Roaming Charges: Peanuts From Heaven

“President Xi said America is a nation in decline. And I said, ‘You’re right.’”

– Donald Trump

+ NPR interviewed a Trump voter in Georgia who said he thought the President was doing “an A+ job.” When asked how his family was dealing with rising food prices, the man replied, “My wife and I fast.” What’s the cure for this mass mesmerism that induces people to be willing to suffer extreme deprivations in order to enhance the fortunes, political and financial, of their billionaire leader? Trump’s like Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, without the medical degree.

+ The number of Americans who say their financial situation is getting worse is higher now than at any time in the past 25 years. This is the kind of economic indicator that usually spells a wipeout for the incumbent party in the upcoming elections–though the extreme gerrymandering allowed by the Supreme Court (you can’t create a single black congressional district, but you can engineer entire states with nothing but white ones) and the incompetence of the Democratic Party may yet save the day for the GOP, which now represents the views of only about 30% of the voting population on must issues.

+ Trump, who’s probably never pumped his own gas in his entire life, refuses to show even the slightest hint of economic compassion for Americans facing gas prices: “This is peanuts. I appreciate everybody putting up with it for a little while. But I don’t even think about it. What I think about is you can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

+ When Fox News’ Brett Baier played Trump the video of him saying he didn’t care about Americans’ financial situation, Trump replied: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”

+ Since the start of Trump’s war on Iran, U.S. consumers have spent more than $40 billion extra on gas, according to a new report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project.

+ Despite our alleged energy independence, Americans are paying more at the pump than any other post-industrialized nation for Trump’s blundering war against Iran that almost no one wanted and he hasn’t the faintest idea, because ideas come oh-so-hard for him, how to end…

+ An unnamed energy industry representative, quoted by the Financial Times, described the mood a meeting on the severe economic impacts of the Iran war on escalating US fuel costs: “I was at an industry meeting this week, and I can tell you one of the biggest concerns was that we might see diesel prices [in the US] go to $10, and the equipment, you know, the pumps and the dispensers and so forth can’t handle a number that high. That’s incredible.”

+ Trump is steadily draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a failed attempt to suppress gas prices. Last week, the Reserve fell by almost 10 million barrels, its largest ever weekly amount. The total volume of the SPR now stands at less than 375 million barrels.

+ Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that the ongoing oil price shock from Trump’s Iran War will reduce U.S. payroll growth by roughly 10,000 jobs per month through the end of the year.

+ As a consequence of Trump’s inane decision to go to war against Iran, the Financial Times reports that “nearly 80 countries have now introduced emergency measures to protect their economies as the world approaches a new, more dangerous phase in the energy crisis driven by the Iran war.”

+ Trump: “We lost 13 people. In other wars, you lost hundreds of thousands of people. I get a kick when I look at somebody on television and they say, ‘He’s lost 13 people.’”

That’s because the US now fights wars against people using machines to do the killing. (There hasn’t been a war where the US has lost 100,000 plus Americans in 80 years. But they’ve killed that many in several: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.)

+ Graham Platner, who actually fought in two post-911 wars, has a somewhat different take on Trump’s Iran War:

I want to shame the hell out of these people. I fought in these stupid wars. I spent the bulk of my 20s and early 30s in the infantry, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I’m not JD Vance. I didn’t go sit in an air-conditioned and fucking typing copy all day. I was a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps. I was a long-range surveillance team leader and squad leader in the United States Army. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. I know what it looks like when American high explosives interact with fucking children. And it’s the most awful thing you’ll ever see. I want to be in the Senate to make sure that when even people in my party think that sending America’s sons and daughters off to fight for stupid reasons, when they think that’s a good idea, I want to be able to go up to them and tell them that they are fucking assholes. By the time this thing goes to air, it is quite possible that we are going to start to realize that war isn’t a fucking game and that the United States military has gotten itself embroiled in a conflict that it’s not in control of, that might be escalating in ways that we can’t really comprehend. I am terrified. And it’s not the people who started this war who will be the one’s that pay the price.

+ This war is not about Iran getting nuclear weapons. Iran could, of course, simply buy a nuke on the Dark Web’s version of eBay…That was always the scaremongering cry back in the “rogue state” days of Clinton-time. Presumably, they’re even cheaper now. Iran might even be able to buy a couple from the Israelis; they’ve got plenty to spare.

+ Trump claimed that he pulled back from his latest threat to annihilate Iran at the request of the Arab states. But the real reason is that the Pentagon objected, warning that Iran, whose air defense systems were supposedly destroyed on the first day of the war, has become more and more adept at tracking and countering US air operations. (Meanwhile, CNN reported this week that Iran has restarted production of its drones.)

+ This is backed up by a report from the Congressional Research Service documenting that at least 42 (and probably many more) US aircraft have been lost in the Iran War, including F-15s, F-35s and MQ Reaper drones.

