Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Or maybe the old-fashioned term: “conquest”

The NY Times calls it “destroy and deal.” But it’s nothing new.

Soon after President Trump joined Israel in launching a new war against Iran, an A.I. video featuring Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated online.

Clad in a black turban and robe, he presides over an Iranian military parade, speaks at a mosque and gazes over the Tehran skyline. The caption: “Marco Rubio realizing he’s the new Supreme Leader of Iran.” Though intended as satire, the video crystallizes a pivotal moment for Mr. Rubio.

Throughout his long political career, Mr. Rubio has advocated toppling governments hostile to the United States. He was once considered so ideologically out of step with Mr. Trump that many officials and politicians doubted he would last a year in the administration. But today, Mr. Rubio is at the helm of Mr. Trump’s aggressive campaigns to reshape the governments of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and beyond.

The U.S. president, who promised to end American wars, is now embracing the policies backed by Mr. Rubio and the secretary’s ideological compatriots, dismaying supporters who thought Mr. Trump had ushered in a new era of military restraint.

But Mr. Rubio is not trying to convert Mr. Trump to George W. Bush-era neoconservatism, which sought to remold other nations’ political systems, sometimes with military force, American officials and analysts say. Instead, he seems to be pursuing a new approach built on power free of principle. It is a merger of neoconservatism with Mr. Trump’s transactionalism, and it amounts to using U.S. military and economic power to turn authoritarian countries into client states.

It is regime compliance rather than regime change, a doctrine of destroy and deal.

Traditional neoconservatives saw promoting democracy and doing nation-building in the world as a moral good, even if it was done at gunpoint. And they viewed those as a means of transforming adversaries wholesale and extending American influence by spreading ideas. The Trump administration’s approach, so far, leaves internal politics to the rival nations as long as they show obeisance.

As long as they show obeisance.

Yeah, this kind of thing has been done since time began. It’s nothing new. It’s uncivilized and monumentally dangerous for us — and the rest of the world.

After WWII it was understood that psychopaths like Trump and Rubio could not be in charge of any civilized country, the United States included. After all, we are not the only country with world destroying nuclear weapons although we have more of them than anyone else. And because Trump is tearing up the existing world order with nothing but chaos and violence to replace it, there will be many more before long. The way things are going, the catastrophic decision to launch one will be aimed at us.

I guess it could be worse. He could be reading entrails or something. But now that I think about it, the entrails would probably have better judgement.

Ivanka’s beloved Jared is making a killing:

Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region. Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration.

PIF, which is already the largest and earliest investor in Affinity, invested $2 billion soon after the first Trump administration ended. As part of that deal, the Saudis must be given the first chance to invest during any subsequent attempts by Affinity to raise funds, the two people said. Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more, the people said.

Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.

The chutzpah is overwhelming. We know how intimately involved he’s been with every foreign policy issue. And he’s been everywhere. One example:

In January, Mr. Kushner traveled to Davos, Switzerland, as part of the official U.S. delegation at the World Economic Forum, where he unveiled the Trump administration’s plan for a “New Gaza.”

While at Davos, Kushner also discussed his plans to raise billions in new investments for Affinity in private meetings with international business leaders, two people with knowledge of the conversations said.

As recently as December 2024, Mr. Kushner suggested that he would not seek more money for Affinity during Mr. Trump’s second term. That month, he told the podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy that he would “pre-emptively try to avoid any conflicts.”

“We don’t have to raise capital for the next four years,” Mr. Kushner added.

That appears to have changed. In materials provided to potential investors this year and reviewed by The New York Times, Affinity indicated that more than three-quarters of the roughly $5 billion it had raised since its founding had already been spent on investments in companies such as Phoenix Financial, an Israeli insurer, and Revolut, a financial technology start-up.

I wonder what Hunter Biden’s up to these days?

We’re spending 2 billion a day on this war. At the same time:

Egg prices aren’t bad so it’s all good. But with the gas prices going through the roof, I’d guess the eggs will go up too. That’s how this usually works, anyway.

