Demolition Noir, Studio City, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair
“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.”
– Norman Mailer
+ I don’t always read Heather Cox Richardson (because, frankly, one can hardly keep up with her, given that dishes need to be washed, the grass needs to be cut, the dog needs to be walked, a baseball game needs to be watched), but this pretty accurately sums up the current mental state of the person running our country…
Over the course of three hours last night, he posted on social media fifty-five times. Those posts accused a number of those Trump considers his personal enemies, including former president Barack Obama, of treason…reposted a fake quotation from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) accusing Obama of making a personal fortune of $120 million from the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare…. He posted an AI image of Obama, Biden, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) apparently swimming in a filthy version of the reflecting pool with the caption: “Dumacrats Love Sewage.” Then he posted an image of himself on the $100 bill. And then he was back to calling House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) “Low IQ.”
After posting a number of AI images showing the U.S. military destroying the Iranian military, Trump posted: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”
Then he posted an image of a map with Venezuela overlaid with the U.S. flag. The caption read: “51st State.
And who is it that’s assembling and writing most of these deranged late-night social media posts for Trump? Natalie Harp, who looks as if she walked right out of Trump Central Casting: blonde, svelte, an adoring supplicant to Trump’s divinity on Earth. She’ll probably have an absolutely fabulous second career as a Fox News anchorette.
To the mounting frustration of White House Chief of Staff Suzy Wiles, who has to clean up the mid-morning damage inflicted by these after-hours rants, Harp answers to no one at the White House other than Trump, who very personally approves each post.
+ Trump and his late-night social media helper, Natalie Harp, on a Marine One flight. Harp is the person who presented Trump with the Obamas as apes video and Trump as Jesus meme for posting on Truth Social...(I had to scroll through about 15 seconds in the video clip of Trump’s excitedly nodding head to capture that revelatory smile on Harp’s face.)
+ As for Wiles, she appears to be slowly being driven mad by her duties keeping the Oval Office running. These are the eyes of someone you wouldn’t want to ride alone with on an elevator in a Brian DePalma movie…
+++
+ Just five companies–Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Broadcom and Apple–have accounted for half the S&P 500’s market gains since April…
+ As Wall Street is propped up by the flood private equity money into AI companies that want to replace human jobs with software and robots and health care companies servicing at astronomical prices an aging, sick and dying population, the real economy sucks at almost every measure, even that most American of obsessions (aside from guns) cars: in the first months of 2026, 30% of car buyers tradied in vehicles that were “underwater,” according to the Wall Street Journal, owing more on their loans than the car is worth, with an average gap of over $7,000.
+ Housing Market on the Brink: Home sellers now outnumber buyers by 630,000, the largest gap in US history. At the same time, home foreclosures have climbed by 18% over last year, with banks repossessing 42,000 homes a month.
+ This might seem dire, but on the other hand, the Wall Street Journal reports that the number of homes which sold for more than $100 million in the US has hit a new high. What does a $100 million home look like in these days of Trumpflation, something like this, perhaps?
Morgantown, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ $109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It’s the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.
+ One of the greatest cons of American-style capitalism is beginning to crumble right here in the land of the protestant work ethic: In 2016, 67% of Americans agreed that most people can get ahead if they are just willing to work hard. Today, it’s 47%, in a new CNN poll, and free-falling. Is it any wonder? According to Harper’s, the average amount that a U.S. WORKER has saved for retirement is $955.
Poll by CNN.
The Consumer Price Index rose by 3.8% in April, driven largely by gas prices, which shot up by 28% last month. Food prices climbed by 3.2%.
+ Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit, on the soaring inflation numbers in the latest Consumer Price Index report:
Inflation is the key drag on the U.S. economy now. This is hurting Americans. There is a real financial squeeze underway. For the first time in three years, inflation is eating up all wage gains. This is a setback for middle-class and lower-income households and they know it.
+ AOC: “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that’s unheard of. You can’t earn a billion dollars, right? You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than they’re worth. But you can’t earn that. So you have to create a myth of earning it.”
