“Optimism is the philosophy of the past.”

– Marcel Proust, The Fugitive

+ Dante himself couldn’t have found a better spot in Hell to deposit James Dolan, maybe the worst owner in all of professional sports (and that’s really saying something), than to lock him in a box next to a farting, snoring, grunting Donald Trump as  24,000 Knicks fans jeer and boo them both, while watching his team lose to the young San Antonio Spurs, over and over again, night after night for all eternity…

Call it the revenge of Charles Oakley, one of the Knicks’ most legendary players, who Dolan, in true Trump-style, ordered armed security guards to haul out of MSG during a Knicks game, arrested, charged with assault and banished from the arena because he couldn’t handle Oakley’s spot-on critiques of Dolan’s incompetent management of the team.

+ Ann Coulter on Trump’s MSG escapade:

Of all the selfish, narcissistic things Trump has done, attending MSG to see the Knicks play in person Monday night is the absolute worst.  20,000 attendees will be MASSIVELY inconvenienced for all the extra security, the Knicks Watch Party at the Garden is canceled, thousands of extra law enforcement officers will be required (paid for by taxpayers), traffic will be a disaster — all so he can sit in the Garden rather than watch the game on TV. Presidents ought to be willing to sacrifice once in a while.

+ The New York Knicks last won the NBA championship in 1973, the same year Donald Trump made his debut appearance in the New York Times: “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in New York City.”

+ 97% of the country could be “busted-flat in Baton Rouge,” and Knicks tickets in the nosebleed section of MSG would still be selling for $12,000 a seat…

+ As ESPN’s Dan Wetzel pointed out, “In many cities these numbers would be a Zillow Listing.”

I checked home prices in Buffalo. Wetzel wasn’t joking…

+ Trump’s never been an “NBA guy.” Basketball is now a black sport and by definition political in its very nature. Trump: “Look at the basketball ratings. They’re down to very, very low numbers. People are angry about it. They don’t realize. They have enough politics with guys like me. They don’t need more as they’re driving down, going up for the shot. They don’t need it. There was a nastiness about the NBA the way it was done, too, so I think the NBA’s in trouble. I think it’s in big trouble, bigger trouble than they understand, and frankly, ice hockey, which is doing very well, they didn’t do that. They respected the mores. They respected what they’re supposed to be doing.”

+ As for who is really watching what…

Stanley Cup NHL Finals (2026) viewership: 5.05 million (Game 3)

NBA Finals (2026) viewership: 28.7 million (Game 4)

+++

 + The guy with the inflated ego, waistline and net worth loves the inflation!

+ Sen. Tim Scott took the bait:

Inflation ticked up to 4.2%, the highest in 3 years. The trend is not going in the right direction. But one of the things it signals is resiliency in our economy, which is, in fact, good news. Because of Donald Trump, we have more Americans with more money in their pockets.

+ Inflation hits 4.2 percent. Trump: “I love the inflation.” MAGA: “We love the inflation. Biden didn’t give us enough of the inflation! Only Trump gave us the inflation we need. Please give us more of the inflation! ” 30 percent of the country is living in their Own Private Jonestown, willing to swallow en masse whatever toxic nonsense Trump tells them.

+ Inflation is now officially ahead of wage growth (it’s been this way for most of us for a while now, since like, I don’t know, the 1970s…?)

+ Around 48% of Americans said their financial situation was worse in May than a year ago, the most since January 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations. Only half?

 + Bank of America reported that 70% of its bear-market indicators have now been triggered.

+ Michael Burry, one of the economists who predicted the 2008 housing collapse, describes the AI bubble as a “spending Fugazi,” and says that only three customers are responsible for more than 60% of Nvidia’s entire accounts receivable.

+ The concentration before the collapse…

+ Over to you, Bob…

Whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall fall in it, shall fall in it
Whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall bury in it, shall bury in it

+ According to the Financial Times, almost all returns from investments in hyperscaler AI are negative. Only Amazon has shown positive returns…

Amazon: +7.1%
Microsoft: -9.2%
Alphabet: -15.7%
Meta: -28.8
Oracle: -35.6%

+ The coming crash is going to be the economic equivalent of the Chicxulub asteroid…

+ According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the nation’s 10 largest occupations by employment have below-average wages, ranging from $32,150 for fast food workers to $46,590 for customer service representatives.

+ Despite the “good” May jobs report, planned job cuts hit the highest total for May since 2020. Most of the blame is attributed to AI.

+ Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, warned this week that the US economy is on the “precipice of a recession.” Zandi said that lower and middle-class Americans are already “living paycheck to paycheck…Real disposable income — that’s after tax, after accounting for inflation — is no higher today than it was a year ago. So, there’s been no growth in purchasing power, and that’s going to get worse and start declining.”

 + Reuters: “US consumer sentiment has plunged to a record low, cost of living is a top concern and 57% of consumers cite high prices as the cause of erosion of their personal finances.”

+ The portion of Americans who said jobs are “plentiful” dropped to 25.5%, the lowest in three years.

+ Two-thirds of Americans are cutting back on spending.

+ WSJ: “The summer teen job market is the toughest in decades.”

