Roaming Charges: the Jesus of Uncool
Tears from Heaven for the Jesus of Uncool (Apologies to Nick Lowe), Getty Museum. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.
– Guy Debord
+ Donald Trump’s few remaining defenders are now reduced to explaining his increasingly erratic behavior as a ploy, that like Hamlet (I mean, the Don can play Jesus on Truth Social, so why not Hamlet on Fox News?), he is merely putting on “an antic disposition,” and is only “mad North-by-Northwest.,” not mad “true north,” not truly insane, but only acting so, as part of some still obscure deep strategy. Yet imagine the state of imperial entropy the US must’ve reached that its $1 trillion war-making budget and 5,000 nuclear warheads no longer command respect or obedience from smaller, much less powerful nations, so that its leader must pretend to be deranged in order to frighten people into submission … and even then, they still resist.
+ In Trump’s America (as in most previous versions of America), crime pays. But war crimes pay better. JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo reported more than $25 billion in profits for the first quarter…
+ According to the American Farm Bureau, the overwhelming majority of farmers, most of whom voted for Trump, now can’t afford to buy the fertilizer needed for this year’s crops. More than 70% of the farmers polled by the Farm Bureau say the price of fertilizer is now too high for them to buy all they need.
+ Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF: “I am concerned that the oil shock is taking attention away from pressing issues, including AI and financial stability risks.”
+ The Economist: “Roughly 18.5 million of Iran’s 93 million people live within a kilometre of a reported airstrike, as do 8.4 million people in other countries.”
+ The US and Israel have bombed 763 schools and 316 health facilities in Iran since the war began, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
+ JD Vance saying the quiet part out loud about the US blockade on the Strait of Hormuz:
What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game.
Vance well knows (or should) that economic terrorism has always been the US’s most efficient way of killing. As Cockburn wrote of Robert McNamara: “After McNamara contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate), he went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.”
+ Bloomberg News: “A hoard of Iranian crude on tankers at sea and robust onshore stockpiles in China will provide a cushion for the nation’s independent refiners should a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz choke off flows.”
+ Kim Jung Un of North Korea, with an ironic gleam in his eyes, offers to broker peace between the US and Iran: “I am always ready to sit down with the US President at any time to make efforts for a mediation with Iran to produce an outcome that the international community would welcome.”
+ The IMF’s World Economic Outlook report on the possible repercussions of the Iran war is grim reading:
“In the severe scenario, (1) The shock to commodity prices is more severe and persistent, with oil prices increasing by 100 percent starting in the second quarter of 2026, relative to the January 2026 WEO Update baseline, but also staying at that level in 2027, before dissipating in 2028 (corresponding to an average petroleum spot price index of about $110 per barrel in 2026 and about $125 in 2027). Gas prices for Europe and Asia increase by 200 percent over the same period, and food commodity prices increase by 5 percent in 2026 and 10 percent in 2027. (2) One-year-ahead inflation expectations ratchet up by as much as 100 basis points in advanced economies by 2027 and by as much as 130 basis points in emerging markets excluding China, also by 2027. (3) A significant risk-off episode pushes up corporate premiums in advanced economies and in China by 100 basis points in 2026, and they stay at that level in 2027, while emerging markets excluding China experience a widening in sovereign spreads of 100 basis points over the same period, along with an increase in corporate spreads of 200 basis points. As in the adverse scenario, the monetary policy response is geared toward containing inflationary pressures rather than stabilizing output.”
+ Reporter: “How much longer will Americans continue to see these high gas prices?”
Trump: “Well, they’re not very high. If you look at what they were supposed to be in order to get rid of a nuclear weapon, with the danger that entails, so the gas prices have come down very much over the last three, four days.”
Reporter: “$4 a gallon still.”
Trump: “I know, you know, that’s what ABC says, but the fact is that if you look, the stock market’s up, everything is doing really well. And the big thing we have to do is we have to make sure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, because if they do, you want to talk about problems, you’d have problems. So, very important is it that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and they’ve agreed to that. Iran’s agreed to it, and they’ve agreed to do it very powerfully.”
+ The national average price of gas per gallon, according to AAA, when Trump told this whopper, was $4.09 a gallon. It was $4.992 a gallon in Oregon and $5.o3 a gallon here in the Portland metro area.
Chevron, Oregon City, Oregon, April 16, 2026. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ In 2025, the US imported 5 percent of its oil from the Middle East.
