Khamenei, One of Most Evil People in History, is Dead
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 05:42
VIEWED: 15626
PAGE 68 of 73
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SIX, I'm going to make one more attempt on reality checking you.
First, I'm not saying that many Muslims aren't a threat to western culture and society. Many are.
Europe and Britain made a HUGE mistake when they allowed in, and Merkel INVITED IN, millions of military-aged men as refugees from the most (IMHO) ignorant, degenerate, culturally maladaptive regions of the Middle East (now called west Asia BTW), central Asia, and North Africa.
WTH were they thinking???? That the immigrants would immediately see the superiority of western culture and adopt it???
I honestly don't know how they correct that mistake, assuming it WAS a mistake and not some globalist plan to destroy European living standards and society! That "refugee" policy needs to end, imams that preach takeover should be deported immediately, and women and children need to learn the national language so they're don't depend on the local Muslim mafia for translation services and access to shops etc.
BTW, Biden's decontrolled border/ invite in illegal immigrants mirrors Europe's invitation to Muslim "refugees".
And SOME radical Muslims, the Takfiri/ Wahhabist branch of Sunni Islam (which is pretty large) are an actual terrorist threat. Of course, they need to be found and punished thru law.
So let's not CONTINUE to carry on with Biden's and Europe's policies! It's pols like Biden and Merkel who're the real enemy.
But when you get all paranoid and start gibbering about ALL Muslims, you're setting yourself up for failure and significant blowback.
The people of Iran, primarily Shia Persians, are culturally friendly to the west. Their Shia branch of Islam focuses on resistance, NOT AGGRESSION, thanks to their history of having been betrayed and slaughtered by their Sunni "brethren". They are not terrorists. Even when being attacked with (western supplied) chemical weapons, they didn't respond in kind. They're proud of their culture, history, and language (Farsi, not Arabic) which goes much farther back than the bandit tribes of Saudi Arabia.
And many primarily Muslim nations don't even follow Sharia law. https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/do-all-muslim-countries-follo
w-sharia-law-969289
When you make an enemy of Iranians, you're making an unnecessary one, and when you make an enemy of ALL Muslims that's just dysfunctional and counterproductive.
As far as I'm concerned, Muslims can have their cultural and religious quirks, as long as they practice them in THEIR country, not here! We should DEFINITELY impose our language and moral/ legal structure on people living here, and jail those who harm us and deport those who preach otherwise.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America’s Iran Failure Is Bigger Than Trump
Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.
By Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail | July 21, 2026
Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.
Less than a month after stepping back from military escalation in pursuit of an interim understanding with Tehran, the Trump administration has returned to the same maximalist strategy that nearly 40 days of fighting had already shown could deliver neither a favorable outcome for the United States nor regional or global stability. In the latest wave of escalation, three more US service members were killed, bringing the US military death toll to 17. The United States has widened its strikes to include bridges, electrical infrastructure, and, according to Tehran, the unfinished Darkhovin nuclear power site, while Iran has attacked US bases and critical infrastructure across Jordan and the Persian Gulf.
It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.
For nearly half a century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have largely operated from the same basic theory: that escalating economic and military pressure would eventually force Tehran to concede or buckle under the weight of coercion. The Obama administration’s pursuit of the 2015 nuclear agreement was the clearest break from that logic. Yet the agreement never escaped the coercive architecture surrounding it. Its promised economic benefits for Iran depended heavily on reversible presidential waivers, making the deal easy to dismantle and difficult to trust. When Trump withdrew, Washington drew no lesson from the collapse beyond the one it had always preferred: apply more pressure.
Trump’s principal departure has not been from America’s fundamentally coercive approach to Iran but from the way that approach is conducted. Consequential foreign policy decisions have increasingly been concentrated in the hands of family members, trusted friends, and informal envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, bypassing many of the institutions meant to provide expertise, deliberation, and accountability. Yet those institutions have long struggled to fulfill that function. Trump’s approach has only further diminished their ability to challenge assumptions, incorporate dissenting views, and learn from failure.
Indeed, Trump’s personalization of foreign policy is ultimately a symptom of a deeper institutional problem rather than its source.
As one of the authors, Sina Toossi, argues in a recent Center for International Policy report, Washington has consistently approached Iran through linear assumptions about how states respond to coercion. The underlying assumption has been simple: more sanctions create more pressure, more pressure yields more concessions, and overwhelming US military superiority will inevitably translate into the political outcomes Washington seeks. https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/beyond-maximalism/
The historical record, however, tells a different story. Rather than producing a predictable chain of cause and effect, US pressure repeatedly reshaped the very political system it was intended to influence, often in ways Washington neither anticipated nor understood. The economic siege weakened the social and political forces most invested in engagement while strengthening the security institutions best positioned to thrive under confrontation. Diplomatic reversals discredited Iranian leaders who argued that accommodation with the United States could produce lasting benefits, reinforcing the arguments of those who insisted that Washington could not be trusted.
That same dynamic is evident today. The current war has strengthened the influence of Iran’s hard-
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The Putinization of the American Military
When poseurs and yes-men run a war
By Paul Krugman
Jul 28, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-putinization-of-the-american
Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.
