Por Jeffrey St. Clair
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He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, a citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.
― Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves
+ The function of the Democratic Party is to [fill in the blank]…
+ After sweeping the elections last week, the Democrats agreed to a deal to end the shutdown that gave them almost nothing and could have been made weeks ago. It’s what they do.
+ The Democrats weren’t going to “win” the shutdown, but they could’ve drawn blood from Trump and his cadre of cruelty in Congress. In the end, they surrendered and all of the bleeding was on their side, from largely self-inflicted wounds.
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+ Same as it ever was, same as it ever, ever was…
+ Nancy Pelosi was often awful, but she wasn’t weak or listless, like Jeffries, and she held her caucus in line and usually prevailed in the battles she chose to fight. She intimidated Trump, who rightly feels no fear from the docile tag-team of Jeffries and Schumer.
CNN: Was the shutdown worth it?
HAKEEM JEFFRIES: We have waged a battle on behalf of the American people.
CNN: But you didn’t get what you want [ie, anything].
JEFFRIES: At the end of the day, the fight lives on.
+ Sen. Tim Kaine on why he thinks just getting a vote on healthcare is a win: “We’re the minority party, but everybody will get to see who is standing for them when it comes to lowering their healthcare costs.” But you didn’t “stand with them”. You folded.
+ Sen. Dick Durbin: “During the historic roll call last night, I walked across the aisle and met with Senator John Thune, the Republican leader. I told him that I was counting on him to keep his word on this agreement. He assured me he would.” Neville Chamberlain had a stiffer spine…
+ At the very least, the capitulation of the Senate Democrats has prompted calls within the party to finally oust Chuck Schumer as leader. But don’t expect Sanders to join them, whose mysterious loyalty to the old guard of the party he claims not to be a member of remains iron-clad…
+ C’mon, Bernie…
+ Trump on his plan to replace ObamaCare subsidies by just giving people cash to buy their own insurance: Trump: “I want the money to go into an account for people where the people buy their own health insurance. It’s so good. The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody is going to be happy. They’re going to feel like entrepreneurs. They will be able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance…Call it Trumpcare.” Someone might want to ask Luigi Mangione about what it’s like “negotiating with insurance companies.”
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+ According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, out-of-pocket premiums for ACA insurance policies will more than double if the subsidies aren’t renewed.
+ Elizabeth Warren: “Under the Big Ugly Bill, Alphabet gets $17.9B in tax breaks. That could pay for SNAP benefits for 7.5 million Americans. Amazon gets $15.7B. That could lower ACA premiums for 2.4 million people. Microsoft gets $12.5B. That could cover Medicaid for 3.8 million children.”
+ Basic SNAP Facts…
– Nearly 60% of Americans enrolled in SNAP are either children under 18 or adults who are 60 or older.
– About 1 in 5 non-elderly adults with SNAP benefits have a disability.
– Less than 10% of all the people receiving SNAP benefits are able-bodied adults without children who are between the ages of 19 and 49.
– Around 55% of all families with children that receive SNAP benefits include at least one employed adult.
– About 35% of the Americans who get benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white, around 26% are Black and 16% are Hispanic.
– Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for SNAP. Only 4.4% of SNAP recipients in the 2023 fiscal year were immigrants who were not citizens but were legally present in the U.S., such as refugees. (Trump budget ended SNAP for all immigrants, regardless of status.)
+ The 43-day shutdown may have cost 60,000 private sector jobs.
+ Rep. Jim McGovern on the perks embedded in the Reopen the Government Bill:
This is a massive payday for Republicans. It would allow eight of their senators to shovel millions, millions of dollars into their own wallets. I’m talking cash money. Not for their states, not for their constituents, no, no, for their own personal bank accounts… It is wrong and it’s probably the most brazen theft and plunder of public resources ever proposed in the United States.
+ The Trump administration is trying to fire Ellen Mei, a program specialist at the Food and Nutrition Service, who warned that the shutdown could have negative impacts on the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government to put food on the table. Mei is also president of the National Treasury Employees Union’s Chapter 255, which represents employees at USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service in the Northeast.
