Trump says peace in Lebanon without Israel or Hezbollah agreeing. Like a Gaza deal without Israelis or Palestinians. Or a US-Russia deal without the Ukrainians. And in Afghanistan by cutting out the Afghan govt. Peace without the combatants keeps failing. Unsurprisingly. My latest, in @ms.now:

Bari Weiss and Co. at CBS really, deeply believed their changes would be popular, something the public craved, freeing the people from the manipulations of the radical leftists who took over all institutions and forced wokeness upon them. Similar with Musk taking over Twitter. Genuinely surprised.

Vance and Trump say Iran accepted new nuclear inspections. Iran says no. Vance says an Iran will spend unfrozen money on US products. Iran says otherwise. Trump says no Hormuz tolls. Iran’s setting up tolls. Sadly, the recent record says the Americans are lying and Iranians are telling the truth.

Erling Haaland scored that one for his brother, who was killed by John McClane

Caution against over-comparison of UK (Starmer) and US (Biden)—clearly some important differences—but both look like failures of deliverism. Passed large increases in material benefits, but voters didn’t reward them for it. Electorally, information flows and social/cultural issues mattered more.

There's a vast chasm between what the Trump administration is doing and diplomacy. Trump seems to think that bloody threats will move the Iranian negotiators. Vance supports him. This is ignorant and ineffective. But they don't seem to understand that.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold the president of the US to a lower standard of self-control than a 10-year-old. Among the reasons is that the president is empowered to represent the country in sensitive, consequential international diplomacy. Sorry to get so partisan, but that’s how I feel.

Occurs to me that we’re at the end of an ultimately very anomalous century-long evidentiary golden age during which it was extremely easy to produce an accurate visual/auditory record of reality, and relatively difficult to produce a false one.

"The Americans can't get the slime out of their capital's monument pool and will arrest you for touching it," sounds like the sort of lie they'd tell us in the Soviet Union so we'd stop bitching about bread lines.

There once was a pool that reflected A big algae bloom resurrected Peroxide will fix it Never mind, nix it Corrupt and quite dumb, one suspected

One of the only things Trump has ever been actually good at is knowing when something has the stink of loser and, in this case, he has absolutely figured that out, but cannot get out of it

It is absolutely true that Dems need to win swing voters to win elections. The misdiagnosis is that swing voters are “moderates.” They are not. They have almost entirely incoherent politics. You don’t win them from the middle. You appeal to your base with conviction and hope swings like the vibes.

The Left (collective noun): A large, loosely connected group of people who completely agree with and are fully represented by whichever individual, regardless of fame, power, or influence, that you personally find most annoying online.

It's not especially subtle that some tech oligarchs envision private AI-enabled robot armies they personally control, so maybe Peter Thiel personally controlling enriched uranium isn't the best idea. The "individual sovereigns" part of Snow Crash was like the proverbial Torment Nexus. A big DO NOT.

I like the World Cup for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is the reactions of small countries that pull off upsets.

US President Donald Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran that, in article 1, explicitly forbids the US and Iran from threatening each other. He did not have to sign that, but he did. And he touted it. Almost immediately he violated it, and the Iranians used that to their advantage.

Graph of Strait of Hormuz crossings since June 2025. See that little spike all the way on the right? The one that's much lower than the leftward 2/3 of the graph, and immediately crashes back down? That's what the US government and quite a bit of US media tell us is fully open, with normal traffic.

Strong defensive showing by Iran against a Western power past its prime. I am speaking, of course, about Belgium.

The left ceded all notions of patriotism to the right? I saw that and didn't get it. Then I remembered the same person's assertion scolding everyone that they have to be on X because that's where persuading regular people happens, and it made more sense. Sometimes the timeline delivers.

Elon Musk's right-wing civility cop sycophants have been in a snit because the world's biggest corporate welfare queen is getting criticized for tripling his net worth in the two years since his money helped Trump get re-elected. (new @ms.now column)

The US position in talks with Iran is that the US president's words don't matter, at least not when inconvenient, and Iran should willfully ignore years of his party and media apparatus going along with whatever he says no matter how false, how stupid, or how much it contradicts his previous stance.

Trump signed an official document explicitly forbidding the US and Iran threatening each other, then proceeded to issue threats against Iran. The document commits Israel to change its behavior, but the Israelis weren't involved. How can a real, lasting agreement be possible under these conditions?

ME: *points at my "World's Greatest Dad" shirt* CO-WORKER: *points at his own "World's Greatest Dad" shirt* ME: *takes a sip from my "World's Greatest Dad" mug* CO-WORKER: *sips from his own "World's Greatest Dad" mug* ME: [eyes narrow] *draws "World's Greatest Dad" sword*

Also Labour got 32% of the nationwide vote in 2019, a devastating result that permanently discredited Corbyn. After 5 years of the Tories crashing out into terminal unpopularity, Starmer's careful triangulation was able to get them... 33% of the nationwide vote. bsky.app/profile/nich...

