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

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, August 7, 2026 07:13
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PAGE 96 of 96

Tuesday, August 4, 2026 4:26 PM

Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

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

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 4:32 PM

SECOND

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

Where Are Trump's Lawyers Now?

• Roy Cohen Disbarred; dead

• Michael Cohen Disbarred; pleaded guilty to tax, campaign and false-statement crimes

• Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in NY and DC; $148 million in defamation damages

• Alina Habba Sanctioned $1 million for frivolous litigation

• Boris Epshteyn Pending Arizona criminal charges in fake-elector case

• John Eastman Disbarred in California and suspended in DC; Arizona criminal case pending

• Kenneth Chesebro Disbarred in New York; pleaded guilty in Georgia; Wisconsin case pending

• Sidney Powell Pleaded guilty in Georgia

• Jenna Ellis Pleaded guilty in Georgia; suspended in Colorado; Arizona criminal case pending

• Jeffrey Clark Facing criminal charges in Arizona over fake-elector scheme

• Christina Bobb Facing Arizona criminal charges over fake-elector scheme

• Lin Wood Disbarred in Colorado; Retired and surrendered his law license rather than face disbarment in his home state of Georgia

• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among all of Ronald Reagan's, George H. W. Bush's, Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Barack Obama's, and Joe Biden's lawyers: ZERO

• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among Donald Trump's lawyers: Ten and counting

https://imgur.com/gallery/where-are-they-now-0cJdfqJ

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 5:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:37 AM

SECOND

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

Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous

The president’s recent rant is a sign of serious dysfunction in the Oval Office.

By Tom Nichols | August 4, 2026, 6:03 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-reflecting-pool-irrati
onality/688180/

Many Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have become inured to Donald Trump’s strange rants. When he shouts about sharks, when he drones on about his brilliant uncle, when he casually ponders violating the Constitution, his supporters try to dress his statements up as some kind of strategy: He’s not lost touch with reality, you see. He’s doing the weave, or he’s owning the libs. He’s fighting the fake news and flooding the zone. He knows what he’s doing.

These excuses have never really held much water. But his rant yesterday about the Reflecting Pool (speaking of things that don’t hold water) was a warning that the president has encased himself in the hard amber of irrationality that inevitably surrounds authoritarian leaders. He has become detached from reality—and that detachment is extremely dangerous.

The Reflecting Pool mess is different from other Trump obsessions because it reveals just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become, even when a trusted lieutenant wheels an entire box of supporting evidence into the Oval Office. In Trump’s world, nothing is ever innocent. If something went wrong, the fault must lie with Americans conspiring against him, not with a contractor who did shabby work. And so the boss put out the order: Find the criminals who destroyed my lovely pool.

The task of prosecuting this inane case fell to Jeanine Pirro, who has known Trump for more than three decades. She has long been one of his most loyal defenders on Fox News, and she was his personal choice for the job of U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia after the failed nomination of Ed Martin. She dutifully charged multiple people with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, including the Olympic athlete David Hearn. But last week, she moved to drop the case after admitting that the pool’s condition was “the result of a botched installation” and not of criminal activity. Trump immediately turned on her. In a Truth Social post after Pirro’s filing, Trump said he disagreed “100%” with his old friend. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”

This outburst, however, was merely a warm-up for a nearly 10-minute performance yesterday afternoon in the Oval Office that went well beyond Trump’s usual whining. Pirro, he said, “choked” under pressure from the court. She “made a mistake. It was vandalism.” He continued:

Quote:
One of the things was, the Reflecting Pool hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest, longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it was—it leaked. Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that. He said, “I have an idea. Let’s take the river from, let’s take the water from the Potomac.” So they took the water from the Potomac, and it was putrid. It was putrid. It was a disaster. Biden was a disaster.

