Why do we hunger so for vicious things?
Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

― Robert Lowell

Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls’ school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump’s people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

Trump brushed off talk from some of his advisers that Iran would likely respond by shutting the Strait of Hormuz and attacking other Gulf States that had aided the US, either explicitly or covertly. His aides were right. He and Hegseth were wrong. Then Israel killed Iran’s top negotiators. Suddenly, there was no one left to talk to. Trump claimed that the Iranian military was completely destroyed. Iran responded by downing US fighter jets, drones and surveillance planes. It struck US military bases, ships and a CIA station house.

Trump claimed Iran had no leaders and its government was in a state of collapse. But the new regime quickly coalesced around Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, and took a more radical, uncompromising stance. Trump said the Kurds would invade Iran and arm Iranian dissidents. But the Kurds, burned one too many times by the US, declined. And after US and Israeli missiles hit neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, power plants and oil refineries, the Iranian resistance turned against the US.

The Strait of Hormuz was shut down. The price of oil shot up and Trump’s poll numbers sank. The global economy was sent into crisis. Trump asked the European nations he had refused to warn about his plans to go to war against Iran for help. They refused. Spain, Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland went further. They either blocked or restricted the use of their airspace, landing rights or shared military bases for airstrikes on Iran.

His top intelligence advisors, Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard, either resigned or were pushed out. The CIA and the Pentagon began leaking stories to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that Trump had been fully briefed that Iran would likely respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump sent the FBI out to find the leakers and hound the reporters. More stories came about how the US had used half of its THAAD interceptor missiles to defend Israel, at $15.5 million a pop, while Israel held its own missiles in reserve.

Unable to extort former US allies to bail him out or bomb the Iranians into submission, Trump began to manipulate the market, announcing fake cease-fire deals one week, threatening to make Iran glow the next. The market spasmed up and down and people with inside knowledge, including Trump, who made over 3000 trades, cashed in.

The US kept bombing with Iran’s high-tech weapons to little strategic effect. Iran kept responding with low-tech drones, which got progressively more accurate in their targeting. Within two months, the US had largely exhausted its missile supply, while Iran was rebuilding its own Fateh-110 short-range and Shahab-3 medium-range missiles, repairing its missile launchers, and reinforcing the bunkers at its nuclear sites.

Chess not being Trump’s game (no one is quite sure what his game is), he responded to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz by moving inexplicably to impose his own blockade, thus placing himself in check. He vowed to send the Navy SEALs to steal Iran’s uranium stockpile. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, anyway. Trump threatened to send the Marines to seize Karg Island. He didn’t and they couldn’t have, in any event. The Iranians took note. The price of gas continued rising. Farmers ran out of fertilizer. An airline went bankrupt. Trump shrugged. The costs of the war were peanuts to him.

Trump boasted that Netanyahu would do anything he asked him. Trump said he was in control. But the Israelis acted on their own. They did what they wanted, which was to deepen and widen the war, subverting every timid move toward peace by Trump, by escalating its attacks on Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in southern Lebanon. Fulfilling Thucydides’ prophecy, Trump had walked right into his own trap and Netanyahu, behind his cynical smile, helped to spring it.

Europe was against the war. Russia was against the war. China opposed the war. The global south opposed the war. The American public opposed the war. But Congress did nothing as Trump usurped its constitutional power, refusing even to invoke the War Powers Act. There was no one left to stop the war, which almost no one wanted.

Two months into the war, Trump was desperate to find a way out. He sent his negotiating team, led by JD Vance, to Pakistan. The Iranians rebuffed the offer. Vance came home in disgrace and out of favor with Trump, who now considers him a loser. Trump turned his affections toward Marco Rubio, who wants to invade Cuba, but keeps his distance from Iran, a war even he understands to be unwinnable, plugging his ears against the ravings of the Israel-lobby funded hawks in his own party, as Odysseus did the call of the sirens. So the negotiations were left to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two non-diplomats, whose negotiating style is predicated on the pursuit of their own self-interest.

Trump needs a fig leaf to end the war. He was willing to pay Iran billions to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile. This should be an easy win and could have been under Ali Khamenei, who seemed ready to make just such a concession to prevent war, before they bombed his home. After all, Iran doesn’t need it. There are other ways to acquire nuclear weapons, if it wants them. But at this point, Iran knows it holds all of the cards. Iran, not Trump, holds the fate of the global economy in its hands. Despite the death and destruction Trump and Netanyahu have inflicted, Iran is more powerful now than it was before the war. The cards it holds can’t be bombed away. The US would have to send hundreds of thousands of ground troops to come take them. To Trump’s credit, he’s too squeamish to endure the bloodbath such an invasion would inevitably engender.

