Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 18:15
VIEWED: 16399
PAGE 3 of 8
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Iran’s willingness to escalate this high-stakes war is its greatest weapon
The regime will do whatever it takes to cling on to power – including sacrificing economies of other Gulf states
As usual, I get one sentence into your malicious posts, and am forced to stop.
This time, I didn't get past the headline.
IRAN isn't the one escalating, it's Israel, backed by us.
While Iran was negotiating, Israel attacked, followed by the USA, assasinating Iran's top religious leader (and a moderate) and killling 170 schoolgirls.
Israel attacked Iran's South Pars gas field first. Iran retaliated in kind.
Israel attacked Iran's nuclear power plant first, Iran retaliated in kind.
Iran very clearly warned everyone that if they were attacked (as they have been multiple times) THIS TIME they would fight to the finish. Stupid Arabs, stupid Zionists, stupid Trump admin, didn't take them seriously.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:All Trumptards I know have delusions of grandeur. Yours is right in the signature.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Just curious, brother...
Do you manually change my signature 10 times every day when you quote reply me with something irrelevant, or do you actually have a document that is open on your computer 24/7 where you can copy and paste that?
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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For the record, the president of the United States is now simultaneously claiming:
he has won the war,
is currently winning the war,
needs help to win the war, and
needs no help to win the war.
All to destroy the nuclear program he claims to have already destroyed last year.
Based on reported statements and activities as of late March 2026, the rhetoric from the White House regarding the conflict with Iran has been described as shifting and contradictory.
According to reports, President Donald Trump (in office as of Jan 20, 2025) and his administration have made varied, and at times simultaneous, claims about the status of the war initiated on Feb. 28, 2026:
• Claiming to have "Won" or "Won in many ways": Trump has stated, "We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough," and "I think the war is very complete, pretty much".
• Claiming to be "Winning" and "Ahead of schedule": The operation was described by the administration as "way ahead of schedule".
• Needing "Help" / Further Action: Despite victory claims, the president has noted, "We've got to finish the job," and his administration has been reported to be preparing to seek hundreds of billions in further funding.
• "No help" / Can end it quickly: Trump has stated he could end the conflict in "two seconds".
Nuclear Program Claims
Regarding the nuclear program, President Trump has asserted that the U.S. "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, despite reports suggesting he continues to argue the need to destroy it.
These statements reflect a broader, rapid shift in the administration's messaging, which has ranged from suggesting the war is "nearly complete" to threatening to "hit and obliterate" Iranian power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not opened.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Love it.
You dumb lefties don't know what the hell is going on now.
What are we supposed to bitch about when we have no idea what we're supposed to bitch about!!!!???
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Do you remember Vietnam? The Lefties bitched about that, too. Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resigned because he was taking bribes and cheating on his income taxes, complained about the complainers as "Nattering nabobs of negativism". Spiro said the US would have won in Vietnam if it had not been for the Lefties. What a stupid asshole that guy was, but he was also a Trumptard before there was Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Love it.
You dumb lefties don't know what the hell is going on now.
What are we supposed to bitch about when we have no idea what we're supposed to bitch about!!!!???
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
An Israeli military official told Newsweek the war may end “where the Iranian regime believes that they won and they’re not lying.”
Tom O'Connor | March 22, 2026
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-now-sees-irans-survival-as-a-real-poss
ibility-11710344
. . . there has been little to indicate the Islamic Republic's imminent capitulation despite suffering serious military setbacks and the loss of senior leadership.
And while Iran's future remains uncertain, Israeli officials tell Newsweek the conflict could very well end with their enemy government surviving, creating frustrating narratives due to asymmetrical objectives and a slowing tempo of high-profile wins since the opening phases of the conflict.
"It's important to accept that this Iranian regime, it's a country 80 times the size of Israel, essentially half the size of Europe, an enormous country that built a big security establishment over decades, and right now they're in a place where they would consider victory if they survive," an Israeli military official told Newsweek.
They added: "And right now, the media is taking up that narrative and saying, 'If they survived, that Israel and America lost,' where I actually think that the fact that that's where it is right now, a country 80 times the size of Israel that wanted to destroy us is considering if they're able to survive and not be destroyed, that they beat us, at least for us, from the Israeli perspective, I think it shows a lot."
The official also asserted that "we never put out as a military target to overthrow the regime," but rather "to remove an existential threat, and that will also set the conditions for regime change if the Iranian people choose to do that."
The result could see both parties walk away claiming victory.
"I think that there is a scenario in which this war ends in a situation where the Iranian regime believes that they won and they're not lying, they're being honest with themselves. And Israel and the U.S. believe they won, and they're also not lying, they're being honest with themselves," the Israeli military official said.
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:Do you remember Vietnam?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Love it.
You dumb lefties don't know what the hell is going on now.
What are we supposed to bitch about when we have no idea what we're supposed to bitch about!!!!???
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nope. Before my time, I'm afraid.
But I can imagine you hanging out a helicopter with your machine gun and mowing down women and children though.
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Quote:Just like the Iran War is now, the Vietnam War was once upon a time the most important war in history, until the Republicans decided that the US had won, declared victory, left Vietnam, and ignored it ever since. It turns out that a Communist Vietnamese government is NOT the big deal that Nixon claimed it would be. I might add that Trump learned from Nixon that Truth/Honesty/Law-Abidingness is meaningless to a certain class of Americans I call Trumptards.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Before my time, I'm afraid.
But I can imagine you hanging out a helicopter with your machine gun and mowing down women and children though.
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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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Just like the Iran War is now, the Vietnam War was once upon a time the most important war in history, until the Republicans decided that the US had won, declared victory, left Vietnam, and ignored it ever since.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nope. Before my time, I'm afraid.
But I can imagine you hanging out a helicopter with your machine gun and mowing down women and children though.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Oh yeah? What's going on with Afghanistan right now?
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Donald Trump and his minions are having a meltdown. On Saturday, Trump lashed out at the New York Times for an article saying the obvious — that many of his original war goals, whatever they may have been, remain unaccomplished. Just an hour later, he posted a threat to commit massive war crimes, saying that if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours — that is, today — he will order U.S. forces to begin bombing civilian power plants. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/us/politics/trump-iran-offramp.html
Quote:
Ever since President Trump began what he now delicately calls his “excursion” into Iran, Washington has been consumed by the question of when he would call it a day — even if many of his war goals remain unaccomplished. On Friday evening, as he headed to Florida, Mr. Trump seemed to be designing that much-discussed exit. But he clearly has not yet decided whether to take it. And there is mounting evidence — average gas price approaching $4 a gallon, infrastructure in ruins across the Persian Gulf, a decimated Iranian theocracy digging in and American allies at first rebuffing and now struggling with demands to patrol hostile waters — that the repercussions of Mr. Trump’s excursion may outlast his interest in it.
Why the desperation? The answer is obvious. It’s turning out not just that regime change — if that was really the goal — is hard to engineer, but also that the world is a lot more dependent on the Strait of Hormuz than Trump and co. seem to have realized. And what is becoming increasingly clear is that this dependence extends well beyond oil and natural gas.
In addition to oil and gas, the Gulf region is a key global source of fertilizer. It produces about a third of the world’s helium — and helium isn’t just for party balloons, it’s key to production of semiconductors and has important medical uses. And the Gulf is a choke point for pharmaceuticals, with many key ingredients normally shipped through Hormuz and many final products normally being flown to their destinations via Dubai and other Gulf airports.
So are we learning that the Persian Gulf is a uniquely crucial choke point for the world economy? I don’t think so.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Nobody is having a meltdown.
Except for you. We've been witness to your unraveling for over a decade now.
P.S. We know you just plagiarized Paul Krugman again...
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-hyperglobalization-meets-chaos
Idiot.
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I can't believe you guys are arguing about which party "won" or "lost" any particular pointless war. The smart thing to do is not start them in the first place.
And BTW, if a President is handed a burning- bag- of- dogshit of a war, the best thing to do is cut losses: declare victory and go home.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Trump obviously melted down. This morning was supposed to be the start of him committing new and bigger war crimes. Then he turned back for 5 days, and maybe longer, because he is fucked up in the head: Trump Announces A Sort Of Cease Fire, and, The US Strategic Goal Seems To Be "Mowing The Grass"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is having a meltdown.
Except for you. We've been witness to your unraveling for over a decade now.
P.S. We know you just plagiarized Paul Krugman again...
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-hyperglobalization-meets-chaos
Idiot.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-us-strategic-goal-seems-to-
be
As a leader and as a businessman, Trump has always been fucked up in the head, but Trumptards are blind to that in themselves and in their leadership, which is why life is such an unending struggle for them, 6ix. You spending today smoking and watching porn is truly fucked up, 6ix. Your software project and home improvement projects are a weak diversion from facing the reality that you are wasting your life. Your only hope for a real purpose in life is for Trump to turn it around for you with invasions of foreign countries and purges of aliens, just like Hitler gave the Germans a meaningful life by his invasions and purges of Jews. At least Hitler was giving the Germans more living space or "Lebensraum". Trump can't even claim that. Only he is getting more space for Trump-brand golf and hotel expansion. Hitler never lowered himself to Trump-levels of pettiness and greed.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:I hope someday you realize what a nitwit you are, Signym.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I can't believe you guys are arguing about which party "won" or "lost" any particular pointless war. The smart thing to do is not start them in the first place.
And BTW, if a President is handed a burning- bag- of- dogshit of a war, the best thing to do is cut losses: declare victory and go home.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Another day in America’s self-immolation as a Great Power - Adventures in Fantasy Diplomacy
Trump says he's negotiating with Iran. Iran says he isn't. Who are you gonna believe?
It’s Monday morning. Donald Trump has, at least for the time being, called off plans to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure. He has done so because, according to him, highly productive negotiations are underway involving the government of Iran, an invisible six-foot white rabbit, and his Canadian girlfriend.
What I just said is not strictly true, or it’s not all true. Trump did not say anything about the invisible rabbit or the Canadian, but the gist of it is true. He said that there are highly productive talks underway. And shortly afterwards, the Iranian government and Iranian state media said, no, they aren’t. This is not happening.
I’m not going to say that Iranian state media is necessarily a credible source, but the odds are that they are, in fact, telling the truth and the President of the United States is either lying or fantasizing or both. There’s really no reason at all to believe that anything like what he said is happening is in fact happening.
Aside from the fact that Trump has not exactly been truthful on a lot of things, there are three important reasons to believe he might be making this stuff up.
First, he put himself in a very bad spot with his threat to commit a massive war crime if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. and must be looking for a way out. Another president at another time might say that on careful consideration, We have recalibrated the policy or something like that. Trump doesn’t do that. Trump is always winning, never admits that he’s had a setback, never admits that he’s changed his mind.
So saying that, oh, the Iranians have come to the table, probably big, strong Iranians with tears in their eyes, but anyway, that the Iranians have come to the table and that’s why we’re not doing what I said we would do is a very Trumpian out.
Second, Why would the Iranians be making a deal at this point? We can talk a lot about how the war is going, but it’s pretty clear that as the Iranians are likely to see it, they’re winning. I mean, they’re not winning militarily, but that was never on the cards. They have successfully turned what was supposed to be a lightning decapitation of their government into a protracted contest in relative ability to bear pain and all indications are that the Iranians are nowhere near cracking and all indications are that the United States, although obviously we’re not losing thousands of people, and we are having our whole life disrupted, but the American public really doesn’t like higher gas prices, does not believe Trump. The clock is ticking for Trump on this in a way that it is apparently not for the Iranian regime. So Iran has the upper hand here. And very hard to see why they would want to make a deal until they basically humiliate us substantially more.
Finally, consider possible motives. Imagine that you were somebody close to Trump, somebody close enough to actually have an influence on his decisions, as well as inside knowledge. Here’s what you could have done, really, just between last night and now. You could have sold a bunch of crude oil futures at very high prices, Brent was over $112 over the weekend, then bought them back immediately after Trump announced triumphal progress, but before the Iranians said that it is not happening. And you could have turne
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I can't believe you guys are arguing about which party "won" or "lost" any particular pointless war.
Who has been posting for over 4 years in the Russian/Ukraine thread?
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump obviously melted down. This morning was supposed to be the start of him committing new and bigger war crimes. Then he turned back for 5 days, and maybe longer, because he is fucked up in the head: Trump Announces A Sort Of Cease Fire, and, The US Strategic Goal Seems To Be "Mowing The Grass"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is having a meltdown.
Except for you. We've been witness to your unraveling for over a decade now.
P.S. We know you just plagiarized Paul Krugman again...
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when-hyperglobalization-meets-chaos
Idiot.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-us-strategic-goal-seems-to-
be
You, nor Phillip or any of your "elites" and "experts" have any idea what Trump is doing.
That's why you're all throwing even bigger temper tantrums than usual.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I can't believe you guys are arguing about which party "won" or "lost" any particular pointless war.
Who has been posting for over 4 years in the Russian/Ukraine thread?
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
SECOND.
But I'm referring to Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq (twice!), Afghanistan, Syria, Lybia, and (now) Iran. If you're going to get into a dick- measuring contest, don't do it over "how stoopid can my Fearless Leader be?".
