I'm Just a Sound

One Sunday​ morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you feel as if you are standing alone in a cathedral, bathed in sound. Wilson was able to make pop music that was uplifting without ever being sickly. Secular hymns baited with pop hooks; heavy themes made exquisitely light. ‘His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).

From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.

To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?

Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past ... the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs. [...]

Murry Wilson, the father of Brian and his two brothers, fellow Beach Boys Carl and Dennis, was not by all accounts an easy man to love. He was a businessman, but his dream life was dominated by the siren call of music. It nagged at him that his talent as a composer and songwriter wasn’t getting its due. Why weren’t his melodies heard everywhere? He was snappish, sniping, volatile, and doled out violent punishments to his three sons. The only time he wasn’t angry was when he could be soothed by the syrupy sounds of easy listening music. Off the back of his sons’ success he would eventually release his own LP, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson (1967) – the title is apt. The middle Wilson, Dennis, took the brunt of Murry’s physical abuse, but Brian, first born and most gifted, was the one in the dangerous position of being able to realise his father’s dreams. The ire of a disappointed god: anything you do will be either too good or not good enough. In this eggshell atmosphere, while the boys’ mother, Audree, rustled up huge amounts of anaesthetic food – hyperactive Dennis was the only one who didn’t pile on the pounds – Brian taught Carl and Dennis to sing in harmony; this, he later reflected, ‘brought peace to us’.

Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.

The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen ...’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.

One of​ the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.

The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.

Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.

Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.

by Ian Pernman, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Secret History of Wakanda

The history of Wakanda is not, of course, an African history; it’s a history of Europe, and of Europe’s fantasies about Africa.

This hidden kingdom is first attested in Book V, Chapter VIII of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the ‘countries on the other side of Africa.’ As Pliny ventures further from the known world of the Mediterranean, and into the depths of Africa, the peoples he describes are drawn with a lighter and lighter brush. He can’t quite say what these people are, but only what they lack. Nightmares live here, in the hot voids of the world: [...]

But then, after this list of fantastic degenerations, we meet something different. Pliny describes a kind of African Utopia:

At the centre of the region of Æthiopia we may find the source of the Nile, guarded by a kingdom called Vicindaria, so called for its many conquests. The Vicindariæ are ruled by their philosophers; and if Pelagon of Rhodes is to be believed their libraries contain all that can be known in the useful crafts. Among their marvels are flying chariots, drawn by certain spinning serpents; fine silks that protect the body like armour; trees bearing glowing fruit with which they light their houses; and great towers made of brass and iron. Their cities are arranged in circles, like those of the Etruscans; at the centre of each stands a library which is also a temple to their God and his son. In all their affairs they are orderly and virtuous; solemn are their laws and just are their judges, and all men live in amity with one another. The Vicindariæ are the ancestors of the the Egyptians and the Numidians, and by some accounts, the fathers of all men. But Pelagon says that they have withdrawn from their troublesome children, have no intercourse with the peoples of the world, and no longer set off on voyages over the oceans or to the Moon; preferring to perfect their knowledge in seclusion, their kingdom can not be found by foreigners.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Pliny appear to describe helicopters, skyscrapers, and the electric lightbulb? Pelagon of Rhodes was a Greek geographer of the second century BC; frustratingly, one of our only surviving sources for his works is Pliny himself. Maybe the story stretches back further; maybe the Greeks had nursed this legend of a distant, magical kingdom for centuries. It’s been suggested that the army of Memmon in Arctinus Milesius’ lost Aethiopis might have some relation to the myth; so too might the Homeric gods’ repeated habit of flying off to visit Ethiopia. We will probably never know.

We do know that in Pliny’s time, Vicindaria was widely believed to be real. Sixteen years before the Natural History was published, the emperor Nero sent a praetorian expedition down the White Nile, to find its source and establish relations between Rome and Vicindaria, for future trade and possible conquest. Seneca, as Nero’s tutor, had commissioned the voyage, and he reports its findings in his Natural Questions:

There we found not towers of bronze or wondrous libraries, but only marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know, so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat, since the muddy overgrown marsh would bear only a small boat containing one person.

Nero’s expedition may have reached present-day Uganda: the furthest Roman legions ever travelled into equatorial Africa. Europeans made no further efforts to contact the hidden kingdom of Vicindaria for another thousand years.

This is not to say that the story was forgotten. Pliny’s account was reproduced in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville; among early medieval writers the most significant part of the narrative was the reference to ‘their God and his son.’ Centuries before Christ, these people were Christian. In 687 AD, the heresiarch Caelestius of Aquitaine was burned for insisting that Christ had been born twice, once to the Vicindariae and once to the rest of the world, but that the Vicindariae, being wise, had not killed him. Small communities of Caelestians survived in the Pyrenees for another two hundred years, claiming to follow a purer, African version of Christianity, in which redemption can be achieved without blood. (They rejected the name Caelestians, and preferred to call themselves the ‘Good Whites’ instead.)