Iran is now in the position to dictate the terms of any deal, not the man who hubristically considers himself the “artist” of dealmaking, though most of his deals, like this one, ended in ruins.

+++

+ On hearing word of a potential agreement between Iran and Oman to control the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump fumed: “Oman will behave just like everyone else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” Even Hegseth looks at Trump as if he’s gone totally bonkers, thinking to himself, “Didn’t I just explain to him that we’d don’t have enough missiles left in the stockpile pile to blow up Berkeley, never mind Oman?”

+ In this bizarre, circuitous post, which was definitely not written by Trump or his late night helper, Natalie Harp (aka, the Human Printer), the author, perhaps Jared Kushner with Steven Miller’s help, is attempting to extort the Gulf States into joining the defunct Abraham Accords, the precipitating factor behind the Oct 7 attacks, by alleging that Iran (which Trump elsewhere claims to have destroyed militarily) will destroy them…Hard to see this ever happening. Why wouldn’t the Gulf States just cut a deal directly with Iran and leave Trump and Netanyahu in the cold?

+ Democrats like Cory Booker support invoking the War Powers Act on Iran in order to vote for it. He is attacking Trump from the right for trying to say “Uncle” and calling it quits. ON CNN’s State of the Union, Booker claimed that Trump was being “played as a fool” in negotiations with Iran. “This weak nation has put America in a stalemate.”  Booker said that Trump and Hegseth have run an incompetent war that has failed to prevent Iran from “fueling their terrorist proxies.”

+ Not to be outflanked by Booker, here’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz attacking Trump from the Democratic Right:

I am concerned and frustrated, again, over another potential deal, or negotiations for more negotiations, where we’re going to unfreeze Iranian assets and give them billions of dollars to be able to control proxies again and to rebuild their ballistic missile programs, never mind their drone program which has been incredibly deadly and they’ve been increasing their drone capabilities. So this is deeply concerning. Look, I’m glad that Iran, their capability militarily has been degraded, but if what we get from this initial deal is just going back to where we were before, where Iran could not control the Strait of Hormuz, then what has been accomplished?

+ Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in harmonic alignment with Cory Booker and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, rejects Trump’s deal with Iran…“The government of Israel cannot allow this to happen. This is a bad agreement. This is an agreement that can harm the State of Israel, and we will not allow this to happen.” And, he urged Netanyahu to start bombing the hell out of Lebanon, again, which Bibi did…

+ Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir’s partner in (war) crime, Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich called on Netanyahu to ramp up the airstrikes on southern Lebanon: “For every drone that hits one of our soldiers, 100 buildings must be taken down.” [Israel has lost 24 soldiers in the latest assault on southern Lebanon, which has killed 3,320 Lebanese, most of them civilians, including 50 in the last two days.]

+ It must have come as quite a shock to many of the professional Islamophobes and neocons that still inhabit some of the more rancid quarters of DC  that Trump wanted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to become the Delcy Rodriguez of Iran. Then, in true Trump-style, they nearly killed him in an airstrike on his compounds in the first hours of the war and the insane plan fell apart before it could even be set in motion…

+ Four months after Trump unveiled his Board of Peace, which he hailed as the “most consequential” international peace group in history, with a budget of $17 billion from pledged contributions by each member, the Board’s accounts are empty, void of even a single dollar. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has ordered the Israeli military to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip, a flagrant violation of the “peace” deal that Trump’s board, which doesn’t have even a peanut to its name, was meant to enforce. Israel has killed 890 civilians since the “ceasefire” began.

+ Ken Klippenstein on the fall, internal exile and ultimate eviction of Tulsi Gabbard:

When intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard resigned this past week, citing her husband’s health, the battle immediately began to shape the narrative — saying it was due to clashes with Trump over Iran, or being frozen out of the West Wing, or deep frustration with her own agency.

These stories all have one thing in common: they cast Gabbard as a martyr. But that isn’t what happened. If you look at what Gabbard actually did, the picture is less flattering.

