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

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Brainwashed by who?

I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.

Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.

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

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

Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!

Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?

-----------

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

You need to see more videos of real life, Sigs. The stuff they're not showing you on the news.

Oh, puhleeze!

Y
Do you REALLY think I get my news from "the news", stupid?
I've seen videos of women burned to death in cages.
Or slowly drowned in cages.
Heads being chopped off.
A man anally raped to death with a knife.
People falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers.
Hears stories from my Ethiopian colleague about what is done to slave labor.
Open air slave markets.
I've seen the horror, son.

Quote:
I'm not even goign to entertain this conversation with you while it just came out that over 250 THOUSAND FUCKING GIRLS in the UK have been molested by Muslim men since they started taking them in and the government has so much control over the population that they were able to hide that until just recently.

Yup! I know about that too!

Quote:
White British people are a minority in London today. We have several American-hating Muslims as politicians in America now, but if the Democrat Party doesn't fucking fix itself, we're about to have A LOT FUCKING MORE OF THEM.

Blame the British government and Dems, then.

Quote:
They hate us. They plan to kill and/or enslave us.

And I just watched as 99% of the people in my country took a fucking knee and let the government ramrod everyone up the ass with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations and nobody did a fucking thing about it until they decided it was over.
blag blag blah

You're just spewing.

Quote:
FUCK YOUR WHITE GIRL EMPATHY.

IT'S NOT EMPATHY!

Quote:
Unless you start seeing the real world on this issue, we will never see eye to eye and I will not be shy about it.

SIX, you are gaspingly, astonishingly stupid once somebody has got ahold of your gonads.

Those head choppers? THEY ARE NOT IRANIAN,

THEY ARE SAUDIS AND THEIR WAHHABIST ACOLYTES. NOT IRANIAN. EVERYTHING YOU THINK IRAN DID WAS DONE BY DEGENERATE MULSIM WAHHABISTS, TAKFIRIS, OR WHATEVER YIU WANT TO CALL THEM.

Those rapists and molesters? NOT IRANIAN. PAKINSTANIS, AFGHANIS, AND OTHER MEN "EDUCATED" IN SAUDI WAHHABI-FUNDED MADRASAS, where they spread their troglodyte ideology.

WHO USED THE HEAD CHOPPERS AS PROXIES?

WE DID.

WE - the Dems, the CIA, globalist Repubs.
WHO cozied up to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to the troglodyte "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, knowing they've been spreading their filth across the Mideast, and now the western world, for decades?

WHO was in an unholy alliance with the source of that festering, disgusting ideology, bc of the almighty dollar?

YOUR problem, son, is that you lump all Muslims together. Indonesia is mostly Muslim. Is Indonesia a hotbed of terrorism?

It's time you woke up to who our REAL enemies aee.

Iran wasn't an enemy, until now. That's what your stupidity supported.

GET HOLD OF YOUR EMOTIONS, they're running you.

-----------

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 10:36 AM

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

A Key House Dem Breaks Down the White House’s ‘Unfathomable’ Iran War Funding Requests

by Hunter Walker | 07.22.26 | 5:15 pm

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-key-house-dem-breaks-down-the-whi
te-houses-unfathomable-iran-war-funding-requests

Weeks after the Iran War began, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) predicted to TPM that it would become a billion-dollar-a-day “mess.” Now, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth taking to Capitol Hill to request almost $67 billion in supplemental war funding, Morelle says his fears have been confirmed. And though Morelle is a member of two key committees with oversight of the Pentagon, he claims Congress has been given little information about where all the money is going.

“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle said in a conversation with TPM on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s unfathomable.”

Morelle is vice-ranking member of the House Appropriations committee and a member of its defense subcommittee. Despite these positions, Morelle said Trump administration officials haven’t offered any detailed insight into their funding requests.

“Usually if you’re in a classified setting, they should be prepared to give you information, but they haven’t done that,” he said.

Hegseth on Tuesday told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the “urgent” supplemental war funding was necessary to avoid “critical shortfalls” in combat pay and munitions supplies that could be caused by military operations. As he made his case, Hegseth said the war, which began on February 28, had cost $37.5 billion so far.

That figure announced by Hegseth is far below internal cost estimates that have been reported on by NBC News and expert analyses, which are in line with Morelle’s initial projection and amount to approximately $150 billion overall. Given that staggering total and the spike in gas prices that has come along with the conflict, the economists at Moody’s say the Iran War has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.

All of this war funding is coming in the wake of President Trump nearly doubling defense spending overall. The latest supplemental funding request totaled almost $88 billion including the money Hegseth said was specifically needed for the war.

As the administration has sought this increased funding, it has turned to three separate avenues: standard congressional appropriations; reconciliation legislation, which can avoid the filibuster; and the supplemental request. Morelle said this approach, which is unprecedented, has added to the overall lack of transparency since reconciliation funding can bypass appropriations committees. And he claimed the administration has not answered questions about why they have placed various requests in each different “bucket.”

“That doesn’t come to the appropriators. It goes to the authorizing committees. So the appropriators and the authorizers aren’t even together,” Morelle said, adding, “There’s no answer. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”

That behind-the-scenes chaos is taking place as Trump and his team have made continually shifting statements about their objectives in Iran.

“We still don’t know what the goal here is,” Morelle said. “It changes all the time.”

When Hegseth previously appeared before the House Appropriations Committee, Morelle chastised him for being less transparent and up to date in his requests than America’s founding military leader was in the days of quill pens and correspondence conducted via horseback. Morelle reiterated that point in his conversation with TPM.

“General Washington was more timely and more accurate in his reports to the Continental Congress in 1776 than the current Department of Defense Secretary is with the United States Congress,” Morelle said.

The increase in government spending is only one aspect of the war’s cost. Morelle noted the conflict will also impact other government programs and the national debt.

“The whole thing is alarming because, look … there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” he explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”

Along with the financial questions, there are legal concerns surrounding the war in Iran. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires a president to obtain congressional approval for a military conflict or withdraw troops within 60 days of hostilities beginning. With the Iran War going far beyond that mark, the Trump administration has argued various informal and unsuccessful ceasefires marked an end to the fighting and effectively restarted the clock. Administration officials have also suggested that rebranding and renaming the military operation triggered a reset. Morelle flatly rejected those arguments and said it “clearly stretches credibility.”

“This is all part of a chain of events directed at one single adversary, one single set of circumstances,” Morelle said, adding, “It would have been absurd to have put [the War Powers Act] in place if all you had to do was change the name of the operation.”

In June, War Powers resolutions urging the president to end the conflict passed both the House and Senate. House Democrats are currently mulling similar legislation and already have some GOP support.

Hegseth faced withering questioning from both Democratic and Republican senators during his testimony on Tuesday. Morelle predicted more and more Republicans could oppose the administration’s funding requests or get behind future War Powers votes due to the broad unpopularity of the war.

“I think they’re starting to really worry about this in some quarters. It’s an unpopular war, which has driven up gas prices and … the price of other things, which people are paying for. They can see that every time they go to the gas pump,” said Morelle. “So you’re paying more money, you’re getting fewer services, whether it’s Medicaid or SNAP benefits or all the other things that they’ve cut. And you’re now seeing, we have now 18 service members who’ve lost their lives in this, which is beyond tragic. And you still haven’t, have the president be able to articulate what in God’s name we’re doing there.”

Recent polling has shown just 29% of Americans approve of the war. That’s in line with some of the worst figures from the Vietnam War.

“I think this is historic in terms of numbers. … 29% approval wrote for the conduct of the war,” Morelle said. “I mean, that’s not even the MAGA base.”

Given that math, Morelle predicted that, whatever happens in Congress, the conflict will be brought to an end when voters have their say in November.

“It is happening. It’s not happening at the speed with which we’d like it, but it’s going happen one way or another. It’s either going to be the Republicans are going to say, ‘Okay, that’s it, Mr. President,’ or they’re going to lose their seat,” Morelle said. “The American people have a way of ultimately being in charge here, which is the whole point of the thing, right?”

Despite his political optimism, Morelle believes there will be serious consequences before this fight is brought to a conclusion.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “In the interim while they’re making those decisions, more money is being spent, the lack of accountability continues, and it’s really — it’s deeply disconcerting.”

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 11:42 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Brainwashed by who?

I just want to see every Muslim in the world dead is all.

Nobody told me to think that way. They are evil people and they all need to die. That includes any white and black American Muslims too. Every single one of them.

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

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

Oh, no, EVERYBODY told you to think that way!

Tell me, Oh Wise One, in any movie, TV show, or video game, have you ever seen a Muslim man portrayed as a good guy?

-----------

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

You need to see more videos of real life, Sigs. The stuff they're not showing you on the news.

Oh, puhleeze!

Y
Do you REALLY think I get my news from "the news", stupid?
I've seen videos of women burned to death in cages.
Or slowly drowned in cages.
Heads being chopped off.
A man anally raped to death with a knife.
People falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers.
Hears stories from my Ethiopian colleague about what is done to slave labor.
Open air slave markets.
I've seen the horror, son.

Quote:
I'm not even goign to entertain this conversation with you while it just came out that over 250 THOUSAND FUCKING GIRLS in the UK have been molested by Muslim men since they started taking them in and the government has so much control over the population that they were able to hide that until just recently.

Yup! I know about that too!

Quote:
White British people are a minority in London today. We have several American-hating Muslims as politicians in America now, but if the Democrat Party doesn't fucking fix itself, we're about to have A LOT FUCKING MORE OF THEM.

Blame the British government and Dems, then.

Quote:
They hate us. They plan to kill and/or enslave us.

And I just watched as 99% of the people in my country took a fucking knee and let the government ramrod everyone up the ass with lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations and nobody did a fucking thing about it until they decided it was over.
blag blag blah

You're just spewing.

Quote:
FUCK YOUR WHITE GIRL EMPATHY.

IT'S NOT EMPATHY!

Quote:
Unless you start seeing the real world on this issue, we will never see eye to eye and I will not be shy about it.

SIX, you are gaspingly, astonishingly stupid once somebody has got ahold of your gonads.

Those head choppers? THEY ARE NOT IRANIAN,

THEY ARE SAUDIS AND THEIR WAHHABIST ACOLYTES. NOT IRANIAN. EVERYTHING YOU THINK IRAN DID WAS DONE BY DEGENERATE MULSIM WAHHABISTS, TAKFIRIS, OR WHATEVER YIU WANT TO CALL THEM.

Those rapists and molesters? NOT IRANIAN. PAKINSTANIS, AFGHANIS, AND OTHER MEN "EDUCATED" IN SAUDI WAHHABI-FUNDED MADRASAS, where they spread their troglodyte ideology.

WHO USED THE HEAD CHOPPERS AS PROXIES?

WE DID.

WE - the Dems, the CIA, globalist Repubs.
WHO cozied up to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to the troglodyte "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, knowing they've been spreading their filth across the Mideast, and now the western world, for decades?

WHO was in an unholy alliance with the source of that festering, disgusting ideology, bc of the almighty dollar?

YOUR problem, son, is that you lump all Muslims together. Indonesia is mostly Muslim. Is Indonesia a hotbed of terrorism?

It's time you woke up to who our REAL enemies aee.

Iran wasn't an enemy, until now. That's what your stupidity supported.

GET HOLD OF YOUR EMOTIONS, they're running you.

-----------

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

Get fucked.

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.

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

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 11:52 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:

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.

Elon Musk controversially stated on The Joe Rogan Experience that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", adding that this can lead to "civilizational suicidal empathy" when overextended to the detriment of societal stability.

How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles

March 22, 2025 8:05 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-se
en-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:02 PM

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

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.
Elon Musk controversially stated on The Joe Rogan Experience that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", adding that this can lead to "civilizational suicidal empathy" when overextended to the detriment of societal stability.

How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles

March 22, 2025 8:05 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-se
en-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

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

Fuck NPR and fuck you.

You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.

We're not following you off the cliff.

Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.

You won't be missed.

Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.

So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.

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

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:29 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Fuck NPR and fuck you.

You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.

We're not following you off the cliff.

Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.

You won't be missed.

Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.

So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.

"Behold The Strange Spectacle Of Christians Against Empathy."

Jesus - the central figure in Christianity - embodied empathy by coming to Earth as a man and enduring the human experience. Trump has cut programs long supported by many evangelicals and conservative Catholics, including funding for religious organizations that help the poor. So how do you rationalize this change? These arguments about toxic empathy help people who are looking for a moral frame around which they can fit the Trump movement, and decrying empathy does that.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:43 PM

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 12:46 PM

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

Fuck NPR and fuck you.

You ignorant fuckers have been destroying this country for decades now.

We're not following you off the cliff.

