Global

This article was originally published by Truthout.

Perhaps some things should never be spoken — for, when they are, they leave us aghast, in a state of horror. Think here of the ghostly figure in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” During the height of the war on Iran, Donald Trump threatened: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Those are words that elicit something frightening, terrifying. Let’s be frank. The words, which clearly constitute a genocidal threat, are atrocious and should make all of us want to scream.

That threat came after Trump also threatened the Iranian government to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Not only is this not “presidential,” but it’s characteristic of someone who has a warped moral compass; it is indicative of someone who has failed to understand the dignity and preciousness of human life.

Solar generation to surpass coal in Texas

Utility-scale solar power is projected to surpass coal-fired generation on the Texas grid this year as the region shifts generation away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.

Data from the latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) indicates a structural shift within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT} market. Solar generation is forecast to reach 78,000 Gigiwatts per hour (GWh) in 2026, surpassing the 60,000 GWh projected for coal.

Texas remains at the front of the domestic energy transition, accounting for 12.9 GW or 53 percent of the utility-scale battery storage planned for the U.S. grid in 2026. It is also anticipated that Texas will account for approximately 40 percent of all new U.S. solar capacity additions this year.

I’ve been reading Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. It’s a collections of things Daniel Ellsberg wrote and didn’t publish. I come to it having read what he did publish, having spoken with him about some of it, having debated him — publicly and privately — on some of it, and generally and extremely admiring what he had to offer and wishing the whole world would catch up to him. But, apart from some aspects of his personal story and other details here and there, it’s familiar stuff that I agreed with and still agree with. It’s mostly timeless, if not ahead of its time, apart from things Ellsberg didn’t have the benefit of when he was writing, such as the full debunking of the Milgram experiments.

But reading a great writer can get you thinking, even if it’s along a line of thought you were already on, and even if it’s along a line of thought the writer might himself not have gone down with you. In this new book is a note that Ellsberg wrote in 2017:

Here are some examples.

#1 - As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices

This is the title of Tony Romm’s article, New York Times, May 7 2026

(https://nytimes.com/2026/05/07/business/us-debt-trump-policies-budget.html). Here’s some of what he writes. 

“The debt is outgrowing the size of America’s economy. The president’s policies could accelerate the country’s fiscal headaches, experts say, unless policymakers intervene.

The debt problem.

Romm writes this. “The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.

“It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II.” 

The source of the problem.

President Donald Trump is back from his business trip to China which had a lot of ambiguity over issues like Taiwan without having done either much discernible damage or benefit to American interests. The trip ended with the American participants dropping all the gifts that they had received from the Chinese into a large garbage bin on the tarmac before they boarded their plane. And while the president was gone Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to everyone’s surprised announced that he was canceling plans to deploy an additional 4,000 Texas-based US soldiers to Poland for a long-planned nine month rotation that includes training with NATO allies. The assignment was also originally intended to serve as a possible resource should the situation with Russia-Ukraine happen to spill over into adjacent NATO countries.

Israeli settler violence is not isolated — it is state‑backed terror enabled and protected by the Israeli government and military. Its goal is to instill fear in the hearts of Indigenous Palestinians so they can be driven from their land once and for all.

On March 12, 2026, an illegal Jewish Israeli settler kidnapped a Palestinian man from the village of Beit Iksa, northwest of occupied Jerusalem, according to local sources. The sources told WAFA, the Palestinian Information Agency, that the settler abducted Issa Maher Zayed while he was heading to his land near a new colonial outpost established just days earlier on village property. Another day in the apartheid state of Israel — and they wonder why so much of the world condemns these actions.

In the United States, democratic legitimacy has increasingly been undermined by structural distortions embedded within the electoral system itself. For decades, political influence has been shaped not only by voters, but also by lobbying networks, corporate financing, and concentrated donor power, enabling organized economic interests to exert disproportionate influence over public policy. As a result, many scholars and observers have characterized the American political system less as a fully representative democracy and more as a plutocratic or post-democratic order, in which formal democratic institutions persist while substantive political power becomes increasingly concentrated among economic elites.