Do you remember back in the very early days of COVID in 2020 when Trump wouldn’t let a cruise ship dock in Oakland, California? There were people with the virus on board the ship, and COVID statistics would double if the sick passengers disembarked on U.S. soil.

That’s been Trump’s way of dealing with inconvenient numbers for years. Pretend there isn’t inflation, and it will go away. The number of measles cases shoots up, and Trump says it’s something else. Load ‘em up with fish oil and vitamins and send ‘em back to school.

Today, just two days after attending the “dignified transfer” of four dead bodies at Dover Air Force Base, Trump’s Pentagon has erased them from the official total of those killed in action in the Middle East. Yesterday, Trump was on Truth Social bragging about how only 18 soldiers had died since his war with Iran began. Today, the Pentagon made the official count 14, because the four killed over the weekend died after Trump had declared a ceasefire in April.

Got that? With a ceasefire, there’s no war going on, so the three soldiers killed by an Iranian missile in Jordan, and the soldier killed during the controlled detonation of an Iranian Shahed drone in Iraq did not die in a war, they died in a ceasefire. They even came up with a new word for the change in Pentagon statistics: the four soldiers in the flag-draped coffins Trump saluted in Dover were “delisted.” But the Pentagon wasn’t finished. They also divided the numbers of dead Americans according to whether they were killed by “hostilities” or by accident. That leaves the new Pentagon number, 14, with seven dead because of Iranian missiles or drones, and seven dead because they were on missions and died accidentally, like the crew of the Air Force KC-135 refueling tanker who died in a crash in Iraq in March. Let me look at my calendar: Was the war going on in March? Check. But they’re not listed as KIA because, why exactly?

Because Trump and Hegseth changed the rules to make their war statistics look better, that’s why.

Tell that to their grieving families.

The April ceasefire they’re using as an excuse was declared over by Trump on July 8 at the NATO summit in Turkey but never mind. It wasn’t really a ceasefire to begin with. It was just a couple of pieces of paper called a “memorandum of understanding” that both sides started violating the minute it was signed, and the whole thing was Kabuki theater to get oil and gas prices down and the stock market up.

So, we’re at war with Iran today, but over the weekend, when we bombed the shit out of Iranian missile sites and Iran bombed our bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia…that wasn’t a war because…of a ceasefire that Trump ended on July 8.

Or something.

Not only is Trump a blithering fuck-up for starting the war, he’s a blithering fuck-up for negotiating a ceasefire that wasn’t a ceasefire, and he’s a blithering fuck-up as the commander in chief in charge of the war.

But none of it is his fault, despite the fact that Trump has been saying for the last five years that the 13 soldiers killed by a suicide bomber during the pull-out from Kabul were killed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “These people shouldn’t have died,” Trump said during the campaign in 2024. “They died because of Biden and because of Kamala. They died just like if they pulled the trigger.”

So, applying that logic, the 18 soldiers killed during Trump’s war with Iran, or the 14, or the seven killed by “hostilities,” whatever the number is at this hour, they died just like Trump himself fired a missile or drone. Do I have that right?

I can’t believe I’m writing this. I really can’t. Every time I think Trump has reached some new nadir, he tears it up and goes even lower. How that man could have stood on the tarmac in Dover as the caskets containing four dead bodies were carried past him on one day, and then four days later subtracted the same four dead bodies from the total KIA in his war is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Now he’s threatening a “massive” attack on Iran for next week. What are they going to do when Iran retaliates and Americans get hit by missiles and drones on bases in the Middle East? Say they died from scorpion bites or an infestation of malaria-carrying sandfleas?

Trump will say anything to make himself look good. On Thursday, he said the U.S. is “doing better than anyone expected” in the war on Iran. But just wait until troops get killed in Jordan and Kuwait and Iraq. It’s Biden’s fault! Or Kamala’s! The next thing he’s going to say is that Biden and Kamala have been geo-located inside Iran firing missiles at tankers and personally enriching uranium. I would say that the man is demented, but that would mean 30 percent of the American public is demented, and that couldn’t be right.

Could it?

