REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 23, 2026 18:07
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Thursday, June 18, 2026 7:25 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.
6ix, you would NOT write these false stories, unless you are NOT a decent human. You would NOT write "Fuck Ukraine" and "Rootin'ForPutin" unless you are indecent. Decent people don't vote for Trump. I know this because all the people I know who voted for Trump I knew to be horrible before Trump got into politics.

Quoting someone 6ix despises: "This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it."

The quote is from a much longer article:

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk are dominating our economy and our politics, which tells us something about the era we're living through

Robert Reich | Jun 15, 2026

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-era-of-the-super-asholes

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes “makes me smart.” Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a “consoler-in-chief” in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists”; his 2017 “Muslim ban”; his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization as threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom — particularly in Belfast and London — Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous”). In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”

Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny.

Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights.

Musk, too, has faced frequent claims of misogyny and sexism. Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit detailing a pervasive “’Animal House’” culture — accusing Musk of creating a hostile environment, treating female employees as sexual objects, and retaliating when employees challenged his sexism. Separate reports have also emerged alleging that Musk engaged in inappropriate relationships and persistent advances toward employees, including asking them to bear his children.

Musk has 14 kids with different mothers and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles.

**

The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?

Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame and a disintegration of public morality — that has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.

The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”— not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad.

But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good.

Subsequently, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required that we work together for the common good. Many of us — including both white and black Americans — were motivated to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And a sense of common good moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age.

This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


What Did You Expect?

Perhaps this was always how Trump’s ill-conceived war was destined to end.

By Daniel B. Shapiro | June 17, 2026, 6:59 PM ET

Daniel B. Shapiro served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-war-reversals/687
590/

The whiplash is jarring.

President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.

And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.

Let’s count the ways.

Nuclear: A core goal of the war was to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program could never produce a nuclear weapon. Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 advanced that goal by destroying key nuclear facilities and burying Iran’s enriched uranium, setting back the program significantly.

But little had changed in the nuclear program by the time this war was launched this past February, and little has changed since. Now, in exchange for an oft-repeated pinky promise that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, Trump has agreed to delay negotiations on the key goals of removing Iran’s enriched uranium and banning further enrichment, and the verification measures needed to guarantee that those commitments are upheld. These talks are punted to a second phase that may never arrive or never end.

Sanctions: Trump long advocated maximum-pressure sanctions, and beat his chest during the war about the cost to Iran of the U.S. naval blockade.

But now we will pay for reopening the Strait of Hormuz—simply, at best, restoring the prewar status quo—by approving the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign assets and waiving sanctions to permit Iranian oil sales. More goodies are in store for the regime, in the form of fees paid by ships transiting the strait and a shockingly large $300 billion reconstruction fund. (The latter, supposedly to be funded by Gulf states, recalls the worst of former Secretary of State John Kerry’s post-JCPOA diplomacy, when he sought to drum up investment in the corrupt economy of a still-adversarial regime.)

With no change in the regime’s character or ideological outlook, it is being rewarded with a shift from maximum pressure to maximum windfall. There is no reason to think that the money will flow to schools and hospitals or provide any benefit to the Iranian people that the regime still suppresses. It will, instead, almost certainly fund more missiles, drones, and support for terrorists at home and abroad—threats about which the memorandum of understanding is silent.

Lebanon and Hezbollah: The war, misguided though it was, represented the zenith of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, with unprecedented combined operations and ample praise by Trump for the partnership. Trump voiced recognition of the genuine threats Iran posed to Israel, not least from its network of terrorist proxies.

But Israelis have been aghast at the speed of Trump’s turnabout. Israeli officials were excluded from negotiations on the MOU, and were not even given the opportunity to review the text. Meanwhile, as U.S. and Israeli interests diverged, Trump barked expletives at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adopted the Iranian demand to impose restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon—even as the militia continues to attack northern Israeli communities—as part and parcel of the broader cease-fire.

Regime: Trump also long correctly identified the Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous and evil, with the blood of many Americans, Israelis, Arabs, and its own citizens on its hands. Israel’s decapitation strike enabled by Trump on the war’s opening day gave clear expression to that understanding. One did not need to endorse this war—I opposed it—to recognize the imperative of containing and weakening the regime of the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps until such time as the Iranian people could overthrow it.

But in a flash, Trump and his weirdly credulous vice president have discovered the putative moderation, reasonableness, and, dare we say, decency of what is, if anything, an even more hard-line crop of Iranian leaders. Most states in the region, and soon in Europe, see which way the wind is blowing and are moving to improve their relations with Iran. Regime leaders must be chortling over their surprising and unearned new international legitimacy.

To those at home and abroad whose necks are snapping and whose heads are spinning, I have to ask an obvious but uncomfortable question: What did you expect?

This debacle is, at the end of the day, classic Donald Trump.

In multiple ways, we are seeing Trump’s essential characteristics playing out on a national-security matter of the highest stakes.

First, he is utterly assured that he can do anything, that he can will any reality into being, despite all evidence and expertise to the contrary. Seduced by the overnight success of the removal of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, he convinced himself that he could bring about the rapid collapse of the Iranian regime. His own intelligence experts and Cabinet officials counseled otherwise. Yet he pressed ahead.

Second, he deepened his self-deception through his childish belief in the invincibility of U.S. military power. A testosterone-infused operation name—Epic Fury—and a daily video diet of buildings going boom reinforced his delusion. The members of the United States military are fearsome and highly professional, and they carried out their assigned tasks with precision and effectiveness, degrading various Iranian capabilities. But Trump was incapable of aligning those operations with achievable strategic objectives. His mind doesn’t work that way.

Third, when the going got tough, Trump started to flail. One day he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, the next (and the next and the next) he promised that a deal was just around the corner. Never a detail man (for policy, anyway; he goes deep on architectural trimmings), he confessed to being bored with the war. And as when his business ventures veered toward bankruptcy, with better off-ramps in the rearview mirror, he grasped for any way out, damn the costs to U.S. credibility, alliances, and influence.

Fourth, he was susceptible to flattery, especially from strongmen. Remember his fruitless exchange of love letters with Kim Jong Un? They produced no breakthrough in nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. Somehow, without even an 80th-birthday card from Iran, Trump flattered himself into believing that he was the leader who could recognize, and cultivate, a new spirit of cooperation coming from the “very rational” and “not radicalized” leaders now in charge in Tehran.

Fifth, as always, Trump is out for Trump. He stumbled by entering a war that Americans broadly opposed, and their opposition increased as they felt it in their pocketbooks at the pump and the grocery store. But it soon became clear, with a midterm-election disaster looming, that Trump would pull the plug. Again, ending the war was necessary; giving away the store while doing so was panic-induced self-preservation.

Finally, Trump swaggered into the war, and will skulk out of it, with total confidence in the slavish support of his political base. His faith will probably be justified. Remember their discovery of the absolutely essential national-security imperative that we grab Greenland? (Wait for it: Cuba is next.) The hurrahs for Trump the conqueror will soon transform into oohs and aahs toasting Donald the diplomat. A few lonely, honest critics of the JCPOA—a flawed but workable deal that verifiably set back Iran’s nuclear program—will resist the demand to tie themselves into pretzels, and instead acknowledge that Trump’s deal makes the JCPOA look ironclad.

No doubt, Trump’s visibly advancing age has also played a role. As with all of us, time intensifies his most fundamental personality traits: ego, vanity, self-delusion, impatience, panic under pressure.

And so here we are. A war that should not have been fought. An enemy that was hit hard but remains unrelentingly hostile and is now reaping unexpected strategic gains. The credibility of the U.S. in tatters and its military readiness compromised. Alliances and partnerships under stress. The global economy in tumult, inflicting financial pain on American citizens that will linger even as oil prices decline. A fine and avoidable mess all around.

Indeed, what did anyone expect?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 1:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 2:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump’s Deal Sidesteps Key Reasons He Went to War With Iran

Pact makes no demands on Tehran over its militias or huge arsenal of missiles

President Trump defended on Wednesday his agreement to end the Iran war, saying he wanted to avoid an “economic catastrophe” that could have resulted if the conflict the U.S. launched had continued.

Trump said he was influenced by the stock market’s rise as he worked toward a resolution of the conflict. He said he didn’t want to be compared with former President Herbert Hoover, who was president during the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump said at the Hotel Royal where he and other world leaders gathered for the Group of Seven meeting. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.”

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-deal-sidesteps-key-reason
s-he-went-to-war-with-iran-6820b1b4

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 3:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.




--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, June 18, 2026 4:18 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Iran Has Humiliated Trump

Officials in Tehran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation.

By Graeme Wood | June 18, 2026, 12 PM ET

Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State. He joined the magazine in 2006 after working as a translator, courier, and bootlegger in northern Iraq.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/iran-trump-war-defeat-deal/6
87595/

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic.

Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. Watching Trump and his aides sell the deal is in some ways as humiliating as the deal itself. “If other countries have” ballistic missiles, Trump said at the G7 conference yesterday, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran “not to have some.” Elimination of those missiles was one of the primary aims of the war, and thousands of Iranians, as well as more than a dozen Americans, died contesting it. Trump began his remarks today by stressing that the United States could have kept up the bombing if it wished “for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open.” Keeping the strait open is one of the main purposes of the United States Navy, so these words sound a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job, and might be equally vulnerable elsewhere, too.

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic?

The best defense of this deal, from a U.S. perspective, is probably one that takes into account these economic and political headwinds facing Iran, and notices that they are more likely to change the regime than any further military action. You don’t need to huff and puff to blow down the house when the weatherman is predicting a typhoon tomorrow.

Another possible defense is that, like all deals made by Trump, and most deals made by the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is not much of a deal anyway, because both parties intended to break it before it was even signed. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN yesterday that “people shouldn’t read too much into the language” of the agreement, because the core of the agreement is “understandings we have with each other.” This statement goes against all legal advice ever given. (Read the contract; ignore what the other guy tells you while he watches you sign it.) Much of what’s in the agreement is so vague as to be meaningless. We know what a nuclear deal looks like, because Barack Obama got one, and it established detailed and invasive inspections that are most certainly not delineated in any document leaked or mentioned by Trump officials. The deal might have been reached only because both sides wanted to stop fighting, and both were willing to add vague terms because they didn’t want to be bound by precise ones.

The same U.S. official’s other comment to CNN was assurance that the “language” of the document—the same language the official encouraged his domestic audience to ignore—is calibrated to let Iranian officials “say what they need to say for their domestic politics.” This intriguing comment reflects a view of Iranian leadership I have heard from officials in previous administrations, including Democratic ones: that they are susceptible to flattery, and that they regard the exasperation and humiliation of the Americans as an end in itself.

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Now it is time to see how Iran will use the dividends from this humiliation. The $300 billion in investments is hardly the biggest opportunity for Iran to cash in. Far more valuable would be a pivot by the regime’s leadership away from some of the dogmas of its past, and toward reform. No previous leaders have had the ability to make such a pivot, and they probably did not want to make one anyway. The current leaders, however, have positioned themselves as saviors of the Islamic Republic, and with that credibility could institute certain changes that are widely known to be necessary and desirable, but that would have looked counterrevolutionary if proposed by anyone else.

Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it. The peace is up for grabs.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 4:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:44 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Israelis see Trump-Iran deal as ‘catastrophic capitulation’ and ‘diplomatic Oct. 7’

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/middleeast/israel-iran-deal-r
eaction-netanyahu.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rFA.S9Pt.kVhjEC6FP6wa&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The New York Times reports:

Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 11:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, June 19, 2026 5:53 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


part two Khamenei the second

take that $300 Billion and then call you a bunch of insults

Khamenei approves deal, says Trump acted out of 'desperation'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/irans-khamenei-approves-deal
-says-185725223.html


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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


If Only Trump Knew What Vice President JD Vance Is Doing

If the president is infallible, there must be some other explanation for his Iran defeat.

By Jonathan Chait | June 18, 2026, 1:05 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/vance-surrender-iran-trump/6
87597/

Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”

Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.

The administration’s Plan A is to claim the war was a complete success—10/10, no notes, would wage it again. A handful of hawks have been willing to repeat this line. The primary argument is that the bombardment set back Iran’s conventional and nuclear military capabilities enough to justify the cost to the United States. “The fact is that the missile program is in ruins, just like the nuclear weapons program,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt proposed.

This rationalization overlooks a few small points, such as the fact that Iran’s missile program is not in ruins at all. American intelligence reportedly estimated last month that Iran retains 70 percent of its missiles and launchers, and has restored 30 of its 33 missile sites. Trump himself is now arguing that Iran must retain ballistic missiles as a matter of fairness. (“They have to have some,” he said yesterday, “because other people have some.”) Moreover, Trump’s deal would ultimately give Iran enormous new revenue streams by eliminating decades of economic sanctions, along with providing hundreds of billions of dollars in what Iran calls reparations. The money will eventually allow Tehran to build its military capacity beyond current levels.

As for Iran’s nuclear program, if it were in ruins, that would primarily be as a result of bombings that occurred last year; outside experts believe that the most recent war caused less damage to the program. In any case, ruins seems exaggerated. Iran’s nuclear material is buried underground but can be recovered, and its ability to deter attacks by threatening the Strait of Hormuz will permit it to restore the program over time. This is precisely why Iran hawks were insisting for months—even as Vance reportedly expressed skepticism of full-scale war—that the continued military action was necessary.

After having claimed that Iran’s missiles and nuclear efforts are existential risks to American interests, most hawks will have trouble bringing themselves to call the deal that leaves the programs intact as a great victory. Republicans who have too much self-respect to reverse themselves so nakedly have a fallback plan: pretend that the defeat was Vance’s doing.

“Conservatives on the Hill are stunned that Vance would erase all of Trump’s military victories in such a terrible deal. Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” one unnamed congressional Republican told NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer. The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro complained, “The vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.” On Fox News, Brian Kilmeade tentatively suggested, “I just wonder if the vice president, who was against this, by all reports was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn’t the right person to bring this conflict to an end.”

But why would Trump authorize his vice president to make unnecessary concessions? Why, indeed, would a supposedly brilliant negotiator leave such an important negotiation to Vance at all? (Kilmeade explained that Trump “has too many plates in the air that he can’t be into every detail,” as if obsessing over the color of the Reflecting Pool is a more important use of the president’s time than avoiding a geopolitical catastrophe.)

If the logic here is contorted, it does make political sense to Republican hawks who want to elevate Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Trump’s successor. The war they supported has ended in failure, but they don’t want the party’s anti-interventionist wing to benefit. Therefore their plan is to blame Vance, who opposed the Iran war all along, for the defeat, while insulating Rubio, who is said to have favored the conflict, from its consequences. The main opponent of starting the war becomes the sap tasked with promoting the surrender terms to the public.

Vance is clearly betting that most Republicans will prefer his version of the story, which presents the Iran war as the latest Trump win in a line of unbroken victories that runs from the greatest landslide in American history to making the Reflecting Pool blue again. “Have a little faith in the president of the United States,” he said at a press conference today, “The idea that he is gonna strike a deal that’s bad for the American people, it’s preposterous.”

A healthy conservative movement would be able to concede error, rather than resorting to a choose-your-own-adventure ruse in which the war is Trump’s if we won and Vance’s if we lost. But the movement has decayed to the point that honest analysis is impossible, and prominent Republicans hardly bother to pretend otherwise.

When details of the memorandum of understanding first leaked, Senator Lindsey Graham expressed dismay. Graham has espoused ultra-hawkish views for decades, and has deferred to Trump again and again in an apparent effort to maintain his ability to pull the president toward his position. When a reporter informed Trump this week of Graham’s concern, the president didn’t even bother to show anger.

“Lindsey is skeptical? I’ll have to talk to Lindsey,” Trump said. “He’ll be in big trouble. Lindsey’s good. Lindsey’s fine. He’s not skeptical. He’s just fine.” Indeed, just as Trump expected, Graham has swallowed his objections and praised the deal as “essential” and “worthwhile.”

On some level, GOP hawks understand that their real dispute is with the president, not with Vance. A “source close to the president” told the New York Post that “JD is just a proxy for attacking [Trump], because they can’t do that.” If Republicans wish to scrutinize how their party blundered into a calamitous war, the personality cult around the blunderer in chief might be a good place to begin.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


'We've made the world more dangerous': Former top CIA official reveals global havoc caused by Trump

Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon joins Nicolle on Deadline White House to give her assessment on the likely ramifications for global security in the aftermath of Trump's war with Iran.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:22 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump’s Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.

Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.

Yet here’s the irony: On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.

Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to high natural gas prices.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:46 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Price of Defeat in Iran

An indeterminate end to a foolish war leaves Americans more disillusioned than ever with engagement in the Middle East.

By Thomas Wright | June 19, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/06/iran-defeat-marshall
-plan-price/687600/

Seventy-nine years ago this month, at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, committed more than $13 billion for Europe’s postwar recovery—approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars. Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, which he signed yesterday in Versailles, commits the United States and its regional partners to ensuring that Iran receives “at least $300 billion” for its “rehabilitation and economic development.”

This is, in effect, a Marshall Plan for the Iranian regime, albeit not one funded with American taxpayer dollars. But whereas the original was designed to consolidate an American victory, this one is designed to manage the consequences of a defeat that pushes the United States closer to disengaging from the Middle East.

The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran is remarkably vague. Point one commits the United States and Iran to regional peace and stability. Vice President Vance told CNN that this means Iran will stop funding proxy forces and destabilizing the region; Tehran might well interpret that differently. The text does reiterate Iran’s commitment not to build a nuclear weapon, and it says that Iran agrees to “downblend” its highly enriched uranium on-site (which basically means diluting it). But the memorandum includes no other details regarding limits on enrichment. It says that Iran will not charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 60 days, but after that, nothing is specified.

When asked about the $300 billion, Vance claimed that the Gulf countries would supply it all. But the deal makes no such provision. It tasks the United States and its regional partners to develop the plan. Perhaps this is why a senior administration official told CNN that “people should not read too much into the language.” The official went on to describe the memorandum as a political document, saying, of the Iranians, “We came up with language that allows them to say what they need for their domestic politics.” But Iran will almost certainly demand that the United States stick to the letter of the agreement.

What we do know is that the relief for Iran is to come in stages. An immediate waiver of sanctions will allow it to export oil. This is a return to the arrangement under the Obama-era nuclear deal and is estimated to be worth up to $60 billion a year. Once the memorandum is implemented but before a final deal, Iran’s frozen assets will be released for it to spend as it seems fit. This reportedly consists of $24 billion held in banks in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq, although Tehran believes that its total inaccessible assets worldwide may exceed $100 billion. Only if a final agreement follows on this provisional one will Iran be provided with $300 billion and the lifting of all sanctions, including those linked to terrorism, its ballistic-missile program, and human-rights abuses. But Iran will already have received quite a lot up front.

The prospect of a final deal is remote, given the gap between the two sides. History is replete with wars that end in interim agreements, deferring difficult issues to future negotiations, only for the interim arrangement to become permanent. That is very likely to happen here.

When it does, Trump will face a choice. He can applaud the downblending of uranium and accept the new status quo. Or he can end the waivers and reimpose sanctions on oil. If he chooses the second course, Iran will, at a minimum, begin to charge a toll for transit through the strait, using the leverage it gained in the war. Things could spiral from there, but Trump has been clear that he wants out of the war and fears the economic consequences of a closed strait. That won’t change as the midterms approach. The Iranians surely know this, which makes it even less likely that they will compromise further.

The deal is a bad one. But Washington has no good choices at this point. Judged by the administration’s own objectives, the outcome is difficult to describe as anything other than a defeat. The United States entered the conflict seeking to eliminate Iran’s leverage, constrain its regional influence, and force it to accept strict limits on its nuclear program. Instead, Iran emerged with sanctions relief, a pathway to generous reconstruction financing, continuing ambiguity over key nuclear issues, and new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason for this defeat was not a reluctance to use force. Many hawks advocated introducing ground troops, but doing so would have made matters much worse. The United States almost certainly would have wound up fighting the sort of casualty-heavy counterinsurgency campaign that has led it to costly defeats elsewhere. If the U.S. had attacked Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Iran would have retaliated against infrastructure in the Gulf, widening the war and exponentially worsening the global economic shock waves.

This was a war that should never have been fought. It was also fought foolishly. Beginning the campaign with a decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership made the conflict existential for the Iranian regime, which then had no reason to hold anything back. By contrast, the 12-day war last summer had the limited objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program; knowing this, Tehran tempered its response to avoid a protracted all-out war with the United States. It did not do then what it did this winter: attack the Gulf states and close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump made no preparation to deal with these responses, even though they were widely predicted.

The memorandum of understanding may not even encapsulate the most important of Iran’s gains from this American blunder: The war could well mark the end of America’s will to play a security role in the Middle East. Domestic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is in free fall. U.S. bases in the Middle East have been badly damaged, their vulnerability as targets exposed. Trump and his successors will be reluctant to use force against Iran in the future, knowing, as is now clear, that doing so will likely trigger the closure of the strait and an economic crisis. And Americans could be forgiven for feeling that they have tried every kind of policy in the Middle East over the past quarter century—war, diplomacy, working with civil society, building up regional partnerships, pushing various players to sign accords with one another—and watched them all fail.

No one should be under any illusion that an American withdrawal from the Middle East will make the region more peaceful or stable. The Israel-Iran rivalry would likely intensify, resulting in regular closures of the strait and possibly more wars. New rivalries, including one between Israel and Turkey, would no doubt fester and grow. The situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would almost certainly worsen and become more hopeless. Russia and China would increase their influence and strategic presence.

But right now, those who favor American engagement in the Middle East have very little to work with. Israel is perceived as trigger-happy and indifferent to U.S. interests, and many Americans have come to see the region as a strategic black hole.

That might change if a new Israeli government comes to power, especially one led by a mainstream critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policy, such as retired General Gadi Eisenkot, who has been rising in recent polls. Then the United States could possibly be persuaded to reengage: to help build energy infrastructure that circumvents the Strait of Hormuz and to return to the project of normalizing Israeli-Saudi ties, for which progress for Palestinians is a precondition.

