We are about to do something that will ignite a fuse

A week ago Thursday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that it seems like the US joined Ecuador in a military operation against terrorist organizations there. This seems to be at the invitation of their President Daniel Noboa. I mention this because Needham included this:

In 2025, Trump managed to bomb seven countries: Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, and Somalia.

That’s in thirteen months. No, he’s not one to get a peace prize. A week ago Friday (when the Iran war was a week old) Meteor Blades, Kos staff emeritus, discussed the nasty guy’s claim that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in two weeks, that their attack on the US would be “imminent.” Blades first discussed how likely the nasty guy’s claim of a bomb being ready in that short of time. Possibly in a “few” weeks, but not likely. There is also a big difference between could have a bomb ready and actively considering using it against the US or any other country. The nasty guy tends to say “two weeks” when he wants us to think he’s about to do something but will likely never actually do it. This phrase could easily be applied to what he thinks Iranians are doing. Blades reviewed the likely intentional confusion of of preemtive and preventive, saying one while using the definition of the other. Both have specific meanings in international law and the UN Charter. Preemptive means an attack is going to happen quite soon, it will be overwhelming, and leave no time for deliberation. This is classified as self-defense. A preventive attack is an attempt to eliminate a potential threat, before the foe becomes stronger. It is based on prediction rather than proof, so is considered aggression. Any country can accuse any other of a future threat. Bush II in Iraq was preventive. It had a bad outcome. Even worse, what it was trying to prevent didn’t exist.

And here we are with the Trump regime engaged in a global free-for-all. The Iran war is also preventive, illegal under a U.N. Charter that in no way will be enforced. The worst part of this? Unless very different leaders come to power in Iran, keeping that country from getting nukes may not even have been prevented. Iran shouldn’t build a nuke. But then the world should follow the advice of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, each of whom proposed or at least suggested at one time or another eliminating all nuclear weapons. ... Instead, today as you read this, the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom are currently spending trillions of dollars to upgrade and expand their nuclear arsenals.

On the same day Oliver Willis of Kos reported:

Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to help locate U.S. assets like warships and aircrafts. The revelation follows years of cozy relations between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post reported Friday that multiple officials have confirmed that Iran is receiving Russian intelligence, with one official describing the effort as “pretty comprehensive.” ... Meanwhile, Russia’s involvement in the war follows years of Trump catering to Putin. Instead of an adversarial relationship with Russia, Trump has sought to curry favor with the nation, repeatedly asserting that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified and that Ukraine was to blame. He even made a point of humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting at the White House last year.

This past Wednesday Emily Singer of Kos reported the nasty guy claimed the Iran war would end soon because there is “practically nothing left to target.” He added that he could end it whenever he wanted. Yeah, that last bit sounds like an addict. Singer takes this in a different direction:

Trump's ridiculous claim that he can simply decide when the war against Iran will stop is patently absurd. Iran is not a rational actor. It doesn't care about the suffering of its people, nor about preserving the nonexistent relationships it has with other western nations. So long as it has munitions and the ability to cripple the global economy by choking off the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway critical to the global oil supply—it has no incentives to stop. Indeed, Iran has every incentive to continue, as the war could spark a global recession and damage Trump politically—which Iranian leaders are surely taking great pleasure from. Iran has said in no uncertain terms that it has no plans to stop its hostilities.

The nasty guy probably made that claim because he realizes this “excursion” is getting away from him. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers charted the public response, the presidential approval rating, to military adventures from WWII. Roosevelt got a small bump for WWII, partly because his approval rating was already high. Entry into the war also had a 97% approval rating. Bush I got a big increase in approval for the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. Bush II got a big boost after the 9/11 attack and another boost at the start of the Afghanistan War a few months later. He also got a boost from the Iraq War. The nasty guy didn’t get a bump in public approval (or hasn’t yet – some of the earlier wars didn’t produce a bump for a couple months). Morris went looking at political science literature political approval and came up with five conditions needed to get a meaningful increase. They are: A big sudden shock, such as Pearl Harbor or the seizure of American hostages in Iran in 1979. Bipartisan consensus or at least no criticism from the opposition. Unified media coverage. The action is perceived to be legitimate. The public is willing to rally around the president. And in this Iran war... There was no sudden shock Democrats condemn the attack. There has been plenty of coverage of the war, but also coverage of the opposition and protests. Also, the media are highly fragmented. The nasty guy didn’t seek Congressional approval and 59% of Americans say he should have. The public isn’t willing to rally – his approval was already quite low. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, has a quote from Molly Ivins every Thursday. This one is from February 2024 and discusses Bush II and the Iraq war. He also wanted to invade Iraq because the threat was “imminent.” Then this:

Perhaps the administration thought peaceniks could be ignored, but you will recall that this was a war opposed by an extraordinary number of generals. Among them, Anthony Zinni, who has extensive experience in the Middle East, who said, "We are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started." After listening to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference, Zinni said, "In other words, we are going to go to war over another intelligence failure." Give that man the Cassandra Award for being right in depressing circumstances.