+ From the Congressional Budget Office’s (not Thomas Piketty or Michael Hudson) report on income inequality…

+ Rising housing costs, climate-driven hurricanes, rising sea levels and high insurance prices seem to have killed off Florida’s population boom.  Census data released in March shows net domestic migration shrinking by 93% since 2022, from +310,892 to just +22,517 in 2025. The population flows into Tampa, Orlando, and Miami are all now shrinking.

+ Update on the Dollar General Stage of Capitalism: “Dollar General says its core customers are ‘financially constrained’ and cutting back on household expenses, including food.”

+ It’s one of the perversities of our economic system that good jobs reports (if you can believe the numbers, anymore) almost always promote panic on Wall Street…

+ There’s a reason Faulkner named one of the characters in The Hamlet, his funniest novel (maybe the funniest American novel after all of Twain’s), Wall Street Panic Snopes, a simple man who wanted to make money honestly, which of course really would start a panic on Wall Street…

Wall Street Panic knew where he wanted to go. He knew that he could get there provided he observed a few of the rules of the game, which he did, and he got there. I think that Wall Street Panic wasn’t really a Snopes, that probably, actually, he was not a Snopes, that—that his—his father’s mama may have done a little extra-curricular night work, and that he really wasn’t a Snopes. He was a—a—more of a simple human being than the other Snopes were. But he—he wanted to be independent, wanted to make money, but he had rules about how he was going to do it. He wanted to make money by simple industry, the old rules of working hard and saving your pennies, not by taking advantage of anybody.

[From Faulkner’s 1958 lecture at the University of Virginia]

+++

+ Remember when Trump claimed he launched his attack on Iran while feigning negotiations and refusing to give US allies any advance warning because he wanted to preserve the element of surprise (a war crime)? Well, now he’s telegraphing airstrikes and a possible invasion of Kharg Island a day in advance, in a desperate attempt to demonstrate that he’s doing something beyond daydreaming about building a triumphal arch to himself that will cast a sinister shadow across the graves at Arlington.

+ Trump to Fox News on Thursday morning: “I don’t know if America has the appetite to do what I would really much prefer doing. We’ve lost 13 soldiers in two wars. In Iraq– in Iran, we lost 13. In Vietnam, we lost hundreds of thousands. We didn’t have the right leadership, to be honest. If it were me, I would’ve had that war done in three months. Four months.”

The US lost 58,220 military service members in Vietnam from 1956 to 2006–47,400 from wounds suffered in combat. The US did kill more than 2 million Vietnamese…

+ Just minutes after making this belligerent boast on Fox News, Trump reversed course. Apparently, he didn’t have the “appetite” for what he wanted to do either. (But the Pentagon and arms-makers might have also informed him that he’d already shot his wad of smart bombs.) Trump claimed that he canceled the planned airstrikes because he’s close to a deal.

+ 39: the number of times Trump has said a deal is imminent to end the Iran war.  Does President False Alarm continue to move the market?

+ The International Atomic Energy Agency warns that the Iran war has created new nuclear threats that didn’t exist before Trump and Netanyahu began their bombing campaign. One of them that the IAEA probably didn’t anticipate: Trump threatening to nuke Tehran.

+ Here’s the chilling lede graph from Sy Hersh’s Wednesday column:

Four months into a difficult air war with Iran, President Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking among American voters. I have been told that in a recent secret meeting in the White House, he began speculating, albeit vaguely, about a nuclear option that could perhaps bring a quicker end to the war.

How would nuking Tehran or one of its nuclear research sites end the war or open the Strait of Hormuz?

+ Trump having what they used to call on the shock corridor ward of the state mental hospital, an “abreaction”…

First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?…I sent the B2 bombers in about nine, ten months ago. And they obliterated, totally obliterated, the site. And I saved it…Do I want to go along and have a country that’s doing really well, but somebody is going to try and kill us? Or do I want to put out that horrible threat? And I did. It put it out….We took over a very powerful country, Venezuela. Lot of soldiers. Big, strong military. We took over Venezuela in a matter of minutes. We destroyed the capability of Iran in a matter of days. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it…Now, I’m going to put it out permanently. I’m going to do it either through negotiation, where we’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them, to be honest with you. And it’s going to be very easy for me to do that. That’s actually the easier path…My red line would be if I think I wasn’t going to make a deal, or if I wasn’t going to make a deal fast enough. We’re having very good negotiations with the people that are leading the country now. It’s the third group that we’ve been dealing with. And they are different. And you could say it’s regime change, actually, because these are very different people. I find them to be more rational, very smart.

+ Reporter: How do you define a “ceasefire”?

Trump: In that part of the world, a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.

+ Trump describing, accurately for once, the actions of the US Navy as piratical, though not the kind of pirates you’ll find in the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker: “We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that? We’re like pirates.”

+ Trump’s sociopathic response to a question from the normally docile Peter Doocy reveals his complete lack of concern for his family, Khamenei’s or yours…

Trump: If I did meet with the new Ayatollah, I would be honored to meet him.

Doocy, Fox News: Do you think because Epic Fury killed his killed his dad and his wife and his kid that he has hard feelings?