Meanwhile, we have a medical research system in free fall. The good news is that RFK Jr and some wellness influencers are ready to help us with great advice about how to be healthy by drinking beef tallow and using cod liver oil to cure measles. We’re going to be so healthy that we won’t even need vaccines because we’ll be impervious to all disease. So that’s good.

Carry on.

Daniel Dale from last year:

President Donald Trump likes to portray himself as a visionary, someone who sees important things before others. Trump has been claiming for the last decade that in a book he published the year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he warned the authorities that they needed to deal with Osama bin Laden

Trump’s claim is false. His 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden. His tale about the book’s nonexistent warning was conclusively debunked in 2015. CNN published another debunking when he revived the tale in 2019.

But the president repeated it once again on Sunday – to a crowd of sailors celebrating the 250th birthday of the US Navy.

This time, Trump delivered the phony narrative after saying history wouldn’t forget how it was Navy Seals who killed bin Laden (in 2011 under then-President Barack Obama, a frequent target of Trump criticism). Trump added, in an apparent ad-lib, “And please remember, I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago,” then corrected himself and said, “One year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’ And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true.”

How many people in our country think this is normal now? Or this?

Eugenics. Excursions. Shoe sizes.

Somebody take away President Dementia’s guys keys before he gets anyone else killed. He went on a genetics ramble about immigrants on Friday with “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade. He was commenting on recent terrorist attacks (The New Republic):

“There’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly your genetics, it’s one of those problems, Brian,” Trump said. “It’s a terrible thing, and it happens, it happens too often.”

Critics slammed Trump’s comment as blatantly racist and speculated that the president might admire more about Adolf Hitler than just his economic and political machinations.  

“Trump is an old school eugenicist nativist. He actually is fine with immigrants as long as they have the right ‘genes,’” David J. Bier, director of immigration for the Cato Institute, wrote on X. “This argument was the basis of the creation of the restrictive US immigration system 100 years ago.”

“He’s a white supremacist. He doesn’t hide it,” posts Mehdi Hasan.

Worse. He’s the president of the United States, launching wars, and proudly killing people.

Everyone around him can see that grandpa has gone around the bend. No one has the guts to do anything about it. Or even to wear shoes that fit.

Drink up. It’s the weekend.

Our tech overlords decree it

Palantir CEO Alex Karp spoke with CNBC on Thursday. On Iran, the Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic (over killer robots), and tech giants’ vision for America’s A.I.-fueled future.

Karp warns that the technology is incredibly disruptive to the economic and political lives of a large swath of mostly female and Democratic voters and transfer their power to vocationally trained, mostly male voters (quoted in The Ink):

The one thing that I think even now is underestimated by all actors in industry, including in Silicon Valley, is how disruptive these technologies are. If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party space — highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat — and military and working-class people who do not feel supported, and you feel like that… you believe that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.

You cannot… this technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters. And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs from their perspective.

If Karp has ideas about how “we” come to such an agreement, he isn’t saying. These technologies are “dangerous societally,” Karp warns, and the only justification for the mass dislocation they bring that might sell politically is that if we don’t control them militarily our adversaries will. And that would threaten “our ability to be American. ”

While the technologies control friend and foe alike?

 Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman told BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit on Wednesday that “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter.’” But someone will, to be sure, and he/they will sell the sum of human intelligence (that the A.I.’s appropriated for free) back to you. That is, they’ll privatize knowledge like everything else.

What kind of world is that where intelligence become a utility? The Ink asks:

Maybe it’s the one that political scientists Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman have described as “neoroyalism”: a post-everything world vision that Donald Trump and his oligarchic enablers seem to share, under which a new class of kingly rulers own everything and they extract their wealthe from the rest of humanity that simply rents, using whatever they make as they work piecemeal in gig employment. Or they’re warfighters, sacrificing for that kingly vision of nations, whoever’s “rule of law” they happen to fall under.

