REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, March 12, 2026 11:19
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Monday, March 9, 2026 7:10 PM

SECOND

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


Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 09, 2026

Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.

Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.

The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.

The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.

Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”

“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”

The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.

Much more at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-8-2026

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

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Monday, March 9, 2026 7:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 4:42 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:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288

Trump Cornered on Wild New Excuse for Bombing Iran School
PASS THE BUCK

The president can’t get his story straight.

By Vic Verbalaitis | Mar. 9, 2026 10:00PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse-for-bo
mbing-iran-school/
and
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-cornered-on-wild-new-excuse
-for-bombing-iran-school/ar-AA1XRLFG

President Donald Trump blundered his way through a grilling surrounding U.S. responsibility for the bombing of an Iranian elementary school.

During a press conference held at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida, on Monday, the president was asked about reports that found an American Tomahawk cruise missile was likely what destroyed an Iranian girls’ school on Feb. 28. The strike killed at least 175 people, many of whom were children.

Trump, 79, interrupted the reporter who asked the question, CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju, saying, “Well, I haven’t seen it, and I will say that the Tomahawk, which is one of the most powerful weapons around, is sold and used by other countries.”

“And whether it’s Iran, who also has some Tomahawks—I wish they had more—but whether it’s Iran or somebody else... a Tomahawk is very generic, it’s sold to other countries," Trump rambled. “But that’s being investigated right now.”

The Australian Department of Defense said in late 2024 that only three countries currently have Tomahawk cruise missiles: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

The U.S. also approved the sale of 400 Tomahawks, which are solely manufactured by the American company Raytheon, to Japan in 2024 and 163 missiles to the Netherlands in 2025.

CNN’s Erin Burnett reported on Monday evening that “neither Israel nor Iran uses Tomahawk missiles, according to experts.”

Even Fox News’ national security expert Jennifer Griffin called out the president’s remarks, saying, “It seems highly unlikely that it would be anyone’s Tomahawk other than a U.S. Tomahawk that hit that school, and I think the president knows that.”

When asked about whether Iran possesses Tomahawk missiles and how they would have acquired them, if they do, the Pentagon referred the Daily Beast to the White House.

Minutes later, another reporter, New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh, asked the president about his confusing response.

“You just suggested that Iran got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” McCreesh said. “But you’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”

“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump replied, interrupting the reporter again. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know.”

“Numerous other nations have Tomahawks; they buy them from us,” he added. “But I will certainly, whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, said aboard Air Force One alongside Trump on Saturday that they were looking into the school strike, but did not completely echo the president’s claims that it was done by Iran.

“We’re certainly investigating,” the former Fox & Friends Weekend host said. “But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

The president interrupted him, saying, “We think it was done by Iran.” “They have no accuracy whatsoever,” he added.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the president’s remarks.

The Shajareye Tayabeh girls’ school in Minab, located adjacent to an IRGC naval base in Southern Iran, was struck by three missiles on Feb. 28 as U.S. and Israeli forces began their aerial bombing campaign against the region.

A report from The New York Times, which included video analysis, satellite imagery, and other evidence, found that the school was struck by a precision strike that was near-simultaneous to strikes on the neighboring naval base.

Since the conflict began on Feb. 28, seven American service members have been killed in action in Kuwait, and another died of a “non-combat-related incident.”

Over 1,200 have died in Iran, according to Al Jazeera, including the nation’s former Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 5:11 AM

SECOND

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


Whoops! Trump overlooked an important detail:

The U.S. war against Iran has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history, more than double the previous record set during the Middle East crisis of the 1950s, according to an analysis by consulting firm Rapidan Energy.

About 20% of the world’s oil supply has been disrupted for nine days now as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains at a standstill. Crude prices have surged above $100 per barrel in response.

The biggest disruption before the current war was during the Suez Crisis of 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the energy consulting firm told clients in a Sunday note. In that crisis, about 10% of the world’s oil supply at the time was disrupted.

The disruption triggered by the closure of the Strait is nearly three times the size of the shock caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, Rapidan analysts told clients. The Arab embargo disrupted about 7% of global supplies.

The big difference between the supply shock of the Iran war and past crises is the world has no spare oil capacity to address the problem, the analysts said. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold the overwhelming majority of swing capacity but they have been cut off from the global oil market by the Hormuz closure, the analysts said.

“The conflict has not only taken offline a historically high share of global supply – it has simultaneously disrupted the primary holders of spare capacity,” the Rapidan analysts said. “The result is a market with no meaningful cushion. There is no swing producer positioned to step in.”

This means that the global oil market will need to balance by destroying demand through sharply rising oil prices, the analysts said. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “finite and insufficient to fully offset” the supply bottled into the Persian Gulf due to the closure of Hormuz, they said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/the-us-iran-war-is-the-biggest-oil-sup
ply-disruption-in-history.html

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 6:49 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:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
American Farmers Dealt New Blow as Trump’s Iran War Escalates

Mar 10, 2026 at 04:00 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/american-farmers-dealt-new-blow-as-trumps-ira
n-war-escalates-11648730

The war zone sits at the crossroads of the world's fertilizer supply. Since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran a week ago, maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a near standstill. The waterway moves roughly 20 percent of the world's daily oil and 25 percent of its nitrogen fertilizer.

The fertilizer shock is not arriving alone. Diesel has surged to a national average of $4.60 a gallon.

"In soybeans alone, we lost $54 billion from the president's tariffs," he said. "What they're proposing with a $12 billion relief package is a drop in the bucket."

Farmers had already grown critical of the administration over a deal that quadrupled Argentine beef imports, undercutting domestic producers.

Farm bankruptcies filed under Chapter 12 are up 46 percent compared to 2024.

Thank you, Trump, for your attention to these details.

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 6:56 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:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Some of the underlying premises behind “drill, baby, drill” were accepted by many people. At the very least, it was widely presumed that U.S. self-sufficiency in oil would protect America from disruptions in oil supplies overseas.

But that presumption was wrong. America produces a lot of oil, substantially more than we consume. Although we import some oil, mainly from Canada and Mexico, while exporting even more oil, mainly from Texas, we buy hardly any oil from the Persian Gulf. Yet the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused U.S. prices of oil products to soar. Self-sufficiency in oil has done nothing at all to insulate the U.S. economy from Middle East chaos.

It could be different. In the 1970s the U.S. imposed price controls on domestically produced oil and partially insulated consumers from global oil shocks. When price controls were lifted, they were replaced by a windfall profits tax intended to capture part of the gains experienced by oil companies.

It’s almost inconceivable that 1970s-type price controls or excess profits taxes would be imposed today. So US prices of gasoline and other oil products reflect world crude prices, and the fact that America produces a lot of oil doesn’t matter at all.

It is a detail Trump doesn't think about.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-impotence-of-drill-baby-drill

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 11:22 AM

SECOND

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


The Lie of ‘Preventive’ War

Never has Donald Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran.

By David Cole | March 6, 2026

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/06/the-lie-of-preventive-war/

In January, during a lengthy New York Times interview with President Donald Trump, one of the paper’s reporters asked him whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage.” Yes, he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” Another reporter asked about international law. “I don’t need international law,” he explained. “I’m not looking to hurt people. I’m not looking to kill people.”