+ Kevin Hassert: “Imagine if oil prices start going back down because the situation resolves itself somehow, then you could be looking at an inflation close to zero. That’s something the Fed needs to pay attention to.”
Imagine there’s no Hormuz, it’s easy if you lie
No blockade, mines or missiles, the prices not sky high…
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+ After ranting that Pope Leo from the Southside was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump posted this delusional image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social engaged in an act of magical healing (the only kind available to most Americans with RFK, Jr running health policy for the country), as an F-35 wobbles across the sky, unable the fly straight in a 12-mph wind gust…
+ Katie Rogers at the NYT getting some subtly righteous revenge against the man who called her “ugly inside and out”…
The image showed President Trump in a white and red robe, commonly used in renderings of Jesus Christ and in Scripture prophesying his return. Bright golden light, which is used to depict divine intervention in religious imagery, radiated from Mr. Trump’s hand as he touched the forehead of a sick man. A woman observed the scene with her hands steepled in prayer.
As he received two bags of a McDonald’s food delivery to the Oval Office on Monday morning, Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not catch all that religious imagery. He said he had thought the image he had posted to his Truth Social account had depicted him not as Jesus — but as a physician.
“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Mr. Trump said of the social media post, which he deleted after an outcry. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”
+ Trump: “Hand me my surgical robes, Nurse, the red one for terminal cases, and the glowing elixir. No, not the Pfizer, dammit! The Moderna. You know their CEO contributed to my ballroom!”
+ Evidently, Trump can’t recite or even name a single Bible verse, which, if he truly is the anointed prophet of the Messiah, raises considerable doubts as to whether the Latin Vulgate and literalist ESV (English Standard Version) are the true Bible authorized by the Big Guy or a fraud perpetrated by the sinister translator Jerome, that old misogynist, and Irenaeus of Lyons, who purged the Gnostic gospels from the biblical canon and perverted the meaning of the original Greek…
+ Leo from the Southside making the Southside proud, while denouncing neocolonialism in Algeria:
The future belongs (to) those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by power or wealth. Africa knows all too well that people and organizations that dominate others destroy the world.
+ As even the religious right cringed at Trump sliming the Pope and depicting himself as Jesus, the ever-unctuous Mike Johnson attacked the Pope on Trump’s behalf:
A religious leader can say anything they want, but obviously, if you wade into political waters, you should expect some political response and I think the Pope has received some of that. Frankly, I was taken a bit aback by him saying something about ‘those who engage in war, Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers’ or something. There’s something called the ‘just war’ doctrine.
+ Pelosi, when asked why Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus: “You should ask a psychiatrist. It needs diagnosis, not conversation.”
+ JD Vance, the man who lied about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio, instructs the Pope on what he should say about Catholic theology:
When the Pope says God is never on the side of those who wield the sword, there is more than a thousand-year tradition of Just War Theory in Christianity.”
Just as I have to be careful when speaking about public policy as Vice President, the Pope should be very careful when speaking about theology.”
If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, it must be anchored in truth. That’s what I strive for, and it’s exactly what we should expect from the clergy, Catholic or Protestant.
+ I never thought I’d say this, but with two Trump administration Catholics, Tom “the Bag Man” Homan and JD “Why Won’t My Wife Convert?” Vance, attacking Leo from the Southside’s understanding of the Church’s social justice teachings, perhaps it’s time for the Pope to bring back the Inquisition…After all, Leo is the first Augustinian pope and his patron saint, Augustine of Hippo, developed the “Just War” theory for the church. The hubris of Vance and Homan to assert their knowledge of Catholic doctrine above Leo’s is truly Trumpian in its audacity and stupidity.
+ Once again, Joe Rogan ripped into Trump and Netanyahu’s war:
All of it’s terrifying. Any time you’re involved with — you’re shooting missiles into towns and blowing things up, blowing up infrastructure, blowing up bridges — you know, and Israel’s blowing up Lebanon now. It’s like, what the fuck are we doing? Like, how is this still going on?… Netanyahu has been telling the United States that Iran was months away from building a nuclear bomb for 30 years, or 20 years at least,” Rogan continued. “They’ve always been saying that. Trump was the first one to go, ‘All right, let’s do something about it.’ But it seems like they didn’t know what the fuck they were going to do…Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be in office, one of the things that was attractive was this ‘no more wars,’” Rogan said. “And now we’re in one of the craziest ones. And China’s flying in cargo planes filled with stuff. We don’t know what the fuck’s in there. Fun, super fun. Great times.
