The New York Times put it succinctly this morning as the Hungarians went to the polls:

Over 16 years, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party has repeatedly tweaked the electoral system to its advantage, making the vote free, but not entirely fair.

Their article, Many Polls Say Orban Will Lose. But He Has an Edge Even Before Voting Begins, is, even after the fact, a brilliant short history of this craven tyrant’s manipulations of his country, of the war in Ukraine, and of a learning-disabled Donald Trump, who heeded his advice between his first and second administrations and won again. But the question of whether Trump really did win the last election, given the NSA’s evaluation of the last election, will haunt Trump all his days. And of course, if Trump went into this last election as the acolyte of Bolsonaro and Orbán, the adept manipulation of voting machines and voting rules—not to say the possible interference of Elon Musk—he would have used every trick they have played on everyone.

These three, known in this house as the Tawdry Triumvirate, have done incalculable damage to their countries, their allies, and their planet. And their see-saw effect has been deadly:

Bolsonaro, the Trump of the Tropics

First, there’s Bolsonaro, who let the Amazon burn and infamously said that he could eat an Amazon Basin indigenous person—a black person, of course.

Racist, sexist, vile, and corrupt, Bolsonaro came to Florida just after his defeat by Lula da Silva, to hang out near Donald Trump, who deeply admires him.

But Bolsonaro lost his welcome in the United States and was sent back home to face charges that he attempted to have Lula da Silva, the man who defeated him, killed. That’s killed, as in assassinated.

Bolsonaro also tried to overthrow the government but couldn’t quite pull it off.

He’s doing 26 years in a Brazilian prison with the melodrama of allegedly having a serious problem with asthma. He may. But that’s not the reason he lost a medical reprieve that sent him home with an ankle bracelet. Friends tried to hack the tracking device on his lovely anklet and had a plane ready to take him out of the country. Brazilian courts yanked his chain all the way back to a prison cell, and he won’t be treated to Ankle Bracelet Heaven again, ever.

Trump has tried everything to get Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” out of jail. He tried to bully da Silva and the Brazil supreme court, to no avail. Writes Time Magazine, Trump posted a letter to current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Truth Social. His Eloquence speaks:

“I knew and dealt with former President Jair Bolsonaro, and respected him greatly, as did most other Leaders of Countries,” Trump wrote. “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace. This Trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

Of course, Bolsonaro’s attempted coup drew comparisons at the time to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the U.S. by Trump supporters after Trump lost his first reelection campaign.

Mr. Grammar Savvy (speciality: upper and lower cases) continues:

“Brazil is doing a terrible thing on their treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro. I have watched, as has the World, as they have done nothing but come after him, day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year! He is not guilty of anything, except having fought for THE PEOPLE. I have gotten to know Jair Bolsonaro, and he was a strong Leader, who truly loved his Country — Also, a very tough negotiator on TRADE. His Election was very close and now, he is leading in the Polls. This is nothing more, or less, than an attack on a Political Opponent — Something I know much about! It happened to me, times 10, and now our Country is the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World! The Great People of Brazil will not stand for what they are doing to their former President. I’ll be watching the WITCH HUNT of Jair Bolsonaro, his family, and thousands of his supporters, very closely. The only Trial that should be happening is a Trial by the Voters of Brazil — It’s called an Election. LEAVE BOLSONARO ALONE!”

(Really, nothing written by anyone indicts Trump’s language skills more profoundly than his own prose. If he were French, he would be indicted by the murder of his Mother Language.)

Trump raised Brazil’s tariffs to 50% to “rectify the grave injustices of the current regime” and make the U.S.-Brazil trade relationship more “reciprocal,” despite the fact that the U.S. running a trade surplus with Brazil. Trump also announced another 10% additional tariff on countries that align themselves with the “anti-American” policies of the BRICS group, of which Brazil is a founding member.

In a post on X, Lula forcefully rebuked Trump’s message, writing:

“Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage.” … [Brazil’s judicial proceedings] “are not subject to any interference or threats that could compromise the independence of national institutions” … “F0reedom of expression must not be confused with aggression or violent practices.” [All interests] “whether domestic or foreign—must comply with Brazilian law in order to operate within our territory,” and that “tariff increases will be addressed in accordance with Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law.”

Brazil’s Reciprocity Law states that Brazil can suspend concessions with other countries in trade, investments, and obligations if unilateral measures imposed on Brazil harm its economic competitiveness.

According to CNN: “This marks the first time in months another country has threatened to match Trump’s tariff threat.”

“Sovereignty, respect and the unwavering defense of the interests of the Brazilian people are the values that guide our relationship with the world,” Lula concluded.

Bolsonaro is still in jail and will likely die there.

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Orbán

So … just wondering … why would Orbán visit Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago just months before the last election? Reports AP in the summer of 2025.

The European Union’s longest-serving leader has become an icon to some conservative populists for championing what he calls “illiberal democracy,” which includes restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. He has also cracked down on the press and judiciary in Hungary and been accused by the EU of violating rule-of-law and democracy standards.

The Mar-a-Lago meeting — Orbán’s second since March — came as the latest stop on what he calls a “peace mission” aimed at finding a path toward ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

[Read: the complete destruction of Ukraine and a redux of the starvation and murder of a million Ukrainians in the early 20th century. What a sweetie this guy is.]

Widely considered to have the warmest relations with the Kremlin among all EU leaders, Orbán made an unannounced visit last week to Kyiv, where he held talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Some of his critics interpreted the Kyiv visit as a sign that Hungary could take steps closer to the EU mainstream’s pro-Ukraine stance as it took over the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency earlier this month.

But those hopes were dashed when he made an unannounced trip to Moscow days later to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a rare trip to Russia by a European leader that drew condemnation from Kyiv and other European capitals.

This last week, the ever-failing, ever-dark, ever-humiliating, ever tacky0 J.D. Vance cheered on Hungary’s dirtiest politician in history, and he lost. J.D., that makes you two for two this week.

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Donald J. Trump, aka “The Loser”

So, first Donald Trump threatens Brazil over Bolsonaro, sends Vance to Hungary and then to negotiate the end of his stupid war with Iran—Lordy, how badly can one man be set up in one week?!—and now, here he is, all alone, with a 39.6 approval rating, an unwinnable war of his own making, a hopping mad electorate, and a wife trying to do a preemptive strike on Amanda Ungaro, who has every skeleton in Melania’s closet—comprising a veritable Wadi-us-Salaam* of graves—a whitewash that will fail.

Meanwhile, what do we get? An Arc de Trashy, a one-week reprieve on the tawdriest ballroom ever to damn Earth in the eyes of every peering alien civilization, and a violent man headed for defeat and probably prison.

And he has an adolescent drunk at the helm of the biggest war machine on earth. What the F-word-in-gerund-form + f-word is wrong with these people?

What do we want? Two words: 25th Amendment, and the Republicans better play ball now, or they will pay for this with the destruction of their whole party. It won’t be violent. They’ll just have died of the flesh-eating virus they let loose upon the world.

• Wadi-us-Salaam cemetery in Najaf, Iraq spreads across 600 hectares (1,485 acres) and contains five millions graves.

It’s an isolated and sparse place. Chukotka is the easternmost province of Russia, a sprawling 737,700-square-mile “autonomous Okrug” and federal possession of Vladimir Putin’s personal fiefdom. It has almost no roads and a population of only 50,526 people—about 0.1 people per square kilometer—or just one person every ten square kilometers. And its population is falling due to migration out of the area and low birth rates.

Alaska being long sold to the United States, it is the only part of Russia that still lies in the Western Hemisphere, and, in fact, it shares its eastern ocean with Alaska, which also borders the Bering Sea. Dotted with volcanic and stellar-impact craters, it is a place almost untouched by time. Its people are largely ethnic Russians, the Chukchi and other indigenous peoples. Their major sources of income are reindeer herding, whale hunting, and fishing.

So why the rusting oil drums on the Chukotkan shoreline of the Bering Sea? Chukotka has large reserves of oil, natural gas, coal, gold, and tungsten, and the oil is slowly being harvested by Russian interests. It is unlikely that any of this oil wealth will trickle down the people who live there. But even this far from major shipping ports or vast, erg-gulping industries, oil is the enforced source of energy.

The Oil Curse in Developing Countries

In 2013, Michael L. Ross gave us a book called The Oil Curse, published by Princeton University Press. It specifically addresses the phenomenon in the developing world where oil: nationalized oil results in depressed and uneven development. Princeton UP describes the book’s findings this way:

Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. …

Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries’ oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats—and twice as likely to descend into civil war—than countries without oil.

The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones.

I encourage everyone to read this book, as The Oil Curse outlines many problems everyone needs to understand right now.

And now to a couple of deeper points in the most recent hideous head-rearing of oil wealth. And I write this series because what we are seeing is that everyone on this tiny, beautiful blue marble is breathlessly praying that Iran stops threats to the Strait of Hormuz and returns life to normal.

No! don’t JUST hope things return to “normal.” We need normal plus CHANGE.

We just saw the president of the United States lose his mind after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for less than a month.

Now, Donald Trump—variously know as His Taco-ness and the Mango Mussolini—is the person most emotionally ill-suited to power that has likely ruled a country since Nero.

Here is a batch of resources we’ve gathered about Trump’s Mental Health. Read ‘em and weep.

Donald Trump is a bully, a serial philanderer, a convicted rapist, a convicted fraudster, and, very likely, a pedophile. It is also likely he started this war to deflect attention from his hoarding the Epstein files that likely incriminate him and any number of other high-profile craven men. I give you as just one example the fact that Bill Gates will testify before Congress on this manner in a matter of days.

Having already overthrown the government (though not, apparently, duly elected) of Venezuela for oil—having also released a former president of Honduras doing time for drug trafficking in a U.S. jail so he can rig the next election and take Honduras’ vast cache of rare earth minerals ripe for the mining—he is likely also salivating over Iran’s oil stores as well as caving to ICC-indicted human rights violator and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, Trump so loves the Jews, probably just as much as he loves the Muslims—NOT! He just loves the people at AIPAC who write the checks.

So, off to war goeth Private Bonespurs.

In just a few weeks, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove the price of oil from $65 / barrel earlier this year to $111/barrel the last time I went to the pump, which was yesterday, the day the sticker shock caused me to go into hypertensive crisis at the pump.

The world is screaming for Trump’s head on a platter.

The simple fact is, the whole world went nuts the minute the Strait of Hormuz became a problem. It’s not that the U.S. gets most of its oil from the Gulf region: it doesn’t. But major refineries are there, and that heavily affects most of the people in this world. Last week, Europe’s oil supply started to dry up just weeks after the Iran crisis began with Israel’s mass murder of Iran’s ruling elite; this week, supplies start to dry up in Asia. And the reason it took even this long is that oil tankers were steaming through the seas towards their destinations, having passed through the Strait more than a month ago.

It is not, you see, just the fact that Trump threatened to blow up a civilization that has its origins in major Bronze Age civilizations from 5,000 years ago that’s driving the impetus to remove Trump from office with the 25th Amendment or impeachment because he is either too clinically insane or too vicious to be allowed the kind of power he has—or both. I’ll go with “both.”

The world is enraged at him because in his completely narcissistic quest to avoid all responsibility for his hideous abuse of women and his completely self-centered attempt to glorify himself by putting his tawdry faux-gold Walmart trophies all over the Oval Office and build a similarly tacky ballroom and put his name on it he has just threatened the stability of every nation on this planet.

Already in India, 3,000 children die every day of starvation. When the price of oil goes up, the cost of delivering food to outlying areas rises significantly. It is the women and children who will die because in rural Indian families: they only get food when the men have eaten all they want to complete satisfaction. The women and children get what’s left over. What do you think happens when oil becomes, quite suddenly, 65% more expensive?

It’s coming: Crisis Dementia will hit again.

Crisis Dementia is what I call the human tendency to go right back to sleep after the crisis associated with a wake-up call stops hurting like hell.

You can already see this happening. Just one day after Trump threatened to obliterate a nation of 79.9 million people, the world is breathing a sigh of relief.

But this is madness. What got us into this is not just that America elected the man who is arguably one of the worst citizens the country ever produced but that Trump himself is not the real origin, source or ongoing threat of this crisis. The real problem is that we are being involuntarily forced to keep oil as our most prevalent and prominent source of energy. We are being chained to oil by the oil-producing countries and the ultra rich who own most of the oil wealth through stocks and buy governments because they enforce the destruction of alternative energy so they can stay rich. They block the way of escape while the climate collapses and greed plows under the people who are already destitute.

If you die, they don’t care.

If you can’t afford food, they don’t care.

If women’s rights get trashed, they don’t care.

If kids starve to death, they don’t care.

If the environment’s temperature rises, they don’t care.

If storms get worse, they don’t care.

After all, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you can just build yourself a bunker in Hawaii and live in the lap of luxury while water wars rage and people die because the electrical grids went down because we refused to tap the winds, the seas, and the sun for all the energy we could possibly ever have wanted.

We need to get this right this time.

We’ve had oil crises before. Anybody who remembers the mile-long (not kidding) lines at the pumps in the 1970s knows we’ve been here before. We have also been at the place of realizing the sands pouring through the hourglass towards a climate disaster are coming nearer and nearer the last grains that will drop.

But a week or so after the last Category 5 hurricane or the last flood that covers the entire state of Iowa or the last deluge that changes the course of rivers in California or the last drought season that lasts in the Southwest for 25 years, we go on as if nothing is going wrong.

