Michael Jochum

It's great to see some new writers stepping up and speaking out. Musician Michael Jochum has been posting a lot lately. He's performed with Jackson Browne, Korn, Jonathan Davis and others. Rock on, Michael!

What passes for leadership in this moment would be funny if it weren’t so dangerously real. The world is on edge, American forces are entangled in a widening conflict with Iran, and the man with his thumb hovering over the nuclear codes decides it’s time for a little side trip to Graceland. Not to address the nation. Not to steady the ship. Not to offer even the illusion of command. No, he takes a detour into nostalgia, like a bored tourist killing time between rounds of golf, wandering into one of the most sacred spaces in American music history and treating it like a prop warehouse for his next ego boost.

Because that’s what it is with Trump, everything is a stage, everything is branding, everything is an angle. He doesn’t walk into Graceland with reverence; he walks in like a man mentally calculating square footage and resale value. Elvis Presley wasn’t just a star, he was a cultural earthquake, a once-in-a-generation force who changed music, style, and identity in America. Trump doesn’t see any of that. He sees gold trim. He sees spectacle. He sees something he can compare himself to, compete with, cheapen. So of course, in the middle of a global crisis, he’s asking if he could’ve beaten Elvis in a fight, and reminding anyone within earshot that, growing up, some people thought he looked like Elvis. That’s the level of self-awareness we’re dealing with. History reduced to a mirror, legacy reduced to a punchline.

And then comes the real tell, the moment that gives the whole game away. Not the music. Not the history. Not the human story behind the myth. No, what catches his eye is Elvis’s gold-plated Social Security card. That’s what sparks the imagination. That’s where the policy brain kicks in, if you can call it that. Suddenly we’re floating the idea of bringing back gold Social Security cards, because in Trump’s America even retirement becomes a branding opportunity, a tiered membership in a country that increasingly looks like a casino loyalty program. You can almost hear the pitch: upgrade your citizenship, go premium, get the gold card, skip the line, because equality was always such an inconvenience to begin with.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, airports are jammed, security lines are backed up across the country, and instead of trained personnel we’ve got ICE agents dropped into terminals like confused extras, hovering around like they’re deciding whether to grab McDonald’s or Burger King while pretending to be part of a system they were never trained to run. It’s theater. It’s all theater. A government reduced to optics and improvisation while the stakes climb higher by the hour.

And Graceland, of all places, gets shut down so he can wander through it, sign a replica guitar Elvis never even touched, poke around the Jungle Room, and muse about whether one day people might line up to tour Mar-a-Lago the same way they do this place. That’s the sickness right there. Not admiration, competition. Not respect, envy. He doesn’t stand in the presence of legacy and feel humbled; he stands there and thinks, how do I top this? As if greatness is something you can counterfeit with enough gold plating and self-promotion.

All of this unfolding while the machinery of war hums in the background, while decisions made in quiet rooms carry consequences measured in lives, not headlines. And the man at the center of it all is marveling at bread warmers and gold trinkets, drifting through history like it’s a gift shop he might buy on impulse.

This is not leadership. It’s not even distraction anymore. It’s detachment, total, unapologetic, and dangerous. A presidency that treats crisis like an inconvenience and legacy like a commodity, forever chasing the illusion that proximity to greatness is the same thing as earning it.

It isn’t. And no amount of gold plating will ever make it so.

—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

Robert Reich

Will no one relieve us of the pestilence otherwise known as Donald J. Trump? Grim Reaper? Come in Grim Reaper. We have a live one for you.

Friends,

Yesterday, Trump said that he’d do whatever is necessary to ease the oil crisis. He also assured America that the crisis “will be over soon.” 

Bullshit. 

The problem isn’t just that Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz. It’s also that Iran, Israel, and the United States have all inflicted — and continue to inflict — serious damage to the oil and gas infrastructure of the Middle East. This damage will take months if not years to repair. 

