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 468 of 479
The US has signed up to a deal which puts it in a far worse strategic position than it was in on February 27, 2026 (the day before the bombing started). It is not returning to the status quo ante: it is creating an entirely new, and much weaker, status quo (for the USA).
The USA is pledging to respect the Iranian regime, immediately restore some funding to it, immediately allow the Iranian regime to start trading oil freely, and not to interfere with its present nuclear capabilities. Moreover, the USA is tacitly recognizing that Iran will control shipping in the Strait (with Oman) going forward and has not ruled out the ability of Iran and Oman to charge tolls after 60 days.
In the near future, the US is pledging to help organize a massive reparations program for Iran, to pull back American forces from the vicinity of Iran, to end all sanctions on Iran, and to pledge its commitment to all of this with a UN Security Council Resolution.
And what has the US gotten in return?
Well, it has gotten a temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (under significantly worse conditions than existed on February 27, 2026) and a restatement of a nuclear pledge that Iran has made for years and years.
It is hard to grasp just how humiliating this is for the USA (and Israel). They chose to start this war after great preparation, they used their most advanced technology, and they used up massive military stocks in bombing Iran for six weeks.
And they are in a much worse situation.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-15-the-mou-is-ou
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Key MOU Clauses And Commentary
1 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.
Commentary: The key thing here is that the US has made it perfectly clear that it expects Israel to end its war in Lebanon, and therefore that the US wants attacks on Hezbollah to stop. This was a major Iranian goal and they have achieved it. It is important to see that ending the fighting in Lebanon as a US commitment is made twice here.
2 — The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.
Commentary: Regime change is now permanently out as a US policy. The US is now pledged to respect the internal power of the IRGC. Remember, when the bombing started, regime change was a key victory condition for Trump.
4 — Immediately upon the signing of this MOU, the United States of America will begin the removal of its naval blockade and any disturbances or impediments against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and will fully end the naval blockade within 30 days. During this period, the traffic of vessels will be in proportion to the numbers of pre-war traffic being restored by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final deal.
Commentary: The last sentence is extraordinary. This seems to pledge the USA to remove its forces from near Iran after the deal. “Proximity” is not defined, but that would have to take in a number of close US partners in the Gulf. The US is now allowing Iran to have a major say in where US forces can be deployed.
5 — Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of 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 traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start, and considering the need for removing the technical and military obstacles, and demining by the Islamic Republic of Iran will be instated within 30 days. The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.
Commentary: Iran pledges not to “charge” shipping in the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days (though it is worth noting that Iran said yesterday that they might still levy “fees”. The important thing is that Iran is clearly saying that with Oman it can determine the future of traffic in the strait and Iran has in no way given up its ability to change tolls. This represents a major Iranian increase in authority.
6 — The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of a final deal within 60 days. All required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions will be granted by the United States of America.
Commentary: Do you know what this is? It is the US promising to “undertake” organizing a plan for reparations to pa
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Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland (11,175 words)
“We want Greenland,” Trump said. Four men sprang into action to make fantasy a reality.
By Ben Taub | June 15, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/22/inside-the-ludicrous-dea
dly-serious-plan-to-take-over-greenland
“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything comes to an end,” the Danish Prime Minister said.
On a Saturday afternoon in Nuuk, Greenland, last March, a thousand people walked down toward the harbor, to a small red cabin that bore the Great Seal of the United States—an eagle grasping an olive branch in one foot and thirteen arrows in the other. The air was freezing, and the town was bathed in the crisp Arctic light of a late-winter sun. After almost seven decades with no diplomatic presence in Greenland, the U.S. had opened a tiny consulate in 2020, during the pandemic; now, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, it was the site of the largest demonstration in Greenlandic history.
Even before Trump retook office, he had made clear his intent to annex Greenland. But, from the moment that he was sworn in, his fantasies and provocations became American foreign policy. “One way or another, we’re gonna get it,” he told a joint session of Congress. So five per cent of Nuuk’s residents stood before the consulate, beating traditional drums and chanting their country’s Inuit name: Kalaallit Nunaat. “Enough is enough,” they shouted. But no one from the State Department drew the blinds. It wasn’t clear that anyone was even there.