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I have a confession to make: I do not pay a huge amount of attention to Cuba. I never have. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a little nothing island about 100 miles away from Florida. It’s where the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and where Al Pacino’s Scarface comes from. Also, they apparently make really good cigars, and a lot of really racist Latino assholes who think they’re white fled the tiny island nation over half a century ago. Now they live in Florida and reliably vote for Republicans who will throw these dumb fucks into concentration camps ten seconds after toppling American democracy and installing a white nationalist fascist dictatorship.1

Beyond that, I don’t think about Cuba much, if at all. When I DO think about it, I’ve always thought our obsessive embargo of the terrifying “communist” nation was stupid. Especially after the Soviet Union fell. What was the point? What was Cuba going to do? Lead a communist revolution? With their 1950s cars? Motherfucker, please.

When Obama mostly dropped the embargo and opened up trade and tourism, I thought that was nice. We have other things to worry about. Economically crippling an itty bitty nation right in our backyard probably should be at the bottom of our list. We’re in the 21st century. Move on. Bigger fish to fry. Also, bacalao is delicious.2

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Now, of course, Trump is waging full-scale economic war on a nation that hasn’t done a fucking thing to anyone, cutting its oil off for months. This has resulted in the deaths of at least hundreds of the sick and elderly, including children who were in NICUs. Because the Trump regime is full of serial killers the most pro-life ever.

The regime is doing this because they’re sadistic and cruel and in the neocon business of regime change. Curiously, they’re building a case for an invasion, something they have not bothered to do with any of the other countries we’ve gone to war with since Trump waddled back into power.3

at Decolonized Journalism digs into the report released by Marco Rubio’s deeply compromised State Department that is obviously a prelude to something darker. His analysis is worth a read:

Decolonized Journalism

The New Red Scare: Targeting Leftists, Blaming Cuba for Civil Rights in the U.S.

In the early to mid-20th century, many hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, and supporters of Jim Crow laws would associate everything they hated with communism, including integration and giving nonwhite people equal rights. Nearly a century l…

Read more

3 days ago · 97 likes · 6 comments · Arturo Dominguez

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa,” reads the Department of State report. “Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The fascinating thing about this report is that Cuba is apparently a global supervillain, spreading sccccaaaaaryyyy leftist ideology like dandelion seeds. Undermining world order with ideas like…I dunno…human rights? Universal healthcare? Anti-imperialism? Anti-fascism? Racial equality?

Is Cuba actually behind half a century of countries struggling against injustice and poverty and imperialism? Maybe. A simpler explanation is that people do not like living in squalor and being told that the color of their skin and the language they speak make them inferior. I dunno, call me crazy, but that seems more likely than a tiny little nation with little to no money running a global terrorist organization that no one fucking noticed until exactly the moment the Trump regime needed a justification for invasion.

Here’s the thing, though, and this is my very different take-away from Arturo’s. Republicans are lying sacks of shit. They’re also insanely lazy when it comes to said lying. They cannot be bothered to come up with anything original because thinking are hard and Brawndo has electrolytes. So these twatwaffles look around, see what they’re already doing, and then just blame it on the people they hate. They’ve been doing this for YEARS, and I’ve been repeating this ad nauseam for a reason: Every Republican accusation is a confession.

This is where I remind you that Russia is/was the central hub for global white nationalism/neo-Nazism for the last twenty years. Not because Putin himself is a white nationalist/neo-Nazi, but because far-right extremism is a useful tool to undermine Western democracies and easy to fuel with money and propaganda:

Though Nazzaro’s relationship with the Russian government remains uncertain, these reports point to a broader trend: a mutual affection between Western white supremacists and the Russian government. It also highlights the reality that the distinction between foreign terrorism and so-called domestic terrorism is increasingly irrelevant. Dating back to 2004, David Duke characterized Russia as the “key to white survival,” and American white supremacist Richard Spencer recently identified Russia as the “sole white power in the world.” Both Jared Taylor—founder of the white supremacist outlet American Renaissance—and Matthew Heimbach—a Unite the Right organizer and leader of the now-defunct Traditionalist Workers Party—have met in person with ultranationalist Russian political leaders in 2015 and 2017, respectively.

For its part, the Russian government has exploited this interest. It has both turned a blind eye to far-right paramilitarism within its own borders and actively cultivated neo-Nazism in the West. These decisions align with its broader project to sow discord in Western democracies and influence transcontinental relations, despite its relatively weak military and economy. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for right-wing violence in the West constitutes an element in his broader destabilization campaign.

