Oliver plays this one as close to straight as I've ever seen him do, I suspect because he seems seriously and deeply angry about the damage being done by chatbots. This is worth a watch, but there are two points well worth underlining-
One, these bots were rushed to market long before any guardrails or responsible oversight were worked out (and really, our tech overlords don't seem in any hurry to work on them).
Two, the chatbots number one job is to get you to keep using the chatbot. They need you to upgrade to a paid version, and then they need you to stay with that bot as long and as often as possible, because that's how they maximize revenue. Again, the main job of the chatbot is to keep you talking to the chatbot.
As always, there is language of which my mother would not approve. But some of this is shocking-- I knew most of these stories, but to see it laid out, and hear the quotes from the techbros-- it's all very alarming. And a reminder that these bots should be nowhere near children.
Did you know Donald Trump flew to Palm Beach on Saturday for a “crypto conference” celebrating himself and his own utterly corrupt and failed $TRUMP cryptocurrency? A total of 297 fools who had bought the Trump crypto coin were declared “winners” of some kind of contest and heard Trump deliver the keynote speech of the conference. The top 29 “winners” were allowed to attend a “special VIP reception and champagne toast” with Trump where they could meet other celebrities he had chosen for the occasion such as former Republican Senate candidate Mike Tyson and “motivational speaker” Tony Robbins. Tyson is a convicted rapist who has been accused multiple times of sexual assault and harassment, and Robbins has been accused by 10 women of sexual harassment and unwanted touching. And let us not forget that Trump himself has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assault including rape.
Trump’s meme coin, by the way, was trading at or below $3.00 in the week leading up to his big “contest” with its “winners” who attended his crypto conference at Mar a Lago. The $TRUMP meme coin started its life at a worth of $75.00 each, meaning that those who bought enough of the things to go to the gala at Mar a Lago and quaff cheap champagne with the President of the United States, had lost 97 percent of the value of their investments by Saturday.
On the same day Trump was addressing his “winners” at Mar a Lago, he ordered his two real estate mouthpieces, Kushner and Witkoff, to cancel their trip to Pakistan for negotiations to end the war with Iran. That night Trump and his wife Melania attended the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, where a would-be assassin made an attempt to enter the Washington Hilton ballroom with a shotgun, handgun, and several knives trying to kill Trump. After the dinner was cancelled and Trump returned to the White House, Trump held a press conference at which he said that the attempt on his life justified the ballroom he has been trying to build where the East Wing once stood, because the ballroom will have bulletproof windows and an “anti-drone” roof.
Reports have revealed that the Trump administration did not put the Hilton Hotel on the maximum level of security for the White House Correspondents Dinner. The accused assassin was staying in a room on the hotel’s 10th floor and was able to check carrying luggage that contained the weapons he used on Saturday night. There were multiple reports after the event that people were able to walk into the hotel without showing identification or a room key. Tickets to the event at which Trump appeared were printed on paper, and there were no codes on the tickets that would have proved whether they were genuine. There was tighter security for the Taylor Swift “Eras” tour.
There is also a war going on. Peace talks have stalled or ended completely. We don’t know, because we are not being informed by the White House. At a time when 13 American lives have been lost and more than 400 soldiers, sailors, and Marines have been wounded and lives are still in danger in the Middle East because the war has not ended, The Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, treated his friend Kid Rock to a joyride in an Apache helicopter at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Apache helicopters have only two seats, for the pilot and co-pilot, but Hegseth and Kid Rock were given rides in the co-pilots’ seats in two helicopters, apparently so they could go up on their joyrides at the same time and talk to each other through their helmet communications headsets.
That’s what Hegseth did today in the middle of an ongoing war, where a third aircraft carrier just arrived on station in the Arabian Sea. Pentagon figures show that it costs between $5,000 and $5,500 an hour to operate an Apache helicopter. The Pentagon puts a figure of $12,651 per hour as a “reimbursement” figure if the Apache helicopter is used for non-governmental purposes. For each hour of flight, an Apache requires 35 hours of ground maintenance, which the Pentagon puts at $6,000 per hour, not including what they call “fuel and armament.”
