Wednesday, September 02, 2026

The President Of The United States, Ladies And Gentleman

Paxton:

Stole a $1000 pen at a courthouse in full view of a security camera.

Was impeached by his own party 

Was referred to the FBI by his own staff

Decided to run for the Senate because nobody wanted him to be AG anymore (basically: get out of the state).

Found a way to afford millions of dollars in real estate on a state employee’s salary.

So, yeah: Trump’s guy.
The President of the United States, ladies and gentlemen. Nope. Not hardly. (Innumerate idiot.) Not even close. (Trump has never darkened the door of a grocery store.) Never gonna happen. (Unless he just wants to lose another prosecution.) Talking to himself in the mirror again. Every time you think he can’t get more delusional, he reaches a new level. See what I mean? I have absolutely no idea what he thinks he’s saying. I’m not sure he knows, either.

Sorting Through The Verbiage

Hunt: So, who’s right on data centers? President Trump or Governor Shapiro?

Fetterman: Oh, the president is actually right overall. I mean, you know, uh, we we used to be moving forward on data centers and now, I mean, he's actually scared by the polls. So I mean, what really what's really motivated by more than just the polls overall, you know, I set out I set up my message on it on data centers just a couple days on X where I'm saying it's, you know, the president happens to be right in this. You know, I think it's it's very necessary that we win the war on AI. Uh, we, I think it's necessary because AI is going to transform our world. And, you know, it can be either us be the leaders or it can be the Chinese. And we could we could live under those rules and they're going to build unlimited data centers. And they're not really, uh, really stopped by with the kind of like democracy and the kinds of rules that, that we have overall, I think it's important. And I would remind people, like a lot of the opposition is, is been driven by the ccp and a lot of a lot of influence. So I think now withwith data centers, uh, also there's the facts now that it, it consumes a very, very, maybe one tenth of 1%, you know, compared to almonds and compared to other other things, part of our economy and also our land usage as well, too. Pennsylvania, you know, we are energy rich, we are water rich. And we have we're land rich now. So I think it's an important part of our economy, not just for Pennsylvania's but also the country right now.
He’s limiting himself to Pennsylvania, but Trump doesn’t. So…

AI is not a force of nature which must transform our world. It’s not even clear it will.And frankly, the correct response to data centers is regulation, not “You must obey or China wins!” Nothing is that simple a dichotomy.

Blaming opposition on CCP propaganda is insulting and an assault on democratic processes in this country. Real people have real concerns about the real impact of these centers on their lives and their quality of life. As AOC and others have pointed out, if Trump likes them so, build one next to MAL. Or donate some of MAL property, to lead by example.

Yeah, that’ll happen. 

And PA may have a lot of water to spare, and electricity, but most of the country west of the Mississippi, doesn’t. Including Texas, which has more water than most of the states west of it, but none to spare for AI. Which so far is just producing child porn and pictures nobody needs, and junk summations for Google searches. Oh, and there was that AI that broke out of its limitations and hacked other databases to solve the problems it was told to solve. AI doesn’t know what’s wrong with that, or with creating pictures of naked children. If that’s how it’s going to transform the world, I don’t think we need help in those areas. 

It’s funny how the worst scenario for AI in all the stories was how it would try to kill us all, maliciously. But so far, it’s the worst aspects of the internet, cubed. Or maybe raised to the 10th power. Choose your metaphor.

I’m not an AI. Luddite. But neither am I willing to give the tech bros the authority to do as they please and rake in the money they expect for it. “Trust me, bro,” went out with Elmo and DOGE, if not when Elmo took over Twitter.

If all you’ve got to say as a U.S. Senator is “Let the tech bros run free, they’ll save us from China,” I’ve gotta say the last technological race with a foreign power was the Space Race, and private enterprise didn’t win that one. Government agencies and government contractors did. Government gave us the internet, too; and GPS. And it’s done a damned fine job regulating food and drugs for 100 years; well, until Trump got re-elected. “Let free enterprise be” is not at all the argument Fetterman and Trump think it is. Maybe that’s why 70% of the country is against data centers, and almost the same percentage is fed up with Trump.

