Sunday, March 29, 2026

The Paths Of Glory 🪦

Handing out water bottles? To make the hours long wait “bearable”? Moving money around without Congressional authorization was the basis of the Iran/Contra investigation. Ron Johnson is a living, breathing, human-sized shitstain. "The last, and greatest, delusion, is that people don’t matter.”
BARTIROMO: Some people look at this situation and they don't understand. Republicans are in charge. You are running the House, Senate, and White House, and yet we have these fights and it's obvious that you can't get on the same page and it seems like Democrats are still winning

McCLAIN: It's extremely frustrating
Sucks to be incompetent, don’t it? But is our children learning?
Trump just posted a letter from Franklin Graham assuring him that says "you commented to the media that you might not be heaven bound. Maybe you responded in jest, but it is an important issue to know for certain that your soul is secure and will spend eternity in the presence of God."
Franklin Graham is the voice of God Sauron.* ASK ME HOW! In long run, we’re all better off! (In the long run, we’re all dead.)




.*For the record, I abandoned the idea of hell and damnation in seminary. But then there’s that parable of the sheep 🐑 and the goats 🐐, and the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, so my opinion is not determinative. Neither is Graham’s, therefore.  I always prefer to comfort the afflicted; which tends to afflict the comfortable, so that works out alright.
Apparently Graham did hedge his bets, because his brand of evangelical soteriology is that his salvation depends on doing his best to secure your salvation; but in the end, you ain’t draggin’ him down with you, miserable sinner that you are.

So this is all evangelical SOP. Definitely not the soteriology I subscribe to.

So…?

Another month? At least?

Or is this for Cuba? Maybe Greenland?

Who the fuck is gonna stop him? Before January, I mean. Besides him, I mean.
Reports are, Trump can’t decide whether to shit, or get off the pot. So soldiers prepare for a war he hasn’t decided about yet. The Pentagon makes plans, but Trump can’t make decisions. That is not a decision. That is farming the decision out so that he’s not responsible for it.

He Is Legion, Because There Is Only Him

So I’m catching up on “Legion.” The FX show that aired some time back. I caught part of season two back then, but didn’t see it all and never really knew what was going on. Then again, I literally grew up watching Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner,” a summer replacement show back when there were summer replacement shows. That one intentionally never completely made sense, so I got used to it. Still, you gotta have a program if you wanna know who the players are.

The antagonist of the show, the villain, is a guy who talks. A lot. It’s supposed to be a Marvel superhero show, and the villain’s supposed to have superpowers, but they never really show. Anyway, the details don’t matter. The villainy does.

The second season includes a narrator, who provides “lessons” that elucidate the action; what there is of it. In the tradition of the science fiction I grew up on, it’s a story of ideas; not technology or the “future,” but, really, what it means to be human. It’s mostly adolescent stuff; the stuff children think are “hard questions” and harder truths because… really, they have no idea. Children think it’s all good and evil, and the distinction is easy if you just remember the rules. Which works for the show because while the villain is supposedly centuries old, the good guys are “young people,” still struggling to figure out how to be adults in an adult world.

So, if you’re old enough, the ideas aren’t that interesting, either. Except the last one; the last lesson. The second season lessons are all about delusions, the mistaken assumptions young people, inexperienced children, as it were, are especially susceptible to. And the final delusion, is the idea that people don’t matter; that selfishness is the default setting of all of us, and we are stuck in it. The lesson is Plato’s allegory of the Cave, with a parallel modern version. The cave allegory is twisted a bit: the dwellers in the cave can’t look at the source of the shadows because reality would overwhelm and confuse them. They stick with the simple familiar, because the truth is too hard to see. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” as Eliot said. But that’s where the final delusion enters in; the fear of reality. 

In the modern allegory, reality is a phone screen, where other people are not real, and so can be treated as badly as, well, children treat other children on social media (or adults treat anyone who isn’t in full agreement with them). But what if you put the phone down, and see a world full of people looking at the screens in their hands? That’s literally the endpoint of the”lesson.”

It’s an interesting allegory. But the point is: people are real; and people matter. Two things the villain denies.

He’s clever, the villain. He manipulates people. That’s his real “power.” Manipulation. Because he’s never the villain. He’s the “good guy.” He’s not the victim, whining about how unfair everything is. But he’s careful never to take responsibility for his actions. His actions are selfish, but he thinks they’re justified. He describes himself as a lion, at one point, except lions are predators; they have a place in the ecosystem. They don’t live to slaughter, to rule, to do exactly as they please to every other creature in the veldt. That’s what the villain wants to do. He thinks he’s a god, but to him that only means power. He has no other concept. He isn’t good, but he presents his story as if he is, and the protagonist is the real villain. But he uses everyone for his purpose. His actions are justified because other people don’t matter. And that, as the narrator says, is the greatest delusion of all.

