Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 18:15
VIEWED: 16250
PAGE 7 of 8
What's that, Shit Golem?
I wasn't paying attention to you.
You should get used to that now.
Because nobody is ever going to take anything you ever say seriously again.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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I wasn't joking.
You were the joke all along.
And not a particularly funny one.
And now everybody sees this.
Except for you.
Now carry that fucking weight.
Don't you worry. I know your stupid ass still doesn't get it.
But you will.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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President Donald Trump has made "casual butchery of the innocent" a common occurrence in his administration, according to a new analysis from The i Paper, which argued that his conduct is more bloodthirsty than the mob.
The piece, published on Saturday, hailed from veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn and dug into the growing list of violent acts committed against the innocent that Trump and his allies are racking up, including one which he dubbed "the worst single atrocity in U.S. military history since the Vietnam War."
"On the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran on [February 28], US missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab in southern Iran, killing at least 168 children as they sat at their desks along with 14 teachers – according to the Iranian media – in what may be the worst single atrocity in US military history since the Vietnam War," he wrote, later adding. "The slaughter of the schoolgirls by feckless US military commanders is but one ghastly example of the moral depravity of America during Donald Trump’s second presidency. Trump boasts of assassinating the 86-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but makes no mention of the killing by his side of his daughter, daughter-in-law and a 14-month-old granddaughter whose name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani."
He continued: "For the US government, casual butchery of the innocent has become the norm. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, US Southern Command has carried out some 196 extrajudicial killings of people in boats whom it claims, without producing any evidence, were 'narco-terrorists smuggling drugs into the US.' According to an Amnesty International report on the killings, the US has released and not prosecuted survivors from the air strikes on their boats, strongly suggesting that it has no proof they were carrying drugs."
Cockburn further cited a statement about these strikes from Amnesty International, which called them both "illegal" and "immoral," and accused the Trump administration of normalizing "extrajudicial killings." He went a step further, echoing the common comparison of Trump to a mob boss and likening his government to a "gangster underworld." However, he also argued that this comparison might, in fact, not be fair to the mob.
"This goes to the moral heart of the matter," Cockburn wrote. "The thought processes and behavior of the Trump administration in these cases resemble those of the gangster underworld, pitiless in targeting the weak and defenseless, respectful only of those who respond to violence with greater violence. If anything, the American Mafia arguably operates with greater moderation than Trump has here, making a distinction between civilians and its criminal rivals."
https://www.alternet.org/amp/trump-mobster-2677206637
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What's that, Shit Golem?
I wasn't paying attention to you.
You should get used to that now.
Because nobody is ever going to take anything you ever say seriously again.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I wasn't joking.
You were the joke all along.
And not a particularly funny one.
And now everybody sees this.
Except for you.
Now carry that fucking weight.
Don't you worry. I know your stupid ass still doesn't get it.
But you will.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The U.S. launched yet another round of strikes on Iran on Sunday, part of an effort it said was intended to thwart its attacks on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway crucial to the world’s oil supply.
The latest round of strikes began at 5 p.m. ET, U.S. Central Command said in a statement. The goal is to curb Iran’s ability to target commercial shipping in the strait at a time when the U.S. has declared it open for business and Iran has said it’s closed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/trump-threatens-iran-attempt-assass
inate-open-calls-killing-khamenei-rcna434515
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How many times has Trump declared victory in the Iran war?
President Donald Trump has declared victory or claimed the conflict was nearly over dozens of times. An NBC News review identified at least 32 instances where Trump stated the war was won or close to finishing, while CNN documented at least 38 occurrences of him stating that a peace deal with Iran was imminent.
These declarations and their surrounding contexts include:
• 12 Times in March: According to Moneycontrol, he claimed victory at least 12 times in the first month of the conflict alone, notably declaring to reporters, 'We've won this war. This war has been won."
• Five times in 13 seconds: Trump asserted in a speech that the U.S. won the conflict in the "first hour".
• "Total and complete victory": He has repeatedly used absolute terms online, such as claiming a "Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it," according to The Guardian.
• Diplomatic Deals: He has frequently claimed that his administration's strikes have left Iran desperate to negotiate, declaring the situation finished or nearly complete following tentative ceasefire agreements.
Despite these frequent declarations, the conflict and surrounding military exchanges have routinely resumed, with ceasefires breaking down and the U.S. carrying out further strikes in the region.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Thanks for the update, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate Over Hormuz.
New outbreak of fighting over the strait comes as Tehran sees itself as a winner in the war that would establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East.
By Yaroslav Trofimov | July 11, 2026 8:53 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/https-www-wsj-com-world-middle-e
ast-iran-deal-strait-of-hormuz-b027c30f-580ee99f?st=wH7zeM&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration.
That is because Tehran is playing a long game. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon, after the U.S. and Israel failed to achieve their main goals in the war they unleashed in February. And, as long as Tehran cements this new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway—and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it—then the rest, including American sanctions relief, will eventually follow.
“This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz,” warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security commission. “The Strait of Hormuz will only open with ‘Iranian arrangements,’ not American threats,” added the parliament’s speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
This attitude heralds a rocky future, with regular bouts of violence, continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies.
“The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion—by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz and driving up the price of oil,” said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Like Putin’s Russia, the Islamic Republic believes that its security depends not on the prosperity of its people, but on the insecurity of its neighbors.”
And, just like Russia in its own neighborhood, the Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence—a sphere denied to it by American meddling ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Now that America has failed to protect these Gulf states from Iranian attacks, Tehran’s drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East. After all, the Gulf countries, to a varying extent, rely on the strait not just for their oil and gas exports, but also for other vital supplies, from consumer items to food.
Keep reading at https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/https-www-wsj-com-world-middle-e
ast-iran-deal-strait-of-hormuz-b027c30f-580ee99f?st=wH7zeM&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Trump failed to secure the Strait of Hormuz in his poorly developed ‘deal’ with Iran
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/us/politics/trump-strait-of-hormuz-
iran-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xFA.nTaN.wiXixce04ava
The New York Times reports:
For two months, under a quiet arrangement with the U.S. Navy, commercial tankers turned off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran as they crossed the perilous Strait of Hormuz to carry oil and gas out to the world.
The military offered some air cover in case Iran attacked, as naval officers directed the vessels over the radio to hug Oman’s coast, opposite Iran’s shore. That enabled a steady increase in traffic through the strait from May to June, during a tentative cease-fire in the war.
But a framework deal that President Trump signed with Iran last month helped bring that effort to a fiery end because of its language giving Iran official power in the strait and its vagueness in important phrases.
Mr. Trump celebrated the agreement, reached on June 14, as the reopening of the strait. “Ships of the World, start your engines,” he wrote on social media. “Let the oil flow!”
But critics say it actually formalized a reality that Iranian officials have made clear throughout the war: They now control the strait.
Iran’s missile and drone attacks on commercial ships in the strait essentially shut it down soon after the United States and Israel started the war. Then weeks after the United States and Iran entered a tentative and informal cease-fire in early April, some tankers began taking a southern route through the strait, farther from Iran’s coast.
Now, by striking last week in that area, Iran is trying to force ships to travel through its territorial waters on the strait’s northern side, where Tehran can try to justify charging tolls or fees.
Iranian units attacked three ships on Tuesday along the southern route, the U.S. military said. Mr. Trump responded by ordering airstrikes in Iran. The tensions escalated in an announcement this weekend by Iran’s Navy that it had fired on another vessel in the strait and was closing the waterway “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”
U.S. Central Command said it hit about 140 Iranian military targets in response, for a total of 310 American strikes over the last week.
With Mr. Trump warning that he thinks the June agreement is “over,” global energy prices are surging again, along with fears of a return to all-out war. Before the war, a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through the strait from producers in the Middle East.
The latest crisis is an all-too-predictable result of the June agreement, former American officials and analysts say.
[Continue reading…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/us/politics/trump-strait-of-hormuz-
iran-deal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xFA.nTaN.wiXixce04ava
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The War Trump Can’t Control
President Trump has consistently said the war in Iran will be over “quickly.” Is it becoming one America can’t exit?
By Adam Harris | July 13, 2026, 8:40 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/07/ra-iran-reescalation/6878
49/
Following the United States’ war with Iran can give you whiplash. One day, it’s nearing a resolution; the next, the nations have resumed missile strikes on each other’s military installations, and Iran on Gulf States caught in the destructive web of this conflict. By the time President Trump declared, on Friday, that a cease-fire with Iran was over, the U.S. had already hit more than 140 targets in the preceding days—his words did not make policy; they were simply an articulation of reality.
Though the president has said he would not enter any “forever wars,” America seems to find itself headed toward one. Is there a way out? My colleagues Tom Nichols and Nancy Youssef, who cover the military and diplomacy for The Atlantic, joined me on Radio Atlantic to discuss the conflict that is beginning to feel more like a permanent condition.
Transcript at https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/07/ra-iran-reescalation/6878
49/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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"Can't control", according to whom?
Your chronically whining, Anti-American left wing faggot bitches over at the Atlantic.
Go fuck yourself, stupid.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Suddenly, Hormuz is Less Crucial Than It Was
Why? Because the real energy crunch is coming from the Russia/Ukraine war
Paul Krugman
Jul 14, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/suddenly-hormuz-is-less-crucial-tha
n
Are we back at war with Iran? Did the war ever stop? The US is, once again, bombing Iran while Iranian drones strike shipping. Iran, giddy with its success in defying America, is demanding sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, while Donald Trump is saying no, he owns the Strait and will collect 20 percent tolls.
Folks, this is bad. U.S. national security policy is now entirely in the service of one man’s vanity. We got into this mess because Trump thought he could win an easy victory that would let him strut around feeling powerful. Now we can’t get out because he won’t admit that his war has been a humiliating failure.
The good news is that Trump’s temper tantrum will probably do less economic damage than one might have expected — because the cease-fire that is apparently over wasn’t doing as much good as one might have expected. The fact is that there is now a disconnect between events in the Strait of Hormuz and the energy prices that matter. This disconnect is coming from a surprising place, another war that was supposed to yield a quick, easy victory but didn’t: Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine.
To see what I’m talking about, start with a question: Why was oil so cheap just before this latest confrontation?
Charts, graphs, and more about crude oil prices at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/suddenly-hormuz-is-less-crucial-tha
n
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Immediately after Pearl Harbor, President FDR could have bragged that he, personally, drove the Japanese Fleet out of Hawaii. Pearl Harbor was never again attacked! But, for some reason, FDR felt a need to collapse the Japanese government, not just protect Hawaii. And so began a war that continued for 1,364 days, unlike Trump's War with Iran, which he said was Won On Day One.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
"Can't control", according to whom?
Your chronically whining, Anti-American left wing faggot bitches over at the Atlantic.
Go fuck yourself, stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5967020-donald-trump-da
y-one-iran-war-graham-death-daylight-savings/
It was exactly 1,364 days (or 3 years, 8 months, and 22 days) from the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to the formal signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.
Today is the 137th day of Trump's War with Iran (or 10% of Roosevelt's War with Japan) https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Who Really Controls the Strait of Hormuz?
Since the war began, Iran has only expanded its power over the waterway.
By Will Gottsegen | July 14, 2026, 7:32 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/07/who-controls-strait-of
-hormuz/687920/
Yesterday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the United States would become the “GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” blockading Iranian ports and ensuring the safe passage of non-Iranian vessels. And in the spirit of “FAIRNESS,” he added, the U.S. would charge vessels a fee for the trouble.
Then, this morning, an amendment: Trump disposed of the fee idea while still indicating that he intends to assert control of the strait and resume the blockade. Now, Trump says, the Gulf states will be making “the Trade and Investment Deals” with the U.S. as a form of compensation. But the particulars of those deals (and of which states will participate) remain unclear.
Today marked the fourth consecutive day of strikes across Iran. The cease-fire has disintegrated—Trump formally notified Congress yesterday that the war has resumed—and negotiations have collapsed. If American forces do try to reassert power in the strait, they’ll face a difficult path. Iran is still clamping down on ship traffic, and recent violent clashes in the waterway have once again dramatically reduced the number of vessels entering and exiting the Persian Gulf. The United States’ ability to exert control in the strait could depend on its ability to erode the system of dominance that Iran has established in recent months.
