Saturday, July 4, 2026
What is the United States of America Now?
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
[ed. From an optimist's perspective: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mario Tama/Getty
Todd Snider
[ed. See also: Ottoman Turks, American Male. Have a safe and happy 4th everyone.]
Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me
Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me
Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
[...more]
Non-Technological Constraints to AI
Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.
By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.
The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.
We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.
The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.
The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.
A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.
“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”
There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.
Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.
Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.
Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.
Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]
It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.
Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]
The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.
But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.
Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible.
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]
By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.
The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.
The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.
The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.
A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.
“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”
There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.
Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.
Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.
Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.
Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]
Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.
It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.
Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]
The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.
But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.
Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible.
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]
Cadillac Desert
CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.
It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.
The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.
But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.
It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.
The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.
Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.
Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.
''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''
It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.
But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.
It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.
The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.
Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.
Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.
''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''
by Gladwin Hill, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]
Friday, July 3, 2026
Clearing the Market
Cushing, Oklahoma is the pricing point for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude and the physical hub through which US oil supply flows to refineries across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. As of 25 June, inventories have fallen to 19 million barrels, below the operational minimum (~20mb) that the industry considers the threshold for physical stress. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has fallen to 331.2 million barrels, the lowest since 1983. According to the IEA, global inventories are at their lowest seasonal point in recorded history.
The market has priced almost none of this.
The MOU signed on 17 June was supposed to settle the reopening. Instead it has settled into a pattern of brief traffic windows followed by a strike, a US response, and a return to the negotiating table to manage the aftermath. The Ever Lovely was hit on 25 June inside the safe corridor the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and Oman had set up along the Omani coast days earlier. The US struck Iranian missile, drone, and radar sites the next day. A projectile then hit the tanker Kiku and Iran fired at US positions in Bahrain and Kuwait. The US next expanded its target list to surveillance, communications, and minelaying infrastructure. Both sides then turned up in Doha this week and kept communicating, which suggests the ceasefire itself is intact, but does not indicate the deal underpinning it is progressing.
The two sides are not talking directly to each other in Doha. American and Iranian delegations are meeting Qatari and Pakistani mediators separately, a step back from the direct sessions held in Switzerland two weeks earlier. Iran’s stated priority is Clause 11, the release of frozen assets, and President Pezeshkian has stated that $6 billion of the $12 billion held in Qatar will be returned, though it is not yet clear on what terms or even whether the funds have moved. Iran will not discuss its nuclear programme until those funds move, but if that money moves without a matching concession on enrichment it will reduce the leverage the US has left for that discussion. Trump has claimed a deal was close at least 38 times between late March and early June, according to a CNN count. Doha is yet one more round in that pattern.
The strait’s governance is where the deal has stalled most. Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi has said the removal of “obstacles” in the strait, and its reopening, rests with Iran alone. The IMO’s Secretary-General has said Iran laid an estimated eighty mines across the main shipping channel. The timetable for clearing them is set by Tehran regardless of what Doha produces. The Joint Maritime Information Centre raised the strait’s security threat level to “substantial” this week, citing mine risk and clearance uncertainty. Oman has separately delivered a service-fee proposal to Washington and its allies. An Iranian official has called the fees mandatory, but a regional diplomat has called them voluntary. Either way, Iran can prioritise the shippers who comply and delay the ones who do not, so the dispute over wording matters less than the authority it establishes.
Inside Iran, more than sixty of the Assembly of Experts’ roughly 88 members signed a statement on 28 June warning negotiators against crossing Khamenei’s red lines, control of the strait among them. The Assembly’s own secretariat publicly distanced itself from the statement within hours, which means even the body meant to speak for Iran’s clerical establishment cannot agree on how hard a line to take. Pezeshkian spent the same week in Qom telling senior clerics the opposite, that the MOU was an economic win worth defending. And while the president was making that case, the IRGC struck a vessel inside a corridor the foreign ministry had just endorsed. Three arms of the same state, pulling three different directions, in the same seven days. No single part of the Iranian state can bind the others to one position, hence why incidents the negotiators did not authorise keep recurring.
WTI is trading around $70, close to its level before the war began, and Morgan Stanley has cut its Brent forecast on the basis that Hormuz is reopening faster than expected, projecting a 2027 surplus of 4.8 million barrels a day. “Strip away the narrative,” the bank’s analysts wrote, “and read only the prices. They describe a market that has weakened across the board.” Morgan Stanley may be right about a near-term glut – outbound cargo has genuinely surged since the MOU – but the mistake is extrapolating that burst into durable recovery. The analysts are getting the direction backwards because a weak price does not necessarily prove a weak market. Rather, in this case it means a market distorted by reserve draws and supply disruption, and both of those aspects are temporary props under the market, not foundational features. That makes Morgan Stanley’s case much harder to sustain.
Roughly 170 million barrels of crude that had been trapped in the Gulf cleared the market once the MOU allowed it out. The SPR is drawing at a pace that leaves perhaps three to six weeks of room. Chinese crude imports have fallen by something like 5 mb/d since March, while China’s visible commercial stocks have barely moved, which means the shortfall is being met from reserves that do not appear in any published series. Cushing itself fell to 18.96 million barrels in the week to 19 June, the lowest since October 2014 and near the roughly 20 million barrels traders treat as an operational floor. A partial reopening of the strait does not fix that on its own.
by Nick Wade, State of Play | Read more:
The market has priced almost none of this.