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+ Federal agents doing a “drive by pepper spraying” in the Little Village area of Chicago hit a father and his one-year-old on Saturday, as they were in their car going to a Sam’s Club…I don’t know how any parent or grandparent could look at this and not be filled with rage about what our government is doing every day in cities across the country.
+ A Human Rights Watch report published this week documents that the 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention.
+ Rep. Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat from Arizona, visited the Eloy ICE Detention Center near Phoenix. She described the conditions she witnessed inside the prison as “horrific,” including a leukemia patient “vomiting blood,” who was detained in February and forced to wait eight months before finally seeing an oncologist. Ansari said private prison giants CoreCivic and the GEO Group are “making billions,” while detainees in their care are denied water, medical care, and dignity. “What happens inside these for-profit prisons is how the world sees us now…authoritarian regimes can point to America and say democracy is a façade.”
+ A Pro Publica investigation into the midnight raid by federal immigration forces on a South Chicago apartment complex, which DHS had called a base for the Tren de Aragua “terrorist” gang, where agents descended commando-like onto building from a Black Hawk helicopter, detained, zip-tied and interrogated all of the residents of the building for hours, many of whom, including children, were US citizens found that:
+ None of those arrested were charged criminally
+ There was no evidence that the apartment building was a hub for Tren de Aragua
+ There was no justification for the military tactics, including the Black Hawk helicopter used in the raid.
One of the residents told Pro Publica, “For those fools, everyone from Venezuela is a criminal.”
+ An analysis of crime stats by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times found that Democrat-led states like Illinois have lower murder and violent crime rates than some Republican-led states, along with fewer undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Among the findings:
– States with Republican governors have a murder rate almost 32% higher than states with Democratic governors.
– 14 large cities have higher murder rates than Chicago, which this year recorded the fewest summer murders since 1965.
– Numerous cities in red states have higher murder rates than Chicago, including: St. Louis, Memphis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Atlanta.
– Two-thirds of the 132,000 immigrants with prior convictions arrested by ICE since September 1, 2023, were detained in Red States.
+ A US citizen who goes by the name La Vakerita was filming a raid by US immigration agents in Salem, Oregon, when an ICE agent pointed a rifle at her, then took her car keys and wallet. “Call the cops! He took my wallet,” La Vakerita can be heard yelling on a video of the incident. “Why are you taking my keys?”
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The agents drove away in an unmarked car with California plates, leaving La Vakerita’s car in the middle of the road with no way to move it. “Nobody stopped to help, nobody even came close,” she said later. “But if I die, at least it’s for defending my people.”
+ The War on Christians Comes Home to Roost: Not only does ICE prohibit Mass inside detention centers, but now they’re banning prayers outside ICE facilities.
+ Tuesday night’s protest outside the ICE facility in South Portland, organized by About Face, brought out dozens of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I didn’t carry a weapon so it could be turned against my own community,” said a veteran from Idaho.
+ Important piece from POGO and the American University (Go AU!) Investigative Reporting Workshop using federal data from the last four fiscal years shows that under the leadership of Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander leading the assaults on immigrants, protesters and journalists in LA and Chicago, Border Patrol agents in his former base of operations, the El Centro Sector, have used force far more often than they’ve faced assault. For every assault they’ve faced, El Centro agents have used force over 3.6 times, according to the data. Across the Border Patrol, use of force incidents outpace assaults on agents by just over a 2-to-1 ratio. But El Centro’s data reflects the highest ratio of use of force to assault of any Border Patrol sector in the nation, far higher than the other 19 sectors and the Border Patrol overall.
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+ Here’s Bovino’s defiant response to a federal judge’s order releasing all 650 people arrested by federal immigration agents during the monthlong crackdown on Chicago:
We’re ratcheting operations up in Chicago. That’s a very corrupt system in Chicago—whether it’s elected leaders like Pritzker or those out-of-control judges. Chicago needs some attention. We are not going anywhere out of Chicago….Whether they were criminals or individuals that were taking jobs from Americans — you name it, that’s what they were doing. And I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. We’re gonna go even harder on the streets. If he releases those 650, we’re gonna apprehend 1,650 on the streets of Chicago.