That attitude—save the last two sentences—has been on dramatic display in recent months. Already it has served as the basis for the extrajudicial execution of more than 150 people claimed to have been transporting drugs on the high seas and the deaths of at least a hundred people during the illegal invasion of Venezuela to arrest President Nicolás Maduro, provoke regime change, and gain access to that country’s oil.

But never has Trump’s willful blindness to legal limits been more evident than in his decision to start a war with Iran. As of March 4 the death toll in Iran from the joint US–Israeli military assault, underway since Saturday, had risen to nearly eight hundred. That number includes the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many of its top officials, but also reportedly at least 175 people at a girls school—many of them children between the ages of seven and twelve—that was in session when bombs struck.

Trump’s war with Iran may not trouble his “morality,” but it is manifestly illegal. It violates what is often described as the first principle of international law, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which prohibits nations from using or threatening to use force against another nation except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council. Neither condition obtains here. Early Saturday morning, Trump issued an eight-minute video in which he claimed that he had acted to defend the American people from “imminent threats.” To justify that claim he cited historical Iranian wrongdoing dating back to the 1979 hostage crisis, as well as its support of terrorist groups, but he identified no actual imminent threat. He repeatedly said that Iran could never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but he also stated that a June 2025 air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities had already “obliterated” its nuclear capability. And he urged the Iranian people to “take over your government,” an explicit endorsement of regime change having little to do with self-defense. (As no one disputes, Khamenei was a truly despotic leader, responsible for inflicting terror and death on his own people and on those of many other countries. But there are many despots around the world, and no principle of international law makes Donald Trump the arbiter of which ones stay in power and which ones should be killed.)

In a letter submitted to Congress two days later, the president omitted his previous, unsupported claim of an imminent threat. Instead he vaguely asserted that he had acted in defense of Americans at home and abroad, as well as “in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” But in the absence of any ongoing attack, or any evidence that Iran was planning an imminent attack, neither the United States nor Israel had any authority to start a war against another sovereign country.

Trump’s unilateral action also violated the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize more limited military actions (referred to in the Constitution as “letters of marque and reprisal”). That allocation of responsibility was deliberate. As George Mason explained at the time, the aim was for “clogging rather than facilitating war.” The framers worried, justifiably, that presidents would be tempted to use military force, and they wanted to ensure that the young, vulnerable nation did not enmesh itself in military conflict unless the most representative branch of government first authorized doing so. Here, as under international law, there is a narrow exception allowing the president to repel invasions or imminent attacks, since these may not leave time to get approval from Congress. But Trump has pointed to no such conditions here.

The Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith has argued that law is irrelevant when it comes to war-making, and as a matter of realpolitik he is probably right, at least for powerful nations like the US. There is no effective mechanism to hold the president accountable for running roughshod over the Constitution or the UN Charter. Courts are historically reluctant to get involved, and the Security Council, of which the US is a permanent member, can only act unanimously.

But in another sense the legal questions are not just relevant but essential. A world in which only a leader’s subjective “morality” constrains any nation from launching aggressive military attacks against other nations is not only a world governed by men rather than by law but also one in which power rules absolutely. If Trump can depose any leader he likes, what is to stop Russia or China acting similarly against their foes? (Russia, of course, already has tried, in its war on Ukraine.) Is that the world we want to live in?

*

Ultimate responsibility for the Iran war lies with Trump, but the road to it was paved by his predecessors—of both parties. After the terrorist attacks of September 11 George W. Bush declared an amorphous, global, and preventive “war on terror,” stretching the notion of preemptive war beyond any meaningful limits. A truly preemptive war responds to actual imminent hostilities. The notion of “preventive war,” by contrast, is not recognized in international law, and for good reason. It expands the concept of preemption to excuse interventions in the absence of an imminent threat; it is far more speculative, and therefore far more dangerous.

Under that theory Bush claimed the right to attack any international terrorist organization anywhere in the world, effectively declaring a global war. The administration’s “preventive” measures included disappearing suspects into secret CIA “black sites” where they were tortured, including by waterboarding. It also detained more than seven hundred Arab Muslims in the United States using pretextual immigration charges and only then investigated them to determine whether they had terrorist ties. Not one was charged with any terrorism-related crime.

Bush’s embrace of preventive military action also led him to launch a disastrous war against Iraq, which had neither attacked us nor credibly threatened to do so. Bush claimed that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, was a despot, which was certainly true—but no more justification for an invasion than Trump’s similar charge against Khamenei. He also claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which was not true—and at any rate no justification for war absent a credible threat that Iraq intended to use them to attack the United States imminently.

Trump’s administration is deploying a similarly expansive conception of prevention. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed a kind of second-order preemption as justification for starting a war with Iran. He said that Israel was likely to attack Iran even without us, and that after that attack (which would itself have been illegal), there was a risk that Iran would respond by attacking US targets. But as the Tel Aviv University law professor Eliav Lieblich has explained, that defense fails on multiple grounds. It is doubly speculative, as it depends on predicting the future actions both of Israel and Iran. It presumes, falsely, that the US had no leverage over Israel’s decision, despite Israel’s deep dependence on US support. And in any case its factual premise was contradicted by Trump himself, who denied that Israel dragged us into the war. This sort of reasoning is precisely why expansive concepts of preventive war cannot be squared with international law.

When accordion-like notions of prevention are coupled with advances in modern technology, the risks of illegal war-making multiply dramatically. President Barack Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq and announced the conclusion of a lengthy troop withdrawal in 2011. But he neither abandoned the concept of preventive war nor sought to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the crimes they committed in its name. One of Obama’s most enduring legacies is the use of remote assassinations by drone strikes. By the time he left office he had authorized a reported 542 drone strikes to execute people security agencies had placed on “kill lists” based on secret allegations that they were terrorists. Those strikes ultimately killed an estimated 3,797 people. Because placement on the kill list required no trial or conviction, everyone the drone program killed was at least presumptively innocent. Many of the victims, moreover, were not even on the list at all; they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drone strike fell.

Obama claimed that this tactic was justified to stop terrorists from taking action against the US in the future. But the strikes were not in response to any actual or imminent attacks on US persons or interests. They rested on the unknowable prediction that the people they targeted would harm us at some point in the future. There is, unfortunately, a direct line between Obama’s kill list and Trump’s illegal executions of drug smugglers. In both instances the president claims, without any public trial or even accounting, that a person poses a future threat to the United States, and tells someone to push a button that will end that person’s life (as well as those of the people around him). Obama’s supporters might say there is a difference between targeting alleged terrorists associated with a group that had attacked us and targeting suspected drug runners, and they would have a point. But the legal and conceptual rationales—and the technological method—are the same.

The importance of adhering to legal constraints is only magnified by the technological advances that Obama exploited. It used to be that if the leader of one nation disapproved of the leader of another, he was unlikely to be able to dislodge him from power without committing substantial troops to the cause, with the likely result of a significant loss of life on his country’s side. The unpopularity of sacrificing one’s own people was probably a more effective constraint than international law.