It’s not all right. We’re not all right. It’s going wrong all the time. Plastic fills the oceans. The AMOC ocean circulation is slowing down, and when it stops, we get the Younger Dryas Period, an ice age that has an onset time of no more than 10 months and causes the mean temperature of the earth to drop 40 or more degrees in a single season.

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And the social and economic ills that befall every one of us on this earth, but for a fraction of 1% of the people, are sourced largely in an economic crisis traced to the environmental impacts, the social privileging, and the uneven racial distribution of oil wealth, the ties of oil wealth to governments, and the enslavement of women to the male-privilege system that runs both. That’s where Islamic radical sharia law — and Christian radical Charia law — come in as the enforcing agencies of patriarchy. Oil wealth is, very near its core, an expression, intended or not, or patriarchal power.

The Patriarchy is up to his elbows in blood, only this time, it’s not red, it’s black.

This series will continue in a few days with a discussion of the history of Iran’s oil, the overthrow of Mossadeh, the Iranian Revolution, the nationalization of its oil, and the enslavement of its women by the religious hierarchy made rich by it.

Thanks for reading.

The Daily Kos, calling Trump the “Maestro of Mendacity, the Prince of Prevarication” lays it out for us:

Trump has told at least 170,000 lies in the last 10 years. The calculation is simple. Washington Post famously documented 30,573 lies Trump told in his first 4-year term. That computes to 21 lies on average per day. Since 2015 when he began running for the presidency, that 21 lies per day average computes to 85,000 total lies. However, that is just his public lies. It is highly plausible, almost assuredly true, that Trump lies as much in private conversations and meetings. He can’t help himself. So double the total and that equals 170,000 lies. That is just a staggering amount of dishonesty.

And now he is a “war president” to go along with his naming as much of the world as possible after himself.

And yet it gives major TV broadcasters NO problem to let this man lie to the world some more with a global megaphone while subjecting this drivel to INSTANTANEOUS, ON-AIR FACT CHECKING, which should be requisite any time this narcissist opens his lying mouth.

Meanwhile, the result of Trump’s speech, allegedly meant to calm America and the markets about the war is not what he intended. Business Insider reports the results that Trump’s speech are that:

• Oil surged and US stocks sunk after president Trump struck a combative tone in his latest speech about Iran.

• Traders worry that further military escalation will wreak havoc on global energy flows.

BI further noted that :

• Crude prices have soared more than 75% this year.

Way to go, Donsy!!!!

Any Saudi or Israeli Boots on the Ground? Of course not. Why? Because that’s what they bought when they gave Trump money.

Meanwhile, he and Hegseth, the Eternal Adolescent, have moved 12,000 U.S. troops to the Middle East, along with a Mons Olympus-sized mountain of military hardware. This implies a ground invasion, and for details on this whole war, I sent you to Malcolm Nance at the Black Man Spy Substack. He’s the best. Follow this guy at:

https://substack.com/@malcolmnance

Meanwhile, Iranian President Pezeshkian wrote the American people a letter yesterday. It, too, is full of “false innocent victim” crap, and I will point it out as we go through it:

“In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

“To the people of the United States of America, and to all those who, amid a flood of distortions and manufactured narratives, continue to seek the truth and aspire to a better life:

Well, we’ve certainly suffered that!

“Iran — by this very name, character, and identity — is one of the oldest continuous civilisations in human history. Despite its historical and geographical advantages at various times, Iran has never, in its modern history, chosen the path of aggression, expansion, colonialism, or domination.

Pants on fire! Of course it has. It has enslaved its women. It has targeted the Ismailis with all kinds of abuse. It has arrested, jailed, tortured and executed political dissidents and gays. It has made war on the Kurdish peoples. It has continued operations inside Iraq almost 40 years after the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, it still had butchers inside Iraq. I give as evidence that Iraq is where General Qasem Soleimani of the Iranian Quds Force was assassinated in 2020. It was Soleimani, in tandem with Syrian Hezbollah, that, according to the Mossad, “tightened the noose around Israel’s ncck.” However, there is no evidence at all that Iran knew ahead of time that Yahyah Sinwar would carry out the October 7th music festival attack that killed more than 2,000 Israelis and started the current war. It has been an integral element of the Sunni-Shi’a conflict for 1400 years, starting the day the Prophet Muhammad died without making the Iranian Ali the leader of all Islam.

Even after enduring occupation, invasion, and sustained pressure from global powers — and despite possessing military superiority over many of its neighbours — Iran has never initiated a war. Yet it has resolutely and bravely repelled those who have attacked it.

This is technically true, but it initiated and has sustained an intermittent attack against Israel for 40 years through its support for Hezbollah in Syria and its support for HAMAS in Gaza, which organization is declared a terrorist organization for every good reason I can think of. Iran has been in a proxy war with Israel for 40 years.

“The Iranian people harbour no enmity toward other nations, including the people of America, Europe, or neighbouring countries. Even in the face of repeated foreign interventions and pressures throughout their proud history, Iranians have consistently drawn a clear distinction between governments and the peoples they govern. This is a deeply rooted principle in Iranian culture and collective consciousness — not a temporary political stance.

If that’s the case, why are you constantly calling the United States “the Great Satan”??? Hmmmm? Hmmmmm? Is that not a slur against all Americans?

“For this reason, portraying Iran as a threat is neither consistent with historical reality nor with present-day observable facts. Such a perception is the product of political and economic whims of the powerful — the need to manufacture an enemy in order to justify pressure, maintain military dominance, sustain the arms industry, and control strategic markets. In such an environment, if a threat does not exist, it is invented.

Well, you guys should know. By declaring gays, Ismailis, Iraqis, Israelis, Americans, the Kurds, the Saudis, and any woman without a veil an enemies of the state, you have mastered this technique. Any repressive state MUST create both an external enemy and an internal enemy to continue to legitimize its existence as a possessor of power. [Read Jerrold Post on this.]

“Within this same framework, the United States has concentrated the largest number of its forces, bases, and military capabilities around Iran — a country that, at least since the founding of the United States, has never initiated a war. Recent American aggressions launched from these very bases have demonstrated how threatening such a military presence truly is. Naturally, no country confronted with such conditions would forgo strengthening its defensive capabilities. What Iran has done — and continues to do — is a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defence, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression.

“Relations between Iran and the United States were not originally hostile, and early interactions between the Iranian and American people were not marred with hostility or tension. The turning point, however, was the 1953 coup d’etat — an illegal American intervention aimed at preventing the nationalisation of Iran’s own resources. That coup disrupted Iran’s democratic process, reinstated dictatorship, and sowed deep distrust among Iranians toward US policies. This distrust deepened further with America’s support for the Shah’s regime, its backing of Saddam Hussein during the imposed war of the 1980s, the imposition of the longest and most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, and ultimately, unprovoked military aggression — twice, in the midst of negotiations —against Iran.

True. All of it.

“Yet all these pressures have failed to weaken Iran. On the contrary, the country has grown stronger in many areas: literacy rates have tripled —from roughly 30 per cent before the Islamic Revolution to over 90pc today; higher education has expanded dramatically; significant advances have been achieved in modern technology; healthcare services have improved; and infrastructure has developed at a pace and scale incomparable to the past. These are measurable, observable realities that stand independent of fabricated narratives.

And Iran has jailed its Nobel Prize winners, its critics, its journalists, its film makers, its women’s rights activists, and its religious minorities. It has, with staggering frequency, detained foreigners accusing them of collaboration with the CIA. It has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets when they have required an end to the Islamic regime.

“At the same time, the destructive and inhumane impact of sanctions, war, and aggression on the lives of the resilient Iranian people must not be underestimated. The continuation of military aggression and recent bombings profoundly affect people’s lives, attitudes, and perspectives. This reflects a fundamental human truth: when war inflicts irreparable harm on lives, homes, cities, and futures, people will not remain indifferent toward those responsible.

“This raises a fundamental question: Exactly which of the American people’s interests are truly being served by this war? Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behavior? Does the massacre of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country ‘back to the stone ages’ serve any purpose other than further damaging the United States’ global standing?

Point taken.

“Iran pursued negotiations, reached an agreement, and fulfilled all its commitments. The decision to withdraw from that agreement, escalate toward confrontation, and launch two acts of aggression in the midst of negotiations were destructive choices made by the US government —choices that served the delusions of a foreign aggressor.

“Attacking Iran’s vital infrastructure — including energy and industrial facilities — directly targets the Iranian people. Beyond constituting a war crime, such actions carry consequences that extend far beyond Iran’s borders. They generate instability, increase human and economic costs, and perpetuate cycles of tension, planting seeds of resentment that will endure for years. This is not a demonstration of strength; it is a sign of strategic bewilderment and an inability to achieve a sustainable solution.

Point taken again.

“Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is it not true that Israel, by manufacturing an Iranian threat, seeks to divert global attention away from its crimes toward the Palestinians? Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar — shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?

If this point does not hit home for Americans, it should:

Trump went to war to deflect attention over the Epstein files debacle, over which he has just this morning fired Pam Bondi, making the Bitch Brigade two for two down.

“Is ‘America First’ truly among the priorities of the US government today?

“I invite you to look beyond the machinery of misinformation — an integral part of this aggression — and instead speak with those who have visited Iran. Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants —educated in Iran — who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

And then go talk to every Iranian woman under 30 you can find, and let them tell you what their lives are like.

“Today, the world stands at crossroads. Continuing along the path of confrontation is more costly and futile than ever before. The choice between confrontation and engagement is both real and consequential; its outcome will shape the future for generations to come. Throughout its millennia of proud history, Iran has outlasted many aggressors. All that remains of them are tarnished names in history, while Iran endures —resilient, dignified, and proud.”

And does this mean you will stop funding HAMAS and Hezbollah? Does it mean you will stop torturing your women and gays? Does this mean you will stop disenfranchising the Israelis and stop abusing the Kurds? Does it? Does it? Iran is a totally illegitimate state that has not had a free and fair election in at least 34 years. It is not run by some benign religious potentate. It is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp that has financial tentacles all over the world and by the Basij, the Iranian “Stasi” domestic secret police. I’ll know you mean business when you empty Evin Prison of women and dissidents and the people who falsely accuse of spying for leverage with the West.

So, now, after Pereshkian’s noble exercise of the sooty pot calling the greasy kettle black, back to Trump.

Trump is flailing. This was a mistake. Trump is bleeding treasure every day, and soon he’ll be bleeding the blood of Americans all over the ground in Iran.

The Strait of Hormuz is a strategic and tactical nightmare.

Trump’s ace in the hole is that, as he says, America gets little of its imported oil from the Gulf region. So, he’s really socking it to other countries who do. That’s why Starmer just called together 45 oil-producing and -consuming nations to try to work a solution that does not require opening the Strait immediately.

And do you know what that’s going to do to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE? It will be devastating.

Asia ran out of imported oil this week. Next week Europe will run out.

And then America will rapidly start running out of friends, and it’s possible we will NEVER, ever, ever get them back.

Trump did this to cover his ample backside during the Epstein files furor and to pay his “debts” to AIPAC and Israel and the ones brokered by Jared Kushner with Saudi Arabia.

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And that’s why Pereshkian himself is correct when he asks, “Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar?”

Yes, it is. And this is why we need to get out of this war and stop defending the current regime in Israel. It is why we should make NO deals with Saudi Arabia. And it is why we must reverse Citizens United and disallow foreign campaign financing—because unless we do, it will be American soldiers and taxpayers who pay the price for Trump’s fat ego and craven lack of soul.

The interactive map from Ms. Magazine is right here:

https://msmagazine.com/2026/02/20/no-kings-protest-map/

Quote of the Day (from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman):

Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.

Read his whole brilliant article on the Trump Administration’s vicious targeting of alternative energies of all kinds. Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.

Read his whole brilliant article on the Trump Administration’s vicious targeting of alternative energies of all kinds—and follow this guy. He’s the best.

Paul Krugman

The War on Wind Continues

Electricity generation in Texas. Source: Energy Information Agency…

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a month ago · 902 likes · 231 comments · Paul Krugman

See you TODAY. Sign suggestions:

• NO KINGS

• NO ICE

• PROTECT THE VOTE

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The interactive map from Ms. Magazine is right here:

https://msmagazine.com/2026/02/20/no-kings-protest-map/

Quote of the Day (from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman):

Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.

Read his whole brilliant article on the Trump Administration’s vicious targeting of alternative energies of all kinds. Bear in mind that on the political right wind and solar power are routinely condemned as “woke.” Real men burn stuff.

Read his whole brilliant article on the Trump Administration’s vicious targeting of alternative energies of all kinds—and follow this guy. He’s the best.

Paul Krugman

The War on Wind Continues

Electricity generation in Texas. Source: Energy Information Agency…

Read more

a month ago · 902 likes · 231 comments · Paul Krugman

See you Saturday. Sign suggestions:

• NO KINGS

• NO ICE

• PROTECT THE VOTE

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The timing is pure Epstein. The impetus is money, via AIPAC and hidden front organizations, straight into Trump’s election coffers in 2020, and very likely some vague or specific promise to try to keep this man in control of the United States going forward. At first, it was just that Trump handed Americans’ free speech rights over to being defined by Israeli interests as being the following:

Any criticism of Israel or denial of Israel’s so-claimed “right” to the Palestinian Corridor is an act of anti-Semitism.

NO, IT IS NOT.

It is a basic, inviolable free-speech right in this country to disagree—without being punished for it in any way—and to recognize an ICC indictment of Gallant and Netanyahu on grounds they have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity for targeting civilians, starving them, and attempting to commit genocide by bulldozing shelter.

