Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187782
PAGE 47 of 48
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Hegseth had just given the military an "open invitation to commit war crimes."
"No matter what, President [Donald] Trump and I will have your back when tough decisions are made," Hegseth said during his speech. "Especially decisions made in a split second in the heat of battle. No matter what. No matter if it's the right decision or the wrong decision. If it's made by the right person or the wrong person. For the right reasons or the wrong reasons. Your hands are untied. No matter what, we will have your back."
Former Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling voiced alarm over Pete Hegseth’s assurance that he and President Trump would support troops’ split-second battlefield decisions ‘no matter what.’ Speaking on the 'Bulwark Takes' podcast, Hertling said such remarks could be interpreted as disregarding legal implications and highlighted past cases where individuals accused of killing civilians were released. He warned that this approach would undermine discipline within the ranks and increase national security risks.
"And we've seen that in a couple of situations so far in this administration, where ... war criminals, people who murdered civilians, were allowed to go free and were paroled."
https://www.rawstory.com/pete-hegseth-2676964223/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Why aren't you in prison for murdering all those Vietnamese women and children?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand
By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html
On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.
While the historical circumstances and issues are different today, the house is once again divided against itself. The nation is at a critical crossroads and faces a similar dilemma: can the social, cultural, and political chasm that emerged between Red and Blue America be repaired? Can the Union be saved or will the country continue to separate politically and ideologically, if not geographically, into two sharply opposed societies whose core values, beliefs, and identities are incommensurate and irreconcilable? Is the U.S. entering a prolonged period of social upheaval and political conflict, a kind of cold civil war, between and within Red and Blue states that leaves the country increasingly fragmented and politically dysfunctional?
While many sources contributed to this division, including the rise of neoliberalism and extreme income and wealth inequality, social media algorithms that produce incendiary content designed to addict users, and a far-right media ecosystem that disseminates socially corrosive and divisive propaganda, the primary issue driving national politics in the U.S. today is demographic: the racial restructuring of U.S. society, the browning of America.
This process began with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924 that significantly reduced immigration and heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe to ensure the continued dominance of the white majority.
In the last few decades, Republican Party politics has largely been aimed at cutting taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and reversing this demographic trend, at re-establishing racial and gender hierarchies, in rolling back the civil rights gains of Black Americans and other minorities over the past half century. In addition to an agenda of deregulation and privatization, the party has sought to eliminate the social progress achieved by New Deal and Great Society programs and restore the racial, gender, and class relations of an idealized and fictionalized past.
To achieve this, Trump and his MAGA allies have exploited ambiguous legislation and anti-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution. The demographic and geographic distribution of the electorate gives the Republican Party a structural advantage because seats in the U.S. Senate are apportioned equally among the states, regardless of population. In this way, smaller and less populated states, which are typically more rural and conservative, are disproportionately represented. This advantage is then transferred to presidential elections through the Electoral College, so that California’s nearly 40 million residents have the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming’s nearly 600 thousand.
Other anti-majoritarian and undemocratic features of the U.S. political system include the practice of extreme racial and partisan gerrymandering, which divides voters into state legislative and congressional districts that favor one political party, the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate that enables a minority of senators to exercise veto power over most legislation, and the Supreme Court, which currently has three justices who were nominated by a president (Trump) who lost the popular vote and were confirmed by narrow margins by Republican senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population.
Majoritarian democracy was further eroded by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in
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Trump clears way for companies to dodge taxes in havens like Malta, Bermuda, and Cyprus
By Jesse Drucker and Dylan Freedman
May 29, 2026
The New York Times reports:
A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.
A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.
Tax havens became more appealing after President Trump signed an order on his first day back in office withdrawing the United States from a 13-year international effort to end such schemes. The effort led dozens of countries to impose a minimum corporate tax and rules for pursuing companies using tax havens. After House Republicans passed legislation last year targeting some of those countries with a new tax, international officials agreed to exempt U.S. companies from much of the crackdown.
American Express avoided paying $423 million in taxes last year using the island of Jersey. PayPal trimmed its taxes by nearly half during 2025 thanks to its units in Singapore. Stanley Black & Decker cut its bill by $27 million — nearly one-third — using the island of Cyprus.
A favorite destination was the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, where Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical giant, has claimed all its global profits were earned by a subsidiary with no employees. Malta helped the company cut its tax bill by $336 million last year, the filings show.
Companies making similar moves spanned nearly every sector of the economy: Walmart and Uber; Mastercard and Pepsi; Crocs and Merck; Honeywell and Cigna. To put the $40 billion in taxes they avoided in perspective, it would be enough to triple the annual budget of the Federal Aviation Administration or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. [Continue reading…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/economy/offshore-tax-haven
s-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mFA.Euhg.uOz6XnAdIugP
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Or. If we're going to be honest about it...
This has been happening to Americans no matter who was in office since before I was fucking born.
You're only reporting on it now because you hate the guy running the show.
Take all your hypocrisy and bounce on it, faggot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand
By John Ambrosio | Friday, May 29, 2026 4:00AM
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/05/a-house-divided-against-
itself-cannot-stand.html
On June 16, 1858 in his House Divided speech, Abraham Lincoln declared that the government “could not endure permanently as half slave and half free” and would eventually become “all one thing or all the other.” Addressing the Illinois Republican State Convention, he argued that the deep and intensifying division over slavery threatened to destroy the Union.
John is writing about the Death of the Democratic Party.
He's not wrong. He's just a year and a half late with that prediction is all.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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How Do We Know the China Summit Was a Failure? Because Trump Did It.
Everything he does on the world stage is disastrous, and the U.S. is reviled globally. How much longer will some idiots believe this “Art of the Deal” garbage?
Michael Tomasky / May 15, 2026 / 12:21 p.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/210522/china-summit-failure-iran-jinping
Donald Trump says China agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing. He crowed about it on Fox News Thursday night. But funny thing: A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked specifically about the jet deal after Trump spoke, and he said nothing about any such agreement. Wanna take bets on whether it actually happened?
Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.
And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.
• Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.
• Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.
• The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.
• Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?
• How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?
• U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”
• And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world coul
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The Real—and Deeply Corrupt—Reason Trump Is After E. Jean Carroll
Actually, it’s not reason, singular. It’s reasons, plural. And there are 88.3 million of them.
Michael Tomasky / May 29, 2026 / 11:04 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/211110/trump-e-jean-carroll-justice-depar
tment-corrupt
CNN originally reported late in the day Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll.
This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.
It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.
That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding,” the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)
If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for “defendant-appellant”: Todd Blanche.
This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.
Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.
So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.
Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this sho
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Meet the Press | May 31, 2026
Mike Pence says 2nd Trump term ‘departed’ from ‘conservative agenda’: Full interview
Former Vice President Mike Pence tells Meet the Press he believes the “populist right” is pushing President Trump away from the conservative agenda.
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/mike-pence-says-2nd-trump
-term-departed-from-conservative-agenda-full-interview-264240709752
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:You have no desire to pay income taxes. Nor does Trump:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
Was Trump illegally an author of the tax agreement giving him and his family immunity from audits?
May 31, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-irs-lawsuit-deal.
html
The New York Times reports:
The tax immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million.
That fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected — starting in about 2010. He justified the refund by declaring huge business losses, including on his tower in Chicago.
Early in Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the matter was put on hold, but it came back to life before he left office.
More recently, the company had entered settlement talks with the agency, laying the groundwork for a potential resolution, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Now, it seemed, the audit would vanish.
Acting as a cheerleader for the overall plan, including the tax deal, was Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s top outside legal adviser who has been close to the president for about a decade, both when he was in and out of office.
Mr. Epshteyn played a significant role in moving the proposals forward, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, discussing the issue with Mr. Trump and circulating drafts of the tax agreement to Trump advisers.
While the origins of the tax maneuver remain somewhat obscure, the Justice Department began to assess the proposal about a week before Judge William’s May 20 deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. One of the questions raised was whether giving the Trumps protection against I.R.S. scrutiny would run afoul of a law barring the tax agency from dropping audits at the direction of the president or his aides.
The tax proposal did not end up appearing in the initial document that declared the lawsuit resolved and described the details of the compensation fund. That document was signed by the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, Stanley Woodward Jr., who had worked with Mr. Blanche on Mr. Trump’s defense team and represented several of the president’s close aides in various investigations.
In a curious twist, the tax addendum was posted, without fanfare, on the Justice Department’s website one day after the terms of the main agreement were released. It was a murky piece of writing, full of long sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and the Trumpian use of words in capital letters. Only Mr. Blanche, and no one from the I.R.S., signed it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Pogroms, American Style
Paul Krugman / Jun 1, 2026 at 7:20 AM
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pogroms-american-style
There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.
If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.
To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”
As the article explains,
For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.
According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,
has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee
So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:
Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.
So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?
Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.
We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.
Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.
According to one detainee, a guard told him that
It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.
Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurat
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Why Did Donald Trump Get So Suddenly Shy?
As his signature efforts falter, the president is pleading with his critics to pipe down and pay less attention.
By David A. Graham | June 1, 2026, 5:59 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-iran-kennedy-cen
ter-weaponization-fund/687395/
For once in his life, Donald Trump wishes he was getting less attention.
“Iran really wants to make a deal, and it will be a good one for the U.S.A. and those that are with us,” the president posted this morning at 1:02. “But don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”
The first part of the post is wrong. Weeks of stalled negotiations indicate that the Iranian regime is in no rush to reach an agreement—and this morning, Tehran said it was pulling out of talks and would completely block the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally. The United States, Iran, and Israel all launched strikes today.
Trump’s puffery and prevarication about the war are not new, but the second part of the post is more illuminating about his approach to governance. The president brings an odd combination of authoritarianism and hypersensitivity to the job. On the one hand, he wants to start, fight, and resolve wars without having to answer to Congress or the American people for it. On the other hand, he gets easily distracted and upset by their criticism.
The president’s agitation about pushback from Republicans is perplexing. As I wrote last week, recent primaries show that Trump’s iron grip on the GOP appears to be strengthening, even as the American public further sours on him. (One caveat is that Trump’s conquests of congressional Republican incumbents create a clique of legislators not beholden to him and possibly eager for payback.) Yet he seems very reactive to GOP commentary. Last weekend, he seemed to back off a rumored deal with Iran after attacks from hawkish allies including Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Now he’s fretting about public criticism again.
Members of Congress will always criticize a war that’s going poorly eventually, but Trump could have shored up support among loyal Republicans (and, to some extent, the public) had he sought congressional authorization or made a case for war to the American people. He declined because it was easier not to bother, but the vocal opposition to the war now is a reminder of how checks and balances can be a political benefit to a president, not just a restraint. The pushback hasn’t manifested in any kind of action—Republican leaders in Congress have so far abdicated their right to be involved—but Trump is nonetheless upset that lawmakers are exercising their right to free speech.
Trump wants them to pipe down and go away. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end - It always does!” he wrote in the same post. The past few days alone have offered ample reasons to doubt that. The Trump administration took over planning for the nation’s 250th birthday, installed poorly qualified commissars, and the result—as my colleague David Frum wrote yesterday—is a fiasco. The lineup for a splashy concert turned out to be a mix of has-beens and retreads, and even then many of them pulled out, leading Trump to say this weekend that he may pull the plug and just host a political rally instead.
Over the weekend, Trump also saw a blow to his planned Kennedy Center takeover. He promised that his overhaul of (and addition of his own name to) the arts institution would make it stronger. A few months later, as his plan failed, he announced his intention to shutter the center for two years. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump had to remove his name and couldn’t close the cent
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Two Senators Just Blew Up Trump’s Boat-Strike Justifications
Sens. Kaine and Paul say that the military’s targeting criteria don’t include the presence of drugs or arms.
By John Haltiwanger | June 2, 2026, 4:05 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/02/kaine-paul-rubio-trump-drug-boat-
strike-justification-latin-america/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921
For months, the Trump administration has justified carrying out lethal military strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific by asserting that the United States is targeting dangerous “narcoterrorists” transporting illicit drugs that kill Americans. But two U.S. senators say that, according to classified briefings they’ve received, the U.S. military doesn’t require a boat to have drugs or weapons on board to be targeted in a deadly strike.
It’s a stunning revelation that, if true, raises huge new questions about the administration’s already controversial campaign and could undermine the White House’s public rationale for the deadly strikes.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and Republican Sen. Rand Paul made the claims during a Tuesday Senate hearing where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was testifying. During his questioning of Rubio, Kaine said that he knows what the administration’s targeting criteria for the boat strikes are because of briefings he’s attended but that he could not publicly share that information because it’s classified. However, he said that he didn’t think he was prohibited from sharing what’s not included in the criteria.
“Here’s one that’s not so obvious, and that surprised me,” Kaine said. “There’s evidence of narcotics on the boat—that is not a targeting criteria.”
Kaine, who said there are “three elements” to the targeting criteria but did not offer specifics, said this struck him as “odd” given the Trump administration “always announced this is against narcotraffickers, we’ve attacked narcotraffickers.”
Rubio, who also serves as national security advisor, told Kaine that he was not involved in conversations on the targeting criteria because “those are largely legal decisions.”
“Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,” Rubio said. “There have been strikes that they’ve walked away from, because it doesn’t meet the criteria, or because there’s doubt.”
Kaine did not dispute that the strikes met the targeting criteria, but he repeatedly emphasized how notable it was that “the presence of narcotics on a boat is not one of the targeting criteria.” He then encouraged his colleagues to “get the same briefing I’ve got, take a look at the strike files, you’ll be as surprised as I am.”
The fact that evidence of the presence of narcotics is not listed “is very contradictory to the administration’s public messaging and the way that they have framed Operation Southern Spear,” said a Senate source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue.