Every time Trump threatens to attack Iran he is violating the terms of his surrender. Here's the very first graph of the MOU he signed:

The theory that “electable” means “work to appease right-wing bigots under the assumption that majorities agree with them, at least partially, and they prioritize it when voting” has been tried. It has failed. Try something else.

If Keir Starmer did “everything” to “make the party electable,” and his party is doing poorly in elections, why would he expect praise for that?

Trump got the the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a big new revenue stream. The apparent White House plan is to pretend that “new required insurance coverage approved by Iran” and “maritime fees to Iran” are somehow not tolls to Iran, or blatantly lie that the US gets the tolls, and hope people buy it.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and— I said look. Look with your eyes! Oh now you’ve gone and touched it. The paint is peeling. My beautiful paint! I’ll have to call my pool guy back. Vandal! Antifa! I said look And despair Nothing but the algae remains.

BREAKING: Trump Promises to Hunt Down Swamp Thing, Save Washington and Polluters from the Green Menace

"Because faculty no longer control the curriculum, Texas A&M is quickly becoming an institution of dead dogmas." - Martin Peterson His full resignation letter below. Hear from him directly at our next Resistance Salon - June 24 @ 12pm ET. Register 👇 www.resistancestudiesseries.com/salon

"Specifically, the water is more or less the color of a sour apple Jolly Rancher now. It looks like they're brewing Yodas in there." I love it when @davidjroth.bsky.social writes about Trump inanities.

The Trump administration's top foreign policy priorities are lying to the American people and pocketing money for themselves. Always have been. Here, Vice President JD Vance unleashes a warm stream of yellow liquid onto the audience's leg, and expects them to praise him for making it rain.

Donald Trump started and tried to win a war on Iran, but he messed that up and lost. So now he's trying to surrender to Iran, but he's messing that up too.

Italy still has vibrant newspapers and they are in an uproar this morning over Trump lashing out at Meloni. (Some are mocking Meloni but everyone mocks Trump.) TRUMP IS AN ASSHOLE "Italy Doesn't Beg" The War of the Kneepads Trump Insults Italy "The USA turns backwards as the world moves forward"

Here’s the thing: if the Trump Admin stopped periodically screwing South Korea and making them out to be the enemy, maybe that “malign influence” from China wouldn’t have as much power. Instead, we validate their narrative. english.hani.co.kr/arti/english...

The US government, media, and markets need to accept that Iran has real leverage here. And intends to use it. This isn’t Vietnam or Afghanistan, where insurgents exhausted America’s will to continue fighting. The US lost an interstate war, handing Iran real power and a good reason to use it.

Make the bad guys pay: A Democratic message that the white working class will hear. They respond to gestures of power. A THREAD.

Everyone is going to pay for Trump's weakness. Impeach him. He deliberately lost in the hopes of making the problem go away. www.editorialboard.com/everyone-is-...

If you thought professional diplomacy informed by experts was bad, get a load of the opposite

A cause of world-shaping events—not the only cause, but a significant contributor—is the current president’s personal spite for a (more impressive) previous one. Crazy. But here we are.

The Meloni incident feels like another piece of evidence for his dementia induced degradation. Filters not there to keep his seething misogyny and endless narcissism in check in those specific sort of situations like it would have been even a few years ago. Now he's just talking like he posts.

The Iranians still think Trump can force Israel into a ceasefire on suicidal terms, Trump still thinks there's a magic TACO button somewhere to save himself with, and Bibi is in a state of utter shock that the most compulsively treacherous soul in American history betrayed him.

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem reiterates that Hezbollah's baseline position is no Israeli forces in Lebanon. Israeli leaders reiterate that Israel's baseline position is no Hezbollah near the border and an indefinite IDF presence in south Lebanon to prevent it. I don't see a bargaining space there.

You know the big energy crisis many worried about after Iran blocked Hormuz, the one that'd come when oil reserves run out and there isn't enough oil on the market to meet global demand? The crisis that politicians, media, and markets are now treating as averted? Decent chance it's still happening.

<tapping sign> (screenshot from: www.arcdigital.media/p/the-us-ira...)

It means "I am embarrassed I lost the war I started, I know I look incredibly weak, my top foreign policy priorities are (and always were) lying to the American people and getting money into my own pockets, you people swallow so much BS and seem to buy that bluster is strength, maybe this'll work."

Rhetorically, the statement "Ben-Gvir is worse than Goebbels and the Nazis" is not intended to do the work of delegitimizing Israeli politicians - you don't need this comparison for that - but rather detoxifying Nazis, to make far-right politics seem more acceptable.

Donald Trump, president of the United States, assured us that the Strait of Hormuz would be fully open today, and that economic problems caused by the US-Iran war would reverse immediately upon a US-Iran war-ending agreement. Could he have lied? Or not understand the situation?