It’s long been an internet joke to tag something a “first world problem.” Like deciding between the huge number of quality restaurants you and your friends should go to. Or that your new computer arriving means you have to spend time moving all your stuff over. Problems that are nice to have, and don’t actually represent the an actual struggle. Like whether the person who comes in last in a race might be Trans.

As we sit “at war” aka “attacking another country unprovoked” pretty much everything the news is talking about is a first world problem. We’re expanding the war in Iran, oil prices spiking, the stock market dropping, President Trump lying about Iran wanting to negotiate, who’s shorting the oil markets minutes before the Truths get posted? We talk about the impacts of the violence we perpetrate across the globe in mostly local terms. Gas prices are rising, plane tickets increasing due to fuel costs, goods more expensive due to transportation costs (and tariffs, remember tariffs?) and uncertainty rising.

Here there are interviews at the pump, people bemoaning how much it costs them to get to work, or how much their groceries cost. Remember the cost of eggs? Remember when that was a thing we talked about daily? Imagine if we actually experienced the hunger, the inflation, the death and indiscriminate destruction that we’re inflicting on Gaza, Iran, and Cuba, here.

There, they talk about if they will have any food, because the invaders are poisoning the land, the air, and the water with burning oil, or herbicides, or both. There they don’t have jobs anymore because the building has been bombed, or the owner has been killed in an airstrike, or because how do you have a job while the bombs are falling all around you. Your worst day here, is their best day there. We loft the bombs, they catch them.

When the violence happens over there, it’s a war. When the violence happens here, it’s terrorism. Within the first days of our preemptive strikes there, we’d bombed a girls school, killing over 100 children. For those who use imperial units, approximately 10-20 school shootings, or in metric, 2 days of genocide in Gaza. But we could never prevent or pre-empt school shootings here. No investment in mental health, nor interference in buying military weapons at your local corner gun store. Those are things we could never consider, political suicide. But we can always spend $2B a day on bombing girls.

Except it’s not a “war” it’s a military “excursion,” because our President is a moron who misunderstands words. Wonder why that makes me nostalgic for the early 2000s. Sure, every Republican President I can remember has destroyed the economy and bombed the Middle East. But every Democratic one has bailed out banks and corporations, never the people, and … also bombed the Middle East.

In the 2000s, we overbuilt prisons, predictably creating pressure to fill them. In the 2010s, we overbuilt warehouses, and now ICE is buying them to turn into concentration camps. In the 2020s, the AI bros want to overbuild data centers probably by 2 orders of magnitude, to, what? Shut down their services after 2 months when they have to admit there's literally no way to turn a profit? Not to mention they’re CSAM and copyright violation factories.

But glad we’ll never suffer a war here. That’s not a first world problem. Their blood is spilled, we get the oil.

Reading

Wise Feels Different Today by Amanda Renteria

When I was a little girl growing up in the Central Valley, Dolores Huerta was more than an icon. She was proof. Proof that a woman from our community could stand in the middle of history and hold her ground. Proof that farmworker families — families like mine — had someone in the room. She was Sí se puede before it was a slogan. She was the blueprint.

I thought about her when I decided to run for office. I thought about her when the rooms got hard, when the men got loud, when I had to decide, again and again, whether I was going to stay in the fight or walk away. I thought: Dolores didn’t walk away. I didn’t either.

Today, Dolores Huerta — at 95 years old — broke a silence she has carried for sixty years. She, along with Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, came forward as survivors. And in doing so, she reminded all of us what wisdom really looks like when it’s been hard-won.

Here is what I know about women who build movements: they carry things the rest of us never see.

They carry the weight of a cause that is bigger than any one person. They carry the knowledge that speaking up might cost them — the coalition, the credibility, the work they have spent a lifetime building. They make a calculation, sometimes over and over again, about what protecting the mission requires. And sometimes — too often — they decide that their own story has to wait.

Wise Feels Different Today - by Amanda Renteria

Sí se puede, Dolores. Still. Always.

More Public Humiliations for Tech Fascists, Please by Claire Guinan

After the party, a source told Page Six that playwright Jeremy O. Harris—whose 2020 play, Slave Play, earned a record 12 Tony nominations—drunkenly confronted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, calling him the “Goebbels of the Trump administration,” due to the company’s recent contract with the Department of War. According to the source, the confrontation took place in front of an A-list crowd, including Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, Kylie Jenner, Teyana Taylor, Zoe Saldana, and you can imagine how many more.

Goebbels was known as the propagandist behind the Nazi regime—so it’s not a far-off comparison, considering how Trump has frequently spread AI slop on Truth Social, including a video of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes and fighter jets unleashing shit on “No Kings” protesters.

Hilariously, Harris sent an email to Page Six afterward, clarifying his insult: “It was late, and I had a few too many martinis, so I misspoke when I said, Goebbels… I should’ve said, Friedrich Flick.”

