Especially when it comes to shit details, tasks or missions that have no purpose other than polishing the brass of the senior commanders and the egos of the politicians who give the orders. Iraq was such a shit detail, maybe the biggest in our nation’s history, certainly in competition with Afghanistan and before that, with Vietnam for that dubious honor. George W. Bush launched us into the war with Iraq in 2003 on a thin veneer of lies, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had somehow had something or another to do with the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Almost as soon as the United States Army beat Saddam’s military and occupied Baghdad, it became clear to the soldiers on the ground that this was another shit detail. As looting and chaos in the streets of Iraq’s capital city surrounded them, soldiers were given nothing to do. They stood by and watched and set up defensive perimeters, the largest of which soon became known as the Green Zone, and were witness to the bewildered response of those senior to them, the chief culprit being Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Here he was, the guy in charge of the Pentagon and all the nation’s military services, and in charge of the war itself, and all Rumsfeld could come up with when confronted by the fact that there was no plan, none whatsoever, for our military to carry out once they had “taken” Iraq, was to utter this gem explaining why we had saved Iraq from Saddam: “Stuff happens. And it’s untidy. And freedom is untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” He would later compound his crimes against command with his remark, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” in answer to a question by the press about why soldiers were driving around in Humvees with canvas sides and tops and frequently no doors, when they were facing attacks daily from roadside bombs planted by insurgents that were killing dozens of soldiers.

Vehicles with better defenses would be developed and deployed later, but they didn’t make the bodies of dead soldiers from the days of Humvees with no armor earlier in the war any less dead. Altogether, by the time the last of our soldiers flew out of Iraq today, 4,400 would die and 32,000 would be wounded, many with debilitating wounds such as lost limbs and brain damage due to blast waves from nearby explosions.

More than 1.5 million soldiers served in the Iraq war during its initial phase from 2003 to 2011 when it was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as if pasting an important-sounding title on the unfolding disaster of our presence there would turn the whole thing into the “victory” it never became. Soldiers knew we had no business being in Iraq right from the start. Even a general who turned into what passed for one of the war’s few heroes, General David Petraeus, was quoted by a reporter in the first days of the war saying, “Tell me how this ends,” a despairing remark that soon became famous as the war ground on and on and on.

Soldiers, including generals, were assigned to Iraq over and over. Petraeus earned a third star and then a fourth as he took over larger and larger chunks of the army’s shit detail in Iraq. Other officers went from being captains to colonels during the war. Sergeants earned stripe after stripe. And still the bodies piled up.

For what? In November of 2003, with the war only six months old, I asked a colonel who commanded a brigade under Petraeus in the 101^st Airborne Division in Mosul what the hell we were doing in Iraq. He took a deep breath and said, “Everybody knows the orders we get come from General Rove,” sarcastically referring to President Bush’s political majordomo who was known to be already positioning Bush for reelection in 2004.

That is what the war in Iraq became: an escalator nobody could get off. They couldn’t even come up with a way to prove that we were achieving a “victory.” They couldn’t use the enemy body-count, the figure that was supposed to reflect the victory in Vietnam that was always just one search and destroy mission or carpet bombing away.

So why were we in Iraq, anyway? Well, it morphed from stopping Saddam from “developing weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, to ending the “insurgency” they finally admitted existed, to fighting ISIS, which moved into northern Iraq and took over large swaths of land that the U.S. once thought it controlled. Then there was the threat of attacks from Syrian forces to the West and Iranian-controlled militias from the East. Most recently, Iran has had its proxies hitting U.S. base camps in Iraq with drones and missiles, so the Trump administration started closing our base camps and deploying the troops from Iraq to bases in Jordan, further away from Iran and its proxy militias so that no more American soldiers would die in Trump’s war on Iran that is turning into Bush II, or Iraq II, or a war for oil, or whatever the hell is going on over there.

And now, according to the Pentagon, the last of our military forces have left whatever mission they had in Iraq, marking “a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort,” according to Hegseth’s hand-puppet, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman Trump and Hegseth have put up for promotion to Secretary of the Army. Hegseth fired the last one, Daniel Driscoll, apparently because he wasn’t on board with Pete’s testosterone push and was more interested in modernizing the army to fight with drones the way every other military in the world is rushing to do right now.