*****
I will say, tho, that Iran isn't pointless. I believe this is now all about Russian and Chinese maritime shipping. There are many choke points on sea trade:
The Panama Canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans,
The Suez Canal that connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean,
Straits of Molucca between SE Asia and Indonesia,
The Straits of Hormuz connecting the Persian Gulf and the Arabian sea (leading ultimately to the Pacific Ocean),
The Bosporus and Dardenelles connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean,
The Gibralter Straits connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic ocean,
The Great Belt between Denmark and Sweden
Trump was trying to regime-change Iran which would give him control over Iranian oil and the Straits of Hormuz.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Overall I thought this was a balanced and insightful discussion.
The Duran channel
Title: Jim Jatras: Iran War Ultimatums and Retaliation
Jim brought up two points I hadn't heard before. The first is ... all of Trump's Truth Social posts driving the oil price up and down by $20/bbl ... how much you want to bet there's insider trading going on in the Trump family?
More importantly, Jim described the Mideast as the Crown Jewel of our imperial holdings. It is THE area that allows us to dominate oil and gas importing (most of them) nations and props up our petrodollar. Without it, the USA can't maintain its ambition for world hegemony and becomes just another nation among nations. For the globalists, financiers, and neocons keeping a grip on the Mideast is existential.
So while Iran can't quit, we can't accede to Iran's terms either.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Treason in the Futures Markets
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The first is ... all of Trump's Truth Social posts driving the oil price up and down by $20/bbl ... how much you want to bet there's insider trading going on in the Trump family?
People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets
Paul Krugman
Mar 24, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/treason-in-the-futures-markets
When officers of a company or people close to them exploit confidential information for personal financial gain, that’s insider trading — which is illegal. But we have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit. That word is “treason.”
Why is profiting from insider information about national security decisions effectively a form of treason? First, it’s hard to think of a more fundamental principle for officials we entrust with important decisions, especially those that involve national security, that they or people they know should not be allowed to exploit their positions for personal gain.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Israel, US Strike Gas Facilities In Iran's Isfahan, Possibly Triggering Retaliation Against Gulf
Trump and Netanyahu are deliberately escalating the war ... and the damage to world oil and gas supplies. Is this their way of choking off China, at the expense of Europe, Britsin, the global south, Japan, S Korea, and Australia?
Maybe the idea is to leave the USA as "the last man standing" among western nations?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Israel would be delighted if Trump bombed Iran forever and ever. But Trump realized too late that is bad for the November 2026 election. Personally, I'm profiting mightily, which is true of everyone who produces fuel in America. Bombs away, Trump! Destroy the GOP's election chance! https://days.to/until/election-day-in-us
Can the Iran war even be won?
Shifting goals and asymmetric leverage make a clean victory elusive — for all countries involved.
By Caitlin Dewey / Mar 24, 2026 at 6:03 AM
https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/481592/iran-war-victory
It’s okay; you can laugh. There is indeed something farcical, albeit grim, about the purported negotiations between the US and Iran.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump claimed the two countries had made “very good” progress toward ending the war. Hours later, Iran’s foreign ministry denied that any such conversations had ever occurred. Trump then clarified that his envoys had talked to other Iranian officials but did not name any names. (The word “clarify” is admittedly doing lots of work in that sentence.)
Regardless of who is or isn’t speaking to whom, Trump does appear interested in ending the war he started — or, at least, reassuring markets to that effect. That begs the obvious follow-up question: Did Trump get what he wanted from this? Is the US, in fact, “winning” the conflict?
That’s a messy question, in any war — but especially this one. Trump has moved the goalposts so many times, it’s hard to keep track of what the score is. So, I turned to several of my colleagues who cover world news for Vox and asked them how they’re evaluating the war. Who is winning and who is losing… if anyone?
Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox:
In tactical terms, Iran is the obvious loser of this war: Its senior leadership has been assassinated, and its military assets decimated, with minimal casualties on either the US or Israeli side so far. Under normal circumstances, this would be what total defeat looks like.
But the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been extraordinarily effective in putting pressure on the United States, seemingly bringing the Trump administration to the negotiating table. If the US backs down under economic coercion, Iran will have just proven its ability to hold the global economy hostage and get away with it. That means it would end the conflict in a stronger political position than where it started, despite its overwhelming battlefield defeats — which is what victory looks like.
This would represent a catastrophic failure of planning and foresight by the US-Israel coalition, almost certainly traceable back to Trump himself. The president launched the war with no obvious endgame and has constantly shifted objectives, thus proving that all the tactical might in the world cannot make up for a complete lack of strategic direction.
Joshua Keating, a senior correspondent at Vox:
If Donald Trump has a political superpower, it’s his ability to declare victory in a particular crisis and move on to another one, regardless of the facts on the ground.
Again and again, as his foreign policy has gotten more aggressive and adventurous, analysts like me — primed from the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine — have warned that Trump was risking quagmire and blowback. He’s consistently defied those predictions.
This time around, however, he doesn’t seem to be able to summon his superpower. It may be that the experience in Venezuela fueled his confidence that regime change on his terms would be easy to pull off. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also changed the global economic reality in a way that would make it hard for even this president to call it a victory. And the US is fighting alongside an ally — Israel — with the incentive to keep this war going for as long as possible.
Trump appears to be searching for something he can c
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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 default position is death before surrender.
If that isn’t bad enough…
Air strikes often harden the resistance of your adversary — Every senior American military commander knows that bombing alone cannot force an enemy to give up. In fact, strikes from the air are proven to do the reverse based on our conventional non-nuclear bombing experience in WWII, and the protracted “arc light” bombing campaign in Vietnam.
One other thing — Mr. Hegseth recently stated that “no quarter” and “no mercy” is to be given in the current conflict. These statements are contrary to both US and international law — something to think hard about. More to the point, why would a regime consider any form of surrender, if there is no promise of mercy or quarter. This Pentagon chief’s understanding of war appears to be of
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The War with Iran May Already be Lost
Shut the fuck up faggot.
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Quote:The Dept of War has $trillions worth of weaponry, but it can't pacify one backward country. The Dept of War couldn't handle Afghanistan, and it can't handle Iran. I blame the Trumptards who are in the military. These guys cannot run their own lives worth a damn, so it is no surprise that even with $trillions of dollars they are floundering around. 6ix, you are a perfect example of a Trumptard. Your day consists of smoking cigarettes and watching porn. You'd be suitable for making decisions about military strategy in Iran for Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The War with Iran May Already be Lost
Shut the fuck up faggot.
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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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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Typical Trump: announces an energy infrastructure cease fire and then the USA and Israel attack the very next day. Why would anyone ever negotiate with him? You can't believe a word he says.
"Boots on the ground" appear to be in the cards.
Quote:
. . .
Then I saw this X-post by the IntelFrog:Quote:
A significant movement is underway from US Army, Navy and Air Force bases in CONUS to the Middle East comprised of at least 35 C-17 flights since March 12th, with 11 more flights on the way.
Origins:
12-Hunter Army Air Field/Fort Stewart, GA
8-Unknown
7-JB Lewis-McChord, WA [JBLM]
6-Pope Army Air Field/Fort Bragg, NC
4-Campbell Army Airfield/Fort Campbell, KY
4-Gray Army Airfield/JB Lewis-McChord, WA
4-Naval Air Station Oceana, VA
1-MacDill AFB, FL
1-JB McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, NJ
Destinations:
17-Ovda Air Base, Israel
13-King Faisal Air Base, Jordan
4 -King Hussein Int’l Airport, Jordan
https://x.com/TheIntelFrog/status/2036151943152935073
When you Google the military units located at these airfields in the US, a pattern begins to emerge (the following information is derived from a Google AI search):
Hunter Army Airfield (IATA: SVN, ICAO: KSVN) is located in Savannah, Georgia, and is a military airfield and subordinate installation to Fort Stewart, located in Hinesville, Georgia — about 45 miles to the southwest. What could the C-17 be picking up? Cargo, helicopters or personnel? Important to note that Hunter is home to some of the US military’s most elite aviation forces:
1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — not an aviation unit itself, but the Rangers are based at Hunter and work closely with the 160th SOAR
3rd Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) — the legendary “Night Stalkers,” flying highly modified MH-60 Black Hawks and MH-47 Chinooks on classified special operations missions worldwide.
15th Air Support Operations Squadron (USAF) — Air Force unit embedded with Army ground forces to coordinate close air support
2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — not a flying unit, but the Rangers at JBLM are closely integrated with the 160th SOAR in rapid-raid and direct-action mission sets 1st Special Forces Group — the primary Army Special Forces group for the Pacific theater, also at JBLM, relying on the 160th SOAR for aviation support 22nd Special Tactics Squadron (USAF) — Air Force special operations combat controllers and para-rescuemen embedded at McChord Field, supporting the full joint special operations enterprise ...
is an amalgamation of Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base, which merged on February 1, 2010, as a result of 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommendations. JBLM is the only Army power projection base west of the Rocky Mountains in the Continental United States. Key units at this base include:
The 4th Battalion, 160th SOAR is listed as a major unit at JBLM. Like the 3rd Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield, the 4th Battalion is part of the legendary Night Stalkers — the Army’s elite special operations aviation regiment that provides aviation support to special operations forces worldwide. Flying highly modified MH-60 and MH-47 variants with advanced navigation and survivability systems, the Night Stalkers operate under the motto “Night Stalkers Don’t Quit” and support the full range of classified special operations missions. JBLM’s 4th Battalion supports Pacific-theater special operations requirements.
Fort Campbell, KY: Fort Campbell and Campbell Army Airfield represent arguably the most aviation-dense installation in the entire US Army — the spiritual home of Army rotary-wing aviation and the epicenter of special operations aviation worldwide. Fort Campbell is the regimental home of the 160th SOAR, the most elite rotary-wing aviation unit in the world. Key units include:
1st Battalion, 160th SOAR (Airborne): 1st Battalion is located at Fort Campbell, KY and is equipped with MH-6 and AH-6 Little Bird light assault and attack helicopters and MH-60 Black Hawk as
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Quote:
Oil Tumbles, Stocks Surge As Israeli TV Reports US Seeks 'One Month Ceasefire'; Tehran Refuses Talks With 'Backstabbers'
I guess Trump admin insiders haven't lined their pockets with enough insider trading.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Phillips P. OBrien
Mar 25, 2026
As long as the Iranians control access to the Persian Gulf/Straits of Hormuz and the IRGC leadership exercises authority over the Iranian military, they hold a very strong set of cards in any negotiations. The only way for the US Government to change that equation is to forcibly open trade into and out of the Gulf (more on that below) or to put in place an Iranian government that is willing to do so for them.
So that is the dilemma the US faces. The US must escalate or admit that the Iranians are in a very strong position in any talks. Trump seems to understand this, which is why he is desperately and publicly trying to create the narrative that he has already won. He wants out of this war, but if he cannot convince himself that people will believe that he has won, we might still have escalation.
More at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-3-for-now-this-l
ooks
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Oil industry confronted with its ‘worst nightmare.’ Trump’s former defense secretary sees few options
The sheer scale of the chaos the war has brought to the industry poked some holes in the face of the conference itself: Some of the world’s top oil producers who are regulars at the annual Houston gathering were notable in their absence. Exxon Mobil CEO and Chair Darren Woods, whose company has major oil and gas operations in the Gulf, and Amin Nasser, CEO of national oil company Saudi Aramco, skipped this year to address the disruptions. Top executives from the state-run oil companies in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates appeared virtually.
“We are outraged by this attack against us,” Shaikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corp., said of recent strikes by Iranian projectiles that damaged a major refinery there. “This is an attack against not only the Gulf, but it is an attack that is holding the world’s economy hostage.”
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2026/03/24/oil-industry-confronted-wi
th-its-worst-nightmare-trumps-former-defense-secretary-sees-few-options/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The War With Iran Is Exposing Big Problems for the Military
What we have learned about the strengths and weaknesses of the American way of war
By Eliot A. Cohen** | March 25, 2026, 2:08 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/iran-war-reveals-american-we
akness/686532/
In 1986, the British historian Correlli Barnett published The Audit of War, a brutal critique of Britain’s industrial performance in World War II. One can learn from his controversial effort: The United States is going through its own audit of war right now as we close in on a month of conflict in the Persian Gulf. Free download of The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Pride and Fall sequence Book 2) by Correlli Barnett https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Correlli+Barnett+The+Audit+of+War
No other country could have projected force from its homeland on the scale that America so far has—and not just in a couple of large raids, but in a sustained campaign conducted over a vast expanse of land and sea. Though the intelligence story of this war is, as ever, in the shadows, there is no question that American intelligence-gathering and analysis, especially but not exclusively from technical sources such as satellite imagery and signal intercepts, have been extraordinary.
At the high end, the performance of advanced American-military technology such as the F-35 fighter bombers flown by the United States and its ally Israel has been stunning. Not a single F-35 has been lost. These airplanes, which are flying computers and sensors as much as they are bomb droppers, have remarkable abilities to coordinate with other aircraft, identify threats, and escape detection. So, too, do B-2 bombers and many other remarkable airborne platforms.
The professionalism of the American military has been on display from top to bottom. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, and the head of Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, have been models of clarity, calm, and decisiveness. The young men and women flying, maintaining, and fixing the airplanes and manning defenses have displayed competence and grit.
All good news. But there is plenty of bad news as well, for which the armed services and previous administrations as well as the current one are responsible. The stockpiles of advanced munitions (particularly interceptor missiles) are radically inadequate and will remain so for some time. In the Middle East conflicts of 2025, most estimates have it that nearly a quarter of the stocks of the Army’s high-altitude interceptor, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile, were consumed; a comparable number may have been used up in the current conflict. Many other high-end precision-strike systems have already been consumed at greater than the yearly rate of replenishment scheduled for fiscal year 2026.