***
- The ceasefire holds, but the underlying deal has stalled on the points that determine whether reopening is sustainable.
- Iran is entrenching control over the strait through mechanisms – mines, fees – that outlast any ceasefire.
- Iran’s institutions can’t agree among themselves, so even a signed deal still may not compel the IRGC, hence the physical reopening the market is pricing isn’t coming on the MOU’s own timetable.
- Meanwhile the price is being held down by three cushions – released barrels that had been trapped in the Gulf, SPR drawdowns, and Chinese reserves and reduced imports – that are all finite, so the mispricing identified in Two Spikes Coming hasn’t resolved.
- New evidence this week – inbound tanker numbers, floating storage, operator testimony – confirms the physical picture rather than the price picture.
The argument in Two Spikes Coming rests on a race, between stockpile depletion and production restoration, with Cushing already near its operational floor and reserves elsewhere running out within one to two months. The past week has not changed that race, but it continues to indicate the reserve draws are still outpacing the return of flow.
The MOU signed on 17 June was supposed to settle the reopening. Instead it has settled into a pattern of brief traffic windows followed by a strike, a US response, and a return to the negotiating table to manage the aftermath. The Ever Lovely was hit on 25 June inside the safe corridor the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and Oman had set up along the Omani coast days earlier. The US struck Iranian missile, drone, and radar sites the next day. A projectile then hit the tanker Kiku and Iran fired at US positions in Bahrain and Kuwait. The US next expanded its target list to surveillance, communications, and minelaying infrastructure. Both sides then turned up in Doha this week and kept communicating, which suggests the ceasefire itself is intact, but does not indicate the deal underpinning it is progressing.
The two sides are not talking directly to each other in Doha. American and Iranian delegations are meeting Qatari and Pakistani mediators separately, a step back from the direct sessions held in Switzerland two weeks earlier. Iran’s stated priority is Clause 11, the release of frozen assets, and President Pezeshkian has stated that $6 billion of the $12 billion held in Qatar will be returned, though it is not yet clear on what terms or even whether the funds have moved. Iran will not discuss its nuclear programme until those funds move, but if that money moves without a matching concession on enrichment it will reduce the leverage the US has left for that discussion. Trump has claimed a deal was close at least 38 times between late March and early June, according to a CNN count. Doha is yet one more round in that pattern.
The strait’s governance is where the deal has stalled most. Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi has said the removal of “obstacles” in the strait, and its reopening, rests with Iran alone. The IMO’s Secretary-General has said Iran laid an estimated eighty mines across the main shipping channel. The timetable for clearing them is set by Tehran regardless of what Doha produces. The Joint Maritime Information Centre raised the strait’s security threat level to “substantial” this week, citing mine risk and clearance uncertainty. Oman has separately delivered a service-fee proposal to Washington and its allies. An Iranian official has called the fees mandatory, but a regional diplomat has called them voluntary. Either way, Iran can prioritise the shippers who comply and delay the ones who do not, so the dispute over wording matters less than the authority it establishes.
Inside Iran, more than sixty of the Assembly of Experts’ roughly 88 members signed a statement on 28 June warning negotiators against crossing Khamenei’s red lines, control of the strait among them. The Assembly’s own secretariat publicly distanced itself from the statement within hours, which means even the body meant to speak for Iran’s clerical establishment cannot agree on how hard a line to take. Pezeshkian spent the same week in Qom telling senior clerics the opposite, that the MOU was an economic win worth defending. And while the president was making that case, the IRGC struck a vessel inside a corridor the foreign ministry had just endorsed. Three arms of the same state, pulling three different directions, in the same seven days. No single part of the Iranian state can bind the others to one position, hence why incidents the negotiators did not authorise keep recurring.
WTI is trading around $70, close to its level before the war began, and Morgan Stanley has cut its Brent forecast on the basis that Hormuz is reopening faster than expected, projecting a 2027 surplus of 4.8 million barrels a day. “Strip away the narrative,” the bank’s analysts wrote, “and read only the prices. They describe a market that has weakened across the board.” Morgan Stanley may be right about a near-term glut – outbound cargo has genuinely surged since the MOU – but the mistake is extrapolating that burst into durable recovery. The analysts are getting the direction backwards because a weak price does not necessarily prove a weak market. Rather, in this case it means a market distorted by reserve draws and supply disruption, and both of those aspects are temporary props under the market, not foundational features. That makes Morgan Stanley’s case much harder to sustain.
Roughly 170 million barrels of crude that had been trapped in the Gulf cleared the market once the MOU allowed it out. The SPR is drawing at a pace that leaves perhaps three to six weeks of room. Chinese crude imports have fallen by something like 5 mb/d since March, while China’s visible commercial stocks have barely moved, which means the shortfall is being met from reserves that do not appear in any published series. Cushing itself fell to 18.96 million barrels in the week to 19 June, the lowest since October 2014 and near the roughly 20 million barrels traders treat as an operational floor. A partial reopening of the strait does not fix that on its own.
by Nick Wade, State of Play | Read more:
Image: EIA, HFI Research
[ed. See also: Trump Paused War to Manipulate Oil Prices (video/YT). And, this: New Report Reveals True Extent of Devastation of US Fifth Fleet HQ in Bahrain with a special status update on F-35 readiness. Priceless. (Another good(?) read here). I don't think this war is going the way they thought it would.]
