Roaming Charges: Mad Mouth, Bad Man; Mad Man, Bad Mouth

“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”

– Roberto Rossellini

+ If, in fact, the war is over (don’t count on it), then Iran wins by surviving two massive bombing campaigns by the US and Israel (both nuclear-armed states) in the last year. Iran wins even bigger by keeping the Islamic Republic in power under the control of a younger, more militant leadership with the Republican Guard largely intact. Iran’s victory grows larger when you consider that it keeps its nuclear research program and uranium stockpile. The victory becomes almost total when you factor in its ongoing control over the Strait of Hormuz and the fact that Trump was ready to call it quits in less than two months–not the 20 years it took to realize it had been defeated in Afghanistan.

+ It’s important for Americans who haven’t been paying attention to Gaza to understand that when Israel signs a “ceasefire” agreement, only one side is held to its pledge to cease firing. Since the ceasefire in Gaza, now supervised by Trump’s Board of Peace, Israel has continued killing 10 to 15 Palestinians–mostly civilians–a day, an ongoing slaughter mostly unremarked upon by the NYT, Washington Post, BBC or CNN. This week, an Israeli soldier shot a 3-year-old Palestinian boy in the head. Expect a similar dynamic to unfold in Iran, where the US is waging, if not a war for Israel, at least a war waged in the style of Israel…

+ Geographically, Iran is the size of Western Europe. It has at least 10 cities with populations of more than one million people–four of them are larger than Chicago. How many of these cities could most American politicians or media figures name? Two? That’s probably generous. With a populace of nearly 14 million people, Tehran’s population exceeds NYC’s by 5 million people. We have no idea who we are going to war against, why, or what civilization the leader of our country has vowed to destroy for all time…It’s a safe bet that in this instance ignorance won’t turn out to be bliss.

+ Ceasefire or not, the US has been openly conducting the kind of war it has largely funded its proxies to wage since Vietnam: a war of total destruction, targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves. There’s no hiding behind “winning hearts and minds” platitudes anymore. The skeleton has come out of the closet and the madman has descended from the attic and is raving in the front yard. Yes, the lunatic really is on the grass. But out of the mouth of madness often comes uncomfortable truths, such as the fact that war crimes are only ever committed by losers and not by the imperial powers who kill and immiserate by the tens of thousands.

+ If you need a refresher course on what happens to a country after its civilian infrastructure has been obliterated by US weapons systems, I highly recommend watching Leslie and Andrew Cockburn’s devastating documentary for Frontline on the aftermath of the Gulf War, The War We Left Behind. Try not to cry or break something…(I did both.)

+ The Iran war is now costing upwards of $500 million per day, boosted by the loss of fighter jets and US radar and air defense systems, to a supposedly “obliterated” Iranian military.

+ Unit cost of a combat-ready F-15 Eagle, like the one shot down by Iran last week: $115 million.

+ Unit cost of an A-10 Thunderbolt, like the one shot down by Iran last week: $18.9 million

+ Replacement cost of E-3 Sentry AWACS destroyed by Iranian missile strike on Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia: $700 million to over $1 billion

+ It’s grimly ironic that, as much as Trump hated John McCain, and routinely ridiculed him as a loser, he’s now fulfilling the late senator from Arizona’s lifelong dream (which he probably took with him to his eternal submergence in the Phlegethon of Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell) to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran…”

+ The Beach Boys were to John McCain what the Village People are to Donald Trump.

+ The US having rapidly depleted its arsenal of “smart”  bombs, Tomahawks, THAADs and Patriot missiles in less than two months is a pretty clear indication that these weapons systems aren’t needed to “defend” the US from attack by other Superpowers, including Russia, China and, of course, Greenland. In fact, these weapons are “defensive” only against retaliatory strikes in response to US acts of extreme aggression. The ever-rising defense/war budget is one of the most ludicrous scams ever perpetrated on the American taxpayers.

+ Since Obama’s “Asian pivot” in 2012, the US has spent at least 260 billion dollars a year trying to intimidate China militarily, which is $20 billion more a year than China spends on its entire military budget. China’s military budget is less than 1.5 percent of its GDP, less than half the amount the US spends at 3.19% of its GDP–a figure that Trump and Hegseth want to dramatically increase next year.

+ If the Holocaust Museum really aspired to serve as a warning about all genocides, instead of just the genocide against European Jews, this maniacal frothing by Trump would be projected prominently on one of its walls.

+ Even Trump’s “ceasefire” post sounds like the inchoate ravings by one of the unfortunate characters in Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor,” who is locked in a padded room, awaiting psychological readjustment through electrodes.