It never stops. We go into a country like Vietnam, or more recently, Iraq, and we spend years fighting people who don’t want us there, so they are killing us, and we are killing them. And then somebody at the Pentagon comes up with “Vietnamization,” which was turning the fighting over to our Vietnamese “allies,” or a doofus like Parnell calls it a “transition” to mask the fact that one day we were there, with our base camps and the trillions of dollars spent on “security” and weapons and killing Iraqis, and the next day, we’re gone. Like, poof.

No explanation that even attempts to make sense of the last 23 years and the more than 4,000 of our troops who died. No statement that we “won,” because of course we didn’t, and if Hegseth and Parnell claimed that, you’d be able to hear the laughter over the roar of one of Musk’s Starships taking off on its next satellite run.

Soldiers always know. They’re the ones with the muddy boots and the exhausted faces and the sore bones from sleeping on the ground and riding in armored vehicles that never, ever, end up with enough armor to protect them from the roadside bombs and these days, drones and missiles, that wound and kill them.

I remember one day when I was in Iraq in 2003 on a base out near Tal Afar, an outlaw town near the border with Syria. I was sitting in the dining facility having breakfast with a bunch of soldiers who had just returned from another useless mission down in Sinjar, where they were supposed to suppress insurgents who were taking over the town. The soldiers were dirty and tired and hungry. They hadn’t eaten a hot meal in three weeks. Their M-16 rifles leaned against their chairs as they bent over their meal trays inhaling their third servings of eggs and bacon and cut-up fruit and pancakes.

On a flatscreen television that was mounted on the wall of the huge tent-like structure of the dining facility, a man was giving a speech in Washington D.C. to a group of people. The words at the bottom of the screen said the speech was at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. The man was wearing a suit. Everyone in the auditorium was wearing suits. The man giving the speech was talking about Iraq and how we were “expanding our footprint” in the Middle East, and our victory over insurgents who opposed us was a sure thing because the United States of America had “the most powerful military in the world,” and “no one can beat us.”

One of the soldiers sitting next to me asked if I knew who the speaker was. I recognized him. It was Douglas Feith. The soldier asked, “who the hell is that?” I answered that he was one of the architects of the war in Iraq.

Suddenly every soldier at the table began throwing pieces of toast and empty half-pint milk containers and plastic forks and spoons at the screen, shouting “shut your mouth you stupid fuck” and similar epithets.

It occurred to me this afternoon as I read Sean Parnell’s remarks about the end of our military involvement in Iraq that men in suits are still telling the same lies to the same rooms full of people wearing suits in Washington D.C., as soldiers get on C-130 transports wearing dirty battle fatigues and dusty boots and fly to new base camps in other Middle East countries to do the same thing we’ve been doing for over twenty years.

The shit details just keep on coming. The presidents keep starting the wars. The generals keep getting promoted. It never ends.

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In many of the conversations I’m having this week, and in my girls group chats and on my social media feeds, it seems like we’re all swirling around one story: the Cornell Seven.

I wrote about the case for Slate and thought I said most of what I wanted to say. That piece is about the limits of the law to tell us much about ethics and morals; how the perils of vigilante justice live alongside the necessity of drawing social rules and enforcing them with social penalties; what might have been going on in the brains of the young men who made up the Cornell Seven. I hope you read it; it was hard to write, but cathartic to write, even if I didn’t get to any answers.

What I’m thinking about now, though, is the rest of us. All of the women (and some men, but let’s be honest mostly women) for whom this case is bringing up… everything.

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You know the statistics: One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her life. More than 99 percent of rapes never result in a felony conviction. Most rapists walk free. Most women never report. Of course all of those facts are animating the response to this case.

But there’s something deeper at play here, too, and I think it’s the text messages — the young man who invited his fraternity brothers over for “free pussy,” by which he meant a young woman who was drunk and high on ketamine. Most women who are sexually assaulted have no idea what was going on in their assailants’ minds. For the many women who are assaulted by men they knew or trusted, and especially when the assaults are not sudden violent attacks but rather the result of minutes or hours or days or years of ignoring “no” and overriding your own sense of agency, it’s possible and perhaps tempting to construct a more palatable story: He didn’t know what he was doing; he didn’t read my cues; I wasn’t loud enough; I wasn’t clear enough; perhaps this was a misunderstanding. These texts offer an insight into what was actually happening in the minds of these seven men who stand accused of rape, and what was actually happening was not misunderstanding — it was a belief that the young naked woman was not a real person, but was an object, a thing over which they could bond by engaging in a collective sadistic desire.

