Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
PAGE 56 of 73
In other news, Trump has lost his war with Iran:
Iran attacks Bahrain and Kuwait following US strikes and threatens to halt talks to end the war
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-israel-war-hormuz-strait-june-28-20
26-1132d316545db2cddb3928b6e7840f51
The US would not be at war with Iran if Biden had the decency and the courage to look like a bad guy by assassinating Donald Trump, America's first Nazi President.
Had this old man been President instead of Biden, he would have killed Trump:
World War II veteran gives a stark warning on the dangers of fascism in America today
https://imgur.com/gallery/world-war-ii-veteran-that-is-still-alive-giv
es-stark-warning-on-dangers-of-fascism-america-today-DAV03N5
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump thinks he is Hitler invading the Soviet Union:
On social media, President Donald Trump said, “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic will no longer exist.”
https://www.kcra.com/article/iran-peace-negotiations-us-strikes-bahrai
n-kuwait/71759877
Just like Hitler, Trump is always declaring he won (or soon will) because of all the dead Russians, or in Trump's case, dead Iranians. But Stalin didn't care about how many millions of Russians died, and the Grand Ayatollah doesn't care if a few thousand more Iranians die in his overpopulated country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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“It’s a very strong deal,” Trump said at the G7 summit. “Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong.” The key to a strong deal is not knowing what's in it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/anxious-republic
ans-await-details-iran-deal-trump-rcna350314
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Humbling of the Once Almighty Dollar
Another consequence of Trump’s debacle in Iran
Paul Krugman
Jun 29, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-humbling-of-the-once-almighty
Donald Trump’s stunning failure in Iran has weakened America on many fronts. The world now perceives us as neither a reliable ally nor an invincible enemy, with an extortionately expensive military that is losing its best and brightest to Pete Hegseth’s prejudice and incompetence. We are now four months into a war that was supposed to last a couple of weeks.There is no end in sight as strikes and counter-strikes continue despite Trump’s farcical proclamations of American victory and Iranian surrender. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump has squandered all of America’s credibility with the rest of the world.
So let me add one more item to the tally of destruction: The supremacy of the dollar, the pre-eminent tool in America’s toolbox of global financial power, has been seriously damaged by the rise of alternative payment systems – a rise that was greatly hastened by the Iran war.
Let me be clear that I don’t mean that the dollar is close to losing its dominant role in global business. And I am definitely not claiming that the dollar’s weakened status will make the United States substantially poorer.
Instead, what I am talking about is the loss of a non-military tool of coercion — the power to punish that the dominant role of the dollar in international financial transactions gave the United States. That power is now greatly diminished because Trump’s Iran war demonstrated to other nations that they can bypass the dollar-centered world payments system — largely thanks to China.
Let me provide context by talking about the dollar’s global role.
The dollar’s importance in international financial transactions far outweighs the U.S. economy’s global importance. America is by no means a dominant force in world trade or world GDP. There are, in fact, three roughly comparable-sized economic superpowers in today’s world: China, the United States, and the European Union. However, the U.S. dollar does play a dominant role in world finance. There are multiple aspects to this role, which I discussed at length in April. But one number makes the point: Last year 89 percent of foreign exchange transactions — transactions in which one nation’s currency is exchanged for another — involved U.S. dollars.
How is this possible, when the U.S. share of world exports is only around 10 percent? The answer is that the dollar is the world’s “vehicle currency” — the currency businesses use to make transits between other currencies. A bank that wants to exchange, say, Indian rupees for British pounds generally won’t try to find a counterparty who wants to make the reverse trade. It will, instead, sell rupees for dollars and then use the dollars to buy pounds.
Why does everyone use dollars? Because so many other people and businesses use dollars, which makes markets in dollars far more liquid and efficient than markets in any other currency. As a classic old paper by Charles Kindleberger pointed out, the dollar’s role as a global currency is similar to the role of English as a global business language: Everyone speaks English because everyone else does. When people warn that the dollar is at imminent risk of losing its status to, say, the Chinese yuan, my response is to ask how long they think it will be before businesspeople around the world begin making deals in Mandarin.
Furthermore, the economic advantage to the U.S. of owning the premier global currency — our “exorbitant privilege,” a term coined by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1960s — is not, despite what one sometimes hears, essential to U.S. prosperity. Our overall economic strength rests not on the role of the dollar but on our productivity and our leadership in science and technology. (The Trump administration is doing its best to destroy the latter, but that’s another story.)
What dollar dominance does do, however, is give America a powerful economic weapon ag
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China has emerged as the sole winner in Asia from the Strait of Hormuz crisis, according to a report published on Tuesday. https://straitofhormuz.theasiagroup.com/about/
The report by the Asia Group thinktank looked at Asia’s largest economies – China, India, Japan and South Korea – as well as emerging markets across South-East Asia. The researchers mapped the economic and political repercussions of the crisis and its impacts across key sectors, including manufacturing, energy and agriculture.