Today, in contrast, war-making need not involve many troops on the ground. Sophisticated aerial missions, remote drone warfare, and cyberattacks have all radically reduced the human cost of military intervention, at least as long as one picks opponents that lack the wherewithal to respond in kind against one’s own people. No American soldiers died carrying out Obama’s drone strikes or Trump’s executions on the high seas. Thus far six US soldiers have been confirmed killed in the Iran war. As any economist could have predicted, as the human cost to one’s own side has fallen, the demand for such measures—at least by presidents—has risen.

Wars, needless to say, still impose substantial costs on the countries that start them, even setting aside the destruction and death they visit on the countries they target. The attacks on Venezuela and Iran will cost US taxpayers billions of dollars—billions that won’t be spent creating jobs, building houses, or providing health care, the things the American people actually want from their government. So although Trump believes that the only constraint on his war-making is his own “morality,” he may well learn that there is another factor: the American people. Wars tend to be popular when they begin and only lose support over time: think Iraq or Afghanistan. This war is already wildly unpopular; hardly anyone elected Trump to launch an attack on Iran. If the people find Trump’s morality an insufficient check on executive adventurism, they will have an opportunity to render judgment in the midterms. But November is a long way away, and meanwhile the administration’s latest adventure will keep squandering our taxpayer dollars and taking countless lives.

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 12:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288



Yes I did.

And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 1:41 PM

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:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288



Yes I did.

And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Your just-so story is this: The US was bombing Iranians with Tomahawks. The Iranians saw their opportunity to bomb their school children with a Tomahawk they just so happened to have. And thus, the US looks like it bombed the school children.

A "just-so story" is a speculative, unverified explanation for a specific phenomenon. "Just-so stories" are often criticized as being unfalsifiable, "ad hoc" narratives.

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 7:15 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Can’t Decide Whether the Iran War Is Still Going On

The president seems to be at odds with both himself and his secretary of defense about the status of the conflict.

By David A. Graham | March 10, 2026, 4:05 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/03/trump-iran-war-confusi
on-mixed-messages/686320/

The Trump administration can’t say why the United States went to war with Iran, and it can’t say what the goal of the war is. Now it can’t even decide whether the war is still going on.

During an interview with CBS News yesterday afternoon, President Trump all but declared victory. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said.

This statement is so self-contradictory and confusing that one might be tempted to write it off as just riffing, except that he reiterated it at a press conference later in the day. “We’re achieving major strides toward completing our military objective, and some people could say they’re pretty well complete,” he said, apparently referring to himself. All that was missing to complete the parallel to the Iraq War was a flight suit, an aircraft carrier, and a Mission Accomplished banner.

Yet the same afternoon, the Department of Defense posted on X, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight,” mangling a famous quotation from John Paul Jones, the father of the U.S. Navy. Reporters at the press conference, perplexed, asked Trump about the gap. “You said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says this is just the beginning, so which is it?”

“Well, I think you could say both,” Trump replied.

You could—if you were a pundit making an argument about the future of the war. But people might hope for a bit more clarity from the man who launched the war without congressional authorization, popular support, or even much buy-in from his own advisers.

Trump’s equivocation yesterday may be his attempt to steady an economy shaken by the war. The president’s approval has been battered recently by the high cost of living. Although inflation was a major factor in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump has seldom focused on it since entering office and has insisted that affordability is somehow both a Democratic “hoax” and a problem that he has already solved.

The war in Iran has exacerbated existing stressors: It has driven up gas prices, rocked stock markets, and suggested that Trump’s attention is not on the economy. The president appears rattled by this and even called on oil-tanker captains to “show some guts” and sail through the contested Strait of Hormuz, according to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, though he hasn’t volunteered to personally dodge Iranian missiles aboard a floating makeshift bomb.

Trump’s comments yesterday seemed to work, at least in the immediate term: Oil futures dropped, and markets rebounded a bit. Over time, however, whatever succor Trump provides to the economy by saying that the war is nearly over is likely to be canceled out by his administration’s vacillation. Markets seek stability, and Trump can’t seem to decide on a talking point, much less a strategy or aim for the war itself. As my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl reported last week, Trump offered 10 different rationales for the war in its first six days alone. Traders may be primed to look for examples of Trump chickening out, but yesterday’s remarks seem more like a feint at ending the war: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that today would “be yet again our most intense day of strikes.”

Trump appears confused not only about the future of the war but also about some of its basic facts. The U.S. has faced international criticism over a missile strike on a girls’ school in Iran, which was next to a naval base that was also struck. Iranian authorities say that about 175 people were killed at the school, mostly children. Over the weekend, Trump said that the attack was friendly fire. “In my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Since then, evidence has emerged that the missile that struck the base was a Tomahawk, an American-made weapon. Yesterday, Trump claimed that Iran possesses Tomahawks. “Whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk—a Tomahawk is very generic,” he said. “It’s sold to other countries.” This is nonsense: Only a few U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, are known to have them. When a New York Times reporter confronted Trump, asking why no one else in the government was backing up his claims, the president folded. “Because I just don’t know enough about it,” he replied. “Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

This claim of ignorance is surprising, because Trump usually claims to know better than everyone around him. When asked a question to which he doesn’t know the answer, his default is to say that he’s considering it. But on occasion, when really backed into a corner, Trump will throw up his hands and claim that he doesn’t know anything about a topic.

No president can or should be expected to know everything. This is why he’s provided with a Cabinet and a team of other advisers, an executive branch full of subject-matter experts, and a Congress and judiciary to serve as checks on him. The problem is that Trump wants to operate with complete freedom from any restrictions and without waiting for advisers’ input. Asked when the war would completely end, Trump told CBS, “Wrapping up is all in my mind, nobody else’s.” That’s not very reassuring, for stock markets or anyone else.

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

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Tuesday, March 10, 2026 7:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You just whine about everything, don't you, cunt?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you tried to explain away Trump's claim that the Iranians buy Tomahawks from the US so that he can blame the Iranians, rather than the US, for killing school girls with a Tomahawk.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=1
240288#1240288



Yes I did.

And you have no possible way of refuting the logic in that post either.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Your just-so story is this: The US was bombing Iranians with Tomahawks. The Iranians saw their opportunity to bomb their school children with a Tomahawk they just so happened to have. And thus, the US looks like it bombed the school children.

A "just-so story" is a speculative, unverified explanation for a specific phenomenon. "Just-so stories" are often criticized as being unfalsifiable, "ad hoc" narratives.

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


No. That's not at all what I said.

We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.


Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.

You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 8:53 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:

No. That's not at all what I said.

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, the mystery programming you have been working on for decades could be finished today if you used Claude the AI.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9627
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Meanwhile . . .

. . . the defense department declared that Anthropic is a supply chain risk, and it is trying not just to end its own use of Claude but to prevent any contractors doing business with the department from using Claude.

There’s no mystery about the motivation for banning Claude. Anthropic has said that it wants assurances that its products won’t be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. This has enraged Trump officials: David Sacks, the administration’s AI and crypto czar, has accused the company of supporting “woke AI.” So an administration for which seeking vengeance against perceived enemies is a central motivation is naturally trying to punish Anthropic and damage its business.

