Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187648
PAGE 45 of 48
Heather Cox Richardson
Mar 09, 2026
Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.
Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.
The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.
The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.
Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”
“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”
“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”
The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.
Much more at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-8-2026
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Trump Cornered on Wild New Excuse for Bombing Iran School
PASS THE BUCK
The president can’t get his story straight.
By Vic Verbalaitis | Mar. 9, 2026 10:00PM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse-for-bo
mbing-iran-school/
and
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse
-for-bombing-iran-school/ar-AA1XRLFG
President Donald Trump blundered his way through a grilling surrounding U.S. responsibility for the bombing of an Iranian elementary school.
During a press conference held at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida, on Monday, the president was asked about reports that found an American Tomahawk cruise missile was likely what destroyed an Iranian girls’ school on Feb. 28. The strike killed at least 175 people, many of whom were children.
Trump, 79, interrupted the reporter who asked the question, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju, saying, “Well, I haven’t seen it, and I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is sold and used by other countries.”
“And whether it’s Iran, who also has some Tomahawks—I wish they had more—but whether it’s Iran or somebody else... a Tomahawk is very generic, it’s sold to other countries," Trump rambled. “But that’s being investigated right now.”
The Australian Department of Defense said in late 2024 that only three countries currently have Tomahawk cruise missiles: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
The U.S. also approved the sale of 400 Tomahawks, which are solely manufactured by the American company Raytheon, to Japan in 2024 and 163 missiles to the Netherlands in 2025.
CNN’s Erin Burnett reported on Monday evening that “neither Israel nor Iran uses Tomahawk missiles, according to experts.”
Even Fox News’ national security expert Jennifer Griffin called out the president’s remarks, saying, “It seems highly unlikely that it would be anyone’s Tomahawk other than a U.S. Tomahawk that hit that school, and I think the president knows that.”
When asked about whether Iran possesses Tomahawk missiles and how they would have acquired them, if they do, the Pentagon referred the Daily Beast to the White House.
Minutes later, another reporter, New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh, asked the president about his confusing response.
“You just suggested that Iran got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” McCreesh said. “But you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”
“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump replied, interrupting the reporter again. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know.”
“Numerous other nations have Tomahawks; they buy them from us,” he added. “But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, said aboard Air Force One alongside Trump on Saturday that they were looking into the school strike, but did not completely echo the president’s claims that it was done by Iran.
“We’re certainly investigating,” the former Fox & Friends Weekend host said. “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
The president interrupted him, saying, “We think it was done by Iran.” “They have no accuracy whatsoever,”
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Whoops! Trump overlooked an important detail:
The U.S. war against Iran has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history, more than double the previous record set during the Middle East crisis of the 1950s, according to an analysis by consulting firm Rapidan Energy.
About 20% of the world’s oil supply has been disrupted for nine days now as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at a standstill. Crude prices have surged above $100 per barrel in response.
The biggest disruption before the current war was during the Suez Crisis of 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the energy consulting firm told clients in a Sunday note. In that crisis, about 10% of the world’s oil supply at the time was disrupted.
The disruption triggered by the closure of the Strait is nearly three times the size of the shock caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Rapidan analysts told clients. The Arab embargo disrupted about 7% of global supplies.
The big difference between the supply shock of the Iran war and past crises is the world has no spare oil capacity to address the problem, the analysts said. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold the overwhelming majority of swing capacity but they have been cut off from the global oil market by the Hormuz closure, the analysts said.
“The conflict has not only taken offline a historically high share of global supply – it has simultaneously disrupted the primary holders of spare capacity,” the Rapidan analysts said. “The result is a market with no meaningful cushion. There is no swing producer positioned to step in.”
This means that the global oil market will need to balance by destroying demand through sharply rising oil prices, the analysts said. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “finite and insufficient to fully offset” the supply bottled into the Persian Gulf due to the closure of Hormuz, they said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/the-us-iran-war-is-the-biggest-oil-sup
ply-disruption-in-history.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:American Farmers Dealt New Blow as Trump’s Iran War Escalates
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Mar 10, 2026 at 04:00 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/american-farmers-dealt-new-blow-as-trumps-ira
n-war-escalates-11648730
The war zone sits at the crossroads of the world's fertilizer supply. Since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran a week ago, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a near standstill. The waterway moves roughly 20 percent of the world's daily oil and 25 percent of its nitrogen fertilizer.
The fertilizer shock is not arriving alone. Diesel has surged to a national average of $4.60 a gallon.
"In soybeans alone, we lost $54 billion from the president's tariffs," he said. "What they're proposing with a $12 billion relief package is a drop in the bucket."
Farmers had already grown critical of the administration over a deal that quadrupled Argentine beef imports, undercutting domestic producers.
Farm bankruptcies filed under Chapter 12 are up 46 percent compared to 2024.
Thank you, Trump, for your attention to these details.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Some of the underlying premises behind “drill, baby, drill” were accepted by many people. At the very least, it was widely presumed that U.S. self-sufficiency in oil would protect America from disruptions in oil supplies overseas.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
But that presumption was wrong. America produces a lot of oil, substantially more than we consume. Although we import some oil, mainly from Canada and Mexico, while exporting even more oil, mainly from Texas, we buy hardly any oil from the Persian Gulf. Yet the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused U.S. prices of oil products to soar. Self-sufficiency in oil has done nothing at all to insulate the U.S. economy from Middle East chaos.
It could be different. In the 1970s the U.S. imposed price controls on domestically produced oil and partially insulated consumers from global oil shocks. When price controls were lifted, they were replaced by a windfall profits tax intended to capture part of the gains experienced by oil companies.
It’s almost inconceivable that 1970s-type price controls or excess profits taxes would be imposed today. So US prices of gasoline and other oil products reflect world crude prices, and the fact that America produces a lot of oil doesn’t matter at all.
It is a detail Trump doesn't think about.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-impotence-of-drill-baby-drill
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War
Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.
By David Cole | March 6, 2026
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/06/the-lie-of-preventive-war/
In January, during a lengthy New York Times interview with President Donald Trump, one of the paper’s reporters asked him whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage.” Yes, he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” Another reporter asked about international law. “I don’t need international law,” he explained. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people.”
That attitude—save the last two sentences—has been on dramatic display in recent months. Already it has served as the basis for the extrajudicial execution of more than 150 people claimed to have been transporting drugs on the high seas and the deaths of at least a hundred people during the illegal invasion of Venezuela to arrest President Nicolás Maduro, provoke regime change, and gain access to that country’s oil.
But never has Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran. As of March 4 the death toll in Iran from the joint US–Israeli military assault, underway since Saturday, had risen to nearly eight hundred. That number includes the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of its top officials, but also reportedly at least 175 people at a girls school—many of them children between the ages of seven and twelve—that was in session when bombs struck.
Trump’s war with Iran may not trouble his “morality,” but it is manifestly illegal. It violates what is often described as the first principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which prohibits nations from using or threatening to use force against another nation except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council. Neither condition obtains here. Early Saturday morning, Trump issued an eight-minute video in which he claimed that he had acted to defend the American people from “imminent threats.” To justify that claim he cited historical Iranian wrongdoing dating back to the 1979 hostage crisis, as well as its support of terrorist groups, but he identified no actual imminent threat. He repeatedly said that Iran could never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but he also stated that a June 2025 air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities had already “obliterated” its nuclear capability. And he urged the Iranian people to “take over your government,” an explicit endorsement of regime change having little to do with self-defense. (As no one disputes, Khamenei was a truly despotic leader, responsible for inflicting terror and death on his own people and on those of many other countries. But there are many despots around the world, and no principle of international law makes Donald Trump the arbiter of which ones stay in power and which ones should be killed.)
In a letter submitted to Congress two days later, the president omitted his previous, unsupported claim of an imminent threat. Instead he vaguely asserted that he had acted in defense of Americans at home and abroad, as well as “in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” But in the absence of any ongoing attack, or any evidence that Iran was planning an imminent attack, neither the United States nor Israel had any authority to start a war against another sovereign country.
Trump’s unilateral action also violated the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize more limited military actions (referred to in the Constitution as “letters of marque and reprisal”). That allocation of responsibility was deliberate. As George Mason explained at the time, the aim was for “clogging rather than facilitating war.” The framers worried, justifiably, that presiden
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Yes I did.
And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Your just-so story is this: The US was bombing Iranians with Tomahawks. The Iranians saw their opportunity to bomb their school children with a Tomahawk they just so happened to have. And thus, the US looks like it bombed the school children.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Yes I did.
And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
A "just-so story" is a speculative, unverified explanation for a specific phenomenon. "Just-so stories" are often criticized as being unfalsifiable, "ad hoc" narratives.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Can’t Decide Whether the Iran War Is Still Going On
The president seems to be at odds with both himself and his secretary of defense about the status of the conflict.
By David A. Graham | March 10, 2026, 4:05 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/03/trump-iran-war-confusi
on-mixed-messages/686320/
The Trump administration can’t say why the United States went to war with Iran, and it can’t say what the goal of the war is. Now it can’t even decide whether the war is still going on.
During an interview with CBS News yesterday afternoon, President Trump all but declared victory. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said.
This statement is so self-contradictory and confusing that one might be tempted to write it off as just riffing, except that he reiterated it at a press conference later in the day. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he said, apparently referring to himself. All that was missing to complete the parallel to the Iraq War was a flight suit, an aircraft carrier, and a Mission Accomplished banner.
Yet the same afternoon, the Department of Defense posted on X, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” mangling a famous quotation from John Paul Jones, the father of the U.S. Navy. Reporters at the press conference, perplexed, asked Trump about the gap. “You said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning, so which is it?”
“Well, I think you could say both,” Trump replied.
You could—if you were a pundit making an argument about the future of the war. But people might hope for a bit more clarity from the man who launched the war without congressional authorization, popular support, or even much buy-in from his own advisers.
Trump’s equivocation yesterday may be his attempt to steady an economy shaken by the war. The president’s approval has been battered recently by the high cost of living. Although inflation was a major factor in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump has seldom focused on it since entering office and has insisted that affordability is somehow both a Democratic “hoax” and a problem that he has already solved.
The war in Iran has exacerbated existing stressors: It has driven up gas prices, rocked stock markets, and suggested that Trump’s attention is not on the economy. The president appears rattled by this and even called on oil-tanker captains to “show some guts” and sail through the contested Strait of Hormuz, according to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, though he hasn’t volunteered to personally dodge Iranian missiles aboard a floating makeshift bomb.
Trump’s comments yesterday seemed to work, at least in the immediate term: Oil futures dropped, and markets rebounded a bit. Over time, however, whatever succor Trump provides to the economy by saying that the war is nearly over is likely to be canceled out by his administration’s vacillation. Markets seek stability, and Trump can’t seem to decide on a talking point, much less a strategy or aim for the war itself. As my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl reported last week, Trump offered 10 different rationales for the war in its first six days alone. Traders may be primed to look for examples of Trump chickening out, but yesterday’s remarks seem more like a feint at ending the war: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that today would “be yet again our most intense day of strikes.”
Trump appears confused not only about the future of the war but also about some of its basic facts. The U.S. has faced international criticism over a missile strike on a girls’ school in Iran, which was next to a naval base that was also struck. Iranian authorities say that about 175 people were killed at the school, mostly children. Over the weekend, Trump said that the attack was friendly fire. “In my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Since then, evide
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Your just-so story is this: The US was bombing Iranians with Tomahawks. The Iranians saw their opportunity to bomb their school children with a Tomahawk they just so happened to have. And thus, the US looks like it bombed the school children.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288
Yes I did.
And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
A "just-so story" is a speculative, unverified explanation for a specific phenomenon. "Just-so stories" are often criticized as being unfalsifiable, "ad hoc" narratives.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
No. That's not at all what I said.
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.
Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.
You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ix, the mystery programming you have been working on for decades could be finished today if you used Claude the AI.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. That's not at all what I said.
Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9627
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
Meanwhile . . .
. . . the defense department declared that Anthropic is a supply chain risk, and it is trying not just to end its own use of Claude but to prevent any contractors doing business with the department from using Claude.
There’s no mystery about the motivation for banning Claude. Anthropic has said that it wants assurances that its products won’t be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. This has enraged Trump officials: David Sacks, the administration’s AI and crypto czar, has accused the company of supporting “woke AI.” So an administration for which seeking vengeance against perceived enemies is a central motivation is naturally trying to punish Anthropic and damage its business.
But the fact that the Trumpist-Anthropic feud is understandable doesn’t make it normal or acceptable. In fact, the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is a terrible omen for America’s future, in at least three ways.
First, it’s obviously illegal. Designating a potential contractor a supply-chain risk isn’t something the government is supposed to do casually. The legal basis for such a designation, embodied in the federal government’s acquisition guidelines, is very specific:
“Supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).
So supply chain risk is about sabotage or subversion. “This company is too woke” doesn’t meet that definition.
Second, denying government contracts to a company because the administration doesn’t like that company’s politics is a seriously corrupt practice. Think of it as the flip side of crony capitalism: while throwing taxpayer dollars at companies it considers friends — especially because they personally enrich members of the administration or the president’s family — the administration is freezing out companies it considers enemies. If this practice becomes the norm, as it surely will if these people remain in power, it will waste money because the government is denying contracts to vendors who offer the best value but aren’t sufficiently MAGA. It will also further corrupt our politics, as businesses feel the need to be demonstratively pro-Trump if they want federal contracts.
Finally, the Defense Department is now doing exactly what people like Hegseth have always accused supporters of DEI of doing — refusing to hire the best people for the job, refusing to give contracts to the best suppliers, in the name of political correctness. The Pentagon’s managers and tech experts clearly believe that Claude is the best tool for many purposes, but they have been ordered not to use it because their political masters don’t like the company’s politics.
Imagine the reaction if the roles of the parties were reversed — if a Democratic administration were denying the U.S. military the tools it wants to use because it considered the company supplying those tools too conservative. Republicans wouldn’t just be protesting; they’d be screaming “treason.”
Indeed, while I can’t judge how much damage telling the military to stop using Claude — just as a war was starting! — will do, it’s clearly a move that weakens national security. And what this move tells us is that the Trump administration cares more about fighting wokeness than it does about keeping America safe.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plot-against-intelligence-human
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, whe
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Trump Went to War With Iran Because Jared Kushner Is a Fool
Donald Trump’s top two negotiators have no clue what they’re doing.
Edith Olmsted / March 9, 2026 / 4:59 p.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/207554/donald-trump-iran-war-iran-jared-k
ushner-steve-witkoff
Do Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner actually understand nuclear energy enough to describe Iran’s capabilities to Donald Trump, let alone negotiate a nonproliferation agreement with Tehran?
Several nuclear experts have raised questions about the disastrous duo’s technical understanding of uranium enrichment after they presented an assessment of Iran’s Research Reactor that made no sense, MS NOW reported Monday.
For the uninitiated, here’s a crash course in nuclear energy: Most nuclear reactors that produce electricity only require uranium that is enriched to between 3 percent and 5 percent. Highly enriched uranium is anything above 20 percent, and weapons-grade uranium is enriched above 90 percent, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
Tehran’s Research Reactor is a 60-year old facility designed to use less than 20 percent enriched uranium, not intended for use outside of research and producing medicine. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing any evidence, that the facility was being used to covertly stockpile uranium that would become weapons-grade. Nuclear experts aren’t buying it.
“An [active] operating reactor cannot be used as storage. I am not aware of this ever having happened,” Claus Montonen, a retired nuclear physicist and board member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, told MS NOW.
Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told MS NOW that the administration’s “confusing and misleading” assessment of the reactor was laden with “technical errors.”
“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”
Witkoff and Kushner chose not to have nuclear technical experts present during negotiations in Geneva, a senior Middle East diplomat with knowledge of the talks told MS NOW. The United States then chose to skip out on technical talks scheduled for last Monday in Vienna.
