When black Frida comes, it’ll be chilly, with limited, diluted sunshine in Ashlandia. This is November 28, 2025. Just a few more daz and the eleventh month of 2025 will be in the books. Meanwhile, it’s 43 F and a high of 55 F is hoped. Rain? WTH knows?
A little tomfloofery for your day is in the link. Click and enjoy this interaction between two species.
Today’s music was derived from looking out the window. I was visiting the back scene with Papi, gathering some sunshine against my face and gazing on the leaves on the ground. Dead and dying leaves passed through my thoughts. Instantly Les Neurons began a song in my morning mental music stream about dying leaves and dirty ground. The words were there along with pieces of melody and fragments of sound. What was missing were the title, performer, and the rest of the song. As it didn’t come to me, I took to technology to recover the rest. The answers: “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” by The White Stripes. I thought it a bit cruel of The Neurons to do that to me, trying to me think and remember when I hadn’t even had my coffee yet. Sometimes, I swear, I don’t know what gets into The Neurons.
We had a delightful Friendsgiving, meeting a few new people and visiting with a dozen and a half friends. The food was its usual delicious, the standard for these outings. Standard and straightforward T Day offerings but with organic stuff, vegan offerings, and gluten-free choices.
We chatted briefly about politics. “We ain’t buying it,” was chatted up. We also discussed “A House of Dynamite”, a movie about potential nuclear way now playing on Netflix. One wonders how the Dizzy Donny Regime would respond to detection of an incoming ICBM, given that Donny cut the head off the senior military ranks, replacing them with people more politically reliable to Donny but less experienced. Some had even retired at lesser ranks and were returned to service to take up new positions. Not reassuring.
Hope you had a decent Thirstda. Now out and onward. Cheers
It’s just a few days before the annual food-shopping-football orgy called Thanksgiving in the United States. And man, Trump has ramped up his incessant gobbling.
Affordability? “Gobble gobble,” Trump says. “Just a another Democrat con job,” the great Con-in-Chief declares.
Sure, who you gonna believe? Your wallet and bank account, or Dizzy Donny, a practiced and regular liar? TACO insists prices are down. Independent data sources say otherwise. Overall, for me, personally, prices are up. But once again, Trump exposed his own lies when he declared prices were down and that consumers don’t pay tariffs, and then declared he was lowering tariffs to reduce prices.
Just like the Epstein files, isn’t it? “Democratic hoax,” Dozy Donny woke up and shouted, over and over and over, fearful of what the files say about him and his former BFF, J. Epstein. One thing which has become clear is that Epstein thought that Trump was evil and stupid. Crazy. “The worst person he’d ever known.”
Seems like a pretty accurate assessment.
Dizzy Donny Trump and future with with Trump’s BFF, Jeffrey Epstein.
If you do believe Trump, ask him where the Trump mobile phones are. Orders are in, but phones aren’t being delivered. And they’ve apparently veered away from that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ promise. Trump will blame someone else for the lack of deliveries and the manufacturing location. That’s TACO’s MO. No disaster or deception is ever his fault, no matter how much his fingerprints and name are on it. Talk about hoaxes and deceptions. He’s a walking deception.
“Sedition!” Trump bellows. “Gobble gobble gobble.” Too many experts quickly explained in the press and on the net that sedition doesn’t mean what Trump thinks it means. Dozy Donny is hungry for distractions and some kind of victory. Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats gave Trump an opening in his eyes, when they reminded military members that their oath is to the U.S. Constitution, and not to the POTUS, and that they have a moral obligation to not obey illegal orders.
Of course, what is an ‘illegal’ order for the military? That’s thorny as hell. When a subordinate is given an order by a superior, it’s inferred that it’s legal. It takes moral courage to stand up and say, “That’s an illegal order. I’m not doing it.” Many people lack that backbone to directly challenge authority. The Just Security website has collected multiple opinions about the legality of Trump’s attacks on unarmed civilian Venezuelan boats and Slate article provided a thoughtful summary about the situation.
One opinion on Just Security shares JD Vance’s reaction to comments about the legality.
~snip~
In the early days after the first lethal strike, Vice President J.D. Vance gleefully said he “didn’t give a shit” whether the strike was illegal. And after government officials have (totally implausibly) suggested that the strikes are part of an armed conflict against the cartels, the President shrugged his shoulders at a reporter’s question about seeking a “declaration of war” from Congress, responding that “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”
~snip~
And there it is, nicely encapsulated in that reaction and paragraph: the TACO Regime just doesn’t give a shit about the law. Get it yet?
