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While Trumpers read AI promoted lies from Trump on Truth Social and Fox Pundits mostly cover Trump’s butt there is still real news out there like I’ve been consuming for fifty plus years. Today its found in Trump’s “fake news” generators the NY Times and the Bezos infected Washington Post. I highly recommend glancing at the following even though they are behind pay walls. I have included some short passages when the title isn’t enough. I also add some of my own “take aways” from the articles. (My take aways are italicized)
Global ‘mining mafia’ feeds China’s appetite for gold, investigation shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/12/china-gold-illicit-mining-indonesia/
The bloody, muddy true story of the real Deadwood (History Book Review)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/08/22/deadwood-peter-cozzens-history-review/
A faith-and-flag theme park sails on Europe’s rising political tide
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/25/france-theme-park-gallic-pride/
Opinion: We Can Disagree on Trump’s Motives. But a Pattern Is Still Emerging.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/opinion/trump-voting-mail-election-stolen.html
Opinion sample text: “Many states are already ready to do just that. Lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills since 2024 aimed at changing, restricting and in some cases undermining voting, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab. The bills that would “interfere with election administration” are a mixed bag. The good news is it is still easier to propose a bill than it is to pass one — only four states of the 22 in this group have enacted such a bill.”
Opinion: Pay the Bums More
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opinion/congress-salary-stock-trading.html
Opinion: “Late last year Congress voted to reject the annual pay increase that its members were due under a 1989 law. This sort of ritualized self-flagellation has become entrenched. Fearing political blowback, Congress has not allowed even a cost-of-living adjustment since 2009. With inflation taken into account, the long-frozen $174,000 salary has lost 32 percent of its value over that time.”
Opinion: My chief take away was this ex journalist’s comment that Putin will be in power for 15 years
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opinion/russia-media-ukraine-army.html
“Ruzavin first got the idea to enlist in the summer of 2023, when he was hiking in the Carpathian Mountains with his wife, Nataliya Gumenyuk, who is one of Ukraine’s best-known journalists. He told me about it a few weeks later. He presented it as a decision, but it was clear that he was still just getting used to the idea himself.
“What’s the point of writing another story about the war?” he asked.
Having written several myself, I knew what he meant. A lot of other journalists do, too. No matter how hard you try, the stories become repetitive. People start ignoring them, or reading them, as Susan Sontag once wrote, only to reassure themselves that they “are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.””
And a second take away. The last two quoted lines are exactly how I feel about fighting Trump. Its been ten long years and the next three will determine if the damage he has done will require me to pay attention to our betrayed founding fathers for every breath that remains in my body!
And two stories on China and its threat not counting the NPR story about how it swallowed up “rare earths.”
China’s Sway in New York City’s Elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/nyregion/china-consulate-new-york-elections.html
“In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.
They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.
And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.
In the past few years, these organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party. The groups, many of them tax-exempt nonprofits, have allowed America’s most formidable adversary to influence elections in the country’s largest city, The New York Times found.”
Global ‘mining mafia’ feeds China’s appetite for gold, investigation shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/12/china-gold-illicit-mining-indonesia/
My take away: As Donald Trump gilds the White House making the useful decorative element unnecessarily “indispensable” while miners everywhere destroy the Earth to sift its gold China is ravaging the Earth to beath Trump at controlling the world’s Finances. China is rapacious and for all of Trump’s foot stomping about the Panama Canal he has only succeeded in pissing off Brazil which China is helping to build a railway across the Amazon that will make the Panama Canal irrelevant by the time Trump is being diapered in memory care.