Last week, Witkoff offered this defense of his credentials: “I wouldn’t tell you I’m an expert in nuclear, but I’ve learned quite a bit, and I’ve studied it and have read quite a bit about it, and I’m competent to sit at the table and discuss it, and Jared [Kushner] is as well.”
Ahead of Trump’s military campaign in the Middle East, Witkoff claimed that Iran had amassed 460 kilograms of uranium at 60 percent enrichment, enough to potentially make 11 bombs within a few weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported Iran had enough uranium to make 12.
However, during negotiations, Iranians offered to turn over that uranium, the Middle East diplomat told MS NOW. The Iranians told Witkoff and Kushner that they’d only started enriching uranium after Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.
A senior Trump official had confirmed that Iranians “talked about turning over material to us.” But talks ended abruptly when the United States launched a joint attack with Israel.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, the mystery programming you have been working on for decades could be finished today if you used Claude the AI.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. That's not at all what I said.
Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9627
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
No it couldn't. AI still can't do art.
And among other things, tens of thousands of hours were spent in free Photoshop equivalents.
I told you, I'm a novice coder at best. Coding was just a part of the job, and I had plenty of human help with that over the years.
There's a lot of database management, which AI could never do with accuracy because the data that was out there was extremely flawed.
This is much more a creative work than it is a coding project.
Why are you bringing this up before you post something in reply to me?
Because you're an evil little demon.
As for your Anti-American bullshit after that, didn't read it.
You have nothing worth saying. You have never had anything worth saying.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Pentagon Report: U.S. Military Fired Missile at Elementary School in Iran
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No. That's not at all what I said.
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.
Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.
You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Despite attempts by Trump to claim otherwise, the U.S. military was responsible for killing at least 175 in a strike on a school in Iran.
By Nick Turse | March 11, 2026, 1:07 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/11/iran-school-missile-investigation/
A U.S. military investigation determined in its preliminary findings that the United States conducted an attack on an Iranian elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing inquiry. The findings directly contradict assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school.
The lethal strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a “targeting error” by the U.S. military, which mistook the facility for part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base that was adjacent to the school, according to one of the U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
U.S. Central Command attacked the school based on long outdated coordinates for the strike provided by another defense agency, one of the officials told The Intercept. While the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school was once connected to the IRGC base by roads, the building was partitioned off by 2016, according to an investigation by New Lines Magazine.
The attack, which came after a yearlong effort by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to gut programs to reduce civilian casualties, killed more civilians than any other strike in Trump’s second Iran war. It was “colossal negligence,” one of the current government officials said.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran was responsible for the strike, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Trump told reporters March 7. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Wes Bryant — who served until last year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — called the attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school a “failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards.”
Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes across the greater Middle East as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, said it was common to rely on outdated imagery while conducting operations.
“As a targeter, the imagery and initial intelligence data you receive on a potential target or target set is just the start. You don’t prosecute based solely off any organization — NGA or otherwise — giving you an image and saying they have intelligence that it’s an enemy location,” he told The Intercept, referring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which specializes in such imagery. “You corroborate with other intelligence, and you conduct as near real time as possible characterization of that target as well as the civilian presence and risk to include collateral damage analysis risk of civilian casualties.”
U.S. Central Command refused to comment on the preliminary findings of the inquiry. “It would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation,” a CENTCOM official told The Intercept by email.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not immediately reply to requests for comment on their potential involvement in providi
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.
Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.
You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ix, you didn't make sense, but you tried harder elsewhere to protect Trump from being charged with murdering schoolchildren:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.
Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.
You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=12403
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds fake to me.
But considering it is Iran, maybe it was real?
Hey... If Somalians in America can make 150 day cares in a single town and not have any kids inside of them, what if we did the opposite?
Let's take 100 or so school aged children of the 33,000 civilian adults we killed for protesting last month. Tie them up to school desks in the middle of one of our bases, and then let the Americans kill all of them when they bomb the shit out of us.
You don't think the Iranians know how to manipulate stupid people like you at least as well as the Legacy Media does?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
95#1240395
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yup.
Because your media lies about everything, all the time.
No reason to believe that any of that is true now.
And besides... what is a hundred kids when you can add that to the 300,000 he supposedly murdered by cutting off USAid?
Ya get it yet, stupid?
Maybe if you were to pick and choose what headlines you were complaining about instead of posting a dozen or two of them here every single day including Sundays, somebody might take you seriously.
But this is just one of tens of thousands of headlines you've posted here since 2016, and you will have forgotten completely about it 2 weeks from now anyhow.
Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Trump’s war against Iran is uniquely unpopular among US military actions of the past century
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
By Charles Walldorf, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University
Published: March 10, 2026 1:48pm EDT
https://theconversation.com/trumps-war-against-iran-is-uniquely-unpopu
lar-among-us-military-actions-of-the-past-century-277586
It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.
“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, President Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.
Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.
Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.
For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.
A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.
As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.
Two historical examples
In the 1930s and ’40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.
Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.
With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.
No anti-Iran narrative
Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?
Two things.
First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime – the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.
Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.
By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.
The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.
In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and t
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Yup.
Because your media lies about everything, all the time.
No reason to believe that any of that is true now.
And besides... what is a hundred kids when you can add that to the 300,000 he supposedly murdered by cutting off USAid?
Ya get it yet, stupid?
Maybe if you were to pick and choose what headlines you were complaining about instead of posting a dozen or two of them here every single day including Sundays, somebody might take you seriously.
But this is just one of tens of thousands of headlines you've posted here since 2016, and you will have forgotten completely about it 2 weeks from now anyhow.
Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14
Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup
The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.
Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.
The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/
Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.
Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).
President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.
Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.
Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.
Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.
The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”
In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.
Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!
Oh, and don’t forget a
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As Iran pinches the Strait of Hormuz, American farmers are getting squeezed
By Harry Bruinius | March 12, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET | Plant City, Fla.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2026/0312/iran-war-farmers-fertilizer-st
rait-hormuz
Lance Lillibridge is looking through his financial ledgers over the past few years, putting some perspective on the rising costs of fertilizer for most American farmers.
Mr. Lillibridge, an Iowa corn grower and part of a family of farmers going back a century, has roughly 1,250 acres devoted to his corn crop – including a few acres of hay to feed his some 60 head of beef cattle. Every year, he needs to add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to his fields. “Fertilizer is our No. 1 expense, other than land,” he says.
In 2021, his price for a ton of anhydrous ammonia, which he uses to shoot nitrogen into the soil, was $492. The price of corn at the same time was around $4.50 a bushel, according to his records. By January 2025, the price of corn he commands remained about the same. But anhydrous ammonia jumped to $745 a ton.
Why We Wrote This
American farmers are seeing fertilizer prices spike as supply is choked off by Iran’s threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, in response to attacks by the U.S. and Israel. It’s a sign of how the war is affecting the global economy – including spring planting.
Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which retaliated by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow, 21-mile-wide waterway between Iran and Oman through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. It is also the choke point for roughly one-third of the world’s traded fertilizer supply.
“On Feb. 13, the cost was $850 a ton, and the price of corn was just above $4,” Mr. Lillibridge says of the weeks before the attacks on Iran began. “Fertilizer’s going up; corn’s going down. And today, [anhydrous ammonia] is $1,050 a ton,” he says as he checks his supplier’s website. “That’s what’s going on with Iran.”
Indeed, the attacks on Iran are jolting global energy markets, continuing to push up the price of oil. But for America’s farmers, the more immediate crisis might be unfolding in the current spikes in the cost of fertilizers.
The timing could hardly be worse. Across the Corn Belt, spring planting begins in a matter of weeks. Nitrogen fertilizers, considered the most critical input for growing corn, must be in the ground before seeds go in every year, and are used later in the season as well, unlike phosphorus and potassium.
“I’ve had many, many phone calls this week from farmers in panic,” says Mr. Lillibridge, a past president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. “They can’t even get a price on it.”
Other crops, too, are feeling the effects of what has become a price spike on top of a price spike. In Georgia, some watermelon growers report they can no longer afford to plant a crop because of fertilizer prices. In Arkansas, rice and cotton growers report a looming economic crisis as fuel and fertilizer costs skyrocket and commodity prices fall.
In Florida, strawberry farmers have recently been celebrating the close of the winter season, during the first week of March, as they begin to prepare for the next. While fertilizer costs are a much smaller line item – labor costs being the highest, as strawberries are picked throughout the winter months – farmers here are also feeling pinched by rising costs, and by weather disturbances.
“We have never, ever seen this amount of wind during a freeze in Florida, ever,” says Bob McDowell, a manager at Fancy Farms in Plant City, Florida, where he has been working for about 25 years. “A lot of the old-timer farmers that I talked to, they said we’ve never experienced those two conditions at the same time.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a disaster declaration for the freeze, estimating agricultural losses at more than $3 billion. But the war with Iran has affected Florida agriculture in other ways as well, Mr. McDowell and other experts point out.
Indeed, there is a partic
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14
Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup
The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.
Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.
The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/
Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.
Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).
President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.
Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.
Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.
Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.
The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”
In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.
Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels
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Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Sell This War. Has the salesman in chief gotten rusty?
By Jonathan Lemire | March 12, 2026, 5 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/trump-iran-gas-prices-eco
nomy/686337/
A year ago yesterday, President Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom to try to boost the slumping sales of his then-pal Elon Musk’s electric-car company. A few months ago, Trump declared from behind the Resolute Desk that he was Boeing’s “salesman of the year,” claiming to have helped facilitate the purchase of hundreds of aircraft. And long before he entered politics, Trump slapped his name on just about anything—apartment buildings, steaks, even a dubious for-profit university—to market it to the masses. Trump will sell anything.
He has now made one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: launching a war against Iran. The conflict, which is well into its second week, has widened throughout the Middle East, sent oil prices skyrocketing, and caused tumult in the financial markets. Yet Trump has not sold the war. In many ways, he hasn’t even tried.
The absence of a sales strategy is all the more confounding when you consider the political stakes. The upcoming midterm elections were supposed to be about the economy. That was perhaps Trump’s most effective issue in the 2024 presidential campaign, as voters grew frustrated with the stubborn inflation that permeated Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump vowed to fix it, but his record over the past 15 months is inconsistent: Yes, inflation has cooled some, but last month’s jobs report was brutal; the president’s tariffs have created confusion and kept costs high; and the economy is starkly stratified—the rich are doing great, and everyone else is decidedly less so. Republicans have been on a losing streak in a series of elections, and poll after poll reveals a clear disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy.
But there were some real silver linings. Chief among them: gas prices. Ron Klain, who was Biden’s first White House chief of staff, told me a few years ago that the first thing he did each morning while in that role—even before seeing if the president had called—was check the price of a gallon of gas. Bill Clinton was equally obsessed, realizing that gas-station signs were billboards for the nation’s economy. Trump made the low cost of gas a staple in his stump speech and gave it a central spot in his State of the Union address a few weeks ago. It was key in White House talking points for Republicans pitching voters to keep them in power: See, things are getting better. Give us time to finish the job.
That pitch just got harder to make. Even before the war began, most Republicans privately acknowledged that keeping the House would be challenging. Now they will be forced to defend a war that, polls show, Americans didn’t want. Already, seven U.S. soldiers have died, and approximately 140 more have been injured. Tens of thousands of Americans were stranded in the Middle East after the Trump administration did not facilitate their departure—or evacuate government outposts—before Iran retaliated. And, of course, there is the price of gas. The average cost of a gallon has jumped by more than 50 cents since the conflict began. This spike has been the subject of relentless news coverage and, yes, has been splashed across those gas-station billboards. Even for voters who rarely care about foreign policy, the rising cost of filling up their tank has been unavoidable. And more price hikes are likely coming to airfare, shipping, and groceries, just to name a few.
Elections are in many cases won or lost on economic issues. But there are moments when Americans are willing to endure fiscal hardship or accept that the nation will make sacrifices for a greater good. Presidents of the past have made a point of convincing Americans that it was worth it. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously made the case for World War II, and his nation endured years of rations while sending a generation of young men off to battle. George H. W. Bush bu
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Quote:This is why you flunked, 6ix. There is no "win" because the Republicans in the House of Representatives will vote against the bill. Trumptards are opposed to it. But you, 6ix, were too lazy to even look up the details, just exactly like every lamebrain Trumptard I know. Your life story matches tens of millions of other American failures: you are too fucking lazy to understand and do the simplest, most obvious things necessary for honest success in America. See that word "honest"? I underlined it. Instead, Trumptards follow Trump's path to "success": cheat, lie, and steal. Then complain when all your dishonesty, drunkenness, laziness, incompetence, and ignorance did NOT bring the "success" you feel America owes you just because you are alive.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14
Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup
The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.
Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.
The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills.
. . .
You can't even accept a win. You're fucked up in the head my dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Landmark housing bill overwhelmingly passes Senate, faces uncertain future in House
by Al Weaver - 03/12/26 12:21 PM ET
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5780781-housing-bill-passes-senate/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The New War on Speech
In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.
Aryeh Neier | March 10, 2026
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/10/the-new-war-on-speech-trump/
On January 20, Donald Trump promised to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression” by signing an order “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” I was mystified. There have certainly been periods in American history when the federal government made substantial efforts to limit freedom of expression. But nothing of the sort had taken place in the years preceding Trump’s election. What could he have been talking about?
The executive order, which Trump signed that afternoon, offered a clue. “Over the last 4 years,” it asserted, “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” It is a familiar complaint. Right-wing groups have for years been attacking social media companies for their content moderation practices, which are generally intended to limit the dissemination of hate speech and other offensive material, though whether or not the companies in question do so under pressure from the government is debatable.
Now, Trump’s executive order promised, those days were over: the US would “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” In light of subsequent developments, this line, which suggests that the order applies solely to citizens, seems significant. The First Amendment limits what the government may do regardless of the legal status of the beneficiaries—citizens and non-citizens alike have the right to express themselves freely.
But the order did include a sentence with which I would heartily agree: “Government censorship,” it declared, “is intolerable in a free society.” Trump’s conduct since January 20 with respect to freedom of expression has indeed been intolerable. There has never been an attack on free expression quite like it.
*
The unprecedented nature of Trump’s attack on free expression is difficult to understand except in contrast to earlier periods in which the values embodied in the First Amendment have been under assault. Probably the most concerted attack on freedom of speech in American history came in 1917 and 1918 against those who opposed American entry into World War I and conscription for military service. Under President Woodrow Wilson, the federal government enacted the Espionage Act of 1917 and amendments to that law known as the Sedition Act of 1918; state governments adopted local counterparts. Despite the 1917 act’s name, hardly any of the people prosecuted under these laws were accused of spying; they were usually prosecuted for speaking at protests or publishing articles. According to the contemporaneous work of the legal scholar and Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee, about two thousand prosecutions for speech took place during this period, resulting in prison sentences of five or ten or even twenty years. Most of the convictions were upheld unanimously on appeal. There had, at that point, never been a US Supreme Court decision protecting freedom of speech under the First Amendment. As Adam Hochschild has written in his powerful book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022), it was also a period in which organizations like the American Protective League—a group similar to the Ku Klux Klan in its composition and methods—led a great many violent attacks on antiwar activists, even the most horrifying of which almost never resulted in criminal prosecutions.
During the war an organization called the American U
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The New War on Speech
In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.
Aryeh Neier | March 10, 2026
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/10/the-new-war-on-speech-trump/
On January 20, Donald Trump promised to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression” by signing an order “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” I was mystified. There have certainly been periods in American history when the federal government made substantial efforts to limit freedom of expression. But nothing of the sort had taken place in the years preceding Trump’s election. What could he have been talking about?
Oh fuck you.
After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.
Get fucked, you lying little worm.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union" and is actively seeking to fracture the bloc's unity, according to an interview with the Financial Times published Friday.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh fuck you.
After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.
