This post has Donny’s thick meathead looming over a mountain with a look that’s not imperial just straight-up predator. Like the look he probably made after barging into the room of half-dressed teen girls at the skeevy Miss Universe pageant he used to own. Or maybe the look when he gets on his knees and squints into the keyhole to Melania’s room at her separate bungalow far from Donnie’s “private wing” at squalid Mar a Lago.

Greenland, population 56,000, wants no part of drilling for oil or Trump. The Kingdom of Denmark, which has authority over Greenland’s foreign+monetary policy, feels likewise. Pro tip to FIFA Peace-Prize winner+ender of 30-40 wars going way back to the tough Battle of Lechfeld in 955 (those Magyars were tough, crafty, maybe a little cuckoo) — you might want to think this one through a little more after the nasty surprise (who could have predicted it really) of that Hormuz thing.

Also, War/Sec Hair Gel has used up our missiles+has nothing left to play with. Strong men with tears in their eyes should be telling Donnie that sure, Greenland’s just a bunch of rocks and Denmark’s pretty tiny but there’s the EU thing+the French actually do have nukes so…

And pretty soon the Ayatollah, who’s basically just busting your chops at this point (hey, you did murder his father, sister and 14-month old niece, remember?) will pull that Mrs. Doubtfire wig off your head, stick it on a drone and launch it at Kuwait! Iran’s Moe, you’re Curly and here we are.

Speaking of oil, Greenland Energy has already put drilling equipment on Greenland’s shore. One of the company honchos, Larry Swets, pinkie-swears that they’ll just drill one well to get the lay of the land. One well is the gateway drug; pretty soon Exxon, BP, Saudi Aramco maybe even Vladdy’s Gazprom will all want to lend a hand in the name of international cooperation.

Larry, the Greenland Energy guy, is from Texas (shocker!) and (completely not a shock) had his company flunkie lie at a community meeting at Jameson Land, the location where Greenland Energy intends to drill. Locals had seen a tug dragging a barge onto shore. Containers were unloaded. Said stooge told the townsfolk that the oil company had government authorization to begin exploration. According to the Guardian, that prompted “the government to issue a strong warning that no approval had been granted to land” the drilling equipment. Officials stated that no drilling could take place without the approval of the regional mineral resources authority.

About 100,000 geese stay near Jameson Land in summer and fall, en route to the British Isles for winter. They are protected by national and regional treaties. Donnie should consult with the child he adores, about what happens when you stir up a populace by threatening to wipe out their protected birds. Vanky could barely stifle a yawn from those expensive reconstructed lips when she first heard that the locals were upset she+Jared wanted to build a luxury wellness-for-billionaires village on a nationally protected, unsettled Albanian island which was home to a vibrant flamingo estuary. Then came 6 months of daily demonstrations, lawsuits and massive political unrest now known as the Flamingo Revolution. Her toady, the Prime Minister of Albania is under investigation+looking worse for the wear.

On her summer yacht, Ivanka, shooting selfies for Instagram in her silk charmeuse dress (you can get it at Saks for $849) looks a little pouty. It’s so unfair that flamingos and Albanians can get in the way of her life choices!

Larry Swetts, on the other hand, may have solved the problem of his lying spokesman. He hired an even bigger liar, one of the biggest, Dr. Phil! who’s going to shoot a documentary about the “mission of these modern-day wildcatters” which of course is to make even more $$ for oil billionaires and who knows, maybe another side hustle the Trump family??

This notorious scam artist was forced last year in federal bankruptcy court to put his failed media company into Chapter 7 liquidation after incriminating text messages were found in which Dr. Phil tried to hide that his company was bankrupt. Judge Scott Everett, who heard the case said, “candor to the court is critical and his business was as dead as a doornail.” But Dr. Phil is a favorite of the Trump regime (where have you gone Kanye West?) and he’ll land on his feet, with any luck in a pile of geese shit on the Greenland coast.

Trump was fresh while everyone else was tired; he’d snored through the Knicks-Spurs game so the nocturnal (like hedgehogs, skunks+hammerhead sharks) Donnie had on hand whatever wits were left him.

Yes, great game, both teams played great (they love me in Texas), New York fans cheered me too, maybe a few boos sure. Lots of cheers for me. Then Int/Sec Doug Burgum rushed to his side, breathing heavily in the tarmac shadows, cheeks inflating/deflating on each syllable. A comedy of hollow sounds. The reflecting pool would be open lickety-split, for sure, promised blowfish Burgum.

EPA head Lee Zeldin apparently wasn’t available so they brought out bobblehead Lee whose whitefish-face wobbled up/down, up/down with every breath exhaled by Leader. Bobblehead squeaked that Kathy Hochul (who beat human((ish)) Lee in the 2022 New York Governor’s race) has to start fracking on the southern tier+while she’s at it, build the Constitution methane gas pipeline that would run along western New York, take a sharp right, turn eastward and knife smack into Massachusetts. Dolly Lee seemed to get even paler as Boss sunk down, heaved an alarming bristle and said, “She broke our deal. We had a deal.”

That’s been the Trumpy version of events all along — Kathy agreed to build 2 gas pipelines in order to erect offshore wind facilities off the Long Island coast. The Governor’s office denies this happened. Team Trump has slippery connections to the truth at all times, but here’s El Heifer telling the world she’s trying to stiff him.

Reporters were yawning while Bobblehead Z’s spring was already sagging, maybe ready to snap as he crowed about the NESE pipeline that Kathy does support. NESE is $3-4 billion boondoggle that’s not needed to generate electricity, will rip up the refurbished New York Harbor, soak downstate ratepayers in skyrocketing electric rates and result in a windfall mega-profit for global gas polluter National Grid to rebuild its moldering old power plant on Long Island. Maybe Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have nationalized smarmy Grid by then.

Public Citizen makes clear in last week’s excellent brief that it doesn’t matter if Hochul cut the deal or not. Since FERC has a Congressional directive to insure that fracked gas pipelines be designed+built for the public interest (a futile exercise in this planet-burning year of 2026), Public Citizen argues that “a crass political shakedown using Constitution Pipeline as a bludgeon is plainly contrary to the public interest that requires the Commission to look beyond precedent agreements to determine compliance with public necessity.”

Hochul flack Ken Lovett, who’s usually hyperventilating about the evils of environmentalists batted Trump’s claims away, saying, “this is completely false as the President looks for yet another way to feed his obsession with killing offshore wind.”

Let me edit that for you Ken — “polluter stooge Trump is desperately trying to kill clean energy to pander to his oil donors+petrostate paymasters. Why do you think he’s always on his chubby knees before Putin, the Gulf oil princes+soon the Ayatollah?”

Well a guy can try…

The upstate Constitution pipeline has been blocked by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) 3x because the pipeline failed to pass clean water reviews. There was strong local opposition to the pipeline early on; residents had suffered significant property and land damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. The DEC had battled the slipshod+corrupt work of the Iroquois pipeline builders in the ‘90s — that outfit paid $22 million in criminal+civil penalties for violations of the Clean Water Act. DEC’s regulatory chops had gotten more aggressive by the 2010s when Williams came rolling in.

Nothing has changed environmentally speaking— the 125 mile pipeline would still invade hundreds of streams and wetlands throughout the state. The Williams Companies, still the putative operator of both the NESE+Constitution pipelines (which has 30,000 miles of pipelines+is spending $6 billion to expand its LNG operations), claims that Constitution will save consumers $500,000 a year over 15 years.

That as Poppy Bush used to say, is voodoo economics (tho he sometimes said voodoo math too depending how long he’d been out in the sun). Nowadays, solar and hydropower are cheaper than gas and only getting cheaper. New York will see that directly now that the Champlain-Hudson Power Express (CHPE) transmission cable has begun operation bringing cheap+clean hydro down to Astoria, Queens from Quebec. A smart move by Hochul though her team inexplicably blocked a second line, the Clean Path transmission cable, that would have brought nearly the same amount of clean power from Niagara into Queens. Clean Path would have undercut the need for the NYC Harbor-busting NESE gas pipe. Was that also part of the scuzzy deal oafish Donnie+simpering Lee claim was made?

These instruments are on the Trumpoid hit list because they collect data on something this administration cultishly denies exists — the impact of greenhouse emissions+climate change on the ocean. But just because Trump 2.0 denies reality, scientists still do science and monitor how carbon dioxide+methane hammer fisheries and marine food webs.

A key element in the data collected under the Irminger Sea (which Donnie might mistake for a girl’s name or a daughter or maybe a daughter-figure?) is the ocean system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC is essentially an oceanic conveyor belt that circulates water north to south and back again. The process carries warmth to regions throughout the Atlantic while carrying nutrients critical to sustaining vast regions of ocean life.

There is a general scientific consensus that AMOC is weakening which itself will inflict radical environmental impacts along the Atlantic; some scientists now worry that it might be in the process of collapsing, which would cause a world-historic cooling of western Europe, disruption of the oceanic food supply and induce immensely damaging sea rise. Which is to say it would be good to keep collecting the data to know what the hell’s going on down there. Doesn’t Daddy realize that Vanky’s $1.4 billion Fantasy Island resort in Albania could get submerged, Atlantis-like, if this conveyor belt rips off its track?

It should be noted that Trump’s only connection to the ocean was his ill-fated yacht, the Trump Princess named after you-know-which-daughter. He bought it from the Sultan of Brunei in 1988 for $30 million, poured millions more into it, including adding a disco (his own private Studio 54) and a private hospital (!). In one of his early 90s bankruptcies he sold the Princess for $19 million taking a serious hit+was a-sea-faring no more.

So maybe Trump hates the ocean like he hates windmills, Rosie O’Donnell and California. The NSF attack on ocean science came just after Trump fired all 22 members of the National Science Board (NSB) in April. The NSB which was formed 76 years ago when the NSF, an independent federal agency now with a $9 billion budget, was created by Congress. The NSB is not just an advisory body; the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists described it as the overall policy-maker+priority-setter for the NSF. The NSB also oversees NSF’s acquisition of research tech from mega-computing facilities to telescopes. Before the NSF became a battering ram for the low-info gang of thugs+boobs around Donnie, it bankrolled a quarter of all federally-funded research at American universities while accounting for 0.1% of the federal budget. The Foundation’s outlays are down 60% this year. Maybe if it were doling out crypto so DJT could get a cut, food for thought.

The OOI within the NSF was established in 2016 just before Trump 1.0 took power. The Obama Administration saw the program as having a long life, extending at least 25 years after inception. Jim Edson former OOI head told the New York Times that it was the “world’s most advanced” ocean observation system.

The current system has a hi-tech veneer — sensors attached to moorings nearly 10,000 feet below the sea surface register biological and chemical changes in the deep ocean. These changes have heightened as climate impacts accelerate. Water, water everywhere and it’s getting hotter as the planet smolders. Data is collected by robotic vehicles (or autonomous underwater vehicles ((AUV)) as the boffins call them). The info is transmitted to research laboratories, one of which is the reknowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, by robots that look like sleek, underwater missiles. That will all change beginning this month as the White House wrecking crew bulldozes the program.

The NSF has not had a head for over a year. Trump has nominated Jim O’Neill to remedy the agency’s headless state but predictably the nominee is not without controversy. O’Neill will set a record if he ever gets appointed — Jim (who appears to have been separated at birth from Dwight Schrute) will be the first National Science Foundation big kahuna who’s not a scientist or an engineer. He certainly won’t miss those 22 pink-slipped advisors or may not know they were ever there!

Sudip Parikh, the CEO of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science Journals, sent a letter to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La), chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) requesting that the committee hold an open confirmation hearing on O’Neill’s appointment. Parikh gingerly suggests “while an unconventional background is not disqualifying, it does require greater scrutiny of the nomination by Congress.” In other words, you’re barking up the wrong tree with this slug.

In fairness, while those NSF-granted scientists were researching gene activity to fight cancer or develop cheaper solar thermal materials, Jim was on his own journey. Sure, he was once the Deputy to the Deputy of the Deputy Secretary of HHS in the Bush 43 regime where he railed against those mean FDA regulations. But his career really got cooking when he became the managing director of Clarium Capital, a hedge fund run by our old friend Peter Thiel around the time Peter the Great was starting his now not-so secret society which among other cool things, teaches his secret friends how to start a cult. During our man O’Neill’s tenure, Clarium’s assets under management (AUM) went from $7.8 billion in June 2008 to $700 million in December 2010. Look out Warren Buffet!

But no worries — as a reward, O’Neill got a new gig as the CEO of the Thiel Foundation, funded by you-know-who. Jim, who may even have been taught the secret handshake and then allowed inside the secret treehouse, poured $$ into “life extension” research ops like the Methuselah Foundation (pretty much researching how to be immortal+good luck with that Pete!). Another hungry mouth at the Thiel trough was the Seasteading Institute (Jim wrote them checks+was a long-time board member). Seasteading funds the establishment of “autonomous oceanic communities” that create “alternative” legal+political structures which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like Ivanka’s dreamy island lifestyle thing. So much synchronicity.

Speaking about the island (for the last time, promise), Parikh and other supporters of the ocean protection program argue that it gives the U.S. a solid bang for the buck. Trump tried to kill the program last year and again this spring by slashing 80% of it’s $48 million annual budget. Both times Congress restored the money. If Vanky’s going to plop $1.4 billion more or less into her seastead life fulfillment plan (though the Albanians are getting restless so there’s trouble in Paradise) that means that OOI costs 1/29th of Fantasy Island. She could write a check to save the oceans program+not even notice it. But she won’t.

Clearly it’s not the cost of the program. A strong leader at NSF could restore the sensors. So you can see why Parikh, who has a Phd in biochemistry, would like the Senate committee to cross-examine this O’Neill dude, whose track record doesn’t signal strong anything. Sanders will have a lot of fun torturing a Thiel boot-lick (swig some beer every time Bernie says al-ih-gark!!).

Cassidy, a medical doctor, has nothing to lose. He should be waking up every morning thinking of ways to screw Donald Trump who of course knifed Cassidy in the back b/c Cassidy was appalled by Donnie’s Jan. 6 sedition. Burning O’Neill at a hearing won’t make up for Cassidy’s vote to confirm Bob a’Loon to destroy the American health system, which was always the intent, but you have to start somewhere. In fact Dr. Bill and John Cornyn should caucus with the Democrats for the rest of the year to push back against this wobbly but persistent march to autocracy the Republicans have enabled. Well, at least hold the hearing…

Earl Monroe poured in 23 points as that game’s closer (Earl the Pearl’s the Brunson prototype really — a shape-shifting contortionist whose mid-air spins kept his defenders flat-footed+in foul trouble). He was one of the ‘73 who had big personalities along with Clyde Frazier whose 2nd Act was as flamboyant Knick game commentator, and the seemingly always-injured, long-suffering center Willis Reed whose creaky, clutch play in the paint inspired the team+fans.

Basketball’s a city game and really a New York City game, played in Riis Park in the Rockaways, Rucker Park on 155th Street and Potomac Park in Bed-Stuy. It was a black game, fused with the civil rights movement and black power. The white Manhattan establishment embraced the Knicks and so did working class neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

New York has loved the Knicks for a very, very long time. Brunson’s team has finally made that love requited.

Willis’ New York City is long gone, a very different place then and already lurching toward bankruptcy, but united behind the Knicks just like today. Mostly, it was really dirty. In 1973, NYC residences, some public schools, hospitals and commercial buildings still burned a half million tons of coal a year. The thick gray chemical smog routinely settled over Manhattan, giving the city a Bladerunner patina of skyscrapers shrouded in swirly toxic clouds.

By 1970, federal laws like the Air Quality Act and the landmark Clean Air Act reduced some of the worst floating poison but the air could still get pretty rank — in the early 70s every New Yorker inhaled 730 pounds of dirt+toxic soot annually; it would take another decade for clean air to replace the foul.

A week after the Knicks won the championship, on May 17, the Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by folksy country lawyer Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina) began hearings into the 1972 break-in of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building. The burglars were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign (Committee to Reelect the President — CREEP). (Nixon had signed the Clean Air Act though characteristically, he tried to scuttle it, then water it down just like some of today’s Democratic Governors have sliced up landmark state climate laws).

Ervin’s committee sought to establish just how connected the criminals were to Nixon. In the course of the investigation they found a remarkable cover-up organized by Nixon himself and uncovered a nest of other criminal activity including illegal campaign contributions and an astonishing pattern of suborning witnesses in the Watergate criminal trial.

Nixon, the squinty-eyed shake-down artist, put the arm on practically every major corporate honcho in the country and, illegally, many foreign nationals as well. He granted favorable contracts to friendly business leaders. He threatened to use his Department of Justice to come down hard on his perceived enemies — he even had an enemies list made up of celebrities, writers, Democrats+their donors, labor leaders and academics. He instructed the IRS to harass political opponents. Nixon forced NYC Mayor John Lindsay, a leader of the clean air campaigns in Congress before winning the mayoralty, out of the Republican Party pretty much at gunpoint.

Nixon spied on anti-war demonstrators and spurred on labor goons to attack them on Wall Street. Then he crowed himself hoarse when his tin soldiers killed 4 demonstrators at Kent State (they’re bums, he croaked). When the Washington Post aggressively investigated Nixon’s campaign team he began proceedings to deny the paper’s radio station holdings a renewal of their federal licenses. Nixon exhorted some staffers (in a pizzled rage) to burn down the Brookings Institution think tank because he thought they had documents that proved he had leaned on the corrupt leaders of South Vietnam in the fall of 1968, in the heat of a Presidential election, to blow up the Paris Peace negotiations to end the Vietnam war. Nixon needed the war to continue to win the election.

Once elected, Nixon, the sour con man, morphed into a berserk war criminal. Along with his other manifest skulduggery, he waged a ferociously violent assault against Vietnam+Cambodia. He seethed with jowly, purple rage when his State Department told him nuking Hanoi was overkill.

In other words, sound familiar? Those Knicks were an antidote to a corrupt+bonkers President just as today’s Knicks are (btw neither Nixon or the current looney jefe would be hailed for any physical prowess outside of Olympiad grifting).

Now keep in mind the Knicks have been heartbreakingly disappointing at the rare best of times, clownishly awful pretty much most of the time. I thought that ‘73 squad probably had a title or two left in them but injuries+retirements+boneheaded management gaffes (which became the MSG feature not the glitch) dissolved that team. The 80’s had some promise and the coming of Patrick Ewing but no cigar. In 1994, while Michael Jordan was showing the world he was really bad at baseball, Ewing+the Knicks blew a 3-2 lead in the finals with utter incompetence+truly astonishing lunkheadedness. In 1999, they were bulldozed in the finals by that year’s model of the Spurs.

Until Brunson, the 1999-2022 Knicks were a crew of madcap dolts. That’s when the dolts even showed up. In the ‘99 lottery, the Knicks grabbed, in the first round, a 7’2” Frenchman named Fredric Weis instead of several more familiar, homegrown players like Ron Artest (who in fairness turned out to be a riot-fomenting whack job). But Weis not a foreshadowing of a later French giant — actually he never showed up. Charles Oakley, power forward+the toughest Knick of the ‘90s (maybe of all time+a fan favorite) flew over to France, had a practice session with the 1st-rounder+stunned Fred decided to skip the NBA. Then there’s the $100 million Allan Houston car crash. Houston’s wobbly knees, always an issue even before his gathering of mongo-largesse from Jim Dolan, limited him to part-time duty through a calamitous 6-year contract (50 games in his last 2 seasons — the basketball equivalent of the Yankee’s wealthy summer vacationer Giancarlo Stanton). There was the Isaiah Thomas (then a honcho in the Knick front office) sexual harassment imbroglio, a seedy+deplorable affair (well, actually not an affair).

LOL Knicks won 17 games, lost 65 (!) in 2014-15. Then they much improved to 32-50 the next year, then, oy, back to 17 wins in 2019-20. Sad! Well, 21 wins the next year, yo! Getting better.

