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What Should Be In Labor Day Media Pieces

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The Important Parts You’re Not Likely To Read, Even in the Few That Actually Cover What Labor Is About.

Too much of what gets covered about labor is from a top-down view. It’s about the big corporations hailed as “job creators” and about states in a race to the bottom regarding corporate taxes, which is supposedly good for workers. Labor Day is a good time to look at the flip side.

We have this myth that our economy is dependent on the big players, the big companies, the big investors. The big players are a welcome, and sometimes efficient, part of the economy, but we are not dependent on them. Actually the opposite is true.

Wealth: It is created by the combination of someone pulling a business together, and the workers who do the work. The mountains of cash it takes to start a big operation would be nothing more than worthless paper, the raw materials would never be more than just that, the assembly line idle, if the sweat, work and labor of employees was not a partner in the deal.

Supply: Existing companies, especially large ones, can sometimes ramp up production of some needed good quickly. If they didn’t, though, small entrepreneurs would spring up to fill any unmet need. It can be a couple of brothers in San Bernadino starting one little burger joint that grows into MacDonalds. It can be a couple guys in a garage that grow into an Apple Computer because other computer companies were missing the small computer need. It can be a million individual construction contractors who literally build much of the nation, one house at a time

Capital: The money to start or expand businesses can come from a few big investors, or many small ones. Money loaned by banks comes from the many savers, big and small. Investments may come from a big player like Warren Buffett, or to a great extent from things like mutual funds and pension funds which pool the money of many small investors.

Demand: Rich consumers buy more, but they still only buy so much. To have a healthy economy it takes darn near everyone having the money to buy what they need to keep the economy going.

Labor: Despite technological advances and outsourcing, when the economy is doing well it takes darn near everyone who can work, to be working. And when there is an extended period of plenty of jobs we find they do. Creating a nation’s worth of sufficient wealth takes many, many hands.

Big corporations do often lead the way on advanced technology but how are they able to do that? A big corporation decides a department is needed to develop tech products. How does that wish become reality? By the hard and competent work of many administrators and engineers. How do the tech advances then happen? Each big advance is the result of many small advances, each discovered and developed by clever engineers or teams of engineers. As I’ve written in the past, Apple did not develop the iPhone. Engineers within Apple did. The many clever and diligent employees who labor in tech.

Labor takes all forms, from the carpenter and the office administrator, to the high level manager and even the CEO. We need them all doing what they’re good at. We’re all in this economy together. The labor of all can be honored on Labor Day. There is nothing biased against the CEO or the big investor in this view from the bottom up.

But we need to break this almost hypnotic notion that we are dependent on what’s big. The opposite really is true. Without enough consumers, there is not enough market for big companies to make huge profits. Without enough laborers, there are not enough hands to turn the raw materials into sellable products. The capital, as noted, can come from the few or the many.

So all are welcome, and all can be honored on Labor Day. But there is nothing in the free-market system that requires big, wealthy, powerful players to make it work. The wealth of this nation would never have come about but for the market of the many, the spending of the many (when their work is paid decently), the labor of the many, big and small. Happy Labor Day.

Adapted from my book, “US: Everything is done by us. We can make it for us


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The post  What Should Be In Labor Day Media Pieces appeared first on DCReport.org.

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DGA51
12 hours ago
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Energy Transition: What It Means for Oil and Gas Trading

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The global energy transition is one of the most significant structural shifts in recent economic history, fundamentally altering how the energy markets function and posing new challenges for oil and gas trading. While the world moves towards cleaner energy, traditional fossil fuel markets are experiencing record volatility and transformation.

The Changing Energy Landscape

The cost of renewable energy has decreased over the past decade, and wind and solar power are increasingly price-competitive with conventional fuel sources. Falling costs influence long-run projections for demand in oil and gas, forcing traders to reassess underlying assumptions on future market direction. The transition also introduces policy-driven market distortions as governments implement carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards, and fossil fuel phase-outs. 