Get fucked, you lying little worm.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
"What I think is actually important for everybody to understand is that the US has been very clear that they want to divide Europe. They don't like the European Union," Kallas told the FT. https://www.ft.com/content/1b9cf85e-e1ae-4892-a255-9ca042af4f37
The remarks came after more than a year of turbulence in transatlantic relations. The Trump administration this week launched trade investigations into the EU over alleged unfair trade practices — moves that could result in new tariffs by this summer, following the US Supreme Court's dismantling of much of Trump's earlier tariff program last month. The European Commission said it would respond "decisively and proportionately" to any US breach of the existing trade agreement, while the chair of the European Parliament's International Trade Committee, Bernd Lange, said the investigations were unacceptable as they violate the US–EU trade deal.
Kallas said Washington's approach to the EU echoes tactics used by the bloc's adversaries, the FT reported. EU member states should not seek to deal with Trump bilaterally, she said — instead, they should present a united front, "because we are equal powers when we are together."
The comments landed against a broader pattern of pressure from Washington. Trump has repeatedly targeted the EU in his second term — imposing tariffs on member states and repeatedly raising the prospect of annexing Greenland, a move analysts say could effectively end the NATO alliance.
More at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/03/13/they-dont-like-the-eu-europes-t
op-diplomat-says-washington-wants-to-divide-europe/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump and the Putinization of the US Government
The Iran Bombing As A Clarifying Moment
By Phillips P. OBrien | Mar 13, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-and-the-putinization-of-t
he
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:The US slashed research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, mental health — and nearly everything else
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh fuck you.
After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.
Get fucked, you lying little worm.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
by Pratik Pawar
Mar 13, 2026, 5:30 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/482363/nih-medical-research-grants-
cut-2025
Think about the disease that worries you most — the one that runs in your family. Or maybe someone you love is living with it. Whether that’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or depression, odds are the US government has been funding the research to treat it.
That research is a big reason we have drugs that made fatal blood cancers survivable, treatments that turned HIV from a death sentence into something people live full lives with, and a vaccine that all but prevents cervical cancer.
But last year, the US funded dramatically fewer grants to do medical research that can lead to breakthroughs like those. New data released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from those cuts broke down. https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302
The numbers are striking across the board.
New grants for Alzheimer’s and aging research were cut in half — from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent — even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans. Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.
“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,” said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH’s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.
The NIH’s funding system was already under strain — too many researchers were chasing too few research dollars. That has always meant that the most ambitious and most unconventional ideas struggle to get funded.
But the Trump administration’s policy decisions have made that problem dramatically worse in just a single year.
What went wrong
The NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their proposals, a panel of outside experts scores and ranks them, and then each NIH institute — each focused on a different area of medicine — funds as many top-scoring proposals as its budget allows. In a normal year, about 5,000 new grants get funded.
Last year, one policy change did more to shrink that number than almost anything else.
In July 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget required NIH to start paying the full cost of approved grants upfront — all at once, instead of paying year by year, as it has for a very long time. In principle, funding grants upfront makes them less vulnerable to future budget cuts.
But here’s the problem: When NIH funds a research project, it’s typically a commitment that stretches three to five years. That means in any given year, about 80 percent of the agency’s budget is already spoken for — paying for grants it promised in previous years. Only the remaining 20 percent of the budget is available to fund new research.
When the agency has to pay the full cost of every multiyear grant up front, that means each new grant costs several times more than it used to. Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH’s grant-making for nearly a decade before leaving the agency in early 2025, put it simply: “Instead of funding five grants, you now only fund one, and that means four other grants that would’ve been funded don’t get funded.”
Berg, the former NIH institute director, estimates this single change wiped out roughly 1,000 new grants.
But it wasn’t the only factor. The Trump administration also terminated thousands of existing grants over the past year — something Lauer said he had seen happen only twice in his
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Slavery and Tariffs
For Trumpists, forced labor is the new fentanyl
By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/slavery-and-tariffs
So the Trump administration thinks that slavery is bad. Actually not, but they're using that as an excuse for tariffs. Hi, Paul Krugman here. Another brief video update. It's Friday. We're still bombing Iran. Iran is still blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and that's our prime fixation these days. But meanwhile, tariff policy goes on.
Now, you probably know the story. Donald Trump used some dubious legal maneuvering to impose a lot of tariffs without consulting Congress, without getting legislation. The Supreme Court ruled that most of those were illegal. They took their time about doing it, but now those tariffs, the IEPA tariffs, which were about 70% of the whole thing, are gone.
They have been somewhat replaced by another dubious legal invocation, in this case section 122. Instead of alphabet soup this is all kind of number soup which is also illegal but that may be moot because it's also time limited and that will expire in July.
Also it's not satisfactory to the Trump people because it's not discretionary. It's a flat across the board 10% tariff and what they want to do is be able to say to countries, be nice to us, give us what we want, and we will give you a break on tariffs. And Section 122 doesn't let them do that. So they have been scrambling to find replacements, and it looks like the main attempt now is to use Section 301, which is unfair foreign trading practices. Now, we were kind of wondering, I was wondering, what would they use to do Section 301s against a large part of the world? And it turns out that a large part of the answer is they're trying to invoke a clause that sanctions countries that somehow or other either engage in or fail to deal with other countries engaging in forced labor, effectively slavery. Which is, you know, that's real. The U.S. has longstanding sanctions against some Chinese exports because of, you know, they do do forced labor.
But the reported plan is to bring Section 301 forced labor cases against 60 trading partners, including the European Union, which does not do forced labor, which in fact has its own laws against importing goods produced with forced labor. But the claim is going to be that the European Union, along with 59 other trading partners, does not do enough to limit trade with countries that make use of forced labor. That's a pretty wild thing to be doing. And it may seem uncharacteristic. Do you believe that the Trump administration is deeply concerned about forced labor? Yeah, well, if you believe that, I've got some shoes that don't fit to sell you.
This is obviously an excuse. What makes it especially galling is that, if anything, we know that significant figures in the Trump administration are just fine with forced labor. Pete Hegseth likes a pastor who is on record as saying that he thought that slavery in the South before the Civil War was a good thing. It helped to create racial harmony. So they have nothing against slavery. This is just a device. And it's especially shameful. And the argument that we can put tariffs on the European Union because they're not doing enough to stop the importation of goods produced with forced labor. It's just crazy. Also, they're rushing to get this stuff through, so they're su
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The U.S. Mint dropped the olive branch from the dime. What does that mean for the country?
By Catherina Gioino | March 12, 2026, 7:22 PM ET
https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/
The new design shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right.
What does the olive branch mean?
When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.
Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.
The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s last diplomatic appeal to King George III before the war escalated beyond return.
Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy, and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.
Much more at https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/
Quote:
The U.S. Mint unveiled new designs for the country’s 250th anniversary and it left out one key detail: the olive branch from the newly designed dime. The new reverse shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right, with beneath, the inscription “Liberty over Tyranny.”
For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.
Unchanged since 1946, the Roosevelt dime is now replaced by a modern Liberty figure on the front, solely for one year as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The U.S. Mint is marking the Semiquincentennial with a sweeping redesign of the coinage, something not undertaken since the 1976 Bicentennial. Authorized by Congress, the change touches the dime, quarter, half dollar, penny, and dollar coin, all bearing 1776–2026 dates.
The olive branch has anchored American iconography for 250 years—its absence from the very coin marking that anniversary is a curious choice, if not a telling one.
What does the olive branch mean?
When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.
The arrows—not for lack of symbolism, take a wild guess why there are 13 of them—are in the eagle’s left talon, the traditionally thought-of weaker and subordinate side. Meant to represent the power of war and military preparedness, the arrows clutched in the left talon signal that although the U.S. is always armed and ready, force is not its first instinct.
Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.
The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s las
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"
Very true.
We love Europe. We hate the EU.
Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
If they want to keep giving everyone free everything, including the 59 Million Muslims they've let inside their borders in the last 10 years, they're going to have to find a way to do that while they pay their fair share.
America is no longer subsidizing the rest of the world while racking up any more to add to our current $39 Trillion debt.
I'm sure they can figure something out.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.” Ms. Wiles didn’t mean it literally (Mr. Trump is, in fact, a teetotaler) but offered it as an insight into the president’s own sense of invincibility, his belief “that there’s nothing he can’t do.” 6ix is intoxicated by his self-evaluation of never being wrong, always being the smartest guy in the room, the same as Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Iran endgame tests Trump’s govern-by-instinct style
By Linda Feldmann | March 13, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0313/trump-iran-strategy-e
ndgame
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s supporters say his decision to attack Iran reflects his leadership style of swift, unilateral action. Others see it as impetuous. As the president hints at an endgame, huge questions – over the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian nuclear program, and the country’s leadership – remain.
President Donald Trump has long described his decision-making style as relying on gut and instinct rather than lengthy deliberation with aides and experts.
Almost a year ago, after first imposing and then pausing massive global tariffs, President Trump told reporters his decisions going forward would be made “instinctively, more than anything else.”
By all appearances, the same modus operandi seems to have played out in one of the most momentous decisions a president can make: whether to go to war. When asked by a reporter last week if Israel had forced the United States’ hand against Iran, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had implied, Mr. Trump offered a different explanation.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Mr. Trump said during an Oval Office appearance with the chancellor of Germany. “So if anything, I might’ve forced Israel’s hand.”
Mr. Trump’s Iran campaign has upset some prominent MAGA commentators who took seriously his promises of “no more foreign wars” and the motto “America First.” Many have also accused the president of failing to “sell” or even fully explain the war’s goals to the American people. The administration has put forward various objectives over the past two weeks, from eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat to changing the regime to destroying Iran’s navy and missile capabilities.
Yet longtime observers and those who know Mr. Trump say his decision to attack Iran was entirely in line with a leadership style that has always opted for swift, unilateral action over governing-by-committee caution. “America First,” they say, has never been synonymous with isolationism, but sometimes means pushing aside failing institutions to address threats head-on.
“He’s willing to take risk, and he’s basically elevating a willingness to take risk over process,” Nadia Schadlow, a deputy national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term, recently told New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein. “If the risk is higher of inaction rather than action – and clearly the White House thought that – that’s why they chose to go forward.”
To others, Mr. Trump’s approach appears not so much decisive as impetuous. “It’s never complicated with Trump,” says author Chris Whipple, who gained insight into the president’s world over the course of 11 interviews last year with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “He cares about two things, strength and winning. So it’s war by whim.”
The same could be said of Mr. Trump’s risky military incursion into Venezuela in January to arrest its president, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him back to the U.S. to face federal charges, including narco-terrorism. The bold move was an operational success, but the verdict is still out on the future of Venezuelan governance, where acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Mr
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Phillips O'Brien on Iran
How clueless are our leaders? Very
Another month, another war — this one looking like a complete c*******k. (British slang term for a complete mess, failure, or blunder.)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/phillips-obrien-on-iran
Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman here with another conversation with my favorite military historian/expert, Phillips O’Brien. We do this every time there’s a new war, which means I guess we’re gonna be having a lot of them at the rate we’ve been going.
Phillips O’Brien: Yeah, I’ll see you when he attacks Cuba, right? That’s the next one. So we have Iran now, and then Cuba in a few weeks, I think.
Krugman: I’m not sure we have the resources for Cuba, but yeah. So okay. We’re recording this a bit less than two weeks into this new war with Iran. There are a couple of specific areas I wanna talk about, but first, do you have anything to say that might be a useful starting point?
O’Brien: I don’t think they know what they’re doing. And I don’t think that they had a plan. He basically did what megalomaniac leaders do. They underestimate their enemy and they think they will do this quickly. It’s what Putin did to Ukraine in 2022. “We will just march in, we’ll do what we want. We have this great military.” He was boasting about American military power, and I think he just thought this would be relatively straightforward. He liked to refer to the Venezuela model and I think he thought, ‘okay, what I’m gonna do is blow up the leadership, kill the leadership, and then I’ll get a new leadership that will be much more compliant and do what I want. I don’t wanna actually bring any kind of freedom or democracy to the Iranian people.’ Because, by the way, he’s talking about a leader for the next five to 10 years. So he is actually talking about putting another authoritarian in place. And he thought it would happen, a little bit harder than Venezuela it seems, but not much harder. And he completely underestimated what he was taking on. And what he’s done is caught himself without a strategic plan. They never thought through the second and third order effects, they were nowhere down wondering what would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was cut and they couldn’t get anything out of the Gulf. And I think they’re just making it up now as they go along.
Krugman: Yeah. That’s what we’re all seeing. I wanna come back to that a bit, but, your specialty has been air power, sea power, and strategically how wars are fought that way. And in a way the United States came in with “the O’Brien Supremacy.” We have vastly more, in normal terms or in historic terms, complete air superiority. We have the Navy but actually, let’s talk first about air power. In some ways it seems more effective. It can do big things.
O’Brien: Well, the United States and Israel can blow up anything they want in Iran. Or practically anything they want in Iran. They can’t get to the deep nuclear stuff, or at least they don’t. They’re not sure if they can get to it, but otherwise they could blow up any target on the ground they want to blow up and there’s nothing the Iranians can do about it. Their air defenses, from what we can tell, have mostly been neutralized.
The issue with air power is, it’s great for blowing things up if you have air supremacy, but it’s not great for putting anything else in its place. And this is what they hadn’t worked out. They thought, ‘Okay, we’ll blow things up and something we want will come along and start ruling Iran in a way that we’d like.’ They also didn’t understand that Iran has air power. Not to defend itself, but to strike back. So they totally missed the Iranian capacity to strike back. And Iran has struck back with very cheap drones and very cheap sea drones from what we can tell. And so the Americans haven’t been able to take out Iran’s strike power coming back at them. And it’s why we’re left in this situation.
The US and Israel can destroy anything they want in Iran. And that’s what they’re doing every night. But that doesn’t leave them in the ability to ke
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Joe Rogan says Trump, 79, 'doesn't have much to lose’ because he is about to die soon.
On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience Rogan said that Trump’s advanced age means that he is more likely to engage in conflicts because he won’t be around to face the repercussions.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5780884-joe-rogan-trump-tu
rning-80
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Epstein’s Revelations
By Liel Leibovitz | March 12, 2026
https://firstthings.com/epsteins-revelations/
Far from a mere sordid distraction or an endless supply of tabloid slop, the Epstein files may just be the most important revelation we’ve witnessed in a century or more. The contents tell us much about who we are, what we value, and where, if we’re not careful, we might end up.
More precisely, the files expose three colossal failures, each of which is a cautionary tale worth contemplating at length.
First, and most obviously, let us condemn Washington. In succumbing to petty political pressures and agreeing to release the files, the federal government cracked its knuckles and tossed two centuries of intricate legislation concerning our right to privacy into the dustbin.
Imagine, for example, being Melinda Gates and sipping your morning coffee knowing that, though you’ve committed no transgression, the entire world is now informed that your ex-husband had a plot to clandestinely feed you medication to treat sexually transmitted diseases he’d caught by cavorting with Russian mistresses.
In 1890, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren warned us about the grave damage done by precisely such blatant disregard for our right to be left alone. “To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers,” they wrote.
To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.
Rather than act as a wise guardian of its citizens and their inimitable interests, our government sided with the pornographers and semi-pornographers known as journalists, supplying them with smut and encouraging them to peddle it. Which would’ve been bad enough, had Washington not committed another, far graver sin: In releasing the files, the government admitted, however tacitly, that it is no longer really interested in the rule of law.
Once upon a time not so long ago, before Russiagate and other egregious examples of weaponized law enforcement agencies mobilized to score partisan points, it was assumed that Americans could kinda, sorta trust at least some of the arms of the federal government to conduct investigations fairly, efficiently, and discreetly, if not always, then at least some of the time. A responsible administration would’ve seized this opportunity to make the rule of law great again; this administration chose to dispense with the formalities of trained professionals sifting through relevant data in search of actionable items and let the public be judge, jury, and executioner instead. Yes, shame on Jeffrey Epstein, but also shame on those in office who decided to release his emails for all to see.