Does this start to sound familiar? Like, maybe, an even more modern allegory? Because the villain, left to his own devices, would control the world, and treat every person on the planet as something that doesn’t matter; except as he can use them. The only thing that matters to the villain, is that he can manipulate other people.  And that is the true villainy.


IDEAS DON’T MATTER. 

THINGS DON’T MATTER.

 PEOPLE MATTER.

But the villain can’t possibly see that; can’t ever see that; can’t begin to conceive that. He thinks he’s a lion. He thinks he’s a god. He’s self-justified. 

Except he isn’t. No one ever is, are they?

Saturday, March 28, 2026

Wait A Minute!

RFK JR: Trump has encyclopedic molecular knowledge across a wide range of very eclectic interests—Broadway shows, golf…

One time, he grabbed a placemat, turned it over, took a Sharpie, and drew a perfect map of the Middle East. Then he marked the troop strength of every country along each border on that map. It challenged a lot of the assumptions I had been told about him.

He has this extraordinary depth of knowledge about what’s happening in each of the agencies—my agency and the others—and he has an instinct for making good choices.

I would also say this: I think my uncle, John Kennedy, understood the use of power better than any president before him. And I think Donald Trump understands the use of power better than probably any president we’ve had—at least since Roosevelt, and maybe in American history.

A placemat? A paper placemat? At a restaurant? When was this, 1979? And where? A Denny’s?

Clearly it was right after RFK, Jr. finished sniffing cocaine off a toilet seat 

Or maybe it was after the bath salts. It’s hard to be sure.

The Constitution Will Not Save Us

 Jamelle Bouie reviews the 14th amendment:

The 14th Amendment that Miller seems to despise flows directly from the vision of Gettysburg and Appomattox, Bouie wrote, and he said straightforward reading of its first section makes clear that American citizenship in almost every case would be established by birth and grant all “privileges and immunities” to anyone born on U.S. soil.

"The Supreme Court would eventually trim and limit this vision, eventually going, in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, as far as to permit the kind of subordination that the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to forbid," Bouie wrote. "Indeed, this was part of the transformation of this amendment into a merely legal document — of removing its political content and treating it as a bare set of narrow requirements. The court would do the same to both the 13th and 15th Amendments, robbing them of their power to transform the American republic."

All this chiseling away from the amendment and its intended purpose was done to restore to white southerners the power they felt they'd lost after the Civil War and support the imperial expansion of the era, and Bouie wrote that Miller and his MAGA acolytes were engaged in the same project.

"It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century," Bouie wrote. "Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way."

"It is not enough, as important as it is, to attack the legal basis of Miller’s efforts or debunk MAGA’s historical arguments," he added. "One must also bring a positive political vision to bear against their fantasy of reimposing rigid lines of caste, class and hierarchy.
I have to say that portion of his argument overlooks the core of the Plyler decision which Miller wants the Texas Legislature to challenge.
Justice William Brennan wrote in the 1982 decision that denying those children a basic education prevented them from living within the structure of American civic institutions and kept them from contributing to the nation's progress, and Bouie then explored the political context of the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment granting birthright citizenship, which flowed directly from the previous amendment outlawing slavery.

"Today, as a matter of legal interpretation, we read the 13th quite narrowly; it simply ends slavery," Bouie wrote. "But the authors and ratifiers of the 13th Amendment saw it more expansively. To them, it was the foundation for the society they hoped to build."
That's where he begins, but he ironically narrows the 14th in accordance with the judicial rulings he deprecates.

I should explain: Plyler held that Texas could not deny children of undocumented immigrants access to public schools, in no small part because property taxes support Texas public schools. The basis for this holding was the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The odds the Lege will serve Miller’s interests are zip and none.* But that doesn’t affect Bouie’s analysis, What does is his emphasis on birthright citizenship as providing rights to persons born here. That is effectively Miller’s argument; but the 14th provides for equal protection of the laws to persons born, not just to citizens. That is the basis for “a positive political vision to bear against their fantasy of reimposing rigid lines of caste, class and hierarchy.” Or completely false and unAmerican lines of “citizens” and non-citizen. (I know the “Founders” were enamored of the Romans, but even they didn’t set up a system of citizens with rights, and non-citizens with lesser rights. Slaves were neither, before you ask. Which is shameful in entirely another way, and what the Civil War Amendments tried to rectify.

