One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.

― Jean-Luc Godard

+ President Bone Spurs on Prince Bone Saws: “We have an extremely respected man in the Oval Office today. And a friend of mine for a long time. A very good friend of mine. I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.”

+ You might recall the manufactured furor that erupted in certain predictable precincts of the Right when, in 2009, Barack Obama appeared to bow (more of a curtsy, really, as was his style) before King Abdullah. Well, that questionable show of deference to Saudi royalty was totally eclipsed by Donald Trump’s grotesque and craven display of obeisance before Abdullah’s son, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.

MBS came to DC, wrapped in his Bedouin robes, looking to be received once again in civilized (if you can call Trump’s White House that) society, eight years after his elite hit squad killed and butchered the Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi.

MBS, who runs the kingdom with an iron fist, represents everything Trump fantasizes about enjoying himself: incalculable wealth, absolute power, impunity from even the most heinous of crimes and total loyalty, enforced at sword point.

So it’s no surprise thatTrump did more than receive MBS with diplomatic niceties. He lavished praise on the smirking Prince with the eagerness if a supplicant, asserted his innocence with the fervency (if not articulateness) of a defense lawyer, throwing his own intelligence agencies under the bus, demeaned and ridiculed an American reporter for asking obvious and obligatory questions of the Prince and even went so far as to suggest that Khashoggi may have deserved to be killed on the orders of the man sitting across from him in the Oval Office. “Things happen,” Trump shrugged. 

Rarely has an American president prostrated himself so abjectly and unreservedly in front of another world leader…at least in public. The Bushes–father and son–shared an inexplicable devotion to Prince Bandar, but they largely kept their unseemly acts of fealty to the oil kingdom behind the closed doors of the now demolished East Wing.

The deniability for MBS’s complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is entirely implausible, as both the CIA and the UN concluded. It was MBS’s personal praetorial guard, the so-called Tiger Team, that detained Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, interrogated him, tortured him, drugged him, killed him (likely by strangulation while wearing a hood) dismembered his body using a bone saw, and then either incinerated his body parts or dissolved them in acid and buried them on the consulate grounds beneath piles of barbecued meat.

+ MBS was the head of the Saudi security service that carried out the assassination. It’s inconceivable they would have carried out such an operation without his authority or knowledge.

+ MBS sent multiple texts before and after the killing to his top lieutenant, Saud al-Qahtani, who was supervising the hit squad and apparently gave the order to kill Khashoggi: “Bring me the head of the dog.”

+ The Tiger Team flew to and from Istanbul on the private jets of a company–Sky Prime Aviation–controlled by the Crown Prince.

+ The killers reportedly brought Khashoggi’s fingers back to Riyadh, as proof of the dissident’s death.

+ In 2018, Trump blocked the release of the CIA investigation into Khashoggi’s murder, which concluded with “high confidence” that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. The assessment reportedly included a recorded telephone call between MBS and his brother Khalid bin Salman, who then served as the Saudi ambassador to the US, where MBS allegedly ordered his brother “to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible”.

+ From the executive summary of the CIA report:

We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.

+ When the conclusion of the CIA report leaked out to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, Trump undercut his own intelligence agency, saying that the report was based only on “feelings” and that there was “no smoking gun.” Trump, in his customary manner, said of the Crown Prince, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

+ For his book Rage, Bob Woodward interviewed Trump about MBS and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi…

“I’ve gotten involved very much,” Trump said. “I know everything about the whole situation.”

“So what happened, sir? I asked.

“I saved his ass,” Trump said. “That’s what happened.”

Saved whose ass?

“MBS,” Trump said. “They were coming down on him very strongly. But I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop. . . You know, I’m very friendly with those guys.”

Which guys? The Saudis?

“Congress. I’m very friendly with Congress,” Trump said.