The GOP practices of lying and bullshitting the public continues at a brisk pace. The weekly feature, “Congressional Cowards” in Daily Kos covered the phenomena of GOP lawmakers now trying to get credit for the release of the Epstein files after fighting them.
In actuality, just four Republicans can take credit for the success of the legislation.
~snip~
But the one who really pissed me off was a rep. out of Texas. His releases about the Epstein files parrot Dizzy Don to a tee.
~snip~
But perhaps the most shameless Republican is Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas. Before the discharge petition succeeded, Nehls wrote on X that he would be “voting NO on the Epstein Hoax.”
“The Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax to distract us from the winning of President Trump and his administration,” he wrote. “My message to my Republican colleagues: Don’t let this noise keep us from delivering on the mandate the American people gave us.”
But Nehls quickly changed his vote to a “yes” once Trump gave his blessing.
“As President Trump has said, we have nothing to hide. I voted YES to release the files so we can move on from the smear campaign the Democrats have manufactured, and continue to advance policies that benefit hardworking Americans,” he wrote on X.
~snip~
Gag me with the proverbial fucking spoon.
Meanwhile, the corruption in the Trump Regime seems to be spreading.
In recent days, five U.S. senators and two representatives requested documents from the Department of Homeland Security and a formal investigation into how a firm closely tied to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ended up receiving money from a $220 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign.
The demands came in response to a ProPublica story this month that revealed that the Republican consulting firm had been secretly working on the ads, which star Noem. The company, called the Strategy Group, has long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. Its CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS.
Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.
~snip~
Sure, how did that happen? DOGE and the Trump regime gutted contract and spending oversight by firing multiple inspectors general earlier this year. IG are independent watchdogs who oversee federal agencies and root out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. Removing them encourages corruption. And Trump leads by example, lying, bullying, and grifting. Why should those he hires be different?
Jill Dennison has again brought us a luscious pre-Thanksgiving offering to humor and politics. I didn’t want to share them but The Neurons felt they were so compelling…anyway, here are my favorites. Hope you go by her site to see the rest.
Paul Krugman consistently writes about the Trumpcession vibes.
Trumpcession vibes are a feeling that things are worse than hard data shows us. My wife and I feel it. Not all of it has to do with Trump. We were forced to change home insurance companies last year because our previous company said they no longer wanted to insure homes in our region because of fires. So that price increased substantially. Electricity prices have gone up. Food prices are up. Coffee prices are up. Gasoline. Some of this is related to Trump’s trade policies and tariffs, and some prices are affected by weather and climate change. The world is complicated. We can make the case that Trump isn’t doing anything about climate change except mocking anyone worried about it, so in that way he’s causing prices increases.
Our household’s Trumpcession vibes arise because we don’t trust Trump to tell the truth. By extension, we don’t trust anyone in his regime to tell the truth, nor any of his supporters. Evidence has been presented that Trump Regime members and their supporters will lie heavily and frequently to make Trump look good. Couple that distrust in them with the soft data of what’s going on, and yes, we have Trumpcession vibes. For instance, how can SNAP benefits be cut without doing damage to the economy? Can’t. The SNAP cuts affect my state, Oregon, and my state government’s ability to help the homeless and needy. The state’s inability to help locally affects our local agencies and governments’ ability to help. From our point of view, it’s all a giant snowball rolling down a steep mountain, gaining speed and momentum, and coming fast. It’s going to be a big mess when that snowball finally slams into the world. That’s how we feel in our household.
It doesn’t help anything that Trump keeps lying about prices and tariffs. Trump insists against the evidence presented that everything is cheaper and getting better. And he lies to convince everyone that he’s telling the truth. But he has a deep history of lying and cheating. Like the boy who cried wolf, we just don’t believe Trump much any longer.
I ‘like’ how the story gives Trump the benefit of the doubt and calls Trump’s lies ‘inflation spin’. That’s part of the problem. The media and pundits often sugarcoat the crap that Trump does. Some of that sugarcoating is because Trump, the eternal child-bully, threatens anyone who criticizes him with lawsuits or other punishment, no matter how valid the criticism is.
In other news, Stephen Miller has been speaking out of his ass.
Truth be told, Miller is just mindlessly echoing what Trump mindlessly spews.
I’ll be damned. Trump does sometimes tell the truth:
And for those who are always throwing bothsiderisms at the wall to see if they’ll stick, a timely reminder has arrived that the two sides are not the same.