+ Today, the House failed to pass a resolution to end the war on Iran by just one vote, 213-214. A single Democrat voted to continue Trump and Netanyahu’s war: Jared Golden, the former Marine from Maine. Golden has pocketed more than $1 millionfrom AIPAC and another $2 million from Israel lobby-related donors. As far as I can tell from the FEC database and OpenSecrets, Golden didn’t start getting much, if any, money from AIPAC until after Israel began its genocidal operations in Gaza, when it needed all the political cover it could get. Kind of amazing that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Dan Goldman and Jared Moskowitz didn’t follow suit. I guess all they needed was one. Maybe they drew straws. Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to stand up for Congress’s unambiguous right to declare war.
+ Why would anyone want to be in Congress, enduring the glad-handing, the money grubbing, the banal speeches and artery-clogging food, the snubs, humiliations and insipid conversations with real estate agents, Thursday night preachers and used car lot owners, to end up in a chamber were you have no autonomy, but simply obediently follow the orders of your leadership, right or wrong, even to the point of ignoring the very few obligations you are charged with fulfilling by the Constitution. Is it just for the stock trades?
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+ Netanyahu, who, with his permafrost hair and sagging left eyelid, looks about as decrepit as Trump these days, told Israelis that the US “reports to him” every day on Iran and that JD Vance personally relayed the details of the peace talks to him on the way back from Islamabad: “He reported to me in detail, as members of this administration do every day.”
+ Former Shin Bet head, Ami Ayalon, told France’s TV 24 that most Israelis “don’t see Palestinians as people” and are willing to support Netanyahu’s plan to “annex all the West Bank and Gaza” without considering “the rift that we are creating with the Jewish people everywhere in the diaspora.” Ayalon said that most young diaspora Jews “do not understand us” and “do not accept what they see” Israel doing in the Occupied Territories. “Unless we are able to come to an agreement with the Palestinian people, we shall not be able to create stability in the Middle East,” Ayalon said. “If we do not divide this piece of land (between Israelis and Palestinians), we are heading to apartheid.”
+ From Andrew Cockburn’s latest Substack dispatch on Israel’s increasing reliance on assassination to eliminate its adversaries:
Amid many fits and starts, the Israeli assassination program became steadily more elaborate and ambitious. For the proposed elimination of a single senior Palestinian fighter, Iyad Batat, in the West Bank in 1999, according to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, commanders assembled a joint force consisting of no fewer than nine separate security agencies and units. In Rise and Kill First (2018), his encyclopedic history of the assassination program, Bergman reports that by the year 2000, Israel had launched some five hundred targeted killing operations. By the time the book came out, in 2018, it had conducted eight hundred more.
+ In another sign that the old order is cracking apart, Italy has suspended its “defense” agreement with Israel.
+ Alex Gibney, who secretly made a documentary (The Bibi Files) on Netanyahu’s corruption, which got suppressed in the States: “Netanyahu should be tried as a war criminal. If convicted – and it’s hard to see how he would not be – he should spend the rest of his life in prison, facing the judgment of his cellmates.”
+ Lula da Silva: “I want to say this loudly and clearly: The Israeli president is committing genocide against women and children. This is a historical fact.”
+ Jacqueline Rose in the LRB last year on the Messiah Complex politics of Netanyahu: ‘One of the most dangerous components of modern Israeli statehood as it would come to be personified by Netanyahu is that Israel is always on the brink of disaster, as indeed are all the Jews. It will take catastrophe and a war of resurrection to save them. What should be aimed for is a “restrained catastrophe”, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible.’ So many Messiahs, so little peace…
+ 172—the number of people killed by U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats near Latin America, according to a tally by Airwars, with the latest known strike occurring on April 14. Does anyone care about these weekly homicides on the high seas anymore?
+ Meanwhile, after being stalemated by Iran, Trump, still licking his wounds, ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military invasion of Cuba. Trump snorted this week: “We may stop by the island, after we finish with Iran.”
