REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, March 13, 2026 13:36
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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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Thursday, March 12, 2026 1:21 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:
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.

. . .



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

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
This is why you flunked, 6ix. There is no "win" because the Republicans in the House of Representatives will vote against the bill. Trumptards are opposed to it. But you, 6ix, were too lazy to even look up the details, just exactly like every lamebrain Trumptard I know. Your life story matches tens of millions of other American failures: you are too fucking lazy to understand and do the simplest, most obvious things necessary for honest success in America. See that word "honest"? I underlined it. Instead, Trumptards follow Trump's path to "success": cheat, lie, and steal. Then complain when all your dishonesty, drunkenness, laziness, incompetence, and ignorance did NOT bring the "success" you feel America owes you just because you are alive.

Landmark housing bill overwhelmingly passes Senate, faces uncertain future in House
by Al Weaver - 03/12/26 12:21 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5780781-housing-bill-passes-senate/

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 1:23 PM

SECOND

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


The New War on Speech

In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.

Aryeh Neier | March 10, 2026

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/10/the-new-war-on-speech-trump/

On January 20, Donald Trump promised to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression” by signing an order “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” I was mystified. There have certainly been periods in American history when the federal government made substantial efforts to limit freedom of expression. But nothing of the sort had taken place in the years preceding Trump’s election. What could he have been talking about?

The executive order, which Trump signed that afternoon, offered a clue. “Over the last 4 years,” it asserted, “the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” It is a familiar complaint. Right-wing groups have for years been attacking social media companies for their content moderation practices, which are generally intended to limit the dissemination of hate speech and other offensive material, though whether or not the companies in question do so under pressure from the government is debatable.

Now, Trump’s executive order promised, those days were over: the US would “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” In light of subsequent developments, this line, which suggests that the order applies solely to citizens, seems significant. The First Amendment limits what the government may do regardless of the legal status of the beneficiaries—citizens and non-citizens alike have the right to express themselves freely.

But the order did include a sentence with which I would heartily agree: “Government censorship,” it declared, “is intolerable in a free society.” Trump’s conduct since January 20 with respect to freedom of expression has indeed been intolerable. There has never been an attack on free expression quite like it.

*

The unprecedented nature of Trump’s attack on free expression is difficult to understand except in contrast to earlier periods in which the values embodied in the First Amendment have been under assault. Probably the most concerted attack on freedom of speech in American history came in 1917 and 1918 against those who opposed American entry into World War I and conscription for military service. Under President Woodrow Wilson, the federal government enacted the Espionage Act of 1917 and amendments to that law known as the Sedition Act of 1918; state governments adopted local counterparts. Despite the 1917 act’s name, hardly any of the people prosecuted under these laws were accused of spying; they were usually prosecuted for speaking at protests or publishing articles. According to the contemporaneous work of the legal scholar and Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee, about two thousand prosecutions for speech took place during this period, resulting in prison sentences of five or ten or even twenty years. Most of the convictions were upheld unanimously on appeal. There had, at that point, never been a US Supreme Court decision protecting freedom of speech under the First Amendment. As Adam Hochschild has written in his powerful book American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022), it was also a period in which organizations like the American Protective League—a group similar to the Ku Klux Klan in its composition and methods—led a great many violent attacks on antiwar activists, even the most horrifying of which almost never resulted in criminal prosecutions.

During the war an organization called the American Union Against Militarism established a Civil Liberties Bureau to bring court challenges against some of the punitive measures that the government had used to target the war’s opponents. That effort was led by a New York lawyer, Crystal Eastman, and a social worker from St. Louis, Roger Baldwin, who himself was sentenced to a year in prison for resisting the draft. The next few years saw the continuation of severe repression, with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in November 1917 and labor strikes in the US fueling a red scare. The main targets were immigrants ostensibly suspected of involvement in a series of anarchist bombings, thousands of whom were rounded up and detained in the “Palmer Raids.” Many hundreds were summarily deported to what was then known as Soviet Russia; the perpetrators behind the bombings were never identified.

In January 1920 Eastman and Baldwin formed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a permanent organization, with Baldwin as its founding director. Among the lawyers active in the newly formed group were Chafee and his Harvard Law School colleague Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice. That spring both took part as friends of the Court in a federal case in Boston, Colyer v. Skeffington, challenging the planned deportation of seventeen alleged radicals arrested during the Palmer Raids. “A more lawless proceeding it is hard for anyone to conceive,” Judge George W. Anderson said in handing down his lengthy decision forbidding the deportations on June 23. “I can hardly sit on the bench as an American citizen and restrain my indignation. I view with horror such proceedings as this.” His condemnation helped bring the raids to an end.

Over the next two decades a number of disputes erupted over freedom of speech, including struggles over labor organizing, the teaching of evolution, the distribution of materials dealing with birth control, and the publication of allegedly obscene books like Ulysses. But it was in the second red scare that followed World War II and the onset of the Cold War that free speech in America again came under sustained attack. Many thousands of employees of government agencies and defense industries were purged; college faculty members had to sign loyalty oaths, with some losing their posts; and Senator Joseph McCarthy and others led congressional investigations alleging that their targets had shown disloyalty or associated with allegedly disloyal organizations.

