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Time is almost up, and the last of the mitigation efforts will run out in the next couple of weeks. A month or two at most (and that’s a huge stretch). After that, all of the really bad things start. There will be no one to blame except Joe Biden Trans kids Immigrants Hillary Clinton Your Mother Donald Fucking Trump.

You still have time to get ready. Get to it. Then pull up a seat and enjoy the show as the regime panics.

Monday: Don’t listen to the people telling you society is going to collapse. But you do want to get ready for rough waters ahead.

Tuesday: You cannot be friends or allies with people who want you dead.

Wednesday: Recording and Writing D&D for the girls.

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: Be careful what you wish for.

Friday: The kids had a wonderful prom night. Me? Not so much.

5 Things I found Interesting This Week

1. On Superpower Suicide - And the recovery of justice by Timothy Snyder at Thinking about…

2. Trump Has Officially Lost The War In Iran And The Great Energy Collapse Of 2026 Is Coming. - Bob Kagan just declared “checkmate” on America in Iran while the US prepares to fall off an energy cliff in the next two weeks. You should probably buy an EV soon. by Dean Blundell

3. Nobody Tells You The Last Time They’ll Reach For Your Hand - On Grief, Granola, and the Country Our Children Deserve by JOJOFROMJERZ at Are you f’ng kidding me?

4. The Sex Economy: The Enclosure of Connection - Your Loneliness Is Not a Personal Failure. It’s a Business Model. by Farida Khalaf at Lights On

5. Is Russia Finally Losing Its War of Choice in Ukraine? - The raw numbers don’t lie, and they carry a stern lesson for the U.S. by Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo

Let’s start by calling the 57 missile strikes that have sunk boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean what they are: murders. The Pentagon cannot provide the names of the 192 people killed by missiles fired on civilian boats. The Pentagon calls the victims of the aerial bombings narco-terrorists or drug smugglers. No one knows the names of those who have been killed on the boats because no attempt has been made to learn their identities or to provide proof that what the boats and the 192 victims carried was indeed drugs. They just fire missiles and drop bombs and call what they are doing “authorized.”

Hegseth’s Pentagon could prove that they are hitting drug boats by picking up the debris left by the sunken boats and showing the drugs, if in fact there are any, but they don’t do that. They make another strike or multiple strikes to sink the debris, whatever it is – plastic wrapped boxes, stuffed garbage bags – it’s hard to see from the grainy videos they have largely stopped publicizing. In one early strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic reported retrieving packages filled with cocaine, but those packages, if they were recovered at all, have not been provided to U.S. law enforcement as evidence, because there were no prosecutions resulting from the boat’s sinking. The men on the boat were killed during the strike. Their bodies were not recovered, either, because the U.S. Navy makes no attempt to recover the bodies of the alleged drug smugglers or anyone found to have survived the missile attacks.

In what other context has the United States of America set out to kill alleged drug dealer or smugglers without evidence, much less an arrest, trial, and conviction resulting in a death sentence? None. I don’t believe if a drug dealer or drug smuggler was arrested, tried and convicted that there is a federal statute allowing a death sentence for a drug crime. The former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is currently in jail in The Hague awaiting trial for killing alleged drug dealers without trial and conviction. What he did as president is being described in charges as “crimes against humanity.”

Donald Trump commits crimes against humanity every day. There is a legal word for this campaign of murder that has been carried out on the orders of Donald Trump: impunity. The word connotes being exempt from prosecution or punishment or any legal consequences. The Supreme Court infamously issued its decision in Trump v. United States awarding Trump immunity from prosecution for decisions he makes and actions he takes as part of his official business as president. The immunity granted to Trump – and to any future presidents – was not described by the Supreme Court as transferrable to others if they follow his orders in carrying out what he claims are his official duties. But Trump has made it clear that he will pardon anyone facing prosecution for following one of his illegal orders, so that question is, for the time being anyway, moot.