Ohhhhh riiiiight! You might have forgotten about that because the legacy press doesn’t like to talk about mediocre racist white men and their ongoing assault on the rule of law, democracy, civil rights, decency, morality, etc. etc. There was a while there when the legacy press couldn’t stop breathelessly asking if the march of fascism was unstoppable. If democracy was doomed.

For a very VERY brief time, the legacy press made the connection to this assault on democracy to the regimes in Russia and, later, Hungary. But that quietly went away lest we make mediocre racist white men who idolized the fascist governments of both countries angry. You see, Republicans loooooved themselves some Putin and Orban, so we weren’t allowed to talk about how they funded white nationalist extremism all over the world.

We were, of course, allowed to talk about how Iran funded Muslim extremism all over the world. They were the bad guys, you see. And Muslim extremists are evil! No good! Very bad! Islamic terrorism is wrong! We don’t like it!

But white nationalism across the globe? Wellll…that’s different. Those were white men. Usually Christians. Frequently, Trump fans. Here in the United States, they were almost always Republicans. It’s not terrorism when OUR people do it, right? It’s only terrorism when the left does it! Or when brown people do it! Otherwise, it’s patriotic and for love of ‘Murika!

I’ve been wondering for a while now what is going to happen to global white nationalism when Russia falls. I thought that maybe Hungary would take its place buuuuut…no.

Like Russia, Hungary was secretly funneling money to bankroll far-right extremists.4 With Orban gone, their government is cutting all of the proto-fascists off. So much for Plan B.

What about Plan A? Well, Russia’s economy has been on the brink of collapse for a while now, and Ukraine has shifted from battlefield objectives to economic ones, methodically crippling Russia’s oil infrastructure. Now, Ukraine is going after Russia’s commercial infrastructure, and that’s going to hurt just as much:

Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries, Moscow’s answer to Amazon, said on Friday three more of its warehouses had been attacked by Ukraine overnight, part of a widening campaign by Kyiv to damage Russia’s economy and logistics chains.

So…if Russia is struggling and they’re running out of money, what does that mean for fascists in other countries? Well, here’s a hint from rabidly pro-Russian lunatic Laura Loomer:

In other words, those Russian checks stop coming, and the fascists stop spewing pro-Kremlin propaganda.

More importantly, without Russian money flowing into their pockets, a lot of formerly influential far-right groups are suddenly going to find themselves less capable of attracting attention. It costs money to make noise. Online campaigns are expensive. Getting on TV requires $$$. Real-world events like rallies are not cheap when you live in mommy’s basement and spend all day on The Daily Stomer crying about how women won't fuck you after complimenting the size of their tits and telling them the Jews secretly drink the blood of children.5

Iran and China and other authoritarian countries fund extremism, but not in the same way and not as overtly. And they certainly can’t be seen as a guiding light for global white nationalism. At the highest levels, authoritarians don’t really see race. A billionaire dictator is a billionaire dictator. But down here among the poor and middle-class white trash? They’re not going to devote themselves to a Chinese overlord while waving a “whites only” sign. That’s a level of cognitive dissonance not even Fox News could overcome.

It should be noted that the Trump regime is trying to set itself up as the new exporter of white nationalism, attempting to boost Canada’s far right in exactly the same way that Russia instigated a pseudo-separatist movement in Ukraine as a pretense for its invasion. But that lasts exactly as long as the regime is in power, which will be until noon on January 20th, 2029. Then we can hand over all of the records of whom the regime was working with, and all of those Canadians will be facing charges of treason. So…good luck with that.

In the meantime, we should view this “report” on Cuba, the Communist Superpower, as about as reliable as reports on Trump’s perfect health and perfect cognitive tests. All of it smells like bullshit. Or at least like Trump’s rancid diapers.

I don’t know why Cuba, of all the countries the regime wants to bomb into submission, requires an elaborate cover story to justify a war no one needs or wants, but it’s obvious that’s what we’re doing here. Pay attention in the coming weeks and months to the rhetoric around this as the regime uses it to prepare for war, as well to label its domestic enemies as “collaborators” engaged in “sedition.” Don’t be surprised if we “discover” that Cuba has been “interfering” with our elections as well, since the claims about China have fallen flat. The regime is desperate and panicking and will lash out in wild and unpredictable ways to cling to power, just like all failing and dying fascist regimes.

