Twenty-five years after the attacks, a Jewish season of reflection collides with enduring anger, religious division and questions about what America has learned.

Wow, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, are hitting together today, mashing desires for eternal anger and constant forgiveness – and arriving in a season of total confusion about relationships among Jews, Muslims and proponents of a White, Christian America.

As a society, we are witnessing a now-disgraced Rudy Giuliani, the would-be America’s mayor, telling Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim Democratic Socialist, to skip the 25^th year commemorations at the former World Trade Center site specifically because he is Muslim, and claims tens of thousands of supporting signatures on a petition.

“It offends me,” said Giuliani, who compares the current mayor to 9/11 terrorists. Mamdani, of course, was a 9-year-old in school when the towers went down. Giuliani has become a central figure in trying to tear down democratic elections.

And we have Donald Trump, rebuffing a visit to the memorial site because 9/11 families want to keep the focus on those 3,000 lost and the firefighters and cops who jumped into the burning buildings to try to save them, rather than enduring yet another political speech from Trump. Indeed, the fantasy news this week was Trump’s pronouncement that that two firefighters literally lifted him up and carried him to safety near Ground Zero. Fact-checkers have widely disputed this account, as there is no evidence verifying it.

And, after 24 years of wars, investigations, funerals and memorials, it turns out that there were 68 boxes with 170,000 documents sitting around untouched at City Hall that showed that New Yorkers were told it was okay to return to Lower Manhattan before it was safe to do so. Indeed, more people are thought dead from cancers and disease related to the attacks than in the towers themselves.

Talk about forgiveness. These people have a whole lot of soul-searching and repentance that is overdue for an administration that has hate and division at its core, the destruction of democracy, and the advocacy of a new religious nation state in its vision.

What Does Rosh Hashanah Ask Us to Reflect On?

Okay, it’s a Jewish holiday, but the themes are rather universal, wouldn’t you say? Taking time to consider what you and I have done in the previous year or years that stepped on other people, that cheated, belittled, debased others. And promising to turn the page in a symbolic Book of Life that portends more godly behaviors, more concern for others than self.

For Jews, these high holy days are coming amid a rash of questions about whether being Jewish requires acceptance of objectionable, militaristic and property-grabbing policies of a right-wing government in Israel – the only official Jewish state – just because Israel came about after the horrors of the Holocaust.

We cannot be Jewish or Muslim or Christian just because someone wants to fight us, to eliminate us. Indeed, these religions and resulting ethnologies have evolved over the positives of finding community.

The insistence on the rest of the world deciding for Jews that Zionism, which has turned into ever-expanding control over disputed lands back to pre-Biblical times, is the same as the American or European Jewish experience is simply wrong-headed. The confabulation has led to unnecessary and unwanted violence against American Jews and Muslims, without distinction about what is government policy, what is “Israel” and what any of it has to do with running for Senate or City Hall in this country.

Trump, of course, decided that any Jewish person voting for a Democrat shows a “total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”, stating that they “hate their religion” and everything about Israel.  Jews don’t need Trump to define their politics, religious life, or ethnicity issues.

Israel can’t even figure out what “Israel” means, with pre-election fighting about how religious to be or not, whether the most religious must serve army duty, whether Israeli foreign policy requires raising money through AIPAC to influence Congress to continue to underwrite military aid but never ask questions.

Jews and Muslims come with various political philosophies, of course. They are not any more conforming than other groups in America who think gas costs too much and that we should have a central strategy before going to war.  As Mamdani has shown in New York, we can separate a creative ability for a mayor to get the garbage picked up, the buses to run a little faster, and expand childcare without putting his personal opinions about Middle East politics at the top of the agenda.

For Jews, the holidays are consuming enough in normal times, with required self-assessment and self-fixing at their core. In these times, the job of atonement seems far more complex. October 7 still rings as an international 9/11 perpetrated on Jews from a Palestinian Gaza that felt unseen, unheard, unrecognized.

How much retribution is enough is an open question.

What Does 9/11 Mean to Americans 25 Years Later?

The continuing feelings of violation over the 9/11 attacks drive anger rather than any level of sympathy for root causes. The continuing feelings of pride for the heroes of that day, many average citizens like those aboard Flight 93 who reacted on route to the ramming of the Pentagon, do not wash away the images of the many in the towers who jumped to their deaths on that very clear morning.