Market Volatility and Trading Implications

Oil prices respond not only to traditional supply and demand but also to levels of renewable energy deployment, electric vehicle adoption, and climate policy developments. This longer list of determinants of prices makes price forecasting more complex and requires traders to develop new analytical models.

Short-term trading techniques must now account for rapidly shifting sentiment on energy news. Breakthroughs in battery technology or a dramatic climate commitment by a rising economy can trigger large price swings that are outside the scope of traditional supply-side analysis. Environment, social, and governance (ESG) considerations are now being viewed more and more by traders when making investment decisions.

Supply Chain Restructuring

The energy transition is forcing fundamental changes in oil and gas supply chains. Companies are investing heavily in carbon capture technologies, renewable energy projects, and low-carbon fuel production. These investments affect cash flows and operational priorities, influencing supply decisions and market positioning.

Trading firms are adapting by diversifying their portfolios to include renewable energy commodities, carbon credits, and clean technology investments. This diversification helps hedge against long-term fossil fuel demand decline while capturing opportunities in emerging energy markets. The rise of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a “bridge fuel” has also created new trading opportunities, as natural gas is viewed as cleaner than coal for power generation.

Regulatory and Policy Impacts

Climate policies significantly influence oil and gas trading strategies. Carbon border adjustments, fuel quality standards, and emissions regulations create regulatory arbitrage opportunities while adding compliance costs. Traders must navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape where environmental policies can rapidly alter market fundamentals.

The implementation of carbon pricing mechanisms in various jurisdictions adds another layer of complexity to trading decisions. These policies effectively create shadow prices for carbon emissions, influencing the relative competitiveness of different energy sources and trading routes.

Future Outlook for Traders

The transition away from oil and gas will continue reshaping commodities trading for decades to come. Successful traders will need to develop expertise in renewable energy markets, carbon trading, and clean technology trends. While fossil fuels will remain important during the transition period, their role in the global energy mix will steadily diminish.

Adaptation strategies include building capabilities in new energy commodities, developing sophisticated scenario analysis tools, and maintaining flexibility to pivot as market conditions evolve. The energy transition presents both challenges and opportunities for traders willing to evolve their strategies and embrace the changing energy landscape.


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The post Energy Transition: What It Means for Oil and Gas Trading appeared first on DCReport.org.

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DGA51
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The energy transition is forcing fundamental changes in oil and gas supply chains. 
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Pitting Science against Opinion

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Once again, the Donald Trump steamroller has run off the road, this time over Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s obsession with anti-vaccine policies.

Essentially, infection disease doctor Susan Monarez was fired by RFK and then by the White House as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for — as her lawyers put it — standing up for science.

Even as the dismissal took on comic elements of trying to carry out an actual dismissal, the seriousness of the underlying dispute was evident in the immediate resignations of four other senior CDC leaders who basically accuse Team Trump of bad vaccine science, bad agency fund-cutting, bad health decisions for the nation.

The four included Debra Houry, the agency’s deputy director, Daniel Jernigan, head of infection disease work, Demetre Daskalakis, head of immunization and respiratory medicine and Jennifer Layden, who heads public health data and surveillance. As a group, they even connect their departures to what led a guy apparently upset over Covid vaccine hesitancy to shoot up the CDC headquarters last month, killing a police officer.

While Monarez refused to leave, claiming that no one but Trump himself could fire a Senate-approved appointee — prompting a late-night White House dismissal notice — there was no misunderstanding of the basic disagreement. Monarez was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” and rubber-stamping Kennedy’s announced limitations on Covid vaccines — and vaccines against infectious diseases generally.

Naturally, we heard from the Monarez lawyers that RFK was “weaponizing public health for political gain.” Of course, it irked the White House that Monarez reached out to Sen Bill Cassidy, R-La., a medical doctor who has pressured Kennedy over keeping his hands off vaccine policies.