Power to the people.

A) He Really Thinks This Is Important

B) He really thinks this means something. No shit.

A Man And His Numbers

Or...13,000 more. Based on his numbers. Says the man who knows his numbers. Didn’t someone suggest “Lake America” to him just the other day? We shoot them in the back of the head. Or while they’re driving their cars. Or just for being not-white. We’re much better; for some reason. The Trump endorsement. Focused like a laser beam on the concerns of voters in the midterms. 🫠

“Now That We Have It Under U.S.A. Control….”

At least for a month:
According to Barak Ravid of Axios, citing a U.S. official, the initial goal of these renewed strikes, reducing the Iranian threat to commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, has been somewhat reached, with the official saying that the strikes “bought at least a month” for shipping to pass under reduced threat levels.
When does that month start, again?
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) Center has stated two fatalities have been confirmed in a newly issued an update following today's earlier advisory regarding the attack on a vessel on August 31st as it transited the Strait of Hormuz.

At least 17 mariners have been killed since operations commenced against Iran on February 28th.

Trump Has Whipped Inflation Now*

This $1 coin is available for purchase in rolls of 25 for…$61. Or a bag of 100 for…$154.50.

And I could find it in my change? I haven’t gotten a dollar coin in my change in probably 50 years. When I was using cash, and liked to carry $1 coins (very briefly; it lost its charm quickly), most cash drawers didn’t have a slot for them, or I had to point out it wasn’t a 50 cent piece. I think once I got one in change, because they wanted it out of the drawer.

Anyway, I’m glad I don’t carry cash anymore. That coin would probably burn my hand.

They asked him, Teacher, we know that what you speak and teach is correct, that you show no favoritism, but instead teach God’s way forthrightly.  Is it permissible for us to pay taxes to the Roman emperor, or not?

But he saw through their duplicity, and said to them, Show me a coin. Whose likeness does it near? And whose name is on it?”

They said, “The emperor’s.”

So he said to them, “Then pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God.”
Luke 20:21-25
A coin of Julius Caesar shows his spirit descending cometlike to takes it place among the eternal deities. A coin of Augustus Caesar calls him divi filius, son of a divine one, son of a god, son of the aforesaid comet. A coin of Tiberius Caesar hails him as pontifex maximus, supreme bridge builder between earth and heaven, high priest of an imperial people. A silver denarius was a day's pay for a laborer and, if a day laborer meant somebody who worked every day rather than somebody who looked for work every day, it would have been a very good salary. Imagine this situation: If, after three days of hard work, a day laborer held those silver denarii in his hand, how would he, could he, should he distinguish between politics and religion in the Roman Empire?....Rome, and Rome alone, had built a kingdom and only it could approve how to build an underkingdom, a minirealm, a subordinate rule.
John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed, Excavating Jesus, revised & updated (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), pp. 178-79.


*IYKYK

The Real Problem Is…

CNN: You're not going to trust mail voting if the Supreme Court allows this to go through?

BLUMENTHAL: I won't. And I think most Americans will view mail voting as lacking credibility because the Postal Service is gonna be screening your ballot and sending them back if it finds a single discrepancy, and you may not know.
Most voters won’t know there is a problem, nor that their ballot was never received.

There really aren’t that many people paying close attention to this. The real problem comes if the ballots are never delivered to the voters (vote by mail works by sending the voter a ballot). Some states exclusively use vote by mail, which means USPS could disenfranchise the entire state (would even the Sinister Six run that risk? I seriously doubt it.*) Voters in Texas, expecting a ballot that never comes, could try to vote in person. But they’d have to cast a provisional ballot (paperwork), because records would show they were sent one. And if you vote by mail because you can’t get to a polling place….