No country would believe an offer of peace

Last night I went to the grand Fisher Theater to see the musical The Outsiders. I was interested because last year it won a Tony Award for Best Musical along with Best Direction of a Musical, Best Lighting in a Musical (projections on part of the scenery helped that), and Best Sound Design in a Musical, plus eight other nominations, including Best Actor and Best Featured Actor. All fine recommendations. I hadn’t read the book or seen the earlier movie or play (before the musical was created) because I thought it might be quite violent. And it is. When I, without knowing much of the story, described the show to my friend and debate partner he suggested it might be similar to West Side Story and its source material Romeo and Juliet. Turns out he was right, though there are notable differences. The story is set in Tulsa in 1967. Ponyboy is the main character. He is 14 and lives with his brothers Darrel and Sodapop. Their parents had recently died. The first song Ponyboy sings notes that he knows nobody who has moved away from Tulsa. Darrel, maybe as old as 20, was good enough in football he thought he had a chance of escaping but now feels burdened with trying to be both brother and father. Yes, there are two rival groups of teens. Ponyboy is a Greaser, kids from families whose work involves (automobile) grease. His best friends are Johnny and Two-Bit. Also prominent in the group is Dallas, the only black member and the only one to be in jail, well, county lock-up. The other group is the Socs (spelled that way in the program but pronounced “soshes”), the kids of socialites. As in WSS there are turf battles that go too far. At the drive in theater Ponyboy meets Cherry, a Socs girl. She is claimed by Bob, the leader of the Socs boys. She senses that Ponyboy is different from the other boys that strive for status. Ponyboy is reading Great Expectations by Dickens and identifies with orphaned Pip, though has a few things to say to Dickens. He can also recite a Robert Frost poem. This might be a spoiler: A big difference between WSS and this story is while Cherry and Ponyboy become friends, they do not fall in love. Even so, she’s the one recognizes the battles between the Greasers and Socs. two groups of boys that don’t know what to do with their testosterone, is a “Hopeless War.” This is an excellent show, deserving of its awards. Ponyboy, Johnny, Dallas, and all the others are shown as both good and bad, though they are caught in a bad situation (mostly based on poverty). The songs are good and touching, though I don’t remember any of them. I rate it highly perhaps for the same reasons I consider WSS a favorite musical (though Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance, and Justin Levine are not at the level of Leonard Bernstein). I do have one complaint. There is an overuse on strobe lights in key scenes. As WSS has the Rumble, there is a big fight between the two groups. They way it was staged I got lost in who was doing what to who with not clear winner until one side rejoices in their victory later. This fight takes place in a rainstorm. At first I thought the rain was projected on to the scenery, but at times the actors looked wet, as did the stage, though that was hard to tell from the front of the balcony, where I was sitting. Then the stage looked dry in the next scene. But when the show was done a large tire full of water (important for a key scene) was dumped onto the stage and a bunch of industrial blowers were brought out to presumably dry the stage. The book is by S. E. Hinton, which I was surprised to learn is Susan Eloise. The Outsiders is her first novel and she wrote it while in high school in Tulsa. Her reason for writing was that she was dissatisfied with the stories written about youth, saying in a quote in the program that teens want it real and too many books talked down to them. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit described a disturbing look into the start of the Iran war. He cautions this is not proven but certainly demands investigation and hearings under oath before Congress. A major player in this scenario is Jared Kushner, a top representative in several of his father-in-law’s attempts at diplomacy. He’s also the guy I’ve been calling the Pandemic Prince for his attempts to profit from the pandemic during the first nasty guy term. He also knows Netanyahu well. His partner is Steve Witkoff, a guy with credible evidence of having financial ties to Russia and who had just been to Israel. Here’s my summary of the scenario. Round 3 of nuclear talks between the US and Iran concluded in Geneva on February 27. The Omani foreign minister, the mediator, said a deal was within reach and Iran had fully agreed to the US demands to not make a nuclear bomb. Round 4 had been scheduled to work out the details. On the morning of February 28 members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council were in their offices. They’re the ones to make the big nuclear decisions. In their offices is where they were naturally expected to be to discuss the outline of the agreement made the day before. That expected location is where the first bombs struck. Here’s the speculation: Were the negotiations a ruse? A deliberate double-cross? Were they designed to keep Iran from expecting strikes? Were they structured to give the Council something they need to discuss in a known place so they could be targeted?