And subsidized and guaranteed by you, the nuevo poor taxpayer, suggests Gizmodo:

The way Altman is talking, suggesting that intelligence could be a utility, it’s hard not to recall previous comments from him and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar calling on the federal government to essentially guarantee their investments. Friar said she expects a federal “backstop” to guarantee the company will be able to finance its massive and rapidly expanding data center infrastructure. Altman echoed the comments in a separate appearance, stating, “Given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort.”

The execs later walked back the suggestion that the government treats them as “too big to fail,” but it seems like Altman is once again dabbling in that suggestion, albeit less directly. By suggesting intelligence as a “utility,” there is a tacit acknowledgement that it will need to be subsidized by the government, the way other utilities are. He’s just seemingly left out that particular part of his roadmap to the future.

All hail our new tech overlords!

Big Kitten Edition

Apparently, Trump told the G7 leaders that Iran is about to surrender:

President Trump told G7 leaders in a virtual meeting Wednesday that Iran is “about to surrender,” according to three officials from G7 countries briefed on the contents of the call.

• 24 hours later, Iran’s new supreme leader issued his first public statement vowing to keep fighting.

Why it matters: Trump is as confident about the war’s outcome in private as he is in public. But his assessment is colliding with a more complex reality on the ground.

Huzzah. But why would we be doing this if that’s the case? The Wall St. Journal reports:

The Pentagon is moving additional Marines and warships to the Middle East as Iran steps up its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, according to three U.S. officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from U.S. Central Command, responsible for American forces in the Middle East, for an element of an amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit, typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors, the officials said.

The Japan-based USS Tripoli and its attached Marines are now headed for the Middle East, two of the officials said. Marines are already in the Middle East supporting the Iran operation, the officials said.

The move comes as Iran’s attacks on the strait have paralyzed traffic through the strategic waterway, disrupting the global economy, driving up gas prices and posing a major military and political challenge for President Trump. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

He’s just saying whatever comes into his head believing that he can bend reality to his will as he has so many times before. I don’t think it’s going to work in this case but you never know.

The question is why he’d be sending this particular contingent to the Gulf. Guess:

An amphibious ready group and attached Marine expeditionary unit typically consist of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors. An earlier version of this post incorrectly said it typically consists of 5,000 Marines

Yeah. It’s not looking good.

Oh, and if they are deployed they will almost certainly be ordered to commit war crimes:

One of Pete Hegseth’s first actions after taking charge at the Pentagon was to fire top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force—senior officers who the defense secretary said functioned as “roadblocks” to the president’s orders. The former National Guardsman has a history of hostility toward military lawyers and the legal restraints they impose on the use of military might. They are known as judge advocates general. Hegseth calls them “jagoffs.”

This week, Hegseth proposed a “ruthless” overhaul of how the military’s thousands of lawyers in uniform, and their civilian counterparts, are organized, part of his campaign to move from, as he has called it, “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality.” JAGs serve a vital oversight function on issues such as whether drone strikes are aimed at legally justified targets and whether to prosecute adultery. “In some circumstances, the delivery of legal services across the Military Departments has become marked by duplication of effort, ambiguous lines of responsibility, uncertain reporting relationships, and inefficient allocation of legal resources that do not match the command’s priorities,” Hegseth said in a memo, which we reviewed, that announced the plans. He gave the military services 45 days to submit proposed changes to the way that they allocate legal responsibilities to their JAGs and civilian lawyers.

Hegseth couched the review in terms of efficiency and reducing waste and overlap. He said in a video released on the Department of Defense’s X account that JAGs in the future will be responsible for operational and military issues, including the laws of war and matters of criminal justice, and that civilian lawyers will handle more administrative work such as environmental and labor reviews and routine procurement.

But his plans have alarmed many current and former military lawyers, who see the bureaucratic justifications as cover for what they suspect Hegseth really wants to do: reduce the ranks of lawyers, purge internal dissent, and eliminate guardrails designed to restrict the military from carrying out legally dubious orders.

He’s doing this in the middle of a war. I don’t think we need to wonder why.