+ The Financial Times reports that Amazon employees are “doing random unnecessary task automations to consume tokens and to show their bosses [who will soon be AI bots themselves, presumably] that they’re using AI more.”
+ As homelessness increases here in Portland and sleeping on the streets becomes criminalized, the city is set to close 450 shelter beds.
+ John Lancaster in the LRB on the world’s third biggest business, money laundering:
If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big? Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.
+++
+ The models for the Super El Niño keep getting more extreme. The estimates for peak warming have increased by 0.5 °C in the last two weeks. There are now models showing off-the-chart warming of 4.3C (7F) above normal
+ With a super-charged El Niño and increasingly desperate political actors like Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, it has all the ingredients for a very bloody year… A study of hundreds of armed conflicts around the world finds that El Niño raises the risk of violent clashes.
+ Nearly a quarter of the games in this summer’s World Cup will be played under hazardous heat conditions, caused by climate change and the developing El Niño in the Pacific, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution, a climate modeling organization based in London. Five matches will likely be played when the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) is at or above 28° C. WBGT is a measure of what heat actually feels like to humans, factoring in air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and radiant heat. A WBGT of 28° C is a level of heat stress at which the Federation of Professional Footballers’ Associations recommends that matches be postponed. Despite nearly a decade to prepare, at least two stadiums–Miami and Kansas City–don’t have air conditioning or other kinds of cooling infrastructure. “Our findings show conditions associated with these physiological heat-stress conditions have now become more likely and more intense than during the previous World Cup,” Joyce Kimutai, a research associate in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College in London, told Scientific American. “These changes are confidently attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”
+ Largely as a consequence of climate-driven droughts and intensive storms, water utility bills are rising across the country at twice the rate of inflation.
+ While the Tech-arcy and Trump keep pushing nuclear power as the energy source of the future, it’s renewables that are making the real gains on the ground…
+ This is the only snow we’ve received in a year and it’s cottonwood fluff…
I leave it to do its thing, but one of our tidy-yard-obsessed neighbors has taken to burning it off with something resembling a flamethrower, putting the entire canyon at imminent risk of immolation.
+ According to a Pro Publica investigation, the Trump Administration exempted the biggest polluters in the country from compliance with the Clean Air Act. How’d they achieve these exemptions? They simply sent an email requesting it.
+ The American Lung Association reports that almost half of Americans, 152.3 million people, now live in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution, two of the most harmful air pollutants.
+ From January through April, record-breaking wildfires swept across Asia and Africa, inflicting unprecedented levels of damage, according to the World Weather Attribution site. Conditions are expected to worsen dramatically in the northern hemisphere, as the super El Niño begins to dominate weather systems.
+ An Australian court has ordered the mining conglomerate Fortescue to pay $108 million in compensatory fines to an indigenous tribe, as reparations for lost cultural and archaeological value from operating an iron ore mine on their land without permission.
+ Water levels in the Euphrates River have dropped to record lows, leading Christian believers in the opaque prophecies of the Book of Revelation to conclude that the end times are finally approaching. If the Bible predicts it and it comes to pass, it’s a sign of Armageddon. If scientists predict it and it comes to pass, it’s just a slight change in the weather…
+ WSJ on monkey business: “The macaques steal belongings to use as currency to trade with humans for food. Some monkeys can distinguish between objects we highly value (smartphones, prescription glasses, wallets) and those we don’t…and will barter accordingly.”
+++
+ The odds of having dementia at age 85 were close to 1-in-3 in the 80s; they’ve now dropped to 1-in-10. Good news, right? So then, do you explain the US being governed by two presidents in a row with dementia (and three of the last seven, with one village idiot thrown in for good measure)? Just our luck? Or do Americans prefer it that way?
+ Trump nodded off during a press event in the Oval Office again. This time, while a doctor was discussing maternal mortality in the US…
+ As Trump snoozed, RFK J took the opportunity to blurt out his Strangelovian views on the sperm-count gap: “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today! We are approaching the CATACLYSMIC rates that Japan and China are now experiencing, that is threatening their economy. It’s a threat not only to our economy, to our national security.” Look at the facial reaction of the woman on the far left.
