A Dark Memorial Blotting Out the Miami Skyline

I once wrote back at the end of trump's first turn at destroying America about how even as a failed president occupant of the White House he was entitled to a library in his dishonor. Even then, I dismissed the prospect because of several points (some of which proved prophetic):

Another thing to consider is the overall mess trump's administration has been. Archivists, historians, and other observers have been complaining about the lack of effective record-keeping in his offices. A combination of understaffing and unqualified hires contributed to a disorganized management system. When you consider the possibility of half the things trump and his cohorts did in the White House - the way they broke the immigration policies and committed potential human rights abuses towards children, for God's sake - we're facing the possibility that half the documentation for trump's would-be library will be missing, destroyed, or redacted into solid pages of black lines...

As a Presidential Museum, of course, it would make perfect sense. The museum won't need to answer to the demands of history or accuracy: the trump Museum would be a grand display of trump's narcissism. Every nook, room, and hallway filled with garish, gaudy tributes to trump's "greatness". A performance hall with a stage dedicated to any speaker offering praise and holiest-of-thous to a con artist, an assembly dedicated to the greed and graft of a corrupt overlord.

It's why I don't see a future trump Library as being anything more than an oversized gift store: Balanced between a Far Right bookstore selling trump ghost-written hagiographies at 100 bucks a cover, and a South Florida tourist trap shilling MAGA beach towels and trump-signed golf clubs...

With trump's return to office, the prospect of his Library getting done became more likely, and with trump basically claiming Florida as his place of power it was unavoidable that my home state is absorbing the potential damage of hosting it (via Kate Payne at AP News): 

A judge in Miami has dismissed a complaint challenging a college’s decision to gift prime downtown real estate for President Donald Trump’s future presidential library, clearing the way for the real estate developer-turned-president to build a towering monument to his political rise in an iconic stretch of the city.

A local activist brought the lawsuit against Miami Dade College, arguing the school’s board didn’t give sufficient public notice and violated the state’s open government law when board members voted in September to give away the nearly 3-acre (1.2-hectare) property in downtown Miami.

The site is a developer’s dream and is valued at more than $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. One real estate expert wagered that the parcel — one of the last undeveloped lots on a palm tree-lined stretch of Biscayne Boulevard — could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more...

After the college first voted in September to transfer the property to a fund controlled by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet, the GOP officials voted to transfer the land again, effectively putting the property under the control of the Trump family when they deeded it to the foundation for Trump’s library. That foundation is led by three trustees: Eric Trump; Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos; and the president’s attorney, James Kiley.

Eric Trump has pledged the future library will be “one of the most beautiful buildings ever built” and “an Icon on the Miami skyline.” Under local zoning rules, the best use of the property would be a towering condo building, according to one Miami real estate expert, who described the site as a potential “cash cow.”

That the local developers are picturing the library to be more of a condo seems apt considering how trump and his family view property as money machines for their own pockets. /sigh

As for Eric trump's promise to make the library "one of the most beautiful buildings ever built," you have to remember that the trump ideal of "beauty" is oversized crassness, and this week's preliminary reveal of what they want the library to be wasn't that shocking (horrifying, yes, but not shocking). As Cameron Adams at the Daily Beast documents:

President Donald Trump has shared the first images of his latest vanity building—a book-free library that includes a tacky golden statue of himself and shiny gold escalators.

The first look at the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, to be constructed in Miami, Florida, suggests the building will be firmly on brand for the 79-year-old. It is a mammoth skyscraper with ‘TRUMP’ emblazoned near the top and images of the American flag.

"Book free". Yeah. /Librarian headdesking

An apparently AI-generated video shows multiple aircraft housed inside the library, as well as what appear to be replicas of the White House’s Oval Office and the president’s yet-to-be-built ballroom, as well as a huge gold statue of Trump in what looks like an auditorium.

Linked from the Daily Beast article.

"ALL HAIL THE GOLDEN IDOL! ALL HAIL trump! HAIL! HAIL!"

The president’s son Eric breathlessly posted that he had “poured my heart and soul” into the project over the past six months.

“This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known,” he said on X... 

There's an AI-generated video - which just adds to the tackiness of the presentation - to which I don't want to link. I will share a few more pictures at least.

All images linked from the Daily Beast.

It's all just one big placard for trump's name and likeness, isn't it?

Also note how high this skyscraper is going: it's planned to be the tallest building in Miami, which is already a flat landscape due to Florida's geography. You couldn't avoid it even from the safe distance of Broward County, I'd wager.

I'd also wonder about the all-glass exterior, which can be common among Florida skyscrapers but not at that height, and not at the expense of whichever Category 5 hurricane decides to hit the place.

One more thing I just remembered: Can the ground support the weight of such a structure? It's not the bedrock of Manhattan Island, and South Florida runs the risk of collapsing buildings in this day and age.