(Rage, p. 227; The Trump Tapes, p. 190)

+ Major Garrett: How did you feel when you saw Trump’s reaction to just one question about this today? How hostile he became, how defensive on behalf of the Crown Prince he became

Hanan Elatr Khashoggi: “It was a disappointment to silence the journalists. She’s doing her job. She’s being transparent and professional. I really wish Trump would listen to me, meet with me. I want to tell him who is the real Jamal Khashoggi…To say he’s controversial … it does not give anyone the right to just kidnap him, torture him, kill him and dismantle his body. This hurt me a lot. It’s taking away, as well, the freedom for the journalists to do their job. … And what is the difference then between the U.S. and any dictatorship in a Middle Eastern country? He admitted verbally, he took responsibility verbally, but he did not take any action to show the world there is rectifying of this crime.. I did not receive an official apology myself as a wife, as they destroyed my life. They’ve taken my lover.”

+ Of course, Trump is far from the only US leader to protect MBS. Obama coordinated with MBS in Saudi Arabia’s war on the Houthis in Yemen, where the death toll reached near genocidal proportions. Then, in November 2022, the Biden administration issued a written opinion attesting that MBS enjoyed diplomatic immunity for his role in Khashoggi’s murder and was therefore shielded from prosecution or civil actions in US courts. Biden, who once vowed to make MBS “a pariah,” later gave him a fist-bump when the two met in Jeddah in 2022.

+ At least 8 of Khashoggi’s killers received paramilitary training in the US.

+ Do Americans really need reminding that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi? Or that 15 of the 18 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals and the entire operation was largely financed by Saudi sources. A former Al Qaeda commander and head-chopper backed by the Saudis, who was just feted at the White House last week, is now running Syria…It’s becoming clearer and clearer who won the Forever Wars.

+++

+ As I’ve said several times, nothing unnerves Trump more than being confronted by an intelligent woman who shows no fear of his bullying manner. He quickly becomes unglued. Witness Trump’s absolutely demented attacks on ABC News White House Correspondent, Mary Bruce, for having the guts to ask two obvious questions of Trump and Bin Salman…One would hope that the press corps’ job is to ask “insubordinate” questions, though they rarely do. Let’s see if ABC stands by her.

ABC News reporter, Mary Bruce: “Is it appropriate for your family to do business with Saudi Arabia while you’re president? And to you, your royal highness, the US intelligence agencies concluded you orchestrated the murder of a journalist…”

Trump: “Who are you with?”

Bruce: “ABC News.”

Trump: “ABC Fake news. I have nothing to do with the family business. You mentioned somebody extremely controversial—a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman [Khashoggi]. Whether you did or didn’t like him, things happen, but he [MBS] knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest.”

Then a few minutes later…

Bruce: “Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?”

Trump: “It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who is highly respected, asking him about a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question. You could even ask that question nicely. But you’re all psyched. Somebody psyched you over at ABC. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter… You work for a crappy company. I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake. So wrong. We have a great commissioner, a chairman who should look at that.

+ When Catherine Lucey, an excellent reporter for Bloomberg News, asked Trump on Air Force One last week whether he thought there was anything incriminating in the Epstein files, he jabbed his finger toward her face and sneered, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!”

+ Trump took to his social media account early Thursday morning, clearly in a state of psychological agitation: he called for leading Democrats, including several who are veterans, to be arrested for sedition and tried for treason; demanded once again that the “bum” Jimmy Kimmel be fired; posted a fake video of him kicking a soccer ball in the Oval Office with Cristiano Renaldo (who hadn’t visited the US in 11 years because of a sexual assault allegation stemming from 2009, that was ultimately dismissed by a court in 2023), reposting a call for Democrats to be hanged [It’s what George Washington would do]; then made his own call for the Democratic members of Congress to face the death penalty.

+ What’s the sedition? Urging members of the military to disobey illegal orders and actions.

+ During the same week the Republicans in the House voted down a resolution condemning fascism, the leadership of the Coast Guard decided that swastikas, nooses and the Confederate flag no longer represented symbols of hate, but were now merely “potentially divisive.” Pride flags are, of course, strictly banned.