+ A faked assassination attempt that 25% of the country immediately suspects is fake defeats the point of faking an assassination attempt, doesn’t it, but is probably the kind of fake assassination attempt a Trump operation would ineptly fake: “About 1 in 4 say the correspondents’ dinner shooting was staged, the poll found, including roughly a third of Democrats, as conspiracy theories spread widely online.”
+ Here’s Trump telling another variation on his “neurotic, fat slob, billionaire” friend and the “fat shot” story, this time in front of the Medicine Show carny barker, “Dr. Oz”, and a bunch of women health care workers, who laugh nervously as Trump disses out insults about his anonymous “friend”.
I want to tell you, there’s this famous guy, he’s begging me not to release his name. He’s highly neurotic, very fat, sort of a fat slob, I’d call him…And he’s a brilliant guy, actually. He said, Mr. President, what the hell’s going on here? He didn’t need the money. He’s rich as hell. He couldn’t understand why he had to pay so little in London. He went to London and he couldn’t understand it. He said this is crazy.
+ No matter how many times you’ve heard this stupid, insulting story, if you’re part of Trump’s retinue, you have to laugh like it’s the first time, or the next day he’ll be telling an even more degrading fable about you.
+ Trump claimed his project of painting the reflecting pools on the Mall “American flag blue” would cost $1.8 million. The cost has now swelled to $13.1 million. Another case of Trimpflation. He is the King Midas of cost-overruns. Everything he touches becomes more expensive.
+ The market monitoring site Unusual Whales reports that Donald Trump bought millions in stocks during the Iran war-related declines in the market, which the site claims resulted in “unusually large gains.” Among the stocks Trump quietly took large positions in this spring was Dell Computer. On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock and another $15 thousand to $50 thousand worth in March. Then, on May 8, Trump told Americans to “Go out and buy Dell,” a company in which he now owned millions worth of stock.
Chart of Trump stock trades during the Iran War by Unusual Whales.
+ The most recent polling among Republicans shows Marco Rubio trouncing JD Vance and Ron DeSantis. JD’s a creep, who even creeps don’t like. But the rise of Rubio indicates that MAGA is over its isolationism and is primed for some good, old-fashioned American interventionism…
Rubio: 45.4%
Vance: 29.6%
DeSantis: 11.2%(AtlasIntel poll)
+ Vance is so unpopular with Republicans that an Iowa lobbyist with ties to Governor Kim Reynolds and the ethanol industry was caught offering $100 cash payments for people to attend JD Vance’s Des Moines rally this week. They were so desperate to find people willing to go hear Vance that they also offered bonuses for referrals.
+ Andrew Cockburn on the ever-dwindling JD Vance:
I’m reliably informed that in recent weeks, Trump has asked one of his lawyers, “Can I fire Vance?” The lawyer explained that such an initiative faced insurmountable constitutional difficulties, and would be unlikely to succeed. This should not be read as evidence of Trump’s dementia, a likely reaction from the Democrat commentariat, because it was clearly not a serious question. Even Trump understands perfectly well that he can’t fire the Vice President, but he can torture him.
+ The same poll that shows Rubio with a big lead among Republicans has AOC atop the rather anemic Democratic field for the first time…
AOC 26%
Mayor Petebot 22.4%
Newsom 21.2%
Harris 12.9%
No other Democrat polled in double digits.
+ Gerontocracy Update: Frederica Wilson, the 83-year-old Democratic congresswoman from Florida, hasn’t cast a vote in nearly a month. Her office has offered no explanation for why she’s been AWOL, missing at least 43 House votes. If the Democrats somehow win back the House in November, they may quickly lose it again as eight members who are more than 80-years-old are currently running for reelection.
