Israel thought that Trump was a trusted partner

The nasty guy has announced an agreement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have already signed it. And the more we hear about it the worse it is for America. The deal opens the Strait now and puts off the big issues to be resolved over the next 60 days (don’t hold your breath). One of the possible sticking points is Israel and Lebanon. Iran says that must be part of the deal. But the nasty guy doesn’t control Netanyahu – to the point of letting loose a few expletives. Merlin196360 of the Daily Kos community discussed that Netanyahu has the ability to blow up the deal. But does he have the chutzpah to use it?

There are two parts to this Israeli fantasy. The first is that the Iranian regime could be overthrown with just airstrikes alone. The American military knew this already, but Trump and Netanyahu just proved this point. The second part of the fantasy is that Netanyahu and the Israeli public thought that Trump was a trusted partner. The only people more delusional and gullible than Netanyahu and the Israelis about Trump are MAGA cultists.

Netanyahu was not told the nasty guy is capitulating and had no input to the terms. As the details of the deal are being made public the number of Israelis who object will skyrocket. They can’t take their anger out on the nasty guy. That leave Netanyahu to receive the backlash. The Israeli leader is surely hoping someone will stop the nasty guy. We’ve already seen such a person has already been shoved out of the way. The nasty guy signed the deal while in France and at the Palace of Versailles where he had dinner with French leader Emmanuel Macron. Emily Singer of Kos reported on the news:

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in France during the G7 gathering. “But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” Trump’s comment is an accidental admission that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz boxed him into this deal—in which Iran gets both sanctions relief and hundreds of billions to rebuild from the bombing carried out by the U.S. and Israel—because the longer the major oil passageway remained closed, the closer we got to economic collapse.

This is a wild admission from an Oval Office occupant. Iran holding the global economy hostage worked. They’ll surely do it again. “Even Republicans are saying that the deal Trump struck is itself a catastrophe.” Singer is sure Macron knew and that the nasty guy didn’t that the Palace of Versailles is where Germany signed its unconditional surrender in WWII. I just realized I’m getting conflicting information. One part says he signed the deal while at the fight on the White House South Lawn that was staged for his birthday last Sunday. This site says he signed it while in France. That’s in addition to the formal signing in Geneva in Sunday (or maybe Friday?). Kos community member chloris creator discussed who profited from the Iran war. This list isn’t complete. At the top of the list is the Military Industrial Complex. That include nasty junior and his brother. Next is insider traders, the same people who bet on various aspects of the war as it started. Oil companies raked in windfall profits. Iran is getting $300 billion in reconstruction funds plus a suspension of sanctions. It will likely start charging “tolls” or maybe “fees” for ships sailing through the Strait, even though that’s illegal under international law. China is filling in the void created by the chaos. What it is gaining is explained in a video I didn’t watch. On to the losers. Short answer: It’s the rest of us. First is paying maybe up to $90 billion in taxes to fund the military. Second is paying close to $59 billion (so far) in higher gas prices. That doesn’t include the higher prices of jet fuel. Third is American farmers facing higher fertilizer costs and export tariffs. Fourth is America’s reputation in the world. We started a war we didn’t need to, it affected the world economy, and we lost, leaving Iran stronger. Our remaining ally is Israel and the nasty guy now cusses when saying his name. Then to global losers: Inflation hit everyone. I don’t know if inflation is worse here than elsewhere. Other possible losers: Taiwan. China may be seeing the US as unable to defend Taiwan. Maybe renewable energy? See oil profits above. The disruption of oil may spur more countries to switch to renewables. Is the deal any good? The text hasn’t been released and the vice nasty is spinning it as fast as he can. That’s all you need to know. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing for his Substack that some of the terms of the deal are yet to be worked out, but what is there may be enough to finish off Netanyahu.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job. […] And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo discussed the UFC fight that took place on the South Lawn:

Overall, the evening exemplified the new flavors of American life and power. By the time the last punch landed and the blood was wiped away, the night included suspicious stiff armed salutes, transphobic insults, and fresh allegations of sexual assault as well as pitches for Silicon Valley AI, crypto, prediction markets, and the Saudi regime.

Paul Krugman, in his Substack, compared today’s billionaires with the rich men of the Gilded Age:

Members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society… Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Ghosh again:

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

In the comments, which I’m able to see again, there aren’t the long list of cartoons, but memes still show up. Such as this one posted by exlrrp and credited to Cameron Corduroy, though I’ve seen variations with the same text:

Renames it to the Department of War. Names himself Secretary of War. Fights one war: Loses.