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

If Iran was “negotiated” into a kill box, no government would ever again assume American good faith. American credibility would be damaged, long after the nasty guy and his minions leave the scene. The negotiation process would be poisoned. No country would believe an offer of peace, no matter how genuine it is.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

We can’t assume Kushner and Witkoff are guilty. We can “demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.” Dan K of the Kos community asks an important question: Why have billionaires put “a man with no understanding of economics in charge of our economy?” To attempt an answer Dan K quoted an article Paul Krugman wrote for his Substack. Krugman wrote:

There is, however, something that is still puzzling me: To a large extent billionaires bought themselves a government friendly to their interests. Trump and company have granted many items on the tech broligarchy wish list, from tax breaks to deregulation to promotion of crypto and unregulated AI. But why the abject incompetence? Couldn’t billionaires find political allies who wouldn’t plunge the country into a potentially disastrous and historically unpopular war without considering the risks?

Krugman supplied two answers:

One is that no competent allies weren’t available. Money buys a lot of influence, but to actually take over the U.S. government requires more than money — it requires politicians who are utterly corrupt... and corruption and incompetence go hand in hand.

In the nasty guy’s first term competent people kept him from doing his worst. To prevent that from happening in his second term he surrounded himself with incompetent loyalists.

My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic.

Dan K brought up the concept of noblesse oblige, that with great wealth and power comes great responsibility. The robber barons of the US gilded age may have been nasty to workers, but they knew they had to live in the society they were making and keeping it secure was worthwhile. The current tech bros reject that understanding. They feel they can isolate themselves from the world and their wealth will provide all they need. So if they get the tax breaks and other goodies to keep making tons of money they don’t care what else the nasty guy does. Krugman again:

So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt. This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense.

More from my backlog of pundit roundups for Kos... From Saturday a week ago, Greg Dworkin quoted Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark discussing a lot of commodities that are affected by the nasty guy’s attack on Iran and their response of closing the Strait of Hormuz. At the top of the list is oil and the petroleum products made from it. There is also liquefied natural gas, aluminum, and fertilizer, the last in demand as the northern hemisphere spring planting season begins. That will lead to higher food prices over the year. Many producers of these commodities are having to shut down because they have no place to put their output. Restarting these facilities could take up to a year. Nick Judin tweeted:

Unlike every evil, craven, idiotic decision Trump's made in office, the Iran War is finally the act he can't immediately retreat from. Every one of his catastrophic failures (DOGE, liberation day, siege of Minneapolis, regime change in Venezuela, etc.) he survived by abandoning.

Ishaan Tharoor of the New Yorker explained why the Strait of Hormuz was closed:

For the remnants of the Iranian regime—and, especially, the hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard, who control much of the state’s weaponry—the strategy is clear. They hope to raise the stakes of the war so much that U.S. allies pressure President Donald Trump to change course. “We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” an Iranian regime insider told the Financial Times. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”

Another way to put it: We may be going down, but we’re going to inflict as much pain on the rest of the world as we can in the meantime. Conspiratorial Templates tweeted:

What level of chess is it when you neglect to fill up your strategic oil reserves before starting a war that shuts down oil production worldwide, so you have to buy oil at an inflated price from your enemy who then uses those funds to back the enemy you just needlessly attacked?

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Bishtoons. A man says:

So, you’re telling me that more than 100 children were killed in a school in Iran when it was bombed ... by two nations of the Board of Peace?