Please see the references at the bottom of this article to access ICC indictments of Sinwar, Netanyahu, and Gallant.

It is the right of every American to say that, although grief will always attend the attempted extermination of the entire Jewish population of earth in World War II, not everything the State of Israel does deserves or should get a pass.

It is not to say that when Israel tries to effect the extermination of the Palestinian population of Gaza it is something they get to do because they were hideously treated by the Christians for 2,000 years and targeted by the Germans in a way so brutal and sadistic it beggars belief.

As the Armenians are not exempt from national and international law, so the Jews also are not exempt.

If the indigenous tribes of North American—56 million of whose ancestors died in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, are not exempt from obeying tribal, national and international laws—so the Jews AND NETANYAHU SPECIFICALLY are not exempt from following basic standards of human behavior in peace and war.

And when the Rohingya and the Tibetans finally escape the murderous grip of the Chinese government, they will also be subject to local, tribal, national and international human rights conventions—although in the case of these two groups, they have never argued or behaved otherwise.

If you think that Israel isn’t attempting to completely gut Americans’ First Amendment rights—but only in their own self-interest, mind you, and not in the interests of all groups, or Americans in general, and certainly not in the interests of Muslims in general and Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans specifically—just look at what Israeli influence, through the Trump administration, has tried to do at Harvard and Columbia universities. It is what they will continue to do until the Supreme Court, apparently owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Trump Administration and the Radical Right, stops them.

Now I will be the first to say that HAMAS leader Yahyah Sinwar, architect of the October 7th attack on an Israel concert and widespread slaughter in the settlements near the border, deserved the ICC indictment handed down on him—and I perceive his assassination as a legitimate act of war.

But the leaders of both the State of Israel and the United States of America are playing the same game.

“Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.”*

Both Trump and Netanyahu are facing roughly the same fates, which may include any and all of the following:

• Complete and total loss of political power, followed by

• Exposure to criminal impeachment for Constitutional violations, followed by

• Criminal indictments, followed by

• Life in Prison

The Silver Lining for Netanyahu of the October 7th Attacks

As absolutely dirty as I think Netanyahu is, he was absolutely devastated by the October 7th attacks, as was every Jew in Israel, every Jew in the United States, and every Jew worldwide. And for every American, the craven, sadistic slaughter, the taking of hostages—and the keeping of them for years—is worthy the most vociferous condemnation.

HAMAS is an absolute scourge on the Palestinian people, whom it has endlessly used for its own wealth—its billionaire leaders living in luxury in and running its operations from luxurious Qatar—and its endless rages, its impoverishment of its own people, and its virtual enslavement of its own women (very close to Iranian or Saudi levels). HAMAS has for years carried out the dirtiest kinds of terrorist attacks inside Israel, including loading firearms with nails that have penetrated children’s eyes, blowing up buses and pizzerias, and taunting all four religious groups in Jerusalem, and holding a profoundly strict grip on the Temple Mount, and enforcing the Jordanian Wafq to the nth and hyper-insulting degree.

HAMAS has stationed its snipers and saboteurs in kindergartens, schools, and hospitals and fired upon them using children and the sick as human shields, just daring the IDF to attack or retaliate, and stationing the cameras to make the most of the alleged attacks when they fired first.

All the while, they have run a racket on their own children, training them at the toddler level to hate every Jew and to glorify suicide death and murder. Here’s a photograph that says it all, and proves again why HAMAS has been fairly classified as a terrorist organization:

All that said, the Israelis have endlessly encroached on what was agreed to be Palestinian territory, building endless waves of settlements to run Palestinians off the land. Waves of arrests have followed. And while HAMAS fighters fire from behind the lines of children they have run up against the chain-linked fences to use them as human shields.

In retaliation—and out of fear—Israel has for decades refused to let the Palestinians have cement, so the infrastructure of the territories crumbles. It has bulldozed the residences of the relatives of those it believes have committed crimes. It has jailed Palestinians for decades, sometimes without clear legal right to do so, and year after year and decade after decades, Palestinians die in this conflict at a rate four times higher than Israelis do.

Meanwhile, the entire Arab world wrings its hands while HAMAS and Hizbollah, allied with Iran, have lobbed missiles into northern Israel, while the Saudis have gone on TV whining about the treatment of Palestine to deflect attention from their human rights violations and written $25,000 checks to the families of suicide bombers killed in the act of murdering Jews.

Shi’a Iran—arch enemy of Sunnis everywhere and especially of Saudi Arabia—have similarly deflected criticisms of its staggering panoply of human rights aggressions by calling Israel and the United States “the great Satan” (who, in Islam, is iblis, a created being, not a concept). Iran’s insane abuses of its own people, its insane torture prison system, its arrest of foreigners, ever accusing them of being CIA. It has tortured, flayed, and burned students, leaving their charred bodies in the approaches to university buildings, to stop dissent and fair elections. It has tortured and jailed women’s rights activists by the dozens and put Nobel Prize and Cannes winners in lockdown so they could not receive their awards—and SPEAK.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu,

Netanyahu on the Brink

Just before the October 7th attack, Israelis flooded the streets in protest of Netanyahu.

On 21 November 2019, Netanyahu was officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud. Netanyahu was immediately required to relinquish his ministry portfolios other than prime minister. Netanyahu's trial in the Jerusalem District Court began on 24 May 2020, with witness testimony starting on 5 April 2021. The prosecution listed 333 witnesses. The prosecution rested in July 2024.

[On October 7th, 2024, HAMAS attacked.]

Netanyahu's testimony in his defense began that December, 2024.

Now what is very worrying about this trial is that first Netanyahu, a la Donald Trump, tried to pretend he had immunity. The Israeli Supreme Court didn’t buy it.

Then, Netanyahu tried to autonomously neuter the Supreme Court so they could not try him, convict him, and remove him from office. This brought people into the streets in a purple rage.

Donald Trump, who refrain from supporting criminals, chides the Supreme Court on behalf of Netanyahu in July of 2025. To quote Mr. ALL CAPS:

"Bibi Netanyahu's trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State."

Basically, it was the same pitch Trump made on behalf of Bolsonaro, who tried to overthrow his country and kill the real election winner, Lula da Silva. Da Silva told Trump to take a hike and stop meddling in the affairs of the Brazilian Supreme Court.

In November of 2025, Netanyahu asked for that pardon. He hasn’t yet pulled this off.

Meanwhile, more in reaction to the threat that he’ll be dragged out of office and wind up in prison for decades, he carried out an extermination campaign that has left Gaza in ruins, earned him an indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the ICC, and limited his travel to countries where he can’t be arrested on an international warrant. One of those is the United States, where he and his people have showered a president with so much money, Netanyahu and the American Israel Political Action Committee owns him.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump at the Portal to Hades

There are the four of them: Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, and Bolsonaro.

• Bolsonaro is in jail for 27 years.

• Netanyahu, the moment Israelis are willing to rein in his shocking violence and incessant warring, will be in jail for 10 years or heavily fined—and if we’re blessed he’ll be arrested overseas for crimes against humanity, tried by the ICC, convicted, jailed and wind up like Milosevic.

• Orban will likely get away with.

• Trump is going down. This will be harder because the Supreme Court basically gave him a get-out-of-jail free card in his last term and has backed hideous things he’s done. But the Epstein matter is NOT going away.

The timing of this war appears to have had two causes:

1. Israeli intelligence pegged a date on which a huge gathering of Iranian higher-ups was to take place at Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s personal residence, a sprawling, palatial compound in the center of Tehran.

2. Details of Trump’s alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl were found to be “lost” from the files forked over, then found, and simultaneously Pam Bondi got into very, very hot water in refusing to release the rest of the Epstein files, which number in the millions of emails, videos, notes, flight logs, and details from “Rape Island” and now from the ranch Epstein owned in the Southwest, in whose sands the bodies of two girls are alleged to be buried. Bondi is now being threatened with impeachment, and that has to scare Trump to death. She goes, he goes, I think.

So Netanyahu and Trump went to war, and Trump—and the incompetent, adolescent Hegseth—joined him in the most dangerous Wag the Dog scenario in world history.

The Iran War and Grinning Oil Billionaires

What is now threatened is a world oil supply collapse. Oil is up 30% since March 6. Oil billionaires are over the moon right now, raking in cash. But even they know this is a calculated risk.

Trump’s blustering threat to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure in 48 hours was met with an immediate—and credible—push back that Iran stop all traffic through the Hormuz Strait and destroy every desalination plant in the Persian Gulf area. That would effectively take both oil and water, and every country in the Middle East would collapse in less than six weeks.

Trump has never held any good cards in this bluff. Iran will never surrender. Iranians will die to the last man and kill every Iranian man, woman and child in the process. An as Israeli intel said this morning, their next move will be to create nuclear weapons—which, of course, Trump claimed last summer he’d completely destroyed. Another lie.

This whole thing was a HUGE mistake, and we will be paying it for it in price instability, worsening affordability, and threats of terrorist violence for decades.

And it should never have happened this way.

Oil billionaires chained us to oil. Now it threatens global war and climate disaster.

In 1996, we had a plan. The world largely recognized that if we did not find alternatives to oil, we were going to create a world that was incredibly hostile to human health and happiness, indeed credibly hostile to human habitation on this planet. Here, today, is the result of 30 years of effort, and you can absolutely tell where people took it seriously and where they didn’t — or where monied interests undermined every effort they made. From the UK’s “Green Match”:

For awhile, things seemed to be getting better. A group of nations led the way, proving that changing our ways wasn’t impossible at all. If you look at what the top countries did, you see how things can change. Note Costa Rica way over in Central America, which is a country that made a point of getting off oil. Now Costa Rica is very lucky, as she has the kind of heavy volcanic power we find in Iceland. But it was also intention.

But when you look at the bottom, you see countries that put growth and profit ahead of everything else—notably China—or who are major oil producing countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But there are others—Turkey significantly—who are not major supplies but spends virtually no effort on this problem.

The winners are Sweden, Denmark, and the UK. Western Europe as a rule does well.

The United States, even while it has had Democratic administrations that pushed environmental protections. But the next map shows why the U.S. really has lackluster performance.

We are huge producers of oil, and what that means is that the Billionaires Club, which either owns and pumps the oil out of the ground or consumes most of it have no intention of letting oil go.

And that is why I saw we are CHAINED TO OIL BECAUSE THEY HAVE MANIPULATED GOVERNMENTS TO KEEP THEIR PROFITS GOING.

And here’s the cost:

The World Meteorological Report

Today is World Meteorological Day, so the World Meteorological Organization Released its annual report. The summary from the report:

Geneva, Switzerland (WMO) – The Earth’s climate is more out of balance than at any time in observed history, as greenhouse gas concentrations drive continued warming of the atmosphere and ocean and melting of ice, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These rapid and large-scale changes have occurred within a few decades but will have harmful repercussions for hundreds – and potentially thousands – of years.

Key messages

• WMO State of Climate report confirms 2015-2025 hottest 11 years on record

• Earth’s energy imbalance is highest in sixty five-year record

• The ocean has been absorbing about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades

• Extreme weather impacts millions and costs billions

• WMO’s State of the Global Climate report 2025 confirms that 2015-2025 are the hottest 11-years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43 °C above the 1850-1900 average. Extreme events around the world, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones, caused disruption and devastation and highlighted the vulnerability of our inter-connected economies and societies.

• The ocean continues to warm and absorb carbon dioxide. It has been absorbing the equivalent of about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades. Annual sea ice extent in the Arctic was at or near a record low, Antarctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record, and glacier melt continued unabated, according to the report.

• “The State of the Global Climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

“Humanity has just endured the eleven hottest years on record. When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act,” said Mr Guterres.

And we are now in this STATE OF EMERGENCY because wealth buys countries—and presidents and the militaries that some of thing look upon as their personal possession.

Turn up for NO KINGS. We need 12 million people. You can’t assume somebody else will show up in your place.

Protect your vote and those of others.

And VOTE. We need both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. Then we can handle the Supreme Court to handle foreign and corporate money.

Then we can get off oil. We must.

And make sure that if there are boots on the ground in Iran, they’re Israeli boots. I don’t want to see a replay of Americans dying in Kuwait in Desert Storm only to find out Kuwaiti youth were drinking and dancing in the underground bars in Cairo.

* This famous line is from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and is spoken by the character Marc Antony, in Act III, 0Scene 1.

Happy Spring Equinox, everyone! The moon is waxing crescent in the Northern and Western Hemispheres.

Here in Marin County, the sprawling oak grove in which I live is exploding with leaves on every tree. There are pin oaks, valley oaks, coastal oaks, magnolias, birch trees, and ornamentals with flowers in every color. A pair enormous red-shouldered hawks nested in female pin oak. The nest is the size of a medicine ball. As soon as they arrived, other birds starting nesting, and we have twice as many species as last year. I wonder if they feel protected by the hawks—which are, BTW, an amazing watch. Flap, flap glide … and the glide can go one more than 10 minutes as the winds come over the coastal range and meet the San Francisco Bay.

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The Anna’s Hummingbirds wintered over here, as they do every year. They are nesting eggs now, and they will hatch soon, and then there will be the squawking of hungry little ones, who will fly off in six weeks. Then the parents will build new nests for the rest of the summer. They never nest in the same place, but they will “steal” fibers from the nests of their friends and relatives, spreading family connections. Their nests are made in part of tiny twigs and leaves, but they are largely made of silks they steal from spider webs, which is why they are so light and yet so strong.

