Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, June 20, 2025 11:32
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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 3:45 PM

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

MAGA Phone? Trump Mobile Debuts With $499 Gold 'T1' Smartphone and $47-Per-Month Plan

Officially, Trump Mobile is a licensing venture with the Trump Organization, but the president's fingerprints are all over it, starting with the $47.45 monthly service price.

The $47.45 monthly price tag for its "47 Plan" is an obvious nod to Donald, who is the 45th and 47th US president.

By James Peckham | June 16, 2025

https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-mobile-t1-smartphone-47-plan-wireless

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

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 3:58 PM

SECOND

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

Trump's fraudulent "Made-in-America" promise

Mobile Experts Skeptical of Trump 'T1' Phone Made-in-America Claims

The team behind Trump Mobile says the T1 phone will be manufactured in three US states. But the fledgling carrier is light on other details, including whether any components come from Asia.

By Michael Kan | June 17, 2025

https://www.pcmag.com/news/mobile-experts-skeptical-of-trump-t1-phone-
made-in-america-claims

To appeal to US consumers, the Trump Mobile T1 smartphone will be American-made, according to the Trump organization—something not even Apple has pulled off with the iPhone.

"Making phones in America. It’s about time we bring products back to our great country," President Trump's son, Eric Trump, said while talking about the device.

The T1 phone, housed in a gold casing, arrives as the Trump administration has been urging Apple to make its iPhones in the US. The big question is whether the team behind the Trump Mobile phone has truly pulled off the "made in America" pledge—or if it’s simply marketing spin.

The American-made claim is already facing skepticism that it's a scam. That's because modern electronics manufacturing has long relied on Asia’s low-cost skilled labor and vast supply chains to produce laptops, smartphones, and game consoles at scale. (One analyst, Max Weinbach, even speculates the T1 is merely a modified Revvl 7 Pro 5G handset from China.)

However, the team behind Trump Mobile insists the American-made promise is legit. “Manufacturing will be in Alabama, California, and Florida,” a spokesperson for Trump Mobile tells PCMag.

Still, the company didn’t offer any details or respond to other questions, like if the phone will source components from vendors in Asia. So far, the official site for the T1 phone has only said the device will arrive in either August or September for $499. However, only one picture of the product has been posted, and it appears to be more of a digital mockup than an actual product shot. It's also unclear what processor the T1 device will use, but it'll run Android 15.

Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at the research firm Counterpoint, is also skeptical that the T1 will be American-made. Instead, he expects Trump Mobile to source the device from a manufacturer in China. One reason why is because in an interview on Monday, Eric Trump mentioned: "You can build these phones in the United States... Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America."

"This implies that initially many of them won't be," Przesmicki said in an email. Developing and releasing a phone within a few months also represents "a tight turnaround," he added.

Meanwhile, iFixit repairability engineer Carsten Frauenheim also expects the Trump Mobile team to source the device from China while adding some modifications. "It’s going to be a semi-custom 'modded/assembled in the USA' version of a designed-and-built-in-China basic-as-heck Android phone," Frauenheim said.

In addition, some at iFixit noted there's speculation that the T1 phone could be based on Blackwater CEO and Trump ally Erik Prince's Unplugged phone, pointing to the similar design.

Although the Trump phone looks poised to attract the president’s supporters, it’s not the first time a handset has been marketed toward Republicans and political conservatives. In 2021, a self-described bitcoin millionaire named Erik Finman created the $499 Freedom Phone, promising it would be completely free from “Big Tech’s” censorship and influence. But the actual device was simply a reskinned Android phone from a little-known Chinese vendor.

Finman later said in a deleted tweet: “Impossible to build phone in the US top to bottom unfortunately.” According to Fox News, PayPal also stepped in and reversed payments that customers had made for the Freedom Phone.

In the meantime, the president’s two sons have been marketing the T1 phone and Trump Mobile cell plan. But Trump’s family involvement in the actual device and service might be limited. In a press release, the Trump organization noted that a company called “T1 Mobile LLC” has entered into a licensing agreement to use the Trump name for both the cellular service and the upcoming phone.

“Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals,” the press release added.

We also tried to call Trump Mobile's customer support number. It initially failed to connect with the line, automatically hanging up. By Monday afternoon, the number forced us to stay on hold, with Trump Mobile citing a large call volume.

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

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 7:30 PM

SECOND

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

Who Is in Charge of the Government?
And does he know what his own positions are?

By Ben Mathis-Lilley | June 17, 2025 5:54 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/donald-trump-reversal-iran
-ice-raids.html

Two stories in the news this week raise the question of who is currently in charge of the world’s most powerful country, the United States.

First, there’s the Wall Street Journal piece about how the U.S. government does not believe Israel’s claim that Iran is moving forward with an attempt to build a nuclear weapon.

Long story short, the U.S. didn’t support Israel’s military escalation against Iran because it doesn’t believe what Israel says about Iran’s nuclear plans. (In the New York Times’ phrasing, it “distanced itself from the strikes” via a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.)

Except that, as the Journal notes, Donald Trump now says that Iran is “very close” to building a nuclear weapon; Trump is also, according to multiple Tuesday reports, considering ordering the U.S. military to bomb the country too. What changed? Not a ton, at least as far as new intelligence, input from allies, or Iranian belligerence. It’s just that Trump, in the Times’ euphemistic description, has “cycled” to a different position, one on which he “continues to gyrate.” (Sounds beautiful, perhaps even alluring.) Does he know what his own position was a few days ago? Who can say! According to the Times’ report, which, euphemisms aside, is impressively detailed, Trump told “associates” last week that he had urged Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to attack Iran—only to begin telling reporters this week that he “had played a bigger behind-the-scenes role in the war than people realized.” (The paper suggests that the president’s change of heart may have come after he got excited watching footage of Israeli strikes on Fox News.)

In a similar vein, there is the Washington Post’s new report that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have told agents to “continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants.” This reverses a directive not to target those venues that was itself issued last week, after Trump posted on his Truth Social site that ICE would back off farms and hotels because “very good, long time workers” were being detained. Compounding the confusion, the (new) Post report notes that the directive that was issued because of Trump’s post has been overruled because “the White House did not support it.” Who runs the White House? I thought it was the president!

These are things that have happened only this week. In late May, the State Department announced that it would be revoking visas issued to Chinese students in the U.S. who have “connections to the Chinese Communist Party” or study in “critical fields.” But last Wednesday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Chinese students using our colleges and universities” have “always been good with me.” What else might turn out to be American policy, or have been American policy already, unbeknownst to President Memento (2001, dir. Christopher Nolan) and/or the members of his Cabinet? It will be exciting to find out.