The whole effort is to prevent the people who actually care enough (a distinct demographic minority), from voting. The sad part is, too many voters won’t see it coming.

*I don’t quite see the Sinister Six allowing it. They refused to rule on the legality of the EO, but the return of the appeal of the TRO might force them to, since there aren’t any jurisdictional issues left. The Court did not try to put Trump back in the White House in 2020, and I don’t see any upside to supporting voter suppression this baldly. EO’s don’t allow you to hide behind “states rights”. Interference this blatant would rebound on the Court, especially as states can’t be barred from electing representatives based on an EO. The retribution of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, would be swift and vicious (and probably not entirely a good thing).

The majority also declined to address the legality of Trump stealing money from government coffers to build his ballroom. An issue Roberts did address. It may be they are reconsidering the wisdom of a “unitary executive,” at least when that executive is Trump.

Congress, after all, could force some Justices into retirement, and whittle down the bench to the remainder, to keep Trump from replacing them. And then wait for 2029 to raise the number again. (As well as impose a code of ethics, overseen by an independent body, so the Court operates like any other Art. III court.)

VOTE LIKE TRUMP IS ON THE BALLOT! 🗳️

Because your concerns, are his concerns!

Believe it!

Taking A Lying Regime At Face Value

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

Fun Facts

McGowan: It’s like when you play monopoly and somebody has all of the hotels on the whole board, and it doesn't matter if you're playing the game right, it doesn't matter if you're doing what you're supposed to do, it doesn't matter if you get the education, if you get the job, you are still always going to lose. That is where we are in America right now, and that is not how we should want to be. And I'm saying capitalism is a wonderful system if it is working, it is not currently working for the American people.
The game of “Monopoly” was supposed to be a critique of capitalism; for precisely the reasons stated. White people make better Americans. Or something.
McGowan: I think we have a whole lot of socialism in this country, and it goes to corporations. We give a ton of money to oil and gas companies. We give a ton of money to the airlines, to airlines, big banks when they’re having trouble. But the rest of us are supposed to be rugged individualists who pull ourselves up by our bootstraps…
💯 

Speculation v Reality

I blame the lack of AI centers.
In an opinion granting a preliminary injunction as the underlying lawsuit continues, Cooper called the changes "likely arbitrary and capricious" and found the government had failed to provide adequate evidence for its policy.

"He wrote that grant solicitations for the program '(remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations,"" the Post is reporting, adding that, of the seven cited articles, two appeared to be "entirely made up and three others did not exist in the journals they were attributed to."

This is not the first time Kennedy has faced humiliation over AI-generated falsehoods.

Last year, The Washington Post revealed that citations in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" had also been AI-generated, producing garbled references and invented studies.
And Grok is reportedly still generating kiddie porn, which is something else we can’t farm out to the Chinese. 🤷‍♀️

You know, since Jules Verne, science fiction has predicted the future world, and usually made it a scary place in the present.  And yet science fiction never predicts things like data centers generating significant noise, guzzling water and burning fossil fuels while taking up acres of land; or generating porn and slop for the internet (which even William Gibson didn’t get right. The world on the internet is an infinitely more mundane place than “Neuromancer.”). Or just tech bros in general; although, to be fair, Heinlein pretty much saw that one coming. But he was sure the technology would be an unalloyed good. Ballard got closer to reality with “The Subliminal Man.” (Neither future happened, though Facebook did settle a lawsuit on unduly and improperly influencing adolescents. Nobody foresaw Facebook, either. Or how very, very lonely we would be. I think Wendell Berry touched on that one, but not via “speculative fiction.”)

But what writer ever imagined a psychotic POTUS arbitrarily changing the names of bodies of water, and the companies generating electronic maps (who saw those coming? Or GPS?) altering those names because the mad POTUS said so?

Or, you know, using AI to generate fake medical studies and fake case law? And present those to courts, or as government reports? Reality always beggars imagination.💭 

“With Almost Total Control Of The Hormuz Strait”

"And when is somebody going to solve this problem for me?”