The nasty guy had the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial repainted and supposedly fixed because algae had been growing so well. The fix didn’t work and the algae is worse than before. So exlrrp posted a meme of a red cap in the muck with the slogan, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

The right to move, to disobey, to reshape society

My Sunday movie was Choco Milk Shake. It’s a South Korean Boys Love story of 11 short episodes that fit into 2½ hours. I learned of this series through the Boys Love articles written by Krotor on Daily Kos. Jungwoo is a young man feeling quite sad and lonely. He works for his uncle in a coffee shop (which seems to rarely have customers – saves on hiring extras?). The uncle appears to be not much older. One day as Jungwoo is walking home two young men greet him with bright smiles. When the strangers have a chance to explain themselves they say they are the reincarnation of Jungwoo’s pet dog Choco and pet cat Milk. They were given bodies not of infants but of young men. Choco has a bright smile and follows Jungwoo around. Milk is more reserved. Both want their owner to pet them when they’ve been good (which is most of the time). Over the course of the show we learn that Jungwoo rescued Choco, which explains the devotion. Since Krotor writes about Boys Love stories one quickly wonders where this is going. Hopefully not a threesome. We are quickly shown through a blind date that Jungwoo is gay. And that Choco can be jealous. But where does that leave Milk? The acting is excellent (Krotor agrees). The story is cute and fun. I enjoyed it. If you watch be aware there is always one more scene after the episode credits roll. I finished the book The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I read the paperback edition of the book and it begins by Wengrow announcing that Graeber died three weeks after they finished writing the book. The book had taken ten years to write, first as a way to bounce ideas off each other, then in earnest once they saw they had an important story to tell. That story examines human history since the end of the Ice Age (10,000 BCE). And their central questions are: Where did inequality come from? Is a social hierarchy the natural and default human condition? Seeing that focus I thought, yep, I’m in. These are questions I’ve been exploring. So I want to hear what these guys say about it. Alas, they don’t quite answer them. That doesn’t mean reading the book was a waste – there’s a lot of good and hopeful information here. Yeah, it’s long – 525 pages with another 165 pages of notes (worth reading), bibliography, and index. And, yeah, towards the middle as they reviewed yet another society, it got to be a bit of a slog. There has been a standard way of archaeologists to understand what they saw as they excavated ancient sites. Humans progressed from hunter-gather bands, to tribes, to cities, to states. Each one is declared more advanced than the previous. Along with that was the assumption that as agriculture took hold, which made cities possible, the social complexity of a city required a social hierarchy in which administrators and eventually kings organized the work and a worker class did it. The authors used 500 pages to show that view is contradicted by the evidence. The authors examined evidence of ancient sites from around the world – North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The earliest sites were inhabited in 8,000 BCE, the latest in 1800 AD. These late ones were on the Pacific coast of North America as Europeans arrived, so they were documented directly by Europeans. Some of these places developed hierarchies. Many did not. Some developed hierarchies and later abandoned them. Over and over the authors looked over the evidence and saw previous researchers, in explaining what they found, projected the standard model as well as their own thoughts and understanding onto the evidence. A man steeped in patriarchy would project patriarchy onto an ancient society. A researcher who had been schooled in the social hierarchy would interpret findings as evidence of a social hierarchy. Places where the evidence didn’t fit that was seen as an outlier or was about to develop into a society that fit the pattern. The authors said the older researchers assumed too much. Why is this society – and that, and that – an “outlier?” Why must this place develop in this way to fit the model? Perhaps your model is wrong. A lot of this book seemed like an indictment of how archaeology had been done over the last couple of centuries. Some of the things I learned in those 500 pages: We must assume that throughout human history people were as smart as we are, even if they didn’t know all we know now. They could figure things out. In the 12,000 years since the Ice Age the standard model assumed all of the ancient cultures of a particular size did the same thing. 120 centuries is a long time for societies to try different ways of organizing themselves. That organization does not require an administrative staff. In some situations involving more people than previously believed the people are quite capable of administering and organizing themselves. The authors discussed places, one if them in Florida, where the society was hunter-gatherer, yet was ruled by a brutal king. If I remember right, the Spaniards took him out. The shift from hunting to farming didn’t happen all at once. In many societies it happened over centuries. Many times they farmed small amounts when they had good weather and hunted at other times. A big influence in the Enlightenment in Europe was native tribes of North America facing their first contact with Europeans. Jesuits learned native languages in hopes of converting the natives, but the natives were good at pushing back. The native societies were not hierarchical. Leaders could not give commands because the rest of the community refused to follow commands because that would place one person over another. Jesuits wrote about what they learned and their books became widely read (by those who could read) across Europe. Wendat chief Kandiaronk traveled extensively around Europe describing native life. The idea of a society not based on hierarchy caused a stir and lead to the American and French Revolutions. Kandiaronk was good at arguing that native life was better than the European hierarchical life, though Europeans tried to argue the reverse. One argument in Kandiaronk’s favor was that many Europeans who were raised by natives and later offered the chance to return to European style life chose to stay with the natives. The native life was more concerned with the person. European life was boring – a person had to do the same thing every day. My family is well acquainted with the story of Frances Slocum. There is a Frances Slocum State Park in Indiana. She was abducted by natives at age 5. Her siblings found her when she was in her 70s (I think). She refused to go with her siblings, saying her life was with the natives now. We has always assumed the reason was she felt she was one of them now – well, she had married a prominent member of the tribe and produced two children. This book suggests another reason – she thought the native way of life was better. So the assumption that natives would prefer the European lifestyle once they got to know it, was hubris. Europeans said they had the right to take land from the natives because natives didn’t use the land (as in farm it) and were lazy. Natives countered they managed the land, such as burning out the undergrowth in a forest or reshaping a river bottom to improve fish spawning. Also, their hunting and gathering took less time than farming so they had time to be lazy. Natives were amused by the European belief that natives had dispersed across the North and South American continents by overland routes. They said they had spread down the coasts and up the rivers. The authors talk about basic freedoms and rights. And they aren’t what we have in our Declaration of Independence. The freedoms are: (1) The right to move, to leave this community and join a different one. (2) The right to disobey an order. (3) The right to reshape their social connections, to work out a different way to manage the community. They also listed ways one person or group is able to control another. The methods are: (1) Violence. (2) controlling information. (3) Charisma. I wasn’t able to get a clear sense of whether this last one referred to individuals, such as Hitler, or to a group of people, such as a warrior or hero class. Maybe both. The authors discussed the Cahokia society centered east of St. Louis. They had extensive influence across the Mississippi watershed. After thriving for centuries the leadership turned tyrannical. The society collapsed for what appears to be a simple reason. People objected to being ruled by tyrants. They exercised their first right and moved away. (One thing I feel this book lacked is a timeline, showing when many of these cultures were active. The only thing I remember of when the Cahokia society was active was that it collapsed before Europeans arrived yet the natives were still reacting to it.) Though I feel the authors didn’t quite answer their important question. A great deal of the world today is stuck in a social hierarchy where a government or oligarchs control or oppress those under them. There are many examples in human history where the people threw off the control and oppression. Since they did it so can we. There is hope.