The relatively modest size of the naval task force in the Persian Gulf is also notable. In the 1980s, during a previous conflict with Iran, the U.S. Navy deployed some 30 warships in the Gulf; today it has scarcely a dozen just outside it. In 1986, the Navy had 214 surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and frigates); in 2026 it has only half as many, at a time when the Chinese navy is arguably a greater threat than the Soviet navy ever was.
One particularly significant shortage is of effective minor warships. In 1986, the fleet included 113 frigates, ships smaller than destroyers but vital for missions such as escorting convoys. Now there are none, their place having been taken by some two dozen littoral combat ships, which have proved mechanically unreliable, underequipped for high-threat environments, and unsuited for key missions. Worse: The attempt to replace them, with an Italian-designed frigate, has collapsed because of modifications that made the proposed warship wildly expensive. The Navy is now considering modifying a class of Coast Guard cutters that would lack basic armaments such as vertical tubes for launching a variety of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles.
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Iran has established an informal "$2 million toll" on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, enforced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), leading to a rise in traffic for vessels opting to pay for safe passage through a specific corridor. This fee has prompted at least 20 ships, some "zombie" tankers, to navigate the rerouted passage.
Key Details on the Strait of Hormuz Toll System
• The "Tehran Toll Booth": The IRGC is directing traffic through a new corridor between Iranian islands (Qeshm and Larak), allowing transit for those paying up to $2 million, according to reports in Lloyd's List Intelligence. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603233156
• Increased Traffic: Following a severe drop in transit due to conflict, the number of ships paying for this passage has started increasing.
• Alternative to Risks: This payment acts as a “protection" fee, ensuring safety against attacks. It is being paid because insurance costs have skyrocketed after recent maritime attacks, making the $2 million fee a "bargain" compared to total risks, say analysts at Fortune.
• "Zombie" Tankers: At least 20 ships, including some operating under deceptive identities (zombie tankers), have taken this route, notes Lloyd's List Intelligence.
• Impact on Oil Trade: While total traffic remains lower than the pre-war norm (about 20 million barrels per day), some oil flow is moving again, with analysts in bne IntelliNews noting around 8 million barrels per day are moving, including through this new corridor.
This situation has been characterized as a deliberate "shakedown," with the blockade itself generating the revenue that allows the IRGC to reopen the strait on its own terms.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Politico reports:
President Donald Trump is counting on money from the Gulf Arab States to power his economic golden age. But as the war with Iran nears its fifth week and the regional economy enters a free fall, hundreds of billions of dollars that Middle Eastern governments have pledged for U.S. projects are under threat.
That has the Trump administration concerned that Gulf leaders may not be able to fulfill promises to invest heavily in the U.S., according to three people familiar with the internal conversations, including one former administration official, granted anonymity to discuss them.
“What has really freaked people out is that the Gulf Arabs have warned that they’re a couple weeks away from having to repatriate tens of billions of dollars in investments from the United States,” said one of those people. “When these guys do that, it is going to be immensely destabilizing and contradictory to the president’s investment goals.”
Any pullback on investments from Middle Eastern governments will limit the amount of capital available to U.S.-based tech startups, investment firms and big businesses that have come to rely on the region’s sovereign wealth funds and government-backed investment vehicles as a key source of cash.
But the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has largely choked off oil and gas revenue that support Gulf-based financial institutions that are a major source of global capital. And Iran’s attacks on critical infrastructure and flashy highrises have brought tourism to high-dollar destinations like Dubai and Doha to a standstill.
“The Middle East is essentially closed,” said a top executive at an asset management firm that’s received significant backing from the Gulf, also granted anonymity to speak candidly. Companies will be looking “outside of the Middle East for capital in the short run.”
Continue reading… https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/26/immensely-destabilizing-iran-
war-threatens-gulfs-us-investments-00845486
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 SIGNYM:
Here's a truth-bomb for you, SIX: The biggest state sponsor of terrorism is the USA.
Israel is one of our henchmen. ISIS was another.
Khamenei is a saint by comparison.
Once a Russian propagandist always a Russian propagandist, aye comrade?
T
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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:Donald Trump Is Losing the Iran War
Originally posted by second:
The Worst and the Dumbest
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong . . . 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.
Despite his constant declarations of victory, the truth about this conflict is clear.
By Séamus Malekafzali | March 27, 2026
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-losing-iran-war/
After weeks of bombing Iranian military installations, naval vessels, and cities, President Trump declared the war against Iran “won” on March 24. Such a momentous achievement could have been announced in a grandiose speech—perhaps on an aircraft carrier with a banner describing the mission as having been accomplished—but Trump’s assertion passed without much fanfare.
Perhaps the reaction was so muted because Trump had already proclaimed that the war was won several times before—such as three weeks ago, when he said he thought the “war was complete, pretty much,” or two weeks ago, when he told a rally in Kentucky that America had won “in the first hour” of the war.
Perhaps there was a collective national shrug because, at the same time that Trump has declared victory, he has also claimed, against all Iranian denials, to have recently held “constructive talks” with unnamed leaders in Tehran who are “desperate for a deal,” but simply fear saying so because they will be killed, either by the government or by the US itself.
Or perhaps Trump’s words were ignored because everyone can plainly see that it is a lie. Despite such victories, despite such completeness, the war has somehow gone on still, as the Iranians will, unbelievably, not “accept they have been defeated militarily,” in the words of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The idea that the United States is in fact losing this war is completely out of the question. But there is no avoiding the truth: The United States is, in fact, losing this war.
Endless press conferences, statements to gathered reporters, and social media posts from the commander-in-chief tell of thousands upon thousands of strikes, the decimation of the Iranian Air Force, and the destruction of literally “100%” of Iran’s military capabilities. But, as anyone with eyes can plainly see, the Iranian military continues to fight, not just in a flailing and minuscule way as the president implies, but with consistent levels of ballistic missile fire towards both Israel and American bases in the Gulf. This has forced the White House into increasingly baffling turns of phrase to describe what is happening.
At the same time that the president claimed that in Iran “we have nobody even shooting at us,” an F-35, a stealth fighter jet thought to be the height of cutting-edge military power, was struck and disabled by Iranian anti-aircraft fire for the first time in the plane’s history (Five days later, Trump would claim Iran had “no anti-aircraft equipment). In the 12 days since Trump posted that Iran was now only sending “a drone or two” and “a close-range missile somewhere,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched more than 30 additional waves of attacks and shows no sign of stopping or even dropping the number of missiles and drones it fires. Despite claims of the destruction of the Iranian Navy, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to all shipping from nations the Iranian state deems to be hostile.
Seemingly all other objectives of the war, be they degrading the Iranian military’s capabilities or overthrowing the Islamic Republic, have fallen by the wayside as the American government desperately attempts to control the price of oil and reopen the Strait that was previously completely open before the war. The Trump administration has resorted to a routine cycle of market manipulation, claiming US Navy escorts of tankers that never existed
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Kuwait international airport suffers 'significant' radar system damage after drone attacks
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kuwait-international-airport
-suffers-significant-radar-system-damage-after-drone-2026-03-28/
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Even John Bolton is against this Iran war
Bolton critiques Trump's Iran strategy
By Astead Herndon / Mar 28, 2026 at 7:03 AM
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/484166/iran-war-trump-john-bolton-regime-
change
How did President Donald Trump lose the Republican Party’s biggest Iran war hawk, John Bolton? And why?
For the past 20 years, there’s basically been one guy in Republican politics who was known as the Iran war guy.
For years, even decades, John Bolton has argued for regime change in Iran, and for America to take a proactive military role to make that happen. Bolton served as the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush and, later, as national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term.
The partnership with Trump was fleeting, however. He did not leave the administration on good terms and has been a critic of Trump since. He’s even been indicted by Trump’s Department of Justice for the mishandling of classified documents. Despite that backstory, it is still a bit confusing to hear one of America’s foremost Iran critics break with the Trump administration on this war. How did Trump lose the Republican Party’s biggest Iran war hawk? And why?
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Bolton, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You’ve become known as one of the most prominent American advocates for military action in Iran over a set of decades. But in recent weeks, you’ve emerged as one of the sharpest critics of the Trump administration’s actions and how it’s conducting this war. I wanted you to walk me through your critiques.
What I support is a policy of regime change in Iran. And I’ve held that view for many years because I don’t think there’s any chance the current regime will change its behavior on two critical fronts.
It’s not going to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which threaten Israel, the United States, really the whole world. And it’s not going to give up on its pursuit of terrorism, its support of terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militia in Iraq and conducting terrorist operations around the world.
We’ve got decades of evidence that their behavior is not going to change. So when you’re confronted with that kind of threat, danger, and behavior isn’t going to change, the alternative is change the regime. I think the regime is in its weakest position since any time after it took power in 1979. The economy is a mess. The young people are, they can see they can have a different kind of life. Two thirds of the population is under 30. The women are enormously dissatisfied since the death of Mahsa Amini. Ethnic groups are dissatisfied.
Conditions are ripe for regime change as a policy to succeed. And the question is, what role can the United States play? And here, I think Trump has badly misplayed his hand from the beginning, unfortunately.
Tell me how.
Well, Trump initially did nothing to prepare the American public for the steps necessary to affect regime change. Normally, when a president is going to take a dramatic action like Trump has, you explain that to the American people.
You make the case why it’s in our national interest to seek regime change, to avoid the threat of nuclear weapons, to avoid the continuing threat of terrorism. You don’t have to say anything about what your specific plan is. You don’t have to talk about timing, but you have to be respectful of our citizens and make the case to them that this is in their interest. I think he could have done it. I think there’s a very compelling case he didn’t do it.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
A corollary to that is you need to prepare Congress, certainly on the Republican side, to get their support, but on the Democratic side too. I think there are a number of important steps that Congress is going to have to take, instead of leaving them in the dark. It doesn’t mean they would agree with you necess
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Quote:
US Suffers Heavy Casualties In Iranian Strike On Saudi Base As Houthis Enter War With Missile Launches On Israel
• Houthis enter the war: Houthis launch their first missile barrage on Israel since Operation Epic Fury. Red Sea shipping could once again be under direct threat.
• Serious US casualties in Saudi base assault: Iran fired six ballistic missiles and 29 drones at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan air base in a Friday attack that wounded at least 15 troops: AP. Late-night strike targeted Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (for third time of war).
• Gulf states under sustained fire, casualties mount: Six wounded in missile strike on Abu Dhabi; Bahrain intercepts waves of missiles and drones near the United States Fifth Fleet base; Kuwait reports damage to Mubarak Al-Kabeer Port and Shuwaikh Port.
• US expending billions on Operation EpicFuryFailure: "Battle damage and replacement of losses over the first three weeks of the war likely costs roughly $1.4 billion to $2.9 billion": WSJ
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/many-us-troops-wounded-iranian-
strike-saudi-base-houthis-open-new-front-missile
Quote:
Russia Warns Situation At Bushehr Nuclear Plant Deteriorating After 3rd Airstrike In Ten Days
Saturday, Mar 28, 2026 - 08:05 AM
On Friday Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that Bushehr nuclear power plant was struck by US-Israeli attacks for the third time since the start of the war.
At the same time, the head of Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom has confirmed that the situation continues to deteriorate; however, there's as yet been no damage to the operating reactor and no release of radiation reported. It was the third strike in just ten days.
******
Iran - Vietnam analogies have a glaring critical flaw:
Vietamn was (and still is) insignificant to the world economy. The Gulf region is absolutely essential. So while the Vietnam and Iranian war strategies are both shambolic, the consequences of failure are polar opposites.
The key numbers to look at aren't the costs of oil and natgas, which fly around because of fear, hope, and speculation, but tons of oil and thousands of cubic feet (millions of BTUs) exported.
It's not made the western press, but Iraq has pretty much booted USA military occupation, and if Ansarullah (Houthis) truly enter the war, they can block Saudi oil shipments thru their only alternate oil terminals on the Red Sea.
SECOND, I can't but help notice that, aside from personal, monotonous attacks on "Trumptards" you're incapable of generating a single original thought. You may as well be a bot. As a self-proclaimed energy market and military affairs expert, you should have caught that.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, even John Bolton is against this Iran war. Why? Read the article, but if you won't, he is against it because the way Trump went about it was always doomed to failure, although he imagined success. After all, he is the President and can do anything he wants in his imagination.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, I can't but help notice that, aside from personal, monotonous attacks on "Trumptards" you're incapable of generating a single original thought. You may as well be a bot. As a self-proclaimed energy market and military affairs expert, you should have caught that.
John Bolton's lesson applies to Trumptards. The way they live is destined to fail, even though they imagine success is their right as Americans. After all, Americans imagine they can do anything. See 6ixStringJoker for an example of a disappointing life caused by his overstimulated imagination and, most significantly, his erratic refusal to adapt to his environment. For Trump and his Trumptards, freedom means doing what you want, being irresponsible for what happens next. That's why Trump's life has been one misadventure after another. He has never been accountable for what happens to him, and he always complained about the unfairness of the world. Trumptards find his personality traits very attractive. I do not because those traits cause failure in ordinary Trumptard lives.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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If John Bolton is against something, everyone else should be for it by default.
You need to do a much better job picking allies.
Oh... nevermind. They're picked for you. Anybody who talks shit about Trump is your hero of the day.