+ Trump spent much of the week vowing to escalate his war against Iran by deliberately targeting its civilian population. This obscures the fact that for five decades the US has been waging an almost equally destructive and unrelenting war against Iran through economic sanctions, which have also fallen most heavily on Iranian civilians, limiting critical medical, industrial, technological, and agricultural supplies. These sanctions, often marketed as being motivated by “humanitarian” concerns, are designed to immiserate Iran’s population, just as it has done to Cuba and other regimes that refuse to submit to its imperial dictates. It’s no secret why many Iranians have shouted, “Death to America” across the decades.

+ As Melania once cribbed Michelle Obama, Trump is now cribbing, checks notes, Curtis LeMay: “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next 2-3 weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong!” Once you’ve bombed a girls school and a girls volleyball team, you’ve proved there’s no moral restraint governing who or what you might target with your Tomahawk missiles and gravity bombs…

+ So Hegseth wasn’t just praying to Jesus to help him annihilate Iran, he was also praying that his broker could make him millions off of Operation Furious Trading:

“A broker acting for US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth explored a multimillion-dollar investment in a defence-focused exchange-traded fund in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, according to a Financial Times report. The broker, at Morgan Stanley, is said to have approached BlackRock in February regarding a potential allocation into its Defense Industrials Active ETF, a fund designed to capture growth opportunities in companies benefiting from increased defence spending. The inquiry was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to people familiar with the matter, although the investment ultimately did not proceed.”

+ Trump: “We’re gonna have to force ourselves upon them, which we have the right to do.” Is he talking about random women and girls or Iranians?

+ Maybe, the rising costs of cosmetics will turn the Mar-a-Lago-Face crowd against the Iran war…

+ Michael Cembalest: “In the ~160 years after the Civil War, US presidents fired 11 four- and five-star military officers. In Trump’s first 14 months, the White House has fired 9 of them.”

+ Trump may believe that climate change is a fraud. The ground troops he’s thinking of sending into Iran (one of the hottest landscapes on Earth) likely won’t, as an analysis from JP Morgan illustrates…

+ Trump: “You know who else didn’t help us? South Korea didn’t help us. We’ve got 45,000 soldiers in South Korea to protect them from Kim Jong Un, who I get along with very well. He said very nice things about me. He used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person.”

+ Unlike Iran, North Korea succeeded in manufacturing both nuclear weapons and medium-to-long-range missiles to launch them despite US sanctions. And Kim was literally firing ballistic missiles over US Naval exercises in the Pacific a couple of days after the US started bombing Iran without generating a bleat from Trump’s White House.

+ Only Trump would deploy US troops to a war zone and house them in hotels, thus making hotels legitimate targets for Iranian missiles…

+ Ken Klippenstein: “It’s hilarious that cable news relies on retired four-star generals to explain the exact problems they caused.”

+ The generals on CNN and FoxNews are professional taste-tasters, paid to eat up Trump’s poison to assure cable “news” viewers that they can swallow it, too…

+ They say Americans only learn geography during wartime. But more than a month into the war, the New York Times is apparently still a slow learner, given that it published an upside-down map of the Strait of Hormuz.

+ Trump: “I’m polling higher than anybody has ever polled in Venezuela. So after I’m finished with this, I can got to Venezuela. I will quickly learn Spanish. It won’t take long. I’m good at language. I will go to Venezuela. I’m going to run for president.” Any guesses on how many reincarnations it will take for Trump to learn Spanish, assuming he starts out again as a tapeworm in RFK, Jr’s brain, which may be a generous reset for him?

+ The exquisitely gifted exotic dancer Charm Daze, who US troops quite understandably shared Hegseth’s Iran war plans with during various performances, is the Julian Assange that the Trump administration deserves…

+ Pope Leo from the Southside excoriated Hegseth, and other Trump mouthpieces, for calling on Jesus to help them kill Iranians: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, ​whom no one can use to justify war. (Jesus) does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.”

+ The Economist: “Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from oil sales each day as it did before American and Israeli bombs started falling on February 28th. It may be pummelled on the battlefield, but the regime is winning the energy war.”

+ Trump: “I would only say that we’re doing extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.” Trump admitting that the US used negotiations as a cover for “surprise” attacks on Iran, both a war crime and a deeply evil, or as JD Vance might say: “demonic,” thing to do.

