Bye, bye, Bondi

Even being an ultra-loyalist brown-noser wasn’t enough for attorney general Pam Bondi to keep her job as attorney general because Trump just fired her. She continued her sycophancy even after her ignominious ouster, saying that she will continue fighting for Trump in the private sector. This is understandable since she will be seeking a pardon for any and all transgressions committed by her.

So what caused her demise? After all, she threw a major tantrum at congressional hearings, insulted members of the oversight panel, rescinded prosecution of Trump allies, purged career attorneys who were deemed to be insufficiently cult-like, went after his foes, and praised Trump to the skies at every opportunity. All this would seem to be the kinds of things that would endear her to her narcissistic boss. Some of her appointees as US attorneys were thrown out by judges as being unqualified or not properly appointed but that kind of incompetence seems normal for this chaotic administration. Here is a timeline of her greatest hits during her time in office.
[Read more…]

Blog comments policy

I usually post my blog comments policy at the beginning of the month for the benefit of new readers. Rather than posting the whole thing again, here is a link to the last time I posted it.

I enjoy reading the comments and it has become more pleasurable now. One of the things that used to annoy me were those commenters who seemed to feel the need to show themselves to be clever at the expense of others, usually by making needlessly sarcastic and denigrating comments.

It is also the case that long time commenters get the know each other and sometimes they will use that knowledge to snipe at another commenter based on their history, just to score a debating point even though it had nothing to do with the current post. It is somewhat like people in long-term relationships who know each other well and will dredge up past statements to try and ‘win’ an argument.

Thankfully, that is not happening anymore.

Trying to explain stock market gyrations

I recently posted about my puzzlement as to why the stock market indices gyrate wildly based on Trump’s utterances when we all know that he both lies and changes tack on what seems like whims. Several commenters had valuable insights and now this article from yesterday tries to explain what is going on.

Markets are rallying on a familiar bet: That President Donald Trump will, once again, back down. (It’s not called TACO Tuesday for nothing.)

The Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq just had their best day since May 2025, roaring higher Tuesday in large part because of a report (and semi-confirmation) that the White House is considering an end to America’s involvement in the Iran war without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. CNN later confirmed Trump and his administration increasingly believe that they can’t promise to reopen the strait as a prerequisite to declaring an end to hostilities with Iran.
[Read more…]

How the manosphere influencers distort gender power relationships

I have been thinking more about the documentary Inside the Manosphere that I reviewed recently and it struck me how the so-called influencers of the movement that were featured in the film have taken a kernel of truth and distorted it in order to give the young men who they have lured into their sphere a false idea of how power is wielded in society. It shows how successful a sleight-of-hand argument can be when wielded skillfully against their targets, in this case young, poor men who are frustrated at their lack of success in life, be it in the area of money or with women.

The influencers first assert that it is ‘the system’ that is keeping young men down and preventing them from becoming successful. There is a kernel of truth in that (that most conspiratorial theories must have in order to gain acceptance) but the influencers then divert attention away from the capitalist system that is exploiting most people and say that a shadowy cabal is doing it. Who exactly makes up this shadowy cabal is left largely unspecified but Jews are frequently mentioned.
[Read more…]

Mark Twain’s War Prayer should be read by everyone

At a Christian worship service last week, defense secretary Pete Hegseth gave the following prayer.

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Pope Leo XV issued what seemed like an apparent rebuke.

During a Palm Sunday mass in St Peter’s Square, the pope said the conflict between Iran, Israel and the US was “atrocious” and that Jesus could not be used to justify war.

“This is our God: Jesus, king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” he told tens of thousands of worshippers. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Quoting a Bible passage, Leo added: “‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

[Read more…]

The barbarians attacking the rich cultural heritage of Iran

It is easy to focus on the day-to-day events in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, we should not forget that what is being attacked is much more than material things.

In an essay titled A Bitter Education in the New York Review of Books, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes about the strong legacy of Persian culture that was cherished in India by intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore, and that is now being squandered by the current Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi and the westernized classes of Iran and India as they genuflect to the western capitalist ethos.

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language; I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations, eating food that originated in Persia, and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.

For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China. Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene. Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that, as Richard Eaton writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”
[Read more…]

How Epstein got rich

Even someone as deeply cynical as I am about the lack of morality of Trump and his willingness to do anything to further his personal interests find myself gagging that the suggestion that he would start a major war with Iran just to get the embarrassing Epstein story off the news focus. But there is no doubt that the result of the war has largely been that the demands for the full release of the files has been shunted to the back burner. So here is my measly attempt o bring it back to the front.

