#fabrications

[just3-p3achy]

hey anyone have any bloody art fanfics to recommend? Around 1,000 words preferably but more is welcome!

[ellesthots]

so many romance books are just ‘man gets violent and aggressive to show he cares’ and ‘man objectifies woman as a compliment’

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Trump at the UN: Destroying America's legacy of goodwill.

September 24, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

On Tuesday, Trump delivered one of the most offensive, counterproductive, dishonest, ignorant, and embarrassing speeches ever to sully the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations. In sinking to that nadir, Trump surpassed the shameful performances of Muammar Gaddafi, Nikita Khruschev, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat.

Before addressing the substance of Trump’s stain on America’s relations with the world community, let’s answer the most important question first: Why does it matter, and how does Trump’s shameful performance fit into the ongoing efforts to defeat Trump, MAGA extremist ideology, and Republican officeholders at every level?

At root, Trump squandered the hard-earned legacy of goodwill and respect earned by millions of Americans who represented their country abroad by showing the best America has to offer. The emissaries of America who created that goodwill include soldiers and sailors defending global freedom, foreign service staff, foreign aid and healthcare workers, emergency relief responders, and volunteer educators, social workers, and scientists.

The goodwill that Trump squandered on Tuesday did not belong to him. It was a collective asset of the American people that made each of us safer in a dangerous world. Everything Trump touches dies. On Tuesday, he stood before the assembled leaders of the world and put his stubby hands all over America’s post-war international standing and killed it.

But Trump did more than squander a collective legacy born of sacrifice and selflessness. He created a new obstacle for all Americans who travel abroad or conduct business in other nations. Rather than enjoying the presumption of goodwill, we must overcome the fear that we are Trump supporters—and all that implies about the derision with which he and his supporters view the world.

The men and women who fought, died, and served America’s interests abroad for the last century should be outraged that their legacy is being squandered to massage the fragile yet monstrous ego of Donald Trump.

We can and will rebuild what Trump destroyed on Tuesday. But it will take decades.

The process of rebuilding that legacy begins with taking back Congress in 2026 and the presidency in 2028. The damage that Trump inflicted on Tuesday is at the core of who we are as Americans and who we aspire to become as a nation in the next century.

Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly

Trump was given 15 minutes to address the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. He spoke for 57 excruciating minutes that felt like days. I will not explicate his speech. Others have done so. See Fred Kaplan in Slate, Trump U.N.: This might just be the most bonkers speech of his career | And that’s saying a lot.

If there is a passage that encapsulates the haughty arrogance and Dunning-Kruger cluelessness of Trump’s ignorance, it was this:

I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell. … I’m really good at predicting things. I’ve been right about everything. . . . [America is]the hottest country anywhere in the world, and there is no other country even close.

As Nahal Toosi said of that passage,

It didn’t land well.

See Politico, Trump to the World: Do as I Say.

As explained by Toosi in Politico,

I’ve listened to every speech Trump has given to the U.N. General Assembly. This was the wildest one yet. . . . Trump rambled to an extraordinary degree, even after the broken teleprompter was fixed. He spouted an astonishing number of falsehoods — yes, even for him — such as suggesting that London was moving toward adopting Islamic law. He contradicted himself, claiming, for instance, that carbon footprints don’t matter while also bemoaning air pollution in some regions. [¶] Some foreign officials described Trump’s speech on Tuesday as uninformed at best and counterproductive at worst. “He tells things which are not true,” one European official complained to [the Politico author] by text.

Trump repeated his lunatic claim that he has “settled” seven wars in his second term. Every member of the UN General Assembly who heard that statement knew it was a lie before the words had reached the back rows of the Assembly Hall.

The lie is so grotesque that Trump cannot keep track of the alleged “wars” that he settled. For example, Trump claims that he settled a war between Cambodia and Armenia, countries that are separated by more than 4,000 miles and are not at war.

Trump also claims that he has settled the war between Albania and the non-existent country of Aberbaijan (a mispronunciation of Azerbaijan)—countries that are not at war. Trump was presumably referring to the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, one of the few conflicts he helped to settle (a process that the Biden administration contributed to significantly).

Trump’s accelerating confusion and ignorance of geography have led to the widespread dissemination of the following fictional map, which illustrates Trump’s muddled view of geography and the fictional wars he has settled:

[I copied the above chart from Mark Chadbourn ‪@chadbourn.bsky.social, who attributed the map to Rasmus Jarlov, Chair of Denmark’s Defence Committee. I do not know who actually created the graphic, but it was not me.]

