A psychotic war made by two psychopaths

Uri Misgav is an Israeli journalist, publicist, lecturer, teacher and director, formerly with Haaretz, the closest thing Israel has to a mainstream opposition newspaper. 

Haaretz gave him oped ed space to denounce Prime Minister Netanyahu's current war. 

I wish to write my opinion about the war. No filters. It's important to do this because, heaven forbid, a missile will hit our rented apartment in Jaffa or the shelter in the assisted living facility next door where we run to during the incessant sirens. I'm using the free platform provided me by Haaretz, which has been under frontal assault by the government in recent years. It is also my right to make my civic voice heard in a democratic country (still, ostensibly).

I think that this is a psychotic war. One that Israel and the United States entered led by two psychopaths. Vainglorious, narcissistic, disconnected. They're up to their necks in political and legal trouble. They head the two most fundamentalist and anti-democratic governments in the history of their countries. And they have the chutzpah to preach democracy elsewhere.

It gets worse.

At the moment, it's a deluxe war, based on bombing from an open air corridor high above, with almost no enemy antiaircraft or jets. Or bombing by American cruise missiles, which sometimes hit desalination plants or a girls school. The cannon fodder are Israelis and people in the Gulf states. 

Also the Iranian people, whom U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are encouraging to replace the ayatollahs' regime even as they are being savagely bombed and hit by black rain after oil depots were attacked. 

And one million Lebanese who were again ordered to evacuate their homes, or were simply unfortunate enough to live in Beirut. Everything is supposed to give rise to "changing the face of the Middle East for generations."

... I have a name for this war: the roaring psychos.

 

Mishav, for all his desperation at finding himself huddling in shelters as a consequence of the vicious stupidity of a government he despises, writes obliviously, ignoring the two million Israeli Arab citizens and the additional two and a half million residents of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. These people largely do not enjoy the same high class bomb shelters.

In the Israeli/Palestinian +972 Magazine the journalist Meron Rappaport puts the psychopaths' war in a  perspective that is both closer to home and wider at the same moment. 

Questioner: ... Where do you see the Palestinians in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and the Palestinian refugees fitting in Israel’s or Netanyahu’s plan for the region and for Iran? 

Rappaport: In two words: not here. I think the genocide and the partial ethnic cleansing in Gaza set a model that this is possible. Or at least I think Netanyahu and his allies think it’s possible, even if we, Israel, failed to do the total ethnic cleansing. 

There are still two million Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, they live in tents and in broken houses, but they are there. But I think it opened up the appetite to do this, that this is possible, that the world will not oppose, that there will be no internal opposition to that. 

Of course we see that in the West Bank, it’s still the semi-official policy in the West Bank. It’s not the official policy — the ethnic cleansing. In Italian there is ufficiale and there is ufficioso. Ufficiale is official and ufficioso is half-official. There is this policy in the West Bank of half-official policy of ethnic cleansing. Still, you have to see the big picture, it does not still succeed fully or even partially. You know, for the communities hit in the Jordan Valley or Masafer Yatta, it’s terrible for every community, but there are still two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank.

But I think this is the idea. The idea is put on the table. It was more or less agreed upon by the army, which was previously a little bit opposed to this kind of move. So I think that there is a semi-official policy of ethnic cleansing and really wiping out any opponent like Israel did in Gaza. We see it in Lebanon now really leveling out. 

The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said yesterday that Israel should have no alternative but to go into South Lebanon and bring down a few villages, level down a few villages. This really went into the bloodstream of Israeli society, not only Netanyahu and his allies, the army, the institutions. 

Of course, it will be hard to do the same thing in Iran, 2,000 miles away and with 80 million people but what we are seeing, the bombing, the pressing now in Tehran, other cities are leveling down. The idea is the same. 

This is, I think, really here Israel’s biggest contradiction maybe or problem. Because if this is the thinking — that taking down the Iranian regime — if someone really believes, and of course we put a lot of question marks on this, but let’s say that people do believe that taking down the Iranian regime will make it possible for Israel to live in peace in the Middle East without giving Palestinians their rights. 

If someone really believes in this I think quite soon he will realize this is not the case. I think Israel will learn quite quickly that it did not solve anything, that the Palestinians are here. ...

The vocation of a genuine objector within Israeli society is lonely. +972 Magazine and Standing Together attempt the near impossible: a joint Israeli/Palestinian peace movement from within.

Much as the two psychopaths wish, Palestinians cannot be just erased from the reality of the lands of their ancestors.

So far, they haven't figured out how to turn off the sun

NPR reports:

Easy-to-install solar panels that plug into a regular outlet are getting attention just as Americans are worried about rising energy costs. That's because these plug-in or balcony solar panels start shaving off part of a homeowner's or renter's utility bill right away.

"A year ago, nobody was talking about this," says Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a California nonprofit group that advocates for plug-in solar. The panels are already popular in Germany, where more than 1.2 million of the small plug-in systems are registered with the German government.

For the panels to become more widely available in the U.S., state lawmakers are proposing bills that eliminate complicated utility connection agreements, which are required for larger rooftop solar installations and, most utilities say, should apply to plug-in solar too. Those agreements, along with permitting and other installation costs, can double the price of solar panels. ...

The utility companies which make a business of selling electricity don't like the promise of plug-in panels ...

"They don't want anyone messing with their business model," Stryker says. "Kicking up dust regarding safety concerns is definitely a strategy that is being used by people who don't want this for their own self-interested reasons." 

Utilities also raise potential safety issues. But they ignore that Germans have been conducting the experiment for a decade.

... with more than a million systems installed, no safety incidents have been reported for customers who used the panels as instructed, according to a research paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

... Stryker says plug-in solar took off in Germany once renters were allowed to install the systems, and she sees the potential for a similar trajectory in the United States. 

State legislation which would overcome utility company opposition is under consideration in Utah and Virginia.

Where's California in this? 

Friday cat blogging

Actually this should probably be titled something like "domesticity at a quiet moment."  The beasts are often not so settled. Erudite Partner can even read without interruption, not always the case.

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.