One last thing to remember is how trump and his kids are grifters of the lowest order: Anything that can make them money while they produce little to no results. Early "fundraising" shakedowns have raised concerns:

This month, congressional Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal wrote to ABC, Meta, Paramount, and X requesting details about the money they pledged to Trump’s library project as part of their legal settlements, The Washington Post reported.

“Now it is unclear where this money has gone, exacerbating concerns about corruption that were apparent at the time of the settlement,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund was originally set up to manage the money, but was dissolved last year.

A second nonprofit fund, called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., was then established. The fund reported in December 2025 that it had received $50 million, though it did not confirm whether that sum includes the legal settlement funds...

There's no guarantee that trump's fundraising is actually going into this tower of triteness. I wouldn't trust anyone in this project with doing any fundraising to build a parking garage in Miami, which would be of greater value than this blight.

All this seems to me is - yet again - trump eager to build an oversized, underused monument to his own decaying corrupt ego, one that will likely get torn down the second he's out of power because nobody else really needs it.

trump and Republicans Starting Fights They Can't Finish

I'm not an expert on war, so I try to look for those who are to get insight on how things are going once a moron starts an oil war against Iran. I found this assistant professor - Bret Devereaux - at North Carolina State who provides some input: 

I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.

Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples...

Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.

Neither is the Middle East. The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.

In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal...

But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses...

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.

In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.

trump - thinking entirely in terms of individual power, projecting his own desire to be an autocrat onto other world leaders - totally believed a decapitation strike would work and everybody else would clean up his mess. And like anyone who's ever bankrupted a casino - which is almost nobody else because trump is the only one to ever do that multiple times - trump had no ideas what the odds were and what the costs would be.

The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.

As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse...

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.

And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.

Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not. Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the Strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the Strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.

Except trump and Hegseth and Rubio and others in that broken, inept White House. None of them even read a Cliff Notes version of Clausewitz's writings, and jumped headlong into a fight without knowing who it was they're really fighting, the terrain they're fighting in, and the reason for fighting in the first place. It wasn't just that they were fools and rushed in: They were morons who rushed in without a goddamn clue.

If you read through - I recommend you do - the rest of Devereaux's thesis, he goes into the probabilities of escalation, the likelihood of U.S. naval vessels getting sunk by an Iranian military that's been planning this kind of war for 40 years, and a continuation of global economic chaos that augurs poorly for our nation. Our own military is struggling with military equipment build-up. The Defense Department is so wary of falling recruitment numbers that they're upping the maximum age of enlistments for guys in their 40s and scrapping restrictions on marijuana users. Talk about enacting the draft is making the 20-something MAGA crowds angry at trump, which could trigger a schism in the wingnut ranks.

We're heading into a regional Middle Eastern war again, with fewer exit ramp possibilities and almost no chance for victory.

All because too many media pundits accused the Democrats of being more war-hungry than trump and a rabid Republican base that's been starting wars since the 1980s and doing a piss-poor job of finishing them. No, I am never going to forgive those media assholes for that.

What I think is going to happen? This war will get out of control: Because trump doesn't know any better; and because Iran knows they don't have to beat the US, they just have to outlast trump and his handlers even if that takes another decade.

Gods help us, the ones who didn't want this war at all.

Airline Service Getting Colder By the Minute

Update: Thank you, Steve in Manhattan, for sharing this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Everyone: Stay safe; Abolish ICE; Stop the Wars; and Defend Your Vote!

File under the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong" category of putting thugs in charge of public transportation (via Luke Garrett at NPR):

President Trump said he is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports as some air travelers face longer security lines due to the partial government shutdown.

"On Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job," Trump posted on social media Sunday.

The Trump administration has blamed Democrats for the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which has entered its sixth week and paused paychecks for Transportation Security Administration workers.

"This pointless, reckless shutdown of our homeland security workforce has caused more than 400 TSA officers to quit and thousands to call out from work because they are not able to afford gas, childcare, food, or rent," Acting Assistant DHS Secretary Lauren Bis told NPR in an email.

What trump and his lackeys aren't mentioning is that the Democrats put a hold on DHS funding in order to curtail escalating violence and civil rights abuses by those very ICE agents. Of course, they can never be in the wrong, can they...

DHS did not respond to NPR's question of where ICE agents will be deployed.

But Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said Sunday evening that agents would be at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to help with "line management and crowd control." In a statement, he said federal agents "indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities."

Which counters trump's own claim that the ICE agents will be there to detain any and all undocumented travelers (with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, because trump is still obsessed with punishing Somali from Minnesota, Ohio, Maine, and elsewhere).

