Reflections from the Heart of the Empire: Clowns on the Road to Mordor

Plus a pair of music-loving bears

• Tucker Carlson thinks Americans who fought for Ukraine should lose their citizenship. OK, Tucker, then what about Americans who genocide for Israel? Or contribute? Or cheer for? Where does this end? Just who the fuck decides?

  • I’m leery of advocating for anyone losing their citizenship myself. That is the start of a road which leads to very dark places indeed.

    

• According to multiple reports, Russia now controls all of the land east of Dnepr River from about Dnepropetrovsk south.

• Ukraine’s head of military intelligence said that Ukraine needs a ceasefire by no later than the end of this year, and probably sooner.

• Donald Trump said of immigrant farmworkers(and no doubt meatpackers), standing next to Homeland Suppression Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Des Moines,

If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people in some way, I think Kristi was just going to have to say, ‘that’s good, right?’ Ya know we’re going to be good with it. Because we don’t want to do it where we take all the workers off the farms. We want the farms to do great like they are doing right now.

• Fun fact: At least 42% of farmworkers in the United States are migrant workers.

  • Another fun fact: They tend not to show up for work when they’re scared masked ICE thugs might scoop them up.

    • Yet another fun fact: If they stay scared, there could actually be food shortages in this country. I’m sure some oligarch mentioned this to Trump, which is why he is hinting ICE is going to leave those workers alone.

• A short time later, also in Iowa, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins was asked about Trump’s comments and replied there was no need for amnesty for farmworkers because there are 34 million able-bodied Americans on Medicaid who can do the work.

  • A spokesman for the Department denied subsequent reports her official portrait in Federal offices had been replaced by the one below:

• Two French women, a journalist and a spiritual medium to be exact, were cleared of defamation charges filed against them by French First Transwoman Brigitte Macron because the truth is an affirmative defense, even in a French court. Who knew?

  • And Candace Owens scores again.

    

  • I’m envious of French satirists right now. Go get, er, pick your pronoun, my distant cousins, and

    

• Former podcaster turned Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is reportedly enraged at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Epstein Files clusterfuck and refusing go to work so long as she is AG.

  • Bongino should be hoping he will resign. The sooner he gets away from Trump, the better chance he has of keeping some of his former audience if he goes back to podcasting. The grift must flow.

    • He’s still a cravenly poltroon for not telling us the truth, though, unlike this guy,

• Two reasons why all those people died in the Texas flash floods are definitely corruption and overdevelopment. Turns out FEMA removed most of Camp Mystic’s buildings from the old flood plain map so that the camp could expand because capitalism requires expansion.

• IOW, they knew the area where new cabins were built was prone to flooding, and just redrew the map so they were no longer in the flood zone. Any parent looking at a new map would have thought their child was safe.

• ICE raided a marijuana greenhouse in San Francisco, and one 57 year old migrant fell off the roof during the chaos and subsequently died. I feel SO much safer now.

  

• A Martian rock is to be sold at auction for at least $2 million. What a wonderful development! It means that trickle-down economics is working exactly as it was intended.

  

• Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced an amendment to cut $500 million in aid to the genocidal apartheid state occupying Palestine, which means she’s not afraid of AIPAC running someone against her.

  • This could not have happened two Julys ago.

• Israeli settlers beat an American citizen to death. Israel delenda est.

• The Freedom Flotilla has not given up. The Handala sets sail from Sicily today in another defiant attempt to break the genocidal Israeli blockade of Gaza. It’s nice to see something good in the world happen on my birthday.

  

• Donald Trump announced new 30% tariffs on both the EU and Mexico effective August 1. Yeah, that will really curb inflation.

• Update on that buck in Ohio with the bird feeder stuck in his antlers: Authorities have given up on trying to catch him. They say it’s not doing any harm and will eventually fall off on its own.

  • I think the deer is just in better shape than the Mentor-on-the-Lake Police, myself. They have good eateries up there.

• Finally, and more cheerfully by popular request, a pair of black bears decided to that they should be allowed into Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado to see Into the Wild Tour 2025. No bears or humans were harmed in the production of this photo:

  

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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