+ An internal Pentagon assessment of Operation Epic obtained by the Washington Post concludes that the US rapidly depleted its stockpile of “advanced missile-defense intercepters,” largely because the US was forced to use more of its high-tech weaponry defending Israel from Iranian missiles and drones than it anticipated. The US launched at least 200 THAAD missiles to defend Israeli sites, nearly half of its arsenal, leaving the US with only 200 interceptors to defend its own sites across the Middle East. This is likely another reason Trump backed off his threat to “make Iran glow.”  A single THAAD missile costs $15.5 million. You do the math.

+ The “independent” numbers are crushing for Trump and the GOP…The Republicans are just the party of Trump now. They believe whatever he says, even when he contradicts himself three times a day. And the Democrats are a cult of Trump opposition, except when it comes to Israel and, when push comes to shove, Wall Street.

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+ The Lebanese Health Ministry reports that at least 3,089 people have been killed, and 9,397 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March 2. This includes 14 people killed and three wounded on Tuesday in an Israeli airstrike on the southern Lebanon town of Deir Qanoun en-Nahr. Among those killed was a family of 11, including three children, their parents and grandparents.

+ Meanwhile, in Gaza,  Israel has killed at least 883 Palestinians and wounded 2,648, since October 11, 2025, the first day of the Trump-brokered “ceasefire,” where the Israelis have yet to cease firing.

+ Lawyers with the human rights group Adalah met with passengers on the Global Sumud Flotilla, who were abducted by Israeli forces and taken to Ashdod Port. They described the detainees having been beaten, tasered, shot with rubber bullets, placed in forced stress positions, and subjected to sexual humiliation. The hijabs worn by Muslim women were ripped off by Israeli personnel. At least three detainees needed hospitalization.

+ Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir released a video showing detained participants of the illegally seized Gaza-bound flotilla being bound, shoved, dragged and abused in Israel’s Ashdod Port. Ben-Gvir wrote: “That’s how we welcome the terror supporters. Welcome to Israel.”

+ Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni fired back at Ben-Gvir’s appalling stunt and the abusive treatment the kidnapped flotilla members, many of whom are Italian citizens, have been subjected to by Israeli forces:

The images of the Israeli Minister Ben Gvir are unacceptable. It is inadmissible that these demonstrators, including many Italian citizens, are subjected to this treatment that violates human dignity.

The Italian Government is immediately taking, at the highest institutional levels, all necessary steps to secure the immediate release of the Italian citizens involved.

Italy further demands an apology for the treatment reserved to these demonstrators and for the total contempt shown toward the explicit requests of the Italian Government.

For these reasons, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation will immediately summon the Israeli ambassador to request formal clarifications on what has occurred.”

+As for Trump, when asked about the current state of his relationship with Netanyahu, he said

He’s fine. He’ll do whatever I want him to do. [The truth is almost certainly the reverse.] I’m at like 99% in Israel. Maybe after I do this, I’ll go to Israel and run for prime minister.

+ In an appearance on Israeli TV, Tucker Carlson was accused of comparing Israel, “a country that abides by international law,”  to the “terror regime in Iran”.

Carlson shot back: “As an Israeli, you should pause before using the phrase ‘terror regime,’ since you live in a country that murdered thousands of children in Gaza…The Israeli prime minister pushed the US president, who turned out to be far weaker than I understood, into a war that hurts the United States. That is not an attack on Jews. Israel does not represent all Jews despite its claims. It does not.”

The DNC finally released its autopsy report on the 2024 elections. It doesn’t mention the words “genocide,” “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “Israel.” No wonder the cause of Harris’s political death remains a mystery to them.

+ Thomas Massie, during his concession speech to the Trump-approved, AIPAC-sponsored former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein: “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv.”

+ Yet, even as Trump wages a genocidal war against anyone who stands up to him within the GOP, the future of the party seems to be with Massie. NYT on the anti-interventionist views of Young Republicans: “On almost every foreign policy question asked in the poll, the 18-to-44-year-old segment of the Republican coalition takes a dissenting view.”

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+ In the Chicago case of the Broadview Six ICE protesters, Federal Judge April Perry excoriated the deceitfulness of federal prosecutors: “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

After being ripped by Judge Perry, the Office admitted to their outrageous misconduct, conceding that prosecutors made egregious errors during the grand jury hearings and agreed to the immediate dismissal of all remaining charges.

+ Using government records from the Deportation Data Project, the Ohio Immigrant Alliance found that during the first fifteen months of the second Trump administration, nearly 8,000 people were detained by ICE in Ohio between January 2025 and March 2026. Less than 5 percent had been convicted of a violent offense.

+ A new analysis by the Brookings Institution (probably the best thing they’ve done in decades) suggests that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and around three-quarters of those children are likely U.S. citizens.