Trump has expanded the immunity against prosecution granted to him by the Supreme Court. He has taken what is understood by legal experts to be a specific form of criminal immunity and applied it to practically everything he does. He did not have the legal authority to rename the Kennedy Center, but he did it anyway. He did not go through the legal processes mandated under the law that apply to making changes to the structure and appearance of the White House before he tore down the East Wing and began construction on his absurd “ballroom.” He just did it.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump did not seek the support of Congress under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act before he ordered the massive bombing campaign on Iran. He just did it. The deaths of Iranian nationals, especially civilians, could be seen as murders because of his refusal to follow clearly written law. But that does not matter to Donald Trump. He can kill unidentified alleged narco-terrorists in boats on the open waters of the Caribbean and Pacific. He can kill anyone in the vicinity of the bombing of what he would call military targets in Iran.

Trump has taken the presidential immunity invented by the Supreme Court and turned it into permission to do anything he wants. He is taking the gilded Boeing 747 given to the U.S. government by Qatar and turning it into Air Force One, and when he leaves office, he is going to take the plane with him to be part of his “presidential library.” That is, by any rational measure, the theft of at least a billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury, but it is small beans compared to what he is trying to do by suing the IRS, over which he has authority, for $10 billion because his tax records were publicly released in 2020 by an IRS contractor. Recently, a so-called “settlement” of the case has been announced, whereby in return for dropping his lawsuit, a slush fund of $1.7 billion will be created, over which he has sole control, to pay off insurrectionists who attacked the Capital on January 6, 2021. It isn’t even clear if the pay offs would go only to those convicted of crimes committed on that day, whom he has already pardoned. Apparently, if you claim you attacked the Capital, you would be eligible to be paid “compensation,” for what isn’t clear, but what does it matter?

Trump would be barred from receiving any of the funds himself, but “entities” associated with Trump are not prohibited from applying for compensation. You can be certain that Trump has lots and lots of entities, and if he doesn’t have enough, he’ll invent more.

So, there will be no money for the 140-some police officers who were assaulted during the attack on the Capital, no money for the relatives of those who died on that day or afterwards. But lots and lots of money for the insurrectionists. If all 1,600 of those pardoned by Trump applied for compensation, there is enough in the slush fund to pay each of them a million dollars.

If there isn’t enough money after Trump has paid off anyone he wants to, including “entities” he controls, he’ll just grab some more money from the Treasury he already raids almost daily. Where do you think the money for all that gold leaf in the White House is coming from? Donald Trump?

MSNOW host Chris Hayes described in a BlueSky post having his “spirit leave my body” when he read the terms of the so-called proposed settlement of Trump’s IRS lawsuit.

I can speak only for myself and Tracy and the cats and Ruby, but our spirits leave our bodies as we watch what this criminal monstrosity is doing on a daily basis. People used to warn against “normalizing” Trump’s behavior by not calling it what it is.

We are far beyond worrying about any sort of normalization of Donald Trump. We are on a lost highway of wonderment at this point, looking around for signposts that might give hints of where we’re headed. But there are none. Trump does what he wants, and there is nothing to stop him. The law does not apply anymore. The Supreme Court took care of that.

We would be defenseless if we didn’t still have elections, but the Republican Party – aided and abetted once again by the Supreme Court – is trying to negate the right to vote along with the right to control your own body and your right to drive a car or walk down a street without being shot dead by an agent of the state wearing a badge that reads ICE or CPB.

It needs to be said that this country is in more trouble than it has ever been in. It can be saved by people of goodwill, but the question is, are there enough of them?

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Prices are on food, and everyday essentials are going up fast. But Trump’s oil shock hasn’t really hit yet, and when it does, prices are going to explode. and I give you a practical guide on how to prepare before that happens.

Oh, and we cover some other important news, too.

Come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Ogre Nation News Update!

4:10 - 4:50 Trumpflation explodes, and it’s just going to get worse

4:51 - 27:45 Trump’s Oil Shock is here, and we’re going to feel it soon. There are a lot of simple, common-sense steps you can take to protect yourself. We give you some.

27:46 - 39:07 Trump’s Epstein scandal refuses to go away, no matter how many countries he invades…

39:08 - 1:02:30 Headlines for Short Attention Spans!

