One year ago, Republicans were pretty sure they had a path to victory. The Senate was a steep uphill climb for Democrats, and Republicans had a plan. They were going to gerrymander so many safe Republican seats, Democrats would never win a majority ever again. It was foolproof!

Well, they forgot about the biggest fucking fool in the country: Donald Trump, the drooling imbecile they put in charge of their party. How’s that working out for them?

US Grocery Prices Saw Their Sharpest Rise in 50 Years, and They’re Still Not Coming Down

Inflation stayed hot in August with annual pace of 3.4%, raising the odds of a Fed hike

Oh, cool. So everything is going down the shitter as fast as humanly possible? Who could have possibly foreseen that kicking off a war that would close a vital source of oil while also intensifying a trade war with our closest trading partner would have an astonishingly negative effect on our economy?

Besides, of course, everyone who understands high school-level economics? Because let’s be honest: I’m no economist and I fully grasp the concept here. This shit ain’t rocket science. Drive up the price of gas, especially diesel, which is what freight trucks run on, and everything gets more expensive. Start a trade war with Canada, and shit gets more expensive. When shit gets more expensive, people get really mad at the party in power.

A+B+C=Republicans are fucked.

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As of this writing, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it’s going to remain that way for as long as Iran wants it to stay that way. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth thought they could bomb Iran into submission, which every military officer who has spent more than ten seconds studying the region would have told was not going to work. And they did.

The only way to break Iran would be a full-scale invasion which would be astronomically costly in terms of blood and treasure. Trump doesn’t actually care about either of those things, but he’s dimly aware that getting 10,000 American soldiers killed would be very unpopular. So we’re stuck threatening and bluffing, which worked for a little while. Now it doesn’t, and no one pays attention to the dying clown with the weird makeup and the stinky diaper who can’t stay awake.

And just for funsies, Iran’s proxies, the Houthis, have also seized control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which closes off the Red Sea. This is where Saudi Arabia was getting its oil out after Hormuz was closed. It was slower, required a pipeline to reach the coast, but it was something. Now there’s nothing, and that’s why oil is back up around $110 a barrel and going higher every day.

Saudi Arabia cannot seem to get a handle on the situation and begged Trump for help. Trump refused, which either suggests that the Saudis have not paid Trump enough in bribes, or that our forces in the Middle East are so degraded because of Trump and Pete Hegseth’s rampant incompetence and sheer stupidity that they cannot provide adequate support.

Just a quick note: Please pay attention to the people cheering for the Houthis. This keeps happening, and they should be fucking ashamed of themselves. Pull them aside and tell them to stop being a fucking asshole. The Houthis are modern-day slavers. They kidnap children, rape them, and then traffic them. Rooting for the Houthis because they oppose Israel and the United States does not make you a moral beacon; it makes you a monster standing with literal pedophiles. It is, in fact, possible not to pick a side in a fight when both sides are repugnant, including your own side. Do better. Don’t side with child-raping slavers. And now back to the matter at hand.

So now, with just seven weeks left to the midterms, Trump has guaranteed the Iran War cannot end. Trump is now getting to the point where he’s draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to critical levels. Will he leave enough for the military in an emergency? Will he drain it to the point where the salt caverns the oil is in begin to collapse, making the rest difficult or impossible to get to? Maybe? If Trump stops tapping the reserve, there will be an immediate spike in gas prices, and he can’t afford that. Better to cripple the nation before taking an electoral hit, right? After all, what is more important? Donald Trump or national defense? What a silly question! Trump, of course!

This is why Trump is now demanding Ukraine stop bombing Russian oil facilities. You see, the world NEEDS Russian oil! So Ukraine should let Russia sell it and fund their war on Ukraine. Ukraine responded to this by immediately bombing another Russian refinery. I guess their answer was a solid, “Fuck you.” Maybe Trump shouldn’t have stopped sending aid? Doesn’t really give them a lot of incentive to listen to us. Oh well.