Sadly, the fictional map is grounded in Trump’s confusion about world events and his role in shaping them.

If you want more details about Trump’s truly awful speech, PBS has compiled and organized video snippets by topic. See PBS, 7 key moments from Trump’s U.N. speech.

The Guardian also provided good coverage of the speech: Trump calls for nations to close borders and expel foreigners in UN speech: ‘Your countries are being ruined’.

I know from corresponding with readers that among the community of subscribers to this newsletter are retired foreign service officers, ambassadors, and senior military leaders who served in Europe. If you feel comfortable commenting on the speech, I invite you to post your comments. If you prefer to keep your comments anonymous, please email me at [email protected], and I will post them anonymously.

Trump changes policy on support for Ukraine

Amidst the carnage of Trump’s rambling comments to the UN General Assembly, Trump announced two significant policy shifts. First, he said that Ukraine was entitled to recover its sovereign territory seized by Russia. Trump had previously said that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end the war. See The Guardian, Trump says he believes Ukraine can regain all land lost to Russia since 2022 invasion

In addition, Trump said that NATO countries should “shoot down” Russian aircraft that invade NATO airspace. See ABC, Trump says NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that violate their airspace.

Both changes in policy are significant. The question is whether they are permanent. Stay tuned.

[Robert B Hubbell Newsletter]

[trumpamerica]

Walz was only enrolled at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota until 2004 but said until 2011 that he was close to getting his doctorate

‘He Did Not Complete the Degree Program’: Tim Walz Repeatedly Claimed He Was ‘Nearly Finished’ With PhD Years After He Disappeared from Univ

As recently as 2011, Tim Walz claimed in official biographies for his campaign and congressional office that he was on the verge of completi

Walz Congressional Website Bio: Walz completed his master's degree in educational leadership in 2001 and is nearly finished with his doctorate at St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota. His approach to teaching has gained him recognition as the 2002 Minnesota Ethics in Education award winner, 2003 Mankato Teacher of the Year, and the 2003 Minnesota Teacher of Excellence as well as being named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce for his service in the education, military, and small business communities.

When Walz ran for Congress in 2006, roughly two years after his last recorded year in the St. Mary’s doctoral program, he portrayed himself on the campaign trail and in Congress as an active student "nearly finished" with his Ph.D. A 2006 voter guide published by the Minnesota Star Tribune indicated that Walz’s Ph.D. was "in progress."

[pollylynn]

Title: Misdeem WC: 950

“I don’t see it going anywhere.” —Richard Castle, Food to Die For (2 x 22)

There are times when he’d like to be a liar. This probably does not exactly set him apart from the masses. Who is out there walking around, drawing breath and sighing it back out again who hasn’t wished they’d been a liar at one time or another? Who hasn’t had a friend solicit reactions a truly hideous new outfit and desperately tried to sell a sincere It’s fantastic! only to have their own stupid, truth-telling face nuke the little white lie from orbit?  Doesn’t he—day in and day out—sit across the table from self-tattling morons who’d like nothing more than to lie their way right out of the interrogation room? He might be—he clearly is—in bad company, but he would very much like to be a liar right now. 

Beckett didn’t seem to mind.

His mother thinks he’s lying. His daughter probably would think he was lying if she had any attention to spare. And it’s not even that he wants to be lying. It should be a lie. That’s the agony of it. 

She should mind. That’s the way of things. This whole Richard Castle: Moral Support for Hire gambit should be one in a long line of his fool-proof plans to get her goat—to make her mind. 

But she doesn’t mind. It’s not a problem. He’s telling the truth, and he’s not even getting credit for it. Not from his mother, who is pursing her lips and shaking her head as she sourly reminds him that he should be getting ready for his date.

He doesn’t want credit, though, not in this instance, and certainly not for this truth. He wants to be the rogue his mother thinks he is—the one his daughter would think he is, if she weren’t, herself, so torn between duty and desire. He wants to be the Hamptons, the seductive allure of fun in the sun that makes Beckett forget all about the microscope-requiring AP exam that is Tom Demming. But he’s not the Hamptons. Or Beckett is not tempted by the beach. Or something. 