Which is actually the lesson here, as it took the Warren Court and then LBJ and then the Berger Court to begin to do what those amendments meant to do. But racism and economic power were in the societal genetics before the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, and no amount of law can prevent that from being the direction of the country.

As we learned in the Sixties (well, the Boomers did), making the country we want to live in is always up to we, the people. We can’t elect anybody to do it for us. We can’t even let the courts do it in spite of us (precisely the outcome Miller wants to engineer). (Court reforms have redirected the Court before; and unless Alito and Thomas retire before November, the odds of Trump getting his first picks are close to zero.)

It always has been, and always will be, up to us. Even LBJ didn’t change civil rights law without the people behind him.
 






*Lite Guv Dan Patrick runs the Texas Senate for six months every two years. He’s announced the Senate agenda (six months goes quickly). It doesn’t include Miller’s wish, which means it probably won’t come up. Patrick had three priorities ; it’ll probably take all six months to get them passed. He’s not interested in making things harder.

The Reason Why …

From the first chapter of Walden, where he discusses clothing. Here is the full excerpt:

"A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet -- if a hero ever has a valet -- bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes -- his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind."
...I went back to wearing blue jeans (all of my youth), and have stuck with button down shirts for 45 years.

Or it’s just easier than thinking…🤔

(In my youth I admired Thoreau. Now I know he never really lived at Walden Pond, just spent days there as it suited him. As a naturalist, he’s admirable. As a thinker, now I find him little more impressive than his friend, Emerson.  And his use of metaphor is both strained, and clumsy. Especially since I’ve lived through about four enterprises that literally, and metaphorically, required new clothes.

I think that’s turned out to be a good thing. Of course, I’ve already lived a good deal longer than Thoreau. And though he lamented the sound of the train whistle at his shack on Walden Pond, I’m of the generation that, a century later, still mourns their passing. 

So it goes.

The Irony Of This Guy…

... getting the Mark Twain Prize is enough to make Samuel Clemens roll over in his grave. 

(All wars are “defensive wars” to the warring parties. Every country that starts a war does it first “protection.”)

Banana Republicanism

Chavez took them away from Chevron. The same “crime” that caused us to put the Shah on the Peacock Throne in Iran. 25 years later, the Iranian youth replaced Pahlavi with Khomeini, and took their oil back.

Now we’re cutting out the middleman in Venezuela? Because apparently we do learn from history?

All the wrong lessons….

Dogs Know

And some people:

Is It 2001 Again? (And I Don’t Mean The Movie)

At least per the ads, Sharia law and being “agin” it, were hot topics in the GOP primary.
“Since 1965, we’ve allowed immigration from lots of places in the world whose culture and values do not align with America,” French said.
He’s in a runoff for the party nomination, if that tells you anything.
“I’m going to say something that’s going to make some people uncomfortable: The problem is, we call it Sharia [law], but the problem is actually Islam,” French said. “If they can infiltrate Texas and conquer Texas, then what’s going to happen? They’re going to be able to control the United States.”
The Texas Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production in Texas (OPEC was modeled on it). Unless Sharia law is going to affect oil production in the Permian Basin, I got no idea why French cares. He is from Midland (Permian Basin area), and there ain’t many Muslims out there. Plenty in Houston, and none of them are forcing the rest of us to follow Sharia law.
Texas is home to more than 300,000 Muslims — more than all but four states — and long-established Muslim communities in Houston and North Texas. As of 2017, Muslims made up less than 2% of the state population.
In fact, some Muslims sued the State to allow Muslim schools access to the new voucher program. But that was Constitutional law, not Islamic (1st and 14th amendments).

I still don’t think this insanity plays well outside the Texas GOP sandbox, but we’ll see.

Three Minutes Plus To Wait For The Wave And Fist Pump To…

… nobody. There’s literally no one on the ground at the end of the plane. It’s tarmac. It’s empty space. 

🤷‍♂️

Nobody Could Have Foreseen

The price of gas is not going back down, either:
For nearly four weeks, the crude oil market has displayed remarkable resilience, holding together in the face of a 17.8 million barrels-per-day trade flow lost out of the Strait of Hormuz (of which 14.2 million bpd is crude and condensates).

The relatively muted price reaction was possible because the market entered this crisis with a heavily buffered system. But that buffer has disappeared.

The global oil system can no longer absorb shocks the way it could three weeks ago.