Thursday, July 2, 2026
The Licensing Revolution: Is Resistance Futile? Part 1: Loss of Ownership Comes to the Car
“Neoliberalism as an economic system enshrines the extraction of rent over industrial production.”Two of the most revolutionary inventions man ever made were created in the 20th century, one at its start and the other close to the end. Both offered the same innovation: a quantum advance in individual freedom and power.
—Yours truly, here
I’m talking, of course, about the automobile, personal transportation, and the PC, your own personal computer.
Cars and Computers
If you own a car, you own your own transportation; you don’t rent it or borrow it. You can argue the merits of “owning” personal transportation — there are climate, pollution, and crowding arguments against — but there’s no question about the freedom it gives to people. You want to leave now? Just jump in the car and go.
Before the PC and its business equivalent, the UNIX-based Sun Workstation, access to computing power were through IBM-style mainframes and minicomputers, like those made by DEC. None of these could be considered “personal”; they were too costly, and though they could accommodate multiple users at terminals, the computing itself was centralized and corporate-owned.
Keep this in mind: Before the PC, computing was centralized and corporate-owned. After the PC, computing power was inside the box you worked at, and priced for individual sale. Now thanks to Windows 11, that’s all been reversed.
Cars and computers, each a revolution in personal power and control. Now both will be taken away. Your car will no longer be yours, nor will your PC.
Soon You Won’t Own Your Car
The above statement is true in too many ways. The car you’ve already bought will be licensed to you, a license that can be revoked.
Cars and computers, each a revolution in personal power and control. Now both will be taken away. Your car will no longer be yours, nor will your PC.
Soon You Won’t Own Your Car
The above statement is true in too many ways. The car you’ve already bought will be licensed to you, a license that can be revoked.
Your New Car Is a Spy
Cars have become computers over the last few years. And that means cars have become spy machines. Here’s one review, by the Mozilla Foundation, of the automobile industry from the standpoint of privacy, written in 2023. Its bottom line is the headline:
It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label -- making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.The link for individual brand reviews is here. Their sins are many; these are the important ones:
1. They collect too much personal data (all of them)Recipients of the sale of your data could include your insurance company, which can purchase everything recorded about your driving habits.
2. Most (84%) share or sell your data
3. Most (92%) give drivers little to no control over their personal data
4. We couldn’t confirm whether any of them meet our Minimum Security Standards
And you can’t shut this stuff off, because it’s not hardware, but software, and the car needs its software to run. Here’s Tesla’s warning about its software, again from 2023 (emphasis mine):
However, “if you no longer wish for us to collect vehicle data or any other data from your Tesla vehicle, please contact us to deactivate connectivity. Please note, certain advanced features such as over-the-air updates, remote services, and interactivity with mobile applications and in-car features such as location search, Internet radio, voice commands, and web browser functionality rely on such connectivity. If you choose to opt out of vehicle data collection (with the exception of in-car Data Sharing preferences), we will not be able to know or notify you of issues applicable to your vehicle in real time. This may result in your vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.”It’s gotten worse since then; Tesla’s just getting started.
The Biden Bill–Mandated ‘Kill Switch’
Watch the Breaking Points video at the top; it details, from reputable reporters, the next dystopian “feature” of cars manufactured in 2027 and later — a “kill switch” that turns your car off if it thinks you shouldn’t be driving.
The detail is here. Basically, under Joe Biden, Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act “requires all new passenger vehicles to eventually include factory-installed technology that detects driver impairment and prevents or limits vehicle operation.”
The implementation falls under the NHTSA, which is writing the rule. Barring congressional prevention or modification, the kill switch is expected appear in all newly manufactured cars (but not used ones) starting in late 2026 or early 2027.
Privacy and Control
In modern America, two things are certainly true. 1) Once privacy is taken away, it never comes back; and 2) when a power is gained by corporations and government, they pervert it as fast as they can.
The prime example is this war — because Congress long ago surrendered its war-making power, the Executive has steadily moved in, to the point that today there’s not even a pretense of getting congressional permission. Trump wants a war wherever, that’s what he does. Or consider the definition of “terrorist” — today it’s “whomever the feds wishes to hurt, and to whatever extent.”
So what’s the maximum harm that can be done by the “new automobile”? Your driving is monitored by AI; the data is fine-grained and stored; anyone who wants it can buy it for whatever goal, including to raise your insurance, or deny you coverage.
Further, anyone with control of the software — the manufacturer, the FBI (initially under subpoena, but later, who knows?), cops, Homeland Security, or any branch of the law, whatever that means — can turn off your car when it wants, or (why not?) gain full control, lock you in, and drive you wherever it wishes. Remember, eventually every new power is perverted.
The next expansion is to further the War Against Crime. (“Remember the OJ Simpson highway chase? What if they could just turn off the car? You want to catch OJ, right? Do you hate the cops?”)