Finally, in response to this Trump rant, we respond…
Trump and his enablers continue to remake the United States from a democratic republic into a one-party mirror of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Acting on fallacies which he promotes as genius, Trump continues cratering the economy. Economists are warning everyone that Trump’s ideas are misguided and that dire consequences are coming. The Hill reports on one in an article, Trump has resurrected one of economics’ oldest fallacies, in a recent issue, the ‘Broken Window Fallacy’. Frédéric Bastiat formulated the Broken Window Fallacy in the 1800s. Scott Burns and Caleb Fuller explain.
Suppose a vandal hurls a rock through a shopkeeper’s window. The shopkeeper is dismayed—this cruel stroke of luck will cost him $1,000. But a local wise guy consoles him, saying, “Actually, there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud!” The broken pane, he explains, creates a job for the local glazier. Perhaps he’ll use those hard-earned shekels to buy shoes from the local cobbler, and so on. Society is ultimately made richerfrom the shopkeeper’s misfortune — all thanks to the domino effect of spending triggered by two seconds of petty mischief.
It’s a nice story — but as Bastiat illustrates, it’s wildly incomplete. Had the window not been shattered, the shopkeeper could’ve spent his $1,000 on something else he valued. Perhaps he would have bought a new suit, creating income for a local tailor. Or maybe he would have bought some meat, ale, and bread for a party, creating income for the local butcher, brewer, and baker.
The fatal flaw in the wise guy’s analysis, Bastiat concludes, is confining his theory to “that which is seen” — the income earned by the glazier, the cobbler, etc. In so doing, he ignores “that which is unseen” — everything else the shopkeeper could have bought, had his window not been smashed.
That example summarizes Trump and MAGA thinking. Notoriously short-sighted, they refuse to embrace facts or history and set to rewrite both. Not satisfied with destroying the government and its effectiveness by blindly cutting federal personnel and services, he’s eagerly trashing systems the United States methodically developed through centuries to harness data and give us insights into nature.
As part of this, another FAFO tale has emerged. CEO Sachin Shivaram of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry, wrote a WaPo OP-ED. In it, he explained how Trump’s trade war has already hurt his workers. Many of them were Trump supporters. Raw Story covered the piece: ‘Batten down the hatches’: CEO warns Trump tariff ‘tsunami’ about to wreck economy In his piece, Sachin Shivaram noted that the tariffs are having a negative impact.
The fee that largely determines the cost of buying aluminum in North America has tripled in the past six months, and the company’s nonaluminum inputs have increased by 7 percent in the last month, and the foundry has had no choice but to raise their prices and lay off some workers.
Sachin Shivaram continues:
“What is not debatable is that our order rate is down 35 percent to 40 percent since the start of the year,” he wrote. “At other companies, too, demand is crumbling. In such a situation, companies have a fiduciary duty to bring costs down, and the one surefire way to do that is layoffs. At our company, we’ve had little choice but to lay workers off at all of our plants. Shareholders aren’t suffering — not yet — because the impact is being absorbed first by the very people Trump’s policies are meant to help.”
The education system that helped the United States grow and succeed as a world power is being deliberately and systematically dismantled. He has no substitute in mind, just as he had no substitute in mind all those times when he promised a new healthcare program to replace ACA. Notice that he’s quietly quit saying anything about that.
Trump used to pretend that Democrats and their demonic behavior was documented in the Epstein File. Throughout his campaign to be elected, he kept promising to release that file. Now he claims that file was created by Democrats. Desiring nothing to do with releasing it because of the photos, accusations, and testimony against him existing outside of the file, he’s trying to make the Epstein matter go away.
Ignoring the Constitution’s checks and balances, and the power of the purse given to Congress, he’s again played Congress, refusing to release legally legislated funds, daring them to take him to court again. The general belief is it will be taken to court and will end up before the Roberts Supreme Court. There, if the past is a predictor of what’s to come, Roberts and his right-wing justices, will give Trump another victory, dealing greater damage to our nation and system of government.
As a self-professed ‘man of peace’, Trump has activated national guard units to patrol cities where no patrols are needed, upping the nation’s divisions, increasing tensions, and further polarizing politics. He does this without regard to his promise to lower the deficit. It costs millions to deploy these troops and distracts from real issues. The troops are not needed there because facts and statistics show that crime is down in those cities. Instead, it is Red States and Red Cities, led by Republicans, who are showing the most violent crime.
