Donald Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.

He put up a post on Truth Social this morning telling Iran that the cease fire is over. He told his fellow national leaders and anyone else who would listen at the NATO summit in Turkey that the cease fire with Iran is over. The cease fire was the greatest thing since cheating at golf when he first made the deal that wasn’t a deal with Iran and stopped the shooting war and replaced it with a bunch of wishy-washy promises from Iran to be good boys and let oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz while Trump’s real estate trust funders ran the negotiations with Iran’s let’s-wait-around-until-they-get-tired-and-go-home diplomatic brain trust.

Iran shot some missiles at an oil tanker and a couple of cargo ships the other day, and the Strait of Hormuz closed. That’s all Iran had to do – fire a couple of missiles or fly a couple of drones and bingo, oil prices shot up, gas prices did an about face, and high prices at supermarkets and everywhere else remained inflated from where they were four months ago.

That is the sum total of what Donald Trump has accomplished with his war on Iran. The war he started on February 28 is the stupidest, most pointless, most useless war the United States has been engaged in since Vietnam. MAGA types and right-wing pundits will argue that Trump hasn’t gotten us into the kind of quagmire that Democrats got us into with Vietnam.

Phooey. It’s a goddamn quagmire and a half, because if Iran wants to keep fucking around with stopping oil shipments from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, they will. There is nothing the U.S. or anybody else can do to stop them. Trump goes on Truth Social and gets in front of the press and says shit like, “we hit them very hard last night.” Do you know what that means? Exactly nothing. Are oil tankers passing freely through the Strait today? Nope. So, what good did it do that we shot some missiles and dropped bombs on “targets” along Iran’s coastline on the Persian Gulf? Nothing.

I can’t make up my mind whether to call this clusterfuck the War of the Dullards or the Nothing War, because nothing we have done since Trump started the damn thing has worked.

Why was it that Trump started the war again? Oh, I remember now! He said he was going to make sure Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. What did CNN report this afternoon? Satellite images show that Iran “may be” rebuilding its nuclear facilities.

May be rebuilding? Of course they are. The minute Trump agreed to his almighty ceasefire, Iran started restocking and rebuilding everything that the U.S. “hit very hard” during the weeks that we waged war on Iran, entirely by air. They’ve got their missile factories going again at top speed. They’re building Shahed drones as fast as they can. They’re working on repairing and rebuilding their small-boat navy that can place mines in the gulf and fire missiles and drones at civilian ships.

And you know what? We don’t have a clue what they’re doing in their underground factories and storage facilities, because we can’t see them, and we don’t have good intelligence about what is happening in that country of 636,000 square miles and 92 million people. That’s a lot of area to keep an eye on. That’s a lot of people who can move around freely on roads that we haven’t blown up, cross bridges we didn’t bomb, and wait until it gets dark so they can enter their underground arms facilities and continue to build all the stuff they need to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Which isn’t much, when you think about it. All they had to do to close it the other day was fire a missile at a tanker, and it was like a gigantic door shut blocking the Strait. Nobody will insure ships that run the risk of being blown out of the water. Nobody will insure the precious cargo carried by the ships, the millions of barrels of oil, the phosphorus that makes fertilizer, the helium used to manufacture the computer chips that power all the almighty AI infrastructure that is supposed to create this big economy of the future that everyone is banking on to the extent that the Smart Guys are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the data centers and all the other shit that is supposed to solve every problem we will ever have and keep our economy humming.

Think about this: Iran can just shut down the entire machinery of western wealth by firing a couple of missiles that cost less than what Kash Patel spends to go see his girlfriend sing the National Anthem at some redneck sporting event.

What kind of sense does that make? No sense at all is the answer. What kind of sense has Trump’s war on Iran made? Less than no sense. We have had hurtlocker economic numbers ever since the day Secretary “I ain’t drinkin’ but I’m still stinkin’” Hegseth announced Operation Epic Fury. Isn’t he proud? It’s like all you’ve got to do is think up some macho name for your war, and everything will be peachy keen. What did Iran do when they read on the internet that they were being hit by Operation Epic Fury?

They launched Operation We’re Closing Absolutely Essential to the Entire World Strait of Hormuz. Then they threw a bunch of missiles and drones at their Gulf state neighbors and knocked out our 5^th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and every other military installation we had east of Cyprus and just sat back and said to Trump and Hegseth, what are you going to do about it, boys?