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Alphonse Mucha, “Médée”
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Shufu Miyamoto
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Humanism in a Posthumanist Age

Should we be surprised that Oxford University Press picked rage bait as the 2025 Word of the Year? Defining the compound noun as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive,” the chair of the selection committee explained that the point of the annual exercise is “to encourage people to reflect on where we are as a culture, who we are at the moment, through the lens of words we use.”

Quite clearly, we are not in a very nice place. When anger is the prime motivator, you can be sure that it feeds on other dark emotions, including fear, suspicion, and resentment. The ubiquity of anger also speaks to the widespread demoralization of late-modern society, evident in the grim statistics pertaining to depression, addiction, suicide, and other deaths of despair. Perhaps the darkest fear bubbling up through our culture is that humans themselves are replaceable—or at least in need of drastic biotechnological upgrading if they hope to keep up with the cool efficiency of their machines. The causes of our unhappy cultural condition are, as social scientists say, multifactorial and overdetermined, with some researchers placing the onus on our highly unsocial social media and others more sensibly arguing that the new media only amplify and reinforce trends and pathologies long in the making. We see the signs everywhere, from the decay of basic good manners and civility to gratuitously violent and crude entertainments to the mistreatment of working people as disposable units of production to actual acts of unspeakable cruelty inflicted on those we deem to be lesser or other, particularly those strangers whom we were long ago enjoined to treat as our neighbors. If we were still capable of the emotion, we would be ashamed of ourselves. But the loss of shame is another hallmark of our current condition, and as columnist George Will recently observed, “A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.”

What we are witnessing today is less a degradation of politics—though it is also that—than a meta-political and profoundly cultural swerve away from the informing humanist idealism of the modern liberal democratic project. When Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, defined democracy as “the political form of the humane ideal,” he was emphasizing the inseparability of a set of political practices and institutions from a broader humanizing effort drawing on the richest ethical, intellectual, and religious traditions of the West. More important than the rivalrous claims of the partisan participants in a liberal democracy was a shared national commitment to the various goods that sustain a decent human life. Give that a thought. Masaryk was no proto-globalist, no “We Are the World” sentimentalist. He regarded the democratic nation as the indispensable crucible in which the humane ideal could be practically instantiated in the treatment of one’s fellow citizens. Though no utopian, he believed the betterment of the shared human condition was the raison d’être of the democratic nation-state.

Masaryk’s idealism, and the exuberant hopes of Czechoslovakia’s fledgling democracy, were for a time snuffed by another variety of nationalist whose goose-stepping troops marched into the Sudetenland in 1938, first annexing that rich northwestern region before moving on to absorb most of the remainder of the country within a year. Far from advancing the humane ideal, this conquering zero-sum nationalist would have no qualms about eliminating some three hundred thousand undesirable elements from his newly acquired territory. Here and elsewhere, he saw it as fundamental to his project of purifying the Reich, ridding it of human garbage, and making Germany great again.

Lessons learned, lessons forgotten. So today, when we utter words such as humanitarian, humane ideal, humanism, we may have trouble suppressing the ironic smirk or the dismissive yawn. Fine words, but what is their real purchase when so much is being done to diminish, transform, transcend, and even surpass the merely human? [...]

The cost of the obliteration of the humane ideal in our time is incalculable. The stakes are nothing less than civilizational—meaning the civilization of the West and other civilizations that value the sacredness and inviolability of the individual human person. The challenge is ultimately about resisting those authoritarians who, now empowered by the most advanced articulation of the Machine, aim to crush the merely human for the sake of absolute power and control. 

by Jay Tolson, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Human Figure (detail), 1921, by Vilmos Huszár (1884–1962)

Max Gunther
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You'll Regret It

Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you. 

One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad. [...]

I like American optimism. Not everyone does. A lot of people from long-vanished empires claim to find it unbearable; it reminds them of what they no longer have. But I like it. There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country, like a dog trying to walk on two legs. They don’t know what it means to wake up and curse the grey skies and poisoned soil of Splugovina, this place that closes around you like a tomb. They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically. It’s a living.

The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump. [...]

So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. 

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

TWEN

B-52's

[ed. Deep cut.]

The Murderer

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Elon vs. Altman: What Their Infrastructure Stacks Reveal About Power

Everyone’s obsessed with the Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman lawsuit. Ronan Farrow’s 18-month investigation. Molotov cocktails. Sister allegations. A $134 billion legal battle over OpenAI’s soul.

But they’re all asking the wrong question.

It’s not “who’s the good guy?” It’s not “who should we trust with AI?” It’s not even “who’s going to win the lawsuit?”

The right question is: What does their infrastructure stack reveal about their actual theory of power?

Because here’s the thing about tech founders: They lie constantly. To investors, to users, to regulators, to themselves. But their products don’t lie. The infrastructure they choose to build. What they spend billions of dollars actually constructing reveals their real theory of survival.

Don’t listen to what they say. Look at what they build.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are building for completely different endgames. And understanding the difference tells you everything you need to know about the actual stakes of their conflict.

Elon’s Stack: Collapse-Proof Sovereignty

Let’s start with Elon, because his infrastructure stack is massive and most people don’t understand how comprehensive it actually is. Every single piece is designed to function when legacy systems fail. This isn’t paranoia; it’s strategic architecture.