Meanwhile, from the latest episodes of Madness Takes over America, I have a few notes to pass along.

• Yesterday, in the sleepy desert town of Martinez Lake, Arizona, the temperature topped out at 145 degrees Fahrenheit, a record for March for as long as records have been kept.

• Presidents’ faces aren’t allowed on coins as long as they are alive. Trump found a way around that. In the same vein of gold in which he coated everything, thinking it makes him look rich (though the effect is quintessentially tacky), Trump has endorsed a 24-karat gold commemorative coin to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Here it is. Barf bags can be located in the seat pocket in front of you.

• To wit, the anniversary celebration will be a CHRISTIAN REVIVAL. Yeah, must rapidly hit those Evangelicals soon, or you’re toast in the Midterms, buddy!

• On a related topic, some of the United States commanders are framing the Iran War as the biblically-predicted Armageddon, and they’re just hopping with excitement.

• Trump says the war is winding down but is sending 2,500 combat Marines and three more warships to the Persian Gulf.

• Experts say that Kharg Island can’t be taken from the air and that clearing the Strait of Hormuz will require ground troops.

• Meanwhile, Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is never, ever, ever, ever going to return to the warm-and-fuzzy tropical passage it once was.

• Trump is threatening that failure to pass the SAVE (read: EVISCERATE) Act will mean loss of the Midterms for Republicans. No shit, Sherlock. Any fair election is going to dump you guys into the gutter. In 36 special elections since the Mango Mussolini took office for the second time, Democrats have won all 36. And since 2000, Republicans have won NO presidential elections not attributable to election gerrymandering or tampering.

• Trump signed an executive order shelving a planned Women’s History museum at the Smithsonian.

• The Kennedy Center is closed for two years for “renovation.” Like hell it is. It’s closed because the artists and orchestras closed ranks and refused to play for him. Here is the living definition of bleeding from the artistic jugular. Refusing to play ball with Mr. Deflategate himself:

— Hamilton: a touring production of the Broadway musical canceled its run at the Kennedy scheduled between March 3rd and April 26th.

— Philip Glass: the acclaimed composer withdrew the premiere of his new symphony.

— Chuck Redd: the leader of the Kennedy Center’s annual “Jazz Jams” Christmas concert since 2006 canceled the 2025 staging of the show. Kennedy Center leadership is now seeking $1 million in damages from Redd.

— The Cookers: the jazz supergroup canceled a pair of shows scheduled for New Year’s Eve 2026.

— Stephen Schwartz: the Wicked composer withdrew as host of the Washington National Opera Gala set for May 16th, 2026. A representative for the Kennedy Center denied that Schwartz was ever officially booked for the gig, even though tickets listing his name were for sale on the center’s website.

— Renée Fleming: the legendary sopranist canceled two concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra scheduled in May.

— Issa Rae: the Insecure star canceled a sold-out March 16th, 2025 stop of her “An Evening With Issa Rae” tour at the Kennedy Center.

— Béla Fleck: the Grammy-winning banjoist canceled a trio of concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra scheduled for February 2025.

— Rhiannon Giddens: the Grammy-winning musician canceled a May 11th, 2025 concert at the Kennedy Center.

— Low Cut Connie: the Philadelphia rockers called off a February 2025 performance at the Kennedy Center.

— Peter Wolf: the artist canceled a book launch event set at the Kennedy Center in March 2024.

— Kristy Lee: the country singer canceled a concert scheduled for January 14th, 2026 at the Kennedy Center.

— Sonia De Los Santos: The Grammy-nominated children’s performer has canceled a pair of concerts scheduled in February 2026.

— Martha Graham Dance Company: America’s oldest dance troupe has canceled a concert scheduled in April 2026.

— Doug Varone and Dancers: the dance troupe will no longer perform at the Kennedy Center in April 2026.

— Balún: the electronic indie band canceled a February 2025 concert at the Kennedy Center.

— Amanda Rheaume: the Canadian musician scrapped an April 2025 concert at the Kennedy Center.

He’s poison. In February, star American violinist Hilary Hahn and cellist Seth Parker Woods announced their withdrawal from three upcoming performances at the Kennedy Center. The duo were scheduled to perform the world premiere of Carlos Simon’s Double Concerto Suite for violin, cello and and orchestra alongside the National Symphony Orchestra on 12, 13 and 14 March.

Woods said on social media: “We have chosen to withdraw from our concerts at the Kennedy Center this March. We are sorry to not be with our friends and colleagues at the National Symphony Orchestra and hope to perform with them again in the future.

Uh-huh. Like I said, he’s poison. He attacked the arts, he attacks intelligence, he attacks knowledge, he attacks history, he attacks DEI and women. And he will be abandoned by all of us.

OK, that’s it for today.

Love you …

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

August 8, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man who oversees the nation’s military reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote.

See full article here: https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2025/08/08/hegseth-reposts-video-on-social-media-featuring-pastors-saying-women-shouldnt-be-allowed-to-vote/

This is where this entire virulent administration is on the freedom and enfranchisement and empowerment of women. He, Vought, and most of the Supreme Court want women home and breeding. Period. They want us out of the public sphere, and they want to control all the money and have all the goodies, and they want their free maid service back.

Taking contraception in all its forms is front and center for this administration, but Hegseth is cutting to the chase to take the vote.

Overwhelmingly, women vote liberal agendas that support healthcare, education, child safety, and equal rights.

Trump knows that if the SAVE bill doesn’t pass, and women and people of color will not be able to register. OR, women will have to go through a legal process to have their married names put on their birth certificates. Having one this myself, I am aware that (1) it’s costly, (2) it’s time-consuming with the clock ticking, (3) and in many red states, road blocks will be thrown up.

This is why Pam Bondi wants to force Meta and Google to turn over the analyses of who is voting and talking liberal — and why she is trying to force state election committees to turn over voter registration rolls so she can determine whose registrations to target.

CALL YOUR CONGRESS PERSON NOW.

Fight.

So, Trump, having now completely screwed up oil deliveries to Israel and the U.S., has asked Europe to send ships to help clear the Strait of Hormuz of mines and defend oil tankers against Iranian assaults.

Response? “Nein, mein freunden!”

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent says that Iranian, Indian and Chinese tankers are making it through—because the Iranians are letting them, certainly by giving them guarantees not to fire on them, and maybe also giving them the location of mine clusters or turning off the mines.

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But, American ships will find it hard to access, say, Sea Island Terminal off Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to pick up a little light sweet crude. They’re going to have a problem, and that is a problem for Trump, who is single-handedly responsible for the worldwide surge in oil prices. That wins the United States no friends.

Now he’d like to make our allies responsible for solving the problem he’s created, and they’re not having it. As The Guardian notes, a negative response from Europe …

… comes after Donald Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the world’s busiest shipping route, which has been effectively blockaded by Iran.

The US president said it would be “very bad for the future of Nato” if allies don’t help secure the strait.

Is that a fact? This is NATO’s problem now? Trump makes a mess that affects the whole world, and now he’s threatening NATO, effectively saying, “You fix this or we pull out”??? Is that what’s happening here?

The Hormuz Strait is closed ONLY to Israeli and American Shipping

But shipping isn’t closed to everyone. It is ONLY closed to U.S. and Israeli shipping, so this is NOT the world’s problem at all. And if Bessent seems happy everyone else’s ships are getting through, that only shines a light on the fact that he intends to lie and say that Iran is doing this only to us because they have special backroom deals with Modi and Putin, that’s not the case, though Putin couldn’t be happier to see the U.S. ground down in a war with Iran than aiding Ukraine.

But ultimately, the U.S. whining that “we’re all in this together” is a total lie. Iran’s strangling of oil trade applies to two countries, and two only.

The rest is a total smokescreen to make the world believe that Iran is intent upon holding the world hostage with oil—blocking Saudi Arabia’s exports—and it is not.

Why Are We Fighting Israel’s War?

It may well be that Netanyahu, already indicted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, has something on Trump. He has steadfastly stood by Netanyahu—and Bolsonaro—despite their human rights abuses—and attempts to subvert fair elections and justice in their own countries.

• Bolsonaro is doing more than two decades in prison after trying to overthrow a fair election.

• Netanyahu used the hideous October 7th attack to try to wipe Palestinians off every acre of Gazan land, much to the glee of Jared Kushner, who wants to turn the vestiges of Palestinian history into a seaside resort. This drew attention away from Netanyahu’s attempt to gut the Israeli Supreme Court to prevent its sending him to prison for graft.

But although Trump clearly believes that gluing himself to tyrants makes him safer, there’s probably something greedier in the mix.

Trump wants oil. As much as he can get.

Let’s see. What doesn’t he want? He wants Iranian oil and Venezuelan oil and Honduran rare early elements and precious ores. But who really owns the greatest levels of the world’s oil reserves?

• BlackRock - One of the world’s largest asset managers with significant investments in oil companies.

• Vanguard Group - A major investment firm holding substantial shares in various oil and gas corporations.

• State Street Global Advisors - Another large asset manager with considerable stakes in the energy sector.

• Saudi Aramco - The state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, one of the largest producers globally.

• ExxonMobil - A leading oil and gas corporation with extensive investments and operations worldwide.

• Chevron - A major player in the oil industry, involved in exploration, production, and refining.

And what about people? We know about Howard Hamm and the Kochs, but what about the Tech Bros—those guys who spent billions to elect Trump, fawned over his inauguration with $1 million dollar gifts and got shown off like fatted calves, and then turned around and forked over $20 million each (at last report) for his horribly tasteless White House ballroom?

Tech Bros heavily invested in oil

Alarmed in the run-up to the election and panicked afterwards, the editors of Food and Water Watch were clear by April of 2025 that we were in deep trouble.

Our current political landscape — chaos, growing corporate power, and endangered food, water, and climate — is no accident. A small number of billionaires and wealthy CEOs have brought it into being.

They’ve invested millions in getting Donald Trump to the White House and his cronies into Congress. … They have more license than ever to run roughshod over our shared resources, make life worse for workers and families, and enrich themselves even further. This is an oligarchy.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Big Tech and fossil fuel industries. Trump directly appealed to oil and gas executives for campaign donations, which they happily provided. He’s now stripping environmental regulations and halting federal clean energy funding.

Where all this goes is that the richest people in America have a lot of oil investments — and they use a lot of energy, and they are NOT investing in alternative means. Which means: they want that spigot to remain pouring oil, and they are backing the destruction of health guardrails to make sure it does. Food and Water Watch again:

For his part, Zuckerberg’s moves to cozy up to Trump could help Meta avoid regulations, as the company has been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Zuckerberg has also said that Meta will work with Trump to oppose the European Union’s heavier speech regulations on social media platforms.

Like Musk and Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos stands to benefit heavily from deregulation and the gutting of government agencies. As the third-richest man in the world (after Musk and Zuckerberg), he gets most of his wealth from his shares of Amazon stock. Regulatory action stands in the way of more profits for Amazon and more wealth for Bezos.

And note that deregulation also means that big polluters get to keep doing it. Trump signed an executive order last week declaring that no one can sue Monsanto if they get cancer from Round-up (glyphosate), which has already been proved to be carcinogenic.

Why? Trump will become dictator or go to jail.

It will take every billionaire’s efforts to keep Trump in office, get elections cancelled, and make him dictator. They seem to feel that it’s worth their while.

They have overtaken virtually all the major news outlets and are now threatening journalists who write unfavorable Iran reports the president doesn’t like.

They want ultimate deregulation and no limits on the amount of water and oil they can use for AI—and more coal, too, if they can get it.

They are making every possible effort to pass SAVE — which gives the Republicans the Midterms, Trump believes. If Thune’s filibuster doesn’t work this week? “Bad,” Trump mumbles. “Bad.”

The world should not fix the mess Trump has made.

Iran is a rogue nation with blood on its hands. It has tortured and murdered dissidents. It has created a regime so hideously repressive of women that it ranks second only to the Taliban. It is a regime that needs to be replaced by a religion-neutral government with a rights-based constitution.

And this was the stupidest possible way to go about making a bad situation even worse. Israel’s attack on Khomenei’s home, with more than 58 government officials present (most killed), left the IRCG intact. It’s not Mojtaba Khomenei who is running Iran. He lost a leg in the attack and was hospitalized in Russia for surgery. Now he’s back, but he’s NOT in charge. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, with its sprawling worldwide financial influence and iron grip on the lives of Iranians, stepped right in and ran a retaliatory war against Israel and the United States.

In poking the wrong bear, Trump has enraged public opinion against the United States worldwide, and the terrorist attacks over this stupid move—when Iranians have waged a brave five-year battle for liberalization of their culture—is 100% counterproductive.

And the media in the United States, owned by Tech-Bros and Oil Oligarchs will lie to us about what is going on, like Bessent just did, but it won’t help.

We’ll know.

Please read Robert Reich’s excellent article on Hegseth this morning. Here’s the link:

Robert Reich

Trump’s Stupidest Cabinet Member

Friends…

Read more

2 months ago · 2025 likes · 246 comments · Robert Reich

There’s no specter scarier than a vengeful Donald Trump with a fistful of America’s nuclear codes—unless it’s a raging Trump with nuclear codes and a glitter of sycophantic MAGA generals and a Secretary of Defense with a brain pickled in alcohol who will do whatever Trump wants, to whomever he wants to punish. That may involve the use of military troops and surveillance against American citizens or nuclear weapons against foreign “enemies”—whether they are really enemies or not.