Dominance in the Persian Gulf has never been clear-cut. In the early 16th century, Portuguese mariners brought their cartaz system of permits to the Strait of Hormuz, overseeing the waterway for more than a century. In 1622, the joint forces of Persia and England’s East India Company seized it. The Strait of Hormuz is now broadly understood as an international zone, and yet portions of the waterway remain contested. Its narrowest stretch is just 21 miles wide—meaning that, according to a United Nations convention, it is entirely within the territorial waters of Iran and nearby Oman. Neither Iran nor the U.S. are party to the UN treaty, but the U.S. nevertheless recognizes it as international law, Michael Poznansky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.
The U.S. has assumed some responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz in the past. Defense of the Persian Gulf was at the core of the Carter Doctrine—Jimmy Carter’s attempt, in 1980, to respond to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Iran periodically attacked foreign vessels in the strait during the Iran-Iraq War of the ’80s; in 1987, the U.S. Navy launched Operation Earnest Will, escorting Kuwaiti tankers through the strait for more than a year. During that war, the Iranian regime threatened to fully close off the strait but decided against it, realizing that the damage to its own economy would be too great. Iran has repeated this threat over the past two decades, but it never actually followed through until February, in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli strikes on its land and the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Despite the persistent threat of Iranian interference in the strait over the past half century, its leadership was never guaranteed to be able to enforce an effective blockade. But what remains of Iran’s military, decimated by months of war, has still proved capable of maintaining the transit restrictions that the regime announced in the spring. The persistent threat of mines, and of its nimble boats that can harass or attack other vessels, has kept ship traffic to a minimum; the number of crossings on Sunday was the lowest it had been in a month.
Past efforts to break Iran’s stranglehold over the course of this war have failed. In May, American forces began escorting some vessels through the strait as part of an initiative called Project Freedom; it ended after just two days, in part because Saudi Arabia declined to let the U.S. use its military bases and airs
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Immediately after Pearl Harbor, President FDR could have bragged that he, personally, drove the Japanese Fleet out of Hawaii. Pearl Harbor was never again attacked! But, for some reason, FDR felt a need to collapse the Japanese government, not just protect Hawaii. And so began a war that continued for 1,364 days, unlike Trump's War with Iran, which he said was Won On Day One.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
"Can't control", according to whom?
Your chronically whining, Anti-American left wing faggot bitches over at the Atlantic.
Go fuck yourself, stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5967020-donald-trump-da
y-one-iran-war-graham-death-daylight-savings/
It was exactly 1,364 days (or 3 years, 8 months, and 22 days) from the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to the formal signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.
Today is the 137th day of Trump's War with Iran (or 10% of Roosevelt's War with Japan) https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
CAN'T CONTROL? ACCORDING TO WHOM?
I don't need any of your bullshit dialog on any topic.
I asked you a fucking question. Do not quote my question and not answer it, fuckwit.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Trump lost to Iran. It is over, kind of like Bush, who lost to Afghanistan, but he didn't realize it. Bush went into Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden, but Osama was in Pakistan. The US Army searched for years unsuccessfully because it was looking in the wrong place. How much did that search cost? $8 trillion. Trump has already spent hundreds of billions on the Iran War. The price will keep going up until the next President, or the one after that, declares the war is over.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
CAN'T CONTROL? ACCORDING TO WHOM?
I don't need any of your bullshit dialog on any topic.
I asked you a fucking question. Do not quote my question and not answer it, fuckwit.
Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How success in Venezuela set Trump up for disaster in Iran
Not every country can be run from afar.
By Joshua Keating
Jul 20, 2026, 5:45 AM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/495917/trump-venezuela-iran
Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”
Key takeaways
• After removing President Nicolas Maduro in January, the US is now effectively controlling Venezuela via new President Delcy Rodriguez. On the other hand, after five months of fighting, Iran shows no signs it will accede to Trump’s demands.
• Trump cited Venezuela as a model for how he would like to control Iran and spoke of finding another “Delcy" to run that country, but it should have been obvious that was never going to work, given the differences between the two countries.
• Trump has spoken of attempting regime change in other countries, particularly Cuba. The question going forward is whether the experience of Iran has changed his views on how easy this would be.
On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.”
The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight.
Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other.
Exporting the Venezuela model
In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state.
The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a join
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Trump lost to Iran.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
CAN'T CONTROL? ACCORDING TO WHOM?
I don't need any of your bullshit dialog on any topic.
I asked you a fucking question. Do not quote my question and not answer it, fuckwit.
No. He didn't.
You're a fucking idiot, Shit Golem.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Since there are no good air defense systems in the region, it's a grudge match and slug fest between America/ Gulf Monarchies + Jordan/ Israel v Iran/ Iraq/ Ansar and Allah(?)/ China(?).
Each side will continue until one runs out of missiles or their assets are destroyed. I don't think infrastructure destruction OR civilian deaths will count.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Shit Golem is just such a compromised stupid fuck that he'll just say anything that comes into his mind and believe anything that he is told as long as they say Trump is a bad boy while they're saying it.
I guaranty you. If we ever lose the war against Iran, every goddamned person living here is going to know about it. HARD.
The fact that Over $151 Million dollars here in America had enough free time and money on their hands to go see The Odyssey this weekend leads me to believe that the reports saying we lost the war to Iran have been greatly overblown.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:What is the connection between movie ticket sales and the Strait of Hormuz being closed by Iran?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guaranty you. If we ever lose the war against Iran, every goddamned person living here is going to know about it. HARD.
The fact that Over $151 Million dollars here in America had enough free time and money on their hands to go see The Odyssey this weekend leads me to believe that the reports saying we lost the war to Iran have been greatly overblown.
Eventually, Hollywood will make a movie about Trump's Iran fiasco. Trumptards won't go to that movie because it makes Trump look like an old fool. How dare Hollywood mistreat the greatest President in history?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Is Caught in the Trap He Set
The war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that the president can slip out of any bind easily.
By David A. Graham | July 20, 2026, 6:39 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/07/trump-is-caught-in-ira
n-war/688006/
The war in Iran has dealt a serious blow to the idea that Trump can slip out of any bind easily. Over the past three days, three American service members died in that conflict: two in Jordan, where Iranian missiles struck a military base, and a third in Iraq, killed by debris during the intentional destruction of an Iranian drone. The official American death toll in the Iran war now sits at 17.
That number is low—still less, for example, than the toll from the 1983 invasion of Grenada—although the military appears to have been keeping quiet just how many troops have been injured. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote over the weekend, the president’s limp attempt at consolation (“It’s a very sad thing,” he said) is especially dismaying because “Trump has offered no comprehensive explanation about why his administration is ordering U.S. military personnel to put their lives on the line.”
And the death toll may begin to rise, because Trump appears to be on the verge of being drawn into a larger war. As the defense analyst Brynn Tannehill wrote in The Atlantic last week, the president faces only bad choices. The United States could effectively cede control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, accepting a fee system that breaks global precedent and centuries of American policy and granting a hostile power the opportunity to close an important shipping lane at any future moment. Or the White House could embark on a major ground war, because fighting over the past few months has shown the limitations of relying on air power. That would be politically hazardous, likely lead to more American deaths, and suck the U.S. into a long-running presence in the region, and it might still fail. Meanwhile, the conflict threatens to grow even larger as Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threaten to close some traffic to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Deciding what to do is hard when you don’t know what you want. Trump has vacillated over whether the point of the war is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and whether the war has already achieved that. He’s offered different answers about whether one goal is regime change, and whether that has been achieved. He has suggested that the purpose is to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though it was open before the war and even though that may no longer be manageable. The administration has also struggled to explain to skeptical members of Congress why it needs more war funding.
In short, Trump’s misadventure in Iran is a story of hubris. The president didn’t bother to plan or consider the dangers before he started a war, and now it has spiraled to a point where even he seems unable to find a way to wriggle out of a jam. For the first time in a very long time—to some extent, the first time in his life—Trump appears to be facing the consequences of his actions.
These circumstances might give Trump’s critics and opponents a chance to feel some delicious schadenfreude if the results of the blunder were not so terrible. The costs are measured not only in the blood of American service members but also in the deaths of Iranian civilians and of merchant mariners trying to sail through the Persian Gulf, in the damage to the global economy, and in the erosion of American alliances and a long-standing global order. Being confronted with a snare that he can’t escape must be unpleasant for Trump, but people around the globe will face misery because of it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What is the connection between movie ticket sales and the Strait of Hormuz being closed by Iran?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guaranty you. If we ever lose the war against Iran, every goddamned person living here is going to know about it. HARD.
The fact that Over $151 Million dollars here in America had enough free time and money on their hands to go see The Odyssey this weekend leads me to believe that the reports saying we lost the war to Iran have been greatly overblown.
Shut the fuck up, retard.
If Trump "Lost" against Iran, that means that Iran defeated America.
Iran objectively did no such thing.
You're a fucking idiot and cultist.
America hates you.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Has Trump achieved any of his objectives?
I don't know. What ARE his objectives?
The USA will keep striking Iran until it runs out of missiles. My guess is that will happen before Iran runs out of missiles. By then, I imagine all of our regional bases and friendly airstrips will be decimated
And altho Iran's infrastructure and civilian population will take a huge hit, the Gulf Monarchies depend almost fully on desalination and oil/ gas exports, and Israel isn't in much better shape.
This is a pure war of attrition. It looks like we and our regional "allies" will collapse before Iran does, and Iran will still be on control of the Straits of Hormuz.
The only factor holding Iran back from destroying oil and gas production in the region is that they can't make any $ unless oil and gas continue to flow thru the strait. So my guess is that Iran will focus on military assets, desalination plants, power generation, bridges, and financial centers and data centers.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Has Trump achieved any of his objectives?
I don't know. What ARE his objectives?
The USA will keep striking Iran until it runs out of missiles. My guess is that will happen before Iran runs out of missiles. By then, I imagine all of our regional bases and friendly airstrips will be decimated
That's one hell of a prediction. I applaud the balls on ya to even make it.
I have no idea where you're getting your information from, but all I'll say is that if we're $39 Trillion in debt and at least half of that debt is military spending, and we're actually running out of missiles like they're OLD WOOD trees being cut down to extinction while we're growing new shit pine trying to replace them, then I guess we deserve what we get.
The entire concept that we would ever possibly run out of weapons before Iran does sounds like pure fantasy to me.
I could be wrong now... But I don't think so.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump, expertise, the Iran war, and the unitary executive
Eric Kramer | July 21, 2026 10:54 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2026/07/trump-expertise-the-iran-war-and-the
-unitary-executive
Trump’s inability to evaluate expert advice and incorporate it into his thinking will undoubtedly play a large role when histories of the Iran war are written.
Trump evidently ignored warnings from experts within the government that Iran would respond to an attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Once the Strait was closed, Trump had a reasonably clear (I think) menu of bad options to choose from:
1) walk away and declare victory,
2) maintain sanctions on Iran and prevent Iranian sales of oil and hope that financial pain eventually brings Iran back to the negotiating table in a somewhat weakened position,
3) lower-level military escalation to bring Iran back to the negotiating table in a weakened position (what we have seen the past few days), and
4) various forms of more serious military escalation (Kharg Island, nuclear sites, civilian infrastructure, etc.).
For several weeks leading up to and following the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) it looked like Trump was choosing door number 1. But in the end he couldn’t stomach the deal his own negotiators had reached. He would have been much better off if he had the foresight to realize this before he opened the Strait to Iranian oil exports and allowed Iran to strengthen its finances.
Menzie Chinn sums it up:
Personally, I do not think the US side is operating with a rational agent (else the MoU wouldn’t have been signed as is, and Iran would not have been allowed to replenish funds by exporting billions of dollars with oil). A rational agent (who probably wouldn’t have struck Iran with such lack of planning in the first place) would have accepted sunk costs, and dropped demands for concessions that clearly the US has no leverage to acquire.