Because of the shutdown, by the by, actual TSA agents aren't getting paid through emergency funding, but ICE agents are, which is going to make things very painful around the water cooler at the workplace this Monday...

The head of the union that represents TSA officers denounced the plan to send ICE to airports.

"ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security," Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Sunday.

He said TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats designed to evade detection at checkpoints.

"They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be," he added.

Word is already this weekend that check-in lines at airports are backed up, delayed by hours and getting worse. There's little evidence that bringing in ICE agents - untrained for crowd control, more likely to be abusive towards passengers already under stress - will free up the lines and improve departure times for people. There's also the risk that anyone "suspicious" in ICE's eyes - anyone with darker skin than a Duggar scion - is going to get harassed and attacked for no other reason than just standing there.

All of the bad governance spawning violence in our cities is now going to be working inside our airports.

What can possibly go wrong? (hint: everything)

I Survived MegaCon 2026: I Want To Believe (In an X-Files LEGO Set)

I dunno if I've mentioned often enough on this blog that I'm an X-Phile ever since Season One (and a 'Shipper to boot). I know I've shared various trips to the Orlando MegaCon events, although I mentioned in 2024 that I might stop going - too fatiguing, too much walking, going solo too often, etc. - unless they had a celebrity I needed to see.

They had Agent Scully showing up this year. I HAD TO GO.

I even spent the extra money - something I've never done before - to get a Photo Op with Gillian Anderson during the event.

So I purchased the tickets, saved the moneys, planned out a cosplay (not a Jedi this year), left early to avoid the I-4 traffic woes and avoid the parking hassles, and made it to Saturday's con. Below are the videos and photos I've taken during the visit.

This is at the end of the line... for the ticket pickup!
Yes, that's how much queueing goes on at comicons!
And yes, I shaved the beard for this one.

If you can tell by this photo, this year I went as an FBI agent
with an X-Files theme. The X pin, the alien tie (got some
compliments for that), freshly polished dress shoes (Dockers),
 and a sweat-inducing trench coat. /sigh

This is the line after the line of getting your hall pass and before the line of getting into the vendor floor where there will be more lines at each table getting tangled up in the foot traffic lines that crisscross the floor. This is why comicons need traffic lights at major intersections!

OMG It's my boy R2-D2, rolling at the MegaCon like a Boss as always! Chirping away at the cute cosplayers, no doubt...

Right before Gillian's Q&A they had one set for ST:TNG's
Gates McFadden and Jonathan Frakes, and they brought a friend
as a surprise guest!

I admit when I'm taking photos I seem to be leaning
too far to the right. I blame trump.

Data!

Dr. Crusher!

This guy!

I left the TNG event to get in line for Gillian's Q&A - they will not
let you remain in the room between events, alas - and when I got there the
line was longer than the one for McFadden/Frakes/Spiner.

I couldn't wear that trench coat ALL the time...

SCULLY!!!

I sat over to the left of the room to see if my right-tilt
photography evened out. I think it did.

This one is where she's enjoying a reveal from one of the fans
doing the Q&A who turned out had worked on an official LEGO set
for the X-Files that's due for release this year. OMFG.
Now I know what I'm buying myself for my birthday...!

Just to give you an idea of the crowd by early afternoon. MegaCon gets big enough to be its own city on Saturdays, its busiest day.

If the lines for getting into the Q&As were bad, the lines
for the Photo Ops were longer (and slightly more stressful)

This was the second queue getting in for the photo!

Part of me wonders if it's okay to share the Photo Op I had with Ms. Anderson. I'll leave it to the nine or ten people who follow this blog, add a comment here or skeet me at Bluesky! 

There was one other moment of queueing up, this time in the Autograph line to see if I could drop off a gift (a printed copy of my X-Files fanfiction: I can't sell it but I ought to be able to gift it). But the line for that was still pretty long, and by that point in the day my legs were about to quit on me. I checked this step-tracking app on my phone and it told me by that time of the con I've already walked 4.2 miles (!). And I knew there were still more spots at the con I needed to visit. So I passed on the moment and stumbled off to a corner to sit and rest for an hour.

Once I got some strength back, I tried to circle about Artists Alley on the main floor, looking for some of the usual suspects that I follow for art, comics, science fiction writing, and so on, but I was so zoned out with my knees twitching a little too much to where I only recognized Amanda Conner's booth, where I bought a poster of her work on the DCU Starfire series a few years back.

After that, I staggered off to the commuter bus service back to the parking lots (this time I remembered the color), and then drove out around 5:00pm in search of a local Italian place my sister-in-law recommended (she grew up in Orlando, even worked at Sea World as a teen), which I got to by 6:00pm (yes, Florida traffic remains bad).

Oh, the step-tracker's final tally on the day: 5.6 miles of walking. Ow ow ow ow...