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+ Bovino was caught lying during his testimony in federal court about his actions in Chicago.
+ ICE agents pretending to be Oregon police pulled over Juanita Avila in the Willamette Valley farming town of Cottage Grove. They dragged her out of her car, forced her to the pavement, cuffed her and then told her they were hauling her off to an ICE facility. Avila, who is a green card holder, screamed, “You lied to me when you said you were police! Who are you? Why pull me over?” She was released from ICE custody only after her daughter proved her legal status.
+ In another Pro Publica investigation, the reporters reviewed Fox News’ coverage of the ICE protests in Portland. An analysis of more than 700 video clips found that the channel had used footage from five years ago, had mislabeled other dates and suggested that footage from other cities was from Portland.
+ Texas AG Ken Paxton against Harris County (Houston), accusing the County commissioners of “blatantly unconstitutional” and “evil and wicked” actions by allocating $1.3 million in funds to “radical left organizations” to “oppose the lawful deportation of illegal aliens.” Who were these “radical left organizations” and what were they doing? Legal firms that provide lawyers for people, including children, rounded up in Trump’s immigration raids.
+ Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S. selected new leaders on Tuesday. The new president is Paul Coakley, an archbishop from Oklahoma City who issued a statement two days after Trump’s inauguration calling on Catholics to recall that Jesus was once a refugee.
+ Update From Here in the War Zone: On Sunday, about two dozen members and supporters of a fitness club — adorned in iridescent leotards, striped knee socks and retro cross-trainers — staged an ’80s-themed aerobics demonstration they called “Sweatin’ Out the Fascists” at the ICE facility in South Portland.
+ My favorite story of the week, which, naturally, stars Puppy Killer:
Kristi Noem and her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, ordered ten Spirit Airlines jets to ramp up deportations—and to use for their own leisure—before realizing the airline didn’t own the planes, and that the planes had no engines.
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+ As it says in The Book of Kings, or is it Leviticus, Deuteronomy, maybe, one of those great books: “Thou shalt pepper spray the children, rip them from their Mother’s arms, Zip-tie them, put them in a cage, interrogate them, make them serve as their own lawyer in immigration court, then ship them to a country they’ve never lived in. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Amen.”
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+ Epstein to Maxwell in 2011, saying that in all of the investigations into their sex trafficking operation, he was never once asked about the “dog that hasn’t barked,” Trump, who he claims was left alone for hours with Trump’s former underage employee at Mar-a-Lago, Virginia Giuffre, who Trump later claimed Epstein “stole” from him. You don’t have to read between any lines to get the gist.
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+ Epstein to Maxwell in 2011, saying that in all of the investigations into their sex trafficking operation, he was never once asked about the “dog that hasn’t barked,” Trump, who he claims was left alone for hours with Trump’s former underage employee at Mar-a-Lago, Virginia Giuffre, who Trump later claimed Epstein “stole” from him. You don’t have to read between any lines to get the gist.
+ The email to Trump pal and current Ambassador to Syria Tom Barrack may not be the most important item in the tranche of Epstein documents released today, but it’s certainly among the creepiest: “send photos of you and child. …make me smile.”
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+ After the Epstein email release, I predicted that once it became clear that Trump knew exactly what Epstein was up to and may have participated, the Trump Cult would find some way to rationalize, if not endorse, pedophilia. At this point, to exonerate Trump, they need to exonerate Epstein. We’re not quite there yet. But here’s Megyn Kelly arguing that the sex trafficking of girls is less heinous once they’ve gone through puberty: “There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and an 8-year-old…”
+ Prince Andrew’s (aka, The Duke) plan to counter-attack the Mail on Sunday for publishing a photo of Andrew with Virginia Giuffre: “We should think about a letter to the editor today. ‘School’ can mean university,” his PR rep wrote. “Age of consent in Florida is complex.”
+ Landon Thomas, one of the NYT’s own financial reporters, called Epstein “a helluva guy” and kept the sex trafficker updated on other writers’ investigations into his, uh, activities.
