REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 17, 2026 16:37
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Monday, June 15, 2026 7:05 AM

SECOND

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


The peace deal with Tehran is an Iranian victory.

By Tom Nichols | June 14, 2026, 9:32 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-deal/687547/

President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.

The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.

If defeat seems a strong word, consider what we do know about how this war will end. Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory.

The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;

the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks;

Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks;

the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror;

and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran.

In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own.

Indeed, the United States has perhaps done worse than gaining nothing. Iran, while temporarily weakened, is now an even more powerful political actor: The regime in Tehran stood up to a massive U.S. onslaught, survived, and then inflicted pain on various states in the Gulf as punishment for going along with Trump’s war.

The Israelis, for their part, have been left out in the cold. It is difficult to shed any tears for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who unwisely encouraged Trump to attack Iran, but he, too, is feeling the sting of humiliation. The Iranians cagily linked Netanyahu’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon to Trump’s war in the Gulf, and Trump is now angry at Netanyahu for making it harder for the United States to get out of the conflict. (When Netanyahu planned major strikes in Beirut at the beginning of June, Trump called him, swore at him, and said, “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me.”)

Reportedly, the upcoming agreement requires a cessation of hostilities in the region, including in Lebanon—and Trump is negotiating as if he can deliver on that demand while leaving Jerusalem out of it. Today, the Israelis said that Hezbollah had launched weapons into Israel. Rather than calling on the Iranians to restrain their proxy, Trump took to social media to tell the Israelis to calm down, noting that the attack “was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”

The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted. The effort to claim that this war has defeated Iran’s nuclear ambitions is merely an effort to distract from the administration’s failure to achieve regime change, which was always its main goal.

(Trump’s self-congratulations about averting the Iranian bomb are like the old joke about the London cabbie who used to throw “lion powder” out of the window to keep lions away. When told that London has no lions, the cabbie said: “And a bloody good thing, too, because the powder don’t work.”)

The agreement—if it actually gets signed on Friday—will then initiate a two-month period of further negotiations, and Trump could argue that he’ll get more in that process. But how?

Trump has for weeks talked about getting rid of Iran’s “Nuclear Dust”—his odd term for the uranium now lying under the rubble produced by U.S. bombings—and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed this morning that the United States has multiple plans for removing this material. The Iranians, however, are busily planting booby traps around the uranium to ensure that it stays where it is, and despite Hegseth’s blustering, America is not going to march into Iran and dig it out without Tehran’s consent. If anything, the Iranians now have every incentive to sprint to a bomb, and can do so with far less transparency than they had to endure under the JCPOA.

Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz will “open,” but it was already open, at least to those the Iranians allowed to pass. In his celebratory message, Trump said: “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” That’s terrific, but such a statement has about as much effect as I or my wife or my cat declaring the strait open; only Iran can make that decision. Trump also declared that the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports is over, something that is indeed within his power, but that only means America will withdraw while Iran remains.

Meanwhile—and again, these are the terms that so far have been leaked to the press, mostly from the Iranians—Iran claims that it will not only get some $12 billion up front, but get another $12 billion within 60 days. Down the line, the Iranians are claiming that they will get a $300 billion fund for reconstruction. (U.S. officials have insisted to reporters that any release of funds will be performance-based, a fuzzy condition that raises more questions and could invite the Iranians to dig in and haggle if the Americans balk at delivering the money.) The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.

Trump today also claimed that he is perfectly willing to restart hostilities if the Iranians don’t cooperate. Tehran, however, can be forgiven for smirking at the idea that Trump is going to tie down U.S. forces and then ignite a second conflict just weeks from the midterm elections, especially because the American people—and, perhaps more important from Trump’s perspective, the international markets—have soured on the conflict.

Trump began this war by promising the Iranian people that they would be able to seize their government from the theocratic tyrants who oppress them, and he repeatedly said he would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” Had Trump toppled the regime in Tehran, he would have had the thanks of most of the world—and congratulations from even his most dedicated critics. Instead, the United States has been defeated, and this evening found Trump out on the lawn waiting for the rain to clear so he could begin his party.

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

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Monday, June 15, 2026 12:36 PM

SECOND

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


All Israelis are displeased with Trump's surrender to Iran

Ministers say Israel won’t be bound by Iran deal, as opposition castigates Netanyahu’s ‘absolute failure’

Defense minister vows the IDF will remain in southern Lebanon, hit Iran hard if needed, despite Trump-Tehran MOU ending Lebanon fighting; Bennett calls Trump-imposed terms a product of failed Israeli leadership

By Emanuel Fabian, Ariela Karmel, Sam Sokol and ToI Staff

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the agreement was “bad for Israel and for the entire free world. Period.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said Netanyahu “lost the war,” and collapsed in the “moment of truth,” adding: “There has never, ever, been a more absolute failure than Netanyahu’s diplomatic failure on the Iranian front.”

“The time has come for us to recognize the fact that Netanyahu simply cannot do it anymore,” Lapid charged, complaining of “an American president openly and publicly telling the prime minister of Israel: ‘I am your boss, and you will do what you are told.'”

“The State of Israel won the battle; Netanyahu lost the war. The Israel Defense Forces fulfilled its missions, Netanyahu failed to deliver the goods,” Lapid told reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting.

Much more at https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-vows-to-stay-in-south-lebanon-if-
iran-strikes-well-hit-it-with-full-force/

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

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Monday, June 15, 2026 2:52 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.

You've opened your big, fat, stupid mouths every single day about Iran and you've been wrong about everything.

Nobody believes you now.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, June 15, 2026 5:49 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:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:

Yes, the Nazi regime persecuted thousands of gay men, but their primary method of dealing with them was forced labor in concentration camps, rather than systematic extermination in death camps. While some gay prisoners were killed in gas chambers or died as a result of gruesome medical experiments, most died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Here are the specific, localized details of how the Nazis targeted homosexuals:

• Paragraph 175: The Nazi regime aggressively broadened the existing German penal code, Paragraph 175, which criminalized sexual relations between men. They arrested an estimated 100,000 men under this law. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

• Concentration Camps: Between 5,000 and 15,000 of these men were deported to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear an identifying inverted Pink Triangle on their uniforms. Holocaust Encyclopedia

• Treatment: Gay inmates were at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy. They were heavily isolated, subjected to severe torture, assigned the most dangerous labor, and were frequently victims of forced castration without their consent. The National Holocaust Centre and Museum

• Casualties: Historians estimate that around 60% of the gay men imprisoned in these Camps perished due to the extreme conditions. The Wiener Holocaust Library

Google concluded that Trumptards are Nazis, as is 6ixStringJack. Sieg Heil, my Führer Trump!

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

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Monday, June 15, 2026 6:10 PM

SECOND

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


TRUMP CELEBRATES ACHIEVING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN IRAN

To end his war on Iran, Trump was forced to return to the status quo with the Strait of Hormuz open and no nuclear deal in place.

By Nick Turse | June 15 2026, 2:41 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/06/15/trump-us-iran-war/

The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump.

With a commitment to a ceasefire and the scheduled signing of a “framework” later this week, Iran is expected to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days. Negotiations over an agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program are expected to take place in the 60 days following Friday’s signing ceremony.

If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.

Trump also teased the prospect of a U.S. protection racket under which Middle Eastern nations would be forced to pay monetary tribute to America if the U.S. and Iran do not finalize a nuclear accord.

On Monday, Iran’s government declared victory and appeared to vow revenge on the U.S. for the war.