Who’s in charge of the government?

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

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 7:57 PM

SECOND

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

Congress Has One Way to Stop Trump From Going to War With Iran

A War Powers Resolution would prohibit the "United States Armed Forces from unauthorized hostilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran."

By Jessica Washington | June 17 2025, 7:39 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/06/17/iran-war-powers-resolution-congres
s-israel-trump-massie-khanna/

As President Donald Trump draws the United States perilously close to war with Iran, some members of Congress are working across the aisle in an attempt to reign him in.

On Tuesday, Representatives Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced a War Powers Resolution, which would prohibit the “United States Armed Forces from unauthorized hostilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., introduced similar legislation in the Senate on Monday.

“U.S. involvement in Israel’s war with Iran is a red line. We need Congress to speak out about that and pass a resolution prohibiting that,” Rep. Khanna told The Intercept. “And we need the United States to try to bring this war between Israel and Iran to an end.”

The War Powers Resolution, enacted in 1973, requires an act of Congress to declare a war. Over the decades, however, presidents have repeatedly ignored the federal law to deploy U.S. troops overseas without Congressional approval, ensnaring the U.S. in numerous foreign wars. Massie noted in his press release that War Powers Resolutions are privileged in the House and “can be called up for debate and a floor vote after 15 calendar days without action in committee.”

The resolution comes against a backdrop of escalating missile strikes between Israel and Iran over the last five days, beginning with Israel’s attack on Iranian nuclear and military facilities ahead of scheduled negotiations between the U.S. and Iranian leadership.

As attacks have continued, so too have concerns about direct U.S. involvement in the conflict. On Tuesday, Trump ratcheted up those fears with a string of Truth Social posts taunting the Iranian regime and calling for its surrender.

“We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” he wrote. “Iran had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment, and plenty of it, but it doesn’t compare to American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’ Nobody does it better than the good ol’ USA.”

In another post, he claimed to have the location of Iran’s Supreme leader. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump wrote. And in a third post, he called for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” News reports emerged Tuesday afternoon that in a meeting in the White House situation room, Trump told officials he was considering joining Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Even before Tuesday, lawmakers expressed concerns about the lack of clarity from the president and senior military leadership. Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to offer assurances to Rep. Khanna that the U.S. would stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not get dragged into the oncoming conflict. And on Monday, while leaving the Group of Seven summit in Alberta, Canada, Trump refused to answer a reporter’s questions about whether the U.S. military would get involved in the war.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he told reporters.

Congresswoman Summer Lee D-Pa., told The Intercept that it is Congress’s duty to intervene and prevent Trump from usurping their authority.

“Since taking office, Trump has continuously tried to supersede Congress and is now using the escalating crisis between Israel and Iran to justify executive overreach. Congressional authorization is not optional, and many are already opposed to being dragged into another endless war,” wrote Rep. Lee in a statement.

The Pennsylvania representative also alluded to the United States’ disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as a reason for caution. “The American people have been lied to before, and millions — at home and abroad — have paid the price. We cannot allow Trump or anybody else to use somebody else’s war for political gain or financial profit,” said Lee.

Members of Congress have previously tried to rein in the President’s military efforts in the Middle East. Earlier this year, progressives sent a letter to the White House demanding that Trump explain his legal basis for strikes against Yemen.

However, on Tuesday, Democratic Senator John Fetterman, also of Pennsylvania, struck a very different chord from Lee — encouraging military action against Iran and saying he would vote against Kaine’s resolution.

“I’m going to vote it down… I really hope the president finally does bomb and destroy the Iranians,” Fetterman told Chad Pergram with Fox News. It marks a reversal for the Senator, who in 2022 criticized President Trump for walking away from the negotiating table with Iran.

Samer Araabi, a member of the Center for Political Education’s advisory committee and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), said the comments from Fetterman aren’t surprising.

“It’s the least surprising thing from a Senator who has been so abhorrently blood chillingly deaf and blind to the situation in Palestine and totally unwilling on any level to recognize the countless war crimes that Israel continues to commit,” he said, adding, “it would be laughable if it wasn’t so horrifying.”

Araabi warned that direct U.S. involvement in the war would be even worse than the invasion of Iraq, due in part to Iran’s larger population and size.

“We’re on the precipice of not even just another Iraq, but something that would potentially be significantly more destabilizing,” he said.

U.S. military intervention on the side of Israel, Araabi said, would heighten the risk for all parties involved. “Even a cursory reading of the past 30 years of history in this country tells us that everything that is happening right now in this drive towards war is making all of us less safe,” he said. “It makes literally every single human being on Earth less safe. It certainly makes the Iranians less safe. It makes Israelis less safe, and it definitely makes us in the United States less safe.”

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

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Tuesday, June 17, 2025 9:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, faggot.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, June 18, 2025 6:32 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.

6ix, if you get mad enough to kill, you might make history. Significant changes for the better are caused by America's evilest citizens, such as yourself. It was the evil Confederates who murderously forced the USA to make slavery illegal. Another example is the evil Klansmen who murdered Civil Rights protestors, thus forcing the USA to recognize civil rights. There wouldn't be Medicare without JFK being murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. JFK would have never passed Medicare because it was too disruptive to Doctors' business interests in JFK's over-privileged, wealthy man's opinion. Thank Oswald for all the good things LBJ did while President.

Will the public side with the protesters in LA? Here are some lessons from history

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/17/will-the-public-
side-with-the-protesters-in-la-here-are-some-lessons-from-history

Civil rights leaders in the 1950s, for instance, went out of their way to provoke high-profile, violent and disproportionate responses from those who supported segregation. Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. had an intuitive understanding of what empirical social science now affirms: what matters isn’t the presence or absence of violence but, rather, who gets blamed for any escalations that occur.

The current anti-ICE protests have included clashes with police and occasional property damage. Melees, looting and destruction are perennially unpopular. Then again, so were civil rights-era bus boycotts, diner sit-ins and marches. In truth, the public rarely supports any form of social protest.

Even before the protests began, there were signs that Americans were souring on Trump’s draconian approach to immigration, and public support has declined rapidly since the protests started on 6 June.

Whether the demonstrations ultimately lead to still more erosion of public support for Trump or continued declines in public support for immigration will likely depend less on whether the demonstrations continue to escalate than on whom the public ultimately blames for any escalation that occurs.