The last time I checked, Kid Rock was not a government employee, but who knows? Maybe Hegseth appointed him Secretary of the Navy. He needs a new one.
Oh, almost forgot. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, locking 20 percent of the world’s oil in the Persian Gulf. Oil prices remain above $100 a barrel and U.S. gas prices are over $4.00 a gallon in most of the country. In parts of the rest of the world, where there is no domestic oil production and refinery capability, gas is being rationed and airlines are cancelling flights because of the price or complete unavailability of jet fuel. In this country, airline prices are expected to go up steeply during the high-travel summer vacation time.
Not to worry. Trump is still ordering marble from Italy for his “America first” ballroom and overseeing an attempt to redo the columns in the front of the White House, turning them from Doric to Corinthian in design, because it’s fancier, or something.
I wonder if the Jefferson Airplane knew that they were talking about our future when they wrote and recorded “White Rabbit” for their album, Surrealistic Pillow.
When logic and proportion Have fallen sloppy dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen’s off with her head Remember what the dormouse said Feed your head Feed your head
Think about this for a moment: our heads are getting fed to bursting every day by a lunatic who falls asleep in his chair in the Oval Office in front of 30 people, including members of the White House press corps, who saw nothing wrong with inviting him to be the keynote speaker at their big dinner after the keynote speech he gave that same day at his meme coin fest at Mar a Lago. I’m still trying to figure out why they didn’t just combine the two and call it “Saturday Night with Meme Coins and Media.”
One day we’ll wake up from this bad dream, and we’ll look around and see if there’s anything left.
Have you found yourself saying “wake me up when it’s over?” So have I, but I’m staying awake to cover these fools and bring their crimes to light for you. To support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
When logic and proportion Have fallen sloppy dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen’s off with her head Remember what the dormouse said Feed your head Feed your head
The international oil market is parked outside the Persian Gulf.
Oil briefly touched $120 a barrel today. Gas prices in the U.S. are $4.23 a gallon, or so we’re being told. Across the Delaware from me here in Northeast Pennsylvania, I paid $3.81 recently. I’ve seen photos of gas station signs from California that show regular gas over $6.00 a gallon, and I read that it’s $7.00 in Menlo Park.
In Europe, gas is over $8.00, in some places in France, more than $9.00 a gallon, but those prices reflect sky-high taxes that can be 50 percent of the real cost of the gas itself. Which is why you see tiny cars on the road everywhere in Europe, and I’m talking cars that hold two people and have two-cylinder and three-cylinder engines.
We’re beginning to see the real cost of Trump’s war on Iran. World oil markets are in freefall. Twenty percent of the world’s oil is locked up in the Persian Gulf. Much of the world has been able to adjust, with countries dipping into their oil and gas reserves to prevent prices from going even higher, and in some cases, just to keep cars on the road.
Countries that don’t have their own oil are looking to other markets, like Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil. We’re coming up on 60 days of Trump’s war, but markets cannot adjust overnight. Countries with oil have to ramp up drilling, and they have to build new pipelines and storage tanks to handle the extra oil they’re drilling. Then they have to ship the oil to the countries that don’t have their own oil. Not much changes in the greater scheme of oil production and refining in 60 days. But what changes very, very quickly are prices. Take 20 percent of the world’s oil supply out of the market, and you’ve got real trouble, which is where we are right now.
The oil business is dirty and messy and dangerous. I just saw a story about a huge oil spill and fire at a Russian refinery in the Black Sea port of Tuapse. People were injured by the refined products burning. Ukraine hit the refinery and shipping areas with drones three times this month, part of its defense against Russian aggression. Look what happened: The sea and air and land fouled, residents described “black rain” falling in their neighborhoods, a massive black cloud over the city, and yet another source of oil for the world market taken off the board.
Donald Trump told a gigantic lie that Iran was an “imminent threat” to the United States. Iran was no such thing. They don’t have a nuclear weapon, not even one, and Iran does not have a missile capable of hitting the Atlantic Ocean, much less the east coast of the United States. Sixty days into Trump’s war, and our bombs and missiles haven’t destroyed even an ounce of Iran’s “nuclear dust,” as Trump calls it – the stock of uranium that Iran has been able to enrich to 60 percent, just short of what they would need to build a bomb.