Dolan exiled Oakley because the Oak criticized his string of front office fizzles. Deranged D banned a fan for shouting out to him “Sell the team.” He banned a gaggle of lawyers from the Garden who worked for law firms engaged in civil litigation with Dolan’s corporations. And what about Dolan hiring a private dick to do surveillance on a NY State Liquor Authority investigator checking into whether Dolan had barred those lawyers? Dolan’s spook camped out at the state worker’s home all because the guy was doing his job?!

Along came Brunson. The script is too precious for Hollywood (actually with AI doing screenplays these days, maybe not). Brunson won 2 national titles playing at Villanova but was drafted 33rd in the NBA draft that year. A pure diss. The genius sportswriter/coach/pundit establishment ruled he was too short, too slow, not athletic, can’t play defense. After a good run with Dallas (witless blabbermouth Mavs owner Mark Cuban, trashed Rick Brunson+thus blew another solid investment op, as is his wont), Brunson came to the Knicks in 2022. That year, they won 10 more games than the previous, un-Brunson season. In 2023-24, he averaged 29 points a game, riding them deep into the playoffs.

Let’s just say this — Brunson is everything the poombahs said he wasn’t. He’s extremely quick off the dribble; can shoot the eyes off the basket from anywhere on the court; has uncanny body control, switching hands to release the ball in a micro-second; can stop on a dime to change the movement of the entire defense; and is one of basketball’s greatest passers, as good as anyone since Magic Johnson.

53 years later the Knicks are on top of the heap and nowhere is there a more stark contrast to dotty Donnie’s UFC death matches which John McCain called human cockfighting (actually it’s near-naked men sniffing each others’ sweaty privates) than Jalen Brunson (not to be confused with affable mediocrity John Starks who singlehandedly blew the Knicks very, could-taste-it above-mentioned close call championship in 1994).

Brunson famously left $113 million on the table in renegotiating his contract so that the Knicks would have more payroll flexibility to bring in Karl Anthony Towns+OG Anunoby. He talks up the team — meaning only a team can win a championship, no matter how spectacular the central player is. His dad Rick played for the Knicks, his mom was a star volleyball player at Temple. He’s been training to be a selfless hoop star since he was 5.

The finals against the young+star-studded San Antonio Spurs was a story repeated in every game — the Knicks trailed through most of the games, often by double digits, then mounted otherworldly comebacks with 5 minutes left (they overcame a 22-point deficit with 7 minutes against Cleveland in the previous round). Game 4 saw the Knicks set the record for a comeback in the NBA finals, 29 points, ending in OG’s stunning airborne pirouette to flick the ball home with a second left in the game. Game 5 was different+not a repeat of the previous games except for the large Spurs leads. This time Brunson willed the team to victory (he said later he couldn’t stand playing another game against the Spurs).

In the 4Q, Brunson scored 13 straight points, nailing jumpers off the dribble, without a pick or much assist from the team. When he couldn’t find the room to heave a shot he drove through the violent mass of Spur defenders, including giant Wemby (who had knocked him to the ground several times without having a foul called) flipping up the soft floater around an 8 foot wingspan. To end his streak, Brunson induced a foul by stretching out to tap his defender hip to hip while shooting, nearly sideways in 3-point range. He made all 3 foul shots, scoring 45 points in the game. The rest of the Knicks scored 49 in Game 5. He told all interviewers he was privileged to have these teammates, they had his back.

When Kenny Anderson said Brunson was the greatest Knick, his dad said no, that would be championshipless Patrick Ewing. Jalen pointed to Rick+said “that’s my dad.” Jalen spoke carefully in every interview and with enormous humility. Maybe even dingus Dolan knows how extraordinary Brunson’s talent and manner is in contrast to this loutish Trump moment. Probably not actually.

New Yorkers are hugging strangers in the street, twerking and break-dancing on the roof of buses. Fans projected the game on walls+surfaces throughout the city so there were Knicks happenings in hundreds of locations as Brunson/David took down Wemby/Goliath. Business is booming, song fills the air. Well, sure, a few school buses got torched. Maybe a cop car or two got trashed. For sure a couple of fatheads slugged each other in the subway (I’m told that happens even when the Knicks don’t clinch a title but I’ll do some further research+get back to you). Empire State of Mind.

NYC trash+bash aside — what does this mean. Joy is a human necessity; for whatever reason sports brings elation to fans.

Anyone with eyes to see realizes that Trump+his oligarch+media toadies are bringing the opposite. And New York has seen its share of heartbreak this century from 9/11 (and the haunting metallic odor that draped Brooklyn for months) to all the bankruptcies brought on by the Great Recession itself brought on by coke-snorting Wall Street greedbags (none of whom went to jail) to Superstorm Sandy which left rubble in neighborhood after neighborhood, including ripping the boardwalk off the promenade in Long Beach where I delivered mail for 4 summers to the wretched toll taken by Covid.

There’s more adversity to come for NYC after the celebrations. Trump’s unflushable fatberg Tom Homan is threatening to unleash his ICE thugs on New York, certainly because Donnie’s jealous that Brunson and the Knicks are getting more attention than he is for the moment in spite of his phony memo of understanding declaring peace for 60 days sometime soon. NY’s feckless governor won’t rise to the challenge. But the city’s gifted Mayor (whose victory was nearly as miraculous as the Knicks’) has shown moxie+grit, including getting the city cleaned up overnight after the Knicks carnivale and so far casting a spell on the skeevy schlub in the White House.

Brunson has told us that his team has his back. Winning the title after more than half a century means that the Knicks as a profound cultural asset have Mamdani’s back (John Lindsay owed his 1969 upset reelection in part to the miracle Mets+Jets championships). This concept is foreign to DJT — 45/47 has never had anyone’s back; these days, he doesn’t even have his own. This would be a bad time for near comatose Donnie to launch an assault on his hometown. The Knicks aura has sweepingly brought New Yorkers together in a way the Trumpoids shouldn’t mess with.

Mirror also said there’s a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad but she didn’t hear it+wouldn’t have understood if she had. Grabbing her cell, Princess instantly commanded her skinny, blanched Huntsman, Jared, (Tom Brady, Daddy’s first choice, would have been easier on the eyes, a low bar sure, problem is he often talks to people who aren’t actually there) to find her a cool island in the Mediterranean.

Jared flew off obediently and with a quick $$ hustle from his friends the Emeriti+the Saudi Prince Killer-of-Washington Post-reporters made his better half’s wish come true. BTW, his buds are the same guys who helped jump-start Daddy-in-law’s blockhead War of Iranian Oil+who, incidentally, are getting their asses kicked by the cranky Ayatollah’s Game of Drones. Anyway, they happily agreed to help the glamor couple find a pretty, Snow White-ish island to despoil.

Jared found the uninhabited island of Sazan, not exactly an undiscovered land mass, off the west coast of Albania in the Aegean Sea, 60 miles east of Italy’s spiked heel.

Jared’s Princess was now a bleached-blonde influencer who calls herself Ivanka+wears a lot of pink+white. Ivanka told a rando podcast host that she and Jared “stopped for a swim in the Aegean, effectively that’s how we found it (the island), we went on a hike barefoot, all the way up to the top and we were captivated.” For all the millions of $$ spent on following the Magic Mirror’s advice, all the cheek filler, forehead botox, multiple rhinoplasty procedures, chin implants, lip lifts+brow elevations, Ivanka’s crack plastic surgeon forgot to remove those tin ears. Americans who are struggling to pay for food, rent/mortgages, gasoline, health care are in no mood to hear about the oligarch Princess+her personal journey of fulfillment. When you can’t pay the rent you get cross with someone swagger about buying a private island.

And in the age of globalization, this tin ear crosses the sea to make mischief on a planetary scale. Albanians are getting heated up over the pending Vanky conquest. She wants to develop two locations, Sazan Island, a former military base under the old communist Albanian regime, that most communist-y of communist autocracies, and the Narta Lagoon on Albania’s coast.

Narta Lagoon is within the Vjosa Wild River National Park, 98% of which is protected area. It sits on the Adriatic Flyway, a migration corridor for millions of birds flying between Africa and Europe each year. The Lagoon has populations of the white-headed duck—an endangered species, endangered monk seals, the near-endangered Dalmatian pelican, nesting sea turtles and 3,000 pink flamingoes, none of whom will be better off under Ivanka’s watch.

But don’t think she’s just the spawn of the world’s most menacing narcissist. Girl’s got plenty of narcissist mojo herself! Ivanka wants to improve these untrammeled locations by replacing those dumb (remember with a “b”) old Soviet nuke bunkers+okay, fill up the spooky underground military tunnels built for the end of the world. She plans to make Sazan an ultra-luxury retreat center for her best+richest friends (the only kind she’s got) — located no doubt far below their 100,000 sq. ft mansion she+Jared will build at the top of the hill they climbed barefoot — note for Mirror, Brady def has more interesting feet.

And sure that lagoon is pretty, but essentially useless, lots of birds flying around gets pretty boring pretty fast. Ivanka wants to invest several billion dollars with Jared’s Affinity Partners (the Gulf oil guys) to construct hotels, high-priced apartment buildings, clammy nightclubs (hey, check out 1950s Havana y’all!), villas, shops, roads, 10,000 rooms and who knows maybe a few casinos even, give Niki Minaj a residency there, her career’s flushed down the toilet+she’s from the Caribbean, right? Same as the Mediterranean. This new hostile city will be built along the lagoon’s undeveloped beachfront Pishe Poro-Narta.

Albania’s socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama is the latest to chomp on the fleshy apple. The PM claims he climbed onto Jared’s borrowed yacht in the Aegean in 2021 and had a “substantial” conversation about investment opportunities in Albania. They’ve been yacht-collabing regularly since then. Rama pushed through amendments to the nation’s Law on Protected Areas in early 2024 exempting 5-Star hotels from the previous prohibition on development in those areas. That exemption has since expanded to include airports, power plants and all kinds of tourist-friendly development.

Rama, who knows global capital in a way those clueless old commissars never could, is so open for business. He was a heralded pro-democracy activist (a la Orban) against the grim Albanian communist regime and in his youth, a professional basketball player, tho no proverbial cup of coffee with NBA scouts has been recorded. Rama led a left coalition of progressives in successful campaigns for the Mayoralty of Tirana, the capitol city.

He was Mayor there from 2000-11, acclaimed for bulldozing miles of Stalin-gray, crumbling buildings and replacing them with brightly painted, affordable modern residences. Rama was also much ballyhooed for his “colorful style of dress” which seems to mean he wore bright 1960s-styled ties, spattered with swirly pink+white (we meet again!) teardrops (or maybe kidney stones) mixed with purple acid-trip cloudscapes.

For ridding Tirana of a dusty expanse of dullness with radical modernization (and probably the ties) he was awarded the first World Mayor Prize in 2004. Rama was defeated in a hotly contested 2011 reelection bid which he appealed to the High Court claiming a trove of voting irregularities. He lost by 86 votes; the courts stacked with rightist opponents looked the other way so the fix was in. In 2013, Rama led a center-left coalition in a successful Parliamentary campaign; he was appointed Prime Minister that year and has been there ever since.

Now the one-time dissenter+reformer has to defend the proposed Vanky-Jared/MBS trashing of beaches, waterways, bird estuaries and deserted islands. He’s all in — crowing that the $6 billion project ($1.5 billion on the island, $4.5 billion in the lagoon), funded by “exceptional partners,” is going to happen, “there is no chance for this investment to stop as long as I am here.” His government gave further preliminary approvals of the Sazan Island project in December of 2024 — a month after something unexpected (some people say demented) happened in the U.S. A something that gave a certain heft to Vanky and Jared’s bargaining power.

Rama did reassure his constituents that he wouldn’t let Americans come in and “pour a ton of concrete over the heads of flamingoes.” But that promise landed with a thud. He pivoted, blaming those evergreen threats, outside agitators. Which the old communist Maximum Leaders used to call him no doubt. This week, the PM called the protests against the development of protected areas a hybrid war. Rama wasn’t specific about who’s triggering the hybrid or what it’s a hybrid of at that point, but China and Western libs appeared to be on the short list.

To get another barefoot up, Jared brought in one of the richest guys in Albania, billionaire Shefqet Kastrati (Brady couldn’t find a Kastrati if it was singing a duet with Minaj so there’s that) to lobby for the development. Kastrati is the biggest fuel distributor in the country, a construction magnate, manager of the Tirana International Airport and politically tight with Rama. The PM bestowed an Order of Merit on Kastrati for contributing so mightily to the nation’s economy. Plus, the fuel king is an estate-neighbor of the Kushner-Trumps in Miami in another small world/terrible world manifestation.

However adept Jared’s local honchos are, things are not going smoothly. Protests in Tirana have been escalating over the past year, peaking in the first weeks of June. In early May, Zvernac South Adriatic Development, a partner of Kushner/Affinity, fenced off part of a protected coastal area. The development crew showed a construction permit to local opponents which the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network reported was still awaiting approval from local+national government agencies. In other words, it was useless. By late May the protest marchers, now called the Flamingo Revolution by Albanian media, numbered in the tens of thousands. On May 30, local neighborhood opponents protesting outside the fenced area were assaulted by private security forces hired by Zvernac. The guards repeatedly struck several demonstrators with batons and used pepper spray on the crowd. The demonstrations intensified, grew in numbers and the Flamingo Revolution moved on to Tirana.

Each day from June 1-June 7, protesters packed Tirana’s Skanderberg Square, across from the PM’s office. According to the AP, on June 3 crowds broke through a police cordon — the cops fired a water cannon to disperse them. By the 6th, the protesters marched with signs reading “Ivanka Trump Go Home” (which is very mean to Vanky+her fulfillment journey). They carried inflatable Greater Flamingoes, which btw are pink+white, located in Narta+threatened by the proposed building of Albania’s Atlantic City there.

The coalition of environmentalists, civic and business leaders now began to call on PM Rama to resign and for Parliament to rescind the Zvernac agreement. The initial investment funds were frozen. That riled Edi up; no way I’m resigning, he harrumphed. All this was making the former World Mayor champ+not quite NBA-ready hoopster pretty cranky; he got more specific about this hybrid war business. Probably it’s Iran who’s behind it, Edi helpfully suggested to any investigative journalist listening.

Last week, the General Directorate of State Police revoked the licenses of the private security companies responsible for the violent actions against the protesters. The local Chief of Police has been fired because he filed false reports after the attacks. A dozen protesters and a half dozen private security guards are under criminal investigation because of the incidents.

Also last week, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Structure (SPAK) opened an investigation into how the controversial legislation changes that opened up the Narta Lagoon to development in February 2024 came about. SPAK is investigating how the more recent revisions of the protected area’s land use codes happened.

Poor Rama is the latest to learn that anything a Trump or Trump in-law touches basically blows up like an exploding cheroot (the PM’s also getting kinda frazzled — a smart aleck reporter asked him if he was tired of bowing down to Donald Trump so much to which Edi replied he “will only kneel before Giorgia Meloni,” the Italian Prime Minister, a, let’s say, unexpected answer).

Last December, Affinity+the Trump Organization (I haven’t heard that name in a very long time) pulled out of a deal in Belgrade, Serbia. That proposition centered on the rebuilding of a downtown complex of office buildings near the Serbian government headquarters that had been damaged in the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999+never repaired. The Trump Org+Jared’s crew planned to demolish the bombed out properties and replace then with an expensive set of apartment buildings and the chef’s kiss, a hotel with the Trump brand name affixed to it.

The problem was that these buildings, under Serbian law, were designated cultural icons in memory of the terrible oppression of the West (ah Serbia, we all have our stories), so, sorry, no deal — those buildings must stand. Then days after Trump’s election in ‘24, Serbian officials hurriedly overrode those protections. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic thought this was a great deal (what could be better for Belgrade than having a Trump franchise hotel there?). But 4 of his senior government officials were subsequently charged with corruption for forging permits and that circle is tightening. One more poisoned apple. Jared pulled out.

As the summer deepens, the Flamingo Revolution shows no sign of coming aground. Vanky with Boy Jared and all their local stooges, money sluices, Kastrati and Daddy’s thugs may need to find another island soon. Where’s that Magic Mirror when you need it?

The Pope has issued his first encyclical, called Magnifica Humanitas. His message, with a shout-out to his namesake Pope Leo XIII who defended workers as the industrial revolution upended their lives, called on world leaders to insure that “technical progress should serve human life (and) keep the question of the human in play.” In other words, human dignity needs to be preserved as technology shifts radically. He wrote on Twitter that artificial intelligences “do not possess a body…do not feel joy or pain…do not know from within what love…or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience since they do not judge good or evil” (news flash — neither do Musk, Zuck or Thiel re: all of the above). Pope Leo came down on the side of normal humans who have to work for a living — humans shouldn’t be tossed onto the dustbin of late capitalism, jobless and adrift as AI hoovers up large chunks of the workforce.

When Pope Leo (Villanova’s finest with stiff competition from Nova Knicks’ Jalen Brunson) scowled at the motives of elites who will use AI+new tech for the purpose of domination, that cut close to home for wobbly Don. Remember our AI-Slopper-in-Chief has shown images of hisself as Dr. Jesus healing his late best friend Pedo Jeff, playing NHL hockey in his suit+red tie, taking a dump on protesters from a plane. Or more likely gal-pal Gen Y-er Natty Harp pushed out Donnie’s slopaganda. So the Pope’s critique of AI was a critique about DJT who sort of uses AI since everything is about Trump, 24/7.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum rose to defend his master. “I didn’t know,” said the prune-faced, stammering Int/Sec, “that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope.” Though obviously Dougie’s role requires a hardy daily grovel to his boss-baby to earn brownie points.

Not part of the Pope’s criticism of AI but a burgeoning political crisis is the escalating utility rates consumers are facing. Some of that cost is the volatile+rising costs of oil and gas largely driven by Donnie’s staggeringly stupid war with Iran — stupefyingly dumb even by Dumb with a b Donnie standards.

But AI+data centers carry a massive cost of their own that consumers will bear, as usual. The centers have to be connected to the grid which means more transmission lines, often massive infrastructure investments and then once on line, data centers drive up costs by adding extra demand which in turns causes local utility rates to skyrocket. Since 2020, average electricity prices have gone up around 30%. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in that same time period, communities with a high concentration of data centers have seen electricity prices explode by 270%

Despite the high costs, the data center construction industry is expanding dramatically. Nicole Greenfield reports in Consumer Reports that data centers by 2028 will use 12% of all electricity consumed in the United States. There are 11,000 hyperscale data centers around the world; 4,200 in the U.S.

McKinsey estimates that $7 trillion will be spent on building, upgrading and installing hardware in these data centers globally in the next 5 years; 40% of data center spending will be by U.S. companies. The total spending by U.S. companies on data center construction was $52 billion in 2025; in January 2026 alone $20 billion was spent on 20 construction sites. Of all those trillions lining up for the data center expansion, 15% will be spent on buying land and construction; 30% on power supplies and infrastructure; and 55% on the installation of the tech, software, hardware, servers and cable.

It’s not like these investments bring substantial employment opportunities for the workforce. A report in 2025 by Food and Water Watch found that fewer than 25,000 in the U.S. worked in the data center industry. In Subsidizing the Cloud a report by business professors Giacoletti and Gargano, the researchers stated that “there is no clear evidence that data centers stimulate local growth in tech employment.”

Besides high costs, opposition to data+AI centers has at least in part been stirred by the fact that some of the most loathsome characters on the planet are trying to build them. Mad Zuck’s Meta plans on building a super-duper AI center call Hyperion along Highway La. 183 in Holly Ridge, Louisiana. Zuck, who’s still looking for his Frodo ring (dude, ask mom if she has it) shook down Louisiana for big-time tax breaks to build this monster. One of Meta’s key supporters, state senator Jay Morris who likes to call black legislators “boy”, got in a fix when state investigators found that he+some cronies were buying and selling land adjacent to the Meta monstrosity. $$ talks+can sometimes land you behind bars.