Trump: I would say I’m not his favorite person, but with that being said, he’s probably a pro—I don’t know him—he’s probably a professional in some circles. He has a very good reputation, actually. You know, sometimes when people say “bad,” but a lot of people say “bad” about me. It’s totally false, of course.

+ JD Vance said the Iran war may go on another year, but he’s like totally confident it won’t go on much longer than that…

+ Trump’s war on Iran has already cost each American household $750, but that price is about to rise sharply if the war doesn’t end soon…

+ The Department of Transportation reported that US airlines paid a total of $6.5 billion in fuel costs in April 2025 (an increase of +78%), prompting airline fares to climb by 20.7% year-over-year in the April CPI inflation data. Globally, airlines are now facing $100 billion in additional fuel costs for 2026 alone, as a result of the fallout from the war on Iran.

+ Remember Michele Bachmann? She’s still out there, letting the Supreme Deity’s desire to see more mass death and destruction speak through her: “rump and Netanyahu were appointed for this task, destined for this task. This is a biblical moment. I truly believe that if President Trump takes care of this evil now, I think God will deliver the midterms as well.”

+++

+ The Defense Intelligence Agency raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat designation to “critical”—its highest internal level—amid evidence that Israeli espionage operatives have intensified their already habitual eavesdropping on U.S. officials. The targets of the Israeli spies include Washington’s internal deliberations, war strategies, and peace negotiations regarding the Middle East and Iran. The internal Pentagon assessment concluded that Israel has increased efforts to intercept communications of high-ranking American personnel, including Trump’s negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as well as the US military commanders in the region. The report noted that U.S. personnel operating in Israel now rely on burner phones and disposable laptops to avoid eavesdropping.

+ Congressional hearings on reports of systemic Israeli espionage against the US would consist of members of Congress interrogating Pentagon officials on why they forced Israel to engage in covert spying for the secrets instead of just faxing them to Tel Aviv on request.

+ New York Post Columnist Miranda Devine: What do you say to people who claim Bibi Netanyahu tricked you into going into Iran?

Trump: They’re just the enemy. They’re dumbocrats. They want transgender mutilization [sic] of our children. He tricked me? I’m the one that started it. I’ll tell you what – if there wasn’t me, there would be no Israel right now.

+ “If there wasn’t a me…!”

+ Trump to Bibi: “I call the shots!” If he did, he wouldn’t feel compelled to say so…

+ It’s hard to believe the veracity of this reporting from Barak Ravid that a source told him Trump chewed out Netanyahu in a recent phone call over Israel’s ceaseless bombing of Lebanon: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” A second source briefed on the call said Trump was “pissed” and at one point yelled at Netanyahu: “What the fuck are you doing?”

+ But if true, Netanyahu’s continued defiance of Trump only serves to illustrate his impotence. Given Ravid’s ties to the Israeli elites, perhaps Netanyahu leaked the story to show Israelis that he wasn’t Trump’s pawn.

+ This week, Israeli troops conducting raids in Hebron shot a seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, in the head while he was held in his mother’s arms. The baby-killing sniper will probably get a medal from Ben-Gvir.

+ Israel has killed more Palestinian children in the last 3 years than Palestinians have killed Israelis of any kind over the last 80 years.

+ Murtaza Hussain: “Trump needs to stop the war for his own political purposes, but does not seem capable of standing up to Netanyahu. This leads to the natural question of whether he has been compromised in some way or the Israeli infiltration and takeover of US institutions is already too advanced.”

+ Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch: “For the first time in two decades of polling, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than Israelis (36%), a reversal from 55% to 26% in Israel’s favor before the October 7th attacks. Even 57% of Republicans aged 18 to 49 now disfavor Israel.”

+ Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, who was interrogated by British police for attending a pro-Palestinian demonstration:  “What’s happening in Gaza is a Holocaust, and what’s being designed by Israel is the final solution to the Palestinian problem. As a Holocaust survivor, my reaction is: not in my name… brave people can resist.”

+ Gwyneth Paltrow enters the Zone of (Self) Interest…

+++

+ The Senate approved an additional $70 billion for Border Patrol and ICE, despite the fact that these agencies already have a combined $100 billion in unspent funds that were part of a previous DHS spending bill. If the House follows suit, ICE will have a larger budget than the Russian military ($157 billion).

Jennifer Welch: “JD Vance is married to a woman of Indian descent. He has mixed-race children. So to all of the MAGA voters out there, if this man will not defend his wife and will not defend his kids, do you think he gives a crap about you?”

+ Dr Oz: “You’re not allowed to complain about Somalians, because that’s racist. And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist.”

I hate to say it, but Oz is right for once. Singling out Somalis (or any other ethnic group) is racist and being a racist is one of the worst things you can be and, he might be surprised to discover, not just in Minnesota…

Andy Hamerlinck: The worst thing you can be in Minnesota is an ICE agent.

+ While Trump administration flaks keep saying that the ICE detention prison in Newark, New Jersey, houses the “worst of the worst…killers and rapists,” data obtained by the New York Times shows that very few of the detainees have criminal records.