At one point on Thursday oil prices jumped to $119 a barrel before falling back to around $111 a barrel — all but guaranteeing that the price of gas at the pump will continue to rise, as will the prices of many other products and services indirectly affected by oil prices. 

What we are now witnessing is one of the grossest military and political blunders in modern history. 

It’s not hard to understand why Trump is trapped in Iran. He doesn’t listen to anyone outside his small circle of sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. 

But there’s something else. Iran has adopted an asymmetric war strategy that’s working.

I’m indebted to Marty Manley for uncovering a fascinating historical fact that sheds light on what Iran is doing. During the Korean War, U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd came up with a theory of competitive decision-making that shaped American military doctrine for a generation. He called it the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

Boyd found that victory doesn’t go to the side with more firepower. It goes to the side that cycles through the OODA loop faster — observing what’s changing, orienting to its meaning, deciding what to do, and acting before its adversary does.

Get inside your opponent’s loop, Boyd reasoned, and you don’t just outpace him. You break his ability to form a coherent picture of the war he’s fighting. 

Manley observes that Iran has adopted Boyd’s approach. Iran hasn’t needed to match American firepower; it’s needed only to generate economic and political problems for Washington that outrun Washington’s ability to orient, decide, and act.

Iran has gotten inside Trump’s OODA loop because Iran has responded to U.S. airstrikes by widening the war horizontally — attacking tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, launching drones and missiles at Gulf state oil and gas infrastructure, provoking the U.S. and Israel to destroy even more of that infrastructure, hitting Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (causing regional outages for banking, e-commerce, and cloud services), and squeezing other choke points that the global economy depends on. 

Iran’s leaders — veterans of asymmetric wars in Iraq and Syria — are applying the same asymmetric logic to Trump’s war. Inexpensive drones, short-range missiles, and sea mines can have the same effect that IEDs had in Iraq — only with far greater strategic impact, because they disrupt global supply chains.

What has Washington done? Dropped more bombs and launched more missiles. 

On Wednesday Israel struck at the crown jewel of Iran’s energy industry — the giant South Pars gas field that Iran shares with Qatar and is by far the largest in the world. (Israel says Trump gave the attack his blessing; Trump says he didn’t.) Iran quickly retaliated with an attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas facility. 

The attacks have sent the global oil benchmark soaring and prompted a mad scramble in Washington. Trump threatens “to blow up the entirety” of Iran’s South Pars gas holdings if Iran attacks Qatar again.

His treasury secretary says the U.S. will consider lifting sanctions on millions of barrels of Iranian oil.

Since he and Israel began bombing Iran, Trump’s strategy has been entirely reactive. Iran is generating problems for Washington faster than Washington can contain them — a clear sign that Iran is inside Trump’s OODA loop. 

Trump and Israel assumed that overwhelming airpower would either compel Iran to surrender or trigger regime change. But neither has happened. The regime seems more entrenched and bellicose than ever.

 

As Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz and attacks its Gulf neighbors’ oil and gas infrastructure, the cost-benefit ratio continues to shift against Trump: Economic and political pressures are mounting on Washington faster than they are on Tehran. 

Sure, Iran is hurting — but, as Manley argues, Iran can sustain its counteroffensive more easily and longer than the U.S. can sustain economic damage to Iran. An Iranian Shahed drone made of styrofoam and powered by a motorcycle engine, for example, costs orders of magnitude less than the precision missiles sent to intercept it or the economic havoc it causes when it ignites a tanker, data center, or desalination plant. 

In addition, the longer Trump’s OODA loop stays broken, the more bad consequences occur that no one in the Trump regime anticipated.

Trump’s war in Iran is now being led by Israel rather than the other way around, and Trump has no easy way to alter this power imbalance. 

The war has also shifted the power balance between Russia and Ukraine, with Russian oil revenues potentially doubling as U.S. weapons stocks become depleted. 

So what’s next for the U.S.? Is there any way out for Trump?

He could put “boots on the ground” in Iran and attempt to seize Iran’s stockpile of approximately 970 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium — enough to produce multiple nuclear weapons if further enriched. If he could pull this off, a major feat. 

