Adam Smith’s 1776 book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is often described in casual conversation (at least by noneconomists) as a manifesto for the benefits and power of free markets. That’s a part of it, to be sure. But Smith was a profound thinker, not a pamphleteer, and he digs down into a much wider discussion of why the people of certain nations become wealthy. Barry R. Weingast offers his own thematic emphasis emphasis in “What Every PhD Student Should Know About Adam Smith” (Annual Review of Economics 2026, pp. 647-668).

Weingast runs through the Smithian topics that are familiar to most economists: division of labor, supply and demand, wages and apprenticeships, the role of money, poor laws, land rents, free trade, and so on. But Weingast’s emphasizes Smith’s discussion of how the laws and institutions supporting these factors arose. Where the lords ruled, those who worked the land called “slaves” by Smith. They had no right to move to another area, and if the land was transferred from one lord to another, the farmers also transferred automatically with the land. In this situation, Smith explains, no farmer under a lord had any incentive to increase production, because as Smith wrote, “[M]en in this defenseless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence, because to acquire more might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors.” Smith also offers data that free men, in contrast to the “slaves” under control of feudal lords, produced about three times as much. Weingast calls this the no-growth “feudal equilbrium.”

Weingast encapsulates the Smithian argument about the transition away from feudalism in this way. In this feudal times in England involved three primary groups: the king, the great lords, and people in towns. However, commerce begins to travel up and down rivers, and at key points along those rivers, towns start building up to handld and manage the flow of commercial traffic. Weingast describes the power shift in this way:

The trading towns of Northern Europe managed to escape the feudal equilibrium, creating liberty, the rule of law, and long-term economic growth—at least for the merchant elite. How did the towns make this escape? … Smith began with the townsmen as part of the feudal equilibrium. He reports that the king and the lords attacked these unfortunate souls without “pity or remorse.” Over time, however, the king and the townsmen came to see that they had a common enemy in the barons and lords. Indeed, the townsmen were the enemies of his enemies. The king and towns therefore could benefit from a political exchange in which the
towns gave the king taxes, fixed for all time, in exchange for various rights. These included the right to build walls around their cities and to create their own militias for security, to have their own magistrates and judicial systems, and to create their own laws and mechanisms to enforce them. These changes provided the critical political and legal infrastructure to support markets, allowing the towns to get rich over time.

The towns thus created three separate and non-incremental revolutions—in security, liberty, and the economy. The towns controlled all of these revolutions. Moreover, these exchanges were incentive-compatible. The kings valued the revenue, giving them advantages over the lords, and the towns valued their rights, greater security, and the income and profits from long-distance trade. Both parties to the exchange therefore had incentives to maintain the deal, and both had an interest in seeing the lords lose power relative to their own power. Over time, the towns grew in income and stature relative to the stagnant agriculture in the countryside. Indeed, as the towns grew rich, they were ahead of the countryside by two centuries from the standpoint of political and economic development. Smith summarizes this process: “Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were, in this manner, established in cities at a time when the occupiers of land in the country were exposed to every sort of violence” …

The towns also created an important transformation of the local countrysides as the towns brought these areas under their (local) security umbrella and with it a semblance of property rights, contract enforcement, and other aspects of the foundations of liberty and the rule of law. This allowed the former slaves in these areas to become specialists in the production of food and raw materials sold to merchants in the town for local consumption or for export in long-distance trade. Per Smith’s division of labor, their incomes were sure to rise above
the subsistence agriculture they had previously suffered for generations. Of course, this transformation occurred largely in the vicinity of the towns at first, spreading into the countryside far more slowly. Nonetheless, much of the agrarian hinterland remained trapped in the feudal equilibrium.

The towns used these rights from the king to take part in long-distance trade. I argue that, in many areas, resources became scarce over time, especially wood for building and for warmth (e.g., firewood). Every year this problem worsened as the scarcity increased. Holding constant for the risks, this scarcity slowly raised the value of taking part in long-distance trade. These merchants became enormously rich as they supplied the local economy with various goods that were scarce in their own towns while at the same time brought goods made or prepared locally that were scarce in other towns, often hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Again, we see here Smith’s division of labor at work.

The towns also had considerable violence potential. Given the violence of the lords, the violence potential of the towns had to be even higher. Indeed, this prowess in violence seemed a necessary and existential condition for the town’s survival. Had this condition failed, the lords would have continued to plunder the towns without pity or remorse.