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There are only 101 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

The Pentagon is fond of playing wargames where they try to come up with scenarios estimating what the enemy might do so they’ll be ready in case it happens. You and me, we’re not in charge of thousands of bombers and missiles and dozens of aircraft carriers and warships and Middle East bases that have had the shit bombed out of them, so let’s play another kind of game.

Let’s imagine we’re the leaders of Iran. This morning, Iran’s leaders woke up in Tehran (or wherever they’re hiding) and they checked their iphones and they read a story on the Washington D.C. insider tip-sheet Axios that said Trump held a big meeting in the Situation Room on Tuesday with Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary Tap-a-Keg Hegseth, and they discussed Trump’s plans for “massive” new strikes on Iran.

Here’s the quote Axios got straight from Trump on Thursday morning: “Next week, it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We’re gonna knock out all their power plants. We’re gonna knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

Now, just wait a minute!

The leaders of Iran have had several of their guys flying all over the place – to Geneva, to Oman, to Qatar, any place they were told to go to “negotiate” with Trump’s thieving son-in-law and his real estate buddy Witkoff. The leaders of Iran agreed to a memo of understanding and a ceasefire, which Trump quickly broke, and now they’re supposed to go somewhere else and “negotiate” with Trump’s two fools again? He keeps sending the same guys, a skinny one in a Brioni suit and Ferragamos carrying a ledger marked “Trump Organization” and a hefty one whose pockets are already stuffed with spare change he found in the seat cushions of the jet he flew in on. All they want to talk about is how much oil Iran is going to put on the market if they lift sanctions on Iranian oil, so they can make bets on oil prices before the market opens the next day.

What good are “negotiations” if the “agreements” they lead to dissolve like teaspoons of sugar in tiny cups of afternoon tea?

Here is what the Iranian leadership read on their phones this morning: Trump told Axios – he calls up their reporter Barak Ravid anytime he wants to rattle markets or scare the Iranian leadership – “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”

You betcha, is the reaction over there in Tehran. Secretary Pop-a-Cork was on Capitol Hill yesterday flexing his tattoos and showing off track marks from his latest round of High-T injections, and he was begging for 78 billion dollars, because his approved leakers at the Pentagon had spent the weekend telling anyone who would listen that the Pentagon is “running out of money.” What they’re running out of is bombs and missiles, but over in Tehran, they’re willing to forgive a new blizzard of lies, because as expert negotiators, they’re used to feeling their way through lie-whiteouts whipped up by Trump’s bumbling “negotiation team.”

Here’s where it gets good. For the 23^rd time -- or is it the 42^nd time, it’s so hard to keep an accurate count -- Trump told Axios that the Iranians “want to negotiate,” but they’re not ready to make a deal because “they haven’t received enough pain yet.”

Now, we civilians, we don’t have missiles that we regularly fire off every time a satellite picks up a rockslide on a mountain “thought” to be hiding some nuclear centrifuges or missile launch sites or Iran’s secret supply of tea Samovars, so we’re left trying to figure out what the reaction would be in Tehran when they read what Trump just said about how they haven’t received “enough pain.” See, that’s the difference between Tehran and the Situation Room at the White House. Trump and his crew of Loyal Florsheim Wearers think that if they drop enough bombs on Iran, they’ll run to Geneva or wherever with their hats in their hands and beg him to stop. When all Tehran has to do is stop oil tankers from transiting the Strait of Hormuz and get the Houthis to shoot at a few tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, and the oil price graph will head straight up and cross the almighty Bad News Bears hundred dollar mark, and stock prices will head in the other direction, sending Trump to his phone to call Axios with a new roundelay of lies intended to “calm the markets” while he issues a few new threats to Tehran.

Are you picking up a pattern here? Isn’t that something: neither am I. There is no pattern. There is chaos in Washington D.C. and glee in Tehran as they watch Master Strategist Trump try to handle the war he started with absolutely no idea of how to finish it. Iran’s leaders are looking at photos in the Washington Post of Trump’s stupid drained Reflecting Pool and the diaper he put on the Kennedy Center to hide the fact his name isn’t on it, and the absolute mess that is the White House and all the silly gold leaf he’s plastered on everything but the seat cushions in his new Marine One helicopter, and the leaders of Iran are just sitting there waiting for Trump to fuck up again, so they can take Kushner and Witkoff to the cleaners and get back to collecting tolls on the Strait of Hormuz and selling their oil to China.