Trump and Hegseth were told by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine that Iran was likely to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. These two macho warriors were so full of themselves and so fucking stupid that they didn’t listen to their own military expert. The Pentagon has been game-planning for a war with Iran for decades. Trump himself stole one of the Pentagon’s top-secret Iran war plans when he left the White House in 2021 and famously showed it to several people at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
But Pentagon war plans are written in words on paper. They aren’t videos. Trump famously doesn’t read. He didn’t even read the executive orders he signed. Trump probably didn’t read the war plan he stole. He just wanted it to wave around and show everyone how powerful he still was, even though he had lost the election.
So, were Trump and Hegseth ready for Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz? No, they were not. It’s likely that Trump was not even aware of the extent of the damage Iran’s blockade would do to the world’s oil market. He certainly has not acted as if he knew what would happen to world oil prices and the price of gas here in the U.S. It is very likely that Trump did not even know what the average price of gas was on February 28 when he ordered the start of the war, because he has never personally bought gas at gas station. He has been backing and filling ever since, telling one lie after another: Prices will go back down. They won’t stay high for long.
Trump is treating the effects of his war with Iran the same way he treated COVID. Remember that insanity? COVID is going to just go away on its own. There are only a few cases. It can be cured by injecting bleach or sunlight or whatever the hell he was saying.
Now, he appears to think that he can cure his war with Iran by blockading Iran’s ports and keeping them from selling their oil. He’s finding out that Iran can take a lot of punishment and still stand up to him. They won’t stop their blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s their leverage. They won’t give up their nuclear dust, either.
So, what is Trump going to do? Well, today he called his friend Vladimir Putin, because that is what powerful leaders do, who are stuck in wars they started. They talk to each other, probably assuring one another that they haven’t made mistakes with their wars, that they hold all the cards, that each of them is, as Trump has taken to referring to himself privately, the “most powerful man who ever lived.”
Can you imagine that phone call? Trump dropped the sanctions the U.S. had imposed on Russian oil, because…well, because there isn’t enough oil on the world market, and he wants prices to go down, so let’s let Russia loose to sell some oil and make some money, oil starts selling for $100 a barrel and more. So, the two of them are talking about all the money they’re making, Trump is bragging about the oil money he extorted from Venezuela, he’s bragging about the big meeting he had with oil executives yesterday, because of course he’s extorting money from them, now that he’s pushed oil prices over a hundred bucks a barrel, and they can start reopening oil wells that were not profitable and drilling new ones. So gimme money. Give money to Republican House and Senate candidates but give it through my superPAC so I can take my share.
And nayh-nyah-nyah, I’ve got a bigger plane with more gold than you do, Vladimir. Let’s see you match that!
What do you think Trump is going to do now? He says he won’t accept Iran’s latest offer to open the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. will end our blockade, probably because he would be seen as caving in to an offer made by Iran, not presented to Iran by him. Seymour Hersh, who still has excellent sources in Israel, reported today that Trump is going to release $25 billion or so in frozen Iranian assets to get them to open the Strait. This theory is based on Trump’s notorious impatience. He could maintain the U.S. part of the co-blockade of the Strait and just wait out the Iranians.
But it took him only 40 days to give Iran a ceasefire they didn’t even ask for. It’s less than a month later, and he is apparently thinking of just paying off Iran to get them to reopen the Strait, so Republicans won’t get killed in the midterm elections, which they will be anyway, even if gas prices go down.
I think he’s going to order some more bombing, this time taking out some bridges that had not been hit, and some Iranian oil facilities. What is Iran going to do if they reach a deal on the blockade when their oil storage tanks have been destroyed and they don’t have any oil to sell? Plus, Hegseth took such a beating at the House hearing today, he’s going to want to do some bombing, like lifting some weights and doing some pushups to show everybody how manly he is.