Hyperion will be built on 3,600 acres, 4 times the size of New York City’s Central Park. It will have a floor area of 4 million square feet, the 3rd largest building in the world by floor area. In other words, the dystopian Kane Parsons’ movie Backrooms, with the miles of insane asylum yellow walls, the constant humming of light fixtures and the occasional off-camera scream is actually a documentary of Zuckerberg’s dream project. Oh, and Zuck promises to bring his own power supply — a bundle of gas plants and a customized nuke (!) for his pet beastie.

Then there’s Elon’s 3 Colossi xAI centers, 2 near Memphis and one across the state line in Mississippi. Fresh from his humiliating trip with DJT to China (the hosts were told not to give him any sharp objects), Musk the Gork wants to fast track his centers to educate Grok. Elon already tried to pull a fast one on both states+the feds by pretending that the gas turbines he bought to feed the Colossi were temporary sources of power. They are not. They are gas turbines on the back of a flatbed trailer, intended for the long haul. Remember that when the next tech bro tells you that they’ll build their own clean power plant to save you $$.

Both projects have spurred opposition in the legislatures and on the street. An even bigger battle is gearing up in of all places Utah. The Stratos Project, consisting of two 20,000 acres plot in Box Elder County (tiny by Zuck standards), is the proposed home of a data center that will consume 9,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity. That’s more than twice what the state of Utah currently uses. According to excellent reporting by AJ Dellinger in Gizmodo, the masterminds of this plan want to be at this location to plug into a gas pipeline that runs through the region. Dellinger reports that “(the project) will cost $4 billion for the first phase of the buildout and will cost $20 billion by completion.” Like all hyperscale centers, this one also will stress water resources significantly.

The developer in question is the talentless windbag Kevin O’Leary of the unwatchable Shark Tank. O’Leary is a Trumpist toady+wannabe actor who appeared in a dopey movie last year which I boycotted because he was in it, tho to be fair the director also sucks so there’s that.

The Alliance for a Better Utah has led the opposition to this boondoggle. The Alliance’s grass roots activists and its political strategists Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan have built such a wave of protests against Stratos with mass rallies and lobby days at the Utah State Capitol that the Utah legislature agreed to analyze the proposed data center’s impacts on the Great Salt Lake, a move that will happen as the state declared a drought emergency this past week.

The opposition has put the project’s developers on the defensive. So what does O’Leary do? He promptly gets on Fox News and tells the somnambulant Maria Bartiromo (who used to work for slugs like Roger Ailes and Lou Dobbs so is used to being shouted down) that Finlayson and Morgan are spies for the Chinese Communists.

Who else would oppose a $20 billion boondoggle that will suck up enormous amounts of power and waste water in a drought except a commie spy?

If flatulence took human form, it would be Kevin O’Leary. He barked at sad Bartiromo that “his guys” had evidence, “like algorithms and IP addresses” that prove China is spreading misinformation about Stratos. So far no evidence has been presented — because there is none. This whole commie-baiting move was last slick maybe around 1953 when Joe McCarthy hurled unfounded accusations against teachers+soldiers, but McCarthy had a reptilian charm. Kevin O just has the reptilian part.

The movement against AI+data centers is just beginning and threatens to be a mega-NIMBY, bipartisan kind of opposition. Even Trump (who of course has personally invested several million dollars in data center power+cooling companies) has tried to impose a modest safety review on the industry. AI firm Anthropic delayed the release of its Claude Mythos model because the program had the ability to exploit flaws in IT systems and web browsers, in some instances attacking the systems with multiple actions, a step up from previous models.

Soon after, the firm announced that a shadowy group had gained unauthorized access to Claude Mythos. This unnerved even the allergic-to-regulations Trumpers. J.D. Vance who apparently still has a job, made a round of calls to tech execs asking them to not oppose the government’s modest, voluntary review proposal.

That call, delivered in that masterful Vancian suasion we’ve come to know so well got results. Mainly the wrong results. Musk+Zuck called their White House protector to tell him that even if a voluntary review was created this would give China an insurmountable edge in the technology. Musk claimed he only talked to Donnie after the President went full TACO on jettisoning the review but then he told us that he’d be on Mars by now.

Just to be sure nothing happens on the regulatory front, Silicon Valley (by way of Argentina now that Thiel has taken the ratline down there as many have before) Super PAC boosts about $150 million for the midterms. OpenAI+Meta are ponying up real $$ to keep government out of AI, aside from massive research grants+tax breaks. Ratepayer revolts might be the only way to avert the looming AI dystopia.

Yet another great Trumpian legacy going on all cylinders is making America sicker (Make America Sicker Again?). HealthSec BobbyK, his snuff-colored skin looking like an old leather wallet the dog chewed on, leads that charge. Not just the anti-vaxxer war cry and his indigestible raw meat+yogurt diet but his attack on prescription drugs. But Donnie/Bobby’s assault on health has numerous fronts. The President has given another of his high rolling donors a big political victory that will make carcinogens great again. This time it’s the tobacco industry getting a big Trumpy hug.

Oh, you forgot about them, huh? Sure, they’ve been focusing on bringing fatal disease to Asia+Africa (killed a lot of Russians too). But that’s just old school smoking butts til your lungs turn black market strategy. New Jack commerce — that’s vaping!

It’s been a market winner for the tobacco industry in the U.S. and worldwide. Vaping is the use of an e-cigarette or vape pen to inhale a hot mixture of nicotine, propylene glycol and weird flavorings like blueberry lemon haze, key lime pie, strawberry kiwi, I don’t know, maybe Cherry Garcia too, you get the drift. The vaping kid sucks up all this thick cloudy mess in an aerosolized mist.

Nicotine of course is an addictive chemical compound that changes the way the brain works to make the consumer crave more+more hits. Teen users whose brains are still in formation get addicted more quickly and, great for the tobacco market, more thoroughly. Even quicker when the mist is sweet — those sharp hits of key lime pie keep the 13-year olds coming back for more. Remember, since the tobacco industry systematically kills off its consumers at a relatively young age, it needs to keep bringing in younger+younger buyers.

The long science of this has shown for decades that the tobacco industry has to ensnare their customers at a young age to get them hooked. Very few 18 year olds start smoking at that advanced age; it’s so much better for the industry to get them 5-6 years younger. One of the most successful government approaches to stymie the tobacco industry’s market assault on kids (R.J. Reynolds et al used to pay vendors to give out free “loosies”, single cigarettes, in front of middle schools) was pressuring convenience stores through fines+loss of their license to prohibit the sale of tobacco products to consumers under 18.

The vaping product’s aerosolized mist contains heavy metals like nickel, tin and lead, which is also not great raw material to swoosh into your lungs. The flavorings, part of the addictive hit along with that old devil nicotine also contains the chemical diacetyl which has been linked to serious lung diseases.

In the 2024 campaign, Trump did that Trumpy Big Daddy kind of pronouncement he loves to do where he says he’s gonna save, you know, Christmas or groceries (“you never hear that word”) or the dogs+cats being eaten by immigrants in Ohio. In this case it was “I will save vaping.” Why would Donnie stand tall+tell the fakenews and libtards he was saving the e-cigarette industry? The industry was coming under stronger regulations at the state and federal levels in the post-Covid era. FDA reporting showed that in 2023, 2.13 million middle school and high school students vaped. A year later, that number was down to 1.63 million. Market crisis.

Anyway, to ask the question why Donnie would help anyone is to answer it — during the 2024 campaign RAI Services, owned by Reynolds American which also owns Camel+Pall Mall gave the Trump campaign $10 million. That’s chump change compared to Elon+the frackers but it was the biggest corporate contribution in ‘24+every little bit helps in a close election.

More recently, according to the New York Times, on April 30, RAI American tossed another sweet $5 million to MAGA Inc, the absolutely Trumpiest of Super PACs.

Donnie’s good to his word for donors. On May 2, lobbyists from Reynolds+Altria (owner of Philip Morris USA) had lunch with Trump at his Jupiter, Florida golf club. While scarfing down Prime Angus burgers (you can get a bun with El Heifer’s face on it) the tobacco lobbyists bellyached that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oppressively restricted their fruity-flavored vape drugs. Trump, between Angus-bites, sprung into action. He couldn’t get then-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary on his cell (tho his diminutive digits may have misdialed). So who you gonna call? Donald did get Bobby+TV charlatan Dr. Oz on the horn during which they heard the cigarette-meisters’ complaints, apparently in great detail.

On May 8 the FDA issued a guidance that short-circuited its own review procedures. Their action (or inaction) allows the sale of 2 new vape flavors from a company called Glas Inc that will hit the market without any pre-market review. This will allow the agency to more efficiently “allocate enforcement resources.” Since there are hundreds of thousands of illegal vaping products all over the internet, many coming from China, the FDA has pretty much announced that enforcement against unauthorized vaping products will no longer be a priority.

In addition, the FDA issued this guidance without an opportunity for public comment because it determined that “prior public participation was not feasible or appropriate” — in other words so many irate citizens opposed to this sleazy move would have jammed the FDA hearings that this crap product might never have gotten to market.

The FDA also argues “this approach (selling new vaping flavors) will encourage the development of applications for less harmful tobacco products.” So to encourage the development of less harmful tobacco products the FDA fast tracks equally harmful tobacco products for consumers to buy — like adding Chocolate Chocolate Chip or Wavy Gravy flavor to crystal meth to encourage a safer meth product.

No enforcement at all=primo enforcement efficiency!

Trump-appointed Dr. Marty Makary, who the vape-saver couldn’t reach by phone that fateful day, stepped down on May 12 as the agency’s Commissioner. Makary opposed approving new vape products. Tony Abboud, the president of the Vapor Technology Association, told The Hill that Commissioner Makary “was very hostile to vaping products.” Abboud further twisted the knife by describing Makary as “preoccupied” with the concern that fruity vape flavors were causing a youth vaping epidemic.

Makary was a cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School before taking over the FDA. He had a mixed record on vaccines which made him palatable to Trump+Bobby Jr. but Bobby asked him to resign over the fruity vaping crisis.

Then the HealthSec lost another soldier in his war against medical science. His spox, Rich Danker, resigned on May 13, a day after Makary left, in protest over the FDA’s vaping decision. In a letter to Trump, Danker, after suitably buttering up the Diva-in-Chief (“you have twice restored our prosperity and national security” not counting that Strait of Hormuz thing I guess) gave his reason for leaving. The approval of flavored e-cigarettes would “expose children to nicotine addiction, lung damage and higher risk of cancer.”

April 30 — $5 million Reynolds donation to Trump PAC

May 2 — Trump has lunch with Reynolds+Altria/Philip Morris lobbyists who carp about FDA regulation of the vaping industry

May 8 — new FDA guidance opens the door for more fruit-flavored vaping products+less enforcement

May 12 — Commissioner Makary, a critic of relaxing those regulations, resigns

Who says $5 mil can’t buy you some love in TrumpWorld?

To be clear, Bobby Jr. is not your grandfather’s Kennedy. Members of his family often led the charge against the tobacco industry; Sen. Ted Kennedy was the principal Congressional advocate in the successful decade-long fight to give the FDA regulatory authority over the manufacturing, sales and marketing of tobacco products. But we have the nephew who goes flaccid before the tobacco lobbyists+here we are.

On May 12, the day Makary stepped down, 21 state Attorneys General called on the FDA to reverse their guidance on flavored vapes. One signatory, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, in a separate press release, described a different mindset than Trump’s broken FDA. Since 2020, California has banned flavored tobacco products and tobacco product flavor enhancers. In 2025, California beefed up its enforcement authority — the California Departments of Justice, Health and Tax have aggressively regulated tobacco retailers, distributers and on-line sellers. After warnings, businesses that continue to sell these products can have them seized.

Back at the FDA ranch, Kyle Diamantas, a former FDA Deputy Commissioner, has stepped in as Acting Commissioner. In a previous life Diamantas was a partner at Jones Day. He represented Abbot Laboratories in a tumultuous lawsuit that accused Abbott of flat-out failing to warn parents that the company’s infant formula increased the risk for premature infants of getting a deadly GI disorder. According to the Guardian Abbot was blown out of court+found liable for $500 million, after appeal.

Diamantas is tight buds with Don Jr. The two have been photographed shooting wild turkeys together in Florida. In one photo, Don+Kyle each hold up their dead turkey. Game knows game.

So it’s the old slow walk scam or to mix metaphors, it’s running out the clock so that the wind project becomes to expensive to ever get started. Trump, home from being serenaded by a dazzle of 11 year old factory slaves and fresh off his knees before any Chinese envoy he was presented to, renews his attack on renewables, especially the hated windmill.

Pie-eyed Pete has nothing to do with any of this because he’s way too busy war-criming in the Strait and the Caribbean or anywhere fishermen are casting their nets. All he knows is that his boss gets red-in-the-face and starts calling women reporters piggy+ “dumb person” whenever the subject of windmills comes up. Legend has it that this Trumpazoid rage was stoked by losing a lawsuit that tried to stop Scottish offshore windmills from being built that he believed would ruin the view from his Aberdeenshire golf course. The sour old geezer does hold a grudge (think Comey, Rosie O’Donnell). But even though he’s lost most of his marbles, like Subway Rat pouncing on a grotty hunk of pepperoni pizza, the Ancient Defrauder remembers from where the $$ flows — Exxon, Chevron, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Abu Dabi National Oil — and they all come to bury wind power, not praise it.

According to the American Clean Energy Association there are currently 165 wind projects on lock being ploddingly extinguished beneath the Pentagon’s ample haunches. Wind developers have to apply to the FAA to get a clearance for construction, usually several years ahead of beginning construction — then the FAA refers the project to the Pentagon. The DoD makes a judgement typically based on whether the height and location of the wind turbine will interfere with military radar, the doppler radar systems used for air defense and military air flight patterns.

The FAA reviews the proposed construction design of the facility with attention to the possible impacts on commercial flight including the height of the wind turbine (the average height of a turbine has steadily grown over the past decade from an average of 400 feet to an average of 550 feet), the turbine’s warning light configuration and the amount of turbulence the facility will generate that might impact air travel. If the FAA does not issue a no hazard determination — which it does in the majority of proposals — the agency negotiates with the developer to redesign the plan. This has been pretty standard procedure for the past decade as onshore wind installations have proliferated, including 4,229 in 2020, the last year of the idyllic reign of Trump 1.0.

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon’s reviews “have ground to a halt in recent weeks.” DoD officials have canceled meetings with several wind developers. At a moment when the cost of oil+gas has escalated perilously for American consumers, the Pentagon is preventing 30,000 megawatts of domestic electricity capacity (enough to power about 9 million homes) from being built. Wind generates 10% of American power and is a central part of the electricity mix in blood red Texas+Nebraska.

The problem appears to be the lack of a signature (shades of the deposed Kristi Noem, you know you miss her). The missing bureaucratic X-marks-the-spot belongs to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for energy, installations and the environment Dale Marks. Marks bears a striking resemblance to bungling meathead Tom Homan. But unlike Homan, Marks has had a grown-up career. After serving in Kabul, he was the executive director of the 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida where he led the evaluation+testing of advanced weapons systems. So for this guy, evaluating a wind turbine must be duck soup compared to testing Excalibur artillery shells or mile-a-second hypersonic projectiles or whatever.

But his boss, our Commander-in-Thief, has growled that his goal “is not to let any windmill be built” so the Ass’t/Sec of DoD has limited (actually no) agency in the matter. According to the Magaziner letter, Donnie’s beef with wind is costing the American economy 150,000 jobs over the life of the projects.

Trump has been assaulting offshore wind projects since the beginning of his second regime. Last year, Trump’s Department of Interior (DOI) shackled shut offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Federal judges have routinely laughed the Trumpy legal eagles out of court (not quite the boffo comic performances of the deposed Pam Bondi ((miss her too??)) and her minions but close enough).

In December, the DOI ordered all work to stop on all offshore wind projects on the east coast because, of course, they were threats to the national security. Interior head, Doug Burgum, who is what a shard of shredded truck tire on the highway would look like if it became human, is fighting back against those ornery courts who have been slapping the Trumpish attempts to destroy the wind industry.

In February, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, a Reagan appointee, said he was “unpersuaded” by Burgum’s claims of the facilities’ threat to national security. According to the NYT the judge argued that DOI’s interventions has “caused irreparable harm” to the developer of New York’s Sunrise Wind and allowed that project to proceed. In late April, Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper, an Obama appointee, issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump Administration from blocking any of the east coast wind farms via lame bureaucratic meddling. Like blockading the blockade in Hormuz, except in reverse.

Burgum told the House Natural Resources Committee this week that he “rejects the whole premise” of Judge Casper’s ruling. “A single judge” can’t decide “a complex permitting process,” he crankily told Congress, really how dare she! So the tug of war presses on (Tug of War — McCartney 1982).

So what can Poor Boy Donnie do when the Judges keep being mean to him about all this wind stuff? How about a little bribery, sort of?!

Well actually a billion dollars of sort of bribery — in March, Dougie B ponied up about $1 billion (not his $$ of course, you know it’s coming out of our pockets) for French energy firm TotalEnergies to scuttle 2 wind farms off the coasts of New York+North Carolina that the company had contracted to build. This klepto deal would have the energy company invest in liquified natural gas projects in Texas (a booming great investment Iran War-wise as LNG prices spike over 50%, well, for now anyway). As always, it was jagged-puss Burgum who broke the news, this time at a presser in (where else?) Houston, aka polluter-central, to a roomful of oil+fracker big wigs.

Patrick Pouyanne, TotalEnergies CEO, told the NYT that this was a “pragmatic” business decision. Welcome to American Kleptocracy, Monsieur Pouyanne! Neither Congress or god-forbid U.S. voters ever okayed Donnie+Dougie forking over a billion in our cold cash to this French operation to raise the price of our gas by sucking it out of our ground+selling it out there on the international market. What about those 150,000 good-paying jobs for Americans that will be created building those wind facilities?

Just kidding!! DJT could give a crap about your jobs or your wallet tbh. In fairness, the Burglar King already told reporters on the White House South Lawn that he doesn’t care about the “financial situation” of Americans, a howler only the vast crater that currently occupies John Fetterman’s thought-process can defend.

TotalEnergies would give even less of a crap if there was less of a crap to give. Total’s doing very well these day because for sure war profiteering is really good business! According to Global Witness, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Total had, from April 2022 to 2024, a $30 billion windfall for shareholders (also subsidized by consumers if anybody’s asking). Total has made $5.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, more than a 33% increase from last year’s 1Q.

Now is where I’d tell you how bad a corporate actor TotalEnergies is. Frankly, the list of Total’s reprehensible behavior is way too long and life is way too short. Total is one of the world’s primo greenhouse gas polluters and would pick up a stiff piece of the tab if the various Polluters Pay laws survive Exxon’s multiple court challenges. In 2022, criminal charges were filed in the Nanterre Judicial Court by French climate activists against Total for its contribution to the climate crisis. In a novel legal turn, the plaintiffs charged the oil operation with unintentional manslaughter for heavily contributing to climate-fueled disasters.

In 2024, another criminal case was filed by several French NGOs seeking to hold our old friend Le Grand Pouyanne and Total responsible for harm suffered by individuals as a result of extreme weather events. There are no boundaries for Total’s chicanery — including about a century’s worth of despoliation by Total of African land and coastlines. Also in 2024, 2 Yemeni citizens filed legal action against the company claiming they were illegally held and tortured by Emirati armed forces at a closed LNG plant that was being used as a prison camp. Total, a minority owner of the plant, failed to report the human rights violation.

New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli has threatened to divest the NYS Common Retirement Fund from Total because of their shameless kowtow to Trump in failing to proceed to build the wind installation in New York. DiNapoli divested NY’s pension fund from fossil fuel in 2019, though it’s been a longer process than many thought it would be.

It helps that the Comptroller has primary opponents who are making Total+fossil fuel divestment an issue in the 2026 NY elections. The presumptive primary challenger to NY Governor Hochul bellyflopped before he got out of the gate. The lack of a primary is likely the reason Hochul, going full DINO (Democrat in Name Only)+getting lustily cheered on by the polluters lobby, is gutting New York’s landmark climate law. It should be remembered that this law wasn’t just a national model but was seen throughout the democratic world as an exemplary way a large economy could begin reversing our burning planet.