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So here’s the thing: Canada is not going to back down because they can’t. The Trump regime gave them a list of insane demands which amounted to effectively handing over sovereign control of their country to Trump. If Trump backs down and agrees to a normal trade deal, sure. But Trump always has to be seen “winning,” and that makes for a poor negotiation. After almost two years of this bullshit, Canada is more interested in becoming part of the European Union and securing its economic future that way. This would be catastrophic for the United States but very good for Canada in the long run. Yaaay. America First. In the short run, though, Canada is going to fuck Trump over as hard as possible to ensure his party feels as much pain as possible for the midterms. They know Democrats will do everything to rein in the Mad King, which will be better for Canada.

Iran is doing the exact same thing. Expect them to come to the bargaining table once Democrats control Congress. And expect them to make a lot of noise about how Democrats are the people they want to negotiate with. They know a Democratic president in 2029 will be someone they can make a good-faith deal with and will not launch a sneak attack in the middle of signing a treaty.

Is that a lot of foreign interference in our elections? It sure is. But Republicans were happy when Russia did it covertly, so fuck them and their whining.

It’s important to understand where we are right now. Republicans are down at least ten points in a generic poll among likely voters. Trump is underwater in the polls by a 2-1 margin. He is unpopular in almost every state, including most of the deep DEEP red states that he won in 2024. Republicans are losing on every single issue, including immigration and the economy, which they, historically, have never lost on.

And it’s all going to get worse in the next several weeks as gas gets more expensive, prices continue to go up, and the economy stalls even further. God forbid the AI bubble, already right on the brink of collapse, goes pop and those headlines are splashed all over the country. This close to an election that is already positioned to be a bloodbath for Republicans, any one of those would be “Just fucking kill me already” news. Any combination of them, or all of them?1 Dinosaur-killing asteroid.

The fun part of this is that it’s all self-inflicted. No one made Trump start a war he couldn’t end. No one made Trump escalate the war after he lost it. No one made Trump restart and then escalate a trade war with Canada two months before the midterms. No one made Trump use up all of his mitigation efforts to stabilize the price of oil over the summer. No one made Trump sabotage his own economy over the last eighteen months. No one made Trump dummymnader his safe red seats so much that there is a very real chance Republicans will lose where they shouldn’t have. No one made Trump wage such a violent war on immigrants that he destroyed all of his gain with the Latino community, putting Senate seats into play that should never even be close.

The blue wave was always going to be brutal, but Trump has done everything imaginable to open the floodgates and leave his party of pedophiles and Nazis defenseless. Hell, he’s going out there to campaign and remind everyone what a fucking loser he is and energize Republican Democratic voters by telling the public to love Flock cameras and data centers.

That’s a hell of a closing message. I’m not kidding, Democrats should send Trump a fruit basket and a very nice thank you card. He really is doing all the heavy lifting for them.

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There are just 49 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is doing the dumbest shit imaginable because they are afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

When I was at West Point in the 1960’s, we took a class called “Ordnance Engineering.” They waited until you were a senior to teach it, so you had the advantage of three years of studying calculus, differential equations, and multiple disciplines of applied mathematics such as mechanics of solids, thermodynamics, and mechanics of fluids. In other words, they waited until you had the tools to know how to do it before teaching you what it was they wanted you to do.

The problem at the end of the semester, as I recall, was something like, “Design the tube of a howitzer cannon capable of firing a 100 mm 12-pound warhead 10 miles.” They left out some of the difficult parts of the design, such as the spacing of the rifling in the barrel and the design of the mechanism of the barrel’s breach, where the barrel opened to receive the gunpowder and the projectile. But there were plenty of other variables: How long should the gun tube be? How thick was the tube, from its base to the muzzle where the projectile left the tube? How thick was the steel around the bore of the base of the gun tube holding the propellant and the projectile so when the thing fired, it wouldn’t explode the tube into a thousand pieces? How much standard black powder propellant, by weight, would be necessary to send the 12-pound warhead 10 miles?