…

Flick was a convicted Nazi war criminal who built his wealth with slave labor during World War II and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He ultimately only served three and went on to become the richest man in Germany. So, if Altman is Flick, maybe Geobbels is more like Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who recently flaunted that his AI’s potential to disrupt the voting power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat.”

More Public Humiliations for Tech Fascists, Please

Jeremy O. Harris drunkenly approached OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Oscars after party and called him a Nazi…in front of Zendaya.

March, 19-21: God is a comedian by No1

The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports. This is, on paper, a reasonable military objective in the same way that sticking your hand into a beehive is a reasonable way to acquire honey. It is technically correct. The bees would disagree.

…

The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.

March, 19-21: God is a comedian - by No1

A stiff drink is recommended

Antisemitism appears from the left and the right, but not equally by David N. Myers, Joshua Goetz

In the aftermath of Oct. 7, a set of new dynamics seemed to emerge. On one hand, a number of reporting agencies noted significant spikes in reports of antisemitism on the far left, in concert with a new definitional scheme that equated anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On the other hand, there have been a good number of anecdotal and statistical reports of an uptick in antisemitic expression on the far right, especially among prominent American media influencers such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Our own unpublished findings from 2025 suggest that those with “very conservative” views were most likely to endorse antisemitic tropes, while “liberal” respondents were least likely. It is too early to offer a definitive assessment of the landscape of antisemitism in the post-Oct. 7 period; at a minimum, we can say that more evidence than currently exists is needed to validate the horseshoe theory.

Emphasis above mine. While Progressive Except for Palestine folks love to talk about how they’ve been abandoned by the left, Jewish academics, who personally experienced the encampment at UCLA, and oppose the Trump lawsuit against UCLA over supposed antisemitism, say loud and clear, there is not evidence of equal, nor surging, antisemitism on the left. Yet the PEPs have clearly, repeatedly, vocally, and violently abandoned human rights in the context of Palestinians. Hypocrites all of them.

Princeton Kicked a Trans Runner Off the Track. Now Athletes Are Organizing A Boycott by Max Freedman

“In the context of the things going on with trans people,” Parts said, “small actions like kicking a trans person out of a track meet build up to the general public thinking lowly of trans people, thinking it’s okay for laws to be passed affecting our lives, demonizing us, trying to eventually result in us being jailed or killed. Trying to push back against that will, hopefully, help increase acceptance of trans people in the public eye.” And with that, the chances of anti-transgender laws being passed — or even proposed — could decrease. A boycott might feel small, but it could help reverse the tides in a big way, and if you know runners on college and university track and field teams, you too can demand that they not participate in the 2026 Sam Howell and Larry Ellis Invitationals.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/op-ed-princeton-kicked-a-trans-runner

Imagining a 2028 Presidential Campaign for a Limited Presidency by Dennis Lytton

The undoing of the limited Presidency began in earnest. Most of the leadership of the GOP in the 1970s, some of whom would rise to heights of power a few decades later, did not believe Nixon should have been forced from office. They never accepted the “consensus” narrative of Nixon’s betrayal of the country. Chief among them Dick Cheney, they made it their life’s work to gradually aggrandize the Presidency, at the expense of Congress and the people. With the breakdown of normal lawmaking caused by the new filibuster of the 21^st century, 9/11, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a gradual state of exception regarding the presidency’s extra-legal power was accepted as normal. George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden found it increasingly necessary to rule by executive order and to push the boundaries of statute.

Imagining a 2028 Presidential Campaign for a Limited Presidency

Why we need a smaller presidency and a more powerful Congress.

What oil actually costs by Emily Atkin

Scientists have been warning for years that excessive fossil fuel burning will cause more catastrophic floods like this. That’s because fossil fuels release greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That makes extreme rainfall more intense.

But these impacts never factor into the price of a barrel of oil. They’re pushed onto everyone else—through disaster cleanup, insurance losses, and taxpayer-funded relief. In Hawaii, the damage is already estimated to exceed $1 billion, with state officials asking the federal government to cover up to 90 percent of the recovery costs. Whether that aid comes through or not, the bill is being paid by the public, not the industry whose emissions made disasters like this more likely.

…

The Trump administration is also spending public money to ensure the public is trapped with whatever the cost of oil may be. This week, the Trump administration announced it would give nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to a French oil company—not for anything the company built, but to make sure it didn't build two offshore wind farms. The deal requires the company to take that billion dollars and invest it in oil and gas instead.

…

This is what the true price of oil looks like: Hawaiians wading through their flooded homes while the state scrambles to find a billion dollars for cleanup; Texans sheltering indoors from refinery smoke while gas prices climb; Iranians and Lebanese caught in the crossfire of war; and taxpayer money being handed to oil companies to deepen our dependence on the very thing causing all the damage.

https://heated.world/p/the-true-price-of-oil