Now it’s time for the political whirlwind that is Rep. AOC+the burgeoning movement around her to dethrone the mad king, settle accounts and build a green economy. Collaborationists should step aside.

Zelensky, who really gets under Trump’s thin, green skin because he doesn’t wear a suit, said that the lifting of the sanctions was subsidizing Putin to the tune of $10 billion a month to keep waging war on Ukraine. Merz of Germany, who has run out of diplomatic niceties to describe Trumpian foreign policy, clenched his jaw as he called the decision “wrong”.

Russia’s Super-friend Don has no worries that Putin is sharing electro-optical imagery from the Bars-M satellite constellation with Ayatollah Jr to target American bases and soldiers. Red Cross Jesus has even fewer worries that Vlad is shipping drone parts and massive shipments of food+medical supplies to Iran along the vast Caspian Sea which directly connects the two countries. Despite the Donnie-*Vlad bromance, Bennett reminded the Administration that the President was required /has to notify Congress 30 days before lifting these sanctions. That’s in accordance with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act which *of course was signed into law by Radical Leftist Sleepy… oh wait! It was signed by that other dwarf Dopey aka Trump, in 2017. Trump 2.0 really hates that guy.

The oil sanctions began in 2014 when Putin made his move on Crimea. The European Union (EU), the U.K. and the U.S. expanded sanctions on Russian oil transactions when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The EU Trade Commission estimates that sanctions on oil and banking assets have denied Russia access to $500 billion since February ‘22, including $285 billion of immobilized foreign currency reserves located in the banking systems of EU+G7 countries. The EU stopped buying most petroleum products from Russia 4 years ago; those supplies flowed to China and to a lesser degree India, both of whom had the leverage to demand drastic price reductions. Since 30% of the Russian economy is dependent on oil/gas revenue from Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil, these market contractions reverberated throughout the Russian economy.

In early 2023, the G7 imposed an Oil Price Cap (OPC) on any remaining oil deals to further diminish Russian fossil fuel prices. In February, the OPC imposed a low of $44 a barrel, though the Trump regime refused to support the change. In addition, the EU+U.K. banned any products produced from Russian crude which spurred India’s largest oil refinery to curtail Russian crude even at bonus discounts.

Putin’s war has continued to misfire, though lifting the sanctions will improve things. But there’s a lot that needs to be improved. Bloomberg estimated that there have been 1.2 million Russian casualties in the war (dead+wounded) as of March 2026. Ukraine drone strikes on the Baltic port facilities of Primorsk and Uta-Luga cut the Russian petro-state’s oil exports by 40% last year. There were 560,000 bankruptcies in Russia in ‘25, over a third more than the previous year. Inflation has been spiraling (watch out for the GROCERIES, a great word, just recently invented by our Wordsmith-in-Chief). Spookily, on top of all that bad news, there have been over 100 mysterious deaths of Russian oiligarchs, apparatchiks and politicians since the war began. Vlad, looking like a crispy potato puff these days, has been making fewer+fewer public appearances as the home front grows restless, scurrying from bunker to bunker (you oughta know not to stand by the window, this ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB).

Even Russia’s infamous shadow oil fleet, now a thousand strong, had been under assault prior to Trump’s removal of sanctions. The shadow fleet is comprised of uninsured, aging vessels whose ownership is obscure. They’re registered in countries that don’t uphold sanctions. This rickety armada transports Russian oil+gas across the globe to defy the oil price cap. The RAND think tank has accused some of these tankers as acting as Russian spy ships, gathering intelligence along the sea routes and sabotaging critical undersea infrastructure like fiber optic cables (which carry 97% of intercontinental data flows) and energy pipelines.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have called the Baltic Sea “ground zero in targeting undersea infrastructure.” In September 2022, 7 months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine which launched the current war, the Nord Stream gas pipelines 1 and 2 were rendered inoperable by a series of underwater explosions. A year later, the Balticconnector that transmits natural gas between Estonia and Finland was ruptured, likely by a Chinese tanker en route to St. Petersburg, Russia. Similar incidents occurred involving the C-Lion1 data cables in November 2024, the ESTLink 2 power cable (a submarine power cable also linking Estonia and Finland) in December 2024 and the Latvia State Radio and Television Centre fiber optic cable in 2025. Aside from the Balticconnector incident, European naval intelligence agencies have located Russian submarines maneuvering unusual undersea routes precariously near these cables and pipelines. In some instances, intelligence services have also detected older vessels of unknown ownership near the infrastructure before it was damaged.

In December 2024, the U.K., Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Estonia and Finland formed a new partnership to challenge suspected shadow vessels up and down the Baltic coastlines. The aggressive enforcement activated by the partnership resulted in fresh sanctions in the ensuing months against 18 Russian oil tankers, 4 Russian LNG tankers and numerous shadow ships. The 18 oil tankers had carried $5 billion of oil in 2024.

Of course the lifting of sanctions during the Iran war has vastly improved Putin’s bottom line, at least for the moment. Besides the $10 billion or more a month the removal of sanctions hands flat over to Russia, the Guardian reports that Russia made an extra $750 million in oil+gas sales this past March as prices increased by 15%. The April profits have likely been even greater. That was after Russia’s February oil sales were the lowest since the Ukraine war began in 2022, largely because of the price cap, an abrupt decline in India’s imports and the Ukraine’s destruction of several Russian oil refineries. War is always good for oil war profiteers but it’s a boom or bust syndrome.

Now, the President who has ended 9, 10, maybe 12 or 13 wars even, if you include his work on the Punic Wars and the nasty War of Jenkins’ Ear (especially after he couldn’t keep his eyes off that NASA guy’s loppers), announced a 3-day CEASEFIRE! between Russia+Ukraine from May 9-11. This came from his long call with Vlad in late April, where DJT gets some of his best ideas anyway, almost as good as when he’s sitting on the Golden Throne in his million dollar White House bathroom.

That Trumpy Truth Social post sort of makes a connection to World War 2 (apparently Ukraine played some role in it). Part of the proposed Russia-Ukraine “deal” would be a swap of a 1,000 prisoners. This brief pause “may be the beginning of the end of a…hard fought War!” End of a “Major Conflict.” 3 days is better than no days, right? and longer than all those Peace-In-Irans.

Well, there’s news on that front too. On Thursday Trump, with some prime UFC beef mouth-breathing behind the Resolute desk (“toughest guys in the world”), told his White House press homeys that his June 14 birthday UFC match on the White House lawn was moving along swimmingly (“you’re born being able to throw a punch and being able to take a punch, too!. You gotta be able to take a punch.”)

Speaking of taking a punch, Trump announced he was close to ending the shorter-than-the-Civil-War Hormuz excursion (it still counts for another war-ending success even if you started it, even if it’s just a “skirmish.”) Marco Rubio, flopping about in those oversized Florsheim shoes Daddy Don bought him, reported earlier in the week that the war was over and absolutely we won, no doubt. Trump, minutes later, red-faced, blustered no, no, the war continues and they better surrender now yatta yatta, we’ll bomb them more than anyone’s ever been bombed in the history of bombing. A few hours later, he announced yet more peace talks+another ceasefire (after the number of oil future trade deals escalated once again just a few minutes before the peace talk announcement — another amazing coincidence!).

Donnie told his regime media that Iran wanted to “make a deal very badly. Their leaders are all dead. I call that regime change.”

The ceasefire seems a little light on the cease. Today, the UAE, which has dropped out of OPEC, reported that Iranian drones hit an oil refinery and an industrial facility throughout the week. Iran denied any responsibility for the attacks and threatened a “crushing response” if UAE launched missiles against them. Qatar also reported that an Iranian drone hit a cargo vessel in Qatari waters. Kuwait announced that two drones launched from Iraq caused damage at “two northern border posts.”

Meanwhile, Iran, in the middle of what, in normal times, would be called a war, today said they have responded to the American 14 point framework for a rough draft of a concept of a possible future peace treaty. Pretty much Iran’s leadership, which contra DJT may not be all dead, want a short-term agreement that would pause fighting or excursioning for another 30 days. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s navy spokesman said if the U.S. attacked any Iranian oil tanker as the discussions continue, that would precipitate a “heavy assault” on U.S. bases in the region. Then we’ll see if Donnie can take a punch.

Immediately, the new government of Prime Minister Peter Magyar, leader of the center-right party Tisza, the binding glue of a center-right coalition, supported a substantial European Union (EU) $106 billion loan package to Ukraine for industrial+defense spending. About $10 billion is earmarked for drone procurement. Orban had opposed providing important funding for Ukraine in their war against Putin’s Russia.

Orban swung far to the right in his successful 2010 campaign, under the political guidance of reclusive American consultant Arthur Finkelstein. The Hungarian Socialist Party (which largely endorsed Tisza candidates in the parliamentary elections to form a popular front against Orban) had seen a collapse of political support because of the global recession’s cascading economy. According to the BBC, Finkelstein, an advisor to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bibi Netanyahu, designed a messaging blitz that focused on George Soros as the source of Hungary’s economic+political crises. This year, Orban updated the message — now it was the leader of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky who was harming Hungary by demanding $$ from the EU to fight Putin.

The late Finkelstein always told his clients that “it’s good to have an enemy” — he told me that over a cup of coffee+a bagel 25 years ago as some free advice. Well, no problem on the enemy front — plenty to go around these days. And this is a tried+true recipe; Nixon, his long ago client, had an entire Enemies’ List! That shrewdly predatory leader of the Silent Majority (how did he hear them exactly?) directed the IRS, Trump-style, to audit those Democrats, business leaders, actors, peace activists+nuns and priests who had hurt the frail Nixonian ego. He heard you Arthur (RIP)!

So did the last Finkelstein client. Orban’s 2 enemies, Soros+Zelensky, did no harm to Hungary but were great targets because they were Jews. Orban, like Nixon, Trump+Putin (did Arthur advise him too? There are rumors!) knew how to stir up tribal hatreds. His overt bigotry against Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants (Orban: “Hungarians don’t want to become a people of mixed races”) and all the Others was an essential strategic device for campaigning and governance.

It’s common knowledge that Orbanesque strong mannishness served as a model for Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump 2.0 (Donnie claims he never read it, which is almost certainly true since he can barely read the teleprompter anymore without sputtering into his signature WEAVE of confusion). Orban took over the Hungarian media and made most of it regime-friendly. He painstakingly rigged the courts to hurt his enemies+insulate himself from legal repercussions. After his 2010 victory, Orban created a National Judicial Office. His appointed Chair was given the power to hire+fire all of Hungary’s judges. Older judges hostile to the regime were removed. Young, regime-friendly judges were promoted by the Chair. Key enforcement and investigative appointive positions like the Prosecutor General and the State Audit Office were given extended terms; for these 2 positions, the agency head was given a 12-year appointment. Political opponents were railroaded by the Orbanized judiciary.

Other corrupt Orbanian moves had more than a whiff of Trumpism about them. In February, 2024, a list of several dozen people pardoned by Orban ally Hungarian President Katalin Novak was made public. One of the pardoned convicts was a politically connected former deputy director of a state-run children’s home near Budapest. He had been convicted of covering up the sexual abuse of minors who resided in the home. When the pardon became public, mass demonstrations occurred throughout Hungary. This led to the resignations of Novak+Judit Varga, Orban’s Justice Minister and former spouse of Peter Magyar.

Magyar promptly resigned as head of a state-owned bank, left Fidesz, joined the Tisza party and announced his candidacy against Orban. So much for Orban/Fidesz’s defining political narrative that only they could protect Hungary’s children.

There are other MAGA-traits that characterized Orban’s party apparatus. There’s plenty of crony capitalism to go around. According to the Cato Institute, by 2023, just 12 businessmen politically close to Orban received nearly 25% of the value of EU-funded contracts through closed, non-competitive bids. That didn’t stop Orban from griping about the EU’s stifling bureaucracy.

Fidesz redrew election districts in 2014 and 2018 to gerrymander their opponents out of office with the full support of the tyrant’s handpicked judges. At one point, Fidesz had a 2/3 majority in Parliament but received less than 50% of the vote. Orban also extended voting rights to Hungarians who lived abroad but would be a secure vote for his regime.

In the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, Hungary is ranked 80th out of 143 countries, far below any other EU country. In the category Constraints on Government Power, it was 123d out of 143, below Niger+El Salvador.

One of Magyar’s first pronouncements after defeating Orban was that the new administration was going to cut government ties+funding to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). The MCC is an Hungarian residential college which had been used by the Orban regime to funnel $$ into right-wing operations around the globe. One of those operations, cited directly by Magyar, is CPAC, aka the Conservative Political Action Conference. This is a nerve center of MAGA political pageantry — it was here in 2025 where untidy Epstein penpal Steve Bannon+the allegedly ketamine-enhanced Elon Musk both gave an admittedly spastic arm push that some have categorized as a Nazi salute. Musk also staggered about the stage struggling to hang on to a bejeweled chainsaw which became an instant Muskian meme, barmy Elon shearing the American Dream.

Orban also spoke at CPAC a few years earlier in 2022 to a more than half empty convention hall. The authoritarian butterball was full of bluster as he raged on about mixed race this, mixed race that, large white families good, gay+trans bad.

His Truculence clenched his chubby fists after a stream of mouth-breathing invective. His yellowish gills tightened as the smallish crowd egged him on. “The globalists can go to hell,” he enthused.

It turns out that Orban was a great CPAC benefactor. Magyar denounced both the MCC, Orban’s collegiate money laundering front and CPAC. He told CNN, “I believe the state should never have financed either of these entities in the first place. Mixing party finance with government spending…is a criminal offense.” Magyar’s government has begun an investigation of the MCC-CPAC financial connection. Here at home, Rep. Mike Levin (D-California) has called on Trump suck-up+malicious prosecutor Todd Blanche to investigate CPAC funding from Orban’s fascist networks.

MCC was a useful tool for the former dictator/illiberal statist. Paunchy Viktor gave MCC 10% of the funds from the state-run oil company MOL. MOL refines oil, 93% of which comes from Russia. That 10% vig, amounting to just under $2 billion with an annual investment income of $100 million, has been spread throughout Europe to far-right cranks of many stripes+nationalities. Russian oil funds foot the bill for all of this reactionary hodgepodge.

Throughout 2024-25, another MCC front, MCC Brussels, organized rallies and conferences of climate deniers in the home city of the EU to “challenge the EU” consensus on global warming. The conference materials called the EU net zero goals “stupid propaganda.” Gas shills blasted the RePowerEU plan which has funded solar investments and energy efficiency plans as a “degrowth” policy. Pretty thin gruel/ agitprop considering this $$ flowed from Vladdy’s high flying Gazprom+Rosneft nest egg.

But there was more.

According to DeSmog, MCC Brussels helped organize farmer protests across Europe, in some cases successfully rolling back parts of the EU green agenda in both renewables expansion and curbing pesticide use. A spox for the Farmers Defence Force (FDF), a group affiliated with MCC Brussels+Orban, claimed that the EU environmental policy committees were “deliberately exterminating farmers and food production.” The MCC Brussels website called on farmers to organize a series of rallies to protest the “EU’s overzealous green policies.” In late 2025-early 2026, some of the protests turned ugly. Farmers blocked highways with their tractors, threw eggs and manure at police and set a ring of fires near the European Parliament in protest of pesticide bans and nitrogen emissions restrictions.

MCC has forked over more than half a million pounds to the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) in the U.K. The Foundation is named after a crank who wrote smokers rights op eds/manifestoes while on the payroll of something called the Japan Tobacco International. Even the Wall Street Journal pulled the plug on old Scruton when it discovered he was a paid tobacco shill. But Roger persisted. He was welcome at Oxford (or greased the right palms) to give asinine lectures on how “Christian” society is the only strong shield against barbarism. He didn’t say “white Christian” but he knows that you know that I know what Roger S means.

In 2014, in a lecture in Hungary at the invitation of PM Orban, “an old friend”, Scruton took a swipe at their mutual obsession: “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish and form parts of the extensive networks around the Soros empire.” In the same lecture Scruton prattled on about how the nation-state is a Christian “construct” which is why Pakistan or really any Islamic state “are often failures as nations.” They don’t make them like they used to.

Nowadays, anti-abortion kook James Orr sits on the RSLF board. Orr is close buds with J.D. Vance+chain-smoking, gin swilling (Taste of Brexit!) immigrant-bashing Brit far-right icon Nigel Farage. With Orr advising, the RSLF still pounds out propaganda against choice+climate activists+has hosted women-shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-vote advocate Peter Thiel for a lecture on the “Diversity Myth.” At Oxford no less.

Thiel, remember, is the emblematic tech/spook with government intel contracts up the kazoo from various countries. His company, Palantir, gets oodles of $$ essentially to collect data globally on an unsuspecting citizenry. Thiel had a warm, oligarch-buddy pen pal relationship (really email pal) with Jeffrey Epstein. This was at the same time that Thiel invested in a newish product, the ever shifting blob of mercury now called J. D. Vance, the white-guy Scrutonian construct which is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thiel Inc.

Vance~Orban~CPAC~Scruton/Orr~Thiel~Vance. Well, maybe they still do make them like they used to.

Dorothy’s rusted Tin Man, who now calls himself Scottie Bessent, croaked that it was “difficult to deconstruct the reasons why anything changes.” He’s already ordered the World Bank to dump its climate targets, an action which requires its own deconstruction coming from a guy who hosted a high-yield fundraiser for Al Gore in the Hamptons in 2000.

Then you have that post-structuralist, DOE honcho/gas shill Chris Wright, telling a crowd this week that just because it looks “like we’re going in the wrong direction doesn’t mean that’s the direction we’re going in.” The Existential Fracker was taking a victory lap in Brooklyn for a gas pipeline that is as dirty as it is unneeded, will rip up New York Harbor, cost a cool $4 billion and hike utility rates in downstate New York. Does kinda look like the wrong direction Chris.

Oil+gas profits are going in one direction — up, up+up! (I know, that’s 3 directions).

According to Rystad Energy, an independent research and energy intelligence firm, when a barrel of oil hit $100 in March the largest oil companies on the planet made windfall profits of over $23 billion.

If that price holds more or less to the end of the year, the Russian fossil fuel companies, Gazprom, Lukoil and Rosneft will make a windfall of $25 billion — these firms already made $840 million a day in March, a more than 50% increase from February. Saudi Aramco (the tail that wags the Prince Bone Saw dog) will also make a windfall of $25 billion. War profiteering has always been a primo business (lots more rubles for Putin’s slaughterhouse war against Ukraine). The oil industry has always loved foreign interventions from seizing Mexican oil assets in the days just before and after the First World War to helping BP grab Iran’s oil after overthrowing the rare democratic regime there in early ‘50s (some of the mess we’re in now started then) to grabbing the Iraq oilfields in the misadventures of Bush the Lesser (one disaster Trump+Obama both derided).

Exxon will make a windfall of $11 billion if the $100/barrel price holds, Chevron $9 billion. Chevron’s boss, Mike Wirth, has already sold Chevron shares worth $104 million between January and March. Nothing suspicious there of course.

Money got made in other ways as the war turns. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) are wary of some big money made on the oil futures market. In an April 9 letter to the Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), they called on the CFTC to investigate suspicious oil futures trade activity that took place on March 23+April 7. The New England Senators expressed concern that:

1. In the early AM of March 23, oil future transactions surged explosively 10 minutes before Trump blared on his skeevy Truth Social post that there would be a bombing halt+talks with Iran would begin — the price of a barrel of oil declined as these (inevitably untrue) words came out of Donnie’s mouth.

2. On April 7, just before another gnomic Trumpy post that peace was at hand (maybe right now, let you know in two weeks) traders placed transactions that the price of crude oil would again be reduced.