US War-making budget: $1 trillion
Cuba’s defense budget: $128.6 million
+ Benjamin Fogel has written an edifying essay on the resurgence of Private Military Corporations (ie, mercenaries) after the Blackwater scandals for the current issue of The Baffler:
Maintaining conventional standing armies has proven increasingly expensive and difficult. One need only look to the current recruiting crisis in the U.S. military. While MAGA blames DEI, Pentagon reports find that 75 percent of Americans between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are ineligible to join the military for mental and physical health-related reasons. Obesity and late-capitalist anxieties distract from a more significant development: young Americans are less and less willing to consider fighting for their country after decades of forever wars and generations of social-contract erosion that enriched oligarchs at the expense of the majority.
The return of the mercenary should come as no surprise. After all, if the reach of the market has been expanded to everything from our appified sex lives to our AI-drunk imaginations, why should the market for violence be any different?
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+ At least 118,727 homes in the US were hit with a foreclosure notice in the first quarter of 2026, a 26 percent spike over the same period last year. Sound familiar?
+ The editorial board of the Bezos Post is now officially to the right of the Wall Street Journal…
+ The share of consumers who say their financial situation is worse than it was a year ago due to higher prices soared from 47% in March to 54% in April and is now the highest on record.
+ Amazon deserves the death penalty…Last week, a 46-year-old “tote runner” died on the floor of an Amazon warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon, while pushing a large cart of parcels. The company forced fellow employees to keep working while the corpse lay on the floor in a pool of blood. The manager told workers to ignore their colleague and friend: “Just turn around and do not look. Let’s get back to work.”
+ A new study from the UC Berkeley School of Economics shows that California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage has not reduced employment and has had a negligible effect on prices.
+ Stephen Semler: “Trump’s budget manages to be $361 billion larger than last year’s despite cutting $300 billion in social programs and other public investments. Reason: Trump wants record funding for war and policing.”
+ Private sector unionization has been on the decline since 1960, falling steadily from a high of 35% of the workforce to only 5 percent.
+ Commerce Secretary, and Epstein Island-hopper, Howard Lutnick at conference hosted by Semafor: “The growth rate in the United States will hit 6% under Donald Trump’s leadership. It will hit 6% annual GDP growth under Donald Trump’s leadership.” If he’s talking about the cancer growth rate, he’s probably in the ballpark, maybe a little low…
+ A Gallup survey shows that China has now vaulted over the US in global approval ratings.
+ According to the Globe and Mail, the belligerence of Trump has made nearly 60 percent of Canadians eager to become a full member of the European Union.
+ The normal cost of a train ticket to MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands (so called) of New Jersey is $12.95. During the World Cup, this same ticket will cost $150. Don’t even think about driving; it will cost $225 to park. Want to take a shuttle, if you can find one near you? That’ll be $80. What this means in practice is that most of the people who go to “the people’s game” won’t know anything about the sport and will go not to watch but to be watched by other people wanting to be watched.
+ More than half of American men (52%) between the ages of 18 and 49 say they have an active sports betting account with an online sportsbook like DraftKings, Caesars, FanDuel, or BetMGM. This is a pretty grim way to live, but it probably gives you a better chance of earning a living wage through gambling than working as a “tote” runner in an Amazon warehouse.
+ Speaking of betting in the manosphere, the finger-waging moralist Ben Shapiro is now listing the predictive market (i.e., gambling) outfit Kalshi as a sponsor and quietly running product-placement ads for it on his show.
+ Elon Musk is having his own companies, like SpaceX and Neuralink, buy up Cybertrucks to hide the slumping sales of one of the ugliest vehicles since the Hummer 2, once described as the “Dick Cheney of cars.” Nearly one in every five Cybertrucks (more than $100 million in value) registered during the last quarter of the year were simply delivered from one Musk enterprise to another. Without those phantom sales, Cybertruck registrations in the fourth quarter would have dropped by 51%.
+ Musk: “I have no problem being hated. I hear it. Hate away. I think it’s a real weakness to be liked. A real weakness. I don’t have that.” You don’t say…
+ Ford’s CEO Jim Farley says that Chinese EV makers should be banned from the US, saying the quality and low prices of the cars would be “devastating” to the US manufacturing industry. That’s a pretty fragile industry, Jim. Yet, there are currently only five cars made in the USA that retail for $25,000 or less: the Hyundai Venue, Kia Soul, Nissan Sentra and Nesson Versa.
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Vance sinks Orban’s slim chances for reelection. (You can see it on Orban’s face.)
+ The combined weight of Putin and Trump couldn’t save the Hungarian despot Victor Orban from getting crushed in Sunday’s elections…He accepted his defeat with unexpected grace, something neither Trump nor Putin would have shown.