Tesla: Energy Independence

Solar panels. Powerwall battery systems. Electric vehicles. Supercharger network.

Translation: You don’t need the electrical grid. You don’t need oil. You don’t need gas stations. You don’t need the energy sector’s supply chains. If the grid goes down natural disaster, cyberattack, economic collapse, political breakdown. Tesla owners keep running. Solar generates power. Batteries store it. Vehicles consume it. The entire energy loop is self-contained. That’s not about environmentalism. That’s about Energy Sovereignty.

Starlink: Communications Independence

Over 5,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. Global internet coverage. Bypasses all terrestrial infrastructure.

Translation: You don’t need undersea fiber optic cables. You don’t need cell towers. You don’t need ISPs. You don’t need government-controlled telecommunications infrastructure. If a government shuts down the internet like Iran during protests, like Russia during Ukraine invasion. Starlink still works. You have communications capability independent of state control. That’s not about rural broadband. That’s about Information Sovereignty.

SpaceX: Logistics Independence

Reusable rockets (Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship). Cheapest launch cost per kilogram in human history. Point-to-point Earth transport capability. Orbital manufacturing potential.

Translation: You control access to space. You can move cargo anywhere on Earth in under an hour. You can put satellites into orbit cheaper than any nation-state. You can potentially manufacture things in zero-gravity that are impossible to make on Earth. If traditional supply chains break. Shipping disrupted, airspace restricted, borders closed. SpaceX can still move things. Anywhere. Fast. That’s not about exploration. That’s about Logistics Sovereignty.

The Deeper Play: Rockets Are Mythos

The Mars colonization narrative isn’t just a business plan. It’s a founding myth.

Think about how legitimacy works:

Ancient kings claimed “Divine Right” they were chosen by the gods to rule.

Democratic leaders claim “Popular Mandate” they were chosen by the people through voting.

Elon is building something different: “Cosmic Mandate”. He’s the one saving humanity by making us multi-planetary. “I’m building the infrastructure to preserve human consciousness across multiple worlds.”

If you’re the person who saved the species from extinction by establishing a backup civilization on Mars, you’re not just a CEO. You’re not even just a political leader. You’re a Civilizational Founder. Like the people who established Rome, or the American republic, or any nation-state that becomes the foundation for centuries of subsequent history. Mars isn’t the goal. It’s the mythology that justifies rule. The founding story that makes everything else legitimate. 

[more]...

This is “Post-State Capability”. The ability to function and to maintain power when traditional state infrastructure is unavailable, hostile, or collapsed.

Elon’s not hoping for collapse. But he’s not betting against it either.

His thesis is simple: “The system will fragment. Build infrastructure that makes you powerful in the aftermath.” If collapse happens, He owns:- Energy systems- Communications networks- Logistics capability- Information channels- Labor (automated)- The founding myth (savior of humanity) That’s not a business portfolio. That’s a blueprint for post-state power.

Altman’s Stack: Acceleration-Dependent Fragility

Now let’s look at Sam Altman’s infrastructure.

OpenAI/ChatGPT: Centralized, Grid-Dependent, Fragile

OpenAI is building toward Artificial General Intelligence through massive-scale computing infrastructure. Current commitments: $1.4 trillion in data center buildout over 8 years.

This requires:

• Stable energy grid (data centers consume gigawatts → entire power plants worth of electricity)

• Chip manufacturing (NVIDIA GPUs, TSMC fabrication→ Taiwan and South Korea must remain stable and accessible)

• Cooling infrastructure (water, HVAC systems, constant temperature regulation)

• Fiber optic networks (global connectivity, low-latency communication)

• Capital markets (functioning financial system to fund trillion-dollar buildouts)

• Regulatory stability (permitting, zoning, environmental compliance, AI development allowed)

Notice the dependency structure?

Elon’s stack works when systems fail. Altman’s stack requires every system to keep working simultaneously.

The Vulnerability Comparison

Elon without electrical grid:

• Still has Tesla solar panels generating power
• Still has Powerwall batteries storing energy
• Still has Starlink satellites providing internet
• Still has rockets for logistics
• Still has underground tunnels for transit
• Still has robots for labor
• Still powerful

Altman without electrical grid:

• Data centers go dark immediately
• ChatGPT stops responding
• Training runs halt
• No product, no revenue, no value
• Completely powerless

The contrast is stark. Elon’s infrastructure is “distributed and resilient”. Altman’s infrastructure is centralized and fragile.

What Does Altman Actually Want?

So if Altman’s building such a vulnerable stack, what’s the theory?

Look at what he’s actually building with AI. Not what he says but what he builds.

He’s NOT focusing on:

• AI companionship (even though Character.ai and Replica prove this is hugely profitable)

• Entertainment AI (even though this is the biggest consumer market)

• Social AI (even though emotional dependency creates the strongest lock-in)

He’s focusing on:

• AI for scientific research (drug discovery, materials science, physics)

• AI for productivity (coding assistants, automation, reasoning)

• AI for problem-solving (complex systems, coordination challenges)

This is the tell. He’s explicitly said he was surprised people want emotional bonds with ChatGPT, and he’s not leaning into it.