Man, I’ve been writing about stupid shit done by stupid men for decades, and this just plain-ass takes the cake. It wasn’t enough to waste tens of billions of dollars of our defense money and put thousands of our service members at risk and kill 13 of them. Noooooo. They had to completely fuck up the entire world economy by revealing to Iran a strategic advantage that they hadn’t realized they already had. Iran can nuke the economy of the whole world with a single missile fired at a single ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

For whatever reason, that idea had never occurred to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But it has occurred to them now because Donald Trump pissed them off. Trump caused considerable damage to our national security because of the oil shortage that he created and by telling Hegseth to go ahead and shoot off about two-thirds of all our important weapons such as Tomahawk and Patriot missiles and a whole bunch of other missiles we haven’t even been told about yet.

Even some of his MAGA minions have begun getting the message. He got us into the kind of dumbass war he promised he would never start. He’s turned Washington D.C. into a goddamned disaster with monuments and the White House itself blocked-off behind chain link fences patrolled by bored National Guard soldiers.

Late today, U.S. “officials” announced that the Strait of Hormuz “will soon reopen,” according to the New York Times. They also assured us that the recent attacks on ships were carried out by “rogue military units.”

Ri-i-i-i-ight. All those rogue Iranians who have known since they were in diapers that if they did anything to piss off the Mullahs their heads would end up in baskets.

Donald Trump is going down in history as the Hormuz president, and there is nothing he can do about it. Iran is in charge, not him.

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Chief Justice Roberts did not do his reading on the Federalist Papers. Hamilton himself clarified what he meant, contradicting Roberts’s interpretation.

This is the third daily fact-check on the Roberts Court, now turning to Slaughter. In the entirety of the Ratification debates, not a single Federalist or Anti-Federalist speaker or writer either suggested that the Constitution implied a presidential removal power — and even more tellingly, nor did any Anti-Federalist warn that the Constitution could imply a general removal power, even as they often warned about other presidential power.

Chief Justice Roberts was left inferring from the Federalist Papers on other aspects of the presidency — and it is telling that he could not come up with anything on point. (We’ll get to his obvious misuse of Federalist No. 66 later.)

It turns out the Federalist Papers twice contradicted the unitary executive theory, of any implied power of presidential removal (whether with cause or without cause!), both Madison in Federalist No. 39 and Hamilton in Federalist No. 77.

Let’s start with the clearest passage, Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77: “The consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.” Displace was a common synonym of “remove,” and those two words were used interchangeably, almost equally. Hamilton was following the common law default rule that removal/displacement followed appointment, and because the Senate consent was necessary to appoint, the symmetry rule applied, so Senate consent was necessary to remove/displace.

Even though the plain meaning of Federalist No. 77 contradicts his argument, Roberts claimed that this sentence was ambiguous, writing that “scholars disagree…” So nevermind that specific sentence directly addressing removal, and just follow my vibes on the other Federalist Papers about other questions.

TL;dr: It does not matter if scholars disagree. Two scholars (Jonathan Gienapp and I) have identified that HAMILTON HIMSELF, during the First Congress debates, clarified what he actually meant, and lo and behold, it was the plain meaning contradicting the Roberts Court and the unitary executive theory. Roberts did not read the articles or amicus briefs addressing his previous misunderstanding with the original historical evidence of Hamilton’s explanation.

Start with Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence at p. 15-16, which is entirely correct:

Removal also “was not discussed in the Constitutional Convention,” Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 109–110 (1926), making an expansion of preratification executive power unlikely. Alexander Hamilton, then writing to support the States’ ratification of the Constitution, explained that because the power to remove traditionally followed the power to appoint, “[t]he consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.” The Federalist No. 77, p. 458 (C. Rossiter & C. Kesler eds. 1999). This was a selling point for the Constitution, as it meant that “[a] change of the [President] would not occasion so violent or so general a revolution in the officers of the government as might be expected if he were the sole disposer of offices.” Ibid.6 Madison also explained that “[t]he tenure of the ministerial offices, generally, will be a subject of legal regulation, conformably to the reason of the case and the example of the State constitutions.” Id., No. 39, at 238.

