Finally Friday Reads: Perpetual Fresh Hells

Posted: March 6, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked, just because, kakistocracy, Kristi Noem, MAGA Assholes, Trump's Wars | Tags: , , , , , , | 7 Comments

“Meanwhile, in the newly acquired Homeland Security luxury jet’s bedroom…” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There’s so much news to cover today that I don’t even know where to start. We’ve got information that we’re the ones who struck the elementary school in Iran, killing all those little girls. We’ve also found out that the Russians are helping Iran target us. This sure feels like the start of World War 3. Additionally, the job picture is bleak as stats show that jobs are being eliminated. Finally, don’t start celebrating Kristi Noem’s demise quite yet. She’s headed to another job, and her replacement is a bimbo with some odd kink. Orange Caligula and his Incompetence Legion continue to wreck everything. Steven Miller must be thrilled.

So, how goes the war? My bad, wars. We’ve got yet another frontline in another country as of 2 days ago. We’re now staging attacks in Ecuador. This is from Time Magazine. “Why Is the U.S. Launching Military Operations in Ecuador?”  This analysis and reporting is by Chantelle Lee.

The United States and Ecuador announced this week that they’ve begun a joint military operation to combat narcoterrorism in the South American country.

The U.S. Southern Command (Southcom), which oversees the nation’s military activity in Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a press release on Tuesday that Ecuadorian and American military forces had started operations that day “against Designated Terrorist Organizations in Ecuador.”

“The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism,” Southcom said in the press release. “Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere.”

Southcom also shared on X a short video in which a helicopter can be seen taking flight and picking up service members. The command didn’t explain what the video was depicting, though, or how it was tied to the operation in Ecuador.

Officials have so far shared little information about the military operation. But here’s what we do know.

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa said in a post on X this week that the country will be conducting “joint operations with our regional allies, including the United States” in March. He didn’t provide any details about the scale of the operation or the intended targets.

“The security of Ecuadorians is our priority, and we will fight to achieve peace in every corner of the country,” he said in his post. “To achieve that peace, we must act forcefully against criminals, wherever they may be. The pursuit of justice and national dignity will never be persecution, but rather a promise that we will keep to Ecuadorians.”

The Trump Administration hasn’t publicly shared how the U.S. military is involved in the operation in Ecuador. But one American official, speaking to the New York Timeson the condition of anonymity, said that, in the months leading up to this week’s announcement, U.S. Special Forces have been assisting Ecuadorian soldiers in preparing for raids. American service members, the official told the Times, have been deployed to support the Ecuadorian military with the operation, which is reportedly targeting drug facilities led by violent gangs. U.S. troops, though, will not be directly involved in the operation, the official told the Times.

Dalia Dassa Kaye, reporting for Foreign Affairs, has this analysis. “The Mirage of a New Middle East. War With Iran Won’t Reshape the Region the Way America Wants.”

Eager to show that he can do what no American leader has done before, President Donald Trump has chosen conflict over diplomacy and gone to war with Iran. The Islamic Republic, knowing that this fight is existential, retaliated quickly with deadly missile and drone attacks on Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East, and targets in Gulf states and beyond. This is now a regional war with global impact, disrupting oil and financial markets, supply chains, maritime commerce, and air travel. Threats to Americans and the death toll in Iran mount by the hour. These growing risks were predictable long before the war became reality, which might help explain why no previous president took the United States down this perilous path.

How this war will end remains uncertain. But when it does, the United States will have to face what comes next. To the extent that the Trump administration has considered plans for “the day after,” it seems to have made a series of overly optimistic assumptions about how the war might reshape Iran and the Middle East. For one, the Trump administration has insisted—including in Trump’s social media post on February 28 announcing the war—that a relentless degradation of Iranian leadership and military capabilities would weaken the regime enough that the Iranian people could rise up and “take over the government.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the administration’s logic goes, Iran would be defanged and so preoccupied with internal problems that it could no longer pose a threat to the region or American interests. Taking the current Iranian regime out of the equation, Washington assumes, would remove one of the largest sources of regional instability and usher in a new Middle East more to the United States’ liking.

But the outcome of this war will likely fall far short of these rosy expectations. After the bombing ends, Iran and the region could look worse, or at least not better, than they did before the war. The fighting could create a power vacuum in Tehran, sour U.S. allies on their partnerships with Washington, and produce ripple effects on conflicts elsewhere in the world, all without removing sources of regional strife that have nothing to do with the regime in Iran. The risks increase the longer the war goes on, so Congress and U.S. allies must press for a cease-fire now if there is to be any hope of mitigating these day-after dangers.