Why?

by MythcoreOps |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Birth of a Nation

From Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American: April 19, 2026

On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.

It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.

Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor by N. Currier, 1846 (Library of Congress)
[ed. My recollection of history classes in grade school was/is pretty spotty, so this granular account of the American Revolution - on the eve of our country's 250-year anniversary, is much appreciated. No Kings.]

via: uncredited

Did Streaming Subscription Prices Just Hit the Wall?

There are (finally) signs that the streaming prices have hit the wall. The public simply can’t afford paying hundreds of dollars per year for each platform. So I’m not surprised that a new survey shows that 55% of consumers want to cancel subscriptions right now.

This isn’t just an idle threat. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers have already cut back on subscriptions during the previous three months. Even more revealing: 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if the price went up by just five dollars.

Let me repeat that—they would cancel their favorite service, not just any platform.

People now complain of subscription fatigue—and for good reason. If things don’t change, it will soon reach the point of subscription exhaustion. Tech companies have created this mess, and now must live with the consequences.

They did it with three exploitative strategies.

(1) Everything got turned into a subscription. [...]

(2) You’re now punished with intrusive and endless advertising if you don’t subscribe. [...]

(3) Instead of competing on quality and service, companies focus on “audience capture”—and then exploit the captives.

That’s you, by the way—you are the captive. At least that’s how you’re treated by the big tech platforms.

Years ago, these same companies started by offering stuff for free, or at a small price. They only forced through huge price increases after they had captured a huge user base. You see that strategy at Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, etc.

These companies make little effort now to improve their offerings or user interface. In many instances, quality has declined, even as they raise prices. But consumers aren’t stupid—they can see that they’re getting a shaft that won’t cop out...

But even I can’t believe how greedily they have now implemented that strategy. Spotify has raised its price three times in less than three years. It’s now asking $12.99 per month. And if you want a family subscription—which is essential in a household like mine—the price jumps to $21.99 per month.

Those are US prices, but Spotify is doing the same thing everywhere. Last summer, the company forced through price increases in 150 countries.

YouTube is even more avaricious. The company is now raising its premium subscription to $15.99 per month. And the family rate is a whopping $26.99—that adds up to $329 per year.

Video streaming companies are playing the same game. Not long ago, Netflix charged me $9.99 per month. I recently got a notice that my new price has been “updated” to $19.99. Yes that’s more than a doubling over the course of just a few years.

But Netflix may have gone too far. The company’s stock dropped 12% last week after its latest quarterly results. Investors expected the company to raise its guidance for future earnings—because of this subscription price boost. But the company refused to do so, and took a more cautious stance.

According to Morningstar analyst Matt Dolgin:

“The market likely hoped for increased full-year guidance, given that the March price hikes came as a surprise…Growth acceleration in 2027 now seems less likely.”

The more you dig into the latest earnings report, the more ominous things look. Netflix only met expectations because of the breakup fee after it walked away from the Warner’s acquisition. Without that one-time benefit, earnings per share would have dropped year-on-year.

If you try to find some good news here for the company, it comes from Netflix’s shift to advertising. This may be its growth engine in the future—because price increases are now stirring up consumer resistance.

I’d like to be able to provide specific numbers here, but Netflix now refuses to tell us the number of total subscribers. That’s revealing in itself. Not long ago, the company bragged endlessly about subscriber growth. Their silence now tells you everything you really need to know.

Three Ways to Defeat Subscription Fatigue

You aren’t helpless here. You do have options for battling subscription fatigue. Here are three of them.

For a start, customers have learned that canceling a subscription might make sense even if they are just bluffing. It’s amazing how different the rate looks if you’re willing to walk away. I recently canceled a subscription, and was offered an 80% price cut if I would reconsider.

I’m now thinking I should cancel every streaming subscription once per year—just to see what special offer I’m missing. Even if I sign up again at the old rate, I haven’t lost anything by trying this tactic.

Another way of combating costs is a rotation strategy. Under this scenario, consumers only pay for one video streaming subscription at a time. When they want to watch something on another platform, they simply cancel the current subscription and move to the new provider. This lets them watch anything they want for just one monthly payment.

Sure, it’s a hassle. But when annual subscriptions can cost $300 per year or more, consumers are increasingly willing to go to the trouble of ‘rotating’ from service to service.

Of course, you always have the final option of just walking away. Judging by the mood of the consumer, that will start happening more and more.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Netflix

[ed. One more option: Earlier this year I got tired of Amazon Prime's video service - more ads and almost every movie I wanted to see was either a rental or purchase. So I quit Prime altogether (or suspended my account, as Amazon put it). Then one day I saw they had exclusive rights to some movie or other that I wanted to see; they'd increased their speed of delivery in my zip code; and I really did miss free shipping and returns. So I unsuspended my account and started paying a monthly membership fee again. But... just by turning off my service for a few months I got back to my initial lower subscription rate simply by cost averaging over the year (albeit with a few less months of service). So you don't have to quit completely, just for a few months. (Might also note this blog has always been ad and subscription free!)]