+++
+ Like many of the rest of you, I suppose, I’ve been thinking a lot about Cuba since Trump and Rubio began starving the little island of oil, as their predecessors, back to JFK, had starved it almost all other forms of trade, and are now threatening an invasion. It struck me how much revolutionary Cuba is admired by almost all colonized people on the planet (excepting some rigidly doctrinaire Marxists who continue to profess the Cuban revolution, along with the Nicaraguan and Zapatistan, was “premature”). I was reminded of wandering the streets of Cardiff a couple of years ago and coming across this restaurant…
The Welsh know what it’s like to be under the boot of an imperial power for centuries and venerate Cuba, as they once did the US, for freeing its people from their colonizer’s yoke and setting an example for the world’s poor and exploited. Let’s hope some of these countries come to Cuba’s aid and defense when it needs it most, as Cuba (and its doctors, nurses, civil engineers and military advisors) has gone to the aid of others.
+ A new YouGov poll shows that Americans oppose a war with Cuba by a margin of 65% to 15% and that two-thirds believe Trump’s war on Iran has harmed the US’s standing in the world.
+ The economic war on Cuba, which has been going on in one form or another for more than six decades, has increasingly become a war waged on Cuban children. Since Trump and Biden reimposed and broadly extended the economic sanctions and embargo on Cuba that Obama had eased, Cuba’s infant mortality rate, which in 2008 was lower than that of the US, has risen by 148 percent. This is infanticide committed through a policy of economic strangulation.
Chart by Robert A. Pape.
+ Robert Pape, University of Chicago:
With Iran rejecting Trump’s proposal, Trump’s Iran strategy has entered the danger zone:
Stage 1: Bombing
Stage 2: Iran controls Hormuz
Now Washington faces the real choice:
Stage 3 → escalation & possible ground war
or
Stage 4 → Iran emerges as a new center of global power
For Americans, this now means casualties OR $6–8 gas for months.
+ In response to a question about oil prices, Trump said the closing of the Strait of Hormuz is a “thing of genius” because people and countries and companies are now buying oil from Texas, Louisiana and Alaska:
“As soon as this is over, with, uh, Iran, as soon as this is over, you’re going to see gasoline and oil drop like a rock. I mean, already, look, just on the basis of, uh, you know, things have happened. It’s going to be dropping down like a rock. When it first came about, 20 percent of the oil came out of Hormuz. That’s a lot. But, you know, with time, they’re going to Texas, they’re going to Louisiana, they’re going to Alaska, a lot of Alaska. Alaska is, you know, it seems like very far away from Asia, but it’s actually a relatively short trip, in comparison to other locations they have to go to to get oil. They’re going to Alaska. In fact, the big problem is they’re building bigger docks, docking docks, you know, to fill up. We’ve become very big on the filling stations. We’re a big filling station. What happened is, when people first heard about losing Hormoz [sic], they said oh…But it’s genius. They’re finding other locations. And some of those people, I spoke to them, those countries, some of those countries and people are going to continue to go to Texas. They like it better. They said it’s an extra 45 minutes. They like it better. And, it’s sort of amazing, you know. So a lot of people thought oil would go to $250 to $300. It’s not. Today it’s less than $100 [Brent crude is selling for $104 a barrel today]. Think of that!”
+ Trump says that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been a “thing of genius” and great for the oil industry. The CEO of Saudi Aramco, Amin Nasser, sees things a little differently: “The energy supply shock is the largest ever experienced. If the current disruptions continue at this rate, the market will lose around 100 million barrels of oil every week the Strait remains closed.”
+ Trump blamed the Kurds, who have been burned by the US one too many times, for failing to bail him out of the Iran quagmire he walked into and can’t find his way out of…
The Iranian [people] want to go out on the streets. They have no weapons. They have no guns. We thought the Kurds were going to give [them] weapons, but the Kurds disappointed us. The Kurds take, take, take… I’m very disappointed in the Kurds.
+ According to internal US intelligence reports leaked to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Iran has
+ repaired to operational condition 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz
+ still maintains around 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile and mobile launchers
+ and 90% of its underground missile storage and launch facilities are “partially or fully operational.”