At present, it’s not looking good for the White House.

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

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Wednesday, June 18, 2025 7:02 AM

SECOND

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

Trump’s $4 Trillion Plan to Raise Your Energy Bills

The president’s plan will also “severely increase the risk” of nuclear accidents

By Joseph Romm | June 17, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-energ
y-nuclear-electric-bills-4-trillion-1235365940/

A September report from the Department of Energy (DOE) — which funds SMR (small modular reactor) development — modeled a cost per megawatt over 50 percent higher for SMRs than large reactors. So, it’s no surprise SMRs show every sign of the kind of cost escalation that has plagued larger nuclear reactors for decades. That’s why a March Financial Times analysis labeled SMRs “the most expensive energy source.”

Indeed, the first SMR the U.S. tried to build — by NuScale — was canceled in 2023 after its cost soared past $20 million per megawatt, higher than Vogtle. In 2024, Bill Gates told CBS the full cost of his 375 megawatt Natrium reactor would be “close to $10 billion,” making its cost per megawatt nearly $30 million — almost twice that of Vogtle.

Significantly, a 2023 Columbia University analysis determined that “if the costs of new nuclear end up being much higher” than $6.2 million per megawatt, “new nuclear appears unlikely to play much of a role, if any, in the U.S. power sector.”

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

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Wednesday, June 18, 2025 8:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.
6ix, if you get mad enough to kill,

You've got a long, long, long history of archived posts with your assasination fantasies here over the years, goober.

I'm not the one who has fixated on one single person for the last 9 years and uttered their name 100 times per day.

Get some help.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, June 19, 2025 7:23 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.
6ix, if you get mad enough to kill,

You've got a long, long, long history of archived posts with your assasination fantasies here over the years, goober.

I'm not the one who has fixated on one single person for the last 9 years and uttered their name 100 times per day.

Get some help.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

This started when Fatso was first running for President.
Elevating the Evil Fathead had consequences:

Where have all the jobs gone, and why does it matter?

By Paul Krugman | Jun 19, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/bad-times-for-college-graduates

. . . The only time college graduates were anywhere close to having higher than average unemployment was at the beginning of the 2000s, when America was in a recession after the tech bubble burst. Now grads are deep in the hole even though the nation as a whole isn’t (yet?) in a recession.

And even these numbers are basically for Americans in their mid-20s, many of whom have already been working for a while. Anecdotes suggest that the situation for those just graduating and looking for their first job is near-catastrophic, with many unable to find any job at all.

So what is going on? Like Thompson, I’d mostly discount the idea that this is largely about AI displacing educated workers. That might happen eventually, but replacement of workers by AI (or the complex number-crunching that we have, misleadingly, been calling AI) is probably too new a phenomenon to explain such a drastic change.

A more likely story, as many have pointed out, is that we’re looking at one consequence of an economy that has been “frozen” by uncertainty, largely uncertainty about U.S. government policy.

Most of the discussion in recent months has involved Donald Trump’s drastic but erratic changes in tariff policy. Imagine that you’re running a business for which decisions about where and how to invest depend a lot on what tariff rates you expect to prevail a year or two from now. Should you make investments assuming that, say, the cost of imported merchandise will be similar to what it was 6 months ago, or should you assume that average tariffs will remain where they are right now, at the highest level in 90 years?

Nobody knows.

Nor is it just tariffs. For a few months, the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on undocumented immigrants wasn’t translating into large-scale deportations. Now significant raids on workplaces have begun. But over the course of just a few days we saw Trump suddenly modify policy, then reverse himself — declaring that agriculture and hospitality would not face disruptive raids, then canceling that declaration. What will actual deportation policy look like? Nobody knows.

So what does a business do in the face of this kind of uncertainty? It tries to avoid making commitments that it may soon regret.

And hiring recent college graduates is a significant commitment. Whatever their formal training, young people need to acquire real-world experience to be effective in their new jobs. Employers need to be willing to spend time and money while new hires gain this experience. And in this uncertain environment, that’s not a commitment employers are willing to make. They may hold on to their existing workers, at least for now, but they won’t hire.

Let me also spitball a bit and suggest that other Trump policies may also be depressing the market for highly educated young people.

First, DOGE’s depredations have pushed a lot of highly educated people out of the federal work force and onto the job market. Indeed’s Hiring Lab estimates that almost 70 percent of the former federal workers now searching for new jobs have at least a bachelors’ degree. I don’t think that it’s unrealistic to suggest that these are experienced workers in effect competing for the jobs new college graduates might normally expect to land.

And what about the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in funding for scientific research? Is it foolish to suggest that these cuts directly and indirectly cut into job opportunities for new graduates?

So how long will it take for students graduating into this bad job market to recover from their bad luck? The answer, according to a 2023 survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is basically “forever.” Graduating into a bad labor market can make you miss a step on the job ladder, depressing your earnings for a decade or more. It increases your chances of being in poor health well into middle age. It even reduces your chances of having a successful marriage.

Oh, and you’ll still be burdened with student debt, now that Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s efforts to offer some relief.

In short, today’s no good, very bad market for recent college graduates is a bigger problem than many people realize. It will cast a shadow on America for years to come. And the Trump administration bears much of the blame.

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

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Thursday, June 19, 2025 8:23 AM

SECOND

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

‘He’s moving at a truly alarming speed’: Trump propels US into authoritarianism

By Robert Tait in Washington | Thu 19 Jun 2025 04.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/trump-us-autocracy-aut
horitarianism

“He’s moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We’re a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can’t get rid of.”

“In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency. And it’s becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, ‘No, that’s not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.’ It’s sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.”

Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House.

“The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,” he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.

“It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task.”

“So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there’s a great deal of damage he can do in that time.”

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

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Thursday, June 19, 2025 8:42 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Calls for Iran’s ‘Unconditional Surrender’

On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social to warn Tehran’s 9.7 million residents to flee the city immediately. He also abruptly left the G-7 summit in Canada a day early, saying he was returning to Washington to discuss the conflict with his national security team. On Tuesday, he told reporters that he wants “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear program, and he called for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” on Truth Social.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114699621000737127

He also seemed to suggest that the United States might consider assassinating Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at some point in the future. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump wrote. “He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114699610769479275

U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have argued that Trump cannot strike Iran without congressional approval. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine introduced a war powers resolution on Monday that would terminate any unauthorized use of the U.S. military against Iran, as only Congress has the right to declare war. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a separate bill on Monday that would prohibit the use of federal funds for “any use of military force in or against Iran” without congressional approval, with the exception of self-defense. And Republican Rep. Thomas Massie co-introduced a resolution with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna on Tuesday reasserting that Congress must approve an armed force commitment.

