsey left his post as head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command after a fractious meeting with War Lord Pete Hegseth over the illegal strikes on Caribbean boats. Since then, the U.S. has moved closer to war in Venezuela, with Trump vowing that the next step will be strikes against “cartels” on land.
+ Amount of cocaine that actually transits Venezuela? (10-13%). Amount of US-bound fentanyl that comes through Venezuela? (None)
+ Rand Paul: “When you kill someone, if you’re not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least. You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without any evidence of a crime.”
+ Trump: “Somebody came up with the word ‘cartel.’ I won’t tell you who that person was, but you gotta lot of bad people in the cartels.”
Cartel: 1550s, “a written challenge, letter of defiance,” from French cartel (16c.), from Italian cartello “placard,” diminutive of carta “card”). It came to mean “written agreement between states at war” (1690s), for the exchange of prisoners or some other mutual advantage, then “a written agreement between challengers” of any sort (1889). The sense of “a commercial trust, an association of industrialists” is from 1900, via German Kartell, which is from French. The older U.S. term for that is trust (n.). The usual German name for them was Interessengemeinschaft, abbreviated IG, as in Farben.
David Adler: “Somehow, the United States of America has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures — the Iraq War and the War on Drugs — into a single regime change narrative…. and sell it again to the mainstream media.”
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+ Bari Weiss re-programming pogram begins at CBS News with the departure of Evening News co-anchor, John Dickerson.
+ Weiss wants Fox’s Brett Baier to anchor CBS News…
+ Bari the Gatekeeper: CBS News was the only network news program that failed to cover Trump’s pardon of crypto fraudster Changpeng Zhao and his ties to the Trump family’s own crypto scheme.
+ In the last two weeks, Washington Post editorials have endorsed policies in which Post owner Jeff Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting the potential conflict of interest.
+ Alex Jones’s InfoWars is now a member of the official Pentagon press pool…
+ JFK told the French writer Andre Malraux in 1962 that “without television he would have no means of reaching the American people except through a press which is controlled by conservative capitalists.”
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+ Karoline Leavitt: “Right now, the President’s priority is the White House ballroom.”
+ Here are the people and corporations who financed the destruction of the East Wing…
Altria Group
Amazon
Apple
Booz Allen Hamilton
Caterpillar
Coinbase
Comcast
José and Emilia Fanjul
Hard Rock International
HP
Lockheed Martin
Meta
Micron Technology
Microsoft
NextEra Energy
Palantir Technologies
Ripple
Reynolds American
T-Mobile
Tether America
Union Pacific Railroad
Adelson Family Foundation
Stefan E. Brodie
Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
Edward and Shari Glazer
Harold Hamm
Benjamin Leon Jr.
The Lutnick family
The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
Stephen A. Schwarzman
Konstantin Sokolov
Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
Paolo Tiramani
Cameron Winklevoss
Tyler Winklevoss
Albert Speer’s model of “Germania,” Hitler’s planned redesign of Berlin, with the “Great Dome” of the Volkshalle at one end of the avenue leading to the Brandenburg Gate.
+ Hitler was obsessed with building his “Volkshalle” (People’s Hall/ballroom for the Nazi elite and their corporate conspirators: IG Farben, Bayer, Volkswagen, IBM (Dehomag subsidiary), BMW, BASF, Krupp, Ford, Coca-Cola, GM, IT&T, Chase, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Bank of England, US Federal Reserve, to name a few). This was his top priority, even as the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht into retreat and Berliners quietly griped: “We have no bacon, no fat, no eggs, but Hitler has his Reich Chancellery!”
+ Stephen Miller:
The scandal is how Democrats and the left scarred the landscape of our country with grotesque so-called modern art that celebrates ugliness … very importantly, President Trump is making sure it’s in the neoclassical design around which our nation’s architecture has long been directed.
+ This is a remarkably faithful echo of the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate” modern art (which Hermann Göring secretly snatched up at every opportunity for his personal enjoyment and profit.)
+++
+ Trump: “The ranchers are so happy for what I’ve done. I saved them. I don’t think you’d have any beef in this country if I didn’t do that. So we’re very proud of that.”
The ranchers are not so happy with what he’s done…
Rancher 1: “90% of the cattle ranchers are Trump voters, but we have to call him on and say no, we don’t agree… We don’t think the government should be manipulating markets. We need to be able to make a living ranching.”
