Biggest story of our time, playing out right now

The Caligula Class

You take a spoon and wedge it under the edge till you hear the pressure release, then just open it as usual

Someone who acts like the stupidest drunk mumbling to himself in the seediest bar is now the president of the United States.

Well, when you put it that way…

mom can you pick me up at the strait of hormuz, my friends are laughing at me and wont help

*emerging from a tank I have driven through your homes* ok which one of you assholes is going to clean up this mess.

It says a hell of a lot that first the Vice President and now top military brass are planting stories in the press in an effort to absolve themselves of responsibility for the calamity that is the Iran War two weeks into the damn mission. www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

WSJ: The likelihood of Iran closing the strait was discussed, Gen Caine predicted it, and Trump decided “Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait — and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.” www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

I think the phrase, “Thank you for your attention to this matter” is basically ruined forever and no longer usable. Kind of like how nobody names their kid “Adolf” anymore.

The guru behind Trump's Iran war is blissing out

The Strait of Hormuz is open for transit

oh no the thing that has happened to every single world power in every single major conflict since the advent of modern artillery is happening again

I don’t think unconditional surrender is imminent.

Spent some time today trying to fathom why the markets don’t seem to care about an unfolding catastrophe. Then I remembered it took them 6 weeks to realise there was a global pandemic, even with wall to wall footage of dead bodies around the world.

Q: Is there any hope or possibility of opting out or avoiding being “seen”? I don't think privacy is dead. I don't think people need to give up and say fine, take my data. There are concrete things people can do. But they do introduce friction. — @josephcox.bsky.social

5/ And on the Strait of Hormuz, they had NO PLAN. I can't go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait, but suffice it say, right now, they don't know how to get it safely back open. Which is unforgiveable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.

tariffs happening for no reason and theyre making your life worse, secret police kidnapping people for no reason and making your life worse, firing thousands of government employees for no reason and making your life worse, going to war with iran for no reason and making your life worse

The problem with mines is that there’s no going back. Even if Trump and Khamenei Jr worked out a ceasefire tomorrow, it would take time and effort to make the Straits safe for passage again.

Capitalism has lost its fucking mind.

“If deep reading cultivates empathy,” Joel Halldorf writes, “the attention-fracturing, dopamine-hitting, scroll-spurring design of digital media often undermines it”:

The bottom line is Trump sacrificed 8 American lives (& counting) and more than 1,000 Iranian lives (& counting) for nothing. He hurt the US & global economies, destabilized the Middle East, & will pull out with the same Iranian regime in power. There's no silver lining. A senseless, criminal waste

If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.

Me, last week: "The main thing I’d want to get across to people about Donald Trump and his administration right now is that however unprepared you might think they are for war, the chances are very good that it’s much worse. Much, much worse." Can I just repeat myself for this week's post?

If you are watching Trump's presser right now, you are seeing beyond reasonable doubt a person not mentally suited for any position of responsibility. Even running a small store. GOP members of the House and Senate: You are seeing this too.

the market manipulation and insider trading presidency www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

The guy who voices Master Chief from the video game "Halo," who was featured in a White House meme video showing missiles blowing people up in Iran, calls it "disgusting and juvenile war porn" wapo.st/3NhffGm

Americans bombing the school once may have been a mistake. Bombing the same school 40 minutes later means it was INTENTIONAL BOTH TIMES.

Breaking News: New video adds to evidence that a U.S. missile likely hit an Iranian school where 175 people, many of them children, were reportedly killed.

We're in uncharted territory- if WTI crude holds these gains tomorrow- the current rise of 29.9% or $27.16/bbl would be its largest single day price jump- in both percent and amount- ever. Ever. EVER.

It's all so horrible and immoral and insane www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

They had names. They had beautiful faces. And they had the same dreams as your kids - crushed when American "precision" bombs slammed into their Minab elementary school, killing 175 Don't blame AI for this. Blame the sick humans who see war as a game My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/iran...

It looks like the war on Iran is going about as poorly as the regime’s previous wars against Chicago, Minnesota and Los Angeles.

“It is becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration has embarked on this operation without a plan, and is making it up as it goes along, as if they killed enough of the right people and destroyed enough Iranian assets everything would fall into place.”

The Pentagon can likely get away with using OpenAI’s technology for mass surveillance of Americans under the terms of their contract, legal experts told @matteowong.bsky.social.

Video geolocated by CNN shows a large fire burning near a petrol storage facility in northeastern Tehran on Saturday. The Israeli military said it struck fuel storage sites in the city that evening. Follow live updates: https://cnn.it/4lhbn4J

Sam Thorne

Donald Trump is pointing to missions in Iran “as if the excellence with which they have been conducted somehow constitutes a strategy in itself,” @radiofreetom.bsky.social argues.

Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs

An airstrike which struck a school in Iran, killing 175 people, was likely carried out by the U.S., according to Reuters and NYT. If confirmed, it would be one of the worst cases of civilian casualties in a U.S. airstrike in decades. The school was next to an IRGC base.

I genuinely don't know if DHS policies will be any different under Mullin (if confirmed). As long as Stephen Miller is calling the shots, I don't expect a big difference. But this was some of the most evil shit I've seen from a US official in my lifetime, so yeah - I'm thrilled she's gone.

The last photo of third-grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, waving to his mom before he left for school. He was killed shortly after in the U.S./Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab.

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

I cannot state it more clearly: I fully intend all the implied contempt for his voters. My contempt for them is boundless.

This is monstrous.

People are just assets to use and discard

The president didn't bother to make the case for war in a marathon State of the Union address and then he fucked off to his sweaty gilded country club so he could literally phone in an unconstitutional war. Every single Democrat needs to be screaming about this at full volume.

From Hunter S. Thompson’s ESPN page 2 column one week after 9/11.