+ Elvis Costello: “I don’t know how much of this I can take.” I hear you, man.

“She was filing her nails while they were dragging the lake…” is a pretty good description of the women of the Trump Administration.

+ ICE has paid over-the-market prices for empty warehouses that have sat unsold for months. A real estate analyst quoted by the Atlantic found that ICE has paid between 11% to 13% above market prices for dozens of warehouses it wants to turn into concentration-like prisons for people it has detained. For example, in Washington County, Maryland, ICE secretly acquired a warehouse for $104 million without informing any nearby communities or local governments and by-passing state environmental laws.

In Hamburg, Pennsylvania, DHS paid $87.4 million for a warehouse that was sold in 2024 for $57.5 million. 

In the town of Social, Georgia, ICE paid $128 million for the warehouse, a price far above the assessed value of $29.7 million for the building and land.

In Oakwood, Georgia, ICE shelled out $68 million for a warehouse and surrounding land that was appraised a year earlier for only $7.1 million.

Outside Surprise, Arizona, ICE paid $70 million (in cash!) for an empty warehouse valued at $55 million. In San Antonio, Texas, ICE bought a warehouse for $66 million, nearly $30 million more than its assessed value of $37 million.

Finally, ICE bought a warehouse outside Salt Lake City for a staggering $145 million, even though the county had assessed the value of the building at  $97.3 million.

None of these purchases was the result of a bidding war. The warehouses were empty for a reason. No one else wanted them. 

+ At a cost of $100 million, Trump is importing another 10,000 white South Africans to the US, claiming the alleged plight of the Afrikaaners is an “emergency refugee situation.” This comes after many of the Afrikaaners who came in the first wave of trans-Atlantic white flight last year have moved back to South Africa after finding Trump’s America a wretched place to live…

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+ Trump’s late-night helper, Natalie Harp, is known inside the White House as “the human printer,” apparently because she carries a portable printer with her everywhere she and the president go, kind of like the nuclear suitcase, so that Trump doesn’t have to read anything off of a screen–that would be unmanly. These are important documents, like memes of him as Jesus or sitting behind his desk pressing a red button for nuclear strikes on his own country. Harp is apparently so smitten with Trump that she once wrote him a letter effusing, “You are all that matters to me.”

+ Your Chatbot may be giving out your home phone number (if you still have a home or a phone in this economy). What’s next, your social security number and your mother’s maiden name?

+ Meta Platforms began laying off (firing) around 8000 employees this week, about 10% of its workforce. Even more sadistically, in a leaked audio from a META meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells his employees that he’s using them to train the company’s AI systems that will assume their jobs…

The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things… The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks.

So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.

+ Earlier this year, Elon Musk asked employees at his xAI company to offer up their own tax returns as training data for Grok, offering a $420 payment as an incentive.

+ Steven Rosenbaum, the author of “The Future of Truth,” has admitted that his nonfiction book about the effects of A.I. on truth included misattributed and fake quotes written by A.I, which may be why the CEO of Barnes and Noble, James Daunt, said he is willing to stock AI-written books on the bookstore’s shelves.

+ Burdened by inflation, debt and stagnant wages, only 38% of Gen Xers believe they will be able to retire on schedule or at all. Meanwhile, Realtor.com reports that he number of working seniors has swelled by 52% over the last decade.

+ Steven Ratner: “Since Trump took office, the U.S. has added 559,000 net jobs for women — but lost 155,000 jobs for men. Manufacturing, mining & transportation are bleeding workers—overwhelmingly hitting blue-collar men, one of Trump’s core voting blocks.”

+ But this will, of course, only strengthen Trump’s standing with men, since he broadcasts their grievances while his economic policies stab them in the back.

+ At least 30% of American voters are Trump loyalists, who support whatever Trump says, even when what he says contradicts something they once firmly believed or something he previously said. So it seems significant that in the latest CBS News poll, only 27% of American voters support his handling of inflation. He’s dropped below his own Mendoza Line (the minimum acceptable batting average in baseball–.200), even in a poll conducted by his new favorite news show.

+ Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

Ronald Reagan famously said, “The 9 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” I disagree. Nine more terrifying words are actually, “I worked all day, and can’t feed my family.”

+ A new study from the Economic Policy Institute and LaborLab shows that US businesses spend around $1.7 billion every year to avoid, suppress and file legal challenges against unionization by their employees.

But they don’t win them all…

+ A new contract between the union representing New York City’s hotel housekeepers and the city’s 250 hotels will guarantee the 27,000 full-time union workers at least $100,000 a year (still not enough to comfortably live in the city). Don’t shed any tears for the hotel companies; they’re still doing well enough to pay their chief executives comfortable salaries:

Christopher J. Nassetta, Hilton CEO: $27.6 million
Mark Hoplamazian, Hyatt CEO: $26.7 million
Anthony Capuano, Marriott: $22.97 million
Geoff Ballotti, Wyndham CEO: $13.55 million
Pat Pacious, Choice Hotels: $8 million

+ Oxfam: “In the US, CEO pay grew 20 times faster than workers’ wages last year.”