+ At one point, Epstein offered Thomas photos of Trump with bikini-clad young women at his pool. The Times remains curiously silent about its former reporter’s close relationship with the sexual predator.
+ For someone who hung with intellectual, political and cultural elites, this trove of correspondence reveals that Epstein lacked even a basic felicity with the English language. Perhaps there was another reason they sought his company?
+ Some of the grossest email exchanges are between Epstein and know-it-all chauvinist Larry Summers, who seems to have relied on Epstein for “dating” advice. Thinking the correspondence would remain secret, Summers apparently felt free to offer his opinion that women have lower IQs than men, something he carefully implied, but didn’t state explicitly, while running Harvard.
+ Here’s Larry Summers saying exactly the kind of smug, misogynistic things to Jeffrey Epstein you’d expect Larry “Do Not Repeat This Insight” Summers to say …
+ Epstein appears to have played the role of relationship counselor to the often morose Summers, who found himself jilted as a “friend without benefits.” One role Epstein doesn’t seem to have played much at all: financial advisor.
+ Even Summers’s wife, the Harvard literature professor Elisa New, was on solicitous terms with Epstein as late as 2018, offering the child predator advice on what to read. She highly recommended Nabokov’s Lolita and Willa Cather’s My Antonia, because both novels are about “a man whose whole life is forever stamped by his impression of a young girl.”
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+ Here’s Epstein bragging to Norwegian politician Thorbjan Jagland about advising the Russians on how to deal with Trump: “It’s not complex. He must be seen to get something. It’s that simple.”
+ Trump on Epstein to New York magazine in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years, terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” This was the same year Virginia Giuffre finally broke free from Epstein’s clutches.
+ Charlie Kirk: “Why don’t you just tell us the prisoners’ names that were on the same cell block as Jeffrey Epstein? That’s B.S., I’m sorry, you’re the president of the United States, figure it out…We want answers.”
+ The girl who testified that she had sex for money when she was 17 with Matt Gaetz, Trump’s initial pick to run the Justice Department, had just completed her junior year in high school when she met the former Congressman from Florida. At the time, she was living in a homeless shelter, working at a McDonald’s and was desperate for money to fix her teeth. The girl testified that she met Gaetz at a party, where she took ecstasy, drank alcohol and had sex with Gaetz twice, once “on a pool table or air hockey table.” She was paid $400. Gaetz continues to claim he “never had sex with that person.”
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+ Over the past five years, the wealth held by the top 0.1% has nearly doubled from $12 trillion to over $23 trillion.
+ David Wallace-Wells on Mamdani and the return of inequality politics: Between 1989 and 2022, the top 1 percent of households in the US added about 100 times as much wealth as households at the national median. The share of all U.S. wealth held by the top 0.00001 percent has nearly doubled over the last decade.
+ A Goldman Sachs study charted the dramatic increase in the cost of basic needs between 2000 and 2025…
Need / % of Income
Home Ownership
2000 33%
2025 51%
Rent
2000 21%
2025 29%
Childcare
2000 12%
2025 18%
Public College
2000 25%
2025 36%
Private College
2000 65%
2025 85%
Health Care
2000 10%
2025 16%
Student Loan Payments
2000 8%
2025 9%
+ U.S. nonfarm payroll employment declined by roughly 50,000 in October, the biggest decrease since 2020.
+ CNBC: The U.S. lost an average of 11,000 jobs every week in October.
+ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “The Democrats may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system with the October CPI. And jobs reports will likely never be released and all of that economic data released will be permanently impaired.” The numbers must be really, really dire.
+ Hassett on the October jobs report: “We’ll maybe be able to concoct something, but we’ll never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October.” Concoct!
+ For the first time, the average new car price has surpassed $50,000.
+ Less than two weeks after Trump announced a trade truce, Bloomberg News reports that China’s purchases of American soybeans appear to have stalled.
+ The Associated Press reports that nearly half of U.S. adults aren’t confident they could find a good job now.