+ Surely one of the wildest scenes in all of Western literature (Oh, the values it teaches, so vastly superior to any “heathen” text, right JD?!) is an episode from the 14th century. French epic poem, The Romance of the Rose, where Nero orders the murder of his mother, Agrippina, and the dissection of her corpse, which he attends so that he can examine the womb from which he sprang. I read Chaucer’s (alleged) translation in college, but I’d never seen an illustration until this morning (thanks Mary Beard) and now I’ll never forget it and, I suspect, neither will you, as a visualization of the depravity of imperial autocracy run amok…Notice her bound legs. 

How that the wicked Emperor,
Nero, his madness without cure,
Had them dismember his mother,
Did her to bitter death deliver,
So as to view, all Rome believed,
That place where he was conceived.

+ During the first week of the war, US and Israeli airstrikes targeted Iran’s pistachio industry, once the largest in the world, destroying the warehouses of the Iranian Pistachio Company adjacent to the Rafsanjan Airport.

+ Here’s a revealing image from Love and Terror: the Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, Claudia Verhoeven’s forthcoming book from Verso on the cultural legacy of the Manson cult. Atrocities committed in the name of the government often spur atrocities on the home front, lending a sense of legitimacy to acts of mass violence.

In this case, the leader of a cult that killed 7 people in LA got the death penalty (later ruled unconstitutional), while the leaders of a cult that killed 504 Vietnamese civilians–women (several of whom were raped), children and elderly–walked. Americans were much more horrified by how Manson could have brainwashed nice suburban girls to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders than by what the military had done to the minds and moral sensibility of their own children, students, church goers and neighbors to commit acts of mindless slaughter and terror at My Lai. (Nixon declared Manson guilty before his trial and cleared Calley after a military tribunal had proved his guilt.) ..It’s reasonable to assume that there will be an uptick in mass shootings in the US during and following the war on Iran.

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+ That Demosthenes of the MAGA movement, Steve Bannon, has reversed himself on the Iran war and is now, as Gen. David Petraeus said to his lover/biographer, “all in:” “President Trump’s in. We’re in, too. We’re gonna go back and re-do what Alexander the Great did 2,300 years ago.” The image of Trump as Alexander is worthy of a cartoon by Gary Larson or R. Crumb. Imagine the size of the crane necessary to hoist Trump’s gargantuan girth onto the back of poor Bucephalus, the world’s most famous war horse.

After Alexander’s army subdued Persepolis, the spiritual capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire for more than two centuries, he ordered the ancient city annihilated, in a reenactment of the genocidal destruction of Melos during the Peloponnesian War–a shocking act of depravity that many of Alexander’s admirers in the manosophere of the classical age, desperate to portray him as an enlightened despot, a philosopher king, blamed on a woman, a courtesan named Thaīs. Thaîs, a hetaira from Athens, was, along with Alexander’s childhood friend and lover Hesphastion, the Macedonian warlord’s most intimate companion during his rampages across Asia Minor and the Subcontinent.   According to the Greek historian Cleitarchus, a near contemporary of Alexander, Thaīs instigated the destruction of Persepolis, claiming that she used her erotic charms to seduce the young tyrant into burning the capital in revenge for Xerxes’s destruction of Athens in 480 BCE, one hundred and fifty years before Alexander’s army routed Darius and ended the Achaemenid dynasty. 

The historian Diodorus Siculus reprised Cleitarchus’ misogynistic account in 80 BCE, at a time when Julius Caesar was beginning to view himself as Alexander reincarnate: “It was most remarkable that the impious act of Xerxes, king of the Persians, against the acropolis at Athens should have been repaid in kind after many years by one woman, a citizen of the land which had suffered it, and in sport.” 

The truth is that Alexander almost certainly burned the city himself “in sport” and probably drunk, as was his violent custom.  The burning of Persepolis was less about revenge for past wrongs than a brutal warning to other cities and empires that might resist against Macedonian hegemony. Alexander and his father, Philip II, had burned plenty of Greek cities in their conquest of Greece. Philip razed Aristotle’s hometown of Stagira and Alexander demolished Thebes. Later, the boy tyrant would burn and loot his way across the Levant, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and India. It’s what being a “world conqueror” is all about, as the Romans showed when they destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE and, according to legend if not fact,  sowed the ground with salt so that the Punic capital could never again rise to threaten the Empire.

I’ve always been drawn to the theory that Aristotle, one of the first mycologists, arranged the assassination of Alexander of Macedon by shipping poisonous mushrooms, with detailed instructions on how to prepare them, to Babylon, after the great ethicist witnessed in horror what a genocidal psychopath his former student had become, after the burning of Persepolis and the murder in a drunken rage of his friend Cleitus the Black, who had saved his life at the crucial Battle of Granicus.