The 1940 Smith Act had made it a crime to “advocate” the violent overthrow of the government—an offense that, in practice, prosecutors often inferred on the basis of the defendant’s organizational affiliations. A series of congressional hearings infamously targeted leading figures in the entertainment industry—including performers such as John Garfield and Paul Robeson and playwrights like Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Clifford Odets—who were alleged to have affiliations with the Communist Party or communist fronts. Some were prosecuted and imprisoned for refusing to answer questions; a great many more spent years on the blacklist, unable to find employment.

A number of factors contributed to the abatement of these attacks on freedom of expression. One was a change in the composition of the Supreme Court. Three appointees of President Dwight D. Eisenhower—Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice John Marshall Harlan, and Justice William Brennan—joined with long-serving Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas as protectors of the First Amendment. In 1957, for instance, Harlan wrote the Court’s decision in Yates v. United States overturning convictions under the Smith Act; that same year Brennan wrote the decision in Keyishian v. Board of Regents striking down the loyalty oaths required of faculty members at the State University of New York.

A few other individuals in this period stand out for their defense of free speech, among them the journalist Edward R. Murrow—whose “See It Now” broadcasts on CBS Television were particularly effective in countering Senator Joseph McCarthy—and the former President of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, who led the Fund for the Republic (funded by the Ford Foundation) that strongly defended civil liberties. The ACLU, for its part, had a mixed record during this period. Though its national office, under the direction of Patrick Murphy Malin, who succeeded Baldwin in 1950, did not provide leadership, many of its state affiliates, including in California and New York, led the way in addressing such matters as the blacklist, Congressional investigations, and loyalty oaths.

Many of the most important free speech battles of the late 1950s and early 1960s involved protests against racial segregation. State and local police beat civil rights activists, attacked demonstrators with police dogs and fire hoses, and in some cases murdered peaceful protesters—as in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964, where three civil rights workers were killed by police affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The federal government under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson intervened to demand that local officials in southern states respect the rights of protesters, as did a few federal judges. It was the civil rights struggle in Alabama that became the occasion for New York Times Company v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision establishing that a public official must prove “actual malice” to prevail in a defamation case—one of the most important protections for free speech in American history. That decision may now be under threat: Trump has said in the past that he wants to “open up our libel laws,” as he put it on the campaign trail in 2016, and US Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have suggested that the Court should revisit the ruling.

Then came the Vietnam War. No other cause has ever brought so many Americans into the streets over a sustained period to object to the policies of their government. Great numbers of protesters were arrested. Some 13,000 arrests occurred on a single day in May 1971, after the Department of Justice took over policing in Washington, D.C., and imposed what William Rehnquist, then an assistant attorney general, called “qualified martial law.” Defended by lawyers for the ACLU of the National Capital Area, virtually all of those demonstrators had their charges dismissed, and some received small payments for unlawful arrest. On the other hand, many young men went to prison when they were denied conscientious objector status, or for such gestures as burning their draft cards—pieces of paper that served no real purpose other than proving that, in most states, they were old enough to drink. Press freedom, too, came under attack, most famously when, in 1971, the federal government attempted to bar The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers and prosecuted Daniel Ellsberg for leaking them. A divided Supreme Court upheld the newspapers’ right to publish the documents, and Ellsberg went free because of government misconduct in its attempt to convict him.1

These battles left behind a generally favorable system of free speech protection. (The most significant setback was over symbolic speech: in its 1978 decision in United States v. O’Brien, the Supreme Court upheld criminal punishment for destroying a draft card.) In the half century between the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of Trump’s second term there were many more struggles over the First Amendment, involving such issues as pornography, hate speech, political campaign spending, the right to privacy or to a fair trial, the rights of journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources, and the regulation of social media. Yet at no point would it have been correct to say that freedom of speech as a whole was under attack. On the contrary, free expression—by means of speech, or the press, or by the right to associate or to assemble peaceably—was probably as well protected in the US as in any other country in the world. In the past year all that has changed.

*

Trump’s assault on speech has some continuities with the past. His campaign against individual political dissenters, for instance, recalls the attacks on immigrants during the Palmer raids. The arrest, detention, and attempted deportation of international students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk is the tip of the iceberg: last March Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he had signed more than three hundred letters revoking the visas of people who had expressed views on foreign policy the Trump administration found unacceptable, signaling to more than a million international students that they can no longer count on having their freedom of speech respected.

But the second Trump administration’s attack on freedom of speech also differs in important ways from earlier attacks. With the exception of certain well-known figures, the great majority of those who suffered during twentieth-century crackdowns on speech were individual antiwar activists, adherents of radical causes, and other political dissenters without substantial resources or stature in American public life. The Trump administration, in contrast, has singled out establishment institutions: elite universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California; mainstream broadcast media; top law firms that represent the country’s most powerful clients and whose partners earn millions of dollars a year.

It is hard, too, to think of an instance in which the president himself has played such a direct and overt part in an assault on free speech. Even Richard Nixon—who kept an enemies list that included opponents of the war in Vietnam and helped choose the targets for FBI wiretaps without judicial authorization after press reports appeared on America’s “incursion” into Cambodia—undertook such actions covertly. In contrast, Trump personally filed lawsuits against the CBS and ABC television networks and issued executive orders specifying the penalties that he would impose on particular law firms he accused of antagonizing him. Personal animus seems the exclusive basis on which they were selected.