Across town, in the commercial center, a lone American handed out flyers. He wore a cowhide jacket and pants, mirrored sunglasses, and a black leather vest with a patch that read “Bikers for Trump.” He was tall and fit, with gray curls and a short mustache, and presented himself as a kind of unofficial ambassador—not of the U.S. government but of its President, whose cellphone number he claimed to have. “My name is Chris Cox. I’m from the United States, and I have come here to try to make some friends,” he said to an elderly Inuit man. “We are not looking at you like a tiger looks at a gazelle.”
Cox had founded Bikers for Trump in 2015, and the group had provided security at campaign rallies and at Trump’s first Inauguration—“a wall of meat,” as he put it, between protesters and the unlikely candidate who became President. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Cox spoke at a rally to call for overturning the result. “I, for one, will take the first bullet,” he said. “If there’s anybody out there from Antifa or Black Lives Matter, spend your first fuckin’ bullet in my chest.” But in Nuuk he struck a more conciliatory tone. “We are not biting at the chomps,” he said. “I just plan on doing the best we can to have an influence here.”
“He wasn’t really breaking any laws,” a senior Greenlandic police official told me later. But Cox’s interactions were inherently provocative. “Without knowing it, a lot of the Greenlanders are living in the Stone Age,” he told an Italian TV channel.
“I’m receiving a lot of death threats as a result of my work here in Greenland,” Cox noted, a few days into his trip. “People are looking at me like I’m a Russian with a machine gun right now, when they see the Trump patch.” By that point, Greenlanders had started wearing red caps with white text that read “Make America Go Away.” Nevertheless, Cox considered his mission to be fruitful. “I’ve got some suggestions for how we can clean this up,” he said, in a phone call from Nuuk to the Washington Times. “We need to change the hearts of some of these Greenlanders.”
Cox left Nuuk for Washington, D.C., where he claims to have briefed the White House and Republican lawmakers on his findings. He also did a prime-time interview with One America News Network, portraying Denmark, whose realm includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, as an illegitimate colonial power that is committing “atrocities” against Greenlanders and “weaponizing” anti-Tru
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What Did You Expect?
Perhaps this was always how Trump’s ill-conceived war was destined to end.
By Daniel B. Shapiro | June 17, 2026, 6:59 PM ET
Daniel B. Shapiro served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-iran-war-reversals/687
590/
The whiplash is jarring.
President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.
And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.
Let’s count the ways.
Nuclear: A core goal of the war was to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program could never produce a nuclear weapon. Israeli and U.S. strikes in June 2025 advanced that goal by destroying key nuclear facilities and burying Iran’s enriched uranium, setting back the program significantly.
But little had changed in the nuclear program by the time this war was launched this past February, and little has changed since. Now, in exchange for an oft-repeated pinky promise that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, Trump has agreed to delay negotiations on the key goals of removing Iran’s enriched uranium and banning further enrichment, and the verification measures needed to guarantee that those commitments are upheld. These talks are punted to a second phase that may never arrive or never end.
Sanctions: Trump long advocated maximum-pressure sanctions, and beat his chest during the war about the cost to Iran of the U.S. naval blockade.
But now we will pay for reopening the Strait of Hormuz—simply, at best, restoring the prewar status quo—by approving the release of tens of billions of dollars of Iranian foreign assets and waiving sanctions to permit Iranian oil sales. More goodies are in store for the regime, in the form of fees paid by ships transiting the strait and a shockingly large $300 billion reconstruction fund. (The latter, supposedly to be funded by Gulf states, recalls the worst of former Secretary of State John Kerry’s post-JCPOA diplomacy, when he sought to drum up investment in the corrupt economy of a still-adversarial regime.)
With no change in the regime’s character or ideological outlook, it is being rewarded with a shift from maximum pressure to maximum windfall. There is no reason to think that the money will flow to schools and hospitals or provide any benefit to the Iranian people that the regime still suppresses. It will, instead, almost certainly fund more missiles, drones, and support for terrorists at home and abroad—threats about which the memorandum of understanding is silent.
Lebanon and Hezbollah: The war, misguided though it was, represented the zenith of U.S.-Israeli military cooperation, with unprecedented combined operations and ample praise by Trump for the partnership. Trump voiced recognition of the genuine threats Iran posed to Israel, not least from its network of terrorist proxies.
