Spent 5 hours at the scene yesterday. Extremely heartening to see so many Vermonters of all ages & backgrounds come out. Depressing to see VSP & SB police aid ICE in their violent detainment of (checks notes) the wrong people.
www.sevendaysvt.com/news/immigra...
www.sevendaysvt.com/news/immigra...
I’m sorry, the suffering is infinite and things are genuinely fucking dire, but it is truly hilarious that the nazis ran into the middle east while screaming “logistics and diplomacy are fake and gay” and now they’re trying to ask everyone else to fix the strait of hormuz because tfw no more THAADs
I thought it was that they said they're not going, and now he's like well you're not invited anyway - in a particularly threatening and creepy way.
This, too, is gender. Sigh. They despise soft power, even though it is critical to anything the country needs to accomplish.
The Trump admin hollowed out the State Department, so does not have the diplomatic finesse to solve the crisis of the strait. Saunders doesn't say this, but I expect some combination of European and Asian diplomacy is what attempts to clean up after Trump.
"The U.S. is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence." - The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, 3/11/26
They don't seem to understand the insurance market either.
I can't raise a red enough flag for the way states are attacking trans people in this moment. It is extremely bad, and escalating quickly (and relatively quietly)
I was a bit reluctant to delve too deeply into what could happen, as my instinct was to think that this could be quite catastrophic. Of course now that I have looked into it, I'm really hoping we can somehow get out of this sooner rather than later.
The longer it goes on, the more likely it is wealthy countries buy up all the available oil, leaving zip for poor countries.
Johnston said if this goes on for a month or two, we are talking about global recession if not global depression.
Like, it's good that they are finally tapping the strategic reserve, but that they didn't do this on Day 3 or 4 is a sign of how out of their depth they are.
About 8 or 9 days' worth of what would normally be going through the strait.
I saw his constant misstatement of the nature of tariffs as willful. He just likes them for non-economic reasons. But there's something that screams own goal here to such an extent, that I think he's just incapable of understanding what is going on.
The need to grasp the structure of the oil market is, in itself, a good reason not to have a sundowning fool who doesn't read in charge of your economy.
It's an ongoing thing, what you do now has effects down the road. Expanding ones.
Then there is also the demand side, mostly in Asia, which has also slowed down refining, so they can keep running without having to stop.
Gulf states lack storage capacity. They have already shut off some production as a result, affecting future supply. Iraq alone has shut off the amount (of feared lost Russian supply) that sent prices up to $120 a barrel in 2022.
If Trump had ended the war 3 days in, we could have gone back to normal relatively quickly. Now, at 10 days in, we have the equivalent of a giant air gap in a pipeline or hose - 200 million barrels' worth is missing from the global flow of petroleum.
Personally, I'm not at all sure Trump would understand the peculiarities of the oil market even if someone explained them to him. Which I'm not sure his advisors are fully doing, for fear of delivering bad news.
It sounded like each day the strait remains closed creates growing effects.
He said it's surprising Trump has tolerated as much chaos as he has - again, suggesting that they don't seem to understand what they have unleashed. As in, if he understood the risk to prices, and thus his presidency, he would not have gone down this path.
From his point of view, you want to get started on keeping the market resilient yesterday, so not clear what they're waiting for. One of the things you want to avoid is a refinery having to shut down, because it takes a *long* time to get it going again.
There's sort of a lot to process, so I'm not totally sure, but I think Johnston is concerned that the Trump administration hasn't already released from the strategic reserve (the way the Biden admin did in 2022, with the invasion of Ukraine). Suggests that they don't understand the problem?
Listening to oil analyst Rory Johnston on the what-if-crude-goes-to-$200-a-barrel scenario:
www.iheart.com/podcast/1308...
*she seized
I think it depends how you read the fact that this is the earliest known account of his abuse. I see it as odd that the seized on a very murky period of his career, before the usual Trump timeline, if what she's doing is tying her memory to press reports.
Just seems a bit... acrobatic on her part, to give so much detail about a random other abuser, about things that were not actually covered by the press but can be investigated.
Or whether there is any other evidence that he and Trump knew each other at the time. If you're following the press narrative, they don't meet until later.
I do see what you're saying. That it could have been some unnamed man she told her friend about, or some random guy named Jeff, and the story evolved to fit the press narrative. But it seems like she can't control elements of the narrative, such as whether he was on Hilton Head at all.