Rancher 2: “Trump’s got it just all wrong. First, he created tariffs. Farmers are taking on higher costs. Then he starts a trade war with China. China stopped buying US soybeans, leaving bins full and farmers going bankrupt. And now, Trump’s going to not only give Argentina $40 billion, now he turns around and says, ‘I want to buy their beef.’ It’s a betrayal.”
+ National Cattleman’s Beef Association: “The reality is that ranchers’ success is driven by their own hard work,” it stated. “America’s cattlemen and women operate in one of the most competitive marketplaces in the world. U.S. cattle producers are proud to provide the safest, highest-quality beef on earth. We simply ask that the government not undercut them by importing more Argentinian beef in order to manipulate prices…Cattlemen and women cannot stand behind President Trump while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef.”
+ In fact, they may even prefer wolves to Trump: “75% of rural residents in states with gray wolf populations support continuing federal protection, and 79% of people who strongly or very strongly identify as a farmer or rancher support doing so as well. Additionally, three out of every four respondents who identified as politically conservative support continuing protection.”
+ RFK, Jr. brain worms for all!
+ Soybean farmer Caleb Ragland: “US agriculture is facing significant challenges. Commodity prices are down nearly 50%, and farm production costs continue to skyrocket. For soybean farmers, the loss of our largest export market due to trade retaliation by China has made financial problems even worse. High production cost and market losses mean soybean farmers are expected to face a loss of around $109 an acre for this year’s crop.”
+ Reporter: American farmers have really suffered from Trump’s trade war. Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel?
Scott Bessent: In case you don’t know it, I’m actually a soybean farmer, so I have felt this pain too.
+ The fewer soybeans Bessent (Net Worth: $600 million) sells, the bigger his tax write-off…
+++
+ JD Vance now refers to Gaza as “Israeli soil.”
Reporter: Mr. Vice President, about the Turkish role—it’s concerning for Israelis. Turkey has supported Hamas. What role will they have? Will they have troops on the ground in Gaza?
Vance: That’s up to the Israelis. We think everybody has a role to play—financial, reconstruction, or communication. We’re not going to force anything on our Israeli friends when it comes to “foreign troops on their soil,” but we do think there’s a constructive role for the Turks, and frankly, they’ve already played one.
+ Rep. Ro Khanna: “I don’t mind telling you this, for the longest time, the Progressive Caucus had these rules prohibiting you from taking a position on Israel and Gaza…I don’t even know, technically, whether we’ve gotten rid of that rule or not.”
+ Trump: “We have peace in the Middle East for the first time ever. We made a deal with Hamas that they’re gonna be very good, they’re gonna behave, they’re gonna be nice, and if they’re not, we’re gonna go and eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated.”
+ Under the alleged Trump-brokered ceasefire, more than 20 Palestinians are still being killed on average each day in Gaza.
+ Of course, the ceasefire deal always only applied to Palestinians: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders “immediate, powerful” strikes in Gaza after accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire deal…
+ The real world precedent for Trump’s shit-bombing meme…Israel spraying Palestinian houses and protesters with sewage…
+ More than 300 writers, scholars and public figures – including almost 150 past New York Times contributors – have committed to refusing to write for the paper’s Opinion section until our the paper 1) addresses it’s anti-Palestinian bias, 2) retracts the widely debunked investigation “Screams Without Words.” and 3) and calls for a U.S. arms embargo of Israel.
+ According to IDF records, 279 soldiers attempted to take their own lives between January 2024 and July 2025.
+ A US colonel who investigated Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s 2022 killing by an Israeli soldier determined it was intentional, but his boss undermined that conclusion so as not to antagonize the Israelis.
+ C’mon, Bernie, has there ever been a government in Israel (right- or left-wing, whatever that really means) that hasn’t done “horrific things to the Palestinian people?”
+ 972 magazine on Israel’s “Project Nimbus” deal with Google and Amazon: “The first prohibits Google and Amazon from restricting how Israel uses their products…. The second obliges the companies to secretly notify Israel if a court orders them to hand over the country’s data stored on their cloud platforms.”
+ Biden’s NatSec spokesman John Kirby, the administration’s leading Israeli apologist and genocide denier for 16 months, has been named director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, a white paper mill founded by David Axelrod.