The lessons of 9/11 are hardly the stuff of MAGA and militarism or of more liberal views about public responsibilities to those most vulnerable in our society. The real lessons have little to do with the politicians and the speechifying that goes on in the name of infusing a kind of patriotism for some Americans and not others.

Can 9/11 Remembrance Also Be a Call for Atonement?

Perhaps the 9/11 memorial should serve as a kind of call for atonement for Americans, something more than surfaced anger, something about maintaining an America that others around the world want to have as partner and protector.

We seem to be using the 9/11 memorial in quite some different way – as a cudgel for removing immigrants, making it much more difficult for our allies to do business with us, as an excuse to mold a “golden age” for an America run by billionaires, not Americans.

Let us write a better page for the Book of Life.

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The post 9/11 Meets Rosh Hashanah: A Time for Remembrance and Atonement appeared first on DCReport.org.

You know, in previous elections, the press swooned over independent voters. They were pretty much the only ones anyone wanted to talk about. They would determine who won, after all! So of course the press wanted to put them center stage! Especially when they were leaning toward Republicans. Whoooooo boy. Then independents were THE most important story.

Never mind voter enthusiasm or how much one party approved or disapproved of their own elected officials. The independent voter was THE story. Until now, anyway.

I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been seeing the press obsessing over them. Why every other headline hasn’t been about which party they’re leaning towards. Now I know: Independents really REALLY do not like Trump, and that is not the narrative the press wants to tell. It’s already bad news for the party of kiddie porn and treason; why put the final nails in the coffin so early, right?

But just how bad is it for Trump and his party of white nationalist pedophile grifters?

Well, in the 2018 midterms, Trump had a +10 approval among independents on the economy. He was -18 in terms of popularity, but on the economy itself, independents were like, “Eh, he’s not that bad!”

These days? Trump is doing…less well:

Yes, you are, in fact, reading that correctly. Trump went from a +10 to -52. That’s a 62-point swing in the wrong direction. His net approval also dropped from -18 in September of 2018 to -50 today. Trump is almost THREE times as unpopular as he was eight years ago.

Allow me to remind you that in 2018, Republicans lost 40 House seats in 2018. It was an extremely brutal Senate map that year, so they actually picked up two Senate seats, but lost SEVEN gubernatorial elections. Republicans also lost 234 seats in state legislatures across the country, resulting in Democrats taking control of 7 chambers. Womp womp.

These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

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Now, Republicans have gerrymandered the shit out of the House, so they probably will not lose 40 seats this time. 20? 25? That’s a good night for the GOP. The chances of them retaining the Senate dwindle by the day. And while they gerrymandered the House, they did not redraw state legislature seats, and Republicans have been getting demolished in special elections since last year in even deep DEEP red districts in even deep DEEP red states. 234 lost seats would be a very VERY good day for Republicans.

It’s important to point out that as of this writing, oil is up to $104.56 a barrel. On Thursday, it almost reached $110. Diesel passed $6 a gallon for the first time ever. We have used up our mitigation efforts that were keeping energy costs (barely) in check. On top of this, cold weather is increasingly moving into the Northern states, meaning sticker shock from heating bills will be in the headlines very soon. There are still seven weeks until the election.

That is a lot of time for public sentiment to get even worse. And that’s assuming nothing new and dramatic happens, like the AI or banking bubble popping, both of which are teetering on the edge of collapse, along with the stability of the Dollar thanks to the regime’s reckless trade wars and economic “policy.”

At this point, nothing can save Trump and his party of fascist perverts from being curbstomped in November. They can’t start a new war to whip up patriotic fervor. We’re already in one, and we lost. They can’t fabricate an immigrant invasion while also insisting the border is completely under control. The next totally real and definitely not faked assassination attempt against Trump will not convince anyone to run out and vote. There just aren't enough ICE agents to assault enough polling sites to drive away enough voters to tip enough elections, and the military certainly isn’t going to do it no matter how much little Pete Hegseth stomps his feet and holds his breath.

That last forlorn hope of having the Supreme Court throw out all the votes? I wouldn’t bet on it. As corrupt as they are, throwing out millions of votes across all 50 states will be a bridge too far, even for them. Remember, stealing an election has to be plausible. Maybe enough to steal a Senate seat. Maybe one or two House seats. But dozens of seats and multiple Senate races? It’s too much and too obvious.