Into the Wood Chipper

The destruction of USAID was just as dumb as it seemed

On February 5, 2025, after USAID’s name had been taken off the building, after most of its staff had seemingly been placed on leave (it was hard to be sure—HR couldn’t confirm because they were also largely locked out of the system), Nicholas Enrich was called in to justify the agency’s global health programming to the Trump administration’s newly-appointed USAID leadership.

According to Enrich, he spoke for about five minutes about USAID’s lifesaving health work: diagnosis and treating HIV and malaria, immunizing children, responding to emerging pandemics. His presentation was met by silence, which senior official Ken Jackson eventually broke. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” Jackson said.

Joel Borkert, USAID’s Trump-appointed acting chief of staff, agreed: “I had no idea you did all this. As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

Adam Korzeniewski, the White House liaison to USAID, was similarly enlightened, and he had an idea. To help raise attention to the importance of programs to fight drug-resistant tuberculosis, “he suggested that [they] draft a simple, ‘Barney-style’ set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television.”

Korzeniewski acknowledged that most of the relevant officials weren’t “health people,” but he didn’t think that applied to him—he had recently read a book on smallpox. Enrich writes that Korzeniewski had another idea, too:

“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”

Much of Nicholas Enrich’s new book proceeds like this, describing a process so surreal that it verges on the comical until you remember that millions of lives were in the balance. Into the Wood Chipper: A Whisteblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID follows the 42-day spell that took Enrich from a relatively anonymous USAID worker to its highest-ranking health official to the author of a widely-reported memo detailing the deadly consequences of the destruction of USAID.

Into the Wood Chipper occupies the somewhat unique genre of civil service thriller, only to then verge into horror. More than anything, it was a 206-page reminder that what happened was so, so murderously dumb.

by Tim Hirschel-Burns, Together But Apart |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Everyone is misunderstanding what happened to USAID (TBA):]

***

The problem is that the development sector’s reckoning with the destruction of USAID has been largely unmoored from what actually happened. The post-mortems have tended to follow a similar recipe: a dash of lamentation and a spoonful of self-flagellation, topped with one cup of the author’s pre-existing policy preferences—all of which bear a tenuous relationship to what actually doomed USAID...

When Trump took office and DOGE went into USAID, even they didn’t plan on destroying it. But two weeks later, USAID was functionally dead. In the end, the administration terminated 83% of USAID projects, shuttered USAID as an independent agency, and kept on just 300 of USAID’s over 10,000 staff in the State Department.

Angine de Poitrine

[ed. Now for something completely different (and delightful). See also: They broke the internet. Here's how they did it.]

Ship of Fools

Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears

Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars but wagered that he could solve, with American air and naval power, a national security problem that had bedeviled seven previous presidents. Now, a cease-fire is in doubt, a critical trade route has been closed for weeks and Iran’s regime has been replaced with radical new leaders, all threatening to lengthen an operation that Trump has repeatedly said would only last six weeks—a deadline already missed since the war began Feb. 28.

White House officials said they believe a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran could be reached in coming days, and they are eyeing more talks in Pakistan.

The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict. Unlike the successful operation in Venezuela, which buoyed his confidence, Trump is confronting a more intractable foe in Iran, which is so far unwilling to bend to his demands.

 
“We are witnessing astonishing military successes that do not add up to victory and that is squarely on the president and how he’s chosen to do his job—lack of attention to detail and lack of planning,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute who served on former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

Soon after Trump’s holiday post, aides fielded calls from Republican senators and Christian leaders. They asked, why would he say “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning? Why would he use the F-word? Trump swears profusely in private but usually calibrates it in public and on social media.

 

When one adviser later asked him about it, he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. But he was also concerned about the fallout. “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers. (Iran’s parliamentary speaker called the threat reckless.)

 
On the Tuesday after Easter, he issued the most dramatic ultimatum of his presidency, saying that unless Iran struck a deal in 12 hours, a whole civilization would die.

 
Again, the post was improvisational, and not part of a national security plan, the administration officials said.

People around the U.S. and the world were gripped with fear and confusion about what the president intended to do. Behind the scenes, top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate.

 
What Trump really wanted, advisers said, was to scare the Iranians, and to end the conflict. Less than ninety minutes before his deadline, Trump announced a precarious two-week cease-fire.

 
“President Trump campaigned proudly on his promise to deny the Iranian regime the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, which is what this noble operation accomplishes,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. She said the president had “remained a steady leader our country needs.”

 
Trump is keeping close score on the war, measuring how many Iranian targets have been destroyed as a key metric of success, officials said.

‘Blood and sand’

Trump’s decision to venture into the war surprised many who knew him best. “Blood and sand,” he told advisers in his first term to describe the region, explaining why he wasn’t interested in getting drawn into any Middle East conflict.

After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place.

 

In Iran, the war started with the execution of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials. Trump was shown clips every morning of stunning explosions across the Iranian terrain. Advisers said Trump remarked to them how impressive the military was, seeming in awe of the scale of bombs.

 
But Trump had done little to sell the American public on the war, and soon grew frustrated that his administration wasn’t getting the same kind of external praise. Leavitt attributed his frustration to what she deemed unfair news coverage of the administration. His team showed him poll results for the November midterm elections that showed him the war was dragging down Republican candidates.

