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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, April 3, 2026 06:51
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Tuesday, March 17, 2026 8:09 AM

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

Trump muses over ‘taking Cuba’ as island’s power grid collapses after weeks of US oil blockade

“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about United States and Cuba, when will the United States having the honor of taking Cuba? That’s a big honor,” Trump said in remarks from the Oval Office. “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah, taking Cuba — I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.”

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/americas/cuba-power-grid-collapse-intl-
latam

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 17, 2026 9:26 AM

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

Not Just a Mistake, a Crime

March 10, 2026

Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalculable suffering. It is flatly, unambiguously illegal. Every year the UN General Assembly votes, virtually unanimously, to require the United States to end it. But Florida’s electoral votes are far more important in Washington than international law. The U.S. embargo of Iran is also illegal—embargoes and blockades are acts of war, which can only be authorized by the Security Council. And every year since 1967, the General Assembly has voted—again near-unanimously—to require Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied. But thanks to unflagging American support, Israel, too, can ignore international law, on the West Bank and, apocalyptically, in Gaza.

As a result of this long and abysmal history, international law now has no force whatever. Previous U.S. administrations pretended to care about it and regularly ignored it. The present administration does not even pretend to respect law, domestic or international. A culture of law-abidingness is no more comprehensible to President Trump and his goon squad than quantum entanglement.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/scialabba-iran-war-trump-internatio
nal-law-israel?check_logged_in=1

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 18, 2026 7:59 AM

SECOND

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

The world’s most credible democracy watchdog: ‘Trump is aiming for dictatorship’

By Martin Gelin | Tue 17 Mar 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-a
iming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_20
26_lowres.pdf

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.

Since 2012, Lindberg has led his small group of researchers in Sweden to become the world’s leading source for analysis of the health of global democracy. In their latest report, published on Tuesday, they conclude that the US, for the first time in more than half a century, has lost its long-term status as a liberal democracy. The country is now going through a rapid process of what the report’s authors call “autocratisation”.

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vucic in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdogan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.

US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.

The researchers use 48 different metrics to assess democratic health, such as the freedom of expression and the media, the quality of elections and the observance of the rule of law. The resulting “liberal democracy index” shows that the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history. The main factor is a “rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency”, Lindberg says. Congress has been marginalised, jeopardising the “checks and balances” (judicial and legislative constraints on the executive) so crucial to US democracy. At the same time, civil rights have been rapidly declining and freedom of expression is now at its lowest level since the 1940s.

“We’ve seen a very fast concentration of power in the executive wing. The legislative branch has practically abdicated its powers to the president. It no longer functions as a check on executive power,” Lindberg says.

In Donald Trump’s first year as president, he signed 225 executive orders, whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed only 49 new laws. “Most of Trump’s executive orders were significant. He shut down entire departments of the government, firing hundreds of thousands of employees. The bills passed by Congress were mostly insignificant modifications to existing laws. So, we no longer have a meaningful division between the legislative and executive branches,” Lindberg says.

Meanwhile, the supreme court has also mostly abdicated power, and even when it does strike down Trump’s executive orders, he circumvents it, Lindberg tells me. He points out that there are more than 600 ongoing judicial procedures against the Trump administration in the courts.

Another aspect of America’s rapidly deteriorating democracy, according to the report, is the removal of internal guardrails that protect the federal government from abuse of power. When I ask Lindberg how we should read the findings, his response is emphatic. “Trump has fired inspector generals and higher levels of civil servants across departments, and replaced them with loyalists. This is exactly what Orbán and Erdogan did. They remove the constraints on power. It should be obvious by now that Trump is aiming for dictatorship.”

Much more at https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-is-a
iming-for-dictatorship-thats-the-verdict-of-the-worlds-most-credible-democracy-watchdog

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 18, 2026 8:11 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump, Petropresident
Follow the Gulf oil money
Paul Krugman
Mar 18, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-petropresident

Why did Donald Trump attack Iran? Did he believe that a quick victory would boost his poll ratings? Was he looking for a way to change the subject from the Epstein files and affordability? Was he seduced into war by the Israeli government?

The answer, surely, is all of the above. Bad decisions don’t have to have a single explanation. In fact, debacles on the scale of what we’re now experiencing usually have multiple causes.

But when I look into the larger picture of Trump administration policy — not just the attack on Iran but domestic policies, especially the administration’s seemingly irrational hatred of renewable energy and its determination to keep America burning fossil fuels no matter what — I keep coming back to the huge influence now being wielded by oil money.

I don’t mostly mean the domestic U.S. oil industry, although them too. The U.S. oil and gas sector spent large sums helping Republicans in the 2024 election, while giving very little to Democrats.

But what really stands out is the centrality of oil money from the Persian Gulf, money that has been crucial in two areas: Trump’s international economic schemes and his personal enrichment.

One recurrent theme in Trump’s economic speeches has been boasting about the size of the foreign investment pledges he has received as part of his tariff strategy. “In 12 months,” he declared in the State of the Union, “I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.”

Nobody knows where that $18 trillion number, which he uses all the time, comes from. The actual announced pledges by foreign governments to invest in the U.S. add up to only about $6 trillion, and many of these pledges are vague statements of intent rather than serious commitments. Indeed, the deal with Europe may well be unraveling in part because Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal.

But what’s especially interesting is who has made these investment pledges, such as they are:

Each of the major Gulf petrostates has pledged to invest more than the whole European Union, even though they have far smaller economies. Here’s another visualization:

So when Trump boasts about the foreign investment he’s bringing to America, the reality is mostly that Gulf petrostates have said — with dubious credibility — that they will make big investments. That puts his boasts in a somewhat different light, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Trump’s relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar’s gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don’t know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.

Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. That fund is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have had a critical journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered with a bone saw.

Why does Gulf oil money play an outsized role in U.S. corruption? Because petrostates, unlike advanced democracies, combine vast wealth with secrecy and a complete blurring of the lines between public office and private gain. So they’re better placed than anyone else to line U.S. officials’ pockets.

Foreign oil money, then, has been central to both the Trump administration’s economic schemes and Trump’s personal financial schemes. What has that money bought in terms of U.S. policy?

I’ve mentioned the Trump administration’s fanatical hostility to renewable energy. Like the Iran war, this hostility surely has multiple causes. Trump himself is still angry about the offshore wind farm that is visible from his Scotland golf course. Many MAGA types clearly think of wind and solar power as woke and unmanly; real men drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn. But suppressing alternatives to fossil fuels is also in the interests of governments and dynasties whose wealth is all about fossil fuels.

As the Guardian notes,

For decades, Saudi Arabia has fought harder than any other country to block and delay international climate action – a diplomatic “wrecking ball” saying that abandoning fossil fuels is a fantasy.

So the Trump administration’s energy policy can be seen as what Prince bin Salman would do if he were in charge. Is he?

Finally, about the war: As the bombing began, the Washington Post reported that foreign influence — and not just from Israel — played a role:

President Donald Trump launched Saturday’s wide-ranging attack on Iran after a weeks-long lobbying effort by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel and Saudi Arabia — according to four people familiar with the matter, as Israeli and U.S. forces teamed to topple Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after nearly four decades in power.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution.

At this point bin Salman is surely regretting his role in promoting the war. But being corrupt and good at corrupting others is not the same thing as being smart.

Again, it’s a mistake to look for monocausal explanations of this debacle. But if you want to understand Operation Epic FUBAR, don’t forget to follow the oil money.

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 18, 2026 9:24 AM

SECOND

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

At Rice University, Chief Justice John Roberts says Trump’s personal attacks on judges have 'got to stop'

By Isaac Yu, Staff Writer | March 17, 2026

https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=6c3e46e9-3c30-4184-b317-be22e9ce4647&share=true

Chief Justice John Roberts said some criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court is “quite dangerous,” but sidestepped directly addressing President Donald Trump’s increasingly vocal jabs at his court during a Tuesday visit to Houston.

Roberts said personal attacks were worrisome, though he stressed that criticism “comes with the territory” of serving on the judiciary and said he tries not to read outside criticism too often.

“The problem sometimes is that the criticism can move from the focus on legal analysis to personalities,” Roberts said at an event held by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“Personally directed hostility is dangerous, and it’s got to stop.”

The comments come just days after Trump issued a lengthy diatribe criticizing the court’s recent ruling against his tariff policies, calling it “bad behavior.” The president has blasted many of the justices since the start of his second term, including some of his own nominees, and expressed increasing disapproval with the court’s decisions, particularly those dealing with executive power.

“This completely inept and embarrassing Court was not what the Supreme Court of the United States was set up by our wonderful Founders to be,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “They are hurting our Country, and will continue to do so.”

Roberts pushed back on the idea that justices must carry out the agendas of their appointing presidents.

“President George W. ?Bush appointed me 20 years ago, and the idea that I'm carrying out his agenda somehow is absurd,” Roberts said.

But the justice avoided mentioning Trump by name or any of his specific criticisms. At another point, Roberts said studying the experiences of earlier chief justices had taught him to “stay in your lane.”

Roberts has served as chief of the court since 2005 and is now the fourth-longest serving chief justice in U.S. history.

The comments came during an hour-long conversation with Judge Lee Rosenthal, a longtime Houston-based judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Robert’s rare repeat visit to Rice, he said, came after a personal request from the Baker Institute’s namesake, James Baker III, a Houston native and former U.S. Secretary of State. Roberts recalled working as a lawyer in the White House during the Reagan administration, when Baker served as chief of staff.

“I got used to doing pretty much what he told me to do,” Roberts said of Baker.