+ Dean Baker: “We really do need to celebrate the humiliation of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Orbán had done all the undemocratic things Trump is starting to do here. He gerrymandered election districts. He took over the media. He took over the universities. And he took over the courts. He gave government money to his cronies and blacklisted his political enemies. Despite all these efforts to tilt the playing field, which he has been doing for 16 years, the people of Hungary still threw him out on his ass.”
+ Someone emailed me on Monday morning saying that “Viktor Orban is a complete shit, but even he conceded that he lost the election and didn’t claim that it was rigged by Ukraine, as JD Vance warned might happen.”
+ Edward Luce: “People will be closely studying how Hungary’s opposition pulled off their win in such a pro-incumbent system. Important to note that the theme was corruption. Democrats need to get much better at calling out Trump’s corruption.”
Trump summoned Rubio during the cage fight last week for an update on the Iran talks, which collapsed in Islamabad a few minutes later.
+ Katie Rogers again in the NYT on Trump watching a cage fight while the Iran talks fell apart in Islamabad…
On Saturday evening, as Vice President JD Vance took to a podium in Pakistan and said no deal had been reached to end the war in Iran, President Trump was in Miami watching a mixed martial arts fight.
Mr. Trump spent several hours orbited by Secretary of State Marco Rubio; a few of his children; some Ultimate Fighting Championship officials; Sergio Gor, the U.S. ambassador to India; the recording artist Vanilla Ice; Dan Bongino, the former deputy director of the F.B.I.; and the manosphere shepherd Joe Rogan.
He was surrounded by people, but Mr. Trump was somehow an isolated figure. People mostly circulated around him, checking in with updates and then leaving again. For the most part, Mr. Trump sat and impassively watched blood and saliva sprayed out from the fighters beating each other silly in front of him….
+ Unlike Nero, Trump’s Bread and Circuses aren’t primarily geared at distracting the “populari” from a bungled war and a collapsing economy, but mainly to satiate his own sadistic appetites…)
+ While urging Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas to resign because they are (both are younger than he is), Trump showed his own age and the rapid erosion of the limited mental faculties he started out with:
Look at Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could’ve appointed a liberal justice. About two minutes after the election, she went out.
+ Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, shortly before Trump, while he was still president, but shortly before he was defeated by Biden. Breaking precedent, including the one McConnell had just set after Scalia died, the Republican-controlled Senate rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett only a month later and just two weeks before the election, in which he would lose to Biden.
+ Stephen Miller seems to be the only member of his inner circle that Trump’s not fuming about replacing. Has he signed his name in blood on some contract Miller holds? How could you stand to have that guy lurking in the darkest corner of your office every day, salaciously rubbing his cold, pale hands together when the clock strikes the hour like Nosferatu?
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Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+This coyote had been shot and strung up as a trophy on a fencepost in Oregon’s French Prairie.
+ More than 500,000 coyotes were killed in the last year (one every minute), at least 70,000 of them by the US government. This one was killed by a rancher in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and strung up on a fence as a trophy.
+ More than 20 percent of the gray whales that have entered San Francisco Bay in search of food in the last eight years have died, many of them from lethal ship strikes, according to a new study published in Frontiers of Marine Science. But researchers think the real figure may be closer to 50%. The whales have been drawn to the Bay as a result of the decline in their normal food sources due to warming oceans.
+ Richard Powers: “People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
+ According to the EU’s climate monitor, Copernicus, March 2026 was the second-warmest global sea surface temperature on record for the month, the fourth-warmest March globally & the second-warmest for European land. The extent of Arctic sea ice was the lowest ever recorded for March. Meanwhile, the Pacific off the coast of California is already the warmest ever recorded for April…
+ California’s March 2026 was the warmest March on record by an absurd 4.2°F. But March was also warmer than the warmest April by 1.4°F. We’re living on a new planet and no one’s prepared for what’s coming next, maybe not even for what’s coming next month…
+ Summer is now more than a full month longer than it was in the 1960s and its conquest of territory once claimed by spring and fall continues to expand.
