We knew he was a crook. The latest Trump heist comes for us all.

The United States is not only failing to "win" but also actively losing Donald Trump's glorious new iteration of a Middle East war. 

Journalist and historian Garrett Graff explains:

... The Pentagon is telling Congress today an initial, partial tally of the monetary cost of the war (the cost in human lives, instability, and reputation is of course much higher): The first week of the war cost about $11.3 billion — an enormous number that is hard to even tally. To put that in context: It’s a number larger than the annual state budget of some 16 states, including Iowa or New Mexico and represents roughly the entire annual state budget of Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

More than that, though, is how we as a nation spend money on war and “immigration enforcement” as if it’s endless, while skimping on all the expenses that actually help our fellow humans. We have already added this past year $150 billion to the defense budget — while destroying and dismantling the $35 billion we spent on the US Agency for International Development. 

As I wrote and investigated a couple weeks ago, the $52 billion construction and procurement budget for Customs and Border Protection is so large that it represents more than the defense budgets of Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, and Norway combined.

The remaining money to spend this year that CBP has to spend equals the entire GDP of Estonia. 

I think a lot in moments like this of the 1953 speech by Dwight Eisenhower about the cost of war versus peace. 

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” [President Dwight] Eisenhower told a group of newspaper editors. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” 

What could $11.3 billion have bought us if we spent it here at home? A few data points: We spent in the 2020-2021 school year a total of about $21 billion to feed near universal school lunches and breakfast across the country during the pandemic — a life-changing educational investment for children. Or today: $11.3 billion would cover putting 1.4 million on Medicaid or into affordable housing — that’s the entire population of New Hampshire or Maine. 

Remember all of this the next time you hear a politician tell you there’s not enough money for this social safety program or that one. ...

I am confident we the people didn't make this grifting moron the president in the hope he'd crash our economic well-being. But here we are.

What does it know? What do we know?

Somebody asked the AI chatbot Claude Opus 4.6 what it is like to be a Large Language Model. 

 Seems to be busy -- and importantly, is emphatically not a human. 

Via Micah Sifry.  

Excrement compounded

There's a tongue-in-cheek joke that our wars are how Americans learn what little we know about global geography. Apparently the Orange Toddler's latest Middle East atrocity is going to teach us about fertilizer.

From the NY Times [gift]: 

... War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.

... “It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”

... The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.

... Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.

... The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.

India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.

As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.

... A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.

The ignorance of the Trump clowns is no excuse.

• • •

Nor is ignorance an excuse for what US and Israeli bombing of Iranian oil depots has wrought. Bill McKibben tells the story of in pictures.

... here’s the Guardian reporting on what that feels like to the people living there

Speaking to the Guardian via voice notes, Negin – not her real name – an activist and former political prisoner based in the central-east side of the city, said the situation was “apocalyptic”.

“The situation is so frightening it’s hard to describe. Smoke has covered the entire city. I have severe shortness of breath and burning in my eyes and throat, and many others feel the same. But people still have to go outside because they have no choice. Many places reopened today, but closed again because it’s impossible to stay outdoors.”

They also heard from a woman, Mehnaz, who wanted to flee after the initial strikes Saturday night.

Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside … [I am] clueless whether to stay in or brave the flames and drive out while it’s still on fire. I don’t even have a mask.”

Fire and fury indeed -- to distract from probable child rape in the Epstein files?

Liz Specht –1929-2026

There was a lot of life in those long years: wife and partner to Eddie Specht for over 70 of them, mother to three children in the 1950s, doting on many grandchildren and a great grandchild, faithfully seeking to encounter a living God through an Episcopal path, and abiding as a "deacon of the earth" always.

Emerging from Grosse Pointe, Michigan and Wellesley College, she gave so much in that life: founding a tutoring program for San Francisco Mission District kids that grew up to be Mission Graduates and also an international aid nonprofit, El Porvenir, which works with Nicaraguans to bring clean water to rural Nicaragua. To the last, she was engaged in civic activism with her Mill Valley community.

For many years, Liz and Ed lived on a boat in Alameda, California. You might notice that water was a theme in this life.

Working a winch on a catamaran off Belize in 2004

  

Riding a pony across a Nicaraguan stream in 2018

Pensive alongside the Mill Valley Cascade in 2025

Out for a short walk at the beginning of March 2026

She was gentle, curious, thoughtful, determined and sometimes fierce. Many loved her; she gave love to many.

We must not become numb ...

A Pew Research Center survey in twenty-five countries asked respondents "to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country." According to the report, only people in the USofA thought a majority (by 53%) of their peer citizens were immoral and/or unethical.