More analysis of the likely deadly results over time, which include the rise of terrorism once more, can be found at the link. Eric Cortellessa has more analysis about “Trump’s War” at Time Magazine.

In short, if Trump campaigned as a President of peace, he has governed as the opposite. Now he has drawn the U.S. into the kind of conflict he long pledged to avoid. Having ousted the tyrannical ruler of Iran’s theocracy, he has committed the U.S. anew to regime change in the Middle East, telling TIME he intends to play a role in shaping the next government of a regional powerhouse home to some 90 million people. “One of the things I’m going to be asking for is the ability to work with them on choosing a new leader,” he says. “I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei. I want to be involved in the selection. They can select, but we have to make sure it’s somebody that’s reasonable to the United States.”

It’s impossible to know how all this will unfold. There was little sympathy internationally for the Ayatollah, who reigned over a brutal Islamist regime; throughout Tehran and across the Iranian diaspora, crowds have rejoiced in the streets upon hearing the news of his demise. To some, Trump’s attacks are historic in the best sense, eliminating an avowed adversary who sought to destroy the U.S. and whom Washington has long viewed as the head of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

But the gambit carries extraordinary risks—for Trump’s presidency, for Iran’s fragile political future, for regional stability, and for the safety of Americans at home and abroad. The gravest decision a President can make is whether to send American troops into harm’s way. Trump, who once defined himself in opposition to foreign entanglements, has pivoted with astonishing alacrity toward open-ended confrontation across multiple theaters.

In his interview with TIME, Trump says his goals are to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat once and for all, to dismantle its ballistic-missile program, and to install a Western-friendly government. “We have to be able to deal with sane and rational people,” he says. Yet Trump launched a war before making a case to the country or to Congress, and his Administration has offered unclear—and at times contradictory—explanations of the mission’s objectives. The most unnerving possibility is that Operation Epic Fury is not the culmination of his shift toward a war presidency, but rather the beginning of a new chapter.

The path to war with Iran was paved by a pair of meetings, one year apart, with Benjamin Netanyahu.

As usual, Trump is easily manipulated by his counterparts with selfish and bad intentions.

On Feb. 4, 2025, the Israeli Prime Minister visited the White House for the first time since Trump’s return to power. Seated at a long table in the Cabinet Room, Netanyahu began with a bracing reminder, according to U.S. and Israeli officials present at the meeting: Iran, he noted, had plotted to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Law-­enforcement officials disclosed that they had disrupted what they described as two Iranian plots to kill Trump. (Tehran denied the allegations.) Trump has long fused geopolitics with grievance, and Iran’s clerical leadership occupied a singular place on his list of adversaries. When TIME asked him in a November 2024 interview about the prospect of war with Iran, Trump did not dismiss it. “Anything can happen,” he said.

Sensing an opening, Netanyahu walked through a slide deck. It showed stockpiles of highly enriched uranium climbing, centrifuges spinning faster, inspectors reporting gaps. Ever since Trump withdrew from President Barack Obama’s nuclear accord in 2018, Tehran had incrementally expanded its enrichment program, moving closer to breakout capacity. By the time Trump was inaugurated a second time, ­international inspectors assessed that Iran possessed enough weapons-grade uranium to place it mere weeks from assembling a bomb. “Look, Donald,” Netanyahu said, leaning in, “this has to be tackled, because they’re racing forward.” He paused, locking eyes with the President. “You can’t have a nuclear Iran on your watch.”

I wanted to mention the economy signalling a meltdown. This is from Jeff Cox writing for CNBC. “Economy:  U.S. payrolls unexpectedly fell by 92,000 in February; unemployment rate rises to 4.4%.”

  • Nonfarm payrolls in February fell by 92,000, compared with the estimate for 50,000 and below the downwardly revised January total of 126,000. It was the third time in five months that the economy lost jobs.

  • Health care, the primary growth driver in payrolls, saw a loss of 28,000, due largely to a strike at Kaiser Permanente that sidelined more than 30,000 workers in Hawaii and California.

  • Wages rose more than expected. Average hourly earnings increased 0.4% for the month and 3.8% from a year ago, both 0.1 percentage point above forecast.