Ain’t this a hoot? If you’re one of the Iranian leaders in Tehran, you’re getting on the blower to the Houthis and telling them to blast a few more tankers out of the water in the Red Sea, and you’re sitting back and waiting.

Iran’s leaders are good at waiting, because they know what waiting gets them: yet another fuckup from the Flailing Blunderbuss of Errors and Terrors in the White House.

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What is it about scum-sucking quagmires started by idiot presidents and $70-plus billion supplementals passed by supine Congresses? The House today passed $73 billion in additional money for Trump’s insane war on Iran that we’ve already won about four times, or is it seven? I guess we’ll have to wait until 3 or 4 a.m. tomorrow for Trump’s latest Truth Social spasm to see if we’ve won the war again, if Iran’s last missile battery has been knocked out, or they’ve sunk the final Iranian Zodiac tender that was scooting around the Strait of Hormuz with its 25-horsepower outboard motor.

On March 25, 2003, five days after the invasion of Iraq began, Bush asked Congress for a $74.8 billion Emergency Supplemental for the ongoing war in Iraq, postwar occupation, reconstruction and relief. They hadn’t even taken Baghdad and they wanted billions for shit they didn’t even know they needed, because with 23 years of hindsight, we remember that the amount of planning they had done for what happened after the fall of Baghdad was exactly zero. In April of 2003, the House and Senate passed a bill for $78.49 billion, $3.7 billion more than Bush had requested, because God only knows how many Congresspersons had tacked on extra goodies for stuff they needed back in their districts and states, so why not throw some extra meat in the pot as long as it’s sitting on the stove simmering, right?

The current gaggle of MAGA-make-overs on the Republican side of the aisle also threw in an extra $1.15 trillion – that’s trillion, not billion – for the defense policy bill that’s on the table for this year. The Pentagon is sitting on about $75 billion in unspent funds from last year’s defense reconciliation bill, but as Emily Litella, played by the brilliant Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live used to say, never mind.

Where did all those tens of billions go in 2003 when we had about 140,000 troops on the ground in Iraq? I actually have some facts about that from personal experience. I was in Iraq as a journalist in November and December of 2003 when the supplemental funds were hitting government bank accounts. A West Point classmate of mine was then the head of USAID in Iraq. He was a bundle of nerves, because about $30 billion of the $78 billion was going to be handled by USAID, which meant him. I asked him how all those billions were going to be spent. I had read about the reconstruction projects that were planned for Iraq – sewers and water treatment facilities for Baghdad and Mosul and Basra, money to secure the antiquities in the national museum that had been raided right after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, and so forth. My classmate hummed and hawed a little, and then he said, nope, none of the $30 billion was going for such rebuilding and relief. It was going for Iraq oil infrastructure, every blooming dime of it.

That left $48 billion from the emergency supplemental, and even though there was no information back in 2003 how that would be spent, we know now where it went: straight down the rabbit hole of military adventurism that would play out for the next eight years. Up in Mosul, the 101^st Airborne Division would be sent back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and two Stryker brigades from the 2nd Infantry Division and the 25^th Infantry Division would be moved into Mosul to take up the fight against Iraqi insurgents that would turn into the Battle of Mosul in November of that year.

Elsewhere around Iraq, other units, artillery brigades and infantry divisions and brigades of Marines would be rotated back to the States and be replaced by other units. That took money. Billions and billions. In fact, between 2003 and 2011 when we pulled our combat units out of Iraq, $751 billion was spent on the Iraq war, according to the Congressional Research Service. When post-service costs such as medical care and retirement benefits for service members are included, nearly $3 trillion will be spent on the Iraq War, according to estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

How much is the current Forever War du Jour going to cost us? Well, Secretary High-T Hegseth told a congressional committee yesterday that we’ve already spent $37.5 billion, and he wouldn’t even answer a question from a Democrat if that amount included money to pay for the U.S. bases in Jordan and the Gulf that have been bombed by Iran. We know from past experience that the Pentagon just adds up active costs to come up with figures like Hegseth’s total of $37.5 billion, such as ammunition fired, aviation fuel consumed, food eaten by sailors on warships, logistics costs of movement of replacement ammo and personnel into the battlespace…that kind of shit. When you factor in the real costs, like troop salaries and every nickel spent to move ships and troops around, like aircraft carriers leaving Norfolk, Virginia for the Indian Ocean, I would estimate that you can double Hegseth’s $37.5 billion.