“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, his 80th birthday. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz.” An hour later, Trump offered a caveat, stating the strait would only be opened “upon the signing of the Deal on Friday.”

“This victory was achieved through absolute national cohesion, under the wise guidance of the Supreme National Security Council and all state pillars,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei announced on Monday, claiming that the conflict “cost the aggressors heavily.”

“Moving toward diplomacy does not mean we will ever forgive or forget the crimes against the Iranian nation; the pursuit of justice for our martyrs is permanent,” said Baghaei.

The White House did not reply to a request by The Intercept for comment on Iran’s declaration of victory and apparent vow of revenge for its dead.

The new “deal” is a complete capitulation for Trump who claimed, on March 6: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” No such surrender occurred.

Nor is it the first ceasefire Trump has claimed would result in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Iran has now agreed to a ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” the White House announced on April 8, essentially the same agreement publicized on Sunday. That original ceasefire collapsed months ago, but the fiction was observed by the administration and mainstream news media outlets alike, until the new agreement was rolled out.

Pakistan says it will oversee a formal signing of a memorandum of understanding on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly session in Islamabad “the immediate and permanent cessation of military operations has been announced across all fronts, including Iran, America, and Lebanon.”

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed on Sunday that the agreement guarantees “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, won’t seek one, won’t buy one, won’t have one.” Iran previously agreed to those terms when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. Trump unilaterally withdrew from that pact during his first term.

Trump indicated Hegseth was lying or uniformed in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. The president said the U.S. was still negotiating whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years but hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension.

Trump has consistently criticized the JCPOA. “Barack Hussein Obama gave them 1.7 Billion Dollars in ‘Green” Cash,’” he wrote during a social media rant in April. Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that the U.S. would release $12 billion in frozen assets to Iran before the start of nuclear negotiations. “The accord secures the unfreezing of all Iranian assets and addresses compensation for wartime damages,” said Baghaei.

Trump said that if the U.S. does not sign a final nuclear agreement with Iran, the United States might assume the role of “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. The proposed extortion scheme appears akin to the 19th-century Barbary States, which practiced state-supported piracy to exact tribute from other nations. The United States fought two separate wars against two of these North African states: Tripoli from 1801 to 1805, and Algiers from 1815 to 1816.

A recent Intercept analysis of Trump’s claims about the Iran war, his stated objectives, and supposed American achievements found the U.S. has fallen short or flamed out on all counts. The public record shows an administration that has consistently scaled back its goals and downgraded its claimed successes, without nearing anything resembling the victory Trump has touted.

On the first day of the conflict, Trump laid out his most ambitious objectives. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 28.

Since April, the White House has not replied to requests for further information about Trump’s inability to achieve world peace. Trump has also failed to accomplish even his more modest goal, as the region remains mired in conflict. Israel continued its war on Lebanon on Sunday and said it was not involved in the new pact. “Trump’s agreement does not bind us. … We are not party to this agreement,” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on Telegram on Sunday.

“He’s a very difficult guy,” Trump said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. “He should be very thankful to us for doing this,” he said of the war, lapsing into typical hyperbole. “Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”

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

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Monday, June 15, 2026 6:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.


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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


The Theory of the Vulgar Class

Collapsing norms, cage matches, and a republic in danger

Paul Krugman
Jun 16, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-theory-of-the-vulgar-class

Surreal UFC White House press conference plays out at Lincoln Memorial

On Sunday Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday with a cage match on the White House lawn. The match and the events that surrounded it — especially the press conference with UFC fighters, shown above, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — were a desecration of America’s capital, whose monuments and buildings have always endeavored to represent small-r republican virtues. The whole affair was an affront to the values on which this nation was founded and also unspeakably vulgar.

That last criticism may strike some readers as elitist and trivial. Yet the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms. As I argued yesterday, these norms historically played a key role in mitigating abuses of power and privilege during the Gilded Age, the last time America suffered from extreme income and wealth inequality (though not nearly as extreme as what we have now).

Norms matter. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class — published in 1899, at the apogee of the Gilded Age — Thorstein Veblen famously argued that much of the behavior of his era’s elite was driven not by the desire to enjoy life but by the desire to impress others. Partly they did this through conspicuous consumption. Thus they built lavish mansions staffed by legions of servants.

However, members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society:


John D. Rockefeller and family

The contrast with the public behavior of Trump’s band of uber-wealthy is startling:

Grimes makes heartwrenching plea to Elon Musk accusing him of ignoring their child's ill health on his platform X

In addition to modeling upstanding behavior, the extremely rich of the Gilded Age were expected to have, or pretend to have, some virtues that were part of the aristocratic ideal, including a sense of noblesse oblige displayed by good works. Veblen was quite cynical about philanthropy, yet even he didn’t dismiss it completely, stating that:

The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method [such as the endowment of a university, public library or museum] is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.

(Veblen’s lasting intellectual influence did not come from his sparkling prose style.)

Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.

While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?

The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.

And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games.

The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment. We should heed the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

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

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 7:01 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.
6ix,
you lost your teeth
you have a hole in your lung from an infection
you are diabetic
you are an alcoholic
you spend your days smoking and watching porn
you pay no income tax because you have no job
you have no children
you have no life beyond your yard, your house's leaky basement, your secret computer projects
lot more failures you don't talk about

The Nazis joined the party because they were failing at life, compared to those awful, rich Jews controlling everything. Hitler made them feel strong.

Trump makes 6ix feel strong. 6ix is no longer a failure when comparing himself to those awful, rich Democrats controlling 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, June 16, 2026 8:41 AM

SECOND

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


Trump, Cynicism and the Deal

GLOBAL VIEW By Walter Russell Mead | June 15, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-cynicism-and-the-deal-00cfce74

The great Iran deal is here, President Trump has declared.

Big if true, as they say on the internet. The agreement was announced and, according to Vice President JD Vance, “digitally” signed on Sunday, but the formal signing is scheduled for Friday. The text hasn’t been released, and Iranian and American officials describe its contents differently. The underlying issue—Iran’s drive for regional hegemony and the American determination to block it—remains unresolved. If anything Tehran appears more eager than before to assert control over its neighbors and the flow of oil from the Middle East. Moreover, Israel, which has its own war proceeding in Lebanon, wasn’t part of the negotiations.

The fate of Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to contain the political and economic fallout from the Iran war without openly abandoning his key objectives will become clear with time. In the short term, Mr. Trump has agitated and distressed the pro-Israel, hawkish wing of his political coalition, while reassuring his isolationist and anti-Israel supporters by demonstrating some distance between Washington and Jerusalem. With the Group of Seven summit under way, the president has calmed financial markets, talked down the oil price and given the leaders of allied countries reason to hope for a quick peace.

Mr. Trump has also preserved his freedom of action. The unusual interval between the dramatic announcement of a deal and its scheduled formal signing gives the president the option of walking away from the agreement if political blowback is too severe. Meanwhile, he has again seized center stage in global politics as virtually every government and every private business in the world hangs on his every word.

The memorandum of understanding is, in other words, a thoroughly typical example of Mr. Trump’s second-term diplomacy. He is driving world events with an agreement that hasn’t been formally signed, whose specifics are unknown and whose prospects are at best murky.

Viewed from that angle, this deal exemplifies both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. He is a master of political theater, producing, directing and starring in the greatest and most compelling spectacle of our time. Yet faced with opposition from serious and determined opponents, he often fails to achieve the kind of concrete results that mark the difference between a P.T. Barnum and an Otto von Bismarck.

