As Trump continues to flail in the aftermath of his disastrous handling of the economy, the Epstein files, and now a new war in the Middle East, he took to Truth Social with a pretty unhinged threat:
If Democrats don’t agree to his demands, he’s going to send ICE agents into airports to handle security and start making arrests.
So if airport security already feels chaotic right now, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Here’s What They’re Doing
Democrats have put forward multiple standalone bills to fund TSA (and FEMA and the Coast Guard), which Republicans have blocked six times as of March 20.
They want DHS fully funded: no concessions, no conditions, no accountability. Now, Democrats are absolutely open to funding the department, but with some basic guardrails: no masks, ICE agents must identify themselves, requiring judicial warrants to enter private property, and stay away from polling places.
You know, baseline following the law. All of which is completely reasonable. Republicans keep rejecting this anyway. So, instead of funding TSA and ending this immediately, they’re making the conscious decision to hold up funding and use the chaos as leverage.
Why it Matters Right Now
This workaround isn’t going to fix the problem. Sending untrained ICE agents in to triage long security lines packed with travelers on edge is not setting them up for success. Now we have ICE playing the role of TSA at US airports. Moving on from their previous role as “law enforcement” in American cities. We all saw how that went. What could possibly go wrong this time?
Spin vs. Reality
They’re saying: Democrats are causing the chaos at airports. What’s actually happening: Republicans are blocking standalone TSA funding and tying it to unrelated DHS demands.
They’re saying: This is about making airports “safe again.” What’s actually happening: They’re proposing to replace TSA agents with ICE agents, who aren’t trained to perform security screenings (let alone anything else).
They’re saying: Democrats won’t negotiate. What’s actually happening: Democrats agreed to fund DHS with basic guardrails. Democrats put forth multiple clean bills to fund TSA. Republicans rejected all of it.
Who Loses
It’s the travelers stuck in endless security lines at the peak of Spring Break travel. It’s exhausted TSA agents forced to work without pay, doing double duty as more and more employees, understandably, call out of work. It’s the airlines forced to hold flights, leading to a domino effect that will cause delays across the country. And it’s travelers coming into the country whose first interaction will now be with the same trigger-happy losers whose actions have scared off tourists and now threaten the upcoming World Cup. (Which the already decimated tourism industry is counting on for a much needed boost.)
In the DHS funding standoff, TSA is the main pain point. It’s the one arm of the department that most regular people interact with most often. As the wait times at security get longer, and lines snake out onto the sidewalk, it’s regular Americans who are feeling the pain here.
The Pattern Here
We have the complete breakdown of an apolitical agency that performs a basic function for everyone. And we have one party using America’s headache for leverage.
The Republicans are once again holding American’s basic needs hostage in order to extract some completely unrealistic concessions from Democrats. Before it was healthcare, this time it’s the TSA (and FEMA, and the Coast Guard, so you’d better hope there’s no natural disasters or maritime… “excursions” before this is over.) How will they inconvenience us next for political gain?
Bottom Line
This could all be over tomorrow. Congress could fund TSA, agents would get their paychecks and return to work. Delays would disappear. Democrats want to do it. It’s Republicans who refuse to offer a single compromise.
tell me, is it a bad thing when the president of the United States clownfucks his way into an unprovoked, unnecessary and illegal don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran, kills over a hundred schoolgirls, destabilizes the entire Middle East, gets the Strait of Hormuz shut down, creates a global energy and financial crisis, and then, realizing he’s shit the bed royally, tries to lie his way out of it?
lucky us, we’re right in the middle of finding out.
yesterday morning, President Piss-Baby declared that a five-day ceasefire was now in effect, because he’d been having some great peace talks with Iran, very strong, very powerful peace talks, peace talks like few thought possible — maybe the greatest peace talks of all time.
the most important thing you need to know about Donny’s all caps crazypants blithering is that it’s pure, unadulterated horse shit. it’s a fever-swamp hallucination — and very little of it is true.