Just realize that you're not going to convince anybody that we shouldn't have gone after Iran because John Bolton says so.
And remember that one of the last things that Dick Cheney did before shaking off this mortal coil and taking over Hell was to vote the same way that you did in November of 2024.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Wow. True to form, you're still incapable of generating any original thoughts, SECOND. Even when it's been pointed out to you, you start quoting somebody and then squawk about "Trumptards" like a parrot.
So, here's an original thought: A "war on Iran" was NEVER going to win. If anyone had paid the slightest attention to what Iran was saying, they would have known that Iran was going to close the Straits of Hormuz and hold the Gulf's energy extracting infrastructure hostage.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Just ignore his personal attacks. It's all he's got.
He's a sad, miserable little man with no life and nobody who gives a shit about him.
He's just crying about his own problems in life and projecting them onto other people. Not at all dissimilar to how Ted can't figure out why nobody likes him or wants anything to do with him after all of these years of convincing himself that he's a good, moral person who always does and says the right thing.
They're just Rage, Personified now.
Neither of them are even capable of having real conversations with human beings anymore.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Just ignore his personal attacks. It's all he's got. ...
Not at all dissimilar to how Ted can't figure out why nobody likes him or wants anything to do with him after all of these years of convincing himself that he's a good, moral person who always does and says the right thing... Neither of them are even capable of having real conversations with human beings anymore
Jeezus, no kidding! Don't they realize how stereotyped they've become? It's medically pathological.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Well, this deserves some research but, according to one article, Saudi Arabia is managing to push 7MMb/d thru their Persian Gulf/ Hormuz alternate on the Red Sea, at Yanbu. That's compared to 15MMb/d thru Hormuz, leaving an 8MMb/d deficit.
UAE also has a port just outside of Hormuz. 
MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/hormuz-bypasses-maxed-out-saudi-east-
west-pipeline-hits-record-7-mmbd-uae-fujairah-crude
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Just ignore his personal attacks. It's all he's got. ...
Not at all dissimilar to how Ted can't figure out why nobody likes him or wants anything to do with him after all of these years of convincing himself that he's a good, moral person who always does and says the right thing... Neither of them are even capable of having real conversations with human beings anymore
Jeezus, no kidding! Don't they realize how stereotyped they've become? It's medically pathological.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I've been trying to find a book that I remembered from the TV show Reading Rainbow when I was a kid, or even better, the episode where Lemar Burton introduced it (and I think it was a female's voice that narrated it).
All I remember about it were the names Paul and Paula, and they were polar bears. One of them loved their individuality and the other one wanted to live in a world where everything and everyone was the same. Something happens where all the bears are now named Paul and Paula, and the lesson is that it turns out things get pretty boring when everybody is exactly the same and nobody argues about anything anymore.
I always think of the Left like that... or at least I have for a decade or more now. They're all Pauls and Paulas, and their only purpose seems to be the desire to see everyone else become Pauls and Paulas too. They all say the exact same things everyday and behave the same no matter where they are. Somewhere along the lines they've been convinced by somebody that they are always right and they are morally superior to everyone they come in contact with, so they've been also given the idea that they can be as awful to everyone as they can muster because what they're doing is just and right and that everyone who disagrees with them is beneath them and they're getting what they deserve.
To everybody else, the Pauls and the Paulas are just bullies and assholes. If you know one of them, you know all of them.
Nobody wants anything to do with any of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Trump Administration Cooked Up Gay Ayatollah Story
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-administration-cooked-gay-ay
atollah-150401515.html
Trump Says CIA Told Him Iran’s Mojtaba Khamenei is Gay
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-cia-briefing-iran-new-supreme-leader-fo
x-news-11743963
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“Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/iran-war-trump-maga/68657
1/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Rubio: U.S.-Iran War Could Last Another 2 to 4 Weeks
The White House remains committed to achieving all of its war objectives despite a lack of NATO support.
By Alexandra Sharp | March 27, 2026, 5:10 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/27/rubio-g7-us-iran-war-two-four-wee
ks-nato-negotiations/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921
How Much Longer?
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told his G-7 counterparts on Friday that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran—already nearing its one-month mark—could continue for another two to four weeks, sources told Axios. Speaking to reporters after the G-7 meeting, Rubio said that the United States is “on or ahead of schedule in ?that operation, and expect to conclude it at the appropriate time here—a matter of weeks, not months.”
Analysts suggest that extending the conflict for that length of time could have devastating consequences for the world economy, as 28 days of war have already caused unprecedented turbulence to global energy flows and worsened instability in the Middle East.
G-7 foreign ministers and their allies convened in the French countryside on Thursday for a two-day conference aimed at addressing rising geopolitical insecurity. Yet the main show did not begin until Rubio arrived on Friday, upon which he stressed that the United States remains committed to achieving all of its war objectives.
“Our mission is clear. Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon,” Rubio wrote on X on Friday. “In my meeting with the G7 foreign ministers, I reiterated that we must meet this moment with maximum partner contributions.”
Yet such contributions may not be easy to secure. Washington’s G-7 allies remain hesitant to join U.S. military efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil normally transits. “We have taken the approach of supporting defensive action, but also we’ve taken a different approach on the offensive action that has taken place as part of this conflict,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Friday.
Such reluctance has angered U.S. President Donald Trump, who has taken out his vitriol on NATO as a whole. “We are very disappointed with NATO because NATO has done absolutely nothing,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Thursday. He later appeared to suggest that the United States would not come to the aid of the alliance’s members due to their own inaction regarding Hormuz. “We’re always going to be there—at least, we were,” Trump said. “I don’t know about anymore, to be honest with you.”
This has forced Rubio to walk a fine line between appeasing the White House and selling the United States’ Iran strategy to Washington’s closest allies.
Still, some common ground has been found. G-7 foreign ministers agreed to adopt a declaration on Friday calling for the “immediate cessation” of attacks on civilian population centers and infrastructure. “Nothing justifies deliberately targeting civilians during armed conflicts, nor carrying out attacks against diplomatic facilities,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said, adding that the declaration “also reaffirms the absolute necessity of permanently restoring free and safe navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
Meanwhile, it remains unclear just how close (if at all) the Iran war is to reaching a diplomatic solution. Rubio reportedly told the conference’s attendees on Friday that Washington is still communicating with Tehran via mediators but is close to holding serious negotiations. On Thursday, Trump gave Tehran another 10 days to reopen Hormuz or else face attacks on its energy infrastructure.
Rubio’s comments come amid reports that the U.S. Defense Department is considering deploying at least 10,000 additional combat troops to the Middle East in the coming days. Rubio said on Friday that the United States can achieve its aims in Iran without ground troops but that it was deploying some to the region “to give the president maximum optionality and maximum opportunity to adjust the contingencies, should they eme
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Trump says his 'preference' would be to 'take the oil in Iran'
Trump told the Financial Times that while his "favorite thing" would be to take the oil, some "stupid people" would ask, "Why are you doing that?"
March 29, 2026, 10:43 PM CDT
By Kyla Guilfoil
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-preference-ta
ke-oil-iran-rcna265747
In an interview with NBC News early this month, Trump sidestepped answering whether he had plans to try to take Iran’s oil. “You look at Venezuela,” he said. “People have thought about it, but it’s too soon to talk about that.” While Trump was saying that, the U.S. had already taken control of the country's oil industry:
Quote:https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/acti
The Trump Administration is rapidly implementing President Trump’s vision to reopen and develop Venezuela’s oil industry for the shared benefit of the American and Venezuelan people. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the United States has already issued several general licenses at record speed for oil and gas companies to make unprecedented investments in Venezuela’s energy infrastructure.
ons-to-implement-president-trumps-vision-for-venezuelan-oil
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 Iran war is holding him hostage
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/30/trump-iran-war
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-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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The Psychology of Military Incompetence
How the Iran War was lost
Paul Krugman | Mar 31, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-military-incompet
ence
Transcript
So the world’s greatest military power went to war against a fourth rate nation whose military budget would be rounding error in our defense spending. And it appears that we lost.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a late night, well, evening update, which I don’t usually do, but I wanted to get this in before who knows what happens in the news tomorrow.
It’s Tuesday. It’s the day that the stock market rallied enormously, that the futures price of oil dropped precipitously, all on the happy news that the United States, at least based on Trump’s Truth Social, appears to be surrendering. Trump put up a Truth Social post saying that, you know, we don’t need to open the Strait of Hormuz. If the Europeans think they need it, they should go ahead and do it. And it’s up to them. And this is pretty amazing.
Of course, the idea that it only matters to the Europeans, that it doesn’t matter to us, is all wrong. And that will be a subject of a Substack post shortly. But it is pretty much a confession. Although it’s framed as we won, now let somebody else do the cleanup, the reality is it’s effectively a confession that, well, we lost. We can’t do this.
How the hell did we manage to do this? I mean, the objective reality is that this was never going to be... Maybe it wasn’t even going to be doable. There were reasons why we didn’t go to war with Iran, particularly why we didn’t go to war in a way that basically became an existential threat for the regime so that they have no compunction about creating lots of damage because the alternative result is annihilation for them personally. But everybody who thought about it even for a couple of minutes, anyone who knew anything, particularly anyone who’d been paying attention to four years of war in Ukraine … we know something about what modern war looks like and about the inability of countries that have conventional superior forces to avoid major damage from drones and missiles. So this was completely, unbelievably stupid.
How did we get there? Well, there was a very good article by Tobin Harshaw in Bloomberg, and mostly I’m just riffing off what he wrote, but I think that it deserves wider circulation. He resurrected a book I had forgotten about, a 1976 book by Norman Dixon called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. It was very British oriented, but the lessons apply; Dixon looked at the great military disasters of British history.
You might think there were many reasons why really bad decisions were made, but he actually said there was a kind of consistent pattern. That what happened was that you had military leaders, or people making military decisions, who for the most part shared two things. First, they believed, they had this atavistic, anachronistic belief that warfare is all about muscles and not about minds. which hasn’t been true for a very long time. And second, he argued that they are just generally anti-intellectual, anti-education.
So in some sense, it’s all about muscles and don’t give me all of these smarty-pants intellectuals who are telling me about why I’m doing it wrong. It’s an uncannily accurate portrait of Pete Hegseth, down to even seemingly minor details. Muscular Christianity is among the defining symptoms of the bad British military leaders that Dixon analyzed. So this is what happened.
This is not about specific bad judgments. It’s not, in a way, about the specifics of the case. It is that we were led into war by people who exemplified in the classic way how really bad military decisions are made. And it all comes down to believing in brute force and toughness and muscles — muscles in the age of drone warfare! — and hate intellectuals, hate learning.
What really gets me is that in a war where the deciding factor is having some intellectual understanding of what you’re doing, a theocratic regime in Iran, which basically wants to bring back the Middle A
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Trump Would Love To Leave, but Iran Might Not Let Him.
Trump has made a prison for himself. He started the war to have what he imagined would be some great “victory”. He would pummel Iran, kill its leaders, put in place compliant new ones, get paid, reap political benefits, and maybe even have a victory parade to celebrate. It was simple, really. If he cannot have his victory, there is no point to all of this. And here is the rub: he can declare “victory” at any time; indeed, he declares victory multiple times every day with ever more outlandish claims. However, if he ends the campaign and the Strait of Hormuz is not open, the Iranian theocratic regime in power, and Iran’s nuclear weapons program is not “obliterated”, he understands that his claims will be a farce. Moreover, the first of these alone means that the world economy will be on the point of implosion with a real chance of a worldwide recession and high oil prices. This stagflation world will be a massive problem for him and the GOP in the run-up to the 2026 elections. So, while Trump can declare victory at any time, he cannot ensure Iran recognizes his triumph. And this is the dilemma he faces when he gives his address to the nation tonight at 9 pm ET “to provide an important update on Iran.”
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-4-trump-would-lo
ve
***********************************
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
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Quote:
Jamie Dimon says US must 'finish this thing' with Iran to protect global economy
JPMorgan Chase CEO warns that winning the conflict is more important than short-term market moves
By Madison Colombo FOXBusiness
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is calling for a decisive end to the conflict with Iran, saying the U.S. must "finish this thing" to protect the global economy and remove the threat to the region.
Dimon appeared on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, saying American strength depends on decisive action in the Middle East and embracing the artificial intelligence revolution.
"It’s much more important that this be successfully completed than what the market does," Dimon said.
Threats to Middle East oil flows have added uncertainty to markets, as the United States, Israel and Iran continue to exchange strikes. On Tuesday, Iran struck an oil tanker off the coast of Dubai and continues to block shipments in the vital Strait of Hormuz.
Dimon said Americans should be hoping the United States wins the latest conflict and acts to "clean up the straits," minimizing future threats to the U.S. and its allies.
"These people have been doing something bad for 47 years. They've been killing people. They've been killing Americans," Dimon said.
"I think people are surprised to find out they had a ballistic missile and go 3,000 miles. These are bad people, and they needed to be stopped," he added.
Dimon advocated for the country to "finish this thing," warning that if the U.S. fails to act, the cycle of threats will continue.
Beyond the battlefield, Dimon noted that a vital part of U.S. security is embracing AI capability and fixing a lagging defense industrial base. He singled out the U.S.’s inability to double or triple its supply of rockets if needed, noting it is a major area of concern.
Dimon discussed his $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency initiative, which lends and invests money to companies researching areas tied to national security, including drones, space and rare earths.
