iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Honda deserves to follow the American car manufacturers into the dirt. That's too bad since the 2026 Trailsports were good for the Northern tier - though they conspicuously lack electrification.

Honda to Debut Supersized Eight-Seat SUV for Premium Buyers

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

The bribes MBS paid Trump and Kushner keep yielding dividends

Houthis threaten to strike Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia
Yemen’s Houthi armed group has said Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities are “a legitimate target”.

The group’s spokesman, Yahya Saree, issued an evacuation alert for “all employees and citizens present near any facility affiliated with Aramco Oil”.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Does Trump know what's real anymore? www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, apparently without consulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said the deal to stop long-range attacks was “news to me”.

In a social media post, the US president claimed the two sides had reached an agreement. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.

He offered no further details. Zelenskyy said he was surprised by the announcement but would agree to it if Vladimir Putin did the same. “If President Trump negotiated it with Putin – please tell us when the ceasefire begins. We are ready and we will accept it,” the Ukrainian president told the Axios website.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Nobody has ever made a better investment than MBS made in bribes for Trump and Kushner.

An attack on Saudi Arabia’s main airport on Saturday marked the deadliest single incident in the kingdom since the start of the Iran war, piling pressure on the Middle East’s largest economy as it prepares to host a flurry of major events aimed at drawing more foreign investment.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels blamed the Yemeni group for “the cowardly terrorist attack” on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, calling it “a full-fledged war crime.”

Twelve people were killed and more than 300 wounded in the strike. The victims included four Saudis, a Palestinian, two Bangladeshis and one person each from the US, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Sudan, authorities said.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Bauke Mollema, a true hardman, hangs up the cleats

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Murderer of girls and fisherman mad he didn't get the Peace Prize from a country that doesn't award Peace Prizes. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Syracuse, New York, Friday night. He called the snub an “indelible stain on the country of Norway and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.”

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Josh Marshall's continuing quest to find someone who can actually tell us what is happening with AI leads to David Robinsin (not the Spur) who did an interview with Ezra Klein (blech). Read Marshall so you don't have to listen to Klein. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/oh-he... 🎁

What I think this amounts to is that we’ve developed technology that is at least very good at devising solutions to bounded tasks (capture the flag, find the answer, hack the machine) but acts in inherently unpredictable ways. And we keep turbocharging those models to be able to act faster and faster and devise more and more inherently unpredictable ways to act. You don’t need to have any wacky ideas about tech-utopianism or tech-doomism to think that might have bad outcomes.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Fjallraven hardest hit (nothing against Carhartt, just have never had anything from them). Also, is cold brew my whole personality?

My interests and hobbies - cold brew
Home and family - cold brew
Brands - Toddy cold brew
Departments - cold brew

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If someone had told me about this yesterday, that would've been great. www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

The record-breaking run in stocks that’s come despite Treasury yields touching multi-decade highs finally hit a wall. One potential impetus may be caution in the face of rate-hike fears. All 19 Federal Reserve officials backed the decision to raise rates in September amid rising inflation and war-driven oil prices. There’s growing belief that a second bump might be on the way.

“Another rate hike is probably coming this year because current policy isn’t very restrictive,” said David Russell at TradeStation. “With inflation above target and most measures of economic activity strong, price stability is the Fed’s dominant mandate.” —Jordan Parker Erb

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Josh Marshall puts our vainglorious bigot of a president on the couch and concludes, I think correctly, that's he's a deeply sad man who wanted to be loved, but is just so fantastically hideous that no one can love him. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump...

A few times I’ve noted that Trump started moving aggressively toward foreign policy and war just as his power and popularity were diminishing at home. That’s when the Greenland fury started, that’s when he went after Venezuela, that’s when, on the sugar high of Venezuela, he launched his catastrophically consequential war on Iran. No one likes unpopularity or flagging power. Trump is unable to handle it. Foreign aggression was a kind of compensating expression of power and dominance, which was possible because an American president’s war power is all but unlimited, a kind of presidential self-soothing. The naming and building campaign kicked off at about the same time and is largely the same thing. It’s an in-spite-of-himself admission that the permanent, almost statutory love he imagined would be his at the outset of the first administration and that he thought he had another shot at in the second will never happen, and he had to start mandating it in construction and name plates that could command it after he’s gone.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Raccoon knowers: Is.the second raccoon, which appears from behind, a kit or an adult?