+ Kevin Hassett, Trump’s top economic advisor: Inflation is one of those things that has a lot of momentum. If you look at the charts, the momentum is headed really towards the Fed’s target.
CNBC: Even though it’s been increasing for five straight months?
Hassett: Well, there are ups and downs.
+ For years, the IRS has been trying to stop one of the slimiest tax dodges exploited by Wall Street tycoons: the use of limited partnerships to avoid paying Medicare taxes. Now the IRS is being overseen by a man who ruthlessly exploited that very scheme: Treasury Secretary and Acting IRS Commissioner Scott Bessent. From 2021 to 2023, Bessent avoided paying roughly $910,000 in Medicare taxes on money he made running his Key Square Capital Management hedge fund, which was set up as a limited partnership.
+ Americans’ perception of the economy has now sunk beneath the lows seen during the 2008 financial crisis.
+ Reporter: How does a $20 billion bailout of Argentina help Americans?
Bessent: Do you know what a swap line is?
Reporter: A currency swap, yes.
Bessent: But what is that? Why would you call it a “bailout?” In most bailouts, you don’t make money. The US government made money.
+ More Bessent on Argentina: “The way to think about it is maybe for your first loan, your parents co-signed for it. We basically co-signed.”
+ The median age of a US home buyer now sits at a record high of 61 years, according to the National Association of Realtors, which means they’d pay that 50-year mortgage off at 101, before finally owning their little piece of the American Dream. The median age of a first-time home buyer is now 41.
+ The real estate tycoon doesn’t know the most basic facts about the real estate industry in the US.
Laura Ingraham: Is a 50-year mortgage really a good idea?
Trump: It’s not even a big deal. You go from 40 years to 50
Ingraham: 30.
+ Monthly mortgage payment on a $500,000 loan
* 30 years, $3,050 a month
* 50 years, $2950 a month (but 240 more payments)
+ According to the real estate industry tracker Redfin, Florida and Texas are the states with the highest number of deals homebuyers have backed out of this year.
+ Trump wants 15-year car loans. I had a Subaru with nearly 300,000 miles on it that had made several cross-country trips and scaled hundreds of mountain passes, but it was only 12 years old when it finally gave out. Imagine paying for it three years after it had gone to the scrap metal yard.
+ S&P Global estimates that Trump’s tariffs will impose about $1.2 trillion in additional costs on companies in 2025. The majority of those costs will be passed on to consumers.
+ Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway now owns 5.6% of the entire U.S. Treasury bill market, per CNBC. Berkshire now owns more Treasury bills than most central banks hold.
+ Millennials now have net worths that are higher than those of previous generations at similar ages, adjusting for inflation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The median millennial had a net worth of $84,941 in 2022, per LendingTree. Adjusting for inflation, Generation X had a median net worth of $78,333 at the same age.
+ Trump is planning to gut federal housing grants, a move that could quickly return as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people to the streets.
+ According to a new YouGov poll, 64% of Americans think billionaires should be paying more taxes. Only 64%?
+ Change in streaming prices since 2019…
Disney +172%
Apple TV +160%
Peacock +120%
Hulu +58%
Paramount +40%
Netflix +38%
HBO Max +23%
+ Lina Khan, co-chair of Zorhan Mamdani’s transition team:
There had been some speculation in the past that if push came to shove. The monopolists, the CEOs, the titans of industry would ultimately stand up for democracy and be on the side of the rule of law. When given the chance these past few months, they’ve all just bent the knee. Time after time, they’ve chosen self-enrichment…
Candidly, at this moment when we are seeing unprecedented levels of corruption from the Republican Party and total pay to play, the idea that our response to that should be, ‘okay, maybe we should be a little bit more corrupt too’ is frankly mind-boggling to me.
+ CNBC: “Rich New Yorkers started looking for therapy when they heard that Lina Khan will be co-chairing Zohran’s transition team.”
+ Franklin Leonard: “Republicans talk about Lina Khan like she’s Omar in The Wire.”
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Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), still from The Wire. (HBO).
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+ Trump to America’s veterans: “If we die, we must die and we as men we die without complaining.” Has an hour gone by in any day when he hasn’t complained about something, usually trivial? (Of the four generations of Trumps in America, none has served in the US military.)
