Everyone thought George W Bush and his cabal of misfits and ideologues were idiots. There is always something, or someone, worse:
"Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, has asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.””
#religion #Trumpism #Iran #Easter #nihilism #militarism #ethics #morality #evil #idiots
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/world/middleeast/pope-iran-war.html
RE: https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116341951832266597
The little train has jumped the rails, but still it rolls along. We are witnessing a test. How long can the society coast along on autopilot? Longer than I would have guessed. But something deep within says back at me that it can't go on forever. This too, shall pass. (His cravat seems a little loose.) His father was a high school football coach, and his mother did business motivational work. He graduated from Princeton. A caricature of the mad war monger. Not the anti-Christ, but plays one on t.v.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials #militarism #fascism #vampires
Trump announced to cut any social spending for day care, Medicare or Medicaid on the federal level because all funds have to be funneled to the military for "protecting the country".
This certainly reminds of a protection racket or other forms of kleptocratic wealth accumulation Mafia style.
The plundering of social budgets is part and purpose of imperalistic warfare deemed to leave people in need to the cold of misery, famine and death. It's nothing but class war from above, and hopefully US Americans will soon wake up to never repeat the folly of voting for leaders like sheep chosing those who will lead them to the slaughtering block.
One important lesson to be learned from the ongoing wars and the inceasing dwindling of social welfare is to fight militarism and imperialism whereever it rears its bloody head.
7.38
“The Trump administration won’t say and prefers the cost not be discussed.
The United States spent an estimated $28.7 billion in the first two weeks of the Iran war, or $2.1 billion a day on average. This is based on my analysis of officials’ statements, federal procurement and operations data, and reporting on military deployments and armament use. This estimate refers only to direct war costs — near-term expenses for military operations, munitions, and the like — and not indirect costs, which include broader and longer-term factors like economic impact and veterans’ care.
This might be a higher estimate than you’ve seen elsewhere. Those estimates are too low. This one could be too.”
"If the strait stays closed, the world will have to significantly reduce its oil and gas consumption — but not before prices spike to a level that forces consumers and businesses to fly, drive and spend much less. Already, demand has begun to drop, and some countries in Asia are hoarding and rationing fuel. US government officials and Wall Street analysts are starting to consider the prospect that oil prices might surge to an unprecedented $200 a barrel.
“It’s clear to me if this crisis lasts more than three or four months it becomes a systemic problem for the world,” Patrick Pouyanne, chief executive officer of TotalEnergies SE said at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. “We cannot have 20% of the crude oil, which is exported globally, stranded in the Gulf and 20% of the LNG capacity stranded, without any consequence.”
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the closure of the strait is reducing global oil flows by some 11 million barrels a day, after accounting for the interventions so far aimed at offsetting the loss. When compared with pre-war demand levels, that leaves a roughly 9 million-barrel shortfall — a yawning gap that is more than the oil consumption of the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Lower demand, particularly in Asia, is already helping to force a closing of that gap. (The market also entered the war in a surplus.)
But for supply this may be as good as it gets. A massive emergency stockpile release and US waivers on Russian and Iranian oil sanctions have bought some time, but they are finite interventions. Once they’re exhausted, it’s not clear what further tools President Donald Trump has to keep global oil prices from surging in the near term – other than fully reopening the strait. Iran has been allowing a trickle of foreign ships to pass through the waterway, but the numbers so far do little to move the needle."
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-war-hormuz-closure-oil-shock/
#Iran #USA #Trump #hormusstrait #Hormuz #MiddleEast #Oil #Militarism
"On the first day of the war with Iran, a weapon bearing the hallmarks of a newly developed U.S.-made ballistic missile was used in an attack that struck a sports hall and adjacent elementary school near a military facility in southern Iran, according to weapons experts and a visual analysis by The New York Times. Local officials cited in Iranian media said this strike and others nearby in the city of Lamerd killed at least 21 people.
The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.
The Times verified videos of two strikes in Lamerd, as well as aftermath footage from the attacks. Times reporters and munitions experts found that the weapon features, explosions and damage are consistent with a short-range ballistic missile called the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM (pronounced like “prism”), which is designed to detonate just above its target and blast small tungsten pellets outward.
Videos that capture one strike, in a residential area about 900 feet from the sports hall and school, show the weapon in flight, with a distinctive silhouette that matches the PrSM. The missile erupts in a large fireball midair.
Another video, filmed from a security camera directly across from the sports hall, shows the strike on the hall and adjacent school. While the video does not capture an incoming missile, it clearly shows an explosion just above the structure."
"Over the past week, both the U.S. and Iran delivered frameworks to mediators aimed at ending the ongoing war. The Trump administration is now insisting that its framework must be the basis for any negotiations, a high-level Iranian official told Drop Site, as President Donald Trump’s top envoy on Friday repeatedly asserted that direct talks are imminent and that the U.S. expects a response from Tehran in the coming days.
Trump has portrayed the diplomatic situation as the U.S. offering a desperate and broken Iran a chance to end the war. “They’re being hit so hard, anybody would be negotiating. They are negotiating. They’re begging to make a deal,” Trump said in remarks at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami on Friday. “Turned out I was right, they were negotiating.”
But Iran, which continues to launch regular missile and drone attacks at Israel and at U.S. military sites across the Persian Gulf, maintains that Trump is sinking deeper into a quagmire and Tehran will decide when the war ends. The senior Iranian official with direct knowledge of internal deliberations said that both Iran and the U.S. recently submitted their own sets of terms and conditions to end the war via intermediaries. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed out that it was the U.S. that abandoned formal direct talks last month mediated by Oman. On February 28, two days before scheduled technical discussions were to take place in Vienna, the U.S. and Israel began a massive bombing campaign they claimed was aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government.
Since the war began, messages have been delivered through intermediaries, most recently through Pakistan. The senior Iranian official said that Iran, however, remains deeply skeptical of Trump’s sincerity and cannot rule out that the entire process is a smokescreen ahead of a major military escalation."
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-trump-witkoff-ceasefire-negotiation
"Judging by the metrics of conventional conflict, Iran is not faring well against the United States and Israel. Its adversaries are destroying crucial targets in Iran, killing its commanders and degrading its military assets. But these are the wrong measures for assessing Iran’s position in the war. The right measure is not even an assessment of whether Iran is absorbing punishment well—which it is. The question that will matter when the fighting ends is whether Tehran is achieving its strategic objectives. And on that count, Iran is winning.
This outcome is not accidental. Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades, since the new revolutionary government faced its first major military test in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. And it is now executing a strategy that has managed to neutralize key U.S. and Israeli air defense batteries, severely damage U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, inflict substantial economic pain, and drive a wedge between the United States and its Gulf allies. The Iranian regime, in other words, is not just surviving the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The serious economic and political problems it is creating for its adversaries are, on a strategic level, giving Iran the upper hand."
SPQR
John Tinker
Dhyan Nada 
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Libertarian Spring
