Latest posts
-
U.S. Navy Goes Tanker Shopping and Calls It Sanctions Enforcement
One part maritime choke point, one part reality show, and one part global oil market swallowing hard. The Trump administration is preparing more at-sea seizures of oil tankers near Venezuela, and it is doing it with the kind of confident swagger that usually shows up right before someone asks, quietly, what the exit plan is.
-
The Federal Reserve Just Handed You a Discount Coupon for a Store That Is On Fire
Jerome Powell is the tired referee in a game where the scoreboard is broken, the players are cheating, and the owner is screaming from the luxury box to let the home team win or else. If you want to understand the current state of the American economy, you do not need to look at a
-
The Hunt for Red October, But Stupid: How a Lying Tanker Became the Star of the Trump’s New Action Franchise
The scene was practically storyboarded for a campaign ad before the first rotor blade chopped the Caribbean air. It had the granular, high-definition aesthetic of a Michael Bay movie that went straight to streaming, complete with the requisite color grading that makes the ocean look dangerously teal and the American military hardware look like the
-
The Repo Man Wears a MAGA Hat: Trump Administration Decides That the Only Thing Trickling Down is Interest
The government has decided that the biggest threat to the American economy is a twenty-six-year-old with a degree in graphic design and an extra two hundred dollars a month. There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a generation when they realize the safety net was actually a trap door. For the last
-
The Red Hat Welfare State: Trump’s $12 Billion “Bridge” Is Just a Toll Road You Paid For Twice
Welcome to the Golden Age of Conservative Socialism, where the government is the problem unless you own a tractor, in which case the government is a limitless ATM. There is a specific, bitter irony that settles in when you watch a political movement dedicated to “free markets” and “personal responsibility” suddenly decide that the federal
-
Trump Affordability Hoax: Welcome to the Carnival of Economic Gaslighting Where the Cotton Candy Costs a Mortgage
When the President tells you the price of eggs is down, but your receipt says you just took out a second mortgage for an omelet, you are living in the Golden Age of the Grift. On Tuesday night, the traveling circus of the forty-seventh presidency descended upon Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, bringing with it the familiar
-
The Great AI Garage Sale: Why We Are Selling Our Brains to China for Store Credit
The United States has decided that the best way to win the arms race of the twenty-first century is to act as the premium supplier for the opposing team. If you have been paying attention to the frantic, breathless security briefings coming out of Washington for the last three years, you know the script. We
-
The Golden Globes: Where We Pretend to Care About Art While Worshiping at the Altar of Marketing Spend
Paul Thomas Anderson wins the math, but Wicked won the culture, and my heart belongs to a movie about kicking. The Golden Globes have always been the drunk uncle of the awards season family reunion. They are loud, occasionally embarrassing, and usually smell faintly of desperate bribery. But this year, the nominations announcement felt less
-
Jasmine Crockett for Senate: The Only Socialist in Texas is the Guy Writing Checks to Elon Musk
They are going to call Jasmine Crockett a socialist.1 Of course they are. In the modern Republican lexicon, “socialist” is just a synonym for “person I am afraid of,” and right now, there is nobody the Texas GOP fears more than the Congresswoman from Dallas who treats a committee hearing like a cross-examination and a
-
Trump’s $12 Billion Apology Note to Farmers Is Signed With Your Credit Card
The arsonist has returned to the scene of the crime, not to put out the fire, but to sell the victims a very expensive glass of water. On Monday, the political circus will descend upon Washington with the heavy, frantic energy of a infomercial host realizing his product is defective. President Trump, flanked by a