There was an early model of one of the first computers, the IBM 360, occupying an entire ice-cold air conditioned and heavily cushioned room in Thayer Hall at that time, but we weren’t using it. We used a slide rule to work the problem, as had been done for decades before then.

Cannons are ancient weapons that date to the 13^th century in China. Cannons in 1969 were the basic weapons of the U.S. Army in assaulting an enemy. Fire the cannons, “soften-up” the target, then move infantry firing small arms forward to take the objective. Warfare was thus across the world and had been for centuries. The problem we were given tested our ability, after three years of study, to move into the future of designing new weapons. If you could design a cannon, one day after more study, you might be designing missiles which would be used in wars of the future.

I can’t recall what my grade was for the problem in Ordnance Engineering that year – probably not sterling – but I completed the work and designed my own gun tube to fire the warhead the required distance.

My point in recounting this story is to describe what it took to design weapons – years of study of very difficult mathematics and science – and then what you got was the most basic of a part of a weapon, the tube of a cannon. You didn’t get the rest of the thing, its breech, firing mechanism, aiming devices, all the stuff that would make it a usable weapon on a battlefield, which would take more years of study of even more difficult math and science. And still, in the end, what resulted was a modern version of an ancient weapon, a cannon.

The U.S. had and still has very, very good cannons – the modern 155 mm Howitzer M114A being the latest variant is capable these days of firing a GPS guided warhead making the weapon extremely precise. At one point, there was even a nuclear warhead for the 155 Howitzer. They showed us a highly classified dummy example in class one day.

At the time I took that class in Ordnance Engineering, we had shipped all kinds of cannons to Vietnam and were firing them at the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong. Today, we’ve got them all over the world, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe. We used them in Iraq in two wars, in Afghanistan, and we still have them in Iraq and on bases in Syria and Jordan. We also have our modern ground-to-ground missile system, the HIMARS, all over the world, which fires missiles further than artillery warheads with great accuracy.

But that was the past.

Today, it doesn’t take all that education in math and engineering and a modern economy to come up with deadly weapons. All it takes is Anthropic’s Claude and a laptop computer, maybe even a smart phone, to design and use a weapon, as Anthropic reported last week, a missile capable of traveling 2,000 kilometers, carrying a hypersonic “glide vehicle,” meaning warhead. Anthropic said “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen” using Claude “in place of human software engineers” managed to create control and guidance and navigation devices, and fired a ballistic missile. The missile failed, Anthropic reported, and “within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.”

The “cell” was the Houthi army in Yemen, a country with a population of 32 million and a nominal GDP of $17 billion, with a per capita GDP of $416. And those are the numbers for the country of Yemen, the one with a government. The Houthi rebels are a breakaway force that controls only part of the country, but the part they control includes the coast of the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, and as of this week, Mayun Island, located right there in the middle of the strategic strait through which billions and billions in trade flows on its way to and from the Suez Canal.

The Houthis have missiles and drones that have been supplied to them by Iran and other “threat actors,” to use the phrase used by Anthropic, and they have been firing those missiles and drones and disrupting shipping in the Red Sea already.

But the news this week is that using the AI technology of Anthropic’s Claude, the Houthis have been able to do for themselves something that until now only countries with great wealth and education systems have been able to do by educating and training people, as I was educated and trained at West Point, to design weapons systems that will one day very, very soon disrupt the entire world.

What should we call this? The democratization of warfare? When people in a country as poor as Yemen are able to develop and use the technology to fire a weapon such as a missile with a warhead capable of traveling 2,000 kilometers – that is not only news, it’s big news. And all they had to do was use an AI system called Claude.

This is why the CEOs of three of the most advanced AI platforms on earth – Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI – agreed with each other in calling for a “slowdown” in development of AI “because of its dangers,” as the Washington Post put it yesterday.

Gee, ya think?