1:02:31 - 1:10:00 Self-care of the Week

Here’s the chart of how much traffic right-wing sites are losing. Ha-Ha!

The Unedited Hot Mess Livestream!

A bazillion words have been written on the obscenely corrupt Louisiana v. Callais decision that surgically removed the teeth from Section Two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision is being described as prohibiting the kind of “race-based redistricting” that created majority Black congressional voting districts enabling Black people, largely in the deep South, to elect not only Black members of Congress to represent them, but Black representatives and senators in state legislatures.

Such race-based districts were created as a remedy to both slavery and the Jim Crow era. Slaves were not citizens but property. The Constitution, as it was originally written, created the dastardly three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person to determine the size of population to establish representation in Congress. Enslaved people constituted roughly 40 percent of the population of the states of the deep South, with South Carolina having 43 percent slaves in its population at the time of the signing of the Constitution. Without counting slaves as semi-citizens for the purpose of representation in Congress, the states of the South would have been dwarfed in the national legislature in comparison to the states of the North. Southerners knew that northern states would run the country’s government and eventually legislate slavery out of existence. That the southern states were willing to fight a shooting war to defend slavery, tells you everything you need to know about where they were coming from, to use a modern turn of phrase.

The South never really let go of slavery, to be as blunt as possible. The states of the deep South still have large Black populations: Louisiana is about 33 percent Black; Mississippi is about 38 percent Black; Alabama is about 27 percent Black. All three states would have much larger Black populations today if Black people had not undertaken the Great Migration to the north during Jim Crow, when about 6 million Black people moved out of the deep South to escape racist violence, economic hardship that kept Blacks in what amounted to enforced poverty, and the lack of political representation they suffered due to being denied the right to vote in their states.

The Callais decision, like Shelby County v. Holder before it, doesn’t just deny the reality of the political situation in the South, where racism rules as if Jim Crow laws were still in effect, it goes back even further to embrace the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which legalized the separate-but-equal doctrine of racists and stripped Black people of their rights under the 14^th Amendment. Plessy followed a previous decision by the Supreme Court that overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in a decision holding that the 14^th Amendment applied only to discrimination by states and not to discrimination by individuals and businesses.

Are you detecting a trend here? The Supreme Court, way back in the late 1800’s, set about to take apart the Reconstruction Amendments, the 14^th and the 15^th, that had been added to the Constitution to scrub at the stain left by slavery since the nation’s founding. This Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has continued the assault on the 14^th and 15^th Amendments by a series of decisions that are so similar to Plessy, they are stunning. Basically, the Court is attempting to return the status of Blacks, especially in the South, to what it was under Jim Crow, when they could be residents of the United States, but not citizens with the same rights as White people.

Elections have no meaning if your vote doesn’t count. We have seen what the Trump administration is attempting to do by making it easier for states to limit participation in voting by people they don’t like, however you define them – Black, Latino, Democrat, liberal. But the Callais decision is worse. The Supreme Court is telling Black people that they can live in Louisiana and Tennessee, just to name two of the biggest offenders, but they can’t vote to affect their status as citizens of those states.

The Callais decision cloaks its racism in the language of pure politics, holding that it’s okay to discriminate in drawing voting maps on the basis of political party, but not on race. But everyone in the deep South has known since the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Laws that there are two parties in the South: the White party and the Black party. And everyone knows what that means. Whites vote Republican. Blacks vote Democrat. When you draw lines creating districts that eliminate the power of Democrats to elect representatives to Congress and to state legislatures, you’re drawing lines that lessen or even eliminate the power of Blacks to elect people to represent their interests.

This is fixing elections, pure and simple. Tennessee is drawing a map that will eliminate the last district in the state represented in Congress by a Democrat, the area immediately around and including Memphis. They already eliminated the Democratic district that existed in Nashville by dribbling sections of Democratic voters into heavily Republican areas around the city. When Louisiana is finished with its post-Callais redistricting, that state most likely won’t have a Democrat in Congress, either, according to Ed Chervenak, a political analyst and political science professor at the University of New Orleans.