She oversaw her agency’s National Counterterrorism Center’s move into purely domestic matters (contrary to its original design). The intelligence budget went up. The surveillance state tightened its grip on the American people, with Gabbard presiding over an intelligence community striking up alliances with private companies, including social media giants.

+ The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner is almost always this interesting, but guys from the Atlantic Council usually aren’t. In this interview, Danny Citrinowicz provides a very clear-eyed assessment of the Iran War, documenting Trump’s repeated blunders and the reconstituted Iranian regime’s come-from-behind win. Here are some of Citrinowicz’s key observations:

“We have to remember what happened on February 28th—that Israel and the United States launched this campaign to topple the regime. In fact, they ended up strengthening it. Opening the Strait is not an achievement, since its closing was a by-product of the war itself. The Iranians are going to get some money, and sanctions relief may come after the deal is signed, too. If they don’t get money from this, they won’t do it. So, in that regard, what we’re facing right now is a war that may have been a tactical success for the U.S., but is a strategic failure.”

“I have to tell you something about the Iranian regime: They’re feeling so much in the driver’s seat that they’re not going to forgo anything. They have reached their limitations when it comes to compromising, and that’s where we are right now.”

“[Trump] should have stopped the war after three days…he should have stopped the war and offered to negotiate. There was no purpose after that. After three days, we all knew that there was not going to be any regime change in Iran. So why continue the war? Stop the war, say you won, negotiate on nuclear, capitalize on the fact that they are in disarray, and try to reach an agreement. Now? Now it’s a catastrophe!”

“[Trump] didn’t have any strategy, any plan, any anything. There were also none of the right experts in the room. Instead, there were people saying, You can do this, you can do that, telling Trump lies. Look at the blockade. How pathetic is his blockade? You should have done it before, not after. Who thought that this blockade would make Iran capitulate? Come on! You don’t know the Iranians. It was obvious it wasn’t going to work.”

“a collapse of the Israeli doctrine regarding Iran. Not only a defeat, not only a fiasco. A collapse. Look at what Netanyahu promised this whole time. He said, Just give me the opportunity to attack Iran. And he got it, twice. He got the U.S. beside him with all that power, the satellites, the air force, everything, and what have we got? A more radicalized regime that can rush into a nuclear bomb and still have a conventional missile capacity. It’s a shit show because at the end of the day, everything that Netanyahu promised failed miserably. And now Senator Lindsey Graham is talking about normalization. Come on. How can you be this disconnected from the situation in the Middle East? Israel is perceived as more of a threat than Iran by some countries after this. How are you going to have an agreement while Israel is annexing the West Bank?”

“Leaving the nuclear deal with Iran was one of the greatest strategic mistakes of the twenty-first century, and maybe would qualify as one of the biggest of the twentieth century as well, if you were to include it. Look, it wasn’t an optimal agreement, but it had certain virtues, and the worst thing was that the U.S. actually left the agreement with no counter-strategy. And Iran has learned so much since the U.S. left the agreement, especially on enrichment.”

+++

Sam Altman: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” This is why they don’t care if (and in fact don’t want) your kids to learn to read or write. They want to sell basic intelligence and the less you know, the more they can charge you for telling you something you should have learned in middle school.

+ Bill Winters, the CEO of the British Standard Chartered multinational banking house, said the company will replace “lower-value human capital” with AI. This is how they think of us, all of us who are not them, as expendable “human capital.” This guy would have owned slave ships and plantations 200 years ago…

+ Pope Leo from the Southside used the 135^th anniversary of the Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII encyclical on capitalism and the working class) to release his first encyclical: Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, in which the first Augustinian pontiff appeals for the safeguarding of humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace…

The Holy Spirit challenges us today regarding our relationship with technology and the ongoing digital revolution. Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.

In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as, in and of itself, it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it.

Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. This is the risk of dehumanization: building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means.

Yet, a bright possibility emerges: that of building together, of transforming diversity into a resource and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity.

+ Ex-Money Honey Maria Bartiromo: The Pope said AI could make civilization ‘less human.’ Why is the Pope commenting on AI right now?

Doug Burgum: “I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope.” There’s a lot that Burgum doesn’t know.

+ Artificial intelligence is causing a net U.S. loss of 16,000 jobs per month, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.

+ The Trump administration is now targeting people who oppose AI and massive water hogging and power-hungry data centers under a new threat category dubbed “anti-tech violent extremism,” many of whom, by all indications, are MAGA–along with the Pope, of course.

