Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead by 6ixStringJack

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, August 17, 2026 06:58
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Thursday, August 6, 2026 9:29 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.

But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.

I read this before the Iraq Invasion:

The Fifty-First State?

Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?

By James Fallows

November 2002 Issue

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-s
tate/302612/

Signym, the article suggested the cost for Iraq would be many $billions. Actual costs were many $trillions with a T.

The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-3-trillion
-and-beyond

Signym, I strongly disapprove of the government starting projects like the very optional wars on Iran, Vietnam, and Iraq unless the cost is known. WWII? That was not optional for the US government. At the time, the Republicans in Congress started investigating President FDR, convinced the war was optional because FDR had tricked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/pearl-ha
rbor.htm

Ukraine War? That was not optional for the Ukrainian government. If the US government did NOT want Russia to eventually invade the rest of Eastern Europe, that war wasn't optional for the US, regardless of the cost.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 10:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Good luck, Shit Golem.

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

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 11:28 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.

But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.

SECOND I read this before the Iraq Invasion:

The Fifty-First State?

Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?

By James Fallows

November 2002 Issue

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-s
tate/302612/

Signym, the article suggested the cost for Iraq would be many $billions. Actual costs were many $trillions with a T.

The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-3-trillion
-and-beyond

Signym, I strongly disapprove of the government starting projects like the very optional wars on Iran, Vietnam, and Iraq unless the cost is known.

I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.

Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.

-----------

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 6:32 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 SIGNYM:

I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.

Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.

You are joking, right? Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Ukraine? That makes zero sense for Russia. This makes sense: Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Poland. Instead of doing the sensible thing, Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin believed he'd win in a day, but years later he is in the same position Trump is in for attacking Iran with the solid conviction he'd win in a day or two.

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 6:33 AM

SECOND

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

Iran's parliament is considering an agreement with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The proposal would ban ships connected to the U.S., Israel and other "hostile countries" from the key waterway until Iran receives compensation for war damages. Commercial vessels passing through the strait would be subject to fees of up to 7% of cargo value and a 20% fine for noncompliance. On Wednesday, Iran said it was finalizing a shipping route agreement with Oman, a U.S. ally. The Trump administration disputes Iran's characterization of the agreement, maintaining that the U.S. currently controls the strait through its naval blockade of Iran. Oman has not commented.

Trump's public statements about progress in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran don't seem to align with the reality of what is understood by Iranians. Trump is facing significant pressure to end the war, but Iran remains unyielding despite military pressure from the U.S., and it's making its own demands regarding the Strait. The stalemate has raised concerns from observers that the U.S. may have to accept terms worse than the previous status quo, which was free movement through the Strait. Current negotiations are also focused on the waterway reopening rather than issues like uranium enrichment, which Trump originally cited as justification for the war.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/07/g-s1-137730/up-first-newsletter-trump-b
irthright-citizenship-iran-oman-strait-of-hormuz-anthony-fauci-mitch-mcconnell

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 6:38 AM

SECOND

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

Iran plots to deal Trump a blow in midterms by keeping him entangled in war

By dragging out talks, Tehran aims to damage the US president politically in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/07/iran-war-trump-midterm-b
allot

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 3:45 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I strongly object to optional wars no matter what the cost.

Considering that we actually provoked Russia by breaking our "not one inch eastward" promise and threatening Russia's security, after we had pillaged it for 10 years, and breaking SEVERAL peace agreements about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is 100% optional.
You are joking, right? Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Ukraine? That makes zero sense for Russia. This makes sense: Because Poland joins NATO, Russia has to attack Poland. Instead of doing the sensible thing, Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin believed he'd win in a day, but years later he is in the same position Trump is in for attacking Iran with the solid conviction he'd win in a day or two.

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

You're evil and, worse, stupid.

Because POLAND HAS A US MISSILE BASE on Russia's border. You think they want more US missile bases in Ukraine? Would we want Russian missile bases in Mexico?

Seriously, STUPID, your brain is fucked.

-----------

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 3:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shit Golems don't have brains.

Just more shit.

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

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

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Saturday, August 15, 2026 10:44 AM

SECOND

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

Trump says he wants the Strait of Hormuz to be a U.S. territory

By Amin Khodadadi | Aug. 15, 2026, 5:47 AM CDT

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-rejects-delusions-trump-strait
-hormuz-us-territory-rcna592666

Iran called on the U.S. to “accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions” after President Donald Trump suggested that he would soon declare the Strait of Hormuz as a “territory of the United States.”