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

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Thursday, June 19, 2025 8:53 AM

SECOND

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

Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy

What he has instead is the promise of chaos.

By Zack Beauchamp | Jun 18, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/417156/trump-foreign-polic
y-ukraine-israel-iran

For years, there has been an increasingly bitter foreign policy fight between two factions of the Republican Party. On one hand, you have the GOP hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC) who want the United States to impose its will on the world by force. On the other, you have the “America First” crowd — like Tucker Carlson and Vice President JD Vance — who want the US to withdraw from international commitments and refocus its attention on domestic concerns.

The big question, as always, is where President Donald Trump lands. If Trump says that the MAGA foreign policy is one thing, then that’s what it is — and the rest of the party falls in line.

On one read, Trump’s early response to the Israel-Iran war settles the debate in the hawks’ favor. After months of opposing an Israeli strike, Trump rapidly flipped after the attack looked more and more successful. Since then, his rhetoric has grown increasingly heated, opening the door to possible US involvement. And he has publicly attacked Carlson for criticizing the war, writing on Truth Social that “somebody [should] please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that, ‘IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!’”

And yet, I think the factional debate remains far less settled than it seems. In fact, I believe it will remain unsettled as long as Trump is in power.

Trump’s own foreign policy thinking does not align neatly with either of the two main camps. The president does not do systematic foreign policy, but rather acts on the basis of a collection of impulses that could never amount to anything so grandiose as a doctrine. Those gut instincts include a sense that the United States should look out for itself only, ignore any rules or norms that might constrain it, use force aggressively without regard to civilian casualties, and seek “deals” with other states that advantage the United States and/or make Donald Trump look good personally.

It looks, in effect, like an internationalized version of Trump’s approach to New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.

This isn’t a new observation: I’ve been making versions of this case since his 2016 campaign, and it’s been well-supported by both his first term and early second-term record.

But its significance for US policy is widely underappreciated. His lack of ideology does not mean that he can be permanently persuaded by one faction or the other, but rather produces volatility. The president has teetered back and forth between interventionism and isolationism, depending on the interplay between Trump’s idiosyncratic instincts and whoever he’s talking with on a particular day.

Given the near-dictatorial power modern presidents have over foreign policy, this will likely produce something worse than ideological rigidity: an incoherent, mutually contradictory policy that ends up undermining itself at every turn. At a moment of acute geopolitical peril, when Trump’s ascendant hawkish allies are calling for yet another war of regime change in the Middle East, it’s easy to see how that could end in true disaster.

Trump’s real foreign policy guide is his instincts

Foreign policy analysts like to talk a lot about “grand strategy.” What they mean by this is a vision that identifies the objectives leaders want to accomplish in world politics — like, say, protecting American territories from physical threats — and then develops a series of specific policies designed to work together in accomplishing that goal.

Both the right’s hawks and the America First crowd have distinct visions of grand strategy.

The hawks start from the premise that the United States benefits from being the world’s dominant power, and from there they develop a series of policies designed to contain or eliminate threats to that dominance from hostile powers like Russia or China. The America Firsters, by contrast, believe that remaining a globe-spanning power costs the United States too much in blood and treasure — and that the American people will be both safer and more secure if the US reduces its involvement in non-essential conflicts and lets other countries settle their differences without American help.

When you start from each of these grand strategic premises, you can basically deduce where most members of each bloc land on specific issues. The hawks love Israel’s war in Iran, while the America Firsters fear it might pull in the United States more directly. The hawks believe in aggressively trying to contain Chinese influence in East Asia, while the America Firsters seek accommodations that don’t risk a nuclear war over Taiwan. The hawks (mostly) support arming Ukraine against Russia, while the America Firsters are overwhelmingly against it.

On all of these issues, Trump’s actual policy is all over the map.

He first tried to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran, which the hawks hated, but swiftly flipped to supporting Israel’s war. His China policy has been inconsistent, pairing initially harsh tariffs and talk of trade “decoupling” with a negotiated climb-down and vagueness on Taiwan. On Ukraine, where Trump cozies up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and berates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the policy substance is even more muddled — he has cut US aid to Ukraine while simultaneously extending President Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia, and even threatened new ones if Putin won’t make a ceasefire deal.

Trump’s second-term record, in short, is a tangle of incoherent policies and whiplash-inducing policy shifts. There is no consistent vision of the world, just whatever Trump decides policy should be in the moment — regardless of how much it contradicts what he’s said or done previously. And while all presidents have to develop new policies based on events, the Trump administration makes confusing and radical policy shifts over the course of very limited time periods (Exhibit A: the still-fluctuating tariff rates).

This foreign policy ping-pong can only be understood if you see Trump as someone who is allergic to foreign policy doctrine. You can spin his allergy positively (he’s pragmatic) or negatively (he knows nothing and doesn’t care to learn). Perhaps both are true to a degree, but the evidence — like his refusal to read briefing documents — tilts heavily in the latter direction.

What we get, in place of doctrine, are Trump’s instincts about interests, deals, and strength.

We know he thinks about current US policy in zero-sum terms, such as that NATO and trade agreements cannot benefit both sides. We know he’s indifferent to legal constraints from domestic and international law. We know he’s willing to use force aggressively, authorizing attacks against terrorist groups in his first term that produced shockingly high civilian body counts. And we know he sees himself as the consummate dealmaker, with much of his policy seemingly premised on the idea that he can get leaders like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping onside.

Sometimes, of course, these instincts combine and crash into each other — with Iran as a case in point.

Trump spent quite a lot of effort in his second term trying to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran. In both April and May, he explicitly warned Israel not to attack Iran. Yet now he seems fully on board with Israel’s war, posting bellicose Truth Social posts suggesting Iranians should “immediately evacuate Tehran.”

Trump’s jumping from negotiations to cheerleading war is not a result of him changing his foreign policy worldview. It’s that he wanted to be the dealmaker and then was persuaded, by a combination of Israeli pressure and his own lack of patience, that the talks weren’t working. Hence, Trump decided, war would be the order of the day.

“Now Mr. Trump is seriously considering sending American aircraft in to help refuel Israeli combat jets and to try to take out Iran’s deep-underground nuclear site at Fordo with 30,000-pound bombs — a step that would mark a stunning turnabout from his opposition just two months ago to any military action while there was still a chance of a diplomatic solution,” the New York Times reports.