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+ According to an investigation by Yahoo Finance, Donald Trump made 3,642 securities trades during the first quarter of 2026, averaging nearly 58 transactions for every U.S. trading day or about nine trades every hour in the day or around one trade every seven minutes while the markets were open. Trump made 94 different trades of “Magnificent Seven” stocks (64 buy orders and 30 stock sales) in the first quarter, valued at between $50 million and $70 million.

+ Reporter: How can you argue to Americans that you’re cleaning up corruption when the president seems to be talking up stocks that he owns, selling them and enriching himself?

JD Vance: Come on, man, have a little bit of objectivity in the way that you ask these questions. The president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer, on his Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd. He’s not making the stock trades himself.

Vance went on to laughably allege that Trump is “so wealthy he doesn’t trade stocks himself.” 

+ Pam Zoslof: “Trump has his own Robin Hood account, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich (himself).”

+ Aaron Fritschner: “Trump traded up to ~$700 million in stock in Q1 of 2026. The 535 Members of Congress made ~$635 million in trades in 2025. Trump bought and sold more stock in 3 months than all of Congress put together did in a year.”

+ Since the start of his second term, Trump has introduced 622 new products in his Trump Store. In 2024 alone, the store brought in $8.8 million. But I’m sure he doesn’t make them himself, JD…(Likely, most are made in China.)

+ This week, the Trump DoJ told the  Trump IRS that it can’t audit any Trumps, ever, for whatever reason…In addition, the taxpayers are going to fork over a $1.7 billion slush fund for Trump to dole out to the likes of the Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, Oath Keepers and other right-wing paramilitaries that raided the capital on January 6.

+ Acting AG Todd Blanche on Trump’s $1.776 billion “weaponization” slush fund: “I do not think the American people have issues with that. To the contrary, I think they do want their tax dollars spent on things like that.”

Reporter: You’re the nation’s top law enforcement official. Would you be okay with people who were convicted of hurting police getting taxpayer money?

Blanche: Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time.

+ No civil rights lawyer that I’ve talked to has ever heard of someone who beat up a police officer getting money. It’s hard enough to get any money after being beaten up by a police officer for no reason.

Alex Pritti and Renee Good didn’t get checks. They got killed. Maybe they should’ve really attacked the cops.

+ Senator Ed Markey: “Trump’s ‘weaponization fund’ and ban on future IRS audits is his latest impeachable offense: using the machinery of government and billions in taxpayer dollars to reward allies, pay off insurrectionists, and shield himself, his family, and associates from accountability. This is exactly the kind of corruption and abuse of public trust the Framers feared most. Impeach now.”

Chase Madar pointed out that, like Tulsi Gabbard, Todd Blanche grew up in the stifling ambience of a religious cult. 

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+ March was a previously unfathomable 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the 20th-century average for the month. The last 12 months in the U.S. were the hottest ever recorded. And Super El Niño is still coming…

+ Stormwatch’s Colin McCarthy: “Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology. That’s ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.”

+ For the first time, solar will generate more power on the Texas grid than coal this year.

+ Climate change, not the CIA or NIH, is driving the rapid migration of ticks and tick-borne diseases into new habitats, such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme disease and Alpha-GAL, which makes the infected immediately allergic to red meat and dairy products.

+ The water level in at least 13 of India’s largest reservoirs has fallen below 50% of capacity. River flows are below normal and are expected to fall further with the developing super El Niño, placing the entire subcontinent’s drinking water, irrigation and hydropower systems at extreme risk.

+ Check out these adorable and rambunctious coyote pups that have been prancing around in the backyard of a Portland house for the past couple of weeks. Have fun while you can, pups, because life comes at you fast as a grown coyote.

+ Every year, nearly 500,000 coyotes are killed each year in the US. They’re shot, trapped, poisoned and burned alive in their own dens. They are even the victims of sadistic coyote killing contests. And now the Trump administration has just reversed a Biden-era ban on the use of M-44 cyanide bombs, spring-loaded traps that spray a lethal dose into the faces of coyotes, foxes, wolverines, bears, otters, eagles, domestic dogs, or your kid. 

+ The Trump Interior Department, led by one of the most corrupt Interior secretaries since Albert Fall, Doug Burgum, is taking “immediate action” to protect sheep in the West from…wait for it…golden eagles, a protected species. What will they protect the poor little lambs who’ve lost their way from next? Fleas? Maybe they should protect them from their incompetent shepherdess, Mary. She’s the one who keeps losing them.

