The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

Pete Hegeth seeking divine authority for US airstrikes on Iran.

For reasons that are not mysterious The weak are sent to the wall They have reservations in heaven Down here, they’re not so fashionable Save me from the people who would save me from my sin They got muscle for brains

– Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

The Iran war is a war of aggression, launched by two nuclear powers against a non-nuclear nation that has been weakened by years of economic sanctions, targeted assassinations, industrial sabotage and cyber-attacks. This is a war of aggression that was initiated during bad-faith negotiations by the US, where diplomacy was used as a cover for a looming bombardment. The gloating over the ease with which US and Israeli airstrikes decimated Iran’s leadership was appalling, given the circumstances under which it occurred. Wars of aggression are crimes. But who is left to enforce international laws? If you can get away with a genocide, as the US’s war partner has done, every conceivable atrocity is fair game. Israel turned Gaza into rubble and still the bombs fall.

What is the objective? To destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities? To kill the Ayatollah? To topple the Islamic Republic? To emasculate the Republican Guard? To de-industrialize Iran? To wreck the Iranian economy? To “liberate” Iranian women? To spark a revolution? Who knows. Probably not Donald Trump. He claims he’ll “feel it in his bones,” though surely he meant his bone spurs.

The US generals don’t seem to have much of an idea, even though nearly 40% of the US military is now zeroed in on Iran, burning through billions of dollars of weapons every week. If we take the bombastic Pete Hegseth at his word, it’s to “rain death and destruction” on Iran and Iranians without much, if any, discretion on who is being killed or what is being destroyed. That sounds about right to me.

The timid Democrats have criticized Trump for not having a “plan,” as if having a plan would legitimize his criminal war. But they do have a plan and the plan is maximum destruction. The plan is for a spectacle of bomb-blast light shows and mass death. One of the first kill shots was an attack on an Iranian girls’ school that murdered 200 people, including teachers and students. Helluva way to liberate women.

Trump tried to blame the girls’ school strike on the Iranians, saying they’d somehow acquired a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Even the Pentagon wouldn’t back up this murderous lie. The school was on the target list. Bad intelligence? Not if the intelligence came from the Israelis, as it likely did. As we know from Gaza, the Israelis targeted schools as if they were ballistic missile batteries.

US airstrikes destroyed Iran’s Russian-supplied air defenses within the first couple of days of the war. Since then, the US and the Israelis can bomb at will, the only risk being an F-35 encountering a little rain or wind that might send it into a tailspin.

Every bomb now is being dropped on a defenseless population. And every bomb from now on is likely to turn that population, even those violently opposed to the rule of the Mullahs, against the bombers. For a war waged by two hyper-nationalist countries, the attackers don’t seem to realize that nationalism cuts both ways, that each bombing of a school, hospital, mosque, factory, desalination plant, or historic site solidifies the bombed in support of their country. And this isn’t just any country: this is Iran, this Persia, this is one of the oldest, proudest and most sophisticated civilizations on the planet. It’s a nation with a long cultural memory and it won’t soon forget the day the US and Israeli missiles hit four oil refineries and the skies of Tehran rained Black Death over a city of 13 million people.

Pete Hegseth boasted that there “will be no quarter given.” What does that mean? It means prisoners of war will be killed. It means the injured will be killed or left to die. Hegseth is a creep, but his fustian outbursts provide clarity on the sadistic objectives of the war. “We have only just begun to hunt,” Hegseth crowed. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Close the door, put out the light! Hegseth dismisses war crimes as an artifact of woke lawyers and seems eager to have the troops under his command commit every one on the books. No wonder he wanted to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly for appearing in that video advising US troops to disobey illegal orders.

Trump has never spent much, if any, time considering the consequences of his decisions in business, sex or politics. In fact, he brags about going on his gut. But making a bad bet on a steak company, mail-in university (diploma mill), porn star or casino is one thing. Wrecking the global economy by dismissing the likelihood that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked reflects a kind of hubristic madness that makes Hitler’s decision to invade Russia seem sound by comparison. But Trump learned in business that the costlier his mistakes, the more likely he was to get bailed out. He’s rarely paid a personal price for any of his blunders. Now he’s in the position of begging countries and leaders that he has ritually humiliated and deprecated as part of his tiresome political schtick to come to his rescue and help calm the chaos his impulsive and criminal war has set in motion. He may well find he’s bombed himself into a crater this time so deep there’s no clear path out, no easy fix, no insurance policy to shield him against the political and economic shockwaves he has unleashed.