But that leaves Iran’s nuclear dust. I think at this point Trump would just say, fuck it, let them have their nuclear dust. Except for one horrifying thing for Trump: the specter of Barrack Obama’s and John Kerry’s nuclear deal with Iran. If Trump can’t make a better deal than they did, he’s lost. That humiliation is what he fears most of all.
You know what? The world is starved for oil right now, with gas and liquified natural gas rationing already happening in some places, all because Obama made fun of him at a White House Correspondents dinner 15 years ago, and Obama made a deal with Iran that Trump threw in the trash and said he could get a better deal, or he could completely knock out Iran’s nuclear program.
Now at the 60-day mark, he is learning that Iran is a harder problem than it seemed when considered from the 6th tee at his Doral golf club.
He’s stuck. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s so addled, that in the Oval Office today, during one of his back-and-forth sessions with the press, when he was asked about the problem he is having ending his war with Iran, Donald Trump confused Iran with Ukraine:
I think Ukraine militarily, they’re defeated, okay. You wouldn’t know that by reading the fake news, but militarily, look, their navy– so they had 159 ships. Every ship is right now underwater. Typically, that’s pretty good.
He rambled on about Iran’s money being useless and inflation “like nobody’s ever seen before,” and then he said this…about Iran.
Do you think they’re doing well where they have no navy, no air force, no anti-aircraft apparatus other than what they may have put there. They may have brought in some light stuff during the cease fire. And we know exactly where it is. So it will be knocked out within the first 15 minutes.
He just said that Iran’s, or Ukraine’s, or somebody’s anti-aircraft apparatus “will be” knocked out in the first 15 minutes.
He’s telling secrets right there in the Oval Office. You read it here first: Iran will be bombed again, and soon. Let’s just hope he orders Hegseth to hit Iran and not Ukraine by mistake…or maybe not by mistake. Maybe he told Vlad he’ll help him bomb the Ukrainians.
With this out-of-control dementia patient loose in the White House, anything is possible.
I love this job. I mean, I really, really love it. I write this column every day and together, we’re going to run this asshole and his party out of power. To support my work, please consider buying a subscription.
I walk more gently now. It’s not because my knee aches or my hip hurts, though they do sometimes.
It began over six years ago. Shaken awake by my nervous system, all night and every night, I fell into a deep hole of exhaustion.
Two years seeing five neurologists and trying a dozen medications taught me that regaining my life wasn’t a pill away.
“My heart still pounds at night,” I told my doctor. He recommended breathwork. Not a little breathwork. A lot. I breathed in for 4 seconds and out for 6. I did this for 20 minutes, twice per day, for months.
Then I saw it.
I saw that I did everything from a place of stress. I was intense all the time. Work wasn’t just getting the job done, it was pounding the keyboard as fast and hard as possible, demanding the highest standards in the least time. Recreation was just another box to check on the to-do list. My nervous system was telling me it couldn’t take it anymore, not if I wanted to sleep anyway.
My intense self would have to go. In a moment, I threw him out, banished him. This was the hardest breakup I’ve ever experienced.
Hard because he was the center of my life, the organizing principle, the motivator, the achiever. For him and his accomplishments, I was rewarded. He was how I excelled in school and in the workplace. He was how I managed at home, stayed on top of it all. Without him, who was I? How would I do anything?
Then I found a path out, not all at once, but little by little. I could not change my nervous system so that I could return to who I was, but I could transform my relationship with it — with myself — to become who I needed to be.
How? I had no idea, so I did everything I could think of: therapy, journaling, meditation, dancing alone, dancing with trees, walking miles barefoot, drawing, painting. I even painted with my feet! Gradually, over time, transformation arrived as grief faded. I learned to live with and love my nervous system, to love myself.
Loving myself required removing layers of armor I’d worn so long I couldn’t see or feel. It takes bravery to remove the armor, to drop the shield. We are designed to fear the arrows of pain, disappointment, and misfortune, so we guard. But very few arrows come from outside. Almost all are from inside. Armor to protect from the world also shields us from ourselves.