+ As the US prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with cage fights on the White House lawn, the Trump administration is denying visas to fans of the Moroccan soccer team for its World Cup games. This rude treatment comes even though, in 1777, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize the United States as a sovereign nation….

Rep. Lou Correa: “Are you keeping a database on US citizens?”

Markfortwaye Mullin: “Are we keeping a database?”

Correa: “Yes, a lot of your ICE agents have said there’s a database…”

Markfortwaye Mullin: “Well, that’s already out there.”

+ During his xenophobic rant marking the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion, U.S. Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth compared the D-Day invasion with illegal immigration, stating, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies…When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

It was the homegrown ideology that Hegseth now mimics, which annihilated millions and the US went to war to defeat, before soon adopting for its own malign imperial projects…

+ Only 11 percent of Europeans now view the US as an ally. Why would they? The fissure is long overdue for Europe’s own good.

+++

+ The Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their cryptocurrency enterprises since Trump began his second term, according to an investigation by Reuters, while more than a million people who invested in their schemes have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses, losses which the Trumps were protected against. A 2025 deal between the Trump family’s crypto enterprise World Liberty Financial and the publicly traded company then called Alt5 Sigma guaranteed the Trumps’ $500 million, according to company documents. But since the deal was announced, Alt5 Sigma’s stock has nose-dived more than 90%. And now, the company (now called AI Financial Corp.) is warning investors about its ability to continue as a going concern.

+ Donors to Trump’s “ballroom” fund were rewarded with $50 billion in federal contracts and, according to a report by Public Citizen, “most of those same companies are facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term.” In addition, over two-thirds of corporate ballroom donors – 19 out of 27 – received government contracts over the last 5 ½ years, totaling $338 billion. According to John Golinger, Public Citizen’s Democracy Advocate and author of the report,

These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts. They have massive interests before the federal government and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.  Millions to fund Trump’s bizarre fever dreams are nothing compared to the billions they’re getting back in contracts and favorable government enforcement decisions.  The American people are paying the price.

+ Speaking of the Ballroom, lawyers for Trump’s Justice Department defending the razing of the East Wing told a federal judge that Trump could also legally demolish the Statue of Liberty without any oversight if he wanted to. It’s already been demolished in spirit. They might as well pack it up and send it back to France.

+ Yahoo Finance reported that a host of high-ranking officials in the Trump administration hold SpaceX stock in advance of its IPO, which will likely make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire: “Ten officials ranging from special envoy Steve Witkoff to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler reported financial interests in Elon Musk’s rocket company or in xAI, the artificial intelligence and social media firm it merged with in February, according to their most recent public financial disclosures. In total, the federal staffers held SpaceX or xAI stock worth at least $9.9 million and as much as $43.8 million, according to the disclosures, which were made last year and list the value of assets in broad ranges. These officials could have sold all or part of their holdings since then without triggering additional disclosure requirements.”

+ China Miéville on human ambition in the age of Late Capitalism: “I don’t want to be a simile anymore. I want to be a metaphor!”

+ “Dr” Oz, who “made” his millions hawking snake oil on television, on Trump’s cruel new Medicaid requirements: “You have to work. You were not put on this planet to sit at home and watch television. The average person who’s on Medicaid, who’s able-bodied, watches 6.1 hours of television, or just hangs out, every day. That’s not why God put you here.”

Oz’s numbers are as bogus as some of his Oprah-approved patent remedies.  Oz pulled these numbers out of a contested 2025 report by the American Enterprise Institute and even then grossly exaggerated what the report claimed. The AEI study looked only at a specific and very narrow demographic of childless adults without disabilities who didn’t report having employment. Even then, the alleged 6.1 hours spent watching TV wildly distorts the claims in the report, which asserted that the non-working able-bodied Medicaid recipients spent 6.1 hours a day on all leisure or socializing activities, including sports, recreation, hanging with friends, playing video games or watching TV.  The report claimed that these people spent 4.2 hours a day either watching TV or playing video games. But this applies to a small minority of Medicaid recipients, most of whom have jobs or are caring for a family member.

+ While Trump continues to threaten to annihilate Iran over its small stockpile of enriched uranium, his pen pal, Kim, is testing missiles capable of striking the US mainland without a word from Trump. The lesson: Iran waited too long to acquire nuclear weapons.

+ I was 3600 pages into my long march through In Search of Lost Time, the end in sight, like the smoke from Moscow burning to Napoleon, when I came across this passage on the role of the imperial press during wartime. The year is 1914, the Germans have crossed into France and are on the outskirts of Paris, but many of the artistocrats, financiers and haute-bourgeoisie in Marcel’s circle are blissful, still attending soirées, strolling down the avenues, sitting on the ornate benches in the Parc Monceau reading Le Figaro, reassured that the threat, if there even was a threat, has been defeated or at least contained: “We read the newspapers as we love, blindfolded. We do not try to understand the facts. We listen to the soothing words of the editor as we listen to the words of our mistress: we are “beaten and happy” because we believe that we are not beaten but victorious.”

