A Ceasefire, Maybe, for a Moment

Is the world a safer place? Nah.

Writing an analysis of the Iran-Israel war is a challenge because so much of what we think we know may be based on or obscuring something we don’t know. My detailed accounting of what actually happened over the weekend must be cast aside as yet another unexpected development occurs.

The purported ceasefire announced on social media was obviously made before attention was paid to the belligerent actions of the combatants already in progress. It’s anybody’s guess how long or if it will hold.

The one thing that can be truthfully asserted is the drive of President Trump to assert his ego into the conflict. A cessation of hostilities is what is being promised, even though the underlying causes have been only temporarily set aside.

The promise of a Nobel Peace prize and the enablement of the buffoonery soon to come on the world stage is what peace means to Trump.

I sincerely hope that no more war is in order, for the sake of the people who won’t get killed and the hatred that won’t be forthcoming. However, given the nature of all the political leaders involved, chances of continuing conflict remain high. Authoritarians need emergencies to retain and or expand their control.

For the US, the military industrial complex has fed itself on the teat of Israel for too long. And, as both the B2 bombing and the ceasefire announcement show, we have a President who can’t be bothered with the details as long as he gets the credit.

Trump has damaged a lot of things in the American ethos and culture. But the most damaging is making hate, rudeness, crassness, mocking disabled people, harassing people of color, and lying normal. His newly (self) enhanced status may well become the lever for making the rest of his dark vision a reality.

For Iran, whose people would love to be freed from the current theocracy, the issue of national pride is at stake. The most recent military assaults have strengthened the hands of hardliners in government. An enfeebled Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has already transferred some powers to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, soon to be led by the (younger) survivors of the Israeli targeting of senior leaders.

There is the chance that Iran takes final steps following these attacks to actually build a nuclear weapon or dirty conventional explosives capable of dispersing radioactive particles. Regardless, it’s a good bet that the materials and expertise surviving the US and Israeli attacks will be a problem in the future. Iran’s relationships with China and Russia will ensure the role the country has played in keeping Sunni-run nations on edge.

For Israel, three words: Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. In their quest to rule over the Palestinians, the Netanyahu government has taken their nation’s national identity to a most dangerous place–becoming a mirror of what they started out opposing. It has become part of the authoritarian anti-democratic movement currently on the ascent in advanced industrial countries.

The question of a two-state solution is settled; it will never happen, especially as other regimes in the neighborhood have become reliant on wealth as the ultimate arbiter of status and power. Deprived of property, any semblance of political power, and all-too-often despised by their would-be defenders, the Palestinians are toast. For now.

The memories and realities of the repression they will suffer as a subjugated people are the seeds of hostilities yet to come. Israel cannot/will not offer Palestinians a path out of despair and into hope, so the future is bleak.

Is the world a safer place? Nah. And I do think that non-state actors will be eager to pull off the terror attack that shatters the current political order.

The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise via McMansion Hell on Medium

• It is a common misconception that the goal of Trump and other McMansion peddlers is to replicate in any way an architectural style from the past with any kind of fidelity, or that the true comedy lies in how badly this fails. In fact, there’s nothing funny about any of this, though the juxtaposition of extremely cheap commodities with the intention to communicate having lots of money is decidedly ironic. Trump’s margents are an architectural representation of the world he inherited in the 20th and 21st century, as much as the world he wishes to make: a world of paternalism and rule by mob, kingly, sure, but also a world of cheap artifice fabricated in miserable conditions soon to be imported from neoliberalism’s imperialist proving grounds into the domicile, with us footing the tariffs. In short, and to our detriment, Regional Car Dealership Rococo is underwritten by a politics as impoverishing as its imagery.

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Senate Parliamentarian Rules Public Lands Sale Can't Be Included In Budget Reconciliation by Wes Siler at Wes Siler’s Newsletter

• The Parliamentarian ruling coincides with an announcement from agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins that the USDA plans to revive efforts from the first Trump administration to eliminate the Roadless Rule, which protects 59 million of our national forest system’s most pristine acres from development.

• Separately, the administration has also recently launched an all-out assault on the Antiquities Act, which is the legislation authorizing presidents to establish national monuments, and is working to break the National Park Service in an effort to privatize park operations and sell some national parks.

• Striking the land sell-off from the budget package won’t stop Republican lawmakers from continuing attempts to steal our land. The Department of Interior and USDA can sell parcels of up to 2,500 acres without mandated congressional approval, a measure interior secretary Doug Burgum has hinted he may use.

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Up With Zohran by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work

• Is it possible to have one nice thing? We shall see. Somehow Zohran’s penetration into the public consciousness has peaked exactly, on the very day, of the election, with the polls drawing even at the last moment, so that anything seems possible. Everyone who believes that it is possible for politics to suck less will be smashed with a wave of either euphoria or crushing cynicism very soon.

• But when people believe in things, they work. As the rally dispersed, one supporter, a pregnant woman with a white Zohran t-shirt hugging her belly, strode down Dyckman with a fistful of fliers. She wasn’t done yet. She went straight up to every person on the street she walked by—aggressively, I must say—thrusting a flier into their hands, berating them in Spanish to go vote. “No clasifique a Cuomo!” she would declare. Old men sitting on folding chairs in the shade would shrink back a bit, and accept the flier, looking a little intimidated. “Vota por Mamdani! Zohran Mamdani!” Then she would beeline to the next person on the sidewalk who was not fast enough to dodge her. There was no escape from her zeal. Because it was real. Andrew Cuomo cannot buy that.

• Zohran’s staff discussed having him take the train down to his next campaign stop, but vetoed the idea— “The subway would be a whole thing.” The rest of us trudged back to the 1 train. The air conditioning was broken again. Among the sweating crowd was a woman in a blue “Hot Girls for Zohran” shirt. She was hot, it’s true. But so were we all. And so can we all be. All we have to do is believe.