I’ve seen stories that attempt to justify the Roberts’ court and its so-called colorblind doctrine by saying, well, it’s just politics. It’s not. When Tennessee wipes out its last Black district around Memphis, and Louisiana carves itself up to eliminate the two Democrats who currently serve in Congress, the Republican Party will make sure to elect White racists to replace the Democrats. Their votes will be added to other Republican votes in Congress that will seek to eliminate Head Start and school lunch programs because they are seen, utterly wrongly, as benefitting the inner cities – read Blacks – more than rural areas.

There is no way to see what the Roberts court has done other than as turning back the clock. The truly stunning part of it is that they want the clock turned back to 1866, not 1965. The Supreme Court, as it is currently constituted, is ready and able to take on the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned Plessy. One after another, right-wing legal outfits have been filing cases saying that the real discrimination today is against White people, denying them jobs and acceptance to colleges. The next thing they will be saying is that the right of White people to associate with other Whites is under attack, and if Whites want separate neighborhoods and separate schools and separate restaurants and separate hotels, they should be allowed to have them.

Roberts infamously said that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. This is what race has been and is in this country: Enslaved people were Black. The people who were prevented from voting in the South were Black. The people who could not sit in the orchestra of movie theaters or at lunch counters or in the front of buses were Black. The people who were sent to separate schools and given hand-me-down textbooks that had been used in previous years at all-White schools were Black.

Justice Roberts doesn’t want us to forget that history. He wants to shove it down our throats.

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If the left is mad at you, go join the far right instead of mending fences! Genius! I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the far-right government of Israel had gone all in on murderous violence in order to steal land under the guise of “self-defense.” The left was no longer buying that particular line of bullshit because, let’s be honest, Netanyahu’s government wasn’t even trying to hide what they were doing anymore. Why bother when America has a Christian Nationalist government willing to support Israel under any circumstances because they think Jesus Christ is returning at any moment? If you were a cycncial power-hungry piece of shit like Benjamin Netanyahu, wouldn’t you go for the brass ring as long as these theocratic fucksticks were running the show?

The right, of course, fully supported any violence that resulted in dead Muslims, so why not cross the aisle? Oh, everyone knew that the right harbored an immense amount of antipathy for Jews, but Israel was just sooooo fucking important to the Evangelicals! They would definitely be good long-term allies!

Looked like it was paying off, too! The Trump regime was abusing using the full power of the federal government to silence critics of Israel! Happy days!

The second Trump administration carried this partnership to its logical conclusion. Official actions now focus on Jews — at least those who support Israel in traditional ways — alongside Christians, white people and men as groups that need government protection, in the form of executive orders, investigations and federal lawsuits.

What could possibly go wrong? The regime was on the side of Israel, the left was on the run, and Israel was safe! Hooray!

Oh, but there was that pesky little Nazi problem, wasn’t there? You may have noticed I’ve written about it a few times.

Welcome To The Ogre’s “Nazis Are Taking Over The GOP” Reading Library!

I’ve been banging this drum for a while now because it’s been super obvious that the American right was infested with literal Nazis (and pedophiles, but I repeat myself) and they were ascendant. As I point out with some regularity, I am not an Ivy League-educated political wizkid.1 I possess no special power to see the future. I am, however, unencumbered by the need to pretend the Republican Party is a normal political party instead of a collection of rapists, perverts, pedophiles, and fucking degenerate grifters. It comes in very handy for accurately understanding reality.

Like, for instance, pointing out to my fellow Jews over a year ago that they were committing suicide by allying themselves with literal goddamn Nazis:

I was not subtle about it:

Don’t you fucking say it can’t happen. You’re watching Republicans do it right fucking now to the trans community and immigrants and you’re not saying a fucking word because “Something something Trump is pro-Israel.”

It can happen and you fucking damn well know it will. The ultimate goal of the Christian Nationalists is to send all the Jews to Israel so we can fulfill their grand end-times prophecy. That’s all their support for Israel was ever about in the first place. They expect us to all die in a grand war against Muslims and kick off the Apocalypse. If you’re not acutely aware of this, you are so painfully ignorant, you’ll be inside the gas chamber expecting a steak dinner before you realize you’re choking to death on the Zyklon B.

