Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 447 of 479
If you're an Antifa terrorist, I wouldn't try getting on any planes starting tomorrow unless you want ICEy fingers up your butts.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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ICE took another step toward becoming Donald Trump's personal army.
He tried this in 2020. Federal agents in unmarked vans grabbed protesters off the streets of Portland because the military wouldn't do it for him. So in this administration, he went around that roadblock. ICE agents don't have the same institutional limits as the military. They've been recruited with massive bonuses, they answer only to his loyalists, and not once in 14 months have they refused a directive.
ICE agents will be at airport security checkpoints
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-homan-ice-crowded-a
irport-security-tsa-screenings-wait-times-rcna264618
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yup.
We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.
Deal with it.
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Quote:There is nothing for me to deal with. Trump is deporting the Republican business workforce that works for less than minimum wage. Those dishonest and incompetent Republicans can barely stay in business by cheating their customers, cheating their employees, and cheating on their income taxes. I prefer that misfortune fall upon them. The Dept of War is in similar trouble caused by its dishonesty and incompetence, although it compensates by asking Congress for a 50% increase in budget. The Republicans in Congress will either give it to them or else the Pentagon collapses:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yup.
We're going to remove all 30 million+ of your illegals.
Deal with it.
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Be Evil. Be a dick.
The War with Iran May Already be Lost
A war launched without a defined end state, sold through metrics and bravado, and blind to an enemy that measures time in generations rather than news cycles, is not a path to victory but a slow-motion admission of strategic failure.
By Robert Bruce Adolph | March 24, 2026
https://sofrep.com/news/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-lost/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-war-with-iran-may-already-be-
lost/ar-AA1ZjauU
With special thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Timothy Grimmett.
If wars were won by bombastic press conferences, the White House should already be planning another military parade in our capital’s streets. In America’s latest war of choice, President Trump’s styled Secretary of “War” is emerging as the head cheerleader for our misadventure in Iran. Mr. Hegseth has already mistakenly defined what constitutes victory — the destruction of various portions of the Iranian Navy and military production facilities. Unfortunately, his definition is flawed. Despite possessing some military experience as a junior officer, he has shown that he is completely out of his depth. For most intents and purposes, the war with Iran might have been lost before the first missile was launched.
Some of the lessons that Mr. Hegseth should have learned by now:
Operational excellence is not a guarantee of strategic success — The best military on the planet cannot win a war if the national strategic objectives selected by the National Command Authority are faulty. This fact was proven in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which like Iran, were wars of choice and not necessity. Does Mr. Hegseth grasp the gap between his definition of victory and that of his boss?
Mr. Trump has demanded “unconditional surrender” of Iran — That choice could cost many lives. America demanded unconditional surrender of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The word “unconditional” suggests that there will be no negotiated settlement. The only means of achieving that objective in Germany and Japan was first a land invasion of the “Father Land” followed by the deployment of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Is this where we are heading?
The best bosses remain always open to bad news — If the boss always demands good news, good news is all that his subordinates will present to him. Mr. Hegseth only wants to focus on the number of strikes; the number of aircraft involved; and the number of targets destroyed. These figures no doubt please this Oval Office. Tragically, war by the numbers was a loser in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The numbers say nothing about an enemy’s will to resist. The senior uniformed staff in the Pentagon all know this fact. A smarter press corps would be asking what is the US strategy if Iran’s military is destroyed and the mullahs simply refuse to surrender?
Know your enemy — Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression. The clerical leadership’s defa
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Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.
Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.
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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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Trump is breaking an axiom of war. Did no one warn him?
By Matthew Lynn | March 24, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/24/trump-war-tariffs-i
ran/
The exact origin of the maxim “Don’t fight on two fronts” is lost to time. It can be variously traced back to “The Art of War,” the classic 5th-century B.C. Chinese treatise by Sun Tzu, to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the main commander of British forces during World War II.
One point is certain, however. No one got around to sharing it with President Donald Trump. The United States has now embarked on two wars at the same time: a trade war with China and Europe, and a real war with Iran. This will surely prove to be a serious mistake.
Trump has an undiminished appetite for conflict. Less than a year ago, on what he oddly called “Liberation Day,” he ripped up the global trading system and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and allies. Earlier this year, he launched a raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and last month, he launched an all-out assault on Iran, aimed at taking out its armed forces and removing its leadership.
An administration that many argued would be isolationist and that promised to put America first has turned out to spend most of its energy trying to reshape the rest of the world.
In fairness, you can make a respectable case for either war. The supposedly rules-based global trading system did at times appear to have turned into a mechanism for transferring wealth and jobs from American workers to other countries. Given persistent U.S. deficits, and with American exporters facing steep tariffs in many countries while U.S. markets remained open, you could certainly argue that the system needed rebalancing. After a decade or two of talking with no discernible change, a more muscular approach has its merits.
Likewise, you can make a perfectly respectable case for removing the regime in Tehran, or at least significantly degrading its military strength. For the better part of five decades, it has been a threat to its neighbors and a persistent sponsor of global terrorism, while brutally suppressing its people and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The world would definitely be better off if it fell. There is a strategic rationale to launching an attack even if the risks are huge.
But both wars at once?