But the fact that the Trumpist-Anthropic feud is understandable doesn’t make it normal or acceptable. In fact, the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is a terrible omen for America’s future, in at least three ways.

First, it’s obviously illegal. Designating a potential contractor a supply-chain risk isn’t something the government is supposed to do casually. The legal basis for such a designation, embodied in the federal government’s acquisition guidelines, is very specific:

“Supply chain risk” means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252).

So supply chain risk is about sabotage or subversion. “This company is too woke” doesn’t meet that definition.

Second, denying government contracts to a company because the administration doesn’t like that company’s politics is a seriously corrupt practice. Think of it as the flip side of crony capitalism: while throwing taxpayer dollars at companies it considers friends — especially because they personally enrich members of the administration or the president’s family — the administration is freezing out companies it considers enemies. If this practice becomes the norm, as it surely will if these people remain in power, it will waste money because the government is denying contracts to vendors who offer the best value but aren’t sufficiently MAGA. It will also further corrupt our politics, as businesses feel the need to be demonstratively pro-Trump if they want federal contracts.

Finally, the Defense Department is now doing exactly what people like Hegseth have always accused supporters of DEI of doing — refusing to hire the best people for the job, refusing to give contracts to the best suppliers, in the name of political correctness. The Pentagon’s managers and tech experts clearly believe that Claude is the best tool for many purposes, but they have been ordered not to use it because their political masters don’t like the company’s politics.

Imagine the reaction if the roles of the parties were reversed — if a Democratic administration were denying the U.S. military the tools it wants to use because it considered the company supplying those tools too conservative. Republicans wouldn’t just be protesting; they’d be screaming “treason.”

Indeed, while I can’t judge how much damage telling the military to stop using Claude — just as a war was starting! — will do, it’s clearly a move that weakens national security. And what this move tells us is that the Trump administration cares more about fighting wokeness than it does about keeping America safe.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plot-against-intelligence-human

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

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 9:37 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Went to War With Iran Because Jared Kushner Is a Fool

Donald Trump’s top two negotiators have no clue what they’re doing.

Edith Olmsted / March 9, 2026 / 4:59 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/207554/donald-trump-iran-war-iran-jared-k
ushner-steve-witkoff

Do Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner actually understand nuclear energy enough to describe Iran’s capabilities to Donald Trump, let alone negotiate a nonproliferation agreement with Tehran?

Several nuclear experts have raised questions about the disastrous duo’s technical understanding of uranium enrichment after they presented an assessment of Iran’s Research Reactor that made no sense, MS NOW reported Monday.

For the uninitiated, here’s a crash course in nuclear energy: Most nuclear reactors that produce electricity only require uranium that is enriched to between 3 percent and 5 percent. Highly enriched uranium is anything above 20 percent, and weapons-grade uranium is enriched above 90 percent, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

Tehran’s Research Reactor is a 60-year old facility designed to use less than 20 percent enriched uranium, not intended for use outside of research and producing medicine. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing any evidence, that the facility was being used to covertly stockpile uranium that would become weapons-grade. Nuclear experts aren’t buying it.

“An [active] operating reactor cannot be used as storage. I am not aware of this ever having happened,” Claus Montonen, a retired nuclear physicist and board member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, told MS NOW.

Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told MS NOW that the administration’s “confusing and misleading” assessment of the reactor was laden with “technical errors.”

“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”

Witkoff and Kushner chose not to have nuclear technical experts present during negotiations in Geneva, a senior Middle East diplomat with knowledge of the talks told MS NOW. The United States then chose to skip out on technical talks scheduled for last Monday in Vienna.

Last week, Witkoff offered this defense of his credentials: “I wouldn’t tell you I’m an expert in nuclear, but I’ve learned quite a bit, and I’ve studied it and have read quite a bit about it, and I’m competent to sit at the table and discuss it, and Jared [Kushner] is as well.”

Ahead of Trump’s military campaign in the Middle East, Witkoff claimed that Iran had amassed 460 kilograms of uranium at 60 percent enrichment, enough to potentially make 11 bombs within a few weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported Iran had enough uranium to make 12.

However, during negotiations, Iranians offered to turn over that uranium, the Middle East diplomat told MS NOW. The Iranians told Witkoff and Kushner that they’d only started enriching uranium after Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

A senior Trump official had confirmed that Iranians “talked about turning over material to us.” But talks ended abruptly when the United States launched a joint attack with Israel.

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

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 11:20 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

No. That's not at all what I said.

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, the mystery programming you have been working on for decades could be finished today if you used Claude the AI.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9627
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf


No it couldn't. AI still can't do art.

And among other things, tens of thousands of hours were spent in free Photoshop equivalents.

I told you, I'm a novice coder at best. Coding was just a part of the job, and I had plenty of human help with that over the years.

There's a lot of database management, which AI could never do with accuracy because the data that was out there was extremely flawed.

This is much more a creative work than it is a coding project.

Why are you bringing this up before you post something in reply to me?

Because you're an evil little demon.


As for your Anti-American bullshit after that, didn't read it.

You have nothing worth saying. You have never had anything worth saying.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 2:27 PM

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:

No. That's not at all what I said.

We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.


Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.

You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Pentagon Report: U.S. Military Fired Missile at Elementary School in Iran

Despite attempts by Trump to claim otherwise, the U.S. military was responsible for killing at least 175 in a strike on a school in Iran.

By Nick Turse | March 11, 2026, 1:07 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/03/11/iran-school-missile-investigation/

A U.S. military investigation determined in its preliminary findings that the United States conducted an attack on an Iranian elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing inquiry. The findings directly contradict assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school.

The lethal strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a “targeting error” by the U.S. military, which mistook the facility for part of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy base that was adjacent to the school, according to one of the U.S. officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

U.S. Central Command attacked the school based on long outdated coordinates for the strike provided by another defense agency, one of the officials told The Intercept. While the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school was once connected to the IRGC base by roads, the building was partitioned off by 2016, according to an investigation by New Lines Magazine.

The attack, which came after a yearlong effort by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to gut programs to reduce civilian casualties, killed more civilians than any other strike in Trump’s second Iran war. It was “colossal negligence,” one of the current government officials said.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran was responsible for the strike, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Trump told reporters March 7. “They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

Wes Bryant — who served until last year as the senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence — called the attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school a “failure in fundamental targeting doctrine and standards.”

Bryant, who called in thousands of strikes across the greater Middle East as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, said it was common to rely on outdated imagery while conducting operations.

“As a targeter, the imagery and initial intelligence data you receive on a potential target or target set is just the start. You don’t prosecute based solely off any organization — NGA or otherwise — giving you an image and saying they have intelligence that it’s an enemy location,” he told The Intercept, referring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which specializes in such imagery. “You corroborate with other intelligence, and you conduct as near real time as possible characterization of that target as well as the civilian presence and risk to include collateral damage analysis risk of civilian casualties.”