Trump illustrates in a way that a million dry academic warnings never could show how dangerously unconstrained the American presidency is. Yet at the same time this world-historic idiot is abusing presidential power in ways that are incredibly damaging to our future and unspeakably cruel to so many, the galaxy-brained justices on our Supreme Court have decided that presidents should have even fewer restraints on their power.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:100%, not 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
but all I'll say is that if we're $39 Trillion in debt and at least half of that debt is military spending
Al Overview
Cumulative United States national defense spending from 1946 through 2026 exceeds $ 27 trillion in nominal dollars, which equates to over $40 trillion when adjusted for modern inflation. This covers the post-WWII demobilization, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the post-9/11 conflicts, and modern defense Operations.
The breakdown of this historic spending trajectory reveals several defining periods:
• The Cold War & Early Conflicts (1946-1989): Sustained military commitments during the Korean War and Vietnam War kept defense spending averaging near 10% of the U.S. GDP. Cumulative spending during this era approached $4 trillion in nominal value.
• Post-9/11 Operations (2001-2026): Military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and broader War on Terror engagements have accounted for more than $18 trillion.
• Recent Years: National defense budgets have scaled up to counter renewed great power competition and rearmament pushes, with the total federal defense budget standing at approximately $1.46 trillion as of 2026.
To explore historical and current allocations in more detail, track exact yearly figures on the US Government Spending historical database or check annual funding profiles through USASpending.gov https://www.usaspending.gov/
If you are interested in a deeper breakdown, please let me know:
Would you like the data broken down by specific presidential administrations?
-----------------------------
China did NOT declare a War on Terror, and it did fine without that $18 trillion in wasted defense spending (unless you think the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars were money well spent, but then you'd think the $trillions about to be spent on the Iran War will be well spent).
As a matter of fact, China spends less than half as much on defense as the US does.
China’s Military in 10 Charts
https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-military-10-charts
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:100%, not 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
but all I'll say is that if we're $39 Trillion in debt and at least half of that debt is military spending
That's not even true by the sheer virtue that we are now paying more every year in interest on our debt than military spending.
You have a very simple, one-track mind, and it is one of the reasons you've had so much difficulty having any conversation about anything at all with anybody in your life.
Dealing with you is a chore for everyone unfortunate enough to have met you that has to deal with you on a regular basis.
You are a burden. You are burdensome.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:The US does NOT pay more interest on debt than military spending.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's not even true by the sheer virtue that we are now paying more every year in interest on our debt than military spending.
You have a very simple, one-track mind, and it is one of the reasons you've had so much difficulty having any conversation about anything at all with anybody in your life.
$1.4 trillion for defense
$883.4 billion for interest
If you cannot get that simple fact right, 6ixStringJoker, you cannot get anything right:
National Defense
A Budget Function
FY 2026 obligated amount
$1.4 trillion
Data as of May 30, 2026
Net Interest
A Budget Function
FY 2026 obligated amount
$883.4 billion
Data as of May 30, 2026
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
If Veterans Benefits and Services are included with defense, Defense spending is even more out of whack:
FY 2026 obligated amount
$299.5 billion
Data as of May 30, 2026
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The US does NOT pay more interest on debt than military spending.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's not even true by the sheer virtue that we are now paying more every year in interest on our debt than military spending.
You have a very simple, one-track mind, and it is one of the reasons you've had so much difficulty having any conversation about anything at all with anybody in your life.
$1.4 trillion for defense
$883.4 billion for interest
If you cannot get that simple fact right, 6ixStringJoker, you cannot get anything right:
Oh right. I forgot. Trump did what the Democrats and NeoCons always wanted and raised our defense spending by $600 Million or so. Josh Shapiro celebrated by doing a photo op and putting is John Hancock on a missile bound for Ukraine that may or may not have killed a person or many people.
You knew full well that was the case when you wrote this braindead reply, Shit Golem.
Or have you already forgotten how much you were bitching about that at the time it happened because your brain is so beyond fucked? There were plenty of stories stating that what I said was the facts before Trump raised the spending. Some of them you posted here yourself.
And above and beyond that, fuck your reply anyhow.
If any other spending besides military is adding to the budget deficit year over year, which many clearly do, INCLUDING THE FUCKING $883.4 BILLION FOR INTEREST, that means the percentage of military spending is not 100% of our $39 Trillion in debt, and you just look like a dumb asshole again, just as you always do.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Starting the Iran war was optional. Trump didn't have to do it and does not know what the final cost will be. Starting the Iraq War was optional for Bush. He didn't have to do it, but the final cost was $3 trillion or more. And the benefit of the Iraq War? Zero. The Iran War benefit will be zero, too.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
And above and beyond that, fuck your reply anyhow.
If any other spending besides military is adding to the budget deficit year over year, which many clearly do, INCLUDING THE FUCKING $883.4 BILLION FOR INTEREST, that means the percentage of military spending is not 100% of our $39 Trillion in debt, and you just look like a dumb asshole again, just as you always do.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/true-cost-iraq-war-3-trillion
-and-beyond
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The US does NOT pay more interest on debt than military spending.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's not even true by the sheer virtue that we are now paying more every year in interest on our debt than military spending.
You have a very simple, one-track mind, and it is one of the reasons you've had so much difficulty having any conversation about anything at all with anybody in your life.
$1.4 trillion for defense
$883.4 billion for interest
If you cannot get that simple fact right, 6ixStringJoker, you cannot get anything right:
Oh right. I forgot. Trump did what the Democrats and NeoCons always wanted and raised our defense spending by $600 Million or so. Josh Shapiro celebrated by doing a photo op and putting is John Hancock on a missile bound for Ukraine that may or may not have killed a person or many people.
You knew full well that was the case when you wrote this braindead reply, Shit Golem.
Or have you already forgotten how much you were bitching about that at the time it happened because your brain is so beyond fucked? There were plenty of stories stating that what I said was the facts before Trump raised the spending. Some of them you posted here yourself.
And above and beyond that, fuck your reply anyhow.
If any other spending besides military is adding to the budget deficit year over year, which many clearly do, INCLUDING THE FUCKING $883.4 BILLION FOR INTEREST, that means the percentage of military spending is not 100% of our $39 Trillion in debt, and you just look like a dumb asshole again, just as you always do.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Period.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Has Trump achieved any of his objectives?
I don't know. What ARE his objectives?
The USA will keep striking Iran until it runs out of missiles. My guess is that will happen before Iran runs out of missiles. By then, I imagine all of our regional bases and friendly airstrips will be decimated
That's one hell of a prediction. I applaud the balls on ya to even make it.
I have no idea where you're getting your information from, but all I'll say is that if we're $39 Trillion in debt and at least half of that debt is military spending, and we're actually running out of missiles like they're OLD WOOD trees being cut down to extinction while we're growing new shit pine trying to replace them, then I guess we deserve what we get.
The entire concept that we would ever possibly run out of weapons before Iran does sounds like pure fantasy to me.
I could be wrong now... But I don't think so.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
"I have my sources." she whispered.
Like with the war in Ukraine, too many to link.
We've pretty much run out of Patriot air defense missiles (not that they do much good anyway).
The next missile of concern is the Tomahawk, which is an attack missile, a ship- launched cruise missile with a 1000 mile range. As long as Iran maintains long range anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft capacity we'll have to stick with Tomahawks I guess.
Quote:
The US Faces a Strategic Crisis with Iran…The Rapid Depletion of US Battlefield Missiles
https://sonar21.com/the-us-faces-a-strategic-crisis-with-iran-the-rapi
d-depletion-of-us-battlefield-missiles/
Quote:
The US Military Just Emptied a Third of Its Deepest Missile Magazine Into Iran — and the Pentagon’s Own Wargames Say the Next War Empties It in Days
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/07/the-us-military-just-emptied-a-thi
rd-of-its-deepest-missile-magazine-into-iran-and-the-pentagons-own-wargames-say-the-next-war-empties-it-in-days/
Well, projections are always pretty iffy, but if we've used up 1/3 of our Tomahawks then we have about 2000 left. Iran OTOH has been estimated to have anywhere from 2,500 to 10,000 ballistic missiles (I think on the higher side) and since their launch sites are buried we probably didn't destroy much of their stockpile.
But we'll see.
----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Each Day The US Weakens Itself
What It Means For US-China Relations
Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 22, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-
us
It is painful as a student of strategy to watch the US weaken itself relentlessly like this. These attacks on Iran, in their latest phase of the war, have been going on for 11 straight nights now. The USA keeps hammering away against an Iranian military that Trump claimed months ago to have “obliterated”. Yet, the Iranians continue to fight back, with what might be called a sideways strategy which is distressingly effective. Indeed as the USA weakens itself, the Iranians seem to be improving their position.
The upshot is a decline in America’s global position, a decline which the USA is aiding and abetting with its present strategy. When it comes to the Asia-Pacific, that degradation has reached a stage where the US might never recover. There will be a section at the end for PS that will go into this.
Each Day The US Weakens Itself
The US has now spent 11 straight nights attacking targets across Iran. The purpose behind these attacks seems to be Trump’s hope that if he does something, anything, to damage Iran, that the Iranian regime will get the message and give him peace terms that he can sell as “not a catastrophic loss”. These terms remain what they have been since March, some kind of concession on the nuclear question and a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz without tolls. The amazing and depressing thing is that each night of these attacks is making things worse for the USA. It is bringing the US further away from achieving anything material and actually putting Iran in a stronger position. It reaffirms the pointlessness of the use of military force in this (and most) situations.
The USA is engaged in a war of choice to defeat itself. It certainly is a special moment. Maybe the best way to understand what is happening is to break it down into a series of points. The first is that the US has no actual military operation to achieve what it wants, beyond a full invasion and deposition of the Iranian regime.
The One (Bad) Military Option
What could the US achieve here? The answer would be even with the whole might of the US military, it is not clear. The US is trying to damage the Iranian regime to such a degree that it will give in, to coerce it. However that is practically impossible to imagine without a change in that regime. So, the only way Trump can reasonably hope to achieve his political goals is to overthrow the Iranian regime and replace it with a new and compliant one. That will not happen with air strikes for a number of reasons. So the only way for Trump to “win” the war is for a full-scale invasion, and that means taking Tehran and installing a new government. Taking Kharg Island (mooted again this week as a possible target for US invasion) achieves nothing towards this but puts US forces in vulnerable positions. If the US cannot protect its troops from air attacks in Jordan, there is no way it can do so in Kharg.
The problem with any full scale invasion is that we are talking about using hundreds of thousands of troops, masses of munitions (it is not clear that the US even has enough left at this point) and has no end-date in mind. General Barry McCaffrey estimates it would take 600,000 US troops and would take a year. I would say even longer. However it is irrelevant, because it is not happening.
That Means Every Day Of Operations Weakens The USA
This process of weakening is happening in a number of ways. First, the US is simply further depleting its stockpiles of vital weapons and doing so in efforts that can achieve nothing political. The reality behind this depletion seems to be causing panic in the Pentagon. Let me start with this quote from an anonymous official about what is happening, which was given to the Washington Post.
"We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don't think the White House is aware of that."
This is extremely serious. The USA had al
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No classified briefings, no press conferences, no acknowledgment that the conflict with Iran is back on
By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | July 21, 2026, 6:38 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/iran-war-trump-h
egseth/688016/
The Trump administration is back at war. It just doesn’t want to admit it.
In the 11 days since the United States resumed its air strikes against Iran, neither President Trump nor any other senior administration official has publicly addressed the campaign. U.S. forces began by striking Iranian military facilities but later expanded to attacking civilian infrastructure that the administration says is being used for military purposes. As of today, congressional officials had yet to receive classified briefings on the latest phase of the war, aides told us.
The Pentagon, whose leadership stepped in front of the cameras in the weeks following the start of the war, in late February, hasn’t held a press briefing since May to answer even basic questions: Why is a resumption of the war necessary? What are the strategic objectives, and how have they changed? How many casualties have American forces suffered? What would define success?
The president, who has repeatedly claimed the war was already won, scheduled a televised address to the nation last week. Instead of talking about the war, though, he focused on election security and mentioned Iran only in passing, telling the nation that “we are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.” (This is hard to square with the record of the past several months.)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were on Capitol Hill this afternoon to plead for $67.1 billion for emergency military funding to replenish munitions and meet other needs, on top of the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion regular budget request. Neither uttered the word Iran in their opening statement. Hegseth, in his testimony, referred to the war as “an operation.”
