End of the dream in the Imperial Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“War is the manifestation of a society that’s lost its meaning.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
+ Cole Allen seemed like a regular guy. Cole Allen is a sturdy American name, right out of a Louie L’Amore novel. But in America, even regular guys snap.
In the Republic of the Gun, almost all of the regular guys have one or two. When they snap, they tend to grab one.
Cole Allen grabbed two. He also grabbed some knives. Then he took a train, rode the iron rails through the long night into the American outback, nursing his grievances across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, over the Rockies and the Great Plains. He looked out on the lights of houses, towns and cities, filled with other regular guys late on their car payments, stuck in dead-end jobs sucking up to dead-end bosses, worried about their kids’ rotten teeth and no dental coverage, going thick in the waist, watching their teams lose night after night. Regular guys with gripes and guns and real intractable problems eating away at their souls. They want to settle scores. But how and with whom?
Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of promise and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.
Cole Allen rode the rails twenty-seven hundred miles to do what, exactly? Did he even know? Does he know now? Did he feel betrayed by both political parties, exasperated by years of empty rhetoric, worn down by a ravenous economic system that works only for the super-rich and pits average guy against average guy? Or was he just bored with it all?
Did he want to shoot or get shot? Was he acting on nihilistic impulse, an American Raskolnikov lashing out against the cultural nothingness leaching the life from him, even if, like most regular American guys, he’d never heard of Rodion Raskolnikov?
Or did he see himself as an avenger? If so, what was he avenging? What was he going to save? Something tangible or abstract? On whose behalf?
Do we really want to know these things? Do we want answers? Or will the answers, if there are any, strike too close to the bone? Have the myths of the country begun to eat itself, to cannibalize the collective psyche of the nation, like the furies in “The Bacchae” of Euripides?
In a country with 500 million guns, everyone has the chance to be an avenging angel, to enter the spotlight and create a spectacle, disrupt the programmed flow of time, if only for a few seconds, and be forever memorialized on security cameras, running down a hallway with a shotgun toward some kind of blazing destiny, you write for yourself, just like those archetypal American guys, Butch and Sundance.
In 1988, George Will attacked novelist Don DeLillo for humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald in his novel Libra and blaming “America” for shaping Oswald’s character. The pious Will denounced DeLillo as “a bad citizen.” DeLillo, who rarely says anything publicly, took Will’s attempted slander as a badge of honor, saying: ”I don’t take it seriously, but being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”
Am I “humanizing” Cole Allen? He is human, isn’t he? And, for the country that reared him’s sake, he had better be understood that way.
+ After another brush (though perhaps not as close as first appeared) with the Grim Reaper, this one wielding a shotgun, Trump keeps comparing himself to Lincoln and McKinley, perhaps unaware of how things actually turned out for those two. The more apt parallel is to the man Alexander Cockburn considered the greatest President since FDR, Gerald Ford, who was shot at (badly, fortunately) twice within a mere 17 days and no one seemed to care…
+ Trump’s strategy to hire only incompetent people is coming back to haunt him. How else can you explain the Secret Service allowing a guy with a shotgun, handgun and knife, who isn’t Ted Nugent, into the White House Correspondents’ dinner? The Secret Service agents on the scene fired as many as five shots at the alleged shooter in a packed room. They missed the would-be assassin, but may have hit one of their own agents….
+ Washington Post: “The Trump administration provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials.” The Post’s analysis of the security camera footage shows the alleged gunman being shot at five times, but doesn’t show him firing a single shot.
+ One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you, as has happened in the Butler, PA shooting and already just a few hours after the shooting (if there was a shooting) in the hallway of the Washington Hilton…
+ The bizarre trend of shouting, “USA, USA” after shootings, as happened last night after whatever that was that happened at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, is definitely a “USA” kind of thing. The gun: made in the USA, the shooter: made in the USA, the intended targets: made in the USA.
+ Trump, hours after the assassination plot, if that’s what it was, used the incident to pitch his White House ballroom: “I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure [sic]. It’s got – it’s drone-proof, it’s bulletproof glass.” (The shooting or attempted shooting or whatever it was took place in the Washington Hilton, not the White House.)
+ White House Press Secretary Leavitt: “The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple people hurt and killed, and it almost did so again this weekend.”