Still more dismayingly, these attacks have been met with strikingly little resistance. The law firms and the broadcast networks that Trump singled out could have readily vindicated their rights in court, yet most chose not to resist. This is less surprising than it might seem. The institutions at the center of Trump’s crackdown are larger and more established than the targets of past attacks on free speech in the US, but that very fact also means that they have large amounts of money at stake. Many—though thankfully not all—seemed to fear putting up a fight because it could cost them dearly. Their failure to resist makes it more likely that Trump will continue on this path.

*

An important component of the Trump administration’s attack on freedom of speech has been its attempt to control leading American universities by imposing large monetary penalties and cutting off federal grants and contracts. The right-wing assault on these institutions actually began a little more than a year before Trump’s inauguration. Starting in December 2023, in hearings by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York questioned Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania; Claudine Gay, president of Harvard; and others about how they had dealt with antisemitism in protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. Those hearings, which led to the resignations of both Magill and Gay, may have helped Trump realize how vulnerable elite universities could be—especially how dependent they were on government grants, how susceptible they were to pressure from wealthy donors, and how many other ways there were to threaten the vast amounts of funding they have become accustomed to receiving.

The administration has made a variety of demands on universities, including increasing “viewpoint diversity” on their faculties and among their students, protecting conservative thought, limiting the number of international students, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The Education Department has declared that “academic freedom is not absolute” and has sought to be involved in determining how academic institutions carry out these policies. Yet it is far from clear how a matter such as “viewpoint diversity” would be addressed. Does it require universities to recruit people with diverse views on an academic subject, or diverse political views? If the former, how might that affect hiring in, say, the chemistry department or the mathematics department, where many questions have only one correct answer based on objective evidence? If the latter, would it follow that if most members of a mathematics department are liberals, then only conservatives would be considered for an opening? Would mathematicians have to advertise their political views to secure an appointment?

The administration’s means of securing compliance with these demands has been to threaten federal grants and contracts, which it has done to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Cornell, Princeton, Northwestern, and others. Often these are grants and contracts involving medical and other scientific research. American universities have been leaders in these areas, but that may be coming to an end.

And yet giving in is also expensive. Brown University settled with the administration by committing to a payment of $50 million. Columbia University agreed to pay four times as much. For months the government demanded that UCLA not only pay $200 million annually for five years but ensure that international applicants who are “likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment are not recruited or admitted,” which would require the university to screen potential students politically. The proposed settlement also had provisions intended to bar transgender students and prevent “any applicant reference to racial identity” from being used in the admissions process. In November a district judge temporarily blocked the proposal, and last month the administration withdrew its appeal of the court’s order—then sued the university days later over allegations of antisemitism.

Trump’s executive orders and memoranda against major law firms were even more explicit about using this sort of financial leverage. In a number of cases they directed federal agencies not to do business with those firms, to deny their lawyers security clearances, and even to bar their personnel from entering federal buildings—potentially costing the firms tens of millions of dollars of lost business. The stated rationales for these proscriptions were too far-fetched to take remotely seriously. (Trump accused Perkins Coie, for instance, of “undermining democratic elections, the integrity of our courts, and honest law enforcement,” among other allegations.) Their only plausible basis was Trump’s private grievance.

The firms affected or threatened by these measures would have easily prevailed against the administration in court, and the four that fought back—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—did indeed get rulings from federal judges in their favor. (Trump’s Justice Department recently asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to dismiss the relevant cases—only to reverse course a day later and renew the appeals after all.) Yet most of the firms agreed to settlements in which they collectively pledged to provide about a billion dollars in free legal services on behalf of Trump-supported causes. In all probability, many law firms will now be reluctant to provide legal support for causes that may further antagonize the president.

*

The attacks on the media have so far taken the form of personal lawsuits. In March 2024 Trump sued ABC, alleging that George Stephanopoulos had defamed him by saying that he had been found liable for rape in a court case. (The ruling in the E. Jean Carroll case actually found Trump liable for sexual abuse rather than rape.) As a public figure suing for defamation Trump would have to prove not only that ABC was mistaken but that the mistake was made with “actual malice”—that is, with knowledge that it was false or in reckless disregard of whether or not it was false. It seemed highly unlikely that he could prevail. Yet in December, after Trump won the election, the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC and had important financial interests in matters pending before federal agencies—including a possible FCC investigation into its planned joint streaming service with Fox and Warner Brothers, and a new FTC regulation requiring that streaming services like Disney Plus be made easier to cancel—agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library to settle the case and another $1 million to his law firm.

The episode seemed to foreshadow the way the company initially dealt with Jimmy Kimmel some months later. In September 2025, Kimmel’s monologue about the assassination of Charlie Kirk elicited an immediate threat from Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, who said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” ABC responded by declaring that all broadcasts of Kimmel’s show would be halted “indefinitely.” President Trump made comments backing Carr, but the episode aroused a furor and two Republican Senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, criticized Carr for interference with free speech. Their intervention may have been crucial. ABC reversed course and restored Kimmel’s show.