+ White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka says that the Trump administration is going to label American Leftists “terrorists” right alongside drug cartels. Will there be drone strikes? “We’re gonna label terrorists as terrorists, whether it’s cartels, whether it’s jihadis, or whether it’s sadly the le — the Americans who are left wing, who are radical, and because they subscribe to some anarchic, anti-fascist, or radically pro-transgender ideology.”

+ Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, dropping an inconvenient truth about the social and economic consequences of AI: “The signature of AI is that it’s going to take us to a world where we have very high GDP growth, and potentially also very high unemployment and inequality.”

+ Jill LaPore, The Pre-History of AI Slop: “Before ChatGPT, more than 98 per cent of all English-language articles published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half.”

+ Vice President Snowflake at the Air Force Academy graduation: “I’ve watched a few highlights of graduation speeches where someone will discuss AI and be met with literal boos. Now you can’t boo me. I’m the Vice President of the United States.” 

+ Trump’s top economic advisor, Kevin Hassett, on AI: “AI is creating jobs right now and the people who are using it are booming. It’s not a negative employment story at all.” That’s their story and they’re sticking to it, even as their base, along with most of the rest of the country, turns violent against AI–because that’s where the money is, that’s propping up the otherwise cratering markets…until the coming crash, which now seems all but inevitable.

Andrew Ross Sorkin sure seems to think so…

Andrew Ross Sorkin: “Most CEOs in America today are very scared to speak out publicly about anything. They are so worried that they are going to be potentially attacked by the administration or regulated. They’re going to have a merger in front of some agency that’s not going to be allowed to go through. They are so nervous about criticizing anything that’s going on with this administration.”

Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes: “There are some economists who suggest that because Mr. Trump ties his success to the success of the market, that he’s not going to let anything like what happened in 1929 happen and that we should feel secure because of that.”

Sorkin: “I think it’s hard to know how things get out of control,” he replied. “When confidence disappears, it happens like this.”

Stahl: “Do you think the market will crash?”

Sorkin: “The answer is, we will have a crash. I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this: we will have the crash.”

+ Dario Perkins, managing director at TS Lombard, on the reverberating supply shocks unleashed by Trump’s war on Iran:

You just have this series of never-ending supply shocks, and these big structural changes in the global economy, and that’s going to create a lot of inflation volatility, with 2% targets starting to look more floor than ceiling. My guess is we’re entering a different phase of the monetary cycle. It’ll be rate hikes everywhere.

+++

+ Some of the highlights from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s must-read op-ed in the NYT on economic inequality and the need for a billionaire’s tax in California (and everywhere else)…

+ Since 1982, the wealth of California’s billionaire class – the top 0.0002% – has been multiplied by 30. It has grown by 144% between 2023 and 2025. California’s billionaires now own $2.3 trillion in wealth, equivalent to 50% of California’s GDP and about 10% of California’s total wealth.

+ California billionaires pay just 0.2% of their wealth in California income tax (a mere 2.4% of total California income tax revenue) on average over 2023-2025.

+ In 2019, 2020 and 2023, Sergei Brin and Larry Page – the 2nd and 3rd richest people in the world today – reported no income and paid no income tax on their Alphabet-derived wealth. Since 2019, their wealth has grown by more than $400 billion.

+ A Bank of America survey reports that 50% of investors say the dollar is overvalued.

+ The Iran war could add billions of dollars in interest payments to US debt, according to the Financial Times.

+ As inflation soared in the last few months, AARP reports that 7% of retirees in the US were forced to reenter the labor force,

+ Yahoo Finance: Americans are feeling worse about the economy now than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial crisis, and following the 9/11 attacks.

+ The employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports that more than 85,000 technology sector jobs have been eliminated, a 33% increase from the same period last year.

+ From SpaceX’s SEC filing in advance of its IPO: “We have a history of net losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.” This company is living on the life support supplied by US government contracts. Musk is the world’s biggest welfare queen, in other words…

+ Stephen Miller: “Based on what I’ve heard, we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them.” 

+ Federal budget deficit: $1.8 trillion

+ All federal and state social welfare spending combined (Medicaid, SNAP, etc): $1.6 trillion 

+ It doesn’t get much clearer. They want to eliminate all social welfare payments and Medicaid. But if they really wanted to recoup money from wasted federal outlays, they should go after the contracts handed out to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, SpaceX or any contract given to a company associated with Don Jr…

+ Let’s eliminate SNAP and give the money to Don Jr? Kid just got married. Everybody agree?