They concluded that China was a clear winner from the crisis caused by Donald Trump’s foray into the Middle East.
The country’s large stockpiles of oil and the hugely ambitious rollout of renewable energy mean it has been less exposed to the energy shock than other countries. Beijing is now gaining from the global solar and EV push.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/30/china-clear-winner-trump
-war-middle-east-report-iran-strait-of-hormuz
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Thank you for keeping a list of all of your failed predictions on the topic in one place.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Midweek Update #17
Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 01, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-17-the-most-dang
erous
Another Week Of Weakness
Well, the extraordinary weakness of the USA in the Gulf was confirmed this week. The Iranians seem to be deliberately stringing the administration along knowing that Trump has little leverage at the present time. The Iranians are openly doing things that Trump said they would never do. This includes such things as planning for tolls in the Strait (maybe with Oman or maybe unilaterally), openly musing about procuring an Iranian nuclear weapon, and rebuilding its military strength in such crucial areas as ballistic missiles and air defense.
The Iranians even flexed their muscles by deliberately attacking an oil tanker that tried to transit the Strait outside of their control. Trump’s response was weakness in a bottle. He made the worst genocidal threat in history and then tossed a few bombs. The threat was as follows:
“there may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable... If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”
Then, a day and a half of pointless airstrikes followed (interestingly aimed at targets the administration had already assured us had been thoroughly destroyed). Then the USA made a desperate pivot on Sunday night and said the strikes were over, hoping to assure the oil markets that this was no big deal and please please please do not drive up the price of gasoline to the American consumer.
And the Iranians went right back to claiming control over the Strait and rebuilding their military.
It is probably the most bizarre use of military force in US history. What we are seeing is strategically useless, wastes ammunition of which the US is already running short, and reinforces the idea that the USA is weakening and aimless. This is the message US partners are taking not only in the region but around the world. In other words, it is the use of American military power to make things worse for the USA.
US partners in the region are indeed getting this message loud and clear, and are already trying to carve out a better relationship with Iran—knowing that the US is in no shape to protect them. In many ways the region is already preparing for a post-American future.
American weakness has one lesson (that really should not have to be learned over and over, but sadly does) and one hopeful sign. The lesson is about the extraordinary difficulty in achieving strategic aims through the use of military force. Time and time again, major powers, such as the USA, and middling powers, such as Russia, employ military force thinking that they are so strong that they can get what they want. And amazingly (as we are seeing now and I will discuss in the last segment), analysts are supporting the idea that war is somehow easy to wage and win.
The sign is that the US is so weak now and lacking in leverage, that the end result of this might be something that could be immensely good for the USA and the region; an American military withdrawal from the Middle East. And that means no more US military bases, no permanent stationing of troops, no regular commitments of US military forces to try and control things.
If there is one thing that can be said without doubt, it is that the massive use of US military force in the Middle East over the last few decades has been a disaster for everyone—Americans, residents of the region, and arguably the rest of the world. This latest humiliation is so total, maybe a new way can be attempted that would see the US stop fooling itself by thinking it can control things it cannot.
And that is a great thing—great for the region and great for the USA. I promise that piece next week, maybe at the start of the midweek update. The US has a chance to benefit from this failure.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Is that the 17th week in a row with an update mid-week? Or is that the 17th mid-week update this week?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Jul 1, 2026
The Pentagon turned to Merops after burning through hundreds of Patriot missiles defending against Iranian Shaheds, each Patriot costing more than $3 million.
The Army bought 13,000 Merops in eight days after the Iran war began in late February, at roughly $15,000 each, Driscoll told Congress in April.
“They protected U.S. troops,” the Army secretary told lawmakers, defending the cost as a fraction of what a Shahed costs to produce. “We will make that trade all day long.”
A Merops costs roughly $15,000 against a Shahed that runs $30,000 to $50,000.
The interceptor is a roughly three-foot, fixed-wing drone that flies up to 174 mph (280 km/h) and homes in on its target using thermal radar or radio-frequency sensors when its links are jammed.
It has downed more than 4,000 Russian drones in Ukraine, German production partner Twentyfour Industries said.
The system has conservatively accounted for 40% of all Shahed destruction in Ukraine.
https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/07/01/video-show
s-a-ukrainian-unit-running-down-a-russian-shahed-the-kind-of-kill-the-us-is-racing-to-reproduce/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The cost of the Iran conflict
Moody’s economist Mark Zandi says the Iran war has already cost the typical U.S. household about $1,000 through higher gas, diesel, airfare, groceries, military spending, and borrowing costs. He argues the bill is still rising and could be even higher than his estimate.
https://fortune.com/2026/07/01/iran-war-cost-american-households-1000-
mark-zandi/?showAdminBar=true
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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