As far as con visits went this trip wasn't as overwhelming, although I wasn't forcing myself to try and see too much of it. Again, going solo isn't a lot of fun - it was nice to chat with other X-Philes and GA fans, although I regret not calling out to see if any OBSSE people were there - so if I go again I need to find a girlfriend dammit. Anyone out there in central Florida in her 40s-50s who's into DC Comics, most science fiction, some fantasy, and pro sports? Anyone...? 

/sigh

The Strait To Sequel

Over the weekend, someone went begging to the other major powers to help him out of a disaster of his own making (from Sam Metz, Will Weissert, Julia Frankel, and Cara Anna at AP News):

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has demanded about seven countries send warships to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, but his appeals have brought no commitments as oil prices soar during the Iran war.

The president declined to name the countries heavily reliant on Middle East crude that the administration is negotiating with to join a coalition to police the waterway where about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally flows.

“I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory,” Trump said about the strait, claiming the shipping channel is not something the United States needs because of its own access to oil. Trump spoke while answering reporters’ questions as he flew back to Washington from Florida aboard Air Force One.

The gist is that after weeks of crowing how victorious he's been blowing up Iran, his handlers have finally gotten him to understand that angering Iran to the point of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz was a really bad idea.

If you're wondering if any of those nations have answered back by now, I think Germany has spelled out what the response is going to be like (via Ellen Mitchell at The Hill):

Germany’s defense minister on Monday rebuffed calls from U.S. President Trump to send ships to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, telling reporters “this is not our war.”

Trump has called on allies, including those in NATO, for military ​support to keep the vital shipping route open. Iran has effectively closed the strait for the past two weeks in response to the U.S.-Israeli war on Tehran, using missiles, drones and mines to attack oil tankers trying to get through.

“What does … Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to ​do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?” Boris Pistorius ⁠said in Berlin, as reported by Reuters. “This is not our war, we have not started it.”

Ever the bully, trump never understood that a bully's victims will not come to that bully's aid when he's getting punched in the face. Having mocked and belittled and threatened our NATO allies - and pretty much 80 percent of the rest of the planet - trump has no peace offering to give them. 

This isn't post-9/11, when most of Western civilization came to our nation's aid to stamp out Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan (and more reluctantly invade Iraq over WMD lies and deception). trump and his lackeys - Rubio and whomever hasn't been fired from the State Department yet - may want other nations to sacrifice their own people and resources to rescue trump from this debacle, but they don't have the genuine skills of diplomacy - compromise, long-term planning, honesty, commitment to shared objectives - to recover from this.

The world may be facing economic turmoil if oil prices keep going up, but all of the other nations seem willing to suffer the pain momentarily if it means trump and the chickenhawk Far Right get humiliated and broken by their own idiocy and hubris.

An entire Far Right ideology of toxic masculinity is getting punched in the face right now. It's the only good news we have in all this death and fire.

Addendum: I hope this BlueSky skeet stays up. Thank you Dr. SkySkull!

Europeans when being asked to unblock the strait of Hormuz

[image or embed]

— Dr. SkySkull (@drskyskull.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 2:43 PM

What If: When THAT Happens

There's an old joke, no one is sure of the origins other than it came about during the early days of daily newspaper publishing. Thing is, Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly told this joke a lot during his tenure as President, so it's attributed to him:

A kid starts working Monday at a newsstand, where he meets a businessman who comes up, buys the morning paper, glances at the headline, then tosses the paper down in anger. That businessman keeps coming back all week doing the same: buys the morning paper, looks at the headline, tosses the paper away. On Friday, the kid asks the businessman when he approaches "Hey mister, why do you buy the paper only to throw it away?"

The businessman answers "I'm looking for the obituary."

The kid replies "Well mister, the obituaries are on the back pages."

To which the businessman snarls "Kid, when the son of a bitch I'm waiting for dies, it'll be on the front page!"

It's a joke I think of often, especially in this day and age because, well...

It's not like anyone is openly writing about it, other than the occasional news report of You Know Who showing signs of physical injury or illness, like recently (via Digby):

His doctor just said he was using a cream on his neck without announcing that he has shingles. But that’s almost certainly what he has. I had them in the same place. Combined with the stress and his age, he’s not feeling well at all. That can’t be good for the world.

There's been a lot of talk on social media, about the bruised hands, the increased signs of dementia, the inability to stay awake, etc. But nobody wants to say it too much too loudly (mostly because nobody wants to jinx it), but among a lot of the non-MAGA people this particular thought is now out there: "I can't wait for IT to happen."

Even the McSweeney's site doesn't exactly spell it out, but you don't need to read between the lines:

It’s impossible to say when IT will HAPPEN. But it can’t be too long until IT HAPPENS. Looking at the data (age, high-stress job, cardiac history), it is statistically plausible that IT will HAPPEN in the next thirty-six months.

