US and Israel attack Iran

[Walker]

The biggest and best in Oz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0b7orogMLY

[accelafine]

A library with no books. What a surprise.
Are you still in love with that man? Such a sycophant. It's pathetic.

[Walker]

A library with no books. What a surprise.
Are you still in love with that man? Such a sycophant. It's pathetic.

There you go with that sweet talk.

Trump’s taste is quintessentially American.
Eurpoeans (and Europeans) first ventured to the New World for the gold in them thar hills.

*

Communist Block Style, modernized, in the city of broad shoulders.
https://chicagocrusader.com/wp-content/ ... n-14-1.png

[FlashDangerpants]

At some point the Senate has to investigate the causes and conduct of this war. Probably after the midterms when some of the collaborators have been swept from office. It's going to be much larger than the Benghazi commission.

I wonder how well Kegsbreath will do in those hearings.

I see you are making a prediction. Making predictions of the future is hard - much harder than making predictions of the past. Chaos theory implies that making predictions of the further future, ie beyond the next couple of weeks, is much harder still.

With this in mind, here are my predictions of the very near future relating to the US-Israeli attack on Iran:

1) Vance has been put in charge of the surrender negotiations precisely so that he can be blamed for the resulting agreement, if there is one. So my first prediction is that Trump will blame Vance for the outcome, but will do so obliquely.
1a) A corollary of (1): Rubio will expend a lot of hot air explaining how he could have obtained a much less bad outcome than Vance did.
2) The Iranians will insist on charging tankers of all nations for transit through "their" Strait of Hormuz.
3) The USA will concede this because it probably now has no choice, but Trump will spin this to his followers by claiming that the transit fees will be shared between Iran and the USA. ("It's a beautiful thing")
4) Trump will say that he doesn't care, because the USA has lots of its own oil, the best in the world, and also that the Yurpeans should open the darn Strait themselves if they are so worried.
5) The White House will announce that a gigantic and gaudy triumphal arch is to be built in Washington DC (***). It will never be built. The purpose will be to generate outrage and thus change the topic of conversation.


(*** I cheated on this one. It's not a prediction - the White House announced this earlier today).

Interesting. I accept the implicit wager!

My near term predictions then.
1. Yes Vance is getting setup to take the fall for a the fallout of losing the war against Iran. But as the author of the bill that prevents Trump from flouncing out of NATO, I can't see little Marco Rubio sticking his head above the parapet to get the blame shifted to himself. He is aware that he can be dismissed from office via tweet, while JD would require constitutional removal from office in a process that might actually be more difficult than removing the real president.

2. Indeed, the old order was that nobody went to war against Iran because of the theoretical threat of the straits getting closed. Meanwhile Iran never actually impeded freedom of navigation in those waters because the threat kept them safe, but the act might get them invaded. The djinn is out of the bottle, they need to spend billions on rebuilding shit that Trump blew up, and Trump has no realistic prospect of forming a coalition to invade Iran, having blatantly been the aggressor. So there's no going back any time soon to the time before Iran actively controlled the passage, and now we'll just have to build a bunch of alternate pipelines to route around the straits if we don't wish to pay toll fees.

3. Vance will be further weakened soon. His trip to Hungary wasn't an effort to help the deeply unpopular autocratic regime win re-election, that would be stupid, Vance is an idiot and nobody wants his endorsement. Its intent was to persuade Orban to take the MAGA approach to losing his election, blame international conspiracies for your loss and refuse to peacefully hand over power. His message was that Trump and Putin will both back him if he does that. He probably doesn't have the juice, he'll step down because he doesn't want a colour revolution, and Trump will blame Vance for another failure.

[Walker]

Whoa. The ball is quickly back in Trump's court.

Whoever they're talking to is obviously willing to take it to paradise.

That is the threat they're calling. All in.

[FlashDangerpants]

Whoa. The ball is quickly back in Trump's court.

Whoever they're talking to is obviously willing to take it to paradise.

That is the threat they're calling. All in.

Are you now in favour of a ground invasion of Iran, or are you now advocating for a nuclear winter?

It all seems like a lot for everyone in the world to have to go through just so that your president can unsuccessfully distract people from his child sexual abuses.

[Walker]

1) Vance has been put in charge of the surrender negotiations precisely so that he can be blamed for the resulting agreement, if there is one. So my first prediction is that Trump will blame Vance for the outcome, but will do so obliquely.
1a) A corollary of (1): Rubio will expend a lot of hot air explaining how he could have obtained a much less bad outcome than Vance did.

Viewed through that prism:

It appears that Vance foiled Trump’s nefarious plan to pin responsibility for failed negotiations upon Vance.

Obviously, Vance’s main purpose in going to Iran was to evade personal responsibility that could be used against his presidential ambitions in the future.

Obviously, Trump’s motive sending Vance there was solely to make Vance the fall guy so that Trump can maintain his claims of being one hundred percent correct about everything.

However, rather than stick around for a couple of weeks, Vance figured if he just says negations were not possible then the buck bounces back to Trump which stalls the hoped-for Vance/Rubio primary bloodbath.

[Walker]

Whoa. The ball is quickly back in Trump's court.

Whoever they're talking to is obviously willing to take it to paradise.

That is the threat they're calling. All in.

Are you now in favour of a ground invasion of Iran, or are you now advocating for a nuclear winter?

It all seems like a lot for everyone in the world to have to go through just so that your president can unsuccessfully distract people from his child sexual abuses.

I favour peace on earth and goodwill to all, however my favours do little to ease ME tensions.

[FlashDangerpants]

1) Vance has been put in charge of the surrender negotiations precisely so that he can be blamed for the resulting agreement, if there is one. So my first prediction is that Trump will blame Vance for the outcome, but will do so obliquely.
1a) A corollary of (1): Rubio will expend a lot of hot air explaining how he could have obtained a much less bad outcome than Vance did.

Viewed through that prism:
...

It's the weekend and the markets are closed. So Trump today announced that he will, having failed to open the straits, will blockade them instead.

This is a fairly familiar pattern now though, so let's see if it plays out in the usual corruption seen over the last few weeks. Tomorrow stock markets will fall as the price of oil rises again. After markets close for the day, miracle of miracles, Trump will tweet something that promises to send the oil price down and stock market up again on Tuesday.

15 minutes before that tweet, a series of brand new Polymarket accounts backed by untraceable bitcoin wallets will place a series of bets and each make their bearer a small fortune of untraceable gains. Meanwhile a billion or so dollars will be placed into leveraged positions betting on a falling oil price, and the holders of those untraceable accounts will make huge gains, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars range.

Same as last week, and the one before. And the one after next.

[accelafine]

Well the oil that Trump has strolen from Venezuela should keep the US going for a while so those tanks that American 'soccer moms' love to drive will be good to go for a bit.