But even amid said deliberations, Trump pines to be the dealmaker — suggesting in an ABC News interview this weekend that war “had to happen” for talks to succeed, and that it “may have forced a deal to go quicker.” His more hawkish allies see Israel’s offensive as the opening shots in a war of regime change; Trump sees it as the art of the deal.

It is, in short, a category error to try to align Trump with one GOP foreign policy faction or the other. He’s just Trump — a man with a long track record of endorsing and ordering armed violence, but also a deep faith in his near-magical dealmaking powers.

Trump’s real policy is chaos

So, if Trump’s guide is his instincts, why do the factional disagreements splitting the GOP matter?

Because we know for a fact that Trump can be easily influenced by the people around him. While he has some fixed and unchangeable views, like his peculiar idea that trade deficits are inherently bad, there are many areas on which he doesn’t have a strong opinion about the facts — and can be talked in one direction or another. This is the well-known phenomenon of Trump making public pronouncements based on whoever he spoke to most recently.

In Trump’s first term, this ended up having a surprisingly stabilizing effect on policy. He was surrounded by more establishment types like Jim Mattis and Mark Milley, who would frequently talk him out of more radical policies — or else quietly make policies on their own that were consistent with longstanding bipartisan consensus.

There were still many Trumpian moments — everyone forgets that we were shockingly close to war with North Korea in 2017 — but the overall foreign policy record wasn’t as radical as many feared.

As we all know, the second term is different. The Mattis types are gone, replaced instead by loyalists. The factional disputes are not between Trump’s allies and establishmentarians who wished to check him, but rather between different strains of MAGA — some more hawkish, others more dovish. But neither is big on stability, in the sense of wanting to ensure Trump colors within the longstanding lines of post-Cold War US foreign policy.

This creates a situation where each faction is trying to persuade Trump that their approach best and most truly embodies his MAGA vision. The problem, however, is that no such vision exists. Each will have successes at various times, when they succeed at tapping into whichever of Trump’s instincts is operative at the moment. But none will ever succeed in making Trump act like the ideologue they want him to be.

What this means, in concrete policy terms, is that the chaos and contradictions of Trump’s early foreign policy is likely to continue.

In the post-9/11 era, presidents have accrued extraordinary powers over foreign policy. Even explicit constitutional provisions, like the requirement that Congress declare war or approve treaties, no longer serve as meaningful checks on the president’s ability to use force or alter US international commitments.

This environment means that the twin factors shaping Trump’s thinking — his own jumbled instincts and his subordinates’ jockeying for his favor — are likely to have direct and immediate policy consequences. We’ve seen that in the whiplash of his early-term policies in areas like trade and Iran, and have every reason to believe it will continue for the foreseeable future.

In a new Foreign Affairs essay, the political scientist Elizabeth Saunders compares US foreign policy under Trump to that of a “personalist” dictatorship: places where one man rules with no real constraints, like Russia or North Korea. Such countries, she notes, have a long track record of foreign policy boondoggles.

“Without constraints, even from elites in the leader’s inner circle, personalist dictators are prone to military misadventures, erratic decisions, and self-defeating policies,” she writes. “A United States that can change policy daily, treat those who serve its government with cruelty, and take reckless actions that compromise its basic systems and leave shared secrets and assets vulnerable is not one to be trusted.”

So long as Trump remains in office, this is the way things are going to be. American foreign policy will be primarily determined not by strategists or ideologues, but by the confused and contradictory whims of one unstable man.

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

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Thursday, June 19, 2025 1:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, faggot.
6ix, if you get mad enough to kill,

You've got a long, long, long history of archived posts with your assasination fantasies here over the years, goober.

I'm not the one who has fixated on one single person for the last 9 years and uttered their name 100 times per day.

Get some help.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
This started when Fatso was first running for President.
Elevating the Evil Fathead had consequences:

I don't give a single shit about your justifications for going insane.

Figure it out before you do something stupid, stupid.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, June 20, 2025 6:27 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't give a single shit about your justifications for going insane.

Figure it out before you do something stupid, stupid.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trump said he will make a decision about bombing Iran in two-weeks.

If “two-weeks” means what it normally means, and as it has regularly meant for Ukraine, then the US is almost certainly going to stay out of the war. It has been Trump’s go-to phrase if he does not want to do something and is looking for time. He has regularly said he needs two weeks to decide if he will sanction Russia more, to produce a new health care plan, etc. Yet, whenever he uses the phrase, the two week deadline passes and nothing happens — and Trump happily goes on to other things.

You'd have to be a Trumptard to not notice the “two-weeks” pattern.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/if-trump-will-not-join-the-war-
what

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

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Friday, June 20, 2025 6:45 AM

SECOND

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

Trump, the Federal Reserve Bank and the fog of inflation

By Paul Krugman | Jun 20, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-the-fed-is-on-hold

Donald Trump got something right this week. Declaring that Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, is a “stupid person,” Trump predicted that the Fed wouldn’t cut interest rates at this week’s meeting. And he was correct! He was also correct to point out that the European Central Bank, which is to the euro what the Fed is to the dollar, has repeatedly cut rates while the Fed hasn’t.

Anyway, Powell isn’t stupid. Nor is he, as Trump also said, “a political guy” who’s keeping rates high to punish MAGA, or something. Of course, interest rate policy does have political effects, which Trump knows perfectly well. You may recall that back in 2024 he warned Powell not to cut interest rates before the election — because when it comes to Trump, every accusation is actually a confession.

But the reason Powell isn’t cutting rates now is that the Fed is in a difficult position, largely thanks to, you guessed it, Trump himself.

It occurred to me, reading Trump’s insults, that I haven’t seen many simple explanations of the dilemmas the Fed now faces — again, largely thanks to Trump himself. So I thought I might go a bit wonkier than usual and try to explain why the Fed is on hold for the time being.

The basics: By buying or selling short-term U.S. government debt, the Fed can effectively control short-term interest rates. Strictly speaking, all it controls is the federal funds rate, the interest rate at which banks lend money to each other overnight. But this rate has a lot of influence on longer-term rates, which in turn affect the real economy by affecting housing construction, business investment and so on.

In setting rates, the Fed has a “dual mandate”: full employment and price stability. These days full employment is normally interpreted to mean an official unemployment rate of around 4 percent, which is low enough that most people can easily find jobs but not so low that the economy overheats. Price stability is interpreted to mean inflation low enough that people don’t think about it much, but not zero inflation, which turns out to create some technical problems for economic management.