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Primoz!!! Some say he was a ski jumper at one point, but he's never confirmed one way or another My grandmother and mother would be over the moon that a Slovenian won in Slovenia. I'm just happy for old guys everywhere

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

If you have a house to sell and a move to make, I don't even know what to tell you. Between mortgage rates and diesel... jesus Defeating Republicans next month is not nearly enough. This is not casual fuckery and cannot be recompensed in ordinary ways. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

US mortgage rates climbed for a seventh straight week to their highest level in nearly three years, compounding the nation’s affordability problem.

The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage rose 19 basis points to 7.49% in the week ended Oct. 2, its highest point since November 2023, according to Mortgage Bankers Association figures released Wednesday. It’s up about half a percentage point over the past three weeks, marking the fastest increase since early 2023.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The courts aren't able to contain Trump's many tentacled lawlessness. They are way too slow. We are just today getting a hearing on Trump's second set of unlawful tariffs. Vote harder than you've ever voted before. 🎁 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

During Wednesday’s hearing, Judge Timothy Reif repeatedly asked Justice Department lawyer Eric Hamilton to identify the specific part of the trade law that Greer relied on for his authority to adopt the tariffs. Reif expressed confusion when Hamilton replied that they weren’t relying on either of two sections that spelled out the definitions for “unreasonable” conduct by trading partners. The judge asked if that meant the administration was “ignoring” how Congress had set up the trade law.

Hamilton replied that they interpreted the structure of the law differently, and that Greer had relied on another section that gave him broad discretion. Hamilton also faced lengthy questioning about the extent of country-specific evidence and analysis that Greer provided to support his determination that each country failed to address forced labor in their imports, and how that burdened the US economy.

Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves at one point commented that there was “not a lot of depth” in the evidence the administration cited to show how it determined certain goods were affected by forced labor.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

More from Josh Marshall about overinvestment and virtually unachievable profits threatening the AI bubble (and the S&P). 🎁https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doubts-about-the-ai-boom-are-seeping-into-elite-headlines/sharetoken/d853fef3-932e-4a9c-a650-da2ed4a4ec26

It’s very hard to know when unsustainable spending, unmeetable profit predictions will catch up with the equities markets. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen until it does. And the Trump-era stock market, with things like memestocks and much else, often drives money into knowingly absurd things. So sometimes Wile E. Coyote just kinda floats in the air forever. But the U.S. economy was never dependent on Gamestop’s valuation. And it’s hard to see how at least some air won’t start coming out of the balloon at some not-too-far-off point when you see the situation boiled down to simple math in the publications key decision makers, both on Wall Street and in DC, read.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's pretty rare that a business reporter makes me reach for a pitchfork, but Hamza Shaban has done it. He says the only real risk from AI is not investing in Anthropic because, you know, the imaginary profits outweigh real risks finance.yahoo.com/technology/a...

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Josh Marshall sees the needle/razor/ice pick closing on the AI bubble. Worth noting this is just about the debt, not the possibility it gets shut down, which is a whole other kettle of fish. 🎁https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/losing-money-but-making-it-up-in-volume-more-news-from-the-ai-front

Four years into the AI boom, the companies selling it are cutting prices. Microsoft, Amazon, Workday and Figma are offering discounts and free access to hold on to customers drifting toward Anthropic and OpenAI, and the two labs cut prices on their newest models by as much as half.

The discounting has a plain explanation: EY says only one in 10 companies can show AI’s return on its income statement. The cost of building AI kept rising. Anthropic is negotiating a single data center lease that would require at least $40 billion, and Blackstone concedes no one has mapped out who will buy all the debt.

The takeaway: AI is getting cheaper to buy just as it becomes more expensive to build. How that gap closes, whether through vendor margins, credit markets or Anthropic’s coming IPO, will shape the boom’s next phase.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I don't know who at Wisconsin Forestry authorized this clear cut in natural forest that left only left about 10% of the trees, but I definitely wish all the worst for them

Public land in the Driftless which was dense oak and hickory. Nearly every large tree and all the understory is gone.

A view of a once dense forest, now almost entirely denuded.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Another triumph of Trumpian diplomacy. $5 national average gas price on the horizon

Iran stuck to its seven-day proposal for reopening the crucial Strait of Hormuz, saying it won’t soften its conditions, while Donald Trump sent mixed signals about his willingness to reach a deal. He told Axios that Tehran has overplayed its hand but added that he expects negotiations to resume this week. Adding to tensions, UK police are investigating a potential terror plot after five men were arrested near an air base used in US strikes against Iran.