Any secondary disruption that would have generated a linear, manageable price response in a buffered system - such as an outage at the CPC pipeline from the Caspian through Russia, an active hurricane season, or infrastructure damage at Yanbu or Fujairah - would now hit a market with no absorptive capacity left.

The floor has moved up.

So has the ceiling.

And critically, the distance between a routine supply event and a disproportionate price move has collapsed.

This is no longer a market that is tight for a couple of weeks, it is a market that will be fragile for longer. That distinction is what the crude oil price does not yet fully reflect.

Before this conflict, the world was expecting a crude oil surplus of roughly 3.0 million bpd this year, onshore and offshore inventories were ample, and there was healthy spare production capacity, albeit very localized.

Those combined "extra" barrels allowed the market to absorb a supply shock that, in any other starting configuration, would have caused prices to react more violently.

Those buffers are now largely consumed, and the system that absorbed the initial shock is not the system operating today. Nearly 500 million barrels of total liquids have been lost in the disruption so far.

The combined policy response of strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) releases by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and waivers of sanctions against Russian and Iranian crude amount to about the same volume. In addition, excluding offshore inventories, the release rate of those policy barrels is far slower than the 17.8 million bpd loss rate of crude and oil products combined.
And Donald Trump’s ignorance is driving the bus:
For example, when he gave a February speech at the US Institute of Peace headquarters building in Washington, DC, which his administration seized from the nonprofit organization last year, he claimed, “It’s brand new, they built it for peace, but nobody occupied it. You know, nobody knew what the purpose of it (was).” In fact, it was known to numerous people in the federal government and in the broader capital that the building had been custom-built as a home for the US Institute of Peace, which had occupied it since 2011.

Was Trump lying, or did he not know this himself and therefore assume nobody else knew either? Nobody knows.
Sometimes Trump says “Nobody knew” to make himself look smart. Sometimes he does it to blind himself to his own ignorance. Either way, we’re going to be paying for it for a long time. Too bad we had no way of knowing….

The Subtle Knife

Maybe The Best Take On The FCC Chair At CPAC

BTW, yes, this CPAC: CPAC is in Texas this year. And MAGA is forcing Trump to back away from endorsing Cornyn in the Senate primary runoff.  Which I think is very good news for Talarico.  Because CPAC is pretty much dead, anyway (as is MAGA):

Friday, March 27, 2026

Going In Circles

Identify three. It’s the picture…. Shit? Or go blind? Trump’s options. Not the flex he thinks it is. Wait! You mean the body count is a lie?

So when Trump says Iran is decimated, and he means “totally destroyed” (which is not what the word means), he’s “overstating” the situation? Huh. Next thing, you gonna tell me, he’s not trustworthy.
Huh. He doesn’t know what that word means, either. Nobody else knows what that word means. And with that, we end where we began.

Trump Thinks He’s Jesus. Finds Out The World Ignored Jesus, Too

Yeah, about that. Trump’s not controlling the war, either. He’s been saying that for two weeks. “Deal” is the only word he knows. It’s the only concept he has. In his mouth, it’s absolutely meaningless. It only means: “I get what I want.” Whether he does or not, he tells himself he did. See? It doesn’t mean anything. Because he has no idea what he’s doing.
And the deathly irony remains that whilst it would prefer not to have been attacked in the first place, the latter is exactly what Iran too wants - it is a great big trap. As we have said repeatedly the Iranian regime has always known it cannot take on America head-on - but it can draw it into a humiliating guerilla war that will cost huge numbers of lives. And it can try and out-cost the US, forcing it to spend even more than the billions it has already cost, whilst also costing the Gulf States billions in Patriot missiles. And this is by using £30,000 drones against multi-million pound Patriot defence missiles to bankrupt Trump’s war machine into a retreat.

He has constantly bragged Israel has no navy or air force. The same could have been said for the Viet Cong and the Taliban and look where that got the States and other militaries that sacrificed troops, such as the UK, helping its war against terror. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has done extremely well, playing for time and resisting Trump’s infantile baiting of the UK to try and get this country involved in offensive operations. But what happens if a UK ship or base is hit by a missile, causing casualties?

But not before, it seems, Trump is tempted into a ground war against hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, of Iranian IRGC and Artesh regular forces that cannot be won. It does not take 17,000 ground troops to win against those odds and it is likely Trump has already been told this. Even with defections and airstrikes a ground invasion of Iran would be a long-term and bloody nightmare. The same goes for the taking of Kharg Island and perhaps a special forces raid on Iran’s nuclear sites to seize its enriched uranium. This will be Trump’s undoing and the same goes for anyone else who goes along with it.
It’s certainly not Venezuela. Even Trump understands that. I’m not even sure Netenyahu wants regime change. He just wants to keep Israel in a permanent state of war. That, or he’s seriously delusional enough to want to destroy all his neighbors. Which makes him seem like Hitler, actually.