U.S. Central Command refused to comment on the preliminary findings of the inquiry. “It would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation,” a CENTCOM official told The Intercept by email.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not immediately reply to requests for comment on their potential involvement in providing intelligence that led to the strike.

The investigation’s findings were widely expected as evidence of a U.S. attack on the school mounted. A video released on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency showed a cruise missile striking the IRGC naval base beside the elementary school as smoke appears to billow from the school itself, indicating that it had recently been struck. According to Bellingcat, the cruise missile was a Tomahawk missile. The U.S. is the only party to the conflict employing Tomahawk missiles.

“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” Hegseth said at a March 2 press conference. “No stupid rules of engagement.”

CENTCOM would not offer an estimated civilian death toll for the U.S. war on Iran. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.

An investigation by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, found that the first days of the Iran war saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign. “While the rate of civilian harm cannot be solely predicted by the number of targets hit, initial indications suggest it has been high — particularly with U.S. targets correlating with heavily populated areas,” according to the Airwars report. “The targets map heavily onto the highest populated areas.”

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

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 4:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.


Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.

You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.


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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 4:16 PM

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 6ixStringJack:
We know that you are illiterate, so do not paraphrase me. Your tiny little brain can't even begin to comprehend any point I was getting at.


Meanwhile, here you are again... blathering on all day long about meaningless bullshit, just as you have done every single day for the last 12 years.

You are a miserable prick and an evil human being.


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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you didn't make sense, but you tried harder elsewhere to protect Trump from being charged with murdering schoolchildren:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds fake to me.

But considering it is Iran, maybe it was real?

Hey... If Somalians in America can make 150 day cares in a single town and not have any kids inside of them, what if we did the opposite?

Let's take 100 or so school aged children of the 33,000 civilian adults we killed for protesting last month. Tie them up to school desks in the middle of one of our bases, and then let the Americans kill all of them when they bomb the shit out of us.


You don't think the Iranians know how to manipulate stupid people like you at least as well as the Legacy Media does?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67406&mid=12403
95#1240395

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

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 4:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup.

Because your media lies about everything, all the time.

No reason to believe that any of that is true now.

And besides... what is a hundred kids when you can add that to the 300,000 he supposedly murdered by cutting off USAid?

Ya get it yet, stupid?



Maybe if you were to pick and choose what headlines you were complaining about instead of posting a dozen or two of them here every single day including Sundays, somebody might take you seriously.

But this is just one of tens of thousands of headlines you've posted here since 2016, and you will have forgotten completely about it 2 weeks from now anyhow.

Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.

*yawn*

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 5:48 PM

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:

Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.

*yawn*

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump’s war against Iran is uniquely unpopular among US military actions of the past century

By Charles Walldorf, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University

Published: March 10, 2026 1:48pm EDT

https://theconversation.com/trumps-war-against-iran-is-uniquely-unpopu
lar-among-us-military-actions-of-the-past-century-277586

It’s clear that regime change is among the biggest objectives of the U.S. war in Iran.

“I have to be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader, President Donald Trump said on March 5, 2026.

Trump has also said he might put U.S. boots on the ground to get the job done.

Trump now joins a long list of modern U.S. presidents – from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – who started wars to either overthrow hostile regimes or support embattled friendly governments abroad.

For all the parallels to history, though, Trump’s Iran war is historically unique in one critically important way: In its early stages, the war is not popular with the American public.

A recent CNN poll found that 59% of Americans oppose the war – a trend found in poll after poll since the war began.

As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that what’s likely generating public opposition to the Iran war today is the absence of a big story with a grand purpose that has bolstered public support for just about every major U.S.-promoted regime change war since 1900. These broad, purpose-filled narratives generate public buy-in to support the costs of war, which are often high in terms of money spent and lives lost when regime change is at stake.

Two historical examples

In the 1930s and ’40s, a widely accepted – and largely true – story about the dangers of fascism spreading and democracies falling galvanized national support in the United States to enter and then take on the high costs of fighting in World War II.

Likewise, in the 2000s a dominant narrative about preventing a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and stopping terrorism brought strong initial public support for the war in Afghanistan, with 88% support in 2001, and the war in Iraq, with 70% support in 2003.

With no comparable narrative around Iran today, Trump and Republicans could face big problems, especially as costs continue to rise.

No anti-Iran narrative

Iran has been a thorn in the side of many American presidents for a long time. So, what’s missing? Why no grand-purpose narrative at the start of this war?

Two things.

First, grand-purpose narratives are rooted in major geopolitical gains by a rival regime – the danger to the U.S. For the anti-fascism narrative, those events were German troops plowing across Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the anti-terrorism narrative, it was planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Gains like these by rivals prove traumatic to the nation. They also dislodge the status quo and provide the opportunity for new grand-purpose narratives with new policy directions to emerge.

Today, most Americans see no existential danger around Iran. A Marist poll from March 3, 2026, found that 55% of Americans view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all. And the number who see Iran as a major threat, 44%, is down from 48% in July 2025.

By contrast, 64% of Americans saw Iraq as a “considerable threat” prior to the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

The poll numbers on Iran aren’t surprising. Iran is far from a geopolitical menace to the United States today. To the contrary, it’s been in geopolitical retreat in the Middle East in recent years.

In the summer of 2025, Iran’s nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities were significantly damaged – “completely and totally obliterated,” according to Trump, though there is no confirmation of that claim – during the 12-Day war between Iran and Israel.

And in recent years, Tehran has lost a major ally in Syria and witnessed its proxy network all but collapse. Iran has also faced crippling economic conditions and historic protests at home.

As the polls show, none of that has sparked a grand-purpose narrative.

Missing a good story

The second missing factor for narrative formation today is any strong messaging from the White House.

In the months prior to World War II, Roosevelt used his position of authority as president to give speech after speech, setting the context of the traumatic events of the 1930s, explaining the dangers at hand and outlining a course going forward. Though less truthful in its content, Bush did the same for nearly two years before the Iraq War.

Trump did almost none of this storytelling leading up to the Iran war. Five days before the war started, the president devoted three minutes to Iran in a nearly two-hour State of the Union Address.

Prior to that, he made a comment here and there to the press about Iran, but no storytelling preparing the nation for war. Likewise, since the war began, the administration’s stated reasons for military action keep shifting.

No wonder 54% of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran and 60% of Americans say Trump has no clear plan for Iran. Also, 60% disapprove of Trump’s handling of foreign policy in general.

By comparison, Americans approved of Bush’s handling of foreign policy by 63% in early 2003.

Absent a cohesive, unifying story, it’s also no surprise there is lots of political fracturing today.

Partisan divides run deep – Democrats and independent voters strongly oppose the war. But Trump’s MAGA coalition is cracking too, with people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene sharply criticizing the war.

The way out

If he opts for it, there is an off-ramp for Trump from the Iran war. It’s one he knows well.

When U.S. leaders get caught up in costly regime change wars that outrun national support, they tend to back down, often with far fewer political costs than if they’d continued their unpopular war.

When the disaster referred to as Black Hawk Down hit in Somalia in 1993, killing 18 U.S. Marines, President Bill Clinton opted to end the mission to topple the warlords that ruled the country. Troops came home six months later.