+ According to the EU’s climate monitor, Copernicus, March 2026 was the second-warmest global sea surface temperature on record for the month, the fourth-warmest March globally & the second-warmest for European land. The extent of Arctic sea ice was the lowest ever recorded for March. Meanwhile, the Pacific off the coast of California is already the warmest ever recorded for April…
+ How Victor Wembanyama, the NBA wunderkind for the San Antonio Spurs, responded to a question about the environment: “Of course, I care a lot about it, and I feel a certain guilt about polluting so much as someone who flies 41 times a season. But..I want to have an impact, and I want to counteract this negative carbon footprint through whatever impact I can, financially [or] socially, I want to have an impact for the future…Investing, yes, but not for profit.”
+ Rolls-Royce won a £599m loan from the Starmer government to develop the UK’s first small modular nuclear reactors, which will be constructed on the Welsh island of Anglesey.
+ It’s one thing to live in the Dark Ages and another to want to return to them. Case in point: Until 2016, the polio and measles vaccination rates for Republicans and Democrats were roughly the same: roughly 95%. Since then, the vaccination rate for both diseases has held steady for Democrats, but failed to 91% for Republicans.
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+ Ta-Nehisi Coates: ”If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw it at democracy.”
+ The Economist provides a kind of taxonomy of the Democratic Party this week, drawn from interviews and surveys of 19,000 post-2024 Dems. The one thing that unites them is raising taxes on the super-rich and, of course, it’s the one thing that Schumer et al won’t consider in a serious way and war against Russia, which they all seem to be gung-ho for. In other words, it remains a party hopelessly mired in its own internal contradictions.
The Democratic Tribes
Progressives: 40 percent of the party, the whitest group, least supportive of border wall (5%), most in favor of higher corporate taxes (95%.
Establishment Dems: 29% of the party, second least in favor of border wall (18%), second most in favor of higher corporate taxes (92%).
Bootstrap Dems: 18 percent of the party, most religious, most in favor of the border wall 55%), least in favor of raising corporate taxes (62%).
Isolationists: 13 percent of the party, most racially diverse, second most in favor of border wall (38%), third most in favor of raising corporate taxes (64%).
The average position of the Democratic Party factions on Policy issues
Raise Tax rates on people earning over $400K to 35%
Progressive 95%
Establishment: 90%
Isolationist: 76%
Bootstrap: 79%
Ave Democrat: 87%White people have certain advantages
Progressive: 99%
Establishment: 83%
Isolationist: 73%
Bootstrap: 63%
Ave Dem: 80%Increase the number of border patrols
Progressives: 49%
Establishment: 87%
Isolationists: 66%
Bootstrap: 85%
Ave Dem: 67%Decrease the police by 10% and increase other services
Progressives: 67%
Establishment: 16%
Isolationists: 39%
Bootstrap: 26%
Ave Dem: 40%Do not get involved in Ukraine
Progressives: 2%
Establishment: 2%
Bootstrap: 5%
Isolationists: 77%
Ave Dem: 12%Source: Cooperative Election Study, The Economist
+ David J. Bier: “Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend.”
+ The Trump Administration is quietly deporting 30 people against their will to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they will be detained in a hotel near Kinshasa’s main airport, despite opposition from politicians in Congo and blasts from human rights groups.
+ Meanwhile, Togo is demanding that the member states of the United Nations stop using maps based on the 16th-century Mercator projection, which makes Greenland loom as large as Africa when in reality the continent is nearly 14 times larger.
+ I got an email this week from a Polymarket-like site with the subject line: “Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize Odds Slip With Iran War.” No kidding. Intrigued as to what Trump’s odds were after bombing schools, apartments, bridges, hospitals and girls’ volleyball teams, I clicked it open and found that while his chances had indeed “slipped,” at 16/1 he was still ahead of his nemesis, the Pope. Also, Xtian Nationalists must be thrilled to see that the ascended shade of Charlie Kirk is still in the running. If Charlie wins, perhaps he’ll time his anticipated return to Earth to coincide with the ceremonies in Oslo, where any doubting Thomases (or Candaces) can touch his wounds…
2026 Nobel Peace Prize Odds
Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms: 2/1
Médecins Sans Frontières: 4/1
Volodymyr Zelenskyy: 8/1
Yulia Navalnaya: 10/1
International Court of Justice: 11/1
UNRWA: 12/1
Minneapolis: 12/1
Donald Trump: 16/1
David Hogg: 16/1
Francesca Albanese: 16/1
Pope Leo XIV: 20/1
Tamim bin Al Tani: 20/1
Aalayah Eastmond: 20/1
Emma Gonzalez: 20/1
Narges Mohammadi: 20/1
+ Can anyone truly be happy if they’re wearing plastic (well, Polymethylmethacrylate) lips?