The texts pull back the curtain. They reframe the night as less about what she did and more about what the men did. What they were thinking. How little they thought about her. How she became just a body part.

To be clear, no crime has been determined by a court of law, and the truth of what happened may never be litigated in one. Here is what we know, though: A girl who was 19 or 20 years old, drunk, encouraged to take ketamine. A guy she thought was her friend, who encouraged her to have sex with him and his friend, and maybe she thought that was ok at first. A text message that went out to more than 50 young men, advertising her as “free pussy.” Several additional men who show up. A girl who says she hides under the covers, swats the men’s hands away, says no, is pushed and pressured. She says she was physically assaulted, too, that the men slapped her and verbally insulted her. And eventually, she says, she was so out of it she was unable to say yes or no at all — and young men who at the very baseline least knew they were having sex with a young woman who was heavily intoxicated, and who I suspect understood perfectly well that she would not have consented to a group sex scenario in the sober light of day. It’s hard not to read the texts and understand that they saw her as a thing, and that demeaning her was fun for them, and that it felt like a way to bond in their shared dominant status — the presence of a drunk naked girl who could be used as “free pussy” made their fraternity, and by extension them, cool (“I fucking love chi phi,” one man wrote in the text chain).

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I don’t know if the facts of this case meet New York State’s high legal bar for proving rape occurred. I don’t know if the facts of this case meet the lower bar for proving civil damages, which wouldn’t put the men in jail but could mean they owe the woman in question some restitution. I have been tempted — so tempted — to dig into the legal questions involved here. But I haven’t. Because that may be what it’s about for Jane Doe’s lawyers. But that’s not why so many women I know are thinking about this case so much.

For some women, the interest is clear: Something very much like this happened to them. For many others, it’s related if not as direct: This didn’t happen, but the story behind the story — that’s familiar. Feeling de-personed, reduced to a sexualized thing, to a collection of body parts. Feeling profoundly betrayed because you thought a man was worthy of your trust and you learned the hard way he saw you as less than a human and more of an orifice with a brain inconveniently attached. Feeling the sheer terror of realizing your physical safely is contingent on the whims of a larger, stronger man (or a group of them). Watching a man you trusted or loved or respected or simply thought was fundamentally decent go along with the degradation of a woman, or realizing he watched that degradation happen and said nothing, or hearing him deny that the actions were degrading at all. Understanding that objecting makes you the bad guy, the un-fun one.

Fifty-seven men were in the Cornell group chat where their friends were advertising “free pussy” and promising you could just “whip it out” and asking “shop still open?” Some of them showed up to partake. Most said and did nothing.

It is a very strange thing to move through the world understanding that the one half of the population that never had their humanity doubted on the basis of their genitalia, that enjoys the privilege of being the default category of human, remains the primary arbiter of your physical safety and, sometimes, your personhood. The gleeful misogynists of the manosphere have made misogynist subtext text (midway through writing this newsletter I went back and re-read the New Yorker exposé on the Tate brothers, and if you haven’t read it, you should). That’s not to say that every man in the world is a secret Tate-addled ultra-misogynist. It is to say that we are reading about this case in the context of a political moment infused with the most unabashed and virulent misogyny I’ve ever seen and experienced in my life. This case, for so many women, is a reminder of the flesh-and-blood costs that misogyny extracts, whether it’s men laughing online about how women are hoes who need to be abused and controlled, a president laughing about how he grabs women by the pussy, or men laughing in a group chat about a woman whose personhood they stripped away — who to them was “free pussy” and nothing else.