But this would be a particularly dangerous move in terms of American lives lost. It could even risk an accidental nuclear explosion. 

Moreover, no one knows where the enriched uranium is being stored. In the wake of U.S. and Israeli strikes last June, it’s likely in deep underground tunnels near Isfahan and other secure locations, but the International Atomic Energy Agency can’t verify the exact locations or status of the stockpile due to lack of access to bombed sites.

What about returning to the diplomatic table? As Richard Haass points out, Trump hardly gave diplomacy a chance before launching his war. U.S. envoys Witkoff and Kushner blended maximal positions — effectively demanding an end to Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile force, and support for proxies — with minimal time for negotiation. 

Haass notes the stark contrast between this process and the administration’s apparently endless willingness to give Russia the benefit of the doubt and compromise Ukraine’s interests.

If Trump returned to negotiations now, from a position of demonstrated military capability rather than exhaustion, Iran might be forced to reorient and respond to an adversary that did something unpredictable.

The problem is that the Trump regime has repeatedly reneged on his promises to Iran, so Tehran has no reason to believe any offer Trump makes. 

So, presumably for the foreseeable future, Iran will remain in Trump’s OODA loop, Trump will remain trapped in Iran, and American consumers will be trapped by soaring energy prices.

Robert Reich on Substack.

oil prices

What did you expect, America? Putting this egomaniacal, narcissistic liar and thief back in the White House? To paraphrase one of my earlier posts, with Trump, nothing good can happen. It can only bad happen. I hope you have some money saved up. You're going to need it.

OIL PRICES: THE GREATEST FUCKING CON JOB IN FINANCIAL HISTORY

Every headline this week says oil hit $108 a barrel. They say it's like a doctor telling you your cholesterol is a bit high. Might want to cut back on the cheese, mate.

Except $108 isn't the real price. It's the cheapest number they could find on the board and they're waving it around like everything's fine.

It's like your house is on fire and the real estate agent is telling buyers about the lovely water pressure.

Brent and WTI are the European and American oil benchmarks. They trade in London and New York. Very civilised. Very much not where the actual crisis is happening.

The crisis is in Asia. Where the oil actually goes.

Dubai crude hit $153.25 a barrel this week. That's not a record for the year. That's the highest price ever recorded for crude oil on any benchmark in the history of the petroleum industry. Higher than 2008. The year the global economy ate itself.

Oman crude hit $152.58. Also a record.

And here's a stat that tells you exactly how broken the market is.

Every oil benchmark has two prices. The futures price is what traders in suits agree to pay for oil on paper next month. That's your headline number. The spot price is what it actually costs to get real physical oil onto a real physical ship right now today. In a normal market those two prices sit right on top of each other. In February the gap on Dubai crude was 90 cents. A rounding error.

That gap is now $56 a barrel.

Think of it like concert tickets. The face value says $100. That's your Brent price. The number on the news. But the venue is on fire, half the shows have been cancelled, and the only way in is through a scalper who wants $250. That extra $150 tells you far more about reality than the number printed on the ticket.

90 cents to $56 in three weeks means the physical oil market is in full blown panic. The headline price hasn't caught up because traders in London are still pricing off old stockpiles. Oil that left the Gulf weeks ago and is already safe in Western storage.

Asia doesn't have that luxury. Asia is buying oil from a war zone. And the price has gone vertical.

JPMorgan, not exactly doomsday preppers in tinfoil hats, called the calm in Brent and WTI "an illusion." They said once Western stockpiles burn through, Brent snaps up $50 to meet the Middle Eastern benchmarks. That puts $108 at $160. Minimum. Citi is forecasting $130 Brent as an average. Add the Asian premium and you're at $190.

One missile away from $200 oil.

And guess what just happened.