In short, Smith (and Weingast) argued that the underlying conditions for division of labor, supply and demand, trade, and the other aspects of market forces were a balance of violence that allowed for public order, and then for contracts and markets to function. Weingast writes:

Indeed, in 1793, Dugald Stewart gave a eulogy for Smith [Stewart 1982 (1793)]. He reported a 1755 paper by Smith then in his possession (now lost), which said, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” To a neoclassical scholar of development, this sentence makes development sound formulaic. The reason, as I mention in the introduction, is that these economists assume the first and the third conditions when studying the developed world. But, as I suggest, Smith argued that creating these conditions is the task of development. To create a rule-of-law judicial system rather than a corrupt one based on bribery and privilege represents one of the central problems of modern development.

Of course, no country eliminated bribery and privilege altogether. There is always an element of “you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch yours” and “who you know matters as much as what you know.” There are always interest groups lobbying politicians, and politicians seeking contributions. There are always people looking to build their own power. Adam Smith was a consummate realist, and in the quotation above refers to “a tolerable administration of justice,” rather than perfect justice. But even in a high-income country, pushing back hard against bribery, corruption, and privilege matters, because those factors erode the foundations on which the wealth of a nation is built.

The post Adam Smith: Rule of Law as the Backbone for Markets first appeared on Conversable Economist.

It took him 25 years, but Osama bin Laden is winning his war on the Great Satan. He wanted to bring to an end the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and it is happening.

Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey assessed recently that the U.S. military has “probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases,” due to Trump’s war on Iran. The Pentagon Inspector General, in a report released today, said that “hundreds” of buildings on U.S. bases across the Middle East were destroyed by Iranian attacks that also caused $184 million in damages to diplomatic facilities in the region. All that damage was caused by thousands of missiles and drones fired by Iran.

Two F-15 fighters were destroyed during the war, along with one A-10 fighter. Five KC-135 refueling aircraft were destroyed on the ground, along with numerous helicopters. At least 30 Predator drones were destroyed “in various circumstances,” including being hit by drones and missiles while they were on the ground. The Pentagon has not released the number of Navy and Army weapons systems that were destroyed where they were deployed on U.S. bases, but it has been reported that several radar systems that cost in the billions of dollars were destroyed by Iranian missiles in Saudi Arabia.

It is significant that the Inspector General’s report did not put a dollar value on the damage done to military facilities in the Gulf region. Those would include buildings, hangars, storage facilities, barracks, offices and the like. It has been previously reported that U.S. military personnel had been moved from their bases in all the countries along the Persian Gulf, including two bases in Bahrain, five bases in Kuwait, three bases in the United Arab Emirates, three bases in Oman, one base in Qatar, and two bases in Saudi Arabia. Some were moved to U.S. bases further away from Iranian missiles and drones in Jordan. That’s not working very well. There have been recent Iranian missile strikes on U.S. bases there. Other military personnel were moved to Cyprus and to bases in Europe.

The U.S. practically decimated its defensive missile capability in the Gulf trying to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones. The Inspector General report says only that “munitions expenditures resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” The Inspector General says they’re working on the problem.

That more or less covers it. The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, outside of the Navy at sea outside the waters of the Gulf, is gone. The Pentagon still claims that approximately 50,000 troops were serving in support of “Operation Epic Fury.” They claim between 40,000 and 50,000 of them are still there, but they haven’t said where they are.

Bin Laden was particularly concerned with the U.S. presence in the Persian Gulf and swore in an infamous Fatwa released in 1998 that it was the duty of every Muslim to liberate the “lands of Islam” from the “grip” of the Great Satan.

So that’s the headline. Osama got what he wanted. It’s how the goal was accomplished that’s interesting.

Iran fired every single one of its drones and missiles defensively. They were trying to damage the U.S. capability of striking Iran after Trump’s initial attack in February. In other words, if Trump and Netanyahu hadn’t gone to war against Iran, we would still have all our Naval and Air Force and Army facilities in the Gulf.

Why were all those bases knocked out, all those buildings and other facilities and weapons systems destroyed? Because the U.S. military thought it was invulnerable. The Pentagon maintained its bases in the Gulf region pretty much the same way they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. They built berms around Air Force bases and Army installations and had guards on the base entrances against terrorism attacks. They built bunkers near military buildings and barracks, so if there was an attack from the air, people could rush into them for safety. The Navy simply built warehouses and office buildings in Bahrain in the area around the port where U.S. ships in the Gulf were resupplied. Previously, I’ve published photos of the damage done to the 5^th Fleet Headquarters and resupply facilities. They were undefended.

Bunkers didn’t save the six who died in a drone attack on the base in Kuwait, or the soldiers who were killed in Jordan. Eighteen American military people were killed during and after Trump’s “Operation Epic Fury.”

The simple way of putting it is this: The Pentagon was not well prepared for Iran shooting back. That is why 15 U.S. bases are no longer functional in the Persian Gulf.