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+ In theater, a dumbshow is a mimed play within a play, as in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet (which Kyd almost certainly had his hand in). In politics, a dumbshow is a press conference by Donald Trump.
+ Chloe Zhao’s film Hamnet wrenched forth a torrent of tears from most of us, as would almost any account of such a cruelly abbreviated life. (Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s only son died when he was 11.) But what about Hamnet’s twin, Judith? The most erudite and loquacious (he did tend to go and on) man in English letters, the man who added by far the most new words to the language–more than Milton, Dickens and Joyce combined–didn’t even bother to educate his second daughter, leaving her unable to read his sonnets, epic poems and plays, leaving her illiterate, incapable of writing her own name, so that she had to sign her signature with a “pigtail” mark and have a lawyer or scribe spell it out for her. Another point in favor of my man, Kit Marlowe…
+ This strange to the point of inhumane decision by the glovemaker’s son of a from Avon is potentially revelatory because there are many literate women in the plays and poems, who read and write letters, in particular: Lady Macbeth, Lear’s daughters, Juliet, Rosalind in As You Like It (a gender-bending play that probably can’t be performed in Florida, Texas and Oklahoma), Ophelia, Desademona and, of course, Miranda, who is tutored by her “father” Prospero, an education which doesn’t keep her from falling for the first shipwreck sailor she sees. Then, of course, there are the sonnets, which, if the “Dark Lady” is really a lady, and not an “unfair” young man (as opposed to the “fair youth”), you would expect her to be able to read. All of this lends some pretty heavy weight to those who contend that Shakespeare wasn’t the main author of the plays attributed to him…
+ I paid a visit to Raymond Carver’s grave, in a small cemetery on a hill above Port Angeles, that looks out across the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward Vancouver Island…I was entranced by Carver’s stories in college. They were so tactile, austere and different from the sprawling hyper-ironic meta-fictions that dominated the literary scene in the 70s and 80s. (There is no literary scene now that I’m aware of.) But they took on a whole new depth of meaning once we moved out here. With Kesey, Carver and Cobain, you get a pretty vivid picture of the lives of white working-class people in the post-WW II Northwest. The problem with Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, which is a very funny film, is that Carver doesn’t translate to LA and all of its sunshine, celebrity and pavement.
Port Angeles and the Olympics from the Victoria ferry. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Ocean View Cemetery, Port Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Raymond Carver’s grave site, Port Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Raymond Carver’s grave, Port Angeles. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ Inane press question: “Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?”
Colson Whitehead: “I could have written about upper-middle-class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
+ Ian Penman reconsidered The Beach Boys in the latest LRB: ‘To an extent rivaled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever-expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair.’
+ If Brooklyn ever gets another Major League Baseball team–and lord knows they should, given how the last one was stolen from them–they should return to the original whimsical and unwarlike name of the Bridegrooms or the Grooms, which may explain, I think, the heart shape inside the gothic Bs of the 1949 caps, which I’ve been wearing all week in honor of Jackie Robinson, even though his day is now completely drained of all political resonance and is merely celebrated as an excuse for MLB, Nike and Fanatics to feel good about themselves while selling new merch that costs more than the monthly salaries of the players in the old Negro leagues…
+ This week, Thomas Branch resolutely approached the People’s Tribunal in Defense of the Common Language with a demand that the phrase “It is what it is” be stricken from the lexicon. The Tribunal conferred and concurred with Citizen Branch that the noisome and meaningless cliché, which leads only to indolence and apathy, be abolished by the executioner’s sterilizing blade.
We Trim your hedges, We Fight Your Wars, Wait in the Trenches and We’re Fucked ’til We’re Sore
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
No to Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War
Linda Pentz Gunter
(Pluto)
Ecological Explosions: the History of Biological Invasions and Invasion Science
Daniel Simberloff
(Chicago)
Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy
Daniela Russ
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Jackson Plays Dylan
Javon Jackson
(Solid Jackson)
At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago
Ahmad Jamal
(Resonance)
Picture in Mind
Rachel Love
(Slumberland)
‘Goddamn, He’s Still Got It!’…Nah
“But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he’s having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that’s why: either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him. When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as I was about its subject matter, and I remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose key was the ridiculously spiteful ‘Idiot Wind,’ I found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome; I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: ‘Goddamn, he’s still got it!’ Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan.”
– Lester Bangs
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