After Alexander’s death, Aristotle was chased out of the Lyceum by Athenians, who were now free to vent their anger against anyone associated with the heavy-handed hegemon from Pella. Apparently, the Athenians were unimpressed by the claims that AlexanderThaīs incinerated Persepolis on their behalf. and with good reason because the Macedonians had, in fact, allied themselves with Xerxes during the second Persian invasion and the sacking of Athens.  (As for Thais, she didn’t return to Athens, but instead married Alexander’s leading general, Ptolemy, moved to Alexandria and gave birth to the dynasty that would rule Egypt until Octavian and Marius defeated Cleopatra and Marc Antony at Actium in 30 BCE.)

Saying he fled Athens to prevent Athenians from “sinning twice against philosophy” (ie, killing him after having executed Socrates), Aristotle spent the last year of his life on his mother’s old estate in Chalcis, where he died at 67 of a mysterious stomach ailment in 322 BCE. (Was he poisoned in retaliation for poisoning Alexander?)

The text of Aristotle’s remarkable will, which is clearer than any written by an estate lawyer these days, was preserved by two Muslim scholars (Al Garib and Ishaq bin Hunayn), who chose to record and translate the last testament of the conqueror’s teacher. It’s highly unlikely the Christians would have done the same. In fact, in 392, Theophilius of Alexandria, a Bishop of the Christian Church, destroyed the Serapeum and urged Christian mobs to ransack the last Neo-Platonist school in the city and murder its leader, Hypatia, one of the first (that we know of) female philosophers and mathematicians.

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+ Let’s do a status check on the “Greatest Economy Ever”….

 + The February hiring rate fell to the lowest level since April 2020 at the outset of the Covid pandemic…

+ A year after Liberation Day, Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young assesses the impact of tariffs on Colorado’s economy: “Trump’s tariffs are a self-inflicted crisis that represents economic devastation, not liberation for working families and businesses. Businesses need predictability to grow, but what they’re getting instead is tariff whiplash.”

+ According to a bankruptcy survey, most Americans are only three months away from financial collapse…

+ For American workers, the financial crisis never ended (and likely never will)…

+ Trump’s blue-collar worker con…following the same dismal trajectory as Biden, Obama, and Clinton’s.

+ In 2016, Trump said he would eliminate the federal debt within 10 years. Since that pledge, the debt has more than doubled, from $19 trillion to over $39 trillion. That tends to happen when you slash taxes for the rich and corporations and balloon the war-making budget to more than a trillion a year. Of course, Dark Lord Cheney advised Republicans that the debt and deficit are only political issues to use against Democrats, not an economic issue that should concern Republicans: “Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter.” So, look for Trump to use the debt he helped to swell in order to justify more cuts in social and environmental spending. 

+ Trump: “We can’t take care of daycare. The states have to do it. We’re a big country. We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.” We have to take care of Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, CivicCore and Palantir. The US military budget amounts to 40% total military spending by all nations on earth and Trump and Hegesth want to increase the Pentagon’s budget from rough $1 trillion this year to $1.6 trillion next year.

+ As part of Trump’s covert campaign to turn America vegan, ground beef prices in the US hit an all-time high…

+ Americans pay FAR more for the same drugs than any other country (and these are often drugs which were developed with funding from the US taxpayer through R&D grants)…

Herceptin
(Cancer drug, 450mg injection)

USA: $6,819
Germany: $2,599
South Africa: $1,620
Greece: $1,418
UK: $1.360
Spain: $1,338

Enbrel
(Arthritis, 50mg/mil–4 springs)

USA: $6,238
Germany: $1,043
Spain: $802
Greece: $668
South Africa: $516

Eliquis
(Blood clots, 5mg-60 pills)

USA: $513
Spain: $96
Germany: $90
Greece: $72
South Africa: $60

Source: International Federation of Health Plans, Health Care Cost Institute; Wall Street Journal

+ Americans have to sell one organ to afford to keep another organ working through pharmaceuticals.

+ Monthly utility bills in West Virginia, the capital of King Coal, are now costlier than mortgage payments

+ Pakistan’s response to a 40% increase in fuel prices? 30 days of free public transportation.

+ It seems increasingly unlikely that there’s a future left to win, but if there is, it won’t be this country that wins it…

+ China has now dethroned Japan as Australia’s leading supplier of automobiles…

China: 25%
Japan: 24%
Thailand: 21%
South Korea: 13%
Others: 17%

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+ The Buffalo Medical Examiner ruled that the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alama was a homicide. Shah Alama, a legally blind and elderly Burmese refugee, was dumped by Border Patrol at a closed shop late on a freezing winter night. He died of a burst ulcer caused by severe stress brought on by dehydration and hypothermia. Typically, DHS dismissed the ruling, saying that “Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol…“his death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol.”