Trump will have to resort to far more blunt and stupid methods, and the country has no appetite for another attempted coup. Trump doesn’t have the clout or the popularity for it. So…good luck with that. Tick-tock, you fascist fuck.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 16 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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Vice President JD Vance, or whatever his name is these days, gravely undercut his putative ally in the Trump administration, Secretary of Something Or Another Pete Hegseth, by talking privately to military commanders around the world about what the hell is going on in the Iran war and the near-total depletion of U.S. weapons stockpiles.

According to the New York Times, Vance had conversations with military commanders with the knowledge of Trump, Chief of Staff Suzi Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. The White House has been papering over Vance’s backchannel efforts to figure out how much of disaster the Iran war has been as standard operating procedure for a vice president. Ha! The fact that Vance let the others know what he was doing is just extra padding for his ass, because what Vance was told by unit commanders around the world was such terrible news.

What Vance learned matches what we’ve read in the news about the war, shrinking missile stockpiles, overly long deployments, and the lack of readiness that has resulted from all of it. The Times reported that Trump has ignored intelligence that Iran is willing to take an extraordinary amount of punishment to preserve its regime and territorial integrity. Vance was told by one theater commander that his area of operations had only 100 Patriot missiles left to defend itself from possible enemy missile attacks. Not Patriot missile batteries, but 100 of the individual interceptors themselves. Other commanders informed Vance that there were shortages of mid and short-range ground to ground missiles, “the lowest they had ever seen,” according to the Times.

Vance’s behind-their-backs-yet-in-their-faces oppo-research comes at a key time in his career and that of a rival he does not like very much at all: Hegseth. Vance was known to be against attacking Iran right from the start, and he appears to be burnishing his reputation as the last man standing among the “no more foreign wars” contingent in the Republican Party, at the same time that Hegseth just made a campaign-style “private” trip to Iowa, with “insiders” starting to talk about Hegseth running for president in 2028.

The other name in this crowd of mini-me 2028 contenders is of course Marco Rubio, and he’s right there on the list of those Vance notified before he started contacting military commanders to get their inside-skinny on Trump’s and Hegseth’s disastrous dive into a war they haven’t been able to win or get themselves out of. Rubio has been noticeably absent in stories about the Iran fiasco, clearly satisfied to let the Kushner-Witkoff Two Stooges diplomacy team get on government jets and scoot around the world trying to make peace or make Big Money deals or whatever it is they’re doing in Oman and Moscow and Kyiv these days.

While Hegseth is stuck with one foot in the Strait of Hormuz and the other in empty warehouses where missiles used to be, and Rubio is doing his best to steer clear of Trump’s latest trade wars and Iran saber rattling, Vance has been playing hide-and-seek with the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. He’s got a tough row to hoe. He can’t look like he’s moving too far away from Trump, the North Star of All Things Republican; he can’t look too peace-y, because even in the current Republican Party politics, whatever they are, that looks weak. Plus, he’s got to convince everyone that even though he was anti-war, he knows a lot about military matters, so what better way to accomplish that than actually going out and getting some real military information from real military sources, the generals and admirals who have military commands around the world?

Contrast Vance’s moves with what Hegseth is once again considering: calling all the generals and admirals in the military back to Quantico for another dressing down. Vance is calling them up and treating the generals and admirals like the considerable military talents every one of them thinks they are, and Hegseth wants them to come back from their overseas commands for a haircut and weight inspection, with a possible trip to the medical clinic for a blood-draw to check their testosterone levels.

There was more negative press today when Trump biographer and inside gossip slinger Michael Wolff went on his Substack column to release the unwelcome news that Hegseth is facing a “rebellion” in the Pentagon. Hegseth is being referred to by his Fox News moniker, “Colonel Vodka,” given him by Fox honcho Roger Ailes, apparently because Hegseth was known to appear on his weekend morning show with alcohol on his breath. Military people in the Pentagon refer to him as “No Tabs Pete,” a reference to the fact that Hegseth never earned the elite status of Army Ranger or Sapper, both of which rate a small half-moon “tab” that is worn on the top of one’s left uniform sleeve.