“No negotiations have been held with the US, and fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” wrote MB Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker.
here’s another clue that Donny doesn’t even have the framework of a concept of a sketch of an outline for a proposal of an almost-a-plan for peace talks: when reporters pressed him for details, he just started pulling numbers out of his flatulent ass.
Kaitlan Collins: “you said there’s many points of agreement with Iran right now.”
Donny: “well, they’re not gonna have a nuclear weapon. that’s number one. number one, two and three. they will never have a nuclear weapon.”
Collins: “they’ve said yes to that?”
Donny: “they agreed to that.”
oh, so Donny is claiming that Iran has agreed to the same deal they’d previously signed with Obama — the one that Donny ripped up eight years ago, because he was jealous of a black man’s accomplishments. awesome.
I love how Donny goes from ‘many’ to ‘fifteen’ as he struggles to come up with a plausible story. and ‘no nuclear weapons’ isn’t just the first point — it’s also the second. no, wait, it’s the third point as well. yeah, that’s the ticket.
watching Dear Leader try improvise numbers on the spot is like watching a chimpanzee play with a live hand grenade. you know it’s going to end badly, but you can’t look away.
I guess Donny used ‘fifteen’ because ‘fifty-seven’ was already taken.
reporter: “who is Steve Witkoff speaking with in Iran?”
Donny: “a top— a top person. don’t forget, we wiped out the leadership, phase one, phase two and largely phase three. but we’re dealing with the man who I believe is— the— most respected and the leader, uh, it’s a little tough. they’ve wiped out— we’ve wiped out everybody.”
reporter: “the Supreme Leader?”
Donny: “no, not the Supreme Leader. we don’t— well nobody’s ever— nobody heard of the second Supreme Leader, the son. nobody— we have not heard from the son. every once in a while you’ll see a statement made but we haven’t had— we don’t know if he’s living. but the people that seem to be running it, and they seem that based on— really fact, because things they’ve said have taken place. I don’t want him to be killed. okay? I don’t want him to be killed.”
I’m sorry, what the fuck? Donny doesn’t want to identify the ‘top person’ he’s been talking to, because they’ll end up being killed? by who? his own government? how does that even make sense?
but Donny will swear up and down that this ‘top person’ really does exist. you don’t know him, though. he lives up in Canada.
and did you catch who Donny’s point-man is in these talks? oh great, Stevie Shitkoff is involved — and not just Shitkoff, but Donny’s over-leveraged and under-qualified son-in-law Jared Kushner as well.
with the Moron Twins on the case, what could possibly go wrong?
Barak Ravid of Axios later reported that Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—both freelancers who have financial ties to the Middle East—rather than the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have sent messages to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, through Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where intermediaries are trying to set up a call between U.S. and Iranian negotiators. Ghalibaf is a close associate of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
so wait — these two numbskulls have been messaging complete randos, hoping and waiting to hear back from someone, anyone? and Donny’s conflated that into ‘good and productive conversations’ with a ‘top person’?
holy fucking shit.
it cannot be overstated just how fucking stupid this all is.
no one could have predicted that a don’t-yo-dare-call-it-a-war that was cooked up by fuckwits and executed from the dining of one of Donny’s vermin-infested golf motels would go so badly.
and now that shit has gone spectacularly sideways, as the markets crater and the price of a barrel of crude goes fuckity-zoom, Donny has no choice but to find a way to TACO out of it, declare victory, and brag that he meant to do that.
dear sweet lord, it’s all so fucking bone-crushingly moronic — and none of it was necessary.
“No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.”
person or persons unknown made a fucking killing in the market — and the only way they could have pulled this off was by having insider knowledge of what was Donny was about to announce.
At around 6:50 a.m. in New York, S&P 500 e-Mini futures trading on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated jump in volume, breaking from an otherwise subdued premarket backdrop. With thin liquidity typical of early trading hours, the sudden burst stood out as one of the largest volume moments of the session up to that point.
it’s really too bad that Congress isn’t alive to see this, because this is exactly the kind of shit they should be investigating.
it’s just one more instance of naked corruption to be thrown atop the giant shitpile of corruption that goes on every day in Dear Leader’s White House. everything these goniffs do is engineered to shovel more money into the pockets of Donny, his family, and his cronies.
how much moolah did Preznit Fuckwit make off his own conveniently-timed announcement of his fictitious peace talks?
what a fucking lunatic. who even thinks like this?