For the quintessential history lesson on alcohol and horrific military blunders, we need look no further than the Memoirs of Soviet Foreign Affairs wizard Andrei Gromyko (1909-1989), who served every leader of the USSR from Stalin to Andropov. It was Gromyko who witnessed the meltdown of a hyper-emotional Leonid I. Brezhnev, who, upon the assassination in Kabul of a protégé, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan while he was blind drunk.

Brezhnev, it seems, had suffered a “Becket moment.” (In)famously, England’s King Henry II (1133-1189) had grown frustrated by the insistence of Thomas Becket (1118-1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, that clergy be subject only to Church law, not to English common law. After hearing of an intense outburst between Becket and members of his court, Henry—who was in a drunken rage—is alleged to have shouted, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!”

Four men, perhaps not the most sparklingly intelligent of Henry’s lackeys, took this to mean that they should rough up said archbishop. Confronting him at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, one struck him on the shoulder with the flat of a sword and attempted to arrest him. When Becket resisted, the four butchered him, felling him with a blow to the head so vicious that it cracked his skull wide open. His brains oozed out onto the floor.

Henry was aghast. Maybe he and Thomas had turned on each other, but they had once been best friends—friends so close, it was said, they had “but one heart and one mind” between them. Henry grieved, wore sackcloth, powdered himself with ashes, and fasted for three days—but the damage was done: Becket became a saint, his slayers were sent to fight in the Crusades, and the Church’s hand was strengthened in Great Britain.

Fast-forward 800 years and find, in Kabul, two men whose fortunes in rising to the pinnacles of power in Afghanistan were as interwoven as those of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Nur Muhammad Taraki and Haifzullah Amin were, as Taraki once commented, “like nail and flesh, not separable.” They had worked for years to establish Soviet-linked socialist power in this gorgeous, fabled “Heart of Asia.” With the Saur Revolution of 1978, they achieved it: Taraki led the country; Amin was second-in-command.

In the course of their friendship, Amin, the press magician, had crafted a personality cult around his beloved friend Taraki that rivaled those of Kim Il-Sung, Idi Amin … and Donald Trump. Amin called Taraki “The Great Leader” and “The Star of the East.” The problem was, Taraki began to believe his own PR, and made the fatal mistake of slowly sidelining his friend. Camps formed around the two, and the Soviet KGB took sides. A series of tit-for-tat intrigues ensued: fake news that Taraki was going to assassinate Amin caused high government officials to seek shelter in the Soviet embassy—an attempt by Amin to intimidate Taraki by delaying his flight into Kabul enraged the head of government—an attempt by Amin to arrest Taraki was a spectacle and a failure—and an attempt by Taraki to fire Amin may have sealed Taraki’s fate.

It was then that Amin, on a trip to the Soviet Union, whined to Brezhnev, “Taraki is still around. What should I do with him?” Brezhnev left the choice to Amin, and Amin took the chairman’s reply to mean it was fine for him to kill Taraki. Which he did. On 14 September 1979, three men sent on Amin’s orders killed Nur Muhammad Taraki, suffocating him in his study. Amin became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan and promptly jailed 28 of Taraki’s relatives, including his wife.

But Brezhnev had promised to protect Taraki and never meant Amin to kill him. Described by Gromyko as “an emotional man easily moved to tears,” Brezhnev reeled. Gromyko: “When the news came through that (Nur Mohammed) Taraki, the general secretary of the Afghan Communist Party, had been murdered brutally in his study, it was too much for Brezhnev to bear. He was simply beside himself.” On Christmas Eve, Brezhnev, blind drunk and emotionally off the rails, ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, starting the Soviet-Afghan War, the first foray of the Soviet troops beyond their borders since World War II. Three days later Amin was dead. His family was arrested and imprisoned for more than a decade.

In his memoirs, Gromyko detailed his major tension with Brezhnev—the alcoholism that plagued the Soviet peoples. Asked if Brezhnev had a drinking problem, Gromyko responded. “Yes, yes, yes.” He added, “It was perfectly obvious that the last person willing to look at this problem was the general secretary himself.”[1]

Hegseth Cometh

Nations cannot escape their leaders’ depravities and degeneracies. In Trump’s case, they are reflected in his nominees for several Cabinet positions. Virtually all the objectionable nominees have been accused of sexual abuse, and their prospective new boss, Trump, the convicted rapist, certainly doesn’t seem more than mildly annoyed by it. If sexual abuse and rape become completely normalized in this country, Trump can only benefit.

Trump wants two things only: complete loyalty and the willingness of all around him to cheerfully sell their souls to Satan to do whatever he wants without question. But apparently, the country is not completely willing to cave on that one just yet. Gaetz went down, and that was a loss, because Gaetz as attorney general would have shut down every single case against Trump, including all potential sexual assault cases still threatening him, and would have turned the most sightless of eyes as Trump rolls out Project 2025, fat as it is with unconstitutional potentials its creators hope Trump will illegally institute by fiat.

“Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!” – Pete Hegseth

Yet Gaetz was never Trump’s most dangerous nominee. That dishonor goes to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense—leader of the world’s most powerful and lethal military—whom whistleblowers accuse of gross financial malfeasance, bullying, belligerence, bigotry towards and hatred of Muslims and everything “Woke,” and alcohol-soaked rages, serial sexual abuse, and rape.

For the record, the Trump team was furious to learn that Hegseth had settled out of court with a woman who accused him of a rape that may have involved a date-rape drug. Apparently, Hegseth just “forgot” to mention the NDA-bound payoff. But the rest—the serial sexual abuse, financial malfeasance, and frequent drunkenness leading to profound misconduct—are ones the Trump team knew about. How bad is all this? Writes The New Yorker:

A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA)—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.[2]

Every problem drinker has a unique “signature” of personality disorders that accompanies a binge. His “signature” appears to include serial sexual assault, drinking to unconsciousness, and staggeringly poor judgment. Examples, but the tip of a very large iceberg, as cited by The New Yorker include:

• Hegseth took co-workers to a strip club and got so inebriated he tried to join strippers onstage and had to be restrained by co-workers. That same evening, he allegedly tried to assault a female member of his own staff in the club.

• A complaint from a co-worker in 2015 says the married Hegseth and other male members of his management team at CVA divided up women employees into categories of “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued female staffers, creating a hideously toxic work environment for CVA’s women.

• A separate complaint from 2015, made by a different employee, states that in the “early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio” (for CVA) Hegseth, drunk again, chanted “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”[3]

Then there’s Hegseth’s serial binge-drunkenness at Fox News. To get the story, Rolling Stone interviewed three current and seven former colleagues at Fox, who told them:

• He was so drunk at the wedding of a Fox producer he could hardly stand.

• He’d arrive for his early morning broadcast either smelling of alcohol or hung over, and he was so often drunk that he had to be “babysat” by Fox staff who knew he’d have been out drinking the night before.

• Once, at 10:00 a.m., he drank ten warm, stale beers that had been left out from a display.[4]

Given such evidence of a major drinking problem, Senate Armed Services Committee member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) summed up why Hegseth must not be confirmed:

“Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure. It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”[5]

Today what we are hearing, on one side, is that Trump and Vance—obviously having done some serious arm-twisting in the last few days—are confident they’ll get Hegseth through. On the other side, Blumenthal is saying he’ll be surprised if we’re still talking about Hegseth next week:

“The power of the presidency, not to mention this president-elect, and what the retribution might be, I think, is pretty daunting, and so I think Republicans are reluctant to step forward and be the first one, but I think privately, they’re much readier to advise the president that the better part of wisdom would be to urge withdrawal of this nomination.”

What’s really happening, Blumenthal is saying, is that half a dozen or more Republican senators are “waiting for the right moment to say no.”[6]

Why Would Trump Fight So Hard for This Drunken, Abusive Bigot?

Well, why Trump is so hot for Hegseth is because he’ll carry out the American civil war through which Project 2025 writers hope to bring down liberals, non-Whites, women, and non-Christians. Hegseth has already, literally, written the book on using the U.S. military against the civilian Liberal population of the United States when Trump begins his “Retribution Tour” to punish the Woke Folk.

And, wouldn’t you know, there’s a Christian cult behind his views. And while it’s fairly comical watching a drunken abuser like Hegseth invoke the name of Jesus—rather like watching Jimmy Swaggart blubber and bleat to Jesus on national TV after he was caught with a prostitute—Hegseth’s willingness to use the U.S. military against U.S. civilians, which is as unconstitutional as it gets, to invoke a conservative Christian state by civil war is no laughing matter. Trump would order it, and Hegseth would absolutely do it, and this time, we’ll have no General Mattis to stand between us and the loss of the country—and to stand up to Trump.

“The Christian ISIS” War at Home and Abroad

Based on numerous public statements and writings, it’s likely he will aim to undermine the military’s long-standing nonpartisan pluralism by scrubbing diversity from the ranks, banning women in combat, urging the military to choose sides in a “civil war” against “domestic enemies” on the left. He has invoked the need for “a 360-degree holy war” to exorcise “the leftist specter dominating education, religion and culture.”

Also on the home front, The Guardian Writes:

[Hegseth] explicitly supports forms of election-rigging through gerrymandering. Fair electoral boundaries, he writes, amount to “Playing nice to placate the so-called middle,” which “has been a losing strategy for patriots for decades”. Since “the other side is stacked with enemies of freedom”, Hegseth argues, “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

A Drunk with God on His Side: Hegseth and Far-Right Christianity

As it often is, it’s Politico that uncovered Hegseth’s potentially deadly association with one of the most radical of all the reformed evangelical denominations:

Two years ago, he moved his family from New Jersey to Tennessee, where Hegseth joined a school and church associated with reformed reconstructionism, an ideology helmed by the far-right theologian Doug Wilson.

Wilson’s denomination opposes religious pluralism and embraces the idea of a nation founded on the premise that Jesus Christ is the “lord of all.” He has written that owning slaves in biblical times was not antithetical to being a Christian and, while he says he rejects racism, he has asserted that “the system of slave-holding in the South was far more humane than that of ancient Rome, although it still fell short of the biblical requirements for it.”

Wilson, himself a former submarine navigator for the Navy, has also described himself as philosophically “indebted” to Robert L. Dabney, the military chaplain to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson who defended slavery and believed in white supremacy.

He claims border defense and Christian dominance are divine conflicts, and claims God has deemed women and children legitimate military targets in such affairs. “The word of God,” Wilson preaches, “tells Christian soldiers what to do, even if Christian soldiers are in the service of an unbelieving magistrate.”

There’s also a system of church courts that metes out punishments for heresy. “They think the Bible applies to every area of life, and they want to see that made into law,” explained Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida. “In that sense, they are not unlike the Taliban.”[7]

The American Taliban State

If Trump is able to force through Hegseth’s confirmation, Hegseth’s statements and hatred of Muslims, hatred of liberals, and choice of a religious orientation that is solidly white supremacist and Christofascist and excuses slavery indicate that the U. S. military will be in the hands of the crafters of Project 2025, with whom he wholeheartedly agrees and who wish to make America “a Christian nation.”

And Hegseth’s drinking, I predict, will continue and no one will care. Because Pete Hegseth will not make a single decision. Project 2025 authors, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, on behalf of Vladimir Putin, will make every decision and Pete Hegseth will rubber-stamp their every whim and have a drink.

And at some point, power that has corrupted completely will escape the confines of the nation and strike out at the world as the Jerusalem Cross on Hegseth’s chest foretells. And then this country will reap the whirlwind, just as did the rash drunken Henry II and the blubbering, drunken Leonid Brezhnev, whose blunder in starting the Soviet-Afghan War in 1979 resulted in the harboring of Osama bin Laden and his attack on America, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghans, and the enslavement of three generations of Afghan women. And the United States will be led by the same kind of stupid, uneducated, bigoted males who think have God on their side. They are indistinguishable from the Taliban.

[1] From NewsDay in LA Times Archives: “Afghan Slaying Spurred Invasion, He Says : Gromyko Calls Brezhnev a Problem Drinker.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-04-mn-958-story.html

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-hegseth-alcohol-abuse-allegations-1235193884/

[5] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history

[6] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5024462-blumenthal-republican-senators-hegseth/

[7] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegseth-defense-religion-christian-00192117

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. 0

                                         – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 41

They rage across history like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—these tyrants who crush peoples repressed for millennia by the standard-bearers of singular authority, with its reeking pride and ravenous greed and venal lust for power. Since the dawn of the 20^th century, these living, breathing malignancies have let slip the dogs of war—the tawdry who goosestep in phalanxes, who slither and lie in wait on the jungle floor—these madmen who torture the betrayed in the blackened basements of Lubyanka and the squalid cells of Evin. They appear at the radical edges of human culture, on the frayed fringes of the ideological fabric at both liberal and conservative selvages. And from the deep—from the heart of darkness itself—they spawn hell.

At first glimpse, their hatreds seem like those of Ahab, whose “hot heart” bore the weight of the world’s seething malice—and, in the end, they are. In the beginning, however, their aggressions are the progeny of overweening hubris and self-elevation—the offspring of the self-crafted fantasies that they are done wrong because the world will not prostrate itself at their feet or because they claw a mere scratch of a loss into a gaping wound. When this personal darkness engages the collective archetypal shadow, it can set flame to continents. In psychological terms, a Dark Triad predator evolves into a Dark Tetrad monster.