But the window for such a shift is very narrow. For two decades, Washington has debated how to engage with this volatile region. Now many Americans question whether they should engage at all. If that sentiment hardens, Trump’s agreement with Iran may be remembered as the moment the United States began its withdrawal from the Middle East.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 9:12 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How Iran won the war

Iran’s next generation is taking over.

By Peter Balonon-Rosen and Sean Rameswaram

Jun 19, 2026, 6:15 AM CDT

There were a few days when this war was about, “Let’s bring freedom to the Iranian people.” Then there were a few days when this war was about the death of the Islamic Republic. And then this was going to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, even though in June 2025 we supposedly obliterated their nuclear weapons program.

It was never really clear what this was really about. We had huge decapitation strikes that happened across Iran on the first days of this war that took out essentially the founding generation of the revolution. We thought the Islamic Republic was on its last legs, and all we had to do was push it a little bit more.

Now, in June 2026, three and a half months after this war started, we have a completely new and younger generation in charge in Iran that is bolder, that is not as afraid of the United States. And then have the Strait of Hormuz, which was not under Iranian control before. Now it is, and Iran is basically saying Israel needs to pull back from Lebanon.

These were conditions that Iran could never have made in February 2026. What we have coming out of this war is a stronger and more entrenched political establishment that leans heavily towards the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Iranian military, that is bolder and that now has sort of shown itself as being a key pillar of West Asia. That’s going to create a fundamentally different Middle East going forward. . . .

What we now see is that the Gulf understands that having American bases is actually a liability because the United States started a war without consulting them. It was not able to protect any of these Gulf countries and their economies.

Iran is the size of Western Europe. I feel like we forget that a lot in the United States, but the reality is, Iran is a massive country geographically. It’s a massive country population-wise, and so the Gulf countries need to figure out a way to live with Iran. That is no longer guaranteed through a big-brother protection of the United States that actually didn’t materialize.

Moving forward, first of all, it seems like the Gulf Arab countries have come to this realization — some quicker than others — but in essence, they are making payments to Iran now. They’re figuring out ways to be able to co-live with them into the future, without Iran being isolated like it was in the past.

That’s a huge difference. The Persian Gulf region is fundamentally transformed. It will no longer be a place where the Americans can do whatever they want. It will now be a place where Iran will reassert its hegemony over that region.

Iran sees itself as having won this war. And because this generation is bolder, it’s actually going to be like, ‘We’re not going to budge. If that means your economy is going to hurt more, fine, you’ve been hurting our economy for 47 years. We’re going to play a game of chicken and see who blinks first.’ That’s this new generation that we’re dealing with.

Much more at https://www.vox.com/podcasts/492390/us-iran-war-peace-deal-how-iran-wo
n

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 19, 2026 10:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
If Only Trump Knew What Vice President JD Vance Is Doing

If the president is infallible, there must be some other explanation for his Iran defeat.


There is.

It was a defeat, just like J6 was a riot.

You're all fucking idiot cultists, and you are all irrelevant going forward.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 3:38 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Iran had all the munitions it needed to destroy the gulf states, Israel, and regional USA bases. It also had tremendous geographic leverage over the Straits. So it doesn't make sense for Iran to settle for promises and a temporary cease fire except that China pressured them.


-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 6:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The era of free and open global commerce, underwritten by American power, has ended

June 19, 2026

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/06/19/the-era-of-free-and-open-g
lobal-commerce-underwritten-by-american-power-has-ended/

Edward Fishman writes:

The United States and Iran have a deal: For 60 days, Tehran will allow ships to sail through the Strait of Hormuz without charging tolls; in return, Washington will lift its naval blockade, waive sanctions on Iranian oil and help Iran get access to its frozen assets. Negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear program are also set to begin.

Even if the deal holds, Iran is poised to emerge from the war battered militarily and economically but strengthened strategically, the newly empowered gatekeeper of the world’s most important energy chokepoint. Other countries will take note — and seek their own chokepoints to exploit.

Though President Trump has declared that the Strait of Hormuz will be “permanently toll-free,” Iran’s grip on the waterway is unlikely to loosen. Over the past three months, its authorities have reportedly charged some ships up to $2 million for passage. Even if fees were much lower than that — say, several hundred thousand dollars per ship, roughly in line with rates at the Suez and Panama Canals — Iran would still receive a multibillion-dollar annuity, giving Tehran an overwhelming financial incentive to preserve its new status.

Controlling the strait also offers Iran considerable strategic benefits. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan is just one of the many world leaders who have appealed to the Iranian government to secure passage for tankers carrying oil to her country, signaling that Tehran is now in a position to cut side deals with governments all over the world. Over time, the Islamic Republic could use its newfound leverage to obtain further sanctions relief and other diplomatic concessions. And of course, any threat to close the strait — explicit or implicit — will provide Iran with a powerful deterrent against military strikes or economic pressure.

Shipowners and energy traders will bristle at paying fees to Iran, but the costs are unlikely to be prohibitive. For a large oil tanker, $2 million amounts to about $1 per barrel of oil, less than a typical credit card transaction fee. Iran’s threats to shipping in the strait have sent insurance rates soaring, with some premiums estimated to have risen to $7.5 million per voyage. If paying Iran guarantees safe passage, insurance costs could fall, offsetting much of the toll. The Greek shipping magnate Evangelos Marinakis, who manages a fleet of over 200 vessels and tankers, has said that he would prefer paying a toll to “all this hassle.”

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may grudgingly reach a similar conclusion. They would be among the biggest losers if their greatest geopolitical rival maintains control over the waterway, but they are also desperate to see the Strait of Hormuz reopened so they can restart their lucrative oil exports at full tilt. These Gulf states could accept an Iranian toll as a necessary, if temporary, evil, as it would buy them time to build new pipelines that circumvent the strait, a project that could take a decade. The deputy prime minister of Qatar has already conceded that a “temporary” fee is “negotiable.”

Though Mr. Trump has been adamant that neither Iran nor its cross-strait neighbor, Oman, can administer the waterway, the past few months have revealed that the United States cannot simply force the strait open. When the U.S. military tried to do so in early May, Iran retaliated aggressively. Within 36 hours, Mr. Trump suspended the mission. That same day, Tehran unveiled the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a government body to oversee traffic through the waterway. Since then, Iran has steadily entrenched its control.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 2:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Iran had all the munitions it needed to destroy the gulf states, Israel, and regional USA bases. It also had tremendous geographic leverage over the Straits. So it doesn't make sense for Iran to settle for promises and a temporary cease fire except that China pressured them.


-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger


Yeah. Didn't have anything to do with 3 of our 11 aircraft carriers bunking out right in their back yard.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 2:36 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Yeah. Didn't have anything to do with 3 of our 11 aircraft carriers bunking out right in their back yard.
Trump’s Second Gamble on Iran

If the regime can’t be dislodged by force, maybe it can be bribed.

By Karim Sadjadpour | June 20, 2026, 7 AM ET

Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focuses on Iran and U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trumps-second-gamble-on-iran
/687650/

Donald Trump’s war against Iran began with one gamble and ended with another. Initially, the president bet that he could stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions by bombing Iran’s revolutionary regime out of existence. So he spent tens of billions of dollars, and upended the global economy, only to sign a memorandum of understanding undoubtedly weaker than any deal he could have struck before the war. Embedded in this document is a new gamble: that if Iran’s revolutionaries can’t be dislodged by force, they might instead be bribed to abandon their identity.

The memorandum offers a bundle of American inducements so lopsided that it reads as if Tehran wrote the plan unilaterally. Of its 14 provisions, 13 either amount to diplomatic boilerplate or heavily favor Iran on their face. Tehran will receive military and economic concessions—and de facto acknowledgment of its control over the Strait of Hormuz—in exchange for a concession that it will not develop or buy nuclear weapons. Never mind that Iran has made and ignored such promises before, and the CIA doubts its sincerity now.

The humiliation of the memorandum is doubly egregious for Trump, who withdrew from Barack Obama’s multinational agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear programs. Trump called that agreement the “worst deal ever negotiated,” but it was less costly to America, was less generous to Iran, and offered more concrete nonproliferation guarantees. Trump is paying far more for far less.

He has acted like a poker player who believes his own bluffs. Trump vowed to raze Iran’s missile industry to the ground; defang its proxy militias, such as Hezbollah; unseat its regime; choose its next leader; and control the Strait of Hormuz. While none of his maximalist war goals were achieved, Trump celebrated the cease-fire, and lifting of the blockade, as if he had had no role in creating the whole mess in the first place.

The Islamic Republic, one of the world’s most brutal, isolated, and unpopular regimes, has emerged with its economy and military further decimated but its confidence restored. On the eve of the war, it was a bankrupt global pariah that had just massacred thousands of its own people—perhaps tens of thousands—to crush a national uprising. Today it celebrates having defied America and Israel, and basks in Western commentary that it is a rising power.

Virtually every American president since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has wanted to improve relations between Washington and Tehran. Doing so would be in the national interest of both America and Iran, but no administration has achieved this outcome. Iran’s revolutionary theocracy thrives in isolation and has made resistance against the United States and its ally Israel central to the regime’s identity, its internal legitimacy, and the cohesion of its security forces.

Having assassinated the regime’s top leadership, Trump is now trying not only to negotiate a new nuclear deal but to engineer a grand bargain that transforms U.S.-Iran relations. But he is hedging his own bet by putting J. D. Vance in charge of the effort. Vance recently told The New York Times that Tehran’s new elite are rethinking the revolution and coalescing around a new consensus that “47 years of Iran policy towards the United States has been a mistake.” Trump, however, has made no secret of his calculations. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said earlier this week. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J. D.”

Vance’s political future may rest as much on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers as on Republican-primary voters. One of Vance’s hopes to lead Iran’s ideological transformation is Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC general and the current speaker of Iran’s Parliament. The two men spent more than 20 hours together in Islamabad earlier this year and reportedly built a private rapport. Yet Qalibaf’s recent public speeches and interviews—mocking America, praising Hezbollah, threatening Israel, and hailing partnership with China—will likely prove to be a truer barometer of Tehran’s intentions than any private assurances of goodwill.

There are other major obstacles to normalization. The memorandum suggests that Iran could get $300 billion in investment, ostensibly from the same Gulf countries that were just on the receiving end of thousands of Iranian missiles. “It’s presumptuous for the U.S. to commit other people’s money,” Ali Shihabi, an adviser to Saudi leadership, told me. “Gulf countries should not be paying reparations for a war they did not want.” A Gulf diplomat was much blunter. “They’re not going to get a penny from us,” he told me.

The logic of Trump’s current gamble with Iran resembles his entreaties to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during Trump’s first term: The president is offering reintegration as a reward for denuclearization. In Singapore, Trump famously tried to entice Kim with visions of turning North Korea’s missile-testing coastlines into prime real estate, marveling at the country’s “great beaches” and envisioning “the best hotels in the world.” But for revolutionary dictatorships such as North Korea and Iran, Western-backed luxury hotels, foreign tourists, and open capital flows aren’t a triumph—they are a Trojan horse that would erode their total information control and ideological legitimacy.