In fact, the medical examiner couldn’t determine the time of Shah Alama’s death. He was released on the street by CBP on the night of February 19 and reported missing in February. 22. He was found dead two days later, four days after being released. Shah Alama, who spoke little or no English, had fled the genocide in Burma and was granted protective status in the US in 2024, pending a ruling on his asylum claim.

“Shah’s death is deeply disturbing and a dereliction of duty by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” said Boston Mayor Sean Ryan. “A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location….CBP’s behavior in the incident was unprofessional and inhumane.”

+ A three-year-old girl was sexually abused while in ICE custody after being separated from her mother at the border. The girl, whose father is a US citizen, was held in an ICE-supervised foster home for five months. while the agency continually delayed releasing her into her father’s care. During that time, she was repeatedly abused by an older child, in assaults that caused vaginal bleeding. When the girl’s father asked about her health, federal officials only told him that she’d been involved in an “accident.”

+ Around 60% (838 people) of the immigrants detained in Oregon and subsequently deported between Jan. 21 and March 10, according to new numbers released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and published by the Deportation Data Project. Very few of them had criminal records.

+ Nearly 5000 people have been arrested by ICE and CBP in Colorado in the last year, 80% of whom have already been deported, despite few of them having any kind of criminal record. This figure is nearly four times higher than the arrest rate in 2024.

+ Justice Gorsuch during oral arguments on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship: “Do you think Native Americans are birthright citizens under your test?”

John Sauer, Trump’s Solicitor General: “Uh, I think … so. I have to think that through.”

Gorsuch: “I’ll take that as a ‘yes?'”

+ Samuel Alito, anchor baby: “I wish that my father had lived to see this day. He was an extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties and made many sacrifices so that my sister and I would have opportunities that he did not enjoy.” (10-31-2005)

+ An 833,000 square foot warehouse outside of Salt Lake City has been sitting empty since it was built in 2022. The assessed value of the vacant property, which no one had shown much interest in buying or leasing for the previous four years, was $97 million. Then, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security showed up with a check for $145 million, made out to a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank–paying more than 40% over the assessed value to one of Trump’s longtime creditors. The deal went through shortly after Trump fired Puppy Killer.

+ Speaking of Puppy Killer, I’m sorry I missed this Kink Night celebration of her husband, Bryon, at the DC gay bar, the District Eagle…

+ Trump Justice: Arrest the innocent, pardon the financial criminals….

+ Crime pays, as long as you steal enough, wear Armani or Brioni suits while doing so and make sure to have bought a few Trump memecoins. An investigation by Bloomberg shows that prosecutions by the Justice Department have declined from a high of around 10,000 a year under George HW Bush and Bill Clinton to around 1650 under Trump in 2015. To be fair, the decline really started with Obama, who bailed out Wall Street criminals, and has continued unabated under Trump, Biden and Trump II.

+ The tragedy of Pam Bondi or when Sycophants are purged for not being sufficiently sycophantic…

+ Pam should never have linked Trump’s job performance to the stock market.

+ US Attorney (and possible Bondi replacement) Jeanine Pirro: “What’s gotta change is we have to lower the age of criminal responsibility … I can’t get my hands on these kids. They’re not kids. I misspoke. These are not children. These are teens. There is this apologetic mentality in DC that doesn’t allow us to have access to these kids.”

+ Fascinating piece by Stuart Elden on Michel Foucault’s visit to Attica Prison in 1972 and how it shaped his thinking about incarceration and punishment.

+ Last week, a New York Times editorial piously asked, “Is the Constitution Bound to Fail?” By denying suffrage to more than half the population, legitimizing slavery, giving an electoral advantage to slave-holding states and valuing property over all forms of life, the US Constitution was born failed and was already out of date by the French Revolution and the Rights of Man. Most countries around the world have far surpassed our Constitution in expanding civil and political liberties, while the US shrinks them, being inexorably mired in the muck of a two-and-a-half century-old document that viewed nearly two-thirds of the nation’s population as subhuman and is apparently impossible to update. There’s no redeeming it.