As detailed by D. L. Paulhus and K. M. Williams in “The Dark Triad of Personality,” there are three attributes present in truly malevolent people: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy:

• NARCISSISM is self-worship that ordains the superiority of oneself along the lines of race, class, masculine gender, ethnicity, national origin, ideology, or religion that are already extant in the person and therefore available to use in the evaluation of others with no potential loss of self-respect for the aggressor. Others will, of course, always be found lacking. For the aggressor, convinced of the “truth” of this “reality,” the reflection of his or her own image becomes mesmeric, for it is the image of a superior being. Those possessed of such arbitrarily elevated qualities are then entitled to privilege themselves while disenfranchising and abusing others.

• MACHIAVELLIANISM—a psychological and perhaps neuropsychological disorder named for the political cruelty of Niccolò Machiavelli—is a characterized by manipulativeness, callousness, cunning, egoism, cold-blooded ambition, ruthlessness, and a thorough indifference to morality. Most Machiavellians (High Machs) also exhibit alexithymia: they cannot tell what others are feeling or even what they themselves are feeling. They will do anything to anybody to get what they want. However, Machiavellians are not focused on hurting others—they just couldn’t care less if other people get hurt or not.

• PSYCHOPATHY is a neuropsychiatric disorder that has “strong genetic influences and which precipitates deleterious effects on widespread functioning networks, particularly within paralimbic regions of the brain.”[1] Psychopathy is characterized by deficient empathy, poor emotional response, and behavioral control, which result in “persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.” Psychopaths constitute roughly 4% of the American population—one in every 25 people. It is worth noting that psychopaths (not to be confused with the far softer, but still dangerous, sociopaths) are far more likely to be promoted on American organizations than their healthier fellows. 

Despite how terrifying the Dark Triad personality is, we have not yet arrived at the harrowing specter of a Hitler or Stalin or Mao. One trait is missing.

• SADISM: The Dark Triad becomes the Dark Tetrad with the addition of the vilest of all human evils—sadism.

The verbatim dictionary definitions of the word sadism, from Merriam-Webster, are:

1: the derivation of sexual gratification from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation on another person. 2a: delight in cruelty. 2b: extreme cruelty.

And herein find an observation rendered by Erin E. Buckels and her colleagues, a clinical demonstration of how much Dark Tetrads love to torture people:

Acts of apparent cruelty were captured using two laboratory procedures, and we showed that such behavior could be predicted.… Sadism [added to] Dark Triad measures predicted unprovoked aggression. … Sadists were willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. In both studies, sadism emerged as an independent predictor of behavior reflecting an appetite for cruelty.

It is this sadism that ultimately defines the Dark Tetrad personality. It is the cruelty, the viciousness, the love of inflicting pain that means the Dark Tetrad knows no limit to what they will do to any person—man, woman, or child—or country—or planet. Fortunately, sadists account for only 1% of the population, but their impact is outsized and devastates humanity and the mind of the species.

But a more detailed notion may be more helpful, and it comes from psychologist Theodore Mollon, who cites four kinds of sadism. Each of these types reflects the temperament of the sadist:

1. Spineless sadism: These individuals display avoidant features to their behavior. They are insecure and lack courage, but they use these shortcomings to fuel their false bravado, among others. They tend to seek out powerless victims on whom to inflict pain.

2. Tyrannical sadism: These individuals display negativistic features and are energized through the menacing and brutalization of others. They crave and abuse power over others and use words as weapons to get others to submit to them. They are destructive, inhumane, and unmerciful.

3. Enforcing sadism: These individuals exhibit dependent features of sadism and find ways to “rightfully” inflict pain on others. They couch their torment in efforts to maintain order in this world through professions such as law enforcement and management. They take roles that give them the power to have control over others as well as seek out and punish those who don’t follow the rules, whether the rules refer to the laws or organizational practices.

4. Explosive sadism: These individuals are reactive and explosive in their displays of sadistic behavior. They can “blow” in a heartbeat and will direct their fury and rage at those around them. It’s as if they have been keeping feelings of humiliation stored up over time, and then when the final straw arrives, they explode. Explosive sadists have been noted to feel contrition after their outbursts. [2]

With Trump, we don’t know if his sadism expresses as a psychosexual problem or not. Despite the primary dictionary definition, not all people express sadism in a sexual way, even if they feel it.

Also, Trump’s personality does NOT seem to echo the Explosive Sadism” described in No. 4 above. Example: when he lost the first E. Jean Carroll defamation case and was fined $5 million dollars, he did NOT apologize. No, he promptly did it again—and got fined again.

So, it’s worth 5,000,000 smackeroos to this guy to be able to shoot of his mouth and viciously attack someone.

That leaves Nos. 1, 2 and 3—Spineless Sadism, Tyrannical Sadism and Enforcing Sadism—and those definitions seem extremely characteristic of his passions in that he seems “energized through the menacing and brutalization of others” and that he “craves and abuses power over others and use[s] words as weapons to get others to submit.” He is, as the definition puts it, “destructive, inhumane, and unmerciful.” And, he lusts after the presidency because it will give him “the power to have control over others as well as seek out and punish those who don’t follow the rules”—his rules, always his rules. Where the Spineless Sadism (No.1) comings in is in his incessant whining, I’m-done-wrong victimhood when he is broadsiding anybody and everybody who doesn’t give him his way. In short, he rants and has throws incessant temper tantrums.

Trump as the Dark Tetrad Chucky Mannequin for MAGA’s stoked hatred.

We have become almost inured to his hate faces. And his taunts. And his targeting. And we mustn’t go to sleep.

For standing behind him is an army that is mule-packing arsenals of weapons and is mentally twisted by a dark theopolitical philosophy shot through with the fascism—the fascism that, in the last century, put Jews, Roma, and gays to death by the millions—and, in its Spanish incarnation, made war on the “Spanish New Woman” in ways that rivaled the worst abuses indulged in by the Gestapo.

At first we thought, “Well, he’s ridiculous, and he’ll never get ahead.”

Then we thought, “Well, we don’t like this: he’s rousing the racism and white supremacy barely held under control by political correctness these long decades.”

Then we watched, with rising anxiety, as these people came out of the woodwork screaming abuse and openly inviting comparisons to the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Just a little more than a year ago, Donald Trump, under 91 criminal indictments and getting his backside kicked in court by E. Jean Carroll—and Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania—instructed the voluntarily enslaved to fawn in a manner not seen since the “Heil Hitler” salute of Third Reich infamy. NY State Senator Anna M. Kaplan (D-North Hills) issued the following statement:

Last night at a rally held by the former President, and today at a political rally held by a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, supporters were urged to hold up their right hands in a unified salute that should shock the conscience of every American for its remarkable similarity to the “Heil Hitler” salute used by the Nazis.

That was an open call—with permission overtly granted and encouraged—for MAGA devotees to embrace Nazism and the racism, violence, genocide, war, destructiveness, hatred, and oppression it espouses. This should teach us a lot about how incredibly deeply many, many whites want to hold onto privilege—and how incredibly dangerous they are.

And not to be forgotten in this are the most prominent elements of fascism involved with MAGA, as they were with Nazism and fascism in the World War II Era:

• Fascism is, as scholar Kevin Passmore points out, “quintessentially male”—male supremacist—going so far as to embody what Sebastiaan Faber calls “the cult of the male body.” Fascism makes war upon, and enslaves, women, relegating them to the status of breeding animals.

• The Nazi form of fascism was, as MAGA is, also quintessentially white supremacist—Aryan to the bottom of its soul.

  • It was virulently anti-Semitic, projecting its archetypal dark shadow onto Jews. Projection is dangerous because it allows us to take absolutely everything about ourselves that we despise, offload it onto somebody else, and then punish them for what we are doing. Anti-Semitism, like racism, is extremely psychologically convenient for people who are deliberately staying unconscious about what they need to change because it is serves their purposes to do so. The Nazis tortured, sterilized, and murdered as many as six million Jews.

  • Nazism also viciously attacked people of color. The Nazis preached the inferiority of blacks and all people of color and made war on them and on the Roma. Before World War II began in earnest, the Reich limited the work rights of blacks in Germany, then numbering 24,000. As the Weiner Holocaust Library points out:

    • “One of the most extreme pre-war actions taken against Black Germans by the Nazi authorities was the mass sterilisation of the Rhineland Children in 1937. The Rhineland Children were 600-800 children who had been born to white German women and Black French soldiers (who had occupied the Rhineland following Germany’s defeat in the First World War). In total, approximately 385 children were secretly sterilised, shortly before most of them reached adulthood.”

• The Nazi form of fascism also makes war on those who do not represent strictly heterosexual gender orientations and expressions—and it makes war on the disabled as allegedly being genetically inferior (they are not!)—and, as in all body cults, fascism feels just fine about exterminating both. The Nazi war against gays, supposedly legally protected in German society, started with the erosion of their rights and ended with brutal physical and psychological tortures to force gay men to divulge the names of their sexual partners and ended with forced castrations and their murders in concentration camp gas chambers.

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Trump’s Embodiment of Dark Tetrad Fascist Traits

Trump is the almost accidental totem and mannequin for American White Supremacist Fascism. He is not, strictly speaking, really intelligent. He just has one talent: an ability to identify and exploit the of weaknesses in a system, so his true talent is anarchy. It’s Leonard Leo who is doing the thinking.

Trump is, as we have seen in his relationship with White-Supremacist Evangelical Christofascism, willing to be told what to do so long as he gets his daily two shots of limelight combined with his five shots of raving at, humiliating, and denigrating his fellow “man”—who is often a woman.

He is accidental—or cunningly manipulative to an embarrassing degree—because he doesn’t believe any of what he’s espousing. He’s as godless a man as walks this earth. What he does express is the vicious, destructive attitude of fascism towards anything it doesn’t see in the mirror.

How many of these Dark Tetrad fascist traits has Trump exemplified? Let me count the ways:

Abuse of Women

Twenty-six women have brought legal complaints against Trump for sexual harrassment, assault, or rape. Cases pending. E. Jean Carroll won her case against Trump, who was convicted of sexual assault.

Legalized abuse of women includes the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elevating of lawyers to the Supreme Court who are challenging women’s rights to no-fault divorce and everyone’s rights to contraception (even if they’re married). We now have a Christofascist Speaker of the House, hand-picked by Trump, who says it’s every woman’s duty to have at least one child. Apparently, white women especially are not breeding fast enough for this group.

Ridicule of the Disabled

Trump mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, whose hand and arm movement on his right side is impaired due to arthrogryposis. Video from 2015 seems to indicate that Trump was indeed cruelly imitating the man.

Ridicule of Fallen Soldiers

Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. Trump dodged the draft multiple times on “medical grounds” that he had “bone spurs,” which led to his oft-cited nickname, Private Bone Spurs.

Chronic Pathological Lying

Trump told more than 30,000 verified lies during his four years in the presidency.

Racism

Trump is on film at a rally referencing an incident from the Civil Rights Movement in which blacks protestors in a Southern diner were viciously beaten during a sit-in. For Trump, it was a fond memory that engendered great nostalgia for the ability of whites in the South to just beat up any Black people anytime they stood up for themselves.

There’s more:

• From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump didn’t stop with racist acts after his 2016 election.

• Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2016 presidential campaign.

• Trump insinuated that Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s Black, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to run for vice president — a repeat of the birther conspiracy theory that he perpetuated about former President Barack Obama.

There’s more, here in a list taken largely from Dara Lind’s tally for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

• 1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to previous discrimination.

• 1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”

• 1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.

• 1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a Black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

• 1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.

• 1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”

• 2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”

• 2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a Black contestant, for being over-educated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”

• 2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”

• This Month: Trump threatens to ban all further immigration of Muslims, from anywhere, into the United States.

• Trump has accused Mexican immigrants of being criminals and rapists.

So, is Trump a Fascist? I give you the inimitable Robert Reich.

Since the last decades of the 19th^th century, those dead at the hands of Dark Tetrads number in the hundreds of millions. Their campaigns of extermination and genocide have been shot through with torture (physical and psychological), rape, amputations, mutilations, and executions made excruciating by design (note the Nazi boxcar/creosote exterminations on that one).

Counted among these monsters are Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, Nicolas Ceausescu, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Idi Amin, and Ismail Enver Pasha. There are others, worse still, and five of them warrant special dishonorable mention: King Leopold II of Belgium—Josef Stalin of the USSR—Mao Zedong of China, who may have killed more people than any human being, ever—Francisco Franco of Spain—and Adolf Hitler of Germany.

“Trump can’t achieve that here,” you say?

Sure, he can. He’s got the supermajority in the Supreme Court that the Evangelicals demanded. He’s got the House of Representatives. He’s got Aileen Cannon. He’s got 54,000 hand-picked minions across the country ready to do his bidding at every level of government the minute he’s elected. He’s got Leonard Leo and Project 2025 to think for him. Republicans are attacking the rights to vote of college students, Gen Z-ers, and Blacks through redistricting, limiting access to mail-in voting and limiting voting hours.

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And we already know he’s willing to put up fake electors, commit fraud, claim fraud where it doesn’t exist, run an election-interference RICO violation and incite an insurrection in which he hopes the Proud Boys and QAnon will overthrow the government and hang Mike Pence.

Zach Beauchamp of Vox nailed it:

Historically, the erosion of American democracy has happened subtly. In a country where democracy is basically a civic religion, politicians generally don’t announce their intention to attack it when running for office. The past decade of voter suppression laws, state-level rules explicitly designed to limit access to the ballot box, have been sold as tools for combating voter fraud. Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.

Donald Trump is currently testing the limits of that unwritten rule by all but openly campaigning on a platform of tearing democracy down.