+ One flag? Half the members of Congress have an Israeli flag in their office; the other half display Confederate battle flags…

+ Meanwhile, Vish Burra, a producer for the  One America News’s “The Matt Gaetz Show” was fired after executives at the Trump-devoted network learned that Burra had posted a cartoon depicting Jews as scheming cockroaches that he later called “vermin.”

+++

+ Trump Net-Approval on the Economy:

NH: -15%
CT: -26%
RI: -27%
MA: -42%

U. New Hampshire / Nov 17, 2025

+ The US unemployment rate rose to 4.4% in September, the highest in four years.

+ Alex Thompson:  “Among people between 18 and 34 years old, consumer sentiment is near its all-series low—worse than the painful end of stagflation, worse than the Great Recession, and worse than the pandemic.”

+ AOC: “We’ve been hearing from the Trump administration that the economy in general is thriving and he’s been saying that the economy is booming, but it’s only seven tech companies that are booming…  So the entire US economy growth can be tracked down to seven companies.”

+ Power costs are up 7.6% this year, meaning that most Americans will pay an extra $32 a month on their electric utility bills. More than six million Americans are so delinquent on their power bills that they will soon be sent to collection agencies.

+ This week, the Florida Public Service Commission approved a  $7 billion rate hike for Florida Power & Light (FPL) customers, the largest rate hike in U.S. history. Half of every dollar requested will go toward guaranteeing FPL shareholders the highest return on equity in the lower 48 states — 10.95%. 

Under the rate hike, 12 million Floridians will pay, on average, an additional $175/annually in energy, fuel, and taxes. By January, the average FPL customer bill using 1000 kWh/month will be 45% higher — $513/year more — than in December 2020.

+ According to Food and Water Watch, the Florida Public Service Commission has approved every electricity utility rate request it has reviewed in the past five years. From 2020 to 2024, Tampa Electric customer bills increased by 56%, Duke Energy by 42% and FPL by 36%. Meanwhile, half the low-income households in major cities, including Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando, and Miami, have an energy burden greater than 7.2%, and a quarter of them, over 12%. The national average is 3.5%.

+ Bloomberg: “Rising electricity demand from data centers is raising the risk of blackouts across a wide swath of the US during extreme conditions this winter, according to the regulatory body overseeing grid stability.”

+ The monthly cost of groceries for a family of four in the US is now $1,030, a record high.

+ Hiring for new graduates among the 15 largest tech companies has fallen by over 50% since 2019, according to the venture capital outfit SignalFire.

+ The top 10% of U.S. households hold 87% of all stocks, nearly 85% of private businesses, and 44% of real estate assets, according to the wealth management firm Ritholtz.

+ Peter Thiel: “Capitalism is not working for a lot of people in New York City. It’s not working for young people.”

+ Trump: “I only care about one thing: will we be number one in crypto?”

+ Martin Casado, a partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, a top investor in Silicon Valley, says 80% of the startups pitching to them are now using Chinese AI models:  ‘I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,’ says  a partner at a16z.”

+ A new National Bureau of Economic Research study on the Economic Impact of Brexit found that Brexit reduced GDP in the UK by 6 to 8%, reduced investment by 12 to 18%, reduced employment by 3 to 4% and reduced productivity by 3 to 4%.

+ Thomas Piketty: “Today, I joined 500+ researchers from 70 countries in calling on world leaders to create an International Panel on Inequality modelled after the IPCC— as recommended by the G20 Committee on Inequality led by Joseph Stiglitz.”

+ With the feds refusing to release job numbers, we’re left to rely on Goldman Sachs, which estimates the US lost about 50,000 jobs in October– the biggest drop since 2020.

+ CEOs in the US are paid 280 times the annual salary of the average worker.