Trump’s suit against CBS—initially for $10 billion, which he subsequently raised to $20 billion—was based on a claim that the network had violated a federal statute barring false advertising by editing an interview with Kamala Harris broadcast on 60 Minutes to portray her in a better light. It seemed at least as weak a case as his lawsuit against ABC. But Paramount Global—which owned the network and was seeking FCC approval for its pending sale—settled the case for another $16 million. Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, and Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, both resigned before the settlement was announced. Soon thereafter, CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night broadcasts, which have been critical of Trump.

In the aftermath of the settlement with President Trump the chief executive, founder, and principal financier of Paramount Skydance, David Ellison, appointed Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, which in an earlier era had acquired a reputation for distinguished investigative reporting under the leadership of journalists such as Murrow, Fred Friendly, Eric Sevareid, and Walter Cronkite. Weiss’s lack of any experience in broadcast journalism, her sympathy for many of the policies associated with Trump, and the fact that she reports directly to Ellison suggested that she was appointed in some part to ensure that CBS’s news reporting would not antagonize the administration. Weiss’s last-minute intervention to block a 60 Minutes report on the notorious CECOT Prison in El Salvador, a torture center to which the Trump administration sent some two hundred and fifty Venezuelan detainees, seemed to confirm this assessment. (The episode eventually aired nearly a month later.)

In December Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against the BBC regarding the network’s editing of a segment dealing with his remarks on January 6, 2021, to demonstrators near the Capitol building. In the weeks prior to Trump’s suit a critical internal review of the broadcast—which aired in the UK but not the US—had been reported in the conservative Daily Telegraph, resulting in the resignations of the director-general and the news chief executive of the BBC and an apology by the network’s chair. Even so, as of this writing the BBC is resisting Trump’s suit in court.

On the whole, Trump so far seems to have less leverage over newspapers. Some newspaper owners have other business interests subject to federal authority, and in certain of those cases Trump’s second coming has indeed had an impact. Most prominent has been the case of The Washington Post. In 2024 Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who bought the Post in 2013, forbade the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris and ended its practice of endorsing presidential candidates; the following February he decreed that the Post’s opinion columns would be limited to support for “personal liberties and free markets.” Then, last month, Bezos eliminated the jobs of more than three hundred of the Post’s roughly eight hundred journalists. Ostensibly the cut was made for financial reasons. Perhaps. But some critics suggested that Bezos, one of the four or five wealthiest people in the world, could readily afford the losses and that it was another step in diminishing the significance of what had been one of the world’s most important news organizations.

Other papers have thus far borne up under Trump’s pressure, perhaps because they have a stronger tradition of resistance to government pressure, perhaps because some have owners less financially reliant on federal regulatory authority. In December 2024 Trump filed suit against the Des Moines Register—now owned by USA Today, the largest newspaper publisher in the US—alleging fraud and election interference for publishing a poll before the election showing him losing Iowa. (He ended up winning the state by a comfortable margin.) While that lawsuit continues at this writing, it has not had a discernible impact on the newspaper’s reporting. The same is true of a lawsuit Trump filed against The New York Times for $15 billion for its reporting on his business activity and a suit for $10 billion against The Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his alleged birthday greetings to Jeffrey Epstein. Early in his term Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press pool for declining to follow his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America; litigation is ongoing as of this writing, but the dispute likewise does not appear to have influenced the AP’s reporting, which tends to be reliable.

And yet it is extremely troubling that newspapers seem to have been the exception rather than the rule. The values set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution endured through other periods of repression in the country’s history because antiwar activists, civil rights demonstrators, birth control proponents, labor organizers, and political radicals resisted, often at great personal cost, and often with the aid of defenders of free speech. So far many prestigious universities, powerful law firms, and major broadcast media have capitulated to Trump. If more of our institutions do not start fighting for those values, we may not be able to count on their survival.

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 1:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The New War on Speech

In modern US history, there has never been an attack on free expression quite like Donald Trump’s.

Aryeh Neier | March 10, 2026

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/10/the-new-war-on-speech-trump/

On January 20, Donald Trump promised to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression” by signing an order “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” I was mystified. There have certainly been periods in American history when the federal government made substantial efforts to limit freedom of expression. But nothing of the sort had taken place in the years preceding Trump’s election. What could he have been talking about?


Oh fuck you.

After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.

Get fucked, you lying little worm.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, March 13, 2026 8:27 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Oh fuck you.

After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.

Get fucked, you lying little worm.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union" and is actively seeking to fracture the bloc's unity, according to an interview with the Financial Times published Friday.

"What I think is actually important for everybody to understand is that the US has been very clear that they want to divide Europe. They don't like the European Union," Kallas told the FT. https://www.ft.com/content/1b9cf85e-e1ae-4892-a255-9ca042af4f37

The remarks came after more than a year of turbulence in transatlantic relations. The Trump administration this week launched trade investigations into the EU over alleged unfair trade practices — moves that could result in new tariffs by this summer, following the US Supreme Court's dismantling of much of Trump's earlier tariff program last month. The European Commission said it would respond "decisively and proportionately" to any US breach of the existing trade agreement, while the chair of the European Parliament's International Trade Committee, Bernd Lange, said the investigations were unacceptable as they violate the US–EU trade deal.