The Inspector General report has whole sections that describe what has happened since U.S. “assets” got blown up by Iran. A section called “U.S. Basing and Disposition” says basically that what they’re doing now is “taking into account Iranian ballistic missiles, one-way unmanned aircraft systems (OWUAS), and maritime threats.” There is no explanation why there was no preparation for those threats beforehand. Another section called “Logistics and Sustainment” tells the tale of how the U.S. Transport Command (USTRANSCOM) was responsible for moving stuff around after the war began and U.S. bases started to take hits. They actually brag about how they accomplished what they call – you’ll love this – “aircraft flushing—the rapid removal of air assets from an area under attack or threat.” If that sounds pathetic — celebrating running and hiding — that’s because it is.

Last year, Hegseth and Trump ordered every general and admiral in the U.S. military to fly to Quantico so Trump could subject them to a campaign rally speech and Hegseth could lecture them about “fat soldiers” and haircuts and beards. Those were the priorities of Donald Trump and Hegseth before they launched their war. That is why we don’t have a military presence in the Persian Gulf after “Operation Epic Fury.” It seems the U.S. military could not withstand the fury of the Iranian military, which does not have a trillion-dollar defense budget and manufactures its missiles and drones in underground facilities that all the missiles and bombs we dropped on Iran were not able to seriously damage.

It took a few terrorists armed with some boxcutters to take down the World Trade Center and do significant damage to the Pentagon. Since that happened, we have spent trillions of dollars on two wars, lost more than 7,000 soldiers and sailors and airmen, and lost the wars themselves. We then spent billions and billions of dollars on our military facilities in the Gulf region to maintain what the military likes to call a “presence” in the region.

What that accomplished over the last 25 years is, to put it mildly, unclear. When it came time to wage a war in the region where we maintained our “presence,” Iran won. They closed the Strait of Hormuz, costing American citizens billions of extra dollars in the cost of gasoline and groceries and who knows what else. Now Iran has used its proxy, the Houthi rebels, to damage a major oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia and close the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, doing more damage to the shipment of oil and other necessities to Europe and points west through the Suez Canal.

As I recall, the U.S. Navy wrapped Osama’s body in canvas and tossed it over the side of an aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea after he was killed in Pakistan in 2011. At least part of the flotilla of Navy combat ships we’ve got cruising around in circles allegedly maintaining Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports is in the North Arabia Sea in the waters above Osama’s dead body.

You can almost hear his ghost laughing at the Great Satan.

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Seniors face higher drug costs, shrinking Medicare Advantage benefits and growing pressure to pay more for their health care in 2027.

It seems all but definite that Medicare, federally paid medical insurance for seniors, will cost more next year.

While there still are some loose ends around the rules, there is no question that providers of Medicare Advantage plans are cutting back on current benefits, that general monthly premiums are going up and that prescription drug caps are being significantly changed or dropped altogether.

Like health care offered more widely through the Affordable Care Act and through Medicaid cuts to those eligible by income and disability, the government is about to execute its broadest and deepest cuts to health insurance for seniors as well. Obviously seniors have more medical issues than younger Americans.

Donald Trump has said on multiple occasions that he wants to protect seniors from cuts hitting other parts of the overall health system, though he is happily having Vice President JD Vance looking for fraud in billing and service claims. But reports from providers, retirement advocates like AARP and political sources say otherwise.

And, if you go to Medicare.org to learn just how it will affect you, good luck. They are not addressing the issues. We are on the cusp of annual open medical enrollment starting Oct. 15 and the details of health care do not seem to be among the top agenda items for our elections.

Indeed, despite a series of self-serving statements about cutting the price of a select number of prescription drugs, Trump has variously insisted that states should fund Medicare and  Medicaid or somehow privatize payments.

Trump said in April that it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and childcare costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

What Medicare Costs Are Changing in 2027?

Medicare provides Part A hospitalization coverage as part of its basic package, a Part B medical coverage plan to pay doctors and other services after seniors pay a monthly premium and meet a deductible level, and a Part D prescription plan that has for the last few years capped yearly drug costs for individuals at $2,000 a year after reaching deductibles.

In addition, Medicare Advantage plans, which often work more like HMOs, charge a monthly fee but cover all costs, often including dental and vision plans. You hear about these plans endlessly each fall when enrollment for the new year opens.

The idea that cuts for the most financially vulnerable would come about now has been in the air since the passage of Trump’s sole legislative piece, which he called the Big Beautiful Bill. It was an omnibus effort that ties tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations with government service cuts.

Now, the changes are taking hold, with the biggest effects on the estimated 20 million who will lose Obamacare with undercutting of program supports and millions more facing Medicare eligibility changes. For seniors – supposedly exempted from most of the cuts – the prospects are more expensive programs to cover less service.

All this comes as more doctors simply refuse to take Medicare patients because they resist the paperwork and believe they are not being adequately paid for their time. As always, the burden is on the senior to manage his or her own care, to find cooperating doctors and ways to afford the services.

