Sunshine. Blue sky. Cool now — 68 degrees — but climbing into the upper 80s again today.
Reports from the Eastern Front were about Mom suffering. A storm knocked out power. Afterward, the temperature climbed into the upper 80s and the humidity was high. Mom was in pain with headaches and other problems. Nothing we could do…
When Mom and I text, she often repeats the same questions and statements, frequently almost word for word.
My sister, Gina, sent texts relating all that remains to be done on Mom’s house, and the progress of things. She’s doing the work of five of us. But she’s supposed to be going on vacation two weeks from now, plans established last year. The house closing is scheduled for July 23, which suddenly seems very close.
Despite Trump’s talk of peace deals and the war being over, Trump’s war with Iran grinds on. Trump said something like we could get a deal as early as this weekend, but he’ll say anything.
A report came out in the “The Independent” that Trump’s support among Independent voters is sinking. The losses are among young Independent voters, along with Hispanic voters. Trump’s support with older, white Indpendent voters is unchanging.
A lot of the news is about Elon Musk becoming richer, thanks to the SpaceX IPO. Paul Krugman did a fine job of relating how little Musk actually accomplishes to become as wealthy as he is. Like Trump, Musk made a lot of promises. Much of what he promised was supposed to be done by 2025, but it isn’t. Krugman reminds us of what a disaster X has been since Musk bought Twitter, and how Wall Street bankers are still sucking on those losses.
In other Trump news, Trump used Ariana Grande’s song, “Bye”, without authorization. Grande immediately responded, “Please do not ever use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense. F*** ICE.
Reading of that, My Neurons responded by instantly playing “Bye” in the morning mental music stream. I thought I’d share it with you. *smile*
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
I hope your day proceeds safely, securely, happily.
We’re at a fascinating — and disappointing — crossroads in the US. The Trump administration is advocating more funding for defense, security, and detention centers. They’re doing this while the national debt grows.
Inflation is eating into people’s discretionary spending. Yet Trump is deliberately shrinking the safety net. Under MAHA, they’re actively working against people being healthy by cutting oversight and campaigning against vaccines while cutting the EPA air and water regulations which kept our air and water safe.
As inflation increases and the number of people on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security rises, the Trump administration says, “Work harder! Work more!”
As with robotics in manufacturing, AI and General AI are often touted as a way to reduce personnel costs in help centers and bureaucracies through employing less people.
Conversely, AI and data centers have an adverse effect on the environment and increases the price of water and energy and hit local economies. That will again squeeze the poor. Spending more on water and energy, they’ll have less for food and anything else.
So, the Trump administration is driving us toward being poorer, with fewer work and employment opportunities, with higher food, energy, and water costs.
That setup benefits the hyperwealthy. People like Trump. Musk. And most of Trump’s administration. They’re not affected by inflation.
In parallel to this, Trump is hyping stocks and then buying them. Once articles about that came out, don’t you think that his administration and faithful followers are doing the same, if they have the money to?
“Oh, look, Trump just visited Thermo Fisher and hyped it. Buy, buy, buy!”
The dichotomy between what Trump says he wants and what he does has never been greater. He’s making himself and his cronies wealthier and bankrupting the rest of us.
This is Trump’s vision of make America great again. The irony, first noted back in 2016 and apparent ever since, is how negatively Trump’s policies hit his staunchest MAGA supporters. Yet, they cheer his moves. It’s a dichotomy rooted in perversity and emotions that I’ll never grasp. Nor will they.
How ’bout that mega arch that Trump plans to build? How does that alleviate the water problems, the drought, the rising food and healthcare prices that Americans are enduring?
Is the Iran war making MAGA safer? Trump is convincing them that it is.
Just as Trump has convinced them that cutting health and environmental rules and regulations will make it ‘easier to do business in America’ — while making it harder for anyone to enter the United States to do business with his oppressive ICE and Homeland Security tactics.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but Trump can fool MAGA all of the time.