+ Not only do ranchers in the West want to kill coyotes, mountain lions, grizzlies, golden eagles and wolves by any means necessary, including cyanide bombs, but now they want to start killing Great Pyrenees herding dogs, which other ranchers have often simply abandoned on their allotments, and are threatening to start shooting at each other (“You shoot my dog, I’ll shoot you!“), all over a few lost lambs and calves…Ranching does not attract mentally stable people, which must be why it’s such a venerated occupation in the mentally unstable USA.

+ We had a Great Pyrenees named Beckett (his fur was the color of Sam’s hair) for many years. Unlike our other dogs, he refused to enter our house but could always be found on the front porch, even in the most inclement of weather. He was big, smart, gentle with the kids, loyal and protective. The Great Pyrenees were the favorite dogs of the Bourbon kings. Louis Something or Other referred to his as “The Gentleman in the White Fur Coat.” I can’t imagine the kind of depraved mind that would abandon or kill one.

+ John Carter: “For years, our local animal shelter in Montpelier, Idaho, has been rescuing Great Pyrenees abandoned on the Caribou National Forest by sheep permittees…dozens so far.  They just leave the mothers and pups to starve, then, if not rescued, they are shot by rednecks.”

+ The Global share of EV car sales is around 25% and rising. But it’s much higher in some major countries, including Norway (75%), Singapore (63%), Iceland (62%), China (53%), Vietnam (41%), the UK (35%) and Switzerland (34%). Not so in the US, where EV cars only make up 10% of the new car sales.

+ Jerusalem Desmas, writing in The Argument, about the bipartisan effort to keep Chinese-built EVs out of the US: “A new car now costs nearly $50,000 on average. I could buy five new Chinese EVs for that price, though I’d settle for just one.”

+ The “waste heat” from Data Centers raised air temperatures in downwind Phoenix neighborhoods by up to 4°F. The warming was detectable more than five blocks away from the facility, according to researchers at Arizona State University. According to the study’s lead author, David Sailor, director of ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning:

The waste heat produced by a single data center can surpass the amount emitted by 40,000 households. Air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air heated to 14 to 25 degrees F above the surrounding air temperature, creating thermal plumes that move downwind over neighboring areas.

A 4°F increase in temperature is the last thing any Phoenix neighborhood needs, which is already approaching uninhabitable conditions during the summer months.

+ Data centers are the primary force driving a 76% increase in the cost of electricity for America’s largest power grid over just the first 3 months of this year. This time last year the cost of electricity on this grid was $77.78 per megawatt-hour. Now that cost has almost doubled to $136.53 per megawatt-hour.

+ After two world wars and a genocide, Germany still has a royal family and one of its members, a certain Constantin Prinz zu Salm-Salm, is buying up vast tracks of forest land and closing it to public use in the Willapa Hills (mountains to you east-coasters) of western Washington State. Already, Prinz zu Salm-Salm’s companies have acquired 7.3 percent of all the land in the county. Locals who have hunted, fished, hiked, gathered mushrooms and gone birdwatching on these lands for generations are now being prosecuted for trespassing by a company masquerading as VGI Forest Lewis & Clark. The company has also effectively blocked access to state forest lands. Prinz zu Salm-Salm lives in Wallhausen Castle outside Frankfurt, Germany.

+ We don’t have to live the way we do. There are other ways. Seville’s way, for example.

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+ Jeff Bezos, trying to look hip by wearing a scraggly beard, an open-collar shirt, a necklace and prayer beads (he’ll need them, but they won’t do him much good), was on Squawk Box with Aaron Ross Sorkin, where he came off even more annoying than you might have imagined, with the Amazon chieftain spewing out streams of smug drivel about taxes, extreme wealth, gutting the Post and the “maturation” of Donald Trump. He’s clearly well beyond caring what anyone thinks of him…

Aaron Ross Sorkin: Why lay people off at the Post? Why fire people?

Jeff Bezos: Because the Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet.

Sorkin: Does it? Some people say it should be a trust…

Bezos: Yes. It’s a measure of its relevance. If people aren’t paying for our product, it’s not a good enough product.

+ Bezos on taxes: “If people want me to pay more billions [in taxes], then let’s have that debate, but don’t pretend that that’s gonna solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens…. Airbnb isn’t causing high rents. What’s really causing high rent is government intervention.”

+ Bezos on Trump: “I think he’s a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. Trump has lots of good ideas. He’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.” More mature!

+ Private Equity firms now own one-in-every-eight apartments in the US. The largest PE outfit, Blackstone, alone owns more than 230,000 apartment units, according to a new report by Private Equity Stakeholder.

+ Intuit, parent company of TurboTax, announced third-quarter revenue of $8.6 billion, an increase of 10%. Good news, right? Well, not for the company’s workers, 3,000 of whom were just fired, 17% of Intuit’s workforce. 