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+ I’m still not sure what the message of the No Kings rallies was, but a lot of people turned out to spread it. Trump isn’t a king and most sitting kings are fully emasculated potentates, far less harmful than whatever you might want to call Trump: autocrat, despot, megalomaniac, crank…

It appears Jesus even made an apparition in Manhattan with the beam of blood from his Sacred Heart, weirdly resembling Trump’s elongated red tie. Not sure what that message was either…There were more than 8 million people out on the streets, including yours truly. Did we shut down Raytheon or Lockheed for the day, block entry into ICE facilities, surround the Pentagon or CIA HQ, occupy the DNC or RNC HQs, disrupt operations of a coal mine or oil refinery, or provide sanctuary to an undocumented family? There were 8 million people, by one estimate, out on the streets and most. of them were home in time to watch the NCAA playoffs or look for themselves on the local evening news…if your town still has an evening news. What changed in America a day after getting 8 million people on the streets? Before I arrived home, my phone pinged with a text from “Forward Blue” (spooky how they got my number, since I never–and never would–gave it to them) asking to “sign a petition” and, of course, for a donation.

+ HRC is apparently testing the waters for a possible 2028 run. Who will launch the first No Queens protest?

+ Polls repeatedly show that the biggest gripe Americans have with the federal tax code is that the wealthy and corporations don’t pay enough.  They’re more pissed off about this inequity than about their own taxes being too high.

+ So what are Democrats pushing, yep, tax cuts as the hot new idea that’s going to win them independents and Republicans who are sick of Trump. (It won’t.)

+ Megyn Kelly: “Trump could drop a nuke [on Iran] and I’d still vote Republican over Democrat.” + She has a point, a nihilistic one, but a point nonetheless…

+ Speaking of the party of Last (strike that) No Resort, here’s Chuck Schumer berating Trump for reneging (for the moment) on his promise to destroy Iran’s civilization:  “Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated…The nations of the world are furious at Trump: the Asians, the Europeans, even the Middle Eastern allies.”

+ During his trip to Budapest to try to save Victor Orban from defeat in Hungary’s upcoming elections, JD Vance was confronted by journalists over reports that the Pentagon, now run by Christian Nationalists who view the Pope as the Antichrist, threatened the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, with military action unless Pope Leo from the Southside tones down his verbal condemations of the various barbarities committed by the Trump administration. Vance, a converted Catholic, at first claimed that he didn’t know who Cardinal Pierre was. Then the VP dissembled:

Oh, OK, OK, I’ve met him before.  Sorry, I just didn’t remember the name. I’ve never seen this reporting. I’d like to actually talk to Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and frankly, to our people, to figure out what actually happened. I think it’s always a bad idea to offer an opinion on stories that are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so I’m not going to do that.

Of course, the worst part of this insane, but entirely believable, story is that it will provide Dan Brown with conspiratorial source material for at least three more of his banal novels.

+ Is there a Methodism to Vance’s Madness?

+ Franklin Graham said he “misspoke” when he urged CPAC to help get Trump reelected president in 2028:  “That’s why it’s important that we do everything we can to get him [Trump] reelected. He stands not only for religious freedom. He stands up for Christians like no president we’ve ever had. And he’s not afraid. He’s not ashamed of the name of Jesus Christ. Other people are ashamed. He’s not ashamed. And just appreciate that about him.” That’s a lot of “misspeaking”…

+ Luxury Bibles, selling at more than $500 a copy, are the new thing for Christian Nationalists. One buyer told the NYTs: “This is actually God’s word. If it’s something that important, then why not have a really nice copy of it?” Well, if you really want “God’s word”, you need to buy the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, because we all know that the true meaning of a text is what’s lost in the translation. How can you really be a “fundamentalist” if you’re preaching from a translation of a translation of a translation and don’t care enough to read “God’s word” in the language that received the Big Guy’s original seal of approval? The New Testament is already somewhat suspect since Jesus spoke Aramaic, the Gospels were written in Greek and none of the gospel writers ever encountered Jesus or heard one of his sermons.

+ Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers: “If you belittle Christ in the halls of power and blaspheme Him by not ascribing to Him glory and authority over the governments that rest upon His shoulders, the scepter you grasp will become the rod that breaks you. Kiss the Son or face the beating.” The government that “rests upon his shoulders” is blowing up girls’ schools, girls’ volleyball teams, hospitals, apartment buildings and drinking water plants in a desert country…

+ You’ve regressed a long way, baby: “When they prayed on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day, as on other Sundays, most of the women at King’s Way Reformed Church in the old mining town of Prescott, Ariz., wore dainty kerchiefs knotted over their hair to show devotion to God. Marybelle East, 36, wore hers all the time, she said — seven days a week — “for him to see that I submit to his authority.” Her husband’s authority, that is.”

+ A friend of mine who covered the PGA for many years said the tour was packed with “drunks, gamblers and sexhounds. And they modeled themselves on the worst of them all, Arnold Palmer.