Mr. Trump’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. The president is a cynic. Unencumbered by deep convictions and free from the constraints imposed by conventional morality or codes of honor, he can alter his tactics to the exigencies of the moment without hesitation or scruple. Cynicism has its uses. No statesman can succeed without a healthy dose of it. But like most potent drugs, it works best in small doses.

Mr. Trump comes by his cynicism honestly—his career in New York real estate, casinos and reality television led naturally to a dark view of human nature. As his political power grew and so many early critics and opponents swallowed their principles to kiss his ring, Mr. Trump’s intuitive belief that ideas and ideals don’t matter was powerfully reinforced.

But cynicism has limits. A cynic would have predicted that Britain would throw in the towel in 1940. Adolf Hitler held more cards than Winston Churchill did. But Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers and fought on to the end.

Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of people who mean what they say. His failure to understand the power of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the struggle regardless of cost. Mr. Trump’s peacemaking efforts as a result have fallen flat.

Ideas matter in the Middle East as well. However perverse and depraved the ideas that animate the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah, they inspire the kind of conviction that motivates people to fight grimly on against the odds. In the end, Mr. Trump underestimated Iran’s determination and resilience and launched a war that is proving much costlier and harder to end than he’d expected.

Mr. Trump’s apparent contempt for ideals like democracy and the rule of law also costs him. Threats to conquer Greenland reduced his ability to call on allies in the Iran crisis. And the American failure to work more closely and effectively with pro-democracy Iranians gives the regime one less problem to worry about. Additionally, Mr. Trump’s penchant for aggressively unpredictable course changes weakens the confidence of allies and bolsters cohesion among his opponents.

Mr. Trump is a supreme and often supremely successful opportunist. But that quality alone won’t see him through the tests that lie ahead.

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

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 12:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at you sad, pathetic faggots.
6ix, your swastika is showing. Did Nazis send "faggots" to the gas chamber? Google said yes, but with caveats:


Oh... I think you misunderstand me.

I don't have a problem with gay people.

Just you sanctimonious, Democrat voting faggots who never run out of nonsense to bitch about.


You're not a gay person, Second. You're a bottomless pit for cum. You're a cum dumpster. It is impossible for you to actually love anybody other than yourself. You just can't get enough cock is all. Especially NeoCon cock when they say something nasty about Trump. You REALLY love that flavor of cock.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 12:57 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:

Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
I understand that Trump is a thief, a liar, and the leader of America's Nazi Party. If Hitler had stolen this much money, his own people would have assassinated him:

Records reveal a $600,000,000 estimate for Trump’s ballroom project, with half from taxpayers

An internal cost estimate in March by the project’s contractor ran $200 million more than Trump has said publicly and counters his claims that no taxpayer money will be spent.

June 16, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

By Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/16/records-revea
l-600m-estimate-trumps-ballroom-project-with-half-taxpayers/

Five months after the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump claimed that the project to construct a massive ballroom and a bunker in its place would cost up to $400 million and that private donors would pay for all of it.

“This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on March 31, describing the project as including bomb shelters and major medical facilities.

But a detailed project summary prepared for the White House by the contractor more than three weeks before Trump’s comments estimated the total construction cost at $600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers, according to a copy of the contractor estimate obtained by The Washington Post.

By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor’s invoices obtained by The Post.

Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost. At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades.

Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.

The White House did not answer questions about the internal cost estimates or taxpayer funding.

“President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for Presidents for generations to come,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in a statement.

A spokesperson for McLean, Virginia-based Clark Construction said all project details are confidential and referred questions to the White House.

The Post obtained six cost estimates for the entire East Wing project, dated from July 2025 to March of this year, that show an increasing price tag as well as the expected sources of funding. Those records, as well as invoice logs and correspondence, provide the clearest accounting yet of Trump’s most ambitious construction project in the nation’s capital. The project is deeply unpopular with most Americans, and even some Republican lawmakers have balked at funding it.

When the White House first announced the plan to build a ballroom on July 31, 2025, it said in a news release that contributions from Trump and “other patriot donors” would cover the cost of the project, which it said would be $200 million. The White House added that the “United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.” There was no mention of an underground military bunker.

The records obtained by The Post show that the administration and Clark worked hand in hand starting last June to determine the scope and cost of construction.

White House officials received a preliminary estimate, dated July 11, projecting that construction would cost $270 million, with over $100 million coming from taxpayers through the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, the records show.

Emails from that time show that administration officials planned to use $3.6 million of Secret Service money to cover initial expenses for site preparation before demolition.

A White House lawyer explained in an email to colleagues on July 30 that she had added a line to contract language “to tie the project more closely to security-related issues since USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is providing the funding.”

“We believe this edit is important to comply with fiscal law principles,” wrote Caroline C. Hunter, general counsel in the White House Office of Administration. Hunter did not respond to messages seeking comment.

More than $1.6 million in Secret Service funds was also budgeted to cover part of the demolition itself, according to a cost estimate. The U.S. Secret Service did not provide answers to questions before publication of this report.

Three contracting and procurement experts who reviewed the documents at The Post’s request said the demolition of the East Wing appeared to fall outside the scope of the Secret Service’s mission of protecting government leaders.

“That is a stretch,” said Anthony Costa, a former General Services Administration official who oversaw complex government real estate projects during a career that spanned four presidential administrations. “How is that something Secret Service should do and fund?”

On Oct. 22, in the same week Clark began demolishing the East Wing, Trump told reporters that the price had risen to $300 million. He said that the military was involved but that the project would be paid for “100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”

However, a project summary dated Oct. 20, the day the demolition began, shows that Clark expected the full project to cost $478 million. Taxpayers were expected to fund nearly half of that, the documents show.

Speaking at the White House in December, Trump said the cost could reach $400 million. “We’re donating a building that’s approximately $400 million,” he said.

By March, Clark had informed the White House that the projected cost had increased to $600 million. A project summary dated March 5 shows that nearly half of that, $293 million, was expected to come from “private sources.” The estimate said an additional $155 million would come from the Secret Service, $149 million from the White House Military Office and $3 million from the Executive Residence, all sources funded by taxpayers.

That month, the administration acknowledged that the project included underground security features, including what Trump has described as a hospital.

A court issued an injunction in March, pausing construction above ground but allowing work to continue on the secure underground bunker after a historic-preservation group filed a lawsuit arguing that the White House had failed to seek necessary reviews.

In April, an alleged would-be assassin attempted to access the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner before he was apprehended by law enforcement. Within days, the administration said that rebuilding the East Wing, including the ballroom, was a national security imperative.

Trump and some elected Republicans said a new ballroom could more securely host events like the correspondents’ dinner. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and others introduced legislation that would have authorized $400 million in spending “to upgrade the presidential ballroom and strengthen the White House’s security infrastructure.” Seven Republican senators joined Democrats to block the idea.

“President Trump indicated that the ballroom was going to be built with private donations,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the senators who opposed it. “I think that’s the commitment that should be kept.”

In May, with the legislative proposal pending, Trump provided reporters with another update, showing off the construction site and saying all the parts of the project were intertwined. “This is one well-knit building. One thing doesn’t work without the other,” he said.

This time the president made more of a distinction over who would pay for each part of the structure. The government would pay for part of the construction on the new East Wing, he said, describing that work as “for the security of that and the whole White House premises.”

“They have a budget in Secret Service and the military to do some of the work that you see right here,” Trump said. The ballroom itself, he said, “is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer. This is a gift to the United States of America.”

The Secret Service and the White House Military Office (WHMO) have long held roles in securing the White House complex for the president, his family and staff members.