Then it transforms into … what? Whatever the security state wants, because “keeping you safe.”
The Licensing Revolution
You won’t own your car for another reason as well. You may have noticed a trend: what you used to be able to buy, you now merely rent.
• Apple doesn’t sell music, it licenses use.
• You no longer own your software. TurboTax, for example, sells a “personal, limited, nonexclusive, nontransferable, revocable license to use the applicable Software only for the period of use provided in the ordering and activation terms”.
• Same with Amazon’s ebooks and audiobooks.
• Same with Microsoft Windows. (More on that later.)
Non-transferable and revokable licenses. Renting your life.
by Thomas Neuberger, God's Spies | Read more:
Images: uncredited; and Branimir Kvartuc/ZUMAPRESS.com/Corbis[ed. In fact, Sony just made news the other day about remotely deleting all previously purchased content in digital libraries, and a couple days later ditching physical disks in favor of licensing. Amazon has already made this transition with Amazon Prime videos. See also: The Licensing Revolution: Windows Edition. Part 2: The computer you bought isn't yours. A tale about power.]
***
"Words have meaning. Proper word selection is integral to strong communication, whether it’s about relaying one’s feelings to another or explaining the terms of a deal, agreement, or transaction.
Language can be confusing, but typically when something is available to “buy,” ownership of that good or access to that service is offered in exchange for money. That’s not really the case, though, when it comes to digital content.
Often, streaming services like Amazon Prime Video offer customers the options to “rent” digital content for a few days or to “buy” it. Some might think that picking “buy” means that they can view the content indefinitely. But these purchases are really just long-term licenses to watch the content for as long as the streaming service has the right to distribute it—which could be for years, months, or days after the transaction." via:
Reflecting Pool Contractor - Greenwater Services
via: X
The Times reported that the company is owned by the J.J. Cafaro Trust, helmed by John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor and one of the president’s Mar-a-Lago neighbors. His water purification company lists Cafaro’s mansion in Palm Beach as its address in Florida corporate records.
[ed. Truth in advertising. If you were scripting this as a farce, no one would believe it.]
The Times reported that the company is owned by the J.J. Cafaro Trust, helmed by John J. Cafaro, a Trump donor and one of the president’s Mar-a-Lago neighbors. His water purification company lists Cafaro’s mansion in Palm Beach as its address in Florida corporate records.
Mr. Cafaro’s family business was in developing shopping centers, but he branched into other industries, including aerospace. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to bribe Representative James A. Traficant Jr., Democrat of Ohio, and later testified against Mr. Traficant.In 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives expelled Traficant, who, until former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) in 2023, was the most recent member to be expelled. Traficant was convicted of bribery and racketeering in 2002 and was released in 2009. He died in 2014. (Mediaite).
[ed. Truth in advertising. If you were scripting this as a farce, no one would believe it.]
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Bob Dylan & Julian Lage
Bob Dylan has just recruited one of the world's greatest jazz guitarists – and no one quite knows what's going on (Guitar World)
[ed. He's always recruited the best. See other Julian Lage videos if you're not familiar with him (I'll post a few links later, or just do a search here). Not counting The Band, the Dead, and TP&The Heartbreakers, Larry Campbell was also a favorite.]
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
The Billion Dollar Crypto Man
President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion dollars from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.
Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.
Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.
Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.
The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many that have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.
The Trump business is growing abroad
The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.
Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid, and other important matters.
A property in the United Arab Emirates took in $10.4 million. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.
One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.
Trump took in in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.
The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.
Trump is now the billion dollar crypto man
After taking office last year, Trump reversed the Biden administration’s tough stance on the crypto industry and pushed policies friendly to the industry.
But regulators still had some concerns. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate polices, and are difficult to value.
Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled last month for a $10 million fine. [...]
Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their meme coin holdings drop significantly. The price spiked to more than $74 in the days after its launch in January 2025, but now sells for just $1.68. Also, the value of the World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they first started trading in September.
The estimated East Wing construction cost has tripled since July, when the project was first announced, with half expected to come from taxpayers, The Post previously reported.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the ballroom would be paid for by private donors and once said that Clark executives offered to build it for free.
“They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump told The New York Times in January.
Clark’s internal cost projections show the McLean, Virginia-based company, the largest general contractor in the D.C. metro area, stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the work...
The records reviewed by The Post do not break out Clark’s estimated profit margin for the entire project, but a March document shows the company projected it would receive a total of $65 million in combined profit, overhead and daily rates for on-site staff and other costs.
Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.
Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.
Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.
The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many that have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.
The Trump business is growing abroad
The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.
Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid, and other important matters.
A property in the United Arab Emirates took in $10.4 million. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.
One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.
Trump took in in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.
The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.
Trump is now the billion dollar crypto man
After taking office last year, Trump reversed the Biden administration’s tough stance on the crypto industry and pushed policies friendly to the industry.
But regulators still had some concerns. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate polices, and are difficult to value.
Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled last month for a $10 million fine. [...]
Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their meme coin holdings drop significantly. The price spiked to more than $74 in the days after its launch in January 2025, but now sells for just $1.68. Also, the value of the World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they first started trading in September.
by Bernard Condon, Seattle Times/AP | Read more:
Image: Alex Brandon
[ed. This actually plays like a feel-good story. Thesheep MAGA cultists and influence buyers get fleeced - as predicted, as they deserve (Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t). Is this a great country or what? In other corruption news, see also: Trump is using a $500M no-bid contract to build his White House ballroom (Washington Post):]
[ed. This actually plays like a feel-good story. The
***
White House officials last year secretly awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million for the construction of the East Wing ballroom in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The Washington Post. [...]The estimated East Wing construction cost has tripled since July, when the project was first announced, with half expected to come from taxpayers, The Post previously reported.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the ballroom would be paid for by private donors and once said that Clark executives offered to build it for free.
“They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump told The New York Times in January.
Clark’s internal cost projections show the McLean, Virginia-based company, the largest general contractor in the D.C. metro area, stands to make tens of millions of dollars from the work...
The records reviewed by The Post do not break out Clark’s estimated profit margin for the entire project, but a March document shows the company projected it would receive a total of $65 million in combined profit, overhead and daily rates for on-site staff and other costs.
[ed. But, but... Hilary's emails!]
The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth
A Monument to Man’s Arrogance
Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.
Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.
But all that water is not nearly enough to sate the five million citizens of the Phoenician sprawl and the farms and the tribal communities. The rest comes from the Colorado River by way of the Central Arizona Project: a series of pumps, tunnels, and canals that every year move 456 billion gallons of Colorado River water 336 miles from the northwest. 5 billion of those gallons evaporate into the desert air before they ever reach Phoenix.
This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.
But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.
This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.
This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.
For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:
But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?
What if we asked them?
Phoenix is in trouble. In 2024, the Arizona capital recorded 113 consecutive days of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater; the summers that were always hot but were still bearable are becoming more and more unbearable. As I write this in March of 2026, temperatures are already topping 100 degrees. While climate change explains some of the hotter temperatures, a bigger culprit is the endless concrete sprawl that traps heat in the daytime and doesn’t let it go at night. Phoenicians are long used to getting up at 5 in the morning to walk their dogs on concrete that doesn’t burn their paws; that time is getting earlier and earlier.
Then there’s the water. Phoenix sits on top of an aquifer and, like everywhere else in the west, they began draining that aquifer faster than they could refill it. So they supplemented. Phoenix sits at the confluence where the Agua Fria, Verde, and Salt Rivers all join with the Gila River; the Gila then runs west through the Sonoran Desert until it reaches the Colorado River some 200 miles downstream. Or, rather, it used to run west through the Sonoran. These rivers are completely used up by Phoenix, its suburbs, the Indian reservations in the metro area, and the farms in the exurbs. Waddell Dam, Horseshoe Dam, Bartlett Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Horse Mesa Dam, Mormon Flat Dam, Stewart Mountain Dam, and Granite Reef Dam create the lakes where Phoenicians go to escape the heat and ensure that one hundred percent of the rivers are available to Phoenix (less the millions of gallons that evaporate daily in the Arizona heat). West of Phoenix, the Gila runs dry until it reaches the Colorado.
This water is, or rather was, guaranteed to Phoenix by the Colorado River Compact. The compact was signed in 1922 and assumed that the 1920-1921 flows of the river were representative of the river as a whole, but this turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way: those years had far more snowpack and therefore far more river water than average, decades before the effects of climate change began to be felt. The struggle to allocate the actual flow of the Colorado, not the paper flow, is a story of election fraud and bribery and lawsuits and gunfights and dynamite attacks involving states and militias and tribes and cities and feds and Mexicans, but that’s not the book I’m reviewing here. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, only three people have really understood the so-called Law of the River: the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who is dead; a Navajo lawyer, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it. So we won’t dwell on the Colorado. The upshot is that thanks to a lot of conservation efforts, Arizona has so far managed with the allocation it was given.
But Phoenix is getting more and more people and less and less snowpack. Arizona farmers are giving up more land and cities are instituting more stringent water restrictions, even as the population continues to increase and the thirsty data centers move in. In 2000, the seven western states in the Colorado River basin agreed to a set of guidelines to allocate the much-diminished river; those guidelines expire at the end of this year. The federal government gave a deadline of February 2026 for the seven states to come to a new agreement, and those states blew past that deadline without anything close to an agreement. The federal government is now in charge of determining how the river will be allocated.
This is a really bad time for the states to be arguing about river allocation; the winter of 2025-26 had the worst snowpack since the compact was signed and probably since much earlier, though records get shakier the farther back you go. This year we’ll avoid disaster by releasing years’ worth of water stored in a Wyoming reservoir. That won’t be an option next year. As the youngest state, Arizona has the weakest water rights; those rights would be the first to go in a crisis. Some of the options that the government has on the table involve cutting off the Central Arizona Project entirely, leaving Phoenix to drain the aquifer dry and collapse the whole metro area into a sinkhole.
This coming crisis has not passed unnoticed. Many people and publications have tried to explain these issues to a national audience, and a lot of them have hit on the same hook.