Nothing about that night was “free” — not for her. And not for the millions of women today who cannot stop thinking about this case.

xx Jill

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Former Special Counsel Jack Smith underwent several hours of stupidly aggressive and just plain stupid and just plain aggressive questioning from Republicans at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill today, emerging as unscathed as he was bewildered by Republican blithering. Smith of course knows exactly what the whole thing was about. Donald Trump got his feelings hurt when a bunch of FBI agents and a couple of prosecutors from the Department of Justice went through his collection of purloined top-secret documents he had stashed around his resort/hotel/club/pedophile palace in Palm Beach, Florida, way back in 2022. That Smith didn’t even come on board to take up the prosecution of Trump as Special Counsel until six months later matters not to Trump or to the Senators who allegedly asked him alleged questions today in an attempt to catch him in lying to the Congress.

As if. Smith knows more about the federal perjury statute than most of the Senators know about how many bottles of $200 “special batch” Kentucky bourbon they’ve been able to squeeze out of lobbyists and stash in the bottom left hand drawer of their desks in the Senate office building.

For those whose memories have disappeared down the rabbit hole of Old Trump Scandals of the Distant Past, the tale is a sordid one. As Trump departed the White House in January of 2021, having recently dispatched his army of Nazis In Training to indulge him with their attack on the Capitol earlier in the month, he ordered several rental trucks to pull up to the front portico so his lackeys could load dozens and dozens of white file boxes containing everything from stacks of state dinner cocktail napkins to clippings of ass-licking Wall Street Journal editorials and love letters from his good friend North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and oh yes, dozens of documents marked top secret and some with red-slash covers indicating they were top secret “compartmentalized,” an even higher category of secrecy.

It was run of the mill stuff as top secrets go – a plan of attack on the not-yet attacked country of Iran including a map, a few odds and ends about U.S. nuclear weapons capability, some lists of defensive weapons held by the U.S. and its allies, and several documents that if analyzed by an enemy foreign intelligence service could lead them to learn about U.S. intelligence sources and methods that we really, really don’t want them to know.

You’ve got to remember how the FBI ended up in Trump’s Mar a Lago office. The National Archives, to which every scrap of paper produced by the Trump White House was supposed to go under the Presidential Records Act, noticed some missing documents in the fall of 2021 and made inquiries to Trump’s post-presidency factotums about where they were and why there were missing documents among those the White House did send to the Archives. Trump stiff-armed them and kept playing hard to get until December, when his lawyer notified the Archives that they had found 15 boxes of documents at Mar a Lago.

In January of 2022 the Archives started negotiating to get the 15 boxes of documents from Mar a Lago. When they received the boxes, they found 184 documents with classified markings, included top secret and some marked “Special Access Program.” The Archives notified the Department of Justice, which got the FBI involved.

The DOJ started sending out subpoenas to people who had been involved in moving documents out of the White House in the closing days of the administration. Things were getting serious. By May, the DOJ subpoenaed Trump himself, demanding return of all documents with classified markings. Trump dithered around, talking to his lawyer, asking if he had to turn over the documents. The lawyer told him, yes, he was subject to the subpoena. In June, lawyers for the DOJ showed up at Mar a Lago to receive 31 classified documents Trump claimed to have found. One of his lawyers, a young woman who worked for his SuperPAC, signed a document saying that that was all the classified documents they found and that all the documents from the White House were stored in a single basement room at Mar a Lago. The room was insecure, and the DOJ demanded that a strong lock be put on it.

The FBI subpoenaed security tapes showing the storage area in the basement and found that people working at Mar a Lago, who did not have security clearances, were removing boxes from the storage room.

In August, the FBI got a search warrant and showed up at Mar a Lago to find classified documents and boxes from the White House all over the place – stored in a public restroom, on the stage of the ballroom, and in drawers of Trump’s desk. They retrieved 13,000 documents that belonged in the National Archives, including secret documents with markings that specified they could only be seen by people with the very highest security clearances inside a so-called SCIF, a secure compartmented information facility. Some of the secret documents were found in Trump’s office, and some were found in boxes that contained random stuff like T-shirts, gifts, and magazines.

As the saying goes in racing…aaaand, they’re off!

Trump claimed that the FBI planted the classified documents, like they just had them lying around the DOJ for that purpose. His lawyers sued to get a “special master” to go through all 13,000 documents to weed out any “privileged” material. The judge assigned to the case was in Fort Pierce, Florida, and her name was Aileen Cannon, and folks, she’s still involved today in running a grand jury that the DOJ empaneled to investigate the investigators, chief among them former special counsel Smith, but also former CIA director John Brennan and of course James Comey, whose crime, it seemed, dated back to the dinner he had in the White House when Trump asked him if he would swear loyalty to him, and Comey had the temerity to defer.