Monarez was the CDC’s second director since January, after Trump appointee David Weldon could not win Senate confirmation — over his anti-vaccine views.

One must wonder what the hiring conversation between Kennedy and Monarez was. How did Kennedy not know that Dr. Monarez would stand up for actual science when RFK was going to appoint a vaccine-review board stocked with anti-vaccine advocates?

Fighting Disease with Politics

As with the firing of Lisa Cook from the Fed board of governors, this CDC decapitation has nothing to do with skill or experience, and everything to do with obedience and loyalty to an agenda that may have nothing to do with reality.

As things stand, the CDC is leaderless, just at the outset of another season for flu and Covid, a growing measles proliferation just as schools are opening, and as tariffs and trade issues are complicating pharmaceutical production worldwide. In an Aug. 19 statement, the CDC estimated that Covid infections “are growing or likely growing in 36 states, declining or likely declining in 0 states.”

The irony here is that it is the same Trump who claims full credit for giving Big Pharma a billion dollars to jump start quick creation of a Covid vaccine in his first term, only to have appointed the nation’s most outspoken anti-vax as head of America’s health agencies — because Kennedy joined his presidential campaign.

Kennedy and his allies have long criticized the CDC as too deferential to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine makers. Kennedy has taken steps to narrowing approval of Covid vaccines to high-risk groups, ended research funds for mRNA vaccines,  has replaced health reviewers with anti-vaxxers whose medical research is seen by peers as spotty, has said we are doing well with measles because there are only a thousand cases so far. RFK has revived a task force to scrutinize the childhood immunization schedule, and promised to unveil environmental risks, including vaccines, that boost childhood autism.

From news reports, Kennedy pushed Monarez to fire her senior staff by the end of this week, which she refused to do. Monarez said she would not support changing coronavirus vaccine policy without consulting her advisers, and the resign-or-be-fired sequence followed.

In emails reviewed by news organizations and various public remarks, the CDC leaders basically say Kennedy is not heeding either science and medicine or the available information about communicable diseases to rely instead on those who tell him what he wants to hear about alternative, unproved theories that make Americans less safe.

That sounds similar to complaints from dismissed employees in Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the shuttered consumer protection bureau, the Education Department and across the Trump government.

In recent weeks, the CDC has been under pressure from Kennedy’s allies to grant access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink that is managed in part by large health systems towards finding purported links between vaccines and autism. This effort is led by Davie Geier, a discredited researcher. Kennedy told a Cabinet meeting this week that his staff was likely to have a preliminary answer to the cause of autism in September.

The war between expertise and a Trump agenda with loose ties to reality rolls on.

TAKE ACTION

Contact Key Federal Agencies & Officials

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS)

HHS Immediate Office Staff

Contact Congressional Oversight Committees

Oversight of HHS and the CDC typically falls under these congressional bodies:

House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation

Other Key Targets for Advocacy

You may also consider contacting your own representatives—Senators and House members—especially those on health-related subcommittees, public health advocates, or local media. You can find them using tools like Congress.gov Find Your Member page Congress.gov.

 

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The post Pitting Science against Opinion appeared first on DCReport.org.

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DGA51
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"obedience and loyalty to an agenda that may have nothing to do with reality."
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The AI Bubble Is Collapsing. What Will The Crazy Billionaire Fucksticks Do?

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These are dark times, but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 $25 a year until Monday at midnight during the Labor Day sale!

50% off for a year?! Wow!

We are in the middle of one of the largest bubbles in history, and it’s getting ready to pop. Maybe. All economic bubbles are irrational, but there’s something different about the AI bubble that may allow it to defy economic reality (temporarily), and it’s not clear how dangerous this will be. What happens if a bubble bursts but then keeps inflating anyway? Presumably nothing good.

