Friends,

Please submit your caption in the Comments section and, as before, please use the Comments section only for captions.

Winners will be announced next Sunday. For consideration, please post your caption by Monday at 9 pm PT, 12 midnight ET.

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Last week’s winner:

“On reflection, I am now the King of Green-land.”

(Congratulations, Carol Nylen.)

Runners-up:

“Mirror mirror in the slime, who’s the sleaziest of all time?”

(Congratulations, Andrew Kelm.)

“Reflection, reflection in the pool: Am I wise, or am I a fool?”

(Congratulations, Steven Horowitz.)

“He’s ‘floating’ a run for a 3rd term as the Green Party candidate.”

(Congratulations, DZK.)

“Mirror mirror on the pool, who’s the greatest king of fools?”

(Congratulations, Mike Hammer.)

“Everything he touches turns to slime.”

(Congratulations, ISOequanimity.)

“It’s even more shallow than me!”

(Congratulations, John Powell.)

“Trump only looks, he never reflects”

(Congratulations, howard levitt.)

“Mirror, mirror in the pool, how do we get rid of this fool?”

(Congratulations, Diane Fogarty.)

“I hired the best pool guy, and I never make mistakes. He’s the greatest pool guy, better than any pool guy ever seen. So it must be some left-wing vandals that caused this.”

(Congratulations, Lynn E Levine.)

“Narcissus in green.”

(Congratulations, ERIK Payne BUTLER.)

“Mirror, mirror, on the mall. I’m the greatest one of all!”

(Congratulations, Sue Kayton.)

“What about my Rhapsody in Blue? I’m green with envy.”

(Congratulations, Laurence Hoffmann.)

“Yep, I am a king, and the water is crystal clear.”

(Congratulations, Michigan Banjo Man.)

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Friends,

For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.

Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.

Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.

But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.

That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.

America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority.

Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support.

I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.

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Friends,

This is my last post to you today, I promise. But I couldn’t resist telling you about Elon’s comeuppance. SpaceX crashed this week, and I just got some of the details.

Remember when Musk became the world’s first trillionaire? No longer. SpaceX’s stock price has settled way down. It’s not even 10 percent over its initial public offering price. Which means Musk’s bag is down to around $900 billion.

The SpaceX crash wiped out just about all of SpaceX’s gains from the last two weeks, which has caused massive headaches for its average investors and initial buyers. Not quite a Ponzi scheme yet, but heading in that direction.

All this shows why we need a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s on the side of average investors and the public and not bought off by today’s robber barons.

SpaceX started to crash with a report out Monday that, notwithstanding all the hoopla surrounding its IPO’s raising $85 billion in its first trading days, SpaceX wasn’t really flying all that high. In fact, it was floating a $20 billion bond sale to refinance its debts (mostly from its acquisition of X, on which Musk had put a lofty valuation).

Since Musk took over X in 2022, the platform has lost almost 80 percent of its market value. No surprise. I mean, who wants to read a bunch of right-wing rants?

To make matters worse, xAI, on which Musk also put a sky-high valuation before merging it into SpaceX, has fallen way behind other American AI companies in the race to develop generative AI.

As of May, all of xAI’s co-founders had jumped ship, according to LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who calls xAI a “complete train wreck.” Small wonder that credit-rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch have graded SpaceX’s debt just a few notches above junk.

At the time of SpaceX’s IPO, Musk priced SpaceX stock at roughly 100 times the company’s total revenue in 2025. This was ballsy, to say the least, given SpaceX’s consistent negative profitability and its failure to meet prior goals, to say nothing of its debt.

The wild valuation depended on a belief that Musk can colonize Mars, put a data center into space, establish interstellar travel, and accomplish other wild things that would eventually generate big profits — but are likely to generate zilch until most investors’ great-grandchildren have kicked the bucket.

Let me remind you that because of its size, a big chunk of Americans’ retirement savings and pensions (as well as university endowments) are now automatically tied to SpaceX’s market value. Yet SpaceX insiders have been able to sell their shares sooner than is usually the case, because that’s the way the IPO was structured.

Put all this together with the increasing likelihood that AI is turning into a bubble whose burst will make the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Bubble look like sparkling water by comparison.

Add in Trump’s fiasco of a war with Iran and its oil shock, his avowed intention to weaken the dollar, and the increasingly likely specter of stagflation in the United States, and you get a perfect storm.

Are Trump and Musk — two of the most despicable people in the world — bringing on a global recession, or worse? We’ll soon find out.

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Friends,

Trump’s war with Iran is continuing. Today, Iran launched attack drones at Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.

Those attacks came after the United States carried out overnight airstrikes on Iranian missile and drone sites, in retaliation for Iran’s firing drones at a container ship on Thursday as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tonight, Trump posted that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

The continuing hostilities are exposing the mind-numbing extent of Trump’s lies about “ending” his war: that he’s achieved a lasting peace in the Middle East; that Iran no longer has any capacity to fire missiles and drones; that the Strait of Hormuz is reopen to cargo traffic; that Iran is committed to reducing its stockpile of nuclear material and won’t seek a nuclear bomb; and that, overall, the war he launched on February 28 has made America stronger and safer than we were before he launched it.

These lies aren’t on par with his big lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was undertaken by peaceful, patriotic Americans. But his lies about the so-called “end” of his war with Iran could have equally large consequences, because they’re leading many Americans to believe that an end of the war is within sight and that America is stronger and safer as a result of it.

Yet the mainstream media refuse to call him out on his Iran lies.

The New York Times terms what’s now happening a “flare-up of hostilities” that threatens “to unravel” ongoing “talks to reach a final peace agreement,” and that “neither side seems eager to return to a full-blown war.”

Well, they may not want to return to a “full-blown war,” but they’ve returned to hostilities that are blocking the strait and destroying whatever shred of trust diplomacy depends on. And not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Washington Post calls it “the latest threat to a ceasefire and ongoing talks toward a broader peace” — which of course assumes there has been a real ceasefire, and that the talks now underway will result in a “broader peace,” whatever that means. Also not a word about Trump’s lies.

The Wall Street Journal says the hostilities have “added to pressure on a preliminary peace deal already under stress from continued fighting in Lebanon and disagreements over nuclear inspections.” But that assumes there’s already a preliminary peace deal. Has anyone actually read it? And the disagreements are hardly confined to nuclear inspections. What about free passage through the strait? Oh, and here again, no word about Trump’s blatant lies.

My expectations for the mainstream press were already low. From the outset of this war, the public has received half-baked and inconsistent reports. And although the media know better than to rely on any words emanating from Trump’s mouth, why have they given up holding him to account for what he says about the war?

Trump’s war with Iran was a disaster from the start, and its so-called “end” is a debacle that Americans need to know about. Trump wants the war to go away, but it won’t because he has strengthened Iran’s resolve, which in turn has strengthened its hand.

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