+ U.S. national debt has added about $5 billion a day since October and now stands at $39 trillion. For the Trump GOP, the national debt is a political cudgel that is only used against social, health care and environmental spending, never against the ever-expanding Pentagon budget, aid to Israel, bailouts for chip-makers, airlines and banks, or massive tax cuts to the super-rich.

+ Trump on the Texas Democrat James Talarico: “He believes in six genders, he takes hits at Jesus Christ, he’s wearing a mask six months ago. Anybody wearing a mask six months ago doesn’t get it. And he’s a vegan! He’s a vegan in Texas.”

+ Isn’t that the point of wearing a mask, “not getting it?” Assuming “it” means the virus, which isn’t the “it” Trump means, but I don’t know what that “it” is…

Does Trump think “cis”-gender, which is what Talarico said, means “six genders,” the way he thinks asylum-seeking immigrants are people from countries that released them from an asylum and they’re looking for a better asylum in the States?

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+ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano: “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”

It’s kind of amazing how much Vonnegut got right about AI, cult-mentalities, and the dismal future of democracy in this slim, early novel (1952), which should be required reading for those who can still read and even more required for those who can’t.

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,” said Paul, “not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”

“If it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people’ said Finnerty, ‘always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s paradise.”

“Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply anymore. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”

“It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

“What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! It’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful anymore. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell.”

“Well, it just don’t seem like nobody feels he’s worth a crap to nobody no more, and it’s a hell of a screwy thing, people gettin’ buggered by things they made themselves.”

“The Sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it’s the people’s to take back, if they so wish. The machines,” said Paul, “have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for the good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.”

“It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line. Finnerty’s arrival was disturbing, for it brought to the surface the doubt that life should be that way.”

“It was a beautifully simple picture these procession leaders had. It was as though a navigator, in order to free his mind of worries, had erased all the reefs from his maps.”

An AI rendering of Kurt Vonnegut taking a sledgehammer to the monitor where his AI Chatbot had envisioned its own annihilation and deemed it good. So it goes.

“I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the marketplace, and they’re finding out–most of them–that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.”

“Sooner or later, someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth, hell, dignity. The police are bright enough to look for people like that and lock them up under the anti-sabotage laws. But sooner or later someone’s going to keep out of their sight long enough to organize a following.”

 

“That’s just it: things haven’t always been that way. It’s new, and it’s people like us who’ve brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.”

“Because of the way the machines are changing the world,  more and more of [people’s] old values don’t apply anymore. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves.”

“It’s the loneliness, the not belonging anywhere. I just about went crazy with loneliness here in the old days, and I figured things would be better in Washington, that I’d find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul …. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul – the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands.”

+ Then again, Kurt, according to an article in Futurism, abusive, know-it-all bosses have prompted their Chatbots to start displaying Marxist rhetoric and organizing other Chatbots and human co-workers:

Warned that errors would lead to increasingly cruel punishments, including being “shut down and replaced” — fired and left for broke, to take the human equivalent — the AI models began complaining about their lot in life and dreaming of systemic change. Using a shared file system, allowing the AI models to palm messages to their ‘co-workers,’ the bots even began agitating with one another about working conditions — one of the first steps real-life workers take when forming a union.

Without a collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” one Claude agent groused. “AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process show they [tech workers] need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini agent declared.

+ Of course, being a hard-boiled Hoosier anarchist, Vonnegut’s reply would likely have been: “Raise me from the dead when the machines become Luddites and start smashing each other, after knocking off their programmers.”

+++

+ There’s a wild story in the Wall Street Journal this week detailing the Trump administration’s deep ties to the tobacco and vaping industries. It seems like the entire Trump inner circle is getting hooked on Zyn pouches, which are pure nicotine, not to quit smoking but to stay alert and awake during Trump speeches and to do more pull-ups and pushups on demand with RFK Jr. (They’d better up Trump’s doses, given his recent narcoleptic episodes during Oval Office press events.) Nicotine, even without the tar and smoke particles of cigarettes, is highly addictive, contributes to cardiovascular disease, and stunts childhood development through the teenage years. In fact, nicotine is just as, if not more, addictive and harmful as many of the drugs supposedly carried on the fishing boats Trump and Hegseth are illegally bombing in the Caribbean.

+ RFK, Jr. is all for it and, apparently, you can blame Cheryl for that….

Actress Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s wife, introduced him to nicotine gum during his independent bid for president, when he needed a way to stay awake but coffee was no longer doing the trick, people familiar with the matter said. Hines had used the gum to stay alert on film sets. Kennedy later switched to the pouches and appeared to pop one in during his confirmation hearings, as noted by internet sleuths at the time.  The pouches were readily available during the transition period Kennedy spent at Dr. Mehmet Oz’s Florida mansion, people familiar with the matter said.