The files were searched in a feeding frenzy to find dirt with which to smear enemies. As we recognized that our government had invited us into a Hobbesian state of war of all against all, it was difficult not to think of that seminal exchange in A Man for All Seasons, in which the lawyer William Roper squares off against the great Sir Thomas More. “So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!” thunders Roper, to which Sir Thomas replies, “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Sounding a lot like those benighted bobos mouthing off on social media, Roper barely hesitates before answering. He bellows, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” But Sir Thomas has the last word: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil tur
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I haven't had a drink in over 9 years and 3 months. No A/A, no self-help books, no external help of any kind required.
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:If you have had zero drinks for 9 years and 3 months, you ARE an alcoholic who cannot control himself, unable to limit himself to only one or two drinks per day.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I haven't had a drink in over 9 years and 3 months. No A/A, no self-help books, no external help of any kind required.
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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For five years in office, President Trump has operated with intuition, impulse and improvisation.
The Iran war, now entering Week 3, is the first time Trump's style has made it impossible for him to easily talk or improvise his way out.
Why it matters: Trump could wind up trapped between his caprice and the realities of war. He expects a quick, clear victory. But unlike tariffs that can be swiftly imposed and rescinded, the war's outcome is beyond unilateral control and quick fixes. And Iran gets a say.
Trump could pull out tomorrow. But the Iranians could keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and push oil prices so high that America would have to re-engage.
The Iranians have made it clear in private and in public that even if Trump decides to end the war, they could continue shooting missiles and rockets until they get guarantees that this is the end of the war, not just a temporary ceasefire.
Behind the scenes: Trump has grown accustomed to doing what he wants and then quickly improvising if things go south. But this time, some in his inner circle have what one official called "buyer's remorse" — growing fears that attacking Iran was a mistake.
A source close to the administration said some key officials around Trump were reluctant or wanted more time. "He ended up saying, 'I just want to do it,'" the source said. "He grossly overestimated his ability to topple the regime short of sending in ground troops."
The bottom line: To claim victory, the Iranian regime just needs to stay alive.
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/16/trump-iran-war-escalation
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If you have had zero drinks for 9 years and 3 months, you ARE an alcoholic who cannot control himself, unable to limit himself to only one or two drinks per day.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I haven't had a drink in over 9 years and 3 months. No A/A, no self-help books, no external help of any kind required.
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I have no desire to drink. Plain and simple. I've been around plenty of people who were drinking in that time and never had the urge to.
Why are you such an asshole? Why do you always make your arguments personal and try to hurt other people?
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The question you should be asking yourself is why every Trumptard is a failure as a human.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I have no desire to drink. Plain and simple. I've been around plenty of people who were drinking in that time and never had the urge to.
Why are you such an asshole? Why do you always make your arguments personal and try to hurt other people?
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump’s cabinet members are vain, self-aggrandizing, arrogant, deceitful fools
The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist. It’s not just that I’ve had to watch the Trump administration destroy cherished alliances, like ours with Western Europe and Canada, that have upheld freedom, democracy and global trade since World War II. It’s also been the stunning cowardice and boundless greed with which leaders of big law firms and Big Tech have bent their knees to King Donald and indulged a cabinet of clowns — not one of whom they’d hire in their own businesses.
We have a president so shameless that he insists on putting his name on every public building he can.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/03/15/americas-real-leaders-are-
not-vain-self-aggrandizing-arrogant-deceitful-fools/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The question you should be asking yourself is why every Trumptard is a failure as a human.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I have no desire to drink. Plain and simple. I've been around plenty of people who were drinking in that time and never had the urge to.
Why are you such an asshole? Why do you always make your arguments personal and try to hurt other people?
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I would never ask myself that question because it's ridiculous.
You are ridiculous.
We know dude. You've never had a single vice in your life and you're all that is good and right in the world. Your virtue is unmatched except by God, if there is one. You will live forever because everything you've ever thought and every action you've ever taken is the correct one, as is the case with all Democrat Party voters.
And despite doing everything right and being a billionaire oil tycoon, you spend all of your waking hours posting negative Trump stories here, even when he's not president for 4 straight years. You are completely miserable, and you try to make everyone around you as miserable as you are.
Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:I checked the history books, and there wasn't any slave-owners who were aware that they were evil. As a Confederacy, they organized to impose their evil behavior on the entire country. The Confederates, if they hadn't been overly aggressive, could have kept slavery going for another century in their states, but they had convinced themselves that slavery was positively good for everyone, including the slaves and the free states. And how was the slave-owners' behavior changed? Not with elections nor with words but by murdering the slave-owners. The Democrats have lost this understanding of how to change evil people that should be obvious from how the Nazis were pacified in WWII. The Dems keep thinking that winning the next election with clever words will permanently change the behavior of the evil Trumptards.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I would never ask myself that question because it's ridiculous.
You are ridiculous.
We know dude. You've never had a single vice in your life and you're all that is good and right in the world. Your virtue is unmatched except by God, if there is one. You will live forever because everything you've ever thought and every action you've ever taken is the correct one, as is the case with all Democrat Party voters.
And despite doing everything right and being a billionaire oil tycoon, you spend all of your waking hours posting negative Trump stories here, even when he's not president for 4 straight years. You are completely miserable, and you try to make everyone around you as miserable as you are.
Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The president’s Sunday night diatribe was most notable for his attacks on the highest court in the land.
By Kyle Cheney
03/16/2026 01:31 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/16/donald-trump-supreme-court-at
tacks-00829708
President Donald Trump is increasingly at the mercy of forces he unleashed but can’t control — so he’s taking aim at the umpires.
Gas prices surging. Unemployment climbing. War with Iran threatening to engulf his presidency. The fracturing of his political coalition. The collapse of his signature trade-negotiations-by-tariff strategy. Relentless scrutiny of the Epstein files. A public backlash to his agenda that could swamp Republicans in the midterms. Failure after failure to criminalize the conduct of his political adversaries.
So it was, in a fit of Sunday night fury that set Washington’s armchair psychoanalysts ablaze, that the president channeled his rage at the few functioning checks on his power: the media, independent regulators and — most pointedly — the federal judiciary.
Trump’s Sunday night outburst took on all of them, but it was most notable for how he cast the Supreme Court — one that has staved off the destruction of his agenda and even his own criminal prosecution — as “a weaponized, and unjust Political Organization.”
“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” the president blared on Truth Social. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”
It was a remarkable attack. Until the Feb. 20 tariff ruling, the Trump administration had been touting its winning streak at the Supreme Court. The justices have salvaged Trump’s broadest efforts to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of noncitizens in the United States, allowed him to assert unprecedented control of once-independent agencies and unilaterally slash congressionally authorized spending.
The court, as Trump knows, is arguably responsible for his return to power in the first place: The justices blocked an effort by some blue states to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot by labeling him an insurrectionist responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. And the court’s decision to adopt a sweeping view of presidential immunity helped stave off special counsel Jack Smith’s most potent criminal case against Trump.
But to Trump, that’s ancient history.
The core of the attack is the frustration that Trump often exhibits when he brushes up against the limits of his power. He spent Sunday lashing out at the news media, cheering on FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s threat to revoke broadcast licenses for stations that report unfavorably on the war in Iran, and lamenting his inability to control the independent Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions.
Trump describes the high court’s recent rejection of his unfettered ability to levy tariffs against American trading partners as a deeply personal affront — one that contradicted the ethos of his entire decade in public life.
Since the stinging tariffs decision last month, Trump has seemed fixated on the ruling, weighing in against the high court every few days.
“Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote Sunday.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the White House referred POLITICO to Trump’s posts.
Trump’s bristling anger over the tariffs decision is akin to the umbrage he felt after the justices rejected his last-ditch courtroom bid to overturn the 2020 election.
Unsurprisingly, both of those cases featured in Trump’s post, adorned by false claims about what the justices actually decided in each one. They did not, in fact, bless Trump’s alternate scheme to re-issue tariffs. And they did not, six years ago, tell Trump he lacked standing to challenge the 2020 election results.
“All I can do, as President, is call them out for their bad behavior!” Trump lamented of the co-equal branch. He even acknowledged his vent session could be a strategic blunder: “This statement
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The question you should be asking yourself is why every Trumptard is a failure as a human.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I have no desire to drink. Plain and simple. I've been around plenty of people who were drinking in that time and never had the urge to.
Why are you such an asshole? Why do you always make your arguments personal and try to hurt other people?
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
I would never ask myself that question because it's ridiculous.
You are ridiculous.
We know dude. You've never had a single vice in your life and you're all that is good and right in the world. Your virtue is unmatched except by God, if there is one. You will live forever because everything you've ever thought and every action you've ever taken is the correct one, as is the case with all Democrat Party voters.
And despite doing everything right and being a billionaire oil tycoon, you spend all of your waking hours posting negative Trump stories here, even when he's not president for 4 straight years. You are completely miserable, and you try to make everyone around you as miserable as you are.
Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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What does Donald Trump expect Europeans to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?
Donald Trump is now pleading with other countries to rescue his war on Iran by helping to open the Strait of Hormuz — although Trump being Trump, his pleas for assistance take the form of threats. Regardless, help is not on the way. Germany, Australia and Japan have flatly said no, while Britain and France have been slightly equivocal but at most hinted at willingness to supply forces after the fighting stops.
Why this effectively unanmous rejection? A large part of the answer is that other countries couldn’t secure the Strait even if they wanted to. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s Defense Minister, was outright caustic in remarks Monday:
"What does (...) Donald Trump expect a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to do in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do?"
Beyond that, who wants to take risks in support of a U.S. government that nobody trusts, a government that neither shows gratitude for aid nor punishes those who do America harm?
Indeed, even as Trump begs in his graceless way for help, his administration is preparing to hit the very nations he is appealing to with another round of tariffs — tariffs that will be imposed based on an obviously false, bad faith, totally insulting argument.
As most readers probably know, almost a year ago Trump imposed tariffs on almost every other nation, including islands inhabited only by penguins, by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This use of IEEPA was blatantly illegal, and after dragging its heels for many months, the Supreme Court finally agreed with lower courts that the tariffs were, in fact, illegal.
One important point that isn’t emphasized enough is that in addition to being illegal under U.S. law, the IEEPA tariffs were a gross breach of contract. Most U.S. tariff rates were set in 1995, as part of the negotiations that among other things created the World Trade Organization. These tariffs were “bound” by international agreements, which have almost as much force as treaties. But the U.S. just ripped those agreements up, without even trying to make a case for its actions.
Now the IEEPA tariffs are gone, but Trump isn’t giving up. On Sunday night he posted a long, falsehood-filled rant about the Court, beginning with a condemnation of its tariff ruling. And while he can’t simply defy Supreme Court rulings — not yet, anyway — his officials have been scrambling for legal strategies to reimpose high tariffs.
And the main one they’ve come up with is a doozy. Under U.S. law the executive branch has the authority to impose tariffs without new legislation in certain specified circumstances. These include Section 232 tariffs to protect national security, the (spurious) basis for most of the tariffs that survived the Supreme Court’s ruling. (I’m ignoring the Section 122 tariffs currently in place to deal with a nonexistent balance of payments crisis, not because they’re legal — they clearly aren’t — but because they will expire this summer.)
Looking forward, however, Trump officials are planning to impose another major round of tariffs using Section 301, designed to cope with unfair foreign trading practices. In particular, they’re proposing tariffs on 60 (!) countries, including Canada, the UK and the European Union, that they accuse of violating rules against international trade in goods produced with forced labor.
Wait — is the administration accusing Canada and Europe of using slave labor to produce their exports? No, they’re saying that these countries’ governments are guilty of “failure to impose and effectively enforce a ban on the importation of goods produced with forced labor,” and that these failures “burden or restrict U.S. commerce.” In other words, they’re going to slap tariffs on Canada, not because they claim that Canada uses slave labor, but because China does, and they claim that Canada is hurting America because it isn’t doing enough to stop those slave-produce
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March 17, 2026, 7 AM ET
The window for Donald Trump to end the Iran war by simply declaring victory and walking away is rapidly closing. Soon he will face a stark choice: He can take greater risks in pursuit of a decisive tactical success, prepare the country for a prolonged conflict that could last for many months, or seek a negotiated settlement that involves a real compromise with Tehran.
Initially, Trump saw his Venezuela operation as the template for Iran. He imagined that he would make a deal with someone inside the regime who would work pragmatically with him and maybe cut the United States in on the oil. But the Islamic Republic proved more aggressive and more resilient than he had anticipated. By his own admission, no one in his administration had expected Iran to strike out against American allies in the region—“they weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East”—although it had repeatedly threatened to do exactly that. As the war grew more difficult, declaring victory anyway and unilaterally ending it without a deal became his most obvious off-ramp.
Trump has set the stage for this outcome. He has repeatedly insisted that the war is “already won” and “very complete.” He told Fox News that he would choose to end the conflict when “I feel it in my bones.” Senator Josh Hawley urged him to declare victory immediately and end the war. But the longer the war continues, the harder it will be to sustain the claim that the United States is winning.
. . .
Trump launched the war because he believed that Iran was weak and that he could quickly win. Many wars start that way. Few end as expected. Now, just over two weeks in, the window for declaring victory is closing. He can try to escalate, as some of his predecessors did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but that is no guarantee of success. Unless he gets lucky, his real choice may be whether to keep fighting or try to negotiate a messy compromise. Either way, the war Trump chose to start is no longer entirely his to control.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/03/iran-victory-trump/6
86411/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Tucker Carlson on Trump's Iran War: "I Can't Believe He Did This To Us"
Tucker Carlson argued that many of the nontraditional voters who helped elect Donald Trump feel deeply betrayed by the war.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/03/13/tucker_carlson_on_t
rumps_iran_war_i_cant_believe_he_did_this_to_us.html
TUCKER CARLSON: The only people who support this war are those born between 1946 and 1964 who watch a lot of Fox News. That's it. I'm not attacking them, by the way. They're Americans. They're my equals as Americans. I love a lot of them. But their perspective on the US and the world is very different from everyone else's very, very different. And so they're not the ones who got Donald Trump elected.
Actually, the people who got Donald Trump elected are the people who hadn't voted for Republicans before or even voted at all before. And they're like Joe Rogan listeners or people who use nicotine pouches. They're not. They're Hispanic voters.
They're young black men. They're non-traditional Republican voters who voted for Trump because he promised not to keep doing the same thing. And one of the things he promised not to do again was to hand operational authority over to Benjamin Netanyahu, as other presidents have. We don't want any more of that. Why would we? And we're not going to like make Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro, who have almost no organic support in the media world, like no one really watches them.
We're not going to hand control of our foreign policy over to people like that who don't know anything and who don't have America's interests at heart or even in mind. So breaking faith with those people, those voters, the ones who actually got Trump elected and whose coalition promised a new day in American politics. That's a big deal.
It's a betrayal on the level that I don't think people who aren't in those groups can understand. Like this is this is heartbreaking. And by the way, a lot of people really like Trump. They like his style. They think he's hilarious. He's brave. You know, he's just like they like him. And to see this is oh, it's so wounding. It just it hurts. I you know, I talked to I've got a bunch who work for me. I'm related to some, you know, they're all Trump voters. And I talked to them in the last 24 hours.
Boy, they're upset. They're not just mad like I hate Israel. That's not that's not the impulse. They're definitely starting to hate Israel. Why wouldn't they? Our relationship with Israel is hurting us gravely. It's getting Americans killed. So they're mad, but it's more than mad. I can't believe he did this to us. You know, I feel just so depressed about it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump muses over ‘taking Cuba’ as island’s power grid collapses after weeks of US oil blockade
“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about United States and Cuba, when will the United States having the honor of taking Cuba? That’s a big honor,” Trump said in remarks from the Oval Office. “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah, taking Cuba — I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/americas/cuba-power-grid-collapse-intl-
latam
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Not Just a Mistake, a Crime
March 10, 2026
Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalculable suffering. It is flatly, unambiguously illegal. Every year the UN General Assembly votes, virtually unanimously, to require the United States to end it. But Florida’s electoral votes are far more important in Washington than international law. The U.S. embargo of Iran is also illegal—embargoes and blockades are acts of war, which can only be authorized by the Security Council. And every year since 1967, the General Assembly has voted—again near-unanimously—to require Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied. But thanks to unflagging American support, Israel, too, can ignore international law, on the West Bank and, apocalyptically, in Gaza.