+++

+ As the nation’s attention was fixated on whether an out-of-control leak at a Southern California chemical plant in the service of the military industrial complex would blow up, it was a chemical plant in out of the spotlight Longview, Washington on the banks of the Columbia River which imploded, killing at least two workers, leaving nine missing and presumed dead, injuring another eight people, including a firefighter, poisoning who knows how many others and unleashing “white liquor” (a chemical used in paper and pulp processing that contains sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide) into the nation’s most productive salmon river. Of course, events like this happen nearly every week in Cancer Alley and few outside the region pay the faintest attention.

+ According to analysts at EMBER, only a decade ago, wind turbines generated three times as much electricity as solar. Now solar has eclipsed wind and is closing in on nuclear.

+ Since 2021, climate-fueled floods in Britain have forced the closure of 67 NHS-run hospitals.

+ From Ann Carlson’s new book, Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air. During the height of Flint’s water crisis, the city’s children had average blood lead levels of 1.3 micrograms per deciliter, almost two times the average American child’s blood levels that year. But from 1976 to 1980, the *average* kid in Los Angeles had average blood levels of 15 micrograms, which was considered “normal.” At the time,  lead levels in LA’s ambient air were 50 times higher than they are today. The elimination of leaded gasoline steadily reversed the deadly trend not only in So Cal, but globally. It can be done.

+ Beyond Plastics conducted a three-month investigation tracking the plastic cups used for Starbucks ’ cold-beverage drinks and found that not a single one ended up at a recycling plant, “not even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.”

+ China now controls more than half of the world’s chemical market, with more and more European countries shifting production there.

+  CNN reported that RFK Jr. has barred officials responsible for leading US research on infectious disease threats from speaking directly with the World Health Organization on the Ebola crisis.

+ National Nurses Union: “Nurses have lived through one bungled, global health emergency  response during the first Trump administration, and we are appalled to know that when it comes to Ebola or any other infectious  disease, the U.S. is now even less prepared  than in 2020.”

+ Ayoade Alakija, a Nigerian ministerial health envoy and co-chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance, of the $5 billion Memorandum of Understanding Nigeria signed with the Trump Administration, under its new “America First” foreign aid policy in December. “It’s a recolonization of our health system. They can create vaccines and diagnostic tools with our data and we get scraps off the table.”

+ The number of 18-year-olds will peak in 2026 and will decline by 14% over the next decade. Hey, nineteen, you’re next…

+  VS Naipul on the torturer who loved bullfights: “I used to go to Lisbon sometimes. It was a nice place to be in. Dangerous, full of agents, full of South Africans. But it was out of Africa. I used to go to the bullfights. They told me that in the Portuguese bullfight, they didn’t kill the bull. I believed them. I went a lot. And then I heard that the bulls were killed afterwards, after the fight. There was nothing else you could do with them. I’d somehow believed that the spears or barbs would just be taken out and the wounds would heal. Oh, my God, why is any of us allowed to live at all? That’s the miracle, the sheer charity of man to man.” (From Guerrillas)

+++

+ Markfortwayne Mullin wants to halt international flights into Sanctuary Cities, which include: Albuquerque, Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Where are the international flights going to land? Pierre, SD, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Wheeling, West Virginia, Huntsville, Alabama? It’s going to be a long, dreary drive to those World Cup games…

+ Visits to the US have already declined for the first time since 9/11. Uzbekistan and Uganda are now more attractive tourist destinations than the US at this point…

+ Texts from ICE officers in New York reveal the abysmal conditions inside the holding cells at Federal Plaza. One text says they held a man with tuberculosis for six days. Another text said, “And we have a guy with monkeypox.” Nancy Zanello, an assistant field office director, described the deplorable, writing: Nancy Zanello, an assistant field office director, said, “This week has been one gross contagion after another.” She noted that they’d had “multiple” cases where detainees needed hospitalization for “cardiac [arrests] and seizures.” Another ICE official described the situation as “insane. We desperately need to get some detainees out of 26 Fed.”

+ The US Attorney’s Office for Washington, led by Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News commentator and Trump devotee, has subpoenaed Reddit and X, seeking to unmask the names, addresses, and banking information of users who have been critical of ICE’s abusive tactics.

+ In 1910, almost 1/3 of the US population was either an immigrant or the child of one.