But how did Trump know that Pirro was wrong and he was right? “We have photographs or tapes,” he said, “like moving cameras, right? We have them where people are on the side, cutting it with a box knife.” Trump then admitted that he wasn’t “thrilled” with the work the contractor did, but “in addition, there was vandalism.” He complained about some damage to the grass nearby, but then came back to the pool, where “they took knives or cutters, and they cut the material—it’s material. And they put their hands and they pulled it.”

Pirro undermined all of this in a lengthy filing to the court that accompanied her request to withdraw the case. Perhaps in an earlier time, when Trump appeared more amenable to listening to the advice of friends and trusted advisers, he might have been satisfied with the harassment of his opponents. As the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote in their recent book on Trump, he admitted that he wanted charges filed just to harass perceived enemies such as New York Attorney General Letitia James, even if the charges were unlikely to stick. “I want to make her life miserable,” they quote him as saying to an adviser.

But Trump has now passed from being a stubborn narcissist to a cocooned authoritarian. Political scientists since World War II have studied the problem of “irrational” leaders, people in positions of power who seem unable to accept any version of reality that conflicts with their assumptions. Irrational, in this sense, does not mean “stupid,” or “incompetent,” or “psychotic.” It refers more specifically to leaders who have become so trapped by their own self-regard, so isolated from the outside world, so imprisoned within their own sense of infallibility that they refuse to consider any arguments or information that conflicts with their beliefs.

Trump reportedly relishes being compared to some of the great dictators of the past, but he apparently does not comprehend how their stories are also warnings. Joseph Stalin was so certain he had outfoxed the Nazis that he fell into catatonic denial for several days after the Germans attacked in 1941. Saddam Hussein refused to believe that American troops were crossing into Iraq, even as tanks rumbled toward Baghdad. Nicolae Ceauescu of Romania was one of many leaders throughout history who refused to believe that he was about to be deposed, despite troops advancing on their palace. (He and his wife died shouting orders at their firing squad.)

Trump’s detachment from reality is sometimes amusing and often alarming, but the price of his irrationality until now has been mostly economic and reputational (or, in the case of the Reflecting Pool, aesthetic, now that the cases against innocent Americans have been dropped). His belief in tariffs, for example, is a flatly irrational attachment to a tool that has been proven, over and over, to harm Americans. Likewise, his fixation on NATO has undermined decades of careful diplomacy and weakened the strongest alliance in history.

The war in Iran, however, has shown that Trump’s inability to perceive reality has become truly dangerous. He led the United States into a disastrous conflict because he thought his “gut” was smarter than the advisers who warned him that deposing Iran’s regime was unlikely. He continues to mislead the American people, and perhaps himself, about America’s strategic defeat at the hands of one of its worst enemies. The world economy and the balance of power have been changed, perhaps for many decades to come, because Trump cannot draw links between cause and effect; he does not understand that his actions and the failures that follow are somehow related to each other.

Iran is a disaster, but Trump’s irrationality could create other, even more perilous situations. When the water systems in seven states were recently subjected to cyberattacks, Trump blamed his fellow Americans, despite evidence of foreign involvement. What if America suffers another mass-terror attack, and Trump decides that it, too, is the work of disloyal Americans instead of foreigners? Will his underlings round people up based on such a delusion? Or perhaps Trump, if his party is beaten soundly in the midterms, will make up his mind that such a loss is impossible and call for invalidating the election’s results. He might even inspire his supporters to violence—as he did on January 6, 2021.

More worrisome is the possibility of a military crisis that unfolds quickly and threatens U.S. allies or the United States itself. If Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to test NATO and attacks a member of the alliance, or if China begins to move in the Pacific, could anyone in Trump’s inner circle contradict the president’s presumptions and biases? If, say, Russia or China or other powers go to a heightened state of nuclear alert, Trump would have to make decisions of potentially cataclysmic importance. Would he listen, even to basic information, if it conflicted with his omniscient gut?