The shield is always at the ready. The first sight of an external threat and BAM! Up it goes. There’s almost no chance of harm getting through. Knowing that, bravery comes more easily. The risk of lowering it is smaller than it feels.
The more time I spend with less armor, the more I feel what the deep breath reaches. Into my core it finds that I am OK just as I am — fully and fundamentally, as a birthright.
I am not different from you in these ways. Your mind messes with you as much as mine does me. Our minds tell us: “If I hadn’t…,” “If only I could…,” “When I finally lose (or gain)…,” “This will not end well.” The truth is, the ends of our minds’ stories are not yet written. The ends we fear rarely arrive.
If we bravely breathe deeply, for long enough — 20 minutes, twice a day, for months if needed — we might shed some heavy armor. Without it, one really can walk more gently.
My friend Terrence Goggin, who writes the excellent Substack newsletter “West Point History Professor” — and yes, he did teach me history at the Academy back in the stone age — published an excellent column today on the possibility of Trump using ground troops to open the Strait of Hormuz by taking the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, which sits right on the Strait and has an airport with an 11,000 foot runway. You can read his column here.
Basically, he describes what he calls a “wargame scenario” whereby the U.S. would use Marines headed to the region on the USS Tripoli and another Marine Expeditionary task force to take the Bandar Abbas airport and take control of the high ground overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, so Iran could no longer shoot anti-ship missiles and launch drones at oil tankers moving through the Strait. Goggin goes into a lot of detail, describing the 7,000-foot-high mountain range that overlooks the Bandar Abbas airport, specifying that Iranian defenses, including Iran’s army, would have to be defeated in these mountains in order to seize the airport and help control the Strait.
The Trump administration has also been talking about deploying soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force to the region. Reports today say that 750 soldiers have been alerted to deploy with thousands more standing by. There are about 4,500 to 5,000 Marines on the two Expeditionary Task Forces on their way to the Gulf.
Goggin’s column has an artist’s depiction map of what an assault would look like, and a map showing the mountain ranges (plural) that line the southern coast of Iran facing the Gulf. It’s such an interesting take on what kind of plans the Pentagon must be making about now, I decided I would spend some time this afternoon looking at Bandar Abbas on Google Earth maps and see more detail of what U.S. military forces might face if they should try such foolishness.
The first thing that struck me was Bandar Abbas itself. It’s a city of more than 500,000 residents. There are seven universities located there, along with at least two hospitals, including a children’s hospital. Here is what the skyline of the city looked like in 2007. You can be sure it has grown during the last 19 years:
Here is a screenshot from Google Earth showing just some of the mountain ranges immediately overlooking Bandar Abbas:
If you zoom in on the image, you’ll see the names of several dozen villages scattered throughout those mountains. I looked up a few of them. They have populations of 100 to 300. Sometimes the populations are given as “43 families,” which is actually an excellent way to present what U.S. military forces would be facing if Trump tells Hegseth’s Pentagon to make the grave, grave error of committing ground troops into the mountainous region overlooking Bandar Abbas in the hope they would be able to take control of what the military calls “the high ground.” As Goggin points out, the high ground in the case of this area of Iran is mountain ranges of 5,000 to 7,000 feet, all of which overlook the Strait of Hormuz and Bandar Abbas.
Goggin says the naval commander might use B-52 and B-1 bombers to drop glide bombs on gun, missile, and drone emplacements. After that, helicopter gunships would hit the area, taking care of Revolutionary Guard Corps troops still alive after the heavy bombing. Then Marines and soldiers from the 82nd Airborne would move in on helicopters, with “targeted ground strikes” from fighter jets hitting Iran’s coastal denial forces.
Looking at the map shown above, and Google Earth satellite images of the mountain ranges north of Bandar Abbas, what I saw was hundreds of miles of more mountains, and hundreds and hundreds of villages in the valleys of the mountains. Every village can be assumed to have hundreds of residents who are, shall we say, unfriendly to American forces.
There is an enormous island, Qeshm Island, right in the Strait of Hormuz just off the coast of Bandar Abbas. It’s 85 miles long and 40 miles wide. The island, too, has an airport with a long runway. And it has a population of 150,000 Iranians who will be, shall we say, unfriendly to the idea of Americans coming to their home turf and taking it over and telling them what to do. If we’re going to control the Strait of Hormuz, we’ll have to control that island, too.
To the south of Bandar Abbas are more mountain ranges and dozens and dozens of villages overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, way too many for me to count. We know that Iran has many thousands of Shahed armed drones. I looked up their drones. They have five versions of the Shahed drone. They also have one called the Kaman 22, a “widebody” drone capable of carrying 300 pounds of explosives. Iran has 36 different varieties of drones. They have so many thousands of drones that for the last two or three years, they have been exporting them to Russia.
Here is a photo of a storage facility at a Shahed factory somewhere in Iran:
The U.S. has been trying to target Iranian missile and drone factories, but like Ukraine, most of their weapons factories are hidden underground. It is unknown how many U.S. or Israeli strikes have destroyed Iran’s drone factories, but if I were to guess, they haven’t gotten all of them, and the finished drones themselves have been moved out of the factories and concealed all over Iran.
The Shahed 131, shown above, is only 8 feet long with a 7-foot wingspan and weighs, with its warhead, about 300 pounds, is small enough to be concealed in the living room of a house. Launchers can be hidden in other living rooms. In one of the many, many villages along the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian men could remove a launcher from a house, go around to other houses, pick up a half dozen Shahed drones, and light their rocket boosters and send them on their way to attack targets across the Gulf, targets like ships in the Strait of Hormuz, or targets like U.S. Marines whom the Pentagon and Trump have been maybe insane enough to have walking around on Iranian soil in Bandar Abbas or on Qeshm Island.
After studying Google Earth maps and Iranian drones, I decided to see what Donald Trump said today as he walked out to his Marine helicopter on his way to play golf in Palm Beach, Florida. Here is what he told the press: “I don’t want to do a cease-fire. You know, you don’t do a cease-fire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.” Earlier, on Truth Social – because that’s where you run a war, you understand, on a social media site – Trump said, “I think we’ve won.” He’s still concerned about the Strait of Hormuz, of course, oil having ended the day at $112 a barrel, but he’s not worried. “The Hormuz Strait will have to be guarded and policed, as necessary, by other Nations who use it — The United States does not! If asked, we will help these Countries in their Hormuz efforts, but it shouldn’t be necessary once Iran’s threat is eradicated.” Because of course all those allies of ours are just chomping at the bit to commit their navies and armies to take over and control the Strait of Hormuz, now that we and Israel have bombed the shit out of Iran and gotten them all pissed off at us and Israel and the countries in the Gulf and everybody else but Russia.
Just between you and me, the United States has used oil for decades that has been shipped through the Strait of Hormuz from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq and other Gulf nations.
Donald Trump his Secretary of the Push-Up Hegseth have it all figured out. He’s not worried about the 125,000 crack troops of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the 300,000 soldiers in Iran’s regular army. Have you read anything or seen anything on the teevee about all our missiles and bombs knocking out Revolutionary Guards or Iran’s regular army forces? I haven’t. An outfit called Human Rights Activists in Iran says that about 1,300 civilians have been killed so far in the war, and about 1,100 military personnel have been killed. They caution that the figure for military deaths is probably low, because such figures are classified. But let’s say it’s ten times higher. That’s still only about 11,000 deaths in the Iranian military out of a total of probably 500,000, when you include Iran’s air force and other services.
So, what are we to think with Trump deciding one day we’ve won the war and the same day saying we have more bombing to do, while he’s got Hegseth ordering the 82nd Airborne over there and sending fleets of navy ships full of Marines to the Gulf?
And what about all those mountains and villages where Iranian regular army forces could hide, not to mention irregulars that I’m sure some day we’ll be referring to as “insurgents?” What about all those drones, thousands and thousands of them, that are scattered all over the tens of thousands of square miles of Iran?
Let’s be brief: If Trump orders American soldiers into Iran, it will be a bloodbath.
You won’t be reading stuff like this in the mainstream media tomorrow. To support the independent journalism I produce every day, please consider becoming one of my paid subscribers. I need your help.