+ Trump last week at the Saudi Investment forum: “I’m going to take a few questions. You can ask me anything you want. You can talk sex.” (Almost every sexual partner or victim of Trump says he knows almost nothing about it.) 

+ When Trump said he was “open to talking about sex” the other night at the Saudi investment fund soiree, why didn’t someone ask him about the new credible evidence supporting the claims that he sexually abused a 13-year-old girl? Another case of journalistic malpractice.

+ Melania Trump now has the lowest net favorability rating of any First Lady of the US…I guess that Amazon-financed documentary about the former model’s shoe fetish was a more effective exposé of her banality and venality than it seemed on first viewing…Did anyone, even the director, watch it twice?

Nancy Reagan: +50
Laura Bush: +46
Michelle Obama: +42
Hillary Clinton: +25
Melania Trump: -12

+ Trump says his presidential library in Miami will be a hotel with a 747 Air Force One in the lobby…What were you expecting, (cooked) books?

+++

+ I surprised this pair of Columbian white-tailed deer last week while sloshing in a slough along the Columbia River called “the Bug Hole,” which it really is in the summer. The Columbian deer are a diminutive species with big, fluffy white tails and they bounce across the fields like prancing wallabies. They live only on the islands and marshes of the lower Columbia River and have been listed as an endangered species since 1967. They’re off-limits to hunters, a prohibition the (blood) sportsmen routinely ignore and the Feds rarely, if ever, enforce…

+ Jules Michelet (1798-1874), coiner of the term “Renaissance,” historian of France and, oui, animal rights activist: “All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.”

+ Trump: “The environmentalists are terrorists. I call them the environmental terrorists.” So says the man blowing up oil refineries and pipelines. Does he have any Tomahawk missiles left in his arsenal to launch at Eugene, Missoula and Arcata, or has he shot his wad bombing Iranian girls’ schools and volleyball teams?

+ The U.S. Forest Service will shutter 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week. The closures will target science studying how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are impacting forests. Historically, however, most of the “research” coming out of the Forest Service Research Stations has ended up calling for more logging, grazing and prescribed burning as the solutions to any ecological problem.

+ Before the latest heat wave, Phoenix had never recorded three straight days at 105°F or above in March or April— The previous record, May 2-4, 1947, was smashed by more than 40 days.

+ Not counting the melting of the separate from the continental ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the Earth’s glaciers experienced a” net mass loss of 408 ± 132 Gt during the hydrological year 2025 (equivalent to 1.1 ± 0.4 mm sea-level rise) and a total of 9,583 ± 1,211 Gt (26.4 ± 3.3 mm sea-level rise) since 1975.”

+ The snowpack in the Upper Colorado drainage is a record lows, which is news you’ll hear almost nothing about from a government hellbent on making this the new normal for the West, except for blaming the consequences (low flows in the Green, Gunnison and Colorado Rivers, fish kills and fires) on us tree-huggers or demons, which in their minds are the same thing….

+ A new report from the energy analysis firm Ember states that battery storage is now “cheap enough in India that solar power can meet 90% of the country’s power demand at lower lifetime costs.” Seven of India’s 10 largest could meet “at least 83% of their electricity demand” from solar plus batteries at “costs lower than current average power purchase costs.”

+ By 2060, the increased frequency and extent of floods due to sea level rise will more than double the number of septic systems exposed to flooding, leading to system failures and groundwater contamination in the Chesapeake Bay region, according to a report in Climatic Change.

+ Unless current climate policies become more restrictive, more than 25 percent of the world’s population will be hit with more frequent and severe hot-and-dry extreme events by the end of the century, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters. Typically, low-income countries are “projected to suffer more frequently” than high-income ones.

+++

+ A little Gilles Deleuze can brighten even the dimmest day…”A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

+ One of my favorite photos of Cockburn, all dressed up (for him), with in his Irish homespun vest, an unstained shirt, a new cowboy hat, in a jolly mood (he mostly was), with his mighty blue Imperial in the background. I vividly recall the day he first came to stay with us in 1992. He pulled up in the Blue Beast, which, when parked in front of our house,  occupied about half of the block. He asked me to unload the car’s cavernous trunk, while he “made a quick call:” typewriter, fax machine, rolls of fax paper, his own (pre-cell) phone, riding boots (still caked with horse manure), leather satchels, a cooking plate, various pots and pans (mostly copper), two Navajo blankets, a jar of French sea salt, sacks of apples, garlic, onions, potatoes and carrots,  implements for making Turkish coffee, bags of his neighbors on the Mattole Joe and Karen Paff’s Gold Rush coffee (Guatemalan), bottles of Portuguese wine and French grappa, flowers for Kimberly, a crate of books, quart-sized Ball jars of hard cider, elderberries, and black currents, two strings of dried sausages picked up at Taylor’s in  Cave Junction, copies of The Nation, New Left Review, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a loose stack of vinyl records, blues and 50s R&B, bought at a thrift store in Grants Pass–all of this I Sherpa’d into our little house,  as Alex tried to explain to JW, Roane, Katrina or Victor why he was a couple of hours over his Nation deadline, who’d heard it all before. He stayed for the next two days before we drove north in my Jeep for gigs in Olympia and Seattle. The aged, rusting Imperial remained an immobile but imposing presence in front of our house for a week, an object of curiosity for our neighbors, having broken down, the defining characteristic of all Cockburn cars …

