the conditions seem to be entirely expectable for a land that lost a war;
President Trump said on Sunday that the US was “low-keying it” with Iran and only “semi-negotiating” with the country, comments that come after a senior Iranian official laid out multiple conditions for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told Axios reporter Barak Ravid, comments that were taken as a signal that the US will continue the blockade and economic pressure against Iran but won’t launch a major military escalation.
A day earlier, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said that the conditions for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz include the US ending its threats against Iran, permanently ending the war and the other wars against Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen, lifting the naval blockade on Iranian ports, and pulling back US forces from the region............more.............
the empire has earned this defeat and deserves to 'reap' it;
Iran and Oman are reportedly finalizing a deal to control the Strait of Hormuz, charging ships fees for passage, and potentially blocking ships from “hostile countries.” Trump resumed bombing in early July to prevent Iran from doing just that, and President Donald Trump has flitted between claiming the United States will control Hormuz and charge tolls, pretending the strait is already open and threatening to “hit very hard” if Iran doesn’t fully open it soon.
Yet Trump and other top U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, are touting the Iran-Oman talks as diplomatic progress, indicating they’re going to accept a deal on Iran’s terms.
This would arguably be America’s most blatant loss in war ever, especially for a war the U.S. started.
In February, before Trump started the war, Hormuz was open, treated as an international waterway, free to all. The U.S. was widely considered the dominant military power in the region. Gulf Arab states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait — made U.S. dominance the basis of their national security and economic strategies. And Iran was engaged in talks over its nuclear program, albeit unlikely to make significant concessions.
On June 17, after a lot of bombing, some extreme threats and a couple of ceasefires, the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran that was mostly an American surrender. The deal front-loaded sanctions relief and other economic benefits for Iran, and punted on all U.S. war aims. Iran agreed to nonspecified nuclear talks in the future, which the U.S. had before attacking. The written document requires both parties not to threaten each other (Trump violated that almost right away) and committed Israel to end operations in Lebanon (which they never agreed to, and wouldn’t). It effectively acknowledged Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, saying Iran would “make arrangements” to manage it with Oman, and wouldn’t charge any fees “for 60 days only.”...........more............
karen's first concern seems to be transvestites;
As Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass oversees the number of rebuilding permits awarded to transgender people and drag performers, other, less critical decisions are falling through the cracks.
Rats. Los Angeles has a rat problem. Not a rat problem like all big cities. Los Angeles rats are of a particular variety.
In addition to some of them being the size of cats and chewing on everything in sight, the rats are literally flea-bitten. And the fleas that chew on the rats carry the medieval disease typhus.
It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from a rat for the typhus-bearing fleas to land on a human in the densely populated city of Los Angeles. And that’s where Los Angeles has a medieval problem.
Fleas become infected when they feed on the blood of carrier animals. In urban settings, the primary reservoirs are rats, opossums, and stray cats. Once a flea contracts the bacteria, it carries it for the rest of its life. Unlike many vector-borne diseases, in which the disease is injected directly through saliva during a bite, typhus is primarily transmitted through flea feces, commonly known as “flea dirt.”
Flea-borne typhus does not spread directly from person to person. But when you have four million people living in close quarters and the little rascals; it’s nothing for a flea to leap from human to human, infecting them with the Rickettsia typhi bacteria.............more..............
its come to the point in which they're now imposing numbers on locals that are unimaginable;
The children of a quiet Oxfordshire village have been forced to put pen to paper and plead with the Prime Minister himself. Their message is simple and heartbreaking: leave our home alone.
Piddington is a tiny English settlement of roughly 350 people—around 250 adults and just 46 children. The Home Office and Labour government under Andy Burnham intend to place 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers on a former Ministry of Defence site that borders the village, runs along the back of homes, and sits directly against the parish playing field and children’s park.
If the plan proceeds, the number of young men dumped on their doorstep will dwarf the entire local population............more.............
looks like the orange man will have to fight an uphill battle to continue his iran war;
Over the last few weeks, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine has privately made clear to other top Trump advisers that the US needs to find an off-ramp from the war with Iran — because the military options on the table to escalate the conflict could backfire and airpower alone is unlikely to achieve President Donald Trump’s stated objectives, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
“Caine is looking for an off ramp,” one of the sources said bluntly.
Caine is not alone in his view that the war has reached a crossroads. He has discussed concerns about the military options for escalating the conflict and raised the prospect of finding an off-ramp from the war with other key Cabinet officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, two of the sources said.
The top US general has recently side-barred with some of those key, like-minded Trump advisers in an effort to facilitate interagency coordination and ensure they are on the same page ahead of meetings with the president. The aim has been to make clear the limitations and pitfalls of the available military options, including those that do not involve putting US boots on the ground, the sources said.
“I think it is just his way of protecting the military,” one of the sources told CNN, referring to Caine’s discussions with other top national security officials within Trump’s cabinet about the Iran war.............more..........
free speech? screw it;
I’m a civil libertarian. We’re practically extinct now. There were never very many of us, but there used to be a lot more. Most people simply don’t support your right to say something they disagree with. And therein lies the rub, as the Bard once said. Political correctness, “hate speech,” call it what you want. It destroys liberty.
I have recounted many times the origin of the expression “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used that phrase to explain why Woodrow Wilson had the right to throw WWI protesters into prison. They weren’t yelling fire, in a theater or otherwise. But the American public of that day and age accepted it. Didn’t offer up a whimper of dissent. In 1942, the Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, decided that “insulting or ‘fighting words’, those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.” Now, Americans in 1942 were in full WW2 war fever mode. They were too busy buying bonds and planting Victory Gardens to worry about any “Fighting Words” exception to the First Amendment. We had Nazis to defeat- screw free speech!............more...........