+ With his new trillion-dollar compensation package, Elon Musk now pockets more money than every elementary school teacher in the US combined. I guess this is why so many of the Tech Bros are saying kids don’t need to learn to read anymore. AI will do it for them…

+ The combined paychecks of all 3.2 million cashiers nearly equal Musk’s average annual compensation.

+ According to Market Watch, as the cost of living in the US rises, 401(k) hardship withdrawals have more than doubled, as people raid their retirement savings to pay the mortgage or health care costs.

+ The number of packages delivered in New York City per day in 2025: 2.5 million, up from 1.1 million in 2017. More than 45,000 people are now employed in the package and freight delivery services in NYC alone.

+ Dario Amodie, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause the unemployment surge by 10% to 20%.

+ Google’s Sundar Pichai: “The job of CEO is one of the easier things AI could soon replace.” Just do it!

+ Since Oracle announced its $300 billion deal with OpenAI on September 10, its stock has lost $315 billion in market value.

+ Higher-income shoppers are now shopping at the Dollar Tree discount store twice as much as they were in 2021.

+ Elon Musk’s foundation gave away a record $474 million in 2024. But Bloomberg reports that the vast majority went to entities he controls.

+ The Repo Man Stage of Capitalism: More than 2.5 million vehicles were repossessed in 2024, and 2025 is on track to hit 3 million, the most since the 2009 recession.

+ John Hazard: “A more progressive repo operative, targeting luxury gas hogs, would not be a bad idea.”

+ The New York Fed reported that delinquency rates of 90 days or more for mortgages, auto loans, and student debt have all increased over the past 12 months.

+ MSNBC: What is the Treasury Department doing to lessen job insecurity?

Treasury Secretary Bessent: “President Trump is bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs.”

MSNBC: “How many have come back?”

Bessent: “It’s just starting.”

+ As of April 2025, the US has lost more than 42,000 manufacturing jobs.

+++

+ Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein sex trafficking circle wide open, on why so many of Epstein’s victims have been reluctant to come forward or name their abusers: “The victims have been threatened. The men they were forced to be with are powerful and wealthy. They can sue them into oblivion and make their lives even more of a hell. Epstein hired people to follow the girls he abused, and to harass members of their families. He told them, “I know where you live.”  He told them he would destroy them. I would hope that the public understands that these women have children — they are afraid not only for themselves, but for their families and loved ones.”

+ The Epstein/Bannon correspondence is some of the most intriguing in the whole tranche, ranging from finding a doctor for the leprous-looking Bannon to deprecating Imran Khan to the HBO film Chernobyl to an FBI episode hinting at Bannon’s role in J6…

+ Rep. Thomas Massie:  “I am sorry if one of your billionaire donors is gonna get embarrassed because he went to Rape Island.  That is what they have coming.  In fact, they need to be on the other side of bars, a lot of them.”

+ MAGA has gone from pushing the QAnon conspiracy to now rationalizing pedophilia through confessional testimonials…

+ The Epstein emails reveal why Brin and Page named Google… “gOOgle” and it’s just as juvenile and misogynistic as you’d expect.

+ Tina Brown on the only thing that gets you canceled in NYC’s elite society: poverty.

+ Prince Andrew’s biographer, Andrew Lownie (Entitled: the Rise and Fall of the House of York], said in a talk at Cambridge University that Epstein introduced Melania to Trump and that Epstein had originally been her lover:

Here we are with him [Andrew] at Mar-a-Lago with Epstein, a woman called Gwendolyn Beck, who Andrew took the Island, and Melania. I had various references in my book to Melania Trump; Epstein had actually been her lover before Trump. But Trump didn’t like that in the book, so he ordered it to be taken out of the book, after about 60,000 copies had been printed, so it proved to be a pretty pointless gesture. But my publishers did it. But I keep spreading the word.