In March, someone put a $600 million stake in the New York Mercantile Exchange that DiveBomber Donny would put a brake on his civilization obliteration mojo. In April, someone or somebodies again laid a big bet on the table, $950 million this time, that whatever Trumpish blather went out into the ether, crude oil prices would again go down.

There was no news story prior to Trump’s pronouncements that suggested peace talks would begin.

Now, big picture, this is kind of old klepto news. In April, 2025, minutes before Trump’s way too visible hand paused the greatest tariff policy since the one that knee-capped capitalism in 1929, options traders made millions in prescient bets. More like mind-reading actually, 6th sense stuff. This year’s 2 oil futures big bets have caught the eye of Congress. Last Friday, Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-California), a member of the House Committee on Financial Services which oversees securities+exchanges, wrote CFTC Chair Michael Selig that the “timing of the trades indicate that bets were placed by those with advanced knowledge of the President’s actions, strongly suggesting illicit trading on insider information.”

CNBC and Bloomberg are reporting that the CFTC is investigating these trades made on venues owned by the CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange.

Selig, a Trump appointee, had been a lawyer for the crypto firm Paradigm before coming to the CFTC. Paradigm had to write down $278 million in investments in fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-cesspool FTX, so Selig should be able to spot a scam artist when he sees one.

But his staff has been cut by 20% thanks to Elon+sidekick Eddie Big Balls Coristine, the Muskite whose grandad was a Soviet double agent. Selig is the sole Commissioner — there used to be 5 but no one has got around to giving anyone those other jobs, and so far Marco hasn’t been assigned (maybe he’ll get all four seats!). BTW, Selig’s new Director of Enforcement, David Miller, was a long-time technical advisor to Showtimes’ Billions (he worked for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the guy Giametti’s character is kind of based on) so he knows how to bring down crooked oligarchs, at least on TV.

Selig/Miller can subpoena trading records from the targeted platforms. There are fresh technologies in use that can hone in on the moment of transaction, on the second the trade commenced those few minutes before the Presidential pronouncements. Mostly though, there will be whistleblowers whispering in the wind if Selig wants to hear them. It’s their season —their knives came out for squalid/grotty Noem/Lewandowski, manic, prattling Pete H and tiny Kash, allegedly comatose-drunk on the FBI Gulfstream jet, at the Poodle Club in Vegas and in his personal office.

One of the venues under observation is CME Group which owns both the New York Mercantile Exchange where some of the trades were made, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and 27% of the S&P Dow Jones Trading Indices. The Indices, among other things, allow investors to compare stock prices+performances with past price levels. That’s a lot of high-powered finance under one roof. Long-time CEO Terry Duffy has proudly noted that he called, you guessed it, Sam Bankman-Fried a “fraud” to his face no less. So, in theory, here’s another guy whose gorge should be packed+rising to expose wrong-doing in the house.

The Intercontinental Exchange owner, Jeffrey Sprecher, a one-time player in the gas biz, also owns+has chaired the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He’s married to former Senator Kelly Loeffler, the potted plant who lost her senate seat to Rafael Warnock in 2022. According to Forbes Jeff+Kel donated $5 million to the Trump re-elect bottomless pit in 2024. The grateful Patron-in-Chief appointed Loeffler the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, which neither Intercontinental or the NYSE would be mistaken for.

While in the Senate, Loeffler got jammed up with accusations of insider trading. On January 24, 2020 (in a time long ago) she attended a briefing on the emerging Covid crisis by hated-by-MAGA+MAHA Dr. Fauci before a closed meeting of the Senate Health Committee. Beginning that day and in the ensuing weeks, Loeffler+hubby dumped about $3 million in stocks just before the markets tanked in the first months of the global Covid catastrophe. No charges were ever filed.

It’s likely in our Trumpoid era that these investigations will lead nowhere. Trump, as his skin further sallows and his speech gets more slurry, responds in his customary rage to inquiries around possible insider trading linked to his manic outbursts.

That’s actually his go-to response to everything at this point. All this winning may not have brought him much happiness. Poll after poll show his favorability sinking to mid-30%, unfavorables hitting in the low 60% range. DJT’s up all night spinning his wrathful Truth Social posts against the legion of enemies, attacking the Pope, getting his gremlins to AI himself as Jesus/Doctor/Red Cross guy, bashing Springsteen, with Rosie O’Donnell back on deck. He was “sidelined” from the Situation Room by the Generals and White House staff because he was overexcited+cussing up a storm in the planning meetings for the downed flyer’s rescue op. The Generals didn’t need this loon going all Punch Drunk Love on them.

But Don T says he is winning the war “by a lot”. But in not great news for Donnie, 67% of Americans don’t approve of his Commander-in-Chiefery. Most of the world thinks Iran just keeps humiliating Trump in the air, on the ground+at the negotiating table, whenever Team Ayatollah even bothers to show up.

With all the talk of heaven these recent months, does Trump sense he’s nearing endgame? Are old ghosts tormenting him, Richard III-style, in the dark Mar-a-Lago-night, Fred, Ivana, Roy C, Jeffrey E, Fat Tony, and the Chicken Man who got blown up in Philly that night? Is he feeling that being old in good times is worse than being young in the worst? Is there one live nerve ending that shudders at the thought of what justice might look like for everything he’s done?

Wyden/Garcia (also leaders in the fight to tax billionaires, get justice for the Epstein survivors and dump pouty, law-breaking AG Blondie— that mission’s accomplished) had a few questions for Affinity, including:

1. Is the White House letting K use his personal influence (he holds no government position or portfolio) for financial gain? (K managed $3 billion in foreign funds in January 2024, had $5 billion by early 2025 right after Daddy-in-law waddled back onto the North Portico).

2. Do K’s “potential” conflicts of interest threaten the “security of the American people?”

3. Why has Saudi Arabia paid K $110 million in management fees since 2021 with zero return on their investment, at least financially?

4. Is K an unregistered foreign agent?

It’s not that Jared’s peace talks have been such an unconditional success (the Arms Control Association said that statements from K+Trump golf buddy/leech Steve Witkoff about their negotiations with Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf were riddled with jaw-dropping misapprehensions). Their peace assignment in Moscow has fizzled for all the world to see. K+Steve couldn’t stop President Raging Pumpkin from raining commination down on Iran (btw, Trump never wanted Vanki the Favorite to marry the bleak K — he so wanted Tom Brady to be part of the one big happy Trump family). The Trumpish Armaggedon got temporarily postponed, for a minute, because someone, prolly the expedient grandma Susie Wiles, would rather have America lose this Iran excursion thing than actually see the world end. Well, that was yesterday. Long-term peace in the mideast is as likely as a Joe Biden comeback.

By the way, Joe B. occupies a permanent spot in Donnie’s shrinking brain pan. At the not-to-be missed White House Easter Egg Roll, Humpty Dumpty rambled along the White House lawn with his harrowing, bug-eyed Big Easter Bunny-on-acid friend. The not-actually-anymore Leader of the Free World sidled up to a crew of industrious egg-hunting 8-9 year olds. He quickly decomposed into a fuzzy mold debriefing them on Sleepy Joe’s criminal use of the autopen. The Presidential audience sank into a distracted boredom, made faces, whatever, then hurriedly raced back to the hunt, escaping the worst baby-sitter any of them had ever been subjected to.

There’s never just one reason for Trump’s monstrous behavior. Maybe it’s the rapid descent into dementia. Maybe he was distracting his base from pushing the Epstein files albatross. Maybe Trump thought, against all reasonable analysis, this would be Maduro Snatch Part 2, overthrowing another hated leader+grabbing all that oil. It’s useful to remember (since the mainstream media won’t) that this disaster started when MBS along with war criminal Netanyahu hammered Trump to regime-change Iran; K their agent, would be hyper-aware of his Saudi client’s actions. (What is a surprise to literally no one, MBS has his own Epstein nexus — the global sex trafficker+great friend of Noam Chomsky (note to self — never trust an anarchist) gave the oil prince financial advice on how to indemnify the Saudis from a law suit filed by survivors of those murdered on 9/11. Also remember that Trump’s favors to+sketchy deals with the House of Saud go back a ways to the halcyon days when yowling Kelley Anne Conway roamed the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room during Trump Part 1.

The long-forgotten Mazars Report on Trump finances, released under Congressional pressure, showed Trump’s multiple violations of the emoluments clause. It reported *that in 2018 alone, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia paid Trump businesses $212,000. These payments included the House of Saud’s ownership of the 45th floor of the Trump World Tower, the seedy residential condo near the United Nations. Another major payment was a week’s stay by the entire Saudi government delegation at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident, was murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. MBS claims he knew nothing about the murder but a 2021 CIA report concluded that the Prince approved the operation which was carried out by Saudi agents. Just after the political murder, Trump harrumphed that the journalist was “controversial” and “things happen.” According to the New York Times, Jared had numerous conversations with MBS about how to “weather the storm” soon after the killing of Khashoggi. In typical Jared style, every chat with his new tyrant bud was in violation of State Department protocols. The NYT continues to remind its readers that the Saudi oil prince is a murderer; to his life-long shame+disgrace, WP owner Jeff Bezos seems to have forgotten.

The Trump Organization then, had already been the beneficiary of substantial Saudi largesse that year. The Saudi government continued to rent the Manhattan condo throughout the rest of Trump’s term.

Saudi Arabia had been Trump’s choice for his first foreign trip against the advice of his Secretary of State (that, uh, excursion, where Trump fondled a glowing white orb with his grand sheik allies). Several weeks later, Trump supported the Saudi blockade of Qatar, despite there being a U.S. military base there. Not long after the blockade ended, on August 3, 2018 (2018 — it was a busy year!) Brookfield Property Partners (BPP) in a joint venture with the Qatar Investment Authority paid $1.2 billion to Kushner’s family real estate company for 666 5th Avenue, a long failing Manhattan commercial property. BPP got a 99-year lease and made no mention of Qatar in their press release that crowed about how “iconic” this property would become.

So, 2 months later, after K’s corporate ass is saved due in part to MBS’s blockade, Khashoggi, an enemy of the House of Saud is slaughtered. Weeks after Trump’s first term ended+his first coup failed, Kushner’s Affinity Partners got mainlined a $2 billion fix from MBS who Jared had helped weather the storm at a rough time in his life. In early 2025, at the dawn of Trump 2, MBS, before the tempest in the Strait, did K another solid+promised to invest a cool $1 trillion in U.S. businesses, including more handsome bounty for Affinity.

That would be roughly the current full value of the Public Investment Fund (PIF aka Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund) which MBS chairs (as he does at least informally for all things Saudi). Since MBS took over the Fund in 2015, its assets climbed from $84 billion to nearly $1 trillion. One burst of asset expansion occurred in 2017-18 when under orders directly from MBS, 20 privately-owned Saudi companies were seized as a result of a vigorous national “anti-corruption” campaign. Part of the campaign included the forcible detention+torture of a faction of Saudi business elites. Eventually, these businesses were dissolved and all of their holdings transferred into the Fund.

A prominent critic of the anti-corruption/corporate theft reign of terror was Jamal Khashoggi. He wrote about it in the Washington Post. According to a landmark report by Human Rights Watch on the rise of MBS, one of the companies stolen by PIF was Sky Prime Aviation which owned 2 planes that were used by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul in October, 2018. On that trip, according to American intelligence reports, those agents murdered Khashoggi.

A second great boon that benefited the Fund occurred between December 2017 and June 2023. During that time, shares of Saudi Aramco — the planet’s biggest polluter+climate threat — was transferred to PIF. That accounted for over 50% of the Fund’s growth. By feeding public+private wealth into the PIF machinery which he controls, MBS avails himself of enormous capital reserves. It’s the House of MBS now. Such is the usual contour of a petro-state: a strong man or small elite controls the oil revenues which further consolidates state power in fewer+fewer hands. PIF, buttressed by vast oil riches, is MBS’s vehicle for further consolidating authoritarian control.

Two-thirds of the Fund’s staysinsideSaudiArabia.Butitalsohasinvestedhundredsofmillionsof in BP, Citigroup, Bank of America, the Walt Disney Company, Boeing (national security anyone?) and Uber. Plus there’s a 5% stake in Nintendo, 8% in Embracer Group and serious high rolling in Electronic Arts+Activision — which gives the Fund big footing capacity in the gamer market. PIF’s not the only pile of big bucks with global reach for the House of Saud. The Saudi Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) put a shade under $2 billion on the table to buy Twitter stock, helping Elmer Fudd Musk snatch a big social media prize, Twitter. Twitter became X and X became a far-right cesspool, good for racists, Nazis and a thick knot of nutty climate deniers. Which was especially good for Saudi Aramco.

But these days, K’s clients, which include the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, petro-states all, are hardly overjoyed with the performance of their maybe-foreign agent or his untethered Pop-in-law. The Gulf oil tyrants have been thwacked by Iranian hardware since the dumbest war in American history orchestrated by its dumbest President began. Erratic Trump continues to spook K’s great friends — the Saudi Sovereign Wealthers have dumped massive chunks of good old USA bonds in recent weeks+are reviewing what’s left of their American holdings as we speak.

It’s been an edgy time recently, even by the Second Coming of Trump standards. Over the last month+a half, the world economy has been rocked by escalating oil/gas prices.

Inflation, caused by exploding oil prices, batters the globe, including hitting 3.3% in the U.S. Then after his war-criming threat to commit genocide on Iran, artful dealer DJT proposed to set up a mutual scam operation with Ayatollah Inc. to pop a dollar per-barrel of oil tolls on all non-Iranian oil tankers cruising through the Strait. That would add $2 million a vessel for Iranian/DJT tribute, which should make the Saudis, the most frequent flyer in the Strait of Hormuz, giddy about investing in our Republic.

Add that TrumpTax to the damage Iran has done to Saudi production facilities in Manifa and Khurais and this week, the blasting of a pumping station critical to a Saudi pipeline that has provided an alternative oil tanker route from the Strait. None of this wins Saudi goodwill for the Trump Administration. The first iteration of this agreement, now, to MBS’s relief, dead at least for the moment, stipulated that the toll can be paid in crypto (good for the Trump crime family) or even Chinese yuan (good for tyrant Xi who wins so much he must be getting tired of winning).

K has other things on his mind. He went to the World Economic Forum at Davos last January with Trump (who never got invited to these kind of things in NYC back in the day) and the incredible shrinking Secretary of State Rubio. K showed his slide show on how big $$ will turn Gaza into Miami on the Arabian Sea. He gave a big shout-out to the Board of Peace+his clients, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar who are pretty much the Board of Peace and who are supposed to shell out $1 billion (in crypto? Yuan?) to be part of yet another of Trump’s shakedowns. The big guy was there too, sitting with his BoP, more vermilion-faced than orange, resembling a mummified fat Elvis at that final Market Square Arena close-out.

K’s big plan is all about taking a deep breath, forgetting the genocide (he calls it war), putting your whereyourmouthisandbuildingussome5starDubai−stylehotels+”iconic”commercialproperties(sweetmemoriesof6665thAve!).MaybethisisthewholepointofaTrumpyPeace—grabthatGulfoil from compliant sheiks to buy the ruins of this war zone on the cheap. Build assorted Trump Places, Trump Gaza hotels, Trump Taj Mahals (!), anything with the Trump brand. It’s part of the Trump-Kushner-oil tyrant continuum from 5th Avenue to Gaza to maybe Teheran. Peak Disaster Capitalism.

Jared keeps failing upward. So does his partner on the Iranian peace mission, J.D. Vance. No one fails with such hectoring consistency like J.D.

1. lecturing the German government not to be so mean to Nazis

2. lecturing Zelensky on manners

3. lecturing his wife that she should convert to Christianity+not jump out of moving airplanes

4. lecturing murdered Americans Good+Pretti on what constitutes terrorism

5. lecturing Pope Chi-town on the true nature of Catholicism

6. kowtowing in his bungling way to Putin/puppet, Islamophobe Orban who of course, with Veep’s diligent help, lost in a landslide

Then suddenly, like Jared, Jimmy Bowman was called in service of his country to bring peace to the Middle East. Unlike Jared he’s not on the payroll of several nations who want a regime change, not a peace deal, so the V.P. presumably wanted to get something, anything, done. But bungle he must! While Mr. Trump (as NYT now calls him) watched a mixed martial arts fight in Miami with Joe Rogan+Vanilla Ice (dumb+dumber) the V.P. at a presser with Jared by his side, grimaced. Getting no deal was bad, sure, but worse for Iran. No way “we” — Trump+Vance+of course Jared— will let the Ayatollah have nukes.

Donnie ripped up an Obama Administration agreement that stopped Iran cold from getting nuclear weapons in 2017. But it was Obama’s deal so it had to go down. And here we are.

Anyway, Mr. Trump, standing by the steel cage in Kaseya Arena as court clown Kid Rock’s “American Badass” filled the martial air, said he didn’t care. Blood on the canvas. He shook hands with the cage match winner Paolo Costa (told Costa how handsome he was+patted the fighter’s thigh). Ivana hovered nearby (where was Tom Brady tonight? On a yacht with Leo?). Dan Bongino, conspiracy podcaster and former FBI second banana tried to get next to Trump in front of the cameras with modest success.

“Regardless of what happens, America has already won,” Trump said. A couple of days ago he said if the talks failed he’d blame J.D. anyway.

Later Trump announced a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz which many say is an act of war.

We’re here because war criminal Netanyahu prodded doddering Donnie into decapitating Iran’s leadership, a longtime dream of his. Also, Saudi oil Prince MBS, who has the First Son-in-Law (SiL) on the hook for $2 billion, now realizes the new, improved Ayatollah can slap the crap out of him at will+needs/begs Daddy Warbucks for protection. Also because Witkoff+the First SiL pretty much stared in baffled stupefaction as Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi tried to walk them through a potential deal before the skies fell down. Mainly though Daddy doesn’t want all God’s Children to see the rest of the Epstein files because it’s not fit for their eyes.

It was cool in those early days for Donnie+the Dimwits, before Trump got bored of the whole thing and announced last Tuesday that the U.S. “will not have anything to do with” insuring any ship’s safety through the Strait. At first, there was lots of video-gamish bombing, Trump+Hegseth gloating about raining destruction on Teheran+Marco prancing about Europe like a low I.Q. Kissinger. Bessent went full Hegalian — “sometimes you have to escalate in order to de-escalate.” Sorry about the Paradox of Praxis, Scott — when all that hard work leads to…nothing?

Pizzled Pete’s bug-eyed, war-porn performance art has a high-comic value (way more reality-estranged than the SNL goof). But Donnie has no friends in Europe or Asia or even Elon on Mars to help win the war. (And anyway Trump, the short-term excursion President, says he has totally won, maybe 2 more weeks, we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age but by-the-way we’ve definitely won, the new moderate regime, very realistic, is begging for a ceasefire, who cares about opening the Strait anyway, let Europe find their own oil!). Still, no matter how charged up Pete+the Trumpists get from their not-war bombs away game, as always, it is the economy, stupid.

The shuttered Strait of Hormuz guarantees that gasoline prices will keep going up. That price is on digital gas station signboards from sea to shining sea and in the face of Americans as they cruise down their hometown commercial strips. But the price of other products, maybe of all products, will follow suit. Skyrocketing costs of fertilizers will not be good for Trump-loving American farmers who love putting food on the table maybe as much as they love Leader (McFlurries with M&Ms verse Don? Making choices is hard).

The chemical+plastics beast Dow (formerly known as Dow Chemical) helpfully announced it was doubling the price of resin which will escalate the price of food wrap, plastic cups and water bottles. U.S. mortgage rates have climbed for a fifth straight week. The U.S. Postal Service announced it was stamping an 8-10% surcharge on packages (so now it will cost more than ever not to receive your package). 40% of fertilizer exports are at risk globally — at not a great time as central farm markets from the U.S. to India begin planting season. Oil prices will even raise the price of brewing+trucking beer (Ayatollah: That’s What Buds Do!!).

The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz was the “greatest global energy threat in history” which is not comforting to those who remember the 1973 oil embargo which gave birth to OPEC led by the House of Saud — a barrel of oil spiked from $2 to $12+within a few months oil prices increased by 300%.