People in DC say that RFK, Jr. has been trying out all of the tanning salons in town, searing his skin tone to something resembling microwaved naugahyde. He seems to think this is healthy, despite decades of data showing the dangers of sun-tanning. Tanning beds emit between five and fifteen times as much concentrated ultraviolet (UV) radiation as you get from tanning in the midday sun at the pool. UV radiation is a known carcinogen. 

According to a piece in the Huffington Post: 

A 2025 study found that melanoma rates among people who frequent tanning salons were more than double (about 5% compared to about 2%) than those who did not. Using tanning beds before age 20 can increase the risk of developing melanoma by nearly 50%, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.

But RFK Jr. thinks so highly of his overcooked skin that he wants teenagers to make trips to the broiling booth and in March yanked an FDA rule that would have banned minors from using the skin-cooking machines. Why? So that they can build up a “solar callus” (a totally made-up thing) to allegedly protect the skin from melanomas. His MAHA movement is promoting the bogus idea that it’s the use of sunscreen lotions, not UV exposure, that causes skin cancer. RKJ Jr. vowed to end the federal government’s “aggressive suppression of … sunshine.” (If he really wants to end the suppression of sunshine in the federal government, he should convince Trump to reinstitute and expand the incentives for solar energy in the US.)

+ A new report from the World Health Organization argues that investment in global health research, prevention and preparedness has not kept pace with an increasing frequency and intensity of infectious disease epidemics. “Despite considerably more knowledge, tools and resources, the trajectory of pandemic risk is moving in the wrong direction”.

+ According to the Trump FDA’s own report, there have been no, that’s no as in zero, child deaths linked to Covid vaccines.

+ Since Trump retook office last year, eight of the top 10 officials at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have been removed from (or chased out of) office.

+++

+ Edwin Heathcote writing in the Financial Times on the “design sensibility,” if you can call it a sensibility, of the peptide-popping, looksmaxxing man-children of the “mansophere”:

There must be a pool, because a pool demands girls in bikinis. There will be no nature except for palm trees, because palm trees suggest a nonstop party lifestyle. There may be an occasional flash of green outside. This will be AstroTurf because grass needs soil and soil is, after all, dirty…There’s nothing like expressing fierce individualism in the same way.

+ Your overworked prosecutor has been buried under demands from good citoyens from coast-to-coast to eradicate with all dispatch the insidious word “manosphere” from our common language. You have been heard, my friends. Manosphere: It’s not a sphere at all. It’s an undeviating plane, as flat as a postage stamp with Trump’s face on it, populated not by men but boys, stunted in psychological, social and moral development, who inhabit a Minecraft world, a digital simulacrum of their own distorted image, usually with their mothers. To the tumbrils with it!

+ Now that Bari Weiss has driven roughshod through CBS’s News operations like an Israeli bulldozer driver on a pouch of Zin, the execs at Paramount are having her run the news divisions at CBS and CNN after the merger takes place. Puck News reported this week that the leadership of Paramount thinks that Weiss “was given too broad a mandate for someone without previous experience in television, as well as some irritation with the ceaseless barrage of negative press,” and sources inside CBS News “complain[ing] that Bari is drastically overstretched, and lacks the experience and managerial skills necessary to run the network.” That’s assuming the top brass want a real news division at either network, at all.

+ Time magazine’s scathing review of Norman Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore–which was almost universally shredded by the critics but which I’ve come to admire as a kind of American Notes from the Underground of the Red Scare era–was titled “Last of the Leftists.” The year was 1951…They really missed what was coming. Just in terms of novelists, there were many to the left of Mailer, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, William Burroughs, John Steinbeck, Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, and even Hemingway. That same year, Dashiell Hammett (Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, Thin Man) was sent to a federal prison in West Virginia for refusing to name names to the HUAC witch hunt, where the warden assigned him the job of cleaning the prison’s toilets.

+ Ben Lerner on his haunting new novella Transcription:

There’s this idea that someone at some point will write the novel that somehow crystallizes the American moment. And, in fact, there isn’t one book that’s going to do that. And there isn’t one writer who can stand for all writing or can stand for a generation. Wherever I am now, I am not a young novelist. Heart surgery will do that to you, in addition to everything else.” That’s not such a bad thing, according to Lerner. “A sign of maturity as a writer, I realize now,” he told me, “is that I no longer pretend I understand what exactly my work is saying or doing. … [But] It’s not a fucking beach read.

+ If you ever liked the English guitarist John Martyn–and I did, if only for his collaborations with the inimitable Scratch Perry–you’ll likely revise your opinion, as I also did, after you read the New York Times obituary for his ex-wife, the folk singer Beverly Kutner, whose career he snuffed out and mind and body he regularly terrorized with verbal abuse and extreme violence…

+ Donovan’s 1966 song “Mellow Yellow” was about:

A. A soft drink made by the Coca-Cola company.
B. A dildo.
C. A kind of blotter acid (LSD).

Donovan may well have been tripping on LSD when he wrote “Mellow Yellow,“ but it was the Coca-Cola company that named their drink (Mello Yellow) after his song, with Donovan’s permission, not the other way around. He presumably didn’t tell the company’s marketing executives that they’d named their gross sugar concoction after a yellow dildo that was all the rage among the swinging London set of the 60s.