The key thing during the Iraq war and today with Trump’s Insanity on the Gulf is that not a dime of the money the Pentagon burns through will come from the U.S. Treasury. Not one tax dollar. The whole bill will be paid on-the-come with off-budget funny money borrowed from bond-buyers who are willing to supplement our Asshole Adventurism with investors’ money, because when all is said and done, they’ll profit from this profligacy. That’s right. We’re still paying the bill from Iraq and Afghanistan, because that money was borrowed, too.

And don’t forget what else Bush was doing in 2003 while he was fighting a war in the Middle East with borrowed money. He was passing tax cuts for rich people and corporations at top speed – specifically, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Reconciliation Act of 2003. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Bush tax cuts added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. By 2010, the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that making the Bush tax cuts permanent would increase the national debt by $5.5 trillion over the next ten years.

So, while the Bush war in Iraq was costing the U.S. about $3 trillion in borrowed money, the Bush tax cuts were adding a gigantic bill of borrowed money on top of that.

And I’ll bet you can’t guess what Republicans are doing right this very minute, as we fight a crazed war over control of the Strait of Hormuz – which was open to all trade for free on February 27, the day before Trump launched his war. Republicans want to make the 2017 tax cuts they passed in Trump’s first term permanent. Because that’s what Republicans always do: They start wars that they don’t want to pay for, and while the bombs are dropping and the bodies are coming home in flag-draped coffins, they pass tax cuts with a 10-year sundown date to get around rules about passing shit in Congress using budget reconciliation. Then later, they want to pass bills to make the tax cuts permanent. Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent will add $4 trillion to the debt.

Am I fucking hallucinating? Are Republicans doing the same shit they did with Iraq over again with Iran? Borrowing money for a useless war as they turn it into a quagmire at the same time they pass tax cuts for the wealthy on the backs of the middle class and the poor?

You bet they are. We haven’t got money for Medicaid. We haven’t got money for school lunches and breakfasts. We haven’t got money for food stamps. The New York Times published a huge story yesterday about how 400,000 people in Arizona are losing their SNAP benefits because of work requirements and other barriers to aid passed by Republicans…and that’s just one state. There are 49 other states where food aid is harder and harder to get because Republicans want to pass tax cuts and fund insane fucking wars at the same time.

And the truly astounding thing is this: Donald Trump, who could barely walk across the medal podium after the soccer championship on Sunday is stumbling the United States into another quagmire of the kind he’s been yelping about for at least two decades. He promised no new wars. He started a new war. He promised no permanent wars. He’s got himself into a war that’s so permanent that he wants $37.5 billion for it on top of $1.5 trillion he is asking for next year’s defense budget, or war budget, or whateverthefuck Secretary High-T is calling it.

What is wrong with this country? What is it about the Middle East that makes one president after another want to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars bombing the shit out of people who have been over there since civilization began? And what the fuck is up with using funny money to pay for all of it? Why don’t they ever raise taxes to pay for this shit? When World War II was over, we had a 90 percent top tax bracket to make up for all the money we spent to save the world from the Nazis and the Japanese. If we wanted to run around the world shooting at stuff and dropping bombs and defending Europe and occupying Japan, we fucking paid for it.

Quagmire, quagmire, here we come! Right back where we started from! Please take out your wallet and have a glance at your bank balance, because it’s going to be thinner if Democrats don’t win the midterms and stop this lunatic before he bankrupts us just like he bankrupted his casinos and had to sell off his properties like the Plaza Hotel to pay off all the bankers he had stolen money from.

This time, he’s stealing from us, and we’re the only ones who can stop him.

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When I was growing up, I remember one of the weirder things I learned about the Nazis was how weirdly homoerotic they were. For an ideology that quite literally had the death penalty for homosexuality, Nazis spent an awwwwful lot of time obsessing over the male body. Lots of pictures of young men in tight shorts, covered in sweat. It was very fetish-coded, and this was before I really understood the concept. As I got older, good fucking god, it wasn’t just gay, it was SUPER gay.

History, as they say, doesn’t repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes, and right now, MAGAland is hitting all the high notes. If you know what I mean. Heeeeeeeeey, girlfriend!