Roberts, who also oversees the nation’s sprawling system of district and appeals courts, said he worried about how generative AI was reshaping the legal profession, saying he foresaw a “really tough” time for young lawyers.

March 17, 2026

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 19, 2026 6:58 AM

SECOND

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

The public often exaggerates the role of political leadership in determining economic performance. In reality, presidents and their policies normally have very little effect on macroeconomic variables like inflation and employment.

But this time is different. The disappointing aspects of recent U.S. performance have been all about Trump.

In his press conference Powell didn’t beat around the bush. Noting that inflation is significantly overshooting the Fed’s target, he declared that

"Some big chunk of that, between a half and three-quarters is actually tariffs."

What about the stalling of employment growth? Research at the San Francisco Fed confirms what many economists have been arguing: Job growth has slowed largely because of the crackdown on immigration, which has reduced labor supply. So employment stagnation is also the result of Trump administration policies.

Now, you might be tempted to argue that while stopping immigration reduces overall job growth, it surely must increase job opportunities for native-born workers. But a look at unemployment rates suggests that the job market for the native-born has gotten (slightly) worse, not better:

The most we can say is that thanks to the loss of immigrant workers the overall unemployment rate hasn’t risen as much as one might have expected given the collapse in overall job growth. But the loss of foreign-born workers is probably contributing to higher inflation, over and above the effects of tariffs and now oil prices. And it will have major adverse effects on America’s fiscal outlook — but that’s a subject for another day.

So Powell is right: If you restrict the term stagflation to situations that quantitatively resemble the 1970s, we aren’t there yet. But there’s definitely a whiff of stagflation in the air — a whiff that is entirely caused by Trump administration policies.

And if the situation deteriorates, as seems all too possible given the mess in the Persian Gulf, can we trust Trump’s officials to respond intelligently and effectively?

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-whiff-of-stagflation

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 19, 2026 11:56 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.

U.S. Warmongering Hits Historic Level As Trump Attacks 3 Continents In 3 Days

Since World War II, the U.S. has rarely, if ever, attacked so many places. “All war. All the time. Everywhere,” one source put it.

By Nick Turse | March 19 2026. 7:51 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/03/19/trump-world-wars-iran-somalia-boat
-strikes/

The United States made war on three continents over three days earlier this month, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the U.S. also struck a civilian boat in the Pacific Ocean. The globe-spanning scope of the attacks represents one of the few instances since World War II that the United States has been simultaneously involved in armed conflicts with such a wide geographic sweep.

The attacks in Ecuador, Iran, Somalia, and the Eastern Pacific from March 6 through March 8 are part of President Donald Trump’s escalating world war against variously defined “terrorists.” They highlight the administration’s increasing willingness to use the U.S. military as a solution to almost any perceived geopolitical problem.

“All war. All the time. Everywhere,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, of the wide-ranging attacks over just a few days. “It’s unprecedented given the absence of any fresh congressional authorization.”

This month, Trump has repeatedly referenced his relentless war-making and even lamented it on occasion. “I built the military and rebuilt it in my first term, and we’re using it more than I’d like to use it to be honest with you,” he said.

The region that has seen the most profound increases in this “use” of military power is the Western Hemisphere as part of what Trump and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — a unilaterally claimed license to militarily meddle in America’s backyard — has led to attacks on civilian boats in the waters surrounding Latin America and an attack on Venezuela. The most recent location of U.S. attacks in the region, Ecuador, is also the site of the first strike in Trump’s recent three-day, three-war spree.

“Yes — as @POTUS has said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists on land as well,” self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6, announcing a new strike in Ecuador. Days later, in a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in that country, the White House informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

The next day, Trump announced an escalation of his latest war of choice in the Middle East. “Today Iran will be hit very hard!” he posted, writing, “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.” That same day, U.S. Central Command posted footage of the U.S. striking unspecified Iranian targets beneath a threat by Hegseth to hunt and kill those that “threaten Americans anywhere on earth.”

A day later, the U.S. conducted an attack as part of its war-on-terror-holdover conflict in Somalia. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) conducted an airstrike targeting ISIS-Somalia on March 8, 2026,” reads an AFRICOM press release. “The airstrike occurred in the vicinity of the Golis Mountains.” (This frequently attacked region was the site, last year, of what a top Navy admiral called the “largest airstrike in the history of the world.”)

On the same day as the recent AFRICOM strike, U.S. Southern Command announced the latest attack in its campaign targeting so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed almost 160 people in 45 strikes since September. “Six male narco-terrorists were killed during this action,” reads the SOUTHCOM announcement, which was accompanied on X by video footage of a boat exploding into a fireball.

During World War II, the U.S. fought a global war conducting combat operations simultaneously in Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as limited fighting in North America against Japanese forces in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska in 1942 and 1943. The fight against the Axis powers was, however, a declared war — America’s last — and one discrete conflict. By contrast, Trump’s sprawling collection of undeclared wars include a remnant of the war on terror and several new unconstitutional wars begun by Trump.

“This is why the U.S. Constitution requires congressional authorization before using military force in this manner,” said Finucane. “It’s so the American public and their elected representatives can debate and deliberate whether the costs of a war are justified by the supposed benefits of this military operation. And whether the use of military force is the appropriate tool to solve the problem. And whether it’s even a problem that needs to be solved at all.”

The U.S. has rarely, if ever, conducted attacks — such as the airstrikes in Ecuador, Iran, and Somalia — on three continents over a 72-hour period since World War II. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently conducted clandestine and covert operations, armed interventions, and wars across multiple continents, but not often analogous attacks. On August 21, 1998, in an early attack on Al Qaeda, the U.S. simultaneously attacked targets in Afghanistan and Sudan with cruise missiles. During the war on terror, the U.S. frequently was involved in simultaneous conflicts and interventions in numerous countries across the Middle East and Africa — and sometimes farther afield. In 2017, for example, a small number of Special Operations forces assisted troops in the Philippines in relieving a siege of the town of Marawi by ISIS-linked militants. U.S. forces were also attacking people in the Middle East and Africa that year, bringing combat to two continents.

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions concerning the concentration of attacks over such a short period of time and how often this has occurred since World War II.

During his second term Trump has already launched attacks on Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The Trump administration also claims to be at war with at least 24 cartels and criminal gangs it will not name.

“Today there are so many places in the world where the U.S. government is conducting military operations — including the war at home on migrants — that each event eclipses the last in terms of media attention,” said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. “Each and every case merits a great deal of study and debate. Many U.S. citizens are trying to do this, but news of yet another act of U.S. war violence continues to crop up, drawing media attention away from earlier events and creating huge obstacles to meaningful, sustained work by U.S. citizens to hold their government accountable.”

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 20, 2026 7:08 AM

SECOND

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

Scenes from the Death of the Pax Americana

I’m feeling almost speechless right now

By Paul Krugman | Mar 20, 2026

Just a few scenes from the accelerating collapse in America’s reputation and influence.

Item: The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, roughly speaking Denmark’s equivalent of the BBC, reports that two months ago Danish forces were prepared to blow up runways in Greenland to prevent a possible U.S. attempt to seize the island by force:
Denmark prepared for possible attack from the US: Flew bags of blood to Greenland and prepared to blow up runways. Key sources in Denmark and Europe are now telling for the first time what happened in the most critical days when Donald Trump threatened to take Greenland "the hard way".

Item: During a meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Donald Trump was asked why the U.S. didn’t inform its allies before attacking Iran. He replied, “Because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

Item: Pete Hegseth angrily attacked news coverage of the war:
The media here — not all of it, but much of it — wants you to think, just 19 days into this conflict, that we’re somehow spinning toward an endless abyss or a forever war or quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scenes-from-the-death-of-the-pax

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

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Saturday, March 21, 2026 10:12 AM

SECOND

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

BREAKING: Attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East have caused the price of oil to skyrocket to a whopping Donald Trump raped children per barrel.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/326796271160689/posts/2303173923522904/

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

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Sunday, March 22, 2026 1:29 PM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Eye Is Already on Cuba

“Regime change is lined up,” awaiting the president’s signal, according to one administration official.

By Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick | March 22, 2026, 1:05 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/trump-plan-cuba/
686497/

A Russian oil tanker is creeping west across the Atlantic, quite possibly toward a confrontation with the United States Navy.

The Anatoly Kolodkin is carrying tens of thousands of tons of crude oil apparently meant for Cuba, which is battling a fuel shortage. But it may not reach its destination: The U.S. Navy is policing the Caribbean to choke off Havana’s oil supply.

The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes. Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, Trump told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking Cuba,” adding: “Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.”

The White House is calculating that the island’s extreme economic hardships will provide the leverage Trump needs to force Havana into submission. Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, publicly acknowledged discussions between the two governments last week and pledged a series of reforms aimed at appeasing Washington, a concession that indicated both the urgency of the domestic crisis and the vulnerability of the regime. Cuba’s economy, already hollowed out by mismanagement, communist economic ideology, sanctions, and the end of subsidized oil from Venezuela, is now tormented by island-wide blackouts and food shortages. After the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1 million people left the island—about 10 percent of Cuba’s population. Another wave could be coming if the island doesn’t receive economic relief.

The government-to-government talks hold the potential for a peaceful settlement—but the track record isn’t strong. U.S. discussions with the regimes in Iran and Venezuela in recent months came to naught, prompting military intervention in both countries. Officials told us the U.S. approach to Cuba would likely replicate the course of events in Venezuela—several called the Caracas operation a “dry run” for Havana—and that the switch from negotiation to military action could happen imminently. Everything, they cautioned, depends on Trump and his willingness to challenge another regime while still fighting in Iran. But preparations on several fronts are well advanced should he decide to proceed.