+ Norman Ornstein, former long-time Republican: “Trump has called the left: – Enemy within – Scum – Terrorists – Vermin – Radical – Lunatics – Demonic – Evil – Fascists – Marxists – Communists – Garbage – The enemy of the people – The enemy within – Treasonous – Animals – Degenerates – Jew haters – Lowlives.”
+ Was this really necessary, Bruce? This is Springsteen’s version of “thoughts and prayers,” I guess. Though praying for the safety of the volunteer military in the Middle East that is currently bombing girls’ schools, hospitals and girls’ volleyball teams is hard to square with a call against “political violence.” At least two of Springsteen’s own songs, American Skin (41 Shots) and Streets of Minneapolis (admittedly 25 years apart), suggest that “political violence” by the government against the people is pretty much endemic to our “beloved United States.” (After Springsteen performed American Skin (41 Shots) about the killing of Amadou Diallo by four NYPD police officers, the NYPD refused to provide security for Springsteen’s concerts.) American Skin was released in 2001, which was quite a year for political violence in America.
+++
+ One week he’s Jesus, the next he’s a hit man for La Cosa Nostra…
+ In the last few days, Trump has said the Iranian regime has collapsed, that they’re ready to make a deal but can’t communicate, that the leadership is hopelessly divided, and that no one in Iran knows who is in charge.
+ But the real chaos seems to be inside the Trump administration.
+ According to Seymour Hersh, Trump is now talking about paying Iran $25 billion to open the Strait of Hormuz, having become disgusted with Netanyahu for luring him into a war that even he now realizes can’t be won:
Trump, in a political panic over the economic fallout from the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is now “talking to Iran,” as an Israeli insider put it, about ending the current impasse in return for a payment from the United States of at least $25 billion, and possibly much more, to the government in Tehran. In return, Iran would end its blockade and open the strait to all traffic, ending a crisis for Trump, the US, and much of the world.
That sounds an awful lot like the “bags of cash” Trump accused Obama and John Kerry of giving the Iranians to seal the nuclear deal.
+ Pete Hegseth: “The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military.”
+ NBC News is breaking all the news that CBS News used to break and now covers up…
American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.
The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials.
The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran.
+ According to a dispatch from the Telegraph, “No one in the administration seems to know what’s going on. What the plans are. What we’re even aiming for now. It’s all just a giant clusterfuck and there’s zero accountability, either.” Accountability is for wussies…
+ Last week, Trump boasted about asking the Iranian leadership (which he said had collapsed) “as a favor” not to execute “eight young women, beautiful women, very young women.”
+ Pope Leo from the Southside: “Those who wage war are thieves stealing away our peaceful future.”
+ Speaking of thieves, the US stock market thrives on war…
+ And the oil companies are winning in a rout, as gas prices hit a new high, rising 8 cents in one day…
+ Gas prices have increased in every state this week, with the highest jumps in three of Trump’s post-industrial Midwest states…
IN +84c/gal
MI +72c/gal
OH +60c/gal
IL +39c/gal
NM +37c/gal
+ Hundreds of AI researchers at Google have signed a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to prohibit the company’s AI systems from being used for classified US “defense” work.
+ I bet Hegseth and Trump aren’t droning the “gold boats“….
The US Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.
+ Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US special forces soldier involved in the planning and kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife, made $400,000 from 13 different bets on Polymarket, using classified information on the timing and targets of the raid. Van Dyke is a scapegoat for the billions being made on the Dow, NSDQ, and predictive markets by much bigger players with inside information on Trump’s chaotic policy reversals. You won’t need any Iran/contra type deals or cocaine-for-guns deals anymore. You can make what you need to fund your illegal covert ops through insider trading on the polymarkets…
+++
+ Number of Israeli soldiers sentenced to 30 days in jail for destroying a statue of Jesus: 2
Number of Israeli soldiers jailed for shooting Palestinian children in the head: 0
+ According to a new report from the UN, Israel’s destruction of Gaza has set back human development in the Strip by 77 years. The estimation for the cost of “rebuilding” Gaza has risen to $71 billion.
+ Let’s check out the latest on the “ceasefire” in Gaza, where more than 720 Palestinians have been killed since Trump “ended the war.” Last week, the Israelis killed two UNICEF workers trying to deliver water to parched and desiccated Palestinian families. Here’s a statement from the UN…
The UN and its partners condemn the killing of two civilian contractors delivering essential water supplies on behalf of UNICEF, who were killed at a water filling point in northern Gaza yesterday.