The crucial waterway that handled one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war “cannot be seized with a tweet, nor with an aircraft carrier, nor by issuing an order, nor through an election speech,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said in a post on X early Saturday.

“This strait will only be opened and closed under Iran’s command, and as long as you do not accept the reality of defeat and stop indulging in delusions, Iran will continue to enforce the blockade,” he added.

With oil tanker traffic through the strategic strait at a trickle and peace talks between the U.S. and Iran at an impasse, there are few signs that the war, launched on Feb. 28, is close to being over.

A 60-day negotiating period intended to hammer out a deal to end the conflict, set when Trump and Tehran signed a memorandum of understanding in mid-June, ends on Monday with few direct negotiations having taken place.

Speaking Friday at a police academy in Nassau County, New York, Trump said Iran was being “very badly defeated,” and once victory was secured, “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”

. . .

Vice President JD Vance, who has been tasked with leading negotiations to end the war, told Fox News on Thursday that the number one goal was to “keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over our country.” He added that “obviously goal No. 2 is ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.” Tehran has repeatedly insisted it has no desire to develop one.

Trump and his team have offered various reasons for conflict, initially saying they wanted to support mass anti-government protests, before prioritizing a desire to end Iran’s nuclear program and topple the hardline Islamic regime.

In an interview with Iran’s Shahrara News published Friday, the country’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said there were “no negotiations currently taking place between Tehran and Washington.”

Qatar and Pakistan, as mediators, were exchanging messages and remained in contact with Iran, “but this does not at all constitute negotiations,” he said. “No decision has yet been taken to resume talks with America.”

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

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Monday, August 17, 2026 6:58 AM

SECOND

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

The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Why Trump is eviscerating the military

Paul Krugman

Aug 17, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-misery-will-continue-until-mora
le

According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.

Hi, Paul Krugman with a podcast update for today. I want to weigh in on the incredible rash of stories about how Trump and company are eviscerating the military. It is truly remarkable. If there’s one thing that we thought that the United States was still kind of number one at, it was that we had the world’s premier military. Now, of course, we managed to rather quickly effectively lose the war with Iran, although current management will never admit it.

But also just a series of stories, some of them related to that war, some of them going beyond and to other areas that just are truly shocking, even for somebody like me, who had no expectation that this administration would be doing any good for the nation.

Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.

After that, we got the story about the horrific conditions on board the USS Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that’s been stationed for a very long time without, it appears, adequate resupply and with toilets flooding. Apparently just horrific conditions, which turn out to be not unique to that ship: Other ships are having problems. There’s the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, which apparently has run out of feminine hygiene products, among other things.

Okay, so we have those horrific stories. And then we have the stories about Trump intervening. Demanding, first, that the Navy construct a whole new class of ships, Trump-class battleships, which are useless and would be sitting ducks. Then demanding that the Navy replace modern catapults with steam catapults, which he thinks are cooler. And then demanding that they relocate the command tower on aircraft carriers because he wants them to look more like the way they looked during World War II.

Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.

We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.

Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.

America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.

The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.

Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect Trump’s aesthetics. Even the gold leaf and gold lettering that is polluting the White House. All of this is really part of the same picture. So what is going on here?

Obviously we have a seriously mentally ill, mentally deficient guy with his finger on the button. The president of the United States is clearly dissociating, I’ve been calling it sundowning because I personally saw sundowning during my father’s awful last year.

Trump is not in full possession of his faculties, and he is obsessing about things that are really just kind of remnant ego trips. I haven’t read the Haberman book yet, but reportedly he spends a large fraction of his time and probably a larger fraction of his mental energy on his redecoration projects, which aside from all being carried out disastrously are also in incredibly bad taste. But this is where he is. He’s actually more interested in his giant, tacky, gilded ballroom than he is in the fate of the nation.

But how does somebody like this end up able to impose his will on these disastrous things? How does he end up able to eviscerate the military?

Well, part of it is that this is a wannabe authoritarian regime. We’re in a peculiar state now where the United States is not yet a police state. It is not yet a place where the secret police will cart you away for expressing the wrong opinion, unless you are not a white U.S. citizen. Maybe the time is coming when that will happen. But in any case, we are not yet East Germany under the Stasi. We are not yet Putin’s Russia.