Even the deaths of American troops have been treated as though they belong to another conflict. After two U.S. service members were killed in Jordan by an Iranian missile on Friday, the Pentagon initially said that they died supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the decade-plus campaign against the Islamic State. It then issued another statement saying that the two troops, along with a third who was killed in Iraq when an attack drone detonated, died while “supporting overseas operations”—but still did not explicitly mention Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon’s name for the conflict with Iran. (Another service member, who had been reported missing in Jordan, is believed dead, the Pentagon said today.)
With those deaths included, at least 18 U.S. service members have been killed in combat since the war started—more than were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2016, 2017, and 2018 each, and only slightly fewer than the total recorded during the 12 years of Operation Inherent Resolve against ISIS. At least 1,700 Iranians have been killed, according to Iranian officials, including dozens over the past 10 days.
Trump is scheduled to attend the dignified-transfer service for the slain soldiers at Dover Air Force Base tomorrow. But his brief remarks saluting the fallen soldiers were quickly followed by his usual blustery insistence that the war was going well. Trump has lashed out on social media against Iran, vowing to punish its regime for killing Americans. But a senior official acknowledged to us that initial intelligence assessments had revealed that the new wave of U.S. strikes has likely done little to change Iran’s behavior.
Trump expected a quick victory, and so the military didn’t prepare for a prolonged conflict. There was no months-long buildup of forces and no large-scale deployment of troops. Although the military surged additional forces into the region, many assets—particularly Navy ships—were diverted from other war theaters rather than tra
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Shut the fuck up.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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SIX, just wanted to comment on our military budget.
For decades Congress and weapons industries used our military budget as a Giant Piggybank, to raid at will. Graft, corruption, and profiteering are the lifeblood of politicians, lobbyists, contractors and subcontractors. That's why our weapons are so complex (development costs!) fragile (exclusive maintenance contracts!), overbudget, and beyond deadline.
On a moral and practical basis, I'm against us randomly picking fights and changing governments around the globe. Most of our wars serve as a great excuse for the military and hangers-on to absorb ever increasing amount of tax dollars! They also serve as a great vehicle for brainwashing and absorbing more and more control over people.
Just saying.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Why no numbers in your comment?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, just wanted to comment on our military budget.
Pentagon and national defense funding has surged significantly,
with the proposed FY 2027 budget targeting $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion,
up from approximately $1 trillion in FY 2026 and
roughly $900 billion in FY 2025.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, just wanted to comment on our military budget.
For decades Congress and weapons industries used our military budget as a Giant Piggybank, to raid at will. Graft, corruption, and profiteering are the lifeblood of politicians, lobbyists, contractors and subcontractors. That's why our weapons are so complex (development costs!) fragile (exclusive maintenance contracts!), overbudget, and beyond deadline.
On a moral and practical basis, I'm against us randomly picking fights and changing governments around the globe. Most of our wars serve as a great excuse for the military and hangers-on to absorb ever increasing amount of tax dollars! They also serve as a great vehicle for brainwashing and absorbing more and more control over people.
Just saying.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I'm all for wasting the money on the military if we kill all the Iranians with it. Every last one of them.
Otherwise we're just wasting money for the sake of wasting money.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, just wanted to comment on our military budget.
For decades Congress and weapons industries used our military budget as a Giant Piggybank, to raid at will. Graft, corruption, and profiteering are the lifeblood of politicians, lobbyists, contractors and subcontractors. That's why our weapons are so complex (development costs!) fragile (exclusive maintenance contracts!), overbudget, and beyond deadline.
On a moral and practical basis, I'm against us randomly picking fights and changing governments around the globe. Most of our wars serve as a great excuse for the military and hangers-on to absorb ever increasing amount of tax dollars! They also serve as a great vehicle for brainwashing and absorbing more and more control over people.
Just saying.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I'm all for wasting the money on the military if we kill all the Iranians with it. Every last one of them.
Otherwise we're just wasting money for the sake of wasting money.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Been watching too much "24", hmmmm???
Ever occur to you that YOU'RE brainwashed? That Iranians are just another excuse for Moar War?
Cause AFAIK everything you think about Iranians is wrong.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Been watching too much "24", hmmmm???
I was going to say that I've never seen an episode of 24, but that's not true. The last time I hung out with one of my uncle's family on my mom's side before he died, he got Buffalo Wild Wings for everybody and we watched the new episode of 24, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. But it looked exciting.
Quote:
Ever occur to you that YOU'RE brainwashed? That Iranians are just another excuse for Moar War?
Cause AFAIK everything you think about Iranians is wrong.
Brainwashed by who?
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Brainwashed by who?
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!
Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Brainwashed by who?
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!
Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
You need to see more videos of real life, Sigs. The stuff they're not showing you on the news.
I'm not even goign to entertain this conversation with you while it just came out that over 250 THOUSAND FUCKING GIRLS in the UK have been molested by Muslim men since they started taking them in and the government has so much control over the population that they were able to hide that until just recently.
White British people are a minority in London today. We have several American-hating Muslims as politicians in America now, but if the Democrat Party doesn't fucking fix itself, we're about to have A LOT FUCKING MORE OF THEM.
They hate us. They plan to kill and/or enslave us.
And I just watched as 99% of the people in my country took a fucking knee and let the government ramrod everyone up the ass with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations and nobody did a fucking thing about it until they decided it was over.
FUCK YOUR WHITE GIRL EMPATHY.
Unless you start seeing the real world on this issue, we will never see eye to eye and I will not be shy about it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:6ix won the contest for Worst Monster of the 21st Century.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
I was reading this article:
Who was the worst monster of the 20th century? And who is the worst monster of the 21st?
By Noah Smith | Jul 22, 2026
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/who-was-the-worst-monster-of-the
Pretty damn impressive, 6ixStringJoker!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix won the contest for Worst Monster of the 21st Century.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
I was reading this article:
Who was the worst monster of the 20th century? And who is the worst monster of the 21st?
By Noah Smith | Jul 22, 2026
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/who-was-the-worst-monster-of-the
Pretty damn impressive, 6ixStringJoker!
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Your mom raised you, Arthur the Shit Golem.
You never told us how you killed her... Was it really by pillow? Is that why you could never stop talking about that scene?
What a coincidence. There really is nothing new under the sun, is there?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities.
By Tom Nichols | July 22, 2026, 4:03 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/trump-iran-conflict-pentagon
/688026/
For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.
This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.
Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.
All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.
But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)
He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
Why are you hiding the link, bitch?
Would you like me to look this up on my own, find out who the author really is and shove his history up your ass so far you start speaking in ancient dialects?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Thank you for pointing it out.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
Why are you hiding the link, bitch?
Would you like me to look this up on my own, find out who the author really is and shove his history up your ass so far you start speaking in ancient dialects?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a contributor to the Atlantic Daily newsletter. He is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years, and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. He has served as a legislative aide in the Massachusetts House and the U.S. Senate. He writes about international security, nuclear weapons, Russia, and the challenges to democracy in the United States and around the world—along with occasional contrarian views on popular culture. His books include The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion.
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tom-nichols/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Atlantic: 'Nuff Said
Bullshit Globalist dead paper with shills who will all be unemployed soon.
Nothing to bother reading here.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Your party is dying.
You are either part of the reason it is dying directly by partaking in the reasons for its death, or you are guilty of killing it by sitting back and doing nothing while it gets co-opted right out from under you.
What the fuck are you doing, stupid?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Brainwashed by who?
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!
Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
You need to see more videos of real life, Sigs. The stuff they're not showing you on the news.
Oh, puhleeze!
Y
Do you REALLY think I get my news from "the news", stupid?
I've seen videos of women burned to death in cages.
Or slowly drowned in cages.
Heads being chopped off.
A man anally raped to death with a knife.
People falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers.
Hears stories from my Ethiopian colleague about what is done to slave labor.
Open air slave markets.
I've seen the horror, son.
Quote:
I'm not even goign to entertain this conversation with you while it just came out that over 250 THOUSAND FUCKING GIRLS in the UK have been molested by Muslim men since they started taking them in and the government has so much control over the population that they were able to hide that until just recently.
Yup! I know about that too!
Quote:
White British people are a minority in London today. We have several American-hating Muslims as politicians in America now, but if the Democrat Party doesn't fucking fix itself, we're about to have A LOT FUCKING MORE OF THEM.
Blame the British government and Dems, then.
Quote:blag blag blah
They hate us. They plan to kill and/or enslave us.
And I just watched as 99% of the people in my country took a fucking knee and let the government ramrod everyone up the ass with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations and nobody did a fucking thing about it until they decided it was over.
You're just spewing.
Quote:
FUCK YOUR WHITE GIRL EMPATHY.
IT'S NOT EMPATHY!
Quote:
Unless you start seeing the real world on this issue, we will never see eye to eye and I will not be shy about it.
SIX, you are gaspingly, astonishingly stupid once somebody has got ahold of your gonads.
Those head choppers? THEY ARE NOT IRANIAN,
THEY ARE SAUDIS AND THEIR WAHHABIST ACOLYTES. NOT IRANIAN. EVERYTHING YOU THINK IRAN DID WAS DONE BY DEGENERATE MULSIM WAHHABISTS, TAKFIRIS, OR WHATEVER YIU WANT TO CALL THEM.
Those rapists and molesters? NOT IRANIAN. PAKINSTANIS, AFGHANIS, AND OTHER MEN "EDUCATED" IN SAUDI WAHHABI-FUNDED MADRASAS, where they spread their troglodyte ideology.
WHO USED THE HEAD CHOPPERS AS PROXIES?
WE DID.
WE - the Dems, the CIA, globalist Repubs.
WHO cozied up to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to the troglodyte "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, knowing they've been spreading their filth across the Mideast, and now the western world, for decades?
WHO was in an unholy alliance with the source of that festering, disgusting ideology, bc of the almighty dollar?
YOUR problem, son, is that you lump all Muslims together. Indonesia is mostly Muslim. Is Indonesia a hotbed of terrorism?
It's time you woke up to who our REAL enemies aee.
Iran wasn't an enemy, until now. That's what your stupidity supported.
GET HOLD OF YOUR EMOTIONS, they're running you.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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A Key House Dem Breaks Down the White House’s ‘Unfathomable’ Iran War Funding Requests
by Hunter Walker | 07.22.26 | 5:15 pm
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-key-house-dem-breaks-down-the-whi
te-houses-unfathomable-iran-war-funding-requests
Weeks after the Iran War began, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) predicted to TPM that it would become a billion-dollar-a-day “mess.” Now, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth taking to Capitol Hill to request almost $67 billion in supplemental war funding, Morelle says his fears have been confirmed. And though Morelle is a member of two key committees with oversight of the Pentagon, he claims Congress has been given little information about where all the money is going.
“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle said in a conversation with TPM on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s unfathomable.”
Morelle is vice-ranking member of the House Appropriations committee and a member of its defense subcommittee. Despite these positions, Morelle said Trump administration officials haven’t offered any detailed insight into their funding requests.
“Usually if you’re in a classified setting, they should be prepared to give you information, but they haven’t done that,” he said.
Hegseth on Tuesday told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the “urgent” supplemental war funding was necessary to avoid “critical shortfalls” in combat pay and munitions supplies that could be caused by military operations. As he made his case, Hegseth said the war, which began on February 28, had cost $37.5 billion so far.
That figure announced by Hegseth is far below internal cost estimates that have been reported on by NBC News and expert analyses, which are in line with Morelle’s initial projection and amount to approximately $150 billion overall. Given that staggering total and the spike in gas prices that has come along with the conflict, the economists at Moody’s say the Iran War has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.
All of this war funding is coming in the wake of President Trump nearly doubling defense spending overall. The latest supplemental funding request totaled almost $88 billion including the money Hegseth said was specifically needed for the war.
As the administration has sought this increased funding, it has turned to three separate avenues: standard congressional appropriations; reconciliation legislation, which can avoid the filibuster; and the supplemental request. Morelle said this approach, which is unprecedented, has added to the overall lack of transparency since reconciliation funding can bypass appropriations committees. And he claimed the administration has not answered questions about why they have placed various requests in each different “bucket.”
