Jack Smith’s Lawfare Carnival Gets Its Formal Autopsy

Margot Cleveland laid it out before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday: unconstitutional appointment, subpoenas that violated the Speech or Debate Clause, phone records vacuumed up on private citizens like Kash Patel — the whole rotten bouquet. The good news is that the Constitution survived Jack Smith. The bad news is that nobody seems to be in any particular hurry to make sure this never happens again. Victor Davis Hanson says a reckoning awaits — I’ll believe it when I see a perp walk, not a podcast.

Markwayne Mullin Confirmed As Next Homeland Security Secretary

Mullin cleared 54-45, with Fetterman and Heinrich crossing the aisle — which tells you everything about how radioactive the open-borders caucus has become in an election year. Rand Paul voted no, presumably because Mullin once offered to fight a union boss on the Senate floor, and Paul has principles about something or other. A new DHS chief is good news; now someone needs to actually reopen the agency so those nine-hour TSA lines at Atlanta stop being a thing.

Iran Issues New Threat As Trump’s 48-Hour Ultimatum Hits Halfway Mark

Tehran’s response to Trump’s ultimatum was, essentially, “nice Gulf neighbors you have there.” Iran is now threatening to strike the energy and water systems of Saudi Arabia and the UAE if Trump follows through on hitting Iranian infrastructure — which is a bold move for a regime that just launched ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia and missed. The mullahs are playing a very dangerous game of chicken with a president who has demonstrated he is not running a bluff operation. Tick tock.

Bellingcat published an investigation this month titled “Border Patrol: Agents of Chaos.” It’s a long, well-produced piece — 85 hours of footage analyzed, agents identified by name, former DHS officials offering grave commentary about “Orwellian” tactics and violations of de-escalation policy. The production values are excellent. The framing is almost entirely backwards.

I want to walk through why — not because Bellingcat is uniquely dishonest, but because this piece is a perfect specimen of a genre: the investigative report that treats enforcement of the law as the problem, and organized interference with law enforcement as a sympathetic backdrop. Once you see the structure, you can’t unsee it.

Trump Sets 48-Hour Clock For Iran As Strait Of Hormuz Standoff Escalates

Trump told Iran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz or watch its power plants get obliterated — and he’s given them 48 hours to decide. Over 20 nations have already lined up to help enforce the opening, which is the kind of coalition-building that tends to happen when the guy making the threat is actually credible. The mullahs spent eight years learning that the previous American president would send them a strongly worded letter; they’re getting a remedial education now.

There’s a moment that changes how you think about AI assistants. It’s not the first clever answer, or the time it writes a function you were dreading. It’s quieter than that.

It’s the moment you realize you haven’t opened a terminal in three days — and your server is running better than ever.

That’s what happens when you stop treating Claude Code as a tool you pick up and put down, and start letting it run. Persistently. Always on. Waiting.

Trump Says U.S. Considering ‘Winding Down’ Iran War — And Hormuz Is Someone Else’s Problem

Twenty-one days in, Trump is signaling the objectives are nearly met and the Strait of Hormuz can be somebody else’s headache — specifically, the somebodies who actually depend on it for their economic survival. That’s not isolationism, that’s arithmetic: if Europe and Asia need that waterway open, they can chip in something more than strongly worded statements. Meanwhile, Bessent is easing oil sanctions to kneecap Iran’s leverage over global supply — which is the kind of economic judo that doesn’t require a single additional Marine.

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Trump Eyes Iran Wind-Down, Tells the World to Guard Its Own Strait

Three weeks into the Iran campaign and Trump is posting on Truth Social that we’re “getting very close to meeting our objectives” and that the Strait of Hormuz is someone else’s problem to secure. Good. The nations that depend on that shipping lane for their economic survival can stop free-riding on the U.S. Navy and pick up the tab themselves. America First isn’t isolationism — it’s a bill coming due.

I run a home server called rocklab — Ubuntu 24.04, a pile of Docker containers, and Claude Code acting as my on-call IT department. It handles routine maintenance, helps me publish blog posts, and executes whatever tasks I throw at it.

The one missing piece was mobility. If I wanted to check on something or kick off a task, I had to be at a terminal. That changed today when I set up Claude Code Channels — specifically the Telegram plugin — which lets me message my server from anywhere and have Claude respond like a proper remote assistant.

“When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment’s notice.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47

Every hardship carries two parts: what happens, and what we decide it means.
The first is beyond our control; the second is ours entirely.
Our reactions — not the events themselves — create much of our suffering.