Israel hit Iran's South Pars gas field. World's largest natural gas reserve. On fire. Iran retaliated within hours. Ballistic missile through Qatar's air defences. Hit Ras Laffan. World's largest LNG facility. 20% of global supply. Also on fire.

Iran then published a fucking shopping list of what's next. Saudi refineries. UAE gas fields. Qatari petrochemical plants. Named them. Told them to evacuate. Then started launching. Saudi Arabia shot down four missiles over Riyadh. The UAE is engaging incoming fire right now. ExxonMobil, Aramco, ADNOC, all evacuating staff.

Now here's the bit the spin doctors really don't want you thinking about.

Everyone's focused on the Strait of Hormuz. Fair enough. It's basically shut. Only 90 ships through in three weeks. That used to be a few days of traffic.

But a shipping lane is a shipping lane. Sign a ceasefire. Send in minesweepers. Within weeks you've got tankers moving.

You know what you can't fix in weeks? A refinery with a ballistic missile hole in it.

These facilities took a decade to plan and five years to build. Cryogenic systems. Compression units. Heat exchangers the size of apartment buildings. A missile goes through one and you're looking at 12 to 18 months minimum. Structural fire damage? Years. Plural.

So pretty soon it won't matter if the Strait reopens because there won't be any fucking refineries left to refine the oil. And even if there were, there aren't enough plumbers on planet Earth to put them back together again.

You can reopen a door. You can't reopen a building that's been turned into a crater.

And who do we have to thank for this masterpiece of strategic genius?

A 79 year old man who dodged the draft five times, went bankrupt running casinos, and thinks windmills cause cancer.

This bloke looked at Iran, a country that spent 45 years building an asymmetric warfare doctrine specifically designed to turn the Persian Gulf into an uninsurable hellscape the moment anyone touched them, and thought yeah nah, we'll just bomb them. They'll probably throw roses.

They didn't throw roses. They did exactly what every defence analyst and every bloke at the pub with a basic grasp of geography said they'd do. They hit the oil. Everyone's oil.

Iran has the world by the balls. Not America. Not Israel. Iran.

And this isn't some desperate improvisation. This is 45 years of meticulous, obsessive planning being executed exactly as designed. The missiles. The drones. The fast attack boats. The mine warfare. The proxy networks. Every piece placed over four decades for one single purpose: making any attack on Iran so catastrophically expensive that no rational actor would ever attempt it.

They didn't just plan for this day. They fantasised about it. They war gamed it. They built their entire military identity around it. The Strait of Hormuz is their nuclear option without the nuclear. And they've had 45 years to figure out exactly how to shut it down and keep it shut.

Then some spray tanned game show host gave them the excuse to pull the trigger.

Iran doesn't need to win. They just need to keep squeezing. Every day the war continues, oil goes up. Every refinery that burns, the recovery timeline extends by years. Every missile that lands, another insurer pulls coverage, another shipping company refuses to sail, another refinery cuts production because it can't source crude.

They are squeezing Donald Trump's nuts like they have never been squeezed before. And the beautiful, horrible irony is that every bomb America drops makes the squeeze tighter. You hit their gas field? They hit Qatar's. You take out their leadership? They publish a target list and start ticking boxes. You send another carrier group? Insurance premiums go up and the tankers sit in port.

Every punch drives the price higher. Iran has known this for 45 years. This is the moment they've been waiting for. And Donald Trump walked right into it like a drunk stumbling into a cage fight thinking it was a buffet.

There is no military solution. You cannot aircraft carrier your way out of $200 oil. You cannot drone strike the laws of supply and demand.

Trump needs to pick up his bat and ball and get the fuck off the Arabian oil fields. No conditions. No victory lap. Just stop. Because every day this continues another refinery burns and another $10 gets added to the price of everything you buy, eat, drive, and heat your home with.

If he doesn't, he exits the presidency as the man who tanked the global economy and handed Iran the greatest strategic victory in its modern history. He will leave office like a flaming ball of African dung beetle shit rolling downhill, getting bigger and more catastrophic with every rotation, and history will remember him not as a strongman but as the single dumbest strategic decision maker to ever hold the launch codes.