+ Around 6,000 refugees have been permitted to enter the U.S. since October. All but three are white South Africans.

+ In the last three years, Texas School Police have used force on students more than 2,600 times. The increase in police violence began after the mass shooting in Uvalde, when police cowered in the hallway at Robb Elementary as the killer gunned down 19 kids. Under a 2023 law, Texas now requires armed officers at every public school, creating nearly 400 district police departments and 11,000 “trained” officers, who operate with few restrictions and little oversight.

+++

+ Trump: “Iran thought they were going to out-wait me, you know, we’ll out-wait him, he’s got the midterms. I don’t care about the midterms, look what happened last night, that was the prelude to the midterms.”

Iran couldn’t care less about the midterms. In fact, the Democrats are more hawkish on Iran than Trump, at this point. Plus, “what happened last night” was another example of Trump’s Stalin-lite purge of his own party, a bloody internal purge that gives the Democrats a real chance at winning a US Senate seat in Texas for the first time in decades. 

+ The ratio of all sentences spoken at Trump cabinet meetings that offer praise for Trump: 1 in 6. This week’s five-star example of shameless sycophancy comes from Kelly Loeffler, who heads the Small Business Administration: “You are leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known. I hear it everywhere I go — ‘Please thank the president.’ They love you.”

+ Sean Hannity used to ridicule “safe spaces” on college campuses; now he’s demanding them. (But only for Zionists.)

+ Megyn Kelly unloads on Trump’s misogyny, which she’s experienced first-hand:

Trump has cheated on every wife he’s had. He met Marla Maples while he was still married to the mother of his children, Ivana…he was proud of the affair…it was all over the papers…If you think Trump’s been faithful to Melania, that’s great. You’ve got bigger issues than I can address here…His first wife accused him of raping her. She alleged in her first book that he was so angry over the hair transplant he got, that she made him get, it was so painful that he raped her and she later retracted that when he ran for president.

This is hardly news to most of us, but Ivanka’s rape allegation probably comes as a shock to many who have lived inside the MAGA bubbleworld for the last decade.

+ Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC): “No offense to Harvard – my safety school – but Democrats need to start speaking more like your high school football coach and less like an Ivy League professor.”

Clinton and Obama were highly educated, articulate politicians who spoke clearly (though often deceptively) about relatively complex issues without any “professor-speak.”  Both were elected and re-elected. Biden and Harris didn’t speak like professors. They could hardly speak complete sentences. They were simply incoherent. Moreover, didn’t the Democrats just run a high school football coach for VP, who got trampled in a debate by the absurd JD Vance?

+ After being ousted in Trump’s ongoing purge of the GOP, Thomas Massie has pledged to read the names of Epstein’s clients into the Congressional Record before he leaves Congress.

+ Trump appears to think he just “aced” the MCATs, again. But will someone ask him, if he aced the test, why does he have to keep taking it, over and over?

+ Lucian Truscott IV on Trump’s deteriorating health, after his third visit to Walter Reed in the last few weeks:

He looks like hell. His mouth droops. His makeup is badly misapplied. His hands are spackled with pancake makeup to conceal injection sites, sometimes both at once. On Monday, as he walked across the plaza at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he repeatedly slapped the side of his thigh with an open hand, as if he couldn’t control himself. When he stood at attention for the ceremony, he couldn’t keep still, his body rocking back and forth, his shoulders moving side to side….The real question right now is how bad is the collapse of his physical and mental health? With no one in the White House and no one in Congress who is willing to risk telling him no about anything, how far down will his spiral go?

+ Pennsylvania Governor, and Democratic presidential aspiration, Josh Shapiro, denouncing the critics of AIPAC’s political spending:  “I think it’s been used cynically by some to try and silence certain voices, to try and say that certain people participating in politics shouldn’t count or should be viewed in a toxic way…. What you are seeing is not ‘AIPAC money’ or however it was termed, but you’re getting ‘the Jews who give to that candidate who also support AIPAC.’” He’s done.

+ Zohran Mamdani is dismantling the shibboleths of neoliberalism one plank at a time, beginning with Reagan and moving on to Thatcher…Mamdani: “Of the Margaret Thatcher quote, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. If anything, my friends, it seems you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.”

+ Mamdani has announced plans for New York City to build 200,000 new rent-stabilized homes over the next decade.