Was that too harsh? Too fucking bad. You’re siding with the Nazis because you think you’ll be safe, said the sheep hiding in the wolf’s shadow.

That brings us to today. Would you be shocked to discover that, oh my fucking god!, it turns out that the Republican Party might not be such good friends to the Jewish community after all?!

…the Republican Party seems to be in the midst of an antisemitism rug pull: Just as major Jewish leaders decided to start working in earnest with the conservative movement and burn bridges with liberals, the MAGA vanguard has decided that Jews may not belong in their coalition after all.

Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who rose to prominence first as a columnist and later as a campus speaker and podcaster before starting The Daily Wire in 2015, has found himself on the losing end of a battle with Tucker Carlson for the future of the conservative movement.

Of course Ben Shapiro is losing to Tucker Carlson. Shapiro offers a veneer of respectability to hide the right’s racism. Carlson offers naked hate with a huge dollop of antisemitism on top. Gee fucking whiz, I can’t imagine why the white nationalists that comprise the GOP’s base are flocking to Carlson. They’ve only become more extreme and violent over the last 50 years. It was impossible to predict they would openly embrace fascism and Hitler!

Except, you know, for all the times they openly talked about how much they loved fascism and Hitler. But other than THAT, how the fuck were right-leaning Jews to know!?!?!? They were totally blindsided by the giant swastika!

It didn’t have to be this way, of course:

Jewish leaders had a choice to make as they faced growing animosity toward Zionism among their longtime partners on the left. They could have engaged in the excruciating work of reconciling their otherwise liberal values with their support for an increasingly illiberal Israel, while simultaneously trying to get their progressive allies to develop a more nuanced understanding of antisemitism and do a better job of including Jews in their coalition.

But that would have been too fucking hard, right? Soooo much easier to scream “antisemitism!” and use it as a cudgel to end any discussion about what Israel was doing. And how did that fucking work out?

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Literally every accusation of Israeli war crimes and imperialism turned out to be correct. Netanyahu’s murderous government is slaughtering civilians with zero regard for either international law or even Israeli law. They are attacking neighboring countries with the explicit intent of snatching and occupying land they have no legal right to.

One can defend Israel’s right to exist and still condemn what it is doing. I do it all the fucking time. One can denounce Israel’s war crimes and still hold the left accountable when it crosses the line into real antisemitism. I do it all the fucking time. It’s not that hard.

Here are some really easy examples:

• “Israel’s government should be tried for war crimes!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth!” = Antisemitism

• “Fuck Israel!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Jews are genocidal monsters!” = Antisemitism

See how easy it is? It’s sooooo fucking easy. If you’re not sure if something is antisemitic, just replace “Israel” or “Jew” with literally any other country or ethnic group/religion and think, “Would it be OK to say this?” If the answer is “I would never be OK with that!”, then it’s OK to push back. If you could swap in “America” or “Americans” and the statement is fine, then you should probably nod your head and agree. Both countries are currently being run by violent fascists intent on murder for fun and profit and ethnonationalism.

Israel should exist. It’s a country with millions of people who were born there over the last 75 years. In no universe can erasing it be separated from antisemitism because, whatever your reasoning, you will not apply it to a single other country, which means your reasoning is based on “Israel is filled with Jews.” Feel free to lie to yourself, but don’t think for a second you’re going to lie to me successfully.2

But that does not mean Israel is above criticism. No one is. Israel is drenched in blood. Russia is drenched in blood. America is drenched in blood. China is drenched in blood. And I’m only talking about this century. Never mind the horrors of the 20th.

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American Jews, specifically pro-Israel American Jews, had a choice. They could have demanded Israel do better. BE better. They could have demanded accountability from both Israel for its violence and the left for engaging in widespread antisemitism. Don’t you fucking tell me the left is innocent. I’ve been watching its rapid descent into hate for the last three years. The right paved the way, and far too much of the left gleefully followed.