Are Medicare Changes Protecting Profit or Guarding Health?

Critics say the changes are being made more to protect corporate profit margins than to reflect medical changes or overall health costs to the government.

A HealthScape Advisors survey of health plan leaders from 35 plans earlier this year found that nearly 70% expected their overall Medicare Advantage benefit packages, which until the last few years had been considered very financially rewarding to companies, will be less rich in 2027.

—Medicare Advantage plans, which cover more than half of seniors, seem to be cutting 2027 benefits. Humana and UnitedHealthcare have yet to make announcements but are making it known among insurance brokers getting an early look that they are cutting benefits – right before the elections. Strategies include changing Part B premiums, increasing copays for specialists, and changing drug coverage. UnitedHealthcare apparently is dropping 13% of plans offered in 18 states.

–Part D prescription cost caps of $2,000 are being increased to $2,400, meaning that beneficiaries pay nothing after reaching the limit. But deductibles also are being increased to $700 to even qualify. Some stand-alone plan caps may disappear entirely, because the Trump administration is halting a benefit extended by the previous Biden administration after Covid. The larger issue, clearly, is that for seniors, the number of prescriptions always increase, and nearly always are lifelong for chronic conditions.

–Premiums are rising too. Medicare faces automatic funding reductions unless Congress acts, which risks restricting patient access to medical care.

Groups, including AARP, are pushing back against proposed reductions and policy changes that threaten senior healthcare benefits. They argue that as in Social Security, older Americans have paid into the system and expect lawmakers to shore up long-term funding rather than shifting the financial burden onto beneficiaries. A proposed Medicare Cost Cap Act would place yearly limits on what original Medicare enrollees spend out-of-pocket for Part A and B services.

Clearly, questions about costs for seniors are not central to health policy or managing a government that finds itself $40 trillion in debt. But it is a good window to witness our never-ending attack on our own values.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Medicare Costs Are Rising in 2027. Here’s What Seniors Need to Know appeared first on DCReport.org.

What Parents Can Learn From the Ways Children Process Tragedy, Violence and a Constant Stream of Disturbing Images

On back-to-school night in 2005, I eagerly entered my youngest child’s first grade classroom. The walls were festooned with brightly colored responses to the prompt: “Draw something you remember.”

I scanned for my son’s picture and was shocked when I encountered his drawing: an airplane flying into New York’s World Trade Center.

“I saw the picture you drew up on the bulletin board,” I said to him later that night. “Do you really remember seeing planes flying into the twin towers?”

He looked me in the eyes and replied, “No, Mommy. But I do remember you crying.”

My son was not quite 2 years old on on Sept. 11, 2001. As a mother, I despaired to learn that my own reaction to that day’s tragedies had stuck with him so viscerally. As a professor and researcher of children’s media, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

My son’s memory was likely influenced not just by my emotional reaction but by the media around him that his parents and siblings consumed in the weeks and years after the attacks – a mix of TV news and content geared toward kids.

More than two decades later, children have many more ways and more platforms to encounter frightening images and stories, often without an adult nearby to help them make sense of what they see. But the ways children’s programming such as “Sesame Street” responded to 9/11 offer a useful lesson: Rather than trying to shield children completely from disturbing events, adults can help them process what they’ve seen in honest, reassuring and age-appropriate ways.

You Can’t Shield Kids From What’s Happening

Psychologist Joanne Cantor was one of the first to study what scares children about news and how they respond to it.

She concluded that what frightens children varies by their developmental stage. Younger children tend to notice and respond to stories about natural disasters and tragedies about kids or animals. Older children are afraid of stories focusing on personal injury and physical destruction, kidnapping, disease and violence. Teens express fear of stories about random acts of violence, natural disasters and foreign conflicts.

Since Cantor first published her groundbreaking research in the 1980s, kids’ media environments have changed dramatically, with more channels, screens and platforms broadcasting images and videos of natural disasters, violence and tragedies from around the world.

One study found that young children’s exposure to news is often accidental but lasting, with many children recalling distressing images long after the fact. Another one found that violent news images take a cumulative toll on children’s mental and emotional health. And an international survey of over 4,000 children from 42 countries found that over half had been scared by stories about the COVID-19 pandemic.

More recently, the children’s media nonprofit Common Sense Media surveyed hundreds of children ranging in age from 8 to 18 and found that what kids are seeing and hearing in the news frequently makes them feel scared, sad, angry or depressed.

Children’s TV Takes a Delicate Approach

On and after 9/11, millions of children like my son either saw the images of terrorist attacks or were near adults who reacted to them.

According to “Sesame Street” producer Lewis Bernstein, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, most of the episodes for the forthcoming season were already written. Yet writers and producers knew that children were not oblivious – that even the 2- to 4-year-olds comprising the core “Sesame Street” audience had some sense of what was going on.