+ RNC Chair Joe Gruters on James Talarico: “Tala-freako is a creep. He’s a vegan. He thinks God is nonbinary. He wants to mutilate children.” Does Gruters really think “God” has a penis and testicles? For what purpose? To pollinate the universe, in one gigantic spray of directed panspermia?

+ House Speaker Mike Johnson’s excuse for not banning stock trading (often exploiting insider knowledge) by members of Congress is that lawmakers’ $174,000 salaries haven’t kept pace with inflation, and they need stock trading to take care of their families.”

+ Even though federal law only permits the image of dead presidents to appear on US currency (hence the hip-hop term for money, Dead Presidents), two Trump appointees at the Treasury Department pushed employees at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prepare a prototype of Trump on a $250 bill….Fortunately, most of us will never see this bill, not having anything approaching $250 in our accounts.

+ According to Pew Research, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Consider the recent case of Disney taking down thousands of articles from Five-Thirty-Eight.

+ As an old Gene McCarthy volunteer campaign worker (1976), it’s cool to see that he consistently polled better against both Nixon and Rockefeller than RFK in 68. But, of course, after the assassination, the party chose to throw its weight behind HHH, precipitating the violent repression in Chicago and the inevitable defeat in November.

I was still a year from being able to vote, but they had almost no one else working in Indiana. They sent me boxes of bumper stickers, campaign literature, buttons, Gene’s books, sample op-eds to write, etc. The shipments kept landing on the front porch, day after day. Finally, my mother said, “What the hell is going on in your room?”

Me: “Oh, not much. I’m just running the McCarthy campaign for southern Indiana.”

Mom: “That’s nice. I kind of like him. They say he’s a poet, though I don’t think that’ll do him much good. And it’s so much better than you writing about those filthy rock concerts.”

+ Speaking of that strange ’76 election, here’s how Norman Mailer began his disastrous interview with Jimmy Carter at the Carter farm in Plains, Georgia:

There are a lot of people in New York who don’t trust you. The joke making the rounds among some of my friends is “How can you put confidence in a man who has been faithful to the same woman for thirty years?”

+ I bet many of those NYC intellectuals have reconsidered their views on the politics of infidelity…

+++

+ “No animal lives more easily in the visual field of humans than the dog,…Dogs see us in a way we think we understand,” Thomas Laquer, The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History. The key phrase here is: “think we understand.”

+ Zohran Mamdami’s father Mahmood on the African university: “What would it mean to decolonise a university in Africa? The East African experience suggests that one answer would be the opposite of what is happening in American and British universities: reducing the cost of a university education, by state grants and subsidies, to make it more inclusive. In the first place, therefore, fees would have to fall.”

+ The German-speaking non-observant Jew Franz Kafka, writing in his diary in 1914, after being relentlessly badgered by a friend to support the Zionist cause: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.”

+ 48% of Americans say their lives are lacking in fun and 12% say they can’t remember the last time they had a full day free to enjoy themselves.

57% cited drained bank accounts as the primary impediment to having fun, followed by packed schedules, work obligations, and general burnout with their overworked and stressful lives. On average, American adults who feel fun-deprived say they would need about another 17 hours a week to have “fun.”

And what’s the number one most “fun” thing most Americans are yearning to do? Have sex? Climb Mt. Rainer? Raft the Colorado through the Grand Canyon? Eat a magic mushroom on the beach at Big Sur an hour before sunset? Go hear Olivia Rodrigo perform in her babydoll dress? Shoot hoops on a barnyard court in French Lick, Indiana, with Larry Bird? No.  77% said, watching TV! A continent-wide electromagnetic pulse may be the only hope for this country…

Americans already eat 50 BILLION burgers a year, three burgers per American a week, more than 150 a year per person. Beef protein seems to be winning the war against Americans. Ask your local cardiologist.

+++

+ It’s a civic crime that the people who run New York City didn’t rename the Williamsburg Bridge after Sonny Rollins before he died this week, at the age of 95. He was one of New York’s greatest artists, and the sound of his sax, reinventing itself late at night above the East River, could well serve as a noir soundtrack for life on the Lower East Side in the early sixties. Rollins was a musical genius, a visionary and an unwavering force for peace, equality and justice.