Let me set the stage for you here, and please bear in mind I am no Paul Krugman. I’ll do my best to be a huge nerd, though. :)

OK, the tech giants are betting big on AI. This, we all know because they won’t shut the fuck up about it. What you might not be aware of is that they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, many many hundreds of billions, in a race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence. Whoever wins the race wins…everything. That’s the idea here.

It’s hard to understand exactly how much money they’re pouring into this, so here’s a handy chart and a little explanation from Mr. Krugman:

The chart below shows the changes between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025 in real GDP and some of its components. Investment in information processing equipment — which at this point basically means data centers — accounted for more than half of overall growth, more than consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the economy:

That’s over $80 billion just in Q2 of this year. So far, the tech fucks have dropped $155 billion this year, and they’re INCREASING the amount of money being spent. By 2028, they’ll be blowing well over half a trillion a year on AI.

So all of the money you and I spend on movies and groceries and toys and clothes and books and eating out and and and? All of that money is being dwarfed by the tech fucks on data centers to create their alleged all-powerful AIs.

Even as our spending drops because Trump and his party of imbeciles have killed the strongest economy in half a century, the techbros are ramping up their spending. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money.

And it’s not working.

You may have noticed that Google search today, compared to just three years ago, is trash. It’s about as trustworthy as Donald Trump around a 14-year-old girl and a bottle of Viagra. But, hey, those are just vibes, right? What do we stupid civilians know? AI is obviously a game-changer for Corporate America and they’re making bank on it!

But are they? Turns out the answer is complicated. And by “complicated,” I mean “No, they fucking are not.”

Wall Street's biggest fear was validated by a recent MIT study indicating that 95% of organizations studied get zero return on their AI investment.

Why it matters: Investors have put up with record AI spend from tech companies because they expect record returns, eventually. This study calls those returns into question, which could be an existential risk for a market that's overly tied to the AI narrative.

Driving the news: MIT researchers studied 300 public AI initiatives to try and suss out the "no hype reality" of AI's impact on business, Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.

95% of organizations found zero return despite enterprise investment of $30 billion to $40 billion into GenAI, the study says.

So AI doesn’t work on the user level and…it doesn’t work on the corporate level. That doesn’t seem to be a good reason to set half a trillion dollars on fire per year.

Then there are big picture issues of energy and resources. AI requires massive amounts of electricity to run, and the systems the tech fucks are planning far exceed what the grid can handle. Even as they race to build nuclear power plants to power their bloated data centers, AI will chew up an increasingly larger amount of what IS available, increasing the cost of electricity for everyone else:1

Individuals may end up footing some of the bill for this AI revolution, according to new research published in March. The researchers, from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, analyzed agreements between utility companies and tech giants like Meta that govern how much those companies will pay for power in massive new data centers. They found that discounts utility companies give to Big Tech can raise the electricity rates paid by consumers. In some cases, if certain data centers fail to attract the promised AI business or need less power than expected, ratepayers could still be on the hook for subsidizing them. A 2024 report from the Virginia legislature estimated that average residential ratepayers in the state could pay an additional $37.50 every month in data center energy costs.

Enjoy sitting in the dark so Chat GPT can give you a shitty answer that is completely wrong while paying through the nose for the privilege, I guess?

“The recipe for chocolate pudding is milk and four pounds of mud.”

Oh, and don’t forget the fresh water data centers guzzle. They’re draining it faster than Fox News drains the IQ points of its audience. That’s going to be unsustainable in the long run as fresh water becomes scarcer due to the climate change the tech pricks are making worse.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Ogres eat Techbros

Alright, so the tech doesn’t work right, it requires too many resources to be practical, and the return on investment is all but non-existent. Also, it’s possibly the most expensive technology ever developed, and it is almost single-handedly propping up the economy.

This is the definition of a bubble and the press and the market are starting to sour on it:

What happens next? Normally, the bubble pops, the economy crashes and we all get very mad at immigrants. Just kidding. Sort of.2

But these are not normal times.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably have some idea that the tech fucks are, quite literally, insane. They believe, REALLY believe, that they will become immortal digital gods and the rest of humanity can fuck off and die as long as they achieve their goal of silicon life eternal.