The problem the DOJ is having in Florida with its “investigate the investigators” program is that they’ve got a grand jury, they’ve got subpoenas, they’ve got the whole force of the Department of Justice, and no indictments have been forthcoming. Plus, their two chief prosecutors assigned to the Florida clown car overseen by Aileen Cannon have resigned -- Joseph diGenova, a long-time right wing loon lawyer from Washington, and Kurt Olsen, a “stop-the-steal” defender of January 6 Capitol terrorists, along with Jack Eckenrode, the lead FBI agent assigned to the revenge investigation, who had spent years under another special counsel, John Durham, who completely unsuccessfully investigated the investigators in the probe into Russia’s connections to the 2016 Trump campaign. Yes, folks, it goes back that far.

The real problem they’re having is this thing called “evidence.” The way it has gone so far is this: Trump says he wants Comey prosecuted, so somebody says what can we get this guy on, and somebody else says, hey! I’ve got evidence! And the evidence turns out to be a cell phone photo taken by Comey on the beach of some sea shells arranged to form the numbers “86” and “47” and another clown in the car says, hey, that’s a threat on Trump’s life, you know, because some unidentified person on a beach arranged the shells and the criminal mastermind Comey came along and took the picture.

That’s the way it’s been going with Trump’s Florida retribution campaign. He’s all pissed about his Mar a Lago ballroom stage and public bathroom and office showing up in FBI photos filled with boxes taken from the White House, so he wants somebody to swing, and it ain’t happening. This week, or was it last week, a story came out that said he fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General because she hadn’t brought any revenge indictments, and now he’s got Todd Blanche in there, and Blanche’s big prosecution team is leaking top prosecutors and FBI biggies like a busted skiff that got sunk in El Nino.

And get this. The second chief prosecutor, the stop-the-steal guy who defended January 6 Nazis, he got out because he had problems with his security clearance – gee, ya think? And now that he’s out, he’s blabbing, and according to the New York Times, he told Brennan’s lawyers that there is not just one, but “multiple” grand juries overseen by Aileen Cannon, and one of them is – you guessed it – tasked specifically with investigating the search of Mar a Lago. The problem with that grand jury? Evidence. Lawyers for FBI agents who have been subpoenaed to testify have told the court that they will swear that the search warrant was legal, the search was proper, and as FBI agents, what they did at Mar a Lago was their job.

For which they were fired by Kash Patel, of course, who old Mar a Lago hands will recall was appointed by Trump way back in 2022 as one of two lackeys in charge of dealing with the National Archives about what, exactly? The top-secret documents that were found by the FBI scattered all over Mar a Lago, because security tapes had shown workers for Trump stashing them hither and yon in a failed attempt to keep them from being discovered.

Oh, goodness! Didn’t you just know that Kash would be in there not just once, but twice, and involved in the cover-up both times.

Isn’t Donald Trump having a hell of a time getting revenge on his enemies? His problem is, they all had jobs to do, and the jobs were to investigate the most corrupt president in the history of the country, and what do you know, but they kept finding corrupt stuff! Look over there! Is that a video I see of a jet at the Palm Beach airport being loaded up with white file boxes carried by Trump flunkies from Mar a Lago in May of 2022 as he departed Florida for his New Jersey golf resort? Why, I think it is! Do I hear a tape of Trump in Bedminster bragging about a plan to attack Iran to a writer working on a puff-piece bio of one of his many, many first term chiefs of staff, as Trump was waving around the top-top-top secret plan to attack Iran? Why, I think we do!

And what about evidence that Comey and Smith and Brennan and sundry other commie Democrats were doing bad things to Donald Trump? Do we have any of that?

Uuuhhhh…let me sort through these DOJ resignations and failed grand juries and Senate hearing clusterfucks and I’ll get back to you.

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A federal carrier snapshot is a summary of a trucking company’s record. It can help you investigate a crash, but it’s easy to read more into it than the government is saying.

Consider a made up carrier with 100 trucks whose federal record shows 20 vehicle inspections. Five led to an out of service finding, giving a rate of 25%.