From Tucker Carlson telling men to tan their balls:

To Donald Trump being obsessed with how sexy men are:

To one of the leading misogynists of the Manosphere, Andrew Tate, dressing like your divorced aunt on her way to brunch with the girls:

The “manly” fascists of the far right are gayer than almost every gay man I have ever met in my life, and I’ve met more than a few. Since the early 90s, I’ve been a walking safe zone for the LGBTQ community. So much so, I collected them like barnacles. To the point where my best “man” at my wedding was a lesbian. Of the remaining four in my party, two more were gay (one male, one female), one was bi (female), and only one was a heterosexual (male). It was made known to the assembled guests that comments on this would be most unwelcome.

And then there’s this nonsense:

The right has been screaming about “low-T” men for years. There’s an epidemic of low testosterone in American men! We’re being wussified! Feminism/chemicals in the water/empathy is making our men weak and soft! We need to return to the old days when men were MEN. When we were tough and manly and and and…you know…MEN!

But have you looked at MAGA men lately? Have you ever seen a group less manly than your average Republican voter?

Start with the stereotypes. Men are supposed to be strong, stoic, brave, and persevere in the face of adversity. What part of that even remotely describes the whining and weeping mass of MAGA manbabies who cling to their guns in terror?

Every day, MAGAland wakes up to a new panic. Are Muslims in your neighborhood? BE AFRAID! Is someone flying a pride flag on the next block? BE AFRAID! A Trans kid goes to your local school? BE AFRAID! And you don’t even have school-age kids!

The list is never-ending. Immigrants. Jews. Blacks. People who speak a second language. Educated people. Chemtrails. People with accents. Homeless people. Feminists. Liberals. The Deep State. China. The media. And on and on and on forever.

The victimhood of mediocre racist white people is eternal. Their fear is deeper than the Marianas Trench and wider than the Grand Canyon. They are consumed by fear. They do not persevere in the face of terror; they crumble and submit, begging for a strongman to save them, surrendering their liberty while groveling for a crumb of illusory security. Not that the Founding Fathers were paragons of virtue, but, holy shit, they would throw themselves into an active volcano if they saw the abject cowardice and self-subjugation of the people who claim to be their ideological successors.

Take another stereotype: Fatherhood. A real man is a good father. We’re going to skip over rates of child abuse among MAGA vs. non-MAGA. That gets complicated. Even staunch liberals can abuse their kids because “that’s how I was raised.” The cycle of abuse is hard to break.

But taking a step back, what does MAGA vote for? Do they vote for a better future for their children? No. They vote for cuts to education. They vote for cuts to healthcare. They vote for more pollution and tainted food and anti-vaxxerism. They vote to burn this country to the ground rather than let their white privilege slip away.

These are not good fathers (and grandfathers). These are men who see their children (and grandchildren) as entirely disposable. They do not care what happens to them. Children are little more than pawns to be used up and cast aside in their fight to “own the libs.” If little Timmy dies from the Measles, or is killed in a school shooting, or is maimed at age 13 in a factory job, or graduates and can’t read because his Bible-themed charter school never bothered to teach basic academic skills? That’s just fine because it makes libs cry, and isn’t that the most important thing? Sure, little Timmy’s life is ruined (or just ended), but admitting they were wrong is worse than death itself for MAGA. What’s the life and future of their children compared to that?!

MAGA are not good husbands, either. They do not view women as partners. Misogyny is a core feature of fascism, and there’s a reason the American right adores Donald Trump. His hatred of women appeals to them on a visceral level. The right has long seen feminism as a threat to the power of men. This is why they have worked tirelessly for the last 50 years to undo Roe. This is why they are trying to make contraception illegal again. This is why they want to make no-fault divorce illegal again.

This is why the American right is openly embracing pedophilia.

The Banter

The Right's Pedophile Problem Is Getting Worse

by Justin Rosario…

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4 years ago · 23 likes · 6 comments · The Opinionated Ogre

Women terrify MAGA men. You know, the big, strong, tough manly men. The men who are so masculine and powerful that there is a real conversation on the right about being attracted to women is actually kind of…gay.

Got that? Sex with women is only for making babies. Otherwise, you’re gay. Or maybe sex with women is just gay altogether. It should be noted that when a middle-aged woman knocked on then-25-year-old Nick Fuentes’ door, he panicked, pepper-sprayed her, and shoved her away before slamming the door and hiding.

Soooooo fucking manly.