The jitters reverberated through markets, sending brent crude prices back up through $108 a barrel and reigniting inflation worries. Treasuries resumed a selloff that pushed yields to multiyear highs last week, while US stock futures slumped.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Another triumph of Trumpian obsequiousness: -Bloomberg Energy Daily

Soybeans — China’s largest agricultural import — were notably absent from the list, with only seed varieties included. The country is already more than halfway to meeting a 25 million-ton purchase target for the year, but that’s mainly been from state-owned buyers.

Outside of agriculture, very little has been announced on energy and metals. The market had been hoping for Chinese pledges to buy more US liquefied natural gas if tariffs of 15% were removed by Beijing.

There was also nothing on rare earths, China’s biggest point of leverage over the US. Beijing was looking to offer more export licenses of the critical minerals as a bargaining chip in the talks, Bloomberg reported last week.

Beyond tariffs, Trump urged Xi during the summit to increase Chinese production of refined petroleum products to help stabilize global supply.

It’s unclear if more easing of tariffs or other measures will be announced in the coming days, while a big agricultural purchase could change the picture. But for now, crop markets are serving as an initial gauge of sentiment on the outcome of the summit — and it’s not positive.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Josh Marshall says we've invented amoral machines that have a survival instinct. 🎁 talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/an-im...

Another concern is that some AI behaviors may be explained by a form of self-preservation goal, e.g., when the AI finds out that it will be replaced by a new version. Nobody gives the system that survival goal, but staying in operation, learning about the world and gaining control over it are stepping stones toward almost any other goal. These are called instrumental goals. Imitation may reinforce this for the same reason explored in the previous point. Self-preservation and control over one’s circumstances are pervasive themes in the human-written text these models are trained on.

The last point isn’t explicit in Bengio’s note. It’s a point LG made in his email to me. Humans have developed habits of sociality, empathy, guilt and a lot more over more than a hundred thousand generations of evolutionary adaptation. LLMs don’t have that precisely because they are not sentient. They’re optimized. Obviously humans do terrible things all the time. But they have discomfort with anti-social and immoral behavior embedded in them. LLMs don’t. So there’s a check on bad behavior, albeit a limited and imperfect one, built into humans which can’t really be “taught” to LLMs.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

There are a lot of mushrooms in these woods. I should have hunted morels in the spring.

A couple white and tan mushrooms in the leaf litter. One has a convex top and the next is concave. They are surrounded by baby oak saplings

A single mushroom with whitish edges and a golden brown center. Looks like it's been cooked in butter.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Anybody know this spider? I just saw one of these charge out of hiding after a wasp that had one foot caught in the web. The wasp started alternating between trying to pull away and trying to sting the spider. And then A SECOND wasp flew down to attack the spider. Pandemonium!

A pretty big, kind of hairy brown spider that is shaped like a naval ship coming towards you in that it's long and thin and tapers to a point at its butt. It has white on its butt. Its web is flat and has a hole, or tube where the spider goes when it's not fighting wasps two at a time

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The "holding cards" talking point needs to be drowned in acid. Trump said a stupid thing to Zelensky one time and now everyone in the administration talks like an extra in a scene in a dusty saloon.

US State Department spokesman Pigott stressed that Trump is committed to seeing through his fundamental objective regarding Iran: ensuring that its government does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

“The president holds all of the cards here,” Pigott told Al Jazeera.

He said the amount of oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz was increasing every day and that the US’s economic operation against Iran was “severing” the Iranian government’s “financial lifelines”.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

He had two gloves on yesterday, including during his salute to the camera. The WH comms people are bizarre.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Not fair that the prettiest cats I've seen are the wild kittens one of my neutered males thinks he sired. They are terrified of me, but they are in the barn 45 seconds after I put down food in the morning.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A second opossum swans by. This one is no baby like the earlier visitor. I know it's not cold enough that anything needs heat, but I'm a softie.

A full grown light-grey opossum warms its feet on the warming mat.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

You coming to us or are we going to you? You'll need to provide the crust.