Likewise, after the Benghazi attack killed four Americans in Libya in 2012, Obama pulled out all U.S. personnel working in Libya on nation-building operations.

And just last year, when Trump realized that U.S. ground troops would be necessary to topple the Houthi militant group in Yemen, he negotiated a ceasefire and ended his air war in that country with no significant political fallout.

With Trump’s Iran war, gas prices keep rising, more soldiers are likely to die, and stocks are highly volatile.

Backing down makes a lot of sense. History confirms that.

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

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026 9:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Yup.

Because your media lies about everything, all the time.

No reason to believe that any of that is true now.

And besides... what is a hundred kids when you can add that to the 300,000 he supposedly murdered by cutting off USAid?

Ya get it yet, stupid?



Maybe if you were to pick and choose what headlines you were complaining about instead of posting a dozen or two of them here every single day including Sundays, somebody might take you seriously.

But this is just one of tens of thousands of headlines you've posted here since 2016, and you will have forgotten completely about it 2 weeks from now anyhow.

Because, SPOILER ALERT: You don't give a single fuck about those alleged kids any more than I do.

*yawn*

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, March 12, 2026 6:20 AM

SECOND

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


Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14

Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup

The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.

Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.

Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.

Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.

The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”

In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a grant program to reward local governments that “promote dense development” and “mixed-income housing,” an idea Ms. Warren campaigned on during her presidential bid in 2020. She sent out an exuberant press release on Tuesday listing all of the left-wing groups endorsing the bill.

Eager to claim a housing victory, the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?

https://x1337x.cc/torrent/6602398/Wall-Street-Journal-Wednesday-March-
11-2026/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/housing-bill-republicans-congress-elizabet
h-warren-single-family-homes-f57b2c04

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

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Thursday, March 12, 2026 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


As Iran pinches the Strait of Hormuz, American farmers are getting squeezed

By Harry Bruinius | March 12, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET | Plant City, Fla.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2026/0312/iran-war-farmers-fertilizer-st
rait-hormuz

Lance Lillibridge is looking through his financial ledgers over the past few years, putting some perspective on the rising costs of fertilizer for most American farmers.

Mr. Lillibridge, an Iowa corn grower and part of a family of farmers going back a century, has roughly 1,250 acres devoted to his corn crop – including a few acres of hay to feed his some 60 head of beef cattle. Every year, he needs to add nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to his fields. “Fertilizer is our No. 1 expense, other than land,” he says.

In 2021, his price for a ton of anhydrous ammonia, which he uses to shoot nitrogen into the soil, was $492. The price of corn at the same time was around $4.50 a bushel, according to his records. By January 2025, the price of corn he commands remained about the same. But anhydrous ammonia jumped to $745 a ton.

Why We Wrote This

American farmers are seeing fertilizer prices spike as supply is choked off by Iran’s threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, in response to attacks by the U.S. and Israel. It’s a sign of how the war is affecting the global economy – including spring planting.

Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which retaliated by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz – the narrow, 21-mile-wide waterway between Iran and Oman through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows. It is also the choke point for roughly one-third of the world’s traded fertilizer supply.

“On Feb. 13, the cost was $850 a ton, and the price of corn was just above $4,” Mr. Lillibridge says of the weeks before the attacks on Iran began. “Fertilizer’s going up; corn’s going down. And today, [anhydrous ammonia] is $1,050 a ton,” he says as he checks his supplier’s website. “That’s what’s going on with Iran.”

Indeed, the attacks on Iran are jolting global energy markets, continuing to push up the price of oil. But for America’s farmers, the more immediate crisis might be unfolding in the current spikes in the cost of fertilizers.

The timing could hardly be worse. Across the Corn Belt, spring planting begins in a matter of weeks. Nitrogen fertilizers, considered the most critical input for growing corn, must be in the ground before seeds go in every year, and are used later in the season as well, unlike phosphorus and potassium.

“I’ve had many, many phone calls this week from farmers in panic,” says Mr. Lillibridge, a past president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association. “They can’t even get a price on it.”

Other crops, too, are feeling the effects of what has become a price spike on top of a price spike. In Georgia, some watermelon growers report they can no longer afford to plant a crop because of fertilizer prices. In Arkansas, rice and cotton growers report a looming economic crisis as fuel and fertilizer costs skyrocket and commodity prices fall.

In Florida, strawberry farmers have recently been celebrating the close of the winter season, during the first week of March, as they begin to prepare for the next. While fertilizer costs are a much smaller line item – labor costs being the highest, as strawberries are picked throughout the winter months – farmers here are also feeling pinched by rising costs, and by weather disturbances.

“We have never, ever seen this amount of wind during a freeze in Florida, ever,” says Bob McDowell, a manager at Fancy Farms in Plant City, Florida, where he has been working for about 25 years. “A lot of the old-timer farmers that I talked to, they said we’ve never experienced those two conditions at the same time.”

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a disaster declaration for the freeze, estimating agricultural losses at more than $3 billion. But the war with Iran has affected Florida agriculture in other ways as well, Mr. McDowell and other experts point out.

Indeed, there is a particular irony in what is happening just south of Tampa, in the flatlands of Polk County. Beneath those fields lies one of the world’s great deposits of phosphate rock, the source of another type of fertilizer.

But phosphate fertilizer requires a lot of sulfur to produce. The sulfur arrives by ship, processed into sulfuric acid, which reacts with the phosphate rock to unlock its nutrients. And roughly half of the world’s exported sulfur moves through the Strait of Hormuz.

Nitrogen fertilizers, which require natural gas to produce them, have similar supply chain issues, says Josh Linville, vice president of fertilizers at StoneX Group, a financial services firm that includes a specialization in commodities.

Methane – the primary component of natural gas – is heated with steam to extract hydrogen, which is then combined with nitrogen drawn from the atmosphere to produce ammonia.

From ammonia, manufacturers make a full range of nitrogen fertilizers: anhydrous ammonia, which farmers like Mr. Lillibridge inject directly into the soil; urea, the granular form that travels by ship across oceans; and liquid nitrogen solutions applied during the growing season.

“Now, three of the world’s 10 largest urea exporters – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – are cut off behind the strait,” says Mr. Linville, who grew up in a farming household in Missouri.

“Israel’s and the United States’ war with Iran threatens to curtail natural gas flows to Egypt, another top 10 exporter,” he continues. “And India, one of the world’s largest buyers of nitrogen fertilizer, is facing its own domestic production problems.”

Fertilizer supply was already low

So what is unfolding now is not simply a crisis born of the current conflict with Iran, Mr. Linville says. Global fertilizer markets were already dangerously depleted.

China, historically one of the world’s largest exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, said earlier this year that it would not export until August. Europe, still reeling from the loss of Russian natural gas following what Sweden and Denmark have called the intentional destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022, has been running nitrogen production at roughly three-quarters of normal capacity.

Taken together, those two disruptions had already removed millions of tons of nitrogen fertilizers from a market that could ill afford the loss.

“Had we gotten on the phone before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran,” Mr. Linville says, “I would have told you we still had supply problems, globally speaking.”