The incident occurred during routine work to provide lifesaving water to hundreds of thousands of displaced and vulnerable people. Such attacks not only cost lives but also disrupt critical services that communities depend on for survival.
The protection of civilians, including humanitarian workers and essential service providers, is an obligation under humanitarian law and must be upheld.
The UN and its partners call on all parties to take immediate measures to ensure the safety of civilians and humanitarian operations.
+ BERNIE SANDERS: Americans do not want us to continue spending billions of taxpayer dollars in support of the illegal, horrific war policies of Netanyahu.
NEWSMAX: Your reaction?
REP. JOHN ROSE (Moron-TN): As I listen to Sanders’s comments, they border on being antisemitic.
+++
Sartre and de Beauvoir’s grave in the cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ What Jean-Paul Sartre regularly consumed over 24 hours while writing The Critique of Dialectical Reasoning and his five volume, 2000-plus page psycho-tentialist study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot: at least a quart of alcohol, often more, including wine, beer, vodka, whiskey, various liqueurs; 200 milligrams of amphetamines; 50 grams of aspirin; several grams of barbiturates, two packs of cigarettes (unfiltered Gauloise Caporal), several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, two pots of coffee, tea, and three rich meals, usually featuring tripe, and the specialities of his natural habitat, the Cafe de Flore, boiled eggs and Welsh rarebit, toasted bread slathered in melted cheddar cheese, Scottish ale and Worchester sauce. This certainly adds some clarifying context to his novel Nausea…
I vividly recall the day Sartre died, April 15, 1980. I was late for a meeting with a very reserved and proper professor of European literature, with whom I was doing an independent study on the French surrealists. The door to his office was ajar and I entered in a rush without knocking. Professor Han was sitting at his desk, face in his hands. He looked up at me, tears flowing down his cheeks and said, “No meeting today, Jeffrey. Sartre is dead. Go home and read something.” He got up, scanned his bookshelves, pulled out a slim volume and handed it to me. “Read this. Read it twice.” It was a copy of Sartre’s short stories, Le Mur (The Wall). I still have it and have read it many more times over the years.
Sartre was only 74 when he died, almost totally blind. The coroner said his body was 90-plus in amphetamine years. Still, he must have written 150 years’ worth of prose in his speed-fueled life. More than 60,000 people jammed the streets of Paris for his funeral procession to the cemetery in Montparnasse. Will anyone on the RFK, Jr. longevity diet enjoy a bigger send-off?
+ Speaking of being, not being and being again, many people are asking, is there life after Trump? While others are asking if there will be Trump in the afterlife? Perhaps because their own lives are becoming ever more dismal and unsatisfactory under the unforgiving strictures of Late Capitalism, Americans are now more obsessed with the afterlife than ever. A new survey shows that more Americans believe that there’s life after death than did so 50 years ago…
+ Of course, perhaps the imminent extinction of the species (ours) is driving some of this anxiety about second acts…(One has to at least admire the optimistic spirit that believes a life after death would be better than the life they’re currently living.)
+ In a Live Science interview with theoretical physicist David Gross, the Nobel Laureate dismissed a question about developing a unified theory by saying the future prospects for the survival of the human species were so bleak would likely never be resolved …
LS: Do you feel that in 50 years, we’ll be closer to having some kind of unified theory that incorporates all the forces?
DG: Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people … that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small. Due to the danger of nuclear war, you have about 35 years.
+ Around the world, more than two-thirds of the public believes at least one false or unproven health claim about vaccines, raw milk, and more, a new survey finds.
