Carl S. Ergo Sum 🇺🇦

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow”

@OurShallowState @PhoenixGirl73 We’re at the Milo Minderbinder phase of late stage capitalism.

You know, I've been studying abnormal psychology for decades. It helps me understand Trump and Cluster B disorders. And it helps me understand collective narcissism and malignant normality - cults, if you prefer. But when the sad history is written on this era, the greatest detriment to our free society and our humanity, will have come from our media's continued normalization of a madman. And they do it for access and ratings and their algorithms, to the detriment of all.

He didn't think about the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. He didn't think about markets. He didn't think about the massive cost to Americans. He didn’t think about how it would benefit Russia. Because he doesn't think. He feels. He craves. It's the kind of processing doesn't allow one to gauge risk or consequence. I mean that. He is a predator acting on instinct. He has very few reasoned thoughts at all. He has impulses.

@unusual_whales Wait until JD becomes POTUS if trumpf doesn’t make it to the finish line. Thiel et al will own the US government.

Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system, per Reuters.

@UkrReview @Maks_NAFO_FELLA WTF?

👀❗️ Rutte offered a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s military efforts against Iran and also said he expects the nations of NATO to come together to support Trump, - Politico Rutte, while expressing reluctance to criticize the European leaders, said of Trump: “He’s doing this to make the whole world safe.” He said it was taking the European powers some time to come around because they had been left out of the initial planning in an effort to preserve the element of surprise of the American and Israeli attacks.

Question: I'm a waiter at a local restaurant in Queens, a full time college student who sleeps an average of four hours a night and is still thousands in debt. How is a war in a country half the world away funded by the taxes pulled from my check, helping me in any way?

@lrozen @Limeylizzie Mansplaining this absurdity. The “now listen “ was the tell.

this person is treasury secretary. discussing military theory. Why?

@RadioFreeTom @leanneofheights And there was an island hopping *strategy* to get within bomber range of Japan.

Price of Iwo Jima was 7000 KIA and 19,000 wounded

@atrupar @joni_askola Lead on, MacDuff.

Lindsey Graham on Kharg Island: "We did Iwo Jima. We can do this."

@atrupar @VeronicaTellsIt What a fucking asshole.

WELKER: Do you think it's appropriate for the president to celebrate the death of a Bronze Star, Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam? BESSENT: Neither one of us can understand what has been done to the president and his family WELKER: But is it appropriate for the president to celebrate the death of any American citizen? BESSENT: Give what has been done to President Trump and his family, it is impossible for either of us to understand what he's been through WELKER: So you don't think there's anything wrong with a post saying, 'Good. Robert Mueller's dead'? BESSENT: We should have empathy for what's been done to the president and his family

Check out this AMAZING video from my friend @cooneycongress & please RT (sent in my personal capacity only--& because he's a great guy!)

@BulwarkOnline I did not believe it was real when I first saw it. Hey, @SpeakerJohnson get ready to deny seeing this!

@Microinteracti1 @FeelnInspired Well said.

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

BREAKING: Trump accused of straight-up extorting Gulf allies for $5 TRILLION to keep his Iran war going – or $2.5 trillion to stop it! An Omani journalist and international affairs expert just dropped a bombshell on the BBC: the Trump administration is pressuring Gulf Cooperation Council states to cough up massive cash to either continue or end the war in Iran. According to sources, Trump is demanding $5 trillion if the Gulf wants the war to keep going, or $2.5 trillion to make it stop. This is classic grift: Trump starts an illegal war that’s already killing U.S. troops, bombing schools, shutting the Strait of Hormuz, and spiking gas prices worldwide – then turns around and tries to shake down rich Gulf allies for trillions to either fund it or bail him out. The council has publicly opposed the war and denied letting the U.S. use their territory, yet evidence shows American rockets firing from Gulf soil and U.S. warplanes crossing their airspace. Now that Iran has hit back hard, striking oil and gas infrastructure across the Gulf, forcing production cuts and massive economic losses all over the region, the stakes have become red-hot. The Gulf states are pulling back trillions in global investments – including $1.2 trillion pledged to the U.S. economy – both to punish Trump for starting a war that wrecked their oil revenue and tourism, and to protect their own money from more chaos if he escalates the war further. Now they’re hit with the old “Nice country you’ve got there,” gambit. This isn’t leadership. It’s Trump treating foreign policy like a protection racket: start the fire, then demand payment to put it out or keep it burning. While American families pay more at the pump and troops die, he’s allegedly trying to extort allies for trillions. If Trump demanding $5 trillion from Gulf states to fund or stop his own war feels like straight-up mafia tactics, like and share to call it out.

@cheeseheadlucy @TheRickWilson I have a bottle of schadenfreude at the ready.

@TheRickWilson There really is no bottom with Trump. None. As much as I hope he drops dead asap, DJT really deserves a slow, painful death. I have champagne ready when the Grim Reaper comes for him.

@MichaelSteele @shannonrwatts Mueller didn’t hurt innocent people. Russian-controlled, pedophile wannabe dictators are fair game, though. Also, he didn’t have time for vengeance because he was too busy upholding the law and trying to protect the country from people like you and your Russian handlers.

.@realDonaldTrump you are a vile disgusting man. Petty and pathetic, you are a hypocrite who reeks of weakness and insecurities with no moral core. Regardless of the politics, the American people should be embarrassed and ashamed for ever having entrusted you with leadership. God rest Robert Mueller.

@wartranslated Maybe she can become an oligarch mistress.

A Russian woman is complaining that no normal messenger or social media works anymore, leaving her with only one perfectly fine option – the FSB-controlled MAX.

@PhilGordonDC @Timodc Bankrupting casinos was just practice. Wharton, Wharton, Wharton. If UPenn/Wharton had any fucks to give they’d revoke his fake degree.

When Obama sent Iran $400m + $1.3bn in interest in 2016 Trump called it "insane" and he and others spent a decade mocking the idea of "pallets of cash" even though it was Iran's own money, American prisoners were released, courts were likely to require the U.S. payment, and Iran had just agreed to significant and verified reductions and restrictions on its nuclear program for 15+ years. Now Trump is giving Iran up to ten times that amount of revenue--one of the most significant measures of sanctions relief provided to the Islamic Republic since its founding--in exchange for marginal and temporary relief from the big increase in oil prices his actions have caused, without any concessions from Tehran, and even as Iran continues to target the United States, its allies, and world oil supplies. No way to read as anything other than desperate recognition of the situation Trump's own actions have created and the lack of available alternatives for dealing with it.

@JayinKyiv Smells like the brilliant negotiating skills of Kushner and Witkoff doing what the Russians tell them to do so that no kompromat will be released.

The US just took sanctions off half a dozen people wrapped up in various capacities within Russia's war machine.

@OurShallowState Maybe he’ll do an Ivana on the AF1 stairs.

Yesterday, Trump had a real tough time getting himself positioned to sit in a chair. This morning, I saw video of him descending the stairs at AF1 - he not only held the rail for balance, but he stopped and paused halfway down. He's definitely been rickety and unsteady of late.

@Acyn Just goes to show how much evil and disregard for the law they had from the start. And also how spineless and stupid and subservient red states and their leaders are.

Miller: At the beginning of this administration, we asked every state, red and blue, to share with us, their voter rolls. Every blue state refused.