The White House, Defense Department, and Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kaine has been among the most vocal critics of the strikes on alleged drug boats, among other military actions taken by U.S. President Donald Trump during his second term, and he has decried them as illegal. The strikes have not been authorized by Congress. But congressional lawmakers have so far failed in various efforts to prevent the Trump administration from continuing the strikes, which are also linked to the military operation in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Top legal experts have also contended that the strikes violate both domestic and international law and that drug trafficking does not constitute grounds for the use of lethal military force. Counterterrorism experts have also underscored that drug traffickers, while dangerous, should not
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You have no desire to pay income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You're goddamned right.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:You are Trump, in a smaller package. He doesn't pay taxes. He doesn't work. All Trumptards I know strive to be like you and Trump. Some can't go to your extreme behavior because there are others around them who occasionally force them to be better than their worst selves.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You have no desire to pay income taxes.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We have no desire for Mike Pence's Conservative Agenda, so that's good news.
You're goddamned right.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Trump Has Given Up
No longer interested in governing, he is filled with rage and obsessed with revenge
Paul Krugman | Jun 03, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-has-given-up
Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.
Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.
The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.
But pointing out that Pulte is unqualified for his new job doesn’t convey the extent to which Trump is trolling America with this new appointment.
For Pulte isn’t merely unqualified for a sensitive national security position. He’s unqualified, intellectually and morally, for any government position. All he has are the qualifications that matter to Trump: he is a shameless lackey and willing hitman for Trump’s vendettas.
Who is Pulte? He’s a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He likes to present himself as the face of the family business, but as a devastating New York Times profile last year explained, he was pushed off PulteGroup’s board in 2020. The family’s charitable foundation has issued a statement that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”
The Times goes on to note that These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.
How has Pulte handled his falling out with his family?
Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.
Thousands of nasty political posts on social media landed Pulte a powerful post in the Trump administration. And while his former role in his family’s business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump’s perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte concocted false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, and
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:6ix, there is no ownership of a thread. And you and Trump are the most anti-American Trumptards in America, neither of you paying your taxes, and both of you on the side of evil as blatantly as were the Confederate slave-owners.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Trump’s New ‘Forced Labor’ Tariffs Are a Fig Leaf
The new import duties are “a solution in search of a problem.”
By Keith Johnson, a staff writer at Foreign Policy covering geoeconomics and energy.
June 4, 2026, 12:04 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/04/trump-forced-labor-tariffs-ustr-t
rade-section-301/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921
The Trump administration this week unveiled its latest plan to hike tariffs, this time focused on the ostensible harms that the prevalence of forced labor in global supply chains do to U.S. commerce.
The latest action would levy tariffs of 10 percent to 12.5 percent on 59 countries and the European Union (making up 99 percent of all U.S. trade), all of whom, the Trump administration says, are lax about regulating forced or compulsory labor in their supply chains.
But every trade expert and lawyer understands that the latest use of Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act—even more than the use this spring of Section 301 to combat “excess capacity” in other economies—is simply another way for U.S. President Donald Trump to levy tariffs after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping global tariffs earlier this year.
“The ‘findings’ are in many ways what many of us expected: an excuse to levy across-the-board tariffs,” said Inu Manak, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Why not just target tariffs on those specific products where forced labor is present? It seems to be a solution in search of a problem.”
What is especially noteworthy about the latest broadside from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) against trade is how unsubstantiated it is, as was made clear during days of hearings earlier this year, written comments by affected countries and industries, and the USTR’s own tortured report on its “findings.”
In a nutshell, the USTR claims that no other country polices the import of goods that may have been made using forced or compulsory labor the way the United States does, and that that surely means that U.S. companies are being harmed somehow, either being disadvantaged as exports or hurt by imports into the U.S. economy. It just can’t say exactly how.
“The effects of unfair competition from forced labor goods on the sales, revenues, exports, and profitability of U.S. producers are evident but may be difficult to distinguish from other factors or discern in data,” the USTR wrote in its final determination.
The argument the USTR makes is that countries that use compulsory labor sell their goods at lower cost into markets that don’t police the provenance of imports, thereby crowding out higher-priced U.S. imports. At the same time, the USTR argues that companies in those economies then export their own stuff to the United States, adding to the woes of beleaguered U.S. firms. It pointed to a range of possible examples including tobacco from Malawi, frozen beef from Brazil, and rice from Myanmar as unfairly competing with U.S. products.
The overarching head-scratcher with the new tariffs is that the USTR said in its final report that the cost of compliance for U.S. firms with provisions meant to trace supply chains for any evidence of forced labor amounts to the equivalent of a 2.5 percent tariff, and yet proposes a tariff four to five times higher as a remedy.
But trade and labor experts point to a number of other problems with the latest batch of tariffs.
For starters, the entire premise is that the U.S. approach to regulating the import of products m
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Trump’s attorney general pick has exactly one qualification
Todd Blanche passed his loyalty test to Trump.
By Ian Millhiser | Jun 4, 2026, 11:55 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/490959/todd-blanche-attorney-general-trum
p-goon
In May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, arrived at an ICE detention facility in his New Jersey city and asked for a tour. Though he was initially let inside the facility’s gate, he was soon confronted by about a dozen federal law enforcement officers and asked to leave. And so he did.
For a moment, that seemed like it would be the end of this incident, but then one of the officers had a phone call. A video, later submitted to a federal court, shows this officer turning to his fellow law enforcers after the call and informing them, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States.”
That deputy attorney general was Todd Blanche, who is now the acting leader of the Department of Justice. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Blanche to become the Senate-confirmed attorney general of the United States.
The practical stakes of this nomination are fairly low. Federal law provides that if the attorney general’s job is vacant, “the Deputy Attorney General may exercise all the duties of that office.” And the Senate already confirmed Blanche as deputy AG (or “DAG” as the job is known within the DOJ). So, Blanche has already been leading the Justice Department since former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s exit in April, and, one way or another, he will continue to do so.
But Trump’s decision to nominate Blanche reveals the president’s confidence in a man who has distinguished himself solely by his willingness to act as Trump’s toady. If he’s officially confirmed, that is not likely to change.
Blanche is Trump’s goon
Blanche was Trump’s personal lawyer before he arrived at the Justice Department. As DAG, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s criminal investigations and prosecutions, including the DOJ’s 93 regional US Attorneys’ offices and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.
That means that Blanche’s involvement in the Baraka arrest wasn’t an isolated incident — at a hearing formally dismissing the charges against Baraka, a federal magistrate judge scolded the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Blanche was the senior Justice Department executive overseeing political prosecutions targeting a wide range of Trump’s perceived enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump reportedly decided to remove Blanche’s predecessor, Bondi, in part due to the president’s belief that Bondi “was not moving forcefully enough against the White House’s supposed political enemies.” Since taking over Bondi’s job duties, Blanche appears to have worked hard to reassure Trump that he will not make the same mistake.
Although a federal court dismissed the first round of federal charges against Comey, the Blanche-led department reindicted Comey for posting a picture of seashells arranged to form the numbers “86 47.” “86” is restaurant slang often used to say that an item should be removed or is unavailable. “47” is a reference to Trump, the 47th US president.
A message saying that the sitting president should be removed is obviously protected by the First Amendment, but Blanche’s Justice Department claims that the former FBI director was threatening Trump’s life.
Similarly, under Blanche’s leadership, the Justice Department reportedly launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, a magazine writer who won $88.3 million in damages against Trump after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Blanche’s primary qualification for the attorney general job, in other words, appears to be his eagerness to use the awesome power of the Department of Justice as a weapon against people who have previously slighted or fought Donald Trump.
Blanche
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump Administration Tries to Shift Blame for Ebola Response
After cutting its support for frontline healthcare workers in Central Africa, the Trump administration is pointing fingers.
Nick Turse
June 4 2026, 5:27 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/04/trump-ebola-outbreak-congo/
As an Ebola outbreak continues to rage in Central Africa, the Trump administration keeps trying to blame the World Health Organization — revealing what experts say is a deep misunderstanding about global disease response.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, local health workers have been battling the devastating virus without adequate supplies, testing materials, or international support. The outbreak is further complicated by the rare strain of the disease, known as Bundibugyo, that standard field tests often miss and for which there are no vaccines or therapeutics. At least 62 people in Congo and one in Uganda have died according to WHO, but experts say this is likely a significant undercount due to the outbreak emerging in a remote, war-torn region.
“The outbreak had a big head start, and we’re still behind, but under the leadership of the Government of DRC, we are catching up,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told journalists on Wednesday, after a visit to the epicenter of the outbreak. African health officials say that it might take nine months or more to get a handle on the outbreak.
Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. The U.S. had been the largest provider of humanitarian assistance and health sector support to the Democratic Republic of Congo, funding more than 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to a 2025 report from Physicians for Human Rights which noted the aid cuts have “severely harmed” public health and humanitarian efforts, including infectious disease control. The Trump administration has reportedly even barred some U.S. health officials from communicating with counterparts at WHO.
In the face of criticism of a U.S. failure to quickly respond to the Ebola outbreak, State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott lashed out at WHO and heaped praise on his boss. “The security concerns in the area – which President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to address – and the WHO’s delay in informing the world of concerns until May 15 has had an impact,” he told The Intercept.
Public health experts say Piggot’s response exposes a fundamental confusion about how authorities combat infectious disease. “It reveals a lack of understanding about how international health regulations work and what a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ actually is,” Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s, told The Intercept.
On May 5, WHO issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Congo’s Ituri Province, which included deaths among healthcare workers. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in the capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.
“We also need to remember that Ebola is only one health threat among many that these communities face.”
Dr. Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, explained that affected nations are the lead actors. “WHO does not declare. It’s the member states who declare,” he told The Intercept on Thursday. “On the 15th, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda declared. On the 16th, we declared the presence of Ebola, and on the 17th, Director-General Tedros declared this as a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’”
Dr. Marie Roseline Belizaire, WHO Africa’s Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, further explained that under the well-defined protoc
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Why do you hijack other people's threads?
You can start your own thread to house all of your anti-American bullshit and that way nobody else has to look at it.
I don't think you get it, dude. Everybody hates you. Nobody wants to hear a single word you have to say.
So go create your own little sandbox to play with yourself. Just like you did when you were a kid and nobody would hang out with you because you suck as a human being and you always have.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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In Trump’s second term, financial gain has become a defining feature
By Linda Feldmann | June 05, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0605/donald-trump-presiden
cy-private-wealth-ethics
On matters of personal and family money, President Donald Trump appears to be playing by a different rulebook from other presidents – and even from his own first term in office. By his own admission, he feels little pressure to restrict family business dealings simply because of his role in government.
A tide of actions reflects the trend:
Investors have pumped vast sums into Trump family members’ business interests. Projects such as the White House ballroom are being funded by donors who have dealings with the government. Agencies have granted no-bid contracts to Trump-friendly firms. And in the 19 months since his election, the personal fortunes of the president and his family have soared.
Why We Wrote This
The Trump family’s wealth has surged over the 19 months since Donald Trump’s election. The circumstances are revealing how, on personal-finance matters, a president might be constrained less by laws than by norms that are vulnerable to testing.
To President Trump’s detractors, it’s unprecedented self-enrichment and corruption, or at the very least a failure to follow norms upheld by past occupants of the Oval Office. To defenders, including his Cabinet, staff, and base supporters, the criticism is politically motivated, aimed at punishing a president who they say is transparent in his dealings and follows all applicable laws.
While Mr. Trump’s first term had its share of headlines about conflict-of-interest questions, the amounts of money involved have surged in Term 2, notably in cryptocurrencies and other relatively new business interests for the Trump family. The voting public is more focused on issues affecting their own pocketbooks than on the president’s. But as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, the tension over financial ethics represents a test for American democracy under a president like no other.
“The number of entanglements, the volume of money, it’s staggering,” says William Howell, dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy in Washington.
This week has also shown that Mr. Trump’s financial gambits still face some constraints. Under pressure from Congress – including a number of Republicans – as well as from courts, his administration appeared to back down Tuesday on the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to compensate those he says were mistreated by the federal government.
On Wednesday, though, when asked about the fund by a reporter, the president said, “I love it.” Asked to clarify whether it was dead or just on pause, he said, “I’d have to ask the lawyers,” suggesting he hasn’t given up on the fund altogether.
The administration rejects the view that the Trump presidency is rife with conflicts of interest, calling critics’ attacks unfair.
“This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade,” says Anna Kelly, White House principal deputy press secretary, in a written statement to the Monitor. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”
Net worth over $6 billion
Across a range of activities, the Trump family has been expanding business ventures with profitable connections to the government – all in plain sight.
One eye-popping headline is the spike in Mr. Trump’s net worth since seeking and winning reelection: from $2.3 billion early in 2024 to $6.2 billion today, according to Forbes. The extraordinary gains come primarily from his business interests, which include vast real estate holdings, licensing deals, merchandise such as Trump watches, Bibles, and sneakers – b
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Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.
We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.
https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds
President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.
By Jonathan Edwards | June 4, 2026 at 3:24 p.m. EDT
https://go.govbrief.today/ballroom-donors
More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group.
Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window, according to the report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit. Most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term, the nonprofit found. https://www.citizen.org/news/corporate-donors-to-trumps-white-house-ba
llroom-have-received-50-billion-in-government-contracts-since-the-east-wing-was-demolished/
The donors have sprawling interests that touch nearly every aspect of American life, including defense contracting, technology and energy. Trump has repeatedly touted the gifts as a boon to taxpayers, but critics of the project say the administration’s refusal to release a full list of donors creates the potential for corruption.
“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Jon Golinger, a public policy advocate at Public Citizen and an author of the report. “They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.”
The analysis builds on a report from the group last fall that found the known donors held $279 billion in government contracts over the previous five years and had spent $1.6 billion on political contributions and lobbying during that time. The new report focuses on contracts awarded in most of the seven months since the East Wing’s demolition, which Trump’s critics have argued created new urgency around potential conflicts of interest.