I know exactly what’s going on with Donny’s desire to whale the tar out of the King of Rock and Roll. it’s pure jealousy on his part — because there was one president who really did get to meet Elvis: Richard Nixon.
On December 21, 1970, Elvis Presley paid a visit to President Richard M. Nixon at the White House in Washington, D.C. The meeting was initiated by Presley, who wrote Nixon a six-page letter requesting a visit with the President and suggesting that he be made a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
oh, and while he was there in the Oval Office, Elvis gave Tricky Dick a gun — as will happen when everyone in the story is a certified weirdo.
how fucking hilarious is it that Elvis wanted to be a ‘Federal Agent-at-Large’ in charge of ‘dangerous drugs’? that’s like making Donny a Federal Agent In Charge of Not Bankrupting Casinos.
hanging on the wall in the White House gallery is a photo of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands. Donny probably walks past that photo every day — and I’m sure it kills him that Nixon got to meet Elvis, and he never will.
hey, you know who else got to walk past that photo?
yes, we get it, Jeff. you got invited to the Biden White House. stop showing off.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
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Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash
A Message to the Would-Be King…
We see that you’ve declared yet another war this week.
This time, you haven’t viciously attacked some distant nation whose people you’ve bombed without cause, as a reckless and deadly act of distraction.
This time, you haven’t launched a violent campaign against brown-skinned human beings, whose dehumanization you’ve trafficked in for over a decade.
This time, you haven’t brought relentless trauma to survivors of the predators and rapists, among whose numbers you find yourself.
This time, you haven’t marshaled a savage offensive on the electoral process, or trans kids, or women’s rights, or environmental protections alone.
No, this time, you’ve declared war on all of us: the Radical Left.
You see, we know it isn’t merely a political party that you’re threatened by, trying to silence, consumed with hatred for, and seeking to eradicate—it’s the American people.
It’s those of us who stand in your way; those whose knees refuse to bow and whose mouths will not regurgitate the curated praise of sycophants and cult members that you bathe your eggshell ego in.
It’s students of history who know a failing, flailing wannabe dictator in a death spiral when they see one, and who have no interest in kissing the ring, shutting our mouths, or quietly complying.
It’s people of conscience who’ve courageously served, fought, bled, and died for this nation to defeat fascism on foreign shores, and who damn well aren’t going to allow it to thrive here.
It’s generations of activists and allies who decades ago braved water cannons, beatings, and arrests so that every human being could be afforded the dignity they deserve, and that you would deny them.
It’s people of true and abiding faith who refuse to allow you to make a mockery of a God you have never sought, a Jesus you have contempt for, and a religion you drape yourself in to cover your wickedness.
It’s human beings of every pigmentation, orientation, nation of origin, religious tradition, and political affiliation who will not allow a Temu authoritarian to write the epitaph for our 250-year republic.
We are all the Radical Left.
And you, you teetering, jittery lame duck, dollar store despot, have declared war on all decent, law-abiding people here, and we’re to tell you that you cannot win.
You are the enemy of the people, of We The People,” the fierce, unwieldy multitude whose presence here is your greatest remaining obstacle.
And so we declare war on you.
You’ll see us gather by the millions this weekend, filling city streets, highway overpasses, city parks, parking lots, and neighborhood sidewalks, declaring our collective opposition. We will stand together as a defiant army of sustained resistance, unlike anything this nation has ever witnessed.
But rest assured, we’ll be there well after the sun sets on that day.
We will be in our neighborhoods, outnumbering the masked monsters you deploy to terrorize and brutalize.
We will be in our communities, feeding, clothing, and caring for one another, protecting the most vulnerable whom you so gladly prey upon.
