Friday, June 6, 2025

Trump's Post About His June 4 Call With Putin is Russian Weird.

Photo Credit: giphy.com

Dylan Combellick, who posts about Ukraine on Medium.com, makes an intriguing point about Trump's post on Truth Social about his June 4 phone call with Putin.

Combellick's observation about Trump's post is worth repeating in full below.  He observes that an English speaker does not seem to have written Trump's post.

The use of language and punctuation, at least for the portion of the post dealing with Ukraine, does not reflect a person who is a native speaker of English.  In fact, it reflects the composition of a Russian speaker.

So, who wrote Trump's post?


"Weird Language

So, this post bothered me. I poked fun at it in an earlier article, but thinking further, it kept reminding me of Twitter user TexasPatriot0946362 mentioning “warm water ports.”

For background, “warm-water ports” are things that ONLY Russians talk about—Russians and penguins from Heard Island. Anyone who talks about them is a Russian bot or troll. Almost all American ports are “warm-water ports,” like virtually every European port. No country except Russia has its access to the sea shut off for months during winter.

So when Trump says “docked.” That’s not how Americans talk, right? Docked airplanes? Well, Russia does. In Russian, airplanes are often referred to as судно (sood-nuh), which can, without context, mean either an airplane or a seagoing ship. Only the military uses that word to refer to aircraft. It’s probably a carryover from when we called them airships. The “docked” comes from a Google Translate of the Russian word пришвартованный (or any number of conjugations). I would translate it as “docked” when used without context, as that is the general civilian understanding of the word. Only the Russian military uses that word when referring to airplanes. Read that sentence again. It is not used by civilians when talking about aircraft, ever.

Then, look at the commas. Those aren’t Trump commas. They aren’t English commas. They aren’t even Shatner or Walken commas. Those are where the commas would be placed by a crappy computerized translator that was sourcing material from a language that has a lot of commas, like Russian.

Peace is capitalized. The Russian word мир (meer) has a double meaning: “world” and “peace.” The Russian Meer, or Русский Мир (capitalized), is the Russian vision of peace in which Russia is the king of everything, so there will be no more war, only oppression.

All of that is very weird."

Buymeacoffee

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Monday, June 2, 2025

U.S. Census Bureau Index of Economic Activity Release June 2, 2025--Trade Weights on US Economic Outlook

The US Census Bureau released on June 2 its economic indicators thru April 2025,

The long view is that nothing seems to change much over time, with the exception of the financial crisis in 2008/2009 and the negative effect of COVID in 2020 (with a strong bounce back in 2021/22 at the beginning of President Biden's term).


But looking at the short term, a lot is happening.  The overall index fell nearly 1% (-0.91%)


But the real story is why it fell.  Generally, economic activity was weak.  For instance, Advanced Wholesale Inventories, Advanced Retail Inventories, and Construction Spending were 0.0%, -0.1%, and -0.4% from March to April, respectively.

But Advanced International Trade: Goods fell a whopping -46.0%, while Advanced New Orders: Durable Goods (not shown on chart) fell -6.3%. 

With economic activity weak overall, clearly, the decline in trade-related economic activities will have a pronounced effect going forward.  Look for economic activity in later months to fall even more.

For a closer look at the numbers, go to,

https://www.census.gov/economic-indicators/