 
Still, Trump himself wasn’t up for re-election—and he thought a win over Iran would give him a chance to reshape the global order in a way he couldn’t in his first term, two top officials said. Trump said early in the military operation that if we get this right, we are saving the world, according to a person who heard his comments.

 
With the strait’s closure choking off some 20% of the global oil supply, energy CEOs soon grew nervous. In mid-March, Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared at a board meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s primary lobbying group, and said the war would be over in weeks, according to people at the meeting. The energy leaders have at times worried that war would drive up prices far more than the White House seemed to appreciate if Trump continued an escalation that matched his rhetoric, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump vacillated, people close to him said, between considering economic worries in calls with advisers including Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and insisting that he was going to keep the war going. He told advisers that they needed to watch the markets, and his words often moved them.

 
But Trump quickly began ruminating on how the military action could turn into a catastrophe. [...]

The strait has been a particular source of frustration. Before the U.S. went to war, Trump told his team that Iran’s government would likely capitulate before closing the strait, and that even if Tehran tried, the U.S. military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Some of the president’s advisers were caught off guard that tanker traffic would grind to a halt so quickly after the bombing began, according to a person in contact with the White House.

Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable. He has publicly oscillated between demanding support from allies to help open it and insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need or want military assistance.

In late March—about a week before the Iranians shot down the plane—Trump had ordered his negotiating team to find a way to start talks, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

By early April, the price of gas was up by more than $1 a gallon, and industry leaders worried that the market still hadn’t properly priced the risk that the war was posing to the oil supply. The president, through his force of personality, was doing a good job talking down the price of oil, but reality would soon set in, said one person familiar with the industry.

 
But they’ve been told Trump is willing to take the political hit for higher prices for a short period of time, the person said.

The president’s competing impulses, playing out in early-morning missives, concerned his aides who were growing worried the war was becoming a political albatross. [...]

  

Trump’s top aides have taken turns telling the president that he should limit the impromptu interviews because they were only convincing the public he had contradictory messages. At times, Trump would joke with Leavitt that he had talked to a reporter and made big news, but she would have to wait and see what it was, White House officials said. For a bit, he agreed to curb them—then soon returned.

Some advisers encouraged him to do a speech to the nation. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles thought it would reassure the country that Trump had a plan. Trump wasn’t initially interested. What would he say? He couldn’t declare victory. He didn’t know where it was going. He was eventually persuaded to make the address on April 1, and aides along with outside advisers filled the room hoping to encourage him.

 
The U.S. had succeeded on the battlefield and the U.S. military objectives would be completed “very shortly,” he told skeptical Americans. The speech, which didn’t clarify how the U.S. would exit the war, didn’t increase public support.

 
Minute-by-minute rescue

The repeated crises prompted by the war have led to scrambles inside the administration.
For 24 hours over Easter weekend, Trump’s team dialed into the Situation Room: Vice President JD Vance from Camp David, Wiles from her home in Florida. They received almost minute-by-minute progress reports, of the military entering Iran, the rescue planes getting stuck in the sand, the efforts to distract the Iranians. They called the last airman by a code name.

 
Trump wasn’t included in the meeting but received updates by phone.

After Trump’s subsequent threat to destroy Iranian civilization, White House officials talked to Pakistani counterparts about mediating a cease-fire. Trump was too mad at the Europeans for any of them to serve the role, administration officials said.

 
As the world waited on the president’s 8 p.m. deadline, Trump flitted between topics, aides said. He talked to officials about endorsements in an Indiana state race. His team prepped for the midterms. He listened to officials talk about cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence policy.

 
He also asked Wiles and Steve Witkoff, the U.S.’s chief negotiator with Iran, where things stood. Push them to a deal, he told Witkoff repeatedly.

 
White House concerns about security threats have been heightened, aides said.

In recent weeks, for example, Trump and his team have noticed an increase in security. On a cloudless night in April at Mar-a-Lago, every umbrella was up on the patio in an unusual arrangement, guests said. Club members were told that there was an effort to limit drone visibility, a Mar-a-Lago member said.

 
Rubio told others about standing outside his home at the military compound where he lives and watching a suspicious drone, administration officials said. Secret Service protection teams have expanded to carry weapons White House officials had never seen before.

 
Despite the high pressure moments, Trump has also told advisers he wants to talk about other topics and see the media focus on other issues. When guests showed up for a meeting of Kennedy Center officials in March, the president pulled some of them aside to talk about the ballroom he is constructing on White House grounds. Out came drawings showing a large hole in the ground—he was amazed at all that could be built underneath. Advisers said he has multiple meetings a week on the topic and views himself as the general contractor.

Also on his mind: raising money for the midterms. Hours after the war began on the last Saturday in February, he was at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. When some staff questioned if they should cancel it, Trump said he would have to eat dinner regardless.

 
At another gathering, one night after threatening to end Iranian civilization, Trump stood in the White House with donors and top staff for a reception ahead of America’s 250th celebration this summer. He mused about giving himself the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, designed to honor bravery, courage and sacrifice, according to people who were at the reception.