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+ The wealth of the world’s 10 richest people increased by more than $500 billion this year, largely driven by the bubble in AI stocks. This week alone, the wealth of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang swelled by $17 billion, as Nvidia became the first company valued at more than $5 trillion. Huang’s personal wealth is now estimated at $174 billion.
+ Trump in Seoul: “We should have the lowest interest rates of any country, because without us, there are no other countries really.”
+ Nothing says economic populism quite like tax breaks for people who buy private jets and their own car washes for their Porsches…
+ Internal documents reveal that Amazon plans to automate 75 percent of its workforce, replacing more than 500,000 jobs with robots. They’re the IG Farben of Late Capitalism.
+ Shari Jablonowski, SNAP recipient: “I usually have my mother over for Thanksgiving, and I don’t even know how I’m gonna do that. There’s no way I can afford a turkey. I’m worried that me and my family could go hungry. I can’t afford all the bills in this house. I’m just totally screwed.”
+ Joel Berg, Hunger Free America: “If the SNAP program shuts down, we’ll have the most mass hunger suffering we’ve had since the Great Depression.”
+ Before the shutdown, the Trump administration cut $500 million in deliveries to food banks across the country, including more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived. The food went to waste instead.
+ WalletHub survey: “More than 2 in 3 people think inflation is a bigger issue than the job market right now.”
+ China has become the world’s largest car exporter (5.7 million a year), outpacing Japan, Mexico, Germany, South Korea and the US.
+ On the other hand, an estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed in the US last year, the most since 2009.
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+ Kids and disgraced mayors say the craziest things….Eric Adams: “New York can’t be Europe folks… That is why I am here today to endorse Andrew Cuomo.”
+ Andrew Cuomo, talking to conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg last week:
“God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?” Cuomo asks.
“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg says.
Cuomo takes a breath, then snickers, before saying: “That’s another problem.”
+ Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, in an open letter backing Cuomo: “One shudders to think of the sort of people Mamdani would bring into his administration. How many of Mamdani’s team have ripped down hostage posters, or worse?” Ripping down posters? That IS terrifying!
+ Sen. Liz Krueger campaigning with Mamdani: “I am a Jew and a Zionist, and I want to make it very clear: this man is not an antisemite…I don’t understand why everyone seems to be focused on this one issue.”
+ More evidence of the political sophistication of Hakeem Jeffries…
Reporter: “Why have you refused to endorse Mamdani?”
Hakeem Jeffries: “I have not refused to endorse; I have refused to articulate my position.”
+ One big reason why Mamdani continues to connect with NYC residents, even amid the manufactured hysteria slandering his campaign: The average rent in New York City is $3,811, making the income required for rent to be affordable in the city at $152,440. This figure is $91,140 above the median wage.
+ Moshik Temkin: “Completely ignored in the madness of this mayoral campaign in NYC is the fact that Mamdani already defeated Cuomo in the primary and he IS the Democratic candidate. If Cuomo had won and Mamdani then decided to run as an independent, establishment Democrats would lose their minds.”
+ This is the Joe Lieberman precedent, who was defeated in a 2006 primary by Ned Lamont, ran as an independent with GOP and conservative Democratic support and won…
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+ Steve Bannon: “Well, he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”
+ George Pollack at Signum Global Advisors has presented the most likely scenario for how Trump will move to secure a third term, despite it being explicitly prohibited by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution…Trump runs as, say, JD Vance’s vice presidential candidate. Then, after the election, Vance steps down and Trump assumes control. The main obstacle here is the 12th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who is not eligible to become president from serving as Vice President. However, Pollack argues that the
pro-Trump voices could try to argue that the ‘eligibility criteria’ referred to in the 12th Amendment include only the factors at the time the amendment was passed (in 1804)–…namely age, citizenship, places of birth (as opposed to the number of terms, which was only implemented thereafter, in 1951, as part of the 22nd Amendment.)
+ If Trump gets one, it’s unlikely to be because he, or his presidential running mate, won the popular vote… In the Economist’s tracking poll, Trump’s net approval rating has hit a new low of -18, which is even worse than any point in his first term, including after the Trump-inspired riots of January 6, 2021. But his approval rating among people under 30 is a merciless -43%.
+ Reporter: Senator, is it constitutional for President Trump to run for a third term?
Sen. Tommy Tuberville: If you read the Constitution, it says it’s not, BUT he says he has some different circumstances that he might be able to go around the Constitution.
Reporter: But you’re open to it?