+++

+ A drunken Border Patrol agent named Isaiah Hodgson stalked a woman into a restroom at a Long Beach restaurant called the Yard House. Holding a loaded gun and an ammunition clip, Hodgson demanded a date. She refused and told security at the eatery. After police were called, the federal immigration agent fled the building and stashed his gun behind a palm tree. Then he punched the arresting officers. Hodgson later whined that he was going to be “doxxed” if his arrest became public. “I’ve already dealt with so much fucking stress and all this bullshit, man,” he screamed while sitting on a bench in jail.  A few weeks later, he died of a drug overdose in his parents’ house in Riverside.

+ After reviewing dozens of body cam videos of DHS’s actions in Chicago, Federal Judge Sara Ellis ruled that DHS officials had misled the public and the court “repeatedly” and that their numerous lies were exposed by their own agents’ body cams. Ellis writes in her decision: 

Videos of what happened in Little Village taken from agents’ BWC’s and helicopters do not match up with agents’ descriptions of the alleged chaos they encountered. DHS tried to claim protesters threw fireworks at agents…(with overlaid text stating “artillery shell type firework shot at agents”), when helicopter and BWC footage indicates that those explosions were in fact agents’ flashing grenades.

She zeroed in on the imperious Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who she said failed to give credible testimony. She described him as appearing “evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses or outright lying.” 

The judge said that “at some point it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe anything the Defendants [ie., the Feds] represent.”

+ On the same day, Judge Ellis handed down her caustic ruling, federal prosecutors quietly dismissed charges against Marimar Martinez, the Chicago woman who was shot by a Border Patrol agent five times. The feds had initially accused her of pulling a gun on the immigration agents, then ramming her car into the Feds’ vehicle, all of which was later undermined by videos of the incident.

+ One of ICE’s first operations in Charlotte was a raid on a church that sent many parishioners running into a nearby woods for safety and left children crying and their mother sobbing…

+ A 911 call and video prove that federal immigration agents with their guns drawn surrounded high school kids at a Dutch Brothers Coffee shop in Hillsboro, Oregon, west of Portland. “They just came out of nowhere and started, like, swarming.”

+ Florida State Rep. Angie Nixon on why she filed a bill (VISIBLE Act of 2025) to unmask Trump’s secret police, making them reveal their faces and show ID:

The reason I decided to file a bill was because I have daughters. I started hearing about some women being kidnapped and raped because there were people posing as ICE officials, and I just don’t understand why they’re masked in the first place.

+ Many cities in Oregon are starting to turn off a brand of digital surveillance camera called Flock that scans and catalogs license plate data over fears the data will be used to arrest immigrants or invade people’s privacy.

+ In her ruling granting a dismissal of charges against. Dana Briggs, who was arrested for protesting ICE raids in Chicago, Federal Judge Gabriel Fuentes excoriated the Feds for a lack of credibility. 

+ Since DHS diverted thousands of agents from public safety and terrorism investigations, there’s been a 33% decline in the amount of time DHS spends investigating child exploitation. Many of the reassigned agents are doing little more than making low-level immigration arrests or driving detainees to and from detention facilities.

+ ABC News reported this week that Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers across the country in a secretive program to identify, track and detain people whose travel patterns it considers “suspicious.”

+ Pope Leo from the Southside on the US Bishop’s statement condemning the Trump administration’s violent crackdown on immigrants:

No one has said that the U.S. should have open borders…But when people are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least and there has been some violence, unfortunately.

+++

+ On a dark, wet morning along the Delaura Dune trail on the north Oregon Coast, Lola and I came a little closer than was at all sensible to a grazing bull elk. Fortunately, there were no females nearby and he just snorted at us, steam literally coming from his nostrils and ears–you can see a little puff from the right ear. (It was cold.) This was Lola’s first encounter with an elk and she wisely didn’t bark or challenge him, but looked up at me as if to say, “What the fuck’s that? Don’t you think we should get out of here, like now?” And we made a discreet retreat.