+ People have asked me what Sonny Rollins records they should listen to and my initial response has been: All of them and I don’t mean that in a snarky way.  But if you want to get a feel for his incredible range and the always evolving nature of Rollins’ vast body of work–and he’s probably the greatest tenor ever (Miles thought so and who is foolish enough to argue with him? Even posthumously, he’d kick your ass)–try these six, spanning more than six decades…

Saxophone Colossus

Way Out West

A Night at the Village Vanguard

The Bridge

This is What I Do

Without a Song: the 9/11 Concert

+ Sonny Rollins could transform the melody of a very simplistic song, like Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire,” into something transcendent, marred only, perhaps, by the warbling voice of the songwriter who is standing before him…

+ Waiting for a Friend is one of the few Stones songs I can still listen to more than once a month and that’s almost entirely because of Sonny Rollins’ solos…When they’ve performed it live with someone else playing the sax, even when they try to mimic Rollins note by note, it ain’t the same…

+ Apparently, Johnny Appleseed wasn’t the proto-hippy, nomadic, seed-slinging low-bagger portrayed in legends and folksongs. According to Isaac Fitzgerald’s new book, American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, the horticulturalist and follower of the Swedish polymath and mystic Emanuel Swendenborg owned more than 1200 acres in three states and fenced in his orchards to keep the deer and the bears out.

+ I hadn’t dipped into Robert Lowell for years, in part because one of his former students described him to me as an insufferable jerk. In part because he encouraged some of the worst, most self-destructive impulses in both Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, enabling them to cut their own lives short. (Two sides of the same coin, right?) But I re-read “Waking Early Sunday Morning” last night for the first time since college, probably. It’s a striking poem, more striking, for me, because it opens with a dream (I assume) of the Pacific Northwest, a region I never associated with the New Englander, and chinook salmon returning upriver, perhaps even in our river, to spawn….

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.
Stop, back off.  The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time’s hoard before the day’s begun!

Then several stanzas later, Lowell invokes the same image, this time in the “dream” of a President [LBJ], trying to break free from his own in false words, impotence and the endless wars, he is waging but can’t end…

O to break loose.  All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now.  Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.

Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life …

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime

+ As Trump’s DoJ pursues a vindictive prosecution of 81-year-old E. Jean Carroll, it’s well worth reading Jonah Raskin’s review of Ask Jean, Ivy Meeropol’s terrific new film on what it took for Carroll to stand up to the vicious thug who a jury determined assaulted her…

+ People were quick to ridicule the list of performers at Trump’s “Great American State Fair” concerts on the Mall, and rightly so, given the lineup of has-beens, never-wuzzes, and lip-synchers…

But the median age of these performers, assembled by Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen, must be well into the 50s…

This may come as a surprise to Morello (61) but there is a youth movement in this country and they’ve got their own music and it ain’t this same shit we’ve been hearing for 6 decades, which I still listen to, and likely always will (excepting Jack Black and Shepard Fairy’s DJ Set), but I’m 67 and not on the frontlines of the movements of resistance, which is where the new music thrives and inspires. Power to the People, right on…

+ Man, “our” bands are looking old. (“My” bands, anyway, in the pantheon of which X ranks highly.) John Doe seems to have aged faster than Exene. Good on you for hitting the brakes on that bio-entropic shit, Exene! But this short clip of them browsing the stalls at Amoeba Records is worth watching, if only for Exene pulling out a Jonathan Winters record from her bag and showing a little clip of Winters as the coach of the Reds telling a trench-coat-wearing Dean Martin what kind of haircut baseball players need to hit the damn ball…

+ The odds in Vegas that a country song would ever be written invoking the German poet Rilke were infinitesimal. But the oddsmakers didn’t count on the emergence of one, Ray Wylie Hubbard…

The message I give you, I got from this old poet Rilke…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Hubris, Pericles, the Parthenon and the Invention of Athens
David Stuttered
(Harvard)

Unpaid: the Past, Present and Future of Wage Theft
Matthew Cole
(Verso)

Where the Earth Meets the Sky: a Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica
Louise K. Blight
(Pegasus)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

The Anthology of Un-American Folk Music
Marisa Anderson
(Thrill Jockey)

Ruido Tovar
Mexican Institute of Sound and the Meridian Brothers
(Ansonia Records)

The Kámán Line
The Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble
(ATA Records)

I Relied on the Goodwill of Prisoners

“I was imprisoned in Concepción [Chile under Pinochet] for a few days and then released. They didn’t torture me, as I had feared; they didn’t even rob me. But they didn’t give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours, I could hear them torturing others; I couldn’t sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. … I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles.”

– Roberto Bolaño, “Dance Card,” Last Evenings on Earth