For example, the July 2024 cover story of The Atlantic tells the story of Phoenix. It opens with this:
No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.The Sierra Club’s cover story in 2022 described the coming Colorado River crisis. Their introduction ends with this:
No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture…The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. It means “all used up” or “exhausted.”There are many more invocations of the Hohokam; I’ll quote just one more here to drive home the point. The ur-text of writing on the water crisis in the west, the book that all others cite as their inspiration, is the 1985 book Cadillac Desert. The chapter that discusses the Central Arizona Project begins this way:
The original 400,000 Arizonans were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya further south. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea. When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves.It’s easy to see why the Hohokam story is used as a hook. It’s too good not to use. A people settle by the confluence of the Salt and Gila rivers and build a great civilization until the changing climate or their overuse of water forces them to leave. The writers of all these pieces start by saying the disappearance of the Hohokam is a mystery, but then make it clear that the answer to this mystery is the same as whatever they believe to be the biggest problem with modern-day Phoenix: climate change, irrigation overuse, poisoned crops, social conflict, etc.
They were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? Drought remains a possibility — perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen — but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much. And that is the exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.
But is it true that nobody knows why the Hohokam vanished? Archaeological investigations into Hohokam society have revealed several great houses, dozens of classic Meso-American ball courts, and a massive network of dams and irrigation canals. But archaeology tells us nothing about why the Hohokam left. Where else could we go to investigate this mystery? Where could we turn to see if Phoenix is heading down a well-trodden path towards destruction? How could we find out what happened to the Hohokam?
What if we asked them?
by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
[ed. Less about current water problems (and possible solutions) in the Phoenix area today and more about the history of Hohokam society that predated it. An interesting and detailed account of a unique and forward-thinking society quite advanced for its time. See also: Friday Book Club - Cadillac Desert (DS).]
Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026
Asteroid Day was cofounded in 2014 (the year after the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor air burst) by physicist Stephen Hawking, B612 Foundation president Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, and Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). Remy, Schweickart, Richters, and May initiated Asteroid Day in October 2014, which they announced during a press conference. It was launched on December 3, 2014.
In 2016, the United Nations proclaimed Asteroid Day be observed globally on June 30 every year in its resolution. The event aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations from a catastrophic event. - Wikipedia
There are about a million asteroids in the Solar System with the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city. Astronomers have discovered only 1% of them. Asteroid Day is an effort to educate the public and encourage policy makers to fund this important effort.
King Tut may have celebrated an ancient Asteroid Day by asking his assistants to make a dagger out of a broken-off asteroid that landed on Earth. Astronomers discovered that the blade of the knife contained much more nickel than is found in terrestrial iron, an amount consistent with iron meteorites, especially with one found in the year 2000 in the Kharga region in northern Egypt. For more information about the dagger, go to http://goo.gl/BHBivd. (via: Bruce Palmquist, Daily Record)
[ed. Brian May was also an astrophysicist? Wow. A man of many talents. Another one would be Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and US missile defense contractor/consultant.]
Daydreaming Proust
Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.
If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.
Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.
It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—
Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.
In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.
Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.
And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.
It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—
As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.
Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.
Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.
In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—
I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust
One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.
In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.
by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader | Read more:
Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936
Monday, June 29, 2026
Choosing Penelope
Riley and I were married on a Saturday in a small Los Angeles church.
We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised.
Initially, the wedding was going to be an incredibly humble affair. I pictured us and a couple of friends in the first few pews. To our surprise, three weeks later, with the nearly-free and movie-montage-esque help of friends and family, eighty-something people showed up (some from clear across the country) at the behest of a mass text that said what amounted to “I know you probably can’t make it, but…”
It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce.
Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.
My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.
Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.
The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.
He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.
Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.
What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.
People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be. [...]
The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.
Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.
As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home. [...]
Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?
I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”
Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.
I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community. [...]
It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom. [...]
By choosing Riley, I have made the decision to leave the island of Calypso forever. I went home, in my case both figuratively and literally. That means we have both sacrificed the illusion of eternal youth and have intentionally chosen to have kids, make a home, get old and ugly together, and then eventually die. By making the choice in full consciousness, I feel that I have received a better kind of eternity in exchange.
We had only been engaged for a month when, at the counsel of our close friend, we decided to have the wedding in three weeks, right before we planned to move away from LA to live in a small town in Louisiana, where I was born and raised.
It was a strange and beautiful wedding, not least because it was also a goodbye. It was a little like the final episode of a beloved sitcom. Also, thirty minutes before the wedding, I was helping my groomsmen clear away shelves of Narcan and lube for the homeless program in the very room where our reception was going to be about an hour later. This is that sort of perfect memory that arises from unplannable imperfection that no amount of time or money can reproduce.
Pronounced man and wife, we ran outside to be showered in rice. Cars horns erupted and windows rolled down to release pumping fists. People just can’t help it, possessed by the spirit of a cloud of cheering witnesses.
My argument for marriage starts and ends with that image. Even jaded LA people sitting in traffic automatically know a good thing when they see it, before they can rationalize their way into thinking something else. Generally, language makes us into casuists, able to twist ourselves into believing whatever helps us avoid the pain of making a permanent choice. Automatic responses remind us what we really must think and what should be attuned to with gentle attention. That’s a long way of saying why we know stories are truer than data.