+ An amazing story from the indispensable Oregon Field Ornithologists email list:  A Dunlin (small migratory shorebird) was detected passing Oysterville on Willapa Bay (coastal Washington) on 11.10.25 at 17:27 hrs and then was detected at the following locations: Cannon Beach, Cape Meares, Cape Perpetua, Bandon, New River, Humboldt Bay and then at the Napa Sonoma Marsh at 19:18 hrs on 11.11.25.  Flight time from Willapa Bay to the San Pablo Bay area (725 miles) was just under 26 hrs. She probably eventually ended up somewhere along the Sea of Cortez.

+South Africa’s solar panel imports increased by 60% in the last 12 months, led by South Africa and followed by 20 other countries. Meanwhile, India has now hit its goal of 50% clean energy, five years ahead of the target date.

+ This is the 29th year in a row that Greenland has lost more ice than it gained. For the past four years, rainfall has been recorded at Greenland’s northernmost point.

+ Trump on climate change at Saudi/US Investment conference: ” I’m all for climate change… It’s climate change that’s destroying the world, remember? The world was supposed to have been gone two years ago. The world was gonna burn up, but it actually got much cooler. It’s a little conspiracy. We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.”

+ Oliver Bateman: “The peptide free-for-all is the logical endpoint of a healthcare system where feeling optimised matters more than being safe.”

+ RFK, Jr’s reckless termination of NIH grants for at least 383 clinical trials hit 1 in 30 of all clinical trials, affecting the treatment of around 74,000 patients. The cuts include more than 100 studies on cancer treatments, 97 on infectious diseases, 48 on reproductive health, and 47 on mental health.

+ 600,000: number of people whose deaths are linked to the closure of USAID, mostly children.

+ When politicians compare chemotherapy to shampoo… Sen. Bill Cassidy:

By giving the patient the money herself, she becomes a wiser consumer. If she goes and gets two types of shampoo and one is a dollar cheaper, she’ll get the cheaper one and the other one lowers their price. Once you give her the power of making the decision, she’s gonna shop, get the lower price — that begins to save her money and squeezes waste out of the healthcare system.

+ Girls in the 12 grade are now less likely to say they want to get married (61%) than boys the same age (74%). In 1993, 83% of girls said they wanted to get married and 74% of boys.

+++

+ Trump’s approval rating has slumped to a new low of just 38%\, in the new Ipsos/Reuters poll. That’s just 3 points above Biden’s all-time low of 35%.

+ A day before Trump rolled out the red carpet at the White House for Crown Prince Bone Saws, the Trump Organization announced a luxury hotel project in the Maldives with Saudi developer DAR Global…

+ The Justice Department’s top ethics adviser, Joseph Tirrell, says he was fired because Pam Bondi and Kash Patel wanted to keep lavish gifts that violated government ethical rules, including a box of cigars “gifted” to Bondi by the Irish MMA fighter (and felon) Conor McGregor…

+ Even some MAGA stalwarts, such as Mike Cernovich, are finding the blatant avarice and corruption of the Trump cabal hard to stomach…

+ Presenting himself as a fierce defender of free speech, Charlie Kirk railed about cancel cancel, especially on campus. Then, predictably, his rightwing followers got at least 600 Americans fired for making critical comments about Kirk following his murder, including 50 academics and university administrators. This came on top of the 180 academics who lost their jobs during the campus protests against genocide in Gaza.

+ Mamdani should come bearing gifts: a signed photo of the Village People, a tiny spoon salvaged from Studio 54, a bronze bust of Roy Cohn and a pair of stilettos certified as being worn by one of the pole dancers at Scores, the Manhattan strip club in the 80s…

+++

+ Given that 20 Palestinians are being killed on average every day by Israelis in Gaza (37 on Wednesday), it seemed a little premature for the UN Security Council to give its approval to Trump’s real estate grab / ethnic cleansing plan for the Strip.

+ The late Nguyen Co Thach, Vietnam’s foreign minister in the 1980s: “We do not have such a high regard for the UN [Security Council] as you do. Because during the last 40 years, we have been invaded by 4 of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council.”