It may or may not hit those staggering heights but it’s going to get worse. For example, before Donnie’s most recent addled speech-to-the-nation (prime time), Brent Crude oil prices were $98 a barrel. Post the Prime-time Presidential babble, it zoomed back up to $108, which proves that this guy costs us $$ whenever he opens his mouth, with all that expensive stupid that comes out of it.

Whatever fantasies Donnie conjures up, Iran keeps pounding their foes+neighbors with abandon. Today, Iran claimed it struck a U.S. F-15 fighter jet (at $90-95 million a pop). Earlier this week, an Iranian cruise missile struck+destroyed an oil tanker off the coast of Qatar that was under lease to QatarEnergy. No one was killed according to reports. Keep in mind, Iran has the largest and likely the most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East (was this overlooked or forgotten by SecWar Hegseth crack war planners)?

One type of cruise missile, the Hoveyzeh, can go about 850 miles below radar in the small neighborhood of the Middle East. This has been one of the go-to weapons Iran has used to set oil+gas facilities aflame throughout the region during the War of the Epstein Files Distraction. 2 weeks ago Iran’s missiles+drones severely damaged the Ras Laffan Industrial City. Ras Laffan is Qatar’s main energy hub, literally a part of a massive facility shared with…Iran. That didn’t stop Ayatollah 2.0.

Ras Laffan is also the world’s largest liquified natural gas export facility. LNG is highly flammable and its containers get brittle quickly from high heat. Hence the massive fires and dangerous leakages. Iran’s attacks, in retaliation for Israel’s attacks on the South Pars gasfield, have wiped out about 17% of Qatar’s LNG production. Nighttime footage showed massive multiple flames burning throughout the hub. Energy markets predict that it will take 3-5 years to fully repair the damaged terminal. Again, no deaths were reported (at least according to to QatarEnergy sources) but not good news for gas prices globally since Qatar accounts for 20% of global LNG exports, second to the U.S. So watch your wallet on gas prices too!

Trump’s new, more moderate Iranian regime who are begging Donnie for a ceasefire seem to be firing without a cease at this point.

One market prediction you can take to the bank, or they’ll take to the bank — the oil industry, as it has before, will boom with war profits. According to Reuters, Exxon had $5 billion and Chevron $4 billion in additional revenues in March alone. Not quite the awesome war profiteering achieved during Ukraine War: Year 1, when U.S. oil firms made $301 billion (a six-fold increase of profits compared to pre-pandemic levels). World Oil, private+public, made $916 billion during the early days of that ongoing war. That’s a big grift to aim for, though not impossible.

Incidentally, a couple of petro-states did pretty well too in March: Russia saw about $6 billion more in war bucks last month than a month before and surprise! Iran, the party of the first part, earned $140 million a day amidst Hegseth’s meltdown.

Not everyone is doing so well. Already inflation in the U.S. surged to 3.25% this month, a full 1% increase of the Consumer Price Index from earlier this year. This hurts middle+working income families. Inflated prices cut more deeply into their buying power than that of wealthy households. Obviously the fabled+loathed 1% reaped much of that earlier 2022 oil profit (around 51% of the total according to a recent UMass Amherst report). The ensuing fossil fuel price spike caused about 25% of the overall American inflation that shadowed Biden’s Presidency like a stalker.

That inflation came about via soaring fossil fuel prices at the pump and through markedly higher utility bills but also in most of the secondary markets at risk of an inflationary spiral due to the Strait of Hormuz shutdown — fertilizer, plastics and a wide range of industrial products. Since consumers’ purchasing power is diminished by inflation, imagine the sticker shock if the U.S. gets stuck in an Iraq-like quagmire and oil costs blow up to $150-200/barrel. Good for Exxon/Chevron/Rosneft etc, bad for the rest of us.

The results of the ‘22-’23 oil inflation weren’t great for the planet either. The oil industry with gobs more money on hand not only made more profits for shareholders but invested more capital in new oil and gas fields. That alone caused an increase of carbon dioxide and gas methane emissions. With short-term oil profits so luringly extravagant, the industry put even less than the microscopic amount of investment they already had in renewables (which faced a surge in borrowing costs as interest rates rose+upfront investment expenses slammed the solar+wind industries). Short term profit maximization uber alles. The more $$ put into new oil/gas supplies, the more infrastructure built that will be an expensive stranded asset when the fast track renewable transition takes place under President AOC, a transition most of the world, excluding the U.S.A, is moving toward anyway, however stumblingly.

We’ve also learned that there’s more than one way to make serious cash in wartime. Way back in the golden era of March 23, someone made a king’s ransom exactly one minute after sunrise. At 6:50 AM, 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures were sold. $580 million was transferred from unknown parties to a set of equally unknown parties. Also, at 6:59, investors bought $1.5 billion in S&P 500 Index stock futures. Bloomberg reported that there was an unusual spike in trades at the Euro Stoxx 50 Index Futures. At 7:04, Trump posted on his scuzzy Truth Social media platform that he had begun “productive conversations” with Iranian leaders which never happened. That AM, the market did its magic.

After Donnie’s fantasy post, the price of oil futures dropped as did the price of a barrel of oil (not for long since, of course, there would be many more DJT hallucinations, make-believe conversations with “top guys” and price-gouging to come).

Somebody made bank in those 14 minutes.

Paul Krugman said the obvious: those somebodies knew what Trump was going to say and moved a boatload of $$ just as the oil futures market was awakening. This walks like a duck/quacks like a duck scenario is likely a classic going-short scheme. If you know that the price of a commodity is going to fall, you sell a bunch of shares before the fall, then buy some back after the fall, at a lower price.

At 6:45 Monday morning, oil futures sold at $98.55 a barrel. After Dear Leader’s utterances, prices plunged, hitting about $85 at 11:00 AM. That’s when the Iranian government denied talking to Trump, who was probably chatting with Roy Cohn or Daddy Fred or Arnold Palmer, but whatever, peace was not at hand. If you sold at top price in that pre-speech surge, then waited a few hours and bought the futures back pre-Iran pouring cold water on the make-believe peace treaty, you made 12-13% profit for a morning’s insider trading. A Twitter (there is no X) account called unusual_whales claimed that these orders were “4-6x larger than anything else at the time.”

So far nobody seems to know who made these moves. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) mused on Twitter “A $1.5 billion bet! Who was it? Trump? A family member? This is…mind-blowing corruption.” A bi-partisan coalition in Congress has pushed for legislation that would prohibit lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from owning, buying and trading individual stock. Earlier this year, Rep. Brian Steil (R-Wisconsin), chair of the House Administration Committee, introduced legislation that would ban members of Congress from buying new stock.

There’s even a bill floating around that would prevent the president and vice-president from engaging in insider trading. So far there are no Republicans emerging to support that restriction.

Tillerson’s State Department gig wasn’t exactly a thrilling tenure: career applications to the Foreign Service declined by over 50% with Rex at the helm. He had been the chair of the Boy Scouts so charisma was likely absent from the scouting report. Rex’s gray hair was matched by his mushroomy whitish-gray face which frowned frequently in public, never more so than while in Trump’s Cabinet. Pale-faced Pootey Put awarded Rex the Order of Friendship (Russia’s boyfriend) when Tillerson was an oil exec eager to drill the Arctic with his great comrade. In solidarity, Rex vigorously opposed Obama’s sanctions against Russia during the invasion of Crimea in 2014.

By appointing Tillerson, Drill, Donnie, Drill was doing a solid for the tyrant he artlessly mimics, dissing Obama and in addition, might have seen Rex as a handy pipeline for shaking down the oil/gas high rollers. But Rex was gone, in disgust, by 2018. The first Trump regime was riven with short, unfaithful hitches.

Trump 2.0 has been different — a younger, preposterous Cabinet, with fewer grayish lumps standing behind him for his manic, surreal pressers (aside from the permanently oxidized Scott Bessent). And this time around the Leader of the Free World is refreshingly candid about grabbing grift from every direction. He loves oil and coal even more the second time around! Give me a billion dollars and you’ll get everything you want, said the Art of the Deal meister in the ‘24 Presidential campaign. The oil kingpins weren’t quite Elon-generous (Donald wined+dined Musk in the heated excitement of the campaign, gave xAI-man the keys to the kingdom, defriended him in a momentary spat then rebefriended — it’s complicated).

To be clear, massive wads of $$ certainly poured in from the fossil fuel magnates. The clubby industry culture has always allowed the main players — whether in the New York boardrooms or the Texas fracking fields — to put aside regional+political differences to bundle the very serious dough that wins most fights in America. Their ponied up+oily Don has been killing the industry’s chief competitors, electric vehicles (EVs) and wind ever since.

Too much proximity might be a liability in the future, though. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in January against Exxon, Chevron, British Petroleum (BP), Shell and the American Petroleum Institute (API), the national trade association for the oil+gas industry. The action accuses these oil honchos of an antitrust conspiracy to suppress renewable energy and EVs in order to unlawfully maintain oil+gas dominance in the energy markets.

The suit seeks to prove that the defendants operated as a cartel to skew the market. The industry leaders “abandoned renewable energy projects, used patent litigation to hinder rivals, suppressed information regarding the hidden costs of fossil fuel, surveilled and intimidated watchdogs and public officials….all to further one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history.”

Here’s where the obligatory bromide “I’m not a conspiracy theorist” should come in but that’s so tired! What’s wired — the history of oil is one big conspiracy after conspiracy beginning when Standard Oil in the 1870s was able to underprice its competitors because the company got secret rebate deals from the railroad industry. In a short time, Standard gobbled up all competitors in its path. But, yes, conspiracy is a word for kooks.

A century later, Exxon and several oil firms that would later combine under Chevron’s rubric invested in the early design and manufacturing of the hybrid electric/gas motor. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 escalated the price of fuel beyond the scope previously experienced by American consumers. As the auto industry competed ferociously with smaller, dramatically more gas efficient cars manufactured in Europe and Asia, Exxon introduced electric drive technology that would make hybrid, less gas-dependent motors feasible. Predictably, hidebound American auto manufacturers, locked into the gas guzzler culture of its ‘40s+’50s midwest/southern markets, went hard in reverse. But in 1981, a team of Exxon engineers gifted Toyota with a gas/electric Cressida, using an AC motor which was better designed for hybrids than the dominant DC motor.

Soon after though, Exxon decapitated the team that worked on the hybrid motor. They were either fired or reassigned by 1983. By the ‘90s, Toyota launched the Prius hybrid with its AC motor. Wonder how that went?

Lee Raymond was the hangman who gibbeted the Exxon hybrid. He was then the head of Exxon Enterprises, the subsidiary that manufactured the hybrid motor in the ‘80s. After burying the hybrid’s carcass, the jowly, truculent Raymond went on to lead Exxon into the great climate denial wars. Under his reign, Exxon captured and killed technology that would develop new battery film separator material that would be crucial for developing hybrids beyond the early Prius models. It went nowhere, extinguished beneath Raymond’s executive haunches. He ridiculed solar+wind technologies for needing government subsidies to compete conveniently ignoring the billions of dollars the oil sector gets from the U.S. government+states annually.

In 2015, Tillerson, then Exxon CEO — Putin’s familiar and Raymond’s successor (Raymond retired as Chair in 2006, receiving a $400 million retirement package, a pretty decent subsidy) though not yet subjected to DJT’s Executive-in-Chief dimwittery — told an audience that “we looked at the science” and getting an EV on the road “is a very, very daunting challenge.”

Chevron got into the capture+kill act too — why should Exxon have all the fun. In 1994, General Motors acquired a majority share of a company that produced nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries. NiMH large format battery packs were an essential element for large scale manufacturing of EVs. A series of rapid-fire mergers+acquisitions took place in late 2000. Texaco bought GM’s stake in the battery pack firm in October of that year; a week later, Chevron bought Texaco for $100 billion, picking up ownership of 125 or so NiMH patents.

Toyota sought to bring the RAV4 EV into the American market in 2001. Chevron whacked Toyota with a patent infringement suit since the RAV4 EV used NiMH batteries. In 2004, Toyota had a hostile settlement imposed on its state-of-the-art EV — the court delayed the RAV4 EV introduction into the North American market until 2010. By controlling key patents, Chevron dealt EVs a commercial setback.

Exxon bought patents that were central to designing and building accessible public charging stations for EVs. In 2005, the company filed a patent application for a multiple vehicle technology service station, certainly more than a hint that this dreamed-of-service-station-of-the-future would include EV charging facilities. Exxon further described this technology in later applications as a “recharging system” for electric-driven vehicles, possibly in order to get the patent, which the company received in 2009. No charging station was ever developed or built under Exxon’s aegis. The patent ran out in 2021, because patent fees were unpaid. In 2012, Exxon acquired a similar Japanese patent which so far remains unused.

Not that this should surprise anyone. In 2019, Exxon head Darren Woods told stockholders that he “doesn’t get the point of EVs.” Matthew Crocker, an Exxon Senior VP, said in an interview with Reuters that if Exxon were to build EV charging stations “we wouldn’t be able to bring our unique capabilities into that space.” Clean cars are not our scene, man.

There’s rich+deep investigations into the fossil fuel industry’s four decades of climate denial, especially the superb work of Benjamin Franta in his important essay Weaponizing Economics: Big Oil and Climate Policy. Remember Exxon scientists by the late ‘70s had calculated in eerie precision the extent of global warming that unrestricted fossil fuel burning would create. In 1988, these 5 defendants and other trade associations created the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). By 1992, the GCC pooled their substantial resources, hired lobbyists, house researchers+scientists and publicists to attack the growing body of climate science being developed by independent academics, most of which tracked closely to Exxon’s own research in the late ‘70s.

By 1995, GCC’s PR firm triumphantly told their clients that over 1,000 stories had been placed across the U.S. media that “turned the tide of press coverage on global climate change science.”

All the defendants contributed to the political+media attacks on climate science. Exxon in the ‘90s ran dozens of anti-climate science ads in newspapers, many designed to look like newspaper editorials. The media blitz was a blizzard of deceptive adverts chock full of deceptive factoids.

Martin Hoffert, an Exxon consultant in the ‘80s, testified before Congress in 2019 that “Exxon was publicly promoting views on climate that its own scientists knew was wrong and we knew this because we were the major group working on it.”

Today, Exxon, Chevron et al run TV, radio, print+digital ads declaiming that they are producing “cheaper, reliable and ever cleaner energy” while their renewable energy portfolios descend increasingly toward zero. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel production side of the ledger aggressively soars upward.

Also, the Defendants+their cartel partners in petrostates have infiltrated climate proceedings like a hot knife through grass-fed butter. At the 2023 COP28 summit, about 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists were in attendance, twice the number that attended COP27. At COP30 in 2025, that number declined to 1,600 but the proportional share of overall attendees was the highest of all U.N. climate summits. The summit’s final document made no mention of a roadmap to decarbonize the largest economies due to pressure from petro-lobbyists Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and the oil industry at COP30.

Then there’s the spooky stuff.

In April 2024, Amil Forlit was arrested at Heathrow airport under a handy Interpol Red Notice, a world-wide law enforcement request to detain someone wanted for a criminal act in the requesting country. In this case Forlit was grabbed on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department for wire fraud and computer hacking.

More specifically, Forlit, a private investigator, was accused of organizing a hack-for-hire scheme. From 2015-2018, he was paid about $20 million by Washington D.C. firm DCI Group. That firm had long been a public relations and contract lobbying operation for Exxon. In 2019, another private investigator, Aviram Azari, had been indicted as this hacking scheme began to be disclosed in DOJ actions. The targets of the hacking were lawyers+advocates for environmental groups and some government officials in Europe+Africa who were working on a legal strategy that became the basis of the “polluters pay” lawsuits that numerous states have pursued in recent years. Exxon, painting the enviros as collusive conspirators (it takes one to know one) engaged in a political vendetta against the oil company, used the hacked material as a defense against the lawsuits. Azari was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2023 and forced to pay $4.8 million in fines and restitution.

DCI, which denies any wrongdoing, has been suspected of providing Forlit, the P.I. with targets for hacking. Forlit worked with third-party vendors to conduct the hacking. Several hundred accounts were hacked, including the accounts of children of the advocates.

This week, the U.K. High Court of Justice opened the door for Forlit to be extradited to the U.S. where for hacking+wire fraud he faces prison time of 45 years.

Exxon denies any involvement with the hacking conspiracy.

None of this bad behavior by the oil companies is new or previously unreported. This industry really wrote the book on how to use political muscle to crush competitors+adversaries and continues to this day. Whenever Trump opens up public lands for oil drilling or bribes a foreign company to crash its own offshore wind investments and instead push LNG facilities (looking at you TotalEnergy!), it’s the result of political action by fossil fuel operatives either outside or inside the government. AG Nessel lets recent history make her case — oil companies have acted in concert to suppress+stifle the development of renewables, to deceive consumers about both renewables+the material/scientific source of climate change and to use its market power to further weaken the competing emerging industries. Not to mention the prospect that one company collaborated even in part with an illegal scheme to hack the data of opponents.

Keep in mind, the American Petroleum Institute, founded in 1919, is a ready-made political institution and forum for these oil majors to further their policies of collusion. The API is also a dynamic and well-funded political operation to carry out the colluders’ policy goals.

What is the likelihood of the lawsuit gaining traction? The political climate in Trumpland is of course hostile to opponents of Exxon+Chevron not to mention to the basic principle of anti-trust enforcement. Gail Slater, the DOJ anti-trust chief and J.D. Vance acolyte was bushwacked by Pammy Joe Bondi+ousted from the agency last month. Slater had shone the bare lineament of a spine in opposing a $15 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Network because that would create a duopoly of wire-networking services. The bigger the better in the Trump regime as long as Donnie or kin get their slice.

But Nessel’s anti-trust angle is novel+gives some political elbow-room for the long-term campaign against the polluters+broad cancer coalition (petro-Putin, Bone Saw, tyrants of the UAE, Ayatollah Jr. etc). Any strategy that diminishes the power of the fossil fuel industry and more broadly empowers the solar+wind industries is an investment in the post-Trump fight for a healthier planet.

Well, actually, her dress-up did get her fired. But a particular kind of dress-up. Sec. Kristi put up $220 million in no-bid TV ad spots — starring Kristi! — with the Secretary riding tall in the saddle, full cowgirl, in front of Mount Rushmore (?) uttering dire warnings about illegal aliens. The ads were paid for by you+me, Joe+Jane taxpayer.

Also in character, Kristi steered big chunks of those contracts to the hubby of Trish McLaughlin, her former chief spox. Trump could care less about the grift — game knows game (though he learned from Fat Tony Salerno that the Man needs to get his vig, which apparently didn’t happen to his obvious chagrin).

The main beef — there’s only one star in the Trump movie and it’s not Kristi. Sen. Yokel, er, John Kennedy (R-Looney Tunes) tormented the DHS Secretary at her final Congressional hearing (where she was roasted in fine bipartisan spirit), pillorying her for the lavish amount of money spent on shameless self-promotion. After he later spoke to Trump (who claimed to know nothing about the advertising contracts that several MAGA Senators were shocked to learn were handed out without a competitive bid), Sen. Snopes drawled, “I knew she was as dead as fried chicken,” which is usually the preferred way to eat it.

Noem maybe knew too. There were many deep sighs+some nervous twitching during her Congressional parboiling. Likely her Administration handlers had told her not to go all beet-red+breathless crazy like Bondi — that spectacle gave the media (which provides Trump’s nanoscopic hold on reality) weeks+weeks worth of high-octane savagery to unload on Pammy Jo. Kristi had a narrow range of options at her disposal in reacting to the grilling.

Noem possesses a predatory cunning like most MAGA shills — they know how to gull the Trumpist base+simultaneously pay court to Leader. But the lure of the bright lights+cool outfits was too intoxicating to pass up. She couldn’t help herself but Leader is unforgiving when it comes to who gets the attention in his world. Kristi’s been the boss — Governor of the ring-necked pheasant state+forewoman of the family ranch right out of high school — how’s she gonna pass up the chance to put on a 2-sizes too big beaver fur hat to arrest some foreign rustlers?