Anthropic reported that Russian “threat actors” designed a kamikaze drone swarm that included targeting technology for class of “person” targets “without a person in the loop.” Anthropic reported there were other uses of Claude by China and Mali. One of them simulated an electronic warfare attack on 12 targets in Taiwan, and another targeted “specific US anti-torpedo and anti-submarine programs,” according to Anthropic. The examples went on and on and included Claude ghost-writing official testimony delivered at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Another instance reported Chinese AI systems such as DeepSeek infiltrating Claude users to get American and European “names, email addresses, company data, and other sensitive data of hundreds of end users.”

And this is just one admission by one AI company, Anthropic, about the way its systems have been misused. Or should it be “used?” It’s becoming apparent that the AI companies have developed this technology without putting controls on who uses them and for what purposes. So what is using and what is misusing? When you turn loose this kind of power on the world, and it becomes available to anyone who can access it…

The three dots at the close of the above sentence are there on purpose. There are no answers to these questions. There is not even an answer to the most important question of them all: what is right and what is wrong when it comes to AI? It’s not built into the systems themselves, because that would mean giving them a sense of morality, which machines do not have. I guess you could build morals into one of the AI systems, but whose morals? We know that the people who have developed and built and own AI companies think that making money and getting rich is something they can all agree on, because that’s what they’re doing. They live in nice houses, they drive great cars, they fly around on Gulfstreams, they give themselves zillion dollar weddings and own massive yachts. But could they agree on such a basic moral as “killing bad, helping others good?”

The beast is in the wild now. The AI systems are out there for anyone to use. Even the Houthi rebels are tapping in and using AI to program and fire a rocket. How long until someone uses AI to develop a nuclear or biological weapon?

Ooops. A young AI engineer from Anthropic already warned us about that last week, before the AI CEOs galloped like crazy trying to get ahead of each other to look like they suddenly give a shit about what they’re doing. But all they did was copy what the young engineer said – it’s happening too fast, and it’s got too much power which is making it too dangerous.

The world has been going in this direction for decades. Humans have been working to make things easier and easier for as long as there have been humans, I guess. Stone age humans developed stone tools and moved on to metal hatchets and knives that were better at cutting and chopping vegetables or meat or each other. Now, in the morning, right beneath this desk at which I sit, a robot vacuum whirrs and makes its rounds picking up cat hair and dust so Tracy and I don’t have to, and I don’t have to tell it a thing. The robot does it on its own, and then it returns to the laundry room and its base vacuums up all the hair and dust into a paper bag. The only human involvement by me or Tracy is to remove the bag and insert a new one.

Apparently, we’ve reached the point where we have made killing as easy as running a vacuum. Robots will do the killing for you. AI will even design the killing machines and pick targets and guide them for you.

Soon – I guess it’s already happening – everyone will be able to do this. That’s what mutually assured destruction has been about. The day that everyone gets the bomb, or so the thinking has gone, nobody will want to use it because everybody else will use their bombs and everyone will be destroyed.

We’re there, folks, and not just nuclear weapons. When everyone can destroy each other by deploying made up social media AI shit depicting one another as thieves or sex criminals or murderers, what’s the use? Nobody will believe any of it if it’s all taken to be fake.

Does any of it matter? When it comes to weapons, it does, because the end result is dead people, and presumably, nobody wants to be dead.

But notice the “body” in “nobody.” That’s a human being. AI isn’t human. What do AI systems think? Will AI come to the same conclusion that humans came did with nuclear weapons about mutual assured destruction? Will AI systems save themselves from each other? Do machines have a soul?

We’re either going to figure out how to give them a soul, or they’re going to take ours.

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Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested.

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front page of its website.

A day or two later, the story disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the NYT found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump’s presidential library.

I found one story in USA Today suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that’s about it.

The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stock markets barely reacted.

Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn’t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump — he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires.

Some are relatively trivial, like steam catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential, like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemies. But he never abandons them for good.

And, in the case of cash handouts, he’s had one big success — the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 — as well as some smaller ones.

In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.

But the US is not a serious country.¹ Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn’t even bothered to vote.

Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal,² sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.

As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time.

¹ Phillips O’Brien has been making this point with respect to foreign policy.

² Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that “this is not who we are”, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are.

For a man who is deathly afraid of losing power in the midterms, Donald Trump is doing everything possible to ensure his party is smashed to dust. From the Senate to your local dog catcher, Trump’s shadow is blotting out the electoral sun for the GOP, and he just will not shut the fuck up.

The billionaires who threw in with the bloated, dying pedophile have got to be wondering if they can get a refund for the defective merchandise they bought. Too late now, fuckos! Everyone hates you just as much as they hate your diapered puppet, and you’re riding the Trump Train all the way down to the bottom of Suicide Canyon. Enjoy the trip. Watch out for the sudden stop at the end.

The Weekend Rewind is pretty easy to put together. It’s mostly just a list of all the work I did that week. But that work still represents hours of time and effort, and not one drop of it using AI (ew). If you enjoy this newsletter, please become a contributing subscriber for just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for all of your support!

Not a fan of long-term subscriptions? That’s OK! I’ll be your one-night stand with a one-time donation through PayPal or Venmo! I’m easy like that! Just don’t tell Mrs. Ogre! 😜

Monday: Labor Day! I didn’t do a goddamn thing! OK, that’s not true. I worked on my D&D campaign. It’s not work if you enjoy it, though, right?

Tuesday: Billionaires are an existential threat to humanity. They have to go.

Wednesday: Recording. 50 nerd points if you know what movie the GIF is from! 20 more if you can tell me without saying the name of the movie.

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: Trump’s convention is great! For Democrats…

Friday: This should be a bigger story.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy

“AI could kill all humans!”—The Unrelenting Psyops of the Chatbot Industrial Complex

In 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed his chatbot had gained sentience. At the time, I was running an AI games studio at a startup…

Read more

2 days ago · 156 likes · 10 comments · Jim Stewartson

For Such a Time as This

How NSPM-7 Will Be Used to Kill Those Who Dissent

I’ve been saving this headline from almost a week ago because it upset me too much to write about it initially. Every time I came back to the story of World Central Kitchen aid workers being slaughte…

Read more

2 days ago · 255 likes · 48 comments · Andra Watkins

The Banter

The Ethics of Post-November Revenge

by Rich Herschlag…

Read more

6 days ago · 27 likes · 6 comments · Rich Herschlag

Baba Was A Witch

When the age of consent was 10

On Notes, I keep seeing people pointing out that the Epstein pedos refer to little girls as “young women” and it’s gross and it needs to stop. Know why men do that? Because that’s how little girls were viewed, once. And it was totally legal…

Read more

3 days ago · 1143 likes · 113 comments · Linda Caroll

The Long Read

Dissent in Bloom

Are You Afraid of the Dark? The AI Industry Is Banking on Blackout Fears

In 2020, America had between 2,600 to 3,000 data centers. By 2026, there were ~5,000 operational facilities…

Read more

11 days ago · 179 likes · 19 comments · Dissent in Bloom 🌻

Twenty-five years after the attacks, a Jewish season of reflection collides with enduring anger, religious division and questions about what America has learned.

Wow, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, are hitting together today, mashing desires for eternal anger and constant forgiveness – and arriving in a season of total confusion about relationships among Jews, Muslims and proponents of a White, Christian America.

As a society, we are witnessing a now-disgraced Rudy Giuliani, the would-be America’s mayor, telling Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Democratic Socialist, to skip the 25^th year commemorations at the former World Trade Center site specifically because he is Muslim, and claims tens of thousands of supporting signatures on a petition.

“It offends me,” said Giuliani, who compares the current mayor to 9/11 terrorists. Mamdani, of course, was a 9-year-old in school when the towers went down. Giuliani has become a central figure in trying to tear down democratic elections.