The blowback from this war will be intense and is likely to last for decades, assuming the planet has that many years left. The war has already spread across the Middle East to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The oil shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has jolted an already wobbly global economy. Soon, refugees will be pouring out of Iran and Lebanon. In choosing to go to war aligned only with Israel, the US will inherit its pariah status across the Muslim world and beyond. Trump doesn’t seem capable of learning lessons, but he may soon find out that it’s easier to impulsively choose to start a war of aggression than to decide when and on what terms the war ends.

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  • Trump on Iran’s leadership: “These are bad people. They go out shooting protesters. You’re a protester, they shoot you right through the head. This is an evil group of people.” Who will tell the family of Renee Good?

  • Substituting muscle for brains, Pete Hegseth makes Donald Rumsfeld sound like Von Clausewitz: “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies. Yet some in the press just can’t stop. People look at the TV and they see banners, headlines — I used to be in that business, I know everything is written intentionally. For example, a banner — ‘Mideast War Intensifies.’ What should the banner read instead? How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. Or more fake news from CNN. CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the impact of the Iran war on the Strait of Hormuz. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better…The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

  • Draft evading President, now thinks he’s Attila the Hun, although Attila rode with his marauders and wasn’t nearly this sadistic (or stupid): “I, as 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so.”

  • In an echo of Bush and Cheney ignoring the CIA’s memo of August 6, 2001, that “bin Laden Determined to Strike the US,” Trump blew off warnings from his intelligence agencies that Iran was likely to retaliate for a US attack by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, telling aides that they’d never close the oil tanker passage with him in charge. Trump apparently based his fatal miscalculation on the advice of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who offered that Iran hadn’t blocked the Strait during the 12-day war last summer.

Wright: “Fortunately, the US produces more oil than we can consume. We’re a net oil exporter. So overall for the US economy, this isn’t bad news.”

Apparently, Wright drank so much fracking fluid to prove it was “safe” (it’s not) that he is no longer capable of realizing that people are looking at the price per gallon tick up as they drive down the street from gas station to gas station? (Nationally, gas prices are 30 cents a gallon higher than last week and 80 cents higher than last month.)

  • WSJ: “Think about the Red Sea: Six months after the Houthis stopped the attacks, and traffic has not normalized. It’s all about perception of safety. And we are far away from that.”

  • Trump is the ultimate–to put it in the second-grade language he might understand–”wuss,” the smack-talking bully who cowers before a punch is even thrown. He goes it alone. Predictably fucks it up. Then demands that the countries he habitually disparages come to his rescue.

  • The UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Thursday that up to 3.2 million people in Iran have been displaced by the war. “This figure is likely to continue rising as hostilities persist, marking a worrying escalation in humanitarian needs,” UNHCR said in a statement. It added that most have fled from Tehran and other major cities toward the north of the country or rural areas.

  • Bahrain’s large Shia population is ruled repressively by a Sunni dictatorship, enforced by the US and its Gulf allies. The war on Iran has reignited the popular resistance in Bahrain. “U.S. sources confirm Bahrain has brought in Jordanian anti-riot troops to suppress protests over Washington’s war with Iran and the kingdom’s role hosting U.S. military. It’s the first time since the Arab Spring that Bahrain has called in foreign forces.”

  • The Pentagon estimates that the first week of the war with Iran cost $11.3 billion. In the first 72 hours of its attack on Iran, the US military used more than $5 billion worth of missiles and bombs.

  • New polling in Italy shows 69.5% of Italians believe Italy should follow Spain’s lead and deny the use of U.S. military bases on its territory. Only 15.9% disagree.

  • Jason Hickle: “The US bombing of schoolchildren in Iran is the biggest single US massacre of civilians since My Lai. The Israeli bombing of Tehran’s oil storage constitutes the biggest single act of chemical warfare against a civilian population in history. Grotesque new depths of barbarism.”

