Still from Storm Warning, 1951.

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

– Geothe

+ As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan (FBI Confidential Informant T-10), as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

+++

+ ICE is relentlessly targeting sanctuary communities, like Greater Boston, with some of its most egregious and violent arrests.

+ Most police in Massachusetts are prohibited from assisting ICE. But last Thursday, local cops in Worcester, Mass. pushed a 16-year-old girl to the ground and pinned her face to the sidewalk, as ICE agents handcuffed her mother and took her away to a detention center.

+ In a Mother’s Day raid, ICE agents were videotaped breaking an SUV’s window, throwing a man inside to the ground, handcuffing him, and driving him away. The man and his family had just left church in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

+ The man who recorded the footage, Kennet Santizo, told Telemundo Nueva that he heard the mother of the man ICE was targeting scream: “He has his papers! He has his license!” Santizo said the ICE officer pulled out his gun and pointed it at his face: “Then he broke the window.”

+ Child abuse as government policy: Another video of an ICE raid in Worcester, Mass., shows ICE agents arresting a man and leaving behind a 12-year-old boy standing on the sidewalk.

+ Masked ICE agents smashed the car window in Waltham, Mass, zip-tied a man inside, showed no warrant, and refused repeated demands to identify themselves as they dragged the man away.  “No reaction,” said the man who filmed the raid. “They just broke the window… You know how they don’t care. Just taking this guy, and they don’t know if he is a legal resident or not.”

+ Officials in Dalton, Georgia, dismissed the traffic violations that led ICE to arrest 19-year-old Ximena Arias Cristobal, who came to the US when she was 4. (I reported on Ximena’s case in my last Roaming Charges.) Officials discovered the officer stopped the wrong vehicle. Ximena remains in ICE detention, facing deportation to Mexico, where she has never lived as an adult. Kasey Carpenter, Republican lawmaker in Georgia, said: “There’s been an uprising of heartbreak for our community [after Ximena’s arrest.] A lot of people felt like we were going after the hard criminals, and unfortunately, good people are getting caught on the wash on this issue.”

+ A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ordered the release of Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown postdoc fellow targeted for deportation because of his pro-Palestine speech. The judge, who said his release is in the public interest in order to “disrupt the chilling of free speech.” After the government failed to present any evidence of Khan Suri’s alleged support for Hamas, the judge imposed no conditions on his release and required no bond. So far, the Trump administration has lost every habeas case brought before a federal court, which is why they want to eliminate habeas corpus. Of the habeas cases that have been filed, only Mahmoud Khalil remains in detention because the case is moving at a more sluggish pace than the others.

+ According to Reuters, the Trump administration has ordered the FBI to devote at least a third of its work to immigration enforcement (ie, rounding up poor migrant workers)— and must deprioritize all white collar crime (by rich people) as a result–to the extent white collar crime was ever a priority in the first place.

+ Figures provided to Congress by the Pentagon’s US Transportation Command show that the Trump administration spent at least $21 million on 46 military flights carrying migrants to Guantanamo between January 20th and April 8th.

+ GOP Rep. Randy Weber on Trump’s plan to give noncitizens $1000 to self-deport: “I’m a Texan. I’m old school. I think that they ought to really be punished in some fashion. Maybe they can have a plane ride and fly them over their country, open the door, and they can either have $1,000 or a parachute.” Funny guy, that Weber.

+ Tulsi Gabbard fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, Michael Collins and Maria Langard-Riefhok, after the council authored an assessment that contradicted Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. It’s no surprise that Tulsi Gabbard, one of the biggest political frauds of our time, landed her dream job in the most fraudulent administration since the Teapot Dome Era.

+ What a weird world Trump invents inside his head…

REPORTER: Why are you creating an expedited path into the country for Afrikaners but not others?

TRUMP: Because they’re being killed. And we don’t want to see people be killed … it’s a genocide that’s taking place. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.

+ Julie K. Brown on the Afrikaner refugees “fleeing persecution” to the US: “I’ve never seen refugees with so much luggage.”