Émile P. Torres and Kate Willett do a far better job of digging into the religion/cult of Silicon Valley, but for the purposes of this article, it’s important to understand that this religion/cult is very widespread in the tech world and has a very tight grip on a lot of very powerful people.

The key to all of their beliefs is the birth of true AI. It’s literally their messiah. True AI, a program that is truly intelligent, not just programmed to carry out tasks faster than humans, will, the theory goes, be able to create more advanced AI. That more advanced AI will create an even more advanced AI, and so on until we have a super-intelligent AI beyond anything humans can possibly comprehend. This event is called “The Singularity,” and it’s what the techbros are feverishly working towards.

A super-intelligent AI would be able to solve just about any problem, specifically, how to make humans immortal digital gods, blablabla.

Do you see the problem here?

The billionaires who own the companies pouring hundreds of millions into a broken technology do not care about the money they are losing. They don’t care about profits. They don’t care about the economy or the environment or how many people they will harm or kill in the process.

They literally believe they are building God, and when they do, they will be rewarded with eternal life.

So, how does a bubble collapse if the people inflating it won’t allow it to collapse? This is what is freaking me out, and something I have not seen anyone discussing. The people who discuss the cult of Silicon Valley have not been discussing the economic ramifications of their bubble. The people who discuss the bubble do not appear aware of the Silicon Valley cult. I really REALLY need these two circles on the Venn diagram to overlap and figure out what happens next because I feel like the results are going to be catastrophic beyond anything I can imagine.

No bubble can stay inflated forever, and the longer the tech shits keep it going artificially, the worse the crash is going to be when they finally hit the wall of reality. Worse, when they finally run out of other people’s money to spend on their dream of immortality (God forbid they bankrupt themselves!), they’re going to face the awful truth: They will not become immortal digital gods.

What is the one thing we know about rich white men when they don’t get what they want? They lash out and destroy everything around them. So how do you think these entitled, insane, and deeply fascist billionaire assholes are going to respond when they realize that the cold, icy hand of death is going to claim them just like all of the pathetic little “NPCs” they’ve spent their lives sneering at?

Yeah, not well.

I’d rather not wait to find out what the next temper tantrum of the Silicon Valley death cult looks like. The pro-fascist human extinction tantrum we’re living through right now is more than enough, thank you very much.

When we topple the regime, and we will, one of our top priorities has to be kicking down the doors of the doomsday bunkers of all the tech fucks and putting them in prison for the rest of their lives. They need to be kept far away from their money and power, ensuring they can never inflict their diseased worldview on us again.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 $25 a year during the Labor Day Weekend Sale! Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 66 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

1

That’s on top of the Trump regime gutting the very renewables that could have mitigated this strain because climate change is a hoax and windmills make Orange King sad.

2

What? How else do you think Republicans keep us from killing them every time they wreck the economy and leave millions of us destitute?

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DGA51
2 days ago
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When will the sun set on the USA?

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I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?

Yes, I’m going there.

 

As we all know, the continental United States has four time zones:

US time zone map ultimate collection-download and print for free.

— so when the sun sets in Seattle today, at 7:54 PM, it will be nearly midnight in New York or Miami.

However!  There’s much, much more to the US than just the 48 contiguous or “continental” states.  Let’s zoom out a little:

Time Zone Map of the United States - Nations Online Project

You’ll notice there’s a pale green band to the east of the US, covering Canada’s Maritime Provinces and a lot of the Caribbean.  This is “Atlantic Time”, and it’s one hour ahead of the US East Coast.  And if you enlarge or peer closely, you’ll see that there are two United States possessions — Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — down in the lower right-hand corner.  So that’s a fifth time zone.

Meanwhile, to the /west/ of the continental USA is Alaska.  And Alaska is so huge that it covers two time zones.  “Mainland” Alaska is an hour behind California and the US West Coast, while the Aleutian Islands are two hours behind. 