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+ According to the latest analysis by the Cost of War Project, since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has spent over $9.65 billion on military activities in Yemen, Iran, and the wider region. Including military aid to Israel, the U.S. has spent over $31 billion on the post-10/7 wars.
+ The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier is now in the Caribbean off the coast of Puerto Rico, after being summoned out of the Mediterranean Sea and toward the coast of Venezuela. The Ford is escorted by the guided-missile destroyers USS Bainbridge (DDG-96), USS Mahan (DDG-72) and USS Winston Churchill (DDG-81). There are now at least eight U.S. warships, a nuclear submarine and F-35 aircraft operating in the Caribbean region.
+ The U.S. military has killed at least 76 people in nearly two dozen strikes on alleged drug boats since September 2.
+ According to CNN, several boats hit by the US airstrikes have either been stationary or were turning around when they were attacked, contradicting the Pentagon’s claims that these small, gunless speedboats posed an imminent threat to US personnel.
+ Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specialized in counter-terrorism and the laws of war, on the Trump administration’s dubious legal rationale for lethal strikes on suspected drug boats:
The administration has established a factual and legal alternate universe for the executive branch. This is the president, purely by fiat, saying that the U.S. is in conflict with these undisclosed groups without any congressional authorization. So this is not just a secret war, but a secret, unauthorized war. Or, in reality, a make-believe war, because most of these groups we probably couldn’t even be in a war with.
+ Both the UK and Canada have told the Trump administration that they do not want their intelligence used to target boats in the Pacific or Caribbean, for fear that the strikes are illegal and might subject them to international sanctions or prosecutions.
+ Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro announced that they would also stop sharing intel with the Trump administration:
Such a measure will be maintained as long as the missile attack on boats in the Caribbean persists. The fight against drugs must be subordinated to the human rights of the Caribbean people.
+ To date, the military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to the National Priorities Project.
+ According to Nick Turse, writing in the Intercept, the total includes “$172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.”
+ Joan Didion on the fatal touch of Dick Cheney: “Dick Cheney pioneered the tactic of not only declaring…apparently illegal activities legal but recasting them as points of pride, commands to enter attack mode, unflinching defenses of the American people by a president whose role as commander in chief authorizes him to go any extra undisclosed mile he chooses to go on their behalf.”
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+ Is it really healthy for a country to have a man riddled with so many psychological insecurities running the War Department?
+ Ryan Ruby, writing in The Baffler, on Violence and the Sacred: “War—whether it takes place between societies or within them—has no heroes, only distributions of cruelty, debasement, and ruin, a fact that is routinely denied, ignored, or repressed by those most responsible for perpetuating it.”
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+ Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise around 1.1% in 2025, reaching a record 38.1 billion tonnes of CO2, according to the latest figures from the Global Carbon Project.
+ A new study published in Nature finds broad support globally for decisive action to combat climate change: “Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.”
+ In the last 13 years, electric vehicle sales in Norway have gone from less than 5% to 95% of all cars and trucks sold in the country.
+ Brett Christophers on the plastic wastestream: “Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part of the problem. In the rich world, our wastefulness is horrific. But, as with climate change, the focus on consumers deflects scrutiny that should be directed towards industry.”
+ Today, almost 3/4 of EU electricity generation comes from non-fossil energy sources.
+ Solar now accounts for around 90 percent of all new energy growth, globally. Global solar grew by 498 TWh (+31%) in Q1-Q3 2025, compared to 2024, “the largest increase ever over a nine-month period.” Global solar output in the first three quarters of 2025 already eclipsed the total output in all of 2024.
+ China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months.
+ Only five states (California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey) move more people by rail each day than the people mover at Atlanta’s airport.
+ Waymo, the self-driving menace of the streets of San Francisco, is now doing one million rides per month in California, a threefold increase over the past year, 26 times more than two years ago..