+ The ongoing leaks about how Trump ignored pre-war warnings about the likelihood of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and successfully counter-attacking US forces and allies in the region have so enraged the president that he’s ordered his team of White House plumbers to hunt down the leakers and go after the reporters who published the damning information contained in the leaks. This week, the Justice Department served subpoenas on the Wall Street Journal, demanding that its reporters surrender demand records from Journal reporters relating to a Feb. 23 article disclosing that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top figures at the Pentagon had warned Trump about the risks of an extended military operation against Iran.
Screengrab from CSPAN coverage of the Senate hearing on the Iran War.
+ You know Trump’s in trouble when he’s lost his most obsequious sycophant, Lindsey Graham, who blasted Pete Hegseth and Gen. Caine this week after getting a bunch of bullshit non-answers during a Senate hearing on Iran: “No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere!” (Of course, losing Graham isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since he wants Trump to nuke Iran. So, let’s hope it continues to “go nowhere.”)
+ John Culver, 35-year CIA veteran, and old China hand: “The Chinese have a very dark portrait of the United States as a global hegemon that’s declining in power and becoming more violent as it tries to cling to its primacy.” The portrait may be dark, but it’s also disturbingly accurate, almost to the point of mimesis.
+ A UN report estimates that armed drones killed at least 880 civilians in Sudan during the first four months of 2026. These deaths account for more than 80% of all conflict-related civilian fatalities in Sudan’s civil war.
+ For decades, Israel has used sexual humiliation and rape as a systematic form of torture against Palestinians and it’s gotten even worse since October 7, 2023. Give credit to Nicolas Kristof for finally writing about it in the New York Times and even more credit to the Palestinians who dared to speak publicly about the vile crimes committed against them by Israeli soldiers, prison guards and interrogators.
+ As Israel threatens to sue the New York Times over Kristof’s piece on the systematic rape of Palestinian detainees, French authorities are investigating the Israeli psy-ops firm, Black Core, for meddling in France’s March elections by launching political smears and disinformation campaigns against left-wing candidates from the France Unbowed party–pretty much a daily (if not hourly) occurrence here in the Land of the Free, though often internalized inside the heads of fully-automatized American politicians themselves. See below…
+ In an interview with Nick Gillespie of Reason, Sen. John Fetterman says Trump’s Iran war is a “noble cause,” that it’s worth higher gas prices to “ just hold Iran regime accountable,” that the Democratic Party has become “anti-Semitic” and “anti-American,” and that he regrets his vote to eliminate the filibuster. Here are some of the low (very low) highlights…
“Yeah, it’s real expensive for America right now, but that’s a noble cause to just hold Iran regime accountable for the mass chaos, murder, and destruction that they’ve underwritten for decades…”
“…I do think there’s a security issue for now as an American. And that’s why it counts a lot more than just because it’s more expensive for gas right now.”
“The same people who were outraged, outraged about the war in Gaza, they gave no fucks about Iran executing 30,000, 40,000 of its young people there…”
“..It’s because the rifles weren’t in the hands of, they weren’t in Jewish hands. You know, it’s like I don’t, I really, I don’t care. But that’s—antisemitism…The indoctrination that’s what’s occurred, you know, in our American universities…overall. So without a doubt, my party’s become intensely anti-Israel.”
“I mean, in 2016, it was much more about the minimum wage and some other very basic kinds of things. And now that’s just turned into much more standing with Cuba, standing with Venezuela, standing with the Iranian regime, and turned that into much more— becoming more increasingly anti-American, for me. So my views really haven’t changed that much…”
“Look at some of the views now that people are espousing. So it’s moving more and more in socialism and communism. I mean, in Maine, for example, Graham Platner, he’s an avowed communist. He described himself as a communist. Antifa, that’s not a slur for me. That’s not, GOP kinds of hit. That’s his own words, how he described that…”
+ Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, Cory Booker was asked if he’d vote to approve future arms sales to Israel, despite the genocide in Gaza, the use of phosphorus weapons against civilians in southern Lebanon and the targeting of civilians in Iran. Booker didn’t hesitate: “We have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.”