He also spoke about the changes he sees on the horizon as the country adapts to the introduction of artificial intelligence. Dimon compared the AI shift’s importance to that of tractors and electricity.
"AI, in the long run, is [going to] be unbelievable. Just like fertilizer was and tractors and the internet and electricity, it’s [going to] cure cancers," he said.
"My guess is our grandkids will be working three and a half days a week. They’ll live to 100. They won’t have all our diseases. That’s good," Dimon added.
What a crock of shit.
Jamie Dimon is either a secret Zionist, or he's worried about the petrodollar and his bank's world-straddling dominance. More likely the latter.
Oh, and promoting his bank's latest get-rich-quick/ make-everyone-else poor schemes.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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NATO slides into Trump-induced coma
By Dave Lawler, Zachary Basu | April 3, 2026
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/03/nato-trump-iran-war
The big picture: The alliance was built on the premise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. President Trump has made that conditional: if you won't help me in my war, I might not show up for yours.
NATO's mutual defensive framework doesn't actually apply in the case of Iran, a war taking place far from the alliance's territory.
But it could be the death knell for the most powerful and consequential alliance of the past eight decades.
Driving the news: Trump and his team have fumed at several NATO allies for denying the U.S. logistical help or access to their airspace or military bases to carry out attacks against Iran.
He's called them "cowards" for refusing to join the war to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration would now "have to reexamine the value of NATO." Trump said he might withdraw altogether.
The flip side: For their part, allies have noted that Trump launched the war without their input or any international legal framework — and created the Hormuz crisis he's now demanding they resolve.
Flashback: This all comes months after Trump threatened to seize Greenland, a territory of ally Denmark, and impose tariffs on any other allies who stood in his way.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trump will probably not withdraw from NATO right now because he does not want to. He really would like to leave the alliance. No, he will not withdraw from NATO now because doing so would not serve Putin’s interests. It is far better for Russia to have an unreliable, destructive NATO being controlled by the USA at the top than to be faced by a European-led defensive alliance planning to protect the continent from Russian aggression.
Originally posted by second:
NATO slides into Trump-induced coma
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/will-trump-withdraw-from-nato
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Has Iran captured US F-15E pilots, and has it shot down 2-seat fighter jet along with a rescue chopper? Full timeline of F-15 shot down Iran claims and rescue mission updates
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/has-iran-ca
ptured-us-f-15e-pilots-and-has-it-shot-down-2-seat-fighter-jet-along-with-a-rescue-chopper-full-timeline-of-f-15-shot-down-iran-claims-and-rescue-mission-updates/articleshow/130000797.cms
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Donald Trump Isn't Sounding Like Himself
And that's terrifying
By Paul Krugman | Apr 04, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-isnt-sounding-like-him
self
Donald Trump isn’t sounding like himself, and that’s terrifying. Hi, Paul Krugman here with a brief update on Saturday afternoon.
Not my usual thing. No economics, no analytics, just I felt I needed to say something. On Wednesday, Trump gave a speech, which was... pretty depressing. He was low energy, listless, and seemed to be disconnected from reality, insisting that everything is going great in this war and everything is going great across the board. And in terms of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, well, it’s somebody else’s problem. And the Strait may naturally open by itself, which didn’t sound like leadership.
In some ways, it sounded like Trump, always living in a fantasy world in which things are going his way. But if you thought about the outcome for the world, it seemed to be pointing towards the U.S. never admitting it openly, but implicitly basically giving up and leaving a stronger Iran, but with the Strait of Hormuz opening up — maybe with tolls collected by the regime in Iran, and just a diminished, weakened U.S., but better than some of the alternatives.
Today, Trump put up a Truth Social post, which said that if Iran doesn’t open up the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, “all hell will reign down on them.” That was how he put it. All hell will rain down. Misspelled rain, but OK. And then finished it up with glory be to God. GOD in caps.
Wow. So first of all, this is a completely different picture suddenly. Aside from the Strait of Hormuz not being our problem to we will commit massive war crimes, presumably. That’s the only thing that makes sense here, unless they open it up, which is pretty bad.
And also... I don’t think Trump has ever said “glory be to God.” That doesn’t sound like him. That sounds almost as if Pete Hegseth wrote this post, which maybe in some sense he did. The misspellings and all do look like Trump in his own hand, but it feels like this is the influence of our religious fanatic Secretary of War, or as people in the Pentagon apparently call him, the Secretary of War Crimes.
This is really bad. It’s hard to see what happens in 48 hours. It’s clear that Trump, for all his pretense of, “I’m always winning,” is aware of how completely he screwed things up, that he’s aware that he has basically led America into an epic strategic defeat. I don’t think he cares about that from the point of view of America, but he is realizing what this has done to him — that he will probably quite rapidly lose his grip on U.S., politics, and certainly to the extent that he cares about his legacy, it’s not going to be his wonderful ballroom. It’s going to be that he’s the man who single-handedly led America to one of its greatest defeats ever. But now what?
It would be one thing if he just kind of slunk away into the night, which is what we would have hoped would happen, but instead it sounds like he’s unable to accept it and that he is going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation.
If we had a functioning democracy, this would be 25th Amendment time. This guy should not have any authority at all. Finger on the button, although I don’t think we’re talking about nukes, but he shouldn’t have any authority on matters of state violence when this is the kind of mood he’s in. Just in general, although religiosity is often expected of American leaders, saying glory be to God before you unleash violence, that is not what used to be the American way.
Anyway, I’m scared. I wonder very much what the next few days will bring because this is looking like basically a president who is losing it and, unfortunately, losing it in a way that can really make the world a much worse place very fast.
I guess enjoy the rest of your weekend.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pag
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Quote:Trump to Iran: "Open the Fuckin' Strait" or face bombing Tuesday
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump Isn't Sounding Like Himself
And that's terrifying
This guy should not have any authority at all. Finger on the button, although I don’t think we’re talking about nukes, but he shouldn’t have any authority on matters of state violence when this is the kind of mood he’s in.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/05/trump-iran-strait-hormuz-bombing-thre
at
President Trump threatened to bomb Iran's power plants and bridges starting Tuesday if the regime doesn't open the Strait of Hormuz.
Why it matters: Trump's 10-day deadline to Iran is expected to expire Monday. He previously threatened to bomb the country’s energy, water and oil infrastructure if no deal was reached to open the strait.
• Tehran has accused Trump of planning to commit war crimes and threatened to retaliate with similar attacks against infrastructure in Israel and in other Gulf states.
• Over the last ten days, the U.S. and Iran have held indirect negotiations through Pakistan. Egypt and Turkey to try to reach a ceasefire deal in return for opening the strait of Hormuz. No significant progress has been achieved so far.
What he's saying: "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," Trump wrote on his Truth Social account on Sunday morning.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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US forced to destroy two of its own aircraft after rescuing F-15 pilot from Iran
Two transport aircraft tasked with evacuating the special forces unit were unable to take off from a remote base in Iran. These aircraft were destroyed to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, sources said. The special forces therefore departed on three additional aircraft that were sent for them.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/04/05/8028831/
A decision to use an abandoned Iranian airstrip south of Isfahan as a forward operating location went wrong when two C-130 Hercules transporters, probably modified search and rescue variants, got stuck in the ground.
They were destroyed by the US to prevent them from falling into the Iranians’ hands, US sources indicated, and more transporters had to be brought forward to complete the extraction of the wounded second crew member. Each of the modified Hercules has a list price of nearly $115m.
An HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter involved in the rescue was also damaged by gunfire on Friday – so it is easy to conclude that the cost in lost and damaged airframes exceeds $250m, largely for the rescue of the second crew member.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/05/propaganda-f-15-crew-res
cue-downing-reminder-iran-fight-back-donald-trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump jumped into an enormous steaming pile of dogshit, and there's no way out.
Honestly, I can't imagine what propelled Trump into such a self destructive war. Is there something in the Epstein files that Mossad is holding over him? Is he delusional? So ill- informed that the people advising him might credibly be accused of treason?
Everyone that I pay attention to in the alt media has been saying for MONTHS that Iran would be a huge challenge to take militarily. IRAN has been saying for months that if they were attacked they would close the straits, and hit out at all of America's proxies in the ME including Israel.
The 12-day war, when Israel begged a halt, was just an image of things to come. Did the CIA's/ spec ops' success in Venezuela cause neocons and zionists to miscalculate wildly?
Now for the consequences of possible failure:
The USA driven out of the ME.
Israel cannot continue as a viable nation.
Energy production infrastructure across the ME is destroyed.
If desalination plants are destroyed, petro- monarchies crumble.
There are petroleum, fertilizer, and helium shortages across the globe.
In addition to higher prices, there will be actual scarcity of food, fuel, and high tech products, which will impact Taiwan, Japan, and S Korea; the EU; and south Asia and Africa the most. Governments will change or fall.
China will turn to pipeline supplies from Russia.
Chinese economy slows as its markets shrink.
Petro- monarchies realize that the USA can't protect them. One leg of the petrodollar deal is broken.
The dollar finance cycle is broken... from ME oil sales (in dollars) to US Treasuries and investments in high tech.
USD banks (JPMC) starved of funds.
Hedge funds collapse.
USA government unable to fund its debt. Interest rates and inflation rise even as the productive economy shrinks.
Iran is in charge of the Straits and whatever oil that is still flowing out of the ME.
Oil is traded mostly in yuan.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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The Real Intelligence Failure in Iran
A costly quagmire was predictable. Trump went to war anyway.
By Shane Harris | April 5, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/04/iran-war-intelli
gence-failure-trump/686694/
In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S. invasion and an eight-year occupation. “Not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over,” the commission found. “This was a major intelligence failure.”
If a similar panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this:
The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success.
Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.
Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.
“Your successes are unheralded—your failures are trumpeted,” President John F. Kennedy remarked in a speech to CIA staff at their headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, in 1961. Ever since, intelligence officers have ruefully invoked that truism whenever they’re blamed for a major screwup. The familiar storyline of an intelligence failure features analysts who neglect to “connect the dots,” case officers who get seduced by sources who exaggerate or lie, and politicians who contort ambiguous information to align with their preferred outcome. That’s what happened in the months before the Iraq War.
The lead-up to Operation Epic Fury turns this narrative on its head. The spies called it right, but the president went another direction. The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.
Some of Trump’s allies have criticized him for not making a public case for war, as the Bush administration did. But if he h
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The Terrorist in Chief
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
It’s time for us to face up to the ugly reality
Paul Krugman | Apr 06, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-terrorist-in-chief
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
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. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Apr 05, 2026, 8:03 AM
Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”
If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.
Don’t tell me that his cause is just, that the Iranian regime is evil. That’s what terrorists always say, and even if it’s sometimes true, terrorism is defined by its means rather than its ends — by its attempt to achieve political goals by violently attacking the innocent.
And that’s exactly what Trump is doing: he’s threatening to attack civilian infrastructure if he doesn’t get his way. And since Trump is talking about targeting essential services — power plants! — this is a threatened attack on people as well as property.
Later on Sunday Trump told Axios that the U.S. is in “deep negotiations” with Iran. Forgive me for doubting that anything like that is happening. But he went on to say that if there isn’t a deal by Tuesday, “I am blowing up everything over there.”
He has issued these threats without even a pretense that we will be attacking military targets, and if anything he seems to relish rather than regret the death and suffering his actions will cause.
On second thought, however, I shouldn’t say that Trump is making a threat of violence; he’s promising violence. That vile post isn’t part of a negotiating strategy, since there is, after all, zero chance that Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz by tomorrow evening. The Iranian regime almost certainly couldn’t open the strait on short notice if it tried: Military control in Iran has, by all accounts, been decentralized to local commanders to limit the effects of U.S. and Israeli decapitation strikes. So there’s no way people in Tehran could order the whole Iranian military to stand down at short notice even if they wanted to.
And of course they don’t want to, because they think Iran is winning. And so do Trump and the people around him, even though they will never admit it.
For terrorism is a strategy of the weak. It’s what extremists do when they lack the ability to achieve their goals through military action or other non-criminal means.
And that’s where Trump and his officials find themselves. They inherited a powerful military (which they are rapidly degrading), but for all its firepower this military lacks the wherewithal to open the Strait of Hormuz to normal traffic. So the Trumpists are gearing up to impose suffering and death on innocent civilians instead, even though this suffering and death will do nothing to achieve America’s objectives.
I don’t know what Trump will do when his deadline passes and the Strait is still closed. He probably doesn’t know either. But he is promising to commit war crimes on a massive scale. And the duty of everyone with any influence who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle is to do all they can to stop him.
Most immediately, military officers should be aware that they have the right and the duty to disobey illegal orders. It’s incredible that we have gotten to this point, especially so quickly, but here we are. You may recall that Admiral Alvin
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Trump threats cause dilemma for US officers: disobey orders or commit war crimes
By Julian Borger | Mon 6 Apr 2026 14.06 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/apr/06/trump-threats-dilemma-for-
officers-disobey-orders-or-commit-war-crimes
“We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” Trump said in prepared remarks that were amplified by the state department’s social media accounts.
There is little debate among legal experts that such an attack on the life-supporting infrastructure for 93 million Iranians would constitute a war crime.
“Such rhetorical statements – if followed through – would amount to the most serious war crimes – and thus the president’s statements place service members in a profoundly challenging situation,” two former judge advocate general (JAG) officers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham wrote on the website Just Security on Monday.