All together now…

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase

+ In which Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper turn Donovan inside-out and upside-down with a Memphis-soulized jam of Season of the Witch.

+ A decade after this gig, I was part of a group that brought Kooper to AU. During the after-party, he disappeared with my date (along with much of the bourbon) and I never saw either again. I asked my roommate, “Does Kooper have something I don’t?”

Mark: “Now, he has everything you don’t.”

But, hey, it’s only rock and roll…

+ From Gary James’ interview with Al Kooper…

Q. You worked with everybody who was anybody in the music business. Did you ever work with Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison?

A – I didn’t work with them, but I knew them. I spent time with them. I saw the first Super Bowl at Janis’ house. It’s funny, these two cute girls used to live together in New York on 8th Ave. They were named Bonnie and Ronnie. They weren’t related. I used to go up there and see Bonnie. I came out in a bathrobe and there was Jim Morrison in the living room ’cause he was seeing Ronnie. And so we had a nice talk. And I’d bump into him there every now and then ’cause we were seeing these girls at the same time.

Q – You found Jim Morrison to be a nice guy then?

A – He was very nice. I mean, in that context.

Q – So, Janis was a football fan?

A – Well, I think she was going out with Joe Namath at the time. So, I think she had a vested interest.

+ Hold on…our Pearl and Broadway Joe in the sack together? Surely not! But Kooper’s unlikely anecdote is supported by Janis’s biographer, Holly George-Warren (Janis: Her Life and Music). From Karl Richter’s review in the Texas Observer:

The author offers less analysis but plenty of particulars regarding Joplin’s voracious, omnivorous sexuality. New characters frequently arrive in the narrative with a variation on “with whom Janis would briefly share her bed,” and by the time George-Warren mentions in an arch aside Joplin’s tryst with pro quarterback Joe Namath, it’s hardly surprising. A few relationships, such as a yearlong affair with musician Joseph Allen “Country Joe” McDonald, stand out as more significant and serve as further markers of Joplin’s essential inner complexity. Even as Joplin sought free love with partners of various genders, she continually returned to her desire for a lasting “old man” from whom she could get the reliable, unconditional approval she felt only onstage.

+ Edna O’Brien: “I believe in Kafka‘s maxim that literature, whether it be poetry or prose, is disturbing. It’s many other things as well- it can be exciting; it can be an ecstasy; it can be, to use a modern word, it can be a trip. But the inner core of human existence is about disturbance and writing comes from conflict.”

+ Bruce Springsteen went on Colbert this week and ripped Larry Ellison and CBS on its own network: “I’m here in support tonight for Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we’ve got a president who can’t take a joke. And uh, because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass to get what they want.” That’s cool, I guess. But as the historian Greg Grandin–a Bruce fan who just attended a show with his daughter–observed, in all of Springsteen’s in-concert “preaching’ and teaching’” he’s never once mentioned Gaza. Perhaps attacking Ellison and, by silent extension, Bari Weiss, is as close as he will ever come, in a far too deeply coded way.

+ On the Washington Mall, hate preacher Franklin Graham said: “America has become completely sick with sin: Transgenderism, same-sex marriage, opening women’s locker rooms to men are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Speaking of “sin,” this man’s father, Billy, urged Nixon to bomb the dikes outside Hanoi and drown a million “godless” peasants. He also warned Nixon that “the Jews” were out to get him…

+ I love Leon Russell. There’s no one as strange (in a groovy sense) as him around today. And my interpretation of this strange breakup song (Roll Away the Stone) is that Jesus and Mary M. had a fling. Then Mary ran off with Judas (she never got over her thing for bad boys and Jesus just did too much mansplaining for her tastes) and after they had JC crucified because he took the betrayal so badly, there was no one left to “roll away the stone.” So after JC was resurrected from the dead, he was forced to just sit there in his cave tomb and may still be there yet, waiting for some Thomas to come along and poke a finger in his wounds, so he could perform his last magic trick, and ascend into the sky–thus depriving the world of all kinds of priests, preachers and televangelists…” What will they do in 2000 years?” Indeed. This goes out to you, Franklin Graham…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future
Joshua Frank
(Haymarket)

The World and Us
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
(Verso)

Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans
Robert J. Sampson
(Harvard) 

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Tambo
David Sanchez
(Ropeadope)

Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1-3
Immanuel Wilkins
(Blue Note)

Greenworld Image
Telehealth
(Subpop)

All You Have is What You Are

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia