Over the years, I have sat down at a good number of Foreign Affairs Desks to write reports. My favorite was the one I had in Mosul, Iraq, in 2003. I was with an infantry company in a small basecamp they had established on the edge of the Old City in a former social security office. To fit canvas cots into the place, they had removed all the desks in the building and piled them in an alley in back, so lacking a real desk, I made one with two stacks of boxes of MRE’s and a piece of lumber I found leaning against the wall outside the building.

I had an actual wooden writing desk in a common area on my floor in the pension where I stayed in Beirut. I set up my Olivetti Lettre 22 and pounded away on Christmas night in 1974 as artillery thundered outside the window from the hillsides just south of the city. My desk in Haarlem in the Netherlands overlooked the train station, and the one I had in Paris looked out through French doors on a walled garden in what they would now call a “boutique” hotel just off the Champs Elysees. I filed my story about the war of terror then raging in the Middle East at a telex machine in a basement room in the hotel – click thunk ckick thunk click thunk – the keyboard worked to create its long ribbon of punctured paper tape that I would feed into the maw of the machine to transmit the story over phone lines under the Atlantic when I was finished writing.

There was something magical about working overseas back then. My backpack was stuffed with paper maps of where I had been and where I was going, and no one back in New York knew where I was from day to day, even week to week, because making international phone calls was so expensive, and letters took days to arrive even when sent via airmail, which was also expensive and only marginally faster than regular mail that went from overseas to the United States on cargo ships.

This afternoon, my friend Clyde Haberman sent out an email with a great line from the Hitchcock movie, “Foreign Correspondent.” Haberman wrote, “The publisher asks a reporter played by Joel McCrea, ‘How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?’ The reporter replies, ‘Give me an expense account and I’ll cover anything.’’’ That was the way it was when newspapers and magazines were flush with advertising money and a seat in coach on an international flight didn’t feel like you were being strapped into the electric chair. Airport waiting areas crackled with conversations in a hundred different languages and accents, men were attired in jackets and trousers and long overcoats, and women had had their hair done and wore perfume and pearls and heels and sometimes even gloves, and everyone smoked. On the plane, there was a smoking section in the back of First Class as well as coach, so no matter where you sat, you couldn’t escape the smell of cigarettes.

At the other end of your flight was a foreign land and its mystery. You didn’t speak the language, sometimes you didn’t even know where you were going to stay, and the story assignment you had been given in New York could have been rendered moot by the time you landed. The war that was supposed to break out, didn’t. The minister you were supposed to interview had been deposed by a coup. The politics of a country or even a region had been frozen solid by fear of a terrorist attack that happened on the ground or at sea or in the air while you were on your flight. The cab driver wouldn’t take you where you wanted to go because a new militia had taken over the area and set up roadblocks you couldn’t get through.

Spring is upon us in Northeast Pennsylvania, although across the country in the Rockies they’re digging out from a late snowfall that is said to be as wet as it is deep. There is a war going on in the Middle East, because there is always a war in the Middle East. When governments aren’t at war with each other, they are at war with their own people, and the climate is at war with all of them, all the time.

It used to be that you had to travel overseas to witness wars by governments against their own citizens, but that is not necessary anymore. You can take a domestic flight to a city anywhere in this country and see men wearing masks and helmets and combat vests carrying rifles lining up civilians and handcuffing them and driving them away to be imprisoned behind the kind of barbed wire enclosures you used to have to travel to distant lands to encounter. The word “concentration camp” that you once saw in history books or reports from dictatorships across oceans now appears in our own press about our own country almost daily.

Deciphering reality from propaganda used to be something that you had to do in foreign capitals that were unfriendly to this country such as Moscow and Budapest and Beijing. Now propaganda appears on a screen you can hold in your hand and read as you sit in a café in your own hometown, and deciphering it is just as hard as it was when it was generated in a foreign language.

To learn what is really happening in the war that our own tax dollars are paying for is impossible. You can’t travel where the war is because flights have been cancelled to most of the region, and even if you drove across borders and arrived near where the missiles are flying or have flown, you can’t learn anything because every place anywhere near the war is off limits. You can’t learn anything from looking at satellite photos, because our government has shut down distribution of commercial satellite images of the entire area around the Persian Gulf. The country that our president has ordered to be bombed and “obliterated” by missiles has distributed satellite images of damage they have done to U.S. bases. It feels odd to depend on the “enemy” to provide information, but then, Iran is not technically our enemy because we have not declared war on that country, and our president tells us that it is not a war that is being fought, but an excursion our military has made into lands where we are not wanted, or the war is over.

But I don’t know, because nobody knows anything. Today, Rachel Scott, an excellent reporter for ABC News, talked to our president, because apparently if you call him on his cell phone, he will talk to you. She asked him about the apparent breakdown of the ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. naval vessels have been fired upon by Iranian drones and so-called “fast boats,” and U.S. forces have hit what they call “targets” on Iranian soil along the Strait. “It’s just a love tap,” our president told the reporter from ABC News.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a love tap that leaves a crater in the ground 30 feet deep and 50 feet across where a building used to stand.

I guess we don’t have real foreign affairs anymore. What we have is a Secretary of State who travels all the way to Rome to meet with the Pope of the Catholic Church to try to convince him to stop being critical of the U.S. war on Iran by giving him a gift of a little piece of engraved crystal in the shape of a football.

Upon seeing the crystal football, Pope Leo, who is from Chicago and is known to be a fan of the baseball team, the White Sox, looked blankly at our Secretary of State and said, “Wow. Okay.”

Here is what I can tell you this evening about the war on Iran that is not a war; about the White House ballroom that was going to be paid for by private donations that they now want to charge taxpayers one billion dollars for; about the federal Department of Health that has decided it’s a good idea to recommend vitamin D to treat a deadly disease that was once eradicated before vaccinations became a conspiracy against your health rather than a lifesaver; about a drunken FBI director who thinks it’s a good idea to travel around on government aircraft carrying a case of expensive bourbon with his name engraved on the bottles to give away to favored friends at the same time he is helping to prosecute one of his predecessors for a fake crime; about one of our political parties that has decided the best way to win elections is to make it impossible for the other political party’s supporters to vote…

Wow. Okay.

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Imagine It, but That Probably Leaves Out a Lot

Imagine how much better off we would be if over the last few decades we had not made mistakes of being overly aggressive and unwisely violent toward other countries. If we had gotten in and out of Afghanistan quickly. If we had not attacked Iraq needlessly. If we had been smart about Vietnam. If we had not interfered in Iran many decades ago, and then again threatened them in 2003? Without that threat Iran would have had much less motivation to acquire nuclear weapons. Imagine the savings in military expenses. The generally more peaceful international situation. The many thousands of young Americans who would be alive, or who would be whole. Imagine that and you’ve still just scratched the surface of how big the difference would be.

First, consider ways we could have behaved smarter. George W. Bush invading Iraq was a mistake, full stop. Afghanistan is murkier. You can read about the ways we meddled in Afghanistan for many years before the 9/11 attacks. It’s murky but leaves a legitimate question whether there would have been enough anger at America to have stoked the 9/11 attack if we had not been playing games there long before. If no such attack had happened then there would never have been a need to invade Afghanistan. Or when the attack did happen we could have gotten in and out quickly and figured out getting Bin Laden later, as ended up happening anyway.

In Vietnam, if we really adhered to our own principles then we would have concluded early on that the people there just wanted to be independent, and that which form of government they wanted was their choice. In the same vein we would have allowed the people of Iran to keep their duly elected prime minister rather than our overthrowing him. We would have let them elect who they wanted as their leader rather than our artificially keeping an unpopular Shah in power. Maybe they would have chosen other leadership and maybe that would have been relatively moderate, rather than blowing up in a full-on revolution by the most radical elements (the ’78 revolution led by Khomeini). If their history had played out like that then the situation of the U.S. and Iran being enemies would never have happened. Imagine what that would be like, if the U.S. had just never pushed Iran into seeing us as an enemy. They might have felt no compulsion to have nuclear weapons. Note that over those same decades many other countries in that region have not felt compelled to develop nuclear weapons.

There have been times we have been smarter and have benefited from it. When General MacArthur wanted to be overly aggressive and invasive in Korea President Truman removed him from leading that operation. We now have a problematic state in North Korea, but the wider, and likely longer and worse, war that MacArthur wanted to pursue would have created much more damage for all. Many criticized the first President Bush for quickly leaving Iraq after having pushed them out of Kuwait. Critics wanted him to overrun Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and transform Iraq into a more friendly and compliant state, as if that kind of thing has ever gone quickly or well (see Afghanistan.) But Bush ended Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then got out quickly, saving us and the region and the world from much worse results.

There are the obvious benefits we could have had: for example less military spending, and so many of our own people who would not have been lost or damaged, but there’s much more. What would we have done with that money instead? Be less in debt? Paid for day care? Reduced climate change? As for our dead and damaged, it’s not just that they would be here. For each one with long term serious damage, physically or mentally/emotionally, we have to spend tremendous amounts of money and time helping them, and even then we often fall short. So it’s a double loss. We not only spend time and money helping them, but we also don’t have them being productive people. By productive I don’t just mean producing work that makes money. I also mean their presence that would have made for better families, would have cared for their elderly, would have created situations that would have led to kids growing up better, would have been helpers in our communities.

As for the wider world, in a similar way, a more peaceful world is a more productive world, in all those same senses. Not only would we spend less on defense, many other countries could do the same. Look at what a productive nation Vietnam has become after we stopped making their entire country a war zone. Imagine a more peaceful Iran focused more on being productive. It might always have been a mixed picture in Iran, we don’t know, but it could have been better. A world of productive countries interacting with one another creates a whole different situation. Perhaps China would have stayed as a nonthreatening and fully participating member of the world community as it was in the ’90s rather than switching to feeling like it needed such aggressive posture. With fewer international conflicts there would also be fewer waves of desperate refugees, who put pressure on neighboring countries, or flood places like Europe until the locals get nervous and that creates societal divisions.

In that better picture perhaps the sense of faith in our own country would have remained stronger. More faith because of a better economy, and because of all those additional productive lives and what they would have contributed, and because of less stress on societal ties from controversial wars and all that comes with them. Perhaps there would be less frustration and less divisiveness, and all the repercussions we now have from that.

Just as war has far reaching effects, so does peace. War has ripples that go on very long after, continuing to inflict damage and waste and cost in ways that come as unforeseen surprises (countries becoming enemies, terrorist attacks, waves of refugees). Or they come in ways we don’t connect back to the source and so don’t realize the full cost. Just so, peace has ripples that reach far and continue without end. Countries that are relatively healthy and relatively peaceful allow people to just go on about their lives, creating benefits and improvements that we can’t even realize come from that peace.

Of course such a scenario might have just had different problems develop, but it certainly would have been better, probably much better. There is an enormous gap between how things would be if we had been wise at each of these steps versus where we are. All because of stupid actions. Actions like this current warring on Iran (we are not at war “with” Iran. We are committing war on Iran). It is a gap so far beyond what we are aware of, or that we can picture, that it is in the most literal sense, a challenging, difficult, fuzzily pictured, distantly viewed, hard thing to imagine.

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The post Imagine the America We’d Have Without Decades of Interventionist Wars appeared first on DCReport.org.

Okay, let’s begin with the important stuff. Well, a lot of what happened this afternoon was important, but the ceasefire with Iran breaking down seems at least a little more important than Kash Patel polygraphing a dozen FBI people trying to uncover who ratted him out about his engraved bottles of very expensive bourbon.

Around 4:40, the New York Times, which is usually pretty careful about what they say and how they say it, reported, “Iran says it is discussing plan with U.S. to end hostilities.”

Less than two hours later, the Times reported that “The U.S. military said it struck Iranian military facilities and other targets after, it said, Iran fired on U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz.”

The Pentagon and the White House are saying Iran fired missiles and drones at two U.S. guided missile destroyers that were “transiting” the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says the U.S. fired missiles at civilian targets in the port of Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island, which sits just off the coast of Iran at the narrowest section of the Strait. The U.S. says it targeted “missile and drone launch sites; command and control locations; and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance nodes.” That’s mil-speak for anything they could find that was painted olive drab or under camouflage netting. Iran had just told the Times that negotiators were discussing reopening the Strait during a 30-day “end to the fighting” so the U.S. and Iran could come up with a “comprehensive peace settlement.” That’s diplo-speak for walking into a blacked-out room wearing a mask and hoping you don’t find Jared Kushner in there.

What were we supposed to think would happen? Well, on a day to day basis, it is very confusing. On Tuesday, Donald Trump, while he was being visited by some schoolchildren in the Oval Office who were there for yet another signing of an executive order, yapped this at the stenographers from the White House Press Corps: “You know, we hit an all-time high stock market today. Despite that, we’re in a little skirmish, military. I call it a skirmish because Iran has no chance. They never did. They know it. They express it to me when I talk to them. Then they get on television. They say how well they’re doing. And they have no Navy, totally wiped out. They have no Air Force, totally wiped out. They have no anti-aircraft capability, totally wiped out. No radar. They have no leaders. The leaders are wiped out.”

Incidentally, just to inject some reality into things, some of the targets the Pentagon said were hit today were radar installations that Trump claimed were all destroyed. Nothing he says, nothing, is true. And yay, we have a new word for war: “little skirmish, military.” That’ll fix those Democrats who want to follow the “Use of Force” law.

He started talking how we had destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability because, “They would have had a nuclear weapon in within two weeks. Remember, we sent that beautiful B-2 bomber in and we, we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated, for those that are not aware, and to a point where they would take them weeks to dig down and we wouldn’t let them dig down.”

Let them dig down? WTF is he talking about?

The kids are standing there next to Trump at his desk, and their coaches are standing behind them, stealing looks at each other as Trump goes off on men in women’s sports, and then he’s talking about “transgender children for everyone,” and a ship that tried to run our blockade, but “They were warned again by a young Annapolis captain of the ship with a great look. Central Casting. These people are Central Casting, I’ll tell you. The ship was so big. But they respect us. They didn’t used to respect us, but they respect us more than we’ve ever been respected. Our country now is the hottest country anywhere in the world. We had a country that was dead when we had that. Group of people that ran this country with their open borders, letting anybody come in from the Congo, from countries all over the world. They came in from prisons and mental institutions. We had a country that would have been dead -- if they won the election, this country would have been a dead country. Now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.” And then somehow CNN is in his good graces for the moment, because they reported that he polled at 100 percent among MAGA Republicans who are “100 percent of the Republican Party, I think, but 100 percent.”

By 7:15 this evening, Trump was on Truth Social telling the world that Iran is “led by LUNATICS. If they had the chance to use a Nuclear Weapon, they would do it, without question — But they’ll never have that opportunity and, just like we knocked them out again today, we’ll knock them out a lot harder, and a lot more violently, in the future, if they don’t get their Deal signed, FAST​!”

And then he bragged that Iranian drones were “incinerated while in the air. They dropped ever so beautifully down to the Ocean, very much like a butterfly dropping to its grave!​”

These were the drones Iran wasn’t supposed to have because we blew them up, but now they’re using them against U.S. Navy ships.

Who knows what the fuck is going on? I got a message today from a reader who teaches high school. She said that she has students who have friends in the Middle East who are “reporting missile strikes and deaths. Some of these kids they are talking to are my former students. Today they were talking about Bahrain. A kid showed me a video from a friend who (she says- and I trust) is in Bahrain with text saying there were deaths.”

Anecdotal, yes, but it took weeks to pull out of the Pentagon the fact that more than 400 members of our military have been injured in the war, some of them “seriously,” which they don’t go into, but can mean anything from loss of limbs to being hooked up on a ventilator in an induced coma because of brain damage from explosive blast.

We’re not getting anything even approximating straight information out of Hegseth’s Pentagon or Trump’s White House, where yesterday he told the schoolchildren about Iran, “they would have taken over the Middle East. Now they’re trying to survive and they won’t be successful unless they make a deal. Oh, if they don’t make a deal, they won’t be successful. Let me just tell you, they want to make a deal. And who wouldn’t when your military is totally gone? We could do anything we want to them. Who wouldn’t? Please.”

That, I can agree with. Please. We need relief from this up and down and sideways and flipped over and asleep half the time man in an ill-fitting suit who has no fucking idea what he’s talking about, who just spews talking points at 105 miles per hour, crap about the Dow and S&P averages being up followed by crap about transgender children followed by insane bragging about destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, but somehow we still need to “make a deal” with them because they still have nukes, or they would have blown up the whole Middle East in “two weeks,” and the Strait of Hormuz is closed, or it’s open, or there will be a “deal” or there won’t…

It would seem that it would be one or the other with the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but it’s neither, because he just makes it up as he goes along – they have nuclear dust, or we destroyed it, or it’s buried, or whatever comes to his mind at the moment, he doesn’t care. It’s all meat for MAGA to him.

There is no relief. None whatsoever. I went to lie down for a nap, and an hour later I got up and walked Ruby, and the news had gone mad with reports of new attacks against Iran and Trump is talking about an “Annapolis captain out of Central Casting” like he’s watching a reality show on TV, and I, for one, want to know what the hell is up with his obsession with the appearance of male officers in the services, including astronauts. He’s all over them, they’re so handsome, and he’s handsome, and he could have been an astronaut because he is “physical” or his former White House doctor Ronny Johnson told him he could be an astronaut because he passed a cognitive test three times in front of a “board of doctors.”

Where he got the thing about the board of doctors, I don’t know, except maybe they came from Central Casting. We’ll have to check on that and watch his Truth Social account closely.

Now, I’m going to fix dinner with Tracy and in about an hour or so, I will approach my desk with great trepidation because something else will be breaking – they’ll increase his demand for tax dollars for the ballroom to two billion dollars, which by the way he claimed yesterday he’s paying part of the bill for personally.

Give this maniac two more days, and I’ll be afraid to go to bed at night for fear of what he’ll be up to when we’re asleep.

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When I was a young teenager, changing diapers for my baby brother and on babysitting gigs, it was all cloth. I could change a sleepy baby’s cloth diaper in the dark, large safety pins and all. A couple of decades later when I was a parent, it was all disposable. What happened? Virginia Postrel tells the story in “Engineering the disposable diaper: Benjamin Spock told mothers in the mid-twentieth century to buy six dozen cloth diapers and a covered pail. Within a decade, both were obsolete” (Works in Progress, April 24, 2026).

Back in 1957, disposable diapers had about 1% of the diaper market. They were expensive, and mainly used for situation where diapers would need to be changed while travelling. Postrel takes up the story:

After buying Charmin Paper Company in 1957, Procter & Gamble began looking for ideas for new paper products.  Motivated by the less pleasant aspects of spending time with his new grandchild, the company’s director of exploratory development, Victor Mills, suggested disposable diapers. After analyzing existing products and conducting consumer research, P&G created a dedicated diaper research group.

The research this group conducted, like that of its successors and competitors, wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t advance basic science. It wasn’t even an obvious route to profit. (One percent of the market!) It was a high-stakes gamble that required solving difficult engineering problems. How that happened represents the kind of hidden progress that leads to everyday abundance.

P&G’s first design flopped. Tested in the extreme heat of a Dallas summer, the pleated absorbent pad with plastic pants made babies miserable and left them with heat rashes. Starting over, the group had a one piece diaper ready for testing in March 1959. With an improved rayon moisture barrier between the baby and the absorbent tissue wadding, the new diaper was softer and more comfortable. An initial test of 37,000 hand-assembled prototypes went well, with about two thirds of the parents deeming the disposables as good or better than cloth. The next step was mass production.

Designing one well-functioning disposable was hard enough. Turning out hundreds a minute was practically impossible. ‘I think it was the most complex production operation the company had ever faced’, an engineer recalled.

Eventually, the diaper team mastered the process. In December 1961, Pampers went on the market in Peoria, Illinois. Once again, the test failed. This time mothers liked the diapers. But the price was way too high for a single use item: ten cents a diaper, equivalent to about one dollar today. By contrast, diaper delivery services, which served about five percent of the market, charged no more than five cents a diaper. Home laundry costs ran to one or two cents.

Lowering the price of a diaper required much larger volumes. Aiming at about six cents a diaper, P&G engineers spent several years developing what Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter described as ‘a highly sophisticated block-long, continuous-process machine that could assemble diapers at speeds of up to a remarkable 400 a minute’. After successfully testing Pampers at 5.5 cents each, P&G began a national rollout in 1966. By 1973, disposables accounted for 42 percent of the US diaper market.

Other firms first entered the diaper market in the 1970s, and then left: Scott Paper, International Paper, Union Carbide, Johnson & Johnson. The competitor that did gain a foothold was Kimberley-Clark, the innovator who had created “Kleenex tissues and Kotex feminine pads … in the 1920s.” After a false start or two, the Huggies diaper, with elastic around the legs and an improved tape closure, swept into the diaper market. It cost 30% more, but for a lot of buyers, the premium price was worth it.

I love a good product development story, and Postrel has lots more details: how new absorbent materials made diapers slimmer over time, reducing logistics costs like storage, handing, and retail shelf space; the environment arguments about disposable vs. cloth diapers; disposable training pants that little ones could pull up by themselves; some well-chosen modern cultural references to disposable diapers; and more. Here, I’ll just offer three takeaways.

First, the creation of a workable disposable diaper, and then improving on that diaper, and being able to take it to mass production at an affordable cost, were all genuinely difficult tasks. The innovations took investment measured in time, money, and varied kinds of expertise. The time-path to disposable diapers having 95% of the diaper market took decades, with a number of failures along the way both within and across companies.

Second, a non-breakthrough innovation like disposable diapers may be nndervalued, in part because Americans take so much for granted that competitive companies will be trying to provide new and improved versions of so many products. But over time, the accumulaton of many such innovations makes day-to-day life so much easier. It’s an enormous benefit of living in a dynamic market-oriented economy that can also be nearly invisible.

Third, when new mothers are asked about the essential needs for their babies, they tend to focus on milk and diapers. But although diapers are affordable in the mass market, they aren’t cheap. I wrote a few years ago in “Some Economics of Diapers” (September 29, 2022) about what an author called a “leaky” part of the US social safety net, along with discussions of diaper “banks” and other methods of assuring that low-income parents and their babies have access to diapers.

The post History of the Disposable Diaper first appeared on Conversable Economist.

It’s time for some consequences.

Just a week after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Trump referred to the war as an “excursion” for the first time and said that “Every single element of their military is gone. Their leadership is gone. There’s not a thing that’s not gone.” A day later, he claimed, “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.”

Trump has said so many conflicting things about the war on Iran that The Bulwark published a “war glossary” to try to keep up with his pronouncements. The war is an “excursion” that we’re “winning by a lot,” that will be over “soon,” and that “hostilities have been terminated,” so there is no need for the 60-day report to Congress demanded by the War Powers Act.

Sixty-five days after Trump and Hegseth launched their war, Iran has a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty percent of the world’s trade in oil is frozen, anchored in ships in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. When Trump announced “Project Freedom” on Sunday and promised to escort tankers and cargo ships through the Strait, Iran fired anti-ship missiles on two U.S. destroyers and started launching new drone and missile attacks on its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, there has been no comment from the Pentagon on CNN’s recent report on the U.S. bases that were destroyed early in the war and that have been largely abandoned. Nobody knows why Iran was able to destroy two U.S. AWACS aircraft that were sitting on runways in Saudi Arabia. Nobody has explained why a U.S. Naval headquarters building in Bahrain was destroyed, or why a complex of radar domes in Kuwait were so damaged, they are unusable. The war room at the U.S. airbase in Qatar was hit and has been unoccupied since early in the war. CNN reported that in all, Iran was able to severely damage 16 U.S. military facilities in eight countries in the Gulf region.

So, with no war room in Qatar, with no radar facilities in Kuwait, with no naval headquarters in Bahrain, how is what is left of our war on Iran being run, and by whom?

No answer to that at the Pentagon today, where Hegseth held a press conference standing next to General Dan Caine, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is looking more and more like a handy prop for Hegseth and less like the Pentagon’s chief military officer.

How easy it is to forget that it was just last year that Hegseth faced questioning at his confirmation hearing about the sexual assault charges that were made against him in Monterey, California in 2017 by a woman who was a participant at a conference of Republican women at which Hegseth was the keynote speaker. I went back and re-read the reports of the incident. Hegseth met the woman, described as a wife and mother who was staying at the Monterey hotel with her husband and children, in a bar at the hotel after his speech. Around 1 a.m., there were complaints of a disturbance at the hotel pool. Security guards who responded found a drunk Hegseth and the woman. Hegseth started screaming that he “had freedom of speech” and had to be restrained by the woman, according to a police report filed later. The woman explained to the security guard that “they were Republicans” and apologized for Hegseth’s behavior.

Later, Hegseth took her to his hotel room and blocked the door with his body so she could not leave. The woman told the police that the last thing she could remember was Hegseth being on top of her with his “dogtags dangling in her face.”

Vice President Vance had to break a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate to secure Hegseth’s confirmation for the post that was then still called Secretary of Defense.

Last week, Hegseth faced congressional questioning about having his former attorney, Timothy Parlatore, serving as a “senior advisor” to him in the Pentagon at the same time he is still representing clients in private practice. Hegseth refused to answer a direct question from Representative Jason Crow about whether Parlatore has a top-secret security clearance, since he accompanies Hegseth to classified briefings and travels with Hegseth to highly classified military bases and facilities.

Nobody asked Hegseth how much he paid Parlatore when he was the lawyer who represented him during a police investigation of the sexual assault claim by the woman in Monterey. Parlatore was also Hegseth’s lawyer when he reached a settlement with the woman who had threatened to sue him for sexual assault. Hegseth paid the woman $50,000. Parlatore attempted to get the police sexual assault investigation report sealed, but was refused, because Hegseth himself had previously requested that the report be emailed to him, negating the privacy laws in California.

Hegseth has fired 24 generals and senior commanders in the military. None of the generals or commanders had any negative performance related reviews against them, nor had any of the generals been accused of sexual harassment or assault. Sixty percent of the generals whom Hegseth fired were women or Black.

So, let’s review. Pete Hegseth has been in charge of Trump’s war on Iran for more than two months. Iran, while accepting a ceasefire offered by Trump that they didn’t even request, has resisted all attempts at a peace agreement, demanding that its control of the Strait of Hormuz and its highly enriched uranium are off the table.

Meanwhile, the world is being starved of the oil that remains bottled up in the Persian Gulf, with gas prices skyrocketing, gas rationing being ordered in some countries, and petroleum-based fertilizers produced by Gulf countries in short supply around the world. Experts have made estimates that if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for much longer, the lack of fertilizer will begin to affect food supplies.

Why does Pete Hegseth still have his job? Because he works for a deranged man who only three days ago was bragging about being able to identify a squirrel in a cognitive test that he claims was overseen by “a board of doctors.”

This country elected a sex-criminal as president who appointed a sexual abuser to be in charge of the U.S. military. They started a war that they cannot win. We are getting exactly what our fellow Americans in the Republican Party voted for.

Late breaking news update: Axios is reporting that Trump has cancelled “Project Freedom,” the operation to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, because of “progress” in negotiations with Iran. The blockade by both Iran and the U.S. of the Strait of Hormuz remains in full effect, with no ships allowed to pass in and out of the Persian Gulf.

I don’t know what the hell this means, other than Trump doesn’t want to look weak, and he has do something, and this spastic craziness is it. He wants to save face somehow. It ain’t gonna happen. He and Hegseth have lost their war, and Iran knows it.

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If you’ve ever been offered “no interest” financing at checkout, whether for medical care, home improvement, or a retail purchase, then you’re not alone because it’s become a common occurrence. These offers are everywhere, and on the surface, they sound like a smart way to spread out payments without paying extra, so you might be tempted to go for it, but there’s a detail buried in the fine print that many consumers miss, which is deferred interest.

Deferred interest is one of the most misunderstood financing structures out there. And if you don’t fully understand how it works, it can end up costing you a lot more than you ever expected.

In this article, we’ll look at exactly what you’re getting into before you sign.

What Is Deferred Interest?

Deferred interest is a type of financing where interest is temporarily put on hold , usually only for a promotional period such as  6, 12, or 18 months.

During that time, you’re told you won’t pay interest. Basically, that’s true but only if you meet the terms. Interest is still being calculated in the background from day one. It’s just not added to your balance yet.

If you pay off the entire balance before the promotional period ends, you avoid paying that interest entirely. But if even a small portion of the balance remains, all the accumulated interest gets added back onto your account, but can cause you financial problems that you might not have counted on paying.

Why It’s Easy to Misunderstand

The phrase “no interest” creates a sense of safety that really doesn’t exist. It sounds similar to a traditional zero-percent APR credit card, but deferred interest is not the same thing.

With a true 0% APR offer, interest simply doesn’t exist during the promotional period. However, with deferred interest, it’s more like a ticking clock in the background because the interest remains.

Many consumers assume that making minimum payments is enough to stay on track. In reality, minimum payments are rarely structured to fully pay off the balance before the deadline, so you’ll be stuck with paying interest. That misunderstanding can lead to a surprise bill that’s much higher than you probably expected.

How the Costs Add Up

Let’s say you finance $3,000 with a 12-month deferred interest plan.

You make your monthly payments on time, but by the end of the promotional period, you still have $200 left to be paid even though you’ve made the payments.

Instead of just paying off the remaining balance, you now owe all the interest that  has accumulated over the full 12 months, often at rates exceeding 20%. That could add hundreds of dollars to your total cost overnight.

When the interest takes effect retroactively, it doesn’t matter how close you were to paying it off. Missing the payoff by even a small amount will trigger the full interest charge to be launched.

Where Deferred Interest Is Often Used

Deferred interest financing shows up in a wide range of industries such as the following:

• Healthcare and dental procedures
• Cosmetic treatments
• Furniture and appliance purchases
• Electronics and retail stores
• Home improvement projects

In many cases, it’s presented as a convenient solution to make large purchases more manageable.

And to be fair, it can be, but only if you fully understand the terms and plan your payments carefully to avoid the interest.

Why Companies Use Deferred Interest

From a business perspective, deferred interest is an effective way to increase conversions. Offering financing removes the immediate barrier  of a large upfront cost. It allows customers to say “yes” to purchases they might otherwise delay or decline.

The structure of deferred interest means that lenders still have a strong chance of earning interest revenue, especially if consumers don’t pay off the balance in time.

It’s a model that benefits businesses, but it places the responsibility squarely on the consumer to manage the risk to the best of their ability.

Fine Print Matters

One of the biggest issues with deferred interest plans is how the terms are disclosed.

Important details, like when interest starts accruing, how it’s calculated, and what triggers it, are often buried in dense contract language that’s hard for a person to decipher.

Consumers may not realize:

• Interest accrues from the purchase date and not after the promo period
• Minimum payments don’t guarantee payoff in time
• A single late payment can void promotional terms
• The interest rate may be significantly higher than standard credit cards

These aren’t small details, but the difference between saving money and paying a premium.

How to Protect Yourself

Deferred interest isn’t inherently bad. It just requires a more strategic approach.

If you’re considering this type of financing, here are a few ways to protect yourself:

Know the Exact Payoff Date

Don’t estimate. Instead, get the exact date when the promotional period ends and work backward from there.

Calculate Your Monthly Payment

Divide the total balance by the number of months in the promo period. That’s your target payment, and not the minimum payment listed on your statement.

Set Up Automatic Payments

Missing a payment could cancel your promotional terms, so it’s imperative that you make your payments on time.

Pay It Off Early If Possible

The sooner you eliminate the balance, the less risk you carry.

Alternatives Worth Considering

Depending on your situation, there may be better financing options available.

These include things like:

• True 0% APR credit cards (without deferred interest)
• Personal loans with fixed interest rates
• Transparent payment plans with no retroactive charges

Some financing providers are also working to make terms clearer and more consumer-friendly, by focusing on simple interest rather than deferred interest rate structures.

Exploring these alternatives can help you avoid surprises and choose a plan that aligns effectively with your financial goals.

Why Transparency Matters

As more consumers become aware of how deferred interest works, there’s a distinct growing demand for clearer, more transparent financing options.

Regulators and consumer advocates have raised concerns  about how these plans are marketed, especially when key terms aren’t clearly communicated so there are a lot of gray areas.

At the same time, financial literacy is improving because people are asking better questions and taking a closer look at the details before committing to the loan.

That shift is important. Because when consumers understand the rules, they’re in a much stronger position to make informed decisions and avoid interest.

Final Thoughts

Deferred interest financing can be a useful tool, but only if you go into it with a clear understanding of how it works.The biggest mistake isn’t using it, but it’s  assuming it’s something it’s not.

Before you agree to any financing plan, take a few extra minutes to review the terms, calculate your payments, and consider your options. That small amount of effort can save you a significant amount of money. Because in the end, the goal isn’t just to make a purchase more affordable today, but to ensure it stays affordable in the future.

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The post The Hidden Costs of Deferred Interest: What Consumers Need to Know appeared first on DCReport.org.