 
He then told a story about why he said he deserved it: In his first term as he flew into Iraq for a surprise holiday visit to the troops, his jet descended in the dark toward an unlit runway. In dramatic fashion, he counted down the feet to the plane landing, and recalled how scary it was. The pilots kept reassuring him, he said, and they landed safely.
He couldn’t get the medal, he said, because White House counsel David Warrington, who was standing nearby at the event, wouldn’t allow it.

 
Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, said he was joking.

by Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:
Images: Matt Rourke/AP; Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock

[ed. When you've lost the Wall Street Journal... If they (staffers) are keeping him at arms length and somewhat removed from any form of pragmatic decision-making, then that would partly explain why so many of his posts are uninformed and contradictory.]

Reality Instruction

The idea​ of a road trip organised around trials and hearings at courthouses across the US had been in my head for years. Last autumn I found myself in a position to make it a reality. I had a month. My aim was to attend as many different kinds of criminal and civil hearing in as many parts of the country as I could. Some courts post their weekly dockets online but most don’t, so there was little scope for detailed planning. A helpful clerk in Deadwood, South Dakota told me of a jury trial that was almost certain to go ahead early in my time frame (most trials are plea-bargained out), and I had to be in New Orleans for a talk three weeks later. That gave me the bare bones of an itinerary.

I left New York at the beginning of October and headed for Chicago. The day before I arrived, ICE agents conducted a raid on a South Side apartment building, with agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and zip-tying children. Given the mayhem I’d seen on TV, the city was surprisingly calm. Families were out enjoying the sunshine in Millennium Park. Office workers strolled in shirtsleeves. Even the Chicago Immigration Court, my first destination, seemed oddly quiet. I had to pass through a magnetometer, but nobody asked what I was doing and there were no agents lurking in corridors to snatch deportable aliens, as had recently started happening in New York.

I’d had some misgivings about my project before setting off, mostly to do with the voyeuristic element. What I hadn’t imagined was the possibility of my presence affecting anyone but myself. It became apparent the moment I stepped inside the windowless courtroom. A dozen adults and children, all Hispanic, turned to me with looks of terror, and it dawned on me that, with my shaved head and pale skin, I must look like some ICE body snatcher. Mortified, I slid onto one of the wooden benches and tried to make myself invisible.

It was a master calendar hearing (the first stage in removal proceedings) and hybrid, with participants appearing remotely as well as in person. The judge was swearing in a Russian interpreter on speakerphone while a young couple from Kyrgyzstan appeared huddled on a screen. After some back and forth, the judge gave the couple’s attorney a date for 2028, when ‘their comments about their government’ would be assessed. The Department of Homeland Security, in the person of a young attorney in the courtroom, offered no objection.

Similar hearings followed at a clip. Some of the technicalities went over my head, but the gist was that the respondents, while admitting to being in the country illegally, were asking for asylum. Until recently, America’s conflicted attitude to immigration expressed itself in lengthy procedures that offered undocumented migrants some grounds for hope. Under Trump, judges are being pressured to dismiss cases altogether, a cynical tactic that exposes migrants to the body snatchers, and around 150 have been sacked (immigration judges are not part of the judiciary proper, but employees of the Department of Justice). Here in Chicago, both the judge and DHS lawyer appeared to be playing by the old rules, setting follow-up appearances far into the future.

The families on the benches next to me were dressed in their finest and their children sat in absolute silence. Speaking to them through an interpreter, the judge told them they’d been summoned because the government ‘thinks you shouldn’t be in the country for one reason or another’. They had a right to representation, he continued, though they would have to pay for it themselves. ‘Raise your hands if you don’t want time to look for an attorney, and just want to talk about removal from the country today.’ No hands went up and the judge set an appearance date for the following year, wishing them luck.

A woman who’d been sitting with a little boy in a braided pink suit said: ‘I just want to know. Do we have a removal order against us today?’ The judge repeated patiently that no order would be made until their next appearance.

As the room emptied out, he turned to me. ‘You’re an observer, I assume?’ I nodded, pleased by the designation, which had a reassuringly official ring. [...]

Courtroom encounters present you with just a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest. On the face of it, these particular shards didn’t add up to much, and yet I felt encouraged in my belief that courts were still places where, to adapt a phrase of Saul Bellow’s, ‘reality instruction’ was to be had. The first time I was inside a courtroom was at the Old Bailey, in my twenties. I had dropped in on a whim and found myself lost in the exploits of a Pinteresque young crook who’d got the pampered son of a Harley Street doctor into his clutches and pressured him into using his father’s money to finance a long spree of luxury shopping and drug bingeing. When asked how he’d persuaded his victim to make yet another raid on the family coffers, the young man said: ‘I speeched him, didn’t I?’ I was never good at striking up conversation with strangers – a major drawback for an aspiring writer – but I realised that here was an arena where an endless variety of characters would reveal their stories to you without your having to utter a word. [...]