Of the known donors, no single contributor received more new business with the government since giving to the project than Lockheed Martin. The defense giant received roughly $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding since last fall, according to the report.
Booz Allen Hamilton followed, with more than $4.2 billion, and Palantir, with just over $1 billion. Other donors that received new or increased contracts include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar and T-Mobile. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Altogether, more than two-thirds of corporate ballroom donors — 19 of 27 — have received government contracts over the past five and a half years, totaling $338 billion, the report says.
Sixteen of the 27 donors are facing federal enforcement actions or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration, the report found, including major antitrust reviews involving Amazon, Apple, Meta and Nvidia; labor rights cases involving Google, Lockheed and Meta; and securities matters involving Coinbase and Ripple, whose cases have been dropped or scaled back under Trump.
The White House on Thursday pushed back on the report’s pay-to-play framing.
“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “The donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for genera
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The reason I like writing about it is that I do think it’s emblematic of this willingness inside the Trump administration to shoot from the hip. They chose a company that apparently had no experience doing this job. They’re disregarding expert opinions. They’re not letting people compete to see if there’s somebody else who could do it better or more cheaply. They’re just jumping right into this thing. And they’re doing it in a rush, in this case because they want to get it done before July 4. How many other things have we seen that follow that kind of pattern but are much bigger and more important than the Reflecting Pool? The Iran war could be a good parallel to that.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every single day they've got more brainwashing for you dumb fucks.
If the Reflecting Pool contract goes bad, what happens? The pool leaks a little bit. There’s algae. It’s not that different from the status quo Trump inherited. But you can tell, in that situation, how they got themselves into this easily avoidable problem. And you can see their decision-making approach to a million other things that are much more important.
We’re not talking about the impact on the international economy from putting tariffs in place. We’re not talking about the complex Middle Eastern diplomacy involved in starting a war with Iran. But you can still discern the same rush, the same eagerness to assume that everything is going to turn out great without taking many steps to make sure that it does.
https://slate.com/business/2026/06/donald-trump-news-reflecting-pool-a
merica-250.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?
Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?
Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:You did it again, 6ix. You totally missed the point. I can see why you flunked out of college four times. Professors notice when students miss the Big Picture. Those students won't be graduating.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?
Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?
Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Letters from an American
Heather Cox Richardson
Jun 05, 2026
The wheels are wobbling on the Trump administration bus.
The administration has always been an alliance of groups and people that oppose the so-called liberal consensus: the idea that the U.S. government should regulate business, provide social welfare programs, promote infrastructure projects, protect civil rights, and support a rules-based international order.
Republicans had embraced that ideology since the 1980s, but for all their celebration of tax cuts and deregulation, leaders recognized that the modern American state depended on the free trade and defensive security systems of the international order, and that the American people liked infrastructure and social welfare programs.
Trump upended that system, promising to get rid of the federal government built around the liberal consensus, the government his voters thought they hated because they thought its protection of equality before the law gave Black Americans, Brown Americans, women, and gender or religious minorities a leg up on white Christian men. Or they thought funding for science wasted their money on the research that right-wing influencers mocked for wasting their money and intruding on their freedom. Or they thought the U.S. contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and U.S. participation in alliances did not put “America First.”
In 2024, Trump cobbled together enough groups who thought that way to win the White House, and as soon as he took power, he set out to destroy the liberal consensus government with the help of loyalists he installed in key positions. In its place, he sought to establish an authoritarian government with himself and his family at its head.
Now the effects of his plans on the American people are filtering through to those who weren’t paying close attention. Trump’s initial tariffs of April 2025—his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs—destroyed the foreign markets for U.S. agricultural products, while Trump’s war on Iran has sent the price of the diesel fuel farmers need skyrocketing and put the cost of fertilizer out of reach. Today Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins testified before the House Agriculture Committee, where she made the national cost of a government of loyalists determined to destroy the federal government clear.
Minnesota’s Representative Angie Craig, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, grilled Rollins, who did not appear to know much about the industry she oversees. As Ron Filipkowski of Meidas+ reported, when Craig asked Rollins how many farms we lost in the U.S. last year, Rollins said about 315 had gone into bankruptcy. While the number of bankruptcies is correct, it does not reflect the loss of smaller farms to consolidation. That number, as Craig pointed out, is 15,000.
Craig continued to hammer Rollins with statistics: farm diesel has gone up 95% in the last year, to $5.41 a gallon; farmers lost $28 billion last year; 70% of farmers say they cannot afford fertilizer because of Trump’s war on Iran. Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) added that farmers in his district “have been totally screwed over by this administration. They are livid, they are mad, they are pissed off.”
He continued: They “can’t afford fertilizer; it’s at record highs because of your administration. They can’t afford diesel because of this president’s reckless, illegal war. They can’t afford farm equipment—it’s more expensive than ever because of the stupid tariffs.”
And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.
“If we all work together
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Fuck the Liberal Consensus.
You tried taking WAAAAAAAAY too much.
Now you're going to lose everything.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You did it again, 6ix. You totally missed the point. I can see why you flunked out of college four times. Professors notice when students miss the Big Picture. Those students won't be graduating.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're talking about algae in a fucking pool?
Why don't we talk about how Democrats in California have been handling the fires?
Fuck you. Nobody wants to hear a fucking word out of you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
No. I got your simpleton point, faggot.
I just reject anything you have to say on any topic because you're an idiot, a cultist and nothing you have ever predicted has ever come true.
Not once.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Welcome to the Postmodern Presidency
Before there was Trump, there was the theory of Postmodernism.
Damon Linker
Jun 03, 2026
https://www.persuasion.community/p/welcome-to-the-postmodern-presidenc
y
If it was anything, postmodernism was an expression of skepticism about the capacity of reason to forge genuine consensus, let alone for it to achieve objective truth or knowledge. What other thinkers call “objective truth” and “objective knowledge” are merely expressions of the interest of one person or group, according to the theory of Postmodernism. There is no such thing as disinterested reason, just various forms of self-interested rationalization. The claim that one possesses truth or knowledge is nothing but a power move.
There is no better distillation of this view than Donald Trump. All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation. Rather than determining what is true and then deciding what to do on that basis, Trump takes the reverse approach, first determining what he wants to do, and then adjusting what he claims to be true in order to help him accomplish it. This is why he is the first truly postmodern president.
There are a multitude of examples of this from the first and second Trump administrations, but none is more powerful than the way the Iran War has been conducted.
How to Wage a Postmodern War
When Trump ran for the presidency in 2024, he promised to end America’s “forever wars” and vowed not to start new ones. Yet he has kept the military quite active since returning to the White House, and nowhere more so than against Iran. When he opted to leap to the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in seeking to topple the Iranian government and eliminate its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Trump offered no coherent explanation. He made no effort to build support in public opinion or Congress. He merely acted, as if reasoning about going to war was irrelevant and persuasion both futile and unnecessary.
He then articulated no clear or consistent goals after it became apparent that the country hadn’t undergone regime change, and the constantly shifting rationales he trotted out on his Truth Social account, together with those expressed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, made it impossible to judge the progress, success, or failure of the operation. That sense of arbitrariness and chaos has only deepened as it’s become clearer that Trump is eager to bring the war to any kind of conclusion (it doesn’t matter what) and to move on while declaring victory.
Just after the conclusion in 1991 of the Persian Gulf War, the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard famously published a short book that was provocatively titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. I’ve always considered his argument transparently ridiculous. Of course the war took place, just as the Iran War is taking place right now, despite a fragile ceasefire.
Yet what Baudrillard was pointing to back in 1991—the transformation of war into a media event broadcast to the world in eye-catching snippets that turn it into a carefully curated spectacle—really was something new at the time. But now it no longer is. We have entered the age of fully postmodern propaganda in which the powers that be don’t even bother to construct a coherent narrative to generate support for what they do. They merely act and then bombard us with shards of multiple competing and contradictory rationales, assuming we’ll be so entertained by explosions and infliction of pain that we’ll be indifferent to what’s actually transpiring—and, above all, to the fact that the White House has embraced a mode of governance that’s completely indistinguishable from tribalistic partisan spin.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more perfect example of postmodern politics than that.
Much more at https://www.persuasion.community/p/welcome-to-the-postmodern-presidenc
y
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation.
Says the obese balding soyboy writing for PERSUASION.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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America’s Military Decline is Worse Than You Think
The wars in Ukraine and Iran are reshaping the way the world views America's global power (military and otherwise). The reasons are obvious...to those living outside of the United States. But among Americans, most aren't even aware that this conversation is going on. In this video I bring together a wide swathe of data and topics, from Ukraine to Iran, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Vietnam, and more, talking about how America has begun to reveal its greatest weakness more and more with each passing year. It means that while America controls objectively powerful military force, there's a genuine question mark as to America's willingness to actually use that force to achieve its objectives. From Bush, to Obama, to Donald Trump, this is an issue that spans more than just one presidency - it's a systemic problem that America needs to recognize before it's too late.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow.
Now you're writing stuff that I've already said.
Turn Mecca to glass. Right now.
Nobody will fucking do shit for 50 years after we do that.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought
Tom Zoellner on Trump-Era Censorship
June 3, 2026
https://lithub.com/the-side-that-won-the-civil-war-is-now-banning-book
s-about-why-the-civil-war-was-fought/
In May of 2025, a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Order 3431 entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It directed the superintendents of national parks and monuments to “review property for inappropriate content” and scrub their facilities of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.
My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S. Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National, the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.
I asked the National Park Service whether this book had been censored. “Neither the Department of the Interior nor the National Park Service leadership gave direction to remove or prohibit your book, and no such directive has been issued under Secretary’s Order 3431,” they told me in a written statement. Eastern National did not return multiple calls seeking comment.
A strong clue to what happened might be found in a letter that went out to regional Park Service directors on November 25, 2025 asking for a review of “all retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners” to make sure they were in accord with the administration’s ideological goals. “Items identified as non-compliant with this order must be removed from sale immediately,” said the memo, signed by comptroller Jessica Bowron.
More at https://lithub.com/the-side-that-won-the-civil-war-is-now-banning-book
s-about-why-the-civil-war-was-fought/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Fact-checking Trump’s interview with NBC News’ ‘Meet the Press’
Digging into some of the president’s claims on the Iran war, the Jan. 6 riots, California’s primary elections and more.
June 7, 2026, 8:00 AM CDT
By Jane C. Timm
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-trump-inte
rview-meet-press-june-2026-rcna348518
President Donald Trump sat for an interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker on Friday, discussing topics including the war with Iran, gas prices and the “anti-weaponization” fund.
Throughout the interview, which aired Sunday, Trump made a series of false, misleading or exaggerated comments.
NBC News reporters dug into some of the president’s remarks. Here are the facts behind the claims.
Iran war
Trump defended his first-term decision to terminate the Iran nuclear deal President Barack Obama had negotiated and his second-term decision to initially strike Iran in June 2025.
“They were very close to having a nuclear weapon. I terminated the deal. Then I sent the B-2 bombers in about nine, 10 months ago. And they obliterated, totally obliterated, the site. And I saved it,” Trump said. “We had a choice. We could let them have a nuclear weapon, or we could go along and have some beautiful days. But they would have, you know, it’s a judgment. They would’ve used a nuclear weapon.”
Later in the interview, Trump reiterated: “If I didn’t go in there with the B-2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.”
Trump’s statements are not in line with what then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers in March 2025, months before the initial U.S. strikes on Iran. At the time, Gabbard testified that U.S. spy agencies had assessed that Iran had not decided whether to build nuclear weapons, but that the country had stockpiles of enriched uranium beyond what is required for civilian purposes. NBC News reported in June 2025 that the U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program had not changed since March. Additionally, while Trump claimed that the U.S. “totally obliterated” an Iranian nuclear site in the strikes, the reality is more nuanced. NBC News reported in July 2025 that one nuclear enrichment site was mostly destroyed, but two others were not as badly damaged.
Currently, Iran likely retains nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%, a short step from weapons grade, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Even if Iran had enough uranium enriched to weapons grade, it would need months or possibly more than a year to build a nuclear warhead that could fit on the tip of a missile, according to experts and former officials.
Before Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal in his first term, Iran had no stockpiles of uranium enriched beyond a low level and was subject to regular United Nations inspections.
Welker noted that Trump had promised he would negotiate a better deal, asking him if he wished he would have done so in his first term. Trump responded that it was better to negotiate now, saying “Israel wouldn’t have been ready” during his first stint in the Oval Office.
Much more at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-trump-inte
rview-meet-press-june-2026-rcna348518
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This federal judge ruled against Trump. Then the death threats rolled in | 60 Minutes
Federal judges say criticism from President Trump can put their safety at risk.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Okay.
How many Republicans have been attacked by you lunatics since 2016, including Supreme Court Justices at their homes with their families? Ten times as many? 100 times?
How many times did somebody take a shot at Biden*? Zero.
Every single school and church shooting in the last 10 years was done by you freaks. Most of them were transsexual lunatics. Stunning and Brave, the entire diseased lot of you.
Go fuck yourself, Second.
EVERY problem in this country right now is directly because of YOU and the people you vote for.
And isn't it amazing that the people who always Vote Blue, No Matter Who are supporting the party that wants to take everyone's guns away, but they always manage to find guns for shooting up schools or to take with them during their "peaceful" protest of ICE agents.
What's up with that?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Why Republicans Aren’t Condemning Trump’s Meet the Press Walkout
Denying the legitimacy of vote-counting has become party doctrine.
By Jonathan Chait | June 8, 2026, 4:27 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/los-angeles-election-lies/68
7473/
The most important outcome of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary may be that the Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of election defeats. This reflex has spread up and down the party, to everyone including the trailing candidate, Spencer Pratt, and the president of the United States, who grew so enraged when the Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker challenged his election denial that he left the set mid-interview.