Making matters worse, the American fertilizer market had effectively frozen in the months before the war began – not because of shortages per se, but because of farmers and retailers playing wait-and-see.

Mr. Lillibridge knows this well. As fertilizer prices climbed steadily over the past couple of years, corn prices did not. Unable to pencil out a profit, farmers refused to lock in purchases. Retailers, unwilling to risk being caught holding expensive inventory if prices fell, declined to build up their stocks.
Challenges beyond war’s effects

Corn growers like Mr. Lillibridge also insist current shortages are not simply because of the current crisis.

He says the primary problem has been the consolidation of agricultural suppliers – seed, fertilizer, and chemical companies – into a handful of dominant players with no meaningful competition.

“We’ve been working very hard and trying to have transparency into why costs keep rising,” says Mr. Lillibridge. “And there is no transparency. If we had enforced antitrust laws over the last 40 years, our house would be in order. Our house is not in order.”

In December 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to establish task forces to investigate alleged price-fixing and anticompetitive behavior in the food supply chain, specifically naming fertilizer as a vulnerable sector.

“Companies claim fertilizer is a world market and they don’t control the prices,” Mr. Lillibridge says. “And I disagree with that. There’s no place that I can go and hedge that cost. Where can I do that? It’s not available.”

For Mr. Linville, national security is the real issue, as conflicts continue in the Gulf region. But he sees it in a very different context.

“The biggest national security issue for every country around the world is food availability,” he says. “And we’re talking about being so dependent on nitrogen imports. We need to get to where we’re less reliant, so that we know we can at least feed our people year in and year out.

“We have the capability, and we have the finances,” Mr. Linville continues, noting how much natural gas the U.S. has with which to make its own nitrogen fertilizers, if it had the facilities. “My gosh, with what we spent on Iran in the last couple of weeks, we could have built a new facility.”

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

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Thursday, March 12, 2026 10:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, Page A14

Elizabeth Warren’s Housing Coup

The GOP Senate is about to pass a bill that is great for progressives.

Republicans want to show voters they’re doing something to ease housing costs. The result, alas, is a pork-filled bill hitting the Senate floor this week that is big win for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the political left.

The Senate’s 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a melange of some 40 bills. Call it a blueprint for a bigger Washington. It establishes multiple grant and loan programs for “affordable” housing while expanding federal power over local zoning. The worst provision is a ban on large investors purchasing single-family homes to rent. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-21st-century-road-
to-housing-act/

Companies like Amherst and Invitation Homes that buy and then rent single-family homes have become a popular scapegoat for high housing prices. The real leading culprit is the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era monetary policy. Historically low mortgage rates followed by inflation fueled price appreciation and resulted in a lock-in effect for owners that is constricting the supply of homes for sale.

Large investment firms mopped up foreclosed homes after the 2008 housing crash, placing a floor on prices. They account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock, and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).

President Trump thinks the investor ban polls well and likes to say “people live in homes, not corporations.” But who does he think lives in rental homes—hedge fund managers? Most tenants are lower-income. The Senate bill could force many of them out of their homes.

Investors who own 350 or more homes would be barred from buying new ones with a few exceptions—namely, if home builders construct homes specifically for rental purposes; if investors make substantial renovations to bring homes into compliance with local building codes; or if they buy them from other large investors.

Investors would still be required to sell any homes they acquire under these exemptions within seven years. This may not be enough time to recoup their investment, especially since they would have to pay hefty taxes and transactions costs upon selling a home. They also face risk if prices fall.

Smaller firms will likely exit the market because they couldn’t expand. If investors are forced to unload properties, where will their tenants go? Amherst estimates that roughly 85% of its tenants wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage because of credit constraints or other underwriting restrictions.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter warn that federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises might seek to prevent evictions by easing underwriting standards to enable tenants to buy homes that investors are forced to sell. This would increase the risk and costs for taxpayers who backstop mortgages.

The bill implicitly acknowledges the potential for collateral damage by giving the Treasury Secretary carte blanche authority to issue rules to “minimize market disruptions” and “mitigate, to the extent possible, negative impacts on consumers and communities.” Treasury could also redefine “large institutional investor,” “single-family home,” and “excepted purchase.”

In other words, Treasury would have the power to rewrite the provision. Don’t Republicans want to pare back the administrative state? We’re told the Trump team demanded this unfettered discretion because they realize Ms. Warren’s drafted language would cause problems in the housing market.

Imagine how a Democratic administration will exploit this sweeping power. How about a nationwide eviction moratorium or rent control? The bill also instructs the Housing and Urban Development Department to establish housing “best practices” for local governments—solar panels on all homes!

Oh, and don’t forget a grant program to reward local governments that “promote dense development” and “mixed-income housing,” an idea Ms. Warren campaigned on during her presidential bid in 2020. She sent out an exuberant press release on Tuesday listing all of the left-wing groups endorsing the bill.

Eager to claim a housing victory, the White House is pressuring Senate Republicans to pass the bill and wants the House to accept it. But why do Republicans want to provide a down payment for Ms. Warren and fellow progressives to expand Washington control over housing in their states?

https://x1337x.cc/torrent/6602398/Wall-Street-Journal-Wednesday-March-
11-2026/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/housing-bill-republicans-congress-elizabet
h-warren-single-family-homes-f57b2c04

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




You can't even accept a win. You're fucked up in the head my dude.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, March 12, 2026 11:19 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Sell This War. Has the salesman in chief gotten rusty?

By Jonathan Lemire | March 12, 2026, 5 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/trump-iran-gas-prices-eco
nomy/686337/

A year ago yesterday, President Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom to try to boost the slumping sales of his then-pal Elon Musk’s electric-car company. A few months ago, Trump declared from behind the Resolute Desk that he was Boeing’s “salesman of the year,” claiming to have helped facilitate the purchase of hundreds of aircraft. And long before he entered politics, Trump slapped his name on just about anything—apartment buildings, steaks, even a dubious for-profit university—to market it to the masses. Trump will sell anything.

He has now made one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: launching a war against Iran. The conflict, which is well into its second week, has widened throughout the Middle East, sent oil prices skyrocketing, and caused tumult in the financial markets. Yet Trump has not sold the war. In many ways, he hasn’t even tried.

The absence of a sales strategy is all the more confounding when you consider the political stakes. The upcoming midterm elections were supposed to be about the economy. That was perhaps Trump’s most effective issue in the 2024 presidential campaign, as voters grew frustrated with the stubborn inflation that permeated Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump vowed to fix it, but his record over the past 15 months is inconsistent: Yes, inflation has cooled some, but last month’s jobs report was brutal; the president’s tariffs have created confusion and kept costs high; and the economy is starkly stratified—the rich are doing great, and everyone else is decidedly less so. Republicans have been on a losing streak in a series of elections, and poll after poll reveals a clear disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy.

But there were some real silver linings. Chief among them: gas prices. Ron Klain, who was Biden’s first White House chief of staff, told me a few years ago that the first thing he did each morning while in that role—even before seeing if the president had called—was check the price of a gallon of gas. Bill Clinton was equally obsessed, realizing that gas-station signs were billboards for the nation’s economy. Trump made the low cost of gas a staple in his stump speech and gave it a central spot in his State of the Union address a few weeks ago. It was key in White House talking points for Republicans pitching voters to keep them in power: See, things are getting better. Give us time to finish the job.