+ Imagine being the copy editor and typesetter who was handed 4000 of these manuscript pages, furiously written late at night in Proust’s cork-walled room, to compose for printing…

+ Robert Proust on the kind of people who tended to read his brother’s long and winding novel: The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” Better take my temperature…

+ Forgive me, but Proust has invaded my mind. That same neurotic voice chattering on for six months now for two hours a day, about war, death, sexual obsession and jealousy, illness, anti-Semitism, homosexuality and homophobia, sado-masochism, the degernation of the aristocracy, the paintings of Monet, the music of Chopin, the taste of a Madeleine cake after being dipped in warm tea, insomnia, grief, boredom, the sound of the ocean breaking on the rocks at Balbec, the color and shape of the clouds over Combray. So here’s a bit more of the loquacious Marcel, writing once again about that endangered species, the daily newspaper…

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au last.

+ The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on JD Vance’s “panicky” response to the Epstein files…

The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.

Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.

+ Haberman and Swan also report that the White House convened what one participant described as a surreal meeting to deal with nipple gate, the allegations in emails from Epstein accuser Sarah Ransome that detail Trump’s mazophiliac obsession and  abuse of her friend’s nipples:

“[A]nother friend … was one of the many girls that had sexual relations with Donald Trump … She confided in me about her casual ‘friendship’ with Donald. Mr. Trump definitely seemed to have a thing for her and she told me how he kept going on about how he liked her ‘pert nipples’. Donald Trump liked flicking and sucking her nipples until they were raw. One evening, when we were showering together, she showed me her nipples. They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them.

At the meeting in the Situation Room, Vance apparently argued that Trump wouldn’t mind having these allegations about his crude sexual behavior made public…

The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse. “I think we should put it out,” he said. “It would cause people to say we’re going further than we need to.” Wiles quickly responded that the president would not, in fact, be OK with it. It was a point no one wanted to continue debating.

+ Check out this passage from Vance’s book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,  where JD shamelessly exploits his wife, Usha the Non-Believer’s miraculous conception, as if she had been impregnated by the passing shadow of Charlie Kirk’s holy ghost, as Mary was 2000 years ago…

For years, I had asked Usha to have another baby, and for years she had told me she was done—especially now that public service had elevated us into the national spotlight. But something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy. One life was stolen from us, but another was given.

+ The Christian Nationalists Hegseth prays, parties and bombs with have never considered Mormons “Christians”…whatever “Christian” means these days.

+++

+ An AP survey shows that on the 250th anniversary of the founding document of the US, fewer Americans than ever feel that “democracy” is central to the nation’s identity. Even fewer realize that it never was. The founders of the country feared nothing so much as a democracy. Democratic Athens wasn’t a model, but a case study for Hamilton and Madison of mob rule, a threat to the propertied interests that had to be managed and contained. The checks built into the US system of government weren’t against tyranny but against democracy.

+ Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelly on how Bari Weiss demanded he reedit his report on ICE’s murderous tactics in Minneapolis to portray the protesters as violent: “It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

+ According to a piece in Zeteo by Justin Barragona, CBS correspondent Cecila Vega (a fellow AU alum) was fired by Bari Weiss as she was preparing a profile of the heroic Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

+ Samantha Ruddy: “The girl in your freshman social studies class who raised her hand to ask why there’s no white history month is running half the major news outlets.”

+ There’s a reason the New York Times hired Bari Weiss to write editorials for the paper, even if the drama queen eventually (and predictably) departed the Times in a theatrical tempest, smearing her former colleagues as she went out the door. At root, Weiss shares the paper’s reactionary politics. This piece, for example, slamming Claudia Sheinbaum, perhaps the most popular leader in the Western Hemisphere, could easily have run on Weiss’s old grievance sheet, The Free Press, and probably will become a segment on 60 Minutes next season, if there is a 60 Minutes next season…

+ Trump on the US government taking stakes in AI companies: There are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public—where the American public essentially becomes a partner.

Reporter: Senator Bernie Sanders proposed this.

Trump: I’ve been talking about it for the past year. Many of his people voted for me.

He’s planning to invade Cuba because they did the same thing to sugar plantations and casinos.

+ Number of medical specialists seen by Presidents…

George HW Bush: 5
George W. Bush: 12
Joe Biden: 20
Donald Trump: 22

+ David Rush, the former CIA officer found with more than 300 gold bars in his home, along with $2 million in cash, and more than 30 luxury watches, worked closely with Stephen Feinberg, the second-highest-ranking Pentagon official, on a covert program to spy on China.

97:  Number of J6 rioters pardoned by Trump who have committed new crimes since J6. Recidivism is the hallmark of a true Trumper.

+++

+ El Niño has officially arrived. How super it will be is yet to be determined. But a 3.5˚C rise in central equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures is possible by November, which would mark the strongest El Niño on record,  with dire consequences for global climate well into 2027.

+ Global sea surface temperatures have been hitting record highs, day after day, week after week and El Niño’s just warming up…

+ Scientists studying the Colorado River are warning yet again that the entire river basin and its three major reservoirs, which supplies water for 40 million people across the Southwest, are headed toward a “system crash:” “We’re trying to lay out, in the starkest terms, where we’re at so that everybody understands the significance of the cuts that lie ahead,” said the study’s lead scientist, Jack Schmidt. “We cannot go over the cliff.”