Go to California and finally make good on that promise to secede from the Union, and you can go fuck that state up until it's completely broken and bombed out and we'll just laugh at you losers.

You won't be missed.

Until then, it ain't happening here anymore.

So if you love Muslims so much, go where they live. I'd love to hear you report back while you were living there, but I'm figuring a worthless annoying fuck such as yourself would only last 2 or 3 days before they'd take you to the top of a building and see if you can fly.
"Behold The Strange Spectacle Of Christians Against Empathy."

Jesus - the central figure in Christianity - embodied empathy by coming to Earth as a man and enduring the human experience. Trump has cut programs long supported by many evangelicals and conservative Catholics, including funding for religious organizations that help the poor. So how do you rationalize this change? These arguments about toxic empathy help people who are looking for a moral frame around which they can fit the Trump movement, and decrying empathy does that.

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

Fuck Jesus. Fuck David French. And Fuck You.

I'm not against Empathy. This is another false argument from your Legacy Media Masters that lead you around every day.

You're not showing any empathy here. You are destroying yourself and your country because you feel guilty that you've been such a worthless sack of shit your entire life and you never had to work for any of it.

Fuck you.

If you feel so guilty, spend your own fucking money. You're done spending mine.

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

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 1:48 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.

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

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

IT'S NOT EMPATHY.

Here's what's going on with you SIX.

JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.

You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.

Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.

Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!

Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)

And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.

Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.

I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.

-----------

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 6:31 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.

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

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

IT'S NOT EMPATHY.

Here's what's going on with you SIX.

JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.

You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.

Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.

Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!

Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)

And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.

Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.

I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.

-----------

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

Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 6:32 AM

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

The Iran War Is Lost. Now Fix What It Broke.

America has to rethink how it moves resources, fights wars, and deters adversaries.

By Andrew Exum | July 23, 2026, 4:51 PM ET

From 2015 to 2017, Andrew Exum was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/07/iran-defeat-cost-oil
-drones/688034/

The sooner we acknowledge that the United States has lost the war with Iran and stop fighting, the better. Because we now have a lot of work to do.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was pressed to explain before the Senate what the United States had accomplished in its war with Iran. Sputtering with fury at times, he claimed that Washington had won “a historic military victory.” But even if that were so, as a certain dead Prussian once counseled, nations do not fight wars to achieve military objectives. They fight wars to achieve political objectives.

The United States has not secured any of its political objectives in the war with Iran, and indeed, it has produced a situation in July that is markedly worse than the one antebellum: Iran’s former supreme leader, an elderly man known for his extreme views but also his caution, has been replaced by a group of leaders who are, if anything, more extreme and far less cautious about confronting the United States and its partners in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz, which was open prior to the start of the conflict, is now largely closed. And the Arabian Peninsula’s other choke point, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, appears to have been shut by Iran’s partners in Yemen, the Houthis. In the spring, American energy executives sounded like Chicken Little as they warned of oil and gas shortages that a reduction in Chinese oil imports helped forestall. But Exxon and Chevron have more recently cautioned that an energy crunch really is inevitable if the situation does not improve, and that this could threaten the entire global economy.

The U.S. does not have a workable military solution to this problem. Iran can threaten tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz with little more than inexpensive drones. And, thanks to this conflict, Tehran has discovered that it has powerful psychological leverage over shipping companies and their insurers—so much so that it hardly needs to lay mines to block the strait.

For the U.S. to finance this war beyond the $37.5 billion that the Pentagon admits it has already spent—the actual number is surely much higher—would be to throw good money after bad. The Trump administration needs to face up to having lost so that it can focus on preventing the effects of an embarrassing but ultimately manageable defeat from spreading beyond the Persian Gulf. This will involve rethinking some fundamentals—such as how the region’s oil reaches world markets, how the United States wages war, and how Iran can be deterred from making trouble for American interests in the future.

The Strait of Hormuz is now, and likely indefinitely will be, under a degree of Iranian control that did not exist prior to the conflict. Washington and its allies, together with private-sector investors, will need to devote considerable time and money toward securing alternate routes for Middle Eastern oil to reach global markets. Some infrastructure already exists. The East-West Pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was built during the Iran-Iraq War, which was the last time oil tankers struggled to navigate the strait. This pipeline moves roughly 7 million barrels of oil a day. The Saudis are considering doubling that capacity. The United Arab Emirates has a similar pipeline that bypasses the strait, and whose volume will also likely need to double. Oil and gas pipelines, like other oil infrastructure in the Gulf, are vulnerable to Iranian drone strikes, but they are relatively easy to repair.

The United States should encourage the Saudis and Emiratis to run branches of their pipelines through Yemen and Oman, to keep those countries invested in maintaining the free flow of oil and gas out of the peninsula. Chevron is apparently speaking with Iraq about a new pipeline—through Syria, no less—to move that country’s oil to market. The sooner these conduits are built, the better. (Also, just a friendly suggestion, but this maybe wasn’t the best month to crow about ending federal subsidies for wind- and solar-power generation.)

The Iran war has brought a few things into focus—among them, that the United States needs to rethink its approach to warfare in the region and beyond. For all of the time that the U.S. Central Command undoubtedly spent planning and rehearsing for a confrontation with Iran, the conduct of this war betrays a certain failure of imagination that has cost the U.S. military a great deal. The United States appears to have assumed that its abundance of precision weaponry would give it a huge advantage over the Iranians—which it did, for at least a few weeks. But precision weaponry was not decisive.

Relatively low-cost Iranian missiles and drones have wrought havoc upon U.S. bases and other targets in the Middle East. American planners should have anticipated as much: Ukrainian drones have been inflicting devastating damage on Russian military assets for several years now, demonstrating just how quickly the nature of warfare has changed. Yet American troops are getting killed in their barracks by cheap Iranian missiles and drones, and their leaders haven’t thought through adequate countermeasures.

This failure belongs not only to the Trump administration but also to the military services and their leaders. The Iran war is almost certainly the easiest drone war that America will ever fight. Countering this cheap and widely accessible technology will only get harder. The United States has to dramatically rethink its posture in the Middle East and around the globe until it figures out how to contend with that.

Finally, Washington will need some fresh ideas if it is to reestablish deterrence with Iran. Prior to last summer, Iran had not made a serious move to stop oil and gas from flowing through the Strait of Hormuz in decades, and likely held back from making rapid advances toward a nuclear weapon, in large part because American military power deterred these actions. But as the American scholar Thomas Schelling noted, the power of a deterrent lies in the threat of its use. Once you actually do the thing you threaten to do, the enemy no longer fears what might happen.

The Trump administration has now squandered not one but two deterrents. Last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not, as President Trump initially claimed, “obliterate” the country’s nuclear program. I oversaw the contingency planning for such an operation for two years at the Pentagon. The strikes did what we planned them to do: They degraded Iran’s nuclear program, but only temporarily. Likewise, Hegseth is correct that we have done incredible damage to Iran’s conventional military and the industrial base that supports it. But the United States sought above all to deter Iran from doing two things: striking American partners in the region and disrupting maritime traffic. Is Iran now more deterred from taking these actions—or less so?

The answer is clearly the latter. The administration needs either to reach an accord with the Iranians or to establish a credible new deterrent, and fast. The promoters of this war—including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and the hawks at various Washington think tanks—have gotten everything they asked for. And it has been a disaster. So now what?

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 6:50 AM

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

‘This country is in deep trouble’: Leon Panetta sounds alarm on Iran war

By Jennifer Bowers Bahney | Jul 23

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/this-country-is-in-deep-trouble-l
eon-panetta-sounds-alarm-on-iran-war/ar-AA28xShM

Key takeaways

• Deep Trouble: Former CIA Director Leon Panetta warns the U.S. is in a difficult position, comparing the Iran conflict to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with no clear objectives and rising domestic costs.

• Straits of Hormuz: Panetta emphasizes that control over the Straits of Hormuz is crucial for leverage and restoring economic stability, criticizing past agreements that gave Iran influence there.

• Negotiation Complexity: Any attempt to return to talks with Iran will be highly complicated, involving both nuclear issues and control of strategic waterways, according to Panetta.

The U.S. is in “deep trouble” when it comes to the Iran war, said a former top CIA official who compared the months long conflict to America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Leon Panetta, who led the Central Intelligence Agency during President Barack Obama’s administration, made the remark during a Thursday appearance on CNN in which he was asked who had the “upper hand” in Iran.

“Well, history tells us that forever wars do not end well,” Panetta said.

“And I think that’s the box we’re in right now,” he added. “Whether it was Vietnam, whether it was Iraq, whether it’s Afghanistan, or whether it’s Iran right now, the problem is that there really is no clear objective that the president is trying to put his arms around.”

“So he continues military attacks, which intelligence makes clear is not going to move Iran. And at the same time, the American people are paying a very heavy price as a result of oil prices going sky high and the cost of living increasing as much as it is,” Panetta noted.

“And so he he’s basically in a box right now trying to figure out if there’s a way out. And frankly, I think right now, this country is in deep trouble in terms of figuring some kind of strategy that can end this war. It does not look well at this point.”

Anchor Brianna Keilar asked Panetta how the U.S. gets back to the negotiating table with Iran.

“There’s only one way I’ve thought of to achieve any kind of leverage in dealing with Iran, and that relates to the Straits of Hormuz,” Panetta said, continuing:

Quote:
It was a mistake in the MOU to imply — and it did strongly imply — that Iran would control the Straits of Hormuz. That was a bad mistake, and the result is they continue to use that as leverage to get back at the United States.

What the United States has to do in order to get any kind of leverage here is, it has to take control of the Straits of Hormuz and be able to control the free access that is necessary in order to be able to restore our economy.

If the president doesn’t take any action to be able to take control of the Straits of Hormuz, then I think we’re only left with the hope that somehow we’re going to get back to a negotiating table that is now not only going to consider what happens in the nuclear area, but is going to consider what happens to the Straits of Hormuz as well.

That’s going to be a very complicated negotiation.

At an event at the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday, Trump said the U.S. was “doing very well against the Islamic Republic of Iran” — despite a vote in the House to end the war.

“They would like to do something, but I say, they’re not ready yet. They need more of the same. They’re not ready yet. They have some evil intentions. We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon,” the president added.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 9:04 AM

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

U.S. Army Is Buying Older PAC-2 Patriot Missiles For The First Time In Decades

PAC-2 GEM-T missiles are not generally as capable as their PAC-3 counterparts, but the Army needs all the Patriots it can get.

By Joseph Trevithick

Published Jul 23, 2026 2:17 PM EDT

https://www.twz.com/land/u-s-army-is-buying-older-pac-2-patriot-missil
es-for-the-first-time-in-decades

. . . strain on existing Patriot interceptor supply chains, as well as for complete Patriot surface-to-air missile systems, has created problems for current and future customers. Switzerland notably saw its orders for new Patriot batteries deferred last year due to demand from Ukraine. In April, Swiss authorities raised the prospect of canceling the deal altogether due to the delays. Concerns have been raised about the ability of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to meet even Ukraine’s needs. Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin also reportedly warned Germany, Japan, Poland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia about potential uncertainty surrounding PAC-3 deliveries.

The U.S. Army’s first PAC-2 GEM-T order in decades makes clear that domestic need for Patriot interceptors is now pushing American authorities to other sources of supply, and toward maxing out production of PAC-2 and PAC-3 types. Though perhaps less capable than the latest PAC-3 MSE variant, GEM-Ts are clearly still operationally relevant, and represent an additional avenue to bolster stockpiles. Not every target necessarily requires the employment of the highest-end interceptor, either. This is something Lockheed Martin has been stressing around its announcement of the new ACE variant of the PAC-3, which is explicitly stated to be less capable than the MSE version.

With this in mind, the first U.S. GEM-T order in decades is a significant development, but one that also speaks to the immense strains on stockpiles and supply chains, which could take years to fully address.

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 11:56 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked.

You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.

We won't allow allow it.

All Muslims need to die.

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

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

IT'S NOT EMPATHY.

Here's what's going on with you SIX.

JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.

You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.

Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.

Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!

Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)

And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.

Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.

I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.

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

Everything you just said is bullshit. Just like everything you have ever said in your life, Shit Golem.

Nobody in this country wants anything to do with your version of "Progress". You've all but destroyed this country. And we're not going to allow you to do it anymore.

Get the fuck out of my country if you don't like it. Go to Iran and see how long it takes for them to throw your annoying ass off a fucking building.

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

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

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Friday, July 24, 2026 1:55 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:

SIX:

Get fucked.
You white women and your suicidal empathy isn't what's going to take America down.
We won't allow allow it.
All Muslims need to die.