+ Over to you, Sly: “It’s a family affair, it’s a family affair…”
+ According to a study in JAMA Pediatrics, Trump and RFK, Jr.’s decision to drop the long-standing recommendation for newborn hepatitis B vaccination within 24 hours of birth will lead to additional infections and millions in extra health care costs:
In this issue of JAMA Pediatrics, Hall et al5 and Lind et al6 use modeling to estimate the impact of changes to this vaccine recommendation. Hall and colleagues5 use a Markov model to quantify the health and economic outcomes for a cohort of infants given the hepatitis B vaccine at birth vs delaying until 2 months. In their base-case analysis, changes in the recommendation would result in 238 additional infections, 39 cases of hepatocellular carcinoma, 62 deaths, and more than $21 million additional health-related costs. Lind et al6 used a compartmental model to estimate the impact of shared clinical decision-making recommendations on the number of acute and chronic HBV infections in a cohort of US infants, with the estimated impact ranging from an additional 69 to 628 infections in children, depending on screening practices. These models clearly demonstrate that the new ACIP recommendations will have a negative impact on the health of infants and children in the US and result in greater health care costs. Both models also reflect conservative estimates of harm…
+++
+ Gregory Bovino, the disgraced former U.S. Border Patrol commando leader and notorious Fascianista, admits the quiet part out loud, that immigration crackdowns are driven by racial and cultural animus not economics: “Our culture is definitely in jeopardy by those hundreds of millions of foreigners that, as you say, don’t care about your culture… that to me is a greater threat than a violent criminal or a terrorist.”
+ With the latest ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, 420 Federal judges have ruled against ICE’s mass detention policy to only 47 who have ruled in favor. Among Trump appointees, 51 have ruled against the administration, to 37 in favor.
+ According to an analysis by the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier, “Immigrants generate more income and taxes than the average person…”
+ Melissa Isaak was just named as a federal immigration judge in Atlanta by Donald Trump. Here she sets forth her profound views on the essential qualities of American womanhood: “There’s two types of women. There are good, solid, valuable women who are assets to men. A good woman. Then there’s a warm, wet hole.” Isaak didn’t say what type of woman she is, but there doesn’t seem to be anything remotely “warm” or “good” about her. Is there a third type?
+ According to the Washington Post, Isaak also asserts that men are more likely to suffer from domestic abuse than women. The figures are pretty decisively the reverse: 1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.
+ An Institute for Justice review of media reports uncovered at least 14 recent incidents where police officers allegedly used Flock and other automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems to stalk and spy on their wives, girlfriends, exes, and strangers. Examples include a deputy adding a woman’s license plate to a ‘hot list’ to track and pull her over, and a Clarksville, Virginia officer who pleaded no contest to invasion of computer privacy for running a fellow officer’s plate after he dated his ex. ALPR providers claim that their internal monitoring system prevents abuse, but most of these cases were discovered only after victims filed a complaint.
+ Trump wants to bring back the spectacle of firing squads for federal executions, which Biden could have ended but didn’t. The Pope says that’s sadistic and immoral. JD Vance, who is hawking a book on his conversion to Catholicism, says nothing.
+++
+ Former CounterPunch contributor Ken Klippenstein reports that the CIA has been spying on the Vatican:
The CIA has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy. The NSA and CIA seek to intercept telecommunications, emails, and texts. The FBI investigates crimes committed against and by the Vatican. The State Department closely follows the ins and outs of Papal diplomacy and politics. All of these agencies liaise with the Vatican’s own foreign policy, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
+ With Trump’s rhetorical backing, the Argentine lunatic Javier Milei is threatening to take back the Falkland Islands from Great Britain. “Javier Milei says he is ‘doing everything humanly possible’ to bring the Falklands back into Argentine hands as Donald Trump threatened to review UK sovereignty over the islands.” Apparently, it’s our fate to relive the craziest episodes of the 80s, but in reverse…
+ I rarely praise the New York Times, but its description of Sergei Brin’s current MAGA girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, as a “Trump-loving gut-health influencer!” is pretty good stuff…
Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax. They were soon joined by Mr. Brin’s girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a Trump-loving gut-health influencer. Even as she tried to defuse the tension — joking that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would wreck California’s economy. Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.
Photos from Instagram.
+ Does Brin always dress up as his favorite House of Lannister character from Game of Thrones while in his Tahoe estate?
+ Lumen Technologies: “Over half of the planet’s internet traffic is now made up of AI bots.” Only half?
+ Rep. Lauren Boebert: “I don’t trade stocks. Unfortunately, it’s the one moral standard that I have in Congress, and that’s why I have no money.”
+++
+ Harry Enten, CNN: “Trump’s numbers on inflation aren’t just the worst for him ever. They’re the worst I’ve seen for any president. They’re worse than Biden’s worst and worse than Carter’s pre-1980 election. On the cost of living, just 9% of indies & 39% (!) of the GOP say we’re on the right track.”