The three experts who reviewed documents related to the project said it was appropriate for the Secret Service and the WHMO to pay only for parts of the project that fall within their mission. Trump said some security spending would go toward defenses including “the greatest drone empire … to protect Washington” on the building’s roof.

But the experts also said the project documents contradicted the administration’s statements claiming that the East Wing would be paid for by donors. Stan Soloway, a former Pentagon acquisition official who is board chair at the National Academy of Public Administration, said that from a contracting and budget perspective, “you can’t disentangle the entertainment space from all of the other parts that are in here.”

He said it was clear from the documents that taxpayers are footing the bill for parts of the ballroom: “I think it’s inevitable that it bleeds over. It’s one structure.”

Jonathan Edwards and Dan Diamond contributed to this report.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:29 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real

His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?

By Molly Jong-Fast, Michael Tomasky | May 21, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/210114/donald-trump-cracking-up-mental
ly-unfit

Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Blue­sky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around 650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98 percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts.

So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?

“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”

Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.

The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.

Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:

9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article about Biden again
2:38am article on his ballroom
4:10am article on Iran

Yes, he’s always been like this. But many people think it’s worse now. Is it age? He turns 80 in June; there are millions of compos mentis octogenarians out there, but it’s fair to ask whether age is slowing Trump down, especially given the way that he and his backers carried on relentlessly about Biden. Does he have dementia? Or are we seeing more glaring manifestations of his legendary arrogance, which is rooted in his profound insecurity? Or is it merely the stupidity of a man who not only never reads a book but reportedly can’t even read one-page briefing papers?

Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.

1. Age

“We Barely Talk About It”

In 2025, as he began his second term, Trump was the oldest person ever to be sworn into the presidency. But Trump’s oldness does not exist in a vacuum. He is the successor to Joe Biden, a president who was forced to give up his reelection bid because of a disastrous debate performance that led to his supporters deciding he was, at 81, too old to run for president again.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden. During Biden’s presidency, Trump and MAGA writ large were laser-focused on Biden’s age. Even the mainstream media reported endlessly about Biden’s use of the back stairs in Air Force One, his bicycle tumble, his fall onstage at the Air Force Academy graduation in 2023, his name mix-ups (he once called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi the “president of Mexico”). The mainstream media was so obsessed with Biden’s age that, according to Media Matters for America, The Wall Street Journal published 41 articles in the first six months of 2024 on the topic. There was even a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper that alleged that there was a cover-up about Biden’s age-related decline (which, essentially, there was). Even Trump’s nonsensical musings about the autopen are in fact callbacks to Biden’s term, when he was accused of being so addled that he couldn’t do the work of the presidency, even including simply affixing his signature to documents. In mid-April, Trump signed his name to a document and remarked, “Oh, that’s a good one. Look at that, Joe. Do you think Biden can do that?”

Donald Trump is not a normal president; he is the most powerful president in modern American history, or maybe all of our history, because of how he has used unitary executive theory and surrounded himself with a Cabinet filled with billionaire sycophants who largely got their jobs because of their willingness to sign off on anything he wanted. Imagine a Cabinet of Mike Johnsons but somehow richer and dumber. While Trump 1.0 featured the president being held back by guardrails, Trump 2.0 feels like it’s lacking a working frontal lobe: Ideas pop into Trump’s head, and he just executes them. He went from bragging about being a peacemaker to stampeding Venezuela and starting an impulsive, dumb, and possibly disastrous war with Iran. Take away that FIFA peace prize.

We would be remiss not to mention Trump’s mystery hand bruise, which seems to appear monthly and is coated in orange makeup that, like all the makeup Trump wears, does not even come close to matching his skin tone. The White House’s explanation is that he bruises easily because he pops aspirin like they’re Tic Tacs, and because he shakes so many hands. And then there are the pictures of Trump’s drooping lip, which sparked a flurry of speculation after a speech he gave in Miami last November.

Maybe it’s all nothing. But this is a guy who ran on being healthier and spryer than the guy before him. He told us that Joe Biden was too old and too sick to be president, but that he would be able to do the job because he had accomplished certain feats: “The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” he wrote in January on Truth Social.

Trump shows his age the most in the apparently diminished functioning of his frontal cortex—the thin layer of gray matter that helps the brain make decisions and regulate itself, the part of the brain that prevents you from saying the unkind or insane thing. Trump appears unable to hold himself back. He called a reporter “piggy.” He called another a “fresh person.” He confuses Greenland (which he wanted to invade) with Iceland.

Graydon Carter, a co-founder of the digital magazine Air Mail, has been tracking Trump closely (and mocking him mercilessly) since his halcyon days at Spy magazine in the 1980s. Carter said the Donald Trump of now is not the same man who went down that escalator 11 years ago. “He has gone from being the chatty, handsy salesman at the office happy hour to the crazed, opinionated antiquity shuffling the mail cart from cubicle to cubicle,” Carter said. His old Spy colleague Kurt Andersen agreed: “When he became a recurring character in Spy, Trump was an angry, needy ignoramus, liar, bully, and braggart more desperate for attention than anyone I’d ever encountered. And a vulgarian with short fingers. He’s the same—except in his forties he had impulse control in public, didn’t ramble and forget and repeat himself or show other signs of mental illness.”

Trump will turn 80 this June. He will be 82 when he leaves office, assuming he does, so we will see what the future holds. He compares favorably to Biden in one respect. Biden aged visibly before our eyes in ways that most of us associate with watching our parents pass through that portal from their seventies, when they can mostly still drive and golf and play tennis, into their eighties, when those things start to be out of reach. Biden’s voice quieted. He held his mouth agape in that old-man way. He hunched over just a little. Trump has none of those issues, for now.

Vin Gupta, the public health physician and MS NOW medical analyst, said he thought Biden was a pretty healthy 80-year-old. “The guy bikes 30 miles in Rehoboth Beach every weekend,” Gupta said. “From a cardiovascular standpoint, [Biden] was way more robust than Trump,” who famously never exercises, unless you count getting in and out of a golf cart. Yet Biden got run out of the race, “and with Trump, we barely talk about it,” Gupta said.

That’s largely because of the right-wing media. Do they even discuss his age on Fox News? Sometimes—like when one Fox host cheerily picked up Trump’s claim that he’s “aging in reverse.” Trump will literally have to be drooling and forgetting his own name before Fox and others will acknowledge his age as an issue. And the same goes, of course, for Republicans in Congress. That wall of denial will prevent Trump’s age from being an issue until some point when it’s utterly impossible to deny.

2. Dementia

Disinhibition and Digression

In early April, Mary Trump—who, in addition to considering her uncle to be a danger to the country and the world is, remember, a clinical psychologist—took note in two interviews of what she called “concerning changes” in her uncle’s behavior. “Sometimes it does not seem like he’s oriented to time and place,” she told New York magazine. “And on occasion, I do see that deer-in-the-headlights look.” Donald’s father, Fred, she said, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but not till well into his eighties.

No one can say, of course, whether Trump has dementia, an umbrella term for a range of mental conditions, among which Alzheimer’s is the most notable. The common visible symptoms, according to the website of the Alzheimer’s Association, include difficulty performing a number of tasks Trump hasn’t had to perform in years or perhaps ever: paying bills, preparing meals, remembering appointments. The symptoms listed on the Mayo Clinic website are, for present purposes, more on point: problems communicating or finding words; issues with reasoning or problem-solving; confusion and disorientation.

So: Is the president demented? Harry Segal is a clinical psychologist at Cornell University and a former co-host of the podcast Shrinking Trump. (His co-host was psychologist John Gartner, who in 2017 started an organization of mental health professionals, Duty to Warn, that sought to caution Americans about Trump’s unfitness for office.) Shrinking Trump ran for 70 episodes, from May 2024 until October 2025, when it was stopped out of fear of being sued by the president. In an interview, Segal was quick to note that he is not offering a clinical diagnosis of Trump. That, he said, would be unethical. But it’s not unethical to comment on “behaviors so striking that you would recommend an assessment for someone in your family who demonstrated” them.

What has he seen? Three concerning things. One: “He began to have odd quirks of speech where he would begin a word or a phrase and seemingly lose his place, slur, and end up with some kind of compromise word,” Segal said. This is called phonemic paraphasia. It’s a possible sign of dementia (though it could have other sources), and Trump has been doing it for a long time: He coined the “word” “infantroopen,” for example, back in 2019. The same year, he referred twice to the need to look into the “oranges” of the Robert Mueller investigation. He finally carefully enunciated “origins” on the third go.

Second, Segal “began to notice the tangential digressions.” After the mainstream media picked up on how aggressively random and disjointed his stump speeches had become, Trump gave it a name, “The Weave,” and said it was all intentional. But the claim was nonsense. The pattern has continued into his second term—recently, for example, in a late-March Cabinet meeting about the war, when he got lost in a five-minute digression on how much money he’d saved by using Sharpies to sign legislation and executive orders.

The third thing that caught Segal’s ear was that, on certain occasions, Trump said or posted something really shocking even for him: “The outlandish things he’s been saying when people died, right? Like Robert Mueller, I am glad he’s dead, or Rob Reiner.” Maybe that’s just an older man losing patience with decorum, Segal said; but “this feels a little bit more like dysregulation. Like, ‘I have a wildly aggressive thought, I am just going to say it.’”

After Trump’s crazed post on Easter Sunday, Vin Gupta made national headlines by posting on X: “Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”

In an interview, Gupta kept returning to the word “impulsivity.” Speaking the week after Easter, he said: “I think his impulsivity and his erratic behavior, as we’ve all seen just in the last two weeks, seems like it’s getting worse. Like he just has less of a filter. Even at baseline, he had no filter. But it seems like the disinhibition is worse. And when you think about the family history, I think reasonable people can ask reasonable questions.”

Those reasonable questions include, for example: Why does Trump so frequently boast about acing cognitive tests? In January, Trump bragged that he’d nailed his third cognitive test, adding that the tests were “something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take.” That’s one way of putting it. Another way of thinking about it, Gupta said, is that people are administered these tests on a repeat basis only when concern about possible mental impairment exists. Said Gupta: “He’s using it as a sort of a talking point to say, ‘Look how fit I am,’ and in reality, that should tip off anybody.”

Finally, these questions extend to Trump’s physical health, and the White House’s opacity about it. Last fall, Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an examination. The White House said it was for an MRI. Trump later revealed it was a CT scan. Maybe not a big deal, but why the confusion? Over Easter weekend, rumors flew across social media that Trump had been admitted to Walter Reed. There’s been no confirmation of that, but the cartoonish White House denials when such rumors swirl aren’t credible either. That weekend, spokesman Steven Cheung posted about the president who doesn’t read briefing papers, is known to pass his days watching hours of cable news, and has been caught napping in meetings and at events: “There has never been a president who has worked harder for the American people than President Trump. On this Easter weekend, he has been working nonstop in the White House and Oval Office.”

3. Arrogance

Too Much and Never Enough

One thing we know for sure Trump suffers from is his endless, embarrassing, proud, and loud arrogance. It was an unforgettable and, at the time, shocking moment in March 2016 when he was asked on Morning Joe whom he was speaking to on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things.”

That turned out to be a little amuse-bouche that gave us all a small, early taste of what life with Trump would be like. The constant and utterly unquenchable need to be the center of attention. The ceaseless preening and boasting about very average accomplishments. (How many times has he used the phrase “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it”?) The confidence that long, long ago boiled over into auto-infallibility.

It would be one thing if this were just some tic of his that was dismissible. But it has policy implications, which is to say, it affects all of us. Michael Patrick Lynch is a humanities professor at the University of Connecticut whose 2019 book, The Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture, was more a critique of our social media outrage culture than of Trump per se; nevertheless, Lynch said, Trump very much suits the age of toxic argument, arrogance, and certainty. If you’re certain you’re right, Lynch said, you have nothing to learn from anyone else, and you don’t need to pay attention to evidence. “If you ignore evidence, if you ignore other people’s experience, if you don’t think you have anything to learn, then you are going to end up ignoring reality,” Lynch said. “And we know that’s a central feature of Trump’s universe.”

The thing about arrogance, or at least Trump’s version of it, is that it needs constant feeding, a steady stream of new targets to dominate and conquer. At first, he ran for president just as a vanity project, not expecting or even really wanting to win. Then he won. Then, once he actually became president, he needed to be the greatest ever, in his mind. “This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington,” he said in a December 2022 video introducing his “digital trading cards.” In his first term, he needed to dominate his enemies, but as many have observed, there were still some guardrails around him. In the second, with the guardrails gone, he’s extended his reach from the hated deep state to universities and law firms.

He started to run out of domestic enemies, so it was only a matter of time before he turned his gaze outward to the world. This is the precise reason why a person had to be gullible in the extreme to believe him when he said he wouldn’t be starting any wars. He had to start wars. His insatiable arrogance, his grandiosity, made it inevitable. At some point, conquering the United States would not be enough.

“What I really believe is that Trump is struggling with a mix of grandiosity, desperation, and old age,” said Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987) and has been doing penance ever since. “Nothing he’s ever accomplished has been sufficient to overcome his lifelong experience of emptiness and fraudulence. Now, in his final turn, he’s trying to take over the world. It’s only about making himself feel more worthy. He couldn’t care less about the suffering and destruction it causes.”

The problem, though, is this. Once you’re the emperor of the world, at least in your mind; once you’ve “toppled” the Iranian regime and “brought peace” to the Middle East and brokered at least eight other peace deals—what’s next?

This is the really dark and twisted side of Trump’s arrogance. He needs to be right about everything because deep down, he knows that he knows nothing—about history or economic policy or health care. He needs to dominate because deep down, he’s massively insecure. He is contemptuous of everyone—his enemies, of course, and “Sleepy Joe,” and radical left lunatics; but also of a lot of his groveling supporters. (Do you think he has an ounce of respect for, say, Pam Bondi or Ted Cruz?)

But in the end, Schwartz believes, “There is nobody he’s more contemptuous of than himself.” The arrogance and grandiosity are a mask. That’s what makes the title of Mary Trump’s 2020 book about her uncle so brilliant: Too Much and Never Enough. He always needs too much, and yet, it’s never enough for him. And while this personality trait has always been there, and it stands separate in many ways from his age or his possible mental deterioration, it’s implicated in those things, too. The more vulnerable he feels, the more arrogant he’ll become—the more likely he’ll be to post about, oh, destroying an entire civilization. He backed down from doing that. But remember—he has two and a half years left.

4. Stupidity

Every Accusation Is a Confession

In November 2025, Trump berated a reporter for asking him why he blamed Biden over an Afghan national who had shot two National Guard members near the White House. “Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? Because they came in on a plane, along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

This was far from the only time Trump has called a reporter stupid, and it won’t be the last. Trump is very much a known name-caller, and “stupid” is one of his favorite insults, though he also enjoys the use of the phrase “low IQ.” The put-down is pretty rich because Trump has to be one of the least intellectually curious people ever to occupy the Oval Office. But despite this, the state of being stupid seems to be an obsession of Trump’s. It’s the thing Trump calls people when he’s done with them. In April, Trump posted that people who had been crucial to him (Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones) were “stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their record.”

Here’s why this is telling. For Trump, every accusation is a confession, and no accusation of Trump’s seems more of a projection than this one. In 2019, his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen testified before a House committee: “I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.” Certainly, grades aren’t the sole measure of intelligence, but Trump’s obsession with hiding them speaks to a deep insecurity about his own intelligence. A lot of famous people are more than comfortable being honest about their own poor grades.

One of Trump’s best tricks is his ability to obfuscate his gaffes. With the sheer volume of things he’s said, he’s created a wall of sound, an endless stream of noise that comes at us like a firehorse, one mistake drowned out by the mistake that follows like a Möbius strip of misstatements and lies. But there have been moments when Trump’s stupidity has broken through. One classic came during his first term, in April 2020, when he gave a mind-blowing press conference that broke through the noise. At the time, he was giving nightly press conferences with Covid-related updates. And he said: “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light.” He turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and said, “I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting.”

Even Trump’s staunchest defenders seemed flummoxed. After that presser, Trump took to X to say it was “not worth the time & effort” to do the Covid pressers. It was one of those moments when Trump’s own stupidity eclipsed the sun.

One of the ways Trump tries to buttress his own intelligence is by bragging about an uncle, John Trump, who taught at MIT. Trump claims that John was the “longest-serving professor” at MIT. This is of course not true, but it’s closer to the truth than a lot of the things Trump cooks up. Trump’s own insecurity betrays his anxiety about his own intellect, which is certainly merited.

Aside from age, possible mental deterioration, and unfathomable and unstable arrogance, we must deal for another two and a half years with the fact that the president of the United States just isn’t a smart man. The specific question that concerns us here is: Which of his many bad decisions are explained mostly by his stupidity?

The answer? It’s not reassuring. It’s not, for example, his decision to start a war with Iran. That’s explained mostly by his arrogance/insecurity: His need to erase from the historical record anything positive Barack Obama did, in this case the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Iran was evidently abiding by until Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal in 2018. That deal stands as the most striking example of something Trump had to destroy simply because Obama did it. So that was about his arrogance and insecurity.

No—the answer to the stupidity question, quite unfortunately for the American people, concerns the one issue that most directly impacts most Americans: the economy. Most notably, his commitment to tariffs.

Just stop and ponder this: Trump sincerely appears to believe that tariffs can eliminate the income tax. He has said this arguably more than he’s said anything else in his second term, with respect to actual policy. It’s a deranged fantasy. Before Trump, tariffs brought in about $80 billion in revenue. He has raised that to $264 billion—so, yes, it’s tripled! However, since the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on tariffs, the U.S. government has to return at least $160 billion of that money. And income taxes bring in—ready?—about $2.7 trillion. It’s possible he knows this and chooses to ignore it. But from the way he talks, it just seems like he doesn’t know it and doesn’t care to know it. That’s not age or dementia or arrogance. It’s just stupidity. And it isn’t going to change.

Conclusion

Two and a Half More Years of This?

There’s been a lot of talk over the spring about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment option—removal of a sitting president, due to incapacity, by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet. But let’s be real. This Cabinet of fatuous fawners is unlikely to do that. Trump would have to do something we can’t imagine today—take his clothes off at a press conference, bomb a U.S. city—for that to happen. Nobody is going to take advantage of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

The Democrats are still favored to take back the House of Representatives, and they will presumably impeach him over something. (It’s not like there aren’t a lot of choices; as of late April, https://www.impeachtrumpagain.org/ suggests 27 different reasons.) The Senate, however, won’t convict. Even if the Democrats take narrow control of that body, 15 or so Republicans would have to join them to convict Trump of the House charges. Not happening. Said the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens: “No one will stop him. The only people who can stop Trump are Republicans. They’re not going to stop him. They’re going to let him keep crashing and killing and destroying.”

So in all likelihood, we’re stuck with him. What’s he got up his sleeve that he hasn’t unleashed on the nation and the world yet? God only knows. ICE is still hiring like crazy. He’s still building immigrant detention camps. His acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, reindicted James Comey days into the new role; Letitia James can’t be far behind. FBI Director Kash Patel says arrests are coming relating to the 2020 election. He wants to take over Cuba. He still wants Greenland. He hasn’t played the Insurrection Act card. He’s looking at ways to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” a catchall phrase if ever there was one. Said Miles Taylor, the first-term Trump administration official who quit and joined the opposition and now runs https://www.defiance.org : “The machine is going to spit out a bunch of fucking prosecutions against these people. That is going to happen, hands down, no doubt about it. There will be nonprofit groups and individuals that are just protesters that are deemed domestic terrorists.”

And there will be outbursts, and Truth Social posts, and accusations, and God knows what else. Two years ago, a nervous nation watched a president who was no longer up to performing the job. That president just couldn’t adequately fill the office. Today, that nation is watching a president who may well destroy it.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 6:38 AM

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


Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET

‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

Harper, 304 pages, $35

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2

JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.

These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.

Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.

Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”

More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.

You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them.

Whether Mr. Vance’s error arose from laziness or dishonesty or something else, I don’t know, but alas it typifies the low regard he has for people who profess views he dislikes. If he wins the presidency, one hopes he can take his own counsel to practice humility in the face of difficult questions. But by then, he may have a different set of views.

Mr. Swaim writes the Journal's Unruly Republic column.

Download JD Vance’s books for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Vance,%20J.D. or https://z-lib.sk/book/45vmxEveqa/communion-finding-my-way-back-to-fait
h.html for this particular book.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 7:24 AM

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


If Trump signs, he will have formalized his surrender to Iran. But he is known for breaking treaties, so his signature isn't final.

Read the 14-Point Draft Memorandum Between the US and Iran

(Bloomberg) -- The US and Iran are expected to formally sign a memorandum of understanding on June 19 in Switzerland, paving the way for 60 days of talks aimed at ending their war for good and putting strict new limits on Iran's nuclear program.

Below is the text of the 14-point draft memorandum, as seen by Bloomberg News.

By Jonathan Tirone, Daniel Flatley and Josh Wingrove

Tue, June 16, 2026 at 5:09 PM CDT

1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.

2. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs.

3. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.

4. Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States Lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.

5. Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of ??Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.

6. The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, While ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.

7. The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, both primary and secondary.

8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran's nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.

9. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.

10. The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the United States Treasury Department will issue waivers for exports of Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products and their derivatives, and all related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.

11. The United States undertakes that, in light of the progress of negotiations towards a final agreement, frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available. These funds, whether held in the master account or transferred, will be used for any final beneficiary payment determined by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will be fully available for use. The United States undertakes to issue all necessary permits and licenses on this basis.

12. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that an implementation mechanism will be established to oversee the successful implementation of and future commitment to the Final Agreement.

13. Following the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and upon receipt of assurances regarding the commencement of implementation of Articles 4, 5, 10, and 11 of this Memorandum of Understanding, and the continued implementation of these steps, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States will enter into negotiations for a Final Agreement solely with respect to the remaining Articles.

14. The final agreement will be approved through a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/read-the-14-point-dr
aft-memorandum-between-the-us-and-iran-220917023.html

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 9:00 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost

The president’s comments at the G7 summit revealed that he doesn’t understand the war he started—or the words that come out of his own mouth.

By Tom Nichols | June 16, 2026, 6:42 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-g7-comments-misu
nderstsand-middle-east/687569/

Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.

The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.

Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”

“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.

Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.

Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.

Until today.

“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.

“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”

The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological” reasons? (This is reminiscent of his comment that America should seize Greenland because it was “psychologically” important to him.) Does the commander in chief understand what he’s saying? More important, will Iran keep tons of highly enriched uranium under this new deal or not?

“The biggest thing,” Trump said today, is that “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” That’s fine, except that it didn’t have one before, either, and now it has an even greater incentive to get one. But nuclear issues are very complex and technical, so let’s move on to Trump’s comments about something less complicated: Middle Eastern politics.

Once again, the president seemed unable to comprehend either the situation or his own words. No one outside of the Trump administration has yet seen the final memorandum of understanding that Trump and the Iranians have signed, least of all, according to some reports, the Israelis. If the outlines of the deal are in line with the administration’s own talking points, it’s bound to cause serious agita in Jerusalem: The terms reportedly require a cessation of Israeli hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tricky condition considering that Israel was not a party to the negotiations. This is probably why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Israel would maintain its presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria for “as long as necessary.”

Trump, in other words, is trying to deal away Israel’s right to defend itself, treating it less as a sovereign country and more as a kind of 51st U.S. state run by an annoying governor who needs to get with the program. But what if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah attacks Israel? According to the president, the Israelis need to calm down, and he minimized Hezbollah as “a little pinprick out there that constantly rears its head.”

Besides, Trump has an answer for the problem of Hezbollah: Outsource its elimination to the Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa. Trump said that he suggested to Israel to “let Syria take care of Hezbollah, ’cause to be honest with you, I think they do a better job of doing it.”

It’s true that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the organization now in power in Syria, has plenty of experience fighting against Hezbollah. But Syria, a regime still trying to get its legs under it, is not going to march next door and pacify Lebanon—especially not with Israel occupying parts of Syria.

Trump has never shown very much concern about the conduct of Israeli military operations anywhere (including the war in Gaza, which he viewed primarily as a public-relations problem). But now that he needs to rein in Jerusalem at Tehran’s behest, he has taken the position that the Israelis are causing too much damage in Lebanon. And in a stunning reminder that alliances for Trump are only expedients, he pivoted to praising al-Sharaa and criticizing Israel, saying that if Israel “can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job.”

This kind of flip-flop illustrates Trump’s view of global politics: States are just a bunch of playing cards that he can rearrange at will, which makes watching him talk about foreign policy this way like watching someone cheating at solitaire. Even now, after many years as president, he is constantly frustrated to find out how little leverage he has when other nations refuse to abandon their own interests and do as he commands.

Trump’s comments about the Middle East may not make any sense, but one thing that has emerged in 4K clarity is that the only world leader who got pantsed worse than Trump in all of this was Netanyahu. No one should pity Israel’s prime minister: He brought this situation upon himself and his nation. Netanyahu, along with the Iran-war hawks in the United States, somehow thought that he could be smart or flattering or persuasive enough to avoid the inevitable burn that comes from trusting Donald Trump. Netanyahu refused to see that Trump, when it comes to self-interest, is as predictable as a sunrise: When something he’s involved with goes bad, he walks away and lets others suffer the chaos he’s created.

In the past, Trump has tried to conjure new circumstances by speaking them aloud and attempting to wish them into existence. His tired garble in France, however, is something different. It suggests that Trump, more than ever, is unable to fathom what’s happening in the world around him and has been reduced to turning all of his previous statements upside down:

1. A regime that was once the epitome of evil is now a reasonable partner;

2. nuclear material that once represented an existential threat to America might now sit in Iran forever;

3. Syria and Iran and Israel and Lebanon will now do things that they would never do, just because he wants them to.

None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 12:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:27 PM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.
When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:43 PM

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


Trump in Defeat [Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today, too?]

The president went to war triumphant and will likely leave greatly weakened.

By Jonathan Lemire | 11:05 a.m. ET on June 17, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/trump-defeat-ira
n-war/687566/

President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.

The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.

Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.

Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress. His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.

It’s not usually a vote of confidence for your deal when you won’t let anyone else read it. But Trump and his team have threatened to not release the Iran agreement until after it is signed in Geneva on Friday. Officials have said that the deal will extend the cease-fire over the next 60 days and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the U.S. to drop its naval blockade and oil to flow from the region again. Although Iran has agreed to not collect fees on the strait for the next 60 days, it has (according to Iranian state media) left open the door to doing so afterward—and the deal delays addressing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, despite Trump having cast it as his urgent motivation for war. The president’s lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have supported the agreement, as has Vice President Vance, who has been promoting it during preplanned TV appearances to sell his new book. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others have expressed quiet reservations with how the deal will be implemented, according to four outside advisers and senior White House officials who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The deal has also alarmed the GOP’s Iran hawks. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host who championed the case for war, posted on social media his disbelief that Trump had rebuked Netanyahu and that the agreement remained shrouded in secrecy: “I have asked for days, why can’t we, the people, see the damn MOU?’” Senator Lindsey Graham has also made his reservations known, although he has carefully avoided blaming Trump and tried to pin responsibility on Vance, who was the lead American negotiator in the early stages of the talks. Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator, went so far as to declare that “Trump has surrendered to Iran.” And Marc Thiessen, a former President George W. Bush aide with whom the White House consulted during the war, has been one of many conservative voices warning that Trump’s emerging framework looks a lot like the Obama deal.

That notion has infuriated the president. A longtime Trump confidant told me that Trump “was incensed by the dissent”—particularly the Obama comparison—from once-loyal Republicans. Trump has reflexively tried to tear up anything associated with the former president. He mocked the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which aimed to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, during his first presidential campaign and withdrew from it in his first term. But that decision allowed Iran to work on its enrichment program. That, in turn, prompted Trump, one year ago next week, to authorize a massive bombing campaign that leveled uranium-enrichment facilities. Despite Trump’s claim at the time that Iran’s nuclear stockpiles were obliterated, negotiations resumed early this year over the fate of Tehran’s program—until they were scuttled when the United States and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran in late February.

In the first days, the strikes, which were pushed by Netanyahu, killed Iran’s supreme leader and inflicted extraordinary damage on its military and artillery. But Iran proved resilient, attacking its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, and plunging the world into an energy crisis. The price of gas skyrocketed globally, including in the United States. Trump’s poll numbers, already teetering, fell further, and he began looking for a way out. He tried to intimidate Iran into taking a deal, at one point vowing to destroy its “whole civilization,” but walked away from each threat, leaving him open to mockery from Tehran.

As the war dragged on, it became clear that Trump’s goals for the conflict were going unfulfilled. The Iranian navy was damaged, but Tehran’s ballistic-missile capability survived, as did its ties to militia proxy groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. The hard-line regime in Tehran appears poised to sell oil again and receive up to $300 billion in funding from Gulf states that it could use to rebuild. Iran has tightened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz and demonstrated that it can close the waterway at will. Although Tehran has promised not to build a nuclear weapon, no enforcement mechanism has been established. And to the shock of some Iran hawks, Trump yesterday seemed to back off his previous pledge to seize the uranium, saying, “You could make the case, ‘Why are you even bothering?’ Because it’s not really valuable.”

Iran has seemingly come out of the conflict with an ability to check Israel’s freedom to strike Lebanon and potentially elsewhere; in recent days, Trump has blasted Netanyahu for endangering the cease-fire and demanded that he call off an attack on Beirut. Trump’s broadsides, including calling the prime minister “a very difficult guy,” threaten to widen a rift between the U.S. and its longtime ally in the Middle East. Despite Trump’s reprimands, Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will continue to authorize attacks that it deems necessary for self-defense.

“The president has made the decision that this is over,” one of the senior administration officials told me. “That’s all that matters now. And Netanyahu will have to listen, period.”

The White House, in defending the deal, has stressed that any financial relief to the Iranians is performance-based, that Tehran will see the funding only if it keeps the strait open and maintains its pledge to not develop a nuclear weapon. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement that “what the President has achieved on the battlefield and at the negotiating table is nothing short of remarkable and will strengthen American security for many years to come.”

The war has cost Trump. It has rattled the nation’s economy. The Pentagon estimated that it had spent roughly $29 billion on the conflict by mid-May, but independent experts believe that it has spent tens of billions more. The U.S. military’s munitions supply has been depleted, putting at risk its ability to defend its interests in Asia and Europe. The United States’ failure, despite its overwhelming military might, to bring Iran to its knees could encourage China, Russia, or North Korea to take aggressive action. In the eyes of many, Washington has hurt its moral standing around the globe; promises to help the Iranian people rise up went unfulfilled, and more than 170 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a girls’ school in the war’s first hours. Overall, more than 3,000 people in Iran were killed in the conflict, according to Iranian officials. Thirteen U.S. service members were also killed.

The war’s outcome may usher in a new phase of Trump’s presidency. He is unlikely to abandon his adventurism on the world stage, and aides told me that he is eager to pivot to Cuba soon—looking for regime change, likely through economic pressure, but not ruling out military force—and he may revisit a bid for Greenland. This week at the G7 summit, he also resurfaced his ambition to help end the Russia-Ukraine war. His triumph in Venezuela feels like a distant memory. Leaders in Europe are now standing up to him. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has not given him the trade deal he wants.

Back home, Trump is still the most powerful figure in politics. But those small acts of Republican defiance are adding up. He has had a series of losses in the courts, including in his efforts to remake the nation’s capital in his own image. Democrats are favored to capture at least one house of Congress this November, which would give them the ability to slow Trump’s agenda and open investigations into his administration. Once the midterms conclude, the race to replace Trump will begin. Although that will further diminish Trump, it is unlikely that he will go out with a whimper.

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.

Look at Trump. The great unifier.
When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.

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


Joe Biden* made our country trillions of dollars poorer and you didn't say shit about it.

No. That's not true. Any time that blame was placed where it belonged, you defended Joe Biden* by saying that nothing that was happening was his fault and he had no power over any of it. (Which actually WAS true, but only because he was a fucking vegetable and not for any of the reasons you were claiming).


So nobody is interested in hearing any of your bitching about billions in 2026.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


And really...

At the end of the day, why are you so confident the "war" with Iran is over?

You've never believed a single word that's come out of Trump's mouth so far.

Why start now?



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 4:35 PM

SECOND

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


The US has signed up to a deal which puts it in a far worse strategic position than it was in on February 27, 2026 (the day before the bombing started). It is not returning to the status quo ante: it is creating an entirely new, and much weaker, status quo (for the USA).

The USA is pledging to respect the Iranian regime, immediately restore some funding to it, immediately allow the Iranian regime to start trading oil freely, and not to interfere with its present nuclear capabilities. Moreover, the USA is tacitly recognizing that Iran will control shipping in the Strait (with Oman) going forward and has not ruled out the ability of Iran and Oman to charge tolls after 60 days.

In the near future, the US is pledging to help organize a massive reparations program for Iran, to pull back American forces from the vicinity of Iran, to end all sanctions on Iran, and to pledge its commitment to all of this with a UN Security Council Resolution.

And what has the US gotten in return?

Well, it has gotten a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (under significantly worse conditions than existed on February 27, 2026) and a restatement of a nuclear pledge that Iran has made for years and years.

It is hard to grasp just how humiliating this is for the USA (and Israel). They chose to start this war after great preparation, they used their most advanced technology, and they used up massive military stocks in bombing Iran for six weeks.

And they are in a much worse situation.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
t

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

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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 4:37 PM

SECOND

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


Key MOU Clauses And Commentary

1 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.

Commentary: The key thing here is that the US has made it perfectly clear that it expects Israel to end its war in Lebanon, and therefore that the US wants attacks on Hezbollah to stop. This was a major Iranian goal and they have achieved it. It is important to see that ending the fighting in Lebanon as a US commitment is made twice here.

2 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.

Commentary: Regime change is now permanently out as a US policy. The US is now pledged to respect the internal power of the IRGC. Remember, when the bombing started, regime change was a key victory condition for Trump.

4 — Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.

Commentary: The last sentence is extraordinary. This seems to pledge the USA to remove its forces from near Iran after the deal. “Proximity” is not defined, but that would have to take in a number of close US partners in the Gulf. The US is now allowing Iran to have a major say in where US forces can be deployed.

5 — Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.

Commentary: Iran pledges not to “charge” shipping in the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days (though it is worth noting that Iran said yesterday that they might still levy “fees”. The important thing is that Iran is clearly saying that with Oman it can determine the future of traffic in the strait and Iran has in no way given up its ability to change tolls. This represents a major Iranian increase in authority.

6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.

Commentary: Do you know what this is? It is the US promising to “undertake” organizing a plan for reparations to pay back Iran for all the damage that US bombing caused. The US is not committing to give a definite amount itself, but the US is also not ruling out the possibility that a great deal of US money will go to Iran.

7 — The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the sanctions termination issue above mentioned, and expressed their intentions to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Commentary: Pretty self-explanatory. The US is pledging to end “ALL TYPES” of sanctions on Iran and they mean it. Iran obviously wanted this point emphasized and included the second part which simply restates the commitment.

8 — The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on a satisfactory framework being agreed upon in the final deal. The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned. They express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiations in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.

Commentary: This is the key political point for Trump. He gets Iran to say what it has been saying for decades: that it does not want to get nuclear weapons. It will be spun as some Iranian concession, but it is hard to see how that is. There is nothing concrete here about Iran agreeing to hand over anything to the USA, merely sentences that will postpone action. The US is clearly accepting the fact that Iran will have some kind of nuclear program going forward as it pledges to discuss enrichment.

9 — Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

Commentary: Just to reinforce the point: Iran can keep its present nuclear program as is. It is an notable indication of Iran digging in its heels on this after clause 8.

10 — The United States of America undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MOU and until the termination of sanctions, US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.

Commentary: A massive win for Iran. As soon as the MOU is signed the US is basically suspending all sanctions that have been hampering Iran from selling oil for years and years. Iran can now trade freely without any threat from the US when it comes to its oil and financial infrastructure. A clear sign that all sanctions will be over soon.

11 — The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during negotiations. Such funds, whether retained in the original account or transferred, shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America undertakes to issue all necessary licenses and authorizations accordingly.

Commentary: The interesting word here is “implementation”. It is not entirely clear what that means—it might mean immediately upon signing or it might not. If it means upon signing, the USA is handing back to Iran all the frozen assets under its control. This is a tricky thing to calculate. There are somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion of frozen Iranian assets in different holdings, but the US does not definitively control most of this. Some stories are saying that $12 billion of this will be handed over immediately. Long story short—Iran will get billions very soon.

14 — The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UNSC resolution.

Commentary: The Iranians are basically trying to go to the UN Security Council to get endorsement for all this. Remember that their allies, Russia and China, have veto power. It will be to try and compel the USA not to return to using military power against them in the future.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
t

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

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