Speaking of The Data, it suggests the opposite of happily ever after. Divorce is more than likely. My parents got divorced. That whole ordeal nearly ruined me. But the end of my parents’ marriage being catastrophic did not convince me it was a poor institution. If anything, it made me think that the force of the catastrophe could only be produced in the destruction of something good. What kept me living the bachelor’s life into my 30’s was not fear of repeating my parents’ mistakes; it was the lie of eternity promised in fleeting relationships. It was Swiping’s Lie: hookup culture and the corporate hustle that we all know is its conjoined twin.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus is held captive on an island after the Trojan war. Holding him there is the goddess, Calypso promising him eternal life, eternal youth and eternal sex. This is the image of hookup culture, in case you thought it was something new. It’s the age-old promise of never having to grow up—the ability to continuously find newness and youth in others and to therefore renew the youth in yourself. You can easily imagine how a man like Great Odysseus would be tempted to rest on his laurels. The dream of Calypso, after all, is only available to those brave, chosen few men who have risen to the top of the hierarchy. She, then, is the spirit within the droves of young women who would share a hero instead of settling for a man. That image is also still alive and well. Think of DiCaprio. It’s maybe not a coincidence that you might also picture him on an island with his girls, or a yacht at least.
The first part of a man’s life is occupied by the desire to become worthy of Calypso’s island. For Odysseus, that took place in The Iliad. Once the war is over and he is well-known as a brave man, the rules change. The very desire that drove him away from Ithaca to go on a grand adventure now threatens to keep him trapped on an island of his rewards. What the gods conspire to inject in him now is a new kind of courage: the courage to choose his eventual grave. The temptations against this odyssey are great: Calypso is more beautiful than any mortal woman could ever be (because she is the essence of youth and beauty itself, expressed only in part and at times in individual women). His wife back home, Penelope, though very beautiful, does not compare to Calypso. Worse, she will quickly become old and ugly and tired, like Odysseus himself would, if he left the island.
He chooses Penelope. He chooses to go home. And he is punished for the length of the novel as a test of the graveness of that choice.
Riley and I had a strangely old-fashioned wedding, which was made even more strange by its setting in the infinitely hip neighborhood of Silverlake. An artist friend of ours, who, in my opinion, is very hip indeed, said the aesthetic was cool, almost “gothic.” I liked that. Riley’s antique dress made her look like the Virgin Mary. Mine was a navy-issued, double-breasted felt wool suit, authentic from the 50’s. We’ve joked that we should have done it real old-fashioned and gotten married in our own graves.
What’s romantic about a wedding is not the passing promise to pretend we’ll feel puppy-love for each other for the rest of our lives (e.g. “You’re my person”). Or else the even-sadder and more common promise to always watch TV together, as if we know all adventure is over and we have firmly settled for less than we once dreamed of. What’s romantic about a wedding are the parts modern weddings cut out or downplay: the “til’ death” part. That’s not to be morbid. The opposite. Given that we both have the choice to stay on the proverbial island with Calypso—forever looking for something new and better—we both look each other in the eyes and choose our eventual decay. We’re going home. As a result of this sacrifice there are no immediate riches; storms will rage and probably a cyclops will try to eat us, but we are going home to be with each other, come hell or high water.
People love romantic love, especially when it breaks rules, because it has no “why.” The moment you put a “why” on love—economic reasons, reasons of convenience, or because you’ve finally accepted that you just can’t do any better—it dies. So people yearn for the reckless and reasonless love they think can only be found outside the bounds of marriage. They have associated marriage with necessity, and cannot conceive of any other way it could be. [...]
The number one reason young people give for not getting married is money. It seems likely to me that this is a convenient substitute for the real reason. If you have enough money, after all, it can make commitments go away when they become inconvenient. Money makes kids go away when they annoy you. It can even get you a younger wife down the line, which is to say that money makes for a false sacrifice. At the same time, people damn well know they shouldn’t stay in Calypso’s cave forever. They sense they will wake up one day as an old child and with either no children or estranged ones, but they lack the courage to choose Penelope outright. So they try to have it both ways: to keep the island as a backup plan. We can all guess what half-measures avail us.
Speaking of money, it shocked Riley and I how much people wanted to help us once we announced we were getting married. Dozens of people worked for free to make our wedding happen in less than three weeks. There is an old Italian saying that married couples always have bread under their arm, which, you could argue (cynically), is just a way to encourage poor people to get married. It has proved to be incredibly true for us.
As a man, it has also been incredibly humbling. Had I continued searching for more and more ways to win friends and accumulate resources before I got married, it may have never taught me that provision is better gained as a gift received than something to be wrestled from a hostile world. Marrying a woman taught me what women know intuitively: that the world wants to help you. When I was still a single man, the sentiment was more like that it hated me. And it did, in the sense that young men, unlike young women, have to prove their worth. Joining flesh with a woman means that my personal war against the Trojans is over. That courage is not wasted, it has just outlived its usefulness and it’s time for me to develop a new kind of courage. The kind that takes me home. [...]