Is it ironic that Trump and the Red State MAGALand inhabitants are rebuilding a Red State nation that is so similar to the old communist Soviet Union which was featured in so many Republican ‘red scare’ tactics?
In short, Trump is remaking the nation in his graven, greedy, ignorant image. As bad as that is, he’s delusional, irrational, and detached from reality. The gestalt creature which will emerge from this insult to truth, history, facts, and logic, will forever stain the nation’s Founders’ history and intentions.
Things just ain’t going well for Americans, and it will get worse. As they awaken to their issues brought on by the reckless incompetent installed in the Offal Office, they’re beginning to reject TACO’s ‘leadership’. As confidence in Trump and the United States economy falls, he’ll get more reckless. More desperate. As the snowball picks up speed and starts wrecking more of the nation, Trump will go off the rails. ta
And that’s a problem. Trump has insulated himself from facts and reality by building a wall of protective sycophants. Republicans in Congress are willing accomplices to Trump’s disastrous behavior. Right-wingers on the Supreme Court are working hard to give him the green light to do as he will. All of them are doing their damnedest to ignore what history has proven and what the facts are showing.
We’ll see what happens when that snowball crashes full on into the economy. At the current rate, it might well be around Black Friday, that hallowed retail day. Maybe then there will be a reckoning.
Until then, we need to hang on and fight the Trump craziness.
I shake my head. “I don’t understand what that means.” I guess, treats, water, outside, attention, scratching, Lassie’s in the well? Papi keeps talking. He’s a chatty cat this morning.
I’m less so but have been talking to my computer. My computer doesn’t say much but it’s a good listener. Never interrupts. Most of my words are sentences of disbelieving comments about some of the things I’m reading. There is some spirited cursing thrown in. Like, the thirty thousand eggs the White House is using in this time of high egg prices has me saying some things to my monitor. Poor optics, as if the man gives a shit ’bout optics. He wants the eggs.
“They were saying that for Easter ‘please don’t use eggs. Could you use plastic eggs?’ I say we don’t want to do that,” Trump said earlier this month during remarks announcing a new tariff policy.
Yes, so, there you go.
It is Wenzda, April 16, 2025, 64 F, and sunny. Yesterday clipped 79 F. That’s a good temperature to enjoy when it’s a hot sun and cool breeze. Nice combo. I’ll probably order that regularly once we’re living in virtual reality and ordering our weather. Snow still whitens some higher peaks and ridges, such as Mt. Ashland. The green trees and white mountains dazzle in the sunlit blue sky. I went out and pulled weeds. The front area is a weeded, cut and trimmed. The back yard is a tall grass, weedy, bee and pollinator paradise. We’re seeing few bees so far this year.
Today’s theme music is “It’s Good to Be King”. This is a 1995 Tom Petty song. My Neurons slotted it into the morning mental music stream after reading many of the things Trump said and do. Yes, he acts like the American King which our founders warned us about.
Coffee has landed in my gullet again. Time to rock on through another day, though it might be a slow-paced rock. Hope the best for you. Cheers
I’m trying to decide: are we living in the New Dark Ages, or the Chaos Era?
I think it might be both.
It could also be that the Chaos Era is the New Dark Ages intro. Too early for mere mortals to decide. Historians or AI will call it at some future date.
The news churn stays heavy. Stock market swings and bond selloffs, inflation, and tariff wars suck up most of the oxygen, followed by Trump administration emergency appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and docket rulings. I’m forced to hunt for updates to stories which I follow, like the U.S. measles outbreaks.
West Texas has 541 reported measles cases but ‘only’ 30 of them are still able to spread. The U.S. has over 700 cases now. Six states are reporting measles outbreaks. The U.S. is reporting 90 new cases in one week in the nation, the highest since 2019.
Trump was POTUS for that 2019 outbreak, too. I think there might be a pattern there…
With vaccination rates down, measles cases have been reported in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington.
Under RFK Jr’s guidance, the Federal government’s response is spotty. That reminds me that we already had the Anti-science Age and Misinformation Age under way, along with the Conspiracy Era.
Donald Trump may have put the name on the period for us: “I couldn’t care less.”
Yes, it’s the Careless Age of Misinformation and Chaos. CAMAC. A place of chaos, misinformation, declining personal freedom, drooping consumer confidence, rising prices, growing ignorance, increasing disease, less trust, more danger, and mushrooming lawlessness.
Michael Seidel, writer 