+ Here’s Benjamin Netanyahu openly bragging about “promoting laws in most US states” to punish boycotts of Israel. One might call it “election interference” and/or espionage. This is usually the kind of machinations that get your ambassador sent home after a stern rebuke from the Secretary of State and your embassy shuttered. Here, politicians respond by soliciting you for free tours of the Holy Land and covert help in the next election cycle…

+ Israeli security minister Itamar Ben Gvir on how Israel should respond to the designation of a Palestinian state:

If a Palestinian state is recognised, Israel must respond by arresting Mahmoud Abbas [many Palestinians may support this, given his two decades of ineffectuality since Arafat’s death] and killing Palestinian Authority officials.

+ You have to read this talk to the Jewish Foundation by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz on how Holocaust education has backfired by making young people, including young Jews, think that Israel’s “carnage” in Gaza should be opposed, several times to grasp just how perverse her argument is…

I think since Oct 7, and even before, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel and I think that is especially true of young people. So we are now wrestling with a new generational divide here. And I think that is particularly true in that social media is now our source for media. And it used to be the media you got in America was American media and it was pretty mainstream. You know, it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is a global medium. Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s, a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It’s also this increasingly post-literate media, less and less text, more and more videos. You have TikTok just bashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything we try to say to them, they’re hearing through this wall of carnage. So I want to get data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene. And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit. Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-semitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated youngsters and they think anti-semitism is like anti-black racism, powerful white people against powerless black people. So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising they think, Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel, you fight the big, powerful people, hurting the weak people.

+ If she “sounds obscene,” it’s because she is obscene.

+ Recall that the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum was forced by its donors to ditch a campaign that said, “Never Again Can’t Just Apply to Jews.”

+ A senior Israeli official on Trump’s F-35 deal with the Saudis:  “There is no need to panic. First of all, it will take some years, and when it happens, the Americans will have the ability to control these planes from a distance and severely limit their capabilities.”

+ Eric Adams at the Wailing Wall on his farewell tour of…Israel:  “I wanted to come back here to Israel and let you know that I served you as mayor.”

+ Oh, look, the Iraq War Gang (Bret and the NYT) rides again!

+ Trump crowed that he would “be proud” to bomb Mexico and Colombia….

+ Lindsey Graham hasn’t been that excited since John McCain invited him out to Sedona to watch old videos of the napalming of Vietnamese villages…

+ Yes, that’s Rachel Maddow sitting between Anthony Fauci and James Carville at the funeral of…Dick Cheney. And not just sitting there there out of reportorial obligation, but looking, well, grief-stricken…This lends credence to my long-held view that Maddow is a Neo-con, who will, mark my words, eventually fill the role once played by the likes of Victoria Nuland in setting an interventionist foreign policy for the Democratic Party.

+++

+ From Olivia Nuzzi’s self-enraptured memoir of her “affair” with RFK Jr…

+ Colby Hall, writing at Media-ite, on the Nuzzi affair and access journalism:

We spent a decade-plus dismantling the institutional guardrails that once protected young journalists. Salaries plummeted. Job security evaporated. Newsroom mentorship disappeared. What replaced it? A ruthless attention economy where your Instagram and Twitter followers mattered far more than your editor’s guidance, where “personal brand” became the only portable asset in an industry of constant layoffs and collapses. We told a generation of talented writers: You’re not a reporter for an institution. You ARE the institution. Your access is your value. Your personality is your product.

And Olivia Nuzzi was brilliant at this game, which is why she succeeded.

+ I’m more incredulous that Charles Murray, peddler of racist junk science, is considered an “academic,” than that he “found religion,”–he certainly has much to repent for…

+ Here’s Trump at the McDonald’s Summit this week speaking about some handsome dudes for who knows what reason:  “And we met ‘em, all handsome. They looked like Tom Cruise. They really did. I don’t want to be a wise guy and say, ‘But taller.’ I’m not gonna say that. No. They’re perfect specimens. I mean, these guys are like from a movie. I could take every one of them and put them in a movie.” (This is how he responds to the rumors that he’s gay, which are recirculating after the “Blowing Bubba” email?) Is this what the PR people mean by taking your biggest vulnerability and owning it?