We’ll be organizing in our communities to support candidates, monitor the polls, and protect people whose voices you are working so hard to silence.
We’ll be relentlessly hounding the compromised lawmakers and public servants who would discard their oaths and abdicate their responsibilities just to please you.
We’ll be everywhere your cultic disciples show up to let them know that they are part of a miserable minority that will not prevail.
And believe us when we tell you that we will defeat you and we will outlast you.
When you leave the office or this planet, whichever comes first, we will be here to rebuild what you have broken, to heal all that you have injured, to tear your name from every place you have defiled with it, and to course-correct from the greatest collective error in our nation’s history.
And so today, we, the Radical Left, raise a defiant middle finger, we spit on the ground in front of you, we defy your will, and we piss on your crown.
The King is already dead.
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In just over a year, things didn’t just change. They distorted.
Not all at once, not in a single moment you could point to and say, there, that’s when it broke, it was slower than that, more insidious, like something bending just slightly out of place over and over again until one day you look around and realize nothing sits where it used to, and the strangest part is not the chaos itself, it is the way it is being presented back to us as normal, as reasonable, as something we are supposed to adjust to without question.
We are living through a time where leaders stand at podiums and speak about God while starting wars that leave children buried under rubble. They invoke faith while funding violence. They talk about sacrifice, but the sacrifice is never theirs.
It is always yours. It is always the people choosing between groceries and rent, the people watching gas prices climb while being told to be patient, to understand the bigger picture, to do their part. It is always the families absorbing the cost of decisions they never made, while those same leaders frame rising costs as necessary, as unavoidable, as the price of something bigger, even as billions continue to move freely through a system that somehow always has room for excess.
People are being told to tighten their budgets and brace for impact, told to accept higher costs as necessary, while the Pentagon spends tens of billions in a single month, with millions going not just to defense but to luxury food, lobster and crab, steak, furniture, electronics, even items that signal comfort and status rather than necessity, a level of spending that makes it painfully clear that austerity is not a shared condition, it is something imposed, all while it is burning through roughly a billion dollars a day on a senseless war.
At the same time, people are calculating groceries down to the dollar and watching their cost of living climb in real time, while those in power continue to move through private golf courses, luxury properties, political fundraisers, and expansion projects like ballrooms, operating inside a world that remains untouched by the consequences they are asking everyone else to absorb.
So when they stand there and talk about sacrifice, what they mean is your sacrifice. When they talk about endurance, what they mean is your endurance. When they tell you to bear the cost, what they mean is that the cost will not be theirs. They say it with a straight face. They say it while looking directly into the camera, as if the disconnect is not obvious, as if we cannot see the gap between what they preach and how they live, as if invoking God somehow cleanses the cruelty of what they are doing.
That is the part that unsettles something deep in the body, because it is not just policy and it is not just economics. It is the moral inversion of it all, the rewriting of right and wrong in real time, where greed calls itself strength, where cruelty calls itself practicality, and where indifference calls itself leadership.
If you have found yourself feeling like you are losing your grip on reality, like you are constantly trying to reconcile what you know to be true with what you are being told is true, that is not a failure in you, that is your awareness working exactly as it should, this moment has demanded something unnatural from people, it has asked you to watch suffering and call it strategy, to watch excess and call it success, to watch hypocrisy dressed up as righteousness and pretend not to notice, it has asked you to go numb.
And a lot of people have. You can see it and you can feel it, the quiet checking out, the “this is just how things are now,” the slow acceptance of things that not long ago would have stopped us in our tracks, but not everyone has gone there, there are still people who see clearly.
There is still something in people that resists, and you can see it in the anger that will not settle, in the discomfort that will not go away, in that persistent feeling that something is wrong even when the noise is telling you everything is fine, and that is not weakness and that is not overreaction, that is the part of you that still recognizes truth when it sees it, and that matters more than anything right now.
What is happening is not just political, it is not just about one administration or one set of policies, it is about the normalization of a way of thinking that separates power from consequence, that allows people to make decisions that reshape millions of lives while remaining untouched by the outcomes of those decisions, it is about a system where those in charge can tell you to endure hardship while actively insulating themselves from it, and then call that leadership, call it necessary, and somehow call it good.
