jaymzangel

“I have crossed oceans of time to find you”

We told you we were fighting for democracy and you called us ridiculous. Now a state is literally throwing out votes.

I often find myself wondering, "What was this mf like.....on drugs?" If ***this*** is sober.....

"A French woman who tested positive for hantavirus after she was evacuated from a cruise ship reported symptoms to doctors onboard but was told it was probably just anxiety, the Spanish health minister has said." Or course. theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

The Trump appointee in charge of grazing policy owns at least 5 cattle operations that will directly benefit from the opening of federal lands to cattle grazing.

This is getting wild now 👀 So I started looking at the ballroom after digging into the Reflecting Pool yesterday. I’m starting to see some patterns. The playbook works like this. Pick your contractor personally. Invoke “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” to skip competition. Use the 250th anniversary as the justification. Inflate the price. Don’t disclose who’s actually doing the work. Repeat. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. $13.1M. No bid. No competition. Justification: “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” 250th anniversary. Contractor: Atlantic Industrial. Zero prior federal contracts. No pool or monument experience. The subcontractor doing the actual work doesn’t appear anywhere in the justification documents. Now the ballroom. Trump personally selected Clark Construction to build his $400M White House ballroom. Clark is already on site with people and equipment. Then NPS quietly awards Clark a separate $17.4M no-bid contract to fix two fountains in Lafayette Park directly across the street. Never posted publicly. Never competitively bid. The justification? Clark was already nearby. That’s it. The original estimate for those fountains in 2022 was $3.3M. The consultant who wrote that estimate said the administration literally took his cover page and added millions with no itemization. Final price: $17.4M. Same urgency exemption. Same 250th anniversary justification. Both contracts bypassed competitive bidding. Both used the same urgency exemption. Both cited the same 250th anniversary. Both awarded to contractors with direct Trump connections. The Lafayette Park contract was never posted in public federal spending databases. The Reflecting Pool contract was posted but the subcontractor doing the primary work appears nowhere in the paperwork. Combined taxpayer bill: over $30 million. Combined competitive bids received: zero. This urgency exemption has been used in less than 1% of NPS contracts over the past decade. They used it twice in the same year. For birthday decorations. Senator Blumenthal is already demanding answers on the Lafayette Park contract by May 15th. The Reflecting Pool has a Cabinet secretary photographed on site and a subcontractor with an expired federal registration that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the contract documents. This isn’t two separate stories. This is one story. The 250th anniversary isn’t just a celebration. It’s a billing mechanism. And taxpayers are footing the bill with zero say in who got the work or why..

HE FLED THE COUNTRY TO ESCAPE BEING CHARGED FOR RAPING LITTLE BOYS, and yet he just waltzes into Trump's property, protected, to dedicate a golden statue.

Lying in a legal briefing would get you disbarred as a regular lawyer. But when you’re an unelected, lifetime appointee with powers to write decisions that completely undo & remake the Constitution, the decision gets to stand & you get to keep your lifetime position. Outrageous.

I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79 year old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all.

🚨 HOLY CRAP. A FOREIGN PRIME MINISTER just told American media YOUR war isn't over, and casually floated sending YOUR sons into Iran to grab uranium. NETANYAHU: "It's not over." "You go in and you take it out." REPORTER: With what? Special forces from Israel? From the United States? "I'm not going to talk about military means, but what President Trump has said to me, I want to go in there." "I think it can be done physically." REPORTER: How long? "I'm not going to give a timetable." So a foreign leader sets the mission, dodges the means, refuses a timeline, and YOUR kids fight it. YOUR taxes fund it. YOUR dollar inflates for it. This is Israel dictating YOUR foreign policy. Reject it. 🟧🦍

There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet. As a reminder Bob Kagan is: - The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat) - A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself... - The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today) - The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk. And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat). So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great. Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…). Here they are 👇 1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions. Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.” And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.” Same point. 2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.” He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words. 3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power. Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.” On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice… 4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.” On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?” The exact same argument. 5) Global chain reaction Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.” You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.” 6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.” Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.” Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.” Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.” ----------- So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢 Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects. First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map. For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness. Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America. I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is. Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still! He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.” The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article: "There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead." I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke. Src for the Atlantic article: theatlantic.com/international/…

A new twist. The American who tested positive who was on the ship was tested without having symptoms and was positive. Interesting thread to read which discusses the implications of this:

We are two weeks from oil shortages and demand rationing according to Bloomberg. Not months…weeks. Anyone that thinks this oil shortage isn’t a serious immediate crisis is delusional:

The 12 members of staff at the Dutch hospital made procedural errors during the blood draw and disposal of urine from the patient contaminated with hantavirus. They will be placed in quarantine for 6 weeks.

Just got word Mobil and Shell have informed Costco and Walmart they have no packaged product to send them and to expect bare shelves in the motor oil section in a few weeks

The government is preparing to seize homes and land using eminent domain for the construction of a Data Center in Coweta County, Georgia This American’s childhood home is being “taken by force by Georgia Power. Homeowners in this county do not have a choice” It affects over 330 private properties. Georgia Power says it will negotiate purchases and easements and use eminent domain Georgia Power claims its to strengthen the grid for the growing energy demand in Georgia (due to many new data centers) The lines are widely linked to Project Sail, a massive proposed hyperscale data center campus that will span 829 acres

You just can’t make this stuff up

This is the third major refinery fire in the United States in just the past week or so. It’s getting harder to argue that it’s just accidental.

Everyone being in hazmat suits should tell you it’s time to put masks back on at minimum

"Officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account" politico.com/news/2026/05/0…

@ProudSocialist @RobRobbEdwards Love the response from Maui’s Mayor 🦭 🦭