+ While the Trump administration continues to strip away visas and deport hundreds of students over pro-Palestinian social media posts, it has welcomed into the US an Afrikaner refugee who said Jews are “untrustworthy and dangerous,” demonstrating once again these repressive policies have nothig to do with protecting American Jews from people who hate Jews and everything to do with protecting Israel from people who object to its wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

+ The Episcopal Church announced this week it will end its decades-old partnership with the US government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by the Trump administration.

+ On Monday, Customs and Border Patrol forcibly yanked Yamal Said, drummer for Lord Buffalo, the Austin, Texas-based rock band, off a plane as the band prepared to leave the US for a  European tour. “We are heartbroken to announce we have to cancel our upcoming European tour,” the band wrote. “Our drummer, Yamal Said, who is a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States (green card holder), was forcibly removed from our flight to Europe by Customs and Border Patrol…He has not been released, and we have been unable to contact him.”

+++

+ Trump seems to be ripping the Constitution apart, clause by clause. This time: the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the President from accepting foreign gifts…Last week, Trump announced that a $5.5 billion Trump golf course and resort would be built in Qatar. This week, Qatar gifted Trump a “palace in the sky” luxury jet that he can use as Air Force One while in office, and then will be transferred to the Trump “Library.”

+ AG Pam Bondi, who approved Trump’s $400M jet gift from Qatar, was a paid lobbyist for Qatar, “earning” $115K a MONTH.

+ Cassandra and Old King Priam on the wisdom of leaders accepting gifts from foreign countries..

REPORTER: What do you say to people who view that luxury jet as a personal gift to you?

TRUMP: You’re ABC fake news, right? Let me tell you — you should be embarrassed asking that question. They’re giving us a free jet. When they give you a putt, you pick it up and walk to the next hole.

+ Rand Paul:  “The Constitution specifically says you can’t take gifts from foreign leaders.”

+ Speaker Mike Johnson: “The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind the curtains… Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They’re not trying to conceal anything…Trump has had nothing to hide.”

+ Someone asked Elon Musk’s Grok AI program to fact-check Johnson’s statement. Grok replied: No, transparency doesn’t make illegal actions legal. Open corruption, like Trump’s business fraud, is still illegal despite public visibility.”

+ Trump in a 2016 debate with HRC, on the Clinton Foundation accepting contributions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar: “It’s a criminal enterprise. Saudi Arabia is giving $25 million. Qatar–all these countries. You talk about women and women’s rights? So these are people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly. And yet you take their money.”

+ It’s not something you’d see in Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. (Maybe Lil’ Rocket Man gave him the idea in one of his love letters.)

+ Trump told Saudi Arabian officials in Riyadh that they should recognize Israel formally, and by doing so, “You’ll be greatly honoring ME.”

+ Trump remains the number one super-fan in his own cult of personality.

+ 23: Number of Fox News personalities now in the Trump administration. The latest is Jeanine Pirro, the former NYC prosecutor, whose former producer at Fox called a “reckless maniac” who “should never be on live TV.”

+ On Wednesday, Federal Judge Christopher Cooper of the DC Circuit Court ruled that the Justice Department canceled grants to the American Bar Association in retaliation for criticizing the Trump administration. Judge Cooper enjoined the department from terminating the grants on that basis. 

+ In a speech at Georgetown Law School, Chief Justice John Roberts said:  The rule of law is endangered…“The notion that the rule of law governs is the basic proposition. Certainly, as a matter of theory, but also as a matter of practice, we need to stop and reflect every now and then on how rare that is, certainly rare throughout history, and rare in the world today. We need to stop and reflect every now and then on how rare that is, certainly rare throughout history, and rare in the world today.”

+ I seem to recall Roberts writing the lead opinion in a case giving Trump total immunity from crimes related to his time in office, even if they occurred after he left office.

+++

+ According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the latest version of the House GOP tax cut package will add $5.3 trillion to the federal deficits if made permanent, even after offsets. Add another $900 billion for interest payments on the expanding debt, and the total debt increase will be $6.2 trillion, the most expensive measure since LBJ combined the Great Society with the Vietnam War.

+ The federal debt is something the GOP only cares about when the Democrats are in power or when they want an excuse to slash social and environmental spending, while raising the military/domestic policing budget. As Dark Lord Cheney said, “Reagan taught us the deficit doesn’t matter.”