  • According to Axios, Trump rejected an offer from Vladimir Putin to move Iran’s uranium to Russia.” They wanted the spectacle of bombing the hell out of the country.

  • German Chancellor Merz said the US and Israel appear to have “no common plan” for bringing the war against Iran “to a swift and convincing end”.

  • “Plans?” What plans? Who needs a friggin’ plan? Don’t you know plans are woke, man?

  • Claudia Sheinbaum: “I oppose the U.S.-Israeli war axis. Bombing schools full of girls is a crime, not defense.”

  • Trump: “We did a little excursion. A couple of weeks, a few weeks of excursion, had to take an excursion, but it’s doing well. We had to take a little trip to get rid of some evil, very evil people. The market is holding up well. I figured we would be hit a little bit, but we were hit less than I thought and we will be back on track in a pretty short while. Prices are coming down substantially, oil will be coming down.”

  • Will Trump make Hegseth rename the Department of War the Department of Excursions?

  • Wag the Pedophile’s Dog! A new poll shows that the majority of Americans (52%) believe Trump launched the Iran War to distract from disclosures about his role in the Epstein scandal. The Washington Post labeled this a “conspiracy theory,” while the ADL denounced it as “anti-semitic.”

  • Lindsey Graham, Senator from Tel Aviv: “I will be with Israel until my dying day. To all of the isolationists, forget it. I am not with you. I am with Israel.”

  • New survey finds that 46% of American voters, including a majority of independents, believe Donald Trump is more responsive to Netanyahu on the Iran war than Americans, which is an incredible number for someone who claims to pursue America First policies…

  • Ted Cruz: “As we sit here right now tonight, the threat of terrorist attack is higher now than it has been for decades. There’s two causes of it. Number one, Joe Biden … “

  • Last week, Jon Stewart, who some liberals want to run for president, did a really stupid segment claiming Iran was simply firing missiles in every direction, hoping they’d hit something. In fact, Iran’s targeting has been fairly precise, hitting US embassies, a CIA station house, radar systems, THAAD and Patriot missile batteries. Yet on the first day of the war, the US’s “smart” bombs hit a girls’ school, killing more than 165 civilians….

  • Spain’s government has approved the removal of Ambassador Ana Salomon from Israel, as a response to escalating tensions over Gaza and Israel’s war on Iran. Spain leads, who will follow?

  • Gianmarco Soresi: “It isn’t a war? It’ll be a war when Trump can claim he stopped it.”

  • Joe Rogan: “It just seems so insane based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on ‘No more wars, end these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”

  • A week into the Israeli/US war on Iran and 53% of Americans oppose the war, 74% oppose sending US troops to Iran, including 52% of Republicans…

  • A week into the Israeli/US war on Iran and 53% of Americans oppose the war, 74% oppose sending US troops to Iran, including 52% of Republicans…

  • Proud to be part of the <8% who opposed the Afghan War. We were right.

Support for American wars…

World War II: 97% Afghanistan: 92% Iraq: 76% Korea: 75% Libya: 47% Iran: 41%

  • Trump: “They would’ve had a nuclear weapon within 2 weeks to 4 weeks. And they would have used it long before this press conference.” (The war is only a week old.)

  • In 2018, Pete Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, sent him an email that said: “You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

She was eventually harangued into retracting this email, which proved her point.

  • Killing 175 school girls in the name of liberating them. Will you “liberate” the women of Saudi Arabia by cruise missiles next? How about the women of Alabama? (How many mothers, daughters, and grandmothers are you willing to indiscriminately kill in the name of “liberating” them?)

  • The Trump boys have invested in a drone company (Powerus) that plans to sell its Ukraine-acquired technology to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner has been hitting up Middle East big shots for infusions of cash (to the tune of $5 billion) into his private equity firm while working as Trump’s “envoy” to the region, which is now in flames. War profiteers used to be considered about as disgusting as pedophiles. Now we have an administration that coddles and caters to both, tolerated and even celebrated by a large swath of the country…

  • Fox News couch potato Brian Kilmeade, echoed Trump’s call that captains of oil tankers sail through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iranian mines, missiles and revocation of Insurance coverage by Lloyd’s of London: “If you want to diminish the Iranian threat, if you want to make sure this ends with complete Iran capitulation, show some guts and go through that Strait.”