But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.
Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.
But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.
So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.
No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.
For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:
The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that
· Munitions aren’t depleted
· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail
· It’s Joe Biden’s fault
Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?
First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.
Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.
And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians w
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Midweek Update #21: Iran Is Toying With The USA
Phillips P. OBrien
Jul 29, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-21-iran-is-toyin
g
Iran Is Toying With The USA
On July 23rd, the USA launched its last day of direct attacks on Iran during its latest phase of kinetic attacks in Trump’s War. This phase lasted for 13 days, as the USA continued to throw away valuable weapons systems, further depleting its stocks, for no strategic gain.
How do we know this? Well, the White House was briefing it to the press. In their desperation to provide arguments about why they needed to stop the bombing (which they never should have started) White House sources provided confirmation for the worst kept secret of the war. The US had not prepared and soon would struggle to protect its own troops, to say nothing of its allies (more on that below).
Things reached a tragi-comic level when America’s UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz, went on Meet The Press. In a series of wonderfully contradictory statements, he first said that the shortfall in US munitions existed because of the Biden administration, then he said it was not true and the US military had “everything that it needs”. Then he pivoted again and admitted that the shortfall exists by saying those leaking the information should go to jail. That of course was a great dodge, as it means many people in the White House, including Trump, should probably be jailed.
If you want to watch the whole Waltz interview, here it is:
The shortfall is very real, btw. US stocks are not a mystery as there are annual appropriations that can be accessed and provide a pretty good idea of the numbers.
As I tried to say last week, re-upping this bombing campaign for 13 days only left the USA weaker every day. There is also stockpile info in this piece if you want to read it:
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-
us
The US administration, not quite grasping how weak it has made itself, even did its usual trick of threatening to escalate wildly against Iran, and stories started circulating of a large number of reinforcements being flown from the USA into the theater in preparation for a ground assault.
However, this was always bluff. The US has weakened itself so dramatically that it has taken a very unpalatable proposition from March and turned it into a political impossibility. If it inserted US ground forces into Iran, say in the Strait area or around Kharg, it would blow through what remains of its stockpiles of advanced air defense weapons in a very short time. Then it would have to either withdraw or suffer increasing casualties.
Adam Kinzinger made a very good point about how Trump’s casualty fear has neutered his escalation threats. He has used up massive numbers of the most advanced systems because they can be fired from a distance, and thus put US soldiers in a safer position. Of course, this means that they are being used at an unsustainable rate, which means if he did escalate, US casualties would be much higher.
All of this came together on July 23 when, after the last of the 13 days of strikes, Trump lied about Iran saying it had been so badly mauled that it had begged for more negotiations.
The actuality was that he was, once again, throwing in the towel as Iran was making a mockery of his operations.
How do we know this was the case? It is pretty straightforward, actually. Once Trump stopped military operations, Iran continued to attack either directly or through its proxies. Here is what has happened since Trump’s latest humiliation.
1. Iranian attacks on US bases — Friday 24 July
Iran’s army said it used Arash one-way attack drones against fuel tanks, equipment warehouses and barracks at Isa (Sheikh Isa) Air Base in Bahrain, and against aircraft hangars, maintenance hangars and barracks at Al-Azraq / Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Jordan’s military said it intercepted seven missiles and six drones, so we can say this attack definitely happened.
2. Houthi strikes
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Loser.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Aren't you special, 6ix. By which I mean you are a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I can agree with all of this, ONLY IF AND WHEN THEY'RE ALL DEPORTED FROM AMERICA AND EUROPE.
Until then. They all need to die.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I didn't say anything about Jews.
We're talking about your Muslim friends who want to enslave the planet.
Get them the fuck out of here and back where they belong, or we're gonna start doing it for you. And we'll just put them into the fucking ground.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Great Chinese Oil Mystery
America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why.
By Rogé Karma | July 29, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/07/china-iran-usa-oil-prices/
688086/
When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, experts warned that oil prices could hit $150 or $200 a barrel within a few weeks. The great mystery of the Iran war is why that hasn’t happened—why, nearly five months later, oil prices have scarcely surpassed $100, even as countries around the world have been forced to dip into their oil reserves. Now an explanation seems to be emerging: China.
Before the war, China, by far the world’s largest oil importer, was buying more barrels than the entire European continent and almost twice as much as the second-largest importer, the United States. Then, weeks after the conflict broke out, the country abruptly slashed its oil purchases, eventually cutting them by half compared with prewar levels. That appears to be why global prices have risen so much less than experts predicted. The shift also poses mysteries of its own. No one outside China knows how exactly the country has managed to meet its energy needs while forgoing imports, nor why its leaders chose this course. And no one knows how long the situation can last.
The predictions of catastrophe for the world’s oil system were based on simple supply and demand. The Strait of Hormuz saw the passage of 20 million barrels of oil a day, a fifth of the world’s total supply. Countries found ways to make up for some of that loss, including by releasing barrels from strategic stockpiles, but not enough to avoid a price shock. If demand stayed constant, buyers would be forced to try to outbid one another to secure the scarce remaining supplies.