+ The cuts to the SNAP program in the House budget bill have grown from 20% to roughly 30%, as Republicans try to impose an Israeli-style starvation regime on the US’s own mothers and children–all to pay for tax cuts for the one percent.

+ Net worth of Mehmet Oz, hawker of snake oil: >$220 million.

+ According to a new analysis by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity: “The bottom 60% of U.S. households don’t make enough money to afford a “minimal quality of life.” When you start to refer to the large marjority of your country as “the bottom,” you know you’re in deep, perhaps irreversible economic decline.

+ Fortune: “To comfortably afford a typical home, a US household needs to earn about $114,000 a year. That’s a $47,000, or 70.1%, leap compared to 2019. But the real median household income in the United States is only $80,610, per the latest government data.” 

+ 64% of U.S. adults fear financial collapse more than death (the figure is 70% for Gen Xers.)

+ Sarah Bundy, who is 54 and still buried under student debt: “Recently, my loan servicer informed me that when my forbearance period ends, my loan payments could be over $2,000 a month. That is more than my monthly take-home pay.”

+ 5.1%: The amount of the entire US Treasury bill market owned by one person, Warren Buffett.

+ Even after the China Pause, the United States’ average tariff rate of 17.8% is still the highest since the 1940s.

+ WSJ Editorial Board on the Great China Tariff Pause:  “As with last week’s modest British agreement, the China deal is more surrender than trump victory.”

+ WalMart CEO John David Rainey says the retailer isn’t able to “absorb all the pressure” of Trump’s tariffs and it will begin raising prices in June: walmart ceo says prices set to go up later this month: “Given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins.”

+ According to disclosure forms examined by Pro Publica, Trump’s AG Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares on the morning of April 2. Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares on April 2. After the market closed later that day, Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs press conference sent the market tumbling.

+ Canadian air travel to the United States in March: down 13.5%

Canadian air travel to Mexico in March: up 15.6%

 + Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism, Josefina Rodríguez Zamora: “I think they are choosing more friendly places.”

+ Since Trump’s return to power, China has become more popular than the US globally. Six months from now, China will likely be more popular than the US inside the US…

+ Global opinion of world figures

Trump

Positive 27%
Negative 58%
No opinion 15%

Putin

Positive 32%
Negative 49%
No opinion 19%

Musk

Positive 31%
Negative 42%
No opinion 27%

Xi Jinping

Positive 32%
Negative 31%
No Opinion 37%

+ Lula said this week that Brazil seeks an ” indestructible” relationship with China as a result of Trump’s trade war.

+ RFJ, Jr. on Monday: “No one has fought the oligarchs as hard as Trump.” On Tuesday, Trump had lunch in Riyadh with some of the world’s leading oligarchs, including Elon Musk, Larry Fink, Sam Altman, Andy Jassy and Reid Hoffman…

+ The Trump administration is preparing to “relax” (ie, gut) the financial capital rules for big banks instituted after the last financial crisis. What could go wrong that has gone massively wrong at least twice before? 

+ Imagine a Federalist Papers-style debate over designing an ideal government that would run like this: “At the Social Security Administration, some employees are running out of paper, pens and printer toner because the U.S. DOGE Service has placed a $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards.”

+ From the Everything You’ve Been Told is a Lie Newswire: “First DOGE said it saved $660 million from real estate cuts. Then it said $500 million. Then $400 million, then $291 million and so forth.”

+ In March, Musk claimed to much fanfare in the press that 40% of the phone calls to Social Security centers were fraudulent and DOGE used this estimate as an excuse to shut down the call centers. But after they began tracking the calls, it turned out that only 2 out of more than 100,000 calls (0.008%) were likely fraudulent and the tracking device slowed down the processing of people’s payments.

+++

+ The ENTIRE population of Gaza is being starved…

+ An entirely engineered famine is being inflicted on some of the most destitute people on earth, who are living in makeshift tents amid toxic rubble, with the connivance of the world’s wealthiest countries. The countries that have allowed Israel to perpetrate this crime against innocent children and their mothers, who have armed it and run diplomatic cover for it, are as guilty as Israel itself.

+ Is there a single newspaper in the US that would run Gideon Levy, one of the world’s most fearless journalists? (See his latest: “Israel’s New Gaza Operation Should be Called ‘Chariots of Genocide’“) You can read him twice a week in Israel.