David Sacks.

  • David Sacks, White House AI and crypto czar, breaks the blackout on the effectiveness of Iranian counterstrikes against Israel: “Israel is getting hit harder than they’ve ever been hit before in their history. And we’re only two weeks into this.  If this war continues for weeks or months, then Israel could just be destroyed, large parts of it…”

+++

  • Omar (aka, El Niño) is coming! Omar (aka, El Niño) is coming!

What a time to start another oil war!

  • With the planet hitting only 1.5 °C warming and going up with a bullet, 1 in 3 people are affected by extreme heat, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Research: Health. The report found that on average, “people over 65 now experience about 900 hours each year when heat severely restricts safe outdoor activity, compared with 600 hours in 1950–equivalent to more than a month of daytime hours.”

  • A new study published in Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health found that the level of atmospheric CO2 present in human blood is so high that it’s weakening human skeletons.

  • The rotation of the Earth is slowing as a consequence of the climate-driven rise in sea levels, increasing the length of the average day on Earth by an amount “unprecedented in the past 3.6 million years. (See: Climate-Induced Length of Day Variations Since the Late Pliocene.)

  • Winter 2025/2026 is officially the warmest winter in recorded history for the Western United States, according to NOAA.

  • The Trump administration plans to end the ban on bear-baiting in the national preserves of Alaska. Almost everything they do is both banal and evil.

  • The official count of Yellowstone wolves came to 84 wolves in eight packs. That’s down from 108 wolves in nine packs at the end of 2024. For the past 12 years, the annual number of wolves in Yellowstone has ranged from 100 to 110 wolves. Wolf pup survival was low in Yellowstone National Park in 2025, with the Wapiti pack losing all 11 of its young.

  • Between 2002 and 2023, Parisian car traffic fell by more than half, while cycle lanes expanded sixfold. Now, bicycles make more than twice as many journeys a day as cars. After ending her 12-year stint as Mayor, Ana Hildago: ‘The bike beat the car.’”

  • The five million people living in Orlando, Jacksonville and Gainesville have access to fewer buses than Disney World.

  • The Greening of Britain…

  • Trump: “You’re watching television and you want to watch, but your beautiful wife, our first lady, says, I’m sorry, darling, you can’t watch tonight, the wind has gone down. But I want to watch myself on television. I want to watch myself debate. She says, I’m sorry, darling, we have absolutely no energy, there’s no wind tonight. What a scam. That’s a big sham. I’d say it’s top five.” Trump thinks this absurd rant on wind turbines is funny, not realizing, or caring, that probably 3/4s of the farmers from western Iowa to eastern Oregon are surviving on the money generated from leasing their fields to wind energy companies. He still doesn’t know about batteries, or pretends not to…

+++

Daphy Michel.

Daphy Michel was a 31-year-old Haitian refugee, living and working legally in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. In 2022, Michel legally arrived in the US at a legal entry point in Texas and asked for asylum. She was eventually granted Temporary Protected Status. In September, Michel experienced a “significant mental health episode.” A neighbor called the police and she was taken to the county jail, where she was held on misdemeanor charges for six months. Neither she nor her brother, Carlo, could afford the $10,000 bound.

On February 27, Michel finally appeared before a judge, who dismissed the charges against her. She called her brother to share the good news that she would soon be released after six months in the brutal conditions of county lockup. Four days passed before Carlo got a call. But it wasn’t from Daphne. It was from a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center to tell Carlo that his sister was dead. She’d been found unresponsive at a bus stop an hour away in Pittsburgh with an electronic monitor strapped to her ankle. The doctor told Carlo his sister had died of cardiac arrest.

What Carlo didn’t know was that as soon as Daphy had been released from the county jail, she was taken into custody by ICE on a detainer warrant. The detainer warrant had likely been filed on the expectation that Michel could be immediately deported after being convicted of a crime, even a misdemeanor. But they took her into custody, even after the charges had been dismissed. Then, without informing anyone, ICE drove Michel to an ICE “Enforcement and Removal Operations” facility in south Pittsburgh, where she was processed under ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program. An electronic monitor was strapped to her ankle and instead of driving her back to Charleroi, ICE agents simply dumped her in south Pittsburgh, in an area she didn’t know, more than an hour from her brother and her home.