But Israelis have been aghast at the speed of Trump’s turnabout. Israeli officials were excluded from negotiations on the MOU, and were not even given the opportunity to review the text. Meanwhile, as U.S. and Israeli interests diverged, Trump barked expletives at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adopted the Iranian demand to impose restrictions on Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon—even as the militia continues to attack northern Israeli communities—as part and parcel of the broader cease-fire.
Regime: Trump also long correctly identified the Iranian regime as uniquely dangerous and evil, with the blood of many America
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You people have a really warped sense of reality.
Your world sucks. No wonder you're all so miserable all the time.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Whatever we’re paying RFK Jr, it’s too much
Joel Eissenberg | June 12, 2026 5:07 am
https://angrybearblog.com/2026/06/whatever-were-paying-him-its-too-muc
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The NYT published an article reporting that RFK Jr has abandoned most of his responsibilities:
“Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the article. “Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.“
Not exactly news. Kennedy’s rebuttal?
“All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove,” Kennedy wrote.”
LOL! His “accomplishments” are
(a) the firings and resignations of health research experts at the CDC, FDA and NIH
(b) sowing distrust in scientific expertise while replacing sound science with magical thinking.
Whatever we’re paying him, it’s way too much. Unless the job, like in the rest of the Trump administration, is just to create chaos.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Fuck your angry bear and his stupid blog.
Anything that you care about? Nobody else gives a single shit about.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy
His humiliating defeat in Iran has sealed the deal
Paul Krugman
Jun 19, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-champion-of-renewable
On Wednesday the Interior Department announced that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million not to develop three offshore wind farms. This is the third such payment by the Trump administration to undo offshore wind projects that have been years in the planning. Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects. The administration has also tried to stop offshore wind farms already under development — moves that have been blocked by the courts — while the Pentagon has been refusing to grant routine permits for onshore wind projects.
Yes, $2.5 billion to destroy already-approved, cost-effective clean energy projects while Americans are suffering from soaring electricity prices thanks to data centers and high gasoline prices.
Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.
Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.
What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of Nevada:
Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.
Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.
Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:
California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.
Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.
Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now re
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The Most Surprising Miscalculation of Trump’s Second Term - POLITICO
He has underestimated the power of patriotic sentiment in countries besides the United States.
By Alexander Burns | June 19, 2026 05:00 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/19/trump-mistake-nation
alism-brexit-column-00963265
OTTAWA — When Donald Trump won a new term in the White House, Danielle Smith joined the parade of foreign leaders visiting Mar-a-Lago to honor the president-elect. The populist premier of Alberta, Smith enjoyed lively relationships across the American right, even hosting Tucker Carlson in Western Canada in 2024.
Yet when I asked Smith last fall, at a policy summit in Toronto, how she’d feel about Trump potentially intervening in Alberta’s fragile politics, her MAGA stripes vanished.
“I don’t want any foreign influence in our politics here,” Smith told me.
Admiring Trump from afar is one thing. But sovereignty is sovereignty, and borders are borders.
Trump used to understand that.
A decade ago, Trump waged his first-ever political campaign as a nationalist crusader, demanding harder borders and more muscular American sovereignty. When the United Kingdom held its 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union — the 10-year anniversary is in a few days — Trump cheered it on and crowned himself “Mr. Brexit.”
In his second term, Trump’s grasp of nationalist politics has slipped. He has underestimated the power of patriotism and national pride in countries other than his own.
This serial miscalculation has undermined Trump’s trade wars and military adventures, aggravated the cost-of-living crisis, weakened the Republican Party and battered Trump’s bonds with the global right.
It began even before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, with his campaign of bullying against Canada.
The belittling taunts and tariff threats he aimed at Justin Trudeau that winter did not scare America’s neighbor into prostration. They inspired a patriotic backlash and created a new prime minister, Mark Carney, who preaches middle-power resistance to American economic domination.
In Ukraine, Trump’s bid to push the country into a flimsy peace deal — while dressing down Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and grabbing for a share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth — was such an insult to Ukrainian sovereignty that Zelenskyy, even at a political low ebb, faced no consequences for rejecting the terms.
