mearsheimer covers the orange man's big bluff;
The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.
In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.
This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.
Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.
First, the administration argues that Iran is being economically strangled by the US naval blockade coupled with Operation Economic Outcast, the strategy announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 24 August 2026. At the same time, it maintains that oil is once again flowing out of the Gulf at rates not far below those that prevailed on 27 February 2026. The implications are obvious: the economic punishment being inflicted on Iran will force it to capitulate soon, while the US economy – and the international community more generally – is well on its way to recovery..............more..........
canada began becoming a strange place with the advent of trudeau and ain't stopped since;
I am trying to understand and explain why 70% of Canadians support Mark Carney. Essentially, 60% of us depend on the government for our living, and the rest, the 30% will expire, their businesses, income and revenue will drop, if the Trump tariffs take effect. Which means that the Liberal Party of Canada has broken the country so thoroughly, that without the massive subsidy from the States of 10% of our GDP a year - to include our $50 billion trade deficit with the U.S., our 25-50% tariffs on U.S. goods coming in, and 2% of our annual GDP spent on defense.
We cannot do it. We will die. We cannot exist without American largesse. We have destroyed our economy so thoroughly we are beggars.
Our GDP will drop !0% and we will be in a deep deep depression.
Which may be the only thing to wake us up.
Canadians are a sleepy bunch, other than our immigrants who are roaringly ambitious and will succeed using the lovely talents they brought with them. Apparently in their cultures, recreational lakes are also abattoirs, toilets, and laundries.
Once almost crime-free and pristine, Canada is now a Cartel, Triad, fentanyl and human trafficking hub that launders most of the continent’s drug money. Our banks? Fully complicit; the TD was caught but most of them do it; they have to, we are not producing enough revenue for them to profit otherwise.........more..........
the national id no one voted for;
Login.gov now reports 180 million accounts spanning 700 services and 54 agencies, and the man recently placed in charge of expanding it is Greg Hogan, a former executive at the self-driving-car company comma.ai who had never worked in government before the second day of Donald Trump’s second term. That was when Hogan entered the Office of Personnel Management as its chief information officer, becoming the person responsible for deciding who could access the employment records of nearly every federal worker in the country.
Hogan barely exists online. There are no interviews, panels, or public statements explaining what he believes government technology should do, and nearly every word attributed to him in the press came from internal emails obtained by reporters. His first major contribution to the federal government, however, was difficult to miss, because he helped build the system Elon Musk used to email approximately two million public employees and demand a list of five things they had accomplished that week, with Musk threatening that failure to respond would be treated as a resignation..........more...........
chris rock is certainly a sharp individual who can decipher small clues as well as large;
Rock, 61, spoke with David Marchese on The Interview, the Times podcast, about his upcoming film Misty Green and the theme of forgiveness.
The comedian described a friend who had been “canceled,” and said another friend asked how he could still associate with that person.
“If you’re only friends with your friends when they’re good, they’re not your friends,” Rock said. He added that the point was not to condone abusive behavior.
From there, the interview turned to a discussion about the culture of the last several years.
“The problem with ‘wokeness’ — and don’t get me wrong, it is great that marginalized people have a voice; it is great to advocate for anybody that feels marginalized — but the problem is we’re in the Old Testament right now,” he said. “The Old Testament has no forgiveness. The Old Testament didn’t work, so they had to write a remix called the New Testament.”
Marchese noted that some people now call the immediate post-George Floyd period, sometimes labeled “Woke 1.0,” crazy............more..........