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The right’s creepy homoerotic obsession with masculinity is not really all that complicated. They are full of self-loathing and hollowed out by decades of subsisting on a diet of nothing but fear and hate. They are incapable of anything but performative toxic masculinity because true masculinity requires a sense of self and security. You have to be comfortable with who you are as a man before you can be masculine.

But MAGA men live in a state of constant insecurity. They have to. It’s their organizing principle. Security would take away their fear, and without fear, they would not hate. Without hate, what are they? How would they identify with the GOP’s appeal to aggrieved, mediocre, racist white men?

The phrase “masculine MAGA” is an oxymoron. By definition, MAGA men cannot be masculine. They can only playact a caricature of masculinity. The real thing will be forever beyond their grasp because they do not understand it or themselves. They are selfish, empty things, devoid of love and the concept of putting others before themselves. They are built of weakness and an inability to see beyond that weakness or even admit to it.

This is why they despise those of us who put the lie to their cosplaying. We expose their failures just by existing. They spit their hate and rage while envying everything we have: The loving family. The happy home. Living comfortably in our own skin without self-loathing. Living without fear. They despise us and want nothing more than to drag us down to their level because that’s easier than escaping the pit they’ve dug for themselves.

And there’s the irony of it all. What could possibly be more low-T than that?

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There are 104 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak.

Stay strong. You are never alone.

For those who can be fuzzy on global geography, like me, it’s perhaps useful to say that the Persian Gulf is a body of water bordered by eight countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. These countries include some of the world’s most prominent oil exporters, who have shipping ports for their oil on the Persian Gulf. However, oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf (and headed for the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and destinations around the world) need to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that is about 100 miles long, but with shipping lanes for big oil tankers that at the narrowest point are only about two miles wide in each direction. The chokepoint is bordered by Iran to north and UAE and Oman to the south.

Chokepoints can cause problems, and not just because of armed conflict. Some readers may remember that five years ago in 2021, a container ship called Ever Given ran aground and shut down traffic through the Suez Canal for six days. Now the Strait of Hormuz is giving the world a lesson about how supply shocks affect oil prices.

About 90% of international freight trade moves over the oceans. What are some other main chokepoints for global ocean shipping? Stephan Maurer, Luke Heath Milsom, and Ferdinand Rauch offer insights in “The fragility of the global trading system” (London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, Discussion Paper 2186, May 2026). A readable short overview of the paper is available at the blog of the LSE Business Review. In the overview, Maurer, Milsom and Rauch write:

[W]e measured sea routes between 455 ports with a statistical trade model that lets us simulate what would happen if a major route closed, or if a new one opened. We simulate shutting three shipping lanes: the Panama Canal (which connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean), the Suez Canal (between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea) and the Strait of Malacca (between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea). We also looked at opening two new routes: a year-round Northwest Passage (connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic north of Canada) and a proposed canal across Thailand’s Kra Isthmus. (This scheme would lower the distance for many shipment routes between China or Japan and Europe, although the Thai government is reported to be considering a land-bridge project instead of a canal.)

As geography suggests, the Panama Canal is most important for the US economy, because the alternative is that some shipping would instead need to travel around the southern tip of South American. The Suez Canal is important for European trade, because otherwise shipping would need to be re-routed around the southern tip of Africa. (Although Suez is most important of all to the economy of Egypt; the authors estimate that a closure of Suez would reduce the total GDP of Egypt by 8%.) The Strait of Malacca (between Malaysia and Indonesia, with Singapore at its southern end where a key channel is only about two miles wide) is most important for China’s international shipping trade. Otherwise, shipping between China and India, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe would need to be rerouted further to the east through an alternative passage like the Sunda Strait (between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, but also shallow and narrow for some large modern ships) or the Makassar Straight (between the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sulawesi, a longer detour but also deeper water).

The authors also look at the possibilities from opening two new trade routes. If ships could pass freely though a Northwest Passage, it would be possible to move trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without either going through the Panama Canal or around the southern tip of South America. A proposed canal in Thailand across the Kra Isthmus would potentially be quicker than the Strait of Malacca or its alternatives–but would also be a huge infrastructure project.

In a global economy with near-instantaneous communication and rapid air travel, it can sometimes feel as if the details of geography, like chokepoints for ocean shipping, don’t matter all that much. Which is true enough–until they do.

The post Chokepoints for Ocean Trade: Strait of Hormuz, and What Else? first appeared on Conversable Economist.