+ Even as Trump used the Iran war as a legal excuse to shovel a $700 billion bailout to the coal industry, solar generated 12.8% of all US electricity in May, topping coal for the first time.

+ A sprawling plume of Saharan dust has crossed the Atlantic from West Africa, stretching into the Caribbean toward the Gulf Coast of the US…

+ The Washington Post reported on the no-bid contracts going to Trump-linked firms to gouge up large swaths of the Southwest for Trump’s border wall: “The Department of Homeland Security has awarded more than $19.4 billion in contracts in the past six months — compared with $2.1 billion from 2016 to 2024. Most of it has gone to two firms that have ties to the White House and the Republican Party, according to a Washington Post analysis. The most recent contract, a $2.6 billion project, was issued on Wednesday.”

+ And this week, the Trump gang just waived all environmental laws to blast Trump’s border barriers and roads through Big Bend National Park, the first time in American history the federal government has gutted dozens of environmental and procedural laws for a massive (and quite useless) construction project in a national park.

+ Not satisfied with gouging a path of destruction across one of the country’s most spectacular national parks, Trump’s no-bid contracted wall will also pierce through the adjacent Big Bend Ranch State Park and the Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River corridor, even though less than one percent of all crossings happen in the Big Bend sector, where the river, canyons, mountains, and desert climate already act as a natural barrier to human migration. 

+ Sec. of Interior Doug Burgum on offshore wind turbine menace:

We have a report from Hegseth that it’s a national security threat. You could launch an attack on the US in with a bunch of drones coming through a wind tower field, it would undetectable until it was came through because the radar interference.”

Billions upon billions spent on early warning radar and air defense systems that can be defeated by drones using a few windmills as cover. (How the drones cross the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans is another question.) Can we get a refund? My memory is getting hazier and hazier with age, but I don’t recall the 9/11 hijackers needing to hide their murderous mission behind any windmills, except in the windmills of Trump’s mind, perhaps…

+ The dry season is just kicking in here in Oregon and 17 of the state’s 36 counties (and most of the biggest ones) are already in drought conditions.

+ The Barred Owl is the latest scapegoat for the ravages of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest, where decades of relentless clear-cutting have created habitat conditions that favor the more adaptable barred owl over its close relative, the northern spotted owl, which almost exclusively inhabits old-growth forests. As Trump pushes to unshackle this rapacious industry, freeing it to once again start logging in spotted owl habitat, they are placing the blame for spotted owl’s declining fortunes on the barred owl instead of the chainsaw brigades and have initiated a disgusting plan to kill as many as 450,000 barred owls, the slaughter of which won’t do anything to save the spotted owl, as long as its habitat continues to be annihilated. 

+ In the US, spending on data center construction now exceeds spending on public transportation infrastructure — including airports, marine terminals, and all mass transit.

+ The rising opposition to data centers is the latest threat to the neoliberal technocrats who run the Democratic Party and they’re already working on ways to snuff it out the way they did the Medicare for All movement.

+ Police in Philadelphia copped to the fact they’re tracking “First Amendment activity” by citizens who are critical of AI.

It will probably require the construction of a new data center just to track all of the anti-data center posts on Social Media…

+ The Republicans already have an explanation for the opposition to AI and data centers: China! It’s not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money,” claimed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, last month at an industry confab called “Harnassing America’s Power.”

+ 8 out of 10 Northern Fulmars, a seabird that feeds near the surface of the North Atlantic, have plastic in their stomachs…Plastic is everywhere, all at once, even now microdosing its way into our hearts, kidneys and brains.

+ Managers at BYD estimate that by next year, 80% of all car sales in China will be electric.

+ Climate Change News on the greening of Yemen, as the Gulf state turns to solar:

Over recent years, the country has imported solar systems totaling more than 1,000 megawatts of capacity, representing an estimated investment of about $250 million, al-Tuwaiti said. That accounts for almost a quarter of Yemen’s current electricity needs of 4,500 megawatts, he added. It has also given an unexpected boost to the climate-vulnerable country’s efforts to further shrink its tiny carbon emissions. Al-Tuwaiti estimates that solar generation now displaces the equivalent of 7,800 barrels of oil and more than 1.2 million litres of diesel per day. Recent estimates show Yemen contributes only around 0.03%-0.06% of global emissions, with most energy-related emissions coming from transport and power generation.

+ Nearly two-thirds of the planned data centers are slated to be built in drought-stricken parts of the country. ChatGPT probably could have told them that sighting these water-hogging monstrosities in the arid and getting arider West is a bad idea…

+ Rep Lizzie Fletcher (D-Houston):

The New World screwworm has been found in Texas. This flesh-eating parasite, previously eradicated from the U.S., poses a huge threat to our cattle. Last March, the Trump administration fired more than 15,000 USDA employees and eliminated a program to contain the screwworm in Central America. The threat of New World screwworm is just one consequence of the Trump administration’s reckless campaign to eliminate funding for government programs that Americans rely on.