There were other countries which came close to that judgement: Turkey (49%) and Brazil (48%) stand out. But people in most of the surveyed countries thought far fewer were off the ethical rails; the most trusting included Canada (7%), Indonesia (8%), and India (9%). 

We sure don't trust each other these days; I'd hazard the U.S. findings are just about Civil War numbers. We believe, earnestly, that those other guys must be despicable and dangerous. I certainly do think that what MAGA has wrought, through attacks on immigrants and people they see as queer, is quite simply evil. Not all Republicans, but hey ...

John Della Volpe of Harvard reports a finding from a focus group with young adults with mixed political leanings in Charlotte, NC. 

ICE Didn’t Just Target Immigrants

I’ve written before about how ICE has become a feeling for Gen Z, not just a policy. Charlotte made that visceral. Nearly every hand went up when I asked if ICE operations were affecting them personally — across race, gender, and political identity.

A 22-year-old Black behavioral therapist described what happened at her autism center: “The families were scared. They didn’t send their kiddos to therapy. Staff were losing out on hours, the kiddos were losing out on hours — nobody felt safe.”

A Hispanic caseworker and new mother described days away from her baby because parents were being detained and children had nowhere to go.

A refugee resettlement worker said even legally documented families stopped attending appointments out of fear.

When legal status doesn’t eliminate fear, enforcement has created something beyond policy.

It has created a climate.

Friday was the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, of the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, AL, which segregationist cops broke up with clubs and horses. 

Selma is nearby and feels live to Alabama-based legal commentator Joyce Vance:

... On the anniversary of Selma, a moment that reminds us that Americans are capable of coming together and doing great things, MAGA remains enthusiastic about where Trump is taking the country while many Americans seem to have become numb from the constant barrage of truly horrible things this administration does and is perfectly fine with. ...

... We need the kind of national courage that took us from Selma to the Voting Rights Act in the space of five months. It’s difficult in a sense because there are so many different outrages that it’s hard for people who love democracy to pick one to coalesce around. They all deserve our attention.

... There is great danger in moments like this, and that is precisely why we need to make sure we don’t let this go.

She's right. Wherever we fit in our kaleidoscopic patterns of mutual incomprehension and resistance to ignorance and cruelty, we cannot let go. 

History is complicated

This thoughtful young man, Mik Barnes, mulls over the discovery that his ancestors include white men who fought for the Confederate States to preserve Black slavery in the U.S. Civil War. 

The Cado "Parish" he refers to is Louisiana-speak for what most states would call Cado "County."

Video by way of  Civil War Memory.

Does anyone else think that is a Fred Hampton t-shirt that he's wearing?

On cornering that slippery eel ...

Jay Kuo is a lawyer, a besotted father, a playwright, and chair of the Human Rights Campaign. He's also an acute observer of these distressed disUnited States and of our rogue pseudo-king. 

And Kuo, correctly in my view, suggests we step back as we prepare to say NO KINGS on March 28 and notice the dents we are making in the regime.

The Shit Hits the Fan ...

There is a tendency to dismiss any forward progress against the Trump regime, with many on the left asserting (even before they’ve understood the facts fully) that nothing ever matters and that Trump and his allies will never face accountability.

That gut reaction is understandable given how often we have gotten close only to see Teflon Don skate free. He is a very slippery eel, to be certain. But it is factually inaccurate and counterproductive to our aims.

It’s sometimes helpful to zoom out and ask what it is we have been demanding and to compare that against what has been achieved so far. When we go through this exercise, we can more easily identify areas of laudable progress.

With the Department of Homeland Security, we have been demanding Kristi Noem’s firing, along with Greg Bovino’s. We have been insisting that Noem’s corruption and grift, her exploitative and racially charged ads, and her brutal overseeing of mass detention centers and the illegal, warrantless seizure of immigrants and U.S. citizens come to an end.

On each of these questions, we have scored significant gains. Federal judges have ruled on the illegality of the warrantless seizures, and Democrats have held firm on shutting down DHS entirely until their demands on ICE reforms are met. 

Bovino was sent packing after Minneapolis, and now Noem herself is also gone. Shady contract awards to Noem’s political cronies are now under intense congressional scrutiny, and Noem is on notice that she will face charges if the evidence shows she committed crimes.

On the bloody and illegal war against Iran, which is now several days old, there is a steep political cost that Trump, Hegseth and the GOP must now bear on top of the hundreds of lives lost and billions of dollars already spent. ... the America First wing of the Republican Party is now in open revolt against the war. This will only deepen the electoral woes of the GOP in November should the war drag on.

