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President Trump won’t even be straight with the country about how he’s running out of weapons – when his war has depleted well  upwards of 90%  of certain crucial munitions, as  Zeteo  has learned. When reporters have dug in on this topic, he’s huffily accused them of “ treason ,” and pledged that those responsible for leaking the information “are being hunted down” aggressively.    The staggering rate of U.S. weapons exhaustion is one of many indications of how   colossally disastrous the Iran war has been   for the American side since the very moment Trump launched the conflict in February. And the extent to which Trump has routinely ordered the Justice Department to open sprawling leak investigations and browbeat journalists underscores just how much this president is attempting to make it functionally illegal for a free American press to report on how horribly the war is going.   After all, the only thing “ treasonous ” (to use a term so ...

Trump recently claimed that he would make the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Claiming sovereignty over someplace means more that just writing your name on a map with a sharpie. “Western powers have attempted to control the Strait of Hormuz before. Basically, however, they only held it at Iranian sufferance. When, as in 1622, the Iranians determined to expel the foreigners, they proved able to do so. Nowadays they have 50,000 drones and have damaged or destroyed all 17 US bases in the region, so I don’t think trying to occupy Hormuz would be any fun. “It was known as a strategic trading port even before the age of the great maritime empires.” Marco Polo visited twice and wrote about it. “Portugal took the island of Hormuz briefly in 1507-1508, and then came back to rule it 1515 to 1622. This occupation was during the Little Ice Age and we don’t hear as much about fatal heat. Although the Portuguese were now imperial administrators, they ruled through a vassal dynasty of the kings ...

When my dad was a Naval officer in the 1950s, he was part of the team that designed the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier. I remember him explaining to me in excited detail about the arresting gear, the device that stopped a landing jet. He spent most of his career as a chemical engineer, so this was a bit of an excursion. Regardless, I’m confident that he possessed more engineering expertise about aircraft carrier design than failed real estate businessman Donald Trump. “ President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult ...

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, nave to be changed, to be “re-lied,” so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has constantly to rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. ~Hannah Arendt  

When a columnist writes that Trump has reached a new low, the columnist is doing something that looks like moral reporting and is not. The columnist is administering the fiction that the object has an interior. The fiction says: somewhere, in there, is a person who could have chosen otherwise, and today he did not, and we register the failure. The sentence keeps the person alive on the page after nine years of evidence that there is no person on the page. The sentence has an author, and the author does not know how to describe a machine, so the author keeps writing about a man. ~Mike Brock

Businesses fail all the time in America. The owners and investors pay the price (yes, the employees too). But if the businesses are large banks that gamble with other peoples’ money, they become too big to fail and instead are bailed out by the government, a form of financial socialized medicine.   “. . .  the 2008 bailout   was a political albatross   around the establishment’s neck, seen as a rescue of the very rich and connected people who caused mass unemployment and foreclosures. Whoever was in power as this anger built would get singed by it.   “More recently,   a loud chorus   of venture capitalists and tech magnates   pressured the Biden administration   into bailing out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. This crash, much like 2008, stemmed largely from inane financial practices, with fintech and crypto firms keeping massive amounts of cash in regular bank accounts at SVB instead of using   basic risk management practices . ...