+ An investigation by the Dutch newspaper NRC reports that seven of the world’s leading genocide scholars — including renowned Holocaust experts — describe Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocidal.

Genocide scholars interviewed by NRC who believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza…

+ One of the key witnesses in the investigation into the massacre of Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers outside Rafah was killed by the Israelis yesterday. Mohammed Bardawil was the lone surviving witness to the presence of Major Nikolai Ashurov and Israeli tanks during the ambush of the UN staff member who arrived on the scene shortly after the killings of the 15 medical workers. Mohammed Bardawil was 12 years old.

+ Dr Raed Al-Baba at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza: “Many children are stunted, suffering from severe diarrhoea and anaemia … It’s leading to rickets, bowed knees, and even the inability to move. They can’t see things well or clearly as a result of malnutrition.”

+ Those who have justified Israel’s blockade of food, water and medicine into Gaza suffer from a moral blindness from which there will be no recovery or absolution…

+ In response to a request from the Israeli human rights group, HaMakom HaKhi Ham, the Israeli military has officially acknowledged that over 80% of those killed in Gaza since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18 were civilian non-combatants. According to figures provided by the World’s Most Moral Army, of the 2,780 Palestinians killed since March 18, only about 500 were identified as militants. The remaining 2,280 were civilians not suspected of any militant activity. These figures, which are almost certainly vastly undercounted, mean that a ratio of 4.5 civilians were killed for every alleged fighter. That’s much worse than in other recent wars:

Israel’s 2014 Gaza war: ~3 civilians per combatant
Russia-Ukraine war: ~2.8 civilians per combatant
U.S. war on ISIS in Syria: ~2.5 civilians per combatant

+ A Sunday’s meeting of the Israeli Knesset, Netanyahu made clear that the intention of his regime is to destroy Gaza as a liveable space,  forcing the surviving Palestinians to leave, in a second Nakba, and never be allowed to return: “The Gazans we remove will not return. They won’t be there. We will control the place. There is no other war target. Any other target is just a bluff…We are demolishing more and more houses; they have nowhere to go back to. The only obvious outcome will be Gazans wishing to emigrate out of the strip. Our main problem is finding receptive countries.”

+ Not that it should matter (and clearly it doesn’t), but Shireen was an American citizen who was raised as a Christian in New Jersey. If the memory of any other American were being debased like this, there would be national outrage, led from the White House. But because Shireen was also Palestinian, she’s considered subhuman, beneath any consideration.

+ Israel media reports that released Israeli-American prisoner of war Edan Alexander has refused to meet with Israeli PM Netanyahu, while a few moments after Alexander’s release, Israel began bombing Gaza again, killing 47 people.

+ Laila Al-Arian: “Edan Alexander has been released, so why is the U.S. still allowing Israel to starve Gaza? What’s the point of a deal if one side is allowed to break it? This sets a dangerous precedent for diplomacy.”

+++

+ The Joint Committee on Taxation (See above) also concluded that the reconciliation bill would effectively lower taxes for millionaires by 3% and raise taxes for people making less than $15,000 by 1%–all paid for by kicking 8.6 million people off Medicaid coverage.

+ When you’ve lost Josh Hawley: “The right thing to do is not to cut Medicaid … it ought to be just a basic foundational principle: It is wrong to cut healthcare for the working poor. And that’s what we’re talking about here. My state is a Medicaid expansion state.”

+ There’s not a single Congressional district where the support for slashing Medicare is more than 15%. Of course, this doesn’t matter to MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, they sought power in order to use it, especially for malign unpopular policies, and they don’t fret about the future political consequences. Imagine a party who won power and then fulfilled their promises for englightened popular policies, instead of worrying how it might piss off Wall Street?