And “almost total control”? Isn’t that like “a little bit pregnant”? 🫃 

The pressure of the job is getting to him.

The Death Of Wendell Berry Is Announced

“The modern urban‐industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth,” he wrote. “At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit‐making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.”
His vision, his writings, were truly radical. He taught me to understand racism in America as our “hidden wound.” Not because we had lost sight of it, but because we still hide it from ourselves.

I’ve got to go pull all his books off my shelves and re-read them….

Sleepy Trump

And nobody told Trump?
“Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth,” one person familiar with their White House conversation told the outlet.
...is leading this party:
McClintock: There’s only way to prosper in a capitalist society. You need to figure out what someone else needs and get it for them better than they can get it for themselves. It might mean mowing their lawn or brain surgery—whatever it is, you have to help your neighbor.

Socialism is the opposite. If I take a dollar from Peter and give it to Paul I've helped Paul in the amount of $1 and I've hurt Peter by that very same amount. But what I've really done is to rob both of them of $1 of incentive of helping each other.

Socialism sucks.
Peter and Paul?
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

—Acts 2:42-45

That sucks, right ?

...is a confession. Trump came to Houston for a fundraiser for Paxton. The money ended up going to the RNC. Like this? Or Trump’s way: calling Talarico “Talafreako” and “Alfred E. Neuman”?

Fahrenheit 451

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembiling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

...

Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass pole, and set the tickling combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse areaway, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which of the cats or chickens or rats the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began.

--Ray Bradbury 

You’ve Got To Be Kidding

It’s two months until Election Day. Here, try this instead: Or this:
On Monday, the average price of a gallon of diesel was $5.60, up about $1 from early July and almost $2 higher than a year ago. The all-time U.S. record $5.816 set in June 2022 is looming — and with U.S. inventories at their lowest-ever levels going into the peak diesel demand season, little relief is likely.

“That shortage will be acutely felt by the farmers during the harvest, and so the inflationary consequences can be greater at harvest time,” said Kevin Book, managing director at consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. At the same time, products will be on trucks headed to stores for the holidays, and many voters in places like Maine and Alaska will be preparing for winter by buying heating oil, which, like jet fuel, is similar to diesel.

“There is a very strong history of caring about heating oil ahead of elections,” Book added.
Or we can talk about young women: Still more winning friends and influencing people: One of three offices established in the Constitution, third in line of succession, chief official of a house of Congress charged with oversight of the entire administration: Who has apparently never heard Donald Trump say a word. While Shouty Grandpa chats with the voices in his head: Meanwhile, back in reality:

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

20 hours earlier:
Trump had described a very different pool one day earlier, writing that "the Reflecting Pool is almost completely fixed," including its inflow and outflow pipes. Fewer than 20 hours separated that post from Acosta's video of an empty basin being torn up, according to the timestamps on both.
And then there was Venezuela: And the cold, wet slap of reality:
The fast phase is well rehabilitation, and it is fast precisely because it develops nothing. A workover cleans out an existing wellbore, replaces the downhole pump, restores lift and power, and turns a well that already produced back on. This is the entire reason output climbed from just under 1 million to roughly 1.25 million barrels a day, and it was led overwhelmingly by Chevron reactivating known wells after sanctions relief, not by rigs drilling new ones. Run the existing well stock through workovers with diluent flowing and output can plausibly climb toward 2 million barrels a day over two to three years, with diminishing returns as the best wells are worked first. None of that touches the 65 billion barrels; it recovers barrels that were already developed and then abandoned. The easy oil is close to back.