It’s a cavalcade of lousy metaphors, so he doffs his gloves and goggles. He extracts a spare watch from somewhere and he picks out a shirt in a color that she likes on him. Or a week ago he’d have said it was a color she liked on him, but apparently he’s no judge at all of what Kate Beckett likes or doesn’t like. That is the only explanation for the fact that she’ll be toting her microscope and slides all over town tonight, completely unperturbed by the thought that he will be out on the town, raconteuring his way through the celebrity chef world with one of her high school gang.  

There’s a moment when she bursts on the five-star dinner scene that he thinks she’s come to make a liar out of him. He very nearly chokes on whatever it is he’s eating at the moment and weakly, hopefully demands to know: Beckett, what are you doing here? 

He has the answer. He’d happily write it for her. He’d set her up with anything from cue cards to index cards to a state-of-the-art teleprompter, if she’d only read the lines with conviction: I’m here for you. I’m here because I couldn’t stand the thought of this. I’m here because it is a problem, and I do mind. 

But that isn’t the answer, of course. She is not interested in cue cards, index cards, or his writing services in any medium. She is not there for him or because she minds or it’s a problem. She’s there for case-related purposes, because the only struggle for her is the one between duty and more duty. 

He tries to work himself up to play the part everyone expects—the one she expects. He makes a respectable showing of it. He whines at length about the food of which she has cruelly deprived him and her good friend Madison. He accuses her of being uncivilized. He has another nanosecond’s worth of a thrill when she bans him from the interrogation. He parses the words giggling over the risotto with our suspect up, down, and sideways, searching for vindication—for the indisputable evidence that he’s been a liar after all, but it isn’t there. 

She’s hissing, red-faced, and thoroughly embarrassed by Madison’s Castle baby fantasy, but it’s . . . generic embarrassment. Or worse, it’s embarrassment for his sake—that he’d play a role in such an outlandish fantasy, or maybe that he’ll get the wrong idea? She’s avoidant when he tries to get her goat with a reprise of the Castle baby fantasy, but it’s . . . impersonal. She wants to get on with the case and back to her date with duty. There isn’t a shred of evidence that she hopped in the Fun Police Wagon and  drove it down to Rocco DiSpirito’s place because she’s bothered by the fact that he was out with Madison. 

He wonders how it’s come to this. He wonders when, because he could have sworn that she minded when he had his ten-second fling with Ellie Monroe, when he was on the radar of Bachelorette Number 3. He would have laid money on it being a problem when Rina scrawled her digits across his palm, when Lee Waxman wanted to trade favors, and when Meredith and the Crazy-Sex Train blew through town. He’s positive that she has minded virtually every woman who has so much as given him a second glance over the last year or so. 

But Madison? She doesn’t mind. It’s not a problem, because she, herself, has ‘Something’. 

That’s the truth and he’d so much  rather be a liar. 

A/N: Oof. This was ornery; and I didn't think this was the lie that would drive the story. Blegh.

images via homeofthenutty

[found-fabricated]

Patina accumulating on a silver fabrication over time. Rusted paper clips collected on the streets of Stockholm in Sweden when I showed there with @konsthantverkarna . #detail #object #paperclips #finds #fabrications #silver #patina #decay #weathered #coloured #colouredmetal #oxidisation #flatware #strangeobjects #other #notnarnia #fromanotherplace #reactions #utensil #contemporaryart #contemporarycraft #metalwork #sculpture #assemblage #foundobjects #foundobjectart #stuartcairns #artist #maker #smith https://www.instagram.com/p/B_K2_CMpkX5/?igshid=1uxooahvk27lz

[fabricofaman]

MATURITY: The thing I hate the most about getting older is loosing all the colorfully charismatic elders in my life. Sure, I know it’s all so inevitable, but still, I miss their wisdom and their old world charm. There’s something really cool and savvy about a mature man who can sit and listen to the gripes and groans of today and recall with such clarity the lifelessons he learned through time. The value of a dollar when he was a kid. The meaning of love, compassion and forgiveness. The pride of being self-made. His parallels and parables are priceless. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to just sit and listen and learn from each other. #foodforthought #ramblings #fabrications #fabrication #fixation #flaunt #genre #oldschool #flavor #menswear #mensblogger #stylists #fashionguru #thecatinthehat #maturity #sonsandfathers #daddyshome #listenup #leasonslearned #grandparealness Props to @ericlafforgue for inspiring this post with her nostalgic imagery. https://www.instagram.com/p/CBS1ES5p1bx/?igshid=2gcepsr2uw9i