The refusal to accept the prospect of a Republican defeat in L.A. is bizarre and revealing. The race has not been called, but over the weekend, as more ballots were counted, Pratt fell into third place. Republicans had believed that L.A.’s struggles with public order would create an opening for their candidate. The right-of-center Free Press published seven hopeful stories with headlines such as “Inside Spencer Pratt’s Viral Video Machine” and “Heidi Montag Is Already LA’s First Lady.”
The trouble is that the city’s electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republican candidate is a reality-television star with a fondness for pseudoscientific conspiracy theories and nothing resembling qualification for office. Pratt tried to elide the GOP’s reputation in L.A., but Donald Trump blew up that plan by describing him as “a big MAGA person.”
The first batch of votes counted showed Pratt in second place, a position that would qualify him for a runoff in November against the leading candidate, currently the incumbent, Karen Bass. But as more votes have trickled in, Pratt has dropped behind City Councilmember Nithya Raman; there are more votes to count, and the final result remains uncertain. This is a predictable dynamic for the state’s voting system; late-arriving mail-in ballots consistently skew Democratic.
You might suppose that “Republicans tend to vote more promptly than Democrats” and “Government agencies in California operate slowly” are hypotheses that conservatives, of all people, would have an easy time believing. Instead, they have decided that the election was rigged.
Conservative accounts on X exploded over the weekend with confident assertions that Pratt had fallen behind because of vote-rigging. The claims were not confined to radicals, attention-seekers, or obscure figures; they also came from producers for major radio shows, Fox News columnists, right-leaning celebrities, and sports pundits.
Tellingly, Meghan McCain, who has at times sided with the party’s mainstream faction over its MAGA wing, wrote, “For whatever it’s worth, people in my life who have never ever spoken about stolen elections in any capacity are now saying this about California.”
“This” refers to Trump’s interview with Welker, which aired yesterday. Trump slowly worked himself into a lather. He began by answering questions about his proposed government fund for supposed victims of government “weaponization.” Trump’s deputies have said that the fund is dead, but Welker wanted to nail down the president’s own position on the matter.
Trump used the question to repeatedly insist that he and his supporters were innocent victims of government retribution, which he described as “violent” and carried out by “thugs” and “dirty cops.”
Welker permitted these wild lies to go unchallenged for nearly two minutes before she noted that he had no evidence for these claims, and that many of the criminals pardoned by Trump had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers during the Capitol riot. The brief interjection of reality into Trump’s fantastical diatribe appears to have angered him. He began shouting that FBI agents on January 6 had ushered people into the Capitol. Welker gently noted that he had no evidence for that claim either.
Trump began hurling insults at Welker and the media—“people like you; the fake, dirty press; the cr
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Republicans Aren’t Condemning Trump’s Meet the Press Walkout
Because there's no reason to.
Period.
Don't fucking talk to me about crying about election results. I've been watching your party do this my entire fucking life.
We all know the elections are rigged and there's zero confidence in them on either side. The only side who is not complaining about the results at any given time is the side that won.
Hopefully, SCOTUS will be removing all of the many cheating apparatuses that Democrats have constructed over decades and people can have faith in the election results again.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Theory explains Trump's power: Stupidity is more dangerous than evil
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Republicans Aren’t Condemning Trump’s Meet the Press Walkout
Because there's no reason to.
Period.
By Nick Hilden | June 09, 2026 | 04:06PM ET
https://www.alternet.org/maga-psychological-disorder/
Whatever one’s opinion on President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that carried him to office, it’s impossible to deny that they have transformed the United States. The simple description of what’s driving that change, says senior defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, is “fascism.” But as she elaborates, three psychological concepts are underpinning that autocratic impulse: social dominance orientation, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity.
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian who opposed Hitler and the Nazis and spoke out against the killing of disabled people and the persecution of Jews,” writes Tannehill at https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/06/09/four-ideas-explain-americas-de
mocratic-crisis/
“Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity posits that stupidity is more dangerous than evil, because it can be easily manipulated and exploited by evil forces. He argued that while evil is identifiable and can be resisted, stupidity is a force that actively resists reason and critical thinking, making it a powerful tool for those who seek to do harm.”
According to this concept, stupidity isn’t merely a lack of intellect, but “a willful refusal to engage with reason and truth.” It suggests “that stupid people are easily led and controlled, making them ideal tools for those with malicious intent…Unfortunately, stupidity and ignorance were both the cause and the outcome of the 2024 election,” Tannehill explains, as Trump was buoyed into office by non-college-educated voters who actively disregarded information from outside MAGA circles.
At the same time, MAGA adherents exhibit high Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), “a personality trait that reflects an individual’s preference for hierarchical social structures and the dominance of some social groups over others. Individuals with high SDO tend to endorse group-based hierarchies and inequality, while those with low SDO favor more egalitarian social structures… SDO is linked to more conservative beliefs and support for hierarchy-enhancing policies. Individuals with high SDO tend to exhibit more prejudice against stigmatized or disadvantaged social groups.”
Says Tannehill, high-SDO voters represent the base of the GOP, particularly MAGA. “They believe they have a right to rule over others based on characteristics such as their race (white), sex (male), religion (Christian), gender identity (cisgender), wealth (rich), or proximity to the tech sector.”
Finally, writes Tannehill, “the Dunning-Kruger effect is a phenomenon where people who don’t know much about a specific topic tend to overestimate their knowledge or skill in that area. Conversely, experts in that area may underestimate their competence, as they understand the true complexity of the topic or skill in question.”
As Tannehill argues, “Trump has filled the government with unqualified ignoramuses, surrounding himself with people who vastly overestimate their abilities because they believe their ideologies or wealth make them better than the experts. Pete Hegseth was never more than a major in the National Guard, but assumes he is fit because he was a Christian warrior. Linda McMahon was a professional wrestling executive who now leads the Department of Education. The entire governmental health care apparatus is full of people who ‘did their own research,’ drink raw milk, and reject the germ theory of disease and vaccines.”
Because of all of this, says Tannehill, “the United States is now a giant Dunning-Kruger pyramid. From top to bottom the system is now self-reinforcing. The majority of disinformation being put out by the government isn’t particularly plausible to pe
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Quote:I was looking for an example of 6ix being overly articulate and completely stupid. I find one almost instantly: http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12451
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't fucking talk to me about crying about election results. I've been watching your party do this my entire fucking life.
We all know the elections are rigged and there's zero confidence in them on either side. The only side who is not complaining about the results at any given time is the side that won.
08#1245108
6ix, you are a terrible electrician, and don't know it. You are slow and brag too much about the quality of your work, so you talk fast to compensate.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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My work is awesome. I have no idea what you're talking about, mongoloid.
Why don't you stay on topic, you little creeper stalker faggot?
None of that stuff is posted for you. You just stay in your lane and keep jacking off to your TDS clickbait everyday.
It's the only thing that you've ever been good at in your life.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Here is the US military bragging, just like you do, about how awesome they are at their tasks. (They are horribly incompetent, but they will never understand why):
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
My work is awesome. I have no idea what you're talking about, mongoloid.
Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking
If this boat was running drugs, why was it loaded with so many people?
By Nick Turse
June 10 2026,
5:35 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/10/trump-boat-strikes-human-trafficki
ng-victims/
NIne months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.
The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?
“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”
One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.
In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.
A 40-foot go-fast boat with four 200-horsepower engines sped off from San Juan de Unare on Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula deep in the night of September 1. It was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio would later say.
As the peñero cut through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, a secret U.S. Special Operations plane flew high above. Its transponder was “squawking” its military identity by radio. But to the 11 people on the boat below, the plane — a secret Special Operations aircraft with a non-military appearance — would have looked like a civilian aircraft. Its munitions were hidden inside the fuselage, rather than affixed visibly under its wings.
A month earlier, War Secretary Pete Hegseth signed an execute order directing Special Operations forces to attack suspected drug smuggling boats and kill their crews, according to three government officials who spoke with The Intercept. Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to attack the boat to Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, who presided over the September 2 mission — according to four sources.
Now, Hegseth and numerous military officers were watching live video of the boat as it plowed through the Caribbean waters. The Americans gathered at the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, could see the men in the boat clearly, according to three government officials briefed on the matter.
The secret plane dove low enough that those on the boat noticed it, said three government officials familiar with the operation. It apparently unnerved the men aboard so much that they turned the boat around and headed back toward Venezuela.
Bradley — now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — consulted with Col. Cara Hamaguchi, JSOC’s staff judge advocate, before ordering SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed speedboat, according to government sources. In an instant, the vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. Two survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Here is the US military bragging, just like you do, about how awesome they are at their tasks. (They are horribly incompetent, but they will never understand why):
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
My work is awesome. I have no idea what you're talking about, mongoloid.
Don't care fag, and I'm certainly not going to bother reading anything you feel is worthy of print.
My work is awesome. You're just sad that you gave away your creativity and even a moderate level of happiness when you let the media hollow out your brain and take that from you and turn you into the disgusting piece of human garbage you are today.
You gave up creating things a very long time ago, and now you're just a sad, pathetic old man with nothing to live for, and nothing remains but the memories of what you used to be able to do and regrets over all your wasted potential.
Keep being awful. All the way up until the end.
It seems to be working out great for you so far. No hobbies. No joy. No friends. No family who gives a crap about you, and they're all just waiting around for you to die so they can take all your shit.
What a life.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50% is a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.
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 Military Dictatorship Budget
The proposal only makes sense as a bribe
By Timothy Snyder
Jun 04, 2026
https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-military-dictatorship-budget
In this video, I say the obvious about Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by nearly 50%: it’s a bribe to officers and soldiers so that they will side with him when he tries to overthrow the Constitution and stay in power indefinitely.
This is where all the evidence points. If there is any consensus about Trump, it is that he is “transactional.” There is zero evidence that he has a notion of US interests. There is abundant evidence that he understands politics as a matter of people being paid off.
And that is the framework in which to understand his proposed military budget. He is paying people off. No other explanation fits the data.
Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.
The military budget proposal only makes political sense. But it does not make democratic political sense. It is not designed to be popular among the population at large. It makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.
Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power.
Transactionalism, the conventional wisdom about Trump, leads to the conclusion that the military budget is a bribe for power. But if we need more evidence of the intention, it is all around us. Hegseth is purging the upper ranks of the armed services on the basis of politics. Both Hegseth and Trump speak about a future mission of the military against the “enemy within” in the “homeland.”
It’s a military dictatorship budget.
Seeing it in any other way, evaluating it in terms that are transparently inapplicable, makes it more likely to pass, and more likely that a future of American military dictatorship will come to pass.
None of this has to succeed. The military dictatorship budget can and should fail. But to make it fail, we have to see it for what it is.
I do my best to explain in the video. Please feel free to share it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget
The proposal only makes sense as a bribe
Timothy Snyder
Jun 04, 2026
https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumps-military-dictatorship-budget
Transcript:
I wanted to take a moment to talk about the proposed increase in the defense budget. Trump is proposing essentially to increase the defense budget by about 50%. And it’s not just that there’s no reason for this, it’s that it’s actively harmful to our national defense and fundamentally threatening to our system of government.
I want to try to take a few minutes and try to explain this. First, we’ve got to dismiss the conventional explanations for why there might be such an increase in the defense budget. It’s tempting as a citizen or as a journalist to imagine that there must be some plausible conventional explanation for this.
Like, for example, it has to do with the performance of the military. But obviously, it doesn’t. The military under Trump has not performed well. One can debate the various merits of Iran or Venezuela, but what we have not been able to do is use the military in such a way as to defend the basic interests of the United States. We’re now in a war with Iran, which you’ve either lost or losing. Those are the two possible ways of seeing it. We’ve not been able to use our military assets to turn the war to the side of the Ukrainians. They've done that all by themselves. And indeed, if you put those two scenarios together, one recognizes the munitions that we used in the first week of the war in Iran. If we had just given those munitions to Ukraine, the Ukrainians probably would have won their war, and we wouldn’t have lost our war in Iran because we wouldn’t have been fighting it.
So we're not making good decisions. Now, you could say that's not the military, that's the politicians, and you'd be 100% correct, but that's the problem. It's the politicians who are proposing this huge 50% defense budget increase. The point is, it's not based on any kind of positive feedback from the world.
The second conventional explanation you might have in mind is that there's been some kind of general review. There's been some kind of stocktaking. There's been some thought has gone into this. There's a reason, a fundamental reason that goes beyond day to day events, why we would want to have this budget increase. And here again, I can assure you that is simply not the case. There is no defense review or defense technology review that stands behind this. It's just the president making up numbers.
On the contrary, were we to undertake a serious review of defense or defense technology, what we would find is that a lot of the systems that are relevant to defense in the third decade of the 21st century are much smaller and much cheaper than what we're actually using. And we would also find that the things that we have are not very good at defending us from other people's smaller and cheaper systems.
So were we to have some kind of review, it would probably lead to the conclusion that we could have a smaller defense budget. But however that may be, the point is there is no underlying review of defense or technology. Or for that matter, there is no underlying consideration of doctrine that stands behind this. There's none of that.
That simply hasn’t taken place.
A third thing you might be thinking is that we could increase the defense budget by 50% because we’re in some kind of terrific period of budget surplus. And again, here, I just want to point out that is really not the case. Our national debt is now larger than our gross domestic product.
Under Trump, we have the very specific problem that we don’t tax wealthy people at all. Were there to be such an increase in the defense budget, it would basically mean that every breadwinner in the United States is going to pay $5,000 more a year forever for stuff that doesn’t matter and won’t work and will be counterproductive.
We don’t have the money for this. Were we to allocate another h
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Meet the New Bosses, Worse Than the Old Bosses
The second Gilded Age is much uglier than the first:
Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put the brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.
The concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs.
This level of wealth brings with it immense political influence. A New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires accounted for 19 percent of political contributions in the 2024 election. And since the election, the power of money has grown even stronger.
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-bosses-worse-than-the
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The peace deal with Tehran is an Iranian victory.