+++
+ Bloomberg News: “Canada is increasingly acting like the EU’s 28th state.” Don’t worry, Canada may no longer be available for acquisition, but Trump told Fox News’ John Roberts he is seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, citing the country’s “$40 trillion in oil reserves.” Trump brayed that “Venezuela loves Trump.”
Joel Webbon. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
+ MAGA pastor Joel Webbon is calling for the complete “demolition” of Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary. Why? Because he claims Vivek’s a lying, deceiving, polytheistic, idol-worshipping Hindu anchor baby. Got it?
If he becomes the governor of Ohio, you will have solidified Vivek’s political career for the rest of his life in America. He’s not going away. This is the chance to say, “Nah, never, ever. Go back home. Get out of our country. You were born in America, sure, by days. Your dad hates our country. He never took the time to become a citizen. You’re an anchor baby. Your family built their wealth by robbing white people with miracle drugs that you knew were not going to become viable. You became a billionaire. You paid your way onto every podcast. You’ve been lying. You’ve been deceiving. And this is not American. You are not an American. You are a Hindu. You are a polytheist. You are a false Idol worshipper. Go home. Get out of our country. I don’t care about you quoting Thomas Jefferson. I don’t care about you pretending to honor the founders. This is America. We wear shoes in this country. We eat beef in this country. We worship Christ exclusively in this country. We don’t rob people of their wealth in this country. Get the hell out.
+ If Trump ever fires Stephen Miller, who is allegedly in the dog house, he’ll probably replace him with this guy. Or maybe he’ll put him on the Supreme Court when Thomas or Alito hangs it up…
+ Speaking of false idols…
Rev. Burns saying that the 22-foot golden statue of Trump he unveiled at Trump’s Doral country club isn’t a “golden calf” is the evangelical equivalent of Delaware Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell saying, “I am not a witch.”
+ Go down, Moses…
Exodus, 32
1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses, who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.”
3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron.
4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods,[b] Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”
6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.
8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’
9 “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.
10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.
+ About that not robbing people of their wealth…
+ More than 590,000 people paid $59 million for the Trump Gold Phone since it was first announced in August 2025. A year later, not a single phone has shipped. They may never ship. The buyers may never get a phone or a refund.
According to MoneyWise,
Trump Mobile quietly updated its Preorder Deposit Terms and Conditions (5) on April 6, 2026. At the time of writing, the terms and conditions read: “A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.”
The terms also add that a binding sales contract is formed not only if customers complete checkout, submit full payment and Trump accepts and successfully processes that payment, but also if “Trump Mobile makes the Device available for sale,” adding that there’s “no guarantee of release, delivery, or timing.”
This is how the Trumps treat their most devoted cult members. Jim Jones was more egalitarian.
+ Kevin Webb: “As PT Barnum said, ‘There’s a Trump supporter born every minute.’”
+ Trump’s hyper-macho Border Patrol chief, Mike Banks, resigned abruptly on Thursday, after reports in the Washington Examiner that he regularly paid for sex with prostitutes during trips to Colombia and Thailand over more than a decade, and bragged about his illicit assignations to colleagues. After resigning, Banks told Fox News that he felt he’d “got the ship back on course.”
+ Tommy Tuberville, the senator from Alabama who apparently lives in Florida, brings his xenophobic, ethnic cleansing ideology to the floor of the US Senate…
+ The Lever reported this week that ICE contractor Edge Ops, LLC, which was awarded a $12 million no-bid contract for surveillance to track the daily routines and locations of immigrants, appears to have made up its list of executives, partnerships and testimonials from clients.
+ Thomas Nagel on the futility and barbarity of criminal punishment:
Whether the causal order of nature is deterministic or partly random, people do not create themselves. So how can it make sense to blame them for what they do? Punishment makes sense only as a deterrent, not as retribution, and feelings of condemnation and resentment towards a criminal are as out of place as they would be towards a tiger.