And we have Donald Trump, rebuffing a visit to the memorial site because 9/11 families want to keep the focus on those 3,000 lost and the firefighters and cops who jumped into the burning buildings to try to save them, rather than enduring yet another political speech from Trump. Indeed, the fantasy news this week was Trump’s pronouncement that that two firefighters literally lifted him up and carried him to safety near Ground Zero. Fact-checkers have widely disputed this account, as there is no evidence verifying it.

And, after 24 years of wars, investigations, funerals and memorials, it turns out that there were 68 boxes with 170,000 documents sitting around untouched at City Hall that showed that New Yorkers were told it was okay to return to Lower Manhattan before it was safe to do so. Indeed, more people are thought dead from cancers and disease related to the attacks than in the towers themselves.

Talk about forgiveness. These people have a whole lot of soul-searching and repentance that is overdue for an administration that has hate and division at its core, the destruction of democracy, and the advocacy of a new religious nation state in its vision.

What Does Rosh Hashanah Ask Us to Reflect On?

Okay, it’s a Jewish holiday, but the themes are rather universal, wouldn’t you say? Taking time to consider what you and I have done in the previous year or years that stepped on other people, that cheated, belittled, debased others. And promising to turn the page in a symbolic Book of Life that portends more godly behaviors, more concern for others than self.

For Jews, these high holy days are coming amid a rash of questions about whether being Jewish requires acceptance of objectionable, militaristic and property-grabbing policies of a right-wing government in Israel – the only official Jewish state – just because Israel came about after the horrors of the Holocaust.

We cannot be Jewish or Muslim or Christian just because someone wants to fight us, to eliminate us. Indeed, these religions and resulting ethnologies have evolved over the positives of finding community.

The insistence on the rest of the world deciding for Jews that Zionism, which has turned into ever-expanding control over disputed lands back to pre-Biblical times, is the same as the American or European Jewish experience is simply wrong-headed. The confabulation has led to unnecessary and unwanted violence against American Jews and Muslims, without distinction about what is government policy, what is “Israel” and what any of it has to do with running for Senate or City Hall in this country.

Trump, of course, decided that any Jewish person voting for a Democrat shows a “total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”, stating that they “hate their religion” and everything about Israel.  Jews don’t need Trump to define their politics, religious life, or ethnicity issues.

Israel can’t even figure out what “Israel” means, with pre-election fighting about how religious to be or not, whether the most religious must serve army duty, whether Israeli foreign policy requires raising money through AIPAC to influence Congress to continue to underwrite military aid but never ask questions.

Jews and Muslims come with various political philosophies, of course. They are not any more conforming than other groups in America who think gas costs too much and that we should have a central strategy before going to war.  As Mamdani has shown in New York, we can separate a creative ability for a mayor to get the garbage picked up, the buses to run a little faster, and expand childcare without putting his personal opinions about Middle East politics at the top of the agenda.

For Jews, the holidays are consuming enough in normal times, with required self-assessment and self-fixing at their core. In these times, the job of atonement seems far more complex. October 7 still rings as an international 9/11 perpetrated on Jews from a Palestinian Gaza that felt unseen, unheard, unrecognized.

How much retribution is enough is an open question.

What Does 9/11 Mean to Americans 25 Years Later?

The continuing feelings of violation over the 9/11 attacks drive anger rather than any level of sympathy for root causes. The continuing feelings of pride for the heroes of that day, many average citizens like those aboard Flight 93 who reacted on route to the ramming of the Pentagon, do not wash away the images of the many in the towers who jumped to their deaths on that very clear morning.

The lessons of 9/11 are hardly the stuff of MAGA and militarism or of more liberal views about public responsibilities to those most vulnerable in our society. The real lessons have little to do with the politicians and the speechifying that goes on in the name of infusing a kind of patriotism for some Americans and not others.

Can 9/11 Remembrance Also Be a Call for Atonement?

Perhaps the 9/11 memorial should serve as a kind of call for atonement for Americans, something more than surfaced anger, something about maintaining an America that others around the world want to have as partner and protector.