And then there is the issue of Mrs. Hegseth, who is said to have “moved into” the Pentagon, where she is present at important meetings and has interviewed candidates her husband is considering for top jobs. It is not going unnoticed at the Pentagon that Mrs. Hegseth is looking more and more like Pete’s sober-buddy, someone who is ever-present to ensure that Whiskey Pete isn’t tippling from the bottom left drawer when no one is looking. Wolff reported today that Trump’s “closest circle of advisers believe he needs to be fired,” but Hegseth maintains the support of the only insider who counts, Trump himself.

Vance, who is regularly depicted as a cartoonish buffoon, is looking more and more like he’s got a secret reserve of savvy. One surprising nugget in the Times story said that Vance has gotten CIA Director John Ratcliffe to give him the phone numbers of key intelligence analysts whom Vance calls regularly to check in on the latest intelligence from the Middle East and “items from the morning briefing,” according to the Times. In the Washington D.C. of today, the fact that Vance actually pays attention to the morning intelligence briefing is a bombshell.

The three by-lines on the Times story are Johnathan Swan, Adam Entous, and Maggie Haberman, the top White House reporters and key Trump whisperers at the Times. They each have excellent sources in the White House, but sources usually have an agenda when they leak at the volume reflected in today’s front pager on Vance, indicating that Vance himself or people extremely close to him wanted to get the word out that there is more to Vice President JD than meets the eye.

Readers should be cautioned to keep in mind that any story like today’s mini-me puff job is stage managed in a way that is as invisible as possible. But the hands of the handlers can be seen in the fact that while Vance is built up, others are knocked down, and this story does exactly that to Hegseth and Rubio, not to mention Trump. The story follows on the heels of recent depictions of Trump as obsessed with his ballroom and monument-making, so yet another story showing him as out of touch and clueless when it comes to Iran and the military is hardly a surprise.

So, is this the first move by the nascent Vance 2028 campaign? The answer is a definite yes. Next, we’ll probably be treated to in depth interviews with Vance’s Yale professors about what a genius he was as a student. They’ve probably got some advance person beating the weeds of southern Ohio looking for a lower middle class family occupying an apartment or suburban house shabby enough for Vance to visit so he can burnish his “affordability” credentials.

Watch this space.

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The midterms are less than two months away. Republicans are so reviled, the currently very unpopular Democrats have somehow opened a TEN-POINT lead in party identification, the largest lead in a decade. Trump is the single most hated president in American history. Gas prices are rising. Diesel has hit an all-time high. Inflation is up. People are furious about the Iran War quagmire. No one wants a trade war with Canada. ICE is still murdering people. Everything is shitty and getting worse, and literally everyone knows Trump and his party are to blame.

So starting on Wednesday, Trump and his party are holding a two-day convention celebrating…Trump.

There’s tone-deaf, and there’s tone-deaf, and then there’s whatever the fuck this is.

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On the one hand, I get it. Trump is the center of the MAGA universe. He’s the most beloved Republican to ever exist. He has millions of adoring fans who will crawl over broken glass to bask in his glory. Why, without Trump on the ballot, Republicans couldn’t possibly win a single election ever again! There IS no Republican Party without Trump!

That’s the story Trump has been telling himself for years. It’s the story Fox News tells him every night. It’s what dear sweet Natalie, who doesn’t look AT ALL like Ivanka, goddamit!, tells Trump while she tucks him into bed after changing his diaper. Everyone knows it’s true! This is the reality inside the propaganda bubble that is the right.

But out here in the real world, Trump is despised. His 2024 coalition is gone. Latinos have abandoned him. The manosphere thinks he’s a joke. Evangelicals are still clinging to their savior the same way they cling to their guns and bibles and meth and incest porn, but everyone else has turned away. Trump promised them cheap groceries and no more foreign wars. What did they actually get? Another forever war and crushing food bills. Oh, and your groceries will probably kill you, too. Funsies!

Over the last couple of weeks, there were…signs that this “Trump-a-palooza” was going to be a huge embarrassment. Putting aside the fact that Trump was literally forcing his own people to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the “privilege” of attending,1 a whooooole lot of Republicans said, “Aw geez, I can’t make it. I’m washing my hair or I stubbed my toe or my grandmother died, so sorry, gotta go now BYE! click”

When the leader of your party orders you to appear and lick his boots and your response is, “Nah, I’m busy,” that is a sign your party leader is less an ironfisted tyrant and more of a lame-duck loser.