Now, the Fed was way off its target from 2021 to 2023, when inflation surged in the United States (and in almost every nation.) President Biden and his party paid a high price for that inflation surge, which is surely the main reason Trump won the 2024 election. But the surge was transitory. Trump inherited a “Goldilocks” economy in inflation had subsided without the protracted high unemployment some economists (but not me!) claimed was necessary:

The Fed, however, had raised interest rates a lot to fight that inflation surge, so one might have expected a series of rate cuts now that the inflation issue is largely behind us. And Trump might well be riding high in the polls if he had just left the economy alone and taken credit for Biden’s victory over inflation.

Instead, however, he went wild on tariffs.

On April 2 — Liberation Day, in MAGAspeak — Trump imposed huge tariffs on almost every nation. He has modified those tariffs several times since then, but it’s deeply misleading to say, as all too many news reports do, that the tariffs were “paused.” They were reshuffled, with lower tariffs on some countries and goods but higher tariffs on others, but the overall picture remains a leap in average tariffs to levels not seen for 90 years:

Source: Yale Budget Lab

This tariff surge creates big problems for at least one and possibly both sides of the Fed’s dual mandate.

What we know for sure is that the tariffs will cause a large jump in consumer prices. That jump isn’t visible in official price data yet, partly because many businesses rushed to hoard foreign goods before the tariffs kicked in and are still meeting consumer demand out of those stockpiles. But the big price hikes are already happening, and will become obvious to everyone over the next few months.

It's true that Trump continues to insist that tariffs won’t raise prices, that foreigners will pay them. But this is nonsense. Imagine that a Democratic president were to impose a 15 percent sales tax on every good made in America. Would Trump say “This won’t raise prices, because businesses will absorb the tax”? Of course not. So why imagine that foreign businesses will absorb the cost of tariffs, which are nothing but sales taxes on goods made abroad?

The only coherent argument against a large inflationary hit from tariffs was the claim that tariffs would push up the value of the dollar against other countries’ currencies, which would in turn reduce the prices of their goods measured in dollar terms. Both Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, and Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, made this argument before the big Trump tariffs went into effect.

But the dollar has, in fact, gone down rather than up:

This decline reflects a general loss of confidence in American stability and reliability. But that’s another discussion. What it means for the Fed is that yes, Trump’s tariffs are about to cause a major inflationary hit.

And the Fed isn’t going to cut interest rates in the face of surging inflation. My guess is that Trump has never heard of Arthur Burns, who led the Fed under Richard Nixon. But the Fed remembers. Burns is often accused of having kept interest rates low in 1972, despite rising inflationary pressures, in an attempt to ensure Nixon’s reelection — and thereby helping to set the stage for stagflation. One cardinal rule for every Fed chair since then has been, “Don’t be Arthur Burns.”

A tariff-fueled surge in inflation, then, is about as sure a thing as we ever get in economics. But after that, things get a lot less certain.

First, will the price shock from tariffs be a one-time event, or will it feed through into a sustained rise in the inflation rate? The Fed learned long ago to “look through” bumps in the inflation rate caused by fluctuations in volatile prices like the price of oil. That’s why it bases its interest policy on “core” inflation that excludes food and energy — not because food and energy prices don’t matter, but because excluding them gives a better measure of underlying inflation.

But how should we think about the tariffs? Are they a passing event like the now-forgotten oil price surge of 2007-8, or the potential beginning of 70s-type stagflation? I don’t know, and neither does Jay Powell. History offers no guidance: The Trump tariffs are the biggest trade policy shock in history.

Given this fog of inflation Powell is, and should be, cautious. He doesn’t want to be Arthur Burns.

But wait, there’s more. How will the tariffs affect the other side of the Fed’s mandate? Will the tariffs, and especially uncertainty about where they’re going, cause an economic slowdown and rising unemployment? Many observers believe that this will happen, and if it does it would indeed be a reason to cut interest rates. But again, nobody knows, since we’ve never before had a president who keeps announcing huge changes in tariffs every few weeks.

So what would you do if you were Jerome Powell? Almost surely what he is actually doing: Wait and see.

And Trump’s childish insults aren’t going to make any difference, except possibly to make Powell even more cautious to avoid giving the impression that he can be bullied.

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

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Friday, June 20, 2025 6:50 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

winds may actually change...a sneak attack on Iran after Iranian threats and offensive words, 2 weeks coming of Israeli Jew economic shut down as they trade blows back and forth, ok sure Isreal is landing more hits but how much blood and treasure can it afford?

all exports are stopped and both countries are going to bankrupt themselves

they are going nuts trying to drag Trump into this

Ted Cruz, the blackmailed faggot Lindsey and neo Democrats seem to want boots on the ground

will USA be out of this 'World Police' business?

if Trump sees Trillions being sucked out of the US Tax Payer maybe he backs off, or does he go Zionist Donald?

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Friday, June 20, 2025 6:53 AM

SECOND

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

Trump's birthday parade! What an event! (Turn the sound on)

https://imgur.com/gallery/what-event-CUElDyh

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

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Friday, June 20, 2025 7:06 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't give a single shit about your justifications for going insane.

Figure it out before you do something stupid, stupid.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump said he will make a decision about bombing Iran in two-weeks.

All I've heard out of you and Ted is made up lists from the Legacy Media about how Trump has lied over 10,000 times now.

So what do you give a shit?

You really need to get something else in that brain and push Trump out of it. You're fucking mental.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, June 20, 2025 7:54 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

All I've heard out of you and Ted is made up lists from the Legacy Media about how Trump has lied over 10,000 times now.

So what do you give a shit?

You really need to get something else in that brain and push Trump out of it. You're fucking mental.

Why would people complain about Donald "Adolf Hitler" Trump? So repetitive! Stop the complaining because Trump's Nazi followers, the Trumptards, who are degraded semi-humans, are angry about the complaints. Why would anyone want to make unhappy those diseased Trumptards, with their tax-cheating, lying, lazy, dishonest, rapist, racist, ignorant ways of life?

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

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Friday, June 20, 2025 7:55 AM

SECOND

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

We've become a failed nation-state in 150 days
From chaos and political violence to Israel and Iran, Trump's latest actions have sealed our fate

By Brian Karem | June 19, 2025 9:46AM (EDT)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/19/weve-become-a-failed-nation-state-in-
150-days/

Donald Trump made his personal transformation of the White House nearly complete Wednesday morning.