SIGNY:

IT'S NOT EMPATHY.
Here's what's going on with you SIX.
JUST LIKE TED BUNDY JR HERE, YOU'RE SCARED.
You can't engage MEANINGFULLY in the topic bc it scares you.
Instead, you get angry and aggressive because ...
Being angry and aggressive makes you feel STRONG, IN CONTROL, POWERFUL instead of HELPLESS, WEAK, AND FEARFUL.

Personally, I think your overblown fear to certain issues (Muslims, Covid, AIDS) is just displacement.
Look at how your anger bleeds over from Muslims to blacks to illegal aliens to "them"!
Your blind anger about SOME things is a relief valve for all the OTHER things that make you feel insecure. And god knows, there are plenty of them, including the overall job situation of white males without a college degree. (IRAN ISN'T ONE OF THEM.)

And because you LIKE the feeling of being POWERFUL AND RIGHTEOUS AND ANGRY, you refuse to give it up. You believe these "issues" don't immediately threaten your health or finances, so they're safe to be stupid about.

Just contrast how you reacted to pneumonia, diabetes, and your floodplain issues. THOSE were scary, but you gathered as much info as you could to genuinely control your situation as best you could, even tho some of it left you with a little PTSD.

I guess I can't expect you to be rational all the time. You've got enough to deal with.

SECOND:

Signym, you made this about 6ix. You are old enough and have wide enough experience to generalize to the tens of millions in the USA behaving/feeling/voting the way 6ix does, going all the way back to the beginning of politics in the Roman Empire or, maybe, caveman society. Guys like him have held back civilization's progress and promoted war because they are fearful of everything, all the time, everywhere.

OMG, SECOND, you have no self awareness at all. None!

I try not to generalize to entire categories of people like you and SIX do. If I did, I'd say that everyone with TDS is an arrogant sociopath.

And I can understand why many average Americans are angry and fearful. Our whole economy and society has been warped to benefit the wealthiest.

But since YOUR life is going so well, YOU SAY, what's YOUR excuse for being a hate-filled warmongering asshole?

-----------

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

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Saturday, July 25, 2026 3:49 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SIX, I'm going to make one more attempt on reality checking you.

First, I'm not saying that many Muslims aren't a threat to western culture and society. Many are.

Europe and Britain made a HUGE mistake when they allowed in, and Merkel INVITED IN, millions of military-aged men as refugees from the most (IMHO) ignorant, degenerate, culturally maladaptive regions of the Middle East (now called west Asia BTW), central Asia, and North Africa.

WTH were they thinking???? That the immigrants would immediately see the superiority of western culture and adopt it???

I honestly don't know how they correct that mistake, assuming it WAS a mistake and not some globalist plan to destroy European living standards and society! That "refugee" policy needs to end, imams that preach takeover should be deported immediately, and women and children need to learn the national language so they're don't depend on the local Muslim mafia for translation services and access to shops etc.

BTW, Biden's decontrolled border/ invite in illegal immigrants mirrors Europe's invitation to Muslim "refugees".

And SOME radical Muslims, the Takfiri/ Wahhabist branch of Sunni Islam (which is pretty large) are an actual terrorist threat. Of course, they need to be found and punished thru law.

So let's not CONTINUE to carry on with Biden's and Europe's policies! It's pols like Biden and Merkel who're the real enemy.

But when you get all paranoid and start gibbering about ALL Muslims, you're setting yourself up for failure and significant blowback.

The people of Iran, primarily Shia Persians, are culturally friendly to the west. Their Shia branch of Islam focuses on resistance, NOT AGGRESSION, thanks to their history of having been betrayed and slaughtered by their Sunni "brethren". They are not terrorists. Even when being attacked with (western supplied) chemical weapons, they didn't respond in kind. They're proud of their culture, history, and language (Farsi, not Arabic) which goes much farther back than the bandit tribes of Saudi Arabia.

And many primarily Muslim nations don't even follow Sharia law. https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/do-all-muslim-countries-follo
w-sharia-law-969289

When you make an enemy of Iranians, you're making an unnecessary one, and when you make an enemy of ALL Muslims that's just dysfunctional and counterproductive.

As far as I'm concerned, Muslims can have their cultural and religious quirks, as long as they practice them in THEIR country, not here! We should DEFINITELY impose our language and moral/ legal structure on people living here, and jail those who harm us and deport those who preach otherwise.

-----------

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

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Saturday, July 25, 2026 4:43 PM

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

Trump Just Gave Us a Horrible New Reason to Worry About the Iran War

The president is getting frustrated that U.S. military strikes are accomplishing nothing—and he’s starting to lash out.

By Michael Tomasky | July 24, 2026 | 9:52 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/213486/trump-iran-war-horrible-new-reason
-worry

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.

But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

And that’s how little wars grow. There’s a chance that he has enough sense to know that if he doesn’t get out of this soon, it could crescendo into a disaster that will spin out of his control. That’s what happened to LBJ—he knew every step of the way as he asked Congress for more money and troops that he was marching the country to defeat and destroying his own legacy, but he did it anyway. And he was much smarter than Trump will ever be.

I remember well when Syria’s Bashar Al Assad was massacring his own people by the thousands, dropping those cluster bombs on his own people. Some were screaming at Barack Obama: Do something! We’re the United States, how can we allow this to happen?

I think it would have been good if we’d been able to do something. On the other hand, I’m sure Obama thought that the last thing in the world he wanted was to go into a country we don’t really know with a sanguinary tyrant and ancient enmities and think we can smooth it all out before Americans lose their patience; Syria was not going to be his legacy. All those deaths were horribly tragic. But at least, against the charge of typical American hubris, Obama can plead not guilty.

Whatever happens in Iran, Trump is already guilty on that count. The launching of this completely unnecessary and unjustified war was an act of supreme hubris. Now it’s starting to really hit home with him that he may have been wrong. But he’s never wrong; incapable of shouldering blame, he will transfer it onto someone else. If that doesn’t worry you, you aren’t paying attention.

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

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Sunday, July 26, 2026 6:34 AM

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

Even Trump Can’t Spin This One

You can’t post your way out of a war.

By Charlie Warzel | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/trump-iran-war-social-m
edia/688065/

If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.

Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.

Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a close. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Trump posted on March 7, in response to the United Kingdom considering sending military support. In late March, Trump posted that operations were “winding down”; that same day, he rejected a suggestion from Pope Leo that there should be a cease-fire. In early April, he posted that Iran had asked for a cease-fire; later, Iran called his claims “false and baseless.”

Tenuous agreements between the U.S. and Iran have been broken repeatedly. On July 12, the U.S. resumed heavy air strikes on Iran following an Iranian attack on a container ship in the region. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire recently reported, “The Trump administration is back at war. It just doesn’t want to admit it.” The commander in chief has become the boy who cried “Mission accomplished.”

As a result, Trump’s posts have become more erratic. On June 23, in response to rising gas prices, Trump posted on Truth Social, in all caps, to nobody in particular, “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!” And his posts no longer seem as able to influence the market. A recent report from Axios claimed that bond-market traders have stopped paying strict attention to Trump’s social-media feeds to read the economic tea leaves: “Researchers from JPMorgan show that for the most part, his social media posts are noise, with very little ability to move the market.”

And yet, Trump is attempting to double down. Last week, Truth Social announced that it plans to sell early access to posts from certain accounts (presumably including the president’s) and is considering charging as much as $100,000 a month. The clear implication is that Trump or his close associates will share government news that will move markets, giving paying subscribers a distinct first-mover advantage. Trump currently owns 41 percent of the stock through a family-run trust in Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social. Thus, the decision to charge access is akin to the president’s family profiting off his position as leader of the free world. (Trump Media and Technology Group did not respond to a request for comment.)

Trump is president, so obviously, any statement he makes attracts attention. But simply being president has never been Trump’s superpower. His chief skill, first as a mogul with an uneven history and then as a politician, is molding his image in a way that reflects how he sees himself: as the genius, adored, yet constantly victimized center of the universe. This, of course, is delusional. Yet somehow, he’s managed to make that fantasy at least partially real: He has, after all, been the main, divisive figure in American life for more than a decade.

With Trump, it can feel as if there are no limits—to his shamelessness, his lies, his graft, or his ability to sow chaos, lose interest, and move on to the next outrage. But it’s possible that we’re finally glimpsing the limitations of his ability to control the narrative. For too long, Trump has been the force that made reality feel flimsy, pliable. But in the Iran conflict, he’s met an immovable object. Now reality may just be catching up.

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

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Sunday, July 26, 2026 7:38 PM

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

Trump said it himself in June—military force won’t open the waterway, and energy reserves are quickly winding down.

By Thomas Wright | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET
Thomas Wright served as the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/07/iran-war-hormuz-stra
it/688062/

Back in June, at the closing press conference for the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump explained why he had called a halt to hostilities with Iran. Continued bombing would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as the war went on, commercial ships would stay away while emergency oil supplies dwindled.

“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he warned, conjuring up images of shortages, bedlam, surging prices, and a market collapse on the scale of 1929. Trump told the press that he had studied presidents, and “the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.” https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-conf
erence-g7-summit-evian-france-june-17-2026/

Fast-forward to late July. The United States has bombed Iran for nearly two weeks, hitting coastal-surveillance sites and weapons-storage facilities as well as bridges, tunnels, rail lines, airports, and electrical infrastructure. Iran has answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as strikes on oil installations and a desalination plant, and repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait. Iran also claims to have struck Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure in Bahrain, but this has not been independently verified.

Trump resumed the war despite having already explained why military force could not achieve its most pressing objective. He has not resolved this tension. It may be irresoluble. In the meantime, he is betting that Tehran will buckle before economic pressure forces him to do the same.

To understand where we are, consider how the cease-fire collapsed. Each party believed that it had won the war and that the other should accede to its interpretation of the agreement on the strait. Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding stated that 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 Trump administration took this to mean that Iran was obligated to open the strait without tolls for 60 days. But Tehran read it as permission to manage and control access through the waterway. Consequently, Iran sought to funnel ships through corridors it approved, and attacked or threatened vessels that used other routes.

In doing so, Tehran made a serious error in judgment. If it had laid low, it could have reaped the benefits of economic concessions for 60 days and then gradually introduced a toll. Instead, Trump felt compelled to respond, and the agreement broke down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy and investment under President Biden, told me that Iran had thought it could boil the proverbial American frog, but it turned the temperature up too high too fast, and the frog got angry.

Trump is clearly frustrated. Further escalation is likely. He has mused about striking Pickaxe Mountain and is reportedly considering limited ground operations—for example, seizing Kharg Island, which is a hub for Iran’s oil exports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States is sending more forces, medics, and weaponry to the Middle East to give Trump additional military options. But such options were ruled out as implausible or reckless during the war, and their viability has not improved with time.

If Trump continues with limited strikes, he will face the very problems that he laid out in France last month. Hochstein posted on X that the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz could be more economically dangerous than the previous one, because Russia, the U.S., and China can no longer buffer world markets as they did: Russia has reduced its diesel exports, U.S. crude and strategic reserves are unusually low, and China is cutting its oil consumption less deeply than before. In his view, markets are already signaling the inflationary risk, leaving Trump with a narrowing window to make a deal before another disruption produces a sharper fuel-price and financial shock, possibly as soon as mid- to late September.

Iran seems to want to keep the conflict at a simmer. It is striking back against the United States but has avoided direct attacks that would bring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Israel fully into the war, even as it applies pressure indirectly, most dramatically through the Houthis’ campaign against Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. Reuters reported that Iran had previously asked the Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea route if the United States struck Iranian power infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Trump seems to be actively working to keep the Gulf states on board as he continues the war. Two weeks ago, his administration significantly loosened restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to the UAE, something Abu Dhabi has been wanting for years. Then, on Wednesday, he announced that he had approved a civil nuclear-enrichment deal with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration, in which I served, negotiated a similar arrangement with Riyadh as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That deal, which stalled after October 7, would have provided for U.S. enrichment inside Saudi Arabia rather than giving it the ability to autonomously enrich its own uranium. The technical details of the Trump deal are unknown.

No sooner was the Saudi agreement announced than Israeli former officials and experts criticized it, on the grounds that it would fuel regional proliferation and did not require Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. On Thursday morning, Trump posted that the deal would not be approved without normalization—which was puzzling, given that the accord had been signed the day before. Hours later, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that if the Saudis don’t join the Abraham Accords, “the deal is off,” which likely means that the administration will not submit it to Congress for review, as is required by law.

Washington is trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, offer new economic and technological commitments to Gulf states, protect two maritime choke points, and fight an open-ended air war, all while the energy reserves and political patience needed to sustain those projects are running down.