Tuberville: Well, there’s going to have to be an evaluation… Don’t ever close a book on President Trump.
+ More Tuberville, because, as the immortal Jacqueline Susanne wrote, once is not enough: I ruffled some feathers a few weeks back when I came to the Senate floor and said that the greatest national security threat facing the country is radical Islam and Sharia law.
+ NYT: “Since siding with Barack Obama twice, Iowa has become a stronghold for Mr. Trump. Yet perhaps no state has struggled more with his economic policies. During the first quarter of 2025, Iowa’s GDP dropped by 6.1 percent, more than any other state aside from neighboring Nebraska.”
+ Apparently, calls to “tax the rich” are now evidence of anti-Semitism, reversing the precedent of the past 100 years that cited calls to “tax the rich” as evidence of Jewish Bolshevism…
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+ With his customary perverse sense of timing, Trump posted this rubbish on the same day one of the most powerful hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean trashed Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds, and took direct aim at the Bahamas…
+ Luke de Noronha on Hurricane Melissa’s ferocious landfall in Jamaica: ‘Shana texted me: ‘I can hear trees breaking and zinc flying. The wind sounds like it’s talking.’ On the videos people sent, it sounded more like screeching. Chris: ‘An almond tree broke in half next door. It was three storeys high.’”
+ Amitav Ghosh on Earth after the climate apocalypse: “The notion of anticipatory ruination has implications that extend far beyond Bangladesh: in a sense, it has now become a plan for the future of the entire planet.”
+ As Trump calls for a halt to solar installations, Texas has forged ahead. In the last five years, electricity demand on the Texas grid (ERCOT) has grown by 20 percent. But emissions have fallen by 7% over the same period. Why? Because according to the Energy Information Agency, nearly all of the demand has been met by renewables: wind, batteries and, especially, solar.
+ According to a survey by the University of Chicago, only 52% of Americans believe in human-caused climate change, a drop from 55% in 2017. Belief among Democrats has fallen 5 points since then, while belief among Republicans has grown by 9 points and, among Independents, by 16 points. (42 percent of young Republicans now believe in anthropogenic warming, logging only slightly behind the rest of the country.)
+ North Dakota is the only state in the US that has seen its electricity prices fall since 2019. Could that be because in the last six years, the Flickertail State has seen:
– Solar generation increased by 425%
– Wind generation increased by 34%
– Coal generation fell by 8%
+ Carbon reduction plans submitted to the UN by more than 60 countries would reduce global emissions by a mere 10 percent, far below the goals set in the Paris Climate Accords or needed to slow runaway climate change.
+ A Lawrence Livermore / Berkeley study estimates that about 40 percent of California’s electricity price increase over the last five years was due to wildfire-related costs.
+ 20,000: number of whales killed by ship strikes each year.
+ From a recent study in Nature on The Global Biomass of Mammals Since 1850:
According to our estimates, in the 1850s, the combined biomass of wild mammals was ≈200 Mt (million tonnes), roughly equal to that of humanity and its domesticated mammals at that time. Since then, human and domesticated mammal populations have grown rapidly, reaching their current combined biomass of ≈1100 Mt. During the same period, the total biomass of wild mammals decreased by more than 2-fold. We estimate that, despite a moderate increase in the recent decades, the global biomass of wild marine mammals has declined by ≈70% since the 1850s.
+ A new report by Survival International identified at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups in 10 countries, primarily in the South American nations sharing the Amazon rainforest. The report estimates these tribes could be “wiped out” within 10 years. Nearly 65% of the tribes face threats from logging, about 40% from mining and around 20% from agribusiness.
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+ From Sotomayor’s prophetic dissent in the Alabama death by nitrogen gas asphyxiation case…
+ A couple of hours after Sotomayor’s scathing dissent was published, Alabama conducted the most prolonged state execution on record. A witness described Anthony Boyd, who proclaimed his innocence to the end, gasping for air more than 225 times before his heart stopped beating.
+ Deborah Friedell on the NRA:
Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s leader, likes to say that shooting is in America’s blood: it’s what Americans have always done, with the right to own guns “granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright”. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans.
+ Trump on the Bill of Rights…”It might say that, but…”
NBC News: The 5th Amendment says everyone deserves due process.
Trump: It might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.
+ Trump wants to shake down the federal government for $230 million for investigating his crimes and out of office. Many states, especially Trump states, cap restitution for wrongful convictions at $2 million.
+ Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University, on 60 Minutes: “We found over 35 cases in which the judges have specifically said what the government is providing…false information. It might be intentionally false information, including false sworn declarations time and again.”
+ Police officers handcuffed what they believed to be a 16-year-old student armed with a gun at his Baltimore County high school based on an AI system telling them so. It turned out the student had a Doritos bag, not a firearm, and the AI apparently confused the two. The kid’s lucky he wasn’t shot…
+ Yes, they’re still arresting people for pot possession. LOTS of people: The FBI released data showing that more than 200,000 people were arrested for cannabis offenses in 2024. Nearly 90% of them were for possession. And that number is likely a significant undercount, as many jurisdictions don’t share their data with the Bureau.
+ The White House ordered the Justice Department to place two federal prosecutors on leave after they filed a sentencing memo seeking 27 months in prison for a pardoned January 6 rioter who brought illegal guns and ammunition to Obama’s house in 2023. In the filing, the prosecutors described the J6 riot as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”
+ In a country gone crazy, this is one of the craziest stories yet, by the great investigative reporter Liliana Segura: A Tennessee sheriff named Nick Weems, who posted about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, ordered the arrest of Larry Bushart Jr., himself a former police officer, who posted memes mocking Kirk and the vigil. Bushart’s been held on $2 million bail ever since.
+ Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent: “Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11. We are going to…follow the money.” Excuse my ignorance, but wasn’t 9/11 a “domestic 9/11”? The Patriot Act sure hit home.
+Micah Beckwith, the Christian Nationalist Lt. Governor of Indiana:
We are a Christian nation, but we are increasingly becoming a non-Christian people. So, a Christian government, a Christian value system, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Decalogue, Leviticus 19, Blackstone’s common law, was taken right from scripture; our founders drew right from that to create this system of government. All based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. So, someone like an Ilhan Omar is welcome to be here legally, but that does not mean she has a right to change the foundation of this nation, which the Supreme Court just ruled in the Kennedy case that “long-standing historical tradition is the constitutional precedent.” So what’s the long-standing historical tradition of America? It’s Christian values. It was not rooted in Islam. It was not rooted in socialism or Marxism. It was rooted in Christianity, the Judeo-Christian ethic and capitalism. And so when a socialist/Marxist like Mamdani tries to force his values on to New York, I would say no, you’re not welcome to do that because the long-standing tradition is constitutional, because what you’re bringing is something new. You’re trying to remove the foundations.”
+ Images of Hammurabi, Lycurgus, Solon, Gaius, Papinian and, yes, Suleiman are engraved on the US Capitol as some of the non-Judeo-Christian “lawgivers” who inspired the legal theories of the architects of the US system of jurisprudence.
+++
+ A week after the pardon of crypto fraudster Changpeng Zhao, his company, BinanceUSA is promoting a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Finance, the Trump-family crypto outfit.
+ Trump Org’s income in the first half of 2024 was $51 million. In the first half of 2025, it skyrocketed to $864 million. The Trump cartel has already made hundreds of millions of dollars abroad, much of it coming from the United Arab Emirates. The Trump family has at least nine deals with ties to the UAE, including five licensing agreements and three cryptocurrency deals that alone are expected to yield around $500 million in 2025.
+ Don Jr.’s company was just “awarded” the largest drone motor contract by the Pentagon…
+ Trump’s “Golden Dome” ballistic missile defense project will likely take at least a decade (maybe two) to complete, cost more than a trillion dollars, and still won’t work.
+ “I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked about his puppet, Mike Johnson. Of course, Johnson probably ate it up, excited by any attention he gets from Trump, even (and, perhaps especially, given the masochistic psychopathology of sycophancy) when the attention is meant to degrade and humiliate.
+ The man with a .138 lifetime batting average (62 points below the Mendoza line of futility at the plate), who wants gambling addict Pete Rose inducted into the Hall of Fame, claims the World Series has been fixed by the Mafia and the Democrats.
+ Trump’s own ties to the Mafia in NYC and Atlantic City bear renewed scrutiny.
+ From Andy Kroll’s profile of Russ Vought, the Shadow President: “‘If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming … from the strategies we’re putting out,’ Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica.”
+ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s 2022 congressional campaign neglected to pay off any of its outstanding debt of over $326,000 last quarter. The debt includes more than $210,000 in refunds for illegal campaign donations that exceeded the individual contribution limit. I remember when getting the “money out of politics” seemed like a realistic goal, or at least something seriously talked about. Seems like geological epochs ago….
+ Washington Post of the capitulation of large law firms to Trump: “Large firms represented plaintiffs in 15 percent of cases challenging Trump executive orders between the start of his term in January and mid-September, compared with roughly 75 percent of cases during a comparable period in Trump’s first term, The Post found. The analysis examined civil complaints and court records from the legal research website CourtListener mentioning Trump and the term “executive order” for each time period.”
+ Edward Luce writing in the Financial Times: “Such is their fear of jail, bankruptcy or reprisal, that most people I spoke to insisted on anonymity. This was in spite of the fact that many also said Trump would only be restrained by people standing up to him.”
+++
+ Trump continues to treat a basic cognitive test as if it were the MCATs: “They have Jasmine Crockett – a low-IQ person. AOC is low IQ. Have her pass the exams I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. They’re cognitive tests. Let AOC go against Trump. Let Jasmine go against Trump. The first couple of questions are easy — a tiger, an elephant, a giraffe … ” This prattle wouldn’t have made the cut for a scene on VEEP.
+ Low IQ person is Trump’s version of the N-word…
+ A 2020 study published in the medical journal Women’s Health Issues showed that expanding Medicaid lowers maternal mortality by about 7 deaths per 100,000 births. The national average is currently about 13 deaths per 100,000 births.
+ Trump on his mysterious MRI at Walter Reed: “I did. I got an MRI. It was perfect. I gave you the full results. We had an MRI, and the machine, you know, the whole thing, and it was perfect. I think they gave you a very conclusive – nobody has ever given you reports like I gave you. And if I didn’t think it was going to be good, either, I would let you know negatively; I wouldn’t run. I’d do something. But the doctor said some of the best reports for the age, some of the best reports they’ve ever seen.”
+ The latest Covid vaccine study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine shows:
– 29% lower risk of COVID-related ER visits
– 39% lower risk of hospitalization
– 64% lower risk of death
+ I don’t know who would take medical advice from this nitwit. While adults are free to do what they want to their own bodies (unless they’re women in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia or trans people in 27 states), this dangerous nonsense shouldn’t be inflicted on infants and toddlers…
+ Following Trump’s know-nothing post, Texas filed suit against the makers of Tylenol, alleging the companies hid the drug’s links to autism, “links” that even RFK doesn’t quite endorse: “The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy in the perinatal periods is not sufficient to say it definitely causes autism.”
+ Speaking of the TradRight’s views of women, here’s Mollie Hemingway, editor of The Federalist, on Fox News: “The base of the Democrat Party really has become angry women and women who are angry tend to be very mean to other women who are smarter or prettier or more successful or braver than they are.”
+ MAGA pastor Josh Webbon has an even more degraded and unfiltered take on the state of American women:
Women are atrocious today. They are…they are immodest. They’re whores. They’re dumb, right, literally intellectually unintelligent. They are shallow. They are deceitful. They are wicked. They are vile. They vote for trannies. I’m not making it up. It is a forty-five, objectively, forty-five-point difference between young men and young women today. A forty-five-point difference. Women are radical progressives.
+++
+ As a counter to this filth, meet the new leader of the Poblacht na hÉireann…
+ Catherine Connolly won the highest share of 1st preference votes in any Irish presidential election
2025 Connolly 63.4%
2018 Higgins 55.8%
2011 Higgins 39.6%
1997 McAleese 45.2%
1990 Robinson 38.9%
1973 Childers 52%
1966 DeValera 50.5%
1959 DeValera 56.3%
1945 O’Kelly 49.5%
+ Newly elected (in a landslide) Irish President Catherine Connolly: “History did not begin on October 7. It’s important to point out the history of the many atrocities committed by the Israeli regime. Western countries should have no say about Hamas. They should stop the genocide. Hamas is part of the fabric of the Palestinian people. Israel is acting as a terrorist state; they have gone absolutely out of control.”
+ The Daily Mail is experiencing a bit of a freak-out over the landslide victory of Catherine Connolly…
+++
+ Trump on Reagan, Version 1: “I’m a huge fan of Ronald Reagan, but he was bad on trade. Very bad on trade.”
