Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
From Tom Nichols and the rest of the paid liars at The Atlantic.
Fuck you, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
You can’t post your way out of a war.
By Charlie Warzel | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/trump-iran-war-social-m
edia/688065/
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.
That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.
In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.
Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.
Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a clo
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Psychologist explains why fact-checking Trump fails — and what to do instead
By Michael Bader
Jul 27, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/psychologist-explains-why-fact-ch
ecking-trump-fails-and-what-to-do-instead-opinion/ar-AA28M2Ft
“Two years ago our country was dead. Today we are the hottest country in the world. America is respected like it's never been respected before…. Our stock markets are at their highest point of all time….”
The American public has gotten so used to Donald Trump’s bizarre hyperbolic rhetoric that we usually don’t pause to try to understand what it means. By bizarre, I mean his apparently compulsive need to constantly speak in glittering generalities, meaningless hyperbole, and superlatives. It’s closer to what George Orwell called “Duckspeak” than normal speech. [In 1984, Big Brother mandated a language that was English, but was also mindless, repetitive, with hardly any conscious thought]. And as Trump tells it, in such instances he is always the hero of the story. There is hardly a speech in which Trump does not use phrases like “the likes of which nobody’s ever seen before,” “Numbers we’ve never seen,” or “Like nobody ever thought possible.”
One news agency reported that he had used such phrases over 200 times this year already. Of course, such extreme declarations usually cast Trump himself in near-messianic terms — not just as an observer of these unprecedented feats, but their sole and irreplaceable author. This type of vacuous repetition has the effect of hypnotizing his already admiring audience, holding them in place. For those of us who are not enthralled with the man and his actions, this hypnosis becomes paralysis. There is simply nothing there to latch onto and undo.
So, we fact-check.
Trump’s grandiosity isn’t limited to vainglorious claims about rescuing America from the dangerous vermin and garbage ridden hell that he apparently inherited from Obama and Biden, but it frequently appears in much more personal territory, for example, when he preened that no one had ever seen a body as beautiful as his, that he is a ‘stable genius,” that he had been “the most effective President for the black community since Abraham Lincoln,” or when he portrayed himself as Jesus.
Because such bragging is invariably shot through with lies and falsehoods, Progressives and the mainstream media usually respond to Trump’s chest-thumping by fact-checking him. So, for example, following Trump’s speech about election security, the entire media echo chamber was filled with corrections of his facts.
Trump constantly lies, and so we constantly fact-check him. It's as if we believe that the best we can do so often is to defend objective reality in the hopes that people see the light. What we don’t do is try to understand why his lying and boasting are so ubiquitous. Is it that we don’t understand it? Or might it even be that we are embarrassed by it and so keep trying to dig into it as if there was some hidden and perverse sense and logic?
If we did ask why Trump has to lie so much, we would find that the answer is hiding in plain sight. You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to intuitively understand that someone who publicly boasts all the time must privately struggle with feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. This is simply the normal functioning of the mind. Psychologists have long known that our minds are programmed to avoid or otherwise get rid of real, imagined, or predicted feelings or situations that we fear will be too psychologically painful. One person might get rid of a bad feeling through denial. Another might project this feeling onto someone else. Many people, however, do what Trump does—they exaggerate the opposite. So if someone (usually a man) is especially threatened by situations that might make him feel helpless, unimportant, or shamed in some way, that man – Donald Trump – will automatically try to mitigate such a threat by arguing to himself and others that he is actually powerful, special, and perfect.
But this psychological dynamic –
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The Gordie Howe Bridge Is What American Betrayal Looks Like
Canada spent billions on the crossing. Trump turned it into a shakedown
By David Moscrop | Updated 8:00, Jul. 27, 2026
https://thewalrus.ca/the-gordie-howe-bridge-is-what-american-betrayal-
looks-like/
As a symbol of Canada’s relationship with the United States, it’s a bit too on the nose. Linking Windsor with Detroit and named after a Canadian hockey legend who played for an American team, the Gordie Howe International Bridge sat empty for months, completed and useless, after Washington threatened to block the opening, then huffily cancelled the ceremony in June of this year.