+ According to a report in the LA Times, an “expeditionary force” of the LAPD used to routinely stop travelers at the state line and prohibit entry into the state merely because the people, almost all of them US citizens, showed “hints of poverty,” meaning they were usually black, Hispanic or Okies. “The officers took our fingerprints, wrote detailed descriptions of our clothing and baggage and asked us many questions,” James Taylor, a longtime Californian detained in the small town of Hornbrook on the Oregon border, told the Medford Mail Tribune. “As each was questioned, the policemen made frequent motions as if to strike us with blackjacks.” The cops called it the “Bum Blockade.”
+ What racist cops in Eugene, Oregon, talk about when they talk about doing violence to people, even their own spouses…
+++
+ Jonathan Reiner, MD, cardiac surgeon and professor at GW School of Medicine:
Makary is out [at FDA]. Now the US has no CDC Director, no FDA Commissioner, and no Surgeon General. And the NIH Director, who is also de facto acting CDC Director, never trained in Medicine. During this hantavirus outbreak, the US needs steady public health leadership and an authoritative voice to the American people. There currently is no one to fill that role.
+ It’s been a Bari Bari bad year at 60 Minutes and CBS News…60 Minutes veteran Sharyn Alfonsi is reportedly leaving the show at the end of May after butting heads with Bari Weiss on several stories, including her report on the notorious CEPOT prison in El Salvador, where Trump sent hundreds of deported Venezuelans, most of whom had no criminal records. Alfsonsi’s departure may soon be followed by one of the program’s star reporters, Lesley Stahl, who is irate that Weiss blindsided her by handing a planned interview with Benjamin Netanyahu to former Fox News reporter, Major Garrett, a Weiss favorite.
+ Then the weepy CBS News Anchor Tony Dokoupil applied for his visa too late and had to cover Trump’s trip to China from, as Roger Waters put it, that “shoe factory called Taiwan,” which is probably where Tony belongs.
+A current Washington Post staff writer on the transformation of the Post’s editorial page into a less literate and more histrionic (I wouldn’t have thought that possible) version of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion screed page: “I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”
+ The once mighty broadcasting empire of Ben Shapiro, the Rush Limbaugh wannabe whose eyebrows are twice as thick as his mustache, seems to be on the verge of toppling, as even more bombastic voices on the ultra-Right, like Candace Owen, Nick Fuentes, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, have outflanked him, making the former raging Visigoth seem as mainstream as George Will.
+ Fighting for his political life, Sen. John Cornyn introduced a $5 billion bill on Monday to designate US Highway 287 in Texas as a future interstate highway named after Donald Trump. How many wrecks will this cause?
Dirk Fishbach: “Will the potholes be named after MAGA members of Congress?”
+++
Demi Moore at Cannes (Screengrab from video posted to X.)
+ Demi Moore, who somehow landed on the jury at Cannes, warns that humans must surrender to our AI masters or be overtaken, because resistance is futile!
Against-ness breeds against-ness. AI is here. So to fight it is to fight a battle that we will lose. So, to find ways that we can work with it is a valuable path that we can take.
+ “Againstness-breeds-againstness,” is that a Hollywood variation on the Hegelian dialectic?
+ Jonathan McCay: “Moore has basically become the character she played in The Substance.”
+ Here’s one of Sun Ra’s business cards from the great exhibition on Sun Ra and Afro-futurism at the PAM a few years ago.
+ If I’d known how valuable a 1st imprint of a 1st edition of this novel would become ($3,500-$4,000), I wouldn’t have marked up nearly every page. Nah, I probably would’ve, anyway (There was no room for my inane scribblings in the mass market paperback.)…
+ Reading the margin notes some 50 years later is a strange trip back into my adolescent, often, too often it seems, stoned mind…but still less stoned than Pynchon’s, I suspect, at this point in his life anyway.