As a result of this long and abysmal history, international law now has no force whatever. Previous U.S. administrations pretended to care about it and regularly ignored it. The present administration does not even pretend to respect law, domestic or international. A culture of law-abidingness is no more comprehensible to President Trump and his goon squad than quantum entanglement.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scialabba-iran-war-trump-internatio
nal-law-israel?check_logged_in=1
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The world’s most credible democracy watchdog: ‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’
By Martin Gelin | Tue 17 Mar 2026
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-a
iming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog
The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_20
26_lowres.pdf
“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.
Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.
“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vucic in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.
US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.
The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.
“We’ve seen a very fast concentration of power in the executive wing. The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers to the president. It no longer functions as a check on executive power,” Lindberg says.
In Donald Trump’s first year as president, he signed 225 executive orders, whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed only 49 new laws. “Most of Trump’s executive orders were significant. He shut down entire departments of the government, firing hundreds of thousands of employees. The bills passed by Congress were mostly insignificant modifications to existing laws. So, we no longer have a meaningful division between the legislative and executive branches,” Lindberg says.
Meanwhile, the supreme court has also mostly abdicated power, and even when it does strike down Trump’s executive orders, he circumvents it, Lindberg tells me. He points out that there are more than 600 ongoing judicial procedures against the Trump administration in the courts.
Another aspect of America’s rapidly deteriorating democracy, according to the report, is the removal of internal guardrails that protect the federal government from abuse of power. When I ask Lindberg how we should read the findings, his response is emphatic. “Trump has fired inspector generals and higher levels of civil servants across departments, and replaced them with loyalists. This is exactly what Orbán and Erdogan did. They remove the constraints on power. It should be obvious by now that Trump is aiming for dictatorship.”
Much more at https:
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Donald Trump, Petropresident
Follow the Gulf oil money
Paul Krugman
Mar 18, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-petropresident
Why did Donald Trump attack Iran? Did he believe that a quick victory would boost his poll ratings? Was he looking for a way to change the subject from the Epstein files and affordability? Was he seduced into war by the Israeli government?
The answer, surely, is all of the above. Bad decisions don’t have to have a single explanation. In fact, debacles on the scale of what we’re now experiencing usually have multiple causes.
But when I look into the larger picture of Trump administration policy — not just the attack on Iran but domestic policies, especially the administration’s seemingly irrational hatred of renewable energy and its determination to keep America burning fossil fuels no matter what — I keep coming back to the huge influence now being wielded by oil money.
I don’t mostly mean the domestic U.S. oil industry, although them too. The U.S. oil and gas sector spent large sums helping Republicans in the 2024 election, while giving very little to Democrats.
But what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump’s international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.
One recurrent theme in Trump’s economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. “In 12 months,” he declared in the State of the Union, “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”
Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal.
But what’s especially interesting is who has made these investment pledges, such as they are:
Each of the major Gulf petrostates has pledged to invest more than the whole European Union, even though they have far smaller economies. Here’s another visualization:
So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he’s bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn’t it?
And then there’s Trump’s relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar’s gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don’t know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.
Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have had a critical journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered wi
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At Rice University, Chief Justice John Roberts says Trump’s personal attacks on judges have 'got to stop'
By Isaac Yu, Staff Writer | March 17, 2026
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=6c3e46e9-3c30-4184-b317-be22e9ce4647&share=true
Chief Justice John Roberts said some criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court is “quite dangerous,” but sidestepped directly addressing President Donald Trump’s increasingly vocal jabs at his court during a Tuesday visit to Houston.
Roberts said personal attacks were worrisome, though he stressed that criticism “comes with the territory” of serving on the judiciary and said he tries not to read outside criticism too often.
“The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from the focus on legal analysis to personalities,” Roberts said at an event held by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
“Personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”
The comments come just days after Trump issued a lengthy diatribe criticizing the court’s recent ruling against his tariff policies, calling it “bad behavior.” The president has blasted many of the justices since the start of his second term, including some of his own nominees, and expressed increasing disapproval with the court’s decisions, particularly those dealing with executive power.
“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”
Roberts pushed back on the idea that justices must carry out the agendas of their appointing presidents.
“President George W. ?Bush appointed me 20 years ago, and the idea that I'm carrying out his agenda somehow is absurd,” Roberts said.
But the justice avoided mentioning Trump by name or any of his specific criticisms. At another point, Roberts said studying the experiences of earlier chief justices had taught him to “stay in your lane.”
Roberts has served as chief of the court since 2005 and is now the fourth-longest serving chief justice in U.S. history.
The comments came during an hour-long conversation with Judge Lee Rosenthal, a longtime Houston-based judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Robert’s rare repeat visit to Rice, he said, came after a personal request from the Baker Institute’s namesake, James Baker III, a Houston native and former U.S. Secretary of State. Roberts recalled working as a lawyer in the White House during the Reagan administration, when Baker served as chief of staff.
“I got used to doing pretty much what he told me to do,” Roberts said of Baker.
Roberts, who also oversees the nation’s sprawling system of district and appeals courts, said he worried about how generative AI was reshaping the legal profession, saying he foresaw a “really tough” time for young lawyers.
March 17, 2026
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The public often exaggerates the role of political leadership in determining economic performance. In reality, presidents and their policies normally have very little effect on macroeconomic variables like inflation and employment.
But this time is different. The disappointing aspects of recent U.S. performance have been all about Trump.
In his press conference Powell didn’t beat around the bush. Noting that inflation is significantly overshooting the Fed’s target, he declared that
"Some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters is actually tariffs."
What about the stalling of employment growth? Research at the San Francisco Fed confirms what many economists have been arguing: Job growth has slowed largely because of the crackdown on immigration, which has reduced labor supply. So employment stagnation is also the result of Trump administration policies.
Now, you might be tempted to argue that while stopping immigration reduces overall job growth, it surely must increase job opportunities for native-born workers. But a look at unemployment rates suggests that the job market for the native-born has gotten (slightly) worse, not better:
The most we can say is that thanks to the loss of immigrant workers the overall unemployment rate hasn’t risen as much as one might have expected given the collapse in overall job growth. But the loss of foreign-born workers is probably contributing to higher inflation, over and above the effects of tariffs and now oil prices. And it will have major adverse effects on America’s fiscal outlook — but that’s a subject for another day.
So Powell is right: If you restrict the term stagflation to situations that quantitatively resemble the 1970s, we aren’t there yet. But there’s definitely a whiff of stagflation in the air — a whiff that is entirely caused by Trump administration policies.
And if the situation deteriorates, as seems all too possible given the mess in the Persian Gulf, can we trust Trump’s officials to respond intelligently and effectively?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-whiff-of-stagflation
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:U.S. Warmongering Hits Historic Level As Trump Attacks 3 Continents In 3 Days
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Since World War II, the U.S. has rarely, if ever, attacked so many places. “All war. All the time. Everywhere,” one source put it.
By Nick Turse | March 19 2026. 7:51 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/19/trump-world-wars-iran-somalia-boat
-strikes/
The United States made war on three continents over three days earlier this month, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean. The globe-spanning scope of the attacks represents one of the few instances since World War II that the United States has been simultaneously involved in armed conflicts with such a wide geographic sweep.
The attacks in Ecuador, Iran, Somalia, and the Eastern Pacific from March 6 through March 8 are part of President Donald Trump’s escalating world war against variously defined “terrorists.” They highlight the administration’s increasing willingness to use the U.S. military as a solution to almost any perceived geopolitical problem.
“All war. All the time. Everywhere,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, of the wide-ranging attacks over just a few days. “It’s unprecedented given the absence of any fresh congressional authorization.”
This month, Trump has repeatedly referenced his relentless war-making and even lamented it on occasion. “I built the military and rebuilt it in my first term, and we’re using it more than I’d like to use it to be honest with you,” he said.
The region that has seen the most profound increases in this “use” of military power is the Western Hemisphere as part of what Trump and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — a unilaterally claimed license to militarily meddle in America’s backyard — has led to attacks on civilian boats in the waters surrounding Latin America and an attack on Venezuela. The most recent location of U.S. attacks in the region, Ecuador, is also the site of the first strike in Trump’s recent three-day, three-war spree.
“Yes — as @POTUS has said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists on land as well,” self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6, announcing a new strike in Ecuador. Days later, in a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”
The next day, Trump announced an escalation of his latest war of choice in the Middle East. “Today Iran will be hit very hard!” he posted, writing, “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.” That same day, U.S. Central Command posted footage of the U.S. striking unspecified Iranian targets beneath a threat by Hegseth to hunt and kill those that “threaten Americans anywhere on earth.”
A day later, the U.S. conducted an attack as part of its war-on-terror-holdover conflict in Somalia. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted an airstrike targeting ISIS-Somalia on March 8, 2026,” reads an AFRICOM press release. “The airstrike occurred in the vicinity of the Golis Mountains.” (This frequently attacked region was the site, last year, of what a top Navy admiral called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.”)
On the same day as the recent AFRICOM strike, U.S. Southern Command announced the latest attack in its campaign targeting so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Paci
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Scenes from the Death of the Pax Americana
I’m feeling almost speechless right now
By Paul Krugman | Mar 20, 2026
Just a few scenes from the accelerating collapse in America’s reputation and influence.
Item: The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, roughly speaking Denmark’s equivalent of the BBC, reports that two months ago Danish forces were prepared to blow up runways in Greenland to prevent a possible U.S. attempt to seize the island by force:
Denmark prepared for possible attack from the US: Flew bags of blood to Greenland and prepared to blow up runways. Key sources in Denmark and Europe are now telling for the first time what happened in the most critical days when Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland "the hard way".
Item: During a meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Donald Trump was asked why the U.S. didn’t inform its allies before attacking Iran. He replied, “Because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Item: Pete Hegseth angrily attacked news coverage of the war:
The media here — not all of it, but much of it — wants you to think, just 19 days into this conflict, that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scenes-from-the-death-of-the-pax
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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BREAKING: Attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East have caused the price of oil to skyrocket to a whopping Donald Trump raped children per barrel.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/326796271160689/posts/2303173923522904/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Eye Is Already on Cuba
“Regime change is lined up,” awaiting the president’s signal, according to one administration official.
By Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick | March 22, 2026, 1:05 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/trump-plan-cuba/
686497/
A Russian oil tanker is creeping west across the Atlantic, quite possibly toward a confrontation with the United States Navy.
The Anatoly Kolodkin is carrying tens of thousands of tons of crude oil apparently meant for Cuba, which is battling a fuel shortage. But it may not reach its destination: The U.S. Navy is policing the Caribbean to choke off Havana’s oil supply.
The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes. Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, Trump told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking Cuba,” adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.”
The White House is calculating that the island’s extreme economic hardships will provide the leverage Trump needs to force Havana into submission. Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, publicly acknowledged discussions between the two governments last week and pledged a series of reforms aimed at appeasing Washington, a concession that indicated both the urgency of the domestic crisis and the vulnerability of the regime. Cuba’s economy, already hollowed out by mismanagement, communist economic ideology, sanctions, and the end of subsidized oil from Venezuela, is now tormented by island-wide blackouts and food shortages. After the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1 million people left the island—about 10 percent of Cuba’s population. Another wave could be coming if the island doesn’t receive economic relief.
The government-to-government talks hold the potential for a peaceful settlement—but the track record isn’t strong. U.S. discussions with the regimes in Iran and Venezuela in recent months came to naught, prompting military intervention in both countries. Officials told us the U.S. approach to Cuba would likely replicate the course of events in Venezuela—several called the Caracas operation a “dry run” for Havana—and that the switch from negotiation to military action could happen imminently. Everything, they cautioned, depends on Trump and his willingness to challenge another regime while still fighting in Iran. But preparations on several fronts are well advanced should he decide to proceed.
The U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida is preparing indictments against Cuba’s political and military leadership—including members of the Castro family—on a range of possible charges related to alleged violent crime, drug-trafficking, immigration, and espionage, four people familiar with the planning told us on condition of anonymity to discuss internal government proceedings. (The U.S. used a 2020 indictment against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, as a predicate for his capture.) U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quinones is leading a multi-agency effort that could be used to provide legal justification for any military engagement, these people added. (The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The State Department has long accused the Cuban regime of human rights violations, including alleged arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture; degrading treatment of political prisoners; and repression of journalists. Cuba denies the accusations.
The Trump administration is also discussing which wealthy Republican donors with Cuban ancestry could be considered for future transition or leadership roles in Havana.
“Regime change is lined up,” one administration official told us. But Trump-style regime change is unlikely to be the democratic uprising that many Cuban exiles have longed for. Venezuela again is expected to be the model. The administration found that its short-term
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If you're an Antifa terrorist, I wouldn't try getting on any planes starting tomorrow unless you want ICEy fingers up your butts.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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ICE took another step toward becoming Donald Trump's personal army.
He tried this in 2020. Federal agents in unmarked vans grabbed protesters off the streets of Portland because the military wouldn't do it for him. So in this administration, he went around that roadblock. ICE agents don't have the same institutional limits as the military. They've been recruited with massive bonuses, they answer only to his loyalists, and not once in 14 months have they refused a directive.
ICE agents will be at airport security checkpoints
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-homan-ice-crowded-a
irport-security-tsa-screenings-wait-times-rcna264618
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yup.
We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.
Deal with it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:There is nothing for me to deal with. Trump is deporting the Republican business workforce that works for less than minimum wage. Those dishonest and incompetent Republicans can barely stay in business by cheating their customers, cheating their employees, and cheating on their income taxes. I prefer that misfortune fall upon them. The Dept of War is in similar trouble caused by its dishonesty and incompetence, although it compensates by asking Congress for a 50% increase in budget. The Republicans in Congress will either give it to them or else the Pentagon collapses:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.
We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.
Deal with it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The War with Iran May Already be Lost
A war launched without a defined end state, sold through metrics and bravado, and blind to an enemy that measures time in generations rather than news cycles, is not a path to victory but a slow-motion admission of strategic failure.
By Robert Bruce Adolph | March 24, 2026
https://sofrep.com/news/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-lost/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-
lost/ar-AA1ZjauU
With special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Timothy Grimmett.
If wars were won by bombastic press conferences, the White House should already be planning another military parade in our capital’s streets. In America’s latest war of choice, President Trump’s styled Secretary of “War” is emerging as the head cheerleader for our misadventure in Iran. Mr. Hegseth has already mistakenly defined what constitutes victory — the destruction of various portions of the Iranian Navy and military production facilities. Unfortunately, his definition is flawed. Despite possessing some military experience as a junior officer, he has shown that he is completely out of his depth. For most intents and purposes, the war with Iran might have been lost before the first missile was launched.
Some of the lessons that Mr. Hegseth should have learned by now:
Operational excellence is not a guarantee of strategic success — The best military on the planet cannot win a war if the national strategic objectives selected by the National Command Authority are faulty. This fact was proven in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which like Iran, were wars of choice and not necessity. Does Mr. Hegseth grasp the gap between his definition of victory and that of his boss?
Mr. Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender” of Iran — That choice could cost many lives. America demanded unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The word “unconditional” suggests that there will be no negotiated settlement. The only means of achieving that objective in Germany and Japan was first a land invasion of the “Father Land” followed by the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is this where we are heading?