Today, the bridge—all 2.5 kilometres of its soaring cable-stayed deck—is finally open for business. That the bridge is doing what it was built to do is a good thing. The structure will handle a substantial share of Canada’s busiest commercial gateway. Billions of dollars worth of cars, auto parts, machinery, food, pharmaceuticals, and other sundry goods will traverse each year, along with friends, families, tourists, and business travellers. But the whole sorry episode is a reminder of the extent to which Donald Trump has built a bullying, sinister plutocracy that has utterly captured American economic and political life—and some of Canada’s too.
The story of what should have been a triumph of continental integration goes something like this. To ease travel times and facilitate trade, Canada agreed in 2012 to pony up the cash—ultimately $6.4 billion—to construct a new bridge and then earn that money back through tolls. It would be owned jointly between the Government of Canada and the state of Michigan, with the former recouping costs for the capital outlay before splitting revenues with the state. This was, and it can’t be repeated enough, an unusually generous arrangement.
Then, in February, Trump made his opening demand: a 50 percent ownership stake as the price for allowing the first vehicle through. One ostensible justification for the last-minute renegotiation was his desire to, as per the CBC, rectify “longstanding unfair trade practices.” It was nothing more than a shakedown.
Well, there might have been something more. Allegations of political interference cite the influence of the billionaire Moroun family, one of whom—Matthew Moroun—owns the aging Ambassador Bridge also linking the two cities. The Morouns have long opposed the Gordie Howe Bridge, which would rival their own and, presumably, reduce traffic and tolls. Moroun donated $1 million (US) to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. political action committee last January and later met with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick right before the US administration blocked the opening.
Despite the accusations, there has been no proven quid pro quo or untoward dealings involving the Morouns and the Trump administration. However, Mike Levin, the representative from California’s Forty-ninth Congressional District, summed up the situation bluntly: “My friends, it’s corruption in plain sight. A government should work for the people, not for whoever writes the biggest cheque. Open the bridge.”
The ribbon has now been cut. There isn’t a lot to celebrate about how it happened. Canada was able to keep its original pact with Michigan—but only after agreeing to a second deal that, for fifteen years, diverts half the bridge’s net revenues into a US regional development fund under Washington’s sole control. We effectively paid to remove an obstacle Trump himself imposed. Tony Soprano would be proud.
Plans for the bridge were in the works for decades before Trump crashed into the Oval Office. In 2000–2001, transportation planners on both sides of the border looked at the Detroit River, noted the surging trade and mounting traffic, and warned of looming gridlock. They recommended a new international crossing. By 2004, both governments endorsed the idea, sending engineers to their drawing boards eight years later. Throughout it all, Canada and America alternated between co-operation and competition. Canadian ministries join
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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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Worst Person You Know Just Made a Good Point on Impeaching Trump
The Iran war is apparently a bridge too far for some people.
Malcolm Ferguson | July 29, 2026 11:18 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/213682/alex-jones-impeach-donald-trump-ir
an
Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, a dramatic about-face for someone who has been an unflinching supporter of the president for years.
Jones based his demands on Trump’s war on Iran, which many on the MAGA right were opposed to from the start, viewing it as yet another endless foreign war—a pattern Trump ran on ending.
“The big issue is how to stop Trump. And we have to have Congress go for the war powers. They’ve tried three times to vote on war powers—they’re supposed to authorize a war. This is a war; they’re getting the draft ready. If this isn’t a war, nothing’s a war. I mean, this is absolutely out of control,” Jones said in a video posted on Tuesday afternoon. “And so I’m calling for it right now: Twenty-Fifth Amendment, impeachment, whatever needs to happen to get this front and center, to get control of our country.”
Jones went on to allege that Trump is preparing for a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran, a line in the sand for many in the “America First” wing of MAGA.