There are two big problems. First, alliances get stretched very close to the breaking point. It might be helpful in the Gulf, for example, to be able to call upon French naval forces, or British air support, or Canadian or German defense manufacturing to keep the weapons flowing. But that is very hard to do when you have just slapped punitive tariffs on those countries, impeded their exports and dismissed their leaders as irrelevant. To put it mildly, goodwill is in short supply.
The issue is not that anyone in Europe — apart from a few extremists — has any sympathy with the regime in Tehran. It is that European voters understandably have little sympathy with a president who has been attacking their exporters and demanding that jobs be transferred across the Atlantic.
Next, very quickly the objectives start to clash. It is difficult to maintain all the levies and restrictions on imports demanded by the trade war when supply chains are being thrown into chaos by the closure of shipping lanes in the Gulf, when the price of oil is exploding and when critical minerals and components are needed to fight the war.
Even worse, it was always going to be hard to maintain political support for tariffs if they led to a spike in inflation — even if you believed that was a short-term price worth paying to restore manufacturing capacity. But why throw fuel on that particular fire with a military action in the Middle East? (“Wait, war in the Gulf drives energy costs higher? Why did nobody tell us?”)
If inflation goes much higher, the president may well end up lowering tariffs to contain it, effectively surrendering
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Quote:Signym, were you trying to point out an error, but it isn't erroneous? Iran (formerly Persia) is predominantly Shia Islam, with about 90–95% of its population identifying with this branch, making it the world's largest Shia-majority nation and the center of the Shia world. While historically Sunni, the country officially converted to Twelver Shia Islam under the Safavid Dynasty in 1501.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Mr. Hegseth also lacks a fundamental understanding of his opponent. He desperately needs a briefing on the 680CE Battle of Karbala because it is the foundational, emotional, and ideological cornerstone of Shia Islam, transforming it from a political faction into a distinct religious identity centered on martyrdom, justice, and resistance against oppression.
Shia Islam is not Sunni Islam.
Official Religion: The Islamic Republic of Iran is a Shia theocracy.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump is breaking an axiom of war. Did no one warn him?
By Matthew Lynn | March 24, 2026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/24/trump-war-tariffs-i
ran/
The exact origin of the maxim “Don’t fight on two fronts” is lost to time. It can be variously traced back to “The Art of War,” the classic 5th-century B.C. Chinese treatise by Sun Tzu, to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, the main commander of British forces during World War II.
One point is certain, however. No one got around to sharing it with President Donald Trump. The United States has now embarked on two wars at the same time: a trade war with China and Europe, and a real war with Iran. This will surely prove to be a serious mistake.
Trump has an undiminished appetite for conflict. Less than a year ago, on what he oddly called “Liberation Day,” he ripped up the global trading system and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. trading partners and allies. Earlier this year, he launched a raid to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and last month, he launched an all-out assault on Iran, aimed at taking out its armed forces and removing its leadership.
An administration that many argued would be isolationist and that promised to put America first has turned out to spend most of its energy trying to reshape the rest of the world.
In fairness, you can make a respectable case for either war. The supposedly rules-based global trading system did at times appear to have turned into a mechanism for transferring wealth and jobs from American workers to other countries. Given persistent U.S. deficits, and with American exporters facing steep tariffs in many countries while U.S. markets remained open, you could certainly argue that the system needed rebalancing. After a decade or two of talking with no discernible change, a more muscular approach has its merits.
Likewise, you can make a perfectly respectable case for removing the regime in Tehran, or at least significantly degrading its military strength. For the better part of five decades, it has been a threat to its neighbors and a persistent sponsor of global terrorism, while brutally suppressing its people and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The world would definitely be better off if it fell. There is a strategic rationale to launching an attack even if the risks are huge.
But both wars at once?
There are two big problems. First, alliances get stretched very close to the breaking point. It might be helpful in the Gulf, for example, to be able to call upon French naval forces, or British air support, or Canadian or German defense manufacturing to keep the weapons flowing. But that is very hard to do when you have just slapped punitive tariffs on those countries, impeded their exports and dismissed their leaders as irrelevant. To put it mildly, goodwill is in short supply.
The issue is not that anyone in Europe — apart from a few extremists — has any sympathy with the regime in Tehran. It is that European voters understandably have little sympathy with a president who has been attacking their exporters and demanding that jobs be transferred across the Atlantic.
Next, very quickly the objectives start to clash. It is difficult to maintain all the levies and restrictions on imports demanded by the trade war when supply chains are being thrown into chaos by the closure of shipping lanes in the Gulf, when the price of oil is exploding and when critical minerals and components are needed to fight the war.
Even worse, it was always going to be hard to maintain political support for tariffs if they led to a spike in inflation — even if you believed that was a short-term price worth paying to restore manufacturing capacity. But why throw fuel on that particular fire with a military action in the Middle East? (“Wait, war in the Gulf drives energy costs higher? Why did nobody tell us?”)
If inflation goes much higher, the president may well end up lowering tariffs to contain it, effectively surrendering
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The Worst and the Dumbest
Has the U.S. military been Kudlowized?
Paul Krugman
Mar 27, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-worst-and-the-dumbest
Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.
It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.
The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.
Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.
It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?
I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.
And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.
And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, a dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme ri
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