By Tom Nichols | June 14, 2026, 9:32 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-deal/687547/
President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.
The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.
If defeat seems a strong word, consider what we do know about how this war will end. Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory.
The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;
the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks;
Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks;
the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror;
and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran.
In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.
Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war.
The Israelis, for their part, have been left out in the cold. It is difficult to shed any tears for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unwisely encouraged Trump to attack Iran, but he, too, is feeling the sting of humiliation. The Iranians cagily linked Netanyahu’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to Trump’s war in the Gulf, and Trump is now angry at Netanyahu for making it harder for the United States to get out of the conflict. (When Netanyahu planned major strikes in Beirut at the beginning of June, Trump called him, swore at him, and said, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”)
Reportedly, the upcoming agreement requires a cessation of hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon—and Trump is negotiating as if he can deliver on that demand while leaving Jerusalem out of it. Today, the Israelis said that Hezbollah had launched weapons into Israel. Rather than calling on the Iranians to restrain their proxy, Trump took to social media to tell the Israelis to calm down, noting that the attack “was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”
The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere nea
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All Israelis are displeased with Trump's surrender to Iran
Ministers say Israel won’t be bound by Iran deal, as opposition castigates Netanyahu’s ‘absolute failure’
Defense minister vows the IDF will remain in southern Lebanon, hit Iran hard if needed, despite Trump-Tehran MOU ending Lebanon fighting; Bennett calls Trump-imposed terms a product of failed Israeli leadership
By Emanuel Fabian, Ariela Karmel, Sam Sokol and ToI Staff
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the agreement was “bad for Israel and for the entire free world. Period.”
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said Netanyahu “lost the war,” and collapsed in the “moment of truth,” adding: “There has never, ever, been a more absolute failure than Netanyahu’s diplomatic failure on the Iranian front.”
“The time has come for us to recognize the fact that Netanyahu simply cannot do it anymore,” Lapid charged, complaining of “an American president openly and publicly telling the prime minister of Israel: ‘I am your boss, and you will do what you are told.'”
“The State of Israel won the battle; Netanyahu lost the war. The Israel Defense Forces fulfilled its missions, Netanyahu failed to deliver the goods,” Lapid told reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting.
Much more at https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
You've opened your big, fat, stupid mouths every single day about Iran and you've been wrong about everything.
Nobody believes you now.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
Yes, the Nazi regime persecuted thousands of gay men, but their primary method of dealing with them was forced labor in concentration camps, rather than systematic extermination in death camps. While some gay prisoners were killed in gas chambers or died as a result of gruesome medical experiments, most died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Here are the specific, localized details of how the Nazis targeted homosexuals:
• Paragraph 175: The Nazi regime aggressively broadened the existing German penal code, Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual relations between men. They arrested an estimated 100,000 men under this law. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
• Concentration Camps: Between 5,000 and 15,000 of these men were deported to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear an identifying inverted Pink Triangle on their uniforms. Holocaust Encyclopedia
• Treatment: Gay inmates were at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy. They were heavily isolated, subjected to severe torture, assigned the most dangerous labor, and were frequently victims of forced castration without their consent. The National Holocaust Centre and Museum
• Casualties: Historians estimate that around 60% of the gay men imprisoned in these Camps perished due to the extreme conditions. The Wiener Holocaust Library
Google concluded that Trumptards are Nazis, as is 6ixStringJack. Sieg Heil, my Führer 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 CELEBRATES ACHIEVING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN IRAN
To end his war on Iran, Trump was forced to return to the status quo with the Strait of Hormuz open and no nuclear deal in place.
By Nick Turse | June 15 2026, 2:41 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/15/trump-us-iran-war/
The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump.
With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.
If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.
Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.
On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.
“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”
“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”
“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.
The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.
The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.
Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday. That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.
Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”
Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.
Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
I don't have a problem with gay people.
Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.
You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Theory of the Vulgar Class
Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger
Paul Krugman
Jun 16, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-the-vulgar-class
Surreal UFC White House press conference plays out at Lincoln Memorial
On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.
That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).
Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.
However, members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society:
John D. Rockefeller and family
The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling:
Grimes makes heartwrenching plea to Elon Musk accusing him of ignoring their child's ill health on his platform X
In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works. Veblen was quite cynical about philanthropy, yet even he didn’t dismiss it completely, stating that:
The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method [such as the endowment of a university, public library or museum] is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.
(Veblen’s lasting intellectual influence did not come from his sparkling prose style.)
Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.
So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a s
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Quote:6ix,
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
I don't have a problem with gay people.
Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.
You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.
you lost your teeth
you have a hole in your lung from an infection
you are diabetic
you are an alcoholic
you spend your days smoking and watching porn
you pay no income tax because you have no job
you have no children
you have no life beyond your yard, your house's leaky basement, your secret computer projects
lot more failures you don't talk about
The Nazis joined the party because they were failing at life, compared to those awful, rich Jews controlling everything. Hitler made them feel strong.
Trump makes 6ix feel strong. 6ix is no longer a failure when comparing himself to those awful, rich Democrats controlling everything.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump, Cynicism and the Deal
GLOBAL VIEW By Walter Russell Mead | June 15, 2026
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-cynicism-and-the-deal-00cfce74
The great Iran deal is here, President Trump has declared.
Big if true, as they say on the internet. The agreement was announced and, according to Vice President JD Vance, “digitally” signed on Sunday, but the formal signing is scheduled for Friday. The text hasn’t been released, and Iranian and American officials describe its contents differently. The underlying issue—Iran’s drive for regional hegemony and the American determination to block it—remains unresolved. If anything Tehran appears more eager than before to assert control over its neighbors and the flow of oil from the Middle East. Moreover, Israel, which has its own war proceeding in Lebanon, wasn’t part of the negotiations.
The fate of Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to contain the political and economic fallout from the Iran war without openly abandoning his key objectives will become clear with time. In the short term, Mr. Trump has agitated and distressed the pro-Israel, hawkish wing of his political coalition, while reassuring his isolationist and anti-Israel supporters by demonstrating some distance between Washington and Jerusalem. With the Group of Seven summit under way, the president has calmed financial markets, talked down the oil price and given the leaders of allied countries reason to hope for a quick peace.
Mr. Trump has also preserved his freedom of action. The unusual interval between the dramatic announcement of a deal and its scheduled formal signing gives the president the option of walking away from the agreement if political blowback is too severe. Meanwhile, he has again seized center stage in global politics as virtually every government and every private business in the world hangs on his every word.
The memorandum of understanding is, in other words, a thoroughly typical example of Mr. Trump’s second-term diplomacy. He is driving world events with an agreement that hasn’t been formally signed, whose specifics are unknown and whose prospects are at best murky.
Viewed from that angle, this deal exemplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. He is a master of political theater, producing, directing and starring in the greatest and most compelling spectacle of our time. Yet faced with opposition from serious and determined opponents, he often fails to achieve the kind of concrete results that mark the difference between a P.T. Barnum and an Otto von Bismarck.
Mr. Trump’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. The president is a cynic. Unencumbered by deep convictions and free from the constraints imposed by conventional morality or codes of honor, he can alter his tactics to the exigencies of the moment without hesitation or scruple. Cynicism has its uses. No statesman can succeed without a healthy dose of it. But like most potent drugs, it works best in small doses.
Mr. Trump comes by his cynicism honestly—his career in New York real estate, casinos and reality television led naturally to a dark view of human nature. As his political power grew and so many early critics and opponents swallowed their principles to kiss his ring, Mr. Trump’s intuitive belief that ideas and ideals don’t matter was powerfully reinforced.
But cynicism has limits. A cynic would have predicted that Britain would throw in the towel in 1940. Adolf Hitler held more cards than Winston Churchill did. But Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers and fought on to the end.
Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of people who mean what they say. His failure to understand the power of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the struggle regardless of cost. Mr
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
I don't have a problem with gay people.
Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.
You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:I understand that Trump is a thief, a liar, and the leader of America's Nazi Party. If Hitler had stolen this much money, his own people would have assassinated him:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
Records reveal a $600,000,000 estimate for Trump’s ballroom project, with half from taxpayers
An internal cost estimate in March by the project’s contractor ran $200 million more than Trump has said publicly and counters his claims that no taxpayer money will be spent.
June 16, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/16/records-revea
l-600m-estimate-trumps-ballroom-project-with-half-taxpayers/
Five months after the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump claimed that the project to construct a massive ballroom and a bunker in its place would cost up to $400 million and that private donors would pay for all of it.
“This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on March 31, describing the project as including bomb shelters and major medical facilities.
But a detailed project summary prepared for the White House by the contractor more than three weeks before Trump’s comments estimated the total construction cost at $600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers, according to a copy of the contractor estimate obtained by The Washington Post.
By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor’s invoices obtained by The Post.
Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost. At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades.
Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.
The White House did not answer questions about the internal cost estimates or taxpayer funding.
“President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for Presidents for generations to come,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in a statement.
A spokesperson for McLean, Virginia-based Clark Construction said all project details are confidential and referred questions to the White House.
The Post obtained six cost estimates for the entire East Wing project, dated from July 2025 to March of this year, that show an increasing price tag as well as the expected sources of funding. Those records, as well as invoice logs and correspondence, provide the clearest accounting yet of Trump’s most ambitious construction project in the nation’s capital. The project is deeply unpopular with most Americans, and even some Republican lawmakers have balked at funding it.
When the White House first announced the plan to build a ballroom on July 31, 2025, it said in a news release that contributions from Trump and “other patriot donors” would cover the cost of the project, which it said would be $200 million. The White House added that the “United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.” There was no mention of an underground military bunker.
The records obtained by The Post show that the administration and Clark worked hand in hand starting last June to determine the scope
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Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real
His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?
By Molly Jong-Fast, Michael Tomasky | May 21, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/article/210114/donald-trump-cracking-up-mental
ly-unfit
Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Bluesky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around 650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98 percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts.
So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?
“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”
Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.
The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “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.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.
Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:
9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article
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Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET
‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress
JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’
Harper, 304 pages, $35
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2
JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.
These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.
Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.
Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”
More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.
You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”
That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He e
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If Trump signs, he will have formalized his surrender to Iran. But he is known for breaking treaties, so his signature isn't final.
Read the 14-Point Draft Memorandum Between the US and Iran
(Bloomberg) -- The US and Iran are expected to formally sign a memorandum of understanding on June 19 in Switzerland, paving the way for 60 days of talks aimed at ending their war for good and putting strict new limits on Iran's nuclear program.
Below is the text of the 14-point draft memorandum, as seen by Bloomberg News.
By Jonathan Tirone, Daniel Flatley and Josh Wingrove
Tue, June 16, 2026 at 5:09 PM CDT
1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.
2. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs.
3. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.
4. Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States Lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.
5. Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of ??Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.
6. The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, While ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.
7. The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, both primary and secondary.
8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran's nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.
9. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.
10. The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the
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Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost
The president’s comments at the G7 summit revealed that he doesn’t understand the war he started—or the words that come out of his own mouth.
By Tom Nichols | June 16, 2026, 6:42 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-g7-comments-misu
nderstsand-middle-east/687569/
Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.
The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.
Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”
“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”
This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.
Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.
Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.
Until today.
“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.
“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”
The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological”
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Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump in Defeat [Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today, too?]
The president went to war triumphant and will likely leave greatly weakened.
By Jonathan Lemire | 11:05 a.m. ET on June 17, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/trump-defeat-ira
n-war/687566/
President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.
The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.
Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.
Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress. His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.
It’s not usually a vote of confidence for your deal when you won’t let anyone else read it. But Trump and his team have threatened to not release the Iran agreement until after it is signed in Geneva on Friday. Officials have said that the deal will extend the cease-fire over the next 60 days and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the U.S. to drop its naval blockade and oil to flow from the region again. Although Iran has agreed to not collect fees on the strait for the next 60 days, it has (according to Iranian state media) left open the door to doing so afterward—and the deal delays addressing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, despite Trump having cast it as his urgent motivation for war. The president’s lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have supported the agreement, as has Vice President Vance, who has been promoting it during preplanned TV appearances to sell his new book. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others have expressed quiet reservations with how the deal will be implemented, according to four outside advisers and senior White House officials who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The deal has also alarmed the GOP’s Iran hawks. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host who championed the case for war, posted on social media his disbelief that Trump had rebuked Netanyahu and that the agreement remained shrouded in secrecy: “I have asked for days, why can’t we, the p
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Joe Biden* made our country trillions of dollars poorer and you didn't say shit about it.
No. That's not true. Any time that blame was placed where it belonged, you defended Joe Biden* by saying that nothing that was happening was his fault and he had no power over any of it. (Which actually WAS true, but only because he was a fucking vegetable and not for any of the reasons you were claiming).
So nobody is interested in hearing any of your bitching about billions in 2026.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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And really...
At the end of the day, why are you so confident the "war" with Iran is over?
You've never believed a single word that's come out of Trump's mouth so far.
Why start now?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The US has signed up to a deal which puts it in a far worse strategic position than it was in on February 27, 2026 (the day before the bombing started). It is not returning to the status quo ante: it is creating an entirely new, and much weaker, status quo (for the USA).
The USA is pledging to respect the Iranian regime, immediately restore some funding to it, immediately allow the Iranian regime to start trading oil freely, and not to interfere with its present nuclear capabilities. Moreover, the USA is tacitly recognizing that Iran will control shipping in the Strait (with Oman) going forward and has not ruled out the ability of Iran and Oman to charge tolls after 60 days.
In the near future, the US is pledging to help organize a massive reparations program for Iran, to pull back American forces from the vicinity of Iran, to end all sanctions on Iran, and to pledge its commitment to all of this with a UN Security Council Resolution.
And what has the US gotten in return?
Well, it has gotten a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (under significantly worse conditions than existed on February 27, 2026) and a restatement of a nuclear pledge that Iran has made for years and years.