+ Even Texas’s Ag commissioner Sid Miller blames Trump’s slow response to New World Screwworm for increasing beef prices: “You can look for higher beef prices because of the failure of the USDA to control this pest.” You can tell Miller knows what he’s talking about because he’s a real cowboy. Only real cowboys wear their Stetsons inside…

+ Among post-industrial nations, the US leads the world, by a considerable margin, in avoidable deaths…(H/t Adam Tooze)

+ Failed States of America Index: “Americans born after 1970 are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born before them were dying at the same ages, a pattern researchers call alarming given how many years these cohorts still have ahead.”

+++

+ Nothing unravels Trump like having his fabulations exposed by a woman journalist. He melts down faster than a nuclear reactor whose cooling system has failed…

Kaitlan Collins, CNN: Just to clarify. Is the $1.8 billion DOJ fund dead or is it on hold?

Trump: I’d have to ask the lawyers. I don’t know. People like you have abused our people.

Collins: But Republicans—

Trump: Be quiet. You should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be conservative from Alabama. Can you believe it? CNN does such false reporting, but now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out. It’s hard to straighten garbage out.

+ Trump on Graham Platner (or is he engaging in a rare episode of self-reflection?): “This guy’s got a rap sheet, I’ve never seen anything like it.  He’s a low-level thug, and he’s running to be senator…He’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably.”

+ Not to be outdone, Fox News’s Jesse Watters played the white trash card: “Platner is a liar and he’s kind of a fraud, but he’s getting away with it because Maine is a poor white New England state.” I’m confused. I thought poor whites were MAGA’s base? Only when they do what the bosses say, I guess…

+ Here’s one of the reasons they’re coming after Graham Platner hard: “The fact that Jeff Bezos exists and the fact that I know someone in Sullivan who works three jobs and pays 60% of her monthly income in rent, those two things are directly connected. There is no metric of hard work that justifies a billionaire when people in Eastern Maine work three jobs just to put food on the table.”

+ Appearing before more than 1.2 million people in Madrid, Pope Leo from the Southside urged the crowds to live their Catholic faith by helping others in his sermon for the Mass. The Pontiff reminded his followers that “God identifies with the poor, the downtrodden, those who are alone and forsaken.”

+ A YouGov poll on the net favorables of public figures reveals that Tucker Carlson is, if not the anti-Christ of Peter Thiel’s nightmares, at least the anti-Pope, though even these polar opposites have found common ground in their opposition to the Iran War …

Pope Leo XIV (+37)
Jon Stewart: (+14)
Mark Kelly: (+10)
Jon Ossoff: (+6)
Glenn Youngkin: (+6)
James Talarico: (+5)
Ro Khanna: (+5)
Pete Buttigieg: (+1)
Josh Shapiro: (+1)

AOC: (-1)
Kamala Harris: (-3)
Thomas Massie: (-4)
Gavin Newsom: (-5)
JD Vance: (-8)
Marco Rubio: (-8)
Ron DeSantis: (-10)
Donald Trump: (-17)
Don Jr: (-27)
Tucker Carlson: (-36)

I bet most Americans couldn’t name the states Kelly, Ossoff, Youngkin, or Khanna represent, which is why they have positive ratings. And as my friend Tim Withee said, it wouldn’t be surprising if many of their people in their own states could pick them out of a police line-up.

+ Speaking of polls, here’s how one of the predictive markets in Vegas rates the 2028 race. Don’t look too closely unless you’re a political masochist. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel. Only, as the Youngbloods sang, “darkness, darkness”…

2028 Presidential Election

Gavin Newsom              7/2
Marco Rubio                  9/2
JD Vance                       11/2
A. Ocasio-Cortez          12/1
Jon Ossoff                     12/1
Kamala Harris              18/1
Donald Trump Sr.        25/1
Josh Shapiro                 28/1
Mark Kelly                     28/1
Tucker Carlson             28/1

+ Trump: “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. Rigged Elections!”

Why would the Democratic elites rig the primaries against the ridiculous Pratt? Wouldn’t they prefer him to run against Karen Bass, rather than have her face a popular Democratic Socialist attacking her from her left? This is LA, after all, an election Pratt had no chance of winning.

+ Trump threw a tantrum and walked–well, hobbled anyway–out of his interview with Kristen Welker after she pressed him for evidence to back up his claim that the California primaries had been rigged…

Welker: Just to be very clear, there’s no evidence of what you’re saying.

Trump: There’s a lot of evidence. There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. The election was rigged. And it’s happening again in California. They’re cheating.

Welker: Do you have evidence?

Trump: All I have to do is look.

Welker: That’s not evidence. The local officials acknowledge that they are slow

Trump: They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked…You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. Let’s call it quits. Because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling.”

Welker, as Trump storms off: “I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview…”

+ Tina Brown struck the right note on the Welker/Trump spat:

For more in press humiliation week, let’s not forget NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, who was so damn lame when Trump got into her face with a round of insults about her “crooked” network. After she challenged him over his claims about winning the 2020 election, he stormed out of an interview with the parting shot, “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.” Did Welker stand up and tell him, in polite TV terms, to back the fuck off? No. She whimpered, “ Mr President, let’s please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin!” As if getting out of her DC bubble was some heroic sacrifice for the nation.