Attempts to meddle with judicial decisions in Brazil, commandeer British and Spanish airfields and dictate military strategy to Israel have gone no better. Dispatching Vice President JD Vance to campaign in Hungary’s election did not save Viktor Orbán from a landslide defeat.
Perhaps most damaging to Trump, his expectation that he could decapitate Iran’s leadership, blast the country into submission and install a compliant proxy — all without using ground troops — led to a monthslong stalemate that spiked energy prices and sapped the global economy.
It should not surprise any nationalist leader that Iran’s generals and clerics preferred months of American bombing over quick subjugation.
So why does Trump seem lost in these political currents?
Somewhere between railing against OPEC in the 1980s, applauding Brexit in 2016 and winning the presidency in 2024, Trump started blurring the difference between a right-wing politics that insists on putting national identity above international institutions, and a purely American variant that wants to replace resolutions from the United Nations with edicts from Truth Social.
His sometime admirers have noticed. In a thoroughly revealing interview with POLITICO’s Marion Soletty, Jordan Bardella, the likely presidential nominee for France’s far-right National Rally, lamented that second-term Trump was very different from the first-term version.
These days, he said, the United States was acting more like an “empire.” Trump himself was “extremely unsteady and constantly shifting,” Bardella said.
Bardella disavowed interest in Trump’s endorsement in Danielle Smi
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Trump, 80, Unravels Over Botched Vanity Project in Morning Meltdown
BREAKDOWN MODE
The president made unhinged claims that his disastrous $14 million pool renovation was targeted by vandals.
By Sarah Ewall-Wice | Updated Jun. 22 2026 2:25PM EDT
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-80-unravels-over-botched-vanity-pr
oject-in-morning-meltdown/
President Donald Trump spent Monday morning freaking out about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after his renovations turned into a debacle with algae and peeling paint ahead of July 4 celebrations.
The president took to Truth Social to post unhinged threats and accusations after the massive pool on the National Mall has become a mess following his repeated bragging about how good he was at fixing pools.
“Of the MANY Statues and Fountains that we rebuilt, renovated, cleaned, and fixed, the only one that was Vandalized was the Reflecting Pool, which is being taken care of, ASAP!” Trump wrote.
Trump claimed it had been “given a 300 foot long gash, chemicals have been illegally placed in the water, and the beautiful new grass field has been destroyed with a gigantic 86 47 chemically carved into it (Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!).”
“The Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote.
Members of the National Guard patrol the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after recent renovations following a directive from U.S. President Donald Trump to paint it blue ahead of the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence, in Washington, D.C.
Just days after the $14 million renovations were completed and the pool refilled, massive blooms of algae turned the 2,000-foot-long pool bright green, in sharp contrast with the “American flag blue” it had been painted.
Crews with the National Park Service could be spotted furiously pouring in hydrogen peroxide in the pool and vacuuming up dead algae in a desperate attempt to remedy the situation.
Throughout the renovation project, the president had bragged constantly in public and on social media about how he was fixing the Reflecting Pool and would accomplish what previous administrations had failed to do since the pool was first built in the 1920s.
Instead, large pieces of the “American Flag Blue” paint began peeling off the bottom of the pool after the hydrogen peroxide was poured in and could be spotted floating in it.
Donald Trump with a duck in the reflecting pool algae
On Sunday, a dead duckling was found floating in it. It was unclear what killed it, but it happened just days after the Interior Department insisted that the hydrogen peroxide was not harmful to wildlife.
Trump has claimed the pool had been vandalized and attacked “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE!” for it. His top officials vowed to prosecute anyone who vandalizes it. Trump also said that the work to fix it would begin immediately.
“What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly,” Trump rambled in a Saturday post. “We met with contractors today, will probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs, but will have them done as quickly as possible.”
Trump’s allegation that the mysterious “8647” message that appeared on the grass on the National Mall nearly two weeks ago was inspired by the former FBI director was unsubstantiated. However, the numbers are at the heart of the criminal case against Comey.
The investigation into the message on the National Mall is underway, but Comey was indicted in April after the Justice Department claimed he had threatened Trump’s life by posting a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged in the message “8647? last year.
Comey almost immediately deleted the post and said afterward that he was not aware that it would be interpreted as a call for violence.
The term “86 it” is lingo for a restaurant item that has run out and ne
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