Remember Kristi was also a former South Dakota Snow Queen! That’s a resume-builder out there in the rural wilderness. In 2009, the Snow Queen avalanched incumbent Democrat Stephanie Herseth Handlin by slamming Handlin on her pro-choice position and by lashing her opponent with accusations of conflict of interest because her husband was a D.C. lobbyist. Sounds familiar for sure.

In Congress, Noem was your standard reactionary — deny there was such a thing as climate change, outlaw abortion nationally, grant monumental tax cuts for the uber-rich+deport the immigrants by the busloads, well, now by the customized luxury Gulfstream jet-load.

Of course Noem wasn’t fired for eviscerating FEMA. She was hired to do that since Trump hates the program almost as much as he hates windmills. Noem, in fairness, screwed the pooch in grand fashion. According to a recent Senate report, Noem’s micromanaging added so much bureaucratic delay that $17 billion in FEMA funding got caught in a bottleneck. The main delaying tactic — Kristi imposed a stifling order that every grant or contract over $100,000 required her personal sign-off. This overreach hindered FEMA’s response to the deadly central Texas floods (she didn’t okay rescue teams to the flooded towns for 72 hours; she didn’t renew contracts for call centers which resulted in such short-staffed gridlock that only 15,000 out of more than 55,000 calls from disaster survivors were answered), to the thousands of miles of North Carolina bridges and roads destroyed by Hurricane Helene (one source of Sen. Tillis’ animus) or to the endtimes Los Angeles fires of 2025. The micromanaging might also be illegal.

In 2006, Congress passed the unattractively named Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act or PKEMRA. This law was an attempted corrective to the prodigious shambles George W. Bush made of the federal government’s response to Katrina, the deadly storm that flooded much of New Orleans in late August 2005. W. had appointed an unqualified nitwit named Michael Brown to run FEMA. Bush in his vacuous frat-boy fashion mock-praised his sad-sack minion, “heckuva job Brownie” at the Mobile Airport. Brownie beamed. W. wiped his mouth, stared at the ground, sneered.

The swaggering fortunate son banter contrasted grimly with visuals of the quickly deteriorating conditions at the New Orleans Superdome, the gravely ill patients stranded at the Memorial Medical Center for nearly a week without power and the mostly black Lower Ninth Ward flooded with rampaging, toxic waters long after the storm had passed. Brownie was out of work a week after his fist-bump moment with the lesser Bush.

PKEMRA places the burden of competency on the DHS Secretary and FEMA head to insure that another Katrina doesn’t happen again. Or at least to insure that they get out of the way and not make the calamity worse. The two Democratic co-authors of the FEMA report, Senators Peters of Michigan and Kim of New Jersey, argue that Noem’s stymieing of FEMA’s contracts by holding up small transactions impeded the agency from conducting its mission, a central tenet of the Katrina reform.

Then there’s the issue of her disemboweling the workforce. In January, FEMA supervisors warned staff that 1,000 jobs, roughly 10% of the workforce, were going to be lopped off by the Administration. Most of these emergency workers were hired on 2-4 year contracts. These are the Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) staff. Again, Kristi thrust her heavy hand into the process to gum up the works. These workers’ contracts, she decreed, could not be renewed without Secretary Buttinsky’s approval. Losing this staff would be an additional violation of law since it would substantially reduce FEMA’s capacity to respond to disasters.

As it happened, over 1,000, mostly CORE staff, were laid off. Some of the workers were currently serving in hurricane relief deployments. The top brass simply declined to review the contracts. And controversy still reigns, even after Czarina Noem exits the stage (chased by a Lewandowski).

Acting FEMA Administrator Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity apparatchik on board since December, stumbled early in her already troubled tenure. She told U.S. District Judge Susan Illston who is presiding over a case in San Francisco brought by the union that represents FEMA workers to stop the layoffs, that Homeland Security honchos had decided not to reappoint these workers. The Trumpazoid Department of Justice attorney, Robert Bombard, replied, no, no, no, DHS had no hand in this. It was FEMA!

Illston asked the aptronymic Bombard essentially, WTF is going on with these contradictory stories, aren’t you guys on the same team? DoJ dude says, with his bare face hanging out, “I don’t have a great explanation for that.”

Attorneys for the union have accused Noem of recommending in the FEMA Review Council’s final report that the agency staff be cut by 50%. The Review has not been made public. DHS denies that such cuts are on the table. The judge has ruled that both Noem+Evans can be deposed as the lawsuit proceeds. The union will argue that here is yet another example of DHS violating PKREMA since that law limits the agency’s ability to make such radical cuts. Illston, who didn’t appear sympathetic to the union in the early phase of the suit, has found the government’s procedural capsizing nothing short of astonishing. She has also ordered DHS+FEMA to produce documents about the target reductions of CORE staff. Once again the MAGA-fied DOJ has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as it heads into a Bombard-y quagmire.

All eyes (well some eyes, okay a couple of eyes) turn to Trump’s choice to succeed Noem, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Mullin, the richest plumber in the republic (worth between $31-75 million since entering Congress) was once a WWE fighter. Markwayne called out Teamster President Sean O’Brien during a Senate hearing. Literally called him out — “stand your butt up” kind of call-out. It took Bernie Sanders to calm things down (!!).

Markwayne (actual name) is otherwise another standardized MAGA to the right of Ghengis Khan-type. He believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. He wouldn’t want an abortion even if his wife’s life was in danger (easy for him to say). He defends ICE agents at every turn, supports massive deportations and has shown zero interest in either FEMA or disaster relief policy. In other words, a perfect fit for the Trumparchy.

If matters are unlikely to improve for DHS/FEMA under the leadership of the fighter/plumber Missouri Valley College dropout, things are not going to get better for the former Snow Queen. The prospects for a Nuremberg 2.0 where Kristi gets tried at the Hague are minimal. But Noem’s very provable violation of the law in gutting her agency should get her hauled into court, making her smashed career even more painful.

Trump told them that Americans were afraid that these “big buildings, $150 billion buildings, those are big, all of these are pipes, beautiful pipes, unbelievable”). Then he took a victory lap for being the first ever to come up with the idea of “fixing” the electric grid since thanks to Sleepy Joe, who stole the election of ‘20, that grid needed a’fixing.

Another fix: these AI genius guys will build+pay for their own power. More great leadership: Trump told the tech titans that EPA honcho Lee Zeldin would lead the way getting them permits if only there was anybody left working at his agency after the LeePurges!

SecEnergy Chris Wright, a reliable Trump bottom, praised his Leader in his best Michael Jackson falsetto, for bringing the robot masters to the table. Even simpering Mike Johnson took some time off his busy schedule avoiding the press to say a few unconnected words about a subject he clearly knew nothing about.

Trump’s genius foreign policy stratagems might put a wrinkle in these bringing-down the-utility-rates efforts. His Iranian war that’s not a war has driven gasoline prices up 35¢ in a week at the TrumpPump™. Oil prices have escalated to $90/barrel; a dollar increase in a barrel of oil results in a 2.5¢ price increase for a gallon of gasoline.

In the fog of middle eastern war, with drones flying helter-skelter, Qatar has completely shut down the largest liquified natural gas (LNG) facility in the world, not great for gas prices.

In addition, Iran has effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz from which 20% of world oil+LNG is transported. As global LNG reserves tighten, the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of LNG, sells more of that commodity to Europe+Asia. Export prices are higher and more profitable than domestic prices; the obvious market logic in play is that the more LNG sold abroad, the higher the price of gas for domestic consumers. American consumers are forced, in a Hunger Games world, to bid against global consumers.

It’s not just the impact of Trump’s crackbrained Epstein Fury War; gas prices have been on the rise for awhile in the U.S. Public Citizen reported that Americans paid more for natural gas from Jan-October 2025 than in that period in 2024. Electricity prices went up 5% nationwide in 2025; in swing state Pennsylvania, where methane gas is the prevalent fuel, prices went up 9%.

The massive electricity-gobbling AI centers will only add to the rising costs of power. Utilities will need to build expanded infrastructure to provide the data centers with all that new power. The projected amount of needed power is staggering — these giant facilities will use the amount of electricity consumed by a medium-sized city. Some utilities are predicting they will need to double or triple their energy production over the next two years to feed the beasts. On top of the costs of new infrastructure will be added the costs of higher amounts of fuel that will be consumed by the centers. Also, most utility regulators have designed rate structures that favor large commercial users, meaning that residential customers (households) wind up subsidizing their tech monster neighbors.

The tech emissaries promised on bended knee that they would build+buy their own power because, sir, only you could bring tears to the eyes of these strong men+women by promising to make our robot overlords even smarter!

It’s a very Trumpy deal. The tech companies’ pledges are voluntary so that handshake deal is as wobbly as the Gimp-in-Chief’s ankles. It will not be obvious how much of the cost of any new pipeline or high voltage overhead power lines or substations a regulator will assign the data center, especially if it’s a gentlemen’s agreement with a den of techno-thieves. Utility rate-making is an art, maybe even a craft, not a science. It’s not a likely prospect that the richest companies in the world won’t use their political muscle and guile to foist as much of these costs on largely unorganized customers.

Trump has other ideas on how to get energy prices down. The Fifa Peacenik has suggested sending troops into the Middle East to protect oil+gas facilities from Iran’s attacks. But it was American boots on the ground during the Gulf War that riled up Bin Laden+his terrorist thugoons back in the day. Bonny Prince Bone Saw undoubtedly wants to avoid gaming out that scenario.

He’ll need some sharp thinking fast to accomplish that. Apparently someone (schoolmarm Susie Wile, pouty snot-nosed Karoline Leavitt or someone else?) was yelling in a mean way at sad sacks Zeldin+Wright to think outside the box to bring the prices down. Candidate Trump told the Economic Club of New York he’d bring gasoline prices down below $2 and kept telling his handpicked press corps all this past year that it had already hit that mark. Except it hadn’t. Gas hasn’t been that low since 2021. And guess what? It ain’t getting there anytime soon.

Not so much after a day of war, as oil prices spiked first 13% to $82 a barrel of oil, before going down to $78, still a substantial cost increase. All good news for the extraction class — BP+Shell immediately saw profits go up by 5%, Exxon by 4% and Chevron by 3%, with plenty of upside heading their way. All that fat+growing fatter profit means higher prices at the proverbial pump, to heat American homes and every other way high oil prices rattle the economy. For his part, the American Petroleum Institute (API) honcho, Mike Sommers, giddily announced that “our industry is prepared to be a stabilizing force in Iran if they decide to overthrow the regime.” Happy to steal your oil and I just can’t seem to wipe this broad grin off my face.

Putin may have lost his soul mate when the always jolly, 86 year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah, to cop a Hamlet soliloquy, sprung his mortal coil (with plenty of tyrants waiting on the bench eager to take his place). But Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev crowed “$100+ oil per barrel soon” which might give Vladdy some consolation. As Iran and its surrogates shut down the Strait of Hormuz, major oil importers like China+India will buy crude from the Vlad oil patch. Another Russian propagandist, Vladimir Solovyev, doing a joyous Sommers somersault, said that Russia was “gaining a trump card in this complex game”, highlighting once again the uproarious wit of the Putonian order.

On Monday, Iran issued a press statement saying that 3 UK+U.S. tankers had been struck and “were burning.” More than 150 tankers dropped anchor just outside the Strait and Maersk, the large Danish container shipping group, said it was bypassing the Strait and the Suez Canal. Maersk will reroute its fleet around the Cape of Good Hope. Leading mutual marine insurers have canceled war risk cover for fleets. The global head of marine insurance at Marsh insurers predicted that marine insurance in the Gulf could rise by 50-100%. War risk cover is an insurance instrument structured to add protections to businesses from damages due to combat conditions and of course “regime change”, however inept. These policies are expensive+unpredictable. Escalating insurance costs further disrupts the transport of oil and gas — over 20% of the world’s oil supplies and 20% of gas tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Some shipping firms are taking much longer routes to avoid added costs to themselves; of course, these longer journeys add cost to transported oil+gas.

Unlike the polluters cartel, the stock markets are unhappy across the berserk globe. The S&P 500 opened on Tuesday down 1.5% (plenty of future downside there). The South Korean main index dropped 7%, Japanese stocks dropped 3% and every national stock index inside the EU was going down. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who’s being praised by Trump for helping out, called on the U.S. to end the war quickly because skyrocketing oil prices will really make a mess of the world economy.

There is likely not much downside left in one area of American life — voters’ support for the Epstein/Iran war (seriously, what’s in those files that has Donnie at DefCon 5 distress levels?). A CNN poll on Monday found that 59% disapproved of Trump’s war with Iran; only 16% strongly approved. Compare that to the 72% approval Bush had in the early days of his war with Iraq. Most polls have found that overall support for Trump’s war is at an anemic 25%. Most Americans surveyed would prefer if Donnie had Congressional approval to go on his bombing hissy fits; his trained seals in the Republican Congress appear ready to give him that or at least not demand that their Leader abide by the Constitution. Quietly desperate Thune+simpering Johnson are the political eunuchs this moment calls for as Donnie+Pizzled Pete run the war from the Mar a Lago sushi bar.

CNN found that 62% thought Trump didn’t have a clear plan. Now why would they think that?!! Donnie’s ranged all over the map for reasons — Iran is 5 days from getting nukes, we need regime change fast cause I said so, my best friends in the mideast made me do it. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Netanyahu+Trump agreed on the day of attack weeks ago, with the Saudi Prince aggressively pressing Trump to strike the House of Saud’s long-time regional+religious rival. Which means that Jared’s peace overtures were Kabuki theater, like everything else the spooky son-in-law does such as forging the phony Abraham Accords which never really collapsed since they never really existed.

Iran is a country of 93 million people and unlike Venezuela, militarily loaded for bear. Their drone attacks have already pushed the Saudis, the UAE and Qatar far off balance. Did Trump+his brain trust think the theocracy wouldn’t punch back?

U.S. embassies have closed in Saudi Arabia (after being hit by a drone) and in Kuwait. So on Epstein War Day 3, is there finally a game plan? When are the internal foes of the Ayatollah and Iranian allies of DJT ready to fight the regime? Donnie sadly admitted that “most of the people we had in mind (to take over Iran) are dead.” Bummer.

The Muskian universe has had its ups+downs over the past year or so. Elon poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign, primarily in swing state Pennsylvania, which Trump won. As a reward, Elon was given his own secret government initiative of youthful budget-cutters called Doge, a reference to both a cryptocurrency and the oligarchic ruler of the Venice city-state from the 8th century until the office’s abolition by Napoleon. That Doge was replaced by a Podesta, bad vibes for the Trumpist rulers.

One fissure certainly began when X AE A-12, one of Musk’s 14 kids, told Trump to shush!+stared Baby Huey down (Donnie wilted feebly under attack from X’s cold, empty eyes); more gravely, Musk’s Doge crew of college fraternity-rejects cut key government programs into oblivion and maybe sent confidential info to Russia? Trump threw him under the bus as Trump does. This bus-throwing began with leaks to the New York Times of Elon’s exotic drug use+possible bladder malfunctions. Elon struck back accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files (for the sake of narrative suspense, he didn’t say Donnie was in it a million times!). Then the two made up. Turns out that Elon had substantial email traffic with Epstein, at one point begging, like the guy least likely to ever be invited to the party, to be invited to the “wildest party” on the infamous island. It’s not clear if the scurvy+treacherous Epstein crew ever hosted him.

The SpaceX/xAI merged corporation, worth an estimated $1.2 trillion, with about $5 billion ponied up by the Saudi Prince whose goons murdered a Washington Post reporter, got hit with a notice last week that a lawsuit is coming. The NAACP issued an intent to sue the firm for past and present federal Clean Air Act violations. xAI is in the process of building several massive data centers in the metropolitan Memphis area, spilling over the Tennessee border into Southaven, Mississippi which is 40% black. Black communities in this region and throughout the south have long been subjected to dangerously bad air impacts caused by fossil fuel emissions. This case is part of the long history of resistance to the polluters.

xAI has built Colossus I, the world’s largest super computer in Memphis (size of 14 football fields) next to the black community of Boxtown. The purpose of this Colossus+the other planned Colossi is to “train” Grok. Grok is the chatbot that for fun takes on an anime character called MechaHitler, (aka Grokler) which is both chatty and hitlerish in discharging anti-semitic, racist and Islamophobic drivel. Which means: 1) Grok/MechaHitler is likely untrainable so the Colossi are pointless anyway and 2) existentially, artificial intelligence has truly taken the human experience to new levels what with racist robots and all. Further proof that 1+2 are both right: Grok 4.1, nearly the most perfect Grok extant, called Elon Musk, “the world’s top human.” Every word there is a lie, including the the.

House training Grok won’t be good for the environment either. Community activists, sleuthing about, discovered that Colossus I was powered by 27 unpermitted gas turbines. Throughout the summer and fall of 2024 opponents of the data center filled town hall meetings and provided voluminous public comment to municipal, local and state governments. To keep the project going, xAI successfully lobbied the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to the besieged Colossus I. In the late winter of 2025, xAI bought property in Whitehaven Tennessee to build Colossus II. A new report by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) found that the company expects to install 41 permanent gas turbines to feed Colossus II and by their own proposed air permit estimates these turbines would release 20 tons of fine particle pollution (PM2.5) every year. Nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde are other harmful emissions that are being produced at the site.

The report also found that the economic impact of the turbine-generated air pollution would cost the region from $30 million to $45 million in health care costs caused by worsening asthma, heart disease and premature deaths.

The state and federal law isn’t exactly favorable for the 27 temporary turbines. To power this second massive data center, xAI execs met with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) proposing to build a 1.2 Gigawatt (GW) gas turbine power plant in Southaven. To tide them over while waiting for the power plant permit, xAI proposed using temporary, mobile gas-fired turbines without waiting for permits for the temporary turbines. The pliant MDEQ said sure, sending Team Musk a letter of approval with a proviso — just as long as the “temporary” turbines are mobile i.e. on a flatbed truck and the turbines will only operate for a year. Permit applications for new power plants have to be made available for public comment under federal+Mississippi law.

To no one’s surprise in this era of legal, ah, elasticity, though state law in Ole Miss does create a mobile source exemption for air permits, these “mobile sources” are defined as cars, trucks, trains and even airplanes (a great John Candy movie). EPA (RIP) regulations, required by law to be applied by MDEQ, places gas turbines under the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) which are enforced at the federal level — these standards define a stationery source of pollution as a “gas turbine…even if it is mounted on a vehicle for portability.” So the flatbed truck scam doesn’t give xAI permission to fire up gas turbines without permits.

The NAACP writes in their letter that the Musk company will have to shut down the turbines under state+federal laws, and go through appropriate due diligence procedures regarding clean water impacts in order to get proper permits.

Their letter states that if litigation is necessary they and other claimants will seek injunctive relief and civil penalties. There will be more legal challenges to proposed AI centers around the country.

Bill McKibben has counseled a slow-down, lets-get-the-facts-first approach to the emerging data center monsters. Do we need all this AI tech+infrastructure? Where will all the power come from (with the subtext that the fossil fuel industry will be happy to supply gargantuan data centers with massive amounts of dirty fossil-fueled electricity).

Numerous states, including New York and California, have legislation that has been introduced that will impose a moratorium on the construction of AI centers during which the state will investigate the centers’ impacts on consumer costs, job displacement and environmental impacts. In Illinois, legislation has been introduced that is supported by labor, consumer and environmental groups would require data centers to submit their own clean energy plan in order to be given access to the existing electric grid. Any data center within 3 miles of an environmental justice community would be mandated to get a cumulative impact assessment from the state environmental protection agency proving that the center will not disproportionately create additional health and environmental risks.

Another feature of the bill is a requirement that the data center pay into a fund to address energy affordability issues. And this is not a partisan issue — Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed a proposal to transfer increased electric costs created by the energy use of data centers away from from consumers and back to the centers. His proposal also expands the legal authority of local governments to block data centers from their communities.