One of the big puzzles in the Epstein story has been how this one-time math and physics teacher at a private school without a college degree started the process by which he managed to acquire all the wealth that enabled him to live a luxurious predatory lifestyle that involved raping young women, while cavorting with a host of well-knowing people in the world of business, science, and the arts. I was not aware that back on December 16, 2025, the New York Times published a long story that traced his origins from the beginning and filled in many of the missing details. I will provide just the basic summary.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.

[Read more…]

The options with the war

As the US-Israeli war with Iran and Lebanon drags on, trying to figure out how it will end becomes harder. Trying to predict where wars will head is bad enough at the best of times, given their chaotic nature, but doing so with reckless leaders like Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who seem to be willing to do anything for their own short-term benefit, can be seen as an exercise in futility.

On the surface, it would appear that since Iran is in a much weaker position militarily, it will be forced at some point to sue for peace under unfavorable conditions. At least that is what Trump’s rhetoric seems to indicate that he believes. He keeps saying that the US has already won or that the Iranians want to make a deal. But Iran has steadfastly refuted that latter claim. This may be because for the Iranian regime, this is an existential threat and hence they have no interest in agreeing to anything that does not keep them in power. So for them, dragging this thing out indefinitely, and inflicting any damage they can on the global economy by (say) attacking the oil infrastructure and closing the Strait of Hormuz is an acceptable price to pay and they will hold out until Trump offers them something that they can accept.
[Read more…]

Explosive growth of legal gambling in America

When I was around 13 years of age, our neighbors had five children, three of whom were close in age to me. They would invite me to play card games at their place and we played for money. It was not high stakes in any absolute sense but it was for me since all I had was just the little pocket money that my parents gave me. So I did have thrill (if you want to call it that) of fearing a real loss. It was exciting to gamble and I was quickly getting drawn in and looked forward to playing after school. But I would end up losing consistently. After a while, while I could not prove it, I became convinced that the siblings were cheating by colluding against me. They were Indians and would sometimes speak and sing in Hindi, a language that is not spoken in Sri Lanka and that I did not know, and I think that they were communicating with each other. Anyway, I got tired of losing in an unfair game and stopped playing with them after a while. It was my first taste of how the gambling system is usually rigged against you and I lost my taste for it and never got attracted to it again.

Gambling in sports in the US has an ugly history with players accused of adjusting their play in order to make money by getting particular results. This led to federal laws that banned it and for the longest time it was restricted to just in-person gambling in the state of Nevada, primarily Las Vegas. Professional sports leagues vigorously opposed any attempts to legalize it nationwide, arguing that it would lead to the death of sports due to suspicions of cheating. But in 2018, the US Supreme Court overturned the federal ban, saying that the constitution did not allow for this federal power and that it was up to the states to decide whether they wanted to allow gambling or not, and then it was off to the races, as states vied to attract gamblers.
[Read more…]

We should perhaps avoid the TACO taunt

Trump is notorious for talking tough and making threats, taking impetuous actions, and then when he finds that he cannot carry out the threats or gets severe blowback, backtracking. Perhaps the most blatant example of this was with the tariffs which changed from day to day on his whim but he has also done that with things like saying he wants to take over Greenland, a bit of braggadocio that seems to have slipped into the memory hole when Denmark and other European countries presented a united front opposing the move. He does not even talks about it anymore.

As another example, take Trump’s threat to Iran on Saturday that if they did not open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours he would launch attacks on their oil infrastructure. This caused a sharp rise in oil prices and a massive drop in stock prices (one of the few things he cares about) and so he then said that thanks to Iran starting talks with the US, he was postponing the action.

Oil prices, which had been rising after Trump threatened over the weekend to strike Iranian infrastructure unless Iran opened the strait of Hormuz, dropped sharply. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 10% to $101 a barrel. The UK month-ahead gas prices fell 6% to 142p a therm.

The US president said on his social media platform Truth Social that the US and Iran had “very good and productive conversations” over the past two days regarding “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East”.

He said: “Based on the tenor and tone of these in-depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five-day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.”

This caused stock prices to bounce back yesterday. (One thing I do not understand is why investors react to the words of Trump. He is such a liar and so erratic that it would seem pointless to make decisions based on what he says he will do in the future. And yet it appears that many of them do.)
[Read more…]