Maybe that’s why Trump is attracted to him. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, regime change is not coming to Iran. Chaos is the best outcome, but, broken record here, that sounds more and more like Vietnam. We had a Navy; we had an army; we had an Air Force . We dropped more tonnage on Vietnam than in WWII. And we withdrew, finally.

We aren’t going to conquer Iran, because it is not Iraq. Or Venezuela. 

And Trump is trying to find someone to blame. Like he tried to blame China for Covid. Someone to blame so he can tell himself he won.

And how did that work out?
The new cause celebre. But if this is all Carr can brag about, he’s got nothing. CNN has been a joke so long Jake Tapper isn’t even a punchline anymore. Colbert was cancelled because Johnny Carson is dead and late night talk shows died with him (who has ever claimed the mantle? Or for that matter, replaced Jack Parr? Or Steve Allen?). CBS is being driven into the grave by Paramount and the news division. (It was always overrated.) Joy Reid? MS N——- (whatever) hasn’t kept anybody in their lineup except Scarborough for more than a few years, and he’s still more liberal than anyone on FoxNews not named Jessica. Times change, talking heads change. Carr is trying to take credit for the tides and the passage of time. Two more years and he’ll be less remembered than Newton Minow, who at least was memorialized in a sitcom. Carr is the empty suit whose greatest accomplishment was seeing Jimmy Kimmel get back on the air. I discard him.

Don’t make them more than they are.

So Now…

...we’re blaming Netenyahu for our naïveté and ignorance? 

Well, I mean, that tracks. Netenyahu talked us into this.  I just didn’t expect them to be quite so open about it.

Or so easily found out.

How It’s Going At CPAC

Earlier that same day:
During a live discussion at CPAC on Friday, Bannon asked right-wing journalist James Rickards what oil prices were signaling to Trump.

"Wall Street doesn't sell stocks. They sell narratives to get you to buy stocks," Rickards said. "The narrative is the war's going to be over in a few weeks. Yeah, the price of oil is higher, but it's going to come back down. We'll get through this. Trump's got a plan, et cetera."

"None of that is true. This war is going to go on for much longer," he continued. "Escalation is the only path."

"This is far worse than Wall Street expects. I think investors would be well advised to get some cash and trim your exposure."

Bannon then pressed for cheers from the crowd.

"Let me see a show of hands. The American citizens here, the MAGA patriots, are you prepared to bear a little pain to get this problem solved?" he prompted

Four people raised their hands as the crowd reacted with near silence.
😎

The Law School She Attended Should Be Shamed

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Sec. I  "...born or naturalized…” In case AG Bondi thinks naturalized citizens are permanently contingent; or native born citizens are subject to political approval.

There is seriously no context where this statement doesn’t reveal blank ignorance of the law. What she’s ostensibly referring to is judicial proceedings to undo individual cases of naturalization where the process was destroyed by fraud. If I describe it as a high legal bar, I’m doing it right. Given the state of her DOJ:
In contesting the injunction, ICE's legal team twice cited Planned Parenthood v. Rounds for the propositions that mandatory injunctions are "particularly disfavored" and that plaintiffs must meet a "heavy and compelling weight of evidence" standard.

Neither quote appears in that case, nor in any Eighth Circuit case the judge could find.

"Neither of these quotes appear in Planned Parenthood, nor in any Eighth Circuit case the Court has found that addresses injunctions," Brasel wrote flatly. "Even under the most charitable of readings, Planned Parenthood cannot possibly stand for such a proposition; the case discusses the heightened burden that applies to enjoining state statutes and does not involve mandatory injunctions at all."

"The Eighth Circuit does not apply—and has specifically rejected—a heightened standard for mandatory injunctions," the judge wrote.

The nonexistent citations came in a case where the judge had already found ICE's sole witness not credible, calling the witness's testimony "inconsistent at best and incredible at worst." To boot, the agency was found to have violated detainees' Fifth Amendment rights by blocking access to attorneys during Operation Metro Surge.
A snowball in hell has a better chance than her agency does with denaturalizing citizens. This is all just bleating to the cameras for her audience of one, the man who thinks he has a 100% approval rating.

Bondi is unfit to hold a law license, much less be USAG. Stupid and intemperate comments used to be grounds for public rebuke, at least. Now, it’s just Friday.

Nothing To See Here