Trump has always been notoriously un-briefable, but in his first term, he had people who would try to speak the truth to him. More important, he was capable, at least to some limited degree, of occasionally listening to those assistants. All of that is gone. Trump slamming his old friend Pirro shows that when even the most trusted allies offer him the truth, he won’t accept it.

Trump is not going to have some sudden epiphany about the need for an open and honest policy process. Like other authoritarians before him, the president has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed.

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 2:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 9:07 PM

SECOND

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

World Leaders Are Getting Sick and Tired Of Donald Trump’s Antics

By Daniel R. DePetris | Aug 05, 2026 at 10:21 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-deal-tactics-12286430

Before Donald Trump was President of the United States, he was a real-estate magnate in Manhattan who courted celebrity about as much as he courted the big deal. His negotiating style wasn’t prefaced on traditional give-and-take but rather on pummeling the other side into submission. "The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have," Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. "Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs."

For a while, Trump’s strong-arm tactics worked after he ascended to the White House. After all, foreign leaders can’t just stick their heads in the sand when the most powerful person on the planet makes threats. More often than not, those on the receiving end of those threats offered Trump concessions in the hope he would take the worst-case scenario off the table.

Trump’s coercion paid him dividends in the first year of his second term. Mexico was hit with tariffs, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to put a dent in the northerly flow of migrants and fentanyl.

Deathly afraid that Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO, the alliance’s members flattered the American president before signing up to a massive hike in defense spending.

And after Trump used his inauguration address to threaten a takeover of the Panama Canal due to what he argued was excessive Chinese influence there, the Panamanian government sought to mollify his anger by withdrawing from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and declaring Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison’s operations in the strategic waterway unconstitutional.

Yet as Trump’s second term grinds on, small and middle powers who may have thought submission was their best course of action are now fighting back. Trump is as loud and brash as ever, but the results aren’t nearly as impressive for him today as they were in the past. States as varied as Brazil, Canada and Spain are dismissing Trump’s noise and using it as an opportunity for a strategic reassessment.

Brazil is the poster-child of this trend. In July 2025, the Trump administration declared Brazil a national security threat to the United States, accused the Brazilian government of undermining the rule of law and denounced its judicial system for "persecuting" former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Based on this justification, the White House slapped Brazil with an additional tariff of 40 percent in a bid to pressure President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva into dropping Bolsonaro’s case and changing Brazil's trade practices.

The outcome, however, was far from what Trump expected. Instead of capitulating, Lula da Silva argued that Washington was in essence trying to extort a proud, independent Brazil for political purposes. He played the nationalism card and projected himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty.

The strategy worked—Lula saw his approval ratings go up; searched for alternative trading partners to lessen dependency on the United States as an export market; and dropped opposition to negotiating a regional trade pact with Beijing. Trump’s decision to leverage America’s economic firepower merely induced Brazil to double down on its economic relationship with China, the very power the Trump administration views as its biggest non-hemispheric competitor in Latin America. Brazilian exports to China have risen by 22 percent year-on-year.

Canada is increasingly resistant to getting pushed around too. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t jettisoning the strategic alliance with the United States—indeed it would be foolish to do so given Canada’s status as a neighbor and the deep military-to-military ties it shares with Washington as part of the North American Aerospace Command.

But what Ottawa regards as U.S. bellicosity and pettiness—hints about turning Canada into America's 51st state; Washington’s 50 percent levies on a large list of Canadian goods; and Trump holding up the formal opening of a new cross-border bridge over tolls—is forcing the Canadian government to entertain non-U.S. options in everything from defense to economics. One poll from earlier this year found that only 9 percent of Canadians believed the United States was a trustworthy ally.

The Carney administration is therefore diversifying. Canada, which historically relies on its southern neighbor for the bulk of its military equipment, is now reaching out to Europe for certain combat systems and seeking to invest in its own defense industry.