No one knows what happened to Daphy over the next two days, as she wandered the freezing streets of the city with no phone, no money and nowhere to sleep. But on Monday, March 2, a Port Authority maintenance worker found her body next to a bus shelter near the Smithfield St. Bridge. She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. She was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. That’s when the emergency room doctor noticed the ICE ankle monitor on her leg.

“Why is she dead? What was she doing wandering around in Pittsburgh?” asked Joseph Murphy, a civil rights lawyer with the Allegheny Immigration Group. “It seems perfectly reasonable if you’re going to take someone all the way up here and that far out of their element and process them for all these different things, you could just as easily have driven them back down there, where they’d have their support networks and ideally, where things like this were much less of a risk.”

  • Trump: “A lot of them were let in here; they shouldn’t have been let in. Others are just bad. They go bad. There’s something wrong, something wrong. Their genetics are not exactly your genetics. It’s one of *those* problems.” Can he make it any clearer?

  • The recent surge in ICE arrests in the Pacific Northwest has approached the historic height of arrests during the first Obama administration. The spike was particularly high in Oregon, especially in Multnomah County (ie, Portland). The data sets and charts are included in this link to a new study by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights…

  • Puppy Killer and Tricia are gone. The kidnappings and lying continue…

  • Axios reported that the Trump White House told House Republicans to “stop talking about mass deportations.” It used to be all they wanted to brag about….

  • But Markfortwayne Mullin hasn’t killed a puppy…that we know of.

  • Markfortwayne’s curious enrichment: “Mr. Mullin’s frequent trading, which ramped up after he joined the Senate three years ago, has contributed to a level of personal wealth that has ballooned since he arrived in Washington in 2013 to represent an eastern Oklahoma House district. His assets were worth between $29 million and $97 million in 2024, according to his financial disclosure forms, compared with $2.8 million to $9 million in 2012. (Congressional rules only require lawmakers to report the value of their assets within broad ranges.)”

  • In a ruling last week, Federal Judge William Young wrote that the deportation of pro-Palestinian speakers by DHS “was unconstitutional, abhorrent to a society that cherishes free speech,” and “must never happen again.” Judge Young was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan.

  • Despite DHS’s persistent denials that its immigration agents work on a quota system, ICE agents in Oregon testified in a lawsuit brought on behalf of detained people by the Innovation Law Lab that they were given a “target” of making 8 arrests a day. It didn’t matter if the arrests held up in court. Across Oregon, ICE had a quota of making around 50 arrests a day. (Stephen Miller had ordered DHS to make 3000 arrests a day nationwide.) The officers also said they were instructed to use the Elite app, a surveillance software system developed by Palantir that provides Google-like maps of areas with suspected high-levels of immigrants. The officers testified that the app wasn’t always accurate. The officers also described using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify, which again often produced “false positive” results.

  • A nine-year-old girl of the El Gamal family, who has been held in the noxious Dilley Concentration camp for nine months, wrote a letter pleading to be liberated from her cruel confinement: “Please get us out of here.”

  • “I like my ICE crushed.” So read a sign held up at an anti-war/anti-ICE protest outside the old Carnegie Library here by one of the Catholic Workers, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhists or Unitarian Universalists, who’ve been a near constant presence for peace since Reagan invaded Grenada, may their god/s bless them. (The message was a little more aggressive than normal for this crowd of religious peaceniks, so likely made a Catholic Worker, who have been known to take hammers to the instruments of war.)

+++

  • Palantir’s Alex Karp: “What makes America special right now is our lethal capacities. Our ability to fight war.” All of these asocial tech freaks, who cribbed the names for their companies from Tolkien novels, grew up wanting to be Sauron…(Karp learned his dark arts as a protege of Karola Brede and Jürgen Habermas at Goethe University–one more sorrow for the great poet of German romanticism.)