I want to mention a few things about this. Generally, this would indicate that the Fed’s Board of Governors may loosen interest rates.  However, we’re still on the high end of the inflation rate target, considering that wages rose by more than expected, the Fed may be reluctant to move on that.  Wars generally stimulate an economy but that remains to be seen on the various military advantages Trump has undertaken. There is still concern about the supply inventory needed to support the war. Moving to a wartime economy can create shortages in the consumer sector. International markets are already pricing in oil shortages.

As usual, I am ever the economist. I’m just weirded out about all the Kristi Noem and her likely replacement news. These people are all bimbos and freaks. Noem’s replacement, Senator Markwayne Mullin, appears to have a really odd kink. This is from MEDIAite. It’s a headline from 2023. “Markwayne Mullin Reportedly Fingered Nostrils of Colleagues and Their Spouses During Visit to Israel.”  I certainly want the committee hearing to ask about this, but I really don’t want to hear the details.

I do want to know more about Noem’s new job, however. This is from The Hill. WTH is the Shield of the Americans anyway? Ashleigh Fields has this headline. “What we know about Noem’s new ‘Shield of the Americas’ role.”

While the soon-to-be former secretary will no longer head up immigration and other national security agencies under DHS, her work for “Shield of the Americas” will hit on similar topics, including immigrants in the country illegally, transnational trafficking and border crossings.

Here’s what we know about the role: What is ‘Shield of the Americas’?

The regional coalition of countries in Latin America will work together on ideology and policy initiatives that help secure the Western Hemisphere, according to the White House.

The Shield of the Americas will be guided in part by the president’s foreign policy initiatives dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” fashioned after the Monroe Doctrine. The administration has described the doctrine as enlisting “established friends” in the Western Hemisphere to pursue U.S. aims and expanding ties by “cultivating and strengthening new partners.”

Since Trump returned to office last year, he directed the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” announced plans to “take back” the Panama Canal, and pushed efforts to acquire Greenland and make Canada the 51st state.

A summit making the Shield of the Americas official is set to take place this weekend in Miami, and it may largely focus on counterterrorism measures in the region as a group of Latin American leaders assemble on American soil.

Noem will work with foreign leaders in both North and South America. The Trump administration has maintained a heavy interest in connecting with Latin American leaders to combat human smuggling, drug trafficking and undocumented immigration.

Thirteen heads of Latin American countries are expected to be present at the Miami summit this weekend. Some notable names, according to the White House, include: Argentine President Javier Milei, Chilean President-elect José Antonio Kast, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Ortez and Honduran President Nasry “Tito” Asfura.

NPR has the go-to list on “What you need to know about Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new pick to lead DHS.”

Anyway, he has a background in construction. He’s from Oklahoma. Evidently, he and Rand Paul don’t get along, and since Paul is the head of the committee that will approve his appointment, it should be interesting.

So, that’s enough weird Trump news for the day. I need to return to doing something more worthwhile, like the laundry and dishes.

What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?

Friday Reads: A Little This n That

Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Good Morning!

I’m having a challenging week with my senior dog Karma who is really going down hill fast at the moment so I’m going to make this brief.  She’s been a bit of an issue this week since she sleeps a lot and frequently doesn’t wake up in time to get outside.  So, I’m tired too.

Wikileak’s Julian Assange has been granted asylum in Ecuador.

Ecuador has granted asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange two months after he took refuge in its London embassy while fighting extradition from the UK.

It said his human rights might be violated if he is sent to Sweden to be questioned over sex assault claims.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK would not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the country and the move was also criticised by Stockholm.

Ecuador said it would seek to negotiate arrangements for Mr Assange to leave.

“We don’t think it is reasonable that, after a sovereign government has made the decision of granting political asylum, a citizen is forced to live in an embassy for a long period,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said.

Mr Assange took refuge at the embassy in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over assault and rape claims, which he denies.

Mr Patino had accused the UK of making an “open threat” to enter its embassy to arrest Mr Assange, an Australian national.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley Calls Romney a “Stupid Back Stabber”.

Responding to Romney’s plan to kill energy production and thousands of jobs in Iowa, long time conservative Senator Chuck Grassley called Romney “stupid” and a “back stabber” at two town hall meetings.

In his unabated campaign to piss off every possible voter, Mitt Romney called for the cancellation of tax credits for wind energy, a move that would kill 37,000 good paying jobs nationwide.