That is the risk Trump is running with this moronic “Me Me Me” convention. If it’s anything like his last couple of dozen rallies, it’s going to be Trump drooling and slurring and shouting at a mostly empty arena. Those are the visuals of a failed presidency and exactly the single worst image Trump can project this close to the midterms.

So…how did Wednesday night go?

This was AFTER Republicans had to give out free tickets and begged people to show up. Remember, the theory of the case here was that Trump is still so goodamn popular, they would fill the arena to capacity and have to beat people back with a stick. The ratings would be so huge, it would dwarf the first night of football season.

Trump says it totally did. We all know it fucking well did not. Not one network bothered to carry it. Why would they? No one cares. Trump and MAGA are so played out, MAGA merch stores are going out of business all over the country.

Tonight, Thursday, will be the second glorious day of Trump’s triumphant blablabla, what the fuck ever. Friday’s headlines will be the same: Empty seats. No one paid attention. The whole thing was stupid and humiliating.

But this close to the midterms, there is a very real chance this will have the exact opposite effect that Trump was planning. This was supposed to be a power move on his part. He would strut out on stage and show everyone that he was still The Man. That it was still all about Trump. He promised he would pay everyone $5000 if they voted for him! Vote Trump because Trump is so cool and awesome!

Instead, Trump is showing everyone, including his own base, how small and pathetic and weak he is. He was literally trying to bribe people to vote for him. That is not strength. That is a sad loser trying to pay people to like him. Ask Elon Musk how well that works.

Trump is out there, showing his whole (diapered) ass to the world. Right as people are about to start voting.

A smart politician, understanding how unpopular he was, would have done everything to minimize his footprint on the midterms. He would have allowed his party to distance itself. He would have stayed quiet and tried to take himself off the ballot as much as possible to negate the drag his unpopularity represents. But Trump lives in a bubble of delusion and self-inflicted disinformation. HE’S not unpopular. Republicans are unpopular, and Trump is beloved by all. Without him on the ballot, November will be a bloodbath! He has to get out there and get the voters excited to vote for HIM!

This “Trump-a-palooza” is going to be a disaster. The Mad King is fucking around, and now he’s going to find out just how stupid an idea this was. Except, of course, Trump won’t find anything out. He’ll still be protected in his bubble by dear sweet Ivanka Natalie. That means Trump will still insist on going out and campaigning because only Trump can save the midterms for his party! Trump will ride to rescue, and everyone will love him!

But Republicans will be dreading every second of Trump’s ego trip. This train wreck of a convention will be followed by weeks of Trump slouching about the country, calling attention to himself at the worst possible time. He’ll be out there, reminding everyone why they hate him so much. He’ll be reminding his own base that they’re stuck in a war they didn’t want. That gas is expensive, and their godking will be telling them to suck it up, buttercup. Trump will mock them over complaints about affordability while lying to them about $5000 checks even the dimmest of MAGA know will be coming just as soon as their DOGE and tariff dividend checks show up.

This will do wonders for Republican morale. It will also infuriate Democratic voters and motivate them to come out in even larger numbers. It’s almost like Trump WANTS his party to be smashed into dust in November.

If I were a Democrat, especially one in a tight race, I would be sending a fruit basket and a thank-you card to the White House. If I were a Republican, I’d start day drinking and not stop until it was all over.

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There are only 53 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

Trump just keeps escalating. There were more attacks by the U.S. on Iranian tankers today, one off Kharg Island and the others in the Gulf of Oman, according to news reports. The Pentagon said the attacks came after Iran had attempted to hit two U.S. Naval vessels near the Strait of Hormuz.

Late today, Iran said it had launched “a heavy missile strike” at a U.S. base in Jordan and had fired on two more U.S. destroyers, according to the New York Times. Iran also warned oil tankers near Kuwait and Bahrain to disembark their crews, saying they would be targeted in retaliation for U.S. strikes on Iranian oil tankers.