Trump has been flirting with the idea of using nuclear weapons since he ran for office in 2016. That year, during a townhall with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, when Matthews told Trump, “They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.” Trump answered, “Then why are we making them?” During the same interview, Trump said, “Would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly. Possibly,” finishing his comments on the use of nuclear weapons by telling Matthews he wasn’t going to “take any cards off the table.”
During a national security briefing at the Pentagon after he took office in 2017, Trump told the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he wanted the U.S. nuclear stockpile increased significantly. It was after Trump’s comment on nukes that Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron” on his way out of the briefing.
Today, The Economist ran a cover story called “Blind Fury” on why the “War in Iran is making Trump look weaker – and angrier.” They’re right. Trump’s fury is on the rise. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the room yesterday when TV footage showed explosions at the South Pars and Ras Laffan natural gas facilities being hit in an exchange of missiles by Israel and Iran. The explosions sent oil prices above $120 a barrel before they settled at $109 late today.
Big explosions give Donald Trump bad ideas. There he is in his little dining room off the Oval Office quaffing a Diet Coke and stuffing a burger in his mouth, and all those fireballs belong to somebody else.
The point is this: Everything about this war is pissing him off. He thought it was going to be the one-and-done kind of deal he pulled off in Venezuela. Knock off the Big Leader, wait until they appoint someone who’s intimidated by your power, then make a deal. He came out of his Maduro kidnap with 50,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil and a cash-transfer of $500 million to an account in Qatar that was reported to be “controlled by Donald Trump.” Now we’re hearing that the $500 million was “returned” to Venezuela to be “disbursed for the benefit of the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the U.S. government, an unnamed U.S. government official told Reuters.”
You believe that one, and I’ve got a rare metals mining claim in Nevada to sell you. Do you remember when it was reported that at a fundraising dinner, Trump “asked” the big oil companies to contribute $1 billion for his election campaign? Subsequent reporting revealed that oil executives and companies contributed hundreds of millions in “dark money” to Trump superPACs. You know what dark money is: It’s a rumor. It’s money we don’t know the source of, we can’t watch it moving, we don’t know where it ends up. What we can be sure of is that if it’s dark money, some of it ends up in the pocket of the man who asked for it. Trump cancelled tax incentives for solar and wind energy and gave more than $20 billion in breaks for fossil fuel companies. Do you think they didn’t kick back some to him?
Yesterday, it was announced that the Treasury Department “eased” sanctions on Venezuelan oil. Don’t you love that word, “eased?” What the fuck does it even mean? Before that, Trump’s little money-gofer Scott Bessent was “easing” sanctions on Russian oil. Then the stories started coming that tankers carrying Russian oil were parking in ports and off-loading oil. Eight days ago, it was reported that Russia is making $150 million a day in unsanctioned oil revenues. Then the figure moved up to $230 million a day. Now they’re using the word “billions” to describe the windfall Russia is making on oil.
Who is in charge of Russian oil? Who put in the oligarchs that get all that cash? Where does a goodly portion of it go? Let me see if I can remember…oh yes! Vladimir Putin! Who has Trump been on the phone with since his war began? Uhhh…I’m having trouble here, can you help me? I’ve got it! Putin!
Today, it was reported that Oil-money-boy Bessent may remove sanctions on…wait for it…Iran’s oil that is currently floating around various oceans in tankers. How much of it, you ask? Oh, only 140 million barrels of it. Who is Iran’s only ally in this war besides maybe Belarus? That’s right. Russia.
With all this oil money sloshing around, do you think some of it could be going to you-know-who?
Have you heard of crypto? Does your recollection go back far enough to recall what Trump said when he was in office the first time? He said crypto was a scam and called Bitcoin “not money based on thin air.” We have only one real currency in the USA, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”
And then came Liberty Financial. Trump’s attitude about Bitcoin and everything else crypto started changing the minute he moved into the White House in 2025 and crypto started flowing, or squiring electrons, or whatever the hell it does. Tens of not hundreds of millions are going into Trump’s pocket in crypto of every sort. That $500 million in Venezuelan oil money that was “returned” could have been $400 million by the time it hit a treasury account. After what Elon Musk’s DOGE boys did at the IRS, Social Security, and Treasury, will you ever trust another figure with a dollar sign next to it released by anything or anyone connected to Donald Trump?