That doesn’t mean a quarter of the company’s trucks were unsafe. It means inspectors found at least one violation requiring an out of service designation in five of those 20 inspections. The count is of inspections, not different trucks. You can’t use it to say 25 trucks in that fleet were unsafe, or even that the five findings involved five separate trucks.

Add another detail to the example. You’re reading the page in 2026, but the safety rating dates from 2019. The page may be current while the rating is years old. A more recent review date is a separate field, worth checking before you decide when the company was last examined.

The extra detail matters if someone is using the profile to argue that a carrier was safe or unsafe at the time of a crash.

The company profile and the truck in the crash

The federal trucking regulator, FMCSA, makes its SAFER Company Snapshot available free. You can search using a USDOT number, an MC or MX number, or a company name. Start by matching the legal name and identifying number to the documents you have. The profile also has a field for the name a company trades under.

Getting that match right is worth the extra minute. A similar name, an address that doesn’t match or an unfamiliar business name needs an explanation before you start drawing conclusions about the company involved.

Once you’ve found the record, resist the temptation to use the crash total as a verdict. The agency says its entries show involvement in crashes that qualify for reporting. They don’t assign responsibility. A carrier can appear in the table without having caused the collision.

The categories can also mislead. Suppose one crash killed a person and injured others. SAFER counts that event once, under fatal crashes. The injury column isn’t a count of everyone who was hurt. If you’re looking for the human toll, this table won’t give you a complete answer.

The inspection section presents a different problem. Vehicle and driver inspection counts can overlap because one inspection can cover both. Adding all the columns together may count an inspection twice. The figures cover the preceding two years, rather than the company’s entire history.

For a Texas family researching a truck involved in a wreck, a concerning inspection record raises questions worth asking. Which violation was recorded? When? Was the vehicle involved in the crash affected? A percentage on the company page doesn’t answer that last question.

Save enough of the record to explain it

A screenshot containing only a rating or a crash total leaves too much out. Save the company identification and the relevant table with its date range. If you’re recording an inspection percentage, keep the inspection count beside it. Record the rating date and review date separately from the date through which the page is current.

That gives you something useful to return to. You can show where a concern came from without relying on a number copied into a text message weeks earlier.

The agency’s Safety Measurement System offers more safety information, which FMCSA uses to decide where to direct enforcement attention. Its public view has limits too. Some information about freight carriers is withheld from public display, although inspection and crash data remain available. A blank or unavailable item isn’t evidence that there was nothing to report.

Public records research can identify questions about a company, but it won’t decide an injury claim. Readers who want to learn more about Texas truck accident claims can visit Texas Truck Accident Lawyer . Advice about an individual collision needs the facts of that collision.

In the example above, the useful note would say that five of 20 vehicle inspections produced an out of service finding. It would include the reporting period and the carrier’s USDOT number, so another person could look up the same fields and follow your reasoning. The record doesn’t support describing 25 of its 100 trucks as unsafe.

Photo: Markus Spiske via Pexels

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The post What a Trucking Company’s Safety Record Leaves Out appeared first on DCReport.org.

I’ve been wondering what was behind Chinese President Xi’s trip to see Trump at the White House, haven’t you? I mean, that is a looooong way to fly to eat rubber chicken and take a stroll through the gross construction site that Trump calls the White House these days. Trump clearly doesn’t realize that Xi can visit the Great Hall of the People anytime he wants to see excess in action – the place has a banquet hall that will seat 5,000 for dinner, and its main meeting hall seats 10,000 during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, which Trump would love. There are no votes, no laws passed, but lots of praise heaped on China’s Great Leader, President Xi.

Thankfully, the day after the Chinese president took off to fly back to Beijing, we learned what Trump and Xi had been up to. Trump, as usual in the presence of a fellow dictator, was in an expansive mood. He and Xi made another tariff deal so Trump could crow about reducing the trade deficit with China – an obsession of his that does no damage to the U.S. other than denting Trump’s fragile ego. They did some mumbling about having some of their people meet up about AI “incidents,” as the White House called them. That was good of them, as talk continues of AI ending civilization itself by the end of the decade.