The best bosses remain always open to bad news — If the boss always demands good news, good news is all that his subordinates will present to him. Mr. Hegseth only wants to focus on the number of strikes; the number of aircraft involved; and the number of targets destroyed. These figures no doubt please this Oval Office. Tragically, war by the numbers was a loser in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The numbers say nothing about an enemy’s will to resist. The senior uniformed staff in the Pentagon all know this fact. A smarter press corps would be asking what is the US strategy if Iran’s military is destroyed and the mullahs simply refuse to surrender?
Know your enemy — Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression. The clerical leadership’s defa
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--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.
Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Trump is breaking an axiom of war. Did no one warn him?
By Matthew Lynn | March 24, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/24/trump-war-tariffs-i
ran/
The exact origin of the maxim “Don’t fight on two fronts” is lost to time. It can be variously traced back to “The Art of War,” the classic 5th-century B.C. Chinese treatise by Sun Tzu, to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the main commander of British forces during World War II.
One point is certain, however. No one got around to sharing it with President Donald Trump. The United States has now embarked on two wars at the same time: a trade war with China and Europe, and a real war with Iran. This will surely prove to be a serious mistake.
Trump has an undiminished appetite for conflict. Less than a year ago, on what he oddly called “Liberation Day,” he ripped up the global trading system and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and allies. Earlier this year, he launched a raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and last month, he launched an all-out assault on Iran, aimed at taking out its armed forces and removing its leadership.
An administration that many argued would be isolationist and that promised to put America first has turned out to spend most of its energy trying to reshape the rest of the world.
In fairness, you can make a respectable case for either war. The supposedly rules-based global trading system did at times appear to have turned into a mechanism for transferring wealth and jobs from American workers to other countries. Given persistent U.S. deficits, and with American exporters facing steep tariffs in many countries while U.S. markets remained open, you could certainly argue that the system needed rebalancing. After a decade or two of talking with no discernible change, a more muscular approach has its merits.
Likewise, you can make a perfectly respectable case for removing the regime in Tehran, or at least significantly degrading its military strength. For the better part of five decades, it has been a threat to its neighbors and a persistent sponsor of global terrorism, while brutally suppressing its people and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The world would definitely be better off if it fell. There is a strategic rationale to launching an attack even if the risks are huge.
But both wars at once?
There are two big problems. First, alliances get stretched very close to the breaking point. It might be helpful in the Gulf, for example, to be able to call upon French naval forces, or British air support, or Canadian or German defense manufacturing to keep the weapons flowing. But that is very hard to do when you have just slapped punitive tariffs on those countries, impeded their exports and dismissed their leaders as irrelevant. To put it mildly, goodwill is in short supply.
The issue is not that anyone in Europe — apart from a few extremists — has any sympathy with the regime in Tehran. It is that European voters understandably have little sympathy with a president who has been attacking their exporters and demanding that jobs be transferred across the Atlantic.
Next, very quickly the objectives start to clash. It is difficult to maintain all the levies and restrictions on imports demanded by the trade war when supply chains are being thrown into chaos by the closure of shipping lanes in the Gulf, when the price of oil is exploding and when critical minerals and components are needed to fight the war.
Even worse, it was always going to be hard to maintain political support for tariffs if they led to a spike in inflation — even if you believed that was a short-term price worth paying to restore manufacturing capacity. But why throw fuel on that particular fire with a military action in the Middle East? (“Wait, war in the Gulf drives energy costs higher? Why did nobody tell us?”)
If inflation goes much higher, the president may well end up lowering tariffs to contain it, effectively surrendering
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Quote:Signym, were you trying to point out an error, but it isn't erroneous? Iran (formerly Persia) is predominantly Shia Islam, with about 90–95% of its population identifying with this branch, making it the world's largest Shia-majority nation and the center of the Shia world. While historically Sunni, the country officially converted to Twelver Shia Islam under the Safavid Dynasty in 1501.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.
Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.
Official Religion: The Islamic Republic of Iran is a Shia theocracy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump is breaking an axiom of war. Did no one warn him?
By Matthew Lynn | March 24, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/24/trump-war-tariffs-i
ran/
The exact origin of the maxim “Don’t fight on two fronts” is lost to time. It can be variously traced back to “The Art of War,” the classic 5th-century B.C. Chinese treatise by Sun Tzu, to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the main commander of British forces during World War II.
One point is certain, however. No one got around to sharing it with President Donald Trump. The United States has now embarked on two wars at the same time: a trade war with China and Europe, and a real war with Iran. This will surely prove to be a serious mistake.
Trump has an undiminished appetite for conflict. Less than a year ago, on what he oddly called “Liberation Day,” he ripped up the global trading system and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and allies. Earlier this year, he launched a raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and last month, he launched an all-out assault on Iran, aimed at taking out its armed forces and removing its leadership.
An administration that many argued would be isolationist and that promised to put America first has turned out to spend most of its energy trying to reshape the rest of the world.
In fairness, you can make a respectable case for either war. The supposedly rules-based global trading system did at times appear to have turned into a mechanism for transferring wealth and jobs from American workers to other countries. Given persistent U.S. deficits, and with American exporters facing steep tariffs in many countries while U.S. markets remained open, you could certainly argue that the system needed rebalancing. After a decade or two of talking with no discernible change, a more muscular approach has its merits.
Likewise, you can make a perfectly respectable case for removing the regime in Tehran, or at least significantly degrading its military strength. For the better part of five decades, it has been a threat to its neighbors and a persistent sponsor of global terrorism, while brutally suppressing its people and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The world would definitely be better off if it fell. There is a strategic rationale to launching an attack even if the risks are huge.
But both wars at once?
There are two big problems. First, alliances get stretched very close to the breaking point. It might be helpful in the Gulf, for example, to be able to call upon French naval forces, or British air support, or Canadian or German defense manufacturing to keep the weapons flowing. But that is very hard to do when you have just slapped punitive tariffs on those countries, impeded their exports and dismissed their leaders as irrelevant. To put it mildly, goodwill is in short supply.
The issue is not that anyone in Europe — apart from a few extremists — has any sympathy with the regime in Tehran. It is that European voters understandably have little sympathy with a president who has been attacking their exporters and demanding that jobs be transferred across the Atlantic.
Next, very quickly the objectives start to clash. It is difficult to maintain all the levies and restrictions on imports demanded by the trade war when supply chains are being thrown into chaos by the closure of shipping lanes in the Gulf, when the price of oil is exploding and when critical minerals and components are needed to fight the war.
Even worse, it was always going to be hard to maintain political support for tariffs if they led to a spike in inflation — even if you believed that was a short-term price worth paying to restore manufacturing capacity. But why throw fuel on that particular fire with a military action in the Middle East? (“Wait, war in the Gulf drives energy costs higher? Why did nobody tell us?”)
If inflation goes much higher, the president may well end up lowering tariffs to contain it, effectively surrendering
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The Worst and the Dumbest
Has the U.S. military been Kudlowized?
Paul Krugman
Mar 27, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-worst-and-the-dumbest
Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.
It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.
The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.
Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.
It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?
I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.
And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.
And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, a dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme ri
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Quote:Trump’s DOJ refused to rule out nuclear weapons from the kinds of arms it claims the average citizen may be entitled to possess.
Originally posted by second:
The Worst and the Dumbest
By Tess M. Fardon and Shira Lauren Feldman | March 27, 2026 1:48 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/trump-doj-second-amendment
-nuclear-weapons.html
Of the sheer number of absurdist stories you may have missed in the news recently, one is that in public court filings slamming common-sense laws to prevent gun violence, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice refused to rule out nuclear weapons from the kinds of arms it claims the average citizen may be entitled to possess under the Second Amendment. https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1425776/dl?inline
How did we get here, where the top law enforcement lawyers in the country refuse to draw any line at weapons that can be used in lawful self-defense? And why is self-defense an important consideration in showing how laws to prevent gun violence align with the Second Amendment?
In the past year, Trump’s DOJ has taken an extreme pro-gun-rights view of the Second Amendment, with its lawyers making clear their view that the public has a constitutional right to access an extraordinarily broad range of weapons for self-defense. Trump’s DOJ has taken a remarkable stance in recent court filings—including in attacking state assault weapon bans—that any arm that is simply in “common use” by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes cannot be regulated, regardless of how dangerous that arm is, or how unsuited to lawful self-defense.
Now, to be clear, DOJ lawyers do not argue that nuclear weapons are currently protected by the Second Amendment. But that is based on the view that nukes could not become popular enough to be protected, not because of the unmistakable threat to public safety that civilian access to nuclear warheads would create. Under this dangerous logic, if nuclear weapons become more common, all bets are off: Civilians might then be constitutionally entitled to acquire and possess them. And though the Trump DOJ’s discussion of nuclear weapons may seem farfetched, the same logic would apply to a grenade launcher or bazooka.
DOJ’s position that any weapon, no matter the mass destruction it could cause, might be fair game for civilians if it happens to become popular defies common sense. But this is a direct result of a radical shift in the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence within the past two decades.
For two centuries, courts generally understood the Second Amendment to provide a collective right to keep and bear arms—that is, a right shared by officially organized militias, rather than provided to any one individual. This prevailing interpretation was upended in 2008 when the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that D.C. could not ban the possession of handguns in the home. For the first time, the court described an individual right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment. Then, less than four years ago, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court again expanded our understanding of the Second Amendment—including extending its protections outside the home by striking down New York’s requirements for a license in order to carry guns in public. The Roberts court, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the conservative majority, concluded that the law was too discretionary. It also critically introduced an entirely new legal framework for Second Amendment interpretation.
This new interpretation and framework have raised many questions about the limits on the right to keep and bear arms. One thing the Supreme Court made clear in these landmark cases, though, is that the core purpose of the Second Amendment is lawful self-defense. That purpose recognizes that the Second Amendment right is not limitless. Criminal laws limit how, when, where, and why deadly force—which includes the use of a gun—can be lawful.
In addition to being nonsensical, DO
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The Smash-and-Grab Presidency
March 27, 2026
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/27/briefing-podcast-nikhil-pal-singh/
Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to allegedly assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply the most minimal of reforms to ICE. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle,” Nikhil Pal Singh tells The Intercept Briefing. “They smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something.” The professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War” joins host Akela Lacy in a conversation about protests and movement-building in the latest Trump era.
Trump “said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home,” says Singh. “The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.”
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Akela.
AL: I don’t know about you, Jessie, but I honestly feel like I’ve had constant whiplash the past few months. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners if we start with just breaking down exactly where we are right now in the world. I’ll do a quick recap.
We are, as many people know, in a full-blown war with Iran after being told for years that that would effectively mean the beginning of the end. The U.S. has killed more than 150 people in boat strikes around the world and successfully kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife. Trump has consolidated the nation’s largest paramilitary police force and unleashed it on U.S. cities and now airports. The number of people being detained by ICE is at an all-time high. Federal agents have killed two protesters, and more than a dozen other people have died this year alone at the hands of ICE.
At the same time, prices are soaring. The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent, in case you missed that, which I certainly did.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-government-insolvent-fiscal-crisis-f
ix/
The government is still partially shut down, and Trump and his allies are still withholding documents from the public on Jeffrey Epstein.
And in case anyone forgot, we’re knee-deep in a midterm cycle that’s seen unprecedented levels of dark money and efforts by corporate lobbies to influence elections. So how are you feeling about all of this? How are you processing all of this?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Trump’s army of the religious right is preparing for the apocalypse
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-hegseth-religi
ous-right-iran-war-b2942716.html
Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA, Citing Trump’s Attack on Science
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/climate/kate-marvel-nasa-resign.htm
l
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Trump Signifying Absolutely Nothing
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/04/09/signifying-absolutely-noth
ing-iran-war-otoole/
Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.
The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.
Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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10 ways the Trump family is involved in a DC corruptopalooza
By David Mastio
I have come up with a list of 10 awful examples of Trumpworld using his position as the most powerful man in the world to make them all richer.
1. Crypto ventures
The Trump family launched multiple cryptocurrency projects just before and after the January 2025 inauguration, netting $1 billion or more in realized profits (including some $500 million from one United Arab Emirates-linked stake alone.) These deals have been tied to policy favors such as UAE access to artificial intelligence computer chips and a pardon for the founder of crypto exchange Binance.
2. Qatar golf resort deal
The Trump Organization partnered with Qatari state-owned Diar and Dar Global for a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club and villas in Qatar shortly after the inauguration.
3. UAE-Dubai Trump hotel and tower
A licensing deal was struck with Dar Global for Trump International Hotel & Tower in Dubai (with a private club), part of multiple Arabian Peninsula projects generating millions in upfront fees.
4. Vietnam luxury golf-resort complex
The Trump Organization secured approval for $1.5 billion project including golf courses and hotels with a Vietnamese developer tied to the country’s ruling Communist Party during tariff negotiations.
5. India Mumbai development fees
Ten million dollars in fees have been reported from a new Trump-branded project with Reliance Industries (whose chairman attended Trump state dinner). The company later secured a Venezuelan oil license.
6. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners fund
Son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private Affinity Partners investment firm Raised billions more from Saudi Arabia ($2 billion alone!), Qatar and UAE sovereign funds while Kushner served as Trump’s Middle East peace envoy. Assets under its management hit $6.2 billion by the end of 2025.
7. Melania Trump Amazon movie deal
Nearly $30 million was paid by Amazon for the money-losing Melania-focused documentary project. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, has significant federal contracts and regulatory interests.
8. Trump Media & Technology Group
Trump’s 40% stake in Truth Social’s parent company has boosted his net worth by over $1 billion so far in his presidency, as his posts on the platform announce many federal actions first on the Trump-owned social media platform.
9. Foreign officials, sponsored events at Trump properties
There have been at least 19 visits by foreign officials from 10 countries to Trump’s resorts. Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf held a major tournament and sponsored events at Trump National Doral.
10. Luxury jet gift
Qatar provided a $400 million gold bedazzled 747 jet for Trump’s use, coinciding with economic deals between the two countries, and the Trump Organization’s Qatar deals. (I did manage to write about this one.)
In a normal administration, any one of these, well, scandals would be front-page news with coverage spanning months, congressional investigations, special prosecutors and the whole deal. But Trump’s chaos has, for the most part, completely blocked them from public view. Who knows which ones fall into the gray areas of ethics laws and which are genuine crimes? Regardless, any one of them is a bigger deal than the Biden administration’s sordid relations with that president’s sleazy son, Hunter.
The audacity of these crimes against good government is amazing. Anyone involved has to know that if any decent person ever becomes president again, all these cases will be investigated with an eye to prosecuting any provable wrongdoing.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/10-ways-the-trump-family-is-invol
ved-in-a-dc-corruptopalooza-opinion/ar-AA1ZBIVD
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Highly Respected Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is a truly strong and powerful Leader, with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results. He fights tirelessly for, and loves, his Great Country and People, just like I do for the United States of America. Viktor works hard to Protect Hungary, Grow the Economy, Create Jobs, Promote Trade, Stop Illegal Immigration, and Ensure LAW AND ORDER! Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orban. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation. I was proud to ENDORSE Viktor for Re-Election in 2022, and am honored to do so again. Election Day is April 12, 2026. Hungary: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBAN. He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — VIKTOR ORBAN WILL NEVER LET THE GREAT PEOPLE OF HUNGARY DOWN. I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-america-and-the-axis-of-auto
cracy
What this endorsement means depends on what you know about Viktor Orban.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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$150 Oil Could Tip World Economy Into Recession
Mar 31, 2026, 1:00 PM CDT
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/150-Oil-Could-Tip-World-Eco
nomy-Into-Recession.html
Thanks to Trump's war on Iran, economists have warned that activity will fall in the middle of the year if oil prices surge to $150 per barrel and remain there for a period of four months.
Oil prices continued to climb higher on Monday as the Brent Crude benchmark raced past the $116 per barrel mark amid mixed messages between the US, Israel and Iran on the state of the war.
Oxford Economics’ director of global macro research, Ben May, has predicted there would be a contraction in the US economy this year before a recovery in 2027.