There is a kind of psychological strain that comes from living inside that contradiction every day, from seeing clearly and being told not to trust what you see, from feeling deeply and being told you are overreacting, from watching people justify things that should never need justification. It wears on you. It makes time feel strange and reality feel unstable. But here is the truth that I think a lot of people need to hear right now.
If you feel disoriented, it is because you are paying attention. If you feel angry, it is because something in you still knows what should not be accepted. If you feel like the world has been turned upside down, it is because in many ways it has, and choosing not to adapt to that upside-down version of reality is not a failure, it is clarity.
There is power in refusing to normalize what should not be normal. There is power in holding onto your sense of right and wrong, even when it is inconvenient, even when it isolates you, even when it makes you the uncomfortable voice in the room, because that discomfort is honest, and honesty is becoming rarer by the day.
We are living in a time where people are being asked, very quietly and very consistently, to trade their humanity for comfort, to look away just enough to make it easier to function, to accept just enough to avoid conflict, and every time someone refuses to do that, it matters, every time someone says no, this is not okay, it matters, every time someone feels the weight of what is happening instead of numbing it out, it matters, that is how reality holds, not through the loudest voices and not through the people in power, but through the people who refuse to let what is happening rewrite their understanding of what is right.
So if this past year has left you feeling like something is off, like things do not add up, like the world is asking you to accept something you cannot accept, hold onto that, because that feeling is not confusion, it is recognition, and as long as that recognition is still there, as long as there are people who can still see clearly, still feel deeply, and still question what they are being told, this is not over.
Not even close.
A Note From Me:
I hope this helped put words to something you may have been feeling but couldn’t quite name, that quiet, persistent sense that something is off, that things don’t quite add up, that what you are being told does not fully align with what you are seeing and feeling in your own body. That subtle dissonance, the moments where you pause and question if it’s just you, if you’re overthinking it, if you’re the only one noticing, that is not something imagined. It is something many people are carrying, often silently, often without the language to say it out loud. You are not alone in that.
I try to write pieces like this because what we are living through is not just political, it is emotional, it is disorienting, and it is hard to make sense of in real time. I try to put language to that feeling, while also breaking down what is actually happening so we are not just feeling it, but understanding it. The context, the research, the clarity, and also the anger, the real, human anger that comes from watching things that should not be happening, happen anyway.
But I like it. One question, however: who has a lot in a metropolitan area that can accommodate a house of that width?
As I’ve written before, when I was a wee thing I used to pour over my dad’s architectural plan books, and houses like this used to—and continue to—fire my imagination.
“Mac OS X is the future of the Mac, and we hope it will delight our customers with its unrivaled power and ease of use,” said Steve Jobs, in 2001. “The Public Beta has generated incredible feedback and support from Mac users and developers, which has helped us to make Mac OS X the most advanced operating system ever.”
Mac OS X was a next-generation, UNIX-based operating system for the Mac, succeeding the classic Mac OS operating system. It ushered in Apple’s iconic “Aqua” interface, the Dock, an improved Finder app with hierarchical navigation, and more.
“Mac OS X is the most important software from Apple since the original Macintosh operating system in 1984 that revolutionized the entire industry,” said Jobs.
In the U.S., Mac OS X was priced at $129. Apple stopped charging for macOS releases in 2013, when OS X Mavericks was released free of charge.