We seem to be using the 9/11 memorial in quite some different way – as a cudgel for removing immigrants, making it much more difficult for our allies to do business with us, as an excuse to mold a “golden age” for an America run by billionaires, not Americans.

Let us write a better page for the Book of Life.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post 9/11 Meets Rosh Hashanah: A Time for Remembrance and Atonement appeared first on DCReport.org.

You know, in previous elections, the press swooned over independent voters. They were pretty much the only ones anyone wanted to talk about. They would determine who won, after all! So of course the press wanted to put them center stage! Especially when they were leaning toward Republicans. Whoooooo boy. Then independents were THE most important story.

Never mind voter enthusiasm or how much one party approved or disapproved of their own elected officials. The independent voter was THE story. Until now, anyway.

I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been seeing the press obsessing over them. Why every other headline hasn’t been about which party they’re leaning towards. Now I know: Independents really REALLY do not like Trump, and that is not the narrative the press wants to tell. It’s already bad news for the party of kiddie porn and treason; why put the final nails in the coffin so early, right?

But just how bad is it for Trump and his party of white nationalist pedophile grifters?

Well, in the 2018 midterms, Trump had a +10 approval among independents on the economy. He was -18 in terms of popularity, but on the economy itself, independents were like, “Eh, he’s not that bad!”

These days? Trump is doing…less well:

Yes, you are, in fact, reading that correctly. Trump went from a +10 to -52. That’s a 62-point swing in the wrong direction. His net approval also dropped from -18 in September of 2018 to -50 today. Trump is almost THREE times as unpopular as he was eight years ago.

Allow me to remind you that in 2018, Republicans lost 40 House seats in 2018. It was an extremely brutal Senate map that year, so they actually picked up two Senate seats, but lost SEVEN gubernatorial elections. Republicans also lost 234 seats in state legislatures across the country, resulting in Democrats taking control of 7 chambers. Womp womp.

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Now, Republicans have gerrymandered the shit out of the House, so they probably will not lose 40 seats this time. 20? 25? That’s a good night for the GOP. The chances of them retaining the Senate dwindle by the day. And while they gerrymandered the House, they did not redraw state legislature seats, and Republicans have been getting demolished in special elections since last year in even deep DEEP red districts in even deep DEEP red states. 234 lost seats would be a very VERY good day for Republicans.

It’s important to point out that as of this writing, oil is up to $104.56 a barrel. On Thursday, it almost reached $110. Diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time ever. We have used up our mitigation efforts that were keeping energy costs (barely) in check. On top of this, cold weather is increasingly moving into the Northern states, meaning sticker shock from heating bills will be in the headlines very soon. There are still seven weeks until the election.

That is a lot of time for public sentiment to get even worse. And that’s assuming nothing new and dramatic happens, like the AI or banking bubble popping, both of which are teetering on the edge of collapse, along with the stability of the Dollar thanks to the regime’s reckless trade wars and economic “policy.”

At this point, nothing can save Trump and his party of fascist perverts from being curbstomped in November. They can’t start a new war to whip up patriotic fervor. We’re already in one, and we lost. They can’t fabricate an immigrant invasion while also insisting the border is completely under control. The next totally real and definitely not faked assassination attempt against Trump will not convince anyone to run out and vote. There just aren't enough ICE agents to assault enough polling sites to drive away enough voters to tip enough elections, and the military certainly isn’t going to do it no matter how much little Pete Hegseth stomps his feet and holds his breath.

That last forlorn hope of having the Supreme Court throw out all the votes? I wouldn’t bet on it. As corrupt as they are, throwing out millions of votes across all 50 states will be a bridge too far, even for them. Remember, stealing an election has to be plausible. Maybe enough to steal a Senate seat. Maybe one or two House seats. But dozens of seats and multiple Senate races? It’s too much and too obvious.

Trump will have to resort to far more blunt and stupid methods, and the country has no appetite for another attempted coup. Trump doesn’t have the clout or the popularity for it. So…good luck with that. Tick-tock, you fascist fuck.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 16 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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