+  CNN: “But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?”

MIKE JOHNSON: “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

Look, everyone knows Satan rigged the California elections and his demons leave no trace, not even a single hanging chad!

+ Rep. James Comer: “What we’re seeing especially in the blue states is there is rampant fraud, especially in the minority communities.” Meanwhile, Trump issued “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to former Congressman Stephen E. Buyer, the Republican from Indiana, who was convicted of involvement in an insider trading scheme in 2023, where he made nearly $350,000 in illegal profits from the Sprint-T-Mobile and Guidehouse-Navigant mergers soon after leaving office. Buyer is white. If you search the database of Trump’s pardons and commutations, you’ll see convictions for “fraud” cited 72 times–almost all of the convicts were white.–almost all of the convicts were white.

+ From Reese Gorman’s account of how Trump dominates House Speaker Mike Johnson in NOTUS:

Last year, as Republicans were attempting to pass a measure for their reconciliation bill, Trump was on the phone with the GOP holdouts whose names were lit up on the board above the press gallery as having voted “No. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) was handed a phone with Trump on the other end of the line in the cloakroom off the House floor. Two sources described Spartz as trying to talk while noticeably crying during the call. After they were done and she left the cloakroom, Trump, who was on speakerphone, said: “I have no fucking idea what she just said.”

+ Marco Rubio: “President Kennedy announced that we were going to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely. We did it. We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do. And at some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been.” No, Rubio’s not talking about the coup-plotting United Fruit Company, but it’s sports equivalent, the cage-fighting enterprise, which will entertain Trump on his 80th birthday with their own brand of bloodsport waged in swim-trunk-style briefs on the lawn of the White House…

+++

+ Floyd Stovall: I’m going to ask a question which you may think trivial. Suppose we had the ideal society, economic society, where everybody had leisure and comfort and all the Cadillacs we could use. What would that do, if anything, to literature or poetry?

William Faulkner: I think the poet would still be a poet. He’d prefer to be a poet than to have the Cadillac. There may be a culture which would compel him to have that Cadillac, but he would be a poor Cadillac owner, just like he’d be a poor doctor or lawyer because he’s going to be a poet first.

+ From Tyler Jagt’s essay “My Students Can’t Read” in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.”

+ According to Cloudflare, 57.4% of requests to a selection of websites it hosts are now automated bot requests, while only 42.6% are human-generated. As I told the estimable editor and CounterPunch contributor, Susie Day, I’m happy if bots read my columns and one day hope to have a bot-stalker, though not one that goes the full-Rushdie…

+ Jesse Walker: Fun fact: “Hanoi has been under Communist rule for longer than Moscow was.”

+ This clipping for the “Is Trump a Closet Case?” file finds the president gushing at the physique of NFL Hall of Famer Joe Thomas, whom the alleged super football fan didn’t recognize.

Look at this guy over here. I don’t know who the hell he is, but he is one hell of a specimen. This guy, this is one hell of a physical specimen…I thought I was big until I met you, Joe, you know. Fantastic, that’s what I like. Look at the size of this guy! Boy oh boy. He’s a good-looking man!

+ A lot of attention has been paid to the best opening lines of novels, but what’s the best closing line in American fiction? How about this one from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: “I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”

+ Apparently, the summer interns are programming the Criterion Collection this month…

+ First Jesus turned the water into wine and, then seeing his congregation become relaxed, flirtatious and demanding to hear a little Motown, realized his mistake and transformed the wine into sugar water infused with caffeine, taurine and guarana…“God put it on our hearts to specifically preach the gospel through an energy drink,” the creator of Yahweh says in an Instagram video defending the company against accusations that it exists mainly to turn a profit.

+ Jan St. Werner of the German group, Mouse on Mars, about their collaboration with the Sun Ra of dub/reggae, Lee “Scratch” Perry, on his final record, Spatial, No Problem: “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going. He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”

+ Move over, Warren Beatty. Take the blue pill, Sean Penn! Madonna says JFK Jr was the “best dick down” of her life. I wonder if he would’ve rendered the same assessment about carnal relations with Madonna…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It’s Too Late
Cory Doctorow
(MCD)

The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America
Lauren O-Neill-Butler
(Verso)

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words
Sophia Smith Galer
(William Collins)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Spatial, No Problem
Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mouse on Mars
(Domino)

A Sign in the Weather
Bella White
(Rounder)

Doctrine of Love
Jalen Ngonda
(Daptone)

Goya’s Way of Looking at a Massacre

“Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not, of course, our awareness of our potentiality as artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action. The kind of actions implied vary a great deal. A work of art can, to some extent, increase an awareness of different potentialities in different people. The important point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility of an increase, an improvement. Nor need the word be optimistic to achieve this; indeed, its subject may be tragic. For it is not the subject that makes the promise, it is the artist’s way of viewing his subject. Goya‘s way of looking at a massacre amounts to the contention that we ought to be able to do without massacres.” – John Berger