Jonathan Gienapp and I confirmed Hamilton’s meaning from Hamilton himself, as reported by the participants in the First Congress’s debates:

Here is what I wrote in my article “Indecisions of 1789” at p. 778:

There are some highlights from this week worth noting. Early on in the very first day of these debates-indeed, in just the second speech-William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, the leading “impeachment only” member, came prepared with The Federalist. Smith argued that he could see only one other constitutional possibility for removing executive officers aside from the impeachment clauses: the “senatorial” position.130 He quoted Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77 at length, which provided, “[t]he consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.”131 Smith recounted the following exchange in a letter:

“[T]he next day Benson sent me a note across the house to this effect: that Publius [Hamilton] had informed him since the preceding day’s debate, that upon more mature reflection he had changed his opinion & was now convinced that the [president] alone [should] have the power of removal at pleasure; [h]e is a Candidate for the office of Secretary of Finance!”

Smith seemed to imply that Hamilton was changing his opinion with personal ambition and insider patronage “court” politics on his mind.

I cited Gienapp’s The Second Creation, too:

GIENAPP, THE SECOND CREATION, supra note 3, at 154-55 (”While [Benson’s note] complicated Smith’s use of the Federalist, it only reinforced his broader point: that his opponents were treating the Constitution as an object of freedom rather than constraint.”)

Here’s the bottom line: 1) The historical record shows Hamilton himself explaining what he actually meant in Federalist No. 77, which was consistent with the plain meaning — and it obviously bears more weight than commentators decades or centuries later. Keep in mind that Hamilton had every reason to fudge the meaning if he wanted to and if his audience would have bought it.

And 2) These records show how the “public” engaged in these debates (i.e., Congressman Smith and the House) understood what he meant: Senate consent was necessary to remove! Otherwise, Smith would not have cited Federalist No. 77 as clear evidence against presidential removal.

If you’re going to make originalist arguments, read the primary sources carefully, and if they are confusing, maybe read the full record for context.

Well, that was interesting.

Some quick thoughts below the cut.



So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe.  There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.

One is Left / green concern about emissions.  Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing.  It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action.  A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.

Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo.   Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes.  Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need. 

Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon.  You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.

Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism.  Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater!  Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned?  And ice in their beer!

Apropos of that last point.  Here’s a temporal heat map of London:

and one for New York City:


— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards.  Here’s Kansas City:



In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time.  There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.

And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe.  I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.  

Do Americans overuse aircon?  Oh yes, we absolutely do.  But do we need aircon?  Also yes.  Most of us do, at least some of the time.   There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West.  But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health.   99% of homes in Houston have aircon.  And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.

On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.   

This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.

It’s not just about Graham Platner or even Donald Trump. It’s about the millions and millions of men who are just like them. I have personally known far too many of them. They are men who for some reason I have never completely understood believe that they can do anything they want with a woman simply because she is a woman.

It started in high school. I heard guys brag about clocking the movements of a girl who almost always didn’t have siblings to get in the way and was not part of the “in” crowd the guy was in. The guy telling the story had never talked to the girl in the halls at school or asked her on a date. He would figure out when her parents weren’t home, and he would show up on her doorstep and “get some.” I went to three different high schools in three different towns in three states, and I heard guys tell this story in every single one of them. They even used the same phrase, “get some.”

Guys like that turned into Donald Trump and Graham Platner. I heard them talk about what they did in teen clubs, at wrestling and track practice, in barracks at West Point and in the Army, in fast food joints and bars and restaurants, in cars, and even once on an airplane. I could not figure out when I was a boy, and I could not figure out as a young man, and I still do not really understand what made guys like them do what they did and then brag about it.

Later in life, I had relationships with women that were serious enough that we would open up and share secrets with one another. Too many of them – in fact, all but one or two – had been raped or abused when they were very young girls or teenagers or young women. I’m just one guy, and for a long time I believed that it was just happenstance that I became involved with women who had been sexually abused or raped. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe most of the women on this planet have experienced the evil of men.

The Graham Platners and Donald Trumps of the world are everywhere. I am not doing anything more than stating the obvious to say that there are far too many of them, certainly far more than we talk about publicly. In the world as it exists in the United States, it takes a man running for office, or perhaps becoming famous as an actor or musician or sports figure, for the world to find out what is in his past. Trump was certainly known in some circles in New York City for his abusive behavior with women, but it wasn’t public knowledge because it had not been widely shared in the press. Platner was apparently known previously for his abusive behavior with women. One woman put up a Facebook post in 2024 warning other women “not to date this guy,” according to reports. In a story in today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens reported, “Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend of Platner’s, told The Times earlier this year that he had ‘twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so that she couldn’t get out,’ while also describing him as ‘the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.’” That story alone should have ended Platner’s campaign.