Adak National Forest Alaska

[Adak National Forest, Aleutian Islands.  If you know, you know.]

Most of the state of Hawaii is also in this time zone, which is cleverly named the “Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone”.  So when the sun sets in Honolulu at 6:50 PM tonight, it will already be nearly 2 AM in Puerto Rico.

But we’re not done yet.  Continuing west, in the central Pacific we find Midway Atoll and,  a couple of thousand kilometers to the south, the lovely islands of American Samoa (or AmSam, as the cool kids say).  Both are United States possessions — American Samoans are US nationals, thank you very much — and both are an hour behind Hawaii.

And we’re still not quite done.  Because far out in the empty wastes of the blue Pacific are Howland Island and Baker Island.  Located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, these small uninhabited islands are US possessions — formally, they’re “United States Minor Outlying Islands”.  Baker Island is a US National Wildlife Refuge.


Fish and Wildlife sign

And they’re another hour further west — two hours behind Hawaii.

Wow, nine time zones!  Are we done?

Not quite.  Because if we now skip over a time zone and jump back /two/ hours, we will find ourselves in the western Pacific — the same time zone as most of Australia and the Russian Far East.  And here we will find more American territory: Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI).  Despite being way the heck over on the far side of the Pacific, much closer to Shanghai or Manila than to California or even Hawaii, these are all US islands inhabited by US citizens. 


Map of Guam and the Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, courtesy of ...

So in total, from the Caribbean to the CNMI, the USA stretches across an eye-watering 11 time zones.

The capital and largest island of the CNMI is Saipan.  And when the sun sets on Saipan at 7:17 PM tonight, it will be 5:17 AM in the US Virgin Islands.  The sun will rise there at 6:04 AM.  So — it seems — there will be about 45 minutes of night on America.  11 time zones is a lot, but it’s not quite enough.  Maybe the Sun never set on the British Empire, but it does set on the USA, at least sometimes. 

(I actually checked to see if adding territorial waters would make a difference.  That gives us an extra 12 miles each way.  Nope — it only adds another couple of minutes of sunshine.  Adding the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone would nearly do it, but that would be, in my opinion, cheating.)  

Saipan Sunset

[actual Saipan sunset, yes it really looks like that]


But wait!  The United States also extends quite far /north/.  Its northernmost point is at Point Barrow, on the northernmost coast of Alaska.  Point Barrow is about nine miles / 15 km north of the surprisingly large and busy town of Utqiagvik, which is pronounced like it’s spelled.  If you fly into Utqiagvik — you can’t drive there, no road reaches it — it’s easy to get a ride up to Point Barrow, weather permitting.

Point Barrow Alaska - No Roads In Or Out - TRAVEL USA LIFE

At over 71 degrees north, Point Barrow is well above the Arctic Circle.  This means it is in the Land of the Midnight Sun.  Specifically, it means that the Sun stays above the horizon for months at a time, from April through August.

Right now, the Sun is spiraling lower and lower.  It’s grazing the horizon for several hours per day.  But it hasn’t actually set, not quite yet.  It won’t formally, officially go down for a few more days:  September 5, 2025.

And so at last we have our answer.  When will the sun set on the United States of America?

Next week.

 

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DGA51
2 days ago
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Interesting geography lesson.
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Trump’s Dictatorship Has Arrived

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Trump’s Orwellian Propaganda Is Now In Full Bloom, and It Is Delusional

Donald Trump’s takeover and takedown of rules, law and culture are only widening, furthering deep divisions and putting U.S. intelligence capabilities, democratic principles and independence, the supremacy of law and even elections at risk of irrelevance to his unending demand for power.

For those who have feared autocracy and abuse of power, the era has already arrived. For those who see cruelty in this administration’s actions, and elements of “fascism” that parallel other autocracies and Naziism in the 1930s, Trump is delivering on a near-daily basis now — including public acknowledgement that Americans want a dictator, which he says he isn’t, to lower street crime.