In response, the show’s producers collaborated with experts to create additional episodes that would address children’s fears.

In 2002, Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of education and research for “Sesame Street,” explained how the show’s approach was to meet children where they were developmentally.

“Sesame Street” had already helped children process their fears through classic episodes such as “Grover’s Fear of the Dark.” Researchers knew part of what scared children on 9/11 were the loud sirens and the fact that trusted figures such as firefighters and police officers were hurt.

So the episode they developed in response to 9/11 made no mention of the terrorist attacks and instead centered on a fire at Hooper’s Store. Elmo is frightened by the noise of the fire alarm and subsequent sirens. The protective gear that the firefighters are wearing also scares him.

Fortunately, a kind and kid-savvy firefighter named Bill speaks to Elmo about his fears and invites him to visit the firehouse. There, he dispels some of Elmo’s concerns and dispenses advice about what children can do if they are ever in a similar situation.

The PBS show “Arthur” took a similar approach: Its two-part episode “April 9” centers on a fire at Arthur’s school. It makes no mention of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks but explores how Arthur, Sue Ellen, Binky and Buster each process the school fire differently.

“Zoom,” the popular PBS live-action variety show, was geared toward older kids. Just 10 days after 9/11, they aired a special half-hour episode called “America’s Kids Respond.” The seven cast members, all between the ages of 9 and 14, shared their thoughts, fears and feelings. Advisers knew their audience needed more than hearing other kids talk about their feelings. So they made sure the cast also discussed constructive things kids could do, such as helping with food donations or clothing drives for affected families.

A year later, “Zoom” followed up with another special, “America’s Kids Remember,” where cast members talked about how they had coped in the months after the attacks. They also read mail from viewers, including some letters written by kids who had been targeted by anti-Muslim slurs. The episode included a segment in which a cast member visited a girl in lower Manhattan whose school had been damaged. The girl explained how she was able to cope through her art and activism.

What’s a Parent To Do?

In 2001, most children under 8 were watching approximately 3.5 hours per day of television or videos on VHS.

Today, Common Sense Media reports that the amount of time kids spend watching television or videos is similar, but their total media exposure is far greater, thanks to mobile platforms and different types of media.

In a world where extreme weather events often lead local news, natural disasters routinely take place, and school shootings and acts of political violence have become all too common, parents might naturally try to shield children from these stories.

But young children pick up on the news and on cues from their parents, even when we don’t think they do.

There are many things parents and teachers can do to help mitigate children’s fears and anxieties from what they see on the news. Recognize some of the signs your child might be feeling anxious, such as sleep problems, avoidance of activities or doomscrolling. Experts suggest answering children’s questions honestly without necessarily relaying all of the gory details. It’s also OK to say, “I don’t know.”

Some of the lessons from how children’s TV dealt with 9/11 still apply.

Young children can also benefit from adults reassuring them that they are safe, by encouraging them to process a piece of news through play or art, and helping children by giving them language to express their questions and fears.

With older children and teenagers, experts suggest avoiding labels, such as blaming something on “the bad guys.” It’s important to give kids facts and context and provide them with resources to answer their questions. Older children can benefit from outlets to express their concerns and feel agency, whether through journaling or art, or the kind of volunteerism promoted on “Zoom.”

Finally, it’s important to acknowledge and explain our own emotions to our children, as I learned on that back-to-school night nearly two decades ago.

This article was originally published by The Conversation on September 8, 2026

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The post You Can’t Shield Kids From Scary News – Here’s What ‘Sesame Street’ and Other Children’s Shows Did After 9/11 appeared first on DCReport.org.

One year ago, Republicans were pretty sure they had a path to victory. The Senate was a steep uphill climb for Democrats, and Republicans had a plan. They were going to gerrymander so many safe Republican seats, Democrats would never win a majority ever again. It was foolproof!

Well, they forgot about the biggest fucking fool in the country: Donald Trump, the drooling imbecile they put in charge of their party. How’s that working out for them?

US Grocery Prices Saw Their Sharpest Rise in 50 Years, and They’re Still Not Coming Down

Inflation stayed hot in August with annual pace of 3.4%, raising the odds of a Fed hike

Oh, cool. So everything is going down the shitter as fast as humanly possible? Who could have possibly foreseen that kicking off a war that would close a vital source of oil while also intensifying a trade war with our closest trading partner would have an astonishingly negative effect on our economy?

Besides, of course, everyone who understands high school-level economics? Because let’s be honest: I’m no economist and I fully grasp the concept here. This shit ain’t rocket science. Drive up the price of gas, especially diesel, which is what freight trucks run on, and everything gets more expensive. Start a trade war with Canada, and shit gets more expensive. When shit gets more expensive, people get really mad at the party in power.