The memorandum calls for 60 days of negotiations, but virtually no one expects a nuclear agreement—let alone the end of a 47-year U.S.-Iran cold war—to come about so quickly. So the war may not be over; it might merely be paused. Tehran will try to rebuild its missiles and proxies, which won’t be part of any agreement. According to reports, it still retains as much as 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and its mobile launchers. It still produces large quantities of missiles and drones.

Tehran’s new leadership is not moderating the regime’s internal conduct. Parastoo Ahmadi, a 29-year-old singer, was recently sentenced to 74 lashes for performing a concert publicly without a hijab. Security forces have stepped up persecution of the Baha’i religious minority. And dozens of political prisoners have been fast-tracked to the gallows. In other words, there are no visible signs on the ground to bolster Trump’s argument that the regime has become “very rational” and is “not radicalized.”


Aside from the Iranian people, the Gulf countries that sought to befriend Trump have been the biggest losers. Their previously vibrant economies were sabotaged by Iran’s $20,000 drones. Given the existential threat they feel from Tehran, they will have no choice but to rely more than ever on America’s security umbrella—while also being forced, at the same time, to cut their own side deals with Iran.

Trump has recently metamorphosed from an Iran hawk into an Iran apologist, defending the Islamic Republic’s missile program and lauding Mojtaba Khamenei—an ideological carbon copy of the hard-line father whom Trump assassinated—as respected and pragmatic. The president’s incoherence has become a source of gallows humor among Iranians. “Trump went to delete Ayatollah Khamenei,” one Iranian told me, “but he accidentally pressed ‘Update.’”

Perhaps the peace deal is just a tactical retreat. “If he doesn’t like where this is going, he will go back to the blockade or bombing them,” a senior administration official told me. “And oil prices will be much lower.” Yet Trump, who has clearly wearied of the economic disruptions that his war has caused, may not want to gamble on renewed hostilities with Iran.

U.S. presidents typically begin to understand the nature of the Islamic Republic only at the end of their term. Ever since the 1979 revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis ruined Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign, Tehran has prided itself on sabotaging American chief executives. This time it may get a two-for-one: the presidency of Donald Trump, and the presidential ambitions of J. D. Vance.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 4:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Don't quote me and post non-related stuff.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 6:47 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't quote me and post non-related stuff.
Trump's goals for the Iran war and what he's saying now

By Zak Hudak, Natalie McCormick, Maria Sullivan, Gabriella Biello

Updated on: June 18, 2026 / 8:40 PM EDT / CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-goals-iran-war-and-what-hes-saying-
now-nuclear-missiles-regime-change/

Washington — Hours after the U.S. launched its war against Iran in late February, President Trump laid out an aggressive list of war aims. He pledged to "destroy their missiles," prevent the regime from rebuilding its nuclear program and set the stage for Iranians to "take over" the country's government.

A week into the conflict, he wrote on Truth Social: "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!"

Now, as the Trump administration touts a newly signed memorandum of understanding to extend the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and jumpstart nuclear talks, the president has backed off some of those ambitions.

Mr. Trump told reporters this week it's "OK" for Iran to keep some of its ballistic missiles. He said he isn't in a hurry to recover Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and isn't vying for "regime change" in Iran. The memorandum of understanding also leaves most specifics on the fate of Iran's nuclear program to be determined in additional negotiations over the next 60 days.

The president also shared some praise for Iran's current leadership.

"We're dealing with people that I think are very rational people, and they were nice to deal with," Mr. Trump said of Iran's current leadership during an event at the G7 summit in France on Tuesday, noting that some prior Iranian leaders were killed during the war. "They were strong people, smart people. … They're not radicalized and they're looking to help their country."

Here's what the president and top administration officials have said about key issues related to Iran, then and now:

Eliminating ballistic missiles

Trump, Feb. 28: "We're going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally, again, obliterated."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, March 2: "I'm telling you what the objectives of this operation are. The objectives of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can't rebuild it, and make sure that they can't hide behind that to have a nuclear program. That's the objective of the mission."

Trump, June 17: "If other countries have them, it's a little bit unfair for [Iran] not to have some. A ballistic missile is not the same thing as what we're talking about, when we talk nuclear. But if Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they all have some — in relative proportion, I think it's OK."

Context: While Mr. Trump has said preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is his primary goal, the administration and U.S. allies in the Middle East have long raised concerns about threats posed by Iran's conventional military — especially its ballistic missiles, which can reach Israel and U.S. allies and military assets around the region. Throughout the war, U.S. forces heavily targeted Iran's missile stockpile and missile factories.

The U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding does not make any references to ballistic missiles, though Mr. Trump said Wednesday his administration will work on a "parallel effort" with Persian Gulf countries to address Iran's conventional missiles and other "non-nuclear issues."

Mr. Trump argued Wednesday that most of Iran's missile stockpile was either destroyed or buried under rubble during the war. But he suggested he isn't looking to fully eliminate Iran's ballistic missiles.

He also appeared to mock some hawkish Trump supporters who want the country's missile program to be more thoroughly decimated. "I have guys — I like some of these guys, but I don't think they're smart — 'Sir, you shouldn't let them have any missiles.' I said: 'Well, what am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can't have them?' … It doesn't work that way."

"Nuclear dust"

Trump, April 17: "The USA will get all nuclear dust — you know what the nuclear dust is? That was that white, powdery substance created by our B2 bombers, those great B2 bombers, late one evening 7 months ago."

Trump, April 26: "We have to take that nuclear dust. We're going to take it, and that's part of our negotiation with Iran. We don't want them to have it."

Trump, June 16: "What's happening is that at an appropriate time — there's no rush at all. We have cameras from space on it. We know everybody that goes there, which is, like, nobody. The B2 bombers hit it. The entire mountain collapsed inside it. It's a very tough excavation. Nobody else can do it, but us, and probably China. They have the equipment, we have the equipment. We're in no rush, but we get it. And when we get it, we'll destroy it."

Context: In the years leading up to the war, Iran amassed a stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, which is just a short step away from weapons-grade material. Much of that material was held in a handful of subterranean facilities that were bombed by the U.S. last year, making it difficult to access.

During this year's war, the Trump administration strategized on ways to recover the uranium, which the president calls "nuclear dust." An operation to dig through the rubble and take the material would have been among the most challenging and risky special operations missions in U.S. history, experts say.

In the memorandum of understanding, the U.S. and Iran "agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material" in their talks over the next 60 days. The "minimum methodology" is "down-blending" the uranium to a lower level of purity onsite, under the International Atomic Energy Agency's supervision.

But Mr. Trump suggested this week taking the material is not an urgent task, expressing doubt that Iran can recover it. He said Wednesday "we'd like to get it psychologically, but nobody's touching it."

Uranium enrichment

Trump, Feb. 27: "They want to enrich a little bit. You don't have to enrich when you have that much oil. … I say, no enrichment. Not 20%, 30%. They always want 20%, 30%. … They want it for civil. I think it's uncivil."

Trump, June 14: The final deal must permanently ensure that Iran "can only enrich for nonmilitary purposes" and "can never go beyond a certain amount," the president said in an interview with The New York Times in which he said he wants a suspension on uranium enrichment for 15 or 20 years.

Trump, June 17: "I've said to them always: 'You have probably the third-largest oil reserves in the world. What the hell do you need nuclear for?' … It is a little hard, though, when you say that somebody wants it, other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you're not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. It's always a little tough. You have to use a little common sense."

Vice President JD Vance, June 18: "The Obama nuclear deal allowed enrichment. Ours will not."

Context: Iran has long refused to fully give up its uranium enrichment program. Iranian officials insist the program is intended for peaceful purposes, and as recently as last year, U.S. intelligence agencies found Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, though Iran has enriched uranium in recent years to levels well beyond what's necessary for most non-military purposes.

The 2015 nuclear deal inked by the Obama administration allowed Iran to keep enriching uranium to 3.67%, significantly below the 90% used for bombs, with limits on the size of Iran's stockpile and the number and types of centrifuges Iran could operate. That structure drew criticism at the time, and Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal during his first term in office.

Prior to the outbreak of war, Mr. Trump said he wanted Iran to agree to "no enrichment."

The U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding leaves specifics on uranium enrichment for later, saying only that the two countries "agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear needs." It's unclear what a final deal could look like. Mr. Trump suggested this week it could be "hard" to get Iran to fully give up its nuclear program, but Vance suggested the president's red line of no enrichment is still in place.

Regime change

Trump, addressing the Iranian people in a video on Truth Social on Feb. 28: "Take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations."

Trump, March 29: "We've had regime change, if you look already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they're all dead. The next regime is mostly dead, and the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anybody's dealt with before. It's a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change."

Trump, June 16: "You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change."

Context: In the war's opening hours, Mr. Trump explicitly framed it as an opportunity for the Iranian people to overthrow the Islamic Republic, which has governed Iran since 1979. After Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in strikes, Mr. Trump said he wanted a role in picking Iran's next leader, and was "disappointed" by the decision to elevate Khamenei's son to the post of supreme leader.

More recently, as the Iranian regime has remained in place, Mr. Trump offered a slightly different view, arguing the killing of prior Iranian leaders was effectively a form of "regime change."
Frozen assets and sanctions relief

Trump, May 27: "No, we're not talking about any easing of sanctions or giving money. No sanctions, no money, no nothing."

Trump, June 17: "It's not our money, it's their money. And we froze it at a certain point in time, I guess we're going to have to give it back."

Context: A key issue for Iran is the removal — or suspension — of intense U.S. sanctions that have hobbled Iran's economy and frozen its assets, many of which date back to the "maximum pressure" campaign in Mr. Trump's first term or even earlier. The Obama-era nuclear deal lifted sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran's nuclear program, an arrangement Mr. Trump argued in 2018 gave Iran "many billions of dollars."

This week's memorandum of understanding says the U.S. will lift "all types of sanctions" against Iran on an "agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal." The Trump administration has said no sanctions will be removed or assets unfrozen unless Iran demonstrates compliance.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 7:34 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Iran says it is closing Strait of Hormuz, testing fragile agreement with U.S.

As Iran cited Israel’s attacks in Lebanon as the reason it would close the strait again, Vice President JD Vance departed for Switzerland for more peace talks.

June 20, 2026 at 5:30 p.m. EDT

By Maegan Vazquez and Michael Birnbaum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/06/20/iran-says-it-is-closin
g-strait-hormuz-testing-fragile-agreement-with-us/

Iran’s military command said Saturday it is closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to state media, testing a fragile ceasefire agreement intended to lead to a broader peace with the United States.

After the announcement of the closure, Iranian and U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, set off for Switzerland for more high-level talks, which are scheduled to resume on Sunday.

Stranded vessels had cautiously begun to transit the Strait of Hormuz after a preliminary agreement between the U.S. and Iran in which the countries agreed to lift all restrictions on movement through the strategic maritime corridor. U.S. Central Command said movement continued through Saturday, stating that 55 merchant ships and 17 million barrels of oil passed through and denying that the strait is closed.