The Times story was a colloquy between Stephens and long-time Times reporter and opinion writer Frank Bruni about the political implications of they called the “pathetic, ugly last chapter” of Platner’s “demise.” They talked about what primary voters knew and when they knew it. They compared Platner with Trump, talking about the “fan-boying and fan-girling” around Platner by progressives and around Trump by his fawning MAGA base. They even talked about how Karl Marx had posited that “History repeats itself: first as musical tragedy, second as moral farce.”

But let me be blunt and say that they didn’t spend enough time talking about Platner’s sexual behavior with women or the alleged rape that was revealed earlier this week. I want you to listen to this from Stephens as he compares MAGA Republicans and their willingness to “to overlook just about any flaw on its own side in order to win” in comparison to Democrats coming out of the Platner debacle with a better chance to win than they would have had with Platner. Here is the line that got to me: “The silver lining here is that the rape allegation really did destroy Platner’s candidacy.”

Silver lining? There is a victim in this story who is not mentioned even once, as the two New York Times political experts go on to analyze how “this rape allegation” finally tipped the balance in the Senate race in Maine. Then they discuss how support from AIPAC for one candidate might affect a Senate race in Michigan. It’s all politics.

A woman was raped. I guess I’ve got to say “allegedly,” but you know what I mean. In this New York Times story, and in another lengthy story published today that amounts to a kind of autopsy for the Platner campaign, the fact that Platner is accused of violently raping a woman is just another factor in figuring out what happened to a political race in Maine. In the second Times story, three reporters say that they interviewed 30 people in the course of figuring out how Platner so easily dispatched former Governor Janet Mills, who cancelled her campaign and pulled out of the primary despite running “tough” political ads against Platner “featuring his comments about women and rape.”

The campaign analysis story, titled “A slow rolling disaster: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign,” spends hundreds of words as it explores “Questions about the professionalism of the campaign’s senior leadership.”

Here’s what I’ve got to say about that: It’s not about who “recruited” Platner as a candidate, which they cover in detail. It’s not about how he was not properly “vetted” because Democrats seemed to be swooning over his “working class” credentials that turned out to be not so working class at all. It’s not about his campaign staff or how much money they raised.

It’s about Platner. He is a man who during his lifetime has used women, has been abusive to women, violent with women (twisting a woman’s hand behind her back and essentially locking her in a bedroom), was ugly and dismissive of women (the sexting “scandal”), and ultimately stands accused of raping a woman.

It’s about the man, and it happens far, far too many times. Remember Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor who was ousted because of his involvement with a high-end criminal prostitution ring? Remember Congressman Anthony Weiner sending photographs of his private parts to young women who were, to put it mildly, not his wife?

I could go on. And on. And on. What do these sex scandals have in common? Misbehavior involving sex, some of it criminal in nature, by men. What defines Donald Trump? His lying? His thievery? His authoritarian behavior? Yes, but what should define him is his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll and the rest of his sexual assaults and harassment of some 25 other women. His statement that because he was famous, he could “grab them by the pussy.”

That is it, right there, in a nutshell, as the cliché goes. One statement by Donald Trump explains the boys I knew in high school bragging about “getting some” from girls they barely knew. It explains the politicians, the rock stars, the sports figures – it explains all of them, because millions and millions of men have that same instinct or belief or whatever it is in their soulless hearts and minds.

I don’t know what is to be done about it. The “answer,” at least politically, is not better vetting and more professional senior campaign aides. I have read that somehow the culture is to blame, that pornography plays a major role, that boys and violent video games are involved. Many so-called “conservatives” believe that “removing God from the classroom” was to blame. I’ve read all kinds of stuff that seeks to explain the unexplainable. But the boys I heard in high school bragging about their conquests were students in schools when God was still in the classroom, and they did not play video games, and the worst pornography they were probably exposed to was naked from the waist up women in magazines like Playboy.

This is what I have come to believe. It has to do with how boys are raised and what they learn from their parents and other close family members such as brothers and uncles and cousins and even from their friends about how they should treat girls and women.

I will tell a story to illustrate this. It’s one I have told before, but it bears re-telling here. When I lived in the deep South, I was invited along on a duck hunt with a bunch of men, several of whom brought their teenage sons along. I had never hunted ducks. I had never gone to what they call a “duck camp.” I was curious, so I agreed to go along.