Eighteen, if you factor in hamburger consumption and all the weird bruising.

Of course, it doesn’t feel right to want IT to HAPPEN. And it’s obviously not okay to try to make IT HAPPEN. That’s not what this is ABOUT, just to make things CLEAR LEGALLY as far as VARIOUS AGENCIES are concerned.

But regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN. So you’re allowed to think about IT...

When IT HAPPENS, it will probably be FEELING. Just a huge, overwhelming sense of FEELING, the kind where you didn’t even realize how starved you were for FEELING. Punctuated with alternating waves of SECOND FEELING, as well as SENSATION.

Plus, a sudden absence of THIRD FEELING, which makes you realize the toll of A CONSTANT BASELINE OF LOW-GRADE THIRD FEELING for ten goddamn TIME PERIODS straight, even though you were still plenty aware of THIRD FEELING, trust me...

For all the spiritual and emotional catharsis the event could be, for all the whispered wishes every time every American to the Left of the John Birchers prays at night... what WOULD really happen when IT happens?

Well, the simplest answer to that is the 25th Amendment will kick in, and Vice President JD Vance will get sworn in as President and take over the reins of the White House. It will be done within minutes, maybe an hour or two just to make sure You Know Who is officially an ex-shitgibbon. 

After that, chaos will prevail as the entire Far Right ecosystem between the wingnut media, the wingnut preachers, the wingnut congresscritters, and a handful of guys named Dave begin to fight each other over the rotting corpse of trump's MAGA empire.

For starters: While Vance is going to be in prime position to claim the mantle of MAGA leadership, he's not exactly well-liked even among the Republican base. He's relatively new to politics and doesn't have the network in place within the party ranks to seize control. Above all, he really doesn't have anyone he can trust to help corral a fracturing coalition that will fracture because others will scheme in the backrooms to undercut Vance and seize the MAGA crown for themselves.

Even within trump's Cabinet, there at least two people - Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth - who could challenge Vance for leadership of that rabid MAGA base. Rubio in particular has sold himself as the future of the Republican Party ever since 2010 when he got elected Senator, and happily marketed by the Beltway punditry as the GOP Savior... only to get undercut by trump's rise to power in 2016. If Rubio has any presidential ambitions still in him, he has to known his window of opportunity is closing soon, and having that unpopular Vance blocking his way isn't going to help him.

Granted, in this scenario Vance will likely purge the Cabinet of anyone he thinks will work against him, which likely kicks Rubio out of State and out of any position to sabotage whatever bankrupt foreign policy our nation has left. That could give Rubio the chance to play spoiler for party leadership on the outside, criticizing any miscues Vance would likely commit in office, and primary challenge Vance for 2028. Thing is, in modern presidential politics it's been rare to challenge an incumbent let alone beat them, so there's no guarantee for Rubio to win that way (the best possibility is that early primarying exposes Vance and he declines to run for re-election like Truman and LBJ. But in that scenario the GOP primaries become wide open for another crazy field of multiple candidates).

Any "What If" guessing about a post-trump aftermath relies on one key question: How will that rabid Far Right MAGA base react to losing their golden idol trump? It depends a lot on whomever among the Republican leadership that voter base would see as the worthy successor... which becomes its own problem. There isn't anyone that the MAGAts seem to respect as a future standard bearer: Not Vance, not Rubio, not either of trump's kids with political ambitions (junior and that other guy). There are other hardline panderers among the GOP ranks that *could* appeal; but some of them - Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to mind - have turned against trump publicly and could be hurting their own standing, or others like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott or Jim "Sex Scandal" Jordan who have alienated other party leaders to where a schism in Congress is unavoidable.

This is the thing about trump's devoted followers: They are more devoted to HIM than to the Republican Party itself. Given opportunities to change their support to other political figures, they refuse. We saw this in the 2024 primaries even with trump facing a number of criminal and civil charges (and convictions) that normally would make a candidate vulnerable: The likes of Ron DeSantis did his best to "own the libs" the way trump did, only to get rejected hard because the Real Thing was still available and the MAGA base did not want to abandon trump.

I've railed about this before: trump habitually, constantly violated social and political norms and yet kept gaining more voter support. he defied political gravity every time a scandal would have ruined anyone else. Of all of trump's business failings, he is good at one thing: Marketing himself. he wields a horrifying and dark charisma that claimed dominion over a section of the American population - the haters, the fearmongers, the grifters - that no else can reach.

trump is shameless, in a way nearly every other person on the planet isn't. A lot of politicians know how to appeal, how to pander, how to demagogue: None of them can sink themselves to the level of shamelessness trump can, which is why none of them can appeal to that MAGA base the way he does.