There is only one thing Donald Trump loves more than political power, and that is money. It’s why he got in the game in the first place. Was he a billionaire back in 2014 to 2015 when he first started thinking seriously about running for president? He may have called himself a billionaire, but he didn’t have billions in a bank. Come to think of it, there was only one bank that would do business with him back then, Deutsche Bank, and he owed them money, not the other way around.
So, what is Trump going to do, now that he is loading his buddies’ bottom lines with oil profits ripped from the pockets of his MAGA faithful and pocketing some of it for himself?
The word “unsustainable” begins to enter the picture here. Profits are fine with Donald, so long as they’re going in the right pockets, including of course, his. But there is this other bothersome word that keeps being mentioned: the “economy.” Economies are made of money, but they hate being unstable, and they really, really hate chaos. And that’s what’s going on in the world economy right now: chaos. Trump would love to keep his oil money scam going, but it’s beginning to cost him politically, and even with all the Bitcoin and other crypto cash he’s got stashed away, he’s still got just under three years to go as president, and the Economist, bless its heart, is exactly right. This war is making him look weak.
A quarter of the stories that ran in my newsfeed today were about the MAGA crackup. Another quarter were about his crashing poll numbers. And then there is the quarter of stories about the shellacking Republicans are going to take in November at the polls. A new scary word has begun to be flung about along with “House,” and that is “Senate.” The new guy up in Maine is looking like he’s going to beat Janet Mills in the primary, and he’s young, which suddenly counts a great deal, and it looks like he’ll knock off the execrable Susan Collins. All of a sudden we’re seeing the word “Iowa” and “Senate” together. “Shift by Independents Leaves Iowa race close.” There you go.
Independents don’t like Trump’s war on Iran at all. Not even a tiny bit. Neither do young voters, and young voters are turning out in record numbers in Democratic primaries, which is really, really good, right?
All this means that Trump is going to have to figure out a way to end this war and end it fast. That’s why we’re also seeing the word “offramp” in about half the stories about the war. But the problem with offramps is, they go places. If you take the wrong offramp, you can end up in a bad neighborhood. In fact, Tom Wolfe wrote an entire novel about this unfortunate truth.
Trump’s choice of offramps has gone from narrow to practically invisible. He could have probably declared victory and gotten the hell out of Iran in the first week, or maybe even the beginning of the second. But he can’t now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.
He’s fumbling around trying out his allies and finding that allies only show up when you’re nice to them. He hasn’t been nice at all. Today Trump made a “joke” about Pearl Harbor as he sat next to his ally, the Japanese premier in the Oval Office. Responding to a question about why he hadn’t notified allies about the attack on Iran before it happened, Trump explained that it wouldn’t have been a surprise. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? OK, why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
You could have fried an egg on the top of the head of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
So, what’s he going to do? Trump would just love to lob a couple of nukes at Iran, but there is the not-terribly-small problem of world markets. Oil at $200 a barrel? Gas at $8 to $10 a gallon? Mortgage rates through the roof of houses not being built?
World depression, anybody?
So the guy who came into office for the first time over ten years ago itching to increase our nuclear stockpile and do something with the nukes, to the point that General Mark Milley was warning military commanders to call him before they followed any crazy orders given by the guy in the Oval Office who was screaming that he had won the election he had lost and was going to do something about it, damn it!
Thank goodness for crypto. Thank goodness Donald Trump was born with his hand in a cookie jar – or is it Big Mac jar? – and has never pulled his hand out of it.
Here is something I never thought I’d say: Greed is good, especially when it’s Donald Trump’s greed. It’s going to save us…hopefully.
This is one I never thought I’d be writing, but I end up saying that nearly every day with the Orange Menace back in the Gold Oval Office. To support my coverage of this unmitigated monster, please consider buying a subscription.
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