A+B+C=Republicans are fucked.

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As of this writing, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it’s going to remain that way for as long as Iran wants it to stay that way. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth thought they could bomb Iran into submission, which every military officer who has spent more than ten seconds studying the region would have told was not going to work. And they did.

The only way to break Iran would be a full-scale invasion which would be astronomically costly in terms of blood and treasure. Trump doesn’t actually care about either of those things, but he’s dimly aware that getting 10,000 American soldiers killed would be very unpopular. So we’re stuck threatening and bluffing, which worked for a little while. Now it doesn’t, and no one pays attention to the dying clown with the weird makeup and the stinky diaper who can’t stay awake.

And just for funsies, Iran’s proxies, the Houthis, have also seized control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which closes off the Red Sea. This is where Saudi Arabia was getting its oil out after Hormuz was closed. It was slower, required a pipeline to reach the coast, but it was something. Now there’s nothing, and that’s why oil is back up around $110 a barrel and going higher every day.

Saudi Arabia cannot seem to get a handle on the situation and begged Trump for help. Trump refused, which either suggests that the Saudis have not paid Trump enough in bribes, or that our forces in the Middle East are so degraded because of Trump and Pete Hegseth’s rampant incompetence and sheer stupidity that they cannot provide adequate support.

Just a quick note: Please pay attention to the people cheering for the Houthis. This keeps happening, and they should be fucking ashamed of themselves. Pull them aside and tell them to stop being a fucking asshole. The Houthis are modern-day slavers. They kidnap children, rape them, and then traffic them. Rooting for the Houthis because they oppose Israel and the United States does not make you a moral beacon; it makes you a monster standing with literal pedophiles. It is, in fact, possible not to pick a side in a fight when both sides are repugnant, including your own side. Do better. Don’t side with child-raping slavers. And now back to the matter at hand.

So now, with just seven weeks left to the midterms, Trump has guaranteed the Iran War cannot end. Trump is now getting to the point where he’s draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to critical levels. Will he leave enough for the military in an emergency? Will he drain it to the point where the salt caverns the oil is in begin to collapse, making the rest difficult or impossible to get to? Maybe? If Trump stops tapping the reserve, there will be an immediate spike in gas prices, and he can’t afford that. Better to cripple the nation before taking an electoral hit, right? After all, what is more important? Donald Trump or national defense? What a silly question! Trump, of course!

This is why Trump is now demanding Ukraine stop bombing Russian oil facilities. You see, the world NEEDS Russian oil! So Ukraine should let Russia sell it and fund their war on Ukraine. Ukraine responded to this by immediately bombing another Russian refinery. I guess their answer was a solid, “Fuck you.” Maybe Trump shouldn’t have stopped sending aid? Doesn’t really give them a lot of incentive to listen to us. Oh well.

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So here’s the thing: Canada is not going to back down because they can’t. The Trump regime gave them a list of insane demands which amounted to effectively handing over sovereign control of their country to Trump. If Trump backs down and agrees to a normal trade deal, sure. But Trump always has to be seen “winning,” and that makes for a poor negotiation. After almost two years of this bullshit, Canada is more interested in becoming part of the European Union and securing its economic future that way. This would be catastrophic for the United States but very good for Canada in the long run. Yaaay. America First. In the short run, though, Canada is going to fuck Trump over as hard as possible to ensure his party feels as much pain as possible for the midterms. They know Democrats will do everything to rein in the Mad King, which will be better for Canada.

Iran is doing the exact same thing. Expect them to come to the bargaining table once Democrats control Congress. And expect them to make a lot of noise about how Democrats are the people they want to negotiate with. They know a Democratic president in 2029 will be someone they can make a good-faith deal with and will not launch a sneak attack in the middle of signing a treaty.

Is that a lot of foreign interference in our elections? It sure is. But Republicans were happy when Russia did it covertly, so fuck them and their whining.

It’s important to understand where we are right now. Republicans are down at least ten points in a generic poll among likely voters. Trump is underwater in the polls by a 2-1 margin. He is unpopular in almost every state, including most of the deep DEEP red states that he won in 2024. Republicans are losing on every single issue, including immigration and the economy, which they, historically, have never lost on.

And it’s all going to get worse in the next several weeks as gas gets more expensive, prices continue to go up, and the economy stalls even further. God forbid the AI bubble, already right on the brink of collapse, goes pop and those headlines are splashed all over the country. This close to an election that is already positioned to be a bloodbath for Republicans, any one of those would be “Just fucking kill me already” news. Any combination of them, or all of them?1 Dinosaur-killing asteroid.