But instead of demanding better for both Israel and our side, pro-Israel Jews threw their lot in with the Republican Party. They bet that they would be safe with the Evangelicals even as the GOP was being swallowed, in plain fucking sight, by Nazis. It was already a bargain with the Devil because Evangelicals hate us to begin with. Everyone knows the religious right expects us all to die when their Messiah returns. But until that happens, which is never, the theocrats will be more than happy to pour unlimited money to protect Israel until Armageddon. Or until they get impatient and start WWIII to skip to the end.

Who could have possibly foreseen that a party moving further and further to the extreme right would somehow rediscover its love for Nazism, the end boss of right-wing extremism? It beggars the imagination that a party whose only move after losing elections is to lurch to the right would keep doing that until it reached full-throated fascism and genocide. There’s no fucking way that could happen here!

This is what happens when people take the easy way out. When they opt for power over principle. Burning bridges instead of mending fences. When they place devotion to Israel over the safety of all Jews everywhere. These reckless morons have set us back decades. They have made antisemitism acceptable, and hate is fungible. I promise you, the right is already using it to recruit people on the left to their cause. Because if the Jews are behind everything, what other lies have the liberals been telling you?

All of the coming hate and fear and, yes, murder because I promise you, the pogroms are coming again, and for what? Nothing. The Republican Party will be fully Nazi within a decade, and Jews will have no home there. By then, the left will be so done with the conflation of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel (of which there are so very many) that we will not be welcome there, either. We will be at the mercy of whoever feels like picking up a rock and smashing the window of any shop owned by a Jew. Or the skull of any person visibly identifiable as one. Well-played. A masterful gambit that will surely work out in the long run for us all.

You stupid fucking idiots.

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Donald Trump needs to go ahead and lose his stupid-ass war on Iran and let the world get back to what passes for normal.

Here is what normal has been for us: We have paid artificially cheap prices for the bulk of our everyday living expenses for decades. The prices for those inexpensive t-shirts and underwear and socks and clothes at Walmart and H&M and Shein are subsidized by cheap labor in foreign countries, sometimes at sweatshop-level pay and conditions. Those $4.05 gallons of milk and $3.99 chicken breasts and $4.50 pork chops are subsidized by farm animal feed prices kept low by federal farm programs like crop insurance, agricultural risk and price loss coverage. Gas prices, inflated as they are at the moment, are subsidized by federal tax credits, 100 percent write-off deductions for drilling costs, accounting methods that allow for depletion allowances, and cheap leases on federal land.

We know that the slammed-shut Strait of Hormuz is driving up prices, but how?

Diesel.

Diesel fuel is up 50 percent since February 28, and its cost spans everything from powering the trucks that deliver gasoline and diesel fuel to gas stations to delivery of every single product along the food chain. Diesel powered trucks pick up corn and wheat and soybean seeds from where they are grown on farms and deliver the seeds to warehouses. Diesel trucks carry the seeds from warehouses to farms that buy the seeds to plant every spring. Diesel powers the tractors that pull the planters that put the seeds in the ground. Diesel powers the same tractors that spread fertilizer and pesticides on the crops when they’re growing. Diesel fuel the tractors that harvest the crops and powers the trucks that haul the grain to elevators on the farm, and from the farm to the grain elevators where it is sold into market. Diesel trucks pick up the grain and haul it to be milled, more the trucks haul the milled grain to factories where it is turned into feed or bread or cereal, and then diesel trucks pick up the finished product and haul it to warehouses, and from there, haul the product to stores where it is stocked on shelves.

And this isn’t even getting into what else diesel trucks deliver – everything from jet fuel to asphalt used to repair potholes to new electric service equipment to repair stuff that’s been damaged by storms to carrying lumber for new houses to delivering every single item that either mends your health or saves your life in a hospital or doctor’s office to the new washing machine and dryer you need to the bike you want to buy for your daughter’s birthday to every bloody thing including Tylenol and cosmetics you have ordered over the past year from Amazon.

And then there are the diesel engines that power the container ships that move everything we import to our shores and the diesel powered locomotives on trains that deliver it all to the diesel trucks that carry it to the stores where the prices go up every day.

The inflation caused by Trump’s war is happening all over the world.