Perhaps the clearest sign came in a speech on Veterans Day where he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Calling one’s opponents subhuman and vowing aggressive action against them is a hallmark of classical fascist rhetoric, so much so that the Washington Post’s headline — on a news article, not an opinion piece — described it as “echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini.”

They’re not wrong: Anyone familiar with Nazi propaganda can tell you that it commonly dehumanized Jews by describing us as rats or diseases. Trump has used such language more than once: Just last month, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” [a Nazi racial purity catch-phrase].

This incendiary language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda. Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests. They aim to launch mass anti-immigrant raids and detain the people he rounds up in camps. They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.

Given Trump’s track record, we should take these threats seriously. Let’s not forget that many thought it was unthinkable that Trump would attempt a kind of coup after the 2020 election. We now know that’s exactly what happened, up to and including inciting an actual riot on January 6.

There’s been a long-running debate among American political observers as to whether Trump can reasonably be described as a fascist. Between his increasingly fascist rhetoric and increasingly fascist second-term policy proposals, the debate should now be considered settled. A political leader who vows to destroy opponents he calls “vermin,” to weaponize the Justice Department against his critics, and to conduct political purges in the federal government is in fascist territory.

Trump is talking like a fascist, planning fascist policies, and staffing up with fascists. While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers. This is what happened in Hungary, and what is currently happening in India, Israel, and democracies around the world.

Beauchamp sums it up succinctly.

The fascist ideological positioning is a signal of intent: Trump is coming for American democracy. No one can say they weren’t warned.

No, they can’t.

Vote. And sign up everybody else.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/

[2] Millon, T. (2011). Disorders of personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD spectrum from normal to abnormal (Vol. 208). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons

Roald Dahl on Measles:

"Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.

'I feel all sleepy,' she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was...in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.

...I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children."

Roald Dahl, 1986

EDITOR’S NOTE: A couple of years ago, I published this article for PolitiSage subscribers on the slowdown of AMOC—the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. This is the worldwide current and series of gyres that keep the world from turning into Snowball Earth. The collapse of the AMOC happens occasionally, but (thank God) rarely, and it is normally preceded by a melting of glaciers and ice sheets that dilute the salt into the ocean, causing the “chimneys”—seven gigantic whirlpools that take warm water from the surface of the earth to the earth’s crust with such power they force the circulation of waters worldwide—to shut down.

Yesterday, the government of Iceland declared ocean circulation collapse A NATIONAL SECURITY issue. Please see this article in Reuters Sustainable (a great newsletter to subscribe to): https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/iceland-sees-security-risk-existential-threat-atlantic-ocean-currents-possible-2025-11-12/

And recent article in the Economist, an article crystallizes the panic that has been running through the scientific community in the last couple of months. Here’s their bottom line:

Those who think about national security love to bandy acronyms such as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) and WOMBAT (Weapon of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank). They need to add AMOC to the list. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is not a weapons system. But it could lay waste a continent—specifically, Europe—to an extent that only a nuclear war could outmatch.

I began my studies in meteorology as a child, taught by my brilliant father, and continued them with Dr. Carl Berman, a Woods Hole research ship’s captain and professor of meteorology at the University of Maryland. I studied oceanography with Dr. George Buckley at Harvard. He is a famed ocean diver and a former director of Woods Hole director. I hope the following will prove useful in understanding what’s going on and how serious a climate issue this is.

This article is hereby placed in the public domain by Morgaan Rhys-Davies Sinclair, Ph.D.

They are, truly, the stuff of myth and legend. Odysseus, on his journey home, encountered the monster Charybdis, whose great thirst for the sea thrice a day created a great maelstrom that consumed men and ships. Now we place this maelstrom near Messina and Scilla in the narrow strait between Italy and Sicily. It is this whirlpool in this place that proved so threatening to seafarers that it appeared not only in The Odyssey but also in the myths of Jason and the Argonauts and in the stories of the Trojan Aeneas.

But it was not these Mediterranean sea spinners that captivated earth scientists in 1970. It was the spinning of the North Atlantic maelstroms—seven huge whirlpools in the Greenland and Norwegian Seas called chimneys—that would lead to a stunning revelation filled with wonders and fears. The chimneys, scientists learned, were a part of an ocean turbine system—the northern part. The southern part is the current that circles the globe while while it circles Antarctica.

Together these currents run a global “conveyor belt” of ocean water that both cools and warms the planet—releasing excess heat near the Arctic Circle while simultaneously warding off the next ice age by keeping the world warm enough that it doesn’t freeze.

Worldwide, north and south, the circulation of the seas is slowing down. That’s trouble.

First let’s look at the whole world. This image, by German physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, shows the planet’s major ocean currents, which, combined are called Global Thermohaline Circulation. Thermo means “heat,” and saline means “salt.” The whole system runs on the density of the water that is provided by the salt (which makes it heavy) and differences in water temperature. More on that in a minute.

In this image the red flows are warm water near the oceans’ surfaces—and blue and purple lines are cold, deep waters. But the real stars of this show are the four yellow ovals—two in the extreme north and two in the extreme south. Those are the chimneys—the maelstroms that are the turbines that keep the water moving worldwide.

Where these yellow ovals are, the currents release the heat they’ve picked up traveling on the surfaces. Now, of course, they’re very near the poles, and it’s cold. Some of the water is taken up as ice—but its salts are left behind. Salt doesn’t freeze, so all the ice is made up of pure H2O (fresh water) with its salt discarded. Now all the fluid water is super-saturated with salt, making it incredibly heavy, and this dense, heavy, cold water falls by its own weight.

The chimneys begin to spin, swirling down almost two miles to the ocean floor. The water is incredibly cold. The chimneys “flip” the water in the seas—and are known as Meridional Overturning Circulations.

Now the water travels in the deep canyons near the ocean floor, but eventually it rises due to the shape of undersea terrain. Now, exposed to the sun and its salts diluted by fresher water at the surface, the currents warm. Having made a trip from the North Atlantic virtually all around the world, their last detour before heading back to the North Atlantic—a quick trip to the Gulf of Mexico—means the water arriving in the Greenland and Norwegian Seas is very warm. But here, again, the water meets the Arctic cold, its freshwater is taken up in ice (at least at some times of the year), and the remaining water, now cold and dense and salty, plunges again to the ocean floor.

So, these are the four chimneys. But they are not all created equal: it’s the sea around Antarctica that’s really running the show. It is the strongest current on earth and flows clockwise.

Double-click on the replay link below for a moving image of the Antarctica Circumpolar Current (ACC) for the last few years.

Video Credit: Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research. If you can’t get this to play (I’m having mixed results!), go to You Tube and type in FESOM CURRENTS AROUND ANTARCTICA and it’ll come right up.

The Antarctic current looks as if its flow is self-contained, that all of it is just going ‘round and ‘round in a circle. Much of it is—but not all of it.

Looking at the world from the south, you can see the circular current around the South Pole—and also how it feeds into and pushes global ocean current circulation—in three oceans.

What happens if the ACC Slows Down?

Rising global temperature, caused by carbon emissions, is melting ice caps, pouring massive quantities of fresh water into the oceans. New scientific modelling by MIT, Australian National University, and the University of New South Wales indicates that more fresh water could slow down deep water circulation more than 40 per cent by 2050 – putting it on a path towards collapse.

“Our study shows that the melting of the ice sheets has a dramatic impact on the overturning circulation that regulates Earth’s climate,” says Dr. Adele Morrison, from ACEAS and the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

With collapse of the deep current, oceans below 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) would stagnate and cause impacts for centuries, trapping nutrients in the deep ocean away from marine life near the surface. It would decimate sea life as we know it.

And it could trigger a new ice age. Hence the hyperbole about The Day After Tomorrow.

The new study’s scientific modeling is based on a “high emissions scenario” that is all too likely to continue. The melting of the polar ice sheets and the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is expected to accelerate as the planet heats up.

What Happens If Overturning Stops at Both Poles? Maybe Another Younger Dryas Period.

The Younger Dryas was a cool period between roughly 12,900 and 11,600 years ago that interrupted the warming trend in t he Northern Hemisphere at the end of the last ice age. It was a sudden, devastating climate shift. Its onset took less than 100 years, and it lasted thirteen centuries. It returned large parts of the Northern Hemisphere to ice age conditions.

So what happened?

At the end of the last ice age, the glacier over North America, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, started melting and retreating. It left behind a huge inland sea called Lake Agassiz that covered a large part of north-central North America. Rather than draining into the Mississippi River, its waters flowed into the North Atlantic in the area that is now the St. Lawrence Seaway.

As the fresh water diluted the salinity of the northern oceans, the chimneys shut down. The turbines no longer turned. There were no maelstroms to carry the cold water to the sea floor.

Global Thermohaline Circulation, at least in the North Atlantic and possibly worldwide, shut down for 1,300 years. The result was a mini-ice age in the northern climes and a slight warming in the Southern Hemisphere. Populations, human and animal, in the northern latitudes were decimated. Flora species changed dramatically all over Europe and North America. Populations at mid-latitudes began to become more nomadic, following food supplies.

When the salinity-density of North Atlantic waters recovered and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation of the chimneys began to spin again, the Younger Dryas ended even more rapidly than it began, with warming to previous temperatures taking as little as 10 months.

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If a Younger Dryas were to happen now, with populations packed tightly into urban centers with millions of people, it could kill billions of people as well as destroying unimaginable resources in flora and fauna. Mechanical and digital technologies would grind to a halt.

Both the Antarctic Circumpolar Circulation and the Global Thermohaline Circulation are slowing down. Of particular concern is the one at the bottom of the world, which has so much impact on the sea circulations of three oceans and such power to stop the flow of the nutrients that sustain sea life.

Scientists are desperately calling for immediate action to severely limit carbon emissions and to sequester as much of what is already in the atmosphere as we can.

It isn’t like scientists to be melodramatic. In invoking The Day After Tomorrow, they are sounding an alarm they feel must be heard. We are running out of time.

THE FULL ECONOMIST ARTICLE IS HERE;

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/08/14/the-shutdown-of-ocean-currents-could-freeze-europe?utm_content=ed-picks-image-link-4&etear=nl_today_4&utm_campaign=a.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=8/18/2025&utm_id=2101392

A subscription is required, but they do give folks five free articles a month. This is worth spending one of your freebies!

The hand-wringers out there keep wondering aloud what Trump’s motivation for the war against Iran could possibly be. Oh, look no further. The DOJ—which is about to be investigated by a Senate subcommittee for how it’s investigated (or hasn’t investigated) the Epstein mess—finally released the “lost” or “duplicate” files of a girl who gave evidence to the FBI about a sexual assault of her by Donald Trump when she was a teenager. She accuses Trump of forcing a sex act on her when she was as young as 13.

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NBC News summarizes as follows:

In a series of 2019 interviews with the FBI, the woman said she was a sexual assault victim of Jeffrey Epstein. She also alleged that she was assaulted by Trump in the 1980s when she was between the ages of 13 and 15.

The newly released interviews describe the allegations in detail. They include how the woman says her mother was blackmailed by Epstein and that for years after the alleged abuse from the disgraced financier, she received physical and verbal threats that she believed were directed by Epstein. She also told the FBI that Epstein “drove her and/or flew her to either New York or New Jersey” where she went to a “very tall building with huge rooms” where she said Trump sexually assaulted her, according to the FBI interview summaries.

The woman initially contacted federal law enforcement shortly after Epstein was arrested in 2019 with a lengthy description of how he assaulted her on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, when she was 13 years old in or around 1984, according to a summary of the FBI interview that was previously released by the Justice Department.

The FBI determined that the woman’s initial allegations against Epstein were significant enough that it followed up with her for three additional interviews.

This girl’s mother was subsequentlyl extorted by Epstein, to the point that to pay him — remember, he’s already raped her daughter—she embezzeled money to satisfy his demands. She would up in prison for it.

The investigation into this matter, I am reminded, was happening during Trump’s first term. Somehow, all this went quiet.

Wag the Dog

This is why Trump started the Iran war. Now, apparently convinced that there is no Nobel Peace Prize in his destiny, Trump has decided to start a war to deflect attention from a direct accusation of rape by a minor.

Not that I’m an admirer of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens over its tenure and jailed and tortured many more. I am not.

America’s Proxy War for Israel

But this is a proxy war we are fighting on Israel’s behalf. Why? What has Netanyahu got on Trump? Or is it just that AIPAC has poured so much into electing this convicted rapist that he owes them?????

Israel has already engaged in genocidal warfare in Gaza. The ICC has called its withholding of food a war crime and has indicted Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet he is welcome at the White House, despite the indictment.

Meanwhile, criticizing Israel at all often gets the speaker branded as anti-Semitic. An “Antisemitism Awareness Act” made it all through the House in 2024, by a huge margin, and it conflated criticism of Israel with racism and hatred of Jews. In 2025, the act was amended to remove that false accusation, but much damage to free speech has already been done. Universities have been threatened by Trump and fined, students have been blocked for receiving their diplomas, and protests of Israel’s abuses in Gaza—including withholding food and medicine—have been shut down, with arrests, fines, and jail time.

Now American blood is shed to fight Israel’s war against Iran for her. And the cost, other than the seven already dead and the dozens injured, many seriously?

Robert Reich:

We’re spending huge resources on this war — so far, roughly $1 billion per day, or $41,666,667 per hour, $11,574 per second.

And we are squandering materiel at a staggering rate, driving up oil prices, wrecking the Middle East, gutting shipping into the Persian Gulf, and destroying any notion that America is a trustworthy nation or a reliable partner for peace.