Canadian officials aim to award 70 percent of defense contracts to Canadian defense firms over the next decade, both to create more Canadian jobs and ensure that Canada’s military isn’t overly reliant on a single supplier. This, combined with Canada’s goal of exporting 55 percent of its natural gas to non-U.S. customers over a similar time-frame, demonstrates the degree to which Ottawa is trying to limit its exposure to Trump’s impulses.

Europe is tired of the antics as well. When Trump implied that U.S. military force was on the table to acquire Greenland, the EU banded together and essentially drew a line in the sand. When Trump insisted he would cut off all trade to Spain in retaliation for its decision to block the U.S. military from using its bases for the war in Iran, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez shrugged.

The United Kingdom was more sensitive to Trump’s anger but has nevertheless repeated its position that direct U.K. military participation in the war won’t happen.

Trump’s old playbook is wearing out for two reasons.

First, countries doubt Trump can be placated or that any agreements they make with him will actually be implemented. He signs deals, only to ignore them when they become inconvenient or renegotiate them to squeeze out more concessions. Trump is never satisfied, pockets whatever wins he extracts and demands more.

Second, the Trump phenomenon is reminding middle powers why hedging is their best weapon. In a world where great powers are unapologetically brazen, countries like Canada and Brazil need to be willing to adapt when the situation requires it.

As Europe is discovering in real time, relying on a single superpower for your military, diplomatic or economic needs is not a sustainable strategy because it creates extreme dependency and limits your geopolitical options. When the person leading that superpower is as irascible and unpredictable as Donald Trump, that dependency can turn into vulnerability.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the?Chicago Tribune.

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

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Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Say whatever you say, Shit Golem.

Your party is dead.

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

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

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Thursday, August 6, 2026 5:15 AM

SECOND

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

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 1:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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.

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

If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.

Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.

You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 7:12 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.

Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.

You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.

Have you seen too many superhero movies, 6ix? If it makes you feel powerful to believe you will triumph in an impromptu duel to the death, keep fantasizing. That's why people like you go to movies. But you might need to practice to make it a reality. Otherwise, you're just a duck or deer during hunting season dreaming of killing the hunter.

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

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Friday, August 7, 2026 7:13 AM

SECOND

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

The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed

As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames.

By Jonathan Lemire | August 5, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-humiliated-iran-ref
lecting-pool/688184/

One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.

But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.

His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)

For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?

Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.

Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.

Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.

Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately rolled their eyes at the president’s obsession and scoffed at his refusal to admit a mistake. One Republican lawmaker, speaking to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid Trump’s wrath, deemed it “the dumbest controversy of his term” but added, with a rueful chuckle, that “it’s better than talking about how badly everything else is going.” But the episode had real-world consequences: Hearn told my colleague Matt Viser that it was “unsettling to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.” He had to hire lawyers and attend court dates, and he had his phone seized. The legal process itself functioned as a form of punishment.

The Reflecting Pool was an unlikely cause célèbre this summer, but it seemed likely to end with a whimper at the end of last week. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who once touted her office’s ability to prosecute the case, executed a textbook Friday news dump when her office asked to dismiss the cases against Hearn and the handful of others accused of vandalism because evidence had emerged that suggested the damage was the the result of a botched installation, not vandalism. The farce seemed, mercifully, over.

Nope! Trump went on social media this past weekend to eviscerate Pirro, who has been one of his most loyal allies. Throwing the facts out the window, Trump declared that “to me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM” and that he would “disagree 100%” with the U.S. attorney in D.C. Accustomed to complete fealty, he raged to allies. In the Oval Office on Monday, he declared that the former Fox News host had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Pirro was then summoned to the Oval Office; she was later seen walking out of the West Wing, wheeling a box full of materials from the case that she had brought to show the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency has oversight of the Reflecting Pool (Trump did not appear to be mollified by the meeting and continued to criticize his longtime ally last night). A White House official told me that Pirro still had her job. The official added that may not be the case for long.