Kallas said Washington's approach to the EU echoes tactics used by the bloc's adversaries, the FT reported. EU member states should not seek to deal with Trump bilaterally, she said — instead, they should present a united front, "because we are equal powers when we are together."

The comments landed against a broader pattern of pressure from Washington. Trump has repeatedly targeted the EU in his second term — imposing tariffs on member states and repeatedly raising the prospect of annexing Greenland, a move analysts say could effectively end the NATO alliance.

More at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/03/13/they-dont-like-the-eu-europes-t
op-diplomat-says-washington-wants-to-divide-europe/

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

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Friday, March 13, 2026 8:31 AM

SECOND

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


Trump and the Putinization of the US Government

The Iran Bombing As A Clarifying Moment

By Phillips P. OBrien | Mar 13, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-and-the-putinization-of-t
he

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

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Friday, March 13, 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:

Oh fuck you.

After writing those two sentences, there's nothing worth reading in the 80 paragraphs that followed them.

Get fucked, you lying little worm.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
The US slashed research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, mental health — and nearly everything else

by Pratik Pawar
Mar 13, 2026, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/482363/nih-medical-research-grants-
cut-2025

Think about the disease that worries you most — the one that runs in your family. Or maybe someone you love is living with it. Whether that’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or depression, odds are the US government has been funding the research to treat it.

That research is a big reason we have drugs that made fatal blood cancers survivable, treatments that turned HIV from a death sentence into something people live full lives with, and a vaccine that all but prevents cervical cancer.

But last year, the US funded dramatically fewer grants to do medical research that can lead to breakthroughs like those. New data released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from those cuts broke down. https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The numbers are striking across the board.

New grants for Alzheimer’s and aging research were cut in half — from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent — even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans. Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,” said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH’s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.

The NIH’s funding system was already under strain — too many researchers were chasing too few research dollars. That has always meant that the most ambitious and most unconventional ideas struggle to get funded.

But the Trump administration’s policy decisions have made that problem dramatically worse in just a single year.

What went wrong

The NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their proposals, a panel of outside experts scores and ranks them, and then each NIH institute — each focused on a different area of medicine — funds as many top-scoring proposals as its budget allows. In a normal year, about 5,000 new grants get funded.

Last year, one policy change did more to shrink that number than almost anything else.

In July 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget required NIH to start paying the full cost of approved grants upfront — all at once, instead of paying year by year, as it has for a very long time. In principle, funding grants upfront makes them less vulnerable to future budget cuts.

But here’s the problem: When NIH funds a research project, it’s typically a commitment that stretches three to five years. That means in any given year, about 80 percent of the agency’s budget is already spoken for — paying for grants it promised in previous years. Only the remaining 20 percent of the budget is available to fund new research.

When the agency has to pay the full cost of every multiyear grant up front, that means each new grant costs several times more than it used to. Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH’s grant-making for nearly a decade before leaving the agency in early 2025, put it simply: “Instead of funding five grants, you now only fund one, and that means four other grants that would’ve been funded don’t get funded.”

Berg, the former NIH institute director, estimates this single change wiped out roughly 1,000 new grants.

But it wasn’t the only factor. The Trump administration also terminated thousands of existing grants over the past year — something Lauer said he had seen happen only twice in his entire 18-year tenure at the agency. The leftover money from those terminations went to the US Treasury, not back to NIH. Berg estimates that roughly $500 million left the system this way.

On top of that, about 12 percent more grant applications were submitted in 2025 than in 2024, all competing for the shrinking pool of funds.

The Trump administration has been open about wanting a smaller NIH; it proposed cutting the agency’s budget for 2026 by 40 percent, though Congress has not enacted that cut. At the same time, the White House has pushed policy changes it says are aimed at restoring accountability at NIH — but the effect of those changes has been to shrink the agency.

“I think it’s pretty easy to start to wonder if there is some connection between those two things,” Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior NIH official, told STAT News.

The NIH did not respond to specific questions about the institute-level declines, or what happened to the money from terminated grants.

But isn’t the best research still getting funded?

With fewer grants to go around, you might think the system is just getting more selective — funding just the best ideas and cutting the rest. But that’s actually not how it works.

Philippe Aghion, the economist who shared last year’s Nobel Prize, found that past a certain point, more competition actually stifles innovation rather than spurs it. When NIH can only fund the top 5 or 6 percent of proposals, what survives is good but conservative science — established labs extending well-established research.

“The main thing you’re giving up there is new ideas,” Berg said.

Researchers in the UK recently discovered that people vaccinated against shingles had a roughly 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia seven years later. That finding came from a natural experiment in Wales, where people born before a certain date weren’t eligible for the vaccine and those born after were — and the group that got the vaccine had lower rates of dementia.

Understanding why a shingles vaccine works against dementia, and whether it could lead to new ways to prevent dementia, is the kind of exploratory research that would now struggle to get funded.

Katalin Karikó, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for the mRNA work behind the Covid vaccines, had her grants repeatedly rejected long before the Trump cuts. The window for unconventional ideas was already narrow. Now it’s narrowing even further.

And much of the damage could prove permanent. When funding dries up, researchers leave — for other countries, for the private sector, for careers outside science altogether. “Researchers who leave the field or the country to work elsewhere are unlikely to return,” said Joshua Weitz, a University of Maryland professor who tracks science funding.