Vance tries to do it and gets mocked. DeSantis tried and failed. If Greene or other Far Right figures try to rise up and fill the vacuum of hate, they arguably won't be able to fill that void no matter how vile or vicious they behave. Because they run the risk - through self-awareness, through hesitation or moderation to keep themselves even vaguely human - of succumbing to political gravity where trump never fell.

As for the fracturing nature of the Republican Party itself: trump has made himself so indispensable to the party's organization and survival that there is a genuine possibility the GOP will fracture once he's gone. Again, we could see a civil war between the various trump wannabes rising up to pander to the rabid Far Right base for the 2028 presidency. But we could also witness a Republican Party falling apart between the various factions that are torn between keeping our international prestige high (and stopping Russian / Chinese hegemony from taking our top spot), keeping our business overlords happy (by ending trump's disastrous tariff wars), or pandering to an "America First" mob base that also wants a Christian Nationalist war against the heathens to bring about the End of Days.

A lot of that remains speculation. When - IF - THAT happens, we'll have to see what actually plays out.

Something we should prepare for when THAT happens is the likelihood of trump's devoted base going on the warpath. trump has called often at his rallies for his supporters to act out and attack others. We've seen what happened on January 6th, in spite of the MAGA faithful trying to whitewash / excuse the horrors of that riot. This isn't speculation: there is genuine fear if/when trump dies, his base will react with fire and fury.

We can look to how the Far Right reacted after the assassination of one of their media elites Charlie Kirk. The conservative punditry tried to turn Kirk into a Free Speech saint - ignoring all the hate speech he promoted and the colleges he attempted to censor - and attacked anyone on social media they viewed as dishonoring Kirk's memory. They actively got people fired from jobs for their own free speech rights, and a number of people and institutions were harassed with death threats.

At the same time, that same conservative punditry turned on each other trying to make themselves into Kirk's heir to his conservative empire. The likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Ben Shapiro pulled out the knives to backstab each other to claim the audience and financial base for their own. Owens in particular has gone after Charlie's widow Erika, who's been using the martyrdom to rise to political power on her own. Some of the rancor is over the growing anti-Semitism driving the Far Right rage conflicting with the public necessity of siding with Israel in the Middle East chaos going on right now. But a lot of it is really about who gets to be the next Trump - the role Charlie Kirk was growing into - and profiting from it all when trump himself kicks the bucket.

The unity we see in the modern Republican Party - the Far Right Conservative movement as a whole - really only exists as a money-making machine for those at the top who can profit from the graft, the insider trading, the kickbacks, the marketing of hats and t-shirts, the influence peddling, and open bribes. All of it led by the Grifter-in-Chief trump who's trying to squeeze every nickel he can (pennies are phased out, by the way) before he has to answer to a wrathful deity.

And that's the thing. A lot of the corruption trump is pulling right now - and a lot of the half-baked foreign and domestic policy debacles he keeps inflicting upon himself - shows all the trademarks of a con artist half-aware he's running out of time (look at how desperate trump is to see that hideous ballroom of his finished). His end is coming, and Judgment cometh right soon.

It's going to be a question of surviving the chaos that follows.

The Strait Story

Let's get straight to the point: trump and his pro-war lackeys had no idea what they were really doing starting a war with Iran (via Phillips Payson O'Brien at The Atlantic): 

Astonishingly, President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared when Iran, under air assault from the United States and Israel, retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. Military planners have pointed out for decades that the waterway—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes—is highly vulnerable to Iranian assault. But the Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure because officials assumed that such a move would hurt Iran more than the United States.

In its failure to anticipate Iran’s reaction, the administration ignored a dynamic that former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of pointing out: Once hostilities begin, “the enemy gets a vote.” U.S. leaders have drastically underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to survive, adjust, and strike back. Just two weeks into a war that began at a time of the president’s choosing, the U.S. appears uncertain about what to do next.

You can see the lack of intellectual and operational awareness with trump and everyone in his chain of command - Secretary of Voguing Pete Hegseth especially - when it comes to war planning just by noticing the map of the Strait of Hormuz.

via Wikipedia Commons

It's the geographic bottleneck of politics. I've got no training in military strategy or tactics, and even *I* can tell that narrow gap is a major hinderance to any naval operations. No shipping can slip through that 12 mile gap without detection, and Iran is in a prime position to threaten every oil tanker trying to get out of the Persian Gulf.

They've done this before, by the way. The "Tanker War" during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s saw Iraq try to tempt Iran to blockade the Strait in order to draw the United States into their fight. Iran tried to avoid that by targeting Iraqi tankers only, delaying any American intervention until 1987 when the Iraqis accidentally struck the USS Stark, giving Reagan's government the excuse to go after Iran (which unfortunately also led to the tragic downing of an Iranian airliner Flight 655).

