Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Loose Tabs

I'm posting this on May 12, after initially hoping for May 10. The delay will push Music Week out a couple days. Elapsed time since my previous one is 28 days, so I'm still close to monthly, but not on any formal schedule. Still, these are falling into a monthly pattern, even when (as this time) I think I should be kicking something out after 2-3 months. Slowing down in old age is my initial excuse, but one could also say being overwhelmed by events. And even with massive paywalling, I'm still finding many more reports and opinion pieces than I can handle. I'm less and less worried about the world going to hell due to ignorance. But more due to stupidity, for lack of a better word to describe the tendency to view issues and problems through one's own narrowly biased focus, with an inability to even imagine looking at them from some other perspective.

Needless to say, this state of the world has found its ideal in Donald Trump, who is not only a victim of this stupidity, but also a tireless spreader. One can only hope that, as disasters mount, this triggers some massive reflex reaction to undo everything he has done. Still, I worry that some aspiring Democrat is going to look at the polling, and decide that the sure path to power is to campaign on lower gasoline prices.[1] Because the problem here is not just the platform plank, but the whole thinking around it.

One could easily solve the supply problem by ending Trump-Biden wars, unblocking the Persian Gulf, and putting Russian and Venezuelan oil back on the market. But what about also working on the demand side? For instance: by pitching more solar and wind as ways to free up cheaper gasoline. Same for electric cars. Mass transit would also help out, as it allows people to move around efficiently without the congestion and pollution of cars. Do all that and gas will get so cheap you should start increasing taxes to discourage people from wasting it. I'd argue that taxes should gradually increase over time, as setting the expectation of future expenses will help move people away from fossil fuels, without clobbering them right now. A car is typically a 5-15 year investment. You don't want to obsolete current cars immediately.

But most importantly, explain to people that Trump is not only costing them at the pump, his whole worldview is making their lives more precarious, and more miserable.

[1] Looks like this Democrat is Graham Platner, the Maine Senatorial candidate much celebrated recently by left-leaning Democrats for driving centrist Janet Mills. Platner wants to end the federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel (18.4 and 24.4 cents per gallon, respectively, earmarked for funding roads and bridges; there are also state taxes, which in many cases are higher than the federal tax). This tax hasn't been raised since 1993. It is much less than it should be, for lots of good reasons (and not just inflation).

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on April 15.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. Here's a list of recent ones, plus a couple of older ones I've pinned because they still seem relevant here, in LIFO order:

  • [05-05]: The Real Road to Serfdom: Tim Wu explains how monopoly power leads to fascism.

  • [05-02]: Lookback: Iraq 2003: Why does the Iran war story sound familiar? (with allowances for tragedy repeating as farce)?

  • [04-27]: Explaining Inflation: AI treats us like 5-year-olds. They leave out a few things.

  • [04-05]: Iran War: The Big Question: How does it end? Or does it end at all?

  • [04-03]: Iran War: The Three Questions: Why is this happening?

  • [03-13]: Days of Infamy: "Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war." Donald Trump doesn't. He only knows how to start one.

  • [2025-10-21]: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond: "Looking beyond the Trump points toward a peace we can all live with."

  • [2025-10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse."

  • [2025-08-10]: Four Stories: My first post, which sets out the basic ideas behind my effort, and takes its title from a very wrong-headed Vox piece that offered some teachable moments. One sample quote I buried in parentheses:

    There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Last time: Cuba, No Kings, Viktor Orbán, Fascism.

Cuba: While I don't doubt that Trump would like to "do Cuba next," aside from reinforcing the world's view of America as a cruel and petty bully, I doubt the military has (or can come up with) a viable attack plan. So his threats mostly are diversions, meant to distract from the war in Iran, while reinforcing Trump's madman cred (which, and this reveals something, he values as part of his "art of the deal."

  • Peter Kornbluh [04-20]: 65 yrs after the first one, Trump's 'Bay of Pigs' may take many forms: "'There were sobering lessons,' JFK said after the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. There is still time for the current president to learn them." Kennedy does seem to have learned some lessons from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but not the important one of resigning to live with an independent Cuba. Whether Trump is capable of learning any lessons at all, ever, is doubtful. I will say that I'm skeptical that the specific litany of mistakes made in 1961 are likely to be repeated now (both Cuba and the US are very different now). On the other hand, the idea of invading another country just because you think you are entitled to run it (for whatever reason) is as bad as ever. Nor is there any reason to think that, given the chance, the US would allow Cuba to choose their own democracy. The election processes the US set up in Afghanistan and Iraq were shams, and the one in America isn't much better.

  • Lee Schlenker [04-23]: Despite Trump's threats, a US-Cuba deal is taking shape: "Talks in Havana are starting to deliver results even as Washington prepares for the possibility of war."

  • William Leogrande [04-26]: In Cuba a deadlock is more likely than a deal: "Trump wants something that the government in Havana is just not willing to give."

  • Blaise Malley [04-28]: Senate kills effort to stop Trump war against Cuba: "By 51-47 vote, Senate blocks debate due to 'US troops not being engaged in hostilities,' despite ongoing blockade."

  • Joshua Keating [05-01]: Trump says Cuba is "next." What does that mean? "But it's not clear what the plan is." Or what the goal is, other than another feather for Trump's cap. Regime change in Venezuela "worked" because the next up was willing to play along. It didn't work in Iran when the next-in-line leaders refused to play along. In neither case did the long-suffering people revolt, but Trump isn't exactly a grass roots democracy kind of guy, so that's not something he really cares about. Cuba is more like Iran than Venezuela. There is reason to believe that lots of Venezuelans really were unhappy with the Maduro government, even if they were unable to do anything about it. That simplified what was basically a cosmetic change. How unpopular the Cuban government is may be hard to gauge. The reporting here is very myopic, with one quotable Cuban dissenter packed in with an armada of the usual anti-Cuban propaganda (there's a whole section called "In Marco we trust?").

Jerome Powell, David Warsh, and the Fed: Trump originally nominated Powell for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2017 (term starting in 2018), figuring he would be more reluctant to raise interest rates than the other candidates he was offered (John Taylor and Kevin Warsh). Biden, following the precedent of Clinton and Obama, gave the Republican-appointed Fed Chair a second term — a big political mistake, considering how much power the Fed Chair has over the economy that Democratic presidents will be blamed for. Powell ultimately disappointed Trump, so much so that Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Powell in an attempt to turn him out of office early. That effort has failed so far, but Powell's term ends on May 15, and he's appointed Warsh to replace Powell. The Senate has yet to confirm Warsh, who for now has to walk a fine line between professing loyalty to Trump and vowing to maintain the independence of the Fed.

  • Claudia Sahm [04-20]: Fed Chair Apprentice: Written in advance of Warsh's Senate confirmation hearing, with sections on Fed independence, Warsh's understanding of inflation, and financial market deregulation (which Warsh favors).

    Warsh accuses the Fed of being stuck in the past: "the tyranny of the status quo." But he is the one resurrecting Milton Friedman's monetarism of the 1970s and Alan Greenspan's productivity studies of the 1990s. Neither fits the current moment well, and they don't even fit together.

  • Mike Konczal [04-27]: Cherry-picking the wrong inflation measures with Kevin Warsh: "Kevin Warsh's favorite inflation metrics ar exactly the ones that failed us during the inflation wave."

  • Dean Baker [04-28]: Jerome Powell ends his career as Fed Chair: Baker offers a generally favorable review of Powell's two terms as Fed Chair, including why Baker favored giving him that second term. I felt then, and now, that Biden had missed an opportunity to appoint someone better, as had Obama and Clinton before him.

White House Correspondents' Dinner: Where a supposedly fun evening was interrupted by a gunman, who was apprehended. Everyone else went home early.

  • Margaret Sullivan [04-23]: Why are White House journalists partying with Trump? "The White House correspondents' dinner has always been a questionable affair. It's even more worrying under an anti-press administration." That's a good question, one I've had since I've heard there even was a White House Correspondents Association, let alone their gala dinner. I've always assumed that the default stance for journalists viz. their subjects is critical and, when necessary, adversarial. I don't doubt that schmoozing with your subjects can yield insights and lead to stories that one otherwise might have missed, but I also have doubts that journalists who get too close to their subjects can still do their jobs. My own experience is mostly in the low-stakes field of music journalism, where I have always thought of myself as a critic, and almost always avoided personal contact (or limited it to publicists, who work for their clients, but have usually shown me courteous respect; after all, not every bridge is worth burning). I recall Bill James writing a piece on the advantages of his outsider status, as opposed to nearly all sportswriters. But covering politics is relatively high-stakes, and we depend on journalists to get the real stories, and not just to parrot what the PR flacks want them to say. The WHCD has always struck me as not just corrupt, but proud of it. I'd go so far as saying that I take offense to the very idea of there even being a White House Correspondents Association. Isn't there a need for all political journalists to be able to trace their stories all the way to the White House? Why should there be a club of insiders controlling access? Except, of course, that their dependence on access makes them so much easier to control.

    Of course, Sullivan also goes into some specific concerns about this particular president.

  • Benjy Sarlin [04-26]: What we know about the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The suspect arrested was Cole Thomas Allen, who released "a manifesto" before the attack, condemning Trump's wars and policies. Trump and his minions are apoplectic that anyone would contemplate doing unto them what they've so carelessly enjoyed doing to others.

  • Francine Prose [04-28]: Shrugging at calamity: America is reacting in strange ways to our chaotic times: "The reaction to the Washington DC shooting shows that Americans are swinging between outrage, exhaustion and numbness."

  • Elena Moore [05-11]: New poll finds a majority of Americans unsure if attempts on Trump's life were real. "One in four respondents believed the attempted attack . . . was staged. The same was true for Butler. [24%] I don't have an opinion on the WHCD event, but the Butler event during the 2024 campaign reminds me strongly of an Agatha Christie story where the killer cuts her ear to make it look like she was the intended victim (the ear bleeds dramatically, without actually posing much risk; the story appears to be A Murder Is Announced). My main reason for not believing that's the event was staged is that it seems like it would be very difficult to keep the plot under wraps, but it likely had significant impact on the election — it certainly help Trump sell a ton of merch.

Gerrymandering Around Voting Rights: I originally filed this along with the other Supreme Court cases, but the case itself was caused by an attempt in Louisiana to sink a Democratic House district, and the same idea has been floated elsewhere, and as Republican prospects grow worse, their desperation has only increased.

A Cure for Gerrymandering: Representative Democracy: By the way, I have figured out a pretty good solution to gerrymandering, which I call Representative Democracy. With this, every candidate running for Congress that receives more than a low threshold (for sake of argument, let's say 10%) is elected to Congress, able to cast the same number of votes the candidate received. You can still have primaries for candidates who belong to political parties. Jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting could help to fairly narrow down the number of candidates. But the key things are that: winner-take-all districts are gone (nearly all districts will have multiple representatives, which means that nearly everyone in each district will have elected a representative to Congress); precise apportioning of districts is not necessary (but there can be guidelines). This means that every state, including every major city, will have at least one representative in each party. Also, by getting rid of winner-take-all, the value of winning a close race will go way down, which should also drain a lot of money from campaigns — which, of course, could be made cheaper still by limiting fundraising and expenses, and providing basic funding for all candidates, which would in turn make elections much less corrupt than they are now (and would allow people to run who have no chance under the current system). This could be a boon for third parties and/or independent candidates, or not, depending on how you deal with primaries, funding, and voters who don't vote for any elected candidates. (I have some ideas there. For instance, unaligned voters could assign their votes to at-large candidates through petitions, or in the most extreme case could represent themselves.)