+ CNBC reported that housing prices have increased 261% in the US since 1983. Meanwhile, college tuition has increased 914% over the same period.
+ A Gallup survey on the economy shows that 55% of Americans think their financial situation is getting worse; an increase from 53% last year and 47% in 2024. This is the highest since 2001, higher even during the recessions of the pandemic or in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
+ According to a Lending Tree survey, 57% of those earning above $100,000 each year said they
worried about paying for groceries in the past month.
+ Sen. Jon Husted: “As we have demographic challenges, as we have lower birth rates, an aging workforce, less immigration, we’re gonna need people to do more work.” They’ll be calling for the return of slavery soon…Chattle slavery, I mean. Wage slavery is securely in place.
+ Richard Wright: “I sensed…that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.”
+ Giving new meaning to America First, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says he supports bailing out the oil-laden UAE, which just pulled out of OPEC, sending another shock to the Saudi-run oil markets…
Per capita income UAE: $82,000
Per capita income USA: $44,000
+ Brooke Rollins, former Miss Texas, now Secretary of Agriculture: “We now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud. A lot of that is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been. And a lot of it is just a better economy, so people don’t need food stamps.” A “lot of that” is bullshit. In fact, almost all of it.
+ At least 600,000 workers in Colorado alone need SNAP benefits to feed their families.
+ Don DeLillo: “Half the world is redoing its kitchens; the other half is starving.”
+ I haven’t had a drink since Thanksgiving and I roll the cart down the wine aisles at Grocery Outlet every week to test my resolve. It broke today when I encountered a shelf stocked with Death Row Records sparkling wine. It doesn’t matter how good it is, right? It’s the only possible wine to celebrate the Death Row Stage of Capitalism…
+ This is the kind of headline that feeds the giant sucking sound that is Trump’s ego and scares the Bejeezus out of everyone else…
+ Portfolios of Hyperreality: The US stock market no longer bears any relationship to the real economy…
+ Reuters: “For the average price of a car in the US, you could buy five new Chinese EVs.”
+ EV share of new car sales in Singapore:
2021: 3.8%
2022: 11.7%
2023: 18.1%
2024: 34%
2025: 45%
2026 (1st 3 months): 60%
+ The question, as always with EVs, remains: how is the electricity powering the cars generated. In Singapore, 95% of the electricity is generated from natural gas and LNG.
+ According to Axios, “the overall percentage of Americans viewing China as an enemy dropped from 42% in 2024 to 28% now.” By next year, Americans may be begging for China to intervene in the US economy.
+ When they first read the Hobbit, all of these tech lords wanted to be Gandalf, after they got cut from the reserve football team, rejected by every girl they asked to the prom, and could never quite figure out how to roll a joint that didn’t fall apart before they could light it, they envisioned themselves becoming Sauron and taking revenge for their teenage humiliations–but in reality grew into little Sméagols, pale to the point of bloodless, starved for light and companionship, skulking with their frail, sticklike bodies and finger-in-the-light-socket-hair through labyrinthine caverns, clutching their ring, fantasizing about running the world through the evil magic of their software…
+ Financial Times: “The number of white-collar prosecutions in the US has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, leaving many white-collar criminal defence lawyers facing a major problem: they have nothing to do.” Grift, graft and greed are good again!
+ This is a federal court filing on the White House ballroom from the US Justice Department that reads like it was dictated by Trump…
+ Note that it was filed on the same day that Lindsey Graham vowed to pass a measure allocating $400 million in taxpayer money to fund a project Trump has repeatedly said would require no federal funding:” We pay for it by offsetting it with customs fees. The sooner we get the ballroom built, the better it is for the country.” The country demands a ballroom! How can we have a ball if we don’t have a ballroom? Where else are we gonna ball? What happens to the $200 million Trump shook down Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk, Ellison, et al. for? Does he keep it as a tip? No taxes on tips, now!
+ Trump on the his ballroom back in February: “We did this with no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever. This was all donations by friends of mine and people who love our country, love the White House. Not one penny. And it’s a very expensive ballroom.”
+ Felix Guattari: “Under capitalism, You will be organized, you will be an organism. You will be a subject, nailed down as one.”