So considering anyone with a basic understanding of geography, and anyone with a memory of recent history - the 1980s weren't THAT long ago - you'd think there would be enough people even among the neocons and war chickenhawks in the current White House who would have at least done some planning into securing control of the Strait to ensure the flow of trade (oil) would continue unabated.

That - alas - would require someone in trump's administration to be genuinely competent at this point.

trump and Hegseth and every other person involved in this mismanaged war effort simply didn't think or even care to think where the long-term consequences of their actions would lead (as if they ever did).

You can tell they operated on the ass-umption that their "decapitation strikes" - taking out the Ayatollah and any Iranian military chain of command - would lead to the immediate collapse of Iran's government and willingness to fight. That it would lead to the Iranian citizenry - already in decades of protesting the harsh regime of hardliner Shia clerics - rising up in mass protest to overthrow whatever was left to leave a power vacuum to trump's (and Netanyahu's) liking.

It never occurred to trump's circle that Iran's military and leadership have been planning for this kind of situation for decades: Having witnessed the tactics of our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, believing they've been in an existential fight against American hegemony since 1979 actually since 1953 when the CIA installed the Shah, and moving into more modern warfare methods such as drone bombs and cyberattacks (some of which the US military haven't adapted against yet). 

It hasn't occurred to our government's leadership - not just trump but let's face it most of our Presidents since the Second World War - even with the evidence after Afghanistan / Iraq / hell, Vietnam that bombing a population into submission doesn't work. The Iranian people may be tired and frustrated and willing to rise up against the Ayatollah including the new guy replacing his dead dad, but they're not going to do it while trump and his underlings are bombing schools, museums, and desalination plants.

I've often criticized Duyba's failed war effort in Iraq, pointing out that he and his people may have had a Plan A for going in and forcing regime change, but they had no Plan B when their attempt to install a puppet leader fell through. Considering what trump and Hegseth and the rest of the clowns are doing with Iran, there doesn't even seem to be a Plan A with them.

So, to the 77 million of you who voted for this shitgibbon to return to power: WE WARNED YOU. GODDAMN YOU, WE WARNED YOU and you were too butt-hurt about libruls and diversity to realize the damage you were bringing back.

And now a lot of things will get worse: The price of gas obviously, economic instability here and abroad, the likelihood of troop deployments and thousands of American families watching their loved ones go into harm's way - for arguably no reason at all this time save for the vanity and cruelty of trump and his lackeys - are just the immediate pain points we'll feel. We'll be feeling all of this months or even years down the road.

Gods help us. AGAIN.

The Wickedness of the Unwanted War

Are we the baddies?
-- Mitchell and Webb

The "bomb 'em all" war that trump and his lackeys triggered in Iran last week started with a horrific war crime: the destruction of a school building that killed hundreds including children. Only now are we getting confirmation it was our side doing it (via Merlyn Thomas and Shayan Sardarizadeh with the BBC, through a fact-checking service called BBC Verify): 

A US Tomahawk missile hit a military base near a primary school in southern Iran where Iranian authorities said 168 people, including around 110 children, were killed, expert video analysis shows.

A video published yesterday by Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency, which BBC Verify has confirmed as authentic, shows a missile moments before it struck an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base next to the Shajareh Tayebeh primary school in Minab.

BBC Verify has previously established through satellite imagery, verified videos and expert analysis that the area near the school was hit by a series of strikes.

Experts who have seen this latest video told us the presence of a Tomahawk missile, along with evidence the area was hit with multiple strikes, indicates this was a US operation. Neither Israel nor Iran are known to possess Tomahawks, experts said.

Netanyahu and his Israeli forces are eagerly striking targets across Iran for their own reasons - to end Iran's proxy war through terror groups, and to destabilize the entire Middle East to justify land-grabbing Gaza and the West Bank - but they've dragged in on their side a bomb-happy trump regime that wants "results" through glorified explosions and graphic body counts.

Just look at Secretary of War Assholes Pete Hegseth, out here crowing about ignoring the rules of engagement that our military is supposed to follow to reduce civilian casualties (via Haley Fuller at Military.com):

At a Pentagon briefing on March 2, 2026, War Secretary Pete Hegseth used blunt language about how the United States would fight, saying there would be “no stupid rules of engagement,” “no politically correct wars,” and “no nation-building quagmire.”

Those remarks became a flashpoint because rules of engagement, or ROE, are not “vibes” or slogans. They are a formal control system that ties tactical force decisions to strategy, law, and escalation management. Human Rights Watch responded the same day by warning that dismissing ROE in public can read as minimizing legal constraints that exist to protect civilians and keep operations compliant with the laws of war. 

In U.S. doctrine, ROE start with standing baseline rules and then get tailored by commanders for a mission, geography, and threat picture. The Joint Staff’s Standing Rules of Engagement and Standing Rules for the Use of Force (CJCSI 3121.01B) are the backbone reference that describes how U.S. forces think about self defense, hostile act, hostile intent, and the conditions for using force...

There are well-documented cases where tighter guidance on the use of force improved strategic outcomes by reducing civilian harm and preserving legitimacy with the population. In Afghanistan, ISAF’s 2009 Tactical Directive under Gen. Stanley McChrystal tightened standards for air-to-ground fires and emphasized protecting civilians, explicitly shaping how units used force in populated areas.

U.S. military analysis later described how that directive and related command emphasis drove changes in how airpower was used and contributed to decreased civilian casualties from airpower during that period. That is not a moral victory lap; it is operational logic. Civilian harm can create tactical blowback, degrade intelligence access, and strengthen enemy recruiting. 

Counterinsurgency doctrine makes the same point in more formal language: in COIN, legitimacy and civilian protection are not side quests. They are part of the theory of victory, which means ROE can become an instrument of strategy rather than just a compliance checklist...

In short: we're supposed to be the good guys, and good guys do not blow up schools and kill hundreds of children.

We do that - our US forces go in and commit atrocities across the board - and we signal to the local population we can't be trusted, that we are the demons that the other side keep painting us as. Recruitment for insurgents will go up: Local resistance - if we ever send troops to occupy - will get violent. Regional terrorism within any allied nations - and the likelihood of another terror strike here in the U.S. - will play out. And you get the quagmire Hegseth claims we're not getting dragged into.

But Hegseth doesn't care, he just wants to preen and strut as "a warrior" playing out his Alpha Male fantasies. trump never cared, he wants to satisfy the cruel urges that fill that empty void where a human soul should be.

It's telling that neither man were never truly soldiers. For all of Hegseth's "military" experience in the National Guard, he rode a desk not a tank. None of the actual Code of good soldiering got through that thick skull of his. Hegseth thinks warring is all about killing, and planting a colored flag on a battlefield to claim victory.

He is so wrong about that.

And trump, draft-dodging bone-spur coward that he is... he said far too often to far too many people that soldiering is for losers and suckers.

In the process, Hegseth is pushing our military into committing more and worse war crimes on the scale of My Lai, or Sand Creek. He's hoping - with trump's approval - to turn our troops into mindless trigger-pullers, taking aim at any target he and trump order them to kill.

This may be about the senseless - and criminal - killing of Iranians, and Venezuelans, and South American boaters, and now they're taking aim at Cubans. It's also about trump and the Far Right's desire to get troops to aim their rifles and missiles at other Americans, the ones the Far Right fear and hate the most.

trump wants his war on the part of America that doesn't cower or offer him adoration. Hegseth and the other Republican chickenhawks are willing to help him.

We need to stop these warmongers, not just for the sake of innocent lives across the globe but for the sake of our families, friends, and communities.

trump, Hegseth, and the Far Right want to be the Bad Guys. We shouldn't let them.

How Can Our Own Military Be Running Out of Ammo?

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this article at Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! And did Italy just beat the US in baseball this week???

As much as the ongoing deaths of civilians and soldiers horrify me as trump pushes the United States into more bombings and more war with more nations, another thing irking me is the revelation that our military is woefully unprepared for most of this, especially in terms of supplies. Susie Madrak over at Crooks & Liars has the details:

Inside the Pentagon, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation. “The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

Senior leaders are worried that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles.

“I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” one source added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

The president’s senior military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, warned the White House last week that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would raise the risk to any operation in Iran and to the U.S. personnel put in harm’s way.

Granted, the government under Biden has been shipping out a lot of reserve firepower to places like Ukraine, but our own military should have been stockpiling newer gear, ammo, defense systems, tanks, planes, helicopters, and other equipment to fill that void. 

I went digging for information about what's going on with our military manufacturing, and by the looks of it there's hundreds of billions of dollars getting pumped into all that (via Jake Kaufman at Defense and Munitions, a trade magazine):

The President’s FY ’26 National Defense Budget requests $1.01 trillion, a 13% increase from 2025. However, at the moment, Congress has passed $831.5 billion for the Department of War’s Defense's discretionary budget. Outstanding budget considerations going through Congress could bring that final number up toward $893 billion...

You would think $893 billion would pay for a lot of bullets...

The budget includes an additional $1.3 billion for industrial-based supply chain improvements and an additional $2.5 billion for missiles and munitions production expansion. The budget also includes significant new investments of $200 million for automation and artificial intelligence (AI). It breaks down to shipbuilding, munitions and defense supply chains, and air and missile defense alone accounting for 50% of the total enhancements...

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Where's the fucking money, Lockheed Martin???