It is hard to grasp just how humiliating this is for the USA (and Israel). They chose to start this war after great preparation, they used their most advanced technology, and they used up massive military stocks in bombing Iran for six weeks.
And they are in a much worse situation.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
t
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Key MOU Clauses And Commentary
1 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.
Commentary: The key thing here is that the US has made it perfectly clear that it expects Israel to end its war in Lebanon, and therefore that the US wants attacks on Hezbollah to stop. This was a major Iranian goal and they have achieved it. It is important to see that ending the fighting in Lebanon as a US commitment is made twice here.
2 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.
Commentary: Regime change is now permanently out as a US policy. The US is now pledged to respect the internal power of the IRGC. Remember, when the bombing started, regime change was a key victory condition for Trump.
4 — Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.
Commentary: The last sentence is extraordinary. This seems to pledge the USA to remove its forces from near Iran after the deal. “Proximity” is not defined, but that would have to take in a number of close US partners in the Gulf. The US is now allowing Iran to have a major say in where US forces can be deployed.
5 — Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.
Commentary: Iran pledges not to “charge” shipping in the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days (though it is worth noting that Iran said yesterday that they might still levy “fees”. The important thing is that Iran is clearly saying that with Oman it can determine the future of traffic in the strait and Iran has in no way given up its ability to change tolls. This represents a major Iranian increase in authority.
6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.
Commentary: Do you know what this is? It is the US promising to “undertake” organizing a plan for reparations to pa
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Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland (11,175 words)
“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality.
By Ben Taub | June 15, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/22/inside-the-ludicrous-dea
dly-serious-plan-to-take-over-greenland
“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end,” the Danish Prime Minister said.
On a Saturday afternoon in Nuuk, Greenland, last March, a thousand people walked down toward the harbor, to a small red cabin that bore the Great Seal of the United States—an eagle grasping an olive branch in one foot and thirteen arrows in the other. The air was freezing, and the town was bathed in the crisp Arctic light of a late-winter sun. After almost seven decades with no diplomatic presence in Greenland, the U.S. had opened a tiny consulate in 2020, during the pandemic; now, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, it was the site of the largest demonstration in Greenlandic history.
Even before Trump retook office, he had made clear his intent to annex Greenland. But, from the moment that he was sworn in, his fantasies and provocations became American foreign policy. “One way or another, we’re gonna get it,” he told a joint session of Congress. So five per cent of Nuuk’s residents stood before the consulate, beating traditional drums and chanting their country’s Inuit name: Kalaallit Nunaat. “Enough is enough,” they shouted. But no one from the State Department drew the blinds. It wasn’t clear that anyone was even there.
Across town, in the commercial center, a lone American handed out flyers. He wore a cowhide jacket and pants, mirrored sunglasses, and a black leather vest with a patch that read “Bikers for Trump.” He was tall and fit, with gray curls and a short mustache, and presented himself as a kind of unofficial ambassador—not of the U.S. government but of its President, whose cellphone number he claimed to have. “My name is Chris Cox. I’m from the United States, and I have come here to try to make some friends,” he said to an elderly Inuit man. “We are not looking at you like a tiger looks at a gazelle.”
Cox had founded Bikers for Trump in 2015, and the group had provided security at campaign rallies and at Trump’s first Inauguration—“a wall of meat,” as he put it, between protesters and the unlikely candidate who became President. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Cox spoke at a rally to call for overturning the result. “I, for one, will take the first bullet,” he said. “If there’s anybody out there from Antifa or Black Lives Matter, spend your first fuckin’ bullet in my chest.” But in Nuuk he struck a more conciliatory tone. “We are not biting at the chomps,” he said. “I just plan on doing the best we can to have an influence here.”
“He wasn’t really breaking any laws,” a senior Greenlandic police official told me later. But Cox’s interactions were inherently provocative. “Without knowing it, a lot of the Greenlanders are living in the Stone Age,” he told an Italian TV channel.
“I’m receiving a lot of death threats as a result of my work here in Greenland,” Cox noted, a few days into his trip. “People are looking at me like I’m a Russian with a machine gun right now, when they see the Trump patch.” By that point, Greenlanders had started wearing red caps with white text that read “Make America Go Away.” Nevertheless, Cox considered his mission to be fruitful. “I’ve got some suggestions for how we can clean this up,” he said, in a phone call from Nuuk to the Washington Times. “We need to change the hearts of some of these Greenlanders.”
Cox left Nuuk for Washington, D.C., where he claims to have briefed the White House and Republican lawmakers on his findings. He also did a prime-time interview with One America News Network, portraying Denmark, whose realm includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, as an illegitimate colonial power that is committing “atrocities” against Greenlanders and “weaponizing” anti-Tru
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What Did You Expect?
Perhaps this was always how Trump’s ill-conceived war was destined to end.
By Daniel B. Shapiro | June 17, 2026, 6:59 PM ET
Daniel B. Shapiro served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-war-reversals/687
590/
The whiplash is jarring.
President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.
And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.
Let’s count the ways.
Nuclear: A core goal of the war was to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program could never produce a nuclear weapon. Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 advanced that goal by destroying key nuclear facilities and burying Iran’s enriched uranium, setting back the program significantly.
But little had changed in the nuclear program by the time this war was launched this past February, and little has changed since. Now, in exchange for an oft-repeated pinky promise that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, Trump has agreed to delay negotiations on the key goals of removing Iran’s enriched uranium and banning further enrichment, and the verification measures needed to guarantee that those commitments are upheld. These talks are punted to a second phase that may never arrive or never end.
Sanctions: Trump long advocated maximum-pressure sanctions, and beat his chest during the war about the cost to Iran of the U.S. naval blockade.
But now we will pay for reopening the Strait of Hormuz—simply, at best, restoring the prewar status quo—by approving the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign assets and waiving sanctions to permit Iranian oil sales. More goodies are in store for the regime, in the form of fees paid by ships transiting the strait and a shockingly large $300 billion reconstruction fund. (The latter, supposedly to be funded by Gulf states, recalls the worst of former Secretary of State John Kerry’s post-JCPOA diplomacy, when he sought to drum up investment in the corrupt economy of a still-adversarial regime.)
With no change in the regime’s character or ideological outlook, it is being rewarded with a shift from maximum pressure to maximum windfall. There is no reason to think that the money will flow to schools and hospitals or provide any benefit to the Iranian people that the regime still suppresses. It will, instead, almost certainly fund more missiles, drones, and support for terrorists at home and abroad—threats about which the memorandum of understanding is silent.
Lebanon and Hezbollah: The war, misguided though it was, represented the zenith of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, with unprecedented combined operations and ample praise by Trump for the partnership. Trump voiced recognition of the genuine threats Iran posed to Israel, not least from its network of terrorist proxies.
But Israelis have been aghast at the speed of Trump’s turnabout. Israeli officials were excluded from negotiations on the MOU, and were not even given the opportunity to review the text. Meanwhile, as U.S. and Israeli interests diverged, Trump barked expletives at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adopted the Iranian demand to impose restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon—even as the militia continues to attack northern Israeli communities—as part and parcel of the broader cease-fire.
Regime: Trump also long correctly identified the Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous and evil, with the blood of many America
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You people have a really warped sense of reality.
Your world sucks. No wonder you're all so miserable all the time.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Whatever we’re paying RFK Jr, it’s too much
Joel Eissenberg | June 12, 2026 5:07 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2026/06/whatever-were-paying-him-its-too-muc
h
The NYT published an article reporting that RFK Jr has abandoned most of his responsibilities:
“Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the article. “Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.“
Not exactly news. Kennedy’s rebuttal?
“All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove,” Kennedy wrote.”
LOL! His “accomplishments” are
(a) the firings and resignations of health research experts at the CDC, FDA and NIH
(b) sowing distrust in scientific expertise while replacing sound science with magical thinking.
Whatever we’re paying him, it’s way too much. Unless the job, like in the rest of the Trump administration, is just to create chaos.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Fuck your angry bear and his stupid blog.
Anything that you care about? Nobody else gives a single shit about.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy
His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal
Paul Krugman
Jun 19, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable
On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.
Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.
Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.
Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.
What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of Nevada:
Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.
Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.
Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:
California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.
Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.
Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now re
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The Most Surprising Miscalculation of Trump’s Second Term - POLITICO
He has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment in countries besides the United States.
By Alexander Burns | June 19, 2026 05:00 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/19/trump-mistake-nation
alism-brexit-column-00963265
OTTAWA — When Donald Trump won a new term in the White House, Danielle Smith joined the parade of foreign leaders visiting Mar-a-Lago to honor the president-elect. The populist premier of Alberta, Smith enjoyed lively relationships across the American right, even hosting Tucker Carlson in Western Canada in 2024.
Yet when I asked Smith last fall, at a policy summit in Toronto, how she’d feel about Trump potentially intervening in Alberta’s fragile politics, her MAGA stripes vanished.
“I don’t want any foreign influence in our politics here,” Smith told me.
Admiring Trump from afar is one thing. But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.
Trump used to understand that.
A decade ago, Trump waged his first-ever political campaign as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and more muscular American sovereignty. When the United Kingdom held its 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union — the 10-year anniversary is in a few days — Trump cheered it on and crowned himself “Mr. Brexit.”
In his second term, Trump’s grasp of nationalist politics has slipped. He has underestimated the power of patriotism and national pride in countries other than his own.
This serial miscalculation has undermined Trump’s trade wars and military adventures, aggravated the cost-of-living crisis, weakened the Republican Party and battered Trump’s bonds with the global right.
It began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with his campaign of bullying against Canada.
The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at Justin Trudeau that winter did not scare America’s neighbor into prostration. They inspired a patriotic backlash and created a new prime minister, Mark Carney, who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination.
In Ukraine, Trump’s bid to push the country into a flimsy peace deal — while dressing down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and grabbing for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — was such an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty that Zelenskyy, even at a political low ebb, faced no consequences for rejecting the terms.
Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat.
Perhaps most damaging to Trump, his expectation that he could decapitate Iran’s leadership, blast the country into submission and install a compliant proxy — all without using ground troops — led to a monthslong stalemate that spiked energy prices and sapped the global economy.
It should not surprise any nationalist leader that Iran’s generals and clerics preferred months of American bombing over quick subjugation.
So why does Trump seem lost in these political currents?
Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024, Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.
His sometime admirers have noticed. In a thoroughly revealing interview with POLITICO’s Marion Soletty, Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential nominee for France’s far-right National Rally, lamented that second-term Trump was very different from the first-term version.
These days, he said, the United States was acting more like an “empire.” Trump himself was “extremely unsteady and constantly shifting,” Bardella said.
Bardella disavowed interest in Trump’s endorsement in Danielle Smi
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Trump, 80, Unravels Over Botched Vanity Project in Morning Meltdown
BREAKDOWN MODE
The president made unhinged claims that his disastrous $14 million pool renovation was targeted by vandals.
By Sarah Ewall-Wice | Updated Jun. 22 2026 2:25PM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-80-unravels-over-botched-vanity-pr
oject-in-morning-meltdown/
President Donald Trump spent Monday morning freaking out about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after his renovations turned into a debacle with algae and peeling paint ahead of July 4 celebrations.
The president took to Truth Social to post unhinged threats and accusations after the massive pool on the National Mall has become a mess following his repeated bragging about how good he was at fixing pools.
“Of the MANY Statues and Fountains that we rebuilt, renovated, cleaned, and fixed, the only one that was Vandalized was the Reflecting Pool, which is being taken care of, ASAP!” Trump wrote.
Trump claimed it had been “given a 300 foot long gash, chemicals have been illegally placed in the water, and the beautiful new grass field has been destroyed with a gigantic 86 47 chemically carved into it (Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!).”
“The Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote.
Members of the National Guard patrol the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after recent renovations following a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump to paint it blue ahead of the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C.
Just days after the $14 million renovations were completed and the pool refilled, massive blooms of algae turned the 2,000-foot-long pool bright green, in sharp contrast with the “American flag blue” it had been painted.
Crews with the National Park Service could be spotted furiously pouring in hydrogen peroxide in the pool and vacuuming up dead algae in a desperate attempt to remedy the situation.
Throughout the renovation project, the president had bragged constantly in public and on social media about how he was fixing the Reflecting Pool and would accomplish what previous administrations had failed to do since the pool was first built in the 1920s.
Instead, large pieces of the “American Flag Blue” paint began peeling off the bottom of the pool after the hydrogen peroxide was poured in and could be spotted floating in it.
Donald Trump with a duck in the reflecting pool algae
On Sunday, a dead duckling was found floating in it. It was unclear what killed it, but it happened just days after the Interior Department insisted that the hydrogen peroxide was not harmful to wildlife.
Trump has claimed the pool had been vandalized and attacked “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!” for it. His top officials vowed to prosecute anyone who vandalizes it. Trump also said that the work to fix it would begin immediately.
“What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly,” Trump rambled in a Saturday post. “We met with contractors today, will probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs, but will have them done as quickly as possible.”
Trump’s allegation that the mysterious “8647” message that appeared on the grass on the National Mall nearly two weeks ago was inspired by the former FBI director was unsubstantiated. However, the numbers are at the heart of the criminal case against Comey.
The investigation into the message on the National Mall is underway, but Comey was indicted in April after the Justice Department claimed he had threatened Trump’s life by posting a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged in the message “8647? last year.
Comey almost immediately deleted the post and said afterward that he was not aware that it would be interpreted as a call for violence.
The term “86 it” is lingo for a restaurant item that has run out and ne
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Strongmen Can Fail if We Act with Joyce Vance Timothy Snyder
Jun 23, 2026
Tim joined Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney during the Obama Administration, to discuss what he sees as the central challenge facing American democracy: the danger of treating authoritarianism as something that will simply pass on its own.