Unconsciously, also, Riley and I originally moved to LA looking for a king to serve: a big Hollywood king who could bestow power and fame on us if we pushed the correct sycophantic buttons. From that high place, we dreamed, perhaps, our king would die (or something equally fortuitous) and then maybe we would be king. This is the unspoken language of the American dream. We, of course, unlike every other person who has ever existed before us, would use our power for good, our world uncorrupted by our slobbering pursuit of pleasing those corrupt kings we claim to despise. Articulating it like this makes it plain to me now that this plan doesn’t even work in theory, much less in practice. It is also plain to me that we were on a pathway of likely-forever frustrated mediocrity because our spirits were at odds—we wanted what we also hated. And a house divided cannot stand. If we had managed to fully abandon ourselves to our ambitions (which some do manage with the help of some mixture of new age sorcery and hard drugs) we would have been so spiritually mangled that our fates would be something worse than death. What does a man gain if he gets the whole world but sacrifices his soul?
I can forgive myself (a little) because patterns like these usually can’t be apprehended from within. Perspective is required. Waking perception can’t see the forest for the trees, so we sometimes have visions or dreams. These are vague, counterintuitive, and don’t play by the rules of the game you are currently fixated on. So, most people ignore them, most of the time. We also have lost most of our sophisticated language to understand visions or dreams, seeing it all as arbitrary or unscientific. The language didn’t go completely away (it can’t), so it just became unhelpfully simplistic. We’ve settled for, “Follow your dreams,” which now means something like, “Get what you already think you want at any cost and ignore any subconscious warnings against that, especially in the form of other people (aka ‘haters’)” when it probably ought to indicate something more like, “Do that thing you have a strange sense you should do, where people also seem to want you around, even if you lose whatever you once thought was important to you.”
Riley and I found each other in LA as the former type of dream follower. Funnily, though, we met each other as a direct result of a small act of the latter type of dreaming. For in the midst of all our big dreams in LA, we had both followed a still small voice to go to that little church down the street. It was uncomfortable to keep going, I now realize, because it was at odds with the larger part of our spirit that was looking for a good earthly king to serve. But we just kept showing up and volunteering at the food pantry. Right outside of that church was where I first broke the news: “I think we like each other.” And with that, old dreams began to lose their power and new, strange, and humble dreams started to crowd in.
I have to remind myself, that although what I’m trying to do here is make some sense out of all this, there are aspects that go plainly beyond sense. I doubt I will ever recover them with language. One example would be the dream that led me here in the first place, another would be my wife’s exceptional character in the face of these circumstances. For context, she is not just some aspiring actress from LA who, on some level, wanted an excuse to leave the thankless grind behind. She filmed a movie this year and was part of a Disney project last year. She had every concrete reason to stay in Hollywood. She left only because of my weird dream. Now that we’re here and living in the old house, I am the one who is much more likely to forget the dream and fret over some concern of status. Or worry that she doesn’t want to be here because there are too many blighted and abandoned homes on our street. She is usually the one to remind me why we are here: to be involved with people and to do what we are told. This is a special place. There is real history here, and that’s part of it, but what I find remarkable about the town is its aliveness and relative beauty in spite of its total lack of economics. Once you dig a bit, you realize that this town is kept alive only by the good will of a few wealthy families who care about the community. [...]
It also keeps us attuned to how our broader environment may be shaping our inner environment. We notice, for example, that to the extent there is unexplored territory in the house—places filled with dust and cobwebs—there is also unexplored territory in the mind. It is important, then, to intentionally clean every corner of the house, slowly and consciously, literally getting your fingers in every nook and cranny. While you do that, your psychology changes. You master the domain and your nervous system regulates to a more calm, resting state. Until the motions are embodied physically and dramatically, the cobwebs remain also in the marriage. This is not to say dust and cobwebs should be eradicated. Just that the opportunity of their maintenance should be perceived as a privilege rather than the terrifying indication of inevitable decay they are usually seen as. In fact, the modern compulsion to eschew all signs of rust incur an ever-increasing debt that I, at least in this phase of my life, am no longer willing to subsidize my time to afford. I’m thinking of clean, glassy, modern architecture; I once heard someone joke about that sort of place—I can’t remember who said it or where I read it—that those places would be perfect if it wasn’t for all the people in them. The cost is not just in the anti-people aesthetic (which brings a psychic cost probably higher than anyone reckons), but the literal salaries of uncountable maintenance, janitorial, and security people, all built into the ever-increasing hours demanded of the email workers inside. And all that for what? To avoid looking at some dirt, to avoid the realization that you were once that dirt and are quickly becoming it again. And by avoiding those realizations, our resilience to them gets lower, and so we erect even more walls and glass to keep it more securely away, and the cost of it all rises and rises and so we are forced to work our email jobs for longer and longer hours while someone else, also paid for with more and more working hours, makes life-long memories with our children in our stead. You start to think that a little dirt is a small price to pay for freedom. [...]
By choosing Riley, I have made the decision to leave the island of Calypso forever. I went home, in my case both figuratively and literally. That means we have both sacrificed the illusion of eternal youth and have intentionally chosen to have kids, make a home, get old and ugly together, and then eventually die. By making the choice in full consciousness, I feel that I have received a better kind of eternity in exchange.
by James Taylor Foreman, The Metaphor | Read more:
Image: Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829-1904), Penelope
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