ALL TO TRY TO CONTROL THE NEWS CYCLE AROUND THE LATEST NEWS BUBBLING UP FROM THE EPSTEIN CESSPOOL.

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The Drapes of Wrath

Meanwhile, Trump’s press conference about the war with Iran devolved, of course, in to his usual rambling self-aggrandizement, as Paul Krugman points out:

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman

Trump just held a press conference about war with Iran, and spent much of it talking about drapes and his ballroom. I guess those are the drapes of wrath???

And as a parting note of misery, Trump is acknowledging that Jared Kushner talked him into going to war. This would be Jared Kushner who wants to build a luxury resort down the Gaza coast and who chums up with Prince Salman of Saudi Arabia and whose father, a former jailbird, Trump made an ambassador, and who is married to Ivanka. Kushner is now negotiating with Iran.

Constitutional scholars point out that this is illegal.

Quel surprise!

And there’s more …

After this girl, who was trafficked to Trump at age 13, the FBI interviewed her four times, and her details all checked out. Pam Bondi didn’t turn over three of the four FBI encounters. If these allegations are correct, Trump should be in prison for rape and impeached immediately.

It was to smokescreen the information Judd the Brilliant releases in this article that Trump went to war with Iran, not that the mullahs don’t have it coming, but not this way.

Trump’s treatment of this girl should render him impeached and land him in jail—and Pam Bondi with him.

Popular Information

Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor: what we know and what’s still being hidden

President Trump allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein, according to documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursd…

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2 months ago · 159 likes · 6 comments · Judd Legum

Please follow Judd Legum at Popular Information right here: https://substack.com/@juddlegum

He was always the front-runner. Close to his father for three decades, in part driving his father’s policies to every more brutal, punishing, and repressive levels, he has always done just one thing: he has made matters worse for the Iranian people.

First, a few pertinent things:

• In the Israeli bombing of the late Ali Khomenei’s compound, his father was killed, his mother was killed, his own wife was killed, and one of his sons was killed. That is going to make him much more dangerous than he was before, for now there is blood vengeance involved.

• Note the black hat. That indicates he is descended DIRECTLY from the Prophet Mohammad. This gives him tremendous status in the country.

• He is an imam, but not one of stature. His father wasn’t, either. Mojtaba does teach at Qom seminary, but still, he is no great Islamic philosopher or religious authority. The Ayatollah Khomeini, who designed and pulled off the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, had the highest ranking of any Shi’a cleric in history. Mojtaba, like his father, is theologically weak.

• 0He’s got a lots and lots and lots of blood on his hands. During the 2009 protest cycle, the most serious since the revolution before the Mahsa Amini protests began, he ran the Basij, the on-the-streets secret police that rounded people up, tortured them, and killed them. This is the time in which he gained a reputation for brutality that surpassed even that of his father.

How will this shake out in Iran?

It’s suicide—unless Iran has multiple functioning nuclear weapons right now.

But they probably don’t. But Iran cannot win against Israel and the United States, though this is a thoroughly illegitimate war.

What it does mean is that the Iranian people have a targeted painted on them that’s got a tighter bullseye than before, and a better weapon than before, because Mojtaba Khomenei loves tracking people through devices and the Internet and newspaper photos—of which there have been plenty—and they will die.

Mojtaba has been interwoven into IRGC for decades.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was formed by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, just after the Iranian Revolution, to ensure internal allegiance and obeisance to the Islamic state. It grew into the hydra that has been running Iran absent a Supreme Leader for the last week.

After Ali Khomenei came to power, he started appointing many Revolutionary Guard commanders to top political positions, thus blurring the line between military and civilian authority. Writes Al Jazeera:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, Ali Ardeshir Larijani, the secretary of the supreme council of national security, Ezzatolah Zarghami, the head of state television and radio services, Mohsen Rezai, the secretary of the expediency council, and Mohammad Forouzandeh, the head of the Mostazafan Foundation, are all former members of the IRGC who were appointed by Khamenei.

Since 2000, the Revolutionary Guards have become the dominant group in economic, political, defense policy, and Iran’s nuclear program.

The Guards’ emergence was already apparent during the administration of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, when they sought to block Khatami’s supporters from political power and ascendency.

Between 2003 and 2004, more Revolutionary Guards officers saw their way into local and national politics and the IRGC acquired all the trappings of a state within a state, effectively creating a garrison state in Iran.

The Exploding Economic Power of the IRGC—and Khomenei

By 2005, the Guards had come to oversee many economic sectors, including oil, construction, agriculture, mining, transport, the defense industry and import-export companies.

The Guards were also thought to control much of Iran’s business interests in Dubai, where some 9,000 Iranian businesses were registered and 400,000 Iranian nationals constituted a quarter of Dubai’s resident population. [Just take heed on this.]

And speaking of money, Mojtaba Khamenei is widely believed to control significant financial assets in banks such as Bank Ayandeh. Bloomberg:

A year-long investigation by Bloomberg, citing assessments from people familiar with the matter, reported in January 2026 that Khamenei is linked to an offshore financial network used to hold and move assets outside Iran. The reported holdings include high-value real estate in London and Dubai, as well as interests connected to shipping, banking relationships, and hospitality assets in Europe. According to the investigation, the assets were generally not held in Khamenei’s name but structured through intermediaries and layered corporate entities across multiple jurisdictions. Some of these assets have since been sold or restructured amid increased scrutiny.

Not his father’s choice

Ali Khomenei did not want his son Mojtaba to be Supreme Leader after his death. His choice seems to have been Arafi, who, though still purple-edged conservative, appears not to be the butcher Mojtaba is.

Nor does he sit well with the Khatami, the children of Ayatollah Khomeini, who felt that the Iranian regime was becoming too conservative in taking women’s rights, or even the craven Hashemi Rafsanjani, who speaks untruth with both sides of his mouth. Nor does it sit well with Reza Pahlavi, who wants his father’s throne back, nor with Iranian politician and physician President Masoud Pezeshkian, just pilloried for apologizing to bombed Arab states. He will not last long, nor likely live long.

The bottom line is that now, for the Iranian people and for everyone but Vladimir Putin and the Chinese, matters will be worse.

The announcement on the Thames Valley Police website is terse and to the point.

Thames Valley Police has opened an investigation into the offence of misconduct in public office. As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2), at approximately 8am, arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. …

Assistant Chief Constable Oliver Wright said: “Following a thorough assessment, we have now opened an investigation into this allegation of misconduct in public office.”

Notes to Editors

In UK law, an arrest requires police to have reasonable grounds to suspect an offence has taken place and reasonable grounds for believing that it is necessary to arrest the person in question. … Thames Valley Police will not be making any further statement at this time and will not be holding a press conference or conducting any media interviews in relation to this investigation.

This is not an arrest in response to the endless accusations against Andrew for the sexual abuse of minors and participation in a known sexual-trafficking cult run by Jeffrey Epstein. Neither it is an attribution of suspicion of involvement in Epstein’s use of trafficking pedophilia in the control of powerful international figures by threats of extortion.

Instead, this is about how Andrew misused his position as trade envoy for the UK, from 2001 - 2011, in a way that is, in fact, treason.

Found in the tranche of Epstein records we have had to squeeze out of Pam Bondi by sheer force of public will, is a damning series of emails showing Andrew forwarding privileged UK state information to Epstein.

CBS News summarizes the information in the Epstein files in relation to this crime as follows:

One email thread shows that after he traveled to Asia, on Nov. 30, 2010, Mountbatten-Windsor forwarded official reports on his visits, sent to him by his then-special adviser Amit Patel, to Epstein, just minutes after he received them. There was no message from the then-prince to Epstein accompanying the forwarded message.

Another email exchange between the men the following month appears to show Mountbatten-Windsor sharing files he describes as “a confidential brief” on potential investment opportunities in southern Afghanistan, where British forces were based at the time.

If Andrew is found guilty of having done this, the penalty is life in prison, and King Charles—who’s been furious over this stuff for a decade while Queen Elizabeth II covered for her favorite son with the rest of the family until she was forced to limit his activities in 2019—is now openly throwing his brother to the wolves, which, in fact, Andrew richly deserves.

NBC New reports:

[King] Charles [III] said there must be a “full, fair and proper” investigation into Mountbatten-Windsor. …

“Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” Charles said, adding that the investigation would have “our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.” Meanwhile, he added, “my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all. Charles R.”

Charles may try to distance the royal family from this disaster, but it could mean the end of the 1,000-year Windsor dynasty if not the monarchy altogether. In 1983, 85% of Britons felt the royal family was integral to British identity. Last year the percentage had dropped to just over half, at 51%.

Note above that the Thames Valley Police do NOT make an arrest in these matters unless they’re virtually certain they can get a conviction.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been released on bail.

Still to come, possibly, will be charges against Mandelson, who lied to British Prime Minister Kier Starmer about his involvement with Epstein, and Starmer believed him, only to be proved wrong by the Epstein files. Meanwhile, Starmer has called on the crown to force Andrew to testify in the United States against Epstein associates.

And that brings us to …

In the Epstein files, Trump is mentioned 1,100 times more frequently than Andrew …

P.S. Ghislaine sent a message to Trump last week telling him to hose down Pam Bondi before she destroys everyone.

‘Nuff said.

RAINN stands for Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. They gather, analyze and report data on sexual abuse of both men and women at all ages. The short version of a huge database of information shows this information, directly from RAINN:

Gender Disparities in Sexual Violence

RAINN data shows females have a higher rate of sexual violence than men and boys. 1 out of every 6 females in the U.S. has been the victim of attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Girls and young women between 10 and 16 are four times as likely than the general population to be victims of sexual violence. 1 in 33 men has experienced attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, and 1 in every 10 rape victims is male.

Risk Factors Associated with Sexual Violence

Certain risk factors are associated with being a victim or survivor of sexual assault. These include having an intellectual disability, being part of an LGBTQ+ community, experiencing homelessness, among other influences.

So what do we have here?1 We have sexual predators encouraged to come to an island, existing essentially outside the law where they could rape females in this age group — and with everybody this age group it’s at least statutory rape — outside any possible grasp of the law.

This “honey pot” trap to extort control, access, money, influence and possible Russian blackmail (Putin almost certainly involved) ran on the trafficking and exploitation of young girls. And Epstein put together his “stable” of girls in exactly the age group that attracts most predators, who are interested in two things: sex and obedience, exactly what Andrew Tate is saying is owed to him. And Epstein, who totally controlled these girls, provided both.

Epstein Planned Meeting with “All the Trump Boys” in Palm Beach in January of 2017.

OK Magazine notes that the latest tranche of Epstein files contains an email from Epstein to biotech venture capitalist Boris Nikolic, a back-channel communicator for Vladimir Putin:

“When are you back in NYC?” Nikolic wrote in an email dated Sunday, December 26, 2016, at 8:13 p.m.

“4th i’m in palm with all the trump boys. . = fun,” Epstein wrote in response only two minutes later.

Nikolic, who was named “successor executor” by Epstein in his will just two days before his death, replied, “Have fun!! Hope to see you on the 4th. I leave for SF on the 5th.”

https://okmagazine.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-planned-see-trump-boys-2016-emails-contradict-friendship-timeline/

Now, let’s see the remaining 3 million records the Justice Department is still holding against a direct order of Congress.

I hope Bondi feels OK with stripes as a permanent part of her wardrobe.

Donald Trump was on a social-media tear last night, and the worst political bottom-dweller of all time found himself a brand new subterranean low, re-posting a horribly sleazy, racist video portraying Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys.

During this dirty soul-baring, Trump repeats lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him by claiming that the Dominion Voting Systems machines were rigged to help Joe Biden win the presidency, a claim touted by Fox News. Fox was found liable for the lies in court. They paid Dominion $787.5 million in damages and publicly admitted to having knowingly propagated a false claim.

But that “truth-willed-out” doesn’t stop Trump for continuing to spread the lie to a more than willing group of hard-core believers continuing to clutch their Trump bibles, buy red hats, and Trump bitcoins. Soon they’ll be getting their meds from Trump Pharmacies. Trump’s shakedown/cash-in now totals more than $4,000,000,000. Not bad for a year’s work, huh?

After lying about the voting machines (again), he pushes No. 46 in his list of massively egotistical self-aggrandizements: that he deserves his face to up there on Mt. Rushmore alongside Teddy Roosevelt, Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. No, Mr. Trump, you do not.

But by far, the piece de resistance was his brief, but indelible, image of the heads of Barack and Michelle Obama on the bodies of monkeys. There is no more hideous racist trope regarding blacks than this: equating them to animals, sub-human, animalistic.

The Times notes:

The office of Gavin Newsom, the California governor who is a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, condemned the post. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” Newsom’s press office account posted on X.

Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser and close confidant of President Obama, also condemned the imagery.

I’m with Ben Rhodes. I’m now keeping a list of the buildings, projects, renovated places that will need to be torn down and healed when Trump is gone:

• The East Wing of the White House

• The barf white-and-gold “ballroom” (if built)

• The “Trump Arch” if built

• The Kennedy Center, which Trump plans to “renovate” because his name’s being associated with it has turned off the majority of great musicians in any genre on this planet.

It he gets his sticky little paws on Mt. Rushmore, I think there’ll be an extraordinary outcry. As there should be.

Meanwhile, here’s Nate Silver’s latest aggregate on Trump’s approval, and if he’s doing this kind of thing in the middle of the night, somebody out to take that cell phone away from him.

Meanwhile, I’ll give Ben Rhodes the last word:

“Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history,” he wrote on X.

Too right.