A core element of the ceasefire agreement calls for an end to hostilities by Israel against Lebanon, requiring the Trump administration to press Israel to halt its attacks on Iran’s proxy Hezbollah. U.S. intelligence agencies have warned the Trump administration that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to remain intent on continuing military operations in Lebanon — a posture that would undermine President Donald Trump’s effort to reach a more permanent peace deal with Iran.

Around the same time as Iran’s announcement, Vance told “Fox & Friends” on Saturday morning that “the straits are now open.” A U.S. Central Command spokesman also later denied that the strait was closed.

“Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz,” Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins said. “Traffic continues to flow, and U.S. forces are monitoring the situation to ensure this remains the case.”

The commodity tracking firm Kpler said 20 ships had crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday.

The latest development in the strait follows a days-long back-and-forth over whether and when mediated peace talks would continue in Switzerland after appearances from high-level officials, including Vance, had been postponed.

Pakistan, the mediator in peace negotiations, confirmed on Saturday that more talks were planned for Sunday in Switzerland, and Vance departed Washington late Saturday afternoon en route to Lucerne.

“We’ll have a couple of days of talks,” Vance told reporters before boarding Air Force Two. “We’ll try to get this thing kicked off in the right way. There’s a lot to discuss, but we’re going to go through it all.”

The Israel Defense Forces received ceasefire directives for Lebanon, an IDF official confirmed to The Washington Post on Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security issues.

Earlier Saturday, a soldier was killed by a Hezbollah drone strike in southern Lebanon, the IDF said, bringing the number of soldiers killed by Hezbollah fire since March to at least 35.

The Lebanon Ministry of Public Health’s Emergency Health Operations Center said that Israeli airstrikes on Friday resulted in a final toll of 83 dead and 141 wounded.

Vance has complained in recent days that every time the U.S. and Iran got close to an agreement, Israel would launch another attack on Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters Saturday at Joint Base Andrews, Vance downplayed the hostilities, saying that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “actively managing” the situation and that “things are actually getting better there.”

“It’s going to just be something we’re going to have to continuously manage to ensure that Israel and Lebanon are both safe and secure,” he added.

Trump, who is at Camp David this weekend meeting with his senior advisers, has said repeatedly in recent days that his concerns about the economic impact of the war and the closed strait drove his decision to seek peace.

“We wouldn’t have oil for months. As long as you’re dropping bombs, that thing is automatically closed because those ships cost 500 to a billion dollars apiece. They’re not going to be sailing with rockets,” Trump told Axios in an interview broadcast on Friday.

“I mean, we have seven or eight hundred ships are leaving, but if I attack them, none of those ships are leaving,” he said.

Benjamin Friedman, policy director for the think tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for a more limited role of the U.S. military in world affairs, urged Trump to put “real pressure on Israel to not spoil the deal at the expense of the global economy.”

“Israel needs to fear reduced aid and suspension of U.S. military help, including removal of U.S. missile defenses that protect it, if it refuses to play ball,” Friedman said in a statement.

Steve Hendrix, Lior Soroka, Imogen Piper and Suzy Haidamous contributed to this report.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, June 20, 2026 8:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Don't quote me and post non-related stuff.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.


How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."



Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.



Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.



Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.


That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.


Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Sunday, June 21, 2026 6:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't quote me and post non-related stuff.
Donald Trump’s Iran Deal Is Israel’s Disaster

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has few allies but Trump—and that partnership is now in question.

By Ruth Margalit | June 19, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/donald-trumps-iran-deal-is-isr
aels-disaster

After Israel struck a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut on Sunday, Israelis went to bed expecting to be roused by incoming missiles from Iran. Instead, they awoke to news of a ceasefire. Even for a country versed in turmoil, this was an extraordinary turn of events.

But rather than feeling a sense of relief that the hostilities were over—or, at the least, suspended—most Israelis responded with alarm. “Good for Iran, Bad for Israel,” Yediot Ahronot, a popular newspaper, declared in a front-page headline on Thursday, when it became clear that the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran did not address Israel’s top concerns, namely Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and its arsenal of ballistic missiles.

That concern cut across political lines. Less than a third of Israeli Jews—from right, left, and center—thought that ending the war under the current conditions was in the country’s security interests, according to an Israel Democracy Institute poll released days before the deal was announced. (Sixty per cent of Arabs in the country thought ending the war was compatible with security interests.) And only forty-one per cent of Israeli Jews said that the country’s security was a central consideration for President Donald Trump—representing the lowest share since the I.D.I. first started tracking responses in November, 2024. This puts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a real bind: Israelis are now sending the message that he may have to choose between remaining aligned with the U.S. President and retaining his already winnowed base of supporters. On Monday, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called the agreement with Iran a “bad deal for Israel and the entire free world.”

On Wednesday night, Trump signed a copy of the agreement at the Palace of Versailles. The fourteen-point document was then co-signed by the Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian. “This agreement is a catastrophe for Israel,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch for Israel’s military intelligence, told me. Citrinowicz, who is currently a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, was among the few Israelis who vocally opposed the war at the start, arguing that the mass protests that galvanized Iranians over the winter should have been met with intensified economic pressure on the Iranian regime, not with missiles. Now he warned against the ceasefire deal, citing the issues that it sidesteps, including genuine curbs on Iran’s nuclear program and the threat posed by the country’s ballistic missiles. (“They have to have some,” Trump pontificated about Iran’s missiles on Wednesday.)

The deal will also unfreeze tens of billions of dollars in Iranian funds held in international banks as part of the final agreement. Such lifting of sanctions all but guarantees that the Iranian regime will be bolstered mere months after protests brought it to the brink of collapse. Citrinowicz said, “Not only does it illustrate the failure of trying to overthrow a regime and instead only strengthening it, but, even worse in the Israeli context, is what U.S. Administration would ever attempt this kind of adventure again?” Israel, he added, is “decidedly worse off today” than it was on February 28th, when the war began.

Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is regarded as even more of a hard-liner than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated, at eighty-six, by Israeli Air Force strikes. “It’s not a change of regime but a change in regime,” Citrinowicz said. Amos Harel, a military analyst for Haaretz, labelled the Iran ceasefire deal among Netanyahu’s biggest failures, second only to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. “An ending like this to the Iranian saga—with no regime change, no end to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and clear damage to the Israeli-American special relationship—reveals the extent of the destruction Netanyahu has wreaked on Israel’s global standing since 2023,” Harel wrote.

When the U.S. signed the nuclear deal with Iran, under Barack Obama, in 2015, Israel still had a wealth of international allies that it could draw on to insure its security interests. After its conduct in the Gaza war—which involved the deaths of tens of thousands, the withholding of aid, and the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip—it is now more isolated than at any time in the past. Virtually all other countries welcomed the Iran ceasefire deal and raised no concerns about Israel’s security. “Netanyahu is alone. He doesn’t have the Europeans, he doesn’t have the Democrats, he no longer has the Republicans, and now he’s losing Trump,” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister and vocal critic of Netanyahu, told me on Wednesday. On Thursday, Vice-President J. D. Vance said as much, and issued a warning: “If I was ?in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

For months, Trump defended his decision to attack Iran, even as the war threatened to tear apart his MAGA coalition. He seemed to be particularly sensitive about a Times report in April detailing how Netanyahu had persuaded him to open the conflict. “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran,” Trump posted on Truth Social a couple of weeks later, saying that October 7th and his own convictions led to the decision. “I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief.” But, as the war failed to yield the quick results that Trump had counted on, he reversed course, at times trying to sound indifferent to its outcome. “I don’t care” if peace talks were over, he told CNBC earlier this month. At the G-7 summit in France on Tuesday, Trump said that he hoped to put the war in the “rearview mirror.” He also lobbed criticism at Netanyahu, who, he said, “has to be more responsible” about his conflict with Hezbollah, in which more than thirty-eight hundred people in Lebanon and thirty people in Israel have been killed since March. Trump declared, “Without me, there would be no Israel.”

After the ceasefire deal was announced, Netanyahu gave a rare press conference. He vowed that “with an agreement or without an agreement, Iran will not have nuclear weapons—not today and not tomorrow.” But he looked physically spent. The issue he acknowledged to be his “life’s mission”—preventing Iran from obtaining the weapons—was slipping away from him, under a U.S. President whom he once called “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Trump and Netanyahu’s disagreements over Israel’s occupation of Lebanon may prove particularly difficult to resolve. Netanyahu announced at his press conference that Israeli forces will remain in Lebanon for “as long as required.” Trump responded by expanding on what he called his “little dispute” over Lebanon with Netanyahu. “You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah,” Trump said during his G-7 news conference.

“Where did you go wrong?” an Israeli reporter asked Netanyahu. His supporters were beginning to wonder the same. Amit Segal, a senior political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12 with close access to Netanyahu, acknowledged in a recent column that Israel had made a mistake in prioritizing regime change in Iran over eliminating its nuclear capabilities. Segal said that, though the ceasefire deal did not surprise Netanyahu, the way in which it happened came “as a shock.” Trump had shut Israel out of the peace talks. He spent the past two weeks hurling insults at Netanyahu, calling him “fucking crazy” in one phone call, as Axios first reported and Trump later confirmed. But the deal itself “looked like a total surrender wrapped in an anti-Bibi, almost anti-Israel sentiment,” Segal told me. He said of Netanyahu, “It’s something he used to preach against for many years—paying the Iranians in cash and hoping to get something in credit. It’s very similar to the Obama deal but even more dangerous because it’s temporary and because Iran isn’t really obliged to do much at all in return.”

For Netanyahu’s mouthpieces in the media, news of the ceasefire deal appeared to represent a genuine crisis. Would they publicly break with Netanyahu? Or would they turn on Trump, a leader they once lavished with near-mystic praise, comparing him to Cyrus the Great and to the Messiah? Segal told me, “It’s like when your parents divorce and you have to pick sides.”

By Tuesday, the pro-Netanyahu camp appeared to settle on an answer. Trump “came out a loser,” Yinon Magal, who hosts a popular talk show on Channel 14, a pro-Netanyahu outlet, wrote on X. Magal blamed the ceasefire on “Vice President Vance, the lowlife,” and denigrated Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the President’s envoys for peace missions, calling them “two yehudonim,” or “Jewboys.” (When Vance was asked for his response to Magal and other Israeli commentators, he visibly scoffed. “They’re proposing an endless conflict,” he said.) On his radio show, Magal doubled down on the strategy of distancing Netanyahu from Trump. “Why are you blaming Netanyahu?” he said. “Netanyahu has always insisted on victory, total victory. The fact that Trump turned on him halfway there is not his fault.”

Such anti-Trump rhetoric is new in Israel, and it appears to be seeping into broader public opinion. Up until three weeks ago, fifty-eight per cent of Israelis viewed Trump favorably—rendering him the most popular politician in the country. However, in a snap poll published by Israel Hayom after the ceasefire deal was reached, Trump’s favorability rating had plummeted from plus twenty-three to negative sixteen. “I’ve never seen a shift on that scale before,” Segal told me. Among Netanyahu’s supporters, Trump’s popularity had declined by fifty points. Segal attributed the change to the “bad deal” but also, perhaps even especially, to Trump’s insults of Netanyahu.