“That doesn’t come to the appropriators. It goes to the authorizing committees. So the appropriators and the authorizers aren’t even together,” Morelle said, adding, “There’s no answer. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”
That behind-the-scenes chaos is taking place as Trump and his team have made continually shifting statements about their objectives in Iran.
“We still don’t know what the goal here is,” Morelle said. “It changes all the time.”
When Hegseth previously appeared before the House Appropriations Committee, Morelle chastised him for being less transparent and up to date in his requests than America’s founding military leader was in the days of quill pens and correspondence conducted via horseback. Morelle reiterated that point in his conversation with TPM.
“General Washington was more timely and more accurate in his reports to the Continental Congress in 1776 than the current Department of Defense Secretary is with the United States Congress,” Morelle said.
The increase in government spending is only one aspect of the war’s cost. Morelle noted the conflict will also impact other government programs and the national debt.
“The whole
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Brainwashed by who?
I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.
Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!
Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
You need to see more videos of real life, Sigs. The stuff they're not showing you on the news.
Oh, puhleeze!
Y
Do you REALLY think I get my news from "the news", stupid?
I've seen videos of women burned to death in cages.
Or slowly drowned in cages.
Heads being chopped off.
A man anally raped to death with a knife.
People falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers.
Hears stories from my Ethiopian colleague about what is done to slave labor.
Open air slave markets.
I've seen the horror, son.Quote:
I'm not even goign to entertain this conversation with you while it just came out that over 250 THOUSAND FUCKING GIRLS in the UK have been molested by Muslim men since they started taking them in and the government has so much control over the population that they were able to hide that until just recently.
Yup! I know about that too!Quote:
White British people are a minority in London today. We have several American-hating Muslims as politicians in America now, but if the Democrat Party doesn't fucking fix itself, we're about to have A LOT FUCKING MORE OF THEM.
Blame the British government and Dems, then.Quote:blag blag blah
They hate us. They plan to kill and/or enslave us.
And I just watched as 99% of the people in my country took a fucking knee and let the government ramrod everyone up the ass with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations and nobody did a fucking thing about it until they decided it was over.
You're just spewing.Quote:
FUCK YOUR WHITE GIRL EMPATHY.
IT'S NOT EMPATHY!Quote:
Unless you start seeing the real world on this issue, we will never see eye to eye and I will not be shy about it.
SIX, you are gaspingly, astonishingly stupid once somebody has got ahold of your gonads.
Those head choppers? THEY ARE NOT IRANIAN,
THEY ARE SAUDIS AND THEIR WAHHABIST ACOLYTES. NOT IRANIAN. EVERYTHING YOU THINK IRAN DID WAS DONE BY DEGENERATE MULSIM WAHHABISTS, TAKFIRIS, OR WHATEVER YIU WANT TO CALL THEM.
Those rapists and molesters? NOT IRANIAN. PAKINSTANIS, AFGHANIS, AND OTHER MEN "EDUCATED" IN SAUDI WAHHABI-FUNDED MADRASAS, where they spread their troglodyte ideology.
WHO USED THE HEAD CHOPPERS AS PROXIES?
WE DID.
WE - the Dems, the CIA, globalist Repubs.
WHO cozied up to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to the troglodyte "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, knowing they've been spreading their filth across the Mideast, and now the western world, for decades?
WHO was in an unholy alliance with the source of that festering, disgusting ideology, bc of the almighty dollar?
YOUR problem, son, is that you lump all Muslims together. Indonesia is mostly Muslim. Is Indonesia a hotbed of terrorism?
It's time you woke up to who our REAL enemies aee.
Iran wasn't an enemy, until now. That's what your stupidity supported.
GET HOLD OF YOUR EMOTIONS, they're running you.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's fr
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Quote:Elon Musk controversially stated on The Joe Rogan Experience that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", adding that this can lead to "civilizational suicidal empathy" when overextended to the detriment of societal stability.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles
March 22, 2025 8:05 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-se
en-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Elon Musk controversially stated on The Joe Rogan Experience that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", adding that this can lead to "civilizational suicidal empathy" when overextended to the detriment of societal stability.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles
March 22, 2025 8:05 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-se
en-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Fuck NPR and fuck you.
You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.
We're not following you off the cliff.
Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.
You won't be missed.
Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.
So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:"Behold The Strange Spectacle Of Christians Against Empathy."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck NPR and fuck you.
You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.
We're not following you off the cliff.
Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.
You won't be missed.
Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.
So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.
Jesus - the central figure in Christianity - embodied empathy by coming to Earth as a man and enduring the human experience. Trump has cut programs long supported by many evangelicals and conservative Catholics, including funding for religious organizations that help the poor. So how do you rationalize this change? These arguments about toxic empathy help people who are looking for a moral frame around which they can fit the Trump movement, and decrying empathy does that.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:"Behold The Strange Spectacle Of Christians Against Empathy."
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck NPR and fuck you.
You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.
We're not following you off the cliff.
Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.
You won't be missed.
Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.
So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.
Jesus - the central figure in Christianity - embodied empathy by coming to Earth as a man and enduring the human experience. Trump has cut programs long supported by many evangelicals and conservative Catholics, including funding for religious organizations that help the poor. So how do you rationalize this change? These arguments about toxic empathy help people who are looking for a moral frame around which they can fit the Trump movement, and decrying empathy does that.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Fuck Jesus. Fuck David French. And Fuck You.
I'm not against Empathy. This is another false argument from your Legacy Media Masters that lead you around every day.
You're not showing any empathy here. You are destroying yourself and your country because you feel guilty that you've been such a worthless sack of shit your entire life and you never had to work for any of it.
Fuck you.
If you feel so guilty, spend your own fucking money. You're done spending mine.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
IT'S NOT EMPATHY.
Here's what's going on with you SIX.
JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.
You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.
Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.
Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!
Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)
And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.
Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.
I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
IT'S NOT EMPATHY.
Here's what's going on with you SIX.
JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.
You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.
Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.
Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!
Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)
And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.
Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.
I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Iran War Is Lost. Now Fix What It Broke.
America has to rethink how it moves resources, fights wars, and deters adversaries.
By Andrew Exum | July 23, 2026, 4:51 PM ET
From 2015 to 2017, Andrew Exum was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/07/iran-defeat-cost-oil
-drones/688034/
The sooner we acknowledge that the United States has lost the war with Iran and stop fighting, the better. Because we now have a lot of work to do.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed to explain before the Senate what the United States had accomplished in its war with Iran. Sputtering with fury at times, he claimed that Washington had won “a historic military victory.” But even if that were so, as a certain dead Prussian once counseled, nations do not fight wars to achieve military objectives. They fight wars to achieve political objectives.
The United States has not secured any of its political objectives in the war with Iran, and indeed, it has produced a situation in July that is markedly worse than the one antebellum: Iran’s former supreme leader, an elderly man known for his extreme views but also his caution, has been replaced by a group of leaders who are, if anything, more extreme and far less cautious about confronting the United States and its partners in the region.
The Strait of Hormuz, which was open prior to the start of the conflict, is now largely closed. And the Arabian Peninsula’s other choke point, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, appears to have been shut by Iran’s partners in Yemen, the Houthis. In the spring, American energy executives sounded like Chicken Little as they warned of oil and gas shortages that a reduction in Chinese oil imports helped forestall. But Exxon and Chevron have more recently cautioned that an energy crunch really is inevitable if the situation does not improve, and that this could threaten the entire global economy.
The U.S. does not have a workable military solution to this problem. Iran can threaten tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz with little more than inexpensive drones. And, thanks to this conflict, Tehran has discovered that it has powerful psychological leverage over shipping companies and their insurers—so much so that it hardly needs to lay mines to block the strait.
For the U.S. to finance this war beyond the $37.5 billion that the Pentagon admits it has already spent—the actual number is surely much higher—would be to throw good money after bad. The Trump administration needs to face up to having lost so that it can focus on preventing the effects of an embarrassing but ultimately manageable defeat from spreading beyond the Persian Gulf. This will involve rethinking some fundamentals—such as how the region’s oil reaches world markets, how the United States wages war, and how Iran can be deterred from making trouble for American interests in the future.
The Strait of Hormuz is now, and likely indefinitely will be, under a degree of Iranian control that did not exist prior to the conflict. Washington and its allies, together with private-sector investors, will need to devote considerable time and money toward securing alternate routes for Middle Eastern oil to reach global markets. Some infrastructure already exists. The East-West Pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was built during the Iran-Iraq War, which was the last time oil tankers struggled to navigate the strait. This pipeline moves roughly 7 million barrels of oil a day. The Saudis are considering doubling that capacity. The United Arab Emirates has a similar pipeline that bypasses the strait, and whose volume will also likely need to double. Oil and gas pipelines, like other oil infrastructure in the Gulf, are vulnerable to Iranian drone strikes, but they are relatively easy to repair.
The United States should encourage the Saudis and Emiratis to run branches of their pipelines through Yemen and Oman, to keep those countries invested in maintaining the free flow of oil and gas out of the peninsula.
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‘This country is in deep trouble’: Leon Panetta sounds alarm on Iran war
By Jennifer Bowers Bahney | Jul 23
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/this-country-is-in-deep-trouble-l
eon-panetta-sounds-alarm-on-iran-war/ar-AA28xShM
Key takeaways
• Deep Trouble: Former CIA Director Leon Panetta warns the U.S. is in a difficult position, comparing the Iran conflict to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with no clear objectives and rising domestic costs.
• Straits of Hormuz: Panetta emphasizes that control over the Straits of Hormuz is crucial for leverage and restoring economic stability, criticizing past agreements that gave Iran influence there.
• Negotiation Complexity: Any attempt to return to talks with Iran will be highly complicated, involving both nuclear issues and control of strategic waterways, according to Panetta.
The U.S. is in “deep trouble” when it comes to the Iran war, said a former top CIA official who compared the months long conflict to America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Leon Panetta, who led the Central Intelligence Agency during President Barack Obama’s administration, made the remark during a Thursday appearance on CNN in which he was asked who had the “upper hand” in Iran.
“Well, history tells us that forever wars do not end well,” Panetta said.
“And I think that’s the box we’re in right now,” he added. “Whether it was Vietnam, whether it was Iraq, whether it’s Afghanistan, or whether it’s Iran right now, the problem is that there really is no clear objective that the president is trying to put his arms around.”
“So he continues military attacks, which intelligence makes clear is not going to move Iran. And at the same time, the American people are paying a very heavy price as a result of oil prices going sky high and the cost of living increasing as much as it is,” Panetta noted.
“And so he he’s basically in a box right now trying to figure out if there’s a way out. And frankly, I think right now, this country is in deep trouble in terms of figuring some kind of strategy that can end this war. It does not look well at this point.”
Anchor Brianna Keilar asked Panetta how the U.S. gets back to the negotiating table with Iran.
“There’s only one way I’ve thought of to achieve any kind of leverage in dealing with Iran, and that relates to the Straits of Hormuz,” Panetta said, continuing:
Quote:
It was a mistake in the MOU to imply — and it did strongly imply — that Iran would control the Straits of Hormuz. That was a bad mistake, and the result is they continue to use that as leverage to get back at the United States.
What the United States has to do in order to get any kind of leverage here is, it has to take control of the Straits of Hormuz and be able to control the free access that is necessary in order to be able to restore our economy.
If the president doesn’t take any action to be able to take control of the Straits of Hormuz, then I think we’re only left with the hope that somehow we’re going to get back to a negotiating table that is now not only going to consider what happens in the nuclear area, but is going to consider what happens to the Straits of Hormuz as well.
That’s going to be a very complicated negotiation.
At an event at the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday, Trump said the U.S. was “doing very well against the Islamic Republic of Iran” — despite a vote in the House to end the war.
“They would like to do something, but I say, they’re not ready yet. They need more of the same. They’re not ready yet. They have some evil intentions. We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon,” the president added.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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U.S. Army Is Buying Older PAC-2 Patriot Missiles For The First Time In Decades
PAC-2 GEM-T missiles are not generally as capable as their PAC-3 counterparts, but the Army needs all the Patriots it can get.