There are early signs that 2026 could get even worse for medical research. The White House budget office has delayed NIH from spending its 2026 funding, even after Congress approved it, and the NIH has made roughly a third as many new awards as it typically would by this point in the year.

The hardest thing to measure, Berg said, is the research that never got a chance to begin. “It’s much more like we set out across the ocean to see what we could discover and the voyage was canceled. There might be some beautiful island out there of incredibly important stuff, but we’re never going to know about it.”

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

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Friday, March 13, 2026 9:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"


Very true.

We love Europe. We hate the EU.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, March 13, 2026 10:59 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"


Very true.

We love Europe. We hate the EU.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.

Slavery and Tariffs

For Trumpists, forced labor is the new fentanyl

By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/slavery-and-tariffs

So the Trump administration thinks that slavery is bad. Actually not, but they're using that as an excuse for tariffs. Hi, Paul Krugman here. Another brief video update. It's Friday. We're still bombing Iran. Iran is still blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and that's our prime fixation these days. But meanwhile, tariff policy goes on.

Now, you probably know the story. Donald Trump used some dubious legal maneuvering to impose a lot of tariffs without consulting Congress, without getting legislation. The Supreme Court ruled that most of those were illegal. They took their time about doing it, but now those tariffs, the IEPA tariffs, which were about 70% of the whole thing, are gone.

They have been somewhat replaced by another dubious legal invocation, in this case section 122. Instead of alphabet soup this is all kind of number soup which is also illegal but that may be moot because it's also time limited and that will expire in July.

Also it's not satisfactory to the Trump people because it's not discretionary. It's a flat across the board 10% tariff and what they want to do is be able to say to countries, be nice to us, give us what we want, and we will give you a break on tariffs. And Section 122 doesn't let them do that. So they have been scrambling to find replacements, and it looks like the main attempt now is to use Section 301, which is unfair foreign trading practices. Now, we were kind of wondering, I was wondering, what would they use to do Section 301s against a large part of the world? And it turns out that a large part of the answer is they're trying to invoke a clause that sanctions countries that somehow or other either engage in or fail to deal with other countries engaging in forced labor, effectively slavery. Which is, you know, that's real. The U.S. has longstanding sanctions against some Chinese exports because of, you know, they do do forced labor.

But the reported plan is to bring Section 301 forced labor cases against 60 trading partners, including the European Union, which does not do forced labor, which in fact has its own laws against importing goods produced with forced labor. But the claim is going to be that the European Union, along with 59 other trading partners, does not do enough to limit trade with countries that make use of forced labor. That's a pretty wild thing to be doing. And it may seem uncharacteristic. Do you believe that the Trump administration is deeply concerned about forced labor? Yeah, well, if you believe that, I've got some shoes that don't fit to sell you.

This is obviously an excuse. What makes it especially galling is that, if anything, we know that significant figures in the Trump administration are just fine with forced labor. Pete Hegseth likes a pastor who is on record as saying that he thought that slavery in the South before the Civil War was a good thing. It helped to create racial harmony. So they have nothing against slavery. This is just a device. And it's especially shameful. And the argument that we can put tariffs on the European Union because they're not doing enough to stop the importation of goods produced with forced labor. It's just crazy. Also, they're rushing to get this stuff through, so they're supposed to be... The law here does not actually give The president can't just by fiat. He's not supposed to be able to just by fiat, impose tariffs, even if you believe that there are unfair foreign practices. There's supposed to be an investigation and then a hearing.

So they are supposedly having three days of hearings at the end of April. which is, that's not enough time to do an investigation, not enough time to have a meaningful hearing. But of course, it's not intended to be a real investigation or a real hearing. This is just an excuse. And they're barely even pretending.

They're actually kind of openly saying, that we need this to replace the tariffs that the Supreme Court threw out. So there's a little parallel here. There were a bunch of tariffs that were imposed supposedly because of fentanyl against countries like Canada that hardly supply any fentanyl. Now we have these 301s imposed because of forced labor.

It's all nonsense. And aside from it being bad economic policy, it's really corrosive. What we're saying is that Laws are not serious. They're just to be used to drum up excuses to do what the president wants to do. And that's part of the broader picture. I like to say that tariffs are a different issue from the war.

But at some level, it's all the same thing. And if you aren't feeling very concerned about where we're going with all this, then you aren't paying attention. Take care.



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

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Friday, March 13, 2026 11:58 AM

SECOND

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


The U.S. Mint dropped the olive branch from the dime. What does that mean for the country?

By Catherina Gioino | March 12, 2026, 7:22 PM ET

https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/

The new design shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right.

What does the olive branch mean?

When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.

Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.

The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s last diplomatic appeal to King George III before the war escalated beyond return.

Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy, and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.

Much more at https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-w
ar/

Quote:
The U.S. Mint unveiled new designs for the country’s 250th anniversary and it left out one key detail: the olive branch from the newly designed dime. The new reverse shows a bald eagle mid-flight, arrows clutched in its left talon and nothing—where an olive branch once lived—in its right, with beneath, the inscription “Liberty over Tyranny.”

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.