Mac OS X was renamed to OS X in 2012 and to macOS in 2016:
Mac OS X 10.0 (2001): “Cheetah”
Mac OS X 10.1 (2001): “Puma”
Mac OS X 10.2 (2002): Jaguar
Mac OS X 10.3 (2003): Panther
Mac OS X 10.4 (2005): Tiger
Mac OS X 10.5 (2007): Leopard
Mac OS X 10.6 (2009): Snow Leopard
Mac OS X 10.7 (2011): Lion
OS X 10.8 (2012): Mountain Lion
OS X 10.9 (2013): Mavericks
OS X 10.10 (2014): Yosemite
OS X 10.11 (2015): El Capitan
macOS 10.12 (2016): Sierra
macOS 10.13 (2017): High Sierra
macOS 10.14 (2018): Mojave
macOS 10.15 (2019): Catalina
macOS 11 (2020): Big Sur
macOS 12 (2021): Monterey
macOS 13 (2022): Ventura
macOS 14 (2023): Sonoma
macOS 15 (2024): Sequoia
macOS 26 (2025): Tahoe
Mac OS X was a big part of Apple’s renaissance, which began when Jobs returned to the company in the late 1990s. Big hits in those first few years after his return included the iMac in 1998, the iBook in 1999, and Mac OS X and the iPod in 2001. In this sense, it is poetic that this milestone comes just a week ahead of Apple’s 50th anniversary.
I just can’t with this one. I loveFaith, Listen Without Prejudice, and even most of Patience, but there’s nothing on this disc that reaches out and grabs me.
I picked up this beauty a couple months ago, and despite it working without issue at first, it soon started skipping or hanging during playback. I knew this was most likely a simple clean-n-lube, but considering my demonstrated lack of technical expertise, I thought it best to leave that task in the hands of an expert. To that end I sent it off to Shawn in Pennsylvania. I knew from past experience he’d get it back in top shape, and sure enough he did. (Turns out it wasn’t just a clean-n-lube as I’d suspected. He needed to replace the laser; thankfully he had spares on hand and it fixed the problem completely.)
Robert Mueller passed away yesterday. Unfortunately for him he’ll be best remembered for leading a historically crucial investigation into how Donald Trump and Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, only for his investigation to ultimately go nowhere. But before that, Mueller was a strong FBI Director, and before that he was a decorated Vietnam combat veteran. You can easily criticize his work later in life, but you’d be hard pressed to criticize his character or his patriotism. And if you were stupid enough to do such a thing on the day Mueller died, you’d make yourself look unbelievably bad.
That’s why, when someone sent a supposed screenshot yesterday of Donald Trump responding to Robert Mueller’s passing with “Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” I initially assumed it was a fake. But then I went to Trump’s Truth Social site, and sure enough, he actually posted that. Trump actually said “I’m glad he’s dead.” In those exact words. In public. While sitting in the White House. Which he recently partially bulldozed.
If it’s starting to feel like there are no words to describe Trump’s behavior these days, that’s because there really are no words. Except maybe one: asshole. Yes, it’s crude. It’s an easy cheap shot. But how else can one possibly describe the manner in which Trump is now behaving? Yes, he has severe dementia. Yes, he’s increasingly angry at the world because he appears to be near death himself. And yes, he’s a corrupt and evil person who’s done more damage than anyone in American history. But Trump is also something on top of all that. He’s an asshole. Here’s the thing though.
What we’re seeing over the past month or two seems to be new territory even for Trump. When another decorated Vietnam combat veteran John McCain passed away several years ago, Trump initially refused to lower the White House flag to half mast. And when the great Rob Reiner was murdered a few months back, Trump suggested Reiner was to blame for his own death. These were hideous, spiteful, tasteless reactions to the deaths of broadly respected people. But at the time, Trump didn’t go so far as to say “I’m glad John McCain is dead” or “I’m glad Rob Reiner is dead.”
This is a whole new level of disgustingness from an individual who already long ago firmly established himself as one of the most disgusting people in history. As Donald Trump’s cognitive problems and physical health continue to bring him closer to his end, his behavior has become more distasteful than ever. It’s not going to get better. Perhaps deep down Trump knows that when he himself succumbs to his failing health before too much longer, billions of people are indeed going to say “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” And they’ll have more than earned the right to say it.
Thankfully, I can still sip and swallow coffee; other liquids, not so much.
I have to say that Mishima is probably one of Glass’ most underrated works. I’ve never seen the film, but to this day (and it’s been in my collection since the early 00’s) it gives me chills.