And while the press concededly has often disappointed us in its coverage of Trump, with respect to the Iran war there has already been stellar reporting, without which we wouldn’t know who is to blame for the killing of scores of Iranian schoolgirls.

The latest Epstein files are a story that won’t go away for Trump, despite his best efforts to distract us from them. The latest disclosures are less than a day old, but already they are ricocheting across the internet, including with the president’s QAnon base. The Justice Department apparently tried to hide these files from the public, which has led many people to ask why. Now we know, and it’s truly bad for Trump.

It’s one thing to focus on a host of anonymous tips from a national hotline. It’s entirely another for the FBI itself to have conducted four interviews of the same witness, as well as spoken to other witnesses about the claims. It found the allegations credible enough to feature them as the lead on an internal PowerPoint slide.

The story over the cover-up isn’t yet over. While the DOJ finally produced the Form 302s themselves, they still failed to produce the FBI’s notes taken in conjunction with those reports. This only adds to the suspicion that there is even more they are trying to hide.

It is no small matter that Congress voted nearly unanimously last year to release the Epstein files. Nor is it a small matter that five GOP members of the Oversight Committee crossed party lines this week to vote with the Democrats to subpoena the U.S. Attorney General. This is only happening because there are some in the GOP, such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) who decided to put principle over party.

As Trump’s approval ratings sink further and his power dwindles, look for more Republicans to suddenly find the courage to defy his wishes. We aren’t fully there yet, as the failed War Powers Resolution demonstrates, but there are now major cracks in the Trump wall. These cracks are growing bigger, not smaller.

That’s why it’s vital to keep encouraging, rather than dismissing, the tireless efforts of certain reporters and lawmakers to press forward. We should recognize and celebrate important progress when it happens, even while remembering that getting the goods on Trump and his cronies has never been easy.

Each of us has the power to decide whether we are part of that effort, or whether we’d rather fold up our tents and give up just as our long efforts are finally starting to pay off.

Boldface added for readability. 

I think Kuo is right. Hard as it seems with every atrocity, with every cruelty, with every unnecessary death at the hands of this murderous regime, more and more of us are throwing sand in their gears. Nothing else to do if we're to retain our self-respect and regain a country. 

Busy today

A lot happening out there in the disintegrating USofA and beyond, but this catches a lot of it.

That is all.
 

A.I. in war and peace

"Last week, as New Scientist reported that leading A.I. models kept recommending nuclear strikes during war-game exercises, the Department of War tried to strong-arm Anthropic, its leading A.I. vendor, into backing down from its demand that its tools not be used for domestic surveillance or totally autonomous warfare. In general, I’m not an A.I. doomer who thinks existential risk or even thoroughgoing social disruption is right around the corner. But these developments didn’t seem great.

"Then the Pentagon proceeded to launch an attack on Iran, reportedly with the help of Claude, even though President Trump had banned its use just hours before. It’s possible that one of the first targets was an elementary school in which at least 175 people were killed. (Neither Israel nor the United States has claimed responsibility for the strike.) ...

"... The major A.I. companies quickly grew so large and so important to the near future of the American economy that they began to seem not only too big to fail but perhaps so big that the government was scared to interfere with them. And now, partly in response, a genuinely democratic backlash is brewing ...  The country is hugely anxious about what’s to come while at the same time seeming to lack real faith in anyone, or in any institution, to actually manage it. One common analogue for artificial intelligence is nuclear weapons...."

David Wallace-Wells [gift article] argues that a combination of opportunity, nimbyism, and local targeting has channeled vehement popular opposition to unregulated A.I. into preventing build-out of massive data centers. 

"... A.I. arrives in that landscape like an all-encompassing symbol of people’s powerlessness, which is already here but is bound to grow worse, heralding a vision of the future in which much of the ordering of society has been handed over to robots operating in black boxes controlled by a small number of immensely wealthy people.

"Increasingly, voters seem to be trying to take things into their own hands, rising up in opposition to the intrusion of A.I. infrastructure into their local communities.... Younger voters especially hated the building of data centers ... an interesting inversion of the conventional pattern in which younger people are both more tech-friendly and less opposed to change than their parents. ..."

People can be roused and organized in opposition; A.I. is politically potent because what we know and what we are told echoes our felt fears.

"... I don’t know how it will address fears that a small group of tech oligarchs are working feverishly to design a future in which many of the rest of us might be rendered functionally obsolete. “The cultural and economic impact of A.I. is going to be the biggest issue in politics over the next decade,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in December, expressing what has become an even more common refrain in the couple of months since. “I think we have not a clue,” said [Senator Bernie] Sanders in announcing his data center [regulation] bill. “We are totally unprepared for what is coming,” he added, predicting “massive job loss” and widespread “cognitive decline.” ...