The redistricting madness combined with attacks on voting laws, mail-in ballots, and state conduct of elections is not only supposed to be beyond Trump’s authority but attack the republic itself.

Trump’s attacks on businesses, colleges, museums, the constant need to rewrite history, the widening of immigrant deportations and the presence or promise of military in the streets now being honed to stop civil protest all are setting off screams of dissent.

Even Trump fans are starting to react as they recognize ill effects of policies that are cutting public health care benefits while consumer prices rise, and Trump oversteps protected First Amendment rights, extorts ownership positions in private companies and covers up whatever ill information is being hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

If you were writing to a faraway friend, you would be describing a nation caught in constant tension, of fraught effects and feelings as embers of ethnic hate are enflamed and identity populations are turned against one another.  The message: In a time of growing chaos, there is one Dear Leader to heed, and that’s why we should recognize huge Trump portraits being unfurled on the sides of federal buildings and the constant turn to Trump Social posts for daily announcements as signs of growing dictatorship.

Daily Challenges

The daily specifics hardly seem to matter — to Trump and, increasingly to a numbed public. Each bleeds into the next, along with the inevitable court challenges that start strong and get watered down through appeals months later.

Using a public White House meeting with the president of ally South Korea to praise the dictator of North Korea only makes sense in a Trump-ordered world. Declaring flag burning a crime as desecration but putting Trump campaigns on flags would be hypocrisy writ-large outside of this White House.

Of course, Trump crossed the law by firing Lisa Cook from the Fed board; it’s beyond his legal power to do so, even if Trump sees the move as pressuring for lower interest rates. But as with tariffs, immigration orders, federalizing National Guard troops, Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him. There are enough justices on the Supreme Court to let him do most whatever he wants in his count.

For sure, putting masked federal agents on the streets of Washington and placing 2,200 armed National Guardsmen and their equipment is a public relations show and not an effective crime stopper. But Trump is telling us what is happening and threatening the licenses or economics of any news organization that says different.

Threats, fear, extortion, pressure are prime tools for Trump. It turns out he needs the world’s most lethal military not because we have actual enemies overseas, but because he wants to aim those weapons at Black mayors and Democratic mayors. In Trump World, optics are everything, and the resulting absurdity of (illegally) renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War makes perfect sense to ensure that his political foes recognize that they are targeted enemies. Unable to win his own Kennedy Center honors for being a reality show figure, he has needed to take over the whole complex and show, pick loyalists as winners, and name himself the host.

Scrambling Aftermath

What we do get from news reports is the sense of scramble among states, agencies, and localities to clean up the aftermath of Trump executive order bombardments that may be based on little relevant information. So we’re smashing FEMA emergency responders and National Weather Service capabilities just as we enter hurricane season in a climate-changing environment. We are canceling wind and solar energy production just as we are hearing of huge gaps coming for electric grids to meet the needs of Artificial Intelligence and Trump’s newly converted love and personal investment in cyber trading. Moving against vaccines as a new Covid outbreak lurks seems nuts.

Trump is so busy telling us about the wars he has settled that he misses the point that almost none of the claimed settlements is working. Worse, he refuses to face down Russia in Europe, or to either force Hamas to release hostages or for the Israeli government to deal with the starvation it is causing in Gaza or the land-grabbing in the West Bank.

Trump may aspire for greatness but only offers solutions that fit on hats. He solves nothing.

Lest the day pass without Trump declarations, he is telling us that slavery is less important and less distressing for our history than our museums tell us, and that it somehow is the job for all Americans to look past job numbers or prices to recognize the bright new day on the horizon.

Trump’s Orwellian propaganda is now in full bloom, and it is delusional.


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The post Trump’s Dictatorship Has Arrived appeared first on DCReport.org.

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DGA51
3 days ago
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Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him.
Central Pennsyltucky
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