The ceasefire went into effect as Israeli political parties ratcheted up their campaigns ahead of a fall election. (A date has not yet been determined.) According to a new poll released on Tuesday, Netanyahu’s Likud Party is projected to remain the largest, but the center-left Yashar Party, headed by Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the military, has narrowed the gap substantially, gaining four seats in a single week. The anti-Netanyahu bloc is expected to secure a majority in parliament, according to recent polls, as Netanyahu’s coalition partners trail far behind. Segal said that he can imagine a scenario in which Netanyahu, seeing his diminished support and recognizing a “window of opportunity” in Trump’s falling approval rating in Israel, more openly breaks from him.

Citrinowicz, the Iran expert, sounded more skeptical. He used an old Israeli trope about the Army to describe the power imbalance between Netanyahu and Trump and the unlikelihood that Netanyahu will publicly defy him. “When you piss on him, he gets wet,” Citrinowicz said. “But when he pisses on you, you drown.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, June 21, 2026 10:05 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Surprising Reaction Inside Iran to Its War Victory

Despite extracting extraordinary concessions, the reaction in Iran isn’t entirely jubilant. Past betrayals are too recent to forget.

By Seamus Matekafzali | June 20 2026, 2:35 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/20/iran-war-deal-ceasefire/

The White House has been desperate to find a way out of the quagmire of its own making in Iran, leading to the remote signing on June 15 of a memorandum of understanding that promises extraordinary concessions to the Islamic Republic. Stipulations once deemed a “nightmare for Israel” by American politicians and dismissed by President Donald Trump as “not acceptable” — such as total sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars of funds held abroad — are now reality. Despite attempts by the Trump administration to spin this as an achievement of all of America’s goals and an “unconditional surrender” by Iran, the deal has been met with skepticism, derision, anger, and mockery by Democrats and even some Republicans, pushing close Trump allies such as Fox News host Mark Levin and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to admonish the president for doing the “unthinkable” by capitulating to Iran.

In Israel, the deal has been seen far more uniformly across the political spectrum as an immense and almost incomprehensible betrayal by the United States, an unforeseen cruelty by Trump, and an incalculable failure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only 11 percent of Israelis say that their country won the war against Iran, and a whopping 71 percent do not expect Trump to look out for Israeli interests in future negotiations. One Likud member of the Knesset expressed his frustration by filming himself taking off his “Make America Great Again” hat and instead putting on a “Total Victory” hat, a phrase invoked by Netanyahu to justify the wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip.

In Iran, the atmosphere is still not entirely jubilant. Much of Iran’s media and many officials have indeed taken a triumphant attitude: The front page of Javan, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-aligned newspaper, depicted a crowd of Iranians breaking through a wall of threats made by the Trump administration, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, claimed that “everything we wanted to achieve through military action, we achieved many times over through negotiation.” But past betrayals are, after all, far too recent to forget.

It was only in April, for instance, when Israel unilaterally insisted it wasn’t party to the ceasefire in Lebanon and continued its war there. Previous negotiations with America only served as a cover for war preparations in June 2025 and February 2026. This has resulted in a national mood that is much more cautious than the elation that many felt after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated under Barack Obama and agreed to by the Rouhani administration, was adopted in 2015.

While an overwhelming majority of the country has backed the diplomatic track, criticism of the efforts of the team lead by Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has burned subtly in the background since early April. Supporters of the coalition known as the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability, representing the largest faction of the conservatives in the Iranian Parliament, have begun making their objections known, countering previous attempts by those in power to present a united front and to dispense with hardliner-versus-reformist politicking amid the war.

Criticism of current diplomatic efforts on the Iranian state television program “Soraya” in late May led to the suspension of the program days later. In response, its host, Mohsen Maqsoodi, held live conversations in Tehran’s Valiasr Square, where political commentator Ali Abdi criticized the state for not striking Israel as its army continues to bulldoze Lebanon, which led to that series’ cancellation as well. Rumors swirled online that the cancellation was owed to an intervention by an adviser to Ghalibaf.

After Araghchi gave an interview on state TV on June 12 saying that Iran would have to make concessions in its dealings, angry demonstrators who were attending nightly state-sponsored rallies demanded the diplomatic corps remember the “blood of the Leader [Khamenei],” with one speaker in Tehran’s Enghelab Square leading marchers in chants of “Death to the compromiser,” against those who think “America has something to offer [Iran].”

In Parliament, conservatives affiliated or allied with the Front have made their criticism vocal, with members calling for Araghchi to be barred from contacting Trump administration negotiator Steve Witkoff and demanding Parliament see the deal before it is signed. One representative called the agreement worse than “the JCPOA and [the Treaty of] Turkmenchay,” referring to the 1828 treaty that ceded swathes of Iranian territory to the Russian Empire.

Tehran representative Mahmoud Nabavian has been arguably the most prominent member of Parliament criticizing the government’s diplomats, castigating Araghchi for leaving gaps in the memorandum of understanding that America could exploit, namely the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz erasing Iran’s economic leverage, and the lack of clarity in the document about timelines for the lifting of sanctions and the exit of American forces from the region.

The public criticism has less so outlined how exactly Iran could extract more concessions. But it appears such sentiment is now being expressed at the highest level of government: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. In a statement announcing his approval of the deal, Mojtaba raised the eyebrows of some analysts by saying that he “had a different view” than what was agreed to by his negotiators, but nevertheless acceded to the wishes of President Masoud Pezeshkian on the condition that Iran rejects “excessive demands” made by the United States, remarking that the nation “await[s] the realization of the aforementioned conditions.”

This kind of public and immediate skepticism of a deal agreed to by the elected government was not the type of messaging made by Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, who reserved public criticism of the red lines crossed in JCPOA negotiations until the deal had been torn up years later by the Trump administration. Coverage in Axios from an Israeli analyst speculated that Mojtaba means to place any failure of the deal firmly on the shoulders of the Iranian president.

While the deal has yielded extraordinary concessions for Iran, there are already dark clouds looming. Concerns are emerging among other members of Parliament about the agreement requiring cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was suspended last year by the elected legislature. More importantly, the first clause of the agreement — which requires an immediate and permanent end to the war in Lebanon — is already being shattered.

Israel, as it did when the ceasefire was initially achieved in early April, has again argued that it must remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel’s national security demands it. A ceasefire apparently brokered between Hezbollah and Israel on Friday was broken within minutes as Israel continued to bombard the Lebanese south. An order has apparently come down on Saturday from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz for the Israeli military to cease firing in Lebanon, but not withdraw from any of its positions and respond to any Hezbollah attack on its occupying forces. This leaves open the question of how Israeli military doctrine in southern Lebanon is actually supposed to change.

The United States has also taken active steps to secure more concessions from Iran outside of the explicit directives of the deal, with Vice President JD Vance saying that the $300 billion in reconstruction funds would not be released to Iran unless the nation stopped funding “terrorist organizations” like Hezbollah. The memorandum of understanding includes no mention of Iran’s support for allied organizations abroad, nor its ballistic missile program, both of which were primary targets of the Israeli–American war.

Iran, for its part, closed the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday in response to Israel’s refusal to stop the war. While it is still sending negotiators to Switzerland to speak with Vance, Iran is apparently not going there to negotiate a final deal just yet but instead demand U.S. compliance with the terms of the agreement. There is, as of now, still little indication at this time that the U.S. will agree to the demand for a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, despite surprising recent criticism from Trump and Vance of Israel’s scorched-earth tactics in the country.

For the moment, Israeli officials continue to dig in their heels, demanding further and further action, and stirring tension on other fronts like the West Bank, in an attempt to divert attention and lessen the blow that the majority of Israeli society agrees the country has suffered. For National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, there is no possibility of acceptance of the diplomatic track, remarking on Friday: “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 22, 2026 4:17 AM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Trump was hoping for a quick war so he could go to China with Venezuela and Iran in his pocket, but he walked into a bear trap instead.

I think Iran at this point wants to destroy USA presence in the mideast, and maybe Israel too, bc that's the only way for them to get peace and security.

This war is over when Iran says it's over, and that won't happen until Iran's security needs are met.
It is amusing to see our resident Terrorist fangirl and Head Cheerleader for Jihad postulating at this time that the only thing the Terrorist regime of Iran wants is "security." As evidenced by their nearly half century of nonstop and always escalating Terrorist murdering attacks across the globe.

She keeps claiming that Terrorist leaders of Iran are in the driver's seat, and will always be able to pump oil, and will decide when to end their War on The World.

But - they keep dying before they make that decision. And THAT is effectively the whole point of the exercise. Iran seems to have learned from Crow - don't want to choose peace, somebody who replaces you might.

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Monday, June 22, 2026 4:54 AM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Back to the real world.

Something has been bothering me for a few months. Iran has been using the excuse for attacking everybody the concept that, to them, any ceasefire between them and anybody else is breached whenever any sensible, reasonable power who defends themselves from terrorist attacks by any of Iran's co-belligerants is the same as an attack upon Iran itself - because they are all under the umbrella of protection of Iran. So when Boca Haram, Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, or other terrorist miscreants attack enough to get spanked back, Iran claims that as a violation of ceasefire, and the needed excuse for them to attack forces of good.
OK, fine. This does help solidify the knowledge that all of these terrorist entities really are and have always been offspring of Iran terrorists. Which most observant folk have known for a long time, but Libtards and such kept denying.


But what about the reciprocal logic? It should be made clear to Iran (and the world os sensible folk) that any attack by terrorist protectees of Iran should also serve as trigger for ALL of the various faction of good to perform defensive strikes, in response. So when Iran is planting mines in the strait, both USA and IDF - and any other Allied power - should deplete the strike capabilities of Any and All of the belligerants under their Umbrella of Evil Terrorists. When Hezbollah sends a missile, or Hamas launches a rocket, then IDF can obliterate the launch point AND USA can lop off another Ayatollah.

I haven't seen or heard reasoning why this has not been implemented.

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Monday, June 22, 2026 5:39 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Broke Biggest ‘Taboo’ In Diplomatic History With 1 'Adolescent' Threat: Analyst

The president's warning against Iranian diplomats broke centuries of precedent.

By Ed Mazza | Jun 22, 2026, 02:07 AM EDT

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-threatens-envoys_n_6a38b9fae4b081
0d441d5732

While Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland trying to reach a peace deal with Iran, it seemed like President Donald Trump was trying his utmost to undermine the talks.

After initial talks on Sunday, Vance told the media that progress had been made toward a future, noting, “We are looking to transform, fundamentally, the relationship with Iran.”

MS NOW analyst Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs under President Barack Obama, agreed with network host Ayman Mohyeldin, who had praised Vance’s hopeful and optimistic statement, but then said Trump had broken a precedent that goes back thousands of years.

“I thought it was powerful and it was hopeful,” Stengel said. “And then Trump, you know, in the most puerile, adolescent way, you know, threatens the talks.”

While Vance was meeting with Iranian diplomats, Trump warned the delegation against keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed.

“You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Trump said on Fox News. “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country.”

Negotiators walked out in protest, and Stengel said they had every reason to.