Global inflation would also rise to 7.7 per cent this year.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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. . . the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, Alex Younger, told the Economist: “The reality is that the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think as of about two weeks ago lost the initiative to Iran.”
More troubling to ordinary Iranians, Golkar says, is that Trump is suing for peace with a regime more extreme and aggressive than at the beginning of the war.
Hormuz: The Secret Weapon In Plain View
Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 26, Trump offered a succinct summary of why, for more than 40 years, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. “The problem with the straits is this,” he said: “Let's say we do a great job. Say we got 99%. One percent is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars, right?”
That’s precisely the calculation Iran has relied on to deter attacks since the 1980s, when its war with Iraq included a 1987 “Tanker War” that drew in U.S. warships to escort Kuwaiti oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. In the years since, Iran loudly and consistently proclaimed that closure of the Strait was the linchpin of its defense, investing in everything from miniature submarines to mines to swarms of small boats to assure it can do exactly what it’s doing now. Why wasn’t the U.S. prepared? [Trump is why.]
https://time.com/article/2026/03/30/iran-war-strait-hormuz/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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$4 Gasoline is Less Than Half the Story
The biggest losers from the Iran War are buyers of diesel, jet fuel, chemicals and fertilizer
By Paul Krugman | Apr 01, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/4-gasoline-is-less-than-half-the
Although I expected the war on Iran to be a disaster, I didn’t expect the Trump administration to be implicitly conceding defeat after barely a month. Yet that’s where we are:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
All of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A, won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
9.61k ReTruths 39k Likes Mar 31, 2026, 7:11 AM
The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.”
At the same time, Trump’s claim that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem is whistling in the dark. Trump is telling Europeans that if they lack the “courage” to seize the jet fuel they need — funny how the vastly larger U.S. military isn’t doing the job — they can just “buy from the U.S., we have plenty.” Here’s what has happened to the average price of jet fuel at major U.S. airports:
Does this look to you as if we have “plenty”? It doesn’t look that way to airline executives:
REUTERS: United Airlines to cut 5% of scheduled flights as fuel prices soar
The reality is that U.S. prices of petroleum distillates and other products in which Persian Gulf nations are key producers have soared. The rise in gasoline prices, for which the national average just hit $4 a gallon, has made headlines. But other prices are also hugely important.
Most non-electric cars run on gasoline, but most trucks are fueled with diesel. And diesel prices are up even more than gasoline prices — approximately $1.70 per gallon as opposed to $1:
The moral here is that the United States retains a vital interest in seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Much as Trump would like to declare victory and insist that the blockade is other countries’ problem, reality won’t oblige him.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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It's obvious SECOND. Trump is fucking up so bad on everything that Jack and comrade signym are staying home. They must be hiding in the garden thread. Shit, they aren't even posting in their own threads.
T 
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Quote:The Trumptards at work were pretty much impressed with Trump's speech yesterday. I wonder what ultrasonic sounds and words they were hearing that people can't hear?
Originally posted by THG:
It's obvious SECOND. Trump is fucking up so bad on everything that Jack and comrade signym are staying home. They must be hiding in the garden thread. Shit, they aren't even posting in their own threads.
T
Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-iran-war-speech/686663
Reaction to Trump speech: stock prices decline, crude oil prices increase.
President Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation, Apr. 1, 2026
Read the complete transcript of Trump’s address to the nation
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-transcript-address-iran-war-b5
970011fe934dde84d95d650bda56a9
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Hitler's Thousand Year Reich outlasted Trump's.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack Friday, January 24, 2025 9:50 AM:
Nobody cares what you think or believe.
You are an idiot, and everything you have ever said here has been proven wrong, whether it was merely an outright lie when you said it, or given enough time.
You worthless. You are nothing. And I own you.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Hitler’s Edifice Complex
He was obsessed with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich Chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital.
By Timothy W. Ryback | April 2, 2026, 9:27 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hitlers-edifice-complex/6866
62/
He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”
Hitler’s interest in architecture originated in his teenage years when, as an aspiring artist, he applied to the Academia of Arts in Vienna, only to be rejected and informed that his real talent, such as it was, lay in architecture rather than painting. Of the several hundred surviving sketches and paintings from Hitler’s years as a struggling artist, 80 to 90 percent are of physical structures, the best-known being some watercolors from 1912, of the State Opera House in Vienna, and from 1914, of the Courtyard of the Royal Residence in Munich. There is also a 1915 pencil sketch of the farmhouse, near the northern French village of Fournes, where Hitler, then a 26-year-old corporal, was billeted as a message runner for the List Regiment during World War I.
Read more from Timothy Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days
Glimmerings of Hitler’s grandiose architectural imaginings can be discerned from that time. In the rare-book reading room at the Library of Congress, you can request an early-20th-century architectural guide to Berlin, entitled simply Berlin, that is smeared with trench dirt and drips of red paraffin wax, most likely traces of nighttime reading by candlelight, and features this inscription on the inside cover: Adolf Hitler, Fournes, November 5, 1915. The book, by a Jewish art critic named
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Gotta go back a long time to reply to me now, huh?
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Trump lawyer REFUSES to acknowledge Native Americans are birthright citizens
T
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Quote:6ix, can you see what is wrong with Trump's words? I suspect you will reinterpret his words to mean something innocuous.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gotta go back a long time to reply to me now, huh?
*yawn*
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-not-possible-
us-pay-medicaid-medicare-daycare-re-fighting-w-rcna266381
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s First Speech About the War With Iran Explained Absolutely Nothing
Let’s take stock of just how much Trump is distorting the truth about this war.
By Fred Kaplan | April 02, 2026 5:06 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-iran-war-news-speech
-lies.html
The White House heralded it in advance as a “major address,” but President Donald Trump’s actual prime-time speech on Wednesday—what he called “an update on the tremendous progress our warriors have made in Iran”—was a big nothing.
News stories, citing inside sources, had reported that Trump was thinking about escalating the war—even sending in ground troops—or exiting it very quickly. Yet judging from the speech, he’s doing neither. Instead, he’s intent on keeping up the bombing, hitting Iran “extremely hard over the next two to three weeks … to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”—a malapropism of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s call in the 1960s to “bomb them”— meaning North Vietnam—“back to the Stone Age.”
It was the first speech Trump has delivered on his and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, now in its second month—yet he still offered no serious explanation of why he started it, when it will end, or how anyone should define victory. Instead, he crammed the 20-minute address with many of the lies he’s told many times before and invented a few new ones.
Sometimes it’s worth cataloging the lies and distortions in one of his speeches to show just how incapable he is of telling—or perhaps recognizing—the truth. Because this speech was billed as so important, yet carried so little real news, it offers another opportunity.
So let us begin.
Claim: “In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before.”
Fact: U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles have destroyed many targets but racked up no “victories” (if that word has any meaning). Iranian leaders have been killed, but the regime—a theocratic state empowered by a repressive well-armed military—remains intact. A lot of their missiles have been hit, but Iran is still launching a fair number each day.
Claim: “I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran. … I killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani. … I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal … [which] gave them $1.7 billion in cash … [and] would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran.”
Fact: Killing Soleimani was a big deal, but the terrorist commander had nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. The Iran nuclear deal, signed by Obama and six other leaders, then sanctified into law by the U.N. Security Council, in fact halted Iran’s nuclear program, forced Iran to dismantle most of it, and allowed strict international inspection. The $1.7 billion in cash referred to Obama’s return of Iranian money, which the U.S. had confiscated when Iran covertly started a nuclear program. Trump’s scuttling of the deal and his reimposition of sanctions prompted Iran to restart the program, bringing the country closer than ever to an A-bomb.
Claim: “My first preference was always the path of diplomacy, yet the regime continued their relentless quest for nuclear weapons and rejected every attempt at an agreement.”
Fact: The week before Trump started Operation Epic Fury, Iranian negotiators presented a proposal that was actually pretty favorable to us; it would have required them to scale back enriched uranium even more than Obama’s deal had done. U.S. officials said talks would resume on Monday. The Saturday before, Trump launched his surprise attack.
Claim: “In Operation Midnight Hammer,” Trump’s attack on Iran’s enrichment sites last June, “we totally obliterated those nuclear sites. The regime then sought to rebuild their nuclear program at a totally different location, making clear they had no intention of abandoning their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
Fact: Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tu
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Hegseth’s War on America’s Military
Someone needs to explain the Pentagon purges to the American people.
By Tom Nichols | April 2, 2026, 10:05 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/hegseths-war-on-americas-
military/686676/
The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s Chief of Staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green, Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of Army, Dan Driscoll.
Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.
Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C.Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.
Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also cancelled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. In keeping with the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.
Of course, the tone at the Pentagon was set by the commander in chief. Last June, Trump spoke at Ft. Bragg, where he tried to turn his appearance into a political rally. Again, George (and Driscoll) said nothing, at least in public, about this shocking violation of civil-military norms. Trump, after all, is the commander in chief and his behavior can only be curtailed by the Senate or the American people.
Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them have been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.
These dismissals are not even defensible as the product of some high-minded strategic reform. Rather, as Pentagon officials told the New York Times, they are the “product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army, battles over personnel and his troubled relationship” with Driscoll. Hegseth’s beef with Driscoll may be a product of insecurity: When Hegseth was stepping on rakes in the wake of S
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A Republic, Not a Mood
The presidency has become too dependent on the ego and temperament of the man in office.
By Peggy Noonan
April 2, 2026 5:58 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-republic-not-a-mood-75a4c01a
In his Iran speech Wednesday, President Trump asserted much and argued for little. There were some boasts, some threats—“We are going to hit them extremely hard.... We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” And some of what appeared to be magical thinking: “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally.”
The central message seemed to be that the war isn’t over but may be over in a while, the U.S. will continue bombing for two or three weeks, and, unstated but made clear through subject matter, setting, symbolism and the length, extent and success of the military campaign: Of course this is a war.
It was strange that Mr. Trump didn’t prepare the country for any possible repercussions. A somber admission that U.S. actions in Iran might be followed by serious counteraggression was needed, and is part of the president’s responsibility.
I was thinking this week that Mr. Trump’s vision of himself as primarily a dealmaker is unsuited to a necessity of presidential leadership, which involves laying out the logic of a difficult case. Deal makers gain advantage through strategies that don’t necessarily involve transparency and forthrightness. I went back to Mr. Trump’s 1987 "The Art of the Deal.” A strong undercurrent of that lively book is that it’s good to be unreadable and sneaky: "I play it very loose.” "Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.” "The truth is I’m keeping my options open.” "I also protect myself by being flexible. I never get too attached to one deal or one approach.” "I keep a lot of balls in the air.” "Once I’ve made a deal, I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work because anything can happen.” Money is a way of keeping score. "The real excitement is playing the game.”
I want to swerve here to talk about the word that keeps coming to mind when I look at the president’s leadership, and it is “mood.” A lot seems to depend on matters of personal choice, will and mood. In Iran for instance, maybe he’ll bomb the rubble until it jumps, maybe he’ll declare victory and withdraw by May, maybe he’ll send in troops. But it will be his choice, no consultation needed with that pesky branch, the legislative.
There is something not at all right when the weightiest decisions of a democratic republic depend so much on the mood of one man. With the great majority of past presidents personal mood didn’t have such precedence. There were forms and traditions and processes, there were strictures, rules, the law, expectations, all of which would hem in the head of the executive branch, at least eventually. The president’s mood didn’t reign and determine everything. But now mood mows down all. People have become habituated to this, tolerate it, factor it in. But of course when you factor it in you are enabling and continuing it.
Fear of the president’s mood has reduced otherwise impressive appointees to anxious ferrets sparring with Sunday news show anchors in a way that is performatively smug but also fearful—always aware of the famous “audience of one.”
Things are out of whack, and even though we all know this, it still should be said now and then.
Ronald Reagan late in his presidency, in a valedictory appearance at a Republican National Convention, spoke of how he personally experienced the office: “You don’t become president of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the presidency, which belongs to our people.” He approached his two administrations as "a sacred trust.” This was pushback against the idea of an imperial presidency, in which man and office are fused and personal power the point. But man’s life is limited and the institution is continuous, an inheritance accumulated across time. It was also a rebuke to the idea of grandi
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America as we knew it may end on Tuesday.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/living-in-hell
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. Sunday morning update. Yesterday, I talked about how awful Trump’s message about glory to God and all of that was, but it’s looking much, much worse today. I’ll quote Trump in a second.
But let me talk about history for a second. Think about what Abraham Lincoln, a president who was actually winning his war, said in his second inaugural. You’ve all probably heard the magnificent conclusion, which begins,
". . . with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."
Determination, humility, decency. Now, let me read you Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from this morning:
"Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the fuckin strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah."
What happened to us? This is not the country we were supposed to be.
If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, and bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.
But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting and dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.
You can get even more pessimistic. Tim Snyder has been arguing that we’re basically in preparation for a coup, that somehow or other the war will be a pretense and arguing that this insane expansion of military spending in the latest Trump budget is a bribe to the military. https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-coup-attempt
I hope he’s wrong.
It’s entirely possible that by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.
It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things. Take care, I guess.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Jocelyn Sze wrote in 2025:
You know it’s bad when a conflict-avoidant introvert like me is speaking up in public. Please check out this piece about the parallels I see between the Trump administration and my work as a trauma psychologist with survivors of narcissistic abuse. I enjoyed writing about my zany idea that the Constitution serves as a psychological boundary against narcissistic control, and the role we all have in upholding it.
(I didn't write the title and I'm definitely not sure how to stop Trump--but speaking up and joining hands with you is perhaps a step along the way.)
I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists. Here’s What We Need To Do To Stop Trump.
"The same patterns that destabilize families destabilize democracies."
By Jocelyn Sze | May 23, 2025, 07:52 AM EDT | Updated Jul 1, 2025
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/psychologist-how-to-stop-trump-narcissi
st_n_682df1cae4b09b7e5013a586?3u
The Trump administration is planning a June 14 military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army — and the president’s 79th birthday. When your sense of self-exaltation requires tanks, flyovers and up to $45 million for a birthday party, we’re no longer in the realm of cake and candles — we’re squarely in Criterion 1 of narcissistic personality disorder: “a grandiose sense of self-importance.”
To be clear, I can’t diagnose the president or any public figure without personal examination. But research shows that those in positions of power, especially in politics, are more likely to exhibit traits of grandiose narcissism. When narcissistic control seeps into leadership, it distorts truth, erodes trust and destabilizes institutions. The more we understand these dynamics, the better we can protect both the public and the health of our democracy.
As a clinical psychologist who works with trauma and narcissistic abuse, I see echoes of this dynamic every day in my therapy office. The same patterns that destabilize families destabilize democracies: along with the magnetic vision of the grandiose narcissist come denial, attack, reversal of blame and emotional chaos.
I think of one of my patients when she discovered her brother was terrorizing their elderly mother with violent threats and financial abuse. When she named the harm, he flipped the script — denying everything and accusing her of being unstable, all while fiercely protecting his “golden boy” image. Under family pressure to stay quiet, she spiraled into rumination. But armed with awareness and support, she stood firm. Like a broken record, she calmly named the harm until her boundary held. It came at a cost, but her brother was eventually removed from their mother’s home.
This same pattern shows up, magnified, on the political stage. Narcissistic control in government thrives on flipping the script and silencing watchdogs.
Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members, rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare, keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news: Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity against further harm.
For another patient, “moving the goalposts” was the favored tactic of her ex-boyfriend to generate such volatility. He would make a demand (under the guise of “improving her”) and then change the expectation once it was met. In government, this looks like constantly reversing policies or public positions so that citizens, the media and allies remain unmoored.
“The White House has no idea what it’s doing on tariffs and keeps flip-flopping... Why even do an exemption if you’re going to reverse it soon?” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) posted on X on April 13, referring to more than 50 flip-flops on tariff policies since Trump’s inauguration.