In Iowa alone, 7,000 people are employed in the wind energy sector, producing a quarter of the state’s electric power.

Why would Romney do something so heartless? To pay for tax cuts for the rich, naturally.

At a town hall meeting in rural Iowa, Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s conservative Senator for 32 years, said,

“I’m the author of the wind energy tax credit of 1992, and there were people from outside the state came into Iowa and issued a press release that the Republican candidate for president was opposed to wind energy, and I felt it was just like a knife in my back”.
Calling Romney’s proposal an insult, Grassley continued his attack on the Republican standard-bearer at a different town hall meeting:

“when you think at a time of 8.2 percent unemployment there would be any question that you wouldn’t want to lay off 4,000 more people in the state of Iowa and probably 25,000 people nationwide, but that’s kind of what’s at stake here.”
Grassley concluded by saying,

“I don’t know who’s behind it and I’m going to find out who’s behind it, and expose them and tell them how stupid their policy is.”

DU cited the Des Moines Register as a source of the quotes.

Economist Mark Thoma has an excellent Op Ed up at the NYDN titled “Paul Ryan’s imaginary expertise;The supposed economic policy wonk lacks basic understanding”.

When Mitt Romney introduced Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, he emphasized that Ryan “has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party” on economic policy. But a close examination of Ryan’s monetary and fiscal policy proposals makes it hard to understand why he is held in high regard.

Ryan’s views on monetary policy are, by his own admission, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” (In a 2005 speech, he said: “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”)

Concerns about inflation — currency debasement — are prominent in Rand’s novel, and those concerns drive Ryan’s monetary policy proposals. For example, Ryan introduced legislation in 2008 to replace the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate to stabilize both inflation and employment with a single mandate to stabilize inflation. Under Ryan’s proposal, the Fed would ignore employment when making policy decisions.

This lack of concern over employment is disconcerting, but it’s at least possible to find economists who support a single inflation mandate for the Fed. It’s much harder to find anyone who will support another inflation prevention policy Ryan has proposed, a policy similar to a gold standard.

Despite decades of stable inflation, and criticism from many experts that the Fed is too worried about inflation and not worried enough about unemployment, Ryan does not trust the Fed to keep inflation under control. Instead, he has proposed tying the value of the dollar to a basket of commodities. The Fed’s only job under this policy would be to keep the value of the dollar in line with the value of the commodities in the basket. The pursuit of stable employment or any other goal would interfere with this mission.

But this is not a recipe for price stability, as Ryan claims. Every time the price of oil, corn or other commodities in the basket changes due to ordinary fluctuations in supply and demand, which is often, the value of the dollar would change as well. This would make the dollar even more unstable and uncertain than it is now — and we’d also lose an important tool in the fight against unemployment.

That’s not even his worst proposal for monetary policy. That distinction goes to his call to raise interest rates to cure the recession — because “there’s a lot of capital parked out there, and we need to coax it out into the markets.”

This shows a serious misunderstanding of what’s holding the economy back. If interest rates are increased, the higher return on financial assets will cause more people to provide funds to financial markets — but the supply of funds isn’t the problem.

Romney is once again playing race baiting games.  Romney’s campaign has put together a petition to tell the President to stop being such an angry black man.  I’m only going to link to this.  You can go see it for yourself.  This is getting old.

Professional Village Idiot–Quitterella–was put to the Jon Stewart treatment when she said she didn’t know of any conservatives that talk the way liberals do; all nasty and vitriolic.

Jon Stewart poked fun at one of his favorite targets on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night. Stewart ripped into Sarah Palin for saying that she couldn’t think of any prominent Republicans who talk the way liberals do.

“Does the lake behind you have reflective properties?” Stewart said. “If so, you may find the answer to your riddle.”

He then proceeded to show a video of Palin slinging harsh words: accusing Obama of pallin’ around with terrorists, calling Nancy Pelosi a dingbat and questioning the president’s “balls” (so to speak). Turns out, Stewart had quite a bit of material to work with.

He concluded: “So you don’t know of any prominent Republicans who spew divisive vitriol? There can only be two explanations for that. One: Not even Sarah Palin believes she is a prominent Republican anymore. Or two: Sarah Palin can no longer hear herself speak.”

Here’s  a cute item on Madam Secretary from Conde Naste Traveller. What’s it like to spend nine days on the road with Hillary Clinton?