But demand didn’t stay constant. The amount of oil that China stopped buying, about 5 million barrels a day, represented about a quarter of what was lost when the strait closed and is equivalent to the entirety of imports to India, the world’s third-largest importer. This significant and unexpected drop in Chinese demand freed up those barrels to go elsewhere, preventing the kind of shortage that might have led to truly catastrophic prices. “China was definitely the most important factor in keeping prices down,” Rory Johnston, an oil-markets analyst who writes the widely cited newsletter Commodity Context, told me. “And the thing is that nobody—and I mean nobody—saw it coming.”
The most obvious way a country can reduce oil imports at this scale is by drastically lowering its energy consumption. There is no evidence that China has done so. Unlike during the coronavirus pandemic, when the country essentially shut down, most indicators of energy consumption, such as traffic congestion, have hardly budged. The reduction also can’t be explained by a shift to clean energy. China has been investing heavily in renewable energy and electric vehicles for decades, but its economy remains reliant on imported oil. Such a dramatic change would have required millions of Chinese consumers to suddenly switch to EVs virtually overnight. “It’s a genuine puzzle,” Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who specializes in Chinese energy markets, told me. “We’re in one of those rare moments where even the experts are forced to rely on a whole lot of speculation.”
Could China be secretly getting extra oil from Russia? Since 2022, the Kremlin has been shipping huge amounts of oil to China using a “shadow fleet” of tankers that hide their point of origin to avoid Western sanctions. But it’s one thing to try to obscure where a given shipment of oil comes from; it’s another to hide the physical barrels that show up on Chinese shores, which are carried by giant tankers and unloaded at major ports. If Russia—or anyone else—were sending millions of extra barrels to China, the world would know about it.
A more realistic possibility is that China has been tapping into its imm
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Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
The president should have heeded this lesson about war before he got into this mess.
By Fred Kaplan | July 30, 2026 10:00 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/trump-iran-war-bombing-air
-force.html
One major, little-recognized reason for President Donald Trump’s failure to push the Iranians into surrender—even after hitting more than 13,000 targets with bombs dropped from planes or with missiles fired from long range—is this plain fact: No nation has ever won a war with air power alone. To the extent bombs and missiles have played a role in victory, they have been in coordination with forces on the ground, an escalation of involvement that Trump wisely wants to avoid.
In other words, even if Trump hadn’t overestimated the Iranian regime’s fragility, even if he’d devised a clear strategy of what he wanted the war to accomplish, he would almost certainly not have won this war. He might have done so, if he or Israel’s leaders had prepared and trained a cadre of rebels, perhaps from within Iran’s army, to rise up against the regime’s leaders as the bombs fell. But they didn’t do this, unless you count Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s harebrained scheme—thoughtlessly approved by Trump—to groom former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s most brutal and unpopular leaders, to storm the palace after Israeli bombs assassinated the entire top layer of Tehran’s government.
In any case, the plot would have almost certainly failed, even it had been carried out, because Ahmadinejad had no followers inside his own country and because the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have quickly grabbed control of the social, political, and economic levers that it has long dominated—as it indeed did, without pause, in the hours after the bombing began. For a while, there was talk of recruiting Kurdish militias in Iraq to storm across the border and seize power in Tehran—until, perhaps, someone realized they would have no support from Iran’s largely Shiite population either.
The U.S. Air Force was created as an independent branch of the armed forces in 1947, inspired and instantly strengthened by the belief that air power can win modern wars without the messy skirmishes of ground troops. The belief, which air theorists had propagated since the onset of combat planes in World War I, seemed confirmed by the results of World War II. However, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a panel of experts, released a report the same year, concluding that, in fact, the Allied bombing of German cities—and the German bombing of British cities—had little impact on the war. The board singled out the persistent bombing of German oil and communications facilities as a factor that impeded the resupply of the Nazi tank army. In other words, to the extent bombing had an effect on the war, it was by assisting the ground war—not by shaping the course of the war from the sky on its own.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war in the Pacific to a sudden end, but this suggests only that the shock and awe of nuclear weapons—the obliteration of a whole city by a single explosion—might alter the general rule about air power. Even here, though, historians have noted that the Soviet Union’s near-simultaneous invasion of Manchuria—which dispelled Japan’s illusion that Moscow might stay neutral in the war—also had an impact on the emperor’s calculations. (And even then, the emperor disrupted the normal chain of command by intervening in a decision that would normally have been made by the army, whose top officers were prepared to keep fighting.)
The most authoritative, skeptical account of the subject is the 1996 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape. A scrupulous analysis of 33 strategic air campaigns from World War II through the decades since, it tests whether those campaigns validate any of the four war aims that bombs and missiles are said to accomplish: (1) punishment (inflicting enough
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s War With Iran Is Hopeless
Oh yeah? How many times has Fred Kaplan told you that Trump can't levy tariffs?
Why do you keep listening to people who are wrong all the time and/or just lie to you all the time?
You're a fucking idiot. That's why.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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