Americans are irritated. Worried. Bothered. Inflation has pushed up the costs of new homes, home repairs, car insurance, healthcare, health insurance premiums, food, and energy.
Back when Trump started his war with Iran, he mentioned, “We’re not at war.” He often did it with a little sly week, instead referring to it variously as a conflict, operation, or excursion. Yet, he still used terms like dropping bombs and talked about destroying Iran.
MAGA, who loves Trump, immediately began parroting Trump’s language. So, the Iran ‘conflict’ is fine with them, because we’re not at war, and he didn’t break his promise, “No new wars.”
That’s why “I love inflation” makes sense now. They’ll hear Trump say that and begin using his phrase. They’ll get all gleeful and giddy about inflation — using Trump’s terminology, of course, about how inflation is good because we’re fighting Iran, and that’s some kind of good thing, in his head.
That makes it totally swell for MAGA.
For the rest of us in the real world, the inflation isn’t good and has serious repercussions on health, happiness, and the quality of life.
Also, making statements like, “I love inflation,” is part of Trump’s Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! distraction weave.
Look — I tore down the White House east wing! Building the biggest ballroom ever!
Look — I painted the Lincoln reflecting pool!
Look — I bombed Iran! Saved us all from nuclear annihilation!
Look — there’s election cheating going on in California!
Ashland, southern Oregon – Wednesday, June 10, 2026.
Warmer today. 56 F now but looking for 80 degrees as sunshine stretches across a clear blue sky.
Papi did his morning laps. I did the same. We meet, a Venn diagram of habit, wants, and needs, then go back to our respective circles.
Gina plies us with news about a hundred things happening. House inspections, furniture removal, cleaners, realtor. Prescriptions for Mom ordered — not yet ready, come back at 3:30! Commenting that she’s sweaty and tired. Informing us that Mom hasn’t said a word about the house. Saw the listing on Zillow but never spoke about it. Instead talks of the assisted living place.
After Gina’s demands at Heritage Grove, they cleaned Mom’s floor yesterday. Gina orders Mom, “Track it. They better do it once a week. Tell me if they don’t.”
Outside of those twenty texts, it’s quiet.
Trump and Iran are heating up their war. Trump makes continued assertions: the war is over. We have won. They have nothing. We are all powerful. I am a great negotiator. I want peace.
But retaliation is the order of the day: they hit us, we hit back — harder. Playground mentality — or mobster?
Your Trump Quote of the Day:
Iran will ‘pay the price’ for daring to fight back after Trump attacked them. The word sounds like lines out of a movie like “Red Dawn”. The movie was about high-schoolers fighting back after the Soviet Union (along with Cuba and Nicaragua) invade a small town in Colorado. 1980s fare. Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, other young actors.
In an ironic aside, the movie’s background is that NATO was dissolved, which encouraged the invasion, an interesting point, given Trump’s position on NATO…
According to Wikipedia, “Red Dawn” began life as a little anti-war movie but MGM wanted a teenage Rambo style approach. The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, helped refine the script.
Today’s morning mental music stream inhabitant is “Invincible.” I’m referring to the 1985 song Pat Benatar performed to commercial success.
Sample Lyrics:
This shattered dream you cannot justify. We’re gonna scream until we’re satisfied. What are we running for? We’ve got the right to be angry. What are we running for when there’s nowhere we can run to anymore? We can’t afford to be innocent stand up and face the enemy. It’s a do or die situation – we will be invincible. And with the power of conviction there is no sacrifice. It’s a do or die situation – we will be invincible.
Lightly rained off and on all day yesterday. We have a marbled sky today, gray and white against blue. Sunshine cuts through the clouds, darkening the mountain’s greenery with shadow islands. 56 F, our high will cut into the mid 70s. I don’t mind; give me this instead of the drought’s extreme dry and the blistering heat that usually strikes.
Gina is on the warpath, as we put it in my household growing up, a carryover from Mom and her generation and those before her. Mom called Gina with reports of theft and the lack of regular cleaning. Mom said that she’s been cleaning her own bathroom floors with wet wipes.