The U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida is preparing indictments against Cuba’s political and military leadership—including members of the Castro family—on a range of possible charges related to alleged violent crime, drug-trafficking, immigration, and espionage, four people familiar with the planning told us on condition of anonymity to discuss internal government proceedings. (The U.S. used a 2020 indictment against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, as a predicate for his capture.) U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quinones is leading a multi-agency effort that could be used to provide legal justification for any military engagement, these people added. (The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The State Department has long accused the Cuban regime of human rights violations, including alleged arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture; degrading treatment of political prisoners; and repression of journalists. Cuba denies the accusations.

The Trump administration is also discussing which wealthy Republican donors with Cuban ancestry could be considered for future transition or leadership roles in Havana.

“Regime change is lined up,” one administration official told us. But Trump-style regime change is unlikely to be the democratic uprising that many Cuban exiles have longed for. Venezuela again is expected to be the model. The administration found that its short-term goals of ousting a repressive dictator and opening opportunities for U.S. companies was best met by empowering Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who proved more willing to engage with Washington. Much of the Caracas regime remains in place.

Administration officials told us they see an outcome in Cuba that would allow Trump to declare victory and open the spigot for American commerce—“There’s billions of dollars to be made there,” one said—while avoiding major political and social upheaval that could exacerbate the humanitarian catastrophe and create a migrant crisis 90 miles from Florida.

Trump’s approach is: “We control our hemisphere, and we have the ability to do this,” one person familiar with the planning told us. “We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”

In Cuba, signs of severe strain are everywhere. Cities such as Havana and Santiago de Cuba effectively disappear in the night from blackouts. Stockpiles of hospital supplies, gas, and other basics are dwindling. Water distribution is disrupted because pumps have stopped running. Uncollected garbage piles up on city streets because trash trucks lack fuel. Experts warn that the island’s economic contraction has pushed Cuba into its most perilous state since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, its former economic sponsor and political protector.

The United Nations has warned of a potential “collapse” if fuel shortages persist, noting rising food prices, failing agricultural production, and widespread power outages. Citizens wait hours for gasoline; businesses are closed for lack of electricity; and state-guaranteed benefits—health care, food distribution—have eroded. (China has offered renewable-energy equipment, expertise, and financing to ease the crisis, but how swiftly it can scale-up this effort is unclear.)

“An island that was once the crown jewel of the Caribbean has plunged into extreme poverty and darkness,” the State Department said in a statement. “This is the tragic result of over sixty years of Communist rule.”

Influential Cuban-American donors and activists in Florida are pressing the Trump administration to seize the opportunity to overthrow the regime. But some Cubans still revere the 1959 revolution, and, as one foreign official told us, have no desire to humiliate Raúl Castro (Fidel’s 94-year-old brother and a former president), or even Díaz-Canel, who is widely viewed as a weak bureaucrat. “They just want life to improve,” the official said.

Trump is less fixated on regime change or forcing an ideological shift away from communism than on securing broad U.S. latitude to invest, develop, and ultimately capitalize on Cuba’s underdeveloped cities and beaches, people familiar with his thinking told us.

“The Trump administration is going to put Cuba into Chapter 11,” John Kavulich, the president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, told us, referring to the section of the bankruptcy code that companies use for a financial reorganization while still in operation. “It’s not going to be Chapter 7 liquidation. It’s going to be Chapter 11—a country reorganization. But the whole focus is business.”

Trump has sought opportunity in Cuba since his real-estate days. In October 2008, he applied for a trademark in Cuba, according to records from the Cuban Industrial Property Office. The application was approved in March 2010 and was active until its expiration in 2018. Trump held discussions on financial opportunities in Cuba with administration officials and Trump Organization staff during his first term in the White House. One person who met with Trump at the time told us that the president was most excited about the prospect of Trump-branded hotels or condominiums. “He’s interested in Cuba as a market for him, and completely agnostic about the politics,” this person said. “He didn’t care.”

That is at odds with the views of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long called for the toppling of the regime. Last week, Rubio said Cuba needed “new people in charge” but didn’t say the government had to go.

Rubio has privately focused his attention on economic reforms—particularly on dismantling the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., the largest conglomerate in Cuba, known as GAESA, several foreign officials with direct knowledge told us. Controlled by the Cuban military, GAESA operates a portfolio of enterprises that constitutes 40 to 70 percent of the Cuban economy.

Manuel Marrero Cruz, the current prime minister, is among the leaders Washington could potentially work with, officials told us. The Communist Party devotee is also viewed as a pragmatic technocrat by some in Washington. Deputy Prime Minister Minister Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a great-nephew of Fidel and Raúl Castro, is another potential successor, though less likely, some told us. Fraga told NBC News last week that Cuba was open to a “fluid commercial relationship” with American companies.

The talks between the two governments center on American demands for a change in leadership, restitution for owners of property seized by the Cuban government, and the opening of investment and commerce.

“We are talking to Cuba, whose leaders want to make a deal and should make a deal, which President Trump believes would be very easily made,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told us in a statement. “Cuba is a failing nation whose rulers have had a major setback with the loss of support from Venezuela.”

But the discussions could turn out to be, in part, a form of subterfuge, one person familiar with the talks told us, much as they were with Venezuela. The U.S. could claim that Cuba has refused to budge on some key condition as a predicate for a military-backed law-enforcement action.

Cuba appears aware of the threat: Its diplomats and intermediaries have been seeking meetings with U.S. think tanks, academics, and journalists in an effort to influence U.S. opinion and buy time to prepare for a possible conflict, several people familiar with the outreach told us. U.S. officials, meanwhile, are discussing how best to engage with the American and international business communities, and with religious organizations, to drum up support for U.S. intervention.

Any action against Cuba would come at a moment of high stress for the Trump administration amid the intense war with Iran. Before initiating hostilities in Venezuela and Iran, the U.S. military spent weeks building up naval and air assets. That has yet to happen near the shores of Cuba, in part because the Navy has been stretched by those other conflicts. The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier group, for instance, moved from Croatia to the Caribbean for the raid on Caracas before steaming to the Middle East for war with Tehran, extending its current deployment by months.

In the past, before going to war with Iran, any White House would have worried about how the Kremlin might respond. Weighed down by the financial and military cost of its war with Ukraine, Russia has stayed on the sidelines. But, perhaps sensing an opportunity to needle Washington in its own hemisphere, Moscow dispatched two tankers toward the Caribbean, laden with oil that is under U.S. sanctions. “This is the showdown,” one Trump administration official told us with a sense of dread.

The U.S. appeared to provide an opening when the Treasury Department earlier this month lifted sanctions for 30 days on some Russian energy shipments in a bid to stabilize global energy prices. But a week later, the Treasury Department amended the terms to exclude transactions with a handful of countries, including Cuba. Samir Madani, a co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, a maritime-intelligence firm, told us one of the tankers appears to have been redirected toward Venezuela. But the Anatoly Kolodkin is plowing ahead.

Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting for this story.

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

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Sunday, March 22, 2026 3:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

If you're an Antifa terrorist, I wouldn't try getting on any planes starting tomorrow unless you want ICEy fingers up your butts.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, March 23, 2026 7:00 AM

SECOND

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

ICE took another step toward becoming Donald Trump's personal army.

He tried this in 2020. Federal agents in unmarked vans grabbed protesters off the streets of Portland because the military wouldn't do it for him. So in this administration, he went around that roadblock. ICE agents don't have the same institutional limits as the military. They've been recruited with massive bonuses, they answer only to his loyalists, and not once in 14 months have they refused a directive.

ICE agents will be at airport security checkpoints
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-homan-ice-crowded-a
irport-security-tsa-screenings-wait-times-rcna264618

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 23, 2026 7:17 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Yup.

We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.

Deal with it.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 24, 2026 3:12 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:
Yup.

We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.

Deal with it.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

There is nothing for me to deal with. Trump is deporting the Republican business workforce that works for less than minimum wage. Those dishonest and incompetent Republicans can barely stay in business by cheating their customers, cheating their employees, and cheating on their income taxes. I prefer that misfortune fall upon them. The Dept of War is in similar trouble caused by its dishonesty and incompetence, although it compensates by asking Congress for a 50% increase in budget. The Republicans in Congress will either give it to them or else the Pentagon collapses:

The War with Iran May Already be Lost

A war launched without a defined end state, sold through metrics and bravado, and blind to an enemy that measures time in generations rather than news cycles, is not a path to victory but a slow-motion admission of strategic failure.

By Robert Bruce Adolph | March 24, 2026

https://sofrep.com/news/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-lost/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-
lost/ar-AA1ZjauU

With special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Timothy Grimmett.

If wars were won by bombastic press conferences, the White House should already be planning another military parade in our capital’s streets. In America’s latest war of choice, President Trump’s styled Secretary of “War” is emerging as the head cheerleader for our misadventure in Iran. Mr. Hegseth has already mistakenly defined what constitutes victory — the destruction of various portions of the Iranian Navy and military production facilities. Unfortunately, his definition is flawed. Despite possessing some military experience as a junior officer, he has shown that he is completely out of his depth. For most intents and purposes, the war with Iran might have been lost before the first missile was launched.

Some of the lessons that Mr. Hegseth should have learned by now:

Operational excellence is not a guarantee of strategic success — The best military on the planet cannot win a war if the national strategic objectives selected by the National Command Authority are faulty. This fact was proven in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which like Iran, were wars of choice and not necessity. Does Mr. Hegseth grasp the gap between his definition of victory and that of his boss?