+ As part of my project of reading two pages of Proust a day, as a kind of mouthwash for the mind, I came across this passage about 100 pages into Swann’s Way, where the housekeeper Françoise expresses her dismay to Aunt Léonie’s gardener at the sight of thousands of French soldiers marching through their small village of Combray…

Françoise and the gardener, despite their earlier differences, would discuss how to behave in a time of war: ‘Well, if you ask me, Françoise, I’d say a revolution’s better than a war, any day, because you see, when your revolution’s declared, the only one’s what gets called up is them that’s wants to go.’

‘Hmm. Yes, I can see that’s fairer.’

According to the gardener, whenever a war was declared, ‘They’ stopped all the trains.

‘To be sure!’ answered Françoise. ‘So you can’t get away!’

‘Ooh! Aren’t they cunning!’ said the gardener, for whom a war was a kind of dirty trick played by the State on the population, who, if they had been able to do so, would have absconded to a man.

+ This week, the People’s Tribunal on Offenses Against the Common Language received an indictment from Citoyen Jim Goodman against the term “Israeli settlers.” Goodman remarked, “Wouldn’t claim jumper be a more appropriate term?” Our judgment was unanimous and immediate. Off to the tumbrils it goes. Maître executioner, sharpened the blade!

+ I watched William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame last night with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo and a ludicrously miscast Maureen O’Hara as La Esmerelda. The film is a travesty of Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris, which I’d just re-read for the first time since a deadly seminar in European Romanticism 40 some years ago, in which we were assigned about 4,000 pages of reading for the three month term (Hugo, Stendahl, Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Pushkin, Lermontov and Manzoni). An insane syllabus, in other words. Dieterle largely abandons and even inverts the themes of the novel (somehow managing to even transform the odious Louis XI into an enlightened figure–in the novel he’s a senile autocrat who sends Esmerelda to the gallows, after Quasimodo had saved her, even though the man she was “convicted” of killing is alive and was in fact stabbed by the evil archdeacon Frollo), which is an ode to medieval Paris and gothic architecture and Hugo’s indictment of royalty, clergy, the haute-bourgeoisie, bigotry, torture, prudishness and the death penalty.

Still, Dieterle’s film has its moments, and even speaks across the decades to our own moment. Beyond the melodrama, it’s a film (made in 1939) about prejudice and xenophobia and is a thinly veiled parable about the fate of European Jews under the Nazis, where the Romani stand in for the Jews (You couldn’t expect Hollywood to make a film solely about the nearly equivalent fate of the Romani, could you?). The film opens with the banning of Roma people from entering Paris. As the gates of the city are shut in the face of the leader of La Esmeralda’s group of migrants (accused of being Egyptians), he asks why they can’t enter. The guard snaps, “Because you’re foreigners.” The Romani leader replies in a voice that reminded me of Mel Brooks or Larry David, “So what? You came here yesterday. We come today.”

No Light  No People  No Speak  No People No Cars No People No Food  No People Stopped Short Grinding Halt Everything’s Coming to a Grinding Halt

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Whale: the Illustrated Biography
Asha de Vos
(Princeton)

Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Jeremy Harding
(Verso)

Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First
Nancy Folbre
(California)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Glorious Mahalia
Kronos Quartet
(Smithsonian Folkways)

Distracted
Thundercat
(Brainfeeder)

Sexistential
Robyn
(Konichiwa)

Killing Machines

“One of the things that I learned in the war is that we’re not the top species on the planet because we’re nice.  We are a very aggressive species; it is in us.  People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school.  What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies, and we have to recognize them. I worry about a whole country that doesn’t recognize them, because think of how many times we get ourselves into scrapes as a nation because we’re always the ‘good guys’.  Sometimes, I think if we thought we weren’t always the good guys, we might actually get into less wars.”

– Karl Marlantes

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