“As former uniformed military lawyers who advised targeting operations, we know the president’s words run counter to decades of legal training of military personnel and risk placing our warfighters on a path of no return.”
They noted that Trump’s boast that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, and the order by his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, to show “no quarter, no mercy” were not just “plainly illegal” but they also represented a rupture from the moral and legal principles that US military personnel had been “trained to follow their entire careers”.
Charli Carpenter, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there were many historical examples of service members questioning orders, refusing to obey, passively disobeying or even intervening to stop war crimes.
She cited as an example US soldiers who refused to take part in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, including a helicopter pilot who threatened to shoot the perpetrators.
In his court martial, the officer who ordered his men to gun down hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, 2nd Lt William Calley, argued that he was only obeying orders, but the court ruled that was no defence as such orders were “palpably illegal”.
The question is whether officers who carried out orders to bomb Iranian power stations and bridges could argue that they did not know it was “palpably illegal”.
When Democratic members of Congress published a video message in November telling US service members, “you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders”, Trump went on Truth Social to accuse them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump has his deal. But this senseless episode has caused him incalculable damage
By Daniel Bates | April 8, 2026
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-has-his-deal-but-this-senseless-e
pisode-has-caused-him-incalculable-damage-4340613
In the end it was the ultimate Taco moment – thank God.
Donald Trump’s decision to call off his apocalyptic strikes on Iran meant he once again lived up to the nickname Wall Street traders have given him: Trump Always Chickens Out.
But my goodness, didn’t we come uncomfortably close to what could have been the start of the Third World War.
Trump had vowed to launch an air assault at 1am UK time on Wednesday morning that would target Iran’s power plants and bridges.
“A whole civilization will die tonight,” the President said on Monday, adding with jaw-dropping glibness: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The President’s U-turn came 90 minutes before the deadline that put the entire world on edge and drew worldwide criticism, with even Pope Leo calling the plans “truly unacceptable”.
The threat of a war crime – the bombing of civilian targets – had sparked the biggest pushback against Trump since 2018, when Pope Francis led the criticism of his separation of migrant families.
In his announcement of the ceasefire, Trump said that there would be a two-week pause in his threat to annihilate the entire Iranian nation.
But really he sounded like a man who desperately wanted it all to be over, saying it was an “honour” to have this long-term problem come close to a resolution.
He claimed that the Iranians agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway which carries 20 per cent of the world’s oil and has been effectively shut down since the conflict began on 28 February.
In statements from senior officials, Iran claimed that it was America that had agreed to its terms, including that it controlled the Strait of Hormuz, all sanctions would be lifted and that it could continue to enrich uranium – a non-starter for the US.
The fact that both sides were so far apart added to the sense of desperation from Trump: can you imagine the Good Friday Agreement being announced only with Tony Blair and the IRA contradicting each other?
With the reality of what was agreed, if anything, unclear, it does appear that we have been brought back from the brink for now.
But this episode has done incalculable damage to America, and Trump.
It isn’t so much that Trump has turned Europe against him – the potential invasion of Greenland did a pretty good job of that – he has likely lost the support of many Iranians too.
It’s one thing to bomb the hated Iranian regime, it’s another to threaten to wipe the entire country off the face of the Earth.
Does Trump really expect Iranians to welcome him as a liberator when he’s to blame for blackouts and hospitals reduced to rubble?
And does anyone expect us to believe him next time he makes such outrageous threats?
At 79 years old and in his second term in the White House, Trump is closer than ever to bringing us the moment we all feared when he first ran for president in 2015.
As he came down a golden escalator in Trump Tower, critics wondered what would happen when you gave control of the nuclear codes to a madman whose idea of strategic thinking is to set his TiVo to record Fox News.
Now we have the answer, and it was shocking.
We are also getting a disturbing picture of how Trump was led to war thanks to reporting in The New York Times which said he is now surrounded by yes-men who do not stand up to his whims.
Only Vice President JD Vance made the case as to why the conflict would be a bad idea, making an eerily accurate prediction about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and rising petrol prices.
As The New York Times reported, US intelligence agencies mocked claims from Israel that the conflict would be quick, the Iranians would rise up against their rulers and that the Islamic theocracy would be replaced.
Trump ignored them and focused on the things that mattered to h
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This Is No TACO: This Is Complete US Strategic Failure.
Trump Agrees To Iran's Victory Conditions.
Donald Trump yesterday showed how few cards the USA had to play in his war of choice, when he went from threatening to destroy the Iranian people, culture and history, to agreeing to a two-week ceasefire and talks based on an Iranian ten-point plan. The details of this plan (see below) amount to a comprehensive US defeat. If this indeed is the end of the war and that Iranian plan is the basis of a deal, it makes this the most pointless war and a complete waste in US history. Iran looks on the verge of emerging stronger, with the ability to generate massive new income, while the US looks, in a word, like a busted flush.
This is no run-of-the-mill TACO. This is a complete US strategic failure.
Here are the key developments:
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-5-this-is-no-tac
o
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 6ixStringJack:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116150413051904167Quote:
Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead. This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS. He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do. This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us. As I said last night, “Now they can have Immunity, later they only get Death!” Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves. That process should soon be starting in that, not only the death of Khamenei but the Country has been, in only one day, very much destroyed and, even, obliterated. The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Now I guess we just wait and see what happens...
Trump was outsmarted by Iran and lost. He fucked everything up.
T
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The Iranians know Trump is a coward
No One Is Intimidated by Trump Anymore
From Iran to the Supreme Court, the president’s attempts to bully both his adversaries and allies are proving increasingly fruitless.
By Ross Rosenfeld | April 7, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/article/208630/trump-iran-supeme-court-not-int
imidated
A quiet fell upon the Supreme Court chamber on Wednesday as Donald Trump arrived and sat in the public gallery with his soon-to-be-dismissed attorney general, Pam Bondi, and White House counsel David Warrington. He was purportedly there, in a presidential first, to witness oral arguments for Trump v. Barbara, a case concerning Trump’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship. In reality, his appearance was the culmination of a weeks-long intimidation effort targeting the justices, during which he lambasted his own appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, as “an embarrassment to their families” and insisted that only “Dumb Judges” would disagree with his position. Now he’d come to the court to stare down any robed figure who might dare oppose him.
Yet none of the Supreme Court justices appeared to even notice, much less care, as they entered the room and sat, never so much as acknowledging Trump’s presence. If the president intimidated anyone, it may have been his own solicitor general, D. John Sauer, whose raspy voice wavered as he began to make specious arguments about the intentions of those who had crafted the Fourteenth Amendment. Evidently, Chief Justice John Roberts was far from convinced. When Sauer contended, “We’re in a new world now … where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen,” Roberts rejoined, “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.” Laughter echoed throughout the chamber.
And there sat Trump. His glare had evidently failed to do the trick. As the justices questioned the ACLU’s Cecilia Wang, the attorney representing the opposition to Trump’s gambit to gut birthright citizenship, he walked out. It was the latest example of what has become a clear trend in his second term as president: No one of consequence is intimidated by him.
Attempts at intimidation—sometimes successful, often failed—have always been part of Trump’s modus operandi, dating back to early in his real estate career. The tale of 100 Central Park South is a telling example. After buying the rent-stabilized building in 1981, Trump menaced the tenants to get them out so that he might raze and replace it. His tactics included threatening them with eviction, ignoring a rat infestation, and shutting off the heat and hot water. Though at one point Trump paid out over half a million dollars to the tenants and agreed to government monitoring, the fight dragged on for decades.
Much of Trump’s intimidation strategy as a businessman—threatening lawsuits and using the media to level attacks—was influenced by his friendship with Roy Cohn, the notoriously pugilistic attorney and Communist-hunter. And Trump often doubles down on this strategy when he’s on the losing end of a fight. After his failed attempt to buy an NFL team in 1981, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the upstart rival USFL in 1983. He tried to use the team and the media coverage he’d garnered as leverage to buy an NFL team in 1984—and failed again. (He would later admit that he had no interest in owning a team filled with “low class, all third-rate players.”) Trump also sued the NFL, claiming it was an illegal monopoly. Here, he won: A jury ultimately awarded him the massive sum of one U.S. dollar. The USFL, bleeding money and exhausted from Trump’s constant feuds, folded in 1986.
But then Trump realized that he could control his public image even more by becoming part of the media. In 2004, he became the host of The Apprentice, a reality-TV competition show that sold the fantasy that Trump was a successful businessman rather than simply the spoiled scion of a real estate empire established by his much savvier father. Falsely claiming to be “the largest real estate dev
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Ignorance and Ignominy
Our Hormuz humiliation was not an accident
Paul Krugman
Apr 08, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ignorance-and-ignominy
So the world’s greatest military power went to war with a poor, medieval theocracy. It was an incredibly uneven match. Here are the GDPs of Iran and the United States in 2024:
Iran: $0.48 trillion
US: $28.75 trillion
Source: World Bank
Yet Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice.
We’ve also destroyed our moral credibility: Trump may have TACOed at the last minute, but he threatened to commit gigantic war crimes — and for all practical purposes, our political and civil institutions gave him permission to do so.
How did this happen? Naturally, the Iranian Minister of War credited divine intervention, declaring that “God deserves all the glory.” His nation, he said, fought with the “protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”
Well, theocrats gonna theocrat.
But I lied. That wasn’t a quote from an Iranian official. That’s what Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed Secretary of War, said while claiming that one of the worst strategic defeats in American history was a great victory.
There will be many analyses by military and strategic experts of the Iran debacle. But let’s not lose sight of the larger picture: We were led to disaster by the boastful ignorance of men like Trump and Hegseth — boastful ignorance made even worse by claims that God supports whatever they want to do.
With men like that running America, major disasters were just a matter of time. I’d like to think that they have been chastened by this debacle, that they have learned something. But I don’t believe that for a minute.
God help us.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Hegseth Accidentally Reveals Big Hole in Trump Victory Claim
Who blinked first? So Iran came to the table because Trump threatened to blow up their civilization, eh? Sorry, that spin is in tatters.
By Greg Sargent | April 8, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/article/208794/hegseth-reveals-hole-trump-vict
ory-claim
Now that Donald Trump has backed off his threat to obliterate a nation of 93 million people, his propagandists are already retconning it into proof of his Solomon-like foresight and wisdom. The new spin is that the war with Iran temporarily ended in a ceasefire precisely because he made this threat, forcing Iran to renegotiate on more favorable terms.
“Iran ultimately understood—their ability to produce, to generate power, to fuel their terrorist regime—was in our hands,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday, in response to questions about Trump’s threat. Hegseth insisted Trump’s vow to eradicate “a whole civilization” persuaded Iran that he could crush their ability to “export energy” and thus end the entire basis for the regime’s existence.
“That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal,’” Hegseth continued. This talking point has gone out widely: GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a top target of Democrats, suggested that due to Trump’s “extreme rhetoric,” the Iranians “understand for once that they need to actually negotiate.”
But there’s a small problem with this spin. It’s that the Iranians were already negotiating with Trump before the war started. Trump largely sabotaged those negotiations, because he was talked into believing the war would be easy and deliver a quick burst of glory. Trump’s approach to the talks made success impossible—deliberately.
As The New York Times’ magnum opus on this reveals, Trump had decided to take the plunge (all that remained uncertain was the timing) weeks before those talks with Iran hit their critical phase. This was partly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked Trump into believing the risks of war were manageable—that strikes could render the Iranian regime too debilitated to close the Strait of Hormuz (which proved disastrously wrong). U.S. intelligence officials disputed Israeli confidence about all this, the Times reports, but Trump brushed off these warnings—because he “appeared to think it would be a very quick war.”
The prewar talks with Iran were doomed because Trump shifted between objectives in a way that ensured that outcome. The core issue was supposed to be ending Iran’s capacity to develop a nuke. But the Times also reveals that Iran was prepared to make meaningful concessions on that front, yet Trump officials effectively decided only regime change was acceptable, ensuring war.
For Hegseth’s story to be true, Iran would have to be more willing to give Trump the concessions he wants than before, due to his mighty threats. But, while the war did badly degrade the Iranian military and kill many senior leaders, here’s what else we know: The regime is still there in more radicalized and brutal form. The strait is being reopened, but as Ben Rhodes notes, the regime’s control over it now appears tighter. The fate of Iran’s nuclear material remains as indeterminate as ever.
Will talks now get Trump a better deal than he might have gotten the first time? Maybe, but Iran seems emboldened by its survival to demand more this time. The points that Trump accepted as the basis for talks appear more friendly to Iran than before.
“Iran is at the table because Trump now appears willing to base negotiations on a wider range of Iranian demands,” Sina Toossi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, told me. He cites Trump’s apparent willingness to entertain total relief from U.S. sanctions, continued control over the strait, and some form of uranium enrichment: “The civilizational threat did not factor into the ceasefire.”
So
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lol @ your fanfic.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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You guys are hilarious....
"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! HE'S GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!!!!!!"
6 HOURS LATER:
"HAHA! TACO TUESDAY TRUMP! WE KNEW THAT PUSSY COWARD WASN'T GONNA DO SHIT!"
You should consider yourselves very lucky that you have a President that allows you to continue being annoying, idiot jagoff assholes to everyone around you since it seems like this is the way you want to continue living your sad, pathetic lives until the very end.
I guess this means we're not going to invoke the 25th Amendment now, huh?
Retard, faggots.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Only Losers Play the Madman
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You guys are hilarious....