By Joseph Trevithick
Published Jul 23, 2026 2:17 PM EDT
https://www.twz.com/land/u-s-army-is-buying-older-pac-2-patriot-missil
es-for-the-first-time-in-decades
. . . strain on existing Patriot interceptor supply chains, as well as for complete Patriot surface-to-air missile systems, has created problems for current and future customers. Switzerland notably saw its orders for new Patriot batteries deferred last year due to demand from Ukraine. In April, Swiss authorities raised the prospect of canceling the deal altogether due to the delays. Concerns have been raised about the ability of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to meet even Ukraine’s needs. Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin also reportedly warned Germany, Japan, Poland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia about potential uncertainty surrounding PAC-3 deliveries.
The U.S. Army’s first PAC-2 GEM-T order in decades makes clear that domestic need for Patriot interceptors is now pushing American authorities to other sources of supply, and toward maxing out production of PAC-2 and PAC-3 types. Though perhaps less capable than the latest PAC-3 MSE variant, GEM-Ts are clearly still operationally relevant, and represent an additional avenue to bolster stockpiles. Not every target necessarily requires the employment of the highest-end interceptor, either. This is something Lockheed Martin has been stressing around its announcement of the new ACE variant of the PAC-3, which is explicitly stated to be less capable than the MSE version.
With this in mind, the first U.S. GEM-T order in decades is a significant development, but one that also speaks to the immense strains on stockpiles and supply chains, which could take years to fully address.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
IT'S NOT EMPATHY.
Here's what's going on with you SIX.
JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.
You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.
Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.
Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!
Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)
And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.
Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.
I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Everything you just said is bullshit. Just like everything you have ever said in your life, Shit Golem.
Nobody in this country wants anything to do with your version of "Progress". You've all but destroyed this country. And we're not going to allow you to do it anymore.
Get the fuck out of my country if you don't like it. Go to Iran and see how long it takes for them to throw your annoying ass off a fucking building.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
SIX:
Get fucked.
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.
SIGNY:
IT'S NOT EMPATHY.
Here's what's going on with you SIX.
JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.
You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.
Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.
Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!
Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)
And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.
Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.
I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.
SECOND:
Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.
OMG, SECOND, you have no self awareness at all. None!
I try not to generalize to entire categories of people like you and SIX do. If I did, I'd say that everyone with TDS is an arrogant sociopath.
And I can understand why many average Americans are angry and fearful. Our whole economy and society has been warped to benefit the wealthiest.
But since YOUR life is going so well, YOU SAY, what's YOUR excuse for being a hate-filled warmongering asshole?
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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SIX, I'm going to make one more attempt on reality checking you.
First, I'm not saying that many Muslims aren't a threat to western culture and society. Many are.
Europe and Britain made a HUGE mistake when they allowed in, and Merkel INVITED IN, millions of military-aged men as refugees from the most (IMHO) ignorant, degenerate, culturally maladaptive regions of the Middle East (now called west Asia BTW), central Asia, and North Africa.
WTH were they thinking???? That the immigrants would immediately see the superiority of western culture and adopt it???
I honestly don't know how they correct that mistake, assuming it WAS a mistake and not some globalist plan to destroy European living standards and society! That "refugee" policy needs to end, imams that preach takeover should be deported immediately, and women and children need to learn the national language so they're don't depend on the local Muslim mafia for translation services and access to shops etc.
BTW, Biden's decontrolled border/ invite in illegal immigrants mirrors Europe's invitation to Muslim "refugees".
And SOME radical Muslims, the Takfiri/ Wahhabist branch of Sunni Islam (which is pretty large) are an actual terrorist threat. Of course, they need to be found and punished thru law.
So let's not CONTINUE to carry on with Biden's and Europe's policies! It's pols like Biden and Merkel who're the real enemy.
But when you get all paranoid and start gibbering about ALL Muslims, you're setting yourself up for failure and significant blowback.
The people of Iran, primarily Shia Persians, are culturally friendly to the west. Their Shia branch of Islam focuses on resistance, NOT AGGRESSION, thanks to their history of having been betrayed and slaughtered by their Sunni "brethren". They are not terrorists. Even when being attacked with (western supplied) chemical weapons, they didn't respond in kind. They're proud of their culture, history, and language (Farsi, not Arabic) which goes much farther back than the bandit tribes of Saudi Arabia.
And many primarily Muslim nations don't even follow Sharia law. https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/do-all-muslim-countries-follo
w-sharia-law-969289
When you make an enemy of Iranians, you're making an unnecessary one, and when you make an enemy of ALL Muslims that's just dysfunctional and counterproductive.
As far as I'm concerned, Muslims can have their cultural and religious quirks, as long as they practice them in THEIR country, not here! We should DEFINITELY impose our language and moral/ legal structure on people living here, and jail those who harm us and deport those who preach otherwise.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Trump Just Gave Us a Horrible New Reason to Worry About the Iran War
The president is getting frustrated that U.S. military strikes are accomplishing nothing—and he’s starting to lash out.
By Michael Tomasky | July 24, 2026 | 9:52 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/213486/trump-iran-war-horrible-new-reason
-worry
Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.
One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.
But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.
In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.
But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.
So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get ti
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Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
You can’t post your way out of a war.
By Charlie Warzel | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/trump-iran-war-social-m
edia/688065/
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.
That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.
In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.
Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.
Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a clo
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Trump said it himself in June—military force won’t open the waterway, and energy reserves are quickly winding down.
By Thomas Wright | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET
Thomas Wright served as the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/07/iran-war-hormuz-stra
it/688062/
Back in June, at the closing press conference for the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump explained why he had called a halt to hostilities with Iran. Continued bombing would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as the war went on, commercial ships would stay away while emergency oil supplies dwindled.
“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he warned, conjuring up images of shortages, bedlam, surging prices, and a market collapse on the scale of 1929. Trump told the press that he had studied presidents, and “the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.” https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-conf
erence-g7-summit-evian-france-june-17-2026/
Fast-forward to late July. The United States has bombed Iran for nearly two weeks, hitting coastal-surveillance sites and weapons-storage facilities as well as bridges, tunnels, rail lines, airports, and electrical infrastructure. Iran has answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as strikes on oil installations and a desalination plant, and repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait. Iran also claims to have struck Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure in Bahrain, but this has not been independently verified.
Trump resumed the war despite having already explained why military force could not achieve its most pressing objective. He has not resolved this tension. It may be irresoluble. In the meantime, he is betting that Tehran will buckle before economic pressure forces him to do the same.
To understand where we are, consider how the cease-fire collapsed. Each party believed that it had won the war and that the other should accede to its interpretation of the agreement on the strait. Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding stated that 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 Trump administration took this to mean that Iran was obligated to open the strait without tolls for 60 days. But Tehran read it as permission to manage and control access through the waterway. Consequently, Iran sought to funnel ships through corridors it approved, and attacked or threatened vessels that used other routes.
In doing so, Tehran made a serious error in judgment. If it had laid low, it could have reaped the benefits of economic concessions for 60 days and then gradually introduced a toll. Instead, Trump felt compelled to respond, and the agreement broke down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy and investment under President Biden, told me that Iran had thought it could boil the proverbial American frog, but it turned the temperature up too high too fast, and the frog got angry.
Trump is clearly frustrated. Further escalation is likely. He has mused about striking Pickaxe Mountain and is reportedly considering limited ground operations—for example, seizing Kharg Island, which is a hub for Iran’s oil exports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States is sending more forces, medics, and weaponry to the Middle East to give Trump additional military options. But such options were ruled out as implausible or reckless during the war, and their viability has not improved with time.
If Trump continues with limited strikes, he will face the very problems that he laid out in France last month. Hochstein posted on X that the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz could be more economically dangerous than the previous one, because Russia, the U.S., and China can no lo
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, I'm going to make one more attempt on reality checking you.
First, I'm not saying that many Muslims aren't a threat to western culture and society. Many are.
Europe and Britain made a HUGE mistake when they allowed in, and Merkel INVITED IN, millions of military-aged men as refugees from the most (IMHO) ignorant, degenerate, culturally maladaptive regions of the Middle East (now called west Asia BTW), central Asia, and North Africa.
WTH were they thinking???? That the immigrants would immediately see the superiority of western culture and adopt it???
I honestly don't know how they correct that mistake, assuming it WAS a mistake and not some globalist plan to destroy European living standards and society! That "refugee" policy needs to end, imams that preach takeover should be deported immediately, and women and children need to learn the national language so they're don't depend on the local Muslim mafia for translation services and access to shops etc.
BTW, Biden's decontrolled border/ invite in illegal immigrants mirrors Europe's invitation to Muslim "refugees".
And SOME radical Muslims, the Takfiri/ Wahhabist branch of Sunni Islam (which is pretty large) are an actual terrorist threat. Of course, they need to be found and punished thru law.
So let's not CONTINUE to carry on with Biden's and Europe's policies! It's pols like Biden and Merkel who're the real enemy.
But when you get all paranoid and start gibbering about ALL Muslims, you're setting yourself up for failure and significant blowback.
The people of Iran, primarily Shia Persians, are culturally friendly to the west. Their Shia branch of Islam focuses on resistance, NOT AGGRESSION, thanks to their history of having been betrayed and slaughtered by their Sunni "brethren". They are not terrorists. Even when being attacked with (western supplied) chemical weapons, they didn't respond in kind. They're proud of their culture, history, and language (Farsi, not Arabic) which goes much farther back than the bandit tribes of Saudi Arabia.
And many primarily Muslim nations don't even follow Sharia law. https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/do-all-muslim-countries-follo
w-sharia-law-969289
When you make an enemy of Iranians, you're making an unnecessary one, and when you make an enemy of ALL Muslims that's just dysfunctional and counterproductive.
As far as I'm concerned, Muslims can have their cultural and religious quirks, as long as they practice them in THEIR country, not here! We should DEFINITELY impose our language and moral/ legal structure on people living here, and jail those who harm us and deport those who preach otherwise.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America’s Iran Failure Is Bigger Than Trump
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.
By Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail | July 21, 2026
Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.
Less than a month after stepping back from military escalation in pursuit of an interim understanding with Tehran, the Trump administration has returned to the same maximalist strategy that nearly 40 days of fighting had already shown could deliver neither a favorable outcome for the United States nor regional or global stability. In the latest wave of escalation, three more US service members were killed, bringing the US military death toll to 17. The United States has widened its strikes to include bridges, electrical infrastructure, and, according to Tehran, the unfinished Darkhovin nuclear power site, while Iran has attacked US bases and critical infrastructure across Jordan and the Persian Gulf.
It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.
For nearly half a century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have largely operated from the same basic theory: that escalating economic and military pressure would eventually force Tehran to concede or buckle under the weight of coercion. The Obama administration’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear agreement was the clearest break from that logic. Yet the agreement never escaped the coercive architecture surrounding it. Its promised economic benefits for Iran depended heavily on reversible presidential waivers, making the deal easy to dismantle and difficult to trust. When Trump withdrew, Washington drew no lesson from the collapse beyond the one it had always preferred: apply more pressure.
Trump’s principal departure has not been from America’s fundamentally coercive approach to Iran but from the way that approach is conducted. Consequential foreign policy decisions have increasingly been concentrated in the hands of family members, trusted friends, and informal envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, bypassing many of the institutions meant to provide expertise, deliberation, and accountability. Yet those institutions have long struggled to fulfill that function. Trump’s approach has only further diminished their ability to challenge assumptions, incorporate dissenting views, and learn from failure.
Indeed, Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.
As one of the authors, Sina Toossi, argues in a recent Center for International Policy report, Washington has consistently approached Iran through linear assumptions about how states respond to coercion. The underlying assumption has been simple: more sanctions create more pressure, more pressure yields more concessions, and overwhelming US military superiority will inevitably translate into the political outcomes Washington seeks. https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/beyond-maximalism/
The historical record, however, tells a different story. Rather than producing a predictable chain of cause and effect, US pressure repeatedly reshaped the very political system it was intended to influence, often in ways Washington neither anticipated nor understood. The economic siege weakened the social and political forces most invested in engagement while strengthening the security institutions best positioned to thrive under confrontation. Diplomatic reversals discredited Iranian leaders who argued that accommodation with the United States could produce lasting benefits, reinforcing the arguments of those who insisted that Washington could not be trusted.
