The Empire of Incompetence
The Empire of Incompetence
March 23, 2026
ICE at the Airport: Security Theatre Meets Security Farce
I mean, did we really think that ICE would make the lines move any quicker.
TSA, despite being a bit of Security Theatre, actually seems to have more real work than ICE does in the world. For one, TSA does have to look at every passenger's face and ticket and ID and match them all up with the computer readout. That is a high bar for the ICE goons.
While TSA agents — unpaid for two paychecks, watching their colleagues quit by the hundreds — were holding airports together through sheer professionalism, the administration's answer was to send immigration enforcement agents to help manage customs lines. The lines at Hartsfield-Jackson wrapped outside the terminal before sunrise. A theology professor in Atlanta put it plainly: "Pay these people!" ICE, as it turns out, cannot read a boarding pass any faster than it can locate its own moral compass.
Don Quixote and the Wind Turbines
This is the most idiotic, Quixotic quest since Don Quixote to rid the world of windmills.
Right as we are suffering an oil shock to the global economy, the largest since 1973, which was caused by a misguided launch of Trump's Forever War, to take away viable efforts to utilize alternative energy sources is absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid.
The administration paid TotalEnergies $928 million — nearly a billion dollars of public money — to not build wind farms off the coast of New York and North Carolina. In exchange, TotalEnergies pledged to invest in an LNG plant in Texas and more Gulf drilling. As fuel prices spiral from the Iran war, the administration's energy strategy is: burn more of the thing that's running out.
Don Quixote at least had the excuse of madness. This is policy.
Iran: The Productive Talks Nobody Remembers Having
Did they talk about the Epstein Files, I wonder?
Trump claimed "productive talks" with Iran. Tehran denied any contact occurred. Simultaneously, eight freshly-created Polymarket accounts laid $70,000 in bets on a US-Iran ceasefire — accounts that appeared over the same weekend Trump floated "winding down" military operations in an after-markets Truth Social post. Those bets stand to return $820,000.
An account with a nearly identical pattern placed winning bets just before the February strikes on Iran. Crypto watchers called it: wallet-splitting, deliberate obfuscation, someone with inside information. Whether the talks were productive or imaginary, someone knew something.
Shocked. Shocked, I Say.
I'm shocked and surprised. Shocked I say. That someone associated with this administration, or at least close enough to inside trade, is corrupt.
And the scale of it: that's a pretty huge problem to tackle. I mean that from a technical perspective, not from a general society-wide stance. Being able to track all the individuals and markets they are operating in across everything. Good luck with that one.
Kalshi, to its credit, announced guardrails: politicians and athletes blocked from trading in markets tied to their own outcomes. The system is meant to "prevent insider trading and manipulation." Whether it extends to anonymous crypto wallets held by people who happened to hear a Truth Social post before the rest of us is left as an exercise for the regulator.
The Thought Police is Nathan Eckenrode's running commentary on the news, filed from the reading desk.