There was a national security briefing for Trump two days before he ordered the attack on Iran. It’s the one during which Netanyahu made his big pitch that now is the time to attack – they could hit the entire Iranian leadership with a couple of missiles on the 28^th. Iran is “weak,” Trump was told. Our military is the “the most powerful in the world,” he was told. We have “warriors.” They have “fanatics.” Up in the West Wing, you could probably hear the Diet Coke cans popping down in the Situation Room where Trump was assured that Iran would “surrender” or “capitulate.”

Here’s a horrifying thought. If anyone even mentioned the Strait of Hormuz, Trump was told it could be “handled.” And it’s a sure thing that nobody said a word about the prices of everything being affected by this little air-war “excursion” they had planned for his approval.

And here we are.

Losing a war is a terrible thing, but God knows, we’ve gotten good at it. We didn’t win Korea. That war ended in 1953 with a ceasefire, overseen by a permanent U.S. military presence of God only knows how many weapons and about 30,000 soldiers who serve as a deterrent to North Korean aggression. We sure as hell didn’t win in Vietnam. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and didn’t win either conflict, ousted by the humiliation of being told to leave by the government of Iraq and a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan.

Of course, every administration since Eisenhower has framed our military adventures as victories. We may start wars, but we don’t lose them.

The humiliation this time is not that we attacked yet another country a fraction of our size – we do that every few decades -- but that we ran out of ammunition doing it. Here we are, the country with the largest defense budget in the world by something like a factor of ten, and we just didn’t use enough of the trillions we have spent on “defense” on cannons and artillery shells and bombs and missiles, the stuff that goes “bang” and blows shit up when you pull the trigger. In fact, over the weekend, our Secretary “Look at my ill-fitting suit” Hegseth pitched a tantrum because Senator Mark Kelly had the temerity to go on one of the Sunday talk shows and say out loud what everyone already knows, that our stockpile of every missile in our arsenal is dangerously low, and it “will take years” to “replenish those reserves.”

Hegseth accused Kelly of “violating his oath” and said the Pentagon legal counsel will “review” his comments, to which Kelly responded by referring to a clip of Hegseth saying exactly the same thing at a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in a response to a question from, you guessed it, Senator Kelly, asking how long it will take the U.S. to replenish weapons stockpiles. “I mean, months and years,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, we’re building new plants in real time.” Which kind of sounds like Hegseth should be the one being investigated by the Pentagon legal counsel, but such a thing would make way too much sense, so we know that’s not going to happen.

We’re low on bombs, low on missiles, we can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz with the largest navy on the seas, so what are we going to do? Well, the news today was that Trump found Iran’s latest peace proposal “totally unacceptable,” even though he admitted that he hadn’t read the whole thing. The ceasefire “is on life support,” Trump was quoted as saying, so he called a meeting of his “war cabinet” to discuss “increasing the pressure on Iran.” An Israeli television network reported that a source told them “Trump is going to hit them a bit.” The source must have been Trump himself, because it sounds just like him.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan were humiliations, sure, but it was just the U.S. against single countries that didn’t have much effect on the rest of the world. The problem with this one is that Trump got us into a war that affects the whole world. Gas and other fuels are already being rationed in certain countries. The midterm elections aren’t the only thing that will be happening in November. Cold weather will be setting in. In places that depend on liquified natural gas for heat, people are going to be desperate.

If Trump doesn’t somehow slide into his own form of capitulation to Iran by this coming winter, planting season in the spring is going to be hit with some truly unacceptable percentages. Fertilizers like nitrogen and urea are already up more than 50 percent. Next year it won’t be just high prices, it will be shortages.

Every leader around the world knows that the way to get to Trump is to pay him off. The Swiss gave him a gold bar and a Rolex desk clock. The South Koreans gave him a fucking ceremonial gold crown. Qatar infamously gave him a gold plated 747.

The script is going to be flipped on Trump this time. He’s the one who’s going to have to pay off the Iranians to get the Strait of Hormuz open. Maybe he can throw in a promise to build a Trump hotel and a golf course on the beach in Bandar Abbas, the way his sons want to do in Gaza. That should delight the mullahs.

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