The fun part of this is that it’s all self-inflicted. No one made Trump start a war he couldn’t end. No one made Trump escalate the war after he lost it. No one made Trump restart and then escalate a trade war with Canada two months before the midterms. No one made Trump use up all of his mitigation efforts to stabilize the price of oil over the summer. No one made Trump sabotage his own economy over the last eighteen months. No one made Trump dummymnader his safe red seats so much that there is a very real chance Republicans will lose where they shouldn’t have. No one made Trump wage such a violent war on immigrants that he destroyed all of his gain with the Latino community, putting Senate seats into play that should never even be close.

The blue wave was always going to be brutal, but Trump has done everything imaginable to open the floodgates and leave his party of pedophiles and Nazis defenseless. Hell, he’s going out there to campaign and remind everyone what a fucking loser he is and energize Republican Democratic voters by telling the public to love Flock cameras and data centers.

That’s a hell of a closing message. I’m not kidding, Democrats should send Trump a fruit basket and a very nice thank you card. He really is doing all the heavy lifting for them.

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There are just 49 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is doing the dumbest shit imaginable because they are afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

When I was at West Point in the 1960’s, we took a class called “Ordnance Engineering.” They waited until you were a senior to teach it, so you had the advantage of three years of studying calculus, differential equations, and multiple disciplines of applied mathematics such as mechanics of solids, thermodynamics, and mechanics of fluids. In other words, they waited until you had the tools to know how to do it before teaching you what it was they wanted you to do.

The problem at the end of the semester, as I recall, was something like, “Design the tube of a howitzer cannon capable of firing a 100 mm 12-pound warhead 10 miles.” They left out some of the difficult parts of the design, such as the spacing of the rifling in the barrel and the design of the mechanism of the barrel’s breach, where the barrel opened to receive the gunpowder and the projectile. But there were plenty of other variables: How long should the gun tube be? How thick was the tube, from its base to the muzzle where the projectile left the tube? How thick was the steel around the bore of the base of the gun tube holding the propellant and the projectile so when the thing fired, it wouldn’t explode the tube into a thousand pieces? How much standard black powder propellant, by weight, would be necessary to send the 12-pound warhead 10 miles?

There was an early model of one of the first computers, the IBM 360, occupying an entire ice-cold air conditioned and heavily cushioned room in Thayer Hall at that time, but we weren’t using it. We used a slide rule to work the problem, as had been done for decades before then.

Cannons are ancient weapons that date to the 13^th century in China. Cannons in 1969 were the basic weapons of the U.S. Army in assaulting an enemy. Fire the cannons, “soften-up” the target, then move infantry firing small arms forward to take the objective. Warfare was thus across the world and had been for centuries. The problem we were given tested our ability, after three years of study, to move into the future of designing new weapons. If you could design a cannon, one day after more study, you might be designing missiles which would be used in wars of the future.

I can’t recall what my grade was for the problem in Ordnance Engineering that year – probably not sterling – but I completed the work and designed my own gun tube to fire the warhead the required distance.

My point in recounting this story is to describe what it took to design weapons – years of study of very difficult mathematics and science – and then what you got was the most basic of a part of a weapon, the tube of a cannon. You didn’t get the rest of the thing, its breech, firing mechanism, aiming devices, all the stuff that would make it a usable weapon on a battlefield, which would take more years of study of even more difficult math and science. And still, in the end, what resulted was a modern version of an ancient weapon, a cannon.

The U.S. had and still has very, very good cannons – the modern 155 mm Howitzer M114A being the latest variant is capable these days of firing a GPS guided warhead making the weapon extremely precise. At one point, there was even a nuclear warhead for the 155 Howitzer. They showed us a highly classified dummy example in class one day.

At the time I took that class in Ordnance Engineering, we had shipped all kinds of cannons to Vietnam and were firing them at the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong. Today, we’ve got them all over the world, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe. We used them in Iraq in two wars, in Afghanistan, and we still have them in Iraq and on bases in Syria and Jordan. We also have our modern ground-to-ground missile system, the HIMARS, all over the world, which fires missiles further than artillery warheads with great accuracy.

But that was the past.

Today, it doesn’t take all that education in math and engineering and a modern economy to come up with deadly weapons. All it takes is Anthropic’s Claude and a laptop computer, maybe even a smart phone, to design and use a weapon, as Anthropic reported last week, a missile capable of traveling 2,000 kilometers, carrying a hypersonic “glide vehicle,” meaning warhead. Anthropic said “a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen” using Claude “in place of human software engineers” managed to create control and guidance and navigation devices, and fired a ballistic missile. The missile failed, Anthropic reported, and “within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.”

The “cell” was the Houthi army in Yemen, a country with a population of 32 million and a nominal GDP of $17 billion, with a per capita GDP of $416. And those are the numbers for the country of Yemen, the one with a government. The Houthi rebels are a breakaway force that controls only part of the country, but the part they control includes the coast of the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, and as of this week, Mayun Island, located right there in the middle of the strategic strait through which billions and billions in trade flows on its way to and from the Suez Canal.