"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! HE'S GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!!!!!!"
6 HOURS LATER:
"HAHA! TACO TUESDAY TRUMP! WE KNEW THAT PUSSY COWARD WASN'T GONNA DO SHIT!"
You should consider yourselves very lucky that you have a President that allows you to continue being annoying, idiot jagoff assholes to everyone around you since it seems like this is the way you want to continue living your sad, pathetic lives until the very end.
I guess this means we're not going to invoke the 25th Amendment now, huh?
Retard, faggots.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Does Trump seem crazy? Sure. Credible, not so much.
By David Frum | April 8, 2026, 4:43 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-iran-war-ceasefire/686
736/
The most important thing to understand about the “madman theory” of foreign policy is that it was designed by losers for losers.
The world first heard of the madman theory from a 1978 memoir by President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. According to Haldeman, Nixon said: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” Faced with an otherwise hopeless war in Vietnam, Nixon would pretend to be crazy to intimidate the North Vietnamese into allowing him some face-saving escape.
Nobody executes a madman strategy when he feels that he’s winning. Strong and successful powers emphasize consistency and predictability. So do powers that hope to be seen as strong and successful. When China’s foreign minister speaks to the world, he uses language such as “China will be a reliable force for stability” and China “is providing the greatest certainty in this uncertain world.” He understands that true power does not need to boast or yell.
Those who feel their power ebbing, however, may bluster and bellow. Over the seven weeks of his Iran war so far, Donald Trump has discovered that no amount of the force at his disposal will calm world energy markets or boost his sagging poll numbers. He has tried a double strategy of promising imminent breakthroughs in negotiations while posting ever more violent threats on social media to ostensibly accelerate those negotiations. But if this was a madman strategy, it signally failed to gain the advantage that he sought. Everyone could see that Trump wanted a deal more than his Iranian counterparts did. A good rule of thumb is that the side that wants a deal more is the side that is losing.
The madman strategy is for not-crazy leaders caught in adverse predicaments. It’s a strategy of deception. The madman strategist pretends to be willing to do things that he’s not really willing to do. This approach relies on credibility: Rivals must be able to take the threat of extreme action seriously.
Trump’s problems with this strategy are ironic. Foreign leaders are surely willing to believe that Trump is “crazy” in the sense that he is detached from reality. They have seen him miscalculate risk and bungle all kinds of projects, such as his trade wars with China and his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But they also know that when push really comes to shove, Trump will flinch. TACO has become, like NATO, an acronym so familiar that it no longer needs spelling out.
The Iranians just executed the most dramatic TACO event in history. Trump threatened to annihilate their entire civilization if they didn’t agree to his demands to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran defied the threat—and now Trump has apparently conceded control over the strait and the right to impose tolls on the ships that navigate it. On the point in which Trump tried hardest to terrorize, the Iranians aptly guessed that he was bluffing.
Trump has taught the world that he
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Iran Deal By Obama:
• Strait of Hormuz open for free
• Iran limits Uranium enrichment
• Iran agrees to make no nuclear weapons
• Iran allows Int'l inspectors to ensure compliance
• Inspectors confirm Iran's full compliance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal
Iran Ceasefire By Trump:
• Strait of Hormuz closed, only open for $2M Per Ship
• Iran makes no guarantee of limit on uranium enrichment
• Iran makes no guarantee of no nuclear weapons
• Iran makes no guarantee to allow Int'l inspectors
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/08/nx-s1-5771492/iran-war-goals-unmet-ceas
efire-strait-hormuz-trump
MAGA:
Trump Playing 5D Chess!
Art Of The Deal!!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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You're such a fucking loser dude.
America hates you more than you hate America.
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Quote:You act this way because you swallowed Trump's blue pill.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're such a fucking loser dude.
America hates you more than you hate America.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Quote:The Next MAGA Matrix Dilemma Has Arrived
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
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, r
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The only people swallowing anything here is all that NeoCon cock you and Ted were sucking on leading up to the 2024 election.
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Losing the World's Respect
The Iran War looks like a tipping point
Apr 10, 2026
All around the world, big, strong men with tears in their eyes are coming up to Donald Trump and saying, “Sir, you’re a loser.”
Something has palpably changed in the world in the last few days.
As regular watchers of Donald Trump know, Trump has a thing about insisting that people treat him with immense respect — the big, strong men with tears in their eyes thing, “Sir” stories. And in particular about believing that the world despised America under Joe Biden and respects it now under his leadership, which was never true either in the first part or the second.
But it is true that until quite recently, many people in the world at least felt obliged to pretend to respect Trump, felt obliged to flatter him, to stifle the negative feelings that they were having about the course of the United States under current management. And maybe Trump actually took these kinds of coerced professions of respect as reality. But in the last few days, suddenly the masks are off.
Volodymyr Zelensky just yesterday tweeted out a part of an interview that he gave in which he said, among other things, “In my view, Russia played the Americans again.”
So it was just saying, basically, that Trump is working with the Russians, which obviously he’s known and has surely thought for a long, long time. But to say it that openly is something new.
Zelensky — not a big, strong man — but Zelensky is a tough guy. Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of Britain is, alas, not. But also Starmer just in a statement said that we’re tired of a world in which, I’ll quote, “bills go up or down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump.” Equivalence, Trump and Putin in the same sentence, in the same breath, that’s pretty stiff stuff.
And Starmer has been notable in trying to preserve the special relationship, avoid offending Trump, trying to make him get a few points off the tariff rate, whatever. But now Starmer is pretty much openly saying, you know, you are the problem and we don’t trust you.
What’s this about? Well, obviously, the United States went to war with a fourth-rate power, Iran, and lost. Exactly how that plays out, we don’t know. But it was truly impressive how poorly the United States military and US strategic thinking has played out here.
The United States has also proved both temperamental and weak, lashing out at our erstwhile allies and veering between threats of war crimes and then what looks a whole lot like abject surrender.
So the world no longer either fears or trusts us. It turns out that our military might is not what it was cracked up to be, and our reliability is essentially zero at this point. We can’t count on the United States to do anything that it has promised. It’s a world in which the hegemon has basically gone AWOL. So that’s a big thing.
There’s another story that I think is important, which has kind of been overshadowed by the debacle in Iran: the bigger ongoing war, Ukraine-Russia, is not going well for Russia. It is, if anything, tilting increasingly in Ukraine’s favor. Now, what’s interesting about that? Why is that relevant?
Trump is basically on the side of Putin. He’s been unwilling and probably unable to just openly support Russia, but has effectively pulled all aid from Ukraine. There’s essentially no money, no military aid, no economic aid flowing from the US to Ukraine anymore — it’s all on the Europeans. The Europeans have still been buying some U.S. weapons and transferring them to Ukraine, but that’s been largely choked off. And I think the assumption was that Ukraine would be in grave danger, would perhaps collapse without American support.
Not happening. What’s actually happening is that Ukraine appears to be gaining the upper hand in the drone war, which is what this war is mostly about. And Ukraine’s success in adapting to modern warfare has been so great that now it looks like there are a significant number of Ukrainian drones and, to some extent, maybe personnel already deployed i
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Iran Could Be America’s Next Vietnam
By Graeme Wood | April 11, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/iran-vietnam-war-invasion/68
6769/
The prediction that Iran will be America’s next Vietnam—a moral catastrophe, an abyss into which money and lives have been pitched, with the sole effect of weakening the United States and heartening its enemies—is already in general circulation among Americans. A few days ago, the Iranian embassy in Hanoi joined the doomsaying. Its X account featured an AI-generated image of a mouth-breathing American GI being lectured to by a smiling Vietnamese soldier in Saigon on April 30, 1975. “We thought that after the Vietnam War, you would never invade any country again,” the soldier says. “It seems that after 50 years you have forgotten that devastating defeat.”
Fifty years before 1975 was 1925. Why not show present-day Vietnam? Probably because it would be a nightmarish scene, not for an American but for a Vietnamese Communist or, for that matter, for a present-day Iranian hard-liner. Modern Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) is the site of a total victory for market economics, global trade, and consumer culture. American products compete without stigma: You can get a Vietnamese-style coffee at Starbucks. In 2023, Vietnam entered into a comprehensive strategic partnership with the United States, an official diplomatic designation for the highest level of cooperation. Vietnam is not a democracy, and its government would happily forget Western notions of human rights and civil liberties. But it does not hate America—which is why, to invoke the Vietnam parallel, Iran has to pretend that the past 50 years went rather differently.
At this point, Iran as America’s next Vietnam sounds less like a curse than like a relatively optimistic scenario for all involved. Here is the course of events:
1. The United States attacks and escalates when an adversary refuses to surrender.
2. The United States grows stymied and confused that this adversary persists, despite devastation.
3. The United States leaves in a huff, and in denial about having lost the war.
4. The attacked country celebrates its heroic resistance—but soon realizes that it has been reduced to rubble.
The Iranian case tracks the Vietnamese one, in mercifully abbreviated form—five weeks rather than two decades—at least up through the second step. Steps 3 and 4 might be coming. If they do, once the afterglow of defeating America fades, Iran’s best hope will be to speed-run the Vietnamese path from victory to prosperity, and even to pro-Americanism.
I asked Vietnam experts how a country spoiled for reasons to hate America eventually came to have such fondness for it—and whether Iran, now in a self-congratulatory phase, might have anything in common with Vietnam after their respective wars. K. W. Taylor, a historian at Cornell, told me that at least one aspect of the postwar situations already matches. “In Vietnam,” Taylor said, “you had a very autocratic authoritarian regime, and that aspect of it just strengthened as a result of the war.” Iran, according to most analysis, is more tightly controlled by authoritarian hard-liners than it was before the war. When supposed reformers such as ex–Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif have spoken up meekly to suggest compromise, the regime has threatened to arrest them.
After the fall of Saigon, normalization with the United States took another 20 years. That is long enough for a generation to pass. But Taylor stressed that the very hard-liners who had espoused anti-American ideology were seeking reconciliation with the United States as early as the late 1970s. “Vietnam moved straight to fighting another war, this time with China and Cambodia,” Taylor said. “Vietnam was open to normalization much earlier, but the United States bet on China.” The intervening two decades were marked by isolation, poverty, and eventual abandonment by Vietnam’s main remaining patron, the Soviet Union.
“Vietnam had the support of China and the Soviet Union during
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The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
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Quote:Team Trump gets rich while Americans pay for war
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only news that matters today is how your party is destroying the reputation of one of its own as a sacrifice for maintaining power in California.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
During the Korean War, Lyndon B. Johnson aggressively investigated military spending. Today, similar oversight is conspicuously absent.
By Casey Michel | April 6, 2026
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/trump-corrupt
-casey-michel-lbj-talarcio-watchdog-22187479.php
Decades ago, with the Korean War raging, Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to know just how much money was being spent in America’s latest round of fighting and just who was spending it. As chair of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, Johnson corralled officials and defense firms alike, trying to determine how efficient spending was. He was, as Newsweek dubbed him, America’s “Watchdog-in-Chief.”
How times have changed. In 2026, the United States is once more at war abroad, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to fight a distant foe. But this time we lack rigorous oversight, energetic Senate committees and, by all appearances, any serious efforts to check whether or how America’s defense expenditures are being spent for American interests. Instead of a watchdog, we have Americans watching how officials and their family members have turned the American defense sector into an opportunity to profit — and have opened up new spigots of corruption in the process.
Just look at some of the examples that spilled out recently. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley tried to “make a big investment in major defense companies” in the weeks leading up to the war in Iran. We’re not talking pocket change. As the report detailed, this was a potential “multimillion-dollar investment” in America’s defense sector — all for someone who had an inside idea whether war was coming or not.
Hegseth has denied any involvement in the attempted investment. But he is hardly alone when it comes to administration officials and their inner circles profiting from these kinds of networks. A few months ago, we learned that a venture capital firm linked to Donald Trump Jr., 1789 Capital, had backed companies that landed tens of millions of dollars in contracts from his father’s administration. One start-up backed by Trump Jr.’s firm even received a $620 million loan from the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital — reportedly the largest loan that office had ever provided.
Trump Jr. has admitted that he and the firm “understand what the administration wants to do, because we helped craft some of the messaging.” He has claimed that his firm is dedicated to something called “patriotic capitalism.” Given the tangled finances — and the clear mixing of public and private interests — another term is more appropriate: corruption.
These are but two examples, but the list runs on and on. There’s Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and envoy for Iran negotiations, who has taken in billions of dollars from Iran’s foes in recent years — including from Saudi Arabia, who directly lobbied the administration to wage its war in Iran. There’s even Trump himself, who is the “chief crypto advocate” for a crypto firm controlled by his family that took in hundreds of millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates, an unprecedented case of a foreign dictatorship directly bankrolling a sitting president — and opening up all kinds of national security concerns in the process.
At a certain point, the list becomes overwhelming. But it also opens a door for potential reformers, for future campaigners and for any and all trying to highlight just how far this rot of corruption has seeped into Washington — and how we’re all now beginning to pay a price for it. Because corruption isn’t simply about personal enrichment or how public officials can steer po
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Shut the fuck up.
America is finished with you Leftoid retards.
--------------------------------------------------
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March 12th:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well... looks like it's time to park an aircraft carrier or two over there.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/12/trump-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz.html
Just put me on the payroll dude.
We could have been 1 month ahead on the war schedule if I were calling the shots.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:The Pope knows that Trump is evil personified and will burn in hell for what he did as President:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.