+++
+ A little good news: the wolf population in Oregon grew by 13 percent last year, for a new state total of at least 230 wolves. Wolf biologists here say that much of the increase can be attributed to a federally funded cooperative program to reduce degradation on domestic livestock. Naturally, Trump cut all of the funding for that program for 2026/27.
+ In Washington state, the wolf population is also up, depredations on livestock are down by 50%, but still, the ranchers, who are compensated for every wolf-killed lamb or calf, want to kill more wolves. “It’s not enough,” whined Chelsea Hajny, executive vice-president of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association. It’s NEVER enough for them. They want to kill all of the wolves. And the cougars. And the coyotes. These are the welfare queens of the West, subsisting on government handouts of rangeland and water and direct subsidies, but always demanding more and more and more, while moaning and bellyaching about how they are being terrorized by wolves, coyotes and radical environmentalists. These “rugged” individualists are the biggest wimps of the West.
+ Why is Georgia burning? 99.8% of the Southeastern US is now in drought, smashing the previous record of 87%. 94% is in severe drought (previous record: 71%). The worst drought by far the region has seen in decades.
+ Warming seas, melting polar ice, and increased rainfall caused by climate change have dramatically altered the salt balance and temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean and seem to be the driving force behind the Atlantic Ocean’s collapsing circulating currents.
In 1990, coal provided 90% of Danish electricity. Today, it is less than 3%. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of Denmark’s electricity generation is powered by wind.
+ The median forecast predicts that the gathering El Niño in the Pacific Ocean will be the strongest in 150 years. That’s the median forecast. There’s a 50 percent chance it could be much worse.
+ France announced this week it will end the burning of fossil fuels by 2050. Can you move a little faster?
+ What does China know that Trump doesn’t? Pretty much everything, it seems.
+ Costa Samaras, director of the Carnegie Mellon University Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, on news that the Trump administration will pay two more offshore wind companies $900 million to walk away from their projects:
“Hold on. We, the taxpayers, are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?”
+ The public tide is turning against AI data centers…
+ Americans may have turned against data centers. But the “star investors” who want data centers couldn’t care less…They’re willing to suck up all the energy in your state.
+ Fascinating multi-media essay on how people search for and identify bird species…
+ Speaking of our avian co-habitants, in European cities, recent studies have shown that birds seem to be more afraid of women than men. Yet, another blow to the manosphere.
+ The rattlers aren’t “invading”, they’re biting the invaders in self-defense…
+++
+ As Norman Solomon reports in this Weekend Edition, the Democratic establishment is quietly propping up Kamala Harris for another run at the presidency. I’m not sure how Biden won the 2020 election with this crew running his campaign, but I’m absolutely convinced none of them were smart enough to rig it.
Cory Booker: “You may disagree with her [Kamala Harris] on 10% of her views, but you let someone get in office who you disagree with on everything. You let somebody get into office who is locking up our children. You let somebody into office who is taking away our healthcare.”
+ The Democratic establishment is incapable of admitting that they habitually run bad candidates, with no ideas, who are in the pockets of the Israel lobby, the war-making industry, the surveillance state, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Tech, the real estate industry and the banks. Instead, they blame voters for refusing to overlook these fatal flaws.
+ In 2000, nearly two-thirds of American households donated to charity. Today, the share of Americans donating to philanthropy has fallen to only 41%.
+ Jan-Werner Müller in the LRB on Orban’s fall from grace: “Can there be poetic justice in politics? Perhaps once in a lifetime. In 1989, a young Viktor Orbán bravely told the crowds in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square that it was time for the Russians to go home, just as protesters had demanded in 1956; almost four decades later, he was heckled on the campaign trail with the same words.”
+ Twenty years ago, more Europeans moved to the US than Americans to Europe by a margin of 4 to 1. Now, more Americans are moving to Europe than Europeans to the US, leaving the US even more firmly in the grip of xenophobic political reactionaries.
+ I’m all for Texas’s plan to make reading the Bible part of the required curriculum in K-12 public schools. Forcing kids to read the Bible in school is the surest way to inoculate them against religion and make them existentialists as adults…even Being and Nothingness will read like an Elmore Leonard novel by comparison.