They're showing you $108 because $153 would cause a panic. And honestly? A panic might be exactly what's needed. Because the only thing stopping this lunatic from turning a regional war into a global depression is American voters looking at the price on the bowser and finally saying enough.

$200 oil doesn't care about your politics. Doesn't care who you voted for. Doesn't care about red hats or freedom or any of that culture war horseshit. It hits every man, woman, and child on the planet right in the hip pocket. The truckie. The single mum. The pensioner. Everyone.

Right now the only thing standing between the global economy and total meltdown is whether a 79 year old man with the emotional regulation of a toddler in a Kmart can swallow his pride long enough to stop a war he should never have started.

Destination fucked doesn't begin to cover it.

~Gman

Joman

Here's another one I found on the net. On Facebook. This one, from Joman, is pretty much a downer, but I can relate. About all I can say is, don't give up. Darkest before the dawn,
things look hopeless until they don't, blah blah. 

We’re approaching the threshold of insanity. Unfathomable levels of corruption and cruelty and depravity and dysfunction have been laid bare. And nothing is being done about it. Congress might as well not exist, the corporate media has completely folded, all for one man who transparently embodies every single thing that’s wrong with the world, and his band of ghoulish co-conspirators and sycophants and cultists.

They’re not brilliant orators or master manipulators; just mediocre, megalomaniacal men with incredible privilege and entitlement who have managed to stumble from one grift to another, scoff in the face of accountability, and single-handedly destroy every sociopolitical norm we thought we’d never lose since the last world war.

And there isn’t a qualified hero in sight. We’re totally on our own, just carrying on with our trivial little lives like there aren’t a dozen different ways the most evil and powerful people who’ve ever lived are trying to wipe us all out.

The moral arc of the universe needs to bend toward justice a lot faster if we’re ever going to get out of this. The past 10 years have dispelled the concept of “karma” to me. I’ve watched good people get crushed while cackling hyenas breeze through life without a care or concern for anyone but themselves. It’s like everything is upside-down. What we call capitalism is breeding generations of narcissistic sociopaths who like the idea of barbarism over basic human decency. Where is their karma? Where is justice? Where is God?

I’m starting to think “good” was only ever a figment of our imaginations; that no such thing exists, and reality is molded entirely by selfishness, deceit, and criminality. Will they plunge us into chaos, retreat into their bunkers, wait for the dust to settle, paint themselves out as heroes and victims, and get away with all of it scot-free? Are we just living in history that will be rewritten to erase us?

When people say MAGA is crumbling, I roll my eyes into the back of my head. Brazil put the guy in their country who tried to stage an insurrection in prison. The guy who did it here will quite possibly never spend one day in a cell. He’s been implicated in the most sickening crimes imaginable, and millions of people still support him; they just dismiss anything that doesn’t paint him out as a saint as fake news.

I genuinely would not be surprised if he was the actual Antichrist at this point. Never since Germany has such a feverish spell taken over an entire country, and never in history has it happened at this scale. And we just carry on. We just go to our jobs, post our little posts that change nothing, when the global threat we’re facing makes the Cold War look like a game of Pong. And we don’t even get to experience these horrors in a singular, coherent reality. Instead, we have to be gaslit by co-workers and family members and treated like there’s something wrong with us for having the slightest clue about what’s going on.

Hell is real. And it’s right here. And I didn’t sign up for it. And I’m in the beating heart of it, just trying to hang on for dear life for the sake of the people I love. Where’s my karma? Where’s theirs? Where’s the karma for the people we’ve had to bury and grieve?

when Trump is gone

Found this on a "Republicans Against Donald Trump" site.

When Trump leaves office:

The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department.

The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center.

Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference.

The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies.

The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico.

The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom.

Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired.

The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president.

The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists.

Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it.

The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters.

U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators.

And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.

Credit: X user Tom Santos https://x.com/tommysantos14