That pitch just got harder to make. Even before the war began, most Republicans privately acknowledged that keeping the House would be challenging. Now they will be forced to defend a war that, polls show, Americans didn’t want. Already, seven U.S. soldiers have died, and approximately 140 more have been injured. Tens of thousands of Americans were stranded in the Middle East after the Trump administration did not facilitate their departure—or evacuate government outposts—before Iran retaliated. And, of course, there is the price of gas. The average cost of a gallon has jumped by more than 50 cents since the conflict began. This spike has been the subject of relentless news coverage and, yes, has been splashed across those gas-station billboards. Even for voters who rarely care about foreign policy, the rising cost of filling up their tank has been unavoidable. And more price hikes are likely coming to airfare, shipping, and groceries, just to name a few.

Elections are in many cases won or lost on economic issues. But there are moments when Americans are willing to endure fiscal hardship or accept that the nation will make sacrifices for a greater good. Presidents of the past have made a point of convincing Americans that it was worth it. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously made the case for World War II, and his nation endured years of rations while sending a generation of young men off to battle. George H. W. Bush built an international coalition and sold the public on the need to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. And although the public would eventually sour on his son’s own war in Iraq the following decade, George W. Bush made the case for the conflict.

Trump has done none of this. He faced his biggest audience of the year just three weeks ago during the State of the Union address, in which he gave Iran only a passing mention: a few lines near the end of a 108-minute speech. Trump that night declared Iran the “world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror” and warned its leaders against developing a nuclear program. He didn’t prime the public, and his administration barely briefed Congress. (Aides later claimed that he did so to maintain the element of surprise, a perplexing notion considering the unmissable size of the U.S. armada parked in the waters off Iran.) When Trump eventually announced the conflict, he did not do so with a major speech or a prime-time address from the Oval Office. Instead, news of the war came via a social-media video filmed at his Mar-a-Lago estate and released in the middle of the night. Trump, wearing a baseball cap but not a tie, did not offer a clear rationale.

Since then, the explanations that the president and his team have offered for the invasion have grown only more muddled. As documented by my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl, the reasons have shifted from Iran was posing an imminent threat, to Israel made me do it, to We’re doing it for the grandkids. Trump has also taken to briefly answering dozens of reporters’ phone calls in the first weeks of war, and offers a variety of explanations for the invasion (without providing much opportunity for follow-up questions). His administration’s goals for the war have been equally opaque. Only on Tuesday did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, clearly lay out three primary objectives: Destroy Iran’s missiles and its ability to make them; cripple its navy; and permanently end its nuclear program. But Trump himself continues to step on that, musing about the possible need for regime change in Tehran and how he wants to be involved in choosing Iran’s next leader. Iran’s initial response was a strong no: It empowered the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, who is viewed by many as more militant and is likely embittered toward a United States that was involved in killing his father, mother, wife, and son.

A few people close to Trump believe that his lack of clarity comes from a confidence that he doesn’t need to be clear. He’s gotten rusty, perhaps, in convincing anyone of anything. The GOP-controlled Congress has been compliant, his staff is almost exclusively populated by true believers, and although he takes plenty of reporters’ questions, a healthy percentage of them are from journalists who work at sympathetic, right-leaning outlets. Over the past year, the president has fallen in love with overwhelming, one-and-done demonstrations of force, like the kind he ordered in Venezuela, in Nigeria, and last summer in Iran. He appeared confident that a quick strike would suffice this time too. The United States’ and Israel’s military’s performances have been impressive, but Tehran has been resilient—and the Trump administration now expects the conflict to drag on for weeks, not days.

Trump, though quick to extol the damage that the military is inflicting on Iran, has still not laid out what goals would have to be accomplished to declare victory and end the American air campaign. One of his closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Iran hawk, made his views clear yesterday, saying, “There’s no way you can say you won this war with an ayatollah in charge.” (Graham and a few other pro-war Republican senators have privately indicated that the conflict’s political consequences are overrated, because they believe the GOP was going to lose the House anyway, a person familiar with the conversations told me.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also has advocated for the permanent elimination of Iran’s regime. But that goal will be difficult—verging on unattainable—and would likely require a lengthy military commitment. Experts also note that achieving the Pentagon’s goal of ensuring that Iran can never build a nuclear weapon would be more or less impossible; even if the current facilities were destroyed and its scientists killed, another effort could be mounted in the years ahead.

The lack of clear objectives complicates Trump’s ability to find an off-ramp from the war. Iran has continued to pummel its oil-producing neighbors and has threatened to menace the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s petroleum normally travels. Tehran has already struck more than a dozen vessels there, including at least three yesterday, despite Trump’s warnings. Officials said that the U.S. has destroyed at least 16 minelayers, and Trump is considering dispatching naval vessels to act as escorts to the oil tankers. But even state-of-the-art battleships could be vulnerable to Iranian drone and speedboat attacks.

A senior administration official downplayed to me the extent of America’s economic punishment, declaring it “short-term pain; long-term gain.” Yet the price of gas seems likely to keep rising, which alarms Republicans. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters this week that “the price of gas is always kind of a benchmark” and is “something obviously we’ve got to pay attention to.” Senator Rand Paul added that the war could lead to “disastrous” midterms for Republicans.

The White House disputed that Trump has been muddled on the war’s goals, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement that “the military objectives of Operation Epic Fury have been clearly outlined by the President” since “the very first strikes.” Yet Trump, even as the bombing raged, told reporters at the White House yesterday, “Let me tell you. We’ve won. You know, you never liked to say too early you won. But we won.”

There are some influential MAGA voices—Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly—who believe that the Iran attack conflicts with Trump’s “America First” agenda, and his 2016 campaign commitments to end the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan while avoiding new Middle East entanglements. A few elected Republicans, such as Representative Thomas Massie, also oppose the war. But Republicans largely continue to back Trump, making it easy for Democrats to tie them to the unpopular war. A new poll conducted just before the conflict by Navigator, posted yesterday, shows that Trump and his fellow Republicans were perceived as caring far too much about foreign conflicts (as well as immigration), as opposed to caring about the economy. The Democrats have also seized upon Trump’s lack of clarity about the war’s motivations and its endgame. After a briefing from administration officials, Senator Richard Blumenthal told reporters that he was “dissatisfied and angry,” and his colleague Senator Chris Murphy alleged on social media that “all the briefings are closed, because Trump can’t defend this war in public.”

Trump, of course, has no shortage of opportunities to change the war’s narrative. He traveled yesterday to Cincinnati and northern Kentucky for a series of events. And in a lengthy Truth Social post that he unleashed while en route, Trump laid out a case for why he believed that drastic action is needed to remove a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER” from power—just not the one in Tehran.

“Thomas Massie,” Trump wrote, “is disloyal to the United States of America! He is a MISFIT, who should be voted out of Office, ASAP.”

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

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