At the end, no I don't think Trump or Hegseth have the testosterone to push the button to punish China for taking down our grids for months.
All it will take will be one idiot letting one nuclear missile take out a city, somewhere, and civilization will be in great danger.

Trump knew his electorate, he knew that they loved spectacle over sanity, pro 'wrestling" chaos over reasoned science. All trump cared about was winning, even if it took America down a deep hole.

One of the many things China has done better than the US...green energy, taking human caused global warming seriously. Could be a good sign, saying that China actually is sane and doesn't want a catastrophic war over Taiwan.

Why yes, indeed, money is speech, and corporations are people, and even if we are going through late stage capitalism where greed sums concentrate in fewer and fewer greedy hands, hey, it could be worse.
I wrote that last and then tried to think of how it could be worse...Trump puts two more corrupt souls on the Supreme Court and they become his tame legal firm, I guess.

Normally, one sees a healthy election competition and one can say...just how democracy works.
In this case, nothing is normal when fascists are working to take over the country the way they took over Russia.
All they have to do is bankrupt America with insane foreign wars, and then kill FDR's safety net.

Clearly, crypto is designed to replace the Dollar, and is much easier to launder what passes for money through.
I wonder what happens when we wake one day and find that our banking system has been hacked similarly.
Too many times the smartest people in the room end up out of touch with reality.

But Trump and the gang are sold out clients of big oil and coal...so America will suffer for many years, thanks to the idiocy of MAGA supporting a white supremacist fascist who is our totally pay to play President.

Wow, the man is wildly incompetent as SecDef, and now he is applying to become a United States Senator? He is only in it to serve, not the people, but the Trumpian oligarchy, but the job of Senator is about looking out for the needs of all of the people of a State.
No such thing as a good Republican Party in this time of Trump, they all, one way or another, bend the knee, and if one or two rebels, the party itself is onboard the fascist train.

Democracy is a fragile tool to build a society, but it does let the people, if they are allowed to vote, determine their own leaders and their own futures. Both of Trump's wins were legitimate though absolutely injurious to the lives and hopes of those not invested in the "Market". We bought him, we own him, and now he owns us, at least until Nov.3.

We are led by greedy fools like Trump who are adamant that human caused global warming not be addressed, so big oil can help the Republican Party investor caste get richer and richer.

Israeli apartheid and deadly imprisonment of millions of Palestinians wouldn't be possible without American bombs, bullets and bucks. When President Biden said he was a Zionist, that destroyed the hopes of the Palestinian people for a state, so the murderous second Nakba is on both sides of the American political realm.

Brave woman telling the truth and for that indiscretion being charged with the crime of being honest.

What you get when you hire a true fascist to run your democracy, he is only in it for personal power and wealth, like any corporation's CEO.

And make no mistake about it, the attack on public education, from first grade to college level, will also do the same to the poor and powerless in America, as it becomes too expensive to go to a public college, and at the grade school level, make religious indoctrination the law of the land.
We live in terrible times.

I thought I lived through the worst of times, when Nixon was President and we were killing thousands in Vietnam...but now we have someone worse than Nixon in the White House and clearly we will probably attack Cuba next, and all the time, in the dark, big tech is working to make half of the workers in America irrelevant.

If Israel had cared about peace and working with the Palestinian people, it wouldn't have murdered Rabin.

One difference be Brazils elections and our's...we let crooks like Richard Nixon and I would bet Trump, no matter the crimes, ride off into the sunset...pardoned for trying to turn us into a oligarch monstrosity like Russia.

Once again I find myself proud of the work of one of Oregon's two Senators...vote by mail works.

My guess is, if the voters of a region actually had a vote in big tech construction...much of the data center construction would be voted "off the island".

Darkly, one understands that keeping the Iran war going profits American oil barons mightily...so....

Weirdly, there are banks who are in the middle of the AI boondoggle, who, if the AI crash happens soon, may find themselves in 2008 kind of trouble. I wonder just how screwed up things are, we never will be told anything resembling the truth by the Trump fascist gang.

Take from the poor to give to the rich...simple sentence but it describes the Trump administration's mindset, certainly the thinking of the Trump gang itself.

I wouldn't trust a self driving anything, from a cab to a delivery vehicle to a hearse. Machinery breaks down, sooner or later, and if it is your turn to be in a cab during the later...

What is this "we" of which you speak, oligarch?
Trump is your guy, he is totally owned by big oil, and they are making out like bandits as their oil is priced as high as oil from other places, and now that the Straits are mostly closed...
Imagine being poor, with little to no savings as a buffer, and trying to have children and raise them happy and healthy...