Unchanged since 1946, the Roosevelt dime is now replaced by a modern Liberty figure on the front, solely for one year as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The U.S. Mint is marking the Semiquincentennial with a sweeping redesign of the coinage, something not undertaken since the 1976 Bicentennial. Authorized by Congress, the change touches the dime, quarter, half dollar, penny, and dollar coin, all bearing 1776–2026 dates.

The olive branch has anchored American iconography for 250 years—its absence from the very coin marking that anniversary is a curious choice, if not a telling one.
What does the olive branch mean?

When the Great Seal of the United States was finalized in 1782, it contained what the Founding Father’s held as the country’s most esteemed values. The eagle holds 13 arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right, its head turned toward the branch—the side which the eagle preferred to err on.

The arrows—not for lack of symbolism, take a wild guess why there are 13 of them—are in the eagle’s left talon, the traditionally thought-of weaker and subordinate side. Meant to represent the power of war and military preparedness, the arrows clutched in the left talon signal that although the U.S. is always armed and ready, force is not its first instinct.

Charles Thomson, who shepherded the final design, was explicit: the arrows represented the power of war, the olive branch the power of peace, and together they carried a single message: the United States had a strong desire for peace, but would always be ready for war.

The eagle’s head facing the olive branch was not incidental. It was a statement of national preference, drawn directly from the Olive Branch Petition of 1775, Congress’s last diplomatic appeal to King George III before the war escalated beyond return.

Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy, and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.
What was the coin design process?

The U.S. Mint is also redesigning other currency. Five new one-year-only quarter designs trace American history from the Mayflower Compact to the Gettysburg Address. Acting Mint Director Kristie McNally said the goal was for every American to hold 250 years of history in their hands.

“The designs on these historic coins depict the story of America’s journey toward a ‘more perfect union,’ and celebrate America’s defining ideals of liberty. We hope to offer each American the opportunity to hold our nation’s storied 250 years of history in the palms of their hands as we Connect America through Coins.”

In 2025, the U.S. Mint brought the coin designs to the public, with the top rated coins reviewed and recommended by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) and U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). The CCAC, established in 2003, advises the Secretary of the Treasury on themes and designs of all U.S. coins and medals, the latter of which are used in commemoration and neither hold face value nor are legal tender. The CCAC, an informed and impartial resource for the Secretary, essentially, is meant to represent the interests of all Americans. The Secretary then approves all final suggestions.

In Sept. 2024, the coin designs were put into review. Each coin design will depict a special Semiquincentennial Liberty Bell with the numeral “250” marked on the coin.
Coins and their symbolism

In Dec. 2025, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent nixxed some of the quarter designs that were approved by then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during the Biden Administration for focusing “on DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.” One of the coins featured a line of people with arms linked, in between the words “We shall overcome.”

At the time, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said the coinage design is supposed to “celebrate American history and the founding of our great nation,” but that imagery was scrapped because “the Biden Administration and Secretary Yellen remained focused on DEI and Critical Race Theory policies.”

“The Trump Administration is dedicated to fostering prosperity and patriotism. We have no doubt these new designs will be wildly popular with the American people.”

It’s interesting to note, however, the 1916 Standing Liberty Quarter, a medal that also will be released this year in commemoration of the 250th anniversary (dubbed by the Mint as the SemiQ), features a standing Liberty holding an olive branch on the front, and on the back, the talons of an eagle gripping an olive branch.

Perhaps the most famous dime is the Mercury dime which was minted between 1916 and 1946. Designer Adolph Weinman chose to use a Roman fasces—an axe bound tightly in a bundle of rods—wrapped in an olive branch, together symbolizing military readiness tempered by a desire for peace, in a nod to the Roman Republic. Three years after the Mercury dime debuted, Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces as the emblem of his Italian fascist movement, even where the name derived from. It was then replaced in 1946 by the Roosevelt dime, in honor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt following his death. The dime remains the one in use today.

The eagle didn’t always err on the side of peace, and instead, faced the arrows between 1877 and 1945, until President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9646 on Oct. 25, 1945, which changed the direction of the eagle from the arrows to the olive branch. Reportedly, according to the Winston Churchill archives, the president was very happy about the change, and told the British prime minister “The eagle used to face the arrows but I have re­designed it so that it now faces the olive branches.”

Churchill’s response? “With the greatest respect, I would prefer the American eagle’s neck to be on a swivel so that it could face the olive branches or the arrows, as the occasion might demand.”

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

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Friday, March 13, 2026 12:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has said the United States "does not like the European Union"


Very true.

We love Europe. We hate the EU.


Nope. Trump hates individual European countries, which is why he will reimpose tariffs anyway he can, despite the Supreme Court telling him that only Congress can do what Trump is attempting to do by falsely accusing European countries of slavery.


Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.

If they want to keep giving everyone free everything, including the 59 Million Muslims they've let inside their borders in the last 10 years, they're going to have to find a way to do that while they pay their fair share.

America is no longer subsidizing the rest of the world while racking up any more to add to our current $39 Trillion debt.

I'm sure they can figure something out.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, March 13, 2026 1:36 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:

Nope. Europe, the EU and individual countries are no longer getting a free ride.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Describing 6ix, who is an alcoholic, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.” Ms. Wiles didn’t mean it literally (Mr. Trump is, in fact, a teetotaler) but offered it as an insight into the president’s own sense of invincibility, his belief “that there’s nothing he can’t do.” 6ix is intoxicated by his self-evaluation of never being wrong, always being the smartest guy in the room, the same as Trump.