This is, of course, pure and simple insanity. It costs the United States tens of millions of dollars a day to maintain our naval presence outside the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere in the area of the Middle East. Every time we shoot a missile at an Iranian tanker, that missile has to be replaced. The replacement missile must come from munitions stocks in the U.S., because we don’t maintain stockpiles of offensive or defensive missiles in the area of the Strait of Hormuz.

The same is not true of Iran. They can shoot missiles at our ground forces in Jordan – they are the only U.S. forces left in the Middle East – and they can do it all day, every day, because their missile stocks are right there in Iran. They also manufacture their missiles in Iran, in underground facilities that were not destroyed when the U.S. and Israel started our war with Iran in February.

The war between the U.S. and Iran is now official again, since Trump used the word “war” over the weekend. It has devolved into a very old sort of war, one in which the U.S. fires missiles from ships in the region, and Iran shoots back at our ships from missile installations dug into mountains along Iran’s coast on the Strait of Hormuz.

In past wars, these were called coastal batteries – reinforced concrete bunkers where coastal artillery pieces were installed to shoot at the ships of invaders. We had coastal batteries along the Eastern seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and the West Coast. You can still see some of the old coastal batteries at the Presidio in San Francisco, and across the Golden Gate bridge in the coastal highlands of Marin County. Out in Montauk on Long Island, you can visit old World War I and II coastal defense batteries. You can visit others along the Gulf Coast at Battery Pensacola and Battery Worth at Fort Pickens. In the northwest, there are old coastal battery fortifications at Fort Flagler and Fort Worden guarding the entrance to Puget Sound. Even West Point was the site of batteries that defended the Hudson River from naval invasion by the British during the Revolutionary War.

In Europe, entrenched concrete Nazi coastal defense batteries can still be visited at Normandy and elsewhere along the continent’s coast in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.

So, not much has changed, has it? The Iranians have their missiles dug in along their coast, defending their country, missiles being the modern equivalent of the artillery used in World War II and earlier wars. Our naval vessels no longer have the big 16-inch guns that fired 2,000-pound warheads from battleships. Modern destroyers have offensive weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, and aircraft carriers launch combat jets carrying guided missiles and highly-accurate guided bombs such as the JADAM and Paveway series of bombs that use GPS and laser systems to guide the bombs to their targets.

All these modern weapons cost millions and millions of dollars and are called “standoff” munitions, meaning they can be fired at targets a great distance away, either from the ground or from jet aircraft or from ships. That’s what the war is in Iran right now – a standoff war. We fire at Iran’s tankers from the relative safety of our ships in the Gulf of Oman or the Indian Ocean, and Iran fires at our ships or ground installations in Jordan from the relative safety of heavily reinforced coastal missile batteries along their coast on the Persian Gulf, or to the south, Iran’s coast on the Gulf of Oman.

The U.S. is said to still have as many as 50,000 ground troops in the region. Many of them used to be stationed in Kuwait and Bahrain and Oman and other Gulf states friendly to the U.S., but Iran has driven our ground forces out of the Gulf to a few installations that we maintain further away in Jordan. The extra distance doesn’t matter to Iran, however. Iran has developed new ballistic missiles with “electro-optical seekers,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The new missiles are better able to hit moving targets such as U.S. warships, because the missiles can maneuver from the normal parabolic path of ballistic missiles. Iran also has missiles and drones that can maneuver at the last minute as they near their targets, making them more difficult to shoot down with Patriot anti-missile missiles, or anti-drone weapons that are radar guided.

So, the U.S. is back on its heels, having to resupply ships in the area of the Persian Gulf from a borrowed British base on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles away from our forces near the Strait of Hormuz. And who knows where are the 50,000 ground troops we are supposed to have “in the region,” as reports have it. Some are no doubt in Jordan. Some may be on Diego Garcia. Some Marines are aboard Navy vessels afloat near the Strait of Hormuz.

The question is, what are the 50,000 U.S. troops even doing there? They are not going to be used in ground combat. All they’re doing is costing even more hundreds of millions of dollars to keep them there for no apparent reason. We’re fighting Trump’s kind of war – an incredibly stupid tit-for-tat show-war that he thinks makes us look tough, while all we’re doing is shooting at Iranian tankers so Iran can shoot back at our navy ships and at whatever military targets are still located in the Arab states across the Persian Gulf and in Jordan. What sense does that make? Precisely none militarily, and none economically, as high gas prices and prices for everything proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. Meanwhile, Trump has started yet another trade war that is also costing consumers and taxpayers more money.