But the Republican Party, senior politicians, who should be feeling that they have at least some dignity, ability to take a stand, behave as if they were living in an authoritarian state. They’re obviously terrified. They’re afraid to express any dissent. They go along with Trump’s wishes.

On top of that, I think it really helps to think of the ruling party in America right now as being a party that behaves as if we were a full-on authoritarian state. And one of the things we learn about in studying how authoritarian regimes behave is, first of all, that the leader actually can be possibly the worst informed person in the nation because nobody dares to tell him bad news. We’re hearing this a lot about Putin, that he doesn’t know how badly his war is going. Well, Trump in many ways probably still doesn’t understand how badly his war is going.

The really striking thing about the munitions shortage and now the horrible conditions on US ships is that to the extent that any action has been taken on either of those issues is it has been only after extensive reporting in the press. So now the Pentagon is talking about a crash program to have defense manufacturers produce more of the missiles that we’ve been running out of. But it’s not clear it’s even started yet, and that call didn’t happen until many months into the war, whereas the munition shortage was obvious to independent observers just a few weeks in — that we were expending munitions that we couldn’t replace. Nothing happened until there was widespread press reporting.

The USS Lincoln has finally been recalled for refit and shore leave. But that didn’t happen until after many press stories about it, all of which were denied, but it’s very obvious just looking at the behavior that the Pentagon and Hegseth and Trump finally reacted saying, oh, I guess something needs to be done. We can’t let this go on. But they didn’t do it until after the press reported.

Now, is this because they’re totally callous? Well, they are. They don’t care at all. The people who yell support the troops most loudly are the people who actually have no interest whatsoever in supporting the troops. But I think it’s probably also the case that they may not have known. That nobody told Trump that we were running out of missiles. He may have read some press stories to that effect, but he said that’s all fake news and nobody within the administration was willing to tell him.

They may not have been willing to tell Hegseth either, who by all accounts flies into a rage and punishes anybody who brings him bad news. So they just didn’t hear about this. They didn’t hear about the munitions. They didn’t hear about the conditions for US sailors until the drumbeat from the press became too loud for them to remain insulated, to remain in denial.

So this is what happens. This is the problem with authoritarian regimes. It goes with the related problem with authoritarian regimes, which is that they have a single point of failure. You elevate one person to a position of untouchable authority, and if that person loses it, that person is sun-downing, there is no recourse.

One more thing to say about what’s going on is that authoritarian regimes systematically promote incompetence. This is Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. That it’s not just that they value loyalty above competence. They actually actively dislike competence. Because someone who is competent, someone who knows what they’re doing, might stand on their dignity, might refuse to follow instructions from above. You need third-raters or worse.

This has long been true in areas that I know something about. It’s been true of right-wing economics forever. It’s long been the case that although there are plenty of conservative, competent economists, what the right-wing wanted, even pre-Trump, was creatures like Steve Moore or Larry Kudlow, people who had no idea actually how to do economic analysis, but were unimpeachably, unquestionably loyal because after all, they had no constituency to fall back on.

So we have this mix of leader principle, Führer-prinzip. Yes, I think we’re allowed to use the original German here. Information blackout at the top because nobody wants to tell the leader bad news. And incompetence as a general principle throughout the government.

And if you want to understand how the Reflecting Pool happened, if you want to understand how we ended up with this hole in the ground, that was previously the east wing of the White House, all of this is fundamentally the same stuff and it’s true of lots of other areas of policy as well.

Still, I guess most of us thought — I thought, mea culpa — that the military would be among the last places to be hit by this. That, first of all, it should be obvious even to people like Trump and Hegseth that you don’t muck too much with the military, that you don’t destroy the one instrument you really have, and also that the military itself had, so I thought, a strong enough culture, was highly enough respected among the populace that the military would be able to stand up and say no.

But it turns out that I was wrong. And so instead of being insulated from the craziness and incompetence, the military is actually possibly the most acute victim of everything that’s happening.

At this point they might manage to start feeding the sailors and fix the toilets, though I wouldn’t put 100% odds on that. But the broader problem of really destroying one of the last real sources of U.S. strength, that is not going to go away. Instead, it’s going to be the same thing. And the misery will continue until morale improves.

Have a great day.

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

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