Trump Sides with Putin, Farmed Fish
George W. Bush once reflected on a meeting with Putin by saying, “I looked the man in the eye … I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush should have looked a little deeper. If he had gotten to Putin’s colon, he would have seen a puckered-up Donald Trump holding a sack of cash. Back in 2018, in Helsinki, in what should have been the end of any notion of him as president, Trump sided with Putin over US intelligence agencies on the issue of election interference. John McCain responded to Trump’s hellish Helsinki performance by explaining, “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.” At the time, Trump’s siding with Putin over America was shocking. Today, his Helsinki performance barely makes the greatest hits list of Trump’s international betrayals. His latest affront is lifting sanctions against Russia to buy diesel in a clear siding with Putin in his murderous invasion of Ukraine.
+ Six senators call for Trump administration to ‘immediately reverse course‘ on Russian diesel plan. (That’s only 94 senators short of where we should be…)
+ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): “In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange … He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an ‘energy cease-fire,’ an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later … He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.” Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear. Aside from being a Putin puppet for years, why is Trump doing this? The deal doesn’t involve enough diesel to make a real difference in global prices. Go with the Occam’s razor explanation (at least until it’s rebranded as Trump’s razor). “This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit.”
+ “Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.” David Frum: Trump Is an Easy Mark for Putin. “Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.” (Trump is an easy mark for Putin, and for years, tens of millions of American voters have been an easy mark for Trump.)
House Call
NYT (Gift Article): Homeland Security Agents Search Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. “Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Monday, according to three people briefed on the matter, the kind of investigative step the Justice Department has long shied away from so close to an election.” (This is not your father’s Justice Department, and they’re not shy about anything.)
Fish Foul
“Fish farming, known as aquaculture, was supposed to help solve this problem by relieving some of the pressure on the planet’s oceans. It is now a vast and innovative industry … But aquaculture has a dark secret: Most of this farm-grown seafood is raised on other seafood taken from the oceans. Think about it: Farm-raised fish have to eat something. The most efficient way to feed them is to sweep up vast numbers of other smaller fish, which are turned into a nutrient-rich powder called fishmeal — or its liquid equivalent, fish oil. As a result, instead of relieving the pressure of overfishing, aquaculture is making the problem worse.” NYT Magazine (Gift Article): The Dirty Secret Behind the Farmed Fish You Eat.
Giving Zero F–ks
“The most common use case I encountered for deploying AI in this way was to correspond calmly with an ex-spouse, whom one may now resent with the fire of a thousand billable lawyer hours but whom one must treat cordially, lest one gets threatened with changes to the custody agreement. (As one Florida woman who uses AI for this purpose told me, sending an ‘F you’ text to your ex might feel amazing, but you have to think about the ‘legal ramifications.’)” Olga Khazan in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The People Who Outsource Emotional Labor to AI. (Couldn’t you just text ‘F you’ to people, and then blame Claude for writing the message?)
Extra, Extra
Popping a Donor: “Elon Musk has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.” (Nothing like trying to win an election about affordability by deploying a bottomless pit of funds from a trillionaire.)
+ Riyadh Attacks: “A projectile struck a passenger terminal at the international airport in Riyadh on Sunday, a day after a missile hit the same terminal and killed 12 people, the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said. The Houthis claimed responsibility for those attacks and others.”
+ Platonic High Colonic: “The censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because ‘it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.'” All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say in Texas.
+ Shock and Ahhh: “American economists Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics Monday for their work on models that have helped governments and central banks manage economic shocks, such as energy crises and inflation.”
+ Defrost Bite: “An ongoing cyberattack has reportedly struck major supermarket chains across Europe, disrupting refrigeration control systems. The attack — which has reportedly seen units set to continuously defrost at 50 degrees Celsius — is also apparently affecting deliveries and in-store pricing powered by electronic shelf labels”
+ Let’s (Tray) Table The Discussion: The good news: You finally have access to decent WiFi on airplanes. The bad news: So does the person in the seat next to you. The latest nuisance on flights is a Zoom call at 30,000 feet.
Bottom of the News
“In late September, about 15 of them convened for the first time at the International Heat Therapy Research Symposium to hash out how to rigorously study heat therapy — a bucket that includes Finnish sauna, infrared, hot water immersion and more — and to form an organizing scientific body that will help steer the field forward.” Sweating the details: Sauna’s potential health benefits draw scientists’ interest.
+ “Like the Simpsons, many hardware-store owners have long adopted a kitty or two at their shops to help keep mice out of the bird feed and grass seed. But increasingly, they are discovering that the cats are more than just mousers.” Hardware Stores Have a Secret Weapon for Wooing Customers. “Many social-media-savvy stores feature their cats in online marketing to create buzz and build their customer base.” (Nothing in life is constant, except the role of cats in going viral on social media.)