Mr. Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender” of Iran — That choice could cost many lives. America demanded unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The word “unconditional” suggests that there will be no negotiated settlement. The only means of achieving that objective in Germany and Japan was first a land invasion of the “Father Land” followed by the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is this where we are heading?

The best bosses remain always open to bad news — If the boss always demands good news, good news is all that his subordinates will present to him. Mr. Hegseth only wants to focus on the number of strikes; the number of aircraft involved; and the number of targets destroyed. These figures no doubt please this Oval Office. Tragically, war by the numbers was a loser in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The numbers say nothing about an enemy’s will to resist. The senior uniformed staff in the Pentagon all know this fact. A smarter press corps would be asking what is the US strategy if Iran’s military is destroyed and the mullahs simply refuse to surrender?

Know your enemy — Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression. The clerical leadership’s default position is death before surrender.

If that isn’t bad enough…

Air strikes often harden the resistance of your adversary — Every senior American military commander knows that bombing alone cannot force an enemy to give up. In fact, strikes from the air are proven to do the reverse based on our conventional non-nuclear bombing experience in WWII, and the protracted “arc light” bombing campaign in Vietnam.

One other thing — Mr. Hegseth recently stated that “no quarter” and “no mercy” is to be given in the current conflict. These statements are contrary to both US and international law — something to think hard about. More to the point, why would a regime consider any form of surrender, if there is no promise of mercy or quarter. This Pentagon chief’s understanding of war appears to be of the junior varsity variety.

It may take only one side to start a war, but it always demands two to end it — Iran’s willingness to continue battling both Israeli and US forces regardless of losses, again, was a foreseeable consequence by America’s intelligence agencies, assuming anyone was listening to the experts. Trump and Hegseth are viewing time as though they are looking at their watches, Iran’s leadership is looking at a calendar. Time is on the side of Tehran.

As every sailor knows, if you fail to chart a course, all winds are foul — Mr. Trump, Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Rubio can’t seem to agree on the conflict’s objectives. Unconditional surrender, for example, cannot be achieved by air power. Nor can air power alone compel the regime to give up its nuclear ambitions. Better makeup and camera angles won’t result in successful Pentagon war-fighting strategies. I would only remind all concerned that America won every battle in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. All three conflicts ended in strategic defeats. The White House selected objectives in these wars were — like what we are seeing today with Iran — amorphous.

The enemy always gets a vote — Even though America and Israel possess overwhelming military might, that alone cannot force capitulation. The Iranians have successfully shut the Strait of Hormuz; maintained attacks on the affiliated Gulf States; struck targets in Israel; appointed replacements for their dead military and political-religious leadership; encouraged proxies to join the battle — Hezbollah in Lebanon; and have sworn to continue the fight. All these actions and many more were perfectly predictable by American intelligence agencies, which is why past US chief executives wisely chose to avoid utilizing the military option.

Finally, a national war fighting strategy that lacks an achievable end state is no strategy at all — Mr. Hegseth, like his failed predecessors McNamara and Rumsfeld, will eventually learn some lessons the hard way, but lots of blood, treasure, and American prestige is being squandered in the meantime. At the estimated current cost of one billion dollars a day, and without a serious reconsideration of objectives, including a defined feasible end state, the war with Iran may already be a strategic loss.

The only current winner I can see is Israel, although both China and Russia will become longer term beneficiaries.

** A different version of this commentary first appeared in The Steady State on Substack and Medium.
https://steadystate1.substack.com/p/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be
https://medium.com/@adolwulfe/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-lost-dc9f2db8a791

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

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 24, 2026 3:38 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, March 24, 2026 5:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.

Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, March 24, 2026 5:57 PM

SECOND

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

Trump is breaking an axiom of war. Did no one warn him?

By Matthew Lynn | March 24, 2026

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/24/trump-war-tariffs-i
ran/

The exact origin of the maxim “Don’t fight on two fronts” is lost to time. It can be variously traced back to “The Art of War,” the classic 5th-century B.C. Chinese treatise by Sun Tzu, to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the main commander of British forces during World War II.

One point is certain, however. No one got around to sharing it with President Donald Trump. The United States has now embarked on two wars at the same time: a trade war with China and Europe, and a real war with Iran. This will surely prove to be a serious mistake.

Trump has an undiminished appetite for conflict. Less than a year ago, on what he oddly called “Liberation Day,” he ripped up the global trading system and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and allies. Earlier this year, he launched a raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and last month, he launched an all-out assault on Iran, aimed at taking out its armed forces and removing its leadership.

An administration that many argued would be isolationist and that promised to put America first has turned out to spend most of its energy trying to reshape the rest of the world.

In fairness, you can make a respectable case for either war. The supposedly rules-based global trading system did at times appear to have turned into a mechanism for transferring wealth and jobs from American workers to other countries. Given persistent U.S. deficits, and with American exporters facing steep tariffs in many countries while U.S. markets remained open, you could certainly argue that the system needed rebalancing. After a decade or two of talking with no discernible change, a more muscular approach has its merits.

Likewise, you can make a perfectly respectable case for removing the regime in Tehran, or at least significantly degrading its military strength. For the better part of five decades, it has been a threat to its neighbors and a persistent sponsor of global terrorism, while brutally suppressing its people and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The world would definitely be better off if it fell. There is a strategic rationale to launching an attack even if the risks are huge.

But both wars at once?

There are two big problems. First, alliances get stretched very close to the breaking point. It might be helpful in the Gulf, for example, to be able to call upon French naval forces, or British air support, or Canadian or German defense manufacturing to keep the weapons flowing. But that is very hard to do when you have just slapped punitive tariffs on those countries, impeded their exports and dismissed their leaders as irrelevant. To put it mildly, goodwill is in short supply.

The issue is not that anyone in Europe — apart from a few extremists — has any sympathy with the regime in Tehran. It is that European voters understandably have little sympathy with a president who has been attacking their exporters and demanding that jobs be transferred across the Atlantic.

Next, very quickly the objectives start to clash. It is difficult to maintain all the levies and restrictions on imports demanded by the trade war when supply chains are being thrown into chaos by the closure of shipping lanes in the Gulf, when the price of oil is exploding and when critical minerals and components are needed to fight the war.

Even worse, it was always going to be hard to maintain political support for tariffs if they led to a spike in inflation — even if you believed that was a short-term price worth paying to restore manufacturing capacity. But why throw fuel on that particular fire with a military action in the Middle East? (“Wait, war in the Gulf drives energy costs higher? Why did nobody tell us?”)

If inflation goes much higher, the president may well end up lowering tariffs to contain it, effectively surrendering ground in the trade war. Alternatively, he may decide to end the attack on Iran before the task has really been finished, simply to prevent prices from rising and losing the trade war. Either way, he will have to decide which war is the priority.

It would have been far better to fight Iran first, get that wrapped up, and then launch the trade war. Or else contain Iran until the global trading system had been rebalanced and America’s main allies were feeling less aggrieved.

Either way, the White House could have stayed 100 percent focused on a single goal. Instead, it has attempted to achieve two huge objectives at the same time. The result is already becoming painfully clear. The real war makes the trade war harder to win, and vice versa.

As Sun Tzu, Napoleon or Montgomery — or countless other military strategists — would point out to Trump, attempting to fight on two fronts just means you end up losing everything.

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 24, 2026 6:01 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 SIGNYM:

Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.

Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.

Signym, were you trying to point out an error, but it isn't erroneous? Iran (formerly Persia) is predominantly Shia Islam, with about 90–95% of its population identifying with this branch, making it the world's largest Shia-majority nation and the center of the Shia world. While historically Sunni, the country officially converted to Twelver Shia Islam under the Safavid Dynasty in 1501.

Official Religion: The Islamic Republic of Iran is a Shia theocracy.

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 25, 2026 6:26 AM

SECOND

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 27, 2026 10:43 AM

SECOND

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

The Worst and the Dumbest

Has the U.S. military been Kudlowized?

Paul Krugman

Mar 27, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-worst-and-the-dumbest

Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.

It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.

There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.

The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.

Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.

It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?

I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.

And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.

And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, a dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme right-wingers, but kind of small government, low tax, deregulation.

That kind of comes with the territory. It’s not that it’s necessarily right, but the simplified models that we use in economics do tend to point you that way. We like simplified models in which the market is always right, and in some ways the line of least resistance is to say that the models are right, the market is always right. So there are plenty of people who, at least by conventional, by historical standards, would be considered conservatives. And some of them have spent, over the course of my professional lifetime, have spent a lot of time trying to be part of the Republican policy apparatus, have sought appointments in Republican administrations. But more and more, and totally in recent decades, have been frozen out.

It turns out that the modern Republican Party doesn’t want, say, Greg Mankiw. They don’t want moderately conservative, technically competent economists. They want people who have no idea what they’re doing. They want ideologues, not even ideologues, but loyalists, people who will say whatever it is they want, the party wants them to say. They want Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore. They want the often wildly incompetent but reliable people who are reliable in part because they’re incompetent. Somebody who has a professional reputation, a professional skill set might be tempted to actually someday take a stand on principle, and that’s unacceptable.

So we have this kind of real extreme, not just political extremism, but complete lack of ability to do the job, which is almost, in a sense, incompetence is a job requirement.

And I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t started to infect the military as well. Certainly the people that someone like Hegseth wants are people who believe in warrior ethos, who believe in lethality, who believe in muscles in an age when war is largely waged by guys staring at video screens. And it’s a technological war in which all of those things matter not at all. But anybody who is likely to think that is not this regime’s, this movement’s kind of guy.

Now, what worries me, I mean, how much damage could they have done in just 14 months? Well, maybe quite a lot, but when I talked with Phillips O’Brien a while back, he said that this rot has been underway for a while, that there’s actually a kind of a MAGA-esque faction even within the professional officer corps.

And we certainly seem to be seeing that. So it looks as if the worst and the dumbest are not just at the top of the political leadership. They’re not just on the diplomacy and strategic policymaking end, but even in the cutting edge of the military. And it’s terrifying. America as we knew it may just not exist, even in our military forces.

On that happy thought, have a great day.

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 27, 2026 5:12 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 second:

The Worst and the Dumbest

Trump’s DOJ refused to rule out nuclear weapons from the kinds of arms it claims the average citizen may be entitled to possess.

By Tess M. Fardon and Shira Lauren Feldman | March 27, 2026 1:48 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/trump-doj-second-amendment
-nuclear-weapons.html

Of the sheer number of absurdist stories you may have missed in the news recently, one is that in public court filings slamming common-sense laws to prevent gun violence, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice refused to rule out nuclear weapons from the kinds of arms it claims the average citizen may be entitled to possess under the Second Amendment. https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1425776/dl?inline

How did we get here, where the top law enforcement lawyers in the country refuse to draw any line at weapons that can be used in lawful self-defense? And why is self-defense an important consideration in showing how laws to prevent gun violence align with the Second Amendment?

In the past year, Trump’s DOJ has taken an extreme pro-gun-rights view of the Second Amendment, with its lawyers making clear their view that the public has a constitutional right to access an extraordinarily broad range of weapons for self-defense. Trump’s DOJ has taken a remarkable stance in recent court filings—including in attacking state assault weapon bans—that any arm that is simply in “common use” by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes cannot be regulated, regardless of how dangerous that arm is, or how unsuited to lawful self-defense.

Now, to be clear, DOJ lawyers do not argue that nuclear weapons are currently protected by the Second Amendment. But that is based on the view that nukes could not become popular enough to be protected, not because of the unmistakable threat to public safety that civilian access to nuclear warheads would create. Under this dangerous logic, if nuclear weapons become more common, all bets are off: Civilians might then be constitutionally entitled to acquire and possess them. And though the Trump DOJ’s discussion of nuclear weapons may seem farfetched, the same logic would apply to a grenade launcher or bazooka.

DOJ’s position that any weapon, no matter the mass destruction it could cause, might be fair game for civilians if it happens to become popular defies common sense. But this is a direct result of a radical shift in the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence within the past two decades.

For two centuries, courts generally understood the Second Amendment to provide a collective right to keep and bear arms—that is, a right shared by officially organized militias, rather than provided to any one individual. This prevailing interpretation was upended in 2008 when the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, holding that D.C. could not ban the possession of handguns in the home. For the first time, the court described an individual right to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment. Then, less than four years ago, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court again expanded our understanding of the Second Amendment—including extending its protections outside the home by striking down New York’s requirements for a license in order to carry guns in public. The Roberts court, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the conservative majority, concluded that the law was too discretionary. It also critically introduced an entirely new legal framework for Second Amendment interpretation.

This new interpretation and framework have raised many questions about the limits on the right to keep and bear arms. One thing the Supreme Court made clear in these landmark cases, though, is that the core purpose of the Second Amendment is lawful self-defense. That purpose recognizes that the Second Amendment right is not limitless. Criminal laws limit how, when, where, and why deadly force—which includes the use of a gun—can be lawful.

In addition to being nonsensical, DOJ’s refusal to exclude anything, even a nuclear weapon, from what the Second Amendment protects is contradicted by the state and federal laws that limit when someone can use a gun in self-defense.

Different states have different standards for showing that the use of a gun was a lawful act of self-defense (often described as “justifiable homicide”). Someone who shoots another person can avoid a criminal conviction only if they can show that they acted within the bounds of the law. A study we conducted of the law in three states—California, Florida, and Massachusetts—highlights some of the common principles that limit when shooting someone is justifiable, and therefore lawful.

In all three states, a defendant arguing self-defense must show that they were responding to a reasonable fear of imminent danger to justify the shooting. In California, courts have emphasized that imminence means that the danger must exist at the moment the fatal shot is fired. When there is no immediate threat, shooting someone to defend yourself is no longer reasonable or necessary or, therefore, lawful.

A second principle that limits when deadly force can legally be used is proportionality: Shooting someone is only justified when it is a proportional response to the perceived threat. You can only use deadly force if the danger reasonably feared is imminent death, and there is no other way to prevent yourself from being killed. If a defendant shoots someone to respond to a threat of property damage, for example, that is not proportionate, and it is unlawful in many states. This includes Massachusetts, where courts consider factors such as the characteristics of any weapon used when evaluating whether a self-defense shooting was proportional. DOJ, meanwhile, says the characteristics of the weapon be damned.

Many states also consider a person’s attempts to retreat, or otherwise avoid a perceived threat, when evaluating self-defense claims. These states generally require that an individual must use every reasonable and available means to avoid the perceived danger before shooting can be considered “lawful.” Even in Florida, which has expansive and deadly “shoot first” or “stand your ground” laws, you are only relieved of the duty to retreat when responding to a threat outside the home if you had the right to be in the place where you use your gun.

As Trump’s DOJ attacks laws to prevent gun violence in states across the country and the District of Columbia, it is conveniently ignoring all three of these limits to claims of self-defense. Many of the laws challenged in court today, as trial and appellate courts have confirmed, are constitutional partly because they do not affect an individual’s ability to lawfully defend themselves.

Consider the state assault weapon bans that Trump’s DOJ wants to eliminate. An assault weapon generally refers to a semiautomatic firearm that was designed and overwhelmingly used by the military as a weapon of war, uniquely lethal because of its rapid rate of fire and the extreme force of the bullets that it shoots. This same rate of fire does not allow the shooter to continually reassess the threat to themselves while shooting. In states that require constant reassessment of the threat before someone can lawfully shoot someone else, this is another reason that assault weapons can be restricted without violating the Second Amendment.

Similar logic can be applied to firearms training requirements. By the current DOJ’s own admission, adequate armed defense requires skill in using those arms. For an act of self-defense to be considered lawful in states that require a response to be proportional, the shooter must be able to use their weapon in a limited way to address only the imminent threat, and only for as long as the use of deadly force remains necessary. These assessment skills are gained, or sharpened, through appropriate firearms training. Laws that impose training requirements are thus constitutional in part because they further the Second Amendment’s purpose.

The constraints on lawful self-defense teach us a lot about which types of gun laws, and which types of guns themselves, are constitutionally protected. If the Supreme Court cares about being faithful to the purpose of the Second Amendment, it should bear these limitations in mind.

And — seriously — courts should be able to draw a red line at nuclear weapons being outside the scope of lawful self-defense and Second Amendment protection.

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

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Saturday, March 28, 2026 6:38 AM

SECOND

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

The Smash-and-Grab Presidency

March 27, 2026

https://theintercept.com/2026/03/27/briefing-podcast-nikhil-pal-singh/

Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion. The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the country deeper into a humanitarian crisis. The Department of Homeland Security sent ICE to airports across the country on Monday to allegedly assist TSA agents who have gone without pay due to a partial government shutdown over congressional efforts to apply the most minimal of reforms to ICE. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are backing a new drone company vying for a Pentagon contract as the president and his family have amassed about $4 billion in wealth this term, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s a constant stream of violence, corruption, spectacle,” Nikhil Pal Singh tells The Intercept Briefing. “They smash, grab, move on. But I think now they’ve actually broken something.” The professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of several books, including “Race and America’s Long War” joins host Akela Lacy in a conversation about protests and movement-building in the latest Trump era.

Trump “said the real enemy — the real threat — was within. He reversed the Bush priority, which said, we fight the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home. And instead said, no, we actually have to bring the fight home. And he brought the fight home,” says Singh. “The idea there then also is that Americans themselves — that is us — we need to be governed violently first and foremost.”

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at the Intercept and co-host of the Intercept Briefing with Akela.

AL: I don’t know about you, Jessie, but I honestly feel like I’ve had constant whiplash the past few months. Maybe it would be helpful for our listeners if we start with just breaking down exactly where we are right now in the world. I’ll do a quick recap.

We are, as many people know, in a full-blown war with Iran after being told for years that that would effectively mean the beginning of the end. The U.S. has killed more than 150 people in boat strikes around the world and successfully kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife. Trump has consolidated the nation’s largest paramilitary police force and unleashed it on U.S. cities and now airports. The number of people being detained by ICE is at an all-time high. Federal agents have killed two protesters, and more than a dozen other people have died this year alone at the hands of ICE.

At the same time, prices are soaring. The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent, in case you missed that, which I certainly did.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-government-insolvent-fiscal-crisis-f
ix/

The government is still partially shut down, and Trump and his allies are still withholding documents from the public on Jeffrey Epstein.

And in case anyone forgot, we’re knee-deep in a midterm cycle that’s seen unprecedented levels of dark money and efforts by corporate lobbies to influence elections. So how are you feeling about all of this? How are you processing all of this?

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

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Saturday, March 28, 2026 8:53 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

How Trump’s army of the religious right is preparing for the apocalypse
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-hegseth-religi
ous-right-iran-war-b2942716.html

Prominent Climate Scientist Resigns From NASA, Citing Trump’s Attack on Science
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/climate/kate-marvel-nasa-resign.htm
l

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Sunday, March 29, 2026 9:38 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Signifying Absolutely Nothing

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/04/09/signifying-absolutely-noth
ing-iran-war-otoole/

Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

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

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Sunday, March 29, 2026 9:52 AM

SECOND

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

10 ways the Trump family is involved in a DC corruptopalooza

By David Mastio

I have come up with a list of 10 awful examples of Trumpworld using his position as the most powerful man in the world to make them all richer.

1. Crypto ventures
The Trump family launched multiple cryptocurrency projects just before and after the January 2025 inauguration, netting $1 billion or more in realized profits (including some $500 million from one United Arab Emirates-linked stake alone.) These deals have been tied to policy favors such as UAE access to artificial intelligence computer chips and a pardon for the founder of crypto exchange Binance.

2. Qatar golf resort deal
The Trump Organization partnered with Qatari state-owned Diar and Dar Global for a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club and villas in Qatar shortly after the inauguration.

3. UAE-Dubai Trump hotel and tower
A licensing deal was struck with Dar Global for Trump International Hotel & Tower in Dubai (with a private club), part of multiple Arabian Peninsula projects generating millions in upfront fees.

4. Vietnam luxury golf-resort complex
The Trump Organization secured approval for $1.5 billion project including golf courses and hotels with a Vietnamese developer tied to the country’s ruling Communist Party during tariff negotiations.

5. India Mumbai development fees
Ten million dollars in fees have been reported from a new Trump-branded project with Reliance Industries (whose chairman attended Trump state dinner). The company later secured a Venezuelan oil license.

6. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners fund
Son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private Affinity Partners investment firm Raised billions more from Saudi Arabia ($2 billion alone!), Qatar and UAE sovereign funds while Kushner served as Trump’s Middle East peace envoy. Assets under its management hit $6.2 billion by the end of 2025.

7. Melania Trump Amazon movie deal
Nearly $30 million was paid by Amazon for the money-losing Melania-focused documentary project. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, has significant federal contracts and regulatory interests.

8. Trump Media & Technology Group
Trump’s 40% stake in Truth Social’s parent company has boosted his net worth by over $1 billion so far in his presidency, as his posts on the platform announce many federal actions first on the Trump-owned social media platform.

9. Foreign officials, sponsored events at Trump properties
There have been at least 19 visits by foreign officials from 10 countries to Trump’s resorts. Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf held a major tournament and sponsored events at Trump National Doral.

10. Luxury jet gift
Qatar provided a $400 million gold bedazzled 747 jet for Trump’s use, coinciding with economic deals between the two countries, and the Trump Organization’s Qatar deals. (I did manage to write about this one.)

In a normal administration, any one of these, well, scandals would be front-page news with coverage spanning months, congressional investigations, special prosecutors and the whole deal. But Trump’s chaos has, for the most part, completely blocked them from public view. Who knows which ones fall into the gray areas of ethics laws and which are genuine crimes? Regardless, any one of them is a bigger deal than the Biden administration’s sordid relations with that president’s sleazy son, Hunter.

The audacity of these crimes against good government is amazing. Anyone involved has to know that if any decent person ever becomes president again, all these cases will be investigated with an eye to prosecuting any provable wrongdoing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/10-ways-the-trump-family-is-invol
ved-in-a-dc-corruptopalooza-opinion/ar-AA1ZBIVD

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 30, 2026 8:10 AM

SECOND

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

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Highly Respected Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is a truly strong and powerful Leader, with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results. He fights tirelessly for, and loves, his Great Country and People, just like I do for the United States of America. Viktor works hard to Protect Hungary, Grow the Economy, Create Jobs, Promote Trade, Stop Illegal Immigration, and Ensure LAW AND ORDER! Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orban. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation. I was proud to ENDORSE Viktor for Re-Election in 2022, and am honored to do so again. Election Day is April 12, 2026. Hungary: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBAN. He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — VIKTOR ORBAN WILL NEVER LET THE GREAT PEOPLE OF HUNGARY DOWN. I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-america-and-the-axis-of-auto
cracy

What this endorsement means depends on what you know about Viktor Orban.

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 31, 2026 2:34 PM

SECOND

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

$150 Oil Could Tip World Economy Into Recession

Mar 31, 2026, 1:00 PM CDT

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/150-Oil-Could-Tip-World-Eco
nomy-Into-Recession.html

Thanks to Trump's war on Iran, economists have warned that activity will fall in the middle of the year if oil prices surge to $150 per barrel and remain there for a period of four months.

Oil prices continued to climb higher on Monday as the Brent Crude benchmark raced past the $116 per barrel mark amid mixed messages between the US, Israel and Iran on the state of the war.

Oxford Economics’ director of global macro research, Ben May, has predicted there would be a contraction in the US economy this year before a recovery in 2027.

Global inflation would also rise to 7.7 per cent this year.

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 31, 2026 5:30 PM

SECOND

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

. . . the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, Alex Younger, told the Economist: “The reality is that the U.S. underestimated the task, and I think as of about two weeks ago lost the initiative to Iran.”

More troubling to ordinary Iranians, Golkar says, is that Trump is suing for peace with a regime more extreme and aggressive than at the beginning of the war.

Hormuz: The Secret Weapon In Plain View

Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 26, Trump offered a succinct summary of why, for more than 40 years, Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked. “The problem with the straits is this,” he said: “Let's say we do a great job. Say we got 99%. One percent is unacceptable, because 1% is a missile going into the hull of a ship that cost a billion dollars, right?”

That’s precisely the calculation Iran has relied on to deter attacks since the 1980s, when its war with Iraq included a 1987 “Tanker War” that drew in U.S. warships to escort Kuwaiti oil shipments through the Persian Gulf. In the years since, Iran loudly and consistently proclaimed that closure of the Strait was the linchpin of its defense, investing in everything from miniature submarines to mines to swarms of small boats to assure it can do exactly what it’s doing now. Why wasn’t the U.S. prepared? [Trump is why.]

https://time.com/article/2026/03/30/iran-war-strait-hormuz/

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

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Wednesday, April 1, 2026 7:44 AM

SECOND

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

$4 Gasoline is Less Than Half the Story

The biggest losers from the Iran War are buyers of diesel, jet fuel, chemicals and fertilizer

By Paul Krugman | Apr 01, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/4-gasoline-is-less-than-half-the

Although I expected the war on Iran to be a disaster, I didn’t expect the Trump administration to be implicitly conceding defeat after barely a month. Yet that’s where we are:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
All of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A, won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
9.61k ReTruths 39k Likes Mar 31, 2026, 7:11 AM

The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.”

At the same time, Trump’s claim that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem is whistling in the dark. Trump is telling Europeans that if they lack the “courage” to seize the jet fuel they need — funny how the vastly larger U.S. military isn’t doing the job — they can just “buy from the U.S., we have plenty.” Here’s what has happened to the average price of jet fuel at major U.S. airports:

Does this look to you as if we have “plenty”? It doesn’t look that way to airline executives:

REUTERS: United Airlines to cut 5% of scheduled flights as fuel prices soar

The reality is that U.S. prices of petroleum distillates and other products in which Persian Gulf nations are key producers have soared. The rise in gasoline prices, for which the national average just hit $4 a gallon, has made headlines. But other prices are also hugely important.

Most non-electric cars run on gasoline, but most trucks are fueled with diesel. And diesel prices are up even more than gasoline prices — approximately $1.70 per gallon as opposed to $1:

The moral here is that the United States retains a vital interest in seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Much as Trump would like to declare victory and insist that the blockade is other countries’ problem, reality won’t oblige him.

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

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Wednesday, April 1, 2026 3:37 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

It's obvious SECOND. Trump is fucking up so bad on everything that Jack and comrade signym are staying home. They must be hiding in the garden thread. Shit, they aren't even posting in their own threads.

T

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 9:51 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 THG:
It's obvious SECOND. Trump is fucking up so bad on everything that Jack and comrade signym are staying home. They must be hiding in the garden thread. Shit, they aren't even posting in their own threads.

T

The Trumptards at work were pretty much impressed with Trump's speech yesterday. I wonder what ultrasonic sounds and words they were hearing that people can't hear?

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-iran-war-speech/686663

Reaction to Trump speech: stock prices decline, crude oil prices increase.

President Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation, Apr. 1, 2026

Read the complete transcript of Trump’s address to the nation
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-transcript-address-iran-war-b5
970011fe934dde84d95d650bda56a9

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

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 4:01 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 Friday, January 24, 2025 9:50 AM:

Nobody cares what you think or believe.

You are an idiot, and everything you have ever said here has been proven wrong, whether it was merely an outright lie when you said it, or given enough time.

You worthless. You are nothing. And I own you.

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

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

Hitler's Thousand Year Reich outlasted Trump's.

Hitler’s Edifice Complex

He was obsessed with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich Chancellery, part of his grandiose architectural ambitions for the nation’s capital.

By Timothy W. Ryback | April 2, 2026, 9:27 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/hitlers-edifice-complex/6866
62/

He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”

Hitler’s interest in architecture originated in his teenage years when, as an aspiring artist, he applied to the Academia of Arts in Vienna, only to be rejected and informed that his real talent, such as it was, lay in architecture rather than painting. Of the several hundred surviving sketches and paintings from Hitler’s years as a struggling artist, 80 to 90 percent are of physical structures, the best-known being some watercolors from 1912, of the State Opera House in Vienna, and from 1914, of the Courtyard of the Royal Residence in Munich. There is also a 1915 pencil sketch of the farmhouse, near the northern French village of Fournes, where Hitler, then a 26-year-old corporal, was billeted as a message runner for the List Regiment during World War I.

Read more from Timothy Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days

Glimmerings of Hitler’s grandiose architectural imaginings can be discerned from that time. In the rare-book reading room at the Library of Congress, you can request an early-20th-century architectural guide to Berlin, entitled simply Berlin, that is smeared with trench dirt and drips of red paraffin wax, most likely traces of nighttime reading by candlelight, and features this inscription on the inside cover: Adolf Hitler, Fournes, November 5, 1915. The book, by a Jewish art critic named Max Osborn—whose books were burned in the spring of 1933, though Hitler’s copy survived in his private library—mocks Berlin’s pretensions to architectural greatness. “Berlin among the famous cultural sites?” Osborn writes in his introduction. “There will be no shortage of skeptics,” since the city can scarcely compare to urban gems like Paris, Prague, and Venice.

Osborn calls Berlin a “cornucopia of artistic missteps,” a hodgepodge of neoclassical architectural structures built on swampland and overlaid with decades of uncontrolled growth and chaotic urban planning. Having imbibed Osborne’s perspective as a young soldier, Hitler 20 years later as chancellor echoed the Jewish critic’s aesthetic disdain. “Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world!” Hitler told Speer. “Or even Vienna! Those cities are magnificent. Berlin, however, is nothing but a haphazard jumble of buildings.” As chancellor, Hitler set about righting the capital city’s many architectural wrongs with a fierce and unbridled dictatorial will.

When Speer was appointed general inspector of the capital of the Reich in 1938, the architect, then only 32, was given carte blanche in redesigning the Berlin cityscape. Hitler did not want Speer hobbled by legal or bureaucratic restraints. “Neither the interior minister nor the mayor of Berlin, and not even the Berlin Gauleiter Goebbels was to have any authority over me,” Speer recalled. He reported only to Hitler.

One reason that Hitler was so concerned with freeing Speer of architectural constraints was that he himself had confronted them when he sought to have a second-floor balcony added to the Reich chancellery. Eduard Jobst Siedler, the Berlin architect who had updated the old Reich chancellery and the adjacent Wilhelmplatz in 1927, objected to the Hitler balcony as an intrusion on Siedler’s intellectual property, a legally enforceable claim. “Siedler has defaced the entire Wilhelmplatz,” Hitler raged, making the chancellery look “like the administrative office of a soap company, not the center of the Reich.” Hitler eventually secured Siedler’s approval by offering him a new commission. The chancellery’s new balcony, designed by Speer, was installed and became the setting for Hitler’s iconic appearances before jubilant throngs.

In the spring of 1937, Hitler ordered an entire block of historic houses razed, including the justice-ministry building and the “Adolf-Hitler-Haus,” the local headquarters for his own political party, to make way for construction of the new Reich chancellery annex. Protest was muted. Joseph Goebbels held a eulogy before the local party offices were obliterated. Berliner Morgen-Zeitung observed gingerly that bricks and stones that had stood for “decades even centuries” were now “wandering” to other places in the city, where “they will fulfill useful purposes for coming generations.”

Late in January 1938, Hitler summoned Speer to discuss his vision for the annex, which was to fill the entire vacated block of Voss Street that ran perpendicular to the chancellery’s Wilhelmstrasse address and dwarf the rest of the building. A marble gallery leading to Hitler’s new office was to be twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Hitler’s time frame for the project was comparably ambitious: He wanted the new extension completed within a year, in time for the next annual diplomatic reception, in early January 1939. “I place the entire Voss Street at your disposal as the site,” Hitler told Speer. “What it costs is of no concern to me.”

Hitler wanted the new extension built fast but also to endure, at least for the span of his thousand-year Reich. Hitler’s “law of ruins,” as Speer called it, required structures to be built with an eye cast many generations into the future, when they would be “overgrown with ivy, with tumbled columns, and pieces of masonry scattered about.” Speer sourced construction materials from across the country, and following Hitler’s annexation of Austria that March, he was also able to procure large quantities of the distinctive red Adnet marble from Salzburg.

Arno Breker, the sculptor who became known as the Nazi “poet of the human form,” was commissioned to create two 11-foot-tall bronze male nudes—representing “The Party” and “The Army”—to flank the chancellery’s ceremonial Wilhelmstrasse entrance. Josef Thorak, the “master sculptor of the Third Reich,” designed an enormous horse for the garden, under which an air-raid shelter would eventually be expanded into a sprawling underground labyrinth that included the Führerbunker, reinforced with four meters of concrete overhead. Kurt Schmid-Ehmen, who had designed the iconic wide-winged eagle clutching the swastika cross in its talons for the Nürnberg-party rally grounds, created an enormous bronze replica to be placed above the Voss Street entrance. Another iconic addition to the expanded chancellery was the enormous globe that would be parodied by Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator. Seven thousand laborers worked night and day, in multiple shifts, seven days a week, erecting the structure that came to occupy the vacated city block. The final tab came to 90 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of half a billion dollars today.

Hitler reviewed plans and progress on the construction at every turn, studying each detail of every proposed design, sometimes making adjustments, sometimes offering evident approval. Hitler enthused over his office desk, blazing with gold gilt and an inlaid sword half drawn from its sheath. “Good, good,” Hitler said to Speer. “When the diplomats who sit before me at this table see it, they will learn the meaning of fear.”

On Wednesday, January 9, Hitler took a final walk through what he had taken to calling the “new Reich chancellery,” even as he retained his living quarters in the old chancellery. The following day, the doors were opened for the traditional new-year diplomatic reception. Guests entered through a wide portal flanked by the Breker statues, then passed through the polished marble gallery illuminated from above by a glass ceiling and lined below with white orchids, until arriving at Hitler’s cavernous office.

“The German nation recalls with profound gratitude that the year 1938 brought the German people fulfilment of the incontestable right to self-determination,” Hitler said in his welcoming remarks, then alluded to the Munich Agreement, signed in August, which saw France and Britain sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Hitler in putative exchange “for peace in our time.” Hitler could not have been more pleased with the evening or with Speer.

“I flatter myself that I accomplish more than the other statesmen in the so-called democracies,” Hitler told Speer afterward. “I believe that we also set a different pace politically and, if it is possible to incorporate a state into the Reich in three or four days”—a reference to the annexation of Austria and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia—“then it must also be possible to erect a building in one or two years.” Eight months later, Hitler plunged the world into war. Speer’s mission to transform Berlin into the “capital city of the world” was put on hold. Speer was eventually put to work as minister of armaments.

In the coming years, Hitler would employ his Reich chancellery extension as a marble-and-gold-gilt symbol for impressing celebrities, most notably film and stage actors, and for intimidating foreign dignitaries. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s translator, recalled that the most notable feature of a visit was the walk along the 500-foot grand hallway to the new chancellery office, where Hitler received them at his desk with its half-unsheathed sword. “The floor was so smooth that visitors felt compelled to cover the five hundred feet to the great double doors of the anteroom to Hitler’s office with short, prudent, courtly steps,” Schmidt said.

In March 1939 Emil Hacha, the aging, frail president of Czechoslovakia, which had been recently truncated by the Munich Agreement, was summoned to the new Reich chancellery by Hitler, forced to wait until 1:15 in the morning, and then finally marched through the marble gallery and into Hitler’s office where he was met with a tirade from the führer. “Finally, I had worked the old man over to such an extent,” Hitler boasted afterward, “that his nerves were completely shattered and he was already willing to sign; then he had a heart attack.”

Throughout the war years, even long after Allied bombing raids of Berlin had begun, Hitler continued to use the Reich chancellery annex to court and cudgel, as he did with Stalin envoy Vyacheslav Molotov in November 1940, before invading the Soviet Union the following June. As late as December 1944, Hitler received Ferenc Szálasi, the puppet head of the Hungarian government, in his gilded chancellery office, with the chandeliers and wall hangings fully intact. An advent wreath with four candles rested on a table for a seasonal touch.

Even as large tracts of the city were laid to waste in the bombings, the Reich chancellery remained relatively unscathed, as did Hitler’s architectural ambitions. Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, recalled that as even German cities fell into “rubble and ash,” Hitler was planning their resurrection, with wider streets, taller buildings, more beautiful than ever. “The plans for Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Linz and many other cities were not just in Hitler’s mind,” Junge recalled, “but in fact had taken on concrete form as completed plans on paper.”

On Saturday, February 3, 1945, more than 1,000 American B-17 bombers flattened much of central Berlin in the largest daylight raid of the war. The Reich chancellery emerged from the bombing with its façade scored by shrapnel and its windows shattered but with its interior halls and galleries still intact.

By then, Hitler had relocated from his private quarters in the old Reich chancellery into the Führerbunker. Hitler passed hours in the bunker complex studying table-size models of his future construction projects. Speer recalls sitting with Hitler as late as April 1945, the month of his suicide, while he pored over architectural projects that included a palatial residence that Hitler hoped to have completed by 1950, with an office that measured 960 square meters, 16 times the size of the old Reich chancellor office, and a dining room that could seat 1,000 guests. “The isolation of this bunker world,” Speer recalled, “surrounded on all sides by concrete and earth, ultimately sealed Hitler’s isolation from the tragedy that was playing out outside under the open sky.”

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

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 6:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Gotta go back a long time to reply to me now, huh?

*yawn*

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 6:47 PM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Trump lawyer REFUSES to acknowledge Native Americans are birthright citizens

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 7:16 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:
Gotta go back a long time to reply to me now, huh?

*yawn*

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.

6ix, can you see what is wrong with Trump's words? I suspect you will reinterpret his words to mean something innocuous.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-not-possible-
us-pay-medicaid-medicare-daycare-re-fighting-w-rcna266381

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

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Thursday, April 2, 2026 8:24 PM

SECOND

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

Trump’s First Speech About the War With Iran Explained Absolutely Nothing

Let’s take stock of just how much Trump is distorting the truth about this war.

By Fred Kaplan | April 02, 2026 5:06 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-iran-war-news-speech
-lies.html

The White House heralded it in advance as a “major address,” but President Donald Trump’s actual prime-time speech on Wednesday—what he called “an update on the tremendous progress our warriors have made in Iran”—was a big nothing.

News stories, citing inside sources, had reported that Trump was thinking about escalating the war—even sending in ground troops—or exiting it very quickly. Yet judging from the speech, he’s doing neither. Instead, he’s intent on keeping up the bombing, hitting Iran “extremely hard over the next two to three weeks … to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”—a malapropism of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s call in the 1960s to “bomb them”— meaning North Vietnam—“back to the Stone Age.”

It was the first speech Trump has delivered on his and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, now in its second month—yet he still offered no serious explanation of why he started it, when it will end, or how anyone should define victory. Instead, he crammed the 20-minute address with many of the lies he’s told many times before and invented a few new ones.

Sometimes it’s worth cataloging the lies and distortions in one of his speeches to show just how incapable he is of telling—or perhaps recognizing—the truth. Because this speech was billed as so important, yet carried so little real news, it offers another opportunity.

So let us begin.

Claim: “In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before.”

Fact: U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles have destroyed many targets but racked up no “victories” (if that word has any meaning). Iranian leaders have been killed, but the regime—a theocratic state empowered by a repressive well-armed military—remains intact. A lot of their missiles have been hit, but Iran is still launching a fair number each day.

Claim: “I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran. … I killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani. … I terminated Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal … [which] gave them $1.7 billion in cash … [and] would have led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran.”

Fact: Killing Soleimani was a big deal, but the terrorist commander had nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. The Iran nuclear deal, signed by Obama and six other leaders, then sanctified into law by the U.N. Security Council, in fact halted Iran’s nuclear program, forced Iran to dismantle most of it, and allowed strict international inspection. The $1.7 billion in cash referred to Obama’s return of Iranian money, which the U.S. had confiscated when Iran covertly started a nuclear program. Trump’s scuttling of the deal and his reimposition of sanctions prompted Iran to restart the program, bringing the country closer than ever to an A-bomb.

Claim: “My first preference was always the path of diplomacy, yet the regime continued their relentless quest for nuclear weapons and rejected every attempt at an agreement.”

Fact: The week before Trump started Operation Epic Fury, Iranian negotiators presented a proposal that was actually pretty favorable to us; it would have required them to scale back enriched uranium even more than Obama’s deal had done. U.S. officials said talks would resume on Monday. The Saturday before, Trump launched his surprise attack.

Claim: “In Operation Midnight Hammer,” Trump’s attack on Iran’s enrichment sites last June, “we totally obliterated those nuclear sites. The regime then sought to rebuild their nuclear program at a totally different location, making clear they had no intention of abandoning their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Fact: Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified just two weeks ago that Iran had not rebuilt its nuclear program since Midnight Hammer.

Claim: “They were also rapidly building a vast stockpile of conventional ballistic missiles and would have soon had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe, and virtually any other place on earth.”

Fact: They were building more missiles, yes. But Trump’s own top intelligence officials have said there is no evidence that Iran was anywhere close to building missiles with the range to strike the U.S.

Claim: “Our objectives are very simple and clear … we will cripple Iran’s military, crush their ability to support terrorist proxies, and deny them the ability to build a nuclear bomb.”

Fact: The third aim is the main one (he cited it at the start of his speech), but later in the speech he pretty much said this had long ago been accomplished. “The nuclear sites that we obliterated with the B-2 bombers [last June] have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust,” he said. “And we have it under intense surveillance and control. If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we’ll hit them with missiles very hard again. We have all the cards. They have none.” If this is true, why did he go to war in late February?

Claim: “We built the strongest economy in history. … We’ve taken a dead and crippled country—I hate to say that but we were a dead and crippled country after the last administration—and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far.”

Fact: No public appearance by Trump can go without kicking Joe Biden in the shins (or higher up), but “dead and crippled”? Job growth, unemployment, and GDP growth were all better under Biden’s last two years than they have been under the first year of Trump’s current term. It is odd that Trump even went here in this speech, as polls—which show his ratings on the economy at a new low—suggest few people, even among his supporters, believe the economy is so hot.

Claim (continuing the point): “With no inflation, record-setting investments coming into the United States, over $18 trillion, and the highest stock market ever.”

Fact: Inflation is at 2.4 percent and rising, high enough for the Federal Reserve to vote against lowering interest rates. Actual foreign investment amounts to a few hundred billion dollars, no higher than during Biden’s presidency. The stock market has risen, mainly because of the go-go growth (some would say “bubble”) of A.I. corporations. That said, the S&P 500 has declined each week since the war began. And while it rose 3 percent on the day of Trump’s announcement, mainly on reports that he would end the war quickly, the futures market tanked—and future oil markets rose—while he was giving his speech.

Claim: “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait. … We don’t need it. … And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Straight must take care of that passage. … They must grab it and cherish it. They could do it easily.”

Fact: First, the global oil market is a global market. The U.S. might not depend directly on the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran’s restrictions of that passage affect our oil prices, like everyone else’s. Second, our allies could not “grab” the Strait “easily.” We couldn’t do so either. Even given Iran’s much-reduced missile force, one well-aimed drone or missile at an oil tanker or escorting warship passing through could discourage other tankers from following along. It’s worth recalling that the strait was open before the war started. One way to reopen it might be to end the war.

Claim: “Regime change was not our goal … but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead. The new group is less radical and much more reasonable. Yet if during this period of time no deal is made … we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard.”

Fact: Trump and his top aides have said contradictory things about whether regime change is one of the war’s goals, but his continued railing against the regime’s evil—and his boasts about killing its top leaders—would make no sense if it weren’t a goal. Second, as noted before, the regime is very much intact, even if the original leaders are not. Third, there is no evidence that “the new group” is “more reasonable,” presumably meaning more inclined to make a deal that pleases Trump. In fact, given the killing of the top echelons and the destruction of command-and-control, it’s not clear who has the authority to strike a deal with the U.S. Finally, threatening to destroy Iran’s electric grid—a war crime—is hardly the sort of attitude to make them more reasonable.

Claim: “The whole world is watching, and they can’t believe the power, strength, and brilliance, they just can’t believe what they’re seeing, they—leave it to your imagination—but they can’t believe what they’re seeing, the brilliance of the United States military.”

Fact: The speed, power, and precision of U.S. air and naval power is indeed something to behold. (The accuracy of the data that goes into the bombing campaigns is another matter; hence the mistaken, though very accurate, bombing of a school and an athletic center that killed many children.) What the world is watching with wider eyes, and what they really “can’t believe,” is the aimlessness, arrogance, ignorance, and shamelessness of this well-honed military’s commander in chief—his pretense to imperialism with barely a shrug toward the responsibility that has historically gone with it. That, more than anything, was what was on dismal display Wednesday night.

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

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Friday, April 3, 2026 6:51 AM

SECOND

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

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

Someone needs to explain the Pentagon purges to the American people.

By Tom Nichols | April 2, 2026, 10:05 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/hegseths-war-on-americas-
military/686676/

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s Chief of Staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green, Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of Army, Dan Driscoll.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C.Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also cancelled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. In keeping with the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.

Of course, the tone at the Pentagon was set by the commander in chief. Last June, Trump spoke at Ft. Bragg, where he tried to turn his appearance into a political rally. Again, George (and Driscoll) said nothing, at least in public, about this shocking violation of civil-military norms. Trump, after all, is the commander in chief and his behavior can only be curtailed by the Senate or the American people.

Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them have been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

These dismissals are not even defensible as the product of some high-minded strategic reform. Rather, as Pentagon officials told the New York Times, they are the “product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army, battles over personnel and his troubled relationship” with Driscoll. Hegseth’s beef with Driscoll may be a product of insecurity: When Hegseth was stepping on rakes in the wake of Signalgate, Driscoll was an obvious choice to replace him. The Army secretary also took on important tasks that Hegseth either would not—or could not—do. Last fall, Driscoll, not Hegseth, was part of a high-level Pentagon delegation that traveled to Geneva in an attempt to end the Russia-Ukraine war.)

Perhaps that was just as well. Hegseth—now scathingly called “Dumb McNamara” by some Pentagon staff—has busied himself with culture war nonsense rather than substantive defense and security issues. But Hegseth apparently need not worry: Driscoll, according to reporting from my colleagues Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick, is now rumored to be one of the next senior appointees facing likely dismissal. (Hegseth may not know much about strategy or leadership, but he knows how to fight a war of attrition.)

The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy. Pentagon pissing matches are the stuff of legend and George is not the first general to get an unwanted retirement invitation from an irate civilian leader. But America is now engaged in its biggest conflict in decades, with thousands of troops headed into possible combat on the shores of a country the size of Alaska with more than three times the population of North Korea—and with a president whose only formal speech on the war so far consisted of 19 minutes of jumbled thoughts. The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs.

Pete Hegseth has never shown a willingness to explain himself to the public, nor has he demonstrated the character required to take that kind of responsibility. But now that Randy George, along with other senior officers Hegseth has fired or pushed to resign, are about to be civilians, maybe they can step forward and tell their fellow citizens what on Earth is going on in Hegseth’s Pentagon.

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

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