He already announced his intentions to add a ballroom — “the biggest and best ever” — to the East Wing and has begun paving over the lawn of Jackie Kennedy’s iconic Rose Garden. (“It’ll be like nothing anyone has ever seen before,” he promised.) Now he’s installed two giant flagpoles, one on the North Lawn and the other on the South Lawn.

The two flagpoles, he posted on Truth Social, are “tall, tapered, rust proof” and of the “highest quality.” On Wednesday he said they were “beautiful poles” and “the best poles anywhere. . . in the world actually.” A few reporters, members of Congress and even some White House staff made the obvious snarky comments about “over-compensating” and “wishful thinking.” But the observation offered by a few who said that, with the oversized flags, Trump had turned the White House into a “used car lot” seems most accurate.

At this point, your honors, the prosecution humbly suggests we are a failed nation-state — not because of the erection of the flagpoles, but because of everything Trump, the courts, Congress and the press have done during the last 150 days of the new Trump regime. (A reminder that we still have just over 1300 days left.)

Iran is the latest debacle. That nation-state has been a thorn in the side of the United States since 1953, when the CIA toppled a democracy to install the Shah. During the Obama era, it looked like things might finally take a turn for the better after the former president’s negotiating team worked out a deal in 2015 that promised to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Trump canceled the deal during his first term, and since his inauguration in January, he has been trying to put nearly the exact same deal back into place. He says Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s unacceptable.”

Yeah. That’s why Obama negotiated a deal that kept it from doing so.

With little incentive to restrain itself after Trump blew up the 2015 deal, Iran proceeded to enrich uranium. Israel got nervous and, over the weekend, despite the Trump administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched missiles at the Islamic Republic. That caused the whole world to get nervous. Trump blamed Iran and defended Israel’s right to exist, bowing out of the G7 Summit in Canada on Tuesday so he could return to D.C. and ostensibly deal with the “growing crisis,” that is mostly his fault.

Aboard Air Force One, he gaggled with reporters and would not confirm what he would do about Iran. Instead, he posted “Unconditional Surrender” on Truth Social, without any explanation of what that meant, leading some wags in Washington to hope he had just resigned.

But that wasn’t the case, and he instead blasted Iran, saying he could kill that country’s “Supreme Leader” anytime he wanted. “We are not going to take him out (kill!) at least not for now.” He also claimed credit for Israel’s prowess, posting that “we now have complete and total control” of the skies over Iran because of “American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’” But other than that wonderful bit of negotiation on social media, his early return to Washington led to little or no results by midweek. That led to speculation by press and staffers that he simply got bored at the G7 and used the Iranian crisis as an excuse to come home.

As the flagpoles went up on the White House campus on Wednesday, Trump said he had a hand on things and teased that America might join Israel in striking Iran. “You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

I think he said the quiet part out loud again. He has no idea what he’s going to do. As he admired his flagpoles, he admitted that he wouldn’t know what he would do until “a second before the deadline.”

Whatever that means.

Trump again blamed Iran. “Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine.”

If you’re living in Iran you might not think so – especially after Trump sabotaged the last deal the U.S. government put into place. But logic has little place in Trump’s world.

All of this is evidence of why the U.S. is a failed nation-state. The chief executive officer is a convicted felon, 34 times over, and has been held liable in civil court for sexual abuse and defamation. He has issued executive orders that eliminate due process. He has ignored the Posse Comitatus Act and has considered invoking the Insurrection Act. He has deployed the military as police against American citizens. He is systematically purging from the federal government anyone perceived to be disloyal to him. He has hired clearly and provocatively unqualified people for some of the most important jobs in the administration. He has vowed recrimination against his “political enemies” and calls the press “the enemy of the people.” He won’t allow anyone to hold an opinion contrary to his own and lies so often that scores of fact-checkers owe their livelihood to researching his continuous, mind-bending deceptions. His foreign policy is a hot mess. He and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller screamed that “No Kings” protesters across the country were insurrectionists while he commuted the sentences of, or gave pardons to, 1500 people who engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6 because they supported him.

His administration has threatened, harassed and arrested Democratic lawmakers, including a U.S. senator, and a New York Comptroller.

Trump is a symptom of the problem and also a catalyst. The most telling piece of recent evidence of our failed nation-state status occurred Saturday, when two Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers and their spouses were horrifically targeted and shot in their homes. Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, were victims of what U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson called “a political assassination" and "a chilling attack on our democracy."

The MAGA crowd showed no empathy for the victims. A little more than 24 hours after Hortman was assassinated, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee mocked the attack in a pair of social media posts. “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee wrote on his personal X account. An hour later, in a post that showed a picture of the suspect, Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” referencing Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor.

Trump upped the ante. In the same gaggle on Air Force One where he rambled incoherently about Iran and Israel, Trump also insulted Walz. The governor is “slick” and “whacked out.” “I’m not calling him,” Trump said. A courtesy call would be a “waste of time.”

These divisive and deplorable actions by Trump have created imitators in both parties. While Sen. Lee’s comments were disgusting, so too were the recent actions in New York City by Mayor Eric Adams. He banned a New York Daily News reporter from his weekly news conferences after calling the reporter “disruptive” and “disrespectful” for shouting questions without being called on first. Trump tried the same thing with me in the White House. Spoiler alert: He lost three times in court trying to make that stick.

Further evidence of our failure includes the entire Democratic party which continues to eat its own. The Democrats are plagued by Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, who couldn’t manage a 26-year-old activist — David Hogg — nor apparently anyone else in the DNC. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, recently declined offers to stay on as at-large members. Weingarten cited disagreements with Martin. Part of the Democratic party wants to hire consultants to find out what America wants, while another part wants to force its progressive agenda down the throats of a country that leans more centrist-right. How pathetic can the opposition be if it cannot defeat a party led by an autocrat allowing oligarchs to dismantle a democracy so the rich get richer and the poor will “die" anyway, according to Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst.

Welcome back to chaos in a blender, the daily Donald Trump show that features endless madness, freaks, creeps, bumblers, tumblers, several royal curses and at least one trojan horse. And a really funny thing happened on the way to the forum; we don’t know if there’s a happy ending of course. But as Trump often tweets, “Stay tuned.” He is bound to get his. He’s now selling gold cellphones. Just imagine if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done so.

And there you have it. One could mention how Congress has failed to provide checks and balances, but that once reputable branch of government is so ineffective as to be inconsequential in the telling of the tale. The judiciary is only marginally better, with even odds that anything positive done by a lower court will be reversed by Trump’s Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the Fourth Estate has failed spectacularly, with reporters fired, lawsuits settled and apologies made that should never have been made. Rare is it these days that Trump is even asked a decent question.