Tim started off by talking about how “sugarcoating” political realities can become a form of collaboration, because it delays the public response necessary to defend democratic institutions. Tim also rejected the idea that democracy inevitably self-corrects, warning that there is no political “pendulum” that guarantees a return to normalcy. Tim stressed that democracies survive. only when citizens actively participate in shaping their future.
The rest of the discussion explored everything from the aftermath of the Iran war to threats against democratic norms at home, including debates over executive power, habeas corpus, voting rights, and the Supreme Court. Tim emphasized, regarding Iran, that authoritarian movements are often fueled by the illusion that force can solve complex problems, while history repeatedly shows that violence creates consequences its architects cannot control.
To me, the most striking part of the conversation centered on what comes next. Tim urged Democrats and democracy advocates to think beyond simply winning the next election. Success, Tim said, requires a broad coalition, a compelling vision of the future, and a willingness to pursue ambitious democratic reforms—from voting rights and anti-corruption measures to structural changes that strengthen democratic institutions.
Throughout the conversation, both Tim and Joyce returned to a common theme: history is not a script. The future remains unwritten. Whether America emerges stronger from this moment depends not on inevitability, but on the choices citizens make now.
As Tim and Joyce put it in their closing messages, the answer is always action.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Meltdown
One day that captures how Trump has gone from unpredictable to chaotic
By Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman | June 25, 2026, 7:34 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-congress-iran-midte
rms/687704/
A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.
At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.
This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictably were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.
Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court de
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Trump’s plan to run a bank
What’s next for the Trump family crypto company? More ways to turn a profit.
By Dustin DeSoto and Sean Rameswaram | June 26, 2026, 6:00 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/podcasts/493284/trump-witkoff-crypto-bank-world-li
berty-financial-uae
In the almost year and a half since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has found plenty of ways to enrich himself and his family and friends. But one scheme in particular, a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial, is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Trump, along with his real-estate-buddy-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff and both his and Witkoff’s sons, launched World Liberty a few months before the 2024 election.
Then, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family had acquired a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump was inaugurated, netting the Trump family at least $187 million.
Now, World Liberty is on the verge of being approved for a national trust bank charter, NOTUS reported last week. If it goes through, the company would be able to issue its USD1 “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar — more freely, without having to go through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, of course, the Trump family would receive a cut through transaction fees.
In addition to the straightforward potential for presidential self-enrichment, critics argue that the charter application itself is a conflict of interest; the application is being reviewed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leadership is appointed by the president. (Trump has said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, while Witkoff has divested outright.)
It’s all fairly complex — so to sort through what we know about Trump’s crypto enterprise and where it could be headed next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Zach Everson of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. Everson is research director of the group’s Trump Accountability Project.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Zach, you’ve followed the Trump crypto business. What is happening here?
What we’re seeing here is making what happened in [Trump’s] first term look ethical. There are essentially three steps: First, in September 2024, shortly before the election, the Trumps and the Witkoffs launched World Liberty Financial. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial: a “stablecoin” and a crypto token.
Now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government.
What is the Trump stablecoin and who has invested in it?
USD1 is a stablecoin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one-to-one by reserves. Think of it as a bank loan, only going the opposite way. You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You’re giving US dollars and they’re giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they’re sitting on your US dollars, they’re investing them in Treasuries and they are keeping the interest.
In spring of 2025 it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security adviser of the UAE had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using US dollars and was investing them in [the crypto exchange] Binance. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stablecoins out there, by way of the UAE national security adviser directing this money towards them.
That’s a lot of what this banking trust license would allow them to do. Right now, the reserves have to be held someplace else — they can’t hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can’t issue their own [crypto] coin in the United States. It has
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and just then she found her 'concerns' the same MSNBC Host who laughed at Republicans attacked, Laughs as She Reports Trump Headed To Jail, mocked Trump getting shot, laughed at violence from the Left on the Rightwings, Schmidt has been inside the machine works for MSNBC and NBC News as a national security contributor, Nicole Wallace a Socialist propagandist and a self-described LGBT fanatic and "Fauci groupie".
she Hates Trump but is concerned about Buttigieg
,
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the divide will continue...media says you must pick your fanatical political teams
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The 13 Steps of a Trump Fiasco
The Reflecting Pool drama says everything about how the administration operates.
By Charlie Warzel | June 26, 2026, 3:31 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/reflecting-pool-america
-250-trump/687716/
If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.
This is the kind of stuff that AI might spit out if you offered a chatbot a lazy prompt for political satire. The shambolic spectacle has captivated the nation, despite the fact that the Obama administration spent $34 million and 18 months renovating the pool with mixed results. The fallout has reached New York Times push-alert status and become grist for the meme and culture-war mills online. Moreover, Poolgate seems to be bothering Trump more than past fiascoes, which is notable given that he’s particularly embattled at the moment and staring down a defeat in Iran, low poll numbers, and a poor outlook for the midterms. He can’t stop posting about the ordeal on Truth Social, accusing unnamed saboteurs of vandalism. At the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, he ranted about the pool.
Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle is, by definition, a national embarrassment. But America is no stranger to self-inflicted humiliation these days. (See: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet to Trump.) Why, then, is Trump crashing out so hard about the Reflecting Pool? Why does it stand out as the enduring metaphor for an incompetent administration that can’t stop providing enduring metaphors of its own incompetence?
Some reasons are obvious. As my colleague Jonathan Chait notes, uncontrolled algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial are lower stakes and, frankly, much funnier than, say, a war, a self-dealing cryptocurrency scheme, or the destruction of a wing of the White House. (One photo in particular gets me: Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.) Lately, the saga has taken a more serious turn: The National Park Service alleges that the liner of the pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor earlier this month, causing damage to the pool’s foam sealant. Trump has claimed that at least six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for damaging the pool, and a spokesperson from the Interior Department reiterated to me today that “there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed.” According to a report yesterday by MS Now, public records show that only David Hearn, a former Olympic canoer, was arrested. (Hearn has said he was touching a floating piece of paint that had peeled off the pool.)
The spectacle has also been straightforwardly ridiculous, such as when Park Service workers were photographed dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the pool one at a time to quell the algae. But Poolgate is something more—a textbook example of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a way that one can explore the anatomy of Trump debacles, which tend to unfold in a (roughly) 13-step process. The Reflecting Pool drama is not all the way through this process yet, but I’d bet good money we’ll get there. It goe
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Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=67619
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
CN-Fucking-N: Takeaways: Supreme Court hands Trump massive wins on immigration agenda
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/takeaways-supreme-court-hands-tru
mp-massive-wins-on-immigration-agenda/ar-AA26xZqV
You hear that? Straight from CNN.... MASSIVE.
And that is now SET IN STONE, BABY!
How long have I been predicting all of this now, losers? I know it was probably after the 2024 Election, but I can't be sure about that.
Stay Tuned.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYY more incoming.
You lose again. You will always lose. You are losers.
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... Hey... That reminds me...
Haven't really been keeping up on politics for 2 or 3 days, and I was just wondering if we ever got that whole Reflecting Pool thing sorted out yet, or what?
That Trump is a big fucking idiot, huh losers?
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... And enjoy your Democratic Socialist picks that are going to destroy the city and state of New York.
You were warned.
Now suffer the consequences.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Trump knows his Trumptards can't remember the previous scandals. There is a new one every week, forcing the older scandals out of memory.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Keep talking about the Reflecting Pool, loser.
A Watergate Every Week
J. D. Vance contends that the scandal would be “a 12-hour news story” today. He’s probably correct, but the lesson isn’t what he claims.
By David A. Graham | June 29, 2026, 7:01 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/vance-watergate-news-c
ycle-comments/687742/
Back in 2016, before he converted to the MAGA cause, J. D. Vance was deeply wary of Donald Trump. He wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
For most people, “cynical asshole” would seem pejorative, but perhaps Vance meant it as something to aspire to. Late last week, the vice president visited the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, in Yorba Linda, California, and quipped, “Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like J.D. Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”
Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.” (As the journalist Ed Kilgore notes, the same revisionism has been peddled by the Vance-allied propagandist Christopher Rufo.)
Once again, Vance is right to draw a comparison but takes the wrong lesson. Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.
More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now sta
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The Supreme Court just came one vote away from a constitutional catastrophe
The 5-4 vote in the birthright citizenship case is a warning that all of US law is in terrible danger.
By Ian Millhiser | Jun 30, 2026, 12:00 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/culture/493694/supreme-court-birthright-citizenshi
p-trump-barbara
No question in US law is clearly or more firmly settled than the question of whether people born in the United States are citizens of this country. The Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
“All persons” means all persons. And, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed on Tuesday, the amendment’s limited exception for people not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States refers only to the small subset of people, like the children of ambassadors, who are not bound by US law at all.
And yet, the decision upholding birthright citizenship, known as Trump v. Barbara, was only 5 to 4, a shocking near-miss that leaves the door open to further challenges if future appointees pull the Supreme Court further to the right.
While Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the extraordinary claim that the Constitution’s meaning has changed because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868,” he ultimately concluded that a federal statute prevents Trump from canceling people’s citizenship. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
Still, that’s four votes against reading the Constitution according to its unambiguous text. And it’s four votes for overruling a Supreme Court opinion that’s been on the books since the 19th century.
Barbara is the most alarming decision that the Court has handed down since it declared that Trump is allowed to commit crimes in 2024. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
And, if not for the Trump immunity decision, the dissenting justices’ opinions in Barbara would be the gravest judicial attack on the rule of law since the Court upheld Japanese internment in Korematsu v. United States (1944). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214
And that means that, if Donald Trump gets to replace just one member of the Barbara majority, the United States enters a very dark place.
The majority opinion in Barbara is a straightforward application of existing law
When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who was the first judge to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country, announced that decision, he said that he’s “been on the bench for over four decades” and he “can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
It’s not just that the Constitution is clear. The Supreme Court also held more than a century ago, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that the Constitution means what it says. The question in Barbara, which was whether Trump can simply cancel the citizenship of people born in the US, may be the easiest question that has reached the justices in anyone’s lifetime.
The majority opinion in Barbara was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all three of his Democratic colleagues, plus Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is fairly short, clocking in at 26 pages, and it faithfully recites this orthodox view of the Fourteenth Amendment and its history.
As Roberts explains, early US citizenship rules derived from the English common law, which held that children born within the King’s “dominions” were “natural-born subject[s]” of that King and thus were citizens. This rule prevailed in the United States until the Supreme Court’s “odious decision” in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that “all those descended from slaves” were not citizens.
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in large part to overrule Dred Scott and to restore the English rule. And what of the amendment’s exception for persons not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the
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The Trump Vibe Shift Was Just a Mirage
The Vibe Has Shifted Back
By David Wallace-Wells | June 29, 2026
Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.
A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.
It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.
The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.
But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.
Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.
Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and
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Your life is so pathetic.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Why Are US Weather Forecasts So Inaccurate Lately?
Because Trump and Elon Musk fired the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
By Ellyn Lapointe | June 30, 2026, 11:30 am ET
https://gizmodo.com/heres-why-weather-forecasts-have-seemed-so-inaccur
ate-lately-2000779436
Weather forecasting is woke according to Musk.
Besides, the fired employees at NOAA were incompetent scientists, since they had accumulated data showing climate change is real, which most Trumptards know is fake news and a Chinese hoax.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The true cost of Donald Trump's $2.2 billion year | Fortune
Diane Brady | July 2, 2026
https://fortune.com/2026/07/02/donald-trump-billionaire-2-2-billion-we
alth-brand/
Good morning. I sat in Donald Trump’s office years ago, watching him cover a table with paper after paper on various buildings bearing his name. Trump wanted to prove that he was a billionaire, contrary to the allegations of writer Tim O’Brien, whom he was suing for suggesting otherwise. (The suit was ultimately dismissed.) He pointed to the stack of papers, the number of products bearing his name, the pink Italian marble in the lobby, the finer details of his office. He even showed me his watch. Thousands paid to hear him speak at The Learning Annex, he told me, because they want to be a billionaire like Donald Trump. Being rich wasn’t just part of his brand. It was his brand. This was a leader who largely measured success by a single metric.
Now, nobody can dispute that Trump is rich. He made more money last year as president than he ever did in a year as CEO. https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/News+Releases/B8B9EA45F5EB86EC85258E26
00701B77?opendocument
We don’t know how much tax he will pay on the $2.2 billion in earnings, as he is the first U.S. president to refuse to release his tax returns and secured an unprecedented tax immunity deal in exchange for dropping a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump’s sons run the business, control the trust containing his assets, and have launched lucrative new ventures using his name. (His sons and the White House have repeatedly stated there is no conflict of interest.) Trump’s latest 927-page disclosure gives fascinating insights into how the president is getting rich, through crypto ventures and active stock trading, as well as a $77,808 pension from the Screen Actors Guild and a $250,000 sculpture from a longtime CEO supporter.
But everything has a cost. Take the Qatari-gifted Air Force One, which took its inaugural flight yesterday. Trump took the $400 million jet as a gift to taxpayers and then spent at least that much in taxpayer dollars to make it “the world’s most luxurious plane.” Although the gift was deemed legal, multiple polls show voters felt it raised ethical concerns and several prominent Republicans in Congress spoke out against it.
The president’s personal gains cause even more concern. Trump’s investment managers bought and sold company stocks an average of 58 times a day in the first quarter. Some say that’s normal for high-volume, tax-optimized trading. Others are suspicious. The recent disclosure showed 327 individual stock purchases a day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, for example, which caused a market rally that he took credit for.