That same dynamic is evident today. The current war has strengthened the influence of Iran’s hard-
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The Putinization of the American Military
When poseurs and yes-men run a war
By Paul Krugman
Jul 28, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-putinization-of-the-american
Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.
But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.
Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.
But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.
So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.
No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.
For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:
The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that
· Munitions aren’t depleted
· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail
· It’s Joe Biden’s fault
Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?
First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.
Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.
And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians w
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Midweek Update #21: Iran Is Toying With The USA
Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 29, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-21-iran-is-toyin
g
Iran Is Toying With The USA
On July 23rd, the USA launched its last day of direct attacks on Iran during its latest phase of kinetic attacks in Trump’s War. This phase lasted for 13 days, as the USA continued to throw away valuable weapons systems, further depleting its stocks, for no strategic gain.
How do we know this? Well, the White House was briefing it to the press. In their desperation to provide arguments about why they needed to stop the bombing (which they never should have started) White House sources provided confirmation for the worst kept secret of the war. The US had not prepared and soon would struggle to protect its own troops, to say nothing of its allies (more on that below).
Things reached a tragi-comic level when America’s UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz, went on Meet The Press. In a series of wonderfully contradictory statements, he first said that the shortfall in US munitions existed because of the Biden administration, then he said it was not true and the US military had “everything that it needs”. Then he pivoted again and admitted that the shortfall exists by saying those leaking the information should go to jail. That of course was a great dodge, as it means many people in the White House, including Trump, should probably be jailed.
If you want to watch the whole Waltz interview, here it is:
The shortfall is very real, btw. US stocks are not a mystery as there are annual appropriations that can be accessed and provide a pretty good idea of the numbers.
As I tried to say last week, re-upping this bombing campaign for 13 days only left the USA weaker every day. There is also stockpile info in this piece if you want to read it:
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-
us
The US administration, not quite grasping how weak it has made itself, even did its usual trick of threatening to escalate wildly against Iran, and stories started circulating of a large number of reinforcements being flown from the USA into the theater in preparation for a ground assault.
However, this was always bluff. The US has weakened itself so dramatically that it has taken a very unpalatable proposition from March and turned it into a political impossibility. If it inserted US ground forces into Iran, say in the Strait area or around Kharg, it would blow through what remains of its stockpiles of advanced air defense weapons in a very short time. Then it would have to either withdraw or suffer increasing casualties.
Adam Kinzinger made a very good point about how Trump’s casualty fear has neutered his escalation threats. He has used up massive numbers of the most advanced systems because they can be fired from a distance, and thus put US soldiers in a safer position. Of course, this means that they are being used at an unsustainable rate, which means if he did escalate, US casualties would be much higher.
All of this came together on July 23 when, after the last of the 13 days of strikes, Trump lied about Iran saying it had been so badly mauled that it had begged for more negotiations.
The actuality was that he was, once again, throwing in the towel as Iran was making a mockery of his operations.
How do we know this was the case? It is pretty straightforward, actually. Once Trump stopped military operations, Iran continued to attack either directly or through its proxies. Here is what has happened since Trump’s latest humiliation.
1. Iranian attacks on US bases — Friday 24 July
Iran’s army said it used Arash one-way attack drones against fuel tanks, equipment warehouses and barracks at Isa (Sheikh Isa) Air Base in Bahrain, and against aircraft hangars, maintenance hangars and barracks at Al-Azraq / Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Jordan’s military said it intercepted seven missiles and six drones, so we can say this attack definitely happened.
2. Houthi strikes
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Loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I didn't say anything about Jews.
We're talking about your Muslim friends who want to enslave the planet.
Get them the fuck out of here and back where they belong, or we're gonna start doing it for you. And we'll just put them into the fucking ground.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Great Chinese Oil Mystery
America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why.
By Rogé Karma | July 29, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/07/china-iran-usa-oil-prices/
688086/
When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, experts warned that oil prices could hit $150 or $200 a barrel within a few weeks. The great mystery of the Iran war is why that hasn’t happened—why, nearly five months later, oil prices have scarcely surpassed $100, even as countries around the world have been forced to dip into their oil reserves. Now an explanation seems to be emerging: China.
Before the war, China, by far the world’s largest oil importer, was buying more barrels than the entire European continent and almost twice as much as the second-largest importer, the United States. Then, weeks after the conflict broke out, the country abruptly slashed its oil purchases, eventually cutting them by half compared with prewar levels. That appears to be why global prices have risen so much less than experts predicted. The shift also poses mysteries of its own. No one outside China knows how exactly the country has managed to meet its energy needs while forgoing imports, nor why its leaders chose this course. And no one knows how long the situation can last.
The predictions of catastrophe for the world’s oil system were based on simple supply and demand. The Strait of Hormuz saw the passage of 20 million barrels of oil a day, a fifth of the world’s total supply. Countries found ways to make up for some of that loss, including by releasing barrels from strategic stockpiles, but not enough to avoid a price shock. If demand stayed constant, buyers would be forced to try to outbid one another to secure the scarce remaining supplies.
But demand didn’t stay constant. The amount of oil that China stopped buying, about 5 million barrels a day, represented about a quarter of what was lost when the strait closed and is equivalent to the entirety of imports to India, the world’s third-largest importer. This significant and unexpected drop in Chinese demand freed up those barrels to go elsewhere, preventing the kind of shortage that might have led to truly catastrophic prices. “China was definitely the most important factor in keeping prices down,” Rory Johnston, an oil-markets analyst who writes the widely cited newsletter Commodity Context, told me. “And the thing is that nobody—and I mean nobody—saw it coming.”
The most obvious way a country can reduce oil imports at this scale is by drastically lowering its energy consumption. There is no evidence that China has done so. Unlike during the coronavirus pandemic, when the country essentially shut down, most indicators of energy consumption, such as traffic congestion, have hardly budged. The reduction also can’t be explained by a shift to clean energy. China has been investing heavily in renewable energy and electric vehicles for decades, but its economy remains reliant on imported oil. Such a dramatic change would have required millions of Chinese consumers to suddenly switch to EVs virtually overnight. “It’s a genuine puzzle,” Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who specializes in Chinese energy markets, told me. “We’re in one of those rare moments where even the experts are forced to rely on a whole lot of speculation.”
Could China be secretly getting extra oil from Russia? Since 2022, the Kremlin has been shipping huge amounts of oil to China using a “shadow fleet” of tankers that hide their point of origin to avoid Western sanctions. But it’s one thing to try to obscure where a given shipment of oil comes from; it’s another to hide the physical barrels that show up on Chinese shores, which are carried by giant tankers and unloaded at major ports. If Russia—or anyone else—were sending millions of extra barrels to China, the world would know about it.
A more realistic possibility is that China has been tapping into its imm
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Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
The president should have heeded this lesson about war before he got into this mess.
By Fred Kaplan | July 30, 2026 10:00 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/trump-iran-war-bombing-air
-force.html
One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump’s failure to push the Iranians into surrender—even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range—is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.
In other words, even if Trump hadn’t overestimated the Iranian regime’s fragility, even if he’d devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war. He might have done so, if he or Israel’s leaders had prepared and trained a cadre of rebels, perhaps from within Iran’s army, to rise up against the regime’s leaders as the bombs fell. But they didn’t do this, unless you count Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harebrained scheme—thoughtlessly approved by Trump—to groom former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most brutal and unpopular leaders, to storm the palace after Israeli bombs assassinated the entire top layer of Tehran’s government.
In any case, the plot would have almost certainly failed, even it had been carried out, because Ahmadinejad had no followers inside his own country and because the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have quickly grabbed control of the social, political, and economic levers that it has long dominated—as it indeed did, without pause, in the hours after the bombing began. For a while, there was talk of recruiting Kurdish militias in Iraq to storm across the border and seize power in Tehran—until, perhaps, someone realized they would have no support from Iran’s largely Shiite population either.
The U.S. Air Force was created as an independent branch of the armed forces in 1947, inspired and instantly strengthened by the belief that air power can win modern wars without the messy skirmishes of ground troops. The belief, which air theorists had propagated since the onset of combat planes in World War I, seemed confirmed by the results of World War II. However, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a panel of experts, released a report the same year, concluding that, in fact, the Allied bombing of German cities—and the German bombing of British cities—had little impact on the war. The board singled out the persistent bombing of German oil and communications facilities as a factor that impeded the resupply of the Nazi tank army. In other words, to the extent bombing had an effect on the war, it was by assisting the ground war—not by shaping the course of the war from the sky on its own.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific to a sudden end, but this suggests only that the shock and awe of nuclear weapons—the obliteration of a whole city by a single explosion—might alter the general rule about air power. Even here, though, historians have noted that the Soviet Union’s near-simultaneous invasion of Manchuria—which dispelled Japan’s illusion that Moscow might stay neutral in the war—also had an impact on the emperor’s calculations. (And even then, the emperor disrupted the normal chain of command by intervening in a decision that would normally have been made by the army, whose top officers were prepared to keep fighting.)
The most authoritative, skeptical account of the subject is the 1996 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape. A scrupulous analysis of 33 strategic air campaigns from World War II through the decades since, it tests whether those campaigns validate any of the four war aims that bombs and missiles are said to accomplish: (1) punishment (inflicting enough
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?
Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?
You're a fucking idiot. That's why.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:This May Be Trump’s Biggest Error in the Iran War
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?
Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?
You're a fucking idiot. That's why.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Success requires knowing what motivates your enemy.
By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | July 31, 2026, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/iran-war-trump-m
isunderstandings/688117/
For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations—and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.
Iran’s decision Tuesday to launch ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in Jordan was a prime example. It befuddled Washington. U.S. officials had come to expect that their actions would drive the war, and Iran would react. But here was Tehran, escalating matters just after the United States had suspended its 13-day barrage of strikes against Iranian defenses and infrastructure. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, described the move as a “surprise attack.”
Tehran characterized the missile strikes as self-defense against what the regime saw as the Trump administration’s broadening of the war. Around the same time as the Iranian attack, U.S. and Saudi forces launched joint strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Riyadh’s first publicly acknowledged military strikes of the conflict. Turki al-Maliki, a Saudi defense-ministry spokesperson, said in a statement that the militias had attacked the kingdom’s oil facilities and that Riyadh reserved the right to respond “at the appropriate time and place.”
This week’s events hardly represented the first time that the two sides had misread each other’s intentions. The convoluted and complicated war has swung almost weekly between peace overtures and fighting. Those misinterpretations appear set to continue, especially amid signs that others may be dragged into the fight. Egyptian officials earlier this week confirmed that a drone had set two gas vessels ablaze at Damietta, a port city on the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal. No group has claimed responsibility, but the attack raised fears that Iran has expanded its list of nations to target.
The memorandum of understanding that Washington and Tehran signed in the middle of last month quickly devolved into one of the war’s signature misunderstandings. The very first clause of the agreement promised to end the fighting, but the two sides had fundamentally different interpretations of their obligations.
The memorandum did not end the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz but rather, it papered over it. Washington believed it had secured 60 days of open, toll-free commercial navigation. Tehran read the agreement as preserving its authority to manage traffic through the waterway. As the dispute erupted, some Iranian officials believed that the U.S. had purposely drafted a vague agreement to trigger a violation that could be used as a predicate to resume strikes, a person familiar with their thinking told us. And the U.S. sought to use financial incentives, such as sanctions waivers and investment, to entice a government that was preoccupied with the assassination of its supreme leader. Was anyone really surprised that the pact fell apart? Certainly not President Trump, who professed that he “couldn’t care less” after each side had walked away.
Even before the war began, in late February, the two governments were talking past each other. The U.S. believed that
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In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for a Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear
With none of President Trump’s aims accomplished and the Strait of Hormuz closed, U.S. allies see dysfunction and vulnerability from the war.
By Steven Erlanger | August 1, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/middleeast/us-iran-war-strate
gy.html
To America’s allies, President Trump’s war in Iran, now in its sixth month, seems headed for a strategic defeat.