Trump’s war with Iran will go nowhere that is advantageous to the United States. We haven’t got enough missiles to take out all the Iranian missile batteries along the Strait of Hormuz, of which there are likely hundreds. Iran knows this. If Trump thinks he’s fighting a war of attrition, and will wear Iran down, he is grossly mistaken. The attrition is on the other foot. Iran is reducing our weapons stockpiles, both offensive and defensive, day by day, one attack at a time.

Trump and the idiots he put in place to run his war, mainly the idiot who is obsessed with our soldiers’ testosterone levels, Pete “I’ve got a big one too” Hegseth, have no clue about how to fight an enemy such as Iran, which has been defending itself against invaders for several thousand years. Trump keeps saying, “We hit them very hard.” What the hell does that mean? He doesn’t know. He wouldn’t know a hard hit from a peck on the cheek, he is so ignorant about the military and how to fight a war.

It is embarrassing when a country with an economy that is a small fraction of that of the United States is holding its own against “the most powerful military in the world” as Trump and his minions put it. The way to end this war is to start the engines and go home. Donald Trump can’t give that order, because it will make him look like a “loser.” For Hegseth, he’ll look like he’s got “low-T.” How horrible for him.

All the hired Pentagon influencers and right-wing pundits in the world aren’t going to dig these two stooges out of the mess they’ve got themselves into.

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I’ll admit, I was not always a huge proponent of the “eat the rich” mindset. Not because I ever imagined I, myself, would be rich1 or because I idolized the wealthy or because I was friends with any really rich people (or imagined I ever would be).

Mostly, I didn’t think about the rich because I thought they didn’t think about me, so who cares? They live their lives, and I live mine.

But that’s not true, is it? It never was. The rich, especially the grotesquely, obscenely rich, cannot stop thinking about me. And you. And all of us “NPCs” who exist in a world the billionaires consider their personal property. I used to be able to go entire months or years without thinking about people like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. They cannot go five fucking minutes without obsessing over the minutiae of my daily existence.

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Who do I love? What am I reading? What am I watching? What am I thinking? The billionaires have taken it upon themselves to control everything because if they don’t, the peasants, again, you and I, might live our lives in a way the billionaires do not approve of. And that is just unacceptable!

We might love a person of the same sex. Or a different race. Or the “wrong” religion. Or, oh my fucking god!, all three at the same time! We might have children we teach to accept differences. Differences the billionaires find abhorrent. We may live in a way that repulses the billionaires. What if, god forbid!, we don’t worship power and money?

Who knows where that could lead?!

Why, if left to our devices too long, we filthy common folk might start to demand things like clean air and water. Safe food and medicine. Fair pay and vacation and sick time and work/life balance. What the fuck?! How does that benefit the billionaires? How is that fair?! Why do the little nobodies get to have a say in anything at all?! They weren’t born rich. They don’t have the superior genes and innate intelligence of the billionaires. Why do they get to set any of the rules about anything?!

So, yeah, even though most people do not spend much time at all thinking about the billionaire class, they never stop thinking about us and the threat we pose.

This is why the obscenely rich have been waging a war against us for longer than we’ve all been alive. The Civil War. The Business Plot. Nazi sympathizers. The Southern Strategy. The Reagan Revolution. Project 2025. These are just the same people over and over again. Rich (mostly) white men working to end democracy so they can impose their will on us without recourse.

The only solution is to end the billionaire class. Without his unlimited resources, Elon Musk is just another Ketamine junkie with a Nazi fetish. Without his billions, Peter Thiel is just a weird, sweaty creep trying to build a cult. Take away their money, and the damage the fascist billionaires can do dwindles to local domestic terrorism instead of a literal global cabal of pedophiles funding far-right militias and political parties to undermine democracies across the world.

Nothing I’m saying here is new or even remotely radical, honestly. “Radical Thought of the Week” is more tongue-in-cheek than a serious descriptor. Getting rid of billionaires is no more radical than saying, “No one should go hungry in the richest country in the world.” The only people who clutch their pearls at such a statement are the people least qualified, morally and intellectually, to give their opinion. The people who look at hungry children without an ounce of compassion and tell their friends you can’t feed strays because they’ll just have more babies.