Beyond that, money doesn’t buy speed, because extra heavy production is a system and the system is broken in four specific places. Power comes first, because heavy oil lift, any thermal handling, and the upgraders are all electricity intensive, and Venezuela’s grid browns out; a well or an upgrader that trips every time the grid sags produces nothing, and restoring stable generation and transmission to the oil regions is measured in years. Diluent is second, and it is a physical hard stop rather than a preference, because Orinoco blend, the export grade known as Merey, is roughly 60% extra heavy crude cut with about 40% light diluent simply to become pumpable; every million barrels a day of Orinoco output therefore requires on the order of 400,000 barrels a day of naphtha or condensate, which is why the United States is currently shipping naphtha south, and why a diluent interruption does not slow production, it stops it. Third is the processing and midstream chain, the upgraders that convert extra heavy crude into synthetic crude, roughly 600,000 barrels a day of nameplate capacity that sits largely idle after years of deferred maintenance and needs full turnarounds, not a switch, to restart, alongside the pipelines and terminals that decayed with it. Fourth is human capital, because something on the order of 18,000 skilled workers left over the last decade, and reservoir management and heavy oil operations expertise does not return with a signing bonus; every repair above runs at the pace that trained crews and available equipment allow, which is why throwing capital at the problem past a point produces bottlenecks and inflation rather than barrels.

Only after that backbone is whole does new drilling meaningfully draw down the reserve, and here the Permian analogy that keeps getting invoked fails on a single point, that a Permian light sweet barrel flows and sells the day it is drilled, while an Orinoco barrel is not a product until the entire heavy oil chain has been wrapped around it. Recovery is the quiet killer, because cold production on extra heavy crude recovers only single digits to low teens as a percentage of the oil in place, so pulling the resource at meaningful rates eventually requires thermal recovery, steam projects that are among the most capital heavy and slowest to build assets in the industry. From a final investment decision to first oil on a new Orinoco project is three to five years in a functioning country and longer here, and ramping the belt to add millions of barrels is a ten to fifteen year, hundred billion dollar order program that only pencils while oil stays high enough to justify upgrading the crude. Producing the bulk of the 65 billion barrels is a multi decade exercise, which is exactly why the paperwork was written to run a hundred years.
The "65 billion barrels" probably doesn't exist, either:
The flow problem would be damning enough on its own, but the reserve figure underneath it is softer than the flow problem suggests, because the 65 billion, and the roughly 300 billion it belongs to, does not come from an independent count. It comes from the Venezuelan government and PDVSA, routed through OPEC, which does not audit what its members self report, and then republished by the EIA, which passes OPEC through; so the reassuring phrase “300 billion barrels, corroborated by the EIA” is not corroboration at all, it is a single self reported number handed down a chain that never verifies it. A fact check searching specifically for a transparent third party audit reconciling Venezuela’s proven reserves found that none exists.

The history is the tell. Venezuela’s proven reserves sat near 60 billion barrels through the 1980s and 1990s and around 77 to 80 billion by 2005, mostly conventional crude, which placed the country roughly eighth in the world. Then, between 2005 and 2011, the figure nearly quadrupled to almost 300 billion, with no major discoveries and no surge in production to justify it, when the Magna Reserva initiative under Chávez reclassified Orinoco Belt extra heavy oil from resources into proved reserves; the transformation, as Robert Rapier has put it, was statistical rather than physical. High crude prices in 2007 supplied the accounting cover, and OPEC quota politics, in which quotas track reserves, supplied the incentive. The number rose because it was useful.

Set the independent work against it and the range is extraordinary, because three different numbers describe the same rock and none of them is interchangeable with the others. The United States Geological Survey, in a genuinely independent 2009 assessment, put more than 1 trillion barrels of heavy oil in place in the Orinoco Belt and a mean of 513 billion barrels technically recoverable, with a range of 380 to 652 billion; that is the largest figure in the debate and the one bulls reach for, yet the USGS labeled it technically recoverable and undiscovered resources, explicitly not proven, and technically recoverable ignores cost entirely. At the other end, Rystad Energy, the one major independent house that applies an economic screen rather than accepting the reclassification, estimates Venezuela’s economically recoverable oil at roughly 29 billion barrels, about one tenth of the official figure. So the same resource reads as more than a trillion barrels in place, about 513 billion recoverable at any cost, and perhaps 29 billion recoverable at prices that actually clear, and Venezuela’s headline 300 billion, with the deal’s 65 billion sitting inside it, is anchored to the inflated proven figure rather than to the 29 billion economic one. It is presented as the hard number and behaves like the soft one, swinging with the oil price because extra heavy economics do.
There is a great deal more there about why the reported reserves are not the actual reserves (which means the 65 billion barrels Trump thinks he has secured are non-existent. And may be another reason an Exxon, with the necessary resources, may not be interested in Venezuela, no matter what Trump says.). But what about the effect of Venezuelan crude on American oil prices.
That leaves the promise attached to the number, that it lowers gas prices long into the future, which fails for reasons that have little to do with the reserve at all. American pump prices are set by global crude, Brent linked, plus refining and distribution, so an increment of one to two million barrels a day phased in over a decade against roughly 103 million barrels a day of global demand is a rounding adjustment, not a lever, and it is a rounding adjustment that arrives years after any current price. It is worth being precise about the crude itself, because the reflex that Venezuelan oil has nothing to do with American gasoline is not quite right and the accurate version is stronger. Orinoco crude does become gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, but only inside complex refineries equipped with cokers and hydrocrackers, and fewer than half of United States refineries have a coker; the Gulf Coast complex was built over decades specifically to run heavy sour grades like this, with Valero, Chevron, PBF, Phillips 66, Marathon, and Exxon holding the coking capacity. The point is that Venezuelan heavy sour is a coker feedstock and a refinery margin story, competing with Canadian heavy and Mexican Maya for the same complex units, not a supply that moves the retail price of gasoline. And the dependency runs the other way besides, because the United States is already shipping more than 100,000 barrels a day of naphtha south to make Venezuelan crude pumpable at all, so the flow that supposedly rescues the American driver currently depends on the American refiner subsidizing it with diluent.

What the Deal Actually Buys

Strip the framing away and what remains is coherent, just not what was sold. The agreement is a real long cycle resource play and a genuine tailwind for Gulf Coast coker economics over a multi year horizon, and on that basis it is defensible. What it is not is a reserve doubling that lowers the price at the pump, because the reserve number is a stock that takes decades to convert to flow, that stock was inflated by decree rather than discovery, and the single independent house that applies an economic test finds roughly ninety percent of it evaporates. The flow available this decade is capped by power, diluent, upgraders, and people rather than by geology, the barrels that could actually move a United States pump price are five to fifteen years out, and under the governing definition of the word, the reserves at the center of the biggest oil deal in world history are not, in any auditable sense, proven. The oil under Venezuela is real enough; the 300 billion barrel reserve number the deal was sold on is not, and neither is any near term flow of it large enough to move a United States gas price.
This is why we can’t have nice things. This information is not unknown and unknowable. But it is to this government. It’s not just that the President is an idiot, but that the Administration is idiots all the way down. Honestly, it’s like watching children playing games on the playground. When I was young and playing games with imaginary guns or imaginary superpowers, I at least knew I was making things up.

Which leaves us with the important question: why are we believing these people? At all?

How To Win Friends And Influence Texans

These Are Now The Rules

McGowan: I’m so tired of it. Honest to God, the only reason we’re talking about Hasan Piker is because he’s on the left. We have had right-wing shock jocks for years. We had freaking Rush Limbaugh ringing a bell every time a gay person died of AIDS. We have Nick Fuentes dining at Mar-a-Lago after he says, “Your women are your body. My choice.” We’ve got these right-wing Christian zealots who said women shouldn’t vote and we’re nothing but vessels. They are all on the right wing, and we’re not asking every single Republican candidate and sitting person if they approve of them, if they should disown them

Rothman: I’m old enough to remember when every Republican in Congress was asked to respond to things Rush Limbaugh said.

McGowan: He got a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the president we have now, so please stop.