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+ Errol Musk, Elon’s father, ranting about “white genocide” and offering an alt-history of South Africa to CNN: “The USA becoming minority white will be very, very bad… You want to see the US go dark? You want to go back to the jungle? South Africa didn’t oppress black people; we gave them work. We fed them. We never saw this (Apartheid) you’re talking about.”
+ Open AI’s Sam Altman and crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong are backing a startup that plans to create genetically engineered human embryos. According to the Wall Street Journal, Armstrong reportedly wants to make a genetically engineered baby in secret to avoid public backlash. The procedure is banned in the US.
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+ This week, The Onion debuted its first musical comedy. Wait, this was actually a thing?
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+ Financial Times: Mohammed bin Salman’s utopian city was undone by the laws of physics and finance. ‘One former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently.”
+ You might think it doesn’t get more bizarre than a former Al Qaeda commander being invited to the White House. But that was just the beginning. Once in the Oval Office, Trump sprayed Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa with his cologne, then asked him, “How many wives do you have?”
Al-Sharaa: “One.”
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Trump: “You never know.”
+ The Presidential Walk of “Fame” is now live in the White House, featuring decor that even the Shah of Iran would have rejected as too gaudy, which was likely purchased at some Home Depot or Pier 1 across the Potomac in Alexandria and can be seen on the walls of Strip Mall Thai joints from Tehachapi to Tonapah…
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+ Do these come with the wall art? Or do you have to purchase them separately?
+ Chimpanzees on Reddit are using this photo to disprove any evolutionary link between humans and the higher primates.
+ According to Axios, DC plastic surgeons, who are used to patients seeking subtle reconfigurations of their aging physiognomy, are now being inundated with the new Trump crowd who, according to one plastic surgeon, are demanding “a more done look, like that Mar-a-Lago face.”
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“Yes, doc, I’d like the Guifoyle, but with a little more lip, because those lips just weren’t enough for Don Jr.”
+ Trump on Ilhan Omar: “I look at somebody who comes from Somalia, which has nothing but a lot of crime and she comes in and tells us how to run our country. ‘The Constitution says this, the Constitution says that.’ The whole thing is crazy.” Yes, the Constitution is a scary read.
+ JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, takes a few shots (sorry) at his cousin, RFK Jr:
RFK Jr is a dangerous person who is making life and death decisions as HHS Secretary. He fired vaccine experts on the panel and replaced them with antivaxxers. He’s cutting funding for lifesaving research. He’s spreading misinformation and lies that are leading to deaths. There’s a measles outbreak right now, higher than what it’s been in 40 years, that’s a direct result of what he’s done.
+ Is there a better measure for the flaccid state of country music than the fact that the top country song on Spotify is the AI-generated “Walk My Walk.” The “artist” Breaking Rust has two million monthly listeners on the leading streaming service… and it’s the most streamed not for the novelty factor but because it’s better than almost anything else coming out of Nashville these days. In this case, at least, the slop isn’t being generated by AI but the music industry itself.
+ Pope Leo from the Southside’s four favorite films….
It’s a Wonderful Life
Sound of Music
Ordinary People (Condemned by the Church at the time of its release)
Life Is Beautiful
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+ Weren’t Daniel Boone (member of the Virginia House of Delegates) and Davy Crockett (member of Congress from Tennessee), both swaddled in buckskin and raccoon hats (at least in the Fess Parker versions), the “furries” of their day…
I Hear Mariachi Static on My Radio
and the Tubes They Glow in the Dark
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
The End: Marx, Darwin and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis
Joel Wainwright
(Verso)
Legal Plunder: The Predatory Dimensions of Criminal Justice Joshua Page and Joe Soss
(Chicago)
Word Time
Deborah Major
(City Lights)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Sad and Beautiful World
Mavis Staples
(Anti-)
How You Been
SML
(International Anthem)
Daylight Daylight
Steve Gunn
(No Quarter)
Let My Children Have Music
“I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good, I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean, the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. It’s like living in a vacuum and not paying attention to anything that came before you. What’s worse is that critics take a guy who only plays in the key of C and call him a genius, when they should say those guys are a bitch in C-natural.”
– Charles Mingus, “What is a Jazz Composer?”
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
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