+ Trump on Canadian ad featuring Reagan, Version 2: “They cheated on a commercial. Ronald Reagan loved tariffs and they said he didn’t. And I guess it was AI or something. They cheated badly. Canada got caught cheating on a commercial. Can you believe it?”
+ Reagan on tariffs: didn’t love them, not AI, no cheating:
+ The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: “The MAGA crowd likes to dismiss Ronald Reagan as irrelevant today, but apparently he still matters to President Trump. How else to explain Mr. Trump’s tantrum against Canada after the province of Ontario invoked the Gipper on trade in a television ad?…
+++
The devastating opening paragraph of Becca Rothfeld’s blistering review of Biden’s former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s atrocious, self-flattering account of her inept tenure in the Biden White House…
+ The Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka has been banned from entering the United States. The petulant Trump State Department revoked the visa of the Nigerian writer this week. Though no reason for the travel ban has been given, it likely stems from Soykina’s comparison after the 2016 election of Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. The 91-year-old Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, said:
It’s not about me. I’m not really interested in going back to the United States. But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.
+ Mehdi Hasan at the DC No Kings protest: “Two of Trump’s three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that Americans are not willing to do!”
+ Speaking of the No Kings rallies, what about a prohibition on Queens (Elizabeth, Isabella, Catherine and Victoria) and aspirant Queens (Meir, Gandhi, Thatcher, Merkel, Hillary)? They’ve proved to be just as authoritarian and bloodthirsty as the Rexes. Catherine the Great “owned” 500,000 humans and had absolute control over several million more. She once gave 100,000 serfs away in a single day and regularly doled them out to her lovers as gifts for satisfactory sexual performances. Even Denis Diderot, her tutor in matters of law and humane government, couldn’t persuade her to free them.
+ This is an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), where I’ve replaced “anti-semite” with “fascist” since I think it applies equally and because Sartre, himself, equated fascism with anti-semitism in the Europe of the 30s and 40s. It certainly resonates with our own predicament.
Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The fascists have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
+ MAGA deep thinker (he smokes a pipe) Joshua Haymes posted a video a few weeks back in which he urged his fellow Christian nationalists to start defending the institution of slavery. According to Haymes, Biblical scripture proves that “it is not inherently evil to own another human being.”
+ Jacob Silverman, author of the scorching new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, on the week in Trumplandia:
Donald Trump is demolishing part of the White House, launching artillery shells over California highways to intimidate protesters, and AI fantasizing about shitting on the American people. Just describing current events, not thundering metaphors.
+ Fox News’ Steve Doocy bragged about Trump being a “strongman”, based on his appearances on pro-wrestling shows in the 80s: “If you want a leader who is strong, that is what Donald Trump exudes. You go back in the history of WWE and Donald Trump, back in the 80s, was a regular participant… They just went on Bluesky, and they are a really compelling strongman image.”
+ Here’s some manly man talk from the strongman Prez:
That was the swimming pool where Jackie would say, I hear women inside. Are women inside? Quite famous, I’m not saying anything, this is part of the movie. The secret service, no, ma’am, there are no women inside. I’m sorry, ma’am, you have to move along. But I hear women inside. No, ma’am, you have to move along.
+ E. Jean Carroll on Donald Trump: “I don’t understand how people can be afraid of a fat elderly man who wears apricot makeup, his hair done up like Tippi Hedren in The Birds.”
+ Karl Sharro: “I’m surprised to learn this week that French and British museums consider theft wrong.”
+ Herbie Hancock on the remarkable Jack DeJohnette, who died this week at 78:
I first met Jack when he was about 20. I brought him on as a bass player, not realizing he was usually hired as a drummer, but I already had a one. I learned Jack really wanted to be a piano player. He always played the drums with a pianist’s sense of melody, color, and harmony.
+ Richard Beck on Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, a noir called Shadow Ticket: “One detects a writer who has finally lost patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious consequences of their own country’s actions.”
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Femme Fatale
Mon Laferte
(Sony)
Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2
Melvin Gibbs
(Hausu Mountain)
Silver in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse
Horace Silver Quintet
(Blue Note)
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Playing in Peoria
Matthew Stevenson
(Odysseus Books)
Challenging the Myths of US History: Seven Essays on the Past and Present
Marc Egnal
(California)
The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race and the Struggle for Work in America
Melissa Burch
(Princeton)
The Kind of Guts a Real Democracy Depends On
“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”
–Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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