+ Re: Thomas Pynchon. I was asked what I thought of One Battle After Another. It didn’t do much for me. It has none of the qualities that draw me to Pynchon, starting with the language, the sudden leaps into surreality and comic book episodes that will just as suddenly veer into documentary-like horror and zoom back out again. Pynchon experiments with form. PTA doesn’t. Inherent Vice was better, but not much and I can’t detect anything at all of V. in the Master, except that Joaquin Phoenix is a 50s Navy veteran like (but unlike in every other respect) Benny Profane…Even though Pynchon loves film, plays with film scripts in his books and was supposedly up for film critic at the New Yorker, before Pauline Kael swooped in and took the job, for better or worse (better if you wanted Pynchon to keep writing fiction, worse if you wanted a film critic who appreciated Orson Welles), I think his novels, like Joyce, Gaddis or Faulkner, defy cinematic recreations, though it was always a fun game to cast the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow over a few pitchers of Bass Ale on Friday nights at the old Mr. Henry’s Tavern on Tenley Circle with a few other Pynchon-heads…I think PTA’s most Pynchoneseque film is Boogie Nights, in spirit at least, and he’s never again made a film that zany.
+ For the past seven months, the Secretary of Transportation has been secretly filming a reality TV series…Meanwhile, just a few days ago, a person was sucked into the engine of a commercial jetliner and emulsified at the Denver airport under Duffy’s purview…that should make for a hell of an episode.
+ There were more notable films released in 1975 than there have been in the last decade…
Galileo, Report to the Commissioner, Shampoo, The Stepford Wives, Jacques Brel Was Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Mahler, Mirror, Funny Lady, Great Waldo Pepper, Prisoner of 2nd Ave, Rancho Deluxe, Tommy, The Yakuza, Rosebud, The Passenger, Monty Python and Holy Grail, Seven Beauties, Day of the Locusts, The Wild Party, The Man in the Glass Booth, The Fortune, Wind and the Lion, The Hiding Place, Love and Death, Nashville, Night Moves, Jaws, The Drowning Pool, Dersu Uzala, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Rocky Horror Picture Show, 92 in the Shade, Swept Away, Dog Day Afternoon, Three Days of the Condor, Conduct Unbecoming, Hard Times, Litzomania, Lies My Father Told Me, Crazy Mama, Sunshine Boys, The Human Factor, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Romantic Woman, Barry Lyndon, The Man Who Would Be King, Killer Elite, Story of Adele H., Aaron Loves Angela, Peeper, The Wrong Move, Stardust, Let’s Do It Again, Shivers, Hearts of the West, Black Moon.
In other words, films by Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovski, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Gordon Parks, Mike Nichols, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Peter Weir, Jonathan Demme, Milos Forman, Sydney Lumet, Lina Wertmüller, Sam Peckinpah, Sydney Poitier, Francois Truffaut, David Cronenberg, Louis Malle, Sydney Pollack, Walter Hill, Jan Kadar, Michael Apted, Edward Dymtryk, Wim Wenders, Peter Hyams, Gene Wilder, John Huston, Robert Wise, Robert Aldrich, Stanley Donen and even the novelist Tom McGuane…1975 was a good year to be 16, I guess, though I’m not sure I thought so at the time.
+ Like almost everything the Pretenders do, this is a terrific cover of Radiohead’s Creep, the greatness enhanced because you have to suspend your disbelief that Chrissie could ever be one. Not a problem when Thom Yorke sings it…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
All the Work I Never Wanted: A Memoirella of Jobs
Rex Marshall
(BananaPitch Press)
Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area
Rae Alexandra
Illustrated by Adrienne Simms
(City Lights)
Trinity: an Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test
Emily Seyl
(Chicago)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Kind of Now: the Pulse of Miles Davis
Gregory Hutchinson
(Warner)
Look for Your Mind
The Lemon Twigs
(Captured Tracks)
Trio Asesino
Adrian Quesada
(ATO)
American Schizophrenia
“We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches–the cross was well-designed! A land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; a nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small–the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state, it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia–life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.”
– Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago
