Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead by 6ixStringJack

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Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, June 19, 2026 07:46
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VIEWED: 9130
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Thursday, June 18, 2026 7:25 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.

Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

6ix, you would NOT write these false stories, unless you are NOT a decent human. You would NOT write "Fuck Ukraine" and "Rootin'ForPutin" unless you are indecent. Decent people don't vote for Trump. I know this because all the people I know who voted for Trump I knew to be horrible before Trump got into politics.

Quoting someone 6ix despises: "This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it."

The quote is from a much longer article:

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk are dominating our economy and our politics, which tells us something about the era we're living through

Robert Reich | Jun 15, 2026

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-era-of-the-super-asholes

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes “makes me smart.” Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a “consoler-in-chief” in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists”; his 2017 “Muslim ban”; his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization as threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom — particularly in Belfast and London — Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous”). In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”

Both Trump and Musk also have long histories of misogyny.

Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has frequently disparaged women, describing female opponents and journalists as “disgusting,” “slobs,” and “piggy.” He has a well-documented history of sexual aggression. A federal jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, awarding her millions in damages. And he has appointed conservative judges instrumental in rulings that overturned long-standing reproductive rights.

Musk, too, has faced frequent claims of misogyny and sexism. Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit detailing a pervasive “’Animal House’” culture — accusing Musk of creating a hostile environment, treating female employees as sexual objects, and retaliating when employees challenged his sexism. Separate reports have also emerged alleging that Musk engaged in inappropriate relationships and persistent advances toward employees, including asking them to bear his children.

Musk has 14 kids with different mothers and talks about them as a “legion,” as in a Roman military unit. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he told one of his partners, “we will need to use surrogates.” He has frequently drawn ire for promoting a “bro culture” and mocking femininity. He sparked a major online debate by stating that “Instagram is for girls” and has repeatedly shared or amplified sexist theories and extremist content regarding traditional gender roles.

**

The question, then, is why have two such loathsome men come to dominate America and much of the rest of the world at this point in history? Is there something about American capitalism or culture in the 21st century that has given both such extraordinary power?

Part of the answer, it seems to me, is a loss of our sense of common good — a decline of the role of public honor and public shame and a disintegration of public morality — that has allowed, even encouraged, these two dangerous men to acquire such untrammeled wealth and power.

The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”— not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”

To be sure, the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1880s to the 1910s, was dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy men who violated social norms and monopolized the economy. “The public be damned,” said William Henry Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad.

But the reign of these “robber barons” ended when the American public — outraged by their abuses of wealth and power — rose up to demand reform and a return to the common good.

Subsequently, during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required that we work together for the common good. Many of us — including both white and black Americans — were motivated to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. And a sense of common good moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

Yet the common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today. It feels slightly corny and antiquated if not irrelevant. There is no longer any restraint on aggressive men (almost all of them men) using whatever means possible to accumulate vast wealth and power on a scale that exceeds even the Gilded Age.

This moral breakdown is not one of personal, private, religious morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality — in a broad understanding of what we owe one another as members of the same society. Trump and Musk exemplify that breakdown. The wealth and power accumulated by these two deeply flawed men is evidence of how far we’ve fallen, and the scale of the challenge we face to rectify it.

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:13 AM

SECOND

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

What Did You Expect?

Perhaps this was always how Trump’s ill-conceived war was destined to end.

By Daniel B. Shapiro | June 17, 2026, 6:59 PM ET

Daniel B. Shapiro served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-war-reversals/687
590/

The whiplash is jarring.

President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.

And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.

Let’s count the ways.

Nuclear: A core goal of the war was to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program could never produce a nuclear weapon. Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 advanced that goal by destroying key nuclear facilities and burying Iran’s enriched uranium, setting back the program significantly.

But little had changed in the nuclear program by the time this war was launched this past February, and little has changed since. Now, in exchange for an oft-repeated pinky promise that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, Trump has agreed to delay negotiations on the key goals of removing Iran’s enriched uranium and banning further enrichment, and the verification measures needed to guarantee that those commitments are upheld. These talks are punted to a second phase that may never arrive or never end.

Sanctions: Trump long advocated maximum-pressure sanctions, and beat his chest during the war about the cost to Iran of the U.S. naval blockade.

But now we will pay for reopening the Strait of Hormuz—simply, at best, restoring the prewar status quo—by approving the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign assets and waiving sanctions to permit Iranian oil sales. More goodies are in store for the regime, in the form of fees paid by ships transiting the strait and a shockingly large $300 billion reconstruction fund. (The latter, supposedly to be funded by Gulf states, recalls the worst of former Secretary of State John Kerry’s post-JCPOA diplomacy, when he sought to drum up investment in the corrupt economy of a still-adversarial regime.)

With no change in the regime’s character or ideological outlook, it is being rewarded with a shift from maximum pressure to maximum windfall. There is no reason to think that the money will flow to schools and hospitals or provide any benefit to the Iranian people that the regime still suppresses. It will, instead, almost certainly fund more missiles, drones, and support for terrorists at home and abroad—threats about which the memorandum of understanding is silent.

Lebanon and Hezbollah: The war, misguided though it was, represented the zenith of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, with unprecedented combined operations and ample praise by Trump for the partnership. Trump voiced recognition of the genuine threats Iran posed to Israel, not least from its network of terrorist proxies.

But Israelis have been aghast at the speed of Trump’s turnabout. Israeli officials were excluded from negotiations on the MOU, and were not even given the opportunity to review the text. Meanwhile, as U.S. and Israeli interests diverged, Trump barked expletives at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adopted the Iranian demand to impose restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon—even as the militia continues to attack northern Israeli communities—as part and parcel of the broader cease-fire.

Regime: Trump also long correctly identified the Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous and evil, with the blood of many Americans, Israelis, Arabs, and its own citizens on its hands. Israel’s decapitation strike enabled by Trump on the war’s opening day gave clear expression to that understanding. One did not need to endorse this war—I opposed it—to recognize the imperative of containing and weakening the regime of the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps until such time as the Iranian people could overthrow it.

But in a flash, Trump and his weirdly credulous vice president have discovered the putative moderation, reasonableness, and, dare we say, decency of what is, if anything, an even more hard-line crop of Iranian leaders. Most states in the region, and soon in Europe, see which way the wind is blowing and are moving to improve their relations with Iran. Regime leaders must be chortling over their surprising and unearned new international legitimacy.

To those at home and abroad whose necks are snapping and whose heads are spinning, I have to ask an obvious but uncomfortable question: What did you expect?

This debacle is, at the end of the day, classic Donald Trump.

In multiple ways, we are seeing Trump’s essential characteristics playing out on a national-security matter of the highest stakes.

First, he is utterly assured that he can do anything, that he can will any reality into being, despite all evidence and expertise to the contrary. Seduced by the overnight success of the removal of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, he convinced himself that he could bring about the rapid collapse of the Iranian regime. His own intelligence experts and Cabinet officials counseled otherwise. Yet he pressed ahead.

Second, he deepened his self-deception through his childish belief in the invincibility of U.S. military power. A testosterone-infused operation name—Epic Fury—and a daily video diet of buildings going boom reinforced his delusion. The members of the United States military are fearsome and highly professional, and they carried out their assigned tasks with precision and effectiveness, degrading various Iranian capabilities. But Trump was incapable of aligning those operations with achievable strategic objectives. His mind doesn’t work that way.

Third, when the going got tough, Trump started to flail. One day he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, the next (and the next and the next) he promised that a deal was just around the corner. Never a detail man (for policy, anyway; he goes deep on architectural trimmings), he confessed to being bored with the war. And as when his business ventures veered toward bankruptcy, with better off-ramps in the rearview mirror, he grasped for any way out, damn the costs to U.S. credibility, alliances, and influence.

Fourth, he was susceptible to flattery, especially from strongmen. Remember his fruitless exchange of love letters with Kim Jong Un? They produced no breakthrough in nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. Somehow, without even an 80th-birthday card from Iran, Trump flattered himself into believing that he was the leader who could recognize, and cultivate, a new spirit of cooperation coming from the “very rational” and “not radicalized” leaders now in charge in Tehran.

Fifth, as always, Trump is out for Trump. He stumbled by entering a war that Americans broadly opposed, and their opposition increased as they felt it in their pocketbooks at the pump and the grocery store. But it soon became clear, with a midterm-election disaster looming, that Trump would pull the plug. Again, ending the war was necessary; giving away the store while doing so was panic-induced self-preservation.

Finally, Trump swaggered into the war, and will skulk out of it, with total confidence in the slavish support of his political base. His faith will probably be justified. Remember their discovery of the absolutely essential national-security imperative that we grab Greenland? (Wait for it: Cuba is next.) The hurrahs for Trump the conqueror will soon transform into oohs and aahs toasting Donald the diplomat. A few lonely, honest critics of the JCPOA—a flawed but workable deal that verifiably set back Iran’s nuclear program—will resist the demand to tie themselves into pretzels, and instead acknowledge that Trump’s deal makes the JCPOA look ironclad.

No doubt, Trump’s visibly advancing age has also played a role. As with all of us, time intensifies his most fundamental personality traits: ego, vanity, self-delusion, impatience, panic under pressure.

And so here we are. A war that should not have been fought. An enemy that was hit hard but remains unrelentingly hostile and is now reaping unexpected strategic gains. The credibility of the U.S. in tatters and its military readiness compromised. Alliances and partnerships under stress. The global economy in tumult, inflicting financial pain on American citizens that will linger even as oil prices decline. A fine and avoidable mess all around.

Indeed, what did anyone expect?

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 1:56 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.

How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."

Why would I do that?

Since in the nearly 10 sober years that I have known you, you have never once called out Joe Biden* or a single Democratic Party politician or left-leaning media figure on any single topic that they've ever spoken or written about, the fact that I've called out Trump and his administration at least a dozen times since his election would just be an Undefined Operation when held up against your never-wavering, dogmatic adherence to whatever they tell you to think on any given day.

Pure Division or Multiplication by ABSOLUTE Zero.

THAT is what we are talking about here. Period. End of sentence.

Look in the mirror, quarter-wit.

You're a fucking cultist goon.

Everything you've ever accused your betters of are all things that you yourself were guilty of all along.

Deep down you know that I'm right and it just eats away at you a little more everyday... that knowledge that in those rare, fleeting moments where you're brutally honest with yourself about who you really, truly are...

The knowledge that you are nothing more than a hypocrite all the way down to your deep and very dark core.

That's why they call it cognitive dissonance.

You're so adrift at sea and lost without an anchor that there's never going to be any saving you.

You're stuck with this always-miserable little prick that you've allowed them to turn you into for the rest of your short life.

Congratulations to you, Second. You will one day die The Good Guy who never drank and never did drugs and never smoked and always voted Democrat and always took the moral high ground, except for every single fucking second that you thought nobody was watching you.

And you've earned everything that you've got coming to you.

Your end will be sad, and it will be very, very lonely.

But they didn't leave you... did they?

No...

That's the real reason your brutal self-honesty comes out to play so infrequently these days, isn't it?

You pushed them all out. YOU were the one who put all of that distance between yourself and the ones who used to love you. You hung your impossible standards on all of them for their entire lives, and only after they finally broke under all that weight did they learn to run away from you. Then and only then did they finally find the strength to leave you far behind.

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

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 2:42 PM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Deal Sidesteps Key Reasons He Went to War With Iran

Pact makes no demands on Tehran over its militias or huge arsenal of missiles

President Trump defended on Wednesday his agreement to end the Iran war, saying he wanted to avoid an “economic catastrophe” that could have resulted if the conflict the U.S. launched had continued.

Trump said he was influenced by the stock market’s rise as he worked toward a resolution of the conflict. He said he didn’t want to be compared with former President Herbert Hoover, who was president during the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression.

“He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump said at the Hotel Royal where he and other world leaders gathered for the Group of Seven meeting. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.”

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-deal-sidesteps-key-reason
s-he-went-to-war-with-iran-6820b1b4

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 3:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.

How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."

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

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 4:18 PM

SECOND

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

Iran Has Humiliated Trump

Officials in Tehran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation.

By Graeme Wood | June 18, 2026, 12 PM ET

Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State. He joined the magazine in 2006 after working as a translator, courier, and bootlegger in northern Iraq.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/iran-trump-war-defeat-deal/6
87595/

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic.

Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. Watching Trump and his aides sell the deal is in some ways as humiliating as the deal itself. “If other countries have” ballistic missiles, Trump said at the G7 conference yesterday, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran “not to have some.” Elimination of those missiles was one of the primary aims of the war, and thousands of Iranians, as well as more than a dozen Americans, died contesting it. Trump began his remarks today by stressing that the United States could have kept up the bombing if it wished “for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open.” Keeping the strait open is one of the main purposes of the United States Navy, so these words sound a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job, and might be equally vulnerable elsewhere, too.

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic?

The best defense of this deal, from a U.S. perspective, is probably one that takes into account these economic and political headwinds facing Iran, and notices that they are more likely to change the regime than any further military action. You don’t need to huff and puff to blow down the house when the weatherman is predicting a typhoon tomorrow.

Another possible defense is that, like all deals made by Trump, and most deals made by the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is not much of a deal anyway, because both parties intended to break it before it was even signed. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN yesterday that “people shouldn’t read too much into the language” of the agreement, because the core of the agreement is “understandings we have with each other.” This statement goes against all legal advice ever given. (Read the contract; ignore what the other guy tells you while he watches you sign it.) Much of what’s in the agreement is so vague as to be meaningless. We know what a nuclear deal looks like, because Barack Obama got one, and it established detailed and invasive inspections that are most certainly not delineated in any document leaked or mentioned by Trump officials. The deal might have been reached only because both sides wanted to stop fighting, and both were willing to add vague terms because they didn’t want to be bound by precise ones.

The same U.S. official’s other comment to CNN was assurance that the “language” of the document—the same language the official encouraged his domestic audience to ignore—is calibrated to let Iranian officials “say what they need to say for their domestic politics.” This intriguing comment reflects a view of Iranian leadership I have heard from officials in previous administrations, including Democratic ones: that they are susceptible to flattery, and that they regard the exasperation and humiliation of the Americans as an end in itself.

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Now it is time to see how Iran will use the dividends from this humiliation. The $300 billion in investments is hardly the biggest opportunity for Iran to cash in. Far more valuable would be a pivot by the regime’s leadership away from some of the dogmas of its past, and toward reform. No previous leaders have had the ability to make such a pivot, and they probably did not want to make one anyway. The current leaders, however, have positioned themselves as saviors of the Islamic Republic, and with that credibility could institute certain changes that are widely known to be necessary and desirable, but that would have looked counterrevolutionary if proposed by anyone else.

Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it. The peace is up for grabs.

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 4:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.

How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."

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

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:44 PM

SECOND

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

Israelis see Trump-Iran deal as ‘catastrophic capitulation’ and ‘diplomatic Oct. 7’

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/middleeast/israel-iran-deal-r
eaction-netanyahu.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rFA.S9Pt.kVhjEC6FP6wa&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The New York Times reports:

Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

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

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Thursday, June 18, 2026 11:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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

Nah.

I'll see the plan as it's finished, if it actually happens, when it happens and we all get to see it. I don't need to see anything that Bloomberg claims is real. Especially when you know as well as I do that somebody like Trump might be feeding bad intel out there just to help the media look like a bunch of dumb, ideologically captivated assholes that we already know they are.

What's the point about seeing it until it's done? Not a good goddamned thing that you're going to do about it anyway except for bitch and moan.

Oh... nevermind. There's your fucking answer.

How about you and Ted shut your fucking mouths, and only post shit here after it happened?

Then you won't look like a couple of stupid assholes every day.
6ix, change your signature to: "I get all my facts from the President, not from the Fake News, which is why I am well informed."

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

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

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Friday, June 19, 2026 5:53 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

part two Khamenei the second

take that $300 Billion and then call you a bunch of insults

Khamenei approves deal, says Trump acted out of 'desperation'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/irans-khamenei-approves-deal
-says-185725223.html

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:11 AM

SECOND

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

If Only Trump Knew What Vice President JD Vance Is Doing

If the president is infallible, there must be some other explanation for his Iran defeat.

By Jonathan Chait | June 18, 2026, 1:05 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/vance-surrender-iran-trump/6
87597/

Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”

Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.

The administration’s Plan A is to claim the war was a complete success—10/10, no notes, would wage it again. A handful of hawks have been willing to repeat this line. The primary argument is that the bombardment set back Iran’s conventional and nuclear military capabilities enough to justify the cost to the United States. “The fact is that the missile program is in ruins, just like the nuclear weapons program,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt proposed.

This rationalization overlooks a few small points, such as the fact that Iran’s missile program is not in ruins at all. American intelligence reportedly estimated last month that Iran retains 70 percent of its missiles and launchers, and has restored 30 of its 33 missile sites. Trump himself is now arguing that Iran must retain ballistic missiles as a matter of fairness. (“They have to have some,” he said yesterday, “because other people have some.”) Moreover, Trump’s deal would ultimately give Iran enormous new revenue streams by eliminating decades of economic sanctions, along with providing hundreds of billions of dollars in what Iran calls reparations. The money will eventually allow Tehran to build its military capacity beyond current levels.

As for Iran’s nuclear program, if it were in ruins, that would primarily be as a result of bombings that occurred last year; outside experts believe that the most recent war caused less damage to the program. In any case, ruins seems exaggerated. Iran’s nuclear material is buried underground but can be recovered, and its ability to deter attacks by threatening the Strait of Hormuz will permit it to restore the program over time. This is precisely why Iran hawks were insisting for months—even as Vance reportedly expressed skepticism of full-scale war—that the continued military action was necessary.

After having claimed that Iran’s missiles and nuclear efforts are existential risks to American interests, most hawks will have trouble bringing themselves to call the deal that leaves the programs intact as a great victory. Republicans who have too much self-respect to reverse themselves so nakedly have a fallback plan: pretend that the defeat was Vance’s doing.

“Conservatives on the Hill are stunned that Vance would erase all of Trump’s military victories in such a terrible deal. Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” one unnamed congressional Republican told NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer. The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro complained, “The vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.” On Fox News, Brian Kilmeade tentatively suggested, “I just wonder if the vice president, who was against this, by all reports was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn’t the right person to bring this conflict to an end.”

But why would Trump authorize his vice president to make unnecessary concessions? Why, indeed, would a supposedly brilliant negotiator leave such an important negotiation to Vance at all? (Kilmeade explained that Trump “has too many plates in the air that he can’t be into every detail,” as if obsessing over the color of the Reflecting Pool is a more important use of the president’s time than avoiding a geopolitical catastrophe.)

If the logic here is contorted, it does make political sense to Republican hawks who want to elevate Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Trump’s successor. The war they supported has ended in failure, but they don’t want the party’s anti-interventionist wing to benefit. Therefore their plan is to blame Vance, who opposed the Iran war all along, for the defeat, while insulating Rubio, who is said to have favored the conflict, from its consequences. The main opponent of starting the war becomes the sap tasked with promoting the surrender terms to the public.

Vance is clearly betting that most Republicans will prefer his version of the story, which presents the Iran war as the latest Trump win in a line of unbroken victories that runs from the greatest landslide in American history to making the Reflecting Pool blue again. “Have a little faith in the president of the United States,” he said at a press conference today, “The idea that he is gonna strike a deal that’s bad for the American people, it’s preposterous.”

A healthy conservative movement would be able to concede error, rather than resorting to a choose-your-own-adventure ruse in which the war is Trump’s if we won and Vance’s if we lost. But the movement has decayed to the point that honest analysis is impossible, and prominent Republicans hardly bother to pretend otherwise.

When details of the memorandum of understanding first leaked, Senator Lindsey Graham expressed dismay. Graham has espoused ultra-hawkish views for decades, and has deferred to Trump again and again in an apparent effort to maintain his ability to pull the president toward his position. When a reporter informed Trump this week of Graham’s concern, the president didn’t even bother to show anger.

“Lindsey is skeptical? I’ll have to talk to Lindsey,” Trump said. “He’ll be in big trouble. Lindsey’s good. Lindsey’s fine. He’s not skeptical. He’s just fine.” Indeed, just as Trump expected, Graham has swallowed his objections and praised the deal as “essential” and “worthwhile.”

On some level, GOP hawks understand that their real dispute is with the president, not with Vance. A “source close to the president” told the New York Post that “JD is just a proxy for attacking [Trump], because they can’t do that.” If Republicans wish to scrutinize how their party blundered into a calamitous war, the personality cult around the blunderer in chief might be a good place to begin.

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

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:14 AM

SECOND

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

'We've made the world more dangerous': Former top CIA official reveals global havoc caused by Trump

Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon joins Nicolle on Deadline White House to give her assessment on the likely ramifications for global security in the aftermath of Trump's war with Iran.

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

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:22 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump’s Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.

Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.

Yet here’s the irony: On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.

Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to high natural gas prices.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable

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

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Friday, June 19, 2026 7:46 AM

SECOND

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

The Price of Defeat in Iran

An indeterminate end to a foolish war leaves Americans more disillusioned than ever with engagement in the Middle East.

By Thomas Wright | June 19, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/06/iran-defeat-marshall
-plan-price/687600/

Seventy-nine years ago this month, at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan for the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, committed more than $13 billion for Europe’s postwar recovery—approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars. Donald Trump’s deal with Iran, which he signed yesterday in Versailles, commits the United States and its regional partners to ensuring that Iran receives “at least $300 billion” for its “rehabilitation and economic development.”

This is, in effect, a Marshall Plan for the Iranian regime, albeit not one funded with American taxpayer dollars. But whereas the original was designed to consolidate an American victory, this one is designed to manage the consequences of a defeat that pushes the United States closer to disengaging from the Middle East.

The text of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran is remarkably vague. Point one commits the United States and Iran to regional peace and stability. Vice President Vance told CNN that this means Iran will stop funding proxy forces and destabilizing the region; Tehran might well interpret that differently. The text does reiterate Iran’s commitment not to build a nuclear weapon, and it says that Iran agrees to “downblend” its highly enriched uranium on-site (which basically means diluting it). But the memorandum includes no other details regarding limits on enrichment. It says that Iran will not charge a toll for passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the next 60 days, but after that, nothing is specified.

When asked about the $300 billion, Vance claimed that the Gulf countries would supply it all. But the deal makes no such provision. It tasks the United States and its regional partners to develop the plan. Perhaps this is why a senior administration official told CNN that “people should not read too much into the language.” The official went on to describe the memorandum as a political document, saying, of the Iranians, “We came up with language that allows them to say what they need for their domestic politics.” But Iran will almost certainly demand that the United States stick to the letter of the agreement.

What we do know is that the relief for Iran is to come in stages. An immediate waiver of sanctions will allow it to export oil. This is a return to the arrangement under the Obama-era nuclear deal and is estimated to be worth up to $60 billion a year. Once the memorandum is implemented but before a final deal, Iran’s frozen assets will be released for it to spend as it seems fit. This reportedly consists of $24 billion held in banks in Qatar, Oman, and Iraq, although Tehran believes that its total inaccessible assets worldwide may exceed $100 billion. Only if a final agreement follows on this provisional one will Iran be provided with $300 billion and the lifting of all sanctions, including those linked to terrorism, its ballistic-missile program, and human-rights abuses. But Iran will already have received quite a lot up front.

The prospect of a final deal is remote, given the gap between the two sides. History is replete with wars that end in interim agreements, deferring difficult issues to future negotiations, only for the interim arrangement to become permanent. That is very likely to happen here.

When it does, Trump will face a choice. He can applaud the downblending of uranium and accept the new status quo. Or he can end the waivers and reimpose sanctions on oil. If he chooses the second course, Iran will, at a minimum, begin to charge a toll for transit through the strait, using the leverage it gained in the war. Things could spiral from there, but Trump has been clear that he wants out of the war and fears the economic consequences of a closed strait. That won’t change as the midterms approach. The Iranians surely know this, which makes it even less likely that they will compromise further.

The deal is a bad one. But Washington has no good choices at this point. Judged by the administration’s own objectives, the outcome is difficult to describe as anything other than a defeat. The United States entered the conflict seeking to eliminate Iran’s leverage, constrain its regional influence, and force it to accept strict limits on its nuclear program. Instead, Iran emerged with sanctions relief, a pathway to generous reconstruction financing, continuing ambiguity over key nuclear issues, and new leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.

The reason for this defeat was not a reluctance to use force. Many hawks advocated introducing ground troops, but doing so would have made matters much worse. The United States almost certainly would have wound up fighting the sort of casualty-heavy counterinsurgency campaign that has led it to costly defeats elsewhere. If the U.S. had attacked Iran’s civilian infrastructure, Iran would have retaliated against infrastructure in the Gulf, widening the war and exponentially worsening the global economic shock waves.

This was a war that should never have been fought. It was also fought foolishly. Beginning the campaign with a decapitation strike on the Iranian leadership made the conflict existential for the Iranian regime, which then had no reason to hold anything back. By contrast, the 12-day war last summer had the limited objective of destroying Iran’s nuclear program; knowing this, Tehran tempered its response to avoid a protracted all-out war with the United States. It did not do then what it did this winter: attack the Gulf states and close the Strait of Hormuz. Trump made no preparation to deal with these responses, even though they were widely predicted.

The memorandum of understanding may not even encapsulate the most important of Iran’s gains from this American blunder: The war could well mark the end of America’s will to play a security role in the Middle East. Domestic support for the U.S. alliance with Israel is in free fall. U.S. bases in the Middle East have been badly damaged, their vulnerability as targets exposed. Trump and his successors will be reluctant to use force against Iran in the future, knowing, as is now clear, that doing so will likely trigger the closure of the strait and an economic crisis. And Americans could be forgiven for feeling that they have tried every kind of policy in the Middle East over the past quarter century—war, diplomacy, working with civil society, building up regional partnerships, pushing various players to sign accords with one another—and watched them all fail.

No one should be under any illusion that an American withdrawal from the Middle East will make the region more peaceful or stable. The Israel-Iran rivalry would likely intensify, resulting in regular closures of the strait and possibly more wars. New rivalries, including one between Israel and Turkey, would no doubt fester and grow. The situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would almost certainly worsen and become more hopeless. Russia and China would increase their influence and strategic presence.

But right now, those who favor American engagement in the Middle East have very little to work with. Israel is perceived as trigger-happy and indifferent to U.S. interests, and many Americans have come to see the region as a strategic black hole.

That might change if a new Israeli government comes to power, especially one led by a mainstream critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war policy, such as retired General Gadi Eisenkot, who has been rising in recent polls. Then the United States could possibly be persuaded to reengage: to help build energy infrastructure that circumvents the Strait of Hormuz and to return to the project of normalizing Israeli-Saudi ties, for which progress for Palestinians is a precondition.

But the window for such a shift is very narrow. For two decades, Washington has debated how to engage with this volatile region. Now many Americans question whether they should engage at all. If that sentiment hardens, Trump’s agreement with Iran may be remembered as the moment the United States began its withdrawal from the Middle East.

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

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