According to Clinton, the swift resolution of the Chen debacle was the direct result of the intensive relationship-building that the United States and China have been engaged in during her nearly four years as secretary of state. “We were coming as people who had already experienced many hours of dialogue in many different settings and who were invested in a peaceful, cooperative relationship, so we had a personal trust,” she says. “Those conversations are not just about things—they’re about people, and how we listen to one another and interact with one another. Even if we saw things differently, we were not coming as strangers . . . and I think that really helped facilitate how we were able to move forward.”

It also helped that Clinton is so deft with the human touch: Sources familiar with the situation say that China agreed to Chen’s wishes after Clinton had an extended private conversation with Chinese state councilor Dai Bingguo, with whom she has cultivated close ties. “Their relationship is a great example of what she has been doing for the past three and a half years,” says deputy assistant secretary Philippe Reines. “If Chen had been taken into the embassy on January 21, 2009, this would not have had a happy ending. She didn’t yet have the personal relationships that she leaned on in this case.”

It’s precisely this sort of relationship-building that has compelled Clinton to travel more than 800,000 miles (she will have clocked over a million by the time she steps down, early next year) to more than one hundred countries during her time as secretary. She notes the irony that even though we live in an era of easy and instant communication, face-to-face meetings have never been more valued. “I could sit in my office and do videoconferences nearly anywhere in the world, but because that is so easy, people actually expect you to show up more, to make the effort and demonstrate the respect, to sit across the table and look eye to eye. It reflects a commitment to the relationship that you cannot get from sending an e-mail or doing a videoconference.”

Alright, let’s conclude with  my continuing to share my fascination with graves and grave goods.  This is a story from the UK on what mass burials can tell us about catastrophic disasters throughout history.  Many ancient gravesites in the UK and other areas have been removed to make way for shopping centers and the like. This has led to a lot of chances to learn about historic events and peoples.  Here’s a story from London’s volcanic winter.

The Medieval cemetery at Spitalfields is probably the largest excavated graveyard in the world. Work by MOLA between 1998 and 2001 unearthed a staggering 10,516 burials, of which just over 5,300 have been studied in detail. Allowing for those portions of the cemetery destroyed during the construction of Spitalfields market, it is probable that around 18,000 people were once interred there. As well as providing an unparalleled corpus of skeletal material for the period, a rigorous programme of Bayesian radiocarbon dating (see CA 259) by Alex Bayliss and Jane Sidell has provided a tight chronology for the Medieval cemetery. Securing detailed phasing for a site type that is notoriously hard to date proved crucial when it came to understanding how the cemetery population met their fate. It also allowed change within that population to be studied over time, providing vivid insights into the evolving nature of London life.

Spitalfields cemetery was closely associated with the priory and hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate, later known as St Mary Spital. Claimed to be the largest hospital in London when it was closed during the Dissolution in 1539, the institution was originally founded in around 1197. Intended to minister to the poor, sick and infirm, as well as women in childbirth, the new establishment was a reaction to the care needs of London’s growing population.

The first burials in the cemetery, however, seem to have been a response to pressures of a different kind. Radiocarbon dated to about 1120, the earliest bodies pre-date the priory by a good 70 years. Far from occupying ordered rows, the corpses were dumped in open quarry pits. Such opportunistic interment away from any known religious house evokes an emergency situation in which large numbers of bodies needed to be disposed of rapidly. If so, it was not the last time that a catastrophe heralded the suspension of normal burial practices at Spitalfields.

The foundation of St Mary Spital brought the construction of a priory church at the north-west corner of the cemetery, while the other buildings were clustered nearby. Although the majority of those laid to rest in the graveyard were placed in individual grave shafts sunk in neat rows, excavations revealed a group of 140 large pits clustered along the south and east margins of the burial ground.

Dug as far from the priory buildings as the cemetery confines allowed, each pit contained between 8 and 40 bodies. A sure sign that the death rate had once again outstripped existing burial measures, the desire to keep these mass graves away from inhabited areas underscores a very real fear of the dangers the bodies could pose for the living. In London, as elsewhere, the natural reaction to discovering such mass burials is to interpret them as plague pits from the 1348 Black Death.

Just the name Spitalfields was enough to attract me to the article. But hey, mass medieval graves? Whoa … just more lessons in impermanence for a practicing Buddhist.  But, it’s also a window in to a different world, isn’t it?

Okay, that’s it from me today.  What’s on your reading and blogging list?