In the comments of Monday’s roundup is one by rugbymom:

What's unbelievable to me: We refer back continuously to major attacks *on* the US, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11. Yet we somehow imagine that other countries will just absorb our attacks on them, forgive and forget, and cozy up to the US. (Sure, Japan and Germany did after WWII -- but only because the US poured in relief and reconstruction money, and those countries took responsibility for their actions and their leaders were soundly punished.) Not only Iran, but the Gulf monarchies that were Trump’s most loyal allies, will never ever forget this -- and that's assuming that somehow it stops before the planet is utterly destroyed. So far, no signs of any off-ramp or stopping point, a President who is eager to pour in ground troops and/or use nuclear weapons, an Israeli President intent on genocide, and no way to stop either of them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic described an epidemic of “gullicism” – gullibility and cynicism – in America.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” The naive fellow travelers need to be gullible enough to believe these fictions and cynical enough to refuse correction. The inner circle need only be cynical enough to sell them.

In the comments Dr. Art Garfunky tweeted the front page of the Tehran Times (English edition) that shows portraits of all of the students killed in the Iran school that was bombed. In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Dana Dubois of Blue Amp. My summary: Dubois is breaking up with ChatGPT because they can’t tolerate to keep paying the oligarchs that created it. Aaron Rupar tweeted a quote from Sen. Chris Murphy:

I Just came from a two hour, closed door classified briefing on the war. It just confirmed to me it's totally incoherent. We are not gonna be able to achieve any of our stated objectives ... this is a disaster of epic proportions, a 10 day debacle

In the comments Political Cartoon Gallery posted a cartoon by Matt, who is from England. A man has come back from a gas station mini-mart and tells his wife, “It’s worse than I feared. Their tins of travel mints are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.” In Thursday’s roundup Kev quoted Perry Bacon of The New Republic on three reasons why this military action is worse than nearly all others. The important parts:

There is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. This war not only didn’t have the approval of Congress or the American public, but it happened despite explicit opposition from them. This is not a minor skirmish.

In the comments is one by Rambler797 with a link to the article:

Jonathan Lamire, Atlantic. Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Sell This War. Why sell? He got in his quick hit. Mission accomplished, right? An object lesson in why it is better to have someone with impulse control as president.

The Wolfpack posted a meme of the Republican Agenda. I’m giving just the main points. Each has a few to a lot of subpoints for implementation.

Keep ’em poor Keep ’em sick Keep ’em stupid Control the women

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"We are now on day eleven of Jabba the Pizza Hutt's war on Iran. Trump said yesterday that the war could end 'very soon,' which would be encouraging had he not told us he'd end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Ironically, the war he started to distract us could be more damaging to him than the Trump-Epstein files. And that would mean he'd have to come up with another distraction from the war. And if you do need that, Mr. President, I’ve got a good one: release the unreleased Trump-Epstein files." —Jimmy Kimmel "President Trump said yesterday that, while he is spending the day at his Miami golf club, there are 'many important meetings and phone calls taking place.' Hey, man, we're totally fine if you just play golf. Every time you 'have a meeting' we have to change something on a map." —Seth Meyers

Bill also reminds us that tomorrow, March 14, is Pi Day, best celebrated at 1:59. It’s our most irrational holiday.

