Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
PAGE 16 of 73
It's an opinion piece, SIX, not a news article.
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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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I've been batting nearly 1.000 with my opinions since before election day 2024.
I happen to agree with this one too.
All we get from the "news" these days is editorialism anyhow. We don't actually get any real news from anyone anymore. That's why we're living in two separate realities concurrently.
I live in the 3rd reality. The REAL reality.
Maybe some of you would like to join me there one day instead of posting the daily bullshit noise that means absolutely nothing in the long run.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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I've been looking at oilprice.com
Interesting site, not sure how reliable or relevant it is, but curious to see what you think.
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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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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I've been looking at oilprice.com
Interesting site, not sure how reliable or relevant it is, but curious to see what you think.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I'll take a look at it. It's not something I can just give a cursory glance, and I just want to relax for the rest of the day.
On oil though, you might have noticed that every time the price of a barrel goes up, the Legacy Media makes a huge deal about it, but then they don't even mention how it's also gone back down in between the surges. They were screaming about it when it went over $110 per barrel, but no mention at all when it went back down to $88. And of course there is zero mention how we're nowhere near the prices during most of Joe Biden*'s administration.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Signifying Absolutely Nothing
Trump’s war of choice in Iran is a performance of horrific military strength that betrays a stark political weakness.
Fintan O’Toole | March 13, 2026
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/13/signifying-absolutely-nothin
g-iran-war-otoole/
In Donald Trump’s war on Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.
It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.
In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.
The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.
Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”
To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:
“We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.”
It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.
More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing.
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Quote:Pontificate means to express your opinions in a pompous, arrogant, or annoyingly self-important way. It is speaking at length as if you are always right and know more than everyone else, often acting like a "know-it-all".
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've been batting nearly 1.000 with my opinions since before election day 2024.
I happen to agree with this one too.
All we get from the "news" these days is editorialism anyhow. We don't actually get any real news from anyone anymore. That's why we're living in two separate realities concurrently.
I live in the 3rd reality. The REAL reality.
Maybe some of you would like to join me there one day instead of posting the daily bullshit noise that means absolutely nothing in the long run.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
Simple Examples:
"He loves to pontificate about politics, even though he never reads the news."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I think I know why Trump started this war now. But to reel back in history...
When Trump took over Venezuelan oil, it was clear he had an "inside man". Turns out (according to the WSJ) that inside man was Ali Moshiri, a CIA asset and former Chevron executive who had been embedded since the days of Hugo Chavez.
At the time, it seemed pretty clear to me that taking over Venezuela's oil was more about denying China (and Cuba) oil than it was about capturing the oil for our oil companies. Very much in line with Hong Kong company's forced sale of Panama port facilities.
It occurred to me that attempting regime change in Iran might have the same goal: denying China Iran's oil. But why did Trump think it was going to work?
It turns out that the CIA may have had an informant in Iran too: Esmail Qaani, a top general in Iran's Quds who managed to survive multiple decapitation strikes and who has been MIA for several days. Rumor has it that he had been IDd by either Russian or Chinese intelligence and was being used to feed false info to the Trump admin, which is why Trump was so confident that a decapitation would lead to military defections and mass revolt.
Look at the planned sequence of events:
Takeover of Venezuelan oil,
Takeover of Iranian oil....
Meeting with Xi Jinping.
It doesn't hurt that Trump's donors and advisors are rabid Zionists. Two birds, one stone.
What could possibly go wrong??
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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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A Top Official Just Quit in Protest of the Iran War. His Resignation Letter Reveals One of the Biggest Fallacies About Trump.
Kent has a long history of conspiratorial thinking that has twice cost him winnable congressional races.
By Jim Newell | March 17, 2026 3:47 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/joe-kent-resignation-lette
r-trump-iran-war-fail.html
Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday because he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” It is the highest-profile protest resignation of the second Trump administration—during which there has been much to protest-resign over—and exposes the rift within MAGA over President Donald Trump’s keenness for warmaking.
Such a headline-grabbing move from an ideological ally of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, under whom Kent served, is welcome news to the war’s opponents. It should also be welcome news that Joe Kent is no longer serving in the United States government. Kent has a long history of conspiratorial thinking that has twice cost him winnable congressional races.
That’s on full display in his resignation letter. While it arrives at a conclusion held by a majority of Americans—what, exactly, is the point of this war?—the letter manages to absolve Trump of agency in his decision to strike. It suggests Trump had become changed, from the anti-war politician he once was to a manipulee of Israel. But he’s not the latter now, and he never was the former. Greenlighting the Iran war was a decision Trump made, free-thinkingly, based on how he’s always been, in pursuit of his own legacy.
Kent’s mistaken impression of Trump can maybe be explained a bit by his background. He is a former Green Beret who served 11 tours of duty, mostly in Iraq. His wife, who was in the Navy, was killed by a suicide bomber in 2019 during the war against the Islamic State. After the tragedy, Kent became more involved in politics.
He ran for Congress in 2022 in Washington, leaping at the opportunity to take down incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 riots. He was successful in terms of taking down Herrera Beutler—but then narrowly lost the general election to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Two years earlier, in 2020, Herrera Beutler had carried the district for Republicans by 13 points.) Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Kent again in a 2024 rematch.
The double loss was largely attributable to Kent’s fringe-right views and ties. He was an election denier following the 2020 election, and had ties to white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and groups like the Proud Boys. He believes the FBI and intelligence community were involved in “planning/directing” the Jan. 6 riot, and suggested following the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on Trump that the Secret Service were either “in on” it or let it “happen.”
These views may have cost Kent two congressional races in a GOP-leaning seat, but they did earn him the favor of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and Gabbard, who hired him as her chief of staff at DNI before he was nominated to the NCTC. He was confirmed to that role last July in a nearly party-line vote in which all Republicans, excluding retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, supported him.
Fast-forward eight months, and Kent portrays in his resignation letter a president who has been successfully coopted by dark and powerful forces that have led him astray from his previous anti-war commitments.
“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent writes. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the s
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Based on reports from March 16-17, 2026, representatives for all four living former U.S. presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—stated that they have not spoken with Donald Trump recently and did not express approval for his actions regarding Iran.
• The Claim: During a lunch for Kennedy Center board members and later in the Oval Office, Donald Trump claimed a “former president" told him, "I wish I did it, I wish I did," in reference to military action against Iran.
• The Denials: Aides to all four living predecessors told CNN, the Associated Press, and NBC News that they had no such conversations with Trump.
• Details on Denials: An aide to George W. Bush confirmed they "haven't been in touch," a spokesperson for Bill Clinton denied the conversation, and an aide to Barack Obama stated no "recent conversations" took place.
• Trump's Response: When asked to identify the individual, Trump refused, saying it would be "very bad for his career" and later clarified, "it wasn't Bush".
Following the denials, multiple outlets reported that the conversation likely did not take place.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/17/politics/fact-check-trump-iran-war
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Based on reports from March 16-17, 2026, representatives for all four living former U.S. presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—stated that they have not spoken with Donald Trump recently and did not express approval for his actions regarding Iran.
They're all shit, so that's another feather in Trump's cap.
What now?
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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