I meet plenty of CEOs who like the Trump administration’s approach to technology, innovation, regulation, taxation, and the overall ethos of making America great. Behind closed doors, though, many say they don’t trust him. Conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly called the family “grifty” in a Sky News interview. Trust in the federal government is at a two-decade low, and that’s according to a Fox News poll. The Pew Research Center did a 36-country survey that found the rest of the world has negative views of Trump and doesn’t think America is a reliable partner.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, says the president’s willingness to get rich on the job is undermining his credibility and popularity with his base. The irony is that Trump doesn’t seem to get much joy from his money. “He doesn’t cruise on his yacht. Other than the golf course, there’s no luxury in that man’s life,” says Sonnenfeld. “What he cares about is losing pride and being ridiculed.” For someone who seems to equate being rich with getting respect, money can feel like a familiar friend. As he faces pushback—from Republican colleagues voting to limit executive authority to consumer boycotts—the president isn’t recali
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Bicentennial Memories
It was 50 years ago today
Paul Krugman
Jul 04, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bicentennial-memories
Today is the nation’s 250th anniversary. And it should be a day of celebration.
But it won’t be. America’s 250th birthday will be a grim, glum affair. As far as I can tell, even MAGA enthusiasts are feeling depressed. They certainly aren’t turning out to visit Donald Trump’s sad, shabby state fair.
It’s a huge difference from the bicentennial, which I celebrated in an unusual but deeply memorable way.
You see, I spent the summer of 1976 in Portugal, which had had its own revolution (the Carnation Revolution) just two years earlier. That revolution overthrew the nation’s fascist dictatorship and created what has proved an enduring democracy.
I was there as part of a group of MIT graduate students working at the Banco de Portugal — the country’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve. And I spent the 4th at a picnic in a Lisbon park, thrown by the U.S. embassy.
It was a small affair. These days Lisbon is overrun with American tourists and expats, but back then there were very few of us around. Even the U.S. government had relatively few people there, because it was trying to keep a low profile in the face of widespread anti-Americanism: Many Portuguese at the time were still talking about how the U.S. had helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Chile three years earlier. There were graffiti around Lisbon saying “Morte à CIA” — although some of these had had “e ao KGB” added in fresher paint.
So the embassy filled out the picnic by inviting Americans it knew were in Lisbon along with staff from other friendly embassies. I remember chatting with a number of West Germans.
The picnic was a charming affair. We stood around munching hot dogs — God knows how they managed that in the land of salt cod and grilled sardines — and listened as the ambassador read a patriotic message from Gerald Ford. And I remember feeling very good about America.
Furthermore, I wasn’t the only American feeling cheerful at the bicentennial, which was somehow an uplifting occasion.
This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.
Yet somehow Americans managed to have fun at the bicentennial festivities, and there was a surprising amount of optimism in the air.
One source of optimism was surely the end of the Vietnam War. Yes, it ended in defeat. But it did end, which meant that young Americans and their families no longer had to worry about the draft, and that the nightly news didn’t keep reporting on body counts.
Another source of optimism — something people like JD Vance will never understand — was the fall of Richard Nixon. Satisfaction about how Watergate brought Nixon down wasn’t mainly about partisanship. Instead, the Watergate saga felt like an affirmation of the American spirit. Reporters were heroes and the media did its job. So did Congress. Nobody would call Gerald Ford a great president, but he was clearly a decent human being. The powerful were held accountable. America, it seemed, still retained its soul.
Who would say that now?
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday we had confirmation of presidential corruption on a scale Nixon could never have imagined. That’s bad in itself. What’s worse is that nobody believes that there will be any consequences for Trump, his cronies, and their henchmen. In 1974 Republicans joined with Democrats to hold Nixon accountable. This time around they’re fully invested in magnifying Trump’s power and his cult of personality, despite knowing perfectly well who he is and what he is doing.
I am not giving up hope. America is not irretrievably lost. But now, much more than 50 years ago, we are a nation in desperate need of redemptio
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Pump and Dump and Trump
It's much bigger than the memecoin
Paul Krugman
Jul 06, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/pump-and-dump-and-trump
Donald Trump has distinguished himself in many ways. One of them is that he is our first pump and dump president.
Hi, Paul Krugman here. A podcast today rather than a full-on piece: I’m a little exhausted from number-crunching over the weekend. So I thought I’d talk briefly about the really extraordinary financial picture that we’re seeing under the current administration.
Obviously no president has enriched himself from office the way that Trump has. That’s common knowledge. One of the things that is really amazing about it, however, is the way in which he enriched himself — a lot of which has to do with crypto.
So the New York Times had a report just the other day on Trumpcoin, the memecoin issued on Trump’s behalf which got a lot of buyers, a lot of money came flowing into it.
It should have been obvious from the beginning that the coin was inherently worthless, and at this point it essentially is worthless. It has lost 97 percent of its value. But a lot of people did buy in at the high prices.
What was special about the New York Times story was two things. First, they put a number on how much money naive investors have lost on the coin, which is 3.8 billion dollars. And even more surprising is the number of people who were in effect suckers here — almost a million.
That’s really amazing. I mean, I was completely cynical but I didn’t think there were that many suckers out there. But it turns out there were really a lot. A few people made money off the coin — basically insiders who got to buy it early and then were able to cash in before the broader retail market realized that this was a worthless token. There’s another token, the World Liberty Financial coin — which has also crashed, although the Times had difficulty in tracking down how many people have lost how much money. There’s the Melania coin.
Okay, all of this is amazing. As Trump would say, it’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen before. I think we should say, however, that this is a bigger story than just the Trump coin, and it’s a bigger story than just Trump himself.
What we’re witnessing is or has been a really enormous pump and dump scheme, I would argue, involving more or less all of crypto.
So if you don’t know the background, Trump used to be highly critical of cryptocurrency, saying it was worthless and a scam, which was true. But then when it became clear that there was money in it for him, he reversed course. And during the 2024 election, crypto interests contributed a lot of money to Trump. They then after the election poured a lot of money into his own enrichment, into his own projects. And the administration came in with a very pro crypto stance: deregulation encouraging uses of crypto, at least talk about a national bitcoin reserve, all of that. And the price of bitcoin doubled after the election; the valuation, the market cap of cryptocurrency in general went from a little over two trillion to more than four trillion.
And then starting last fall it all came crashing down. Not all the way to zero — the price of Bitcoin right now as I record this is about what it was on the eve of the 2024 election; it’s about half what it was at its peak. That’s also true, roughly speaking for the market cap. So we’ve seen about two trillion dollars of market valuation wiped out.
Why is this a pump and dump story? Well what is cryptocurrency good for? As you know, I’ve been on this for a long time. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009 — this is a seventeen year old idea which has yet to find any legitimate use cases. Illegitimate use cases, yes. There was also a report in the Wall Street Journal about the extent to which Iran and North Korea have been making use of cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions, so there is that. But it’s still not enough to justify a multi-trillion dollar asset.
Anyway, it was trendy, it was exciting, it was fashionable and particularly after November 2
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BREAKING: DOGE has officially been shut down after failing to accomplish its goal. Analysts have found that DOGE actually increased the deficit.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has officially reached its termination date as set out in its original executive order. While it was chartered to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, reports from groups like the Partnership for Public Service estimate that the initiative left an $11 billion gap in the budget and cost taxpayers more than $100 billion in lost productivity, litigation, and rehiring. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/doge-website-deactivates-after-re
aching-self-termination-deadline-come-end
Details regarding the shutdown and its financial impacts include:
• Official Closure: The temporary DOGE organization self-deleted on July 4, 2026, marking the end of its 18-month charter. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/04/doge-july-4-white-house-end-0
0983651
• Fiscal Deficit: Analysts point out that DOGE's cuts to agencies—such as the Internal Revenue Service—resulted in a loss of federal revenue that exceeded the savings achieved by terminating contracts or firing personnel. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-didn-t-doge-staffer-202924948.html
• Exaggerated Savings: An investigation by CBS News estimated that DOGE's reported savings were sometimes exaggerated by up to 97%, with some cuts actually costing the government more due to efficiency losses, paid leave, and rehire cycles.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What a fucking loser.
You posted these two stupid articles in the tags, in my "Today in the Tags" thread, and here.
Go fuck yourself, second. You goddamned good for nothing little prick.
Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto
Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.
By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.
Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/
Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.
Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”
This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.
That investment is now worth $30,000.
Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”
He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”
Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.
Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.
Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about the patriotic Americans who elected him t
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘I’m Now Broke’: Meet The Investors Who Lost Billions Buying Trump Stocks And Crypto
Even though Trump-tied investments have crumbled in the public markets, the first family is still doing quite well. There's plenty more they can salvage, too.
By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor.
Dan Alexander covers Trump’s business.
Jul 06, 2026, 06:30am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/07/06/im-now-broke-meet
-the-investors-who-lost-billions-buying-trump-stocks-and-crypto/
Desperate to rebuild his fortune, Donald Trump asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him most got hurt the worst.
Vadim Fistikan started working at 17 and built the kind of savings that usually takes years of overtime, delayed purchases and adult restraint: more than $100,000 by the time he hit his late twenties. In 2021, the Washington State truck driver eyed a house near family in Florida, with a pool and a waterway that led to a river, and then the ocean. “We were thinking about pulling the trigger,” he says. “Then I saw this whole Trump thing going on.”
This Trump thing was the Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. In October 2021, the president unveiled the business, promising a censorship-free platform and giving supporters a chance to invest via a special purpose acquisition company. Shares of the SPAC jumped 1,650% in two days, then fell about 30% by the start of the third. To Fistikan, that looked less like a warning than a discount. “I’m like, ‘I’m getting in,’” says the three-time Trump voter who added to his bet until it hit $205,000.
That investment is now worth $30,000.
Fistikan logged onto Truth Social last fall to voice his frustrations. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,’” he says. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke.”
He’s not alone. Katherine Chiles, the SPAC’s former chief financial officer, now uses her Truth Social account to promote a song accusing the president of selling out his supporters—“Donald Trump is a b----.” Chad Nedohin, a worship leader who once moonlighted as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s retail shareholders, now describes the company as a vehicle for enriching the president and his inner circle. “We’re just poor cattle to them,” Nedohin says. “He doesn’t care about anyone.”
Throughout the president’s life, his most remarkable creations—whether casinos in Atlantic City, public offerings on the New York Stock Exchange or political movements across America—all relied on one thing: believers. In 2021, Trump left the White House with an abundance of them—and quickly got to work monetizing. To do so, he followed a process with three distinct stages. First, the invention: come up with a business concept, invest almost nothing, take a big chunk of equity. Second, the sale: stir up a frenzy among the faithful, cash out what you can. Third, the mess: watch the assets collapse, salvage the scraps. From 2021 to 2025, five Trump-family ventures reached public investors: Trump Media, World Liberty Financial, Trump’s memecoin, Melania Trump’s memecoin and American Bitcoin.
Now, they are all hitting the messy stage. Trump Media shares are down 89% from their peak. World Liberty tokens have fallen 82%. The president’s memecoin is off 98%. Melania’s version has dropped 99%. Shares of American Bitcoin are down 95%. The Trumps, after cashing out $1.9 billion, are still up $3.1 billion overall, according to Forbes calculations. Their supporters are down an estimated $7 billion.
Representatives of the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did spokespeople for Trump Media, which sued Forbes and other publications over allegedly inaccurate reporting about losses during the company’s first year of operation. The White House ignored questions about the president’s moneymaking ventures, issuing a statement on his policies instead. “President Trump cares deeply about t
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The Results Are In on Trump’s Boat-Strike Campaign
They haven’t stopped the drugs, but that was not the point.
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | July 6, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/trump-narcoterro
rists-boat-strikes/687763/
The official line remains the same: The 10-month campaign of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific has nearly stopped the flow of drugs by sea into the United States. In December, President Trump boasted about a 92 percent drop in seaborne shipments. Last month, in an apparent sign of further progress, he said the decline was up to 97.2 percent.
But government officials and agencies closest to the action, at sea and on America’s streets, tell a different story. In hearings, official reports, and interviews they have all but given up the pretense that the campaign has succeeded in reducing the flow of drugs into the U.S., even as 221 people have been killed in more than 60 strikes.
General Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, which runs the military campaign, told lawmakers earlier this year that “the boat strikes aren’t the answer,” though they remain “one of the many tools” in the long-term effort to counter narcotics. As if to prove the point, street prices for cocaine in the United States have plummeted, the opposite of what would be expected if smugglers were being deterred.
Last month, Senators Rand Paul, a Republican, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the three criteria the military uses to target boats. (The Pentagon’s targeting criteria are classified, but some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have reviewed them.) At a committee hearing, the senators focused not on the criteria themselves but on what was missing: any requirement that guns or drugs be on board.
“In order to blow them up, we don’t have to say that they’re armed or have drugs, and I think that a lot of people would have questions, which I still do,” Paul said.
Rubio told the senators only that the military doesn’t blow up every boat it investigates. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” Rubio said.
Trump has made unsupported claims that fentanyl, the drug most responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses, is on the targeted boats. That line began to fall apart shortly after the initial killings when top officials acknowledged to lawmakers that the strikes were aimed at cocaine smuggling. A Pentagon inspector-general report published in May confirmed that, saying fentanyl is “produced almost entirely in Mexico” and enters the U.S. through the southern border—not via boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Boats do carry cocaine, but the drugs on the vessels off the coast of Venezuela are most likely headed not to the United States but to Europe or Africa, Jonathan Caulkins, a drug-policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.
Over 10 months, the White House and Pentagon have maintained that the campaign is vital to securing “our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it. “The President has leveraged his dealmaking prowess to stop the influx of fentanyl precursors from China and struck narcoterrorist drug boats to stop the flow of drugs by sea,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an emailed statement. “President Trump is using every tool at his disposal to save lives from the scourge of illicit narcotics.”
Yet measured against their stated purpose of reducing the flow of narcotics into the United States, the strikes have been a bust. When combined with other policy changes, they may even have set back the Justice Department’s ability to pursue cases against cartel kingpins. And the strikes’ legal justification, which has been shrouded in secrecy, is now being tested in federal court.
The campaign grinds on regardless. Since Donovan’s March testimony, he has authorized 21 strikes that have killed 64 people.
The initial strike in September provoked outrage, especially after Hegseth
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