Iran endgame tests Trump’s govern-by-instinct style

By Linda Feldmann | March 13, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2026/0313/trump-iran-strategy-e
ndgame

Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s supporters say his decision to attack Iran reflects his leadership style of swift, unilateral action. Others see it as impetuous. As the president hints at an endgame, huge questions – over the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian nuclear program, and the country’s leadership – remain.

President Donald Trump has long described his decision-making style as relying on gut and instinct rather than lengthy deliberation with aides and experts.

Almost a year ago, after first imposing and then pausing massive global tariffs, President Trump told reporters his decisions going forward would be made “instinctively, more than anything else.”

By all appearances, the same modus operandi seems to have played out in one of the most momentous decisions a president can make: whether to go to war. When asked by a reporter last week if Israel had forced the United States’ hand against Iran, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had implied, Mr. Trump offered a different explanation.

“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” Mr. Trump said during an Oval Office appearance with the chancellor of Germany. “So if anything, I might’ve forced Israel’s hand.”

Mr. Trump’s Iran campaign has upset some prominent MAGA commentators who took seriously his promises of “no more foreign wars” and the motto “America First.” Many have also accused the president of failing to “sell” or even fully explain the war’s goals to the American people. The administration has put forward various objectives over the past two weeks, from eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat to changing the regime to destroying Iran’s navy and missile capabilities.

Yet longtime observers and those who know Mr. Trump say his decision to attack Iran was entirely in line with a leadership style that has always opted for swift, unilateral action over governing-by-committee caution. “America First,” they say, has never been synonymous with isolationism, but sometimes means pushing aside failing institutions to address threats head-on.

“He’s willing to take risk, and he’s basically elevating a willingness to take risk over process,” Nadia Schadlow, a deputy national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term, recently told New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein. “If the risk is higher of inaction rather than action – and clearly the White House thought that – that’s why they chose to go forward.”


To others, Mr. Trump’s approach appears not so much decisive as impetuous. “It’s never complicated with Trump,” says author Chris Whipple, who gained insight into the president’s world over the course of 11 interviews last year with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “He cares about two things, strength and winning. So it’s war by whim.”

The same could be said of Mr. Trump’s risky military incursion into Venezuela in January to arrest its president, Nicolás Maduro, and bring him back to the U.S. to face federal charges, including narco-terrorism. The bold move was an operational success, but the verdict is still out on the future of Venezuelan governance, where acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s No. 2, remains in charge.

During his second term, Mr. Trump has grown increasingly aggressive in using military force, notes Katherine Thompson, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a former Trump Pentagon official. Last year saw seven weeks of attacks by the U.S. and allies on Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, plus June’s air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. This year has already seen the U.S. incursion into Venezuela and now war against Iran, with no end in sight.

At the start of his second term, “there was a much clearer sense of vision,” Ms. Thompson says, with the administration prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific and letting allies know they had to contribute to their own security. Even with the attacks on Yemen and Iran’s nuclear facilities, “it was very clear these were narrowly scoped objectives – short-burst campaigns.” Now, she says, Mr. Trump is falling prey to a “white whale” issue that has bedeviled a succession of American presidents – Iran and the wider Middle East. “It’s a legacy item,” she suggests.

All of which prompts another question: Does Mr. Trump have an endgame for Iran?

During last spring’s trade war, when tariff levels were fluctuating by the day and the stock market was plunging, critics coined the term “TACO” – shorthand for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Today, some are asking, “Will Trump TACO on Iran?”

Recently, the president has hinted at wanting to wrap things up sooner rather than later. At a rally in Kentucky on Wednesday Mr. Trump told the crowd: “We’ve won.”

“You never like to say too early you won. We won,” he said. “In the first hour it was over.” In the very next breath, the president then added: “We don’t want to leave early do we? We gotta finish the job.”

What constitutes “finishing the job” remains unclear. Huge questions – and much of the world economy – hinge on the Strait of Hormuz, where oil shipments are currently being blocked by Iran. What remains of the Iranian nuclear program, including stores of enriched uranium, is another critical detail.

At one point, Mr. Trump said he should play a role in determining Iran’s next leader, with the U.S.-Israeli air campaign having wiped out much of the nation’s senior leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran says the late ayatollah has been replaced by his harder-line son, who issued his first public statement on Thursday, vowing revenge against America.

“I was disappointed [by the choice in leader], because we think it’s going to lead to just more of the same problem,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a press conference Monday at his resort in Doral, Florida.

For Mr. Whipple, three months after his Vanity Fair scoop on the inner workings of the Trump White House, one comment from the usually press-shy Ms. Wiles still stands out: that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.” Ms. Wiles didn’t mean it literally (Mr. Trump is, in fact, a teetotaler) but offered it as an insight into the president’s own sense of invincibility, his belief “that there’s nothing he can’t do.”

In Term 2, that observation seems to be bearing out, Mr. Whipple says. Mr. Trump “believes he can do anything without consequences.” And it appears, for now at least, that no one in his midst will try to stop him. “Every White House is a bubble,” he says, “but with Trump, it’s exponentially more so.”

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

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