They worry that the inability of the United States to turn military superiority into a sustainably changed Iran has displayed a vulnerability that Russia and China will welcome. In addition, Mr. Trump’s goals remain unmet, and the U.S. military is running short on key armaments that it needs for global reach.
For the moment, Iran is seemingly resolute under a more radical government, its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are degraded but not destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively under its control. The war has left both the United States and Israel in weaker positions — and blaming each other for the mess.
Iranian missiles and drones not only restrict traffic through the strait and damage the economic infrastructure of allied energy production, but they also continue to threaten American bases across the Middle East and have killed or injured American service members.
With Mr. Trump’s aims shifting, Washington is losing credibility both militarily and diplomatically, analysts said. Its conduct in the war underscores the impression that the United States is an unpredictable instrument of global disorder, they said.
The war may evolve, but so far the result has been “a strategic loss and an embarrassment,” said Robin Niblett, a former director of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “For U.S. allies and those who rely on the U.S. for security, this is confirmation that you can’t trust the United States.”
Even if the Islamic Republic collapses, he added, “people won’t forget that their security and their future were dragged into question by an unpredictable and wavering U.S. foreign policy.”
European allies remember Mr. Trump’s vow to seize Greenland from a NATO ally and his threats to leave the alliance unless other allies met his spending goals. Middle Eastern allies see their own security undermined by this war, even if they are too committed to Washington to abandon partnerships with the United States. But they are already hedging, looking for repaired ties with Iran and better relations with Europe, China and Russia, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.
Many countries disliked the global order as it was, Mr. Niblett said, but there was one. “Now America has confirmed itself as a force of disorder and everyone is drawing lessons from it, and trying to be less dependent,” he said. “No one wants to be subject to a whipsaw foreign policy that doesn’t know its limits, and that is a strategic defeat.”
Mr. Vaez cited other recent developments as evidence that the United States has lost credibility as a guarantor of allies’ security, including Mr. Trump’s abrupt change of demands last week after announcing a landmark nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia.
“The Saudis do a nuclear deal with Trump that he walks back in 24 hours,” Mr. Vaez said. “This is the crisis of credibility of the U.S. Neither its military prowess nor its diplomatic promises can be trusted.”
Mr. Trump has argued that it is vital to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and that it will eventually cede to superior force. Eventually, he said on Friday, he expects Iran to realize it can’t take any more punishment and will negotiate on U.S. terms.
“We’ll be hitting them. We’ll be hitting them very hard,” Mr. Trump said. “At some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”
But he’s losing whatever faith he had in the Iranians, complaining they “always want to talk” but break their word after negotiations. “They’ll get weaker,” he said, “and then they peter out.”
World War II left the United States st
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If you decide to fight a war of choice, it’s very hard to win. If you’re fighting a war of existence, then your capacity is limitless. In that sense - slightly unlikely bedfellows - you see Ukraine doing something similar to Iran: Absorb enormous amounts of pressure and keep going.
Iran has been fighting three cold wars simultaneously - one with “the great Satan,” as Iranians like to call it, the US; one with “little Satan,” Israel; and one with Saudi Arabia. It’s done so for 47 years, with about 3% of the US defense budget.
That’s the major takeaway: that the United States has not been able to deliver a knockout blow to a small-to-middling-size country like Iran. The capability of Iran to keep going was mispriced by Washington, as Ukraine's capability was mispriced by Moscow.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-peter-frankopan-weekend-interv
iew/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Despite Nixon losing the Vietnam War, there were many Texans in the construction industry who profited mightily from that war by building military bases in Vietnam. They remember the war as a great victory for themselves. Despite Trump already losing the Iran War, there will be many Texans in the fossil fuel industry who will remember this loss as a victory for themselves:
Big Oil Is Reaping Rewards From the Chaos in Energy Markets
ExxonMobil’s earnings doubled, Chevron posted its highest quarterly earnings on record as energy prices soared during the Strait of Hormuz’s prolonged closure
By Collin Eaton Updated July 31, 2026 10:29 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxonmobil-xom-chevron-cvx-2q-
earnings-report-2026-stock-77ca6092
The largest U.S. oil companies reported a blockbuster quarter after the Iran war caused a dislocation in global markets that sent energy prices soaring.
At ExxonMobil, profits more than doubled from a year earlier to their highest level since 2022, while Chevron reported its highest quarterly earnings on record.
Exxon said high oil-and-gas production and its nearly two dozen refineries from Texas to Singapore pushed earnings to $14.5 billion.
The total was its highest since the peak of an energy crisis kicked off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Chevron reported earnings of $12.1 billion that rose nearly fivefold from the same period last year, driven by record oil-and-gas production and refining throughput.
Both companies raked in cash as the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz waterway between Iran and Oman cut off a big chunk of the world’s fuel supplies.
U.S. oil prices climbed as high as $112.95 a barrel in the quarter, and gasoline prices surged to the highest levels in four years.
“While we didn’t anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it. In our markets, disruption is inevitable,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in a conference call Friday with analysts. “Despite the temporary loss of approximately 10% of our upstream production, we delivered exceptional financial results.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:This May Be Trump’s Biggest Error in the Iran War
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?
Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?
You're a fucking idiot. That's why.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Just for people who don't know who 6ixStringJack is, he is a Trumptard, a follower of Trump. Trump hates everybody, except for those who worship him. 6ix hates everybody who is opposed to worshipping Trump. If you don't express any opinion about Trump or his incompetence at making War, 6ix won't automatically hate you. But if you do have a negative opinion of the Donald, 6ix will outdo Trump with his hatred of you.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Just for people who don't know who 6ixStringJack is, he is a Trumptard, a follower of Trump. Trump hates everybody, except for those who worship him. 6ix hates everybody who is opposed to worshipping Trump. If you don't express any opinion about Trump or his incompetence at making War, 6ix won't automatically hate you. But if you do have a negative opinion of the Donald, 6ix will outdo Trump with his hatred of you.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
SECOND, don't assume SIX hates you, bc you're not hate- worthy. Despises might be a better word.
And it's not just SIX that despises you, and it's not about Trump. You're just despicable is all.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Amen.
I didn't realize he posted it here to, so now I'm going to post my reply here too as well...
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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From the thread I just made this morning in the Cinema board with the obvious rename in the new title, after Second posted the same paragraph full of shit there too...
[SPOILER WARNING because Second is a Shit Golem] Holy F*#K! It's been so long now that I forgot what a good opening weekend looked like...
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=67718
None of that is even remotely true. Very much like everything that comes out of Shit Golem's mouth.
Anybody who doesn't know who Second is and what he is all about will figure it out pretty quick if they stick around a while. He is pure garbage without any opinions you couldn't get just from reading the NYT.
Like the creepiest of creeps, he regularly reads everything that the members who have interests outside of politics share about their lives, and saves them on his computer, where he will then try to use anything that somebody says against them in a completely different context, like a fucking loser stalker creep would. At one point, a member was talking about their health issues and he brought that up in a different thread in an argument and laughed at her.
I mean, he constantly does this to me, but I don't care about little online bitches who don't know how to behave themselves and I can handle my business. That being said, I've been sober now for 5 months shy of a decade, and he'll still throw my alcoholism in my face.
He finally stopped plagiarizing other people's writing and trying to pass it off as his own after I dedicated an entire thread to catching him in the act constantly doing this. How did I figure that out? Pretty easy when his posts go from 5th grade English to some extra flowery bullshit that Liberal dipshits like to put in their writing.
He sends death threats to everyone, which are all extensively archived because he also likes going back through his own post history regularly and deleting things that have become inconvenient for him.
His alternate handle Reaverfan who once told me explicitly how I should wrap my lips around the barrel of a gun and take myself out got banned years ago, yet somehow Haken allows this evil little troll to keep posting here after all the horrible shit he's said to everyone.
If you don't know who Second is, consider yourself lucky. And until he finally gets the ban here that he so richly deserves, I don't imagine anybody new is going to join this website for any reason.
If you'd like to know more...
Second is a Serial Plagiarist that just got caught red handed
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65471
HAKEN: THIS NEEDS TO STOP. IMMEDIATELY. I'M NOT ASKING ANYMORE.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=2&tid=67251
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050
The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?
Allies that depend on U.S. military equipment need a Plan B.
By Phillips Payson O’Brien | August 3, 2026, 6:56 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/the-us-isnt-making-enough-we
apons/688150/
Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.
Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.
The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.
In the short term, concerns about diminished weapons stocks are already limiting Washington’s strategic options. Because of his advisers’ concern about the adequacy of current supplies, Trump has reportedly been hesitant to escalate the war. If the United States decided to send ground forces into Iran on the scale necessary to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, defending those forces could exhaust the remaining stocks of advanced air-defense systems. After a short period, American troops would be far more exposed, and casualties far more likely.
Trump and his appointees during his current and previous terms bear only part of the responsibility for the current situation. The fundamental problem has been a bipartisan neglect of America’s military-industrial productive base over the past three decades. The United States allowed many of its strategic industries, such as shipbuilding, to wither. Its post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved brief invasions followed by years of relatively low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare that, whatever its difficulties, did not require mass stockpiles of munitions.
Informed by these experiences, military planners appear to have been operating under the assumption that future wars would be short and containable. If China attacks Taiwan and the United States wants to come to the island democracy’s aid, the Pentagon will not be prepared for a protracted war.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to learn from the war in Ukraine. Iran has learned to mass-produce cheap drones—ones that the Russians first imported and now produce themselves. In other words, their effectiveness had been tested, and their existence was widely known. But that seemed to make no difference to U.S. planners. Perhaps in the arrogant belief that a war with Iran would quickly end in a decisive victory, the Pentagon did not have cost-effective systems ready to intercept these weapons. Neither did the Gulf countries that have counted on American weaponry for their self-defense.
In contrast, Ukraine has proved remarka
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050
The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
And you believe that???
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And you believe that???
When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/
“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”
Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.
— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
Channeling His Inner-Martian
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.
“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”
This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.
Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.
White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down lik
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Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
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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 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?
Don't be evil.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?
Don't be evil.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
They don't need to die. They just need to leave.
The US and The EU.
If they die, that is their choice.
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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:I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And you believe that???
When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/
“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition
. . .
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude.
Curiously, the remainder of the article fails to mention Israel's campaign of literal genocide (one of our proxies in western Asia), Saudi Arabia's terrorists (our other proxy in western Asia) and Saddam Hussein (our erstwhile chemical warfare-using proxy against Iran, before we killed him).
GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.
Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.
2 million people were killed in Vietnam.
Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".
Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.
There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.
THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, you are missing the point that Trump's threats of annihilating Iran are fake because of the reasons in the following article. Trump very much wants to annihilate Iran, but he can't unless he nukes Iran because he foolishly squandered America's non-nuclear arsenal.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
. . . GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.
Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.
2 million people were killed in Vietnam.
Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".
Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.
There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.
THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.
How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage.
Idle threats and munitions shortages have boxed Trump in.
By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | August 6, 2026, 10:28 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/shortage-weapons
-shaping-war-iran/688201/
The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.
The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.
President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.
The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post o
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So, to get back to Iran...
Trump can threaten and bluster all he wants, but in reality there isn't much he can do bc we've (apparently) nearly run out of ATACMS (short range offensive ballistic missiles) and have severely depleted our Tomahawk (long range subsonic cruise attack) missiles and Patriot (defensive) missiles. And sending in ships, men, or aircraft would be suicide.
Furthermore, Iran and Ansar Allah in Yemen maintain the capacity to stop all ships, destroy ports, and to devastate all regional nations that host American forces, including their desalination plants and oil/ gas production infrastructure.
So Trump is blasting out threats and bluster to cover up what is, in essence a defeat. Even at expedited production rates, it'll take YEARS for America to build up its stockpiles, and possibly longer since China severely restricted the rare earths and metals needed to make weapons.
And throwing money at weapons mfrs will only lead to higher profits, bc we have LONG-STANDING supply chain and deindustrialization problems that will take a decade or more of focused, diligent effort, not something Trump ... or any of our pols ... are noted for.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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I see we cross posted and, shockingly, we agree.
But I have the strange suspicion that the only reason you object to war with Iran is bc TRUMP started it, and if some Dem had done the same you'd be for it.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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