Trump has complained about Air Force One for nearly a decade. When he took office after his 2016 election, the president—who had grown accustomed to flying around in his luxury private jet—was dismayed by the antiquated state of the two VC-25 aircraft that usually bear the call sign, which had been in use since the early ’90s. He pushed for a new plane with a more Trumpian color scheme, but a series of setbacks and delays pushed the arrival of the modern replacement jet until 2028. This was not something, most people understood, that could be rushed: Air Force One needed to be outfitted with top-of-the-line (and often classified) communications and security features that allow it to serve as a White House in the sky, especially in case of an emergency.

But Trump grew impatient. So when Qatar’s royal family offered to give him a $400 million “palace in the sky,” Trump immediately demanded that the luxury liner become his interim aircraft until Boeing completed delivery. It would, Trump said, be a gift to the Department of Defense, and it would go to his presidential library once he left office. This, of course, prompted all sorts of pushback. Permitting a foreign government to supply the signature American aircraft struck many people as not just unpatriotic, but also an outrageous security risk. It was also yet another example of Trump displaying a disregard for norms and for traditional legal and political guardrails—and this time at a truly gargantuan scale.

Trump didn’t care. Nor did he seem bothered that it would cost up to $1 billion to retrofit the jet to make it acceptable for an American president to use. He set the same aggressive timeline as with the Reflecting Pool: He wanted the interim plane ready for use on the nation’s birthday. And there it was, soaring above Mount Rushmore on July 3 and then off to a NATO summit in Turkey a week later. But then, suddenly, Trump was back aboard the old baby-blue-and-gold Air Force One when he left Ankara. He claimed that the new jet had gone ahead of him to England to give troops stationed there a chance to tour it and that he was taking the original “for old time’s sake.”

A few days later, The New York Times reported what many had suspected: When hostilities ignited again in nearby Iran, the Secret Service determined that there were security concerns with the new aircraft flying near a danger zone. It was missing some key defense modifications, the paper reported, in a story that ran only after the president had safely returned to the United States. Trump, once more, was furious and embarrassed, and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House. In an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on independent news organizations, subpoenas were issued to several Times reporters, some delivered at their homes. The government requested the reporters’ phone records and demanded that they provide grand-jury testimony as part of a leak investigation to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information to the newspaper about a national-security matter.

The Times defended its reporters, while press organizations and Democrats issued statements about overreach and intimidation. Trump, once again, took to social media to blast his hometown paper and its journalists, sometimes in ugly, personal ways. It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the White House later admitted that the new plane would need upgrades, and that the president himself said it would be “maxxed out,” which all but confirmed the newspaper’s reporting. Trump was “incensed,” one adviser told me, and “wanted a head on a pike.” But, again, the legal process intervened, this time in the shape of a federal judge who grilled Department of Justice lawyers late last month over the handling of the subpoenas. DOJ then withdrew them. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement, “The President and the Administration remain committed to holding individuals who recklessly and illegally leak classified information to the media accountable.”

There was a reason Trump reacted so strongly to those two humbling moments, some people close to him told me. And that’s because they came against the backdrop of the near-daily humiliation that the president has been suffering at the hands of Iran. The war is not going well. A conflict that Trump thought might take a few weeks at most has now stretched into its sixth month, and, try as he might, he can’t get out of it. He has declared victory many times and threatened to wipe Iran off the map nearly as often. Neither has happened. At this point, his unfulfilled threats—with Iran calling his bluff—have almost become a dark running gag.

The past few days, in a way, have been a microcosm of the whole conflict: Over the weekend, Trump came close to ordering a new wave of attacks, but walked them back after calls from regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, and fears of how Iran might respond. Instead, Trump said he would give diplomacy another chance, claiming that good progress was being made and that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be open. But Tehran denied that any negotiations were happening. And then another ship was attacked in the strait. Trump reacted in fury, posting that the Iranian regime was “unbelievably duplicitous,” when decades of history would suggest that Tehran was, in fact, very knowably duplicitous.

But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?

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

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