They love the language of blood and gore

My Sunday movie was Glitter and Gold, Ice Dancing. This was released by Netflix a few days before the Winter Olympics to serve as a companion to the Ice Dancing competition. I didn’t have a chance to watch it then. It is a three episode documentary, 2:45 total length, as three top ice dancing couples prepare for their time in the Olympics. Two of the couples are: Madison Chock and Evan Bates, who had won gold medals at lesser competitions, but had not won an Olympic medal. Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, who had also won a lot of medals and known for a more eccentric style. Poirier said he is gay and that it affects the choices he makes when designing a program. Laurence Fournier-Beaudry and Guillame Cizaron were the third couple. He had won Olympic gold in 2022 with a different partner. I don’t remember why his partner left. His new partner had lost her previous partner because he had been suspended for a sex assault accusation. That ruling was overturned and appealed, but not resolved in time to prepare for this year’s games. A year before the Games the ice dancing world was pretty confident that Chock and Bates would take gold and “Piper and Paul” would take silver. That calculus was upset when the Fournier-Beaudry and Cizaron paring was announced. In ice dancing, especially when the competitors are still in their teens, there is a lot of splitting and forming partners. There is even a website where one can fill in their stats in hopes of finding a partner. That can mean partners are from different countries, creating strange situations. An English woman was paired with a Spanish man and got a Spanish passport to qualify. That man left the sport and she paired with a German man. The German man could more easily get a Spanish passport than the English/Spanish woman could get a German passport, so they represented Spain though neither was Spanish. This was brought up because Fournier-Beaudry had to get a French passport and hope the paperwork went through before the Games. By the time a pair is Olympic quality they’ve usually been together for a decades, sometimes more than two. The French pair had to overcome a lot for being so recently paired. Ten months out the pairs create their short and long programs based on the types of things they do best and their own personal style. They choose music and work with choreographers. They talk to costume designers. They have to consider whether the programs are “Olympic enough.” Six months out they start to show their programs to judges to get feedback on what works (what pleases the judges) and what doesn’t. But each pair must decide if what the judges say conflicts with what they understand their personality to be. There are a few scenes of the woman putting on makeup before performing. Their male partners are beside them also putting on makeup. And Poirier showed how much stuff he puts in his hair so that it is as unmoving as a helmet. Then come the qualifying events in which they go to arenas around the world and perform before audiences. How well they place affects whether they get to the Olympics. Their performances may suggest whether parts of their program need to be reworked. Of course, their Olympic performances are not included in this documentary. Though I watched the competition I had forgotten how they finished and had to look it up. I finished the book The Bump, a novel by Sidney Karger. This is the story of Wyatt and Biz, a gay couple. Yes, Biz is a nickname – real name Massimo – gotten perhaps because he was a busy boy, he seemed to be bouncing off the walls (ADD?), or because as a teen he was in show business. Maybe both. They have been together about a dozen years. A baby is about to be born for them through surrogacy. But as the story opens their relationship is showing strain. So instead of flying from from their home in Brooklyn to California, where the surrogate is, they decide on a road trip. Wyatt plans for them to visit gay enclaves – Provincetown, Saugatuck, Palm Springs – before being responsible parents puts a stop to that. They get to Provincetown, but Wyatt’s mother soon calls him to come to Boston, where he begins to learn why his father left when he was a boy and his mother won’t talk about it. Saugatuck gets replaced with a visit with Biz’s huge and boisterous family near Chicago, where Biz begins to confront his fears that he won’t be a good enough father. He compares himself to his own father, who is a gem. This is an enjoyable and satisfying story. It’s a love story with a bit of maturity to it. Even so, it’s a bit of a lightweight. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that (though their cruelty was visible long before the first bombs dropped) the war with Iran demonstrates the nasty guy, the vice nasty, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russel Vought, Karoline Leavitt, Elon Musk, and many more have a severe case of bloodlust.

Trump, Hegseth, Vance, Miller, Leavitt, et al think this sort of thing makes them seem “macho” and “tough.” Nearly 90% of Republican voters agree with them. What it really does is reveal them as psychopaths, the very human embodiment of evil. ... This isn’t the language of leaders reluctantly using force as a last resort; it’s the rhetoric of psychopaths who see the rest of humanity as disposable, as dots in a video game, as objects whose death is entertainment, so long as their own luxury and power are secure. ... They delight in death and destruction. They love the language of blood and gore. They’re monsters.

I haven’t looked at the work of Sarah Kendzior in a while. She had been co-host of Gaslit Nation and now runs her own newsletter on Substack. A post from the end of February is a Q&A with her subscribers. A top topic is the Epstein scandal. Here are a couple excerpts from close to the top of the post.

Will the Epstein files bring accountability? SK: Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US. We’ve seen predators face arrest in other countries. In the US, we’ve seen them resign from jobs. This gives me little hope since MeToo produced more backlash than justice, and many who lost power later regained it. I do think the release has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades. What’s revealing is that they view redacted emails by predators as more credible than consistent statements by victims. There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt. ... Will the rest of the files be released? SK: As I’ve said before, I think they were waiting to release an Epstein trove once: 1) they felt they had consolidated power 2) AI was so ubiquitous that the veracity of the evidence would be questioned. That moment is now. We have seen a lot of emails, though one period of interest — the time around 9/11 — is largely absent. We have not seen much video. I believe the most damaging information is on video. We know Epstein had rooms wired with cameras to film pedophiles assaulting victims. I will not watch that if it comes out. But it may come out, and should that happen, the assaulter will claim it’s fake. This wouldn’t have been a convincing excuse a decade ago, but it will be now due to AI. I’ve wondered if Grok posting child pornography on demand shortly before the Epstein files were released was a trial run for this tactic.