+ The % who support Medicaid cuts in 2026 battleground districts:

AK-AL (Begich): 9%
AZ-06 (Ciscomani): 9%
CA-41 (Calvert): 8%
CO-08 (Evans): 8%
IA-01 (Miller Meeks): 9%
NE-02 (Bacon): 8%
PA-07 (Mackenzie): 8%
PA-10 (Perry): 9%
PA-08 (Bresnahan): 8%
WI-03 (Van Orden): 8%

+ This quartet of eugenicist creeps justify their plan to slash Medicare and Medicaid by BLAMING YOU for your cancer, diabetes, congestive heart failure, and, I guess, getting old…

+ Trump on Ozempic:

A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very, very, very top guy. Most of you would’ve heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug. And he called me up and says, ‘Mr. President,’ he calls me…uh…he used to call me ‘Donald,’ now he calls me ‘President.’ So that’s nice respect. But he’s a rough guy, smart guy. Very successful. Very rich. I wouldn’t even know how we would know this, but because he’s got comments. Mr. President, can I ask you a question’ What? ‘I’m in London and I just paid for this damn fat drug, I take.’ I said, It’s not working.

+ The Luigi Effect…

+ UnitedHealth Group’s stock has fallen 47% over the past six months, and the CEO, who expanded the company’s use of AI to deny claims, resigned “for personal reasons.”

+ CEO Andrew Witty’s abrupt exit from UnitedHealth came just before word broke that the Justice Department has been investigating UnitedHealth since last summer for Medicare fraud.

+ Pro Publica obtained internal documents from Cigna, showing how the insurance giant pressed doctors to deny claims without even opening a patient’s file. The strategy saved the company millions, but may have cost thousands of lives. “We literally click and submit,” a former company doctor said.

+ In Congressional testimony this week, RKF, Jr said he’d probably vaccinate his own kids against measles. Then said, “No one should take medical advice from me.” Was that Bobby speaking or the Worm in Bobby’s Brain?

+ Despite the fact that the US spends far more on health care than any other industrialized nation, only Mexico and Korea employ fewer doctors per capita.

Medical Doctors Per 10,000 People…

Austria: 50.4
Norway: 50.1
Lithuania: 46.3
Switzerland: 42.4
Germany: 42.3
Denmark: 41.9
Czech Republic: 40.4
Spain: 40.2
Italy: 39.8
Iceland: 38.9
Netherlands: 36.7
Estonia: 34.8
Hungary: 33.8
New Zealand: 33.5
Latvia: 33
Ireland: 32.8
Israel: 32.2
Slovenia: 31.8
France: 31.7
Belgium: 31.3
UK: 28.2
Canada: 27.2
USA: 26.1
Mexico:24.3
Korea: 23

Source: Niskanen Center

+ RFK Jr during his appearance before Congress on the cost of drug rehab treatment: “There are many really gold star rehabs that do it for a tiny fraction, like only $20,000 to $40,000 a month.”

+ Per capita annual income in West Virginia, the state with the highest addition rates: $23,450.

+ There were 30,000 fewer drug overdoses in the United States in 2024 than in 2023, the most significant one-year decline ever recorded. Much of the decline can be attributed to greater access to Narcan (Naloxone), which will likely become greatly restricted under Trump.

+++

+ As hurricane and wildfire season opens, the National Weather Service has been blinded by staff cuts ordered by DOGE and now faces 155 “critical” vacancies. At least 30 National Weather Service offices are currently without a chief meteorologist, including those who issue forecasts for New York City, Cleveland, and Houston. Dr. Robert Rodhe, Berkeley Earth: “Severe staffing shortages at the National Weather Service will lead to missing data, worse forecasts, and late or missing warnings of extreme weather. Sooner or later, people are going to die as a direct result of this.”

+ Meanwhile, the David Richardson, the newly appointed head of FEMA, admitted in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn’t yet have a fully formed disaster-response plan, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

+ After record temperatures in 2024, many climate scientists predicted that this year would be cooler. In fact, the planet seems to be heading for a second consecutive year with temperatures breaching the 1.5°C climate goal.

+ New research indicates that “the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 C° per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate most recently.”

+ MAMA: Making America Metastatic Again

+ China’s CO2 emissions are declining for the first time in decades and are now a full one percent below their 2024 peak.

+ Maybe just “Drill, baby” and not “Drill, baby, drill”? According to Kaes Van’t Hof, CEO of Diamondback Energy, U.S. oil production has peaked and will start to decline due to the drop in oil prices.

+ So much for the Great Exodus from those “large oppressive, progressive cities”: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, DC and San Jose, all growing in population.