Data centers are increasingly being blamed in some parts of the country for rapidly rising utility bills. Utility costs became a central issue in elections last year especially in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia, all campaigns won by Democrats. Bloomberg News, in a survey of tens of thousands of locations across the country, found that electricity costs 267% more than it did 5 years ago in locations near significant data center development. These added costs come from 2 directions: from extra transmission lines that need to be built and other infrastructure needed to transport added electricity as well as the further cost of added power demand. The Illinois+Florida bills put that cost burden on the data center owners. In Congress, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) have introduced federal legislation that mandates data centers build+supply their own energy sources. Sen. Bernie Sanders has argued, like McKibben, that there should be a moratorium on data center construction now and if there are new centers on the horizon their energy sources have to be renewable.

The promise of jobs is illusory (like the mega-job creation fantasies of fracking, offshore drilling+gas pipeline construction) — according to a Virginia audit, while roughly 1500 jobs will be created during the building of the warehouse, fewer than 50 permanent jobs will remain to keep the operation rolling.

But as opposition to data centers mounts, in red states, blue states, wherever — NIMBY is a powerful impulse — the physical laws of politics set in. Community opposition begets counter-opposition, often from shadowy parts of the political realm.

Last week, the Sierra Club, California Environmental Voters and other enviro+public health groups urged California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate a deceptive and illegal astroturf campaign powered by AI.

An AI-powered operation called CiviClick was used to generate over 20,000 public comments in opposition to clean air standards proposed by South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). SCAQMD is a regional regulatory agency responsible for improving air quality in major parts of Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties (including, crucially Coachella Valley). When agency investigators followed up in response to the opposing comments, numerous citizens said they had not sent comments to the regulator or were even aware of the clean air proposals. This isn’t the first time. CiviClick was accused of the same deception in North Carolina. In a heated gas infrastructure fight, constituents when contacted by the regulatory agency, denied sending in any comments.

The Los Angeles Times found that the scam campaign in California was run by someone with the possibly prescient name of Matthew Klink. Klink boasted about the undoing of the clean air initiative in the Lobbyist/Corporate PR agitprop outlet Campaigns and Elections. He gave massive props to his AI buddy as making the “ultimate difference in defeating” the standards. Klink crowed that the opposition comments, real or fictional, had left the SCAQMD “reeling.” Klink’s firm represents Sempra, the parent company of Southern California Gas Company, an aggressive critic of the stronger clean air standards which would have reduced nitrogen oxides (NOx) from gas furnaces across southern California, one of the most polluted regions in the country.

Add to all the other economic, environmental, public health and possible end-of-humanity downsides to AI the certainty that it will be used by powerful corporate propagandists to keep reshaping reality for the expansion of their profits.

So, regarding risky AI centers, America should follow the example of our Olympic hockey heroes. Nah, not the Men’s Hockey team who put a medal on the Director of the FBI who was partying with a thrashing, crystal-meth-like mania (dudes, you forgot you can’t feed gremlins after midnight!). Follow the example of the women hockey champions, those tough, cold-blooded+clutch winners of the gold medal, in giving the cold shoulder to the bad faith Trumpish invite to the White House. Thanks Grok/MechaHitler, but no thanks.

The Leader basked in the foggy light of the adoring coal industry leaders. Sure, some words are just hard — undisputed caused a few gasps+what sounded like a lung whistle (came out finally as un-jis-ish-dis-poodled). But special award-winning Donnie got it up to keep the Biden beef going (“Biden shut down a coal plant every day!! Terrible Sleepy Joe.”). What the world doesn’t know, according to undisputed Don, is that the only power that kept working during the big storm was COAL, the cheapest fuel! Plus the awful head of the TVA makes $10 million!!!

EPA head Lee Zeldin was cowering in the background of the announcement. He could see into the future. The next day, zealous Lee, his cheeks rubescent with deregulatory fervor, fumed about the climate scam, declaimed on how he blew up longstanding climate law regarding transportation to make passenger cars+trucks cheaper, let the manufacturers not worry their pretty little heads about greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s done mostly to please the Leader. Good-bye endangerment finding, good-bye making EPA fight global warming. Maybe not so great for the auto industry’s international market sales. But it’s the biggest, best evisceration of environmental law anywhere, ever. Sure, Lee did bloviate somewhat, these are exciting times, right? Making air unbreathable is a big deal! Lee’s cheeks puffed with pride, his voice got trembly+maybe uncomfortably shrill, but his subservience to Trump was absolute. The Old Man walked haltingly to the podium, the left leg favored as he grimaced, grabbing the side of the platform with some effort. “Well, that was…long,” said the *Leader, his critique of yet another fawning sycophant.

Lee’s always frail ego was in an instant beaten beyond all recognition. Zeldin looked down to the floor, then straight ahead, then put on an awkward smile for the cameras, looking like someone who wanted to disappear.

Trump has never scored high as an employer on things like empathy, appreciation, respectfulness or commiseration with his underlings since actually those underlings don’t exist. He’s always been consumed by Iago’s green monster of envy — no one is allowed to get attention except him. The hired help are part of him just like another set of hands or another gimpy leg. They are there to get his needs met whether it’s scoring a Filet O Fish or bombing to smithereens another fishing boat in the Caribbean. Ask those 3 Taj Mahal execs how much he cares about staff (you could ask but you won’t get an answer cause they’re dead). They went down in a helicopter crash in 1989.

First, Donnie claimed he was supposed to be on that flight to New Jersey to visit his failing casino but had to change plans at the last minute — a claim completely blown up by the great Wayne Barrett (who’d be having a lot of fun immolating the Fat Golfer-in-Chief right now). Barrett interviewed pretty much anyone who talked to Trump that day, including several insiders who always wanted to stick a shiv in Trump’s back, off the record. He had no intention of going to Jersey that day. Trump had an irresistible need to pick the phone off its cradle (the way things were done in those days, trust me on this), call his house organ aka The New York Post and make himself the center of the story the day of their deaths. Then characteristically, DJT blamed the dead execs for the Taj bankruptcy a year later, one of many financial deep sixes the Deal Artist perpetrated. So, you’re not alone Lee, in the Trumpian unrequited love department. Ask his kids.

The day before Lee’s girlish crush was rebuked, Trump ordered the Defense Department to purchase billions of dollars worth of coal-fired power for its installations. The Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $175 million to upgrade+retrofit 6 coal plants in the long-ago enervated coal belt in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio. Jim Grech the Peabody Energy honcho presented the award — Grech is the face of American Coal (though he looks like he’s been carted over from a wax museum)+runs the biggest coal company in the country. That “biggest” is with plenty of asterisks though.

Peabody went belly up in April 2016, sent down the chute by massive debt and skidding-off-the-cliff coal prices. In 2020, they slashed $1.42 billion off the book value of their largest mine which was about 25% of the company’s total asset value (President Undisputed was wheeling around the Oval Office that year and didn’t lend a helping hand).

In November 2024, Peabody got a $2 billion bridge loan to buy Anglo American Plc, a mining firm that aimed to sell off its steelmaking coal mines. Part of that loan came from the German Deutsche Bank. Private credit specialists like KKR & Co. and a unit of the Jeffries Financial Group, an American capital markets firm, pitched in as well. Deutsche has a pungent oligarch-y reek — parts of its pedigree are past association with Jeffrey Epstein+past/present dealings with the Trump network+Russian oligarchs. But it actually has a modest though muddled climate policy toward coal.

The bank has a stated policy to avoid investing in thermal coal, the coal used for heating+electricity. Deutsche claims that metallurgical (met) coal, the bulk of Peabody’s product, is used for steelmaking and less harmful as far as greenhouse gas emissions go since it plays an important role in steelmaking which is perceived as a step toward clean energy production. The coal industry has used its connection to steel production via met coal as a lure for investors — there’s a passing glance at investing in green steel tech and steel clearly has a stronger bottom line than coal for bankers. But in truth, this is a distinction without a difference.

Met coal often produces the to-be-avoided thermal coal. In some cases, at particularly high burns, met coal can be even more polluting than thermal coal, in some cases by a factor of 3 according to Wood McKenzie, an energy analyst firm. It’s also increasingly possible to produce steel without using coal at all — hydrogen and recycled metals can be used in steel production and avoids coal pollution entirely. Nice try Deutsche; major insurers like Allianz, AXA, Swiss Re, and Munich Re have begun a long (actually an excruciatingly slow) process of divesting from fossil fuels, especially coal (note — State Farm is absent). Institutional investors, particularly banks, are propping the industry up.

All that finance capital bailouts, with all the faux-climate mea culpa, well, it didn’t help too much. Peabody lost $55 million last year which makes sense since U.S. coal production in 2024 was well less than half of what it was in 2008. In 2000 coal generated 50% of electricity in the U.S.; in 2025, it generated 12%. Since 2000, 780 coal-fired units have been unceremoniously closed down with another 200 units pending. Not exactly a booming industry. Yet Peabody et al are sure to get some kind of Presidential uptick pronto with the Trumpist jolt of neo-lemon socialism via wild-eyed Bourbon Pete Hegseth’s military contracts!

*At the end of the day, coal’s is grimy+in truth, grotesquely vile. Remember those photos of NYC in the ‘60s which were the forerunner of Blade Runner’s smoke+smog atmospherics? A 1966 Mayor’s Task Force on Air Pollution report stated that every New Yorker inhaled 730 pounds of “dirt and poison” each year (now that’s your New York grit) which had much to do with the fact that in the ‘50s+’60s about 15,000 buildings in the city were heated by coal. It was a deadly smog event in NYC on+ Thanksgiving weekend that year, causing over 300 deaths which galvanized a national campaign to pass a strong Clean Air Act in Congress, which eventually happened in 1970. The oil+coal industries hated the law from the get go. And it’s the same Clean Air Act that Trump/Zeldin are doing their (limping) victory lap for carving up this week. Time’s a flat circle.

Coal plants are the largest source of atmospheric CO2, the dominant greenhouse gas, which we’re not trying to limit anymore. Plus sulphur dioxides, nitrogen oxides and particulates are coal plant emissions which all cause respiratory illnesses and in some cases lung disease. Not to mention mercury and other heavy metals that have been linked to neurological damage.

As for the winter storm which was maladroitly called Fern, the storm during which, according to President Trump, only coal kept the lights on? Unlike George Washington (Happy Birthday George, who’s rolling around in his Mount Vernon tomb) DJT can tell a lie or let’s say an untruth. At the height of Stormy Fern’s rage, gas supplied more power than coal. The offshore South Fork Wind Farm which delivers power to Long Island, New York, operated at a 52% capacity factor (more than half of it’s total potential output).

It’s critical to get as much power as possible when the grid is under duress; South Fork’s capacity factor was equal to the most efficient natural gas units in New York and superior to the output of coal plants during the storm. Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts had a capacity factor of 75% in the face of Fern, one of the highest efficiency levels in the country. These offshore facilities could have generated an even higher output of electricity if the Trump Administration hadn’t aggressively attacked them over the past year (see Bad Energy, last week!) and slowed their coming on line.

It’s not about cost — solar and wind are more than competitive with coal as far as price. According to Lazard, in 2025, utility scale solar had a price range of $38-78 per megawatt-hour; onshore wind $38-86 MWh; offshore wind $70-157 MWh; natural gas $48-105 MWh and coal $71-173 MWh. Solar, onshore wind and gas are substantially lower in cost than coal at both the low and high ends of the range. In the upper, most expensive range, coal stands alone at $173 MWh. The reasons are not complicated — wind and solar have high investment costs that are all up front, then run on low operating costs over the life of the unit. Sunlight+air are not costly. Coal (and volatile gas prices) have expensive fuel+safety costs that in the long run have continually gone up.

An area where coal is incontestably king (you could call it undisputed) is in causing the human experience we call death.

According to the Global Change Data Lab, measured by deaths caused by accident+air pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh) of energy source produced (terawatt-hour is a million MWh), coal leads the pack at 24.7 deaths per terawatt-hour. Oil weighs in at 18.4, gas at 2.8 and wind at 0.04. Solar finishes last in the death department at 0.02, which is about as close to nada as you can get, metaphysically speaking+a ratio of 1235 to 1.

In a sane world (not our present Dark Knight Rises timeline, with the heavy-breathing wannabe dictator riling up his crazed base), the federal government would subsidize the cheaper, safer, more reliable technologies. Instead the Trump regime valorizes the most expensive, most dangerous and most unreliable fuel. Call it stupidity or corruption or the raw political power of the old fossil fuel regime or all of the above. Safe bet — no matter how much baksheesh Trump+the banks plow into the coal industry, it will keep going down the tubes like it has for decades. Its shelf life is kaput.

Judge Lamberth had already given the go ahead in Washington for Orsted’s Revolution Wind project which is off the Rhode Island coast. That project hired over 80 fisherman to do construction work (probably more than a few Trump voters there) which suggests that the Building Trades unions ought to make a bigger priority of offshore wind than they have.

Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, found the regime’s national security claims specious. The Department of the Interior (DOI) has offered no proof that a wind facility poses any security threat, just some jabber about radar and turbines, all of which has been resolved in previous safety reviews over the years.

Last month, Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump (!) appointee also on the D.C. bench, found that screwing around with Empire Wind, off the coast of the New York Bight and New Jersey+60% complete, would cause irreparable harm to Equinor, the Norwegian firm building the project. Their attorneys claimed that the company would lose $1 billion in contracts. Nichols also said that the Justice Department showed no “substantive proof” that it gave Equinor any time or even opportunity to respond to DOJ’s order.

Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden-appointed, Boston-based Federal judge, ruled that Vineyard Wind 1 operated by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners off of the Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts coast, would also suffer irreparable harm if it *were not allowed to complete construction. Vineyard had already installed 58 of 62 turbines. Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind also got the go-ahead from the courts. Operated by Dominion Energy, it is off the coast of Virginia Beach and the largest of the offshore wind projects, capable of producing electricity for nearly 700,000 homes. Dominion Energy is a powerful political player in the Southeast with serious Republican cred. The DOI hit was more likely an out-of-the-gate body slam on newly elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger (who the regime hates for obvious reasons) than an actual attempt to strangle the project.

Orsted’s Sunrise Wind is also very big+45% complete+will power 600,000 homes+produces clean energy+hundreds of union jobs and also less a security risk than skulking Tulsi. It has a supply chain that stretches across 34 states. The project has already produced $2 billion in investment and generated over 4,000 jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction. Remember, Trump hates wind generally (noise cancer). He usually bellows his hatred but in his plea to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer to dismantle all offshore wind facilities, the Trumpish puss went still, an immobility that looked like a kind of lights-on, nobody-home narcosis, at peace in his vision of a windless world. Maybe he was thumped by the Deadly Discombobulator?

In the Donald lore we are all currently forced to live in, he loathes the technology because an offshore wind facility reputedly marred the view from his golf course in Aberdeen Bay in Scotland. He sued and lost, was pilloried in the Scottish media (how could they resist — this dopey, dangerous, barely sentient American greedbag—and that hair…). Of course Donny Doofus holds a grudge. He doesn’t care that these projects will lower power costs in competition with volatile gas prices in the northeast or provide grid reliability or inject much-needed economic activity to struggling port towns. Well, of course he doesn’t care about you, he’s Trump, he’s genetically incapable of those human impulses. Other impulses, well….

More importantly to Dear Leader in our post-Citizens United politics, offshore wind is a risk to the profits of Exxon, Chevron and fossil fuel polluters everywhere, a list at one with his donor class. The polluters from ExxonMobil to Koch Industries to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers have funded front groups like the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) which have attacked offshore wind.

The main thrust of the attacks is the notion that the facilities harm whales (a new-found concern on the right, never previously likely to have Save the Whales bumper stickers on their pickups). The wind facilities are driving whales mad with noise, slashing them with their turbine blades. Study after study has refuted these claims, proving that the bulk of unnatural whale deaths are the result of vessel strikes. These oil-funded crackpot claims are almost as baroque as DOI honcho Doug Burgum’s contention that Revolution Wind would open America to underwater drone attacks by our enemies (what do you expect from a guy who insists his staff bake cookies for him). So expect further challenges from the fossil fuel industry and their political subsidiaries.

On his first day in office, Trump shot out an executive memo to his new agency heads to halt new permits, leases and any other authorization to develop new wind energy projects, onshore+offshore. On Jan. 20, 2025, DOI suspended these wind projects. 17 states sued DOI+other agencies arguing that these actions were arbitrary and capricious. The superb advocates at the Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACE NY) intervened as a plaintiff representing the wind industry. On December 8, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts held the agencies’ blanket suspension unlawful. The decision is a full victory for the states+ACE NY and a rout of the Trump bureaucracy (btw — long live the Commonwealth+that’s coming from a Knicks/Yankees fan).

But harm has been done. The entire clean energy industry has been battered in the first year of Trump 2.0. According to a report by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), cancellations, closures and reductions in wind, solar and battery investments amounted to nearly $35 billion in 2025, compared to just a little more than $12 billion in new investments. There were $20 billion in clean energy cancellations in Republican Congressional districts compared to $10.6 billion in Democratic districts. The Biden Administration, still operating in a fantasy land where there were still some sensible Republicans and John McCain and Howard Baker (look him up!) roamed the land, allocated more clean energy investments in red states than blue or purple ones. Naturally, not a peep was heard from those Governors or Congressional delegations. Come on, if the cult leader’s cranky, everyone’s sad.

E2 reported that manufacturing facilities, with a lot of jobs at stake, totaled $30 billion in canceled investments. Another example of the Trumpoid economic miracle.

Meanwhile, there are some who aren’t sitting on their thumbs. In China, clean energy projects drove more than 90% of the country’s investment growth last year. These economic sectors in China are more substantial than all but the 7 largest economies on the planet. In 2021, China built more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world accomplished in the previous 5 years. By the summer of 2025, there were 15,100 offshore wind turbines in operation worldwide; over half were along China’s coast even as Donald J. Trump hallucinated to his captive, nodding-off Davos audience that China had no wind turbines. China also has the world’s most complete supply chain for the offshore wind technology from design to manufacturing to operation. China’s wind and solar expansion in 2025 was 7 times larger than the total U.S. utility-scale additions last year.

This week, Ming Yang, one of China’s largest, private wind companies, connected a 24.5 MW floating offshore wind turbine, the world’s largest, to the nation’s electric grid. The larger offshore turbine uses less cement than multiple smaller turbines and substantially less sea area while generating substantially more electricity.

Ming Yang has been looking to Europe to expand its market. The wind company has proposed building a multi-billion dollar wind turbine plant near Inverness, Scotland. The project would create 1,500 local jobs. The company also wants to be a supplier of turbines for the proposed Green Volt floating wind farm off the Scottish coast.

The Starmer government faces opposition to the project from Parliament. Tory MP Harriet Cross said that China “should be nowhere near our critical national infrastructure.” Last week British media reported that an intelligence agency investigation found that Chinese intelligence had hacked high ranking officials in the Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments from 2021-24. In 2023, the Financial Times reported that a Chinese spy had close relations with ranking members of the Tory government as well as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the sleazy scam artist formally known as Prince (well, there’s an accusation that surprised exactly no one).

China is leading the charge on wind+solar in an impressive global manner but, as the world knows, they’re not exactly an exemplary world citizen — authoritarian, increasingly hegemonic and an incurable thief of cyber/industrial secret. The great+middle powers tread warily around them.

But the tyrants who rule China are shaking their heads, incredulous at their good fortune to be ruling in the Trump era of stupid self-goals (I’m old enough to remember the California National Guard sleeping, head to butt, on a concrete basement floor) and the purposeful evisceration of the American-led global order (tariffs and remember annexing Greenland?).

The National People’s Congress, that “highest state organ of power” got dealt a lucky hand. Trump’s daft attacks on America’s oldest allies, his valorizing the fossil fuel industry as the world goes in the opposite direction and his vast kleptocracy have handed China an advantage far greater than anything their leaders have earned.