Perhaps this is why many of the richest tech companies are investing so deeply in AI? I’ve accumulated a bunch of pundit roundups for Kos. Let’s see how many I get through in the time I have. In the roundup for Saturday at the end of February Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Sarah Fitzpatrick that included a link to an article in The Atlantic. Fitzpatrick’s comment:

At least 6 Trump Cabinet members or senior admin officials were in contact with Epstein. It’s unclear if these relationships w/ Epstein were raised in background checks or security clearances. Every agency involved declined to answer my questions.

The title and subtitle of the article:

The ‘Crazy’ Plot to Release the Epstein Files How an unlikely duo of lawmakers partnered with victims to try to hold the powerful accountable.

In the comments, a tweet (though it doesn’t show as a tweet) by Matthew Yglesias:

Trump warned me that if I voted for Kamala Harris we’d have higher prices and a government-run economy at home and new wars abroad, and I voted for Harris and that’s exactly what we got.

A cartoon posted by The Wolfpack and by John Darkow shows Musk (labeled “DOGE”) pushing an old lady in a wheelchair labeled “Social Security” towards the edge of a cliff. Musk says, “So, which one are you, Granny? Waste, Fraud, or Abuse?!” Another cartoon posted by The Wolfpack and by Daniel Boris, shows Hillary Clinton saying, “Donald Trump’s name is mentioned 38,000 times in the Epstein files, and I am the person Republicans ask to testify under oath. Makes perfect sense!” In the roundup for last Wednesday Dworkin quoted Shanaka Anslem Perera on X:

Satellite imagery shows an Iranian ballistic missile struck the AN/FPS-132 phased array radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. If the damage is as severe as the imagery suggests, Iran just destroyed a $1.1 billion piece of equipment that took years to build and cannot be replaced on any timeline relevant to this war. The AN/FPS-132 is not an ordinary radar. It is one of a handful of early warning sensors in the entire US global missile defence architecture. It detects ballistic missile launches at ranges exceeding 5,000 kilometres. It provides the initial tracking data that allows Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis systems to calculate intercept solutions. Without it, every other layer of missile defence in the Gulf theatre is operating with compressed reaction times and degraded situational awareness.

David Schuster of Blue Amp:

We now know that a woman came forward in 2019 alleging that, as a minor, she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Investigators did not laugh her out of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They interviewed her four times. Four. In the careful, plodding world of the FBI, that is not a courtesy; it is an acknowledgment of credibility. Agents summarized each session in the bureaucratic catechism known as an FBI 302 report. Three of those summary reports are now missing. Not delayed. Not misfiled. Missing.

In the comments is a tweet by Veterans Against Trump:

Reporter: What’s the worst case scenario that you have planned for in Iran? Trump: I don’t know of there’s a worst case... I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person., right? That could happen.

The Maine Wonk added:

Gee, I wonder why every administration for 50 years has avoided outright war with Iran and regime change. But sure, the Host of the Apprentice is the only person in history with a plan that will change everything in a matter of weeks. We live in the dumbest timeline ever.

In last Thursday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Michael Deck of Niemann Lab discussing the 3 million pages of Epstein documents with 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. Search of all that is a big problem. A solution: AI.

These types of AI-powered transparency projects have only become more important as trust in government institutions and the Trump administration’s handling of the files erodes. Last week, NPR reported that the DOJ intentionally withheld and removed documents in the Epstein Files that named Donald Trump, including an accusation by a woman that he had sexually abused her when she was a minor. [...] Since the first Epstein Files were released last year, newsrooms have been using machine learning and LLMs to parse documents and find story leads. Earlier this month, New York Times AI projects editor Dylan Freedman explained how he and his colleagues built “bespoke software applications” to help reporters search photos visually, identify document duplicates, and generate video and audio transcripts. The Times has also been using a proprietary search tool developed by its Interactive News desk to break news about the files and comb through the documents for investigative leads.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Sheneman showing the nasty guy saying:

People say my big, beautiful war has no clear objective, fake news! Since when is war profiteering not a clear objective?

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jesse Duquette in response to generals expecting the Iran war to usher in the End Times. It shows Jesus in a red cap talking to followers: “One day I will return but only once you bomb a bunch of kids because a pedophile told you to.” In the comments of Friday’s roundup paulpro posted a cartoon, author not mentioned. It shows two men talking, the second one in a red cap:

First: So, you’re now supporting a warmonger and pedophile protector. Second: Yeah, its’ tough to keep up with what I believe in... First: But still with Trump? Second: Sure, gas is still under $3. First: Ah... I’ve got some bad news...