“If there is one taboo in the history of diplomacy going back to the Peloponnesian War, is you do not threaten envoys, no matter how opposed you are,” he said. “And there he is, threatening envoys.”

Stengel said Trump didn’t simply break that precedent; he also violated the agreement he signed just days earlier.

“The number one plank in the Memorandum of Understanding says both parties must refrain from threats of force,” Stengel said. “He’s already violated that a dozen times.”

Check out the full conversation below:

-----------------

‘You’ve already played your biggest card’: Ayman Mohyeldin on Trump’s new threats to Iran

As Vice President JD Vance is in Switzerland for high-stakes talks with Iranian officials, President Trump unleashed a fresh new wave of threats against Iran. Our hosts discuss what this means for negotiations going forward and are then joined by MS NOW Political Analyst Richard Stengel.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 22, 2026 7:27 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Tehran Steps Up Executions of Dissidents

Iran’s regime seeks to consolidate hold on power at home through fear

By Henna Moussavi | June 21, 2026 10:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/as-war-with-u-s-eases-iran-steps
-up-hangings-of-dissidents-91f968da

Before Iran’s regime hanged Nasser Bakerzadeh, the 26-year-old spoke of the normal life to which he would never return.

He dreamed of returning to run his mobile-phone store, he told fellow inmates in the main prison of Urmia, a city in Iran’s northwest. Instead, he was executed for being an Israeli spy—a charge he denied and his lawyer said lacked credible evidence.

“He just wanted to live, to work, and to make his parents happy,” said Hamid Chapati, a former cellmate.

Bakerzadeh is one of at least 45 people executed in Iran this year on political charges, ranging from spreading propaganda to espionage, human-rights groups and Iranian state media said.

Most of those death sentences have been carried out in the past three months, as the authorities have hurried to send a message: The regime is still firmly in charge, and dissent won’t be tolerated.

In addition to the hangings, thousands of alleged traitors and spies have been arrested in recent months, said Ahmad Reza Radan, head of Iran’s Law Enforcement Command.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 7:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Will Surrendering to Iran Relieve Trump’s Gas Pains?

Paul Krugman / Jun 23, 2026 at 5:37 AM

Trump Makes Panicked Move as Affordability Crisis Shatters His Polls

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Iran oscillates wildly from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. But Trump has run out of military options that don’t involve huge war crimes, so we seem to be heading for a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s terms. And that includes the imposition of de facto tolls, whatever they are called.

There is no mystery about Trump’s surrender: He’s desperate to end the war because he is paying a steep political price for high gasoline prices, and the midterms are only 4 ½ months away.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-surrendering-to-iran-relieve

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 8:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Can you just take one single day off, dude?

I get why Paul does it. He gets paid really, really well.

You have zero reason to do what you do here.


Am I wrong about that?

I challenge you to attempt to articulate one single justifiable reason for your daily presence as well as the actions that you take while you are here.

Ted's so cooked that his only two personalities are laughing hyena and clapping seal, so even though I'm meaner to him than I should be at times, deep down I view him as a special needs case and I do really believe he's a good guy underneath all those carelessly scattered neurons that are always misfiring all over the place.

But you?

You doing what you do here never made much of any sense at all to me.

If you've ever gained anything from any of the time that you've ever spent on this website, I'd love to hear exactly what you believe that is.


I dunno man...

Ask yourself how long it's really been. Then give yourself some time and ask yourself again. Maybe you just keep asking yourself that question over and over again until you're finally honest with yourself about the answer you already know.

I'm sorry I didn't know you back then. I wasn't always a drunk fucking idiot, but for a good time there I was. I have no memory of you here before I lost myself, and only have memories of starting off entirely on the wrong foot with you when I first began to claw my way out of that pit I'd been drowning in for years, and I do believe that set us off on a rather tumultuous trajectory where we've somehow run both perpendicular and parallel to each other as long as that meant getting into a wreck, over what seems like every single issue that has ever been brought up in the media over the last 3,600 or so days.

I always used to think that on average everybody probably agreed with everybody else on 70% of any possible issue. At least in civilized society, anyhow, I thought for sure that the lack of overlap on issues couldn't possibly ever eclipse 50% from one American Citizen of any background and another of an entirely different and opposite background.

I thought it impossible. Could never happen.

But you and me?

How many times have we ever agreed on anything from the completely trivial to the most serious of issues?

2... 3 times? Maybe half a dozen max?

And certainly only when I agreed with something you said. This has never once happened in reciprocity.

How is that even possible, man.



It wasn't until years after I got sober that I even noticed that you had artwork you've done on display here all this time and that was even a thing that you were ever into. You're such a fucking prick most days I never wanted to give you the satisfaction of telling you how good it was. And yet, here I am doing it even after you just called me a shitty electrician a week or two ago.


So knowing what I know after all these years of sobriety under my belt... Observing your behavior and your patterns.... and seeing what you were capable of creating but never once mentioned a single time I'm aware of since I sobered up....

I'm guessing that you haven't really felt that feeling since you stopped doing art and started focusing on nothing but politics 24/7/365.

You don't have to tell me I'm right. Just the knowledge that you know that I know that you know is good enough for me.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 8:59 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Can you just take one single day off, dude?
6ix, you are lazy, stupid, dishonest, struggling to regulate your impulses, emotions, and behaviors. But all Trumptards I know are like that. That does not mean only Trumptards are like that, which is your usual flippancy. Why don't you goddamn Nazis kill yourselves, doing the nation the first good deed in your life by leaving it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 9:04 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Can you just take one single day off, dude?
6ix, you are lazy, stupid, dishonest, struggling to regulate your impulses, emotions, and behaviors. But all Trumptards I know are like that. That does not mean only Trumptards are like that, which is your usual flippancy. Why don't you goddamn Nazis kill yourselves, doing the nation the first good deed in your life by leaving it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


This really is such a shitty and sad reply to what I just wrote to you.

I hope you get the help you need one day man.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 9:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Can you just take one single day off, dude?
6ix, you are lazy, stupid, dishonest, struggling to regulate your impulses, emotions, and behaviors. But all Trumptards I know are like that. That does not mean only Trumptards are like that, which is your usual flippancy. Why don't you goddamn Nazis kill yourselves, doing the nation the first good deed in your life by leaving it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


This really is such a shitty and sad reply to what I just wrote to you.

I hope you get the help you need one day man.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Libtards have a real emotional struggle with the idea that evil is handled with greater evil. They find the idea almost incomprehensible, but see how Democrats successfully used the concept of "greater evil" to wipe out Germans and Japanese by the millions to end those evil reigns, converting the 90% who survived into decent people for the first time in their lives. The Republicans killed Confederates by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery, but didn't kill nearly enough slave owners so that the survivors won't regress to their former evil ways. Libtards have an emotional belief that with only proper training, evil people can be turned to good. But who has the decades that would take when killing about 10% of evil people works instantaneously? It is called decimation. Look it up, 6ix.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 9:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Can you just take one single day off, dude?
6ix, you are lazy, stupid, dishonest, struggling to regulate your impulses, emotions, and behaviors. But all Trumptards I know are like that. That does not mean only Trumptards are like that, which is your usual flippancy. Why don't you goddamn Nazis kill yourselves, doing the nation the first good deed in your life by leaving it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


This really is such a shitty and sad reply to what I just wrote to you.

I hope you get the help you need one day man.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Libtards have a real emotional struggle with the idea that evil is handled with greater evil. They find the idea almost incomprehensible, but see how Democrats successfully used the concept of "greater evil" to wipe out Germans and Japanese by the millions to end those evil reigns, converting the 90% who survived into decent people for the first time in their lives. The Republicans killed Confederates by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery, but didn't kill nearly enough slave owners so that the survivors won't regress to their former evil ways. Libtards have an emotional belief that with only proper training, evil people can be turned to good. But who has the decades that would take when killing about 10% of evil people works instantaneously? It is called decimation. Look it up, 6ix.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


oooooh... Now we're finally getting somewhere.

Let it all out, man.

All of that pent up hostility for that fucking party that you don't even recognize anymore. That party that is somehow much stronger than you remember in all the wrong ways while at the same time you know it's weaker in every single metric that matters when the deck is no longer stacked in their favor. When their propaganda arm broke itself clean off bending the truth every which way, it all started completely unraveling. And as mortifying as it's been to get some of the information we have to me, compartmentalizing all that shit in your own head after making it your life mission to defend the party ain't the part of any shoes I'd want to be filling everyday.


Yeah... You're a full-on fucking wackjob, and usually I'd have already archived these replies, but consider this therapy session completely off the books.



I really feel bad for you man. I can't even imagine how rough that must have been walking around with that asshole puckered up so tight you could turn coal into diamonds up there your entire life.

We both know that your party has endless amounts of problems and the fact that you've put yourself in such a position of always taking hypocritical points of views to things you've said only days or even hours before which themselves were hypocritical to other things you'd said before those, all in an effort to never say a single bad thing about anybody who has that (D) after their name over and over and over again has not been well on your own sanity over time.

But "Trump Bad!" has to get old to even the most ardent of the followers on some days after 10 years, doesn't it Second? Hasn't there been maybe just one single Saturday or Sunday over the last 120 months where you thought you might skip the news and the internet? Have you ever gotten sick once in the last 520 weeks and decided to skip the news and the internet? One time? One single day in the last 10 years for any reason at all???

There is ZERO reason that anybody in this country should ever be taking the side of one single party 100% of the time on every issue. If you do that, you are mental.


It's nice to have renewed confirmation of the possibility that maybe you weren't mental and it's just been another mask that you wear. I thought I spotted a chink in that mask after Joe Biden* completely did what everybody knew he was going to do in that debate and in a rare moment of raw honestly you said what you actually felt in the moment.

Usually your problem is that, aside from your occasional Tourettes-like death threat outbursts, everything you ever write is so calculated as to not fall astray of ever increasingly long and arbitrary list of tenets you are to follow that everything you ever write sounds exactly like what you wrote the day and the week before. You become background noise over time. Never as pleasant as a fan in the window on a cool night, but nothing worse than a shitty A/C unit that needs to be replaced. Or maybe that seat belt alarm in the car that doesn't stop going off until you cut one of the seat belts in the back and just take that small little piece of metal and stick that right there in your front driver seatbelt and THERE! Much better. No more buzzing sounds.

Buzz buzz, fly. You have nothing new to add to any conversation on any given day and you've become quite a one-dimensional bore in your final years.


But boy... Joe Biden* did that debate and we saw the real you for a minute there, didn't we?

And to see you again today. What a breakthrough. An unexpected treat.

I genuinely do feel bad for you that they put you in that position where you did actual mental and psychic damage to yourself after years of doing this to yourself.

I want to hear more.

And I've been known to be wrong on occasion before, but I'm pretty sure I can promise you that it's going to feel really fucking good to do it too.

Let it all out man...


We know all about the evil Texas Trumptards. And if you didn't manage to turn every topic into a 1v1 Deathmatch, and you didn't spend half of your free time reading and making personal copies of the intimate writings that other members share with each other that were never meant for you, I'd probably agree with you on a lot of your legitimate gripes about those no good rotten Texas people with (R)'s after their name too. But we've heard that story a million times by now.