As the most confrontational of my family, Gina charged right in: this needs to be fixed. What’s the ‘or else’ implied? I’m not sure. It might be ‘more Gina’.
My wife got her latest ‘real ID’ yesterday. This one has the star. What will adorn them next?
Getting that for her required an appointment and a visit to the ‘big’ DMV in Medford. It was either go there or camp out at the Ashland DMV every morning and hope the Gods of Bureaucracy were kind.
She took in her birth certificate. Not the real thing, but a tattered, certified ‘photographic reproduction’ created in 1962. Much of the birth certificate’s entries were in cursive. The DMV agent, a very nice person, laughed about the struggles to read cursive, as she hasn’t had to in a while. That led to a sidebar about her children. They don’t know cursive and when she writes notes using cursive, they ask things like, “What language is that?”
That chased us into a conversation about signatures. The DMV agent said anything can be used and recognized as a ‘signature’. From further conversation, it appears that we’re basically going back to ‘making our mark’.
On the Trump side of things, my wife and I were talking about the food prices. My gosh, how they’ve gone up.
I did a search about Bessent’s claim and saw that he’s made that claim a few times the last several months. And as late as last November – 2025 – he was trying to blame Democrats for the prices. I know from Trump’s latest Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! pivot, aka the Trump Iran war, that Trump knows that prices are higher. He knows that the war is causing it.
*probably also knows his tariffs are causing them but won’t admit it because that would reveal he’s been wrong all along*
Trump, though, has pivoted. He’s not worried about high prices, affordability, or Americans’ finances, no; he’s saving us from Iranian nukes.
Ironically, of course, that was also the Bush-Cheney claim for the war against Iraq: WMD.
Yes, Trump and the GOP have dragged WMD back out of the closet. They’ve avoided using that phrase.That phrase — WMD — is loaded with baggage for US voters and the world.
It shows that in the end, Trump and the GOP only have three dimensions to their strategy: fear, distract, and cause dis-unity. For when facts, truth, and unity show up, Democrats win, and we move forward. Not evenly, and certainly not perfectly. But we move forward in our efforts against poverty, food deserts, climate change, and real challenges. Not fake challenges that are monsters only in unthinking minds.
The Epstein ballroom remains under construction. No new news on who is paying for it.
Trump’s approval continues its slow crash. Disapproval numbers show a sea of red. In a way, Trump is starting to live up to the vision he had of himself as a ‘unifying’ force; unity in disapproval of him and his policies is increasing.
My morning thoughts were about a dream that involved flying. The Neurons were snooping around, found out, and introduced “Aeroplane” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers into the morning mental music stream. Hope you enjoy it.
My hopes for everyone and everything is to go with peace and grace and make life better for all of us. Not just a privileged few.
“I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world? I built our military.”
Trump’s claim that ‘I built our military’ barely stands up to any scrutiny. Most of the military hardware and personnel were part of the US military before Trump entered office in 2017. That is well documented.
His claim that he didn’t ‘guarantee’ no war is technically true: he didn’t ‘guarantee’ it. But he implied no new war by using the words no now war. His claim now goes against the vast Internet documentation of him promising “No new wars.”
Of course, in his mind, we’re not at war, even though he reminded everyone that we were at war, because he’s trying to gaslight us with one of his fabulous word weaves. Most of the world calls his word weaves ‘bullshit’ or early signs of cognitive issues, but to Trump, it’s genius.
Challenged about attacking Iran, Trump claimed, “If I didn’t go in there with the B-2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.”
Unfortunately for Trump, this was contrary to all evidence and facts, including his claims from June of 2025. Apparently becoming upset by having facts and evidence pressed on him, Trump declared, “I’ve had enough,” and stormed off the set. This could be why some have labeled him as TACO, for, “Trump Always Chickening Out”.
On the good news side of things, Trump managed to stay awake during “Meet the Press”.
There’s no confirmation that Trump had to leave because he felt a need to take a nap.
Michael Seidel, writer 