But I am going to give you a reason to dispose of billionaires that you have not considered. A reason they are not just a fascist threat to democracy and human decency and progress, but an existential threat to life on this planet.

If you’ve been following me for a while, or reading the far more authoritative or , you should be aware that a not-insignificant chunk of the billionaire class is obsessed with immortality. They have decided that they must live forever because they are SO fucking incredible and indispensable to the future of humanity; all will be lost if they cannot become everlasting deities to rule over us for all time. No, I am not exaggerating about this in the tiniest bit.

They talk about this constantly. And it’s not just the Silicon Valley tech fucks. The old and dying oligarchs are also obsessed with it.

So here’s the thing, and I touched on this last year when I first started writing about the billionaire immortality psychosis: it’s not going to happen. They’re not going to develop a miracle elixir to stop aging. Injecting the blood of a younger person will not work. At least one billionaire is trying that, which is exactly the kind of vampire shit QAnon used to scream about. Funny how they stopped caring when we discovered it was one of their own doing it…

Anyway! None of that will work, including the Silicon Valley plans to create a godlike AI that will instantly invent a way to upload humans to the internet and make us immortal digital beings. Or maybe put us in immortal robot bodies or some other thing that will do an end run around biological death forever.

Most of these billionaires are in their 50s. In 20 years, they’ll be in their 70s and not far from death. Or old enough to know that they are not going to be immortal. That realization will break their already fragile, drug-addled minds.

These are people who have lived their entire lives in a bubble where they never hear the word “No.” Their every whim is fulfilled. They are the Epstein Class. They rampaged across the world, raping children. Not because they were attracted to children necessarily, but because it was forbidden, and no one tells the billionaires what they can or cannot do. When you have access to anything and everything, you get bored and look to take the things you should not have. The things society says you MUST not have. That is the underlying story of Jeffrey Epstein.

But all the money in the world will not stop death from claiming the billionaires. They are spending literally trillions in pursuit of immortality. They are destroying the climate. They are spreading fascism like a virus. They are destabilizing global peace and edging us closer to a World War, simply so they can solidify their own power. No democracies to oppose them means the work towards immortality can proceed without interruption.

At the end of all their scheming and murder and horror, though, they will still be dying old men facing the void that terrifies them so. How will they react? The same way entitled white men always react when they do not get what they want. Poorly.

The most dangerous place to stand in the world is between an entitled white man and what he thinks he is owed.

Women are murdered every day because they told a man they could not have their phone number or they would not go on a date with them. Minorities have been murdered for generations because they got a job or dated a woman a white man believed belonged to him. So it has ever been.

When the dying billionaires understand they will not live to rule the world forever, their reaction will not be one of acceptance. It will be one of absolute rage. They will see a world of nobodies, of peasants, of NPCS, that will continue to exist without them, the main character, and they will be furious. They will seethe with resentment that anyone dares to go on without their all-important wisdom and benevolence. Worse, they will not be remembered fondly as heroes and saviors; they will be condemned as monsters and villains.

Well, if that’s the case, why not burn it all to the ground? If they can’t have it, no one should, especially not the ungrateful NPCs! With unlimited resources, the billionaires have already unleashed war and violence just in their quest to overthrow democracy and replace it with fascism. How easy would it be to skip the fascism part and just unleash chaos for the sake of chaos and toppling order with no regard for what comes next?

If that sounds far fetched, please recall that the Silicon Valley scumbags have literally thrown in with fascism because A. the left started to ask for accountability as their social media platforms severely damaged, deliberately, an entire generation of our children, and B. they went all in on their immortality delusion. These are insane people with tiny, fragile egos, many of them strung out on drugs. When death starts knocking at their door, they’re going to lose what’s left of their fucking minds and lash out in rage and despair.

If we have not stripped them of their unlimited resources long before that happens, the billionaires will be a doomsday weapon waiting to go off. A weapon fueled by cult-like insanity and infinite malice. I don’t know about you, but I have no particular wish to see what that will look like; the 2026 preview is bad enough. The final act of these junkie nihilists will be cataclysmic, and they need to be stripped of their ability to wreak havoc on a global scale long before we get to that point.

It’s us or them and, frankly, nothing will be lost when they’re gone. Eat the rich.

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