+ A decapitated dolphin was found on a North Carolina beach this week. Officials are offering a $20,000 reward for information on its death and mutilation. Have they checked the back of RFK, Jr’s Bronco? 

+ While Trump tries to annex Canada and Greenland and gives the green light for a foreign mining company to destroy the Apache sacred site of Oak Flat, my president by proxy, Claudia Sheinbaum, is returning thousands of acres of land to indigenous tribes in Mexico.

+ Sheinbaum’s domestic approval rating is among the highest of any world leader.

+ We’ll probably never hear another president speak as forcefully in defense of forests as LBJ did on signing the legislation creating Redwoods National Park:

We have rescued a magnificent and meaningful treasure from the chainsaw.  For once, we have spared what is enduring and ennobling from the hungry and the hasty and the selfish act of destruction.  The redwoods will stand because the men and women of vision and courage made their stand, refusing to suffer any further exploitation of our national wealth, and greater damage to our environment or any larger debasement of that quality and beauty without which life itself is quite barren.

+ Of course, Lady Bird was a driving force behind the preservation of the redwoods and when she attended the dedication of the park at what’s now Lady Bird Johnson Grove, Sierra-Pacific (I think it was) ordered an all out assault on the beautiful stand of redwoods adjacent to it, in a brazen attempt to embarrass the former first lady and drown out her speech. Of course, this brutish act of intimidation only served to emphasize everything she said about how threatened the redwoods were and the urgency of protecting what little was left in the once mighty Redwood Creek watershed.

+ From the Department of Things You Hadn’t Thought to Worry About: “Researchers have concluded that too many older fish have been removed from these waters, preventing the knowledge of the best spawning grounds from being passed to younger, less experienced fish.”

+++

+ Trump, after meeting Muhammad al-Julani, the former head of Al Qaeda in Syria, said of the man who overthrew Assad: “Julani is a young, attractive guy with a very strong past.” Trump seemed so smitten by the Islamic revolutionary that I’m a little surprised he didn’t break out into the chorus of his favorite song: “YMCA.”

+ General Stanley McChrystal said of Trump’s giddy interaction with Syria’s new leader, whom he once tried to track down and kill: “The reality is, people who are our enemies often evolve into not being our enemies; and people who are terrorists evolve into something else. Menachem Begin was a terrorist in his early days. Nelson Mandela was labeled a terrorist. Many people who feel very strongly about something actually exhibit a force of will, and then they can evolve and mature.”

+ I guess it’s too bad Bin Laden didn’t survive to break bread with Trump and Stan. He might even have gotten a golf course out of it.

The party Tony Blair reshaped in his own image was always going to end this way…nativist immigrant bashing and forcing austerity onto Britain’s poor.

+ Keir Starmer: “If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense. So we’re raising English language requirements across every main immigration route.”

Ogebeni Demola: “White people in South Africa still cannot speak Zulu even after settling there for almost four hundred years.”

+ As someone of Celtic ancestry, I contend that if you want to live in the UK, you should speak one of the Celtic languages: Gaelic, Manx, Breton, Cornish, Irish or Welsh…

“The people closest to Biden landed on some techniques to handle (or disguise) what was happening: restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; instructing his writers to keep his speeches brief so that he didn’t have to spend too much time on his feet; having him use the short stairs to Air Force One. When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.” By late 2023, his staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday.”

+ Knowing Jake Tapper, he was almost certainly one of those who knew how far gone Biden was in 2022 and kept it to himself for his book.

+ Biden had no intention of “handling” Netanyahu, since they agreed on everything. Biden’s role was to handle any dissent against a US-funded and armed genocide inside his own party, which he did so ineffectually that he threw the election to Trump. Biden was good at being a bad person and bad at being a good politician.

+ The Resistance in action. Michigan Rep Debbie Dingell falls asleep during congressional hearing. And she’s only 71, which is spry by Democratic Party standards…

+ Someone suggested that perhaps it was something in the water. Yes, if the water had been bottled in Flint.

+ Debbie occupies the Dingell seat, which she inherited from her husband John, the longest-serving member of Congress in history, who was first elected in 1955 and served until 2015.

+ This week, the DNC did the most DNC thing ever by announcing its intention to kick spirited young party activist David Hogg off its central committee for tactfully suggesting that the party should perhaps set some kind of limit on the number of geriatrics running for office.