Trump may inflict more pain on Iran, but this is unlikely to compel Tehran to abandon its attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps Iran will agree to put its ambitions on hold for 60 days in the hope that the previous agreement can be revived. But if the two sides remain gridlocked, Trump will have to decide whether to pay the economic price for continuing a low-intensity war indefinitely; escalate, with all of the risks that entails; or walk away.

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

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Sunday, July 26, 2026 8:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, I'm going to make one more attempt on reality checking you.

First, I'm not saying that many Muslims aren't a threat to western culture and society. Many are.

Europe and Britain made a HUGE mistake when they allowed in, and Merkel INVITED IN, millions of military-aged men as refugees from the most (IMHO) ignorant, degenerate, culturally maladaptive regions of the Middle East (now called west Asia BTW), central Asia, and North Africa.

WTH were they thinking???? That the immigrants would immediately see the superiority of western culture and adopt it???

I honestly don't know how they correct that mistake, assuming it WAS a mistake and not some globalist plan to destroy European living standards and society! That "refugee" policy needs to end, imams that preach takeover should be deported immediately, and women and children need to learn the national language so they're don't depend on the local Muslim mafia for translation services and access to shops etc.

BTW, Biden's decontrolled border/ invite in illegal immigrants mirrors Europe's invitation to Muslim "refugees".

And SOME radical Muslims, the Takfiri/ Wahhabist branch of Sunni Islam (which is pretty large) are an actual terrorist threat. Of course, they need to be found and punished thru law.

So let's not CONTINUE to carry on with Biden's and Europe's policies! It's pols like Biden and Merkel who're the real enemy.

But when you get all paranoid and start gibbering about ALL Muslims, you're setting yourself up for failure and significant blowback.

The people of Iran, primarily Shia Persians, are culturally friendly to the west. Their Shia branch of Islam focuses on resistance, NOT AGGRESSION, thanks to their history of having been betrayed and slaughtered by their Sunni "brethren". They are not terrorists. Even when being attacked with (western supplied) chemical weapons, they didn't respond in kind. They're proud of their culture, history, and language (Farsi, not Arabic) which goes much farther back than the bandit tribes of Saudi Arabia.

And many primarily Muslim nations don't even follow Sharia law. https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/do-all-muslim-countries-follo
w-sharia-law-969289

When you make an enemy of Iranians, you're making an unnecessary one, and when you make an enemy of ALL Muslims that's just dysfunctional and counterproductive.

As far as I'm concerned, Muslims can have their cultural and religious quirks, as long as they practice them in THEIR country, not here! We should DEFINITELY impose our language and moral/ legal structure on people living here, and jail those who harm us and deport those who preach otherwise.

-----------

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

I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.

Until then. They all need to die.

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

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

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Monday, July 27, 2026 1:00 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.

Until then. They all need to die.

Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.

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

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Monday, July 27, 2026 1:00 PM

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

America’s Iran Failure Is Bigger Than Trump

Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.

By Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail | July 21, 2026

Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.

Less than a month after stepping back from military escalation in pursuit of an interim understanding with Tehran, the Trump administration has returned to the same maximalist strategy that nearly 40 days of fighting had already shown could deliver neither a favorable outcome for the United States nor regional or global stability. In the latest wave of escalation, three more US service members were killed, bringing the US military death toll to 17. The United States has widened its strikes to include bridges, electrical infrastructure, and, according to Tehran, the unfinished Darkhovin nuclear power site, while Iran has attacked US bases and critical infrastructure across Jordan and the Persian Gulf.

It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.

For nearly half a century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have largely operated from the same basic theory: that escalating economic and military pressure would eventually force Tehran to concede or buckle under the weight of coercion. The Obama administration’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear agreement was the clearest break from that logic. Yet the agreement never escaped the coercive architecture surrounding it. Its promised economic benefits for Iran depended heavily on reversible presidential waivers, making the deal easy to dismantle and difficult to trust. When Trump withdrew, Washington drew no lesson from the collapse beyond the one it had always preferred: apply more pressure.

Trump’s principal departure has not been from America’s fundamentally coercive approach to Iran but from the way that approach is conducted. Consequential foreign policy decisions have increasingly been concentrated in the hands of family members, trusted friends, and informal envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, bypassing many of the institutions meant to provide expertise, deliberation, and accountability. Yet those institutions have long struggled to fulfill that function. Trump’s approach has only further diminished their ability to challenge assumptions, incorporate dissenting views, and learn from failure.

Indeed, Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.

As one of the authors, Sina Toossi, argues in a recent Center for International Policy report, Washington has consistently approached Iran through linear assumptions about how states respond to coercion. The underlying assumption has been simple: more sanctions create more pressure, more pressure yields more concessions, and overwhelming US military superiority will inevitably translate into the political outcomes Washington seeks. https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/beyond-maximalism/

The historical record, however, tells a different story. Rather than producing a predictable chain of cause and effect, US pressure repeatedly reshaped the very political system it was intended to influence, often in ways Washington neither anticipated nor understood. The economic siege weakened the social and political forces most invested in engagement while strengthening the security institutions best positioned to thrive under confrontation. Diplomatic reversals discredited Iranian leaders who argued that accommodation with the United States could produce lasting benefits, reinforcing the arguments of those who insisted that Washington could not be trusted.

That same dynamic is evident today. The current war has strengthened the influence of Iran’s hard-line security establishment while further narrowing the political space for those advocating renewed diplomacy with Washington. Although Tehran entered into a memorandum of understanding, it was widely viewed not as a pathway to lasting reconciliation but as a temporary instrument for securing economic relief, reducing immediate risks, and positioning Iran more favorably for whatever comes next.

Yet the deeper failure was not simply Washington’s inability to anticipate how Iran would respond to pressure. It was its own inability to learn from how its own strategy repeatedly fell short.

Healthy political systems learn from failure because failure creates pressure to change. That pressure comes through accountability. When strategies repeatedly fall short, leaders are expected to answer for the results, institutions reassess their assumptions, and policies adapt. Washington’s approach to Iran has too often escaped that discipline. Officials rarely pay a political price for strategies that fail, Congress seldom exercises meaningful oversight over military action, and familiar ideas are recycled rather than reconsidered. As a result, when coercion falls short of its objectives, the lesson is rarely that the strategy itself was flawed. More often, policymakers conclude that the pressure was simply insufficient and should be intensified. Failure, in other words, becomes self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting.

Importantly, Trump did not create this cycle. He inherited it and made it harder to ignore. And unless America’s foreign policy establishment becomes more willing to question its assumptions and learn from its mistakes, it is likely to continue reproducing the very crises it seeks to prevent.

The consequences of that dynamic extend well beyond the current administration. One of the clearest opportunities to break this cycle came after the Iraq War. Rather than pursuing meaningful accountability for one of the most consequential foreign policy failures in modern American history, the Obama administration largely chose to look forward rather than backward. That decision helped entrench the expectation that even catastrophic strategic mistakes would carry few institutional consequences. The next administration and Congress should not repeat that mistake.

If that was a missed opportunity to restore accountability, the current administration has gone a step further by seeking to undermine it altogether. A case in point is Marco Rubio’s pledge to dismantle the International Criminal Court “brick by brick” reflects more than hostility toward one institution. It signals an effort to weaken one of the few external mechanisms capable of imposing consequences when American power is used unlawfully. Rather than treating accountability as a necessary condition for learning, it treats accountability itself as the threat.

Yet there are signs that this pattern need not be permanent. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats refused to advance the annual National Defense Authorization Act while the unauthorized conflict with Iran continued, signaling a willingness to use Congress’s institutional powers rather than simply criticize the war. The vote did not end the conflict, but it suggested that at least some lawmakers recognize that preventing strategic failure requires restoring constitutional checks before the next crisis arrives.

Escaping this cycle requires more than a different policy toward Iran. It requires rebuilding the institutions and habits that allow American foreign policy to learn from its mistakes: meaningful congressional oversight, genuine accountability, and a willingness to question assumptions that have repeatedly failed. Until those feedback mechanisms are restored, the United States is likely to continue mistaking escalation for strategy and treating each new crisis as though it were an entirely new problem rather than the predictable consequence of lessons left unlearned.

“Dawn will break over the darkness, and our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”—The Odyssey (2026)

Sina Toossi

Sina Toossi is a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy. He writes on US-Iran relations, Iranian politics and society, and nuclear nonproliferation. His work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera English, among other outlets. He tweets at @SinaToossi.

Nancy Okail

Nancy Okail is president and CEO of the Center for International Policy. A scholar and advocate with more than 25 years of experience in peace and security, human rights, anti-corruption, and the Middle East, she holds a PhD from the University of Sussex focused on power relations in foreign aid. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Hill. She tweets at @NancyGEO.

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

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Tuesday, July 28, 2026 7:15 AM

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

The Putinization of the American Military

When poseurs and yes-men run a war

By Paul Krugman
Jul 28, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-putinization-of-the-american

Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.

But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.

Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.

But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.

So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.

No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.

For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:

The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that

· Munitions aren’t depleted

· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail

· It’s Joe Biden’s fault

Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.

How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?

First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.

Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.

And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz.

The conduct of the Iran war has also been highly Putinesque.

There have been many reports that Russia’s disaster in Ukraine partly reflects the fact that Russian generals are afraid to tell Putin how the war is really going. Sure enough, the British newspaper The Telegraph reports on rumors that “the Pentagon” — presumably meaning Hegseth — has until recently been hiding the extent of the munitions shortfall from the White House. And it quotes insiders saying that Hegseth himself may not know what’s happening, because his policy of purging officers he doesn’t like has created a “culture of silence” in which people are “very loath to bring bad news to Pete.”

Indeed, a New York Times report recounts how Hegseth fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti as head of the Navy, replacing her with Daryl Caudle, who was not on the short list of officers recommended by senior Navy officials. But Caudle had the qualifications that Hegseth wanted: he signaled his lack of integrity and unfitness for command by supporting Hegseth’s attack on highly qualified female officers and hiring a MAGA insider.

I should add that Hegseth has been an equal-opportunity destroyer of the best and brightest in the U.S. military. In April he shocked and disgusted the military brass by summarily firing General Randy George, who was at the forefront of modernizing the military and learning from Ukraine’s brilliant use of inexpensive drones.

Simply put, we defeated ourselves.

True, this war was never winnable, and perhaps we should be thankful that U.S. defeat became obvious before Trump committed ground troops and needlessly sacrificed thousands of American lives. But we should also consider that this defeat shows how deeply and pervasively Trump and Hegseth have crippled the U.S. military. Their incompetence, corruption and irresponsibility have weakened us with incredible speed. And it will take many years for America to recover, if it ever does.

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

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Wednesday, July 29, 2026 6:42 AM

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

Midweek Update #21: Iran Is Toying With The USA

Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 29, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-21-iran-is-toyin
g

Iran Is Toying With The USA

On July 23rd, the USA launched its last day of direct attacks on Iran during its latest phase of kinetic attacks in Trump’s War. This phase lasted for 13 days, as the USA continued to throw away valuable weapons systems, further depleting its stocks, for no strategic gain.

How do we know this? Well, the White House was briefing it to the press. In their desperation to provide arguments about why they needed to stop the bombing (which they never should have started) White House sources provided confirmation for the worst kept secret of the war. The US had not prepared and soon would struggle to protect its own troops, to say nothing of its allies (more on that below).

Things reached a tragi-comic level when America’s UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz, went on Meet The Press. In a series of wonderfully contradictory statements, he first said that the shortfall in US munitions existed because of the Biden administration, then he said it was not true and the US military had “everything that it needs”. Then he pivoted again and admitted that the shortfall exists by saying those leaking the information should go to jail. That of course was a great dodge, as it means many people in the White House, including Trump, should probably be jailed.

If you want to watch the whole Waltz interview, here it is:

The shortfall is very real, btw. US stocks are not a mystery as there are annual appropriations that can be accessed and provide a pretty good idea of the numbers.

As I tried to say last week, re-upping this bombing campaign for 13 days only left the USA weaker every day. There is also stockpile info in this piece if you want to read it:
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-
us

The US administration, not quite grasping how weak it has made itself, even did its usual trick of threatening to escalate wildly against Iran, and stories started circulating of a large number of reinforcements being flown from the USA into the theater in preparation for a ground assault.

However, this was always bluff. The US has weakened itself so dramatically that it has taken a very unpalatable proposition from March and turned it into a political impossibility. If it inserted US ground forces into Iran, say in the Strait area or around Kharg, it would blow through what remains of its stockpiles of advanced air defense weapons in a very short time. Then it would have to either withdraw or suffer increasing casualties.

Adam Kinzinger made a very good point about how Trump’s casualty fear has neutered his escalation threats. He has used up massive numbers of the most advanced systems because they can be fired from a distance, and thus put US soldiers in a safer position. Of course, this means that they are being used at an unsustainable rate, which means if he did escalate, US casualties would be much higher.

All of this came together on July 23 when, after the last of the 13 days of strikes, Trump lied about Iran saying it had been so badly mauled that it had begged for more negotiations.

The actuality was that he was, once again, throwing in the towel as Iran was making a mockery of his operations.

How do we know this was the case? It is pretty straightforward, actually. Once Trump stopped military operations, Iran continued to attack either directly or through its proxies. Here is what has happened since Trump’s latest humiliation.

1. Iranian attacks on US bases — Friday 24 July
Iran’s army said it used Arash one-way attack drones against fuel tanks, equipment warehouses and barracks at Isa (Sheikh Isa) Air Base in Bahrain, and against aircraft hangars, maintenance hangars and barracks at Al-Azraq / Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Jordan’s military said it intercepted seven missiles and six drones, so we can say this attack definitely happened.

2. Houthi strikes on Aramco at Jizan and Yanbu — Saturday 25 July
Iran’s allies, the Houthis, claimed dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones were fired against Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia issued alerts in both cities. AFP-verified footage and NASA FIRMS thermal data showed fire at the Jizan refinery. Aramco shut the refinery, at least temporarily, on 27 July.

3. Attack on crude transit infrastructure / Abqaiq — Monday 27 July (attribution disputed)
Iran-backed groups in Iraq attacked “targets and sensitive points” for moving crude from eastern Saudi Arabia to Yanbu, in response to alleged Saudi drone incursions into Yemeni airspace. Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry said it intercepted drones aimed at Eastern Province petroleum facilities and at Riyadh, and said they were launched from Iraqi airspace by Iran-backed groups.

4. The US and Saudi Arabia Attack Iraq (not Iran) and Iran Attacks Jordan — 28-29 July

Last night the US responded to Iranian actions, but only by attacking targets in Iraq (Iran’s proxies) to try and keep the fiction going that there was a ceasefire. Iran attacked targets in Jordan, to show that it was not. Details are starting to emerge.

In other words, the US tried to get out of the war (again) this week, and Iran told the US to stuff it. Pointedly, Iran continued to attack US allies throughout the region, which puts the Trump administration in a terrible dilemma.

This is what I mean by Iran “toying” with the USA. Trump wants out, desperately, and Iran will not let him. They seem to understand that they have a significant strategic advantage by keeping the fight going. I hate to admit it, but from a strategic point of view they seem to grasp the true weakness of the US position, and are heading now for as complete a victory as possible. To understand that, the next section will be a description of what Iranian strategy might be.

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

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Wednesday, July 29, 2026 7:57 AM

Loser.

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

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

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Wednesday, July 29, 2026 7:58 AM

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

I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.

Until then. They all need to die.
Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.

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

I didn't say anything about Jews.

We're talking about your Muslim friends who want to enslave the planet.

Get them the fuck out of here and back where they belong, or we're gonna start doing it for you. And we'll just put them into the fucking ground.

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

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

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Thursday, July 30, 2026 6:10 AM

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

The Great Chinese Oil Mystery

America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why.

By Rogé Karma | July 29, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/07/china-iran-usa-oil-prices/
688086/

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, experts warned that oil prices could hit $150 or $200 a barrel within a few weeks. The great mystery of the Iran war is why that hasn’t happened—why, nearly five months later, oil prices have scarcely surpassed $100, even as countries around the world have been forced to dip into their oil reserves. Now an explanation seems to be emerging: China.

Before the war, China, by far the world’s largest oil importer, was buying more barrels than the entire European continent and almost twice as much as the second-largest importer, the United States. Then, weeks after the conflict broke out, the country abruptly slashed its oil purchases, eventually cutting them by half compared with prewar levels. That appears to be why global prices have risen so much less than experts predicted. The shift also poses mysteries of its own. No one outside China knows how exactly the country has managed to meet its energy needs while forgoing imports, nor why its leaders chose this course. And no one knows how long the situation can last.

The predictions of catastrophe for the world’s oil system were based on simple supply and demand. The Strait of Hormuz saw the passage of 20 million barrels of oil a day, a fifth of the world’s total supply. Countries found ways to make up for some of that loss, including by releasing barrels from strategic stockpiles, but not enough to avoid a price shock. If demand stayed constant, buyers would be forced to try to outbid one another to secure the scarce remaining supplies.

But demand didn’t stay constant. The amount of oil that China stopped buying, about 5 million barrels a day, represented about a quarter of what was lost when the strait closed and is equivalent to the entirety of imports to India, the world’s third-largest importer. This significant and unexpected drop in Chinese demand freed up those barrels to go elsewhere, preventing the kind of shortage that might have led to truly catastrophic prices. “China was definitely the most important factor in keeping prices down,” Rory Johnston, an oil-markets analyst who writes the widely cited newsletter Commodity Context, told me. “And the thing is that nobody—and I mean nobody—saw it coming.”

The most obvious way a country can reduce oil imports at this scale is by drastically lowering its energy consumption. There is no evidence that China has done so. Unlike during the coronavirus pandemic, when the country essentially shut down, most indicators of energy consumption, such as traffic congestion, have hardly budged. The reduction also can’t be explained by a shift to clean energy. China has been investing heavily in renewable energy and electric vehicles for decades, but its economy remains reliant on imported oil. Such a dramatic change would have required millions of Chinese consumers to suddenly switch to EVs virtually overnight. “It’s a genuine puzzle,” Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who specializes in Chinese energy markets, told me. “We’re in one of those rare moments where even the experts are forced to rely on a whole lot of speculation.”

Could China be secretly getting extra oil from Russia? Since 2022, the Kremlin has been shipping huge amounts of oil to China using a “shadow fleet” of tankers that hide their point of origin to avoid Western sanctions. But it’s one thing to try to obscure where a given shipment of oil comes from; it’s another to hide the physical barrels that show up on Chinese shores, which are carried by giant tankers and unloaded at major ports. If Russia—or anyone else—were sending millions of extra barrels to China, the world would know about it.

A more realistic possibility is that China has been tapping into its immense oil reserves, which it has spent years accumulating in the case of a crisis. But the giant outdoor tanks where China keeps much of its known oil reserves have remained full since the war began. This fact has given rise to yet another theory: On top of its known reserves, perhaps China has been stashing oil, as well as refined diesel and gasoline, in secret facilities, which it is now using to keep its economy running. “I sometimes feel like I should put on a tinfoil hat when I start talking about this,” Johnston said. “We have almost no evidence of it. And yet, it’s really the only explanation that makes any sense.”

Even if the secret-reserve theory turns out to be true, that still leaves the question of why China decided to cut off imports so thoroughly. Several energy experts told me that when a nation taps into its reserves, it typically coordinates with other countries to make sure that no one is shouldering too much of the burden. Then, once the price of oil falls, it starts replenishing the depleted stockpiles. China has done the opposite. It unilaterally and without warning chose to reduce its imports far more than any other country, even after the price of oil fell below the point at which China would have historically started buying again.

This has led some experts to speculate that China was seeking to build soft power by saving the world economy or trying to gain leverage over the United States. Others have suggested that Beijing saw the Strait of Hormuz crisis as an opportunity to show the world that it could successfully withstand an oil shock. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports arrive through the Strait of Malacca, a narrow waterway that could be cut off in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. This has long been considered a potentially decisive advantage for Taiwan and its Western allies. Perhaps Beijing wants to subtly warn the rest of the world that it could not be brought to its knees by an energy blockade. But if any of those geopolitics-focused hypotheses were true, then China would presumably have taken credit for its actions. Instead, its leaders have been completely silent.

A final possibility is that China is propping up foreign economies to protect its manufacturing base. China’s economy relies on exporting huge amounts of cheap goods all over the world. If its biggest customers across Europe and Asia suddenly experienced a recession, the journalist Max Fisher recently argued, China could lose “half its export market and a bunch of its economy with it.” Providing an energy lifeline to the rest of the world might have been a necessary step to keep its own economy humming. This possibility, unlike the others, would explain China’s silence: Beijing likely wouldn’t want to loudly declare to the rest of the world that it has a vested economic interest in helping to cushion future oil shocks.

Whatever China’s exact motivations, the country has demonstrated yet another source of power it can wield on the global stage. As long as the Iran war continues, China’s leverage over oil prices gives it the ability to inflict immense pain on American consumers, and really the entire world, at a moment’s notice. Even if China doesn’t choose to do so, the fact that it can might be enough to give the country even more sway over international affairs. “For the last 50-plus years, whenever there was an oil shock, the first thing the U.S. president did was call Riyadh to try to persuade the Saudis to help out,” Jason Bordoff, the founding director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “Maybe the place everyone needs to call now is Beijing. That’s a very powerful position to be in.”

Rogé Karma: Oil prices might not go back to normal anytime soon - June 16, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/06/trump-iran-deal-oil/687564/

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

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Thursday, July 30, 2026 7:23 PM

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

Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless

The president should have heeded this lesson about war before he got into this mess.

By Fred Kaplan | July 30, 2026 10:00 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/trump-iran-war-bombing-air
-force.html

One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump’s failure to push the Iranians into surrender—even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range—is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.

In other words, even if Trump hadn’t overestimated the Iranian regime’s fragility, even if he’d devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war. He might have done so, if he or Israel’s leaders had prepared and trained a cadre of rebels, perhaps from within Iran’s army, to rise up against the regime’s leaders as the bombs fell. But they didn’t do this, unless you count Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harebrained scheme—thoughtlessly approved by Trump—to groom former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most brutal and unpopular leaders, to storm the palace after Israeli bombs assassinated the entire top layer of Tehran’s government.

In any case, the plot would have almost certainly failed, even it had been carried out, because Ahmadinejad had no followers inside his own country and because the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have quickly grabbed control of the social, political, and economic levers that it has long dominated—as it indeed did, without pause, in the hours after the bombing began. For a while, there was talk of recruiting Kurdish militias in Iraq to storm across the border and seize power in Tehran—until, perhaps, someone realized they would have no support from Iran’s largely Shiite population either.

The U.S. Air Force was created as an independent branch of the armed forces in 1947, inspired and instantly strengthened by the belief that air power can win modern wars without the messy skirmishes of ground troops. The belief, which air theorists had propagated since the onset of combat planes in World War I, seemed confirmed by the results of World War II. However, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a panel of experts, released a report the same year, concluding that, in fact, the Allied bombing of German cities—and the German bombing of British cities—had little impact on the war. The board singled out the persistent bombing of German oil and communications facilities as a factor that impeded the resupply of the Nazi tank army. In other words, to the extent bombing had an effect on the war, it was by assisting the ground war—not by shaping the course of the war from the sky on its own.

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific to a sudden end, but this suggests only that the shock and awe of nuclear weapons—the obliteration of a whole city by a single explosion—might alter the general rule about air power. Even here, though, historians have noted that the Soviet Union’s near-simultaneous invasion of Manchuria—which dispelled Japan’s illusion that Moscow might stay neutral in the war—also had an impact on the emperor’s calculations. (And even then, the emperor disrupted the normal chain of command by intervening in a decision that would normally have been made by the army, whose top officers were prepared to keep fighting.)

The most authoritative, skeptical account of the subject is the 1996 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape. A scrupulous analysis of 33 strategic air campaigns from World War II through the decades since, it tests whether those campaigns validate any of the four war aims that bombs and missiles are said to accomplish: (1) punishment (inflicting enough pain to cause the government to surrender or the people to revolt); (2) relentless damage (compelling the government to surrender in order to avoid further costs); (3) decapitation (killing key leadership, resulting in the regime’s toppling); or (4) denial (weakening enemy troops to the point where our own troops can push forward without suffering unacceptable casualties).

Pape finds some cases that support the fourth (denial), but that’s the one objective that assumes troops on the ground, which, again, Trump is very unlikely to deploy in Iran. Pape finds no evidence—from the wars in Korea to Vietnam to the first Gulf War or any others—to support the theory that air power can accomplish any of those aims on its own. In general, he concludes, “No strategic bombing campaign has ever yielded decisive results, nor were any significant opportunities missed. … The lesson of airpower history is that strategic bombing is a very marginal coercive tool.”

The ironically titled Bombing to Win was published 30 years ago, but the wars since—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and now Iran—do nothing to contradict its conclusions. It seemed at the time that NATO’s 1999 airstrikes on Serbia might be an exception: The reigning dictator Slobodan Miloševic stepped down from power after relentless bombing but no ground forces. However, while researching my 2016 book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, I discovered that several U.S. intelligence agencies—including the Special Technological Operations Division of J-39, a highly secretive unit of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff (which may or may not still exist)—conducted an ingenious series of cyber offensives, information-warfare operations, and targeted intimidation of Serbia’s industrial elite, who backed away from Miloševic under pressure, as a result of which his puppet regime collapsed. These weren’t combat troops, but they were a certain sort of boots on the ground. The ratio was changed a bit—ground ops were supplementing the air war, not the other way around; but still the ground ops were necessary.

In short, the war in Iran is hopeless, short of some extreme calamity that befalls the Iranian leadership, which so far has been shrewd in avoiding such mishaps—and, in fact, quite adept at tightening the screws on the trap that Trump set for himself from the moment five months ago when he started this war (which he figured would last a couple of weeks).

It was Trump’s mistake to assume that toppling the deeply embedded Iranian government would be as swift and easy as it was to abduct the dictator of Venezuela—and to believe Netanyahu’s assurance that killing the top layer of leaders would create a power vacuum that “the people” or some chosen agent would fill (when, in fact, it only strengthened the power of the oppressive, anti-Western Revolutionary Guard). But the air-war commanders—the officers who handpicked the 13,000 targets and sent tens of thousands of bombs and missiles to destroy them—also played a role. Did they fail to brief the president and his inner circle on the inherent limits of air power? Or did they fall prey to the old myths of its transcendency? Did they believe, or hope, that the improved speed and accuracy of the latest weapons and control systems might override the lessons of history? If so, they too are complicit in this war—our nation’s least popular war ever, and possibly its most obtuse and calamitous strategic blunder.

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

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Thursday, July 30, 2026 7:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless

Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?

Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?

You're a fucking idiot. That's why.

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

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

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Friday, July 31, 2026 7:48 PM

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:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless

Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?

Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?

You're a fucking idiot. That's why.

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

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

This May Be Trump’s Biggest Error in the Iran War

Success requires knowing what motivates your enemy.

By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | July 31, 2026, 8 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/07/iran-war-trump-m
isunderstandings/688117/

For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations—and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

Iran’s decision Tuesday to launch ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in Jordan was a prime example. It befuddled Washington. U.S. officials had come to expect that their actions would drive the war, and Iran would react. But here was Tehran, escalating matters just after the United States had suspended its 13-day barrage of strikes against Iranian defenses and infrastructure. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, described the move as a “surprise attack.”

Tehran characterized the missile strikes as self-defense against what the regime saw as the Trump administration’s broadening of the war. Around the same time as the Iranian attack, U.S. and Saudi forces launched joint strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Riyadh’s first publicly acknowledged military strikes of the conflict. Turki al-Maliki, a Saudi defense-ministry spokesperson, said in a statement that the militias had attacked the kingdom’s oil facilities and that Riyadh reserved the right to respond “at the appropriate time and place.”

This week’s events hardly represented the first time that the two sides had misread each other’s intentions. The convoluted and complicated war has swung almost weekly between peace overtures and fighting. Those misinterpretations appear set to continue, especially amid signs that others may be dragged into the fight. Egyptian officials earlier this week confirmed that a drone had set two gas vessels ablaze at Damietta, a port city on the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal. No group has claimed responsibility, but the attack raised fears that Iran has expanded its list of nations to target.

The memorandum of understanding that Washington and Tehran signed in the middle of last month quickly devolved into one of the war’s signature misunderstandings. The very first clause of the agreement promised to end the fighting, but the two sides had fundamentally different interpretations of their obligations.

The memorandum did not end the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz but rather, it papered over it. Washington believed it had secured 60 days of open, toll-free commercial navigation. Tehran read the agreement as preserving its authority to manage traffic through the waterway. As the dispute erupted, some Iranian officials believed that the U.S. had purposely drafted a vague agreement to trigger a violation that could be used as a predicate to resume strikes, a person familiar with their thinking told us. And the U.S. sought to use financial incentives, such as sanctions waivers and investment, to entice a government that was preoccupied with the assassination of its supreme leader. Was anyone really surprised that the pact fell apart? Certainly not President Trump, who professed that he “couldn’t care less” after each side had walked away.

Even before the war began, in late February, the two governments were talking past each other. The U.S. believed that Iran was fragile and the regime susceptible to collapse after nationwide protests. The regime believed that nothing short of its total capitulation to U.S. demands would prevent a war. Trump ordered the war to begin while talks were still under way, and his administration believed that the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the conflict’s first day would quickly be followed by the collapse of the state. Instead, five months in, the regime remains intact and seems to have enough confidence to endure any U.S. response.

This could put the two sides on a path to escalation, each remaining convinced that more military pressure will force the other to abandon its objectives. “America’s calculation is that escalation would lead to surrender. Iran’s calculation is that escalation would lead to deterrence,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told us.

Trump promised on Fox News earlier this week to “beat the fucking shit out of them.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, said that the base in Jordan would remain a target because “as long as threats against Iran persist, resistance will persist.” (The Jordanian military said that all five missiles fired Tuesday were intercepted.) But neither side seems able to answer the question that matters most: What if escalation doesn’t work?

Escalation is “a means to an end, but we don’t know what the end is,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who specializes in Iran, told us.

Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that Trump himself appears to be of (at least) two minds about how he wants to proceed. He has vacillated between backing more military action and giving peace talks a chance. The U.S. cannot begin to understand its enemy if it has yet to settle on its own aims—or how to achieve them. Trump has repeatedly sought to back away from the conflict, but during a meeting with senior advisers last Friday, he seriously considered ramping up attacks. He opted not to, but the plans remain on his desk, a senior White House official told us. A pause in U.S. strikes that began Saturday was over by midweek following Iran’s attack on the base in Jordan.

The U.S. is seeking to understand an enemy that is changing and adapting. Iran appears intent on reintroducing the element of military surprise, driven by the belief that it can outlast Trump and that negotiations no longer present a viable path. The regime operates differently under its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his late father. Iran is no longer content to let proxies across the region fight for its interests. It wants to use its missiles and drones to fight for its long-term security. And it is willing to endure strikes by the U.S. to the point that American military commanders are running short on viable targets it can hit to stop attacks on the strait.

“They are willing to sacrifice themselves and the public for the future of the regime,” Citrinowicz said. He doesn’t believe that Iran wants to fight an endless war any more than Trump does. But Tehran thinks Trump faces constraints, including the economic damage stemming from the strait’s continued closure and the tepid response of Gulf States. Iran’s position, in contrast, has been strengthened by support from the Houthis in Yemen, who recently began targeting Saudi interests and threatened to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait to commercial shipping. Iranian leaders, Citrinowicz said, “believe at the end of the day, they are able to shape the situation on the ground to their own benefit.”

A number of influential MAGA allies—including Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon—have publicly and privately called for the White House to rapidly wind down the war, believing that the conflict has demoralized Trump’s base and will hurt the GOP in the midterms. Republicans facing tough reelection fights have expressed fears to the West Wing that an escalation in the conflict would lead to even higher gas prices, which could doom their November chances. Yet at same time, Persian Gulf allies have made clear that they find Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz untenable—especially if the regime charges tolls. That would, in effect, mean that the same countries battered by Tehran’s missiles would be stuck paying for Iran to rebuild.

Perhaps as a result, Washington has lurched among military, diplomatic, and economic strategies, hoping that one, or some combination of them, would compel Tehran to yield. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions that aim to put economic pressure on Iran by targeting companies and tankers tied to its maritime trade. The U.S. also hopes that an escalation of military strikes will do enough to tip the regime either into collapse or capitulation. But even the threat of escalation can come with a cost: Brent crude climbed nearly 8 percent after Trump’s profanity-laden remarks, briefly breaking $91 a barrel yesterday.

Officials told us that Trump was noncommittal when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his Tuesday visit to the White House, urged the president to ramp up attacks on Iran (among the ideas being considered is to strike the land routes that Iran has been using to resupply its forces). Netanyahu expressed deep skepticism that Iran would ever agree to a reasonable peace deal. U.S. officials believe that some factions in the Iranian power structure favor making a deal, but whether they have the authority to do so is not clear. The officials also believe that Iran’s economy will continue to weaken to a point at which Tehran will be forced into a deal.

For now, there are no good options for Trump and there is no clarity as to how two sides in a widening war can find off-ramps, particularly if they continue to misinterpret each other’s actions.

Trump could declare victory, noting that the U.S. and Israel killed the ayatollah, and vow to attack again should Iran resume its quest for a nuclear weapon. Or he could try to return to the terms of the MOU. But the administration would likely have to sign on to some aspects of Iran’s interpretation of it, such as its retention of control of the Strait of Hormuz. Or Trump can escalate, hitting Iran’s missile capabilities to make the targeting of U.S. bases and Gulf partners more difficult. But he would have to do so at a rate faster than Iran can reconstitute its forces. And he faces political opposition to a more prolonged conflict: A CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this week found that a majority of Americans are not optimistic about the war and feel that its objectives are not clear. More than two-thirds of respondents said the Trump administration should end the war now.

Both sides seem to agree on one thing: There is no end in sight to the war. U.S. defense officials told us that they believe conflict will continue into 2027. Iran is signaling that it plans for a fight even longer than that.

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 9:43 AM

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

In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for a Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear

With none of President Trump’s aims accomplished and the Strait of Hormuz closed, U.S. allies see dysfunction and vulnerability from the war.

By Steven Erlanger | August 1, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/middleeast/us-iran-war-strate
gy.html

To America’s allies, President Trump’s war in Iran, now in its sixth month, seems headed for a strategic defeat.

They worry that the inability of the United States to turn military superiority into a sustainably changed Iran has displayed a vulnerability that Russia and China will welcome. In addition, Mr. Trump’s goals remain unmet, and the U.S. military is running short on key armaments that it needs for global reach.

For the moment, Iran is seemingly resolute under a more radical government, its nuclear and ballistic missile programs are degraded but not destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively under its control. The war has left both the United States and Israel in weaker positions — and blaming each other for the mess.

Iranian missiles and drones not only restrict traffic through the strait and damage the economic infrastructure of allied energy production, but they also continue to threaten American bases across the Middle East and have killed or injured American service members.

With Mr. Trump’s aims shifting, Washington is losing credibility both militarily and diplomatically, analysts said. Its conduct in the war underscores the impression that the United States is an unpredictable instrument of global disorder, they said.

The war may evolve, but so far the result has been “a strategic loss and an embarrassment,” said Robin Niblett, a former director of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “For U.S. allies and those who rely on the U.S. for security, this is confirmation that you can’t trust the United States.”

Even if the Islamic Republic collapses, he added, “people won’t forget that their security and their future were dragged into question by an unpredictable and wavering U.S. foreign policy.”

European allies remember Mr. Trump’s vow to seize Greenland from a NATO ally and his threats to leave the alliance unless other allies met his spending goals. Middle Eastern allies see their own security undermined by this war, even if they are too committed to Washington to abandon partnerships with the United States. But they are already hedging, looking for repaired ties with Iran and better relations with Europe, China and Russia, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.

Many countries disliked the global order as it was, Mr. Niblett said, but there was one. “Now America has confirmed itself as a force of disorder and everyone is drawing lessons from it, and trying to be less dependent,” he said. “No one wants to be subject to a whipsaw foreign policy that doesn’t know its limits, and that is a strategic defeat.”

Mr. Vaez cited other recent developments as evidence that the United States has lost credibility as a guarantor of allies’ security, including Mr. Trump’s abrupt change of demands last week after announcing a landmark nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia.

“The Saudis do a nuclear deal with Trump that he walks back in 24 hours,” Mr. Vaez said. “This is the crisis of credibility of the U.S. Neither its military prowess nor its diplomatic promises can be trusted.”

Mr. Trump has argued that it is vital to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and that it will eventually cede to superior force. Eventually, he said on Friday, he expects Iran to realize it can’t take any more punishment and will negotiate on U.S. terms.

“We’ll be hitting them. We’ll be hitting them very hard,” Mr. Trump said. “At some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”

But he’s losing whatever faith he had in the Iranians, complaining they “always want to talk” but break their word after negotiations. “They’ll get weaker,” he said, “and then they peter out.”

World War II left the United States stronger at home and with more influence abroad. But since then, America’s military record has been a mixed bag. Enemies more willing to suffer the pain and expense of conflict, as in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, outlasted the United States.

This war in Iran may turn out similarly, with Washington finding a sufficient reason to cut its losses and go home.

Already, the conflict “has undermined U.S. deterrence and credibility, antagonized America’s allies and delighted its adversaries,” said Aaron David Miller, a former American negotiator and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And if the Strait of Hormuz falls under Iran’s leverage and control, it will constitute nothing less than a strategic defeat.”

A severe shortage in crucial air-defense munitions like Patriot missiles is having a secondary effect in Ukraine and showing Russia and China — as well as NATO — that the United States will be less capable for years at least to both resupply its allies and fight a lengthy war.

The war has also badly damaged the vital alliance between the United States and Israel, said François Heisbourg, a French security analyst. American officials including Vice President JD Vance have suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was overly optimistic while convincing Mr. Trump that the war would be quick and decisive.

Added to already negative views of Israel and Jews more generally stemming from the long conflict with Hamas in Gaza, which some call genocide, this war has increased antisemitism in the United States and beyond, some polls show.

The most important negotiation now, he and Mr. Vaez agreed, is between Iran and Oman over control of the Strait of Hormuz, which both countries border. Iran wants sole control over the strait’s northern route and shared control over the southern route, which would give it an effective veto over traffic, Mr. Vaez said. While Oman, which Iran is convinced is influenced by Saudi Arabia and the United States, argues for a voluntary fee for passage, Iran is demanding a compulsory one.

“This may be the end of the law of the sea as we’ve known it,” said Mr. Heisbourg. Freedom of the seas has been an American vital interest from its founding, he noted, but it is now at risk.

Even if there is agreement on the strait, Iranian officials believe there is no guarantee Mr. Trump will accept it, analysts said. The Iranians remember that Mr. Trump tore up the 2015 nuclear deal and attacked Iran twice during more recent nuclear negotiations. So they are insisting on a final deal on the strait before any new memorandum of understanding can be negotiated with Washington, Mr. Vaez said, and they also want a pullback of U.S. offensive military assets.

“The Iranian calculus is simple,” he said. With its regional proxies in retreat, “they need the leverage the strait provides them to extract concessions from the U.S. and get a guarantee that an attack on Iran can’t happen again.”

Their position may be strengthened by the decision of their Yemeni ally, the Houthis, to blockade the Bab el-Mandeb strait that Saudi oil exports pass through on their way to Asia.

But even decision makers in Iran who favor further negotiations with the United States are losing confidence that Mr. Trump will be able to keep to any deal over the Strait of Hormuz or anything else, argued Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research institution focused on economic diplomacy.

“Iranian leaders have become intensely pessimistic about what diplomacy with the Trump administration can achieve,” he said. He noted that many of them view Mr. Trump as erratic and have a hard time seeing how they could reach a deal with the United States when it has undercut its own allies.

Washington has started a war it does not seem to know how to win or end, while Iran is mistrustful that any deal reached will be implemented. The coming weeks are likely to see a continuing cycle of ad hoc truces and escalation, Mr. Vaez said, a new form of forever war.

Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 10:10 AM

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

If you decide to fight a war of choice, it’s very hard to win. If you’re fighting a war of existence, then your capacity is limitless. In that sense - slightly unlikely bedfellows - you see Ukraine doing something similar to Iran: Absorb enormous amounts of pressure and keep going.

Iran has been fighting three cold wars simultaneously - one with “the great Satan,” as Iranians like to call it, the US; one with “little Satan,” Israel; and one with Saudi Arabia. It’s done so for 47 years, with about 3% of the US defense budget.

That’s the major takeaway: that the United States has not been able to deliver a knockout blow to a small-to-middling-size country like Iran. The capability of Iran to keep going was mispriced by Washington, as Ukraine's capability was mispriced by Moscow.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-peter-frankopan-weekend-interv
iew/

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 4:30 PM

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

Despite Nixon losing the Vietnam War, there were many Texans in the construction industry who profited mightily from that war by building military bases in Vietnam. They remember the war as a great victory for themselves. Despite Trump already losing the Iran War, there will be many Texans in the fossil fuel industry who will remember this loss as a victory for themselves:

Big Oil Is Reaping Rewards From the Chaos in Energy Markets

ExxonMobil’s earnings doubled, Chevron posted its highest quarterly earnings on record as energy prices soared during the Strait of Hormuz’s prolonged closure

By Collin Eaton Updated July 31, 2026 10:29 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxonmobil-xom-chevron-cvx-2q-
earnings-report-2026-stock-77ca6092

The largest U.S. oil companies reported a blockbuster quarter after the Iran war caused a dislocation in global markets that sent energy prices soaring.

At ExxonMobil, profits more than doubled from a year earlier to their highest level since 2022, while Chevron reported its highest quarterly earnings on record.

Exxon said high oil-and-gas production and its nearly two dozen refineries from Texas to Singapore pushed earnings to $14.5 billion.

The total was its highest since the peak of an energy crisis kicked off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Chevron reported earnings of $12.1 billion that rose nearly fivefold from the same period last year, driven by record oil-and-gas production and refining throughput.

Both companies raked in cash as the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz waterway between Iran and Oman cut off a big chunk of the world’s fuel supplies.

U.S. oil prices climbed as high as $112.95 a barrel in the quarter, and gasoline prices surged to the highest levels in four years.

“While we didn’t anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it. In our markets, disruption is inevitable,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in a conference call Friday with analysts. “Despite the temporary loss of approximately 10% of our upstream production, we delivered exceptional financial results.”

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 4:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless

Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?

Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?

You're a fucking idiot. That's why.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
This May Be Trump’s Biggest Error in the Iran War

Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.

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

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 4:40 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.

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

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

Just for people who don't know who 6ixStringJack is, he is a Trumptard, a follower of Trump. Trump hates everybody, except for those who worship him. 6ix hates everybody who is opposed to worshipping Trump. If you don't express any opinion about Trump or his incompetence at making War, 6ix won't automatically hate you. But if you do have a negative opinion of the Donald, 6ix will outdo Trump with his hatred of you.

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 7:11 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

Answer the question or don't quote me, Shit Golem.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Just for people who don't know who 6ixStringJack is, he is a Trumptard, a follower of Trump. Trump hates everybody, except for those who worship him. 6ix hates everybody who is opposed to worshipping Trump. If you don't express any opinion about Trump or his incompetence at making War, 6ix won't automatically hate you. But if you do have a negative opinion of the Donald, 6ix will outdo Trump with his hatred of you.

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

SECOND, don't assume SIX hates you, bc you're not hate- worthy. Despises might be a better word.
And it's not just SIX that despises you, and it's not about Trump. You're just despicable is all.

-----------

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 7:12 PM

Amen.

I didn't realize he posted it here to, so now I'm going to post my reply here too as well...

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

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

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Saturday, August 1, 2026 7:14 PM

From the thread I just made this morning in the Cinema board with the obvious rename in the new title, after Second posted the same paragraph full of shit there too...

[SPOILER WARNING because Second is a Shit Golem] Holy F*#K! It's been so long now that I forgot what a good opening weekend looked like...

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=67718

None of that is even remotely true. Very much like everything that comes out of Shit Golem's mouth.

Anybody who doesn't know who Second is and what he is all about will figure it out pretty quick if they stick around a while. He is pure garbage without any opinions you couldn't get just from reading the NYT.

Like the creepiest of creeps, he regularly reads everything that the members who have interests outside of politics share about their lives, and saves them on his computer, where he will then try to use anything that somebody says against them in a completely different context, like a fucking loser stalker creep would. At one point, a member was talking about their health issues and he brought that up in a different thread in an argument and laughed at her.

I mean, he constantly does this to me, but I don't care about little online bitches who don't know how to behave themselves and I can handle my business. That being said, I've been sober now for 5 months shy of a decade, and he'll still throw my alcoholism in my face.

He finally stopped plagiarizing other people's writing and trying to pass it off as his own after I dedicated an entire thread to catching him in the act constantly doing this. How did I figure that out? Pretty easy when his posts go from 5th grade English to some extra flowery bullshit that Liberal dipshits like to put in their writing.

He sends death threats to everyone, which are all extensively archived because he also likes going back through his own post history regularly and deleting things that have become inconvenient for him.

His alternate handle Reaverfan who once told me explicitly how I should wrap my lips around the barrel of a gun and take myself out got banned years ago, yet somehow Haken allows this evil little troll to keep posting here after all the horrible shit he's said to everyone.

If you don't know who Second is, consider yourself lucky. And until he finally gets the ban here that he so richly deserves, I don't imagine anybody new is going to join this website for any reason.

If you'd like to know more...

Second is a Serial Plagiarist that just got caught red handed

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65471

HAKEN: THIS NEEDS TO STOP. IMMEDIATELY. I'M NOT ASKING ANYMORE.

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=2&tid=67251

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

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Sunday, August 2, 2026 4:23 PM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050

The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

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

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

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 6:14 AM

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

Why Is the U.S. Running So Low on Weapons?

Allies that depend on U.S. military equipment need a Plan B.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien | August 3, 2026, 6:56 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/the-us-isnt-making-enough-we
apons/688150/

Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.

Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.

The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.

In the short term, concerns about diminished weapons stocks are already limiting Washington’s strategic options. Because of his advisers’ concern about the adequacy of current supplies, Trump has reportedly been hesitant to escalate the war. If the United States decided to send ground forces into Iran on the scale necessary to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, defending those forces could exhaust the remaining stocks of advanced air-defense systems. After a short period, American troops would be far more exposed, and casualties far more likely.

Trump and his appointees during his current and previous terms bear only part of the responsibility for the current situation. The fundamental problem has been a bipartisan neglect of America’s military-industrial productive base over the past three decades. The United States allowed many of its strategic industries, such as shipbuilding, to wither. Its post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved brief invasions followed by years of relatively low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare that, whatever its difficulties, did not require mass stockpiles of munitions.

Informed by these experiences, military planners appear to have been operating under the assumption that future wars would be short and containable. If China attacks Taiwan and the United States wants to come to the island democracy’s aid, the Pentagon will not be prepared for a protracted war.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to learn from the war in Ukraine. Iran has learned to mass-produce cheap drones—ones that the Russians first imported and now produce themselves. In other words, their effectiveness had been tested, and their existence was widely known. But that seemed to make no difference to U.S. planners. Perhaps in the arrogant belief that a war with Iran would quickly end in a decisive victory, the Pentagon did not have cost-effective systems ready to intercept these weapons. Neither did the Gulf countries that have counted on American weaponry for their self-defense.

In contrast, Ukraine has proved remarkably adaptive to emerging conditions. Creating a powerful strategic industry, as Ukraine has done in the case of air, land, and sea drones, not only helps with the country’s security. It also provides a boost to Ukraine’s economic and strategic position, as governments in the Gulf and elsewhere seek to tap its expertise.

The Gulf partners that build their militaries around equipment from the United States do so under the assumption that, in a moment of need, they can get what they require from the superpower. Perhaps the U.S. would even carry the burden of any war in the region. The perils of such assumptions are becoming apparent.

Relying on any other country for weapons is dangerous. Doing so may create a flashy frontline force with some advanced capabilities. But once the purchased equipment is destroyed or worn out, the military that bought it is left with troops trained on equipment that it cannot make and with a military doctrine built around equipment it might never have again.

Sometimes allies drag their feet or change their mind. Ukrainians have used American military equipment to great effect, but the unreliability of those supplies—because of President Biden’s fear of antagonizing Russia and Trump’s usual favoritism toward Vladimir Putin—has hampered their war effort.

Since Trump’s return to office, traditional European allies have come to recognize from his criticism of NATO that they will need to rely more on their own resources for their security. The current munitions crunch could lead its Gulf partners to the same conclusion.

If Saudi Arabia and other customers of the American defense industry start sourcing their military equipment elsewhere, or making it themselves, the United States will lose out. Beyond improving America’s military position and diplomatic leverage, arms exports have been a lucrative industry.

If the United States appears less powerful and less reliable than it once was and is running through munitions faster than it can produce them, many more countries will follow Ukraine’s example. The Pentagon is belatedly ramping up its efforts to develop less expensive self-guided weapons. But those initiatives so far seem inadequate to address the problem that the war with Iran has revealed: a gap between America’s military needs and what it is capable of manufacturing quickly and cheaply.

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

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 10:41 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050

The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

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

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

And you believe that???

-----------

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 5:18 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And you believe that???

I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.

When a President Promises a Massacre

Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.

By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/

“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”

Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”

Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

Channeling His Inner-Martian

As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.

Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.

“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”

This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.

Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.

White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down like wild beasts,” according to the local press. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers exacted revenge on the Indigenous people that left “sixty of them killed and wounded.” The next year, when members of settler police and military forces were pelted with stones, they responded with gunfire and a bayonet charge that “killed seventy of them, dragging the women and children from the crevices of the rocks, and dashing out their brains.”

The slaughter in Tasmania was the inspiration for author H.G. Wells’s late 19th-century sci-fi classic “War of the Worlds,” in which Martians with superior technology, advanced firepower, and no compunction about annihilating humanity invade England, laying waste to London and driving out its population. “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought,” the narrator says in the book’s open. “The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

When lawyer Raphael Lemkin formulated the idea of “genocide” after World War II, almost 50 years after Wells wrote “War of the Worlds,” he considered Tasmania a historical case study of his concept. It’s unclear if Trump ever read “War of the Worlds,” though he attended the New York City premiere of the 2005 Steven Spielberg film adaptation; I doubt he understood Wells’s allegory, presuming he knows what an allegory is.

The Tasmanian carnage was part of an age of slaughter and genocide carried out across the globe by European powers and the United States. Trump has long been in the thrall of the precepts of this era of colonial conquest: Might makes right; territorial acquisition through armed intervention; and colonial relationships with, and resource extraction from, conquered foes and weaker nations.

Trump often invokes and praises Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century predecessor in the White House, who owned slaves and implemented a policy of “Indian removal” that culminated in the Trail of Tears, the military’s forced displacement of Native Americans, during which thousands died. Trump advocated “furthering President Jackson’s legacy, expanding his vision, [and] honoring his memory” earlier this year, pronouncing that Old Hickory embodied the “best of the American Spirit.” Trump has even employed America’s contribution to the eradication of indigenous peoples as a punch line. He has made light, on social media, not only of the Trail of Tears but also the Army’s massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

Even the Army’s official history portrays Wounded Knee as a Tasmanian-scale slaughter in which an effort to disarm a group of Lakota religious revivalists resulted in an errant shot, possibly an accidental discharge, that “led immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers,” including the use of artillery, “despite the presence of numerous noncombatants.” In the end, up to 300 Lakota, including women and children, lay dead while “Army casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire.”

Such disproportionate mass killings and exterminations were a hallmark of the 19th century. This “destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for the destruction of six million Jews in Europe,” as the author Sven Lindqvist observed, in his classic text “Exterminate All the Brutes.” We look back on these Holocaust-precipitating slaughters as beyond abhorrent. Or at least we did.

The death toll disparity at Wounded Knee doesn’t compare to the carnage of Trump’s war on Iran. The estimated 3,375 to 6,000 Iranian deaths dwarf the 19 U.S. deaths by 180 to 320 times, or more than two orders of magnitude. (The official U.S. Iran war death toll stands at 18, with the Pentagon omitting one widely reported loss.) The 60-to-1 Tasmanian toll of dead and wounded is a similar ratio as the estimated 39,806 total Iranian casualties compared to the official U.S. count of more than 700 troops who have been killed or wounded.

Trump has also repeatedly touted the lopsided nature of his punitive expedition in Venezuela, a short war in which the U.S. deposed and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, creating a de facto U.S. colony run by a quisling. “To have a few injuries, but no death on our side, is really amazing,” Trump bragged after the invasion, later comparing the lack of U.S. fatalities to the substantial death tolls of the (much longer) Korean and Vietnam wars. The 100 or more Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians killed compared with a handful of U.S. injuries shares a lineage of battlefield massacres like the 1863 U.S. slaughter of 250 to 500 Shoshone — including at least 90 women, children and infants — at Bear River at a cost of 24 U.S. troops, and the up to 6,000 Zulus armed with shields and spears cut down by Gatling guns and artillery compared with 10 British troops killed at Ulundi in southern Africa in 1879.

Trump’s 2025 war against the Houthi government in Yemen — Operation Rough Rider — was similarly lopsided. The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids combined. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. The U.S. also killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, according to CENTCOM spokesperson Dave Eastburn, who referred to “credible open sources” citing 650 Houthi casualties. The U.S. did not suffer a single reported fatality during the campaign. And Trump’s relentless strikes in nearby Somalia have amounted to up to 420 deaths at a cost of zero American lives.

The Trump administration’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which has killed at least 221 people without the loss of even one U.S. life, is a still more egregious slaughter. In this case, only unarmed civilians are targeted, victims akin to the fleeing Tasmanian women and children who had their skulls bashed in.

There are, of course, myriad differences between Trump’s ongoing war on the world and 19th-century colonial extermination campaigns in Africa, America, Australia, and elsewhere. Trump doesn’t, for example, explicitly assert racial superiority as a reason for his military interventions even if he often lapses into racist rants and is making war in Somalia while deriding Somalis as “garbage.”

But Trump’s more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars have heightened the increasing trend toward “riskless warfare,” a term coined more than a quarter century ago by Paul Kahn, the director of Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights. “It is an image of warfare without the possibility of chivalry,” the prescient Kahn later observed. “At the heart is a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk. Without the imposition of mutual risk, warfare is not war at all.”

Earlier this decade, in a study of drone warfare, Neil Renic, a scholar of military ethics, refined the concept as “radical asymmetry,” in which “one side has, in a practical sense, overcome the type and degree of physical vulnerability that has long been regarded as an expected and unavoidable feature of war.” Renic sees the drift toward unilateral violence leading to the increasing “perception of the weaker party … from an opponent to be fought and overcome, to one that must be hunted and done away with,” contributing to “dehumanization” of the enemy which, “in some cases … has led to a more severe decline in the targeting practices of the United States, from the morally questionable to the morally indefensible.” This feature of modern warfare harkens back to the age of extermination, when Tasmanians and others were also hunted and done away with.

As Trump has reveled in asymmetrical body counts and called for more disproportionate deaths, he has increasingly fancied himself an alien destroyer like Wells’s Martians; even if he himself doesn’t quite realize it. In one bizarre AI-slop image he posted on Truth Social as the Iran war went south, Trump appears to be striding from a spaceship — on some platform high above Earth — as legions of weapons-toting alien warriors flank him. In another, a gigantic Trump is seated at a command console in a space station floating high above the world. On screens above him, we see huge explosions apparently going off simultaneously back on Earth. On still another, an indistinct country is seemingly being ravaged by lasers.

“Then in a moment the Heat Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins,” wrote Wells in “War of the Worlds,” describing the Martians’ weapon of mass destruction. “The houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar.” Wells referenced the “massacre of mankind” and “the rout of civilization.” As Trump has made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa, he has channeled his inner Martian. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote of Iran on Truth Social, promising the “entire country could be taken out” and warning he might bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”

Trump’s unhinged rhetoric is further driven home by the remaining imagery in the command-console post: a mushroom cloud from a monstrous nuclear blast with text on a screen announcing “target destroyed,” while a glowering Trump is poised to push a glowing red button that suggests he is about to incinerate the planet. Trump’s annihilationist fantasies are especially disturbing since he controls a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over. (“We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times,” was how Trump put it.)

Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 1:28 PM

Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.

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

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 2:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.

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

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

Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?

Don't be evil.

-----------

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 2:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Until they leave our country or we force them out, kill every last one of them and their children. Not just Iran. All Muslims.

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

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

Since when did you turn into REAVERFAN, SIX?

Don't be evil.

-----------

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

They don't need to die. They just need to leave.

The US and The EU.

If they die, that is their choice.

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

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 2:50 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And you believe that???
I believe Trump is promising what Trumptards want: a massacre.

When a President Promises a Massacre

Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.

By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/

“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”

Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition

. . .

As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.

Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude.

Curiously, the remainder of the article fails to mention Israel's campaign of literal genocide (one of our proxies in western Asia), Saudi Arabia's terrorists (our other proxy in western Asia) and Saddam Hussein (our erstwhile chemical warfare-using proxy against Iran, before we killed him).

GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.

Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.

2 million people were killed in Vietnam.

Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".

Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.

There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.

THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:33 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

. . . GENOCIDE AND SLAUGHTER IS NOTHING NEW IN AMERICAN POLICY.

Kissinger armed Sukarno, who killed an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians. Later, we supported Indonesia killing up to 300,000 in East Timor.

2 million people were killed in Vietnam.

Our sanctions against Iran killed an estimated 500,000 children; Madeline Albright thought it was "worth it".

Arming the Contras and arming and funding military tyrannies throughout S and Central America.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the way back to the genocide of North America's indigenous people.

There is hardly a place on the globe where we haven't rained death.

THIS IS NOT A FEATURE OF ONLY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION. He's just louder about it than other Presidents.

Signym, you are missing the point that Trump's threats of annihilating Iran are fake because of the reasons in the following article. Trump very much wants to annihilate Iran, but he can't unless he nukes Iran because he foolishly squandered America's non-nuclear arsenal.

How the U.S. Squandered Its Strategic Advantage.

Idle threats and munitions shortages have boxed Trump in.

By Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire | August 6, 2026, 10:28 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/08/shortage-weapons
-shaping-war-iran/688201/

The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.

The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.

President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.

The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, Trump said that reports of munitions shortages were false and that such “leaks” were treasonous. Manufacturers are shipping “large amounts” of munitions “as needed,” he wrote.

White House aides are concerned that Trump is losing his leverage in the conflict. He has threatened Iran many times but has rarely followed through; Tehran knows that. Tehran also knows that the U.S. is running low on munitions despite what Hegseth and the president say in public. Military leverage depends not simply on the U.S. ability to strike but also on its capacity to defend against Iran’s retaliation. Iran has displayed the confidence to further test the U.S., attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The White House has maintained that Iran would soon face an economic situation so dire that the regime would be forced to negotiate, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iran is struggling. But the Trump administration has been surprised at Tehran’s resilience, and is no longer certain that the regime will reach the point where negotiation is its only option.

In the five months since the war started, the president has never faced such a weak position. The shortage of interceptors makes escalation dangerous. Nor would expanded strikes guarantee that Tehran will come back to the table.

That may leave diplomacy and concessions as the administration’s least risky option. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Iran will never be allowed to control any part of the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump is now considering a deal that gives Iran some control over maritime traffic. The proposed agreement between Oman and Iran, pending U.S. and Gulf approval, would reopen the strait by establishing a jointly managed framework for commercial shipping. Such a deal would give Iran the oversight of the crucial waterway it feels it has earned from the war, while also honoring Oman’s insistence on preserving freedom of navigation.

America’s stockpiles have been under strain for years, but became painfully clear after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. military fired hundreds of missiles, some costing millions each, during the Trump administration’s 53-day campaign last year against the Houthis in Yemen. That was followed by nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the interception of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel. During the first 38 days of the Iran war, the U.S. launched thousands of munitions.

Hegseth has repeatedly denied any shortage, including to Trump as recently as last week, one U.S. official told us. On Capitol Hill, the defense secretary did not make a compelling case for the funding he wants, particularly to legislators who face tough reelections partly because of the war’s unpopularity. Between American voters’ frustrations with rising gas prices and Hegseth’s mixed messages and past combative relationship with Congress, “there is no goodwill for the department here,” one congressional aide told us.

Still, Congress is ultimately expected to provide much of the funds the Pentagon says it needs to replenish its stores. But what the U.S. really needs is time. Depending on the weapon, replenishment to prewar levels could take as long as five years, Mark Cancian, who tracks munitions stockpiles for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told us.

Another three years would get stockpiles “to a level where the joint staff and U.S. commanders in charge of the Asia Pacific would be comfortable,” Cancian said. In theory, that gives Beijing plenty of time to take advantage of American shortages with, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” and the amplification of them is irresponsible, Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement. “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

The problem predates the Trump administration. After the Cold War, the U.S. reduced the number, and slowed the pace of production, of vital munitions, figuring that long bouts of peace between short, conclusive wars would provide plenty of capacity. But the military has been almost constantly engaged somewhere in conflicts led by missile strikes: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Nigeria. And Russia’s war with Ukraine has been defined by rapid advances in munitions. The Biden administration signed contracts to replenish Kyiv’s weapons but could not keep up with demand, Cancian told us.

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” Cancian told us. “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated “if we knew when the war will end,” one defense official told us. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes—and the strain they have put on U.S. stockpiles—are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy again, this time without the long-held assumption that U.S. forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:33 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So, to get back to Iran...

Trump can threaten and bluster all he wants, but in reality there isn't much he can do bc we've (apparently) nearly run out of ATACMS (short range offensive ballistic missiles) and have severely depleted our Tomahawk (long range subsonic cruise attack) missiles and Patriot (defensive) missiles. And sending in ships, men, or aircraft would be suicide.

Furthermore, Iran and Ansar Allah in Yemen maintain the capacity to stop all ships, destroy ports, and to devastate all regional nations that host American forces, including their desalination plants and oil/ gas production infrastructure.

So Trump is blasting out threats and bluster to cover up what is, in essence a defeat. Even at expedited production rates, it'll take YEARS for America to build up its stockpiles, and possibly longer since China severely restricted the rare earths and metals needed to make weapons.

And throwing money at weapons mfrs will only lead to higher profits, bc we have LONG-STANDING supply chain and deindustrialization problems that will take a decade or more of focused, diligent effort, not something Trump ... or any of our pols ... are noted for.

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:59 PM