A black and white game camera pic of a big, usually handsome raccoon.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Trump's war has cost the world's markets twice as much diesel as Putin's war. They should both get tossed into the Deerhunter cage, but Trump one day earlier. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

From March to August, estimates from energy analytics companies, Energy Aspects, Kpler and Vortexa, imply an average loss of about 770,000 barrels a day from the Middle East compared to the same period in 2025. That’s more than twice the roughly 350,000-barrel-a-day loss of Russian supplies over the same time-frame.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I don't think anyone has captured the essence of this administration quite as well as Esmaeil Baghaei, Iran’s spokesperson for its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From Al Jazeera's live feed:

“The propaganda is so crude and threadbare that it exposes the naivety of the mindset that launched an unlawful war of choice against the Nation of Iran, and helped deliver the United States to the embarrassing position it occupies today,” he said.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Krugman has been rereading Machiavelli: "Globally, Trump is in exactly the opposite position of where Machiavelli said a prince should be: hated but not feared." paulkrugman.substack.com/p/fear-strik...

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Uh oh, Trump gonna cut off trade with Heard and McDonald Islands now. www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/t...

President Donald Trump demanded that the Federal Reserve slash interest rates or else he will cut off trade with countries with which the U.S. maintains trade deficits.
He doubled down in the Oval Office later Friday, saying, “we should be paying the lowest interest rate in the world.”
Trump has urged the central bank and its chairman, Kevin Warsh, to “get smart” and cut rates.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

When you cannot buck the compulsion to offer a comforting lie...

Trump claims war to end, oil prices to come down after midterm elections
The US president has spoken briefly to reporters, claiming that the war would end “immediately” after the elections, slated for early November.

Donald Trump also said that while the US is not looking for a deal with Iran, negotiations “could happen”.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Koo koo for Cocoapants must have lost his understanding of calendars and time. He's acting like November is 10 months away.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Krugman reminds us that the sundowning grandpa doesn't understand that the long-term enmeshing of US and Canadian economies resulted in a lot of specialization as to who makes what, and his idiotic trade war will cause real privation here in the states. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/adding-inj...

So what is this about? Clearly, we’re looking at a symptom of deranged Trump syndrome. As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply, he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Dean Baker says Trump is making the world a better place despite all his efforts to make it worse. deanbaker22.substack.com/p/trump-goes...

People who buy EVs rarely switch back to gas-powered cars. That means the shifts we’re seeing now will be enduring and built on in future years. As EVs become more common, the infrastructure to support them gets built out. Also, more people will recognize the benefits of EVs when they see friends, neighbors, and co-workers driving cars with lower fueling and maintenance costs.

And EVs keep getting cheaper and charging times shorter. This will push even more people to opt for EVs.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Guess we have to add Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to the pitchfork/torch list. heated.world/p/we-asked-b...

Oil giants like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP are working with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to develop custom AI tools that help them boost production.

The use of these AI tools could trigger 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than the emissions from AI data centers, the study found. Importantly, the study also found that the fossil fuel industry’s use of these tools will almost always outweigh the climate benefits AI provides to renewable energy.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Josh Marshall getting started thinking about democratic backsliding, its causes and who's to blame. 🎁 talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/in-an...

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Trump voters wanted change and now China is the world's economic superpower and Canada and the EU are telling us we can't sit with them. Ascendant adversaries, disgusted friends, be the change you want so see something something. www.bloomberg.com/news/article... 🎁

The European Union and Canada are working toward a new, all-encompassing relationship that will range from trade to security, as the transatlantic partners seek to build a new alliance to offset the global power politics dominated by the US and China.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the top executive of the EU, is expected to announce the plans at her state of the union address in Strasbourg, France, Sept. 16, according to people familiar with the preparations. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will attend the speech then address European lawmakers the following day.

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Born to farm, forced to wrangle raccoons @agroforest.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

People said even Trump couldn't get gas up to $5. Well ha ha, he bout to do it

Bloomberg chart showing Brent crude at $98.62 and West Texas Intermediate at $93.97, followed by the following paragraph:

Brent crude moved toward $100 a barrel as traders watched for details of an Iranian deal with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, which may tighten Tehran’s control over the crucial waterway. Saudi Arabia said operations at several energy facilities in the kingdom’s south were halted after attacks, the latest escalation in the region. Global financial markets, already under strain from a bond selloff and sharp currency swings, face the risk of more volatility in the months ahead driven by the prospect of interest-rate hikes, mounting concerns over fiscal deficits and the war in the Middle East.

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