  • Every Democratic senator–even Chuck Schumer–signed a letter demanding accountability for the strike that killed dozens of Iranian school children, except for one….John Fetterman.

  • At the University of Notre Dame this week, Samantha Power tried to explain how she wrote a book calling genocide “The Problem from Hell” to being complicit in a genocide in Gaza. In sum, she was just following orders: “I don’t just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is. That is the price of being in government.” Of course, as a 4-star humanitarian bomber, Power was always willing to commit a genocide to stop a genocide, except in Gaza, where she helped accelerate one.

  • Harry Truman, 1950: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

  • Trump on Cuba: “It may be a friendly takeover. It may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter.”

  • Lula: “We are a peaceful region: without nuclear weapons, with drones for agriculture and science… not for war! But if we don’t prepare for defense, we will be invaded!” Trump’s mad imperial rampages are going to make every nation pursue a nuclear arsenal.

  • Sen. Rick Scott has his own personal “two China” policy: “Iran is evil. China is evil. North Korea is evil. Communist China is evil. So we’ve got at least four now. Maybe we’ll be down to less now with Venezuela changing and with what Trump is doing in Cuba. Hopefully, we’ll have more people cooperating.”

  • I realize members of Congress have protection against libel laws if they’re making a floor speech, but that jackass Tuberville sent this tweet on as a “Coach”, not a senator. Zohran should sue his ass…

  • James Clyburn is 85, but plans on running for reelection again. The man just can’t give it up, seeing himself as irreplaceable….and he probably is: at wrecking the campaigns of insurgent presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders.

  • It’s clear that John Fetterman’s stroke not only killed part of his brain but also his entire conscience, if he ever had one.

FETTERMAN: We should kill every last member of Iran’s leadership.

VARGAS: His son is now in charge.

FETTERMAN: They should kill him, too.

VARGAS: I mean, 9 months ago, Trump said we ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear threat, and now we’re back bombing again

FETTERMAN: That was semantics.

  • After attending the closed-door deposition of ex-Epstein accountant Richard Kahn, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) told reporters that a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her “was given a settlement” by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.

  • Rep. Andy Ogles: “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”

In 1765, Thomas Jefferson purchased a 1734 two-volume English translation of the Qur’an by George Sale for his law library. His study of Islam influenced his thinking on religious freedom.

It’s estimated that as much as 20% of enslaved Africans brought to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries were Muslim, many of whom continued practicing Islam in secret. The first documented Muslim to arrive in the “US” was Estavancio of Azamor, an enslaved guide from Morocco, who was taken to Florida in 1527, long before Andy Ogles’ ancestors.

  • Benjamin Franklin: “Even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

  • Portland can be insufferably hip and white and at the same time be humane, tolerant and a vibrant place to live, putting on events like the Immigrant and Refugee Girls World Cup…

+++

+AI is polling worse than ICE, while Harris, Newsom and the Democrats are polling worse than Trump and the GOP…

  • Eventually, Trump will declare victory over his “excursion” in Iran, but according to the Financial Times: “TACO on Iran will come too late for Trump.”

  • The WSJ relayed a message this week to American carnivores from the meat industry: “High prices are the new normal in the US beef market.”

  • According to Bloomberg, billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel communicated with Jeffrey Epstein for years, connecting over money, political ties and musings over the role of deception in evolution.”

  • 73.7% of all US wealth is held by those over 55, up from 56.2% in 2000, according to the Federal Reserve. Only 22 % of Baby Boomers say they expect to leave an inheritance.

  • Fourth-quarter GDP growth in the US was revised downward from 1.4% to 0.7%.

  • Michael Harnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America: “Markets are looking like 2008.”

  • Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “no price tag” would make the Iran war unaffordable. Is he talking dollars or bodies?

  • The typical American worker has less than $1,000 saved for retirement, according to a new report from the National Institute on Retirement Security.

  • Former slumlord Donald Trump told House Speaker Johnson to forget focusing on reducing the cost of housing because “no one gives a shit about” it.

  • Iowa farmer Lance Lillibridge: “We’ve had this huge jump in fertilizer prices because of this conflict. With 30% of fertilizer coming through the Strait of Hormuz, we’ve only been in conflict for 12 days here, and our fertilizer costs have jumped 77%.”

+++

  • Store closed signs you see in Portland instead of “Gone Fishin’”…

  • A Catholic priest warned this week that the stage is now set for the rise of the Antichrist. I hope so. The Antichrist would have to be a lot better than who we’ve got running the show now…

  • From Andrew O’Hagan’s scorching piece in the LRB on Epstein and the “Royals”: ‘With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. Bringing down the royal family may be the least terrible consequence of everything Andrew has done. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to travel seventeen miles, the edifice shakes. But when that same man rapes a 17-year-old and calls her a liar, it is the end of days.’

  • A former DOGE employee stole Social Security data, put it on a thumb drive and planned to use it in his new job in the private sector. You’d didn’t really think DOGE was about serving the country, did you?

  • Footwear fascism came to the White House in the form of the Florsheim shoes that Trump is demanding his top advisors and cabinet members wear. The pair of Marco Rubio’s been seen wearing are so oversized they make him look like he’s ready to join the circus, though perhaps that was Trump’s intention?

I stepped up on the platform The man gave me the news He said, “You must be joking, son Where did you get those shoes? Where did you get those shoes?

  • The shoes make the Yes Man!

  • Trump: “Your daughter, she has to be of age. Like above 6 years old.” There’s no longer any context for many of the things that Trump says. The barrier between his subconscious and ego has completely worn away and this sick stuff just seeps out.

  • It’s ironic that the man Christian Zionists hail as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the first great leader of the Achaemenid Persian empire (See: Gore Vidal’s terrific novel Creation), is now bombing the hell out of Persia/Iran. In the Biblical account, Cyrus, after crushing the Babylonians, allegedly freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and allowed them to rebuild Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem…(There’s little evidence to support this.) Still, it’s a good excuse to crack open Herodotus, though the first Greek historian doesn’t mention Cyrus as being an “anointed one” and “messiah” of the Jewish people, as fancifully portrayed in 2 Chronicles and the book of Ezra, and any parallels to Trump remain elusive in my reading.

  • The Dead Kennedys Jello Biafra, a longtime friend of CounterPunch, described his recent stroke:

I hopped out of my bed because I needed to pee, and my left leg just collapsed under me and I fell to the floor. I couldn’t even break the fall with my left arm because it wasn’t working either. I tried to hop back up again, and I couldn’t. I realized I had ‘fallen and I can’t get up!’ It was at this point I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m having a stroke!’ I still have a lot of great stuff in me, but right now I gotta lotta of rehabbing to do.

Jello’s on the mend and will be back in fighting form soon, we trust.

  • FBI director–and frequent flyer–Kash Patel has said that UFC fighters will train FBI agents this week, calling it a “historic opportunity’–a historic opportunity to do what, investigate the trade in anabolic steroids?

  • Erika Kirk to her Club America followers: “Don’t let anyone disenfranchise you–especially you young white male men.” (The “male men” is what the shrinks call a tell, isn’t it?) Kirk has just been appointed to the Air Force Academy board. I thought Pete “Make it a Double” Hegseth didn’t want weepy, emotional women associated with any of the military academies? Kirk: “(This will provide new fodder for Candace Owens’ “transvestigation” into whether Erika is really a man.)

  • Is it just me or do all of those kids behind her look like the offspring of the Stepford Wives? Club America, indeed.

  • Some of you may know Nicky Reid, who writes a weekly column for CounterPunch. His family’s home in Pennsylvania burned down recently and they’ve lost everything. Anything you can pitch in to help will be appreciated.

  • If Kim Gordon asks you to “Play Me,” you probably should…

Stand Up, Hold the Line, Come On, Play me…

Booked UpWhat I’m reading this week…

Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future Bruce Friedrich (BenBella)

The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future of the Promise of a Better Tomorrow Timothy Mitchell (Verso)

How to Read Hegel Now Shannon Hoff (Chicago)

Sound Grammar What I’m listening to this week…

Play Me Kim Gordon (Matador)

Tentative Decisions: Demos and Live Talking Heads (Rhino)

These Frightening Machines Katherine Priddy (Cooking Vinyl)

From Rembrandt to Rimbaud

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