Many dismiss these reversals as mere incompetence or poor strategy — and it’s true th
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Quote:It feels normal when Trump, who was sitting in the front row of the Supreme Court audience, was politely called a goddamn jackass by the justices. The man is still bitter and upset a week later:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The entire atmosphere surrounding all of this is completely different than it was in 2016 and 2020.
Things just kind of feel normal again.
Panicked Trump, 79, Rages at Supreme Court in 1 AM Meltdown
The president’s latest outburst came days after he stormed out of oral arguments about birthright citizenship.
Ewan Palmer | April 6, 2026 9:06 AM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/panicked-donald-trump-79-rages-at-suprem
e-court-in-1am-meltdown-after-humiliating-hearing/
President Donald Trump went on an unhinged 1 a.m. rant about the Supreme Court as it considers whether to allow him to scrap birthright citizenship.
The 79-year-old president suggested on Truth Social that it’s “too bad” the Supreme Court didn’t “study” Mark Levin’s Fox News show, in which the host argued that the 14th Amendment was not intended to grant birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.
“If they saw it they would never allow that money making HOAX to continue. THEY SHOULD USE THEIR POWERS OF COMMON SENSE FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY,” Trump wrote.
“They failed miserably on Tariffs, needlessly costing the USA Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in potential rebates for the benefit haters and scammers. Why??? Don’t do it again! The Country can only withstand so many bad decisions from a Court that just doesn’t seem to care.”
Donald Trump posted the rant just before 1 am. ET on Monday morning. Screengrab/Truth Social
The nation’s highest court heard oral arguments last week on whether the U.S. should stop granting citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants, as proposed in an executive order signed by Trump.
The move has been struck down by every lower federal court that has considered the challenge. The conservative Supreme Court, including justices nominated by Trump, also appears highly skeptical about whether the president can remove the citizenship clause.
Trump took the unusual step of sitting in on the April 1 hearing to watch the justices debate his push to end automatic birthright citizenship. The president stormed out of the hearing after the SCOTUS justices shot down several arguments from the administration’s attorney, Solicitor General D. John Sauer.
One of the sharpest exchanges came from Chief Justice John Roberts, who pushed back after Sauer suggested the framers of the 14th Amendment could not have foreseen how “we’re in a new world now,” with billions of people “one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”
“It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” Roberts replied.
Elsewhere, Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed Sauer on whether children born to Native Americans in the U.S. should be considered birthright citizens.
“Ah, I think… so,” Sauer said. “I mean, obviously they’ve been granted citizenship by statute,” he added, referring to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Gorsuch noted that before the law was passed, children born to tribal Native Americans were not automatically considered birthright citizens.
During the Sunday episode of Life, Liberty and Levin, the pro-Trump Fox News host Mark Levin argued that the 14th Amendment was never intended to grant U.S. citizenship beyond freed Black slaves and their children.
“You on the court, you get to decide now on a big issue, you should leave it to the people in our elected representatives or the amendment process with a legislative process,” Levin said.
“But if you rule on this and constitutionalize this, you will be known as the most activist court in the history of the Supreme Court, and the damage is incalculable.”
Section 1 of the 14th Amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
Paul Krugman
Apr 07, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-is-winning-its-war-against-us
Source: NBER https://www.nber.org/digest/202604/chinas-rise-global-research?page=1&
amp;perPage=50
With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science.
OK, that’s an exaggeration — but not that much of an exaggeration. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal calls for a gigantic increase in military spending combined with severe cuts to social programs. But as the chart above shows, it also calls for debilitating reductions in research funding.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget_fy2027.pd
f
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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'Will keep or destroy numerous records': Trump immediately slapped with lawsuit after DOJ 'nullified' Congress' answer to Richard Nixon's abuses
Matt Naham | Apr 7th, 2026, 12:14 pm
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-immediately-sued-as-doj-giv
es-him-permission-to-ignore-records-law/
Trump has destroyed and will destroy more records despite being told that what he is doing is illegal since Nixon's Presidency.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:From Drill, Baby, Drill to Toll, Baby, Toll
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Iran debacle and global power
By Paul Krugman / Apr 10, 2026 at 5:33 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/from-drill-baby-drill-to-toll-baby
The U.S. attack on Iran will end badly. It’s still not clear, however, exactly what that bad end will look like. The loudly announced cease-fire is on the edge, with Trump and the Iranian regime making very different claims about what was agreed to and the Strait of Hormuz still closed. As you can see in the chart above, prediction markets, after an initial bout of optimism, have turned highly skeptical about the prospects for a quick resolution.
And yesterday the spot price of oil — the cost of a barrel for immediate delivery, as opposed to the prices for delivery a month or two from now, which are what are usually quoted — hit a record high of almost $147 a barrel:
Source: Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/f04ad855-81e3-49c5-827e-d3c4acb901c9?syn-25
a6b1a6=1
There remain three plausible ways this could turn out:
1. U.S. strategic defeat: The Strait is reopened, but with Iran in control of the chokepoint and charging tolls on ships passing through
2. Quagmire: Having failed to impose its will with bombs, the U.S. sends in ground troops
3. Nightmare: Trump follows through on threats to annihilate Iran’s civilian infrastructure
One might have thought that (2) and (3) were off the table. After all, the past six weeks have delivered an object lesson in the limits of “lethality.” But MAGA doesn’t learn lessons. Pete Hegseth — who appears to be lying about why Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel succeeded — still has a job. Trump is still threatening everyone with ALL CAPS. And nothing should be taken for granted. That said, at this point (1) — with Iran the clear winner while America slinks away — is both the least bad and most likely outcome.
It’s a bitterly ironic result, and not only because a war that was meant to demonstrate U.S. power has instead demonstrated our impotence. Also, Trump has always been obsessed with the idea that fossil fuels are the key to U.S. power and prosperity. Now oil has made us weak while empowering and enriching our adversaries.
But how much will Hormuz-as-Iranian-tollbooth shift the global balance of power?
In Trump’s mind, control over fossil fuels is the essence of national greatness. In his inaugural address, Trump declared that
We will drill, baby, drill … We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.
But this was obvious nonsense. For one thing, the narrative that woke environmentalists had hobbled U.S. fossil fuel production was at odds with the reality that fracking had in fact caused a boom in oil and gas production that began under Obama and continued under Republican and Democratic administrations alike:
It was also nonsense to claim that oil production can be the engine of prosperity for a nation like America, with its huge, diverse economy. The fracking boom, although huge in absolute terms, was relatively marginal in its economic impact. In 2025 the U.S. produced about 3 billion more barrels of oil than it did before the fracking surge. At 2025 prices, that was about $200 billion worth of oil. That’s a lot of money! But it’s less than 1 percent of U.S. GDP.
Meanwhile, Trump has been doing all he can to block development of wind and solar power, in the apparent belief that this will empower Am
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did! They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity. Now they think they get some “clicks” because they have Third Rate Podcasts, but nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of MAGA — Or I wouldn’t have won the Presidential Election in a LANDSLIDE. MAGA agrees with me, and just gave CNN a 100% Approval Rating of “TRUMP,” not Hand Flailing Fools like Tucker Carlson, who couldn’t even finish College, he was a broken man when he got fired from Fox, and he’s never been the same — Perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist! Or Megyn Kelly, who nastily asked me the now famous, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” question, or “Crazy” Candace Owens, who accuses the Highly Respected First Lady of France of being a man, when she is not, and will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit. Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace, in fact, it’s not even close! Or Bankrupt Alex Jones, who says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax. These so-called “pundits” are LOSERS, and they always will be! Now Fake News CNN, The Failing New York Times, and all of the other Radical Left “News” Organizations, are “hailing” them, and giving them “positive” press for the first time in their lives. They’re not “MAGA,” they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA. As President, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on World and Country Affairs and, after a few times, they go “nasty,” just like Marjorie “Traitor” Brown, but I no longer care about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our Country. MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons. MAGA is about MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because THE UNITED STATES IS NOW THE “HOTTEST” COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 09, 2026, 3:28 PM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116376634773749603
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Why is Trump hostile to these four? Newsweek explains why, today! And the reason is NOT the one Trump gave.
Quote:The Next MAGA Matrix Dilemma Has Arrived
Originally posted by second:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!
. . .
President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 09, 2026, 3:28 PM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116376634773749603
April 10, 2026, 10:00 AM
https://www.newsweek.com/maga-matrix-red-blue-pill-trump-iran-war-1180
9689
When The Matrix was absorbed into MAGA’s political symbolism during Donald Trump’s rise, the movie’s famous pill metaphor was blunt and effective.
Voters were told they faced a profound choice: take the blue pill and remain trapped in a comforting but false reality constructed by elites, or swallow the red pill and confront the hard truths about America, power and decline, with Trump as their guide.
It helped define a movement that prided itself on skepticism of institutions and hostility to official narratives. Being “redpilled” added a certain cachet to conservatives who declared themselves as enlightened swallowers.
But MAGA’s most potent metaphor is returning in an unexpected form. This time, the dilemma is internal. And this time, Trump is the blue pill.
A Breaking Point Years in the Making
The Jeffrey Epstein files episode had already begun to erode Trump’s standing as the movement’s ultimate truth-teller, exposing limits to his ability—or willingness—to confront uncomfortable realities favored by his base.
Pressure has been building inside MAGA for weeks over the U.S. war in Iran and Trump’s close alignment with Israel.
Iran, and serious questions about its consequences for the U.S., has forced the issue for Trump.
Unlike previous flashpoints, this one implicated a core ideological promise of MAGA: that a Trump-led America would avoid foreign entanglements and reject the interventionism of the pre-2016 Republican Party.
Instead, the movement now faces a reality in which Trump is justifying a war that many of his most vocal allies believe no “America First” president should have initiated or sustained.
It’s a choice between ideological purity and personal loyalty. At one point, they were the same thing within MAGA. But the divergence has arrived.
The Rebellion of MAGA Media Heavyweights
Some of the loudest challenges to Trump on Iran have come from prominent figures who once echoed or amplified his worldview.
Tucker Carlson, long one of the most influential voices in the MAGA sphere, and a guru of America First, delivered a blistering monologue criticizing Trump, U.S. involvement in Iran, and trashing its strategic and moral logic.
His comments, shared widely online, positioned the war as a betrayal of the populist mandate Trump once embodied, and that Carlson himself had campaigned for. He also blasted Trump for the tone and content of an explicit threat issued against Iran on Easter.
Megyn Kelly followed with a sharply critical segment on her own show, similarly arguing that escalation in Iran cut against the promises that initially animated Trump’s political revolution, calling his threats of civilizational destruction “disgusting” and a sign of weakness.
"I am sick of this s**t," Kelly said. "I am sick of it. Can't he just behave like a normal human?"
They were not alone. Candace Owens, who has maintained a massive online audience by blending cultural grievance, anti-establishment politics, and outright conspiracy peddling, raised the idea of forcing Trump from office.
"The 25th amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunati
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(recorded 4/9/26)
Paul Krugman: I’m speaking today with Lisa Graves, author of an incredibly revelatory and deeply disturbing book called Without Precedent, about the Roberts Court and what it has done to America. And...hi, Lisa. Welcome on.
Lisa Graves: Paul, thank you so much for having me on. It’s an honor to be here with you. And thank you for your kind words about my book.
Krugman: I guess I was first sort of seriously alerted to what was happening at the Supreme Court in 2000, with the stolen election and all that. But I have to say, I don’t think I fully appreciated what Citizens United would do. And so why don’t you give us a little background on what has happened, the court and its role and what’s been happening to America?
Graves: Well, I really appreciate your starting with Bush v. Gore, because that in some ways is the beginning of this period. It’s a precursor in a way to what we’ve been experiencing. And that was when the US Supreme Court, in a sharply partisan decision — although not all the Republicans voted to stop the recount — five Republicans voted to stop the recount in 2000, in Florida. And the effect of that was to give George W. Bush the presidency and with it, not just the power to, in essence, make war with the consent of Congress, but also the power to remake the courts, the Supreme Court in particular.
And by the way, as part of my research for the book, I looked into what was happening at that time, and it turned out that Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, was working for the Heritage Foundation on the predecessor to Project 2025 — basically Project 2000. And she was screening people for positions in the potential George W. Bush administration. And Clarence Thomas didn’t recuse himself from that case. By the way, that five-four decision — it would have been four-four. The count would have been allowed to proceed. And the count that actually occurred with news organizations after the fact, after Bush was sworn in, showed that Gore would have won Florida and would have become the president of the United States.
By the way, after Thomas voted to effectively make George W. Bush the president, Ginni Thomas was given a promotion as the liaison from the Heritage Foundation to the White House, and she became the highest-paid non-board member of the Heritage Foundation. And so she was rewarded very well for her work and, basically, for the consequence of her husband’s decision to vote to stop that recount.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-lisa-graves
Download Without Precedent by Lisa Graves for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?index=&page=1&sort=&displa
y=&q=Without+Precedent+Lisa+Graves
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Did Samuel Alito Become This Angry?
A quiet, bookish justice’s personal leanings have become ever more overt.
By Peter S. Canellos | April 10, 2026, 11:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/samuel-alito-supreme-court-c
onservative/686756/
Samuel Alito’s inclinations have not been hard to discern lately. At the Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship earlier this month, legal experts identified him without hesitation as the justice likeliest to side with President Trump. “What we’re dealing with here is something that was basically unknown at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration,” Alito said. The comment hinted at a desire to sidestep the original understanding of the amendment, which, his fellow justices suggested, was that people born on American soil are U.S. citizens.
Five months earlier, at a hearing on tariffs, even Alito’s erstwhile admirers at the National Review objected when Alito started referencing other statutes, not cited by Trump, as justifications for the president’s orders. The conservative outlet slapped back that “it is not the Court’s job to opine on powers the president has not invoked”—a notable rebuke from a publication that Alito read avidly as a young man.
In nominating Alito on Halloween 2005, a sanguine President George W. Bush declared, “He understands that judges are to interpret the laws, not to impose their preferences or priorities on the people.” Alito’s more recent willingness to telegraph his preferences has coincided with more gruffness and edgier assertions in his interviews and speeches. Perhaps the justice is getting something off his chest; bluntness might be his protest against the straitjacketed propriety long expected of Supreme Court justices. Perhaps it is his response to the harassment, up to and including death threats, that justices face.
But Alito’s trajectory also underscores something else: For all the justices’ honorable intentions and their promises to judge cases impartially, the fundamental dynamics of today’s ever more polarized Court are pushing them in a much different direction.
Sarah Isgur: What the Roberts Court is actually trying to accomplish
The notion of judicial neutrality wasn’t a pose for many conservatives. They believed in judicial restraint, in which judges refrain from allowing personal predilections to influence their decision making. Now, however, few see Alito as the same man who said, at the time of his nomination, “Good judges are always open to the possibility of changing their minds based on the next brief that they read or the next argument that is made by an attorney.”
The libertarian legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a retired judge who was Alito’s classmate at Princeton, told me that his friend’s Court decisions reflect his conservatism more than any other theory of jurisprudence. “Sam is not an originalist,” Napolitano said. “Sam is a conservative person who wants a conservative outcome.” Napolitano went on, “There’s nothing wrong with that in the Court in which he sits, because it’s a Court of last resort. If he was on the Third Circuit behaving that way, he’d get reversed a lot. But where he sits, he has the privilege of doing that.”
Alito’s approach reflects a fissure in the conservative legal movement as it deals with Trump’s unusual assertions of power. The conservative justices may prefer Trump’s outcomes, but his methods challenge the system of checks and balances that they’ve sworn to uphold. A legal movement built on strict rejection of politics must pass judgment on a president who shares their same inclinations. Having decried and then overruled what they perceived as activist liberal precedents, judicial conservatives must confront the prospect of excesses of their own.
How Alito and his ideological allies handle themselves, and the ground rules they lay down, will have implications well beyond Federal Reserve officials, U.S.-born children of immigrants, or any other current-day litigants. They will shape the contours of the Ameri
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