+ Hogg: “Everyone in our party says they want to start winning again, and they do — but that simply will not be possible with our current set of leaders, too many of which are asleep at the wheel, out-of-touch, and ineffective.”

+ Jon Schwartz: “If the GOP starts imprisoning Democratic politicians, we know what happens next: Those Democrats will issue statements from prison about how they look forward to working with their Republican friends on bipartisan solutions.”

+ Pope Leo From the Southside’s message on freedom of the press:

Let me, therefore, reiterate today the Church’s solidarity with journalists who are imprisoned for seeking and reporting the truth while also asking for their release. The Church recognises in these witnesses – I am thinking of those who report on war even at the cost of their lives – the courage of those who defend dignity, justice and the right of people to be informed, because only informed individuals can make free choices. The suffering of these imprisoned journalists challenges the conscience of nations and the international community, calling on all of us to safeguard the precious gift of free speech and of the press.

The New York Times ran a big “fly-on-the-wall of the Pentagon” piece this week on why Trump suddenly ended his bombing campaign on the Houthis in Yemen. Short answer: the Houthis were continuing to strike Israel, US ships in the Red Sea and down US drones, while the US was running out of ammo.

+ Among the primary revelations…

– The Houthis almost shot down an F-35
– The bombing campaign cost $1 billion for 30 days
– Pentagon used so many precision munitions that DOD contingency planners started to freak out
– CENTCOM’s success metric was the number of “bombs dropped.”

+ The Cheney Democrats are still alive and spewing neocon talking points: First, Hakeem Jeffries: “Qatar is a close ally of Iran and Hamas.” Then Ritchie Torres: “Qatar is a state sponsor of terrorism. It has a long and ugly history of financing a barbaric terrorist organization, Hamas….Both Air Force One and Hamas are going to have something in common — paid for by Qatar.” (Note: Qatar is home to one of the largest U.S. military bases in the Middle East.)

+++

+ An Ohio man checked out 100 books on Black, Jewish & LGBTQ history, telling the local librarian that his son was gay and he was trying to learn more about homosexuality. Then he publicly burned them to “cleanse the library,” sharing a video feed of the auto de fe on his Gab social media account. (Gab has become a digital gather place for white supremacist and neo-Nazis.) The librarian at the Beachwood library branch told police that she found the man’s behavior to be “very odd and concerning,” but that he didn’t make any overt threats during the encounter.

+ A new NBER Working Paper projects that each $1 spent on Universal Pre-Kindergarten generates between $3 and $20 in aggregate earnings. That’s enough to offset the costs of Universal Pre-Kindergarten through higher tax revenues.

+ The Onion couldn’t credibly run this story of how Trump’s most devoted MAGA followers, seduced by Trump’s own voice on ads, bought a $640 “Trump” Watch, only to find that the prominent name on the watch was actually spelled R-U-M-P. 

+ On Mother’s Day, RKF Jr. took those members of his family who still want to be seen in his company on a hike in DC’s Rock Creek Park, during which he stripped down and jumped into one of the creek’s deep pools for a swim and later posted photos of his aquatic feat on Social Media. Rock Creek is basically an open sewer, and there are warnings throughout the park on the dangers of swimming or even allowing pets to drink the water, which is contaminated with toxins and bacteria, including E. coli.

20, 20, 24 hours to go
I wanna be infected
Nothin’ to do,
nowhere to go, oh
I wanna be infected

+ Kim 1, Big Tech 0: “A growing number of the nation’s top tech firms have hired remote IT workers, only to discover that the employees were actually North Korean cyber operatives.”

+ Here’s yet another study showing that IQ as a measurement of just about anything of probitive value is little more than a “pseudoscientific swindle.” Has anyone checked on Charles Murray?

+ Speaking of IQ, here’s a snippet from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s speech, after receiving an honorary doctorate from Dakota State University:

+ Too bad Paddy Chayefsky isn’t around to update Network, though I don’t know how he could possibly make it more absurd than today’s reality here in Trumptopia…”Kristi Noem has been working with the producer of “Duck Dynasty” to pitch a reality TV show where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.”

+ Soul mates!