Ten years since the Pulse massacre

Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos marked that last Friday was the tenth anniversary of the gay Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. The gunman killed 49 people and wounded 58 others. At the time it was the worst mass shooting in the country and was passed by the Las Vegas shooting the following year. It was, of course, a hate crime and an act of terrorism. In 2023 the city of Orlando bought the property. Just three months ago the building was torn down and the location is being turned into a memorial park, to open in 2027. The Wikipedia entry on the shooting likely has much more detail than most people would want to know. As a war is in urgent need of diplomats Max Burns of Kos discussed the current condition of the State Department. Since the nasty guy retook the Oval Office more than 2,000 career diplomats have left, either retired (sometimes early), voluntary departures, or fired for perceived disloyalty. That includes 195 people with skills in crisis management and important language skills. Secretary Mark Rubio seems very good at not showing up at important times, such as for talks to end the war in Ukraine hosted by Britain. Naturally, morale is low. These departures mean there are a lot of places where the US is not responding to economic and security threats. And China is stepping in to fill the void. This is happening in Latin America and in Africa. When US diplomacy is reduced trade deals are too. American companies and farmers lose out. Iran is enjoying that there are no confirmed ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Iraq, or Kuwait, countries that are the war’s front lines. A crippled State Department also means Iran can easily surprise Rubio and the nasty guy.

Trump’s mismanagement and Rubio’s yes-man complicity will take more than a generation to repair—if it can ever be fully repaired at all. In the meantime, the United States will continue its accelerating decline into a second-tier power less likely to control events and more likely to be controlled by them. Our adversaries couldn’t ask for more.

Clytemnestra of the Kos community went out quite early this morning to get a prime viewing spot to see workers come to the Kennedy Center and take the nasty guy’s name off the side of the building. A judge had ruled since Congress had named the Center only Congress could change its name and his name had to come off yesterday. A lot of people wanted to witness the name coming off. But before the workmen began their work heavy tarps went up, blocking view of the removal. The crew was all done by 3:15am. But at 11:48am the tarps were still in place. So if no one can see that the letters came down how can we verify the judge’s order was followed? Was the tarp put up to spare the nasty guy’s feeling? This all gets so old. Joey Garrison, Susan Page, Michael Loria, and Aysha Bagchi of USA TODAY posted a full article about the removal at 3:00pm today. They did not include a photo of the wall with the name gone and without the tarp. Emily Singer of Kos reported:

President Donald Trump is reportedly trying to expunge his two impeachments—his latest attempt to rewrite history from his disastrous first term. “It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.” But forcing Republicans to pass a meaningless resolution just to soothe Dear Leader’s fragile ego would be politically disastrous for the GOP. First, the majority of Americans want Trump to be impeached again—not see his first two impeachments erased.

Second, voting to expunge would remind voters why he was impeached the first two times and that Republicans failed to convict him then. That would not be good for Republicans in November. Now that Bill Pulte has been replaced with Jay Clayton to be Director of National Intelligence please do not assume we dodged a problem. Lisa Needham of Kos reported he’s just as vile and still doesn’t have Intelligence experience as required by law. To get appointed to big jobs by the nasty guy a candidate must audition. Clayton passed the audition by hopping on TV to spread election conspiracy theories about the California primary election. He has no experience in election law either and the new gig is supposed to prohibit him from participating in domestic affairs (not that such a thing stopped Tulsi Gabbard, his predecessor – see Fulton County, Georgia).

So, Clayton’s pick violates the law just as much as Pulte’s would have, but enforcing that law requires a Congress willing to do so. GOP senators have the power to force Trump to pick someone who meets the legal requirements for the job. But if they won’t, then it is going to be Jay Clayton—and it is going to be just as bad as you think.