America is finished with you Leftoid retards.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Pope Leo tells NBC News he has 'no fear' after Trump labels him 'weak' and 'terrible' in feud over Iran war
The first American pontiff vowed Monday to keep up his appeals for peace, which he said were rooted in the gospel.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-not-big-fan-w
eak-terrible-pope-leo-rcna331461
The American Trumptards cannot wrap their minds around the concept of forbidden behavior. They see sin and say, "Why can't I do what I want? Isn't doing what is pleasurable without limits the very basis of America's freedom?" The Pope is so unfair to Trumptards when he lectures them on the incomprehensible and abstract (to Trumptards) concept of limits required for decency, which Trumptards violate habitually.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, Trump, and Pete Hegseth have no clue about their incompetence at warfare. To get them to understand how hopelessly inadequate they are for useful work is impossible:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
March 12th:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well... looks like it's time to park an aircraft carrier or two over there.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/12/trump-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz.html
Just put me on the payroll dude.
We could have been 1 month ahead on the war schedule if I were calling the shots.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The Fundamental, Misunderstood Strength of America’s Military
By Myke Cole | April 13, 2026
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/military-pete-hegseth-trum
p-bragging-problem.html
Our armed forces are now helmed by a secretary of defense whose ideology has directly framed American military power in the term of a “crusade.” He exemplifies this ethos with his pride in his Jerusalem cross tattoo, and his tattoo of the Latin Deus Vult (“God wills it”), both symbols of Crusader power that have no place in our military. This is coupled with Trump’s promises to “bomb them into the Stone Ages, where they belong,” and otherwise threatening to target civilian infrastructure even though such strikes could be construed as war crimes. Trump’s juvenile, trollish renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is the icing on this self-conscious cake. Or, it would be if we didn’t have so many cringe-inducing comments from Hegseth, such as: “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” His famous dressing-down of his senior staff, actual quiet professionals, should be considered at some length:
"We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters. … You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society."
This is not how American senior military leaders are trained to talk.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yhis has got to be the most counterproductive war in US history.
"Before“ ... that is, before Netwnyahu blackmailed Trump into starting a war with Iran ... Iran had promised not to build a nuclear weapon, it was being inspected by the IAEA, oil was flowing freely thru the Straits and paid for in dollars, the Gulf States were positioned as glitzy (if totally artificial and corrupt) centers of petrodollar finance, and Israel was able to continue its aggressive expansion.
Now Trump and Netanyahu are finding out that Iran is holding the biggest cards... oil shipment, the world economy, and the petrodollar.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Trump lambasts Pope Leo XIV, extending feud over Iran war with first American pontiff
https://apnews.com/article/trump-pope-leo-xiv-02f6b4554ea4b83af02af159
87ae1f2d
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Quote:Look who is blocking the Strait of Hormuz now:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Now Trump and Netanyahu are finding out that Iran is holding the biggest cards... oil shipment, the world economy, and the petrodollar.
Trump says U.S. Navy will blockade Strait of Hormuz
The war against Iran: a timeline.
Mar 3: "We won the war."
Mar 7: "We defeated Iran."
Mar 9: "We must attack Iran." "The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully."
Mar 12: "We did win, but we haven't won completely yet."
Mar 13: "We won the war."
Mar 14: "Please help us."
Mar 15: "If you don't help us, I will certainly remember it."
Mar 16: "Actually, we don't need any help at all."
. . . . . . "I was just testing to see who's listening to me."
. . . . . . "If NATO doesn't help, they will suffer something very bad."
Mar 17: "We neither need nor want NATO's help."
. . . . . . "I don't need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO."
Mar 18: "Our allies must cooperate in reopening the Strait of Hormuz."
Mar 19: "US allies need to get a grip -step up and help open the Strait of Hormuz"
Mar 20: "NATO are cowards."
Mar 21: "We don't use it, we don't need to open it."
Mar 22: "This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours." "Iran is Dead"
Mar 23: "We are giving them more time.'
Mar 24: "The war is nearing its end."
Mar 25: "We are still negotiating."
Mar 26: "Iran is begging for peace. They gave us a gift. We will give them more time."
Mar 27: "Talks with Iran are going very well"
Mar 28: "War will be over soon"
Mar 29: "Maybe we take Kharg island, maybe we don't."
Mar 30: "Open the Strait or we will obliterate all energy infrastructure and oil wells"
Mar 31: "We don't need the strait, we got plenty of oil. Get it yourself UK."
Apr 1: "War will be over in two to three weeks"
Apr 4: "Iran has 48 hours or I'll reign down hell"
Apr 5: "Praise be to Allah! Open the fucking straight!"
. . .
Apr 13: Strait blockade "It's going to be all or none, and that's the way it is."
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-says-u-s-navy-will-blockade-s
trait-of-hormuz-after-ceasefire-talks-end-without-agreement
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 SIGNYM:
Yhis has got to be the most counterproductive war in US history.
"Before“ ... that is, before Netwnyahu blackmailed Trump into starting a war with Iran ... Iran had promised not to build a nuclear weapon, it was being inspected by the IAEA, oil was flowing freely thru the Straits and paid for in dollars, the Gulf States were positioned as glitzy (if totally artificial and corrupt) centers of petrodollar finance, and Israel was able to continue its aggressive expansion.
Now Trump and Netanyahu are finding out that Iran is holding the biggest cards... oil shipment, the world economy, and the petrodollar.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Why? Because you're paying more in gas for a month?
Grow up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Yhis has got to be the most counterproductive war in US history.
"Before“ ... that is, before Netwnyahu blackmailed Trump into starting a war with Iran ... Iran had promised not to build a nuclear weapon, it was being inspected by the IAEA, oil was flowing freely thru the Straits and paid for in dollars, the Gulf States were positioned as glitzy (if totally artificial and corrupt) centers of petrodollar finance, and Israel was able to continue its aggressive expansion.
Now Trump and Netanyahu are finding out that Iran is holding the biggest cards... oil shipment, the world economy, and the petrodollar.
SIX:
Why? Because you're paying more in gas for a month?
Grow up.
No, but you putting words in my mouth is what THUGR does. Thanks for that.
Do you need me to explain my post?
Iran was NOT a terror-supporting state. That's Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
As part of the JCPOA, and also bc of a religious prohibition issued by the (murdered) Ayatollah, Iran was not going to build a nuclear weapon. Now they probably will.
Thanks to the UNITED STATES and ISRAEL launching a war against Iran, the Law of the Seas no longer applies to the Straits of Hormuz. Iran isn't breaking any laws or treaties by taking control.
Our Muslim "allies" in the region - the terrorist-funding corrupt gulf monarchies - are unable to sell oil for dollars. They must now use renminbi. Iran is also collecting a toll in renminbi. This all chips away at the petrodollar.
Russia is making lots of $$, as are our oil companies. But we will be lacking fertilizer, helium, and other basic products which will add to overall inflation.
This is costing us money. And it's POINTLESS. Trump's constantly- shifting narrative, our "goals" and status, is like the Wheel of Fortune.
Worse than being pointless, it's counterproductive. It exposes Trump's brainlessness and the failure of our entire political system to allow our policy to go so far off the rails.
It exposes our duplicity. Again: We attack during "negotiations", so why should anyone negotiate with us?
It chips away at our currency, and creating scarcity in fundamental products.
It's starving Treasuries, banks, and investment firms of the flow of dollars from the ME, increasing the risk of financial collapse.
All of this could be powered thru if we had a military "solution" but I don't think we do.
Which means it exposes our fundamental strategic weakness: We can't protect our "friends" in the ME, or save our "allies" in Europe and the far East.
I'm willing to sacrifice if I see some good coming out if it. But I don't.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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I don't believe anything you just posted.
What now?
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I don't believe anything you just posted.
What now?
--------------------------------------------------
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You should become better informed?
Find better sources?
I've mentioned my sources more than once. American military men with ME experience. Military analysts. Former spooks. Ambassadors with long histories of. Financial advisors.
Russians. Americans. Iranians. Saudis. Chinese. They don't all say exactly the same thing but they do tend to coalesce around the same outlook.
I could post link after link but I doubt that you would listen or read, and even if you did you wouldn't accept what they had to say.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Yup.
They all coalesce around a globalist vision of the world that we'd been living under for more than half a century that is crumbling all around them.
They don't matter anymore.
At the end of the day, nobody likes change. But the rich, powerful and elite really hate change.
And they're all crying about it.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.
They all coalesce around a globalist vision of the world that we'd been living under for more than half a century that is crumbling all around them.
They don't matter anymore.
At the end of the day, nobody likes change. But the rich, powerful and elite really hate change.
And they're all crying about it.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
No.
They don't.
But as usual you ASS U ME you know what they're saying.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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That's a joke BTW.
When you assume you make an ASS out of U and ME.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Well, anyway, I have a few moments.
What most of the analysts say is that we're seeing the beginning of the end of the American Empire. Unipolar moment. Hegemony. Whatever you call it.
Whether you think that's good for Americans or bad for Americans can be debated.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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But I think I see your concern. If there's no Donald Trump, does that mean we revert back to transnationalism? One -worldism?
I think that's a false dilemma. Russia and Iran (so far) have managed to reassert their sovereignty after having been part of the globalist system. Really, that was helped alongside by being sanctioned by the western world, especially western banks. (China I think is a little different. Needs some thought.)
I'm more concerned that engaging in STUPID nationalism ... wasting time and resources trying to piss on and bully the rest of the world... is going to create such a bad experience that ppl will jump right back into transnationalism bc it seems like the better choice.
OTOH maybe by being such an a-hole, The Donald will get the rest of the world to sanction US. Refuse our currency. THAT would force us to stand on our own feet instead of everybody else's. So maybe in a backwards way that's the point?
MAGA!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asks: Will Trump nuke Iran? Will Benjamin Netanyahu?
What once seemed preposterous is now a palpable possibility.
https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/will-trump-nuke-iran/
When Trump, echoing Gen. Curtis LeMay’s 1965 threat toward North Vietnam, threatened to “obliterate” Iran and bomb it “back into the Stone Age”—rhetoric repeated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—he wasn’t just posturing. In fact he was signaling that in an administration which respects no norms, mushroom clouds may be acceptable.
The “how” and “when” remain open questions, but if the ceasefire ceases to hold the crosshairs are likely fixed on the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant or, just as probably, Isfahan, where Iran’s fissile material was allegedly transferred before the June 2025 attack. Buried deep beneath a mountain of solid rock, Fordow is the nuclear facility that Trump had earlier claimed to have “obliterated.”
The math of escalation is inexorable: Iran reportedly holds roughly 450 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium. While a rudimentary gun-type nuclear weapon would be assembled using 80-100 kilograms of this material, a sophisticated implosion-type bomb needs 20-25 kilograms of uranium enriched to contain 90 percent of the uranium 235 isotope, a process requiring only some weeks. If Iran has mastered the complex engineering required for the latter, its current reserves represent a potential arsenal of eight to 10 nuclear warheads.
The game hinges on the upgrade. Iran can push its stockpile to weapons-grade in a matter of weeks. Conventional “bunker busters” like the GBU-57 have already failed; 14 were dropped on Fordow and Natanz in 2025, yet the heart of the program kept beating. To achieve absolute destruction, the hammer would have to be nuclear.
If the United States chooses to go nuclear in Iran, the Pentagon’s solution would likely be an earth-penetrating warhead like the B61-11 or the newly deployed B61-12. Washington would frame such a strike not as a Hiroshima-style apocalypse but as a “clinical necessity”—a tactical operation designed to kill hundreds rather than tens of thousands.
But Iran will not surrender quietly and would retaliate with everything it has. A lucky strike from a sophisticated missile could sink an American aircraft carrier; a coordinated swarm of drones and missiles could turn major Arab oil terminals into pillars of fire. At that point, the “clinical” experiment could end, and the apocalypse might begin as the United States reaches for its next nuclear target.
Even for a man who finds gratification in the suffering of others—who celebrated the recent destruction of Iran’s biggest bridge followed by cars plummeting down—Trump’s nuclear ambitions are constrained by American electoral politics and the upcoming November elections, a potentially hostile public reaction, and a somewhat reluctant military.
For now, America and Israel are operating in lockstep. They reportedly executed coordinated strikes on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant—which has nothing to do with bomb-making—on March 18 and April 4. These were presumably “signaling strikes” since they destroyed only an auxiliary building and killed a single guard. Their intent was clear—even if the endgame is not. The message has been received: In coordination with the Israeli Defence Forces, over 200 high-level Russian technicians have already evacuated Bushehr, leaving behind only a skeleton crew to manage a potential emergency shutdown.
But “signaling” near a live reactor is a high-stakes gamble with an unclear ultimate purpose. While the plant continues to feed the grid, a direct hit on its containment dome would trigger a radiological catastrophe far exceeding that of Chernobyl or Fukushima. With 70-80 tons of uranium dioxide in its core and a massive inventory of spent fuel lying in nearby cooling ponds, a breach would shroud the Persian Gulf with a lethal miasma of radioiodine and cesium-137. This wouldn’t just be a strike against a regime;
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Trump’s decision to counter Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by blockading the Strait of Hormuz surely adds to the perception that relying on U.S. oil and LNG isn’t safe. Who can guarantee that an erratic America won’t try to weaponize other countries’ dependence on U.S. energy?
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/chinese-electrotech-is-the-big-winn
er
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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