+ I think I was the first to refer to Trump’s “redecoration” of the White House as turning the Oval Office into Liberace’s Boudoir. Glad to see the MAGA agrees…

+  Conrad Steel on the aesthetic branding of AI: “Poetry has been curiously prominent as a test case and/or window-dressing for LLMs: OpenAI’s rival Anthropic calls its GPT equivalents Haiku and Sonnet; Google’s used to be known as Bard. These branding decisions work to advance a claim about AI’s sophistication. It’s culture-washing with an edge of metaphysics.”

+ Betsy Drake, the late actress, writer and psychotherapist, on her ex-husband Cary Grant’s long-rumored intimate relationship with Randolph Scott: “For goodness sake, why would I believe that Cary was homosexual, when we were busy fucking? Maybe he was bisexual. He lived 43 years before he met me. I don’t know what he did.”

+ Eleanor Coppola: “When I started, it was such a different time. One executive told me, You couldn’t have a story with a female main character.”

+ Blame it on the Count, the insidious corrupter of America’s youth…

+ In Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s rapturous tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and the making of Breathless, Jean Seberg, the rebellious American beauty from Marshalltown, Iowa, describes her experience working with Otto Preminger on St. Joan and Bonjour Tristesse: “the world’s most charming dinner guest and sadistic director.”

Preminger was, by all accounts, a tyrant on the set. During the filming of his Freudian psychodrama, Angel Face, he made Robert Mitchum slap Jean Simmons in multiple takes, irritating both actors. Then Preminger yelled, “Once again!” Mitchum turned to the balding Austrian and said, “Like this!” And slapped him in the face.

Seberg survived the despotic director, but was hounded to death by the FBI. She became a target of Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation for sending money to the Black Panthers and the Meskwaki tribe in Iowa. The Feds planted false stories in the press that Seberg had gotten pregnant by a Black Panther. The harassment became so distressing that she gave birth prematurely and her infant daughter died two days later. But the FBI kept defaming her, causing the actress to be blacklisted in Hollywood. Hoover wanted her “neutralized.” She was wiretapped, and many of her conversations were reported directly to Nixon, who was thrilled reading these dispatches as if these reports on her persecution were his own little gossip page. She was stalked. Her apartment was repeatedly broken into. She was sent threatening letters.  Her friends were pestered. Even the CIA got into the act, surveilling her across Europe. Finally driven to despair, Seberg committed suicide in 1979.

+ After watching Linklater’s film twice (it’s one of those movies Franco-cinephiles could screen once a month and not tire of), I took down Richard Brody’s book on Godard, Everything is Cinema, and re-read the chapters on the enfant terrible of the New Wave’s life up to the making of Breathless and was intrigued to learn (or re-learn, I suppose) that he had written scripts for two improbable projects which he couldn’t get financed: Goethe’s Elective Affinities (the script ran close to 300 pages–a standard script is 90-100) and even more inconceivably, Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which was meant to be a dramatization of the implications of the essay’s first sentence: “There is only one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” A playful film on the topic of self-annihilation would have been something to see.

I failed the academy, the cops weren’t having me
The army didn’t sound that fun
So, I found me a paramilitary operation
That was keen to hand me a gun

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China
Jonathan Slaght
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

They Should Have Been Hanged: War Nerd Essays on the Civil War
John Dolan
(Caltrops)

Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula
Gail Day and Steve Edwards

(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week… 

On This Day
Tony Molina
(Slumberland)

Another View
Kalia Vandever
(Northern Spy)

The Definitive Decoration Day
Drive-By Truckers
(New West)

Psychopathology as a Game

“I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”

– JG Ballard

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