+ Trump’s grim visage on US passports will be the face that launched 1000 (cruise) ship cancellations…
+ The cult may be shrinking, but the dwindling size of Trump’s following will only trigger a more widespread and fanatical bombardment of Dear Leader’s sinister image…
+ Bill Maher claims that he was a victim of cancel culture because he has never won an Emmy:
People want to say there’s no more cancel culture because people are still doing this or that. But there are different gradations of it. There’s soft cancelling. I would say, I’ve had some of that happen to me…Soft canceling is like, they’ll never give you an Emmy, even though plainly I’ve deserved them.
+ They did what? “Animal Farm, classically, is a story without a happy ending. But Serkis’ interpretation gives viewers closure.” In the US, “closure” usually means attending an execution of someone who may or may not have killed a relative and finding none…”Closure” has lost all meaning. Off to the guillotine with it, post-haste, Maitre l’Exécuteur!
+ Cockburn would approve, since he despised Orwell (for snitching out his father, Claud, and other former friends and UK leftists to British intelligence) and was a founding member of the Happy Enders club.
+ Andie Stewart tells me that “Happy Endings” is the name of a sex club. It’s also the name of a members-only enema/colonic bar in Portland.
The “Stamper” House on the Siletz River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ On the way back from the coast this week, I drove up the Siletz River a few miles just to check in on one of my favorite houses in Oregon (it seemed to be doing fine), which fans of Ken Kesey will recognize as the home of the Stamper clan in Paul Newman’s misconceived film of Sometimes a Great Notion–the house was about the only thing Newman got right about that dark, rain-drenched, sprawling book about nature being laid waste to greed, hubris and the self-annihilating Western myth of macho individualism run amuck.
Stamper House in Paul Newman’s film of Ken Kesey’s novel, Sometimes a Great Notion.
+ I thought I was a reasonably well-read person, until I went through Le Monde’s list of the 100 best books of the 20th century this morning and checked off only 47 and some of those, like Lacan’s Ecrits, I could hardly count as having “read,” more like pushed my way through uncomprehendingly until the last friggin’ word…
+ “Why does nobody talk about this?” Maybe they don’t have the words to talk about it.
+ Vice: “35% of Generation Z respondents admit to using substances, such as cannabis, alcohol, or prescription medication, before starting their workday.” Most of them will need something stronger by the end of the year…
+ Jimmy Kimmel: “You know how sometimes you wake up and the First Lady demands you be fired? We’ve all been there, right? — I agree hateful, violent rhetoric is something we should reject… a great place to start to dial that back would be to talk to your husband.”
+ The word on the street in Queens is that pre-adolescent Trump (yes, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence he remains stuck in this age of human so-called development) used to stand on the roof of Daddy’s mansion and throw rocks at nannies as they pushed baby strollers down the sidewalk. Given his limited athletic skills, he probably didn’t hit any.
+ The weirdest thing about Stanley Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian, attacking Erika Kirk is that Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian is apparently full-on MAGA…Perhaps her father’s “Eyes Wide Shut” wasn’t a visionary exposure of the sexual perversities of the elites who run the world economy after all…
+ Greil Marcus: “Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.” Maybe, eventually. But nearly fifty years after I first dropped the needle on “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols,” “fuck you” or “fuck it” still pretty much says it all about just about everything. Nobody has the time or patience for another “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Dazed and Confused,” even though we all are…
+ Kim Gordon on the meanings of “cool” (or “Kool” in the orthography of Sonic Youth) and “punk”: “This friend of mine once said, ‘Once you’ve given birth and seen death, the idea of cool doesn’t really enter into the equation. I think it’s cool to be a mom. The thing that isn’t cool to me is being corporate. I kind of have always resisted that. And that to me is really, if you were to define punk in some way, it would be sort of anti-corporate. But it doesn’t have to be anything stylized or sound a different way. It’s an attitude….Every tour I’m like [at 72], ‘Can I still wear shorts?” (From an interview in Elle with Sofia Coppola.)
All This Red, White and Blue Can’t Replicate My View…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Robin Anderson
(OR Books)
The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow
Timothy Mitchell
(Verso)
Under Jackie’s Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind
Mitchell Nathanson
(Nebraska)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Something Worth Waiting For
Friko
(ATO)
Graceland Way
Mikaela Davis
(Kill Rock Stars)
Alight Upon the Lake: Live at the Jazz Showcase, 1975
Yusef Lateef
(Resonance)
A Settling of Grievances
‘I don’t trust anybody’s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It’s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
– Don DeLillo, White Noise