I've written this idea up roughly a half-dozen or more times. I should give it a proper essay, but it seems bigger than any outlet I can offer. I have dozens of ideas like this: worth presenting, but someone else needs to pick them up and run with them. I've often thought about compiling them into a book borrowing Paul Goodman's title: Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals. (The utopian end would include ideas for escaping from capitalism. Representative democracy is more on the practical end, although as far as I am aware it's never been discussed. The technology to add up the votes is pretty trivial these days. By the way, there's no need for all voters to show up in person to vote, or for the hall to seat all of them.)

To kick things off, I've thought about a Wikiplans website, which I could seed with my rough sketches, and hope others would flesh them out. I need to figure out how to set up Mediawiki anyway.

Spirit Airlines Bites the Dust: And the industry contracts, competition is reduced, and prices will rise.

  • CK Smith [05-02]: Spirit Airlines collapses after bailout efforts fail.

  • Caitlin Dewey [05-05]: Every airline is Spirit Airlines now.

    And if there's anything positive to be said about Spirit, it's that the company's bottom-barrel fares have forced other airlines to lower their prices. One 2017 study found that fares were roughly a fifth cheaper in markets where Spirit or another low-cost airline had a presence. The airline industry even has a name for this: "the Spirit effect." . . .

    With Spirit out of the game, which airline will inherit the ignominious title of most-hated airline in America? Among large carriers, the title passes to American Eagle, a network of regional flights operated by American Airlines, according to YouGov. If you're looking at all US airlines, then Allegiant — a low-cost carrier that mostly services vacation destinations — was already less popular than Spirit was.

    Don't underestimate the airline industry's ability to give you new reasons to hate it, though. Some analysts predict that Spirit's closure will push other airlines' fares up: CBS found average fares rose roughly $60, or 23 percent, when Spirit exited a route.

  • Dan Primack [05-04]: Spirit Airlines blame game is going strong. One argument is that Biden should be blamed for blocking a merger between JetBlue and Spirit. "It is impossible to know if a JetBlue-Spirit merger would have saved Spirit in the long term, or saddled the combined carrier with so much debt that it too would be liquidating as jet fuel prices climb."

  • Alex Kirshner [05-05]: Who killed Spirit Airlines? "The abrupt collapse of the ultra-low-cost carrier ignited a big, misleading blame game in Washington." Interview with Jan Brueckner.

  • Dave Schilling [05-09]: Air travel was already miserable. Now we get to pay more for it!: "Spirit Airlines helped turn flying into a fee-based nightmare. Now it's gone, and fuel prices are soaring."

  • John Cassidy [05-11]: Why Spirit Airlines failed while European budget carriers thrive: "Loved for its cheap seats and derided for its extremely low-frills flights, the American company was arguably a victim of its own success."

How to Save Bankrupt Companies: By the way, another idea I have is to revamp the bankruptcy laws, to reduce the power of creditors, and allow companies to survive and reorganize under employee ownership. At present, the previous owners' equity is generally wiped out, but creditors can force liquidation to recover what they are owed. Each reorganization would have to be negotiated separately, but I expect that most debt will be written down, the employee shares will be held within the company with an initial $0 value, and any capital needed will be provided as long-term, low-interest loans secured with equity.

By the way, another way to promote employee ownership would be to allow stock distribution to employees to bypass estate taxes (which should be raised high enough to make that seem like a good deal). In general, I believe that most companies should be employee-owned, as this facilitates labor and management working in harmony, and tends to keep companies more responsible to their communities and nation. I'd also add a couple public interest board seats, devoted to customers, clients, and/or the community. This could also be applied to non-profits. (Much more could be said about them.)

Major Threads

War on Iran: Trump's war is in a muddled state, as he flip-flops between apocalyptic rhetoric and caution, while allowing no concession that might actually lead to a negotiated solution. Meanwhile, Iran's leaders — who despite all aspersions of religious fanaticism appear to be the relatively sane ones in this conflict — seem confident that time is on their side. The quality of reporting makes it impossible to know.

  • Michael Arria [04-14]: Understanding the Iran war in the context of US imperialism: Interview with Afshin Matin-Asgari, author of Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations, which came out in January 2026. His analysis of the war is pretty much same as mine, but he provides some info on early US-Iranian encounters I wasn't familiar with: 19th century Presbyterian missionaries had a similar role there as they did in Lebanon and Egypt; the US was shut out of the oil industry by the UK, but wound up stationing 30,000 troops in Iran during WWII to facilitate supply of the USSR. Then there was the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution(s): he sees a second one which kicked off with the US embassy occupation, which Khomeini exploited to concentrate clerical power over the many other anti-Shah factions. I've been making a similar point, as my reading of events is that the anti-Americanism of 1979 was instrumental for Khomenei, and could easily have been shelved as early as 1981 (when the hostages were released to a new American president, Reagan), but have since festered due to America's propensity to hold grudges.

  • Jared Sacks [04-15]: How Zionism's anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue: "Israel bombed Tehran's Rafi-Nia synagogue in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The attack revealed, to a shocking degree, Zionism's willingness to treat Jewish life as disposable in the service of its ideological project."

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

  • Maryam Jamshidi [04-17]: Only one side has clearly broken the law in the Strait of Hormuz: "And it isn't Iran." On closer examination, it turns out that Iran actually has an international law legal case for regulating commerce through their own territorial waters (as does Oman).

  • Lauren Aratani [04-18]: Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on? Pretty obviously, someone is making money on inside information. Quite a lot of money. Whether Trump is personally getting his vig isn't clear, but that's something reasonable people will investigate sooner or later.

  • Ian Proud [04-28]: Iran and Russia are gaming the United States, and winning: "Is Trump running out of time to end the war before the American economy catches up?"

  • Kate Aronoff [05-01]: Trump's Iran war is smashing his fossil fuel dreams: "The president wanted to ensure American hegemony and global energy dominance. Instead, he might be torpedoing both." This may be the "silver lining" in the war. Of course, there were better ways to move away from fossil fuels, but when you elect the wrong people, inadvertent disasters may be the best you can hope for. I'm tempted to write a piece on the ten worst things Trump has done, plus five more bad things he's done that may eventually turn out for the better. Of course, there are hundreds of options to choose from, and rebounding is a tricky concept.

  • Trita Parsi: Author of three important books on Iran, Israel, and the United States (e.g., Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, from 2007). He's been all over media of late, and his early warnings of how Iran would respond to the attack have been spot on.

    • [05-02]: Trump's Iran blockade snatches defeat from the jaws of victory: "Washington's search for a 'silver bullet' to defeat Tehran has made it all but impossible to secure a deal."

    • [05-02]: Trump's war has destroyed the illusion of US military supremacy.

    • [05-03]: A few observations on Iran's latest proposal to Trump.

    • w/Brandon Carr [05-06]: 'Christmas bombings' worked in Vietnam but won't drag Iran to the table: "The military and diplomatic situation in the Persian Gulf bears virtually no similarity to that in 1972." "Worked" is a funny word to use in this context.

    • [05-08]: Iran war marks the end of American primacy as we know it: "For states that had opted to depend on US protection, this should be a wake-up call." While obviously true, this piece is sorely lacking in specifics, possibly because primacy was never anywhere near what it was cracked up to be. It always depended on consent of the weaker powers, perhaps because they didn't feel like testing their weakness, while it was easy and not too expensive to humor the American egos. I suppose you could say that the US moved to protect Berlin in 1948 and South Korea in 1950, but since then the US has achieved little, mostly beating up on small and poor countries, and having little to show for their efforts. But while the US is increasingly frustrated by minor gestures (like disallowing use of bases and air space for launching wars), that consent has yet to crack let alone break in a big way. While the US military gets little respect, the American market (and US support for global capital) is still a big enough deal to tread carefully. The Persian Gulf states could shut the Iran war down almost instantly, but they need the West (and especially the US) to launder their oil profits. A break by Europe could be an even bigger deal. Ironically, while Trump's madman act is breaking up the old world order, it makes other nations reluctant to be explicit.

  • NBC News [05-06]: Trump's abrupt U-turn on a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz came after backlash from allies: "Saudi Arabia, a key Gulf ally, suspended the US military's ability to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation, sources say."

  • Stavroula Pabst [05-06]: Five shameless moments of Iran war opportunism & grifting: "War brings out the best — and worst — in Americans, especially in industril Capitol Hill and Wall Street."

    1. Lockheed Martin CEO: wartime Trump Pentagon a "golden opportunity"
    2. Trump sons roll in the drone industry dough
    3. Defense-contractor funded think tanker: Iran war is a bargain!
    4. Literally gambling on war
    5. Political influence blitz

  • Ishaan Tharoor [05-06]: How the Iran war is shifting power toward China: "As the US's credibility and military capacity are tested abroad, China has gained leverage by staying out of the fight and learning from it."

  • Chas Danner [05-06]: Trump still thinks his confusion can crush Iran.

    It has been more than nine weeks since President Trump started his war with Iran, and somehow he's still keeping everyone guessing — about whether he has any idea what he's doing. Less than two days after launching his latest strategy for the very unpopular war, "Project Freedom," he's already pausing the operation.

  • Juan Cole:

    • [05-09]: How the Iran war is changing the Middle East: Interview with Tafheem Kiani. Most interesting thing here is the dynamic between Muhammad bin Zayed (head of Abu Dhabi and president of UAE) and the much better known Muhammad bin Salman (Saudi crown prince). I think the war will ultimately turn on those two countries, and possibly on the fates of those two monarchs. Both are in way over their heads, with an enemy in Iran that could do they a great deal of damage, and allies in Trump and Netanyahu who could hardly care less about them, but ultimately depend on them to sustain their war. Of course, what makes prediction impossible is that both (or really, all four) are wack jobs — we're used to Iran's leaders being depicted as fanatics, but compared to their adversaries, they are paragons of reason and sanity.

    • [05-10]: Iran threatens to kidnap data cables as well as oil; Trump warns of nukes: His nukes, not theirs.

    • [05-08]: China grows 5% — but fears a Trump-caused Hormuz shock.

      Still, China has some cushions with regard to petroleum. It produces about a quarter of the oil it uses. It can increase imports from Russia. It has six months of oil reserves, and anyway 53% of new car purchases are electric, a percentage that is likely to rise substantially this year.

  • Dave DeCamp [05-11]: UAE has secretly launched attacks against Iran: "The attacks included the bombing of Iran's Lavan Island after the ceasefire was announced."

Israel: After Israel reluctantly agreed to Trump's ceasefire plan in Gaza, Netanyahu escalated his search for other targets, not just because his perpetual war machine always needs live bait, but by ensnaring Trump into his Iran adventure, and opening the Lebanon front much like 1982, he's avoiding scrutiny in Gaza and the West Bank, where something akin to genocide proceeds apace (given the goal of eliminating or substantially marginalizing the political and/or economic viability of a group of people, does it matter how fast you actually kill people?). This section deals with military and political matters within Israel. A second section follows, dealing with the propaganda front.

Israel-America-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • Philip Weiss:

    • [04-15]: The Israel lobby is fracturing as young Jews abandon Zionism: "A revolution is underway within the Jewish community as youth abandon Zionism following the Gaza genocide. While the community scrambles to respond, the Israel lobby is being fractured in the process."

    • [04-29]: The mainstream media is finally beginning to echo Americans' outrage at Israeli slaughter: "Over the past two years, Israel has lost the support of the American public and is now losing one of its last bulwarks in the political arena — prominent voices in the mainstream media."

    • [01-15]: J Street is the new AIPAC in the Democratic Party: "AIPAC is suddenly unwelcome among Democrats, but there's a new sheriff in town to enforce the pro-Israel orthodoxy. J Street aims to make liberals 'love Israel again,' but most Democrats are looking to distance themselves due to the Gaza genocide." Older piece I think I missed. I haven't followed Jeremy Ben-Ami or his organization, but they used to be a more decent (but still passionately Zionist) alternative to party-line advocates like AIPAC, so I think it's less likely that they've become "the right-wing Jewish establishment here" than that some of said establishment have moved in search of a less toxic organizational identity. This refers to a piece by Ben-Ami [2025-12-07]: How can I get my kids to love Israel? He's asking the wrong question. It should be: how can we get Israel to be worthy of our kids' love? (I would have preferred "respect" here.) Otherwise, you're just attacking your own kids, while ignoring the problem. Not that I'm sure anyone can (or should) try to change some other country. But the only hope I still have for Israelis to change is by realizing that their blind support in America is lost. Maybe that will trigger some self-examination. (After Shamir's obstinate refusal to even talk about peace alienated the first Bush admin, Israel's voters replaced him with the more flexible and diplomatic Rabin. I suspect that much of Netanyahu's appeal in Israel is due to his reputation as a Trump/Biden whisperer.) Related here:

  • Michael Arria:

    • [04-16]: In historic Senate vote, over 75% of Democrats vote to block arms sales to Israel: "In a historic vote, 75% of Senate Democrats backed an effort to block weapons to Israel. The resolutions failed, but the vote was the latest sign of Democrats' growing consensus against aid to Israel, as support for the country hits an all-time low." I suspect that most of them still want to help Israel, but have come to the conclusion that sending Israel more arms right now is just pouring gasoline on a fire, which is bound in the end to hurt Israel as much as anyone else.

    • [04-16]: Senate Democrats' vote to reject weapons for Israel reveals an out-of-touch party leadership: "Senate Democrats supported two measures to block weapons shipments to Israel in record fashion, but they were not joined by party leadership, who suddenly appear very out of touch with the party's base."

    • [04-23]: Unpacking the liberal Zionist sleight of hand on military aid to Israel: "While it may appear that pro-Israel politicians and organizations are finally embracing calls to end military aid to Israel, a closer look reveals they are simply trying to maintain the status quo."

    • [04-24]: How the corporate media helped fuel Israel's genocide in Gaza: "Mondoweiss speaks with media critic Adam Johnson about his new book detailing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians." Johnson's book is How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Johnson is also interviewed here:

      • Current Affairs [04-24]: How the media sold a genocide. Long interview with Adam Johnson, with a lot of detail. Here's Johnson on The Atlantic:

        Well, they really are one of the most high-leverage, along with The New York Times, of what I call soft genocide denial for the tote bag set. Their interventions were consistent. They were genocidal. They were racist. They promoted the beheaded babies trope and never retracted it. They published Eliot Cohen's "these people are barbaric" kind of outright racist screeds. They published Hillary Clinton with her "Hamas must go" headline. They didn't have any pro-ceasefire arguments at all. They constantly scolded and demagogued against a ceasefire. They did genocide denial with respect to body counts. Graeme Wood's interventions were really disgusting — his infamous "it's permissible to kill children legally" line. Pretty much every intervention they had was genocidal, and to the extent to which they allowed some hand-wringing, there was no real call to action. No mention of child deaths in any meaningful, rigorous way. No mention of the dozens of journalists who were killed by Israel. No mention of Hind Rajab. Just an obsession with fake college antisemitism. Dozens of articles about Claudine Gay alone, again, without mentioning any other major moral crisis in the context of Gaza.

        Just bottom-rung Zionist propaganda by a former IDF prison guard. But it's all done in this kind of highbrow trappings. It has the aesthetic of serious reportage and the aesthetic of intellectual and academic seriousness. But again, if you read a lot of what I call the "move along, nothing to see here" genre, they would have these multiple rebuttals to claims about genocidal statements by Israelis. They're very unrigorous. I'm sure you've come across this because you're obviously very rigorous when you do this. But they'll sort of say, "Israel didn't mean to be genocidal when they said that." And you're like, "Well, why?" And they don't even say; they just kind of move on. Because it has the trappings and the aesthetics of rigor and think tanks and academic kind of credibility, but it's really just third-rate, sloppy, racist, dehumanizing arguments meant for upwardly mobile liberals who could have maybe been swayed towards the anti-genocide camp.

    • [04-30]: Biden official says Israel committed genocide in Gaza, but the US must keep supporting it: Wendy Sherman, former US Deputy Secretary of State.

  • Aaron Gell [04-21]: What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines 'what Zionism became': Omer Bartov, who has a new book on this, Israel: What Went Wrong?.

  • Alison Glick [04-26]: Latest polling paints dire picture for Israel in US politics: "Israel's plummeting popularity has been driven by the Gaza genocide and Iran war, but it has been building for decades. We are now finally seeing the political results." Picture shows a Pew poll of Democrats, showing that net favorability of Israel has dropped from -26 to -74 among liberals, +3 to -55 among "not liberal" Democrats (self-described moderates as well as conservatives).

  • Eric Cheyfitz:

    • [05-02]: Understanding the shared ideology behind settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine: "Both the United States and Israel were founded and exist on land taken during ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism drives these genocides, and both nations share an ideology that justifies the theft and rationalizes the killing." The question of whether (or how) the repopulating of America from 1500-1900 fits into the legal concept of genocide is rather academic, not that you can't find interesting insights from the exercise. My own interest in viewing Israel through the prism of settler colonialism has focused on the demographic tipping point: colonialism has only been successful if the immigrants outnumber the natives, usually by a large margin (US, Australia, Argentina); otherwise they have failed (South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Malaysia). There is a secondary factor having to do with the degree of segregation, which was extreme for English colonies, much more muddled for Spanish. Israel has always been marginal (the 1950-67 period, where Jewish Israelis held a 70% majority, had started to stabilize, but the conquests of the 1967 war brought a return of British-style colonial rule). Ethically, of course, settler colonialism has been a disaster, as with every attempt of one group to overpower another. Nor is the disaster limited to the victims, as such power eventually corrodes the humanity of the oppressors as well.

    • [03-31]: Zionism and the Iran War.

  • Amra Lee [05-09]: Israel's atrocities in Lebanon are normalizing war crimes. UN Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher says: "1,000 dead humanitarians in three years — when did that become normal?"

The Crutch of Anti-Semitism: By the way, I originally wrote this up to follow the author's article on Roger Marshall (R-KS), below, but it fits better here, along with a couple counterpoint articles that I had been sitting on. But I didn't feel like slotting it chronologically above, either.

  • Gary Blumenthal [04-27]: When did anti-semitism become acceptable again? "Will there ever be peace, mutual respect and an end to reciprocal hate?" Blumenthal calls his newsletter Heartland Cynic, but he can't see past one of the hoariest myths of our age: that any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews, a revival of two millenia of anti-semitism. Sure, he might take exception to my summary, as he is critical of "the Trump-Netanyahu war of choice," and he opens with photos of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians in mourning. But he insists that "more than half of American Jews say they've experienced anti-Semitism in just the past year" (something I've neither seen nor heard any evidence of, but most of the Jews I know are critical of Israel). He goes on to claim, "People of my faith have heard this crap, throughout recorded history, that Israelis and Jews are aggressors, oppressors, and outsiders." Just because some statements are crap doesn't mean they all are. Let's skip over all of recorded history, and just focus on the last 50-100 years.

    Before 1947, there were Jews, self-consciously divided between the Yishuv and the Diaspora. Before 1880, there were Jews in Palestine, but no Zionists. Diaspora Jews may have been outsiders, but there is no record of them as aggressors or oppressors. But Israelis are a different story. Every war from 1946 on was aggression by Israelis, and every time they gained power over Palestinians, they oppressed them. Some of the early wars (1947 and 1973 are the best cases) could be characterized as defensive, but in 1947 they seized territory beyond what the UN partition plan had offered them, and they drove some 700,000 Palestinians into permanent exile, while subjecting all of the remaining Palestinians to military rule and second-class status. Israel has continued such discrimination and oppression to the present, and since 2023 have flaunted their power more harshly than ever.

    I have considerable sympathy for people (many Jews, but also others) who originally developed such an emotional attachment for Israel back in the days when the holocaust revelations were fresh and the anti-colonial movement threatened (as happened in Algeria in 1962). But the world changed since then: anti-semitism faded in the west, in favor of tolerance, diversity, and human rights. White Afrikaners in South Africa gave up apartheid power, without being displaced. Since the 1990s, most Palestinian leaders based their aspirations on universal rights. But Israel has failed to meet them. Instead, Israel has doubled down on colonial control, drawing from British law and violence, while adding their own innovations.

    But few Americans seem to fully appreciate how extreme Israel had become, even well before November 2023. Since then, you really have to bury your head in the sand not to notice the depths of Israeli malevolence. You also have to completely ignore that Palestinians have long offered peace deals for coexistence, and that Israel could have peace on very favorable terms, but has chosen war and oppression instead. I shouldn't have to explain Jews in America and Europe shouldn't be blamed for what Israel does. But by not holding Israelis responsible for their crimes against humanity (most simply refused to acknowledge them), and not trying to use whatever influence they have to get Israel to change, their neglect can be seen as support, opening themselves up to blame — especially as Israel's supporters, more than anyone else, are the ones insisting that criticism of Israel is plain old antisemitism. It's almost like they want for Jews in the diaspora to pay for failing to heed the call to immigrate to Israel.

  • Moti Rieber [04-08]: Israel breaks people's brains: Post by a Kansas rabbi who when I first encounted him was as gung-ho on Israel as Blumenthal has ever been. I'm not sure where Blumenthal lives, but that he is commenting on Kansas politics suggests he may be a neighbor.

  • MJ Rosenberg [03-03]: Jewish organizations are setting Jews up for antisemitic attacks: "With the help of Brett Stephens, Bari Weiss, and other Dershowitz successors." Let me quote some of this:

    Because once you sell the country on the idea that Jews and Israel are interchangeable, once you insist "we are one" — you don't just stain every Jew with Israel's crimes. You also paint a target on our backs. And then, when the backlash grows, these same organizations act shocked, pass the hat, and use the fear to recruit and fundraise. Oh how they fundraise!

    I think they like seeing antisemitism spike — not because they want Jews harmed, but because panic is their business model. Fear is their fuel. And the grotesque irony is that they help manufacture the very conditions they later monetize. . . .

    So let me be clear, keep us out of it. We are not "one" with you. We are not "one" with Israel. You don't get to launder state violence through my identity, and you don't get to draft my family into your propaganda let alone turn American Jews into human shields for Israel's war crimes.

    You are not the solution to antisemitism. You are the problem.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics:

  • Wenjing Wang [03-26]: On energy, China can sit this crisis out. "'Green energy' here isn't a slogan or abstract aspiration. It's economical and geopolitical survival."

  • Harrison Stetler [04-20]: The honeymoon is over between Trump and Europe's Far Right: "Viewing an alliance with Trumpist America as a liability." JD Vance stumping for Orbán didn't save him. Elsewhere, reports are skeptical. But it's never made much sense to me that rabid nationalists should band together, because their nations are by definition not just separate but in conflict with each other. I suppose that could change if they wanted to get serious about their flagship issue: blocking immigration. The only real way reduce migration is to join with other countries to counter the driving forces: war, economic dislocation, and climate change. But the idea of international (or any other kind of) cooperation is inimical to the right, while their instincts of chauvinism and repression are fundamental.

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [04-25]: UAE's dollar swap threats show how brittle these US alliances can be: "The Emirates don't need the money but they are laying down a market: if we take fire because of Washington, we want something in return."

  • Karthik Sankaran [04-28]: UAE leaves OPEC: what it means for the US, oil markets & Saudi: "The Iran war is certainly exposing a lot of long festering wounds, with this rupture certainly stunning Wall Street today." Chart here suggests that UAE can afford to sell oil much cheaper than Saudi Arabia can (breakeven at $49/barrel vs. $90; that has less to do with production costs, which do vary between oil producers, than with other government expenses funded by oil).

    [PS: Yanis Varoufakis commented: "So what that the UAE is leaving when it cannot send a single barrel of oil through the Hormuz Strait!"

  • Pavel Devyatkin [04-10]: Japan's new long-range missiles put US-China on collision course: "Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, Tokyo is making moves that could stoke tensions between the two powers." Japan's constitutional embrace of pacifism should have been a model for the world, but the US started pushing for Japan to rearm in the 1950s, and now the war lobbyists seem to have a breakthrough. There's even a note her that Japan's Prime Minister "Takaichi also signaled a willingness to abandon Japan's 1967 pledge not to produce, possess or host nuclear weapons." Takaichi also "said that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could lead to a Japanese military intervention."

  • Umud Shokri [05-09]: Can China use its huge economy to break US sanctions? In 2021, China issued something called "Rules on Counteracting Unjustified Extraterritorial Application of Foreign Legislation and Other Measures" ("China's Blocking Rules"):

    The order bars the recognition, enforcement, or compliance inside China with U.S. sanctions imposed on five Chinese refineries accused of buying Iranian crude: Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Refinery, Shandong Jincheng Petrochemical Group, Hebei Xinhai Chemical Group, Shouguang Luqing Petrochemical, and Shandong Shengxing Chemical.

    This was not just another diplomatic complaint from Beijing about U.S. "long-arm jurisdiction." It was the first formal use of China's Blocking Rules and marked a sharper legal response to Washington's secondary sanctions. By invoking the measure, Beijing signaled that it is prepared to defend its energy trade with Iran not only through rhetoric, but through domestic law, court remedies, and regulatory pressure. . . .

    In the long run, China's legal shield against U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil may be remembered less as a single dispute over five refineries and more as an early sign of a multipolar sanctions order, one in which economic coercion is increasingly met by legal counter-coercion. The age of sanctions was already messy. Now it is becoming institutionalized on both sides, because apparently global governance needed more paperwork and fewer exits.

    While South Africa showed that widespread adoption of sanctions can sometimes persuade a government to change course and redress internal injustices, the US sanctions regime has more often been used simply for power projection, and often just for spite (which has usually been the case viz. Iran). Two things Americans don't seem to understand here are: sanctions can only have widespread support to advance political goals rooted in common morality — such as opposition to South African apartheid, or to Russia's war against Ukraine; and that sanctions need to be reversible once the underlying problem is resolved. The attraction of sanctions is that they're one way to express one's feeling and to do something potentially effective without resorting to armed violence — which attacks sovereignty, hardens resolve to resist, can escalate, and produces collateral damage, effectively abandoning one's claim to moral high ground. Of course, the targets of sanctions may regard them as "acts of war," but their credibility is something for others to judge. Also, one should be sensitive to the likelihood that the burden of sanctions will largely fall on people not responsible for the offense. There are ways around this, like allowing "humanitarian" relief supplies to get through, but they are rarely good ones.

    I should note here that the one case where sanctions were most clearly justified has been Israel. Indeed, had the BDS movement been more successful, it's likely that the 2023 Gaza revolt and Israel's genocidal response, including spreading war to Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, could have been avoided. But the world's sanctioner-in-chief, the US, actively sided with Israel in resisting BDS, and as such bears substantial responsibility for Israel's atrocities. I'll also note that sanctions against Russia preceded the Ukraine invasion, with two major effects: they led Putin to view the US as an aggressive foe, and they pushed Russia to figure out ways to work around them, making them less effective. Promiscuous use of sanctions can cause more problems than they solve. By the way, one of those problems is that ineffective sanctions, especially combined with diplomatic sloth, ultimately weaken America's standing in the world. (Cuba and North Korea have resisted US sanctions for 65-75 years, making the US look cruel, vindictive, and ineffective.)

    China is the one country that seems to be able to face down American sanctions directly. Tariffs are a prime example: Trump has tried to use them to express American power and to punish other nations he dislikes, and with China he has mostly had to back down — not least because China is proving they too can play this sanctions game. But while other countries, even Russia and Iran, may chafe when faced with American bullying, China has the wherewithal to create a viable alternative to America's global power. China has opened doors with trade, and with relatively generous direct foreign investment. They are willing to work with everyone, and show no interest in the internal politics of other countries (except perhaps Taiwan, which for them remains a sore point). And they're using the UN, while building alternative organizations to America's increasingly politicized ones. As a strategy, it reminds me of what the US did viz. European imperialism: the Open Door strategy meant to undermine colonial exploitation, the Good Neighbor Policy. The US generated enormous good will around the world up to 1945, after which they squandered it on rabid anti-communism, but even as they sought global hegemony, they at least allowed more autonomy than the UK and their ilk did. As Trump drives the US into his peculiar combo of autarky and global terror, China will increasingly be seen as a way out. Of course, that will depend on them not being as stupid as the American order (not just Trump but Biden and Obama and Bush and Clinton) has been.

    • Robert Wright [05-08]: China bites back: Some more details here, including a story about a China-subsidized Singapore-based AI company, Manus, that Meta tried to buy, but China vetoed.

  • Ziyad Motala [05-09]: Fatal friendships: Gulf monarchies and the price of American patronage: "For decades, Gulf rulers mistook access to America for influence, but now, with the Iran war, they finally see they are viewed as disposable on the front lines of the US empire."

  • Evan Robins [05-11]: The UK's far right is on the march — thanks to Keir Starmer: "How the Labour Party's catastrophic prime minister paved the way for fascists to dominate British politics."

  • Dan Sabbagh [05-11]: Why is Putin now talking about the war in Ukraine 'coming to an end'? "Drone strikes, mounting casualties and a distracted US president means a slow-motion victory is in doubt." It sounds like the stalemate has only gotten staler.

Trump's Wars: And the Department Thereof, and its associated graft and malice. I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats, but we're obviously beyond that now, so see the sections on Iran and Cuba for more on on those specific fronts.

Trump vs. Law: The latest from the Courts, and sundry other matters involving the so-called Department of Justice, although the Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering has been moved elsewhere, along with its political fallout.

  • Ian Millhiser:

  • Nia Prater [04-23]: ICE will reportedly curb some of its most aggressive tactics.

  • Elie Honig:

    • [04-24]: Trump seems to be planning ahead for losing the Senate.

    • [05-08]: Why the Jim Comey prosecution is about to fall apart (again): While the charges are ridiculous, and should be laughed out of court the moment they appear, I do appreciate this paragraph:

      Let's stipulate up front: Comey is a legendary blowhard, an inveterate fibber, and a pretentious prig whose guiding principle is that he alone has access to some mystical code of morality that conveniently justifies his outrageous conduct over the past decade. The former FBI director's arrogant defiance of core DOJ policy likely swung the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump and earned excoriation from the DOJ's nonpartisan inspector general and a bipartisan procession of former AGs. Comey then launched a sneak attack on the incoming Trump administration and later chortled publicly about how he broke ordinary FBI protocol in the process. Comey leaked to paint himself as a hero to undermine Clinton (in 2016) and to undermine Trump (in 2017). Afterward he claimed that even though he arranged for sensitive FBI information to be released through a personal friend to the media, it somehow wasn't a leak. Nobody likes the guy, and everyone has got their reasons.

  • Cameron Peters [04-28]: James Comey gets indicted (again): "Trump's revenge ploys are getting kookier." How kooky? "prosecutors allege that a 2025 social media post Comey made, showing seashells arranged to read '86 47,' was a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, Donald Trump."

  • Kelli Wessinger/Noel King [04-29]: This is what it takes to become Trump's attorney general: "Who is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump's personal lawyer?"

  • Rachel Rebouché [05-02]: The Fifth Circuit seeks to unilaterally reimpose an outdated abortion pill protocol: "What comes next is shifting terrain. The drug manufacturer has asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but the Food and Drug Administration could also step in."

  • Andrew Duehren/Alan Feuer [05-12]: Justice Dept. officials consider settling Trump suit against IRS: "One of the settlement terms under review is for the IRS to drop any audits of the president, his family members and businesses." The ostensible reason for the suit is that someone at IRS leaked some of Trump's tax returns (which, once upon a time, he had promised to release himself, as has been customary for all other presidential candidates, at least in recent years). As a tweet linking to this put it: "This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in US history." For more on this:

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, its culture and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

  • Center for American Progress [2025-10-23]: The Trump Administration is erasing American history told by public lands and waters: "Through a series of executive orders targeting place names, signage on, and access to public lands and waters, the Trump administration is erasing important chapters of American history." I should follow this website more closely. For instance:

  • Whitney Curry Wimbish [04-16]: GOP food stamp work requirements hit just as jobs dry up: "Millions of people will lose food stamps, according to early estimates."

  • Caitlin Dewey [04-22]: Another Trump official exits in scandal: "Lori Chavez-DeRemer's resignation underscores a familiar pattern in the Trump administration." She was Secretary of Labor.

  • Merrill Goozner [04-22]: RFK Jr. and the perils of peptides: "The Health and Human Services Secretary's push to deregulate unapproved peptides will inevitably lead to worse health outcomes.

  • Pratik Pawar [04-29]: What really happened after Trump slashed HIV funding: "The official numbers are finally here." Well, we're not all dead yet, but they're working on it.

  • Adam Federman [04-30]: Trump bulldozed a 1,000-year-old archaeological site to make room for a second border wall.

  • Gregg Gonsalves [05-01]: The rise of the Vichy scientists: "Too many scientists are willing to collaborate with Trumpism in the mistaken assumption that obedience will save their own necks." Again with the Nazi analogies, because once again they seem to be the only historical precedents that come close to the gravity of the current situation. Focuses on anti-vaxxers currently in vogue at NHS. Refers to a piece on similar opportunism in the law schools:

    • Steve Vladeck [01-29]: Legal scholarship and the dual state: "A few thoughts on the responsibilities of legal academics in a time of increasing governmental lawlessness." While I've mostly been following Ian Millhiser at Vox, Vladeck also has a newsletter, One First, "aiming to make the Supreme Court's rulings, procedures, and history more accessible to all." It looks to be worth following.

  • Jack Healy [05-04]: Home on the range no more: Trump wants bison gone: "The Trump administration is evicting bison herds from federal grasslands, in Montana, siding with ranchers and Republican leaders over environmentalists and tribal leaders."

  • ProPublica [05-04]: 8 things you should know about Trump's effort to "take over" the midterm elections: "Trump is gutting federal agencies and installing allies who supported his claim that the 2020 vote was stolen."

  • Nia Prater [05-08]: ABC takes the fight to Trump administration over FCC's View probe.

  • Timothy Noah [05-08]: It's no longer safe for civil servants to be good at their job: "If you're an effective federal worker, don't let Trump find out — you might not be one for much longer." This remind me that I had never heard the word kakistocracy before Trump (definition: "government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people"), although it evidently was used as far back as 1644 (in reference to Roman Emperor Nero, who famously "fiddled while Rome burned"). Most of the examples given strike me as misapplied, suggesting it's already turned into a generic but meaningless slur, but the Trump administration is chock full of such people, not just incompetent themselves but intent on exporting their incompetence to everyone around.

  • John Feffer [05-08]: Trump's ostrich policy on climate change: "The president has downgraded the threat of climate change to the point of non-existence. Like Stalin, Trump now stands alone."

    The administration's campaign started with the scrubbing of all references to climate change from federal websites. It has encouraged more widespread self-censorship: anyone who wants to keep their federal job or apply for a federal grant has tactically removed anything Green-related from their descriptions and applications. This animus toward anything climate-related has also shaped many of the administration's latest budget cuts: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget halved, $1.6 billion cut from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program eliminated, $449 million in renewable energy funding slashed. . . .

    The administration's approach can also be seen in the carrot side of the equation. It has approved pipelines like the recent Bridger Pipeline Extension, green-lighted deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies, and tried to prop up the dying coal industry. The administration has paid out $2 billion to companies to cancel their wind power projects and invest instead in fossil fuels. Deregulation and lack of enforcement — of pollution standards, of safety and health requirements, of environmental permitting — have been huge gifts to companies spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

  • Mark Olalde [05-10]: Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from air quality rules. All it took was an email: "Admin set up an EPA address where companies could get compliance pause simply by sending an email."

Donald Trump and His Cult: While his administration implements malign policies crafted by lobbyists and right-wing think tanks, the news is so dominated by his cult of personality that it seems like a full-time job just to resist the rising tide of vanity and stupidity.

  • Margaret Hartmann: She also handles the British royal family beat, which I have even less interest in than I do Melania (or her idiot husband).

    • [04-22]: Trump hiding ballroom donors for secret, non-corrupt reasons: Or so they say. While the donations look like bribes in the short term, further out they're just likely to be embarrassing.

    • [04-25]: Is Melania Trump a US citizen? Her immigration story, explained.

    • [04-30]: Amazon mulls Apprentice reboot absolutely no one needs: "Trump is making money from reruns, Don Jr. doesn't need a hosting gig, and Amazon has already done plenty of groveling. So who is this for?"

    • [05-01]: Don Jr. has incredible excuse for putting wedding on hold: "While Bettina Anderson just had her bridal shower, the latest rumor is that the couple won't wed until the Iran war is over."

    • [05-05]: Surprise! You're paying $1 billion for Trump's ballroom: "The White House insisted the project wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. A new GOP bill includes $1 billion in public funding for ballroom 'upgrades.'"

    • [05-07]: Gold 22-foot Trump statue definitely isn't a false idol. Thus spake Pastor Mark Burns, before anyone even asked.

      It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, "Which one?" . . .

      Today, we're focusing on a statue dubbed Don Colossus, which now sits outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course. The statue, which depicts Trump with his fist raised, was commissioned by the $PATRIOT cryptocurrency group shortly after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. Artist Alan Cottrill finished it before Trump's second inauguration, as the New York Times reported earlier this year. But then Don Colossus was held hostage in a payment dispute between Cottrill and the crypto bros. The disagreement was resolved this spring when an anonymous donor stepped in and paid the artist the remainder of what he said he was owed.

      So in late April, the 15-foot statue was placed atop a seven-foot pedestal on the grounds of Trump's Miami golf course. And on Wednesday, the statue was formally unveiled at a dedication ceremony presided over by Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project.

      The "not a gold calf" line came from Burns, lest someone mistake "gathering to praise a giant golden status [as] textbook idolatry."

  • Stephen F Eisenman [04-24]: How Fascism works now: A note about Trump as the Healing Christ: "By attending to obvious outrages — the supposed blasphemy of an image of Trump as Healing Christ — the public is more likely to overlook bigger, but less promoted ones, like weakened pollution standards, cuts to disease research, and of course, war. But there's another, equally important communication strategy at work, and it's hiding in plain sight: insipidness or kitsch. That's the language of fascism now."

  • Andrew O'Hehir [05-03]: An arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe? Hitler wanted that too: "Tyrants and dictators often dream of building gigantic monuments to themselves."

  • Hafiz Rashid [05-11]: Trump turns White House UFC cage match into massive cash grab: Of course. You hear about TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), but there's also a TBS (Trump Bewilderment Syndrome): the inability lots of us have to see any attraction whatsoever in most of the things Trump claims to value. I've never once, even out of morbid curiosity, been tempted to watch The Apprentice. Similarly, UFC is something I lack even the slightest interest in ever attending or viewing. Very little that he does or says has any interest whatsoever — aside from the many cases that are purely repulsive, but they only matter because for some reason he is president. TDS is often cited by his supporters as way to ignore the possibility that anyone might have cause for taking exception to him. TBS is less useful to them, because it is clearly subjective.

Other Republicans:

  • Gary Blumenthal [03-02]: Is Roger Marshall the worst US Senator in Kansas history? If you want an argument, I'd note that Sam Brownback didn't even get a mention here. I'll also note that I never forgave Bob Dole for his dirty campaigns against Bill Roy, who came within a hair of becoming the best US Senator in Kansas history. But Marshall is pretty bad, and not just for his extraordinary suck up to Donald Trump. Blumental misses the most glaring example: during Covid, while he was still a US Rep running in the Senate primary, as a MD he prescribed Ivermectin for his whole family. Certainly proved he's not the sort to let science or professionalism get in the way of political expediency. By the way, I looked some more at Blumenthal's blog, and responded at some length here to a piece he wrote on Israel.

  • Naomi Bethune [04-02]: The far-right cash machine: "There's money in bigotry, and specialized crowdfunding platforms are where to get it."

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [04-23]: Trump's average job approval hits new second-term low: As far as the mid-terms are concerned, the interesting numbers are the "strongly disapprove" (47.5%) and "strongly approve" (22.8%), as mid-term voter turnout always slumps, which makes strongly-held opinions loom even larger.

    • [04-23]: Why the GOP's new midterms strategy won't work: The "new" strategy is actually just the old one: to bash the Democrats, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong under Trump. This is largely because they've convinced themselves that most Americans hate Democrats as much as they do, and for the same reasons (you know, that they are radical communists who will take your guns away, promote abortion and atheism, and convince your children that they'd be happier as another sex). That's never been remotely true, but somehow Democrats manage to look guilty by denying such nonsense. This reminds me of the advice given to lawyers when they neither have facts nor law on their side: pound the table. Given how thin Trump's margins have been, and how disillusioned many people have become since "Trump Will Fix It!" proved a hollow promise, it shouldn't be hard for Democrats to tip the balance. Still, until Democrats show some actual skill at campaigning, we should all be nervous.

    • [04-30]: DHS shutdown finally ends with an exhausted whimper: After 75 days, Republicans decided to get what they wanted through some kind of future "budget reconciliation" which they could pass on a straight party line vote.

    • [05-05]: Republicans' second 'Big Bill' isn't beautiful at all.

    • [05-06]: Trump's polling is getting into George W Bush territory: "Disapproval of his performance as president is now pervasive across nearly every issue, and he's particularly unpopular with independents."

    • [05-08]: Trump's Big Ballroom could tank GOP's 'skinny' ICE bill: "After the WHCD shooting, it seemed like a good idea to market Trump's ballroom as a security imperative. Now it's a politically dangerous boondoggle."

    • [05-08]: Trump's affordability agenda barely exists anymore. Did he ever have one?

  • Sarah Jones [05-07]: JD Vance and the rise of the Catholic right: I have zero interest in reading Vance's Communion, but my hunch is that his conversion was a calculation based on the newfound prominence of Catholics on the right (including a majority of the Supreme Court). Sam Brownback is an earlier example. I wondered about his lord and master Peter Thiel, and was informed that he was raised evangelical Christian, with "somewhat heterodox" views, but also "he is known for his deep interest in Catholic theology and in 2026 was hosting lectures on the Antichrist near the Vatican."

Democrats:

  • Ross Barkan [04-23]: Chuck Schumer used to be popular. Now he's stuck. Quotes the D-NY Senator as saying (at an AIPAC conference): "We say it's our land — the Torah says it, but they [Palestinians] don't believe in the Torah. That's the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state, and that is why we in America must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin." Because we Americans, with our separation of church and state, and constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law for all, belived that a foreign country that mocks our values should be able to quote a line from the Torah and use it to justify killing, torturing, and otherwise discriminating against and harming a large segment of the people who live there?

  • Eric Levitz [04-27]: Democrats' latest critique of Walmart is wrong — and dangerous: "No, Medicaid is not 'corporate welfare.'" Filed here because the author is calling out Democrats explicitly, although the general complaint is applicable to Republicans as well, who differ mostly in omitting the word "corporate" before attacking "welfare."

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-29]: This billionaire could be California's next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller: "Tom Steyer talks to Vox about using state power to fight the Trump administration." It takes a lot of ego to run for president, and that's something billionaires have in spades. When Steyer ran for president in 2016, he had the ego (and the money), but he didn't have a campaign that actually appealed to anyone. He seems to have found one now, on the left, which as I've long said is where the answers come from. He's picked up an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-founded group Our Revolution. Reminds me that Ralph Nader wrote a novel back in 2009 called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!". JB Pritzker, in Illinois, is another example. (Mike Bloomberg is not.) Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Or as Steyer puts it several times here, that's the world we live in.

  • Eoin Higgins [05-01]: Graham Platner handed centrist Dems a bruising defeat in Maine: "After throwing their support behind Gov. Janet Mills, party leaders are left doing an about-face on the insurgent candidate."

  • MJ Rosenberg [05-01]: Death to end stage capitalism: Time for Dems to be the Social Democratic Party: 20 points about capitalism. I could use this as scaffolding for commentary, grouping some things, discarding (or revamping) others. I still see a place for capitalism going forward. It's just not the only place, and it's one that becomes progressively unimportant as we get on to better things.

The Economy (and Economists): Also see Dean Baker.

Technology (Including AI):

  • Susannah Glickman/Amba Kak/Sarah Myers West [04-08]: The great AI grift: "Tech leaders want you to believe that AI is the key to a new golden age. The reality looks more like a bold, government-backed heist."

  • Ryan Cooper [04-23]: Meta is a monopoly even if TikTok can compete: "It is foolish to suggest that competition anywhere proves that a company isn't a monopoly." Still, he doesn't make the case as clearly as it should be. Any company that owns a patent (or other exclusive intellectual property) has a monopoly right, at least to the extent that it is able to collect rents beyond what competition allows. Pharmaceutical companies don't compete with each other so much as they exercise and exploit monopolies over individual drugs. HP has a monopoly selling ink for the printers it manufactured. Perhaps at some point words like "monopoly" and "antitrust" should be recognized as antiquated, in that they are really just extreme forms of much broader (and in some cases subtler) behavior. Unfortunately, our "antitrust" laws limiting anti-competitive behavior were mostly passed in the 1880s, leaving us playing catch up with 140 years of rent-seeking innovation (not that the most common and effective means, bribing politicians and officials, is a new development). One monopolistic innovation that has become increasingly prevalent is network effects, which even more than IP is the source of Meta's monopolistic power.

  • Timothy Noah [04-23]: How the tech world turned evil: "Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they're greedy monopolists who'd sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way — and they have to be stopped." This is stuff I've been reading a lot of recently, including notes from recent books by Corey Doctorow and Tim Wu. For what it's worth, I think the shift toward evil has more to do with money than tech. And the shift to Trump is due to their shared perception that nothing else matters.

  • John Herrman [04-25]: The downgrading of the American tech worker: "Meta is laying off more stuff — and monitoring the rest to train AI."

  • Jasmine Sun [04-30]: Silicon Valley is bracing for a permanent underclass: Seems like an important article (I haven't delved very deeply into it yet), but one thought I have is that industry estimates of the economic effect of AI are likely to be very tailored not to what the tech can or cannot do, or what the public does or does not want, but to the opportunities to jack up their stock prices, which right now is the main thing AI has going for itself. Since most of the target customers are looking to save money on labor, that's a major angle. What happens to people out of jobs isn't going to impact their bottom line, at least directly, so can be ignored. That they might all wind up in a permanent underclass is, well, at first approximation also not their problem. Granted, those people may eventually be driven to revolt, but the leading wave of AI tools are being designed to surveil and control dissidents, and to lock them out of political channels and otherwise shut them up. As for the problem of who do you steal from when all the wealth is held by the super-rich, AI should help there, too, creating a cycle of cannibalism as sport.

  • Astra Taylor/Saul Levin [05-08]: The fight against AI datacenters isn't just about tech — it's about democracy: "Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions." I don't really get the whole data center issue, but I do understand that new tech can be good and/or bad, and leaving it to the big companies drives it toward bad, so slowing them down makes sense. But the answer probably has more to do with the companies than with their tools.

  • David Futrelle [05-11]: How prediction markets are taking control of everything: "We have seen the future, and it is Polymarket and Kalshi processing insider bets on mayhem, chaos — and celebrity-wedding guest lists." I grew up with an intense hatred of gambling. (I got it from my mother, but it's probably the only one of her prejudices I kept.) I don't want to criminalize it, because I don't like banning things just because they're bad for you. But I also don't think we should go around advertising and promoting it, because it's not only bad for individuals, it warps society, especially our apprecation of the value of work. While Republicans have pretty much kept with their old prohibitionist impulses, the one exception is gambling, which they have embraced with gusto. They seem to get off on folks playing with their money, and not just because that makes it easy to separate it from them. But also because they promote an ethic of pure gain for no work, a dream which beats even fraud. Stripped of all the other bullshit (and there's a fair amount of that here), prediction markets are just gambling, but elevated to a massive scale, tied to real world events that insiders can manipulate at will.

  • Sam McAfee: I was forwarded a PDF by mutual friends, and started to quote it before I tracked it down.

    • [03-23]: The reality behind the singularity: I'm not especially up on this discussion, but found this interesting. He attributes the "singularity" concept to Ray Kurzweil (The Singlarity Is Near, 2005), then notes:

      What this framework inherits, without much examination, is a fundamentally Cartesian view of mind. Cognition, in this model, is computation. The brain is hardware. Intelligence is a function that runs on it, and can in principle run just as well, or better, on different hardware entirely. The substrate, in other words, does not matter.

      This is a position that several decades of neuroscience research have given us good reasons to question.

      Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, developed across a series of influential works including Descartes' Error (1994), demonstrated through careful clinical study that emotional processing is not incidental to rational decision-making but constitutive of it. Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the region most associated with emotional integration, did not become more rational in the absence of emotional interference. They became incapable of making decisions at all. The implication is significant: what we commonly describe as reason is not separable from the affective systems that the singularity framework is inclined to treat as noise.

      Lisa Feldman Barrett's more recent work in How Emotions Are Made (2017) extends this argument further, presenting evidence that emotion and cognition are not merely intertwined but that the distinction itself may be a useful fiction. The brain, in Barrett's account, is a predictive organ constantly modeling the body's internal state and its relationship to the external environment. Feeling and thinking are different descriptions of the same underlying process.

      The implications for the singularity argument are not trivial. If intelligence in any robust sense requires embodiment, a body whose states are continuously integrated into cognition, then the prospect of disembodied computational intelligence reaching or exceeding human cognitive capacity is not simply technically difficult. It may be the wrong description of what intelligence is.

      The broader framework known as 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) further develops this position across a range of disciplines, arguing that cognition emerges from the dynamic interaction between organism, body, and environment rather than from computation occurring within a bounded system. On this account, the question of whether a machine could be more intelligent than a human is a bit like asking whether a map could be a better traveler than a person. The category does not transfer cleanly.

      And then there is the social dimension, which the singularity framework tends to underweight to a degree that borders on negligence. Human cognitive capacity is not simply individual. It is distributed across relationships, institutions, cultural practices, and accumulated knowledge that has been refined across tens of thousands of years of collective life. The organizational intelligence that allows human societies to coordinate at scale, to build and maintain institutions, to sustain trust across generations. This is not separable from the embodied, emotionally regulated, socially embedded creatures who produce it.

      The latter point risks some fuzziness, and I suspect will prove hard to pin down. It's much easier to train AI to quantitatively approximate intelligence than qualitatively, not just because we have a pretty good idea of the former but not the latter, but also because quantities are by definition measurable, whereas qualities are not.

    • [2025-12-27]: The risk of AI writing is leadership without judgment: This earlier piece, which appeared as the title in the PDF I was sent, is styled as management advice. Indeed, the most prominent word is "leadership," which means that the sales pitch starts with a bit of flattery. McAfee turns out to be a "technology and product leader, author and coach" for a management consulting company called Humanize (or maybe that's their product and/or service? he is one of 14 members of their "personal board of advisors," where "coach," "strategist," "expert," "facilitator," and "storyteller" are the most common occupations). Some interesting things here, but I'm often unsure whether meant to solve problems or just inadvertently expose them. For example:

      Generative AI doesn't just help the CEO write faster. It changes when the CEO stops thinking. It offers coherence early, before ambiguity has done its work. It makes conclusions feel available before judgment has fully formed. When a medium removes friction from thinking, leaders don't just move faster — they skip the moments where responsibility normally takes shape.

      Tools don't merely speed work up. They define what counts as work in the first place.

      Human writing started to sound like this long ago — safe, optimized, detached from real stakes.

      AI doesn't create this problem. It removes the last excuses for ignoring it.

      This led into a section called "We Were Already Drowning in Bad Writing."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker:

  • [03-22]: $200 billion for Trump's Iran "Excursion" is real money: First thing I did when I saw this was flash on Everett Dirksen's quip — back from the 1960's, and nowhere in evidence here, so all I'm doing is showing my age — that "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Baker offers other examples of much smaller things one could spend money on, but aside from "Minnesota fraud" the more significant difference is that they're things that generate positive value. Most of them will even result in long-term positive paybacks (although child care and health care may seem nebulous to accountants). The Iran War will only result in negative paybacks, which is to say the massive expenditure now is only a down payment on future inevitable and irrecoverable costs. Even when people talk about burning or blowing up cash, they're showing the limits of their imagination. Reality is far worse.

  • [04-14]: Inflation is a process: Notes the return of "anti-inflation hawks" arguing for "a structural break" causing persistent post-pandemic inflation. Baker argue for an alternative "bad breaks" theory, where the baddest of breaks was Trump becoming president, feeding price rises with tariffs and war (and I would add lax constraints against anti-competitive behavior, including price gouging). By "process" he means that inflation is something that takes time to develop, as higher prices raise costs which get fed back into even higher prices (he cites the "wage-price spiral" of the 1970s). He doesn't go much into what the current process is (after all, he's arguing against any such thing), but what I think is that the supply disruptions by and after the pandemic kicked off a general psychology where businesses discovered they could get away with price gouging (in common discourse described as "inflation") and took advantage of decades of anti-competitive consolidation. The wars and tariff shenanigans just added to the pile of excuses, but another big motivation (for business) was that under Biden workers got a bit of real income gains, and businesses were desperate to claw that back.

  • [04-15]: Are the Republican killing you? "Americans in Republican-led states live significantly shorter lives than those in Democratic states, highlighting major health disparities." The difference in life expectancy is 8 years longer in Hawaii than in West Virginia. "Even moving away a few notches from the extremes, a person living in California can expect to live 5.5 years longer than a person living in Tennessee." Only one of the top ten states is nominally Republican (Utah), while only one of the bottom ten leans Democratic (New Mexico). Baker has fun with his cart by adding some foreign countries, showing not only that Japan and South Korea are way ahead of Hawaii (the top US state), but so are Albania and Costa Rica. Cuba scores higher than Idaho (12 in US), Iran (pre-war) better than Florida (19), Mexico better than Indiana (40), and even Russia beats out Kentucky (49, ahead of India, which also beats Mississippi and West Virginia).

  • [04-17]: The stock market is not your friend: "Stock market gains driven by higher profit shares benefit a minority of investors, while most workers would be better off with higher wages instead." Sadly, many people regard the stock market as measuring the health of the economy, whereas a big part of what it really measures is how much business owners are at screwing everyone else over. (It also factors in real growth, so it's not simply wrong. And it also, more sensitively, not just measures but exaggerates investor panic, which has made it an easy mark for Trump's war machinations.) I suspect much of its allure is that it is reported daily, whereas most other economic measures come out monthly, quarterly, or annually. But that it mostly serves to inflate the importance of the investing class is also part of why corporate media pushes it so hard. (And why it matters to Trump.)

    In principle, the stock market reflects expectations of future after-tax corporate profits. Expected profits can rise because the economy is expected to grow more rapidly, and corporations will get their share as profits rise along with the economy. But that has not been the case over the last quarter-century.

    The after-tax profit share of national income has nearly doubled, going from an average of 6.6 percent in the 1990s to 12.5 percent in the last quarter of 2025. This explains most of the soaring stock market over this period, although the ratio of stock prices to corporate earnings is also near a record high, leading many of us to argue that we have a stock bubble.

    It is hard to see why the bulk of the population, who own little or no stock, should be celebrating the redistribution from wages to profits that provides most of the basis for the run-up in stock prices in the last quarter-century.

    Two further notes:

    There is one other point worth noting in this respect. As I said, the price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market are near record highs. That is also not something most of us have cause to celebrate.

    The run-up in house prices has far exceeded the run-up in rents over the last decade. This is likely at least in part attributable to people with big gains in the stock market bidding up house prices. Many of the big winners in the market have two or three homes.

    The common denominator here is that because rich people have more money than they can productively invest (let alone spend), they're driving up asset prices, possibly to bubble levels. In the case of house prices, this can have a major impact on affordability.

  • [04-18]: A $600 billion increase for the military is a ton of money: "Trump's massive military budget proposal highlights how enormous spending increases often go underexamined without meaningful context." Again, he's comparing this waste to other more sensible possible expenditures. Even I find the figure so mind-boggling I'm not sure where to start. The $900 billion the old Department of Defense spent each year was almost totally wasted. Sure, it produced a jobs program for contractors and indolent youth, and provided some degree of a socialist safety net for the soldiers (and veterans, who had their own budget, as did the nukes and the supplementals for unplanned wars). But it subtracted from the productive economy, and shipped a lot of that money abroad, so jobs and education for Americans could have been handled much more efficiently. Still, when you take an enterprise which is already pretty close to worthless, and throw 60% more money at it, what happens? You're going to hire more soldiers, but you're going to get somewhat less than 60% more: not that many people want to waste their lives "in service," so maybe you bump up the pay and perks and get 20-30% more people (probably less qualified and trained; the recent expansion of ICE hiring is worth studying). And you can buy more stuff, but again you have too much money chasing too little value, so you'll wind up paying more to get anything of value, and since value is so hard to evaluate in war, you'll probably wind up with a lot of no value at all. Some of the latter will be pure fraud. Much of it will be software, especially AI, where the gap between sales pitch and reality may turn out to be infinite. Of course, you could just buy a lot of bombs and bullets, but that's just going to build up pressure to use them. Given that management has already renamed Defense to the Department of War, the worst possible outcome seems destined.

  • [04-20]: We don't need billionaires, and we can structure the market so we don't have them: "A critique of claims that billionaires are essential to innovation, arguing that policy choices, not individuals, create extreme wealth." As Baker points out, there is no reason to think that "the innovations [billionaires] are associated with would not have taken place otherwise." (I'd add that many billionaires, including Trump, are responsible for no worthwhile innovations whatsoever.) But the bulk of the piece argues that "capitalism can be structured differently, with sections on:

    • Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies
    • Let the financial industry enjoy the free market: as opposed to repeatedly bailing them out
    • Whack private equity: The structure of bankruptcy laws is not intrinsic to capitalism
    • Make non-compete agreements unenforceable
    • Capitalism needs to be restructured to produce less inequality

    These are old themes for Baker (see his book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer), and much more can be written both about the problems and the solutions. I'd like to see bankruptcy laws changed so that companies can be restructured under employee ownership, which would preserve competition and jobs.

  • [04-21]: Trump hits a home run for the green transition: "Trump's war-driven energy shock may unintentionally hasten the global shift to clean energy while weakening US dominance." This is more like a Wrong Way Corrigan touchdown than a home run for anyone, but it does underscore how right Chinese leaders were when they shifted focus from coal in the 1980s-90s to wind and solar, and moved their fledgling automotive sector from gas to electric. Roughly up to 2000, the Chinese saw emulating the west as the definitive development strategy, but since then they've dared to find their own way, starting with avoiding the warmongering the US succumbed to after 2001.

  • [04-24]: Bad vibes and the Trump betrayal: "Consumer pessimism may stem less from economic fundamentals than from polarization and Trump supporters feeling betrayed by unmet promises." The partisan shift is certainly good for a few points swing, especially in the absence of sensible information. Trump's reliance on magical thinking may also have set unreasonable expectations, at least for the hordes of voters inclined to believe him. But isn't it also possible that the fundamentals measurements that Baker follows and touts don't seem to have a lot of relevance to most people's lives. The unemployment rate hits very hard on its edge, but until you get fired, it doesn't have a lot of impact. The felt impact of wage changes depends on how close it impacts you, at which point it seems to be more personal than macroeconomic. Rising prices have a broader and more immediate impact, so one might feel them without appreciating as much that your own wages have outpaced them. Then there are vibes that are measured very imperfectly, like precarity and enshittification.

  • [04-25]: Trump's ignorance could kill millions: "Trump's apparent disregard for the predictable consequences of striking Iran could drive energy shocks, food crises, and widespread suffering that put millions at risk worldwide."

  • [05-01]: Five bit takeaways from the first quartet GDP report: "The Q1 GDP report shows modest growth masking deeper weaknesses, including fragile demand, rising inflation, declining manufacturing investment, and no sign of an AI-driven productivity boom."

  • [05-08]: The Trump corruption tax on the oil industry: "Perceived insider trading tied to Trump's oil-related announcements could distort futures markets and increase costs across the oil industry." Baker tends to use the word "tax" broadly, to refer to any extraneous cost imposed by an external source, usually but not necessarily a government. Insider trading is an example, as it extracts money from a series of stock trades, leaving everyone else (on average) poorer. Over time, it also undermines trust in the markets, as participating in them opens you up to depredation from people who know things you cannot know. This rot eventually carries over into futures markets. Those where originally set up as a means of risk management. That way you could secure future costs, instead of just waiting to see what happens. That usually cost you a small premium, but reduced the risk that you might get screwed. The problem is, once the market has been tainted by manipulations, no one knows how to set that premium, so the futures market also rots, and risk multiplies.

  • [05-09]: Trump Accounts are a sick joke, not a threat to Social Security: "Trump accounts are unlikely to replace Social Security, offering limited benefits while Republicans simultaneously cut programs many families rely on."

  • [05-11]: Citizens United, Buckley v. Valejo, and media ownership: Turning money into power: "Billionaires maintain political power not just through campaign spending, but through growing control of media and social media platforms." I suppose if you're familiar with William Randolph Hearst, you can't use the word "unprecedented" to describe the way media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are imposing their politics on the media they own, but in my lifetime at least it's never felt like this much of an imposition. Baker advocates for using defamation suits against right-wing liars. I've gotten to where I hate defamation suits, but he may have a point:

    The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News was an enormous public service. In addition to many damning e-mail exchanges that were revealed in discovery, the $787 million settlement was effectively an admission by Fox that it spread lies about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.

    One thing I've learned from reading Thomas Geoghegan is that the sue a company is a big equalizer, as you can obtain relevant documents in discovery, and compel them to answer depositions under oath. They still have huge structural advantages in our lopsided "justice" system, but it does even the playing field a bit, making it harder to hide from the truth.

Current Affairs/Nathan J Robinson:

  • Ben Burgis/Matt McManus [04-15]: Steve Pinker doesn't know anything about Marxism: "Bill Gates' favorite writer keeps spewing out lazy clichés about Marxism being a 'disaster' whenever it's 'implemented.' But he's way off-base, and Marx deserves better critics." I think it's a little late in the day to care much whether people give Marxism proper respect, although I will point out that people who do will learn a lot of things that might otherwise escape them. Some time ago, I bought a copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, because I'm sympathetic with its thesis, and I think that our sympathy with and desire for violence has in fact declined over recent centuries. But I never got around to reading the book, or anything else by him. But even if his thesis is valid over the long term, it's hard to deny that there is still a lot of violence in the world, and that there are periods (including the "30 years war of the 20th century" that so disturbed Adorno, and the current period where Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin are on the warpath seems to qualify) where violence has at least temporarily intensified.

  • Nathan J Robinson [04-21]: The Bezos Post editorial page has become a mouthpiece for pro-billionaire propaganda: "Jeff Bezos said The Washington Post would no longer publish opinion pieces critical of free markets. Recent editorials show just how seriously the paper has taken this mandate."

  • Nathan J Robinson [04-23]: In praise of "virtue signaling": "Signaling our convictions to one another is an important part of the push for moral progress." Ok, but not a point I really feel like making. He wants to map "virtue" onto "morality" and "signal" onto "expression," so what he's really defending is expressing your views of morality. The reason they call it "virtue signaling" is that they don't want to talk about morality; they want to talk about the superior airs you seem to be taking on when you assert that your moral views are better than theirs. That's almost always a caricature of what's actually going on, but does it really help your case to fight them on their terms?

  • Adam McKay [04-27]: Staring at the pointing hand: "How do we actually get people to pay attention to the crises unfolding around us? As corporate media fails, we need to build a mainstream consensus against fascism and climate collapse."

  • Nathan J Robinson [05-06]: The Democratic establishment can be defeated: "It's not 2016 anymore. We can throw out the party's sclerotic leadership."

  • [05-08]: Why "progress" is a dangerous idea: "In his new book, Samuel Miller McDonald argues that progress is one of humanity's deadliest illusions." Interview with the author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It. I don't particularly get the arguments here, although, sure, focusing on progress skips over a lot of history/pre-history that is interesting and possibly useful, and it's a mistake either to assume that anything new will be better, or that nothing new will ever be lost. I have a narrower political quarrel with people who call themselves "progressives": they are suggesting that change is inevitable, and we need to just go with it. The former may be true, but the latter needs to be mediated by political judgment. And for now, change is happening so fast and thoughtlessly that I wouldn't mind slowing down a bit, and thinking more. I don't know that McDonald and/or Robinson would disagree, but they don't exactly say so.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [04-24]: "A picayune detail": Nazi science heads west. An updated chapter from the book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.

  • [05-01]: Roaming Charges: Bad citizens: Starts with a section on WHCD "shooter" Cole Allen, suggesting that he didn't shoot, but was shot at (five times) by the Secret Service (who may have hit one of their own).

    + One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you, as has happened in the Butler, PA shooting and already just a few hours after the shooting (if there was a shooting) in the hallway of the Washington Hilton . . .

    + Pete Hegseth: "The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military."

    + Financial Times: "The number of white-collar prosecutions in the US has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, leaving many white-collar criminal defence lawyers facing a major problem: they have nothing to do." Grift, graft and greed are good again!

  • [05-08]: Roaming Charges: Pity, the poor billionaire: Ted Turner, Steve Roth a piece by Kyle Smith called "Billionaires Rock" ("We ought o build statues of them, not chase them from state to state").

    + According to the National Association of Realtors, the average age of a first-time home buyer in the US has climbed to a record high of 40. Meanwhile, the average age of a repeat buyer has reached a record high of 62.

    WSJ: More and more people are selling their cars, even though they still owe more money than the car is worth.

    + We keep being told that the US doesn't need foreign oil, yet as this chart from analysts at JPMorgan shows, the spiking gas prices in the USA in response to Trump's Iran war are higher than any region in the world, except Southeast Asia, which is the most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf States.

    + Trump's top economic advisor Kevin Hassett finding (inventing) the good news about soaring gas prices: "Credit card spending is through the roof. They're spending more on gasoline, but they're spending more on everything else too."

    + Trump: "4 or 5 snipers way up high on buildings killed 42,000 Iranian protesters." (He went on to describe in graphic detail how the snipers, who allegedly killed 10,000 protesters apiece, aimed at people's heads, which then exploded, making these gruesome remarks in front of pre-teen children.)

    + In April, the level of atmospheric hit a new record high, averaging carbon dioxide detected in the atmosphere, averaging about 431 parts per million (ppm).

    + Dr. Tyler Evans on the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius:

    There is a pattern that has repeated across every major outbreak I have worked on, from HIV in sub-Saharan Africa to COVID-19 in New York City. The acute event commands attention. The structural lesson does not. Cruise ships, whether they carry six thousand passengers or one hundred fifty, are mobile communities that move pathogens across borders faster than any public health system can track them.

    + I don't know what kind of people enjoy going on these floating Petri dishes after outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, Norovirus, Covid and now Hantavirus . . . but they should all be nominated as a class for the Darwin Awards.

    + Of course, the Trump/RFK, Jr. CDC wasn't just MIA, it was gone, baby, gone, as in eliminated.

    Jonathan Reiner: Last year half of CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program staff were fired. This is the group responsible for investigating cruise ship outbreaks. The cuts were made despite the fact that US taxpayers don't pay for this team. The cruise ship industry does.

    Under his "Booked Up" section, I was pleased to see John Berger: The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays. Originally published in 1969, it is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read. I could also say that about his 1972 Ways of Seeing, which I think is different from the also newly reprinted 1960 book, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing. I also recall reading The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) and Art and Revolution: Ernst Niezvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969).

  • [05-12]: A force for a livable planet: Mitchel Cohen's unwavering sense of direction.

TomDispatch:

  • Tom Engelhardt [04-21]: "You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!": The editor appears to be blowing a gasket, but actually just scraped this title off a No King's Day protest sign. This makes me wonder what a truly unhinged screed against Trump might look like. I'm reluctant to guess, but it shouldn't stop mid-way to lament, "And the worst thing is that I feel I've written all of this before." Indeed, he has, especially the seemingly inevitable recycle of "he's also launched another brutally losing war against Planet Earth." Whenever I read something like that, I can only sigh, "Planet Earth is going to cope with whatever we throw at it (or dump onto it). It's what we're doing to ourselves that we should be worried about.

  • Alfred McCoy [4-23]: Military disasters and the end of empire: Writes about "what modern historians now call 'micro-militarism,'" which Google AI defines as "the tendency of declining imperial powers to launch small-scale, often ill-fated military interventions to project strength and regain fading glory, which often accelerates their decline." And citing TomDispatch, is "often driven by emotional, irrational responses from leaders, not strategic necessity." I wasn't familiar with the term, so had to look it up. I don't much care for the term, nor for any explanation of modern events that harkens back to ancient Greece for examples. Current cases remind me of Trilling's decay of conservative thought into mere "irritable mental gestures." It matters little whether they lead to loss of power or merely reflect the fear that power has already been lost.

    • Michael Schwalbe [2012-11-26]: Micro Militarism: Examples here include "patriotic displays at sporting events, such as flyovers and national anthem singing, as a form of cultural militarism that discourages debate on war policy," and "celebrating military personnel in media, normalizing war-making as an integral part of national identity."

  • William D Hartung [04-26]: Shutting down the war machine: Co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, which Trump and Hegseth now want to give an extra $500 million to (beyond the $200 million "supplemental" they want for Iran?). It's tempting to fixate on the insane waste in this spending, but worse still is the off chance that someone in charge might be stupid enough to think they can actually use this military (especially now that someone has, so we're no longer talking hypotheticals).

  • Andrea Mazzarino [04-28]: The trauma and the terror among us, or "The global war on terror's journey home: the collective trauma of America's twenty-first century wars."

  • William deBuys [04-30]: The border wall thrives, the borderlands don't.

  • Tom Engelhardt [05-03]: A world in Trumple deep "(And we are all his apprentices now)": Another tirade, self-conscious enough to forgo "section titles for a simple reason. It's all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break." As usual, this winds up with Trump making "climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term."

  • Karen Greenberg [05-10]: Trumpland is a man's world.

  • Juan Cole [05-12]: The Strait of Hormuz oil crisis of 2026 is the biggest ever.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles, on subjects that don't really fit anywhere above, are more/less in order published.

Jelani Cobb [05-04]: Two hundred and fifty years of complicated commemorations: "Donald Trump's aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see events that grapple with the nuanced nature of the nation's history this July 4th." Or any time. I am in no way looking forward to any 250th anniversary celebrations. I expect that each of them, with or without Trump, will only heighten my disgust with what this nation has become.

Kenny Torrella [05-06]: The backlash to Billie Eilish's vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else): I hated this title even before I had any idea what Eilish's comments were. Why should anyone on the left care what Eilish or anyone else eats? Being left has nothing to do with what one eats, or what anyone else eats. The only real question is whether to treat all people the equally. If you think so, you're on the left. Conversely, you're on the right if you think there should be some kind of hierarchy, where some people receive preferable treatment over others. Whether you eat is affected by the left-right balance, but what you eat is up to you. Most people like to eat some meat (at least when given the option), but some don't, and some of those claim their rejection of meat and animal products is some kind of virtue. I disagree, but when those same people are antiwar, egalitarian and/or altruistic, I'm happy for them, and don't mind their idiosyncrasy, as long as they don't become too imperious about it. As a leftist, I feel it is important to respect other people's preferences. Attacking people who eat meat is bad politics, and bad manners. Putting the welfare of animals over people is another non-starter, especially given how far we still are from ending the mistreatment of people.

I'm even more bothered by the subhed: "Why are American leftists so reluctant to confront the meat industry?" Why is the author so eager to attack the left? And drive a wedge between them and the meat-eating majority? Actually, Vox has gone out of their way to focus on trashing the meat industry (Torrella's byline notes his "focus on animal welfare and the future of meat"; by the way, Current Affairs is also obsessed with meat, which I think undermines the rest of their agenda). I'm not saying the meat industry should be beyond reproach: it's big, competitive, runs on thin margins, and like all businesses is tempted to cut corners. But it also manages to keep extraordinary numbers of people living "high on the hog" (or whatever your preferred cut is). I understand most of the anti-meat arguments, but the only solutions are higher prices and scarcity, and whoever imposes that isn't going to be very popular.

As for Eilish, my main complaint is I don't understand what "loving all animals" means. It's more complicated than that.

Mike Masnick [05-06]: Matt Taibbi loses his vexatious SLAPP suit as judge explains what a 'metaphor' means. Taibbi had sued Eoin Higgins, author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left for "defamation" (aka, reporting).

Books: Reviews, although there are more books scattered above.

  • Kohei Saito [02-11]: The enclosure of all: "How capitalism transformed the natural world." Review of Alyssa Battistoni: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

    This past fall, the Liberal Democratic Party's Sanae Takaichi, who had long been regarded as an outlier on the party's right flank, became the country's first female prime minister. . . .

    Part of Takaichi's rise was fueled by heat. After the rainy season ended unusually early in much of Japan, the country saw a third straight year of record-breaking temperatures as the global average increase approaches the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. Rice yields plummeted, and the resulting "rice shock" deepened public anxiety in an already inflationary economy and forced the government to release its emergency grain reserves for the first time.

    Out of this economic and ecological turmoil came a right-wing-populist turn. Enraged at the Ishiba administration's tepid response, many voters turned to Sanseito (the "Do-It-Yourself Party"), whose platform combined promises of food self-sufficiency and support for organic farming with a rhetoric of "Japanese First." Over time, its mix of nationalism, conspiracy politics, and environmental populism curdled further into xenophobia and opposition to climate action, taking the form of attacks on immigrants, renewable energy, and vaccines. To win back the many defectors to Sanseito, the Liberal Democratic Party swerved ever more to the right and elevated Takaichi to power.

    Sound familiar? From Donald Trump in the United States and Javier Milei in Argentina to the far-right resurgence in many parts of Europe, the pattern is unmistakable: The convergence of ecological disaster, resource scarcity, a flagging and disoriented liberalism, and climate-driven displacement leads to an authoritarian turn.

  • Nancy Folbre [04-17]: What, exactly, is a fair wage?: "Arindrajit Dube brilliantly dissects how wages really are set — but overlooks the particular hurdles that care workers face." Review of the book, The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It.

  • Corey Robin [05-11]: The long revolution: "Will capitalism last forever?" Review of Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History, a book which goes way back (1150) and ranges wide (starts with the merchants of Aden). While the historical sprawl is probably the most interesting aspect of the book — having recently read Hobsbawm's quartet, Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Credits, and into Acemoglu & Johnson's Power and Progress, I'm pretty familiar with the usual turf — but the tendency to be all-inclusive risks blurring what is most peculiar about capitalism: the unique power accorded to owners. If all factories (or for that matter all trade) are capitalism, is any future alternative possible? [PS: Elsewhere Robin describes the book as "poorly conceived and terribly written." He's less clear on that here, or maybe just more diplomatic, or just chooses to focus on the facts at issue?]

Some Notable Deaths: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia (May, also April), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on April 15:

  • [04-15]: Barbara Carr (85): Soul/blues singer. Name sounds familiar, but nothing in my database. [PS: Added The Best of Barbara Carr, which covers 1997-2001, B+(***).]

  • [04-15]: Robert Skidelsky (86): British historian/economist, wrote a major biography of Keynes. I read his 2009 Keynes: The Return of the Master, which convinced me of his continuing relevance and value. I also read his later How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, which is a question few economists ask.

  • [04-19]: Desmond Morris (98): English zoologist, The Naked Ape was a big bestseller in 1967. My impression is that the book hasn't aged well.

  • [04-19]: Dave Mason (79): English singer-songwriter, started in Traffic, had a solo career of some note in the 1970s.

  • [04-22]: Michael Tilson Thomas (81): Classical music conductor, composer.

  • [04-23]: Nicole Hollander (86): Cartoonist (Sylvia).

  • [04-24]: Donald Riegle (88): Michigan politician, elected 1966 to House as a Republican, opposed Vietnam War, switched parties in 1973 and served in Senate 1976-1995.

  • [04-24]: Tony Wilson (89): Trinidadian musician, member of Hot Chocolate (first two albums), I liked his 1976 solo album I Like Your Style.

  • [04-29]: David Allan Coe (86): American country singer ("Take This Job and Shove It").

  • [05-02]: Bob Skinner (94): baseball player (1954-66), two all-star games, manager.

  • [05-06]: Ted Turner (87): Rich guy, inherited a billboard business, bought a TV station in Atlanta (WTBS), expanded it into Turner Broadcasting System, founder of CNN (and other cable networks), sold out to Time Warner (which he became largest shareholder in; he supported their AOL merger, regretted it later, losing a lot of money), owner of Atlanta Braves, married Jane Fonda (1991-2001), raced yachts, owns multiple ranches (about 2 million acres), signed a pledge to give away most of his money on death.

  • [05-09]: Bobby Cox (84): Baseball, short career as a third baseman (1968-69), long career as a manager with Atlanta, Toronto, and Atlanta again (1978-85, 1990-2010).

  • [05-09]: Craig Morton (83): Football, quarterback for Dallas and Denver.

  • [05-10]: Abraham Foxman (86): head of Anti-Defamation League (1987-2015), an organization set up to patrol against anti-semitism, but which has reduced its scope to attacking any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism.

  • [05-12]: Rex Reed (87): Film critic.

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