Nah... Tell us all about these fucking Libtards and their fucking stupid and weak ways.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 11:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

oooooh... Now we're finally getting somewhere.

Let it all out, man.

All of that pent up hostility for that fucking party that you don't even recognize anymore. That party that is somehow much stronger than you remember in all the wrong ways while at the same time you know it's weaker in every single metric that matters when the deck is no longer stacked in their favor. When their propaganda arm broke itself clean off bending the truth every which way, it all started completely unraveling. And as mortifying as it's been to get some of the information we have to me, compartmentalizing all that shit in your own head after making it your life mission to defend the party ain't the part of any shoes I'd want to be filling everyday.
I love the way all Trumptards reveal, when you listen to them long enough, that they are goddamn idiots, which explains why life is so hard for them, as it is for Trump, who is always in court or in trouble.

I am not saying that all Democrats have few troubles, for the Democrats most mentally similar to Trumptards have as many troubles as Trumptards (the ones who pursue fame, wealth, and power are guaranteed to suffer drug/porn/food addictions, bankruptcy, divorce, mental illness, and all the other misfortunes Americans are prone to when orgasms, money and mindless "happiness" are your main goals in life).

My trouble with the Democrats is that they don't make decisions fast enough. Trumptards go the opposite extreme, making decisions too fast, based on orgasms and money, just like Trump makes every decision.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 4:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

I love the way all Trumptards reveal, when you listen to them long enough, that they are goddamn idiots . . .
America’s Big Mistake in Iran

Aerial bombing alone can’t win a war.

By Brynn Tannehill | June 23, 2026, 7 AM ET

Brynn Tannehill is a a former aviator in the Navy and the Army National Guard. Most recently, she was a senior analyst at the Rand Corporation from 2015 to 2025.

When the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, their plan was simple: bomb Iran until either the Iranian public rose up and overthrew the government, or the existing government capitulated to American demands. It rapidly became apparent that neither was going to happen. The Iranian people didn’t revolt against their oppressors. The Iranian government hunkered down, closed the strait, and gambled that the U.S. would be unwilling to invade or strike at crucial infrastructure.

So it seems U.S. planners made an obvious, if common, mistake: They assumed that a war could be won via aerial bombing alone.

Starting right after World War I, military theorists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom rallied around the idea that airpower lessened or eliminated the need for armies and navies. Their central thesis was that wars could be won almost exclusively with bombers and bombing campaigns.

In his 1921 book, Il dominio dell’aria (“The Command of the Air”), Italian General Giulio Douhet argued that whichever nation claimed air superiority first would be able to bomb their enemies’ cities to ash, forcing capitulation. Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the so-called father of the Royal Air Force who pioneered strategic-bombing theory during World War I, thought that airpower could break an enemy’s will to fight rather than merely provide tactical support for ground troops. And General Curtis LeMay, an American champion of strategic bombing, believed that overwhelming, concentrated force was the best way to win a war. He favored the use of incendiary weapons against urban centers and of immediate, devastating strikes instead of gradual escalation.

When these theories of total war through bombing were put to the test in World War II and beyond, however, they failed miserably. The German Blitz on London did not induce the British public to give in. Allied bombing of Germany did not break the Nazis’ will to fight; the German collapse at the end had much more to do with the (justified) fear of being captured by the Red Army, and the opportunity to surrender to the Americans.

In the case of Japan, the combination of the naval blockade and firebombing of cities left millions of Japanese people likely to die if the war went on into 1946. However, it was not until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, that Japan sought a nearly unconditional surrender.

Strategic bombing failed in Vietnam as well. In that war, the U.S. dropped approximately 7.6 million tons of bombs, compared with the roughly 2.7 million tons dropped by the U.S. military across the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. The “Christmas bombings” of 1972 were not enough to persuade North Vietnam to offer favorable terms; rather, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were a result of U.S. exhaustion with the war. They paved the way for North Vietnam to conquer the south in 1974–75.

The advent of “true” mass precision bombing in the 1990s led some analysts to conclude that the rules of war had changed, and that airpower alone was at last sufficient. But the supposed examples of victory through aerial bombing aren’t what they seem. The first Gulf War ended only after U.S. troops went into Kuwait in a 100-hour-long charge. In Serbia in 1999, Slobodan Miloševic’s capitulation to a united NATO’s demands was based on fears of regime survival and the credible threat of ground invasion. The air campaign in Afghanistan succeeded because the U.S. had allies on the ground willing to fight for, take, and hold territory in the form of the Northern Alliance. In each case, there were troops on the ground, or a credible threat thereof.

A study by the RAND Corporation in 1996 on the capabilities and limitations of the psychological effects of U.S. air operations cautioned leaders that airpower alone was unlikely to coerce an enemy to offer favorable terms, unless there were other factors at play. Those external influences include the enemy’s belief that they would be defeated on the battlefield, that continued fighting would not improve their position, that damage from air attacks would likely be worse than concessions, and that there would be no hope of mounting a defense or effective counterattack.

The U.S. plan for attacking Iran was doomed from the start because it relied on airpower without the benefit of external factors that would have made an air campaign successful. There was no credible threat of mass ground invasion to overthrow the Iranian regime. It was either internal revolution or nothing.

The U.S. was also unwilling to inflict the sort of mass casualties and suffering that might have caused Iran to decide that capitulation was less damaging than continued resistance. The administration generally avoided targeting crucial infrastructure such as water and electrical plants and ground lines of communication (bridges and rail). And it was unwilling to resort to something drastic, such as setting off a nuclear electromagnetic-pulse weapon to permanently disable the majority of Iranian infrastructure.

Unlike Serbia or Afghanistan, Iran had the ability to fight back and inflict significant pain on the United States. Iran fully grasped, from the beginning, that the outcome of the war would be determined by who could withstand the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The regime always had a plausible theory of victory and pursued it logically and consistently throughout the conflict.

Senior U.S. military leaders have spent decades studying warfare from every angle and must have understood the possibility of a prolonged regional conflict. In fact, General Dan Caine reportedly cautioned the Trump administration against attacking Iran.

But President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not appreciate the need for caution. Hegseth gained his experience at the tactical level, as a junior officer in the field. He seems to believe that technological might and physical strength, rather than carefully thought-out strategy, win wars. An Army captain in the field might see dropping a 2,000-pound munition on a house as a self-contained solution to his troops taking fire; a flag officer understands the risk of it creating 100 more enemies next week.

The consequences of the botched war effort are nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S.’s munitions stockpiles are depleted, its military reputation is in tatters, its foreign relations are strained to the breaking, and Iranian leadership is in the best strategic position it has ever been in. It’s a hard way to relearn the old lesson that airpower alone doesn’t win wars.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026 6:07 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Try again.

You're only screwing yourself and making yourself even sicker by holding it all in.



Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Can you just take one single day off, dude?
6ix, you are lazy, stupid, dishonest, struggling to regulate your impulses, emotions, and behaviors. But all Trumptards I know are like that. That does not mean only Trumptards are like that, which is your usual flippancy. Why don't you goddamn Nazis kill yourselves, doing the nation the first good deed in your life by leaving it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


This really is such a shitty and sad reply to what I just wrote to you.

I hope you get the help you need one day man.

--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Libtards have a real emotional struggle with the idea that evil is handled with greater evil. They find the idea almost incomprehensible, but see how Democrats successfully used the concept of "greater evil" to wipe out Germans and Japanese by the millions to end those evil reigns, converting the 90% who survived into decent people for the first time in their lives. The Republicans killed Confederates by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery, but didn't kill nearly enough slave owners so that the survivors won't regress to their former evil ways. Libtards have an emotional belief that with only proper training, evil people can be turned to good. But who has the decades that would take when killing about 10% of evil people works instantaneously? It is called decimation. Look it up, 6ix.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


oooooh... Now we're finally getting somewhere.

Let it all out, man.

All of that pent up hostility for that fucking party that you don't even recognize anymore. That party that is somehow much stronger than you remember in all the wrong ways while at the same time you know it's weaker in every single metric that matters when the deck is no longer stacked in their favor. When their propaganda arm broke itself clean off bending the truth every which way, it all started completely unraveling. And as mortifying as it's been to get some of the information we have to me, compartmentalizing all that shit in your own head after making it your life mission to defend the party ain't the part of any shoes I'd want to be filling everyday.


Yeah... You're a full-on fucking wackjob, and usually I'd have already archived these replies, but consider this therapy session completely off the books.



I really feel bad for you man. I can't even imagine how rough that must have been walking around with that asshole puckered up so tight you could turn coal into diamonds up there your entire life.

We both know that your party has endless amounts of problems and the fact that you've put yourself in such a position of always taking hypocritical points of views to things you've said only days or even hours before which themselves were hypocritical to other things you'd said before those, all in an effort to never say a single bad thing about anybody who has that (D) after their name over and over and over again has not been well on your own sanity over time.

But "Trump Bad!" has to get old to even the most ardent of the followers on some days after 10 years, doesn't it Second? Hasn't there been maybe just one single Saturday or Sunday over the last 120 months where you thought you might skip the news and the internet? Have you ever gotten sick once in the last 520 weeks and decided to skip the news and the internet? One time? One single day in the last 10 years for any reason at all???

There is ZERO reason that anybody in this country should ever be taking the side of one single party 100% of the time on every issue. If you do that, you are mental.


It's nice to have renewed confirmation of the possibility that maybe you weren't mental and it's just been another mask that you wear. I thought I spotted a chink in that mask after Joe Biden* completely did what everybody knew he was going to do in that debate and in a rare moment of raw honestly you said what you actually felt in the moment.

Usually your problem is that, aside from your occasional Tourettes-like death threat outbursts, everything you ever write is so calculated as to not fall astray of ever increasingly long and arbitrary list of tenets you are to follow that everything you ever write sounds exactly like what you wrote the day and the week before. You become background noise over time. Never as pleasant as a fan in the window on a cool night, but nothing worse than a shitty A/C unit that needs to be replaced. Or maybe that seat belt alarm in the car that doesn't stop going off until you cut one of the seat belts in the back and just take that small little piece of metal and stick that right there in your front driver seatbelt and THERE! Much better. No more buzzing sounds.

Buzz buzz, fly. You have nothing new to add to any conversation on any given day and you've become quite a one-dimensional bore in your final years.


But boy... Joe Biden* did that debate and we saw the real you for a minute there, didn't we?

And to see you again today. What a breakthrough. An unexpected treat.

I genuinely do feel bad for you that they put you in that position where you did actual mental and psychic damage to yourself after years of doing this to yourself.

I want to hear more.

And I've been known to be wrong on occasion before, but I'm pretty sure I can promise you that it's going to feel really fucking good to do it too.

Let it all out man...


We know all about the evil Texas Trumptards. And if you didn't manage to turn every topic into a 1v1 Deathmatch, and you didn't spend half of your free time reading and making personal copies of the intimate writings that other members share with each other that were never meant for you, I'd probably agree with you on a lot of your legitimate gripes about those no good rotten Texas people with (R)'s after their name too. But we've heard that story a million times by now.


Nah... Tell us all about these fucking Libtards and their fucking stupid and weak ways.



--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.


--------------------------------------------------

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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