The Houthis have missiles and drones that have been supplied to them by Iran and other “threat actors,” to use the phrase used by Anthropic, and they have been firing those missiles and drones and disrupting shipping in the Red Sea already.

But the news this week is that using the AI technology of Anthropic’s Claude, the Houthis have been able to do for themselves something that until now only countries with great wealth and education systems have been able to do by educating and training people, as I was educated and trained at West Point, to design weapons systems that will one day very, very soon disrupt the entire world.

What should we call this? The democratization of warfare? When people in a country as poor as Yemen are able to develop and use the technology to fire a weapon such as a missile with a warhead capable of traveling 2,000 kilometers – that is not only news, it’s big news. And all they had to do was use an AI system called Claude.

This is why the CEOs of three of the most advanced AI platforms on earth – Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI – agreed with each other in calling for a “slowdown” in development of AI “because of its dangers,” as the Washington Post put it yesterday.

Gee, ya think?

Anthropic reported that Russian “threat actors” designed a kamikaze drone swarm that included targeting technology for class of “person” targets “without a person in the loop.” Anthropic reported there were other uses of Claude by China and Mali. One of them simulated an electronic warfare attack on 12 targets in Taiwan, and another targeted “specific US anti-torpedo and anti-submarine programs,” according to Anthropic. The examples went on and on and included Claude ghost-writing official testimony delivered at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Another instance reported Chinese AI systems such as DeepSeek infiltrating Claude users to get American and European “names, email addresses, company data, and other sensitive data of hundreds of end users.”

And this is just one admission by one AI company, Anthropic, about the way its systems have been misused. Or should it be “used?” It’s becoming apparent that the AI companies have developed this technology without putting controls on who uses them and for what purposes. So what is using and what is misusing? When you turn loose this kind of power on the world, and it becomes available to anyone who can access it…

The three dots at the close of the above sentence are there on purpose. There are no answers to these questions. There is not even an answer to the most important question of them all: what is right and what is wrong when it comes to AI? It’s not built into the systems themselves, because that would mean giving them a sense of morality, which machines do not have. I guess you could build morals into one of the AI systems, but whose morals? We know that the people who have developed and built and own AI companies think that making money and getting rich is something they can all agree on, because that’s what they’re doing. They live in nice houses, they drive great cars, they fly around on Gulfstreams, they give themselves zillion dollar weddings and own massive yachts. But could they agree on such a basic moral as “killing bad, helping others good?”

The beast is in the wild now. The AI systems are out there for anyone to use. Even the Houthi rebels are tapping in and using AI to program and fire a rocket. How long until someone uses AI to develop a nuclear or biological weapon?

Ooops. A young AI engineer from Anthropic already warned us about that last week, before the AI CEOs galloped like crazy trying to get ahead of each other to look like they suddenly give a shit about what they’re doing. But all they did was copy what the young engineer said – it’s happening too fast, and it’s got too much power which is making it too dangerous.

The world has been going in this direction for decades. Humans have been working to make things easier and easier for as long as there have been humans, I guess. Stone age humans developed stone tools and moved on to metal hatchets and knives that were better at cutting and chopping vegetables or meat or each other. Now, in the morning, right beneath this desk at which I sit, a robot vacuum whirrs and makes its rounds picking up cat hair and dust so Tracy and I don’t have to, and I don’t have to tell it a thing. The robot does it on its own, and then it returns to the laundry room and its base vacuums up all the hair and dust into a paper bag. The only human involvement by me or Tracy is to remove the bag and insert a new one.

Apparently, we’ve reached the point where we have made killing as easy as running a vacuum. Robots will do the killing for you. AI will even design the killing machines and pick targets and guide them for you.

Soon – I guess it’s already happening – everyone will be able to do this. That’s what mutually assured destruction has been about. The day that everyone gets the bomb, or so the thinking has gone, nobody will want to use it because everybody else will use their bombs and everyone will be destroyed.

We’re there, folks, and not just nuclear weapons. When everyone can destroy each other by deploying made up social media AI shit depicting one another as thieves or sex criminals or murderers, what’s the use? Nobody will believe any of it if it’s all taken to be fake.

Does any of it matter? When it comes to weapons, it does, because the end result is dead people, and presumably, nobody wants to be dead.

But notice the “body” in “nobody.” That’s a human being. AI isn’t human. What do AI systems think? Will AI come to the same conclusion that humans came did with nuclear weapons about mutual assured destruction? Will AI systems save themselves from each other? Do machines have a soul?

We’re either going to figure out how to give them a soul, or they’re going to take ours.

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