If the United States before, during or immediately after World War II, had been presented with the fact of any nation-state behaving the way the U.S. has in the last 150 days under Donald Trump, the president, heavily supported by Congress, would have taken decisive action.

Now, the eye rolling, interruptions and damning with faint praise the G7 leaders gave Donald Trump is about the only indication of how little this country is respected internationally.

But it was a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan who nailed it when he blocked hundreds of cuts Trump had initiated for NIH grants. “I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” said U.S. District Judge William Young of Massachusetts. “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that…Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”

Apparently not.

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

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Friday, June 20, 2025 11:32 AM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Vagueness on Iran Is Not Strategic

By Fred Kaplan | June 20, 2025 11:00 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/donald-trump-iran-war-isra
el-two-weeks.html

What is Donald Trump up to? What is he trying to accomplish? Asked by reporters on Tuesday whether he’ll join Israel in its attacks on Iran, the president replied, “I may do it, I may not do it,” adding, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Sometimes a remark like this can be useful; it can prod an adversary into behaving with caution. Trump’s supporters have lauded him for his mastery of “strategic ambiguity” — a term coined by scholars of international relations to describe policies designed to deter aggression without quite spelling out the consequences.

But that’s not what’s going on here. In order for this ambiguity to be effective, leaders should have an idea of what they would do if war came — of how they would like to see the conflict play out.

Yet it’s clear, from all evidence, that Trump himself is among those who don’t know what he’s going to do. His contradictions breed only confusion; they might rein in Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but they might also spur him to take gigantic risks, believing (or hoping) that the threats are just bluffs. In any case, Trump has lost control of the narrative — the opposite of what any leader, much less a superpower, should do while playing this game.

Trump has gone back and forth on the question of whether to join Israel’s attacks on Iran, but in the past few days his words and deeds seemed to indicate that U.S. intervention was imminent. He warned residents of Tehran — a city of 9 million people, in a country of 90 million — to evacuate immediately. He said he’d given Iran an “ultimatum.” He said that when his emissary started negotiations with Iranians to get them to give up their nuclear program, he gave them a 60-day deadline — and “today is 61, right?” He said he was demanding “unconditional surrender.” He said he knew where “the so-called Supreme Leader” was hiding, though he wasn’t going to kill him — “not now,” anyway, suggesting that he might do so later (something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu definitely would like to see happen).

Then came his “To be, or not to be” act — maybe he’ll attack, maybe he won’t, “nobody knows what I’m going to do.” Now Trump says he’ll decide what to do within the next two weeks.

This is not strategic ambiguity; it is, at best, ambivalence. In any case, a leader should not utter the rather definitive statements that Trump has uttered the past few days if he still hadn’t made up his mind, or if his mind was whirring like a strobe light.

Given Trump’s consistent record of inconsistency — his frequent threats, followed by reversals (and sometimes reversals of reversals), whether on tariffs, foreign conquests (cf. Greenland, Panama, Canada), or deporting migrants — Khamenei could reasonably conclude that the threats of recent days are more of the same and that, therefore, he needn’t back down. This, of course, could lead to catastrophe, especially if Trump decided to follow through this time — and Khamenei followed through on his own threats to unleash hundreds of missiles against Israel and U.S. bases throughout the Middle East if Trump intervenes.

Whatever happens, world leaders — all of whom are closely watching these events — are learning that nothing this president says should be taken seriously. Again, this is not strategic ambiguity. It’s merely the rantings of an overconfident president who thinks that acting tough gets results but doesn’t know what results he wants.

The best thing Trump could have done, when reporters asked him what he might do or not do in Iran, was to say nothing. Yes, he should have publicly noted that Iran’s pace of uranium enrichment is concerning, that he is considering a range of options. It was also a good idea, in and of itself, to move military assets, especially cargo-transport planes and aircraft carrier groups, into the region — whether as a deterrent or preparation for action. (It could serve both functions; that’s strategic ambiguity.) But then he should have kept quiet.

He should have sent private messages to Israel and Iran and consulted with other leaders — especially Arab and European allies — who have stakes in this war and its outcome. The problem is, Trump craves the spotlight; he can’t resist talking at length when cameras and microphones are pointed his way. And he finds allies unnecessary, at times annoying. He thinks he can figure out everything by himself. In recent days, he has called Cabinet meetings to discuss the options, but his secretaries — all of his minions — have learned to go along with everything he says. Offering contrary views gets them nowhere.

Trump is facing some dissension, if not from within his Cabinet, then from within the Republican Party. Many joined the MAGA movement because Trump promised to avoid getting sucked into the “stupid wars” of previous presidents, especially wars in the Middle East. On the other hand, the more traditional Republicans, especially those long devoted to Israel and hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran, are yearning for Trump to drop bunker busters on the Fordow enrichment plant and help overthrow the ayatollah.

To the extent Trump is swayed by domestic politics, here too he is torn — and not for reasons having anything to do with strategy or ambiguity.

On Tuesday, I wrote a column that began, “By the time you read this, the United States might be at war with Iran. If not, check back in a few hours or a couple of days, as President Donald Trump is giving every indication that he’ll join the fighting soon.”

Well, a few days have passed, and here we are, nervously twiddling our thumbs while Trump has pedaled back and forth to the fence. It is worth noting, once again, that Trump is to blame for what’s going on. In his first term, he scuttled the Iran nuclear deal, which President Barack Obama and six other leaders had negotiated and which — as international inspectors had verified — Iran was following to the letter. In the years since, Iran restarted its nuclear program and is now closer than ever to building a bomb. It is not true, as Trump currently claims, that he gave the Iranians a chance to negotiate a new deal, but they refused. The Iranians were negotiating; it’s just that the last remaining obstacle to a deal — Trump’s insistence on barring the country from enriching any uranium, even to the low levels permitted (even encouraged) by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — was a demand that no country could permit, especially Iran, whose advanced program gave it more bargaining leverage than it had during the Obama era.

Now, Trump is trapped between his (I think genuine) aversion to war and his bellicose rhetoric to the contrary. If coupled with shrewd diplomacy and a realistic negotiating strategy, this could have amounted to an effective bargaining strategy of his own; it could stand as a case study in strategic ambiguity. But Trump doesn’t know what he wants, or how to get it, so it’s just a muddle — and a dangerous one, which could find him dashing or sleepwalking into war.

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

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