While they were at it, Trump asked Xi if he’d like to buy some U.S. weapons. The U.S. Ambassador to China, a Georgia resident who has made a specialty of being a loser in business as well as politics, went on Fox News yesterday morning and said that Trump had told Xi that we sell weapons all over the world and asked Xi “would he like to buy some at one point.”

Trump is sitting there with Xi at the table at the Big Dinner and Melania is looking like she’s about to lift off carried by that balloon of a bow on her shoulder, and Trump just casually drops the offer of selling him some high-tech U.S. military technology. Why not? China’s main air force fighter jet is a cross between our F-22 and F-35 fighters, but it’s known that China is not completely up on what makes our jets so invisible to radar. Not to worry though. A whole bunch of key parts for an Australian F-35 was lost in shipment back to this country for maintenance, and two key elements of the plane’s stealth capability, the clear plastic cockpit canopy, and the bomb bay doors somehow ended up in Hong Kong in possession of China’s military authorities.

Oooops.

Oh, almost forgot. We’re running out of a lot of our best military hardware, having wasted tens of billions of dollars worth shooting at Iran during Trump’s abortive war that was supposed to last a couple of weeks and is now in its sixth month. And besides, all those promises we made to Taiwan to look after them are out the door along with every other promise we made to countries that have, or rather had, alliances with us. Hello, NATO! Trump is right now sitting on $14 billion worth of arms for Taiwan that was promised last December and is now delayed because….well, we don’t know why, because Trump doesn’t tell us, and besides he’s been busy with the reflecting pool and his mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn, and he’s got the problem of how he’s going to get his name back on the Kennedy Center to worry about.

You know, and I know what happened when Xi was in town. He was so eager to please Xi, Trump threw his own press out of the White House and welcomed Xi’s stenographers with all access passes. Trump knew they would never write a wrong syllable about him because his pal Xi would put Chinese reporters out on the northern steppes bordering Mongolia herding yaks if they were lucky, and deep in the ground if they weren’t.

Trump is like the kid who hands his lunch money to the school bully in the playground even if the bully doesn’t ask for it, just so he can stay on his good side. Trump knows that China has been sending not only missiles other Chinese weapons to Russia to fight the Ukrainians. He knows that his pal Xi, with that perpetual mix of a scowl and a smile on his face, has had his intelligence agency handing over targeting coordinates to the Iranians during the war. Trump’s own intelligence people have told him that it was Chinese satellite imagery that targeted the Saudi Arabian airbase where two of our surveillance and control aircraft, each worth a billion dollars, were hit by Iranian missiles, not to mention several of our most expensive long-distance radar installations that are key to U.S. Patriot and Thaad anti-missile weapons.

But who needs radars when you’re running out of anti-missile missiles, right? And who cares if a few American soldiers are hit and killed by Iranian missiles that flew in using Chinese GPS data? What the fuck matters when…

Xi is coming to town!

Trump’s walls for his ballroom aren’t even up. His Corinthian columns aren’t standing tall. The “granite” that Xi loves so much hasn’t been trucked in yet. His marble floors aren’t gleaming. Ground hasn’t even been broken for his absurd arch. Pennsylvania Avenue hasn’t been renamed for him yet. He’s got to do something to show Xi who’s the boss of the U.S. A.

This is what loser dictators do when they know they’re headed for the door. Nicolae Ceaușescu was still building his almighty Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest when on Christmas Day in 1989, he was arrested, given a one-hour trail, and summarily executed by firing squad along with his wife Elena. The palace cost four billion dollars and nearly bankrupted the country when it was under construction. Trump’s ballroom is a comparative bargain at $600 million, or whatever the cost is by now. Three more Trumpian squiggles on its design plans, and it’ll hit a billion, trust me.

I’m poking fun at Trump here, of course. His time as president has become such an absurd collection of excess, bullshit, cruelty, theft, and treason, what else can you do? I mean, the idea of selling arms we don’t even have to the country that is the biggest rival of the United States on this earth…

What could be next? Putting up a sports stadium in a national park?

Oh, that’s right, those plans are already underway. That insane maniac Nicolae is going to look like a piker by the time Trump is done. The only questions left with Donald Trump are who will he go to war with next, and how much will a gallon of gas cost on January 20, 2029. I’m sure there’s a betting line on Polymarket, so get your wagers down now.

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