"... In the past three [years], we’ve gone from casual users freaking out about their first encounters with ChatGPT to the Pentagon staging industrial-strategy-level fights over whether fully autonomous A.I.s can be deployed in war zones without any human oversight. In the next three? Those exponential curves may not bring us to a new godhead, but the genie doesn’t exactly look like it’s going back in the bottle, either. And those hoping to play a more active role in shaping the future that it’s conjuring will probably have to do more than stop ground from being broken for a few new data centers. 

Technological progress can't be stopped, but can it be regulated. Maybe. 

I grew up in the shadow of the atom bomb, raised with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's requirement that school children become practiced in ducking under their desks should the great mass incineration seem immanent. (Really! Since nuclear proliferation is pretty much sure to recur in the law-free world we have slipped into in 2025, that anxiety is likely to reinvigorate.) And then, with the end of the Cold War, awareness of the nuclear threat became a second order terror, superseded by global pandemics and, for some, the immanent arrival of aliens, extraterrestrial or not.

Can human beings survive ourselves? We always have, though often at terrible cost in lives and suffering. The Orange Toddler's perfect little war should force all this onto the agenda of a free people. But will it? Do explore David Wallace-Wells' musings. He's smart, measured, and thought provoking. 

The last rational man

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime being alternately denounced for choosing to be himself by converting from Catholicism to Islam while young -- and also being admired as one of the most exciting, skilled, and durable basketball greats ever. Meanwhile, he's gone about his business of trying to be a thoughtful and rational man in an irrational nation and world.

As he does about most doings of his country, he has opinions about Iran and the Orange Toddler's war:

... When you step back and look at the full arc of the Islamic Republic, a pattern emerges. This is a regime that has survived by manufacturing enemies abroad and crushing dissent at home. It has used religion as a shield and a weapon, not as a source of compassion or justice. It has turned a country with immense human and natural resources into a place where young people dream of leaving, where talent is exported and fear is imported into every home.

The cost, both to Iran and the United States, has been staggering. Americans have lost loved ones in bombings and wars shaped by Ayatollah’s hand. Iranians have lost children to bullets, prisons, and gallows. The region has been destabilized by proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Millions of refugees have been created by conflicts in which the Islamic Republic has played a central role. And inside Iran, generations have grown up under a government that treats their aspirations as threats.

Iran is an ancient civilization with poetry, music, science, and philosophy that have enriched humanity for centuries. The problem is not Iran; the problem is a regime that has hijacked Iran’s name and used it to justify violence and repression.

A world without the Islamic Republic as a governing system would be a world where American families wouldn’t have to learn the names of distant cities only because their sons and daughters died there in attacks planned in Tehran. It would be a Middle East where one of its largest, most educated populations could participate openly in building regional stability instead of being used as cannon fodder in ideological battles.

And yet, in spite of all that, the U.S. cannot be the country that begins wars, or even conflagrations. We cannot become the world’s attack dog. We cannot simply march into a sovereign nation and take out their leader or system of government. 

Have we done that in the past? Have we begun and even sustained conflicts without going through the proper channels, also known as congressional support?

Yes we have. And it has never, ever turned out well. ...

Kareem puts me in mind of The Last Rational Man, a poem by Margaret Atwood. 

Yet cry out against war we must. 

Pioneers remembered

Obituaries marking the passing of runner and entrepreneur Jeff Galloway reminded me again of how much I owe to the generation of accomplished athletes, who, in the 1970s, popularized road and trail running for the untalented masses. That includes me.

Galloway promoted a run-a-little, walk-a-little system for enabling us to complete races and distances we never might have imagined. I never took to his system, preferring to develop a long, slow, distance habit of running that enhanced my fitness. But people like Galloway and Dr. Joan Ullyot made it acceptable for we, the slow pokes, to stumble out there in a way that had been unimaginable before. Movement was no longer confined to "real" athletes; it was encouraged for everyone.

I observe the trend they started is still with us, because I see it outside my San Francisco front window. Before the pandemic, I was the very rare older person who ventured for a trot on the local Mission city streets, usually at dawn. Reduced traffic during the shutdown months brought out a new generation of runners; many are still continuing an urban running practice today.

For the last few years, infirmities have reduced me to long, slow walking using trekking poles, but I still keep up the regularity I long ago learned from the first running boom. Twenty to twenty-five miles a week, however slow and whether I like it or sometimes not. 

I remain grateful to the generation pioneering mass athletic participation of whom Galloway was an important leader!