+ Ian Bremmer: “A true Pope must speak for the downtrodden: the poor, the forgotten, the Chicago White Sox.”

+ When reporter Daniel Boguslaw knocked on Sy Hersh’s door…

Moshik Temkin: “Sacha Baron Cohen has made an entire career and fortune making fun of ordinary poor people who were nice to him even though he was obnoxious with them.”

+++

Lola Montes Aphrodite before her descent into the Canyon of the Banana Slugs.

Last month, we adopted an 8-week-old Australian Shepherd puppy. We don’t know what she calls herself, but we call her Lola. LO-LA, Lola. Or just Lo. Lo in socks. Lola in slacks. Though usually our socks and slacks are in Lola—in her mouth, to be precise. Lola Montes, after one of Cockburn’s favorite films.

Lola’s nearly all black with a white slash on her chest and white paws with black spots, markings that are out of favor with the people who collect Aussies. Indeed, Lola’s markings are such that in the not-so-distant past, an Aussie breeder smugly told me, they would have gotten her drowned as a discredit to her breed (“Drown cats and blind puppies,” said Iago to poor, suicidal Rodrigo.) But in these more enlightened times, buyers of Aussies simply passed her over as an untouchable, and this puppy of the Preterite ended up with us. LO-LA Lola, Lola Montes, our Black Aphrodite. 

This week, I’ve been taking Lola for short walks into Newell Canyon, the branching, forested gorge with a salmon run below our house. After a couple days of heavy rains, the canyon had sprung alive with tree frogs, salamanders, and banana slugs, dozens of which were making their incremental way across the trail, when Lola slurped one up as if it were an oyster at the bar in Dan and Louie’s, the venerable Portland fish house.

I panicked. Are slugs poisonous?  They sure look poisonous.

So, I pried open Lola Montes Aphrodite’s goddess-like mouth, stuck my trembling fingers past her shark-sharp puppy teeth, and extracted the six-inch-long slug, shrunken but seemingly unscathed by Lola’s unforgiving canines.

What to do?

Lola and the Banana Slug, after its extraction.

Lola stubbornly refused to retrace our steps up the canyon trail back to the house. So we sat on an extrusion of basalt near the creek, where I consulted the Oracle Siri on the toxicity of Banana slugs. It turns out these large yellow-greenish gastropods with black spots, despised for their markings like Lola herself, were a staple in the diets of the Clackamas and Molalla people who fished for salmon and lamprey, gathered roots and berries, hunted elk, and, I presume, collected banana slugs in this very canyon, perhaps on this same trail.  This species of slug is rich in protein and though they look, marginally, like a banana, they taste, you guessed it, like chicken–but chicken crossed with calamari, as in some mad surf-and-coop fusion recipe from Dr. Moreau’s kitchen.

The slime of banana slugs is slightly hallucinogenic, like microdosing magic mushrooms, I was told by a local connoisseur of slug juices. But, the venerable Siri warned, the slugs themselves should not be eaten raw–by humans at least–but sautéed in a splash of white wine, a lovely Sancerre, perhaps, lest you invite the terrible-sounding rat lungworm to enter your body, a nematode whose normal habitat is the pulmonary system of rattus rattus and which can transmit meningitis to humans. How the rat lungworms got into the single-lunged slugs, I do not know, nor do I want to contemplate.

Needless to say, I didn’t break this news to Lola, who was happily tripping on her own awesomeness and perhaps the mind-expanding excresences of the Banana slug, as well.. 

Girls Will be Boys and Boys Will be Girls, It’s a Mixed Up, Muddled Up, Shook Up World, Except for Lola…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
Dennis McNally
(DeCapo)

House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company
Eva Dou
(Portfolio)

Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing
John Berger
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day: The Unissued Atco Recordings 1970-1971
Jesse Ed Davis
(Real Gone Music)

Even in Arcadia
Sleep Token
(RCA)

An Afternoon in Norway: The Kongsberg Concert
Art Pepper
(Elemental)

Glimpses of Beauty and Bedrock Joy

“I suspect almost every day that I’m living for nothing, I get depressed, and I feel self-destructive, and a lot of the time I don’t like myself. What’s more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we’ve got and, simplistic as it may seem, it’s a person’s duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We’re all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.”

– Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

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