“They want us in a total war so they can censor and take our freedoms, nationalize everything, and push us aside with AI—total liability, immunity, and protection. This is a disaster. We are facing tyranny, but the public’s awakening,” he continued. “We’ve got to come together and transcend left and right, and we have to say no to an expanded war that will definitely destroy the economy and kill a bunch of our troops. They’re preparing a massive ground invasion. It’s all confirmed. This is going down right now.”
While this announcement is historically uncharacteristic for Jones, the internal MAGA split on the Iran war has been brewing for some time.
“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones wrote back in April after Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” referring to Iran. “WAR CRIME ALERT!!—Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people! Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Trump’s Fundraising Operation
Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed ‘princess of darkness,’ carries out the president’s desire to wring hundreds of millions from companies for his projects.
By Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer | July 30, 2026 7:30 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-donations-company-fundraisin
g-1e34a78f
WASHINGTON—Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.
Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.
“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments.
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.
Trump has been demanding checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists their companies should give $25 million or $50 million.
No laws prohibit presidents from raising unlimited sums for nonprofits, like the ones used for the ballroom and his presidential library, his super PAC or political issue committees. For most of these types of transactions, public disclosure of donors isn’t required and reporting on spending is infrequent.
All told, the second-term president has raised more than $800 million since returning to office, according to an updated Wall Street Journal analysis.
Some of the money is earmarked for specific projects, including the White House ballroom and the Freedom 250 funds for the nation’s birthday celebrations, but Trump has floated using funds in other ways. The president, at the dinner thanking contributors to the ballroom project, said, “We’ll have money left over, and we’ll use that for something...maybe for the arch or something else that will come.”
Tracking who gives
Interviews with dozens of donors, executives, lobbyists, Trump advisers and others indicate a staggering fundraising and influence operation, with Trump at the center. The president closely tracks who gives, aides said, repeatedly assigning O’Rourke with big asks that she has told others make her uncomfortable. Danielle Alvarez, an outside spokeswoman for Trump and O’Rourke, said it was “laughable” that O’Rourke had ever been uncomfortable with a request.
Chevron was asked to give $50 million. The oil company gave millions, but far less than the requested amount. Several top Washington lobbyists have been asked to raise $50 million or more for Trump projects.
Meta executives convened a series of calls among themselves to discuss strategy after being repeatedly aske
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Thanks for proving my point all along and turning this into a daily diary of a TDS suffering fool's thread.
Your world is dead. It never existed in the first place.
It was funded by $39 Trillion in debt.
We are going to fix everything and never let people like you run anything a step above a lemonade stand going forward and we're never going to look back, loser.
You are irrelevant.
You always were irrelevant.
But now everybody knows it.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The people who built Trump now say he’s evil and demonic (150 seconds): Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, et. al.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Where Are Trump's Lawyers Now?
• Roy Cohen Disbarred; dead
• Michael Cohen Disbarred; pleaded guilty to tax, campaign, and false-statement crimes
• Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in NY and DC; $148 million in defamation damages
• Alina Habba Sanctioned $1 million for frivolous litigation
• Boris Epshteyn Pending Arizona criminal charges in fake-elector case
• John Eastman Disbarred in California and suspended in DC; Arizona criminal case pending
• Kenneth Chesebro Disbarred in New York; pleaded guilty in Georgia; Wisconsin case pending
• Sidney Powell Pleaded guilty in Georgia
• Jenna Ellis Pleaded guilty in Georgia; suspended in Colorado; Arizona criminal case pending
• Jeffrey Clark Facing criminal charges in Arizona over fake-elector scheme
• Christina Bobb Facing Arizona criminal charges over fake-elector scheme
• Lin Wood Disbarred in Colorado; Retired and surrendered his law license rather than face disbarment in his home state of Georgia
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among all of Ronald Reagan's, George H. W. Bush's, Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Barack Obama's, and Joe Biden's lawyers: ZERO
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among Donald Trump's lawyers: Ten and counting
https://imgur.com/gallery/where-are-they-now-0cJdfqJ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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