I took the scenic route towards Nebraska. White wooden farmhouses among clusters of silos appeared at regular intervals, along with ivied chimneys and other tenderly preserved ruins of bygone industry. Together they conveyed a settled, agreeable way of life, one that clearly worked well for those who enjoyed it. ‘We Know Clean!’ a sign at a rest stop declared, and it was true that everything, from the curving plough-lines in the fields to the filigreed gantries on the silos, looked amazingly clean and orderly. I could see the domed sky meet the land far ahead along the road and felt as if I were driving through an enormous glass paperweight.

I stopped for the night in Omaha, a city I’d put on my itinerary largely because I had never imagined visiting it. In the morning I went to the Douglas County District Court, where a bench trial (i.e. no jury) was just starting. The structure of a state court system usually echoes that of the federal system, with trial courts, appeal courts and a supreme court. Unlike the federal courts, however, where judges are appointed by the president, state courts have a mixture of elected and locally appointed judges, who sometimes serve fixed terms, and the jurisdiction of a given court will vary from state to state. In Omaha, a witness was describing an incident from earlier that year. He’d been eating lunch when a man approached him asking for food and money. ‘I told him I wanted to relax,’ he recalled on the stand. He’d then seen the man enter several nearby businesses, including a restaurant where he set off the sprinkler system the witness had just installed. The witness called the cops. His 911 tape was played. ‘There’s like a drunk, homeless Black man keeps entering businesses here ... He set off the fire suppressants. I didn’t see any weapon, but I don’t want to get too close to the dude ... He looked all jacked up.’

The accused (I’ll call him Fletcher), dressed in orange prison scrubs, was acting as his own defence. He’d mastered some lawyerly phrases and quickly scored a point with them. ‘Objection! Did you see me pull that alarm?’

‘I did not.’

‘No further questions!’

Unfortunately, he spoiled the effect by asking again: ‘Did you see me with your own eyes pull that particular fire alarm?’

‘No, but it wasn’t pulled before you went in and it was afterwards.’

The police officer who’d responded to the 911 call took the stand. She testified that she and her partner had found Fletcher at the back of the restaurant and been met by ‘a very rude demeanour’. ‘I was advised by Mr Fletcher: “Fuck you bitch.”’

Her bodycam footage was offered into evidence.

‘Any objection, Mr Fletcher?’ the judge asked.

Fletcher produced another courtroom phrase. ‘No, I have no objection at this time.’

He was visibly intoxicated in the bodycam footage, stumbling around a patch of waste ground and swearing colourfully.

‘Hi, how are you?’ the officer greeted him, putting on latex gloves. ‘Why’d you pull the fire alarm?’

‘What am I charged with?’

‘Disorderly conduct.’

She cuffed and frisked him.

‘What did you do today, besides drink?’ she asked. She and her partner began removing and bagging the copious contents of his pockets.

‘You’ve got a lot of stuff on you!’

‘I got a pickle in there,’ he muttered.

‘You do have a pickle!’ she said, holding it up.

She then talked to the witness who’d installed the sprinkler system. ‘I didn’t go in after him,’ he told her, ‘because I don’t know what he’s got and I don’t want to get diseased or anything.’ He showed her the damage in the restaurant.

‘What a mess!’ she exclaimed. ‘This is such a nice, up-and-coming area too.’

The real issue, the man told her, wasn’t the mess but the cost of recharging the sprinkler system, around $6000. The sum surprised her, and on the basis of it – still with the same amused, motherly air – she amended the disorderly conduct charge to a felony charge of ‘criminal mischief, $5000 or more’.

The judge called a recess. After he and the prosecutor had left the courtroom, the deputy guarding Fletcher asked him about the incident. ‘I never went into the building,’ Fletcher told him. ‘I was just down by the dumpster there.’

The deputy shrugged. ‘I don’t have a dog in the race.’

‘I never was in the restaurant, period.’

The judge returned, and now it was Fletcher’s turn to question the officer.

‘Your probable cause to detain me was disorderly conduct,’ he began. For a moment he seemed to be laying the ground for a procedural point about the charge being amended, but he quickly lost his thread and began spinning out random Perry Mason phrases – ‘Did you or did you not? ... Yes or no? ... Let me rephrase ...’ Changing tack, he offered to pay restitution for any damage he’d caused rather than go to prison, while again protesting that he hadn’t been in the restaurant. The judge stopped him, pointing out that he couldn’t testify while he was also questioning a witness, and asked whether he wanted to take the stand. He didn’t, and the state gave its closing arguments. Fletcher began talking again, more frantically now, but the judge cut him off.

‘Sir, you already made your closing statement. The court finds that the state’s witnesses are credible. I am going to find you guilty.’

A sentencing hearing was scheduled, and Fletcher was led away, loudly demanding a restitution hearing.

As I stood up to leave, the judge came over and asked if I had ‘any investment in the case’. ‘Just an observer,’ I replied. He nodded affably. It was unusual for defendants to act pro se, he said, and it always presented challenges. He’d originally set bond at $200, keeping it deliberately low, but Fletcher hadn’t paid. ‘He’s been having trouble in jail,’ he said, adding gloomily: ‘He’s a danger to himself.’ He and the prosecutor were both Black, and I wondered what they’d made of the witness’s barely disguised bigotry.

by James Lasdun, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: David Golbitz, Omaha Daily Record