The duck camp turned out to be a barge containing cots and a kitchen floating in the swamps of southern Louisiana in Cajun country. Next to the barge, on land, was a wooden building on stilts that turned out to be a bar. The first night, when the bar opened, the whole group, including the boys, went to the bar. I watched three men take their sons and treat them to blow jobs from women at the bar who turned out to be prostitutes who were there just for the purpose of providing sex to the men and boys. The fathers would pay one of the prostitutes, and this is the phrase I heard fathers use speaking to their own sons: “Go get you a piece of ass, boy.” I saw at least one father go with the same woman he had paid to go with his son. Where did they go with the prostitutes? It’s even worse than you think: into the woods behind the bar.

Later, the fathers would chortle with each other about teaching their sons how to be a man. They did this openly, and spoke in front of me, because they thought, wrongfully, I had gone through the same rituals when I was a boy. One of the men offered to “treat” me to one of the women. When I declined, all the men avoided me afterwards. I was never invited on another hunting trip by any of these men again.

The way boys are raised ends up affecting their entire lives. Even though what I witnessed happened in the deep South, I am telling you that the same sort of thing in a different context happens all over the country in suburbs and cities. It may not be duck camps and prostitutes, but it is everywhere.

Some men pass along to boys an inherent disrespect of women as things rather than human beings. Something similar was probably experienced by Donald Trump and Graham Platner. You are not born believing the way they do. Trump is a pig. Platner is a pig. Too many men are pigs.

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Digital rights and data management have found themselves embroiled in a contentious global discussion regarding virtual private networks (VPNs). Governments across the globe have begun to enact legislation against these tools, with some states completely prohibiting them.

They cite security reasons for these prohibitions. But in many cases, banning such tools limits online users’ ability to protect their personal information, maintain privacy, and hold others accountable.

The Regulatory Argument vs. The True Value of Encryption

Those advocating for regulations against the use of VPNs often cite concerns with cybersecurity due to encryption. Since encryption is used by VPNs to hide information, regulatory agencies find it difficult to control activity within their borders.

Companies have resisted VPN regulation because restricting encryption would weaken the entire internet . It is not only about malicious actors but also about ordinary citizens, who are even more at risk.

Nevertheless, an overzealous attempt to regulate encryption ultimately ends up taking away much-needed security from regular internet users.

The Advantages of VPNs

The use of a VPN provides several important advantages to average internet users:

• Protecting Everyday Privacy:  VPNs shield citizens, journalists, and activists from intrusive data tracking by internet service providers and hackers.
• Securing Remote Work:  Digital workforce today is quickly growing. For them, having a VPN to encrypt their data while connecting to corporate servers is essential. Not only for their digital safety, but also for the company’s.
• Promoting Digital Freedom: With the global knowledge expanding, everyone needs access to it. VPN lets users bypass the virtual digital borders in a secure way.

Is There a Need to Restrict Data?

What really drives VPN bans isn’t primarily about protection or digital safety. Many regulatory groups aim to control what people can say, do, and access online. Keeping information restricted is important for those in power.

VPNs break down those barriers, allowing people to access independent news, document what’s really happening, and express their views without the fear of being monitored.

When a government targets VPNs, it creates a digital wall that isolates people from the outside world. Locals stop receiving news from international sources. For journalists and whistleblowers, VPNs are not just useful; they are essential. They encrypt everything, making data unreadable to anyone who might want to misuse it.

Do Virtual Private Networks Aid Companies?

Blocking VPNs impacts not only individual privacy but also how businesses operate around the globe. Encryption is critical to modern corporate infrastructures ; therefore, it plays an important role in protecting the company’s intellectual property, financial, and other internal confidential communications. Global businesses face many challenges without these methods.

If those who work in the company cannot securely connect to external servers through encrypted tunnels, much of the sensitive corporate data is left exposed to both surveillance and localized cyber threats.

Giving Everyone Access to Digital Safety Tools

The value of reliable and accessible digital safety tools becomes obvious as the push to regulate them increases. Everyone who goes online, especially on public networks, and understands the dangers of it wants to keep their data safe and their communications secured. They are proactively searching for trusted tools and try different trials, like a Windows VPN free trial to test things out. Relying on a VPN trial allows you to check what the software offers and make sure your connection is safe before having to make an investment.

How Will Digital Autonomy Look in the Future?

Ultimately, the reason why governments are pushing against VPNs is to gain more control over the flow of information and how people use the internet. This just highlights the role that tools like VPNs have in defending individual data sovereignty.

They are part of the puzzle that potentially enables a more secure and open internet world.

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