Oh, the other thing to add to the discussion is that Diesel was $7.49 and 7.59 in Southern California while on vacation in July. The 4 dollar gas everyone is talking about is peanuts. Just saying.
Jack, congratulations on your 1K article! I sincerely appreciate your straightforward, no fluff reporting! You always tell us exactly where things stand and what we need to do to combat what this damned lawless "administration," er, uh mafia is doing. (Apologies for the insult to the mafia).
1,000 articles!! Wow that is an amazing accomplishment. I appreciate your incites.
I am so relieved on how big we are winning in Iran! Higher gas prices, the weakness of the USA government on full display, the incompetence of Sec Hegseth and Trump also confirmed. We couldn't be bigger winners!! I mean who would have thought that a global choke point would be such a problem! Perhaps if our leaders had paid a little more attention in HS World History they might have an basic concept of how this works. Heavy on the sarcasm today lol.
1K articles! That makes my day. Keep up the great work but as noted elsewhere, take a day or two for yourself once in a while. We need you to #HoldFast! :-)
Happy 1,000th, Jack! That truly is winning, winning at sharing, at opening minds, and bringing minds of similar perspectives , questions, and concerns together. Thank you! I’m so glad I found you on here and can appreciate reading your articles plus the responses by you and other people as often as possible.
As far as “Winning” within the topic of this article goes, a couple of substitute lines came to me from a song that began “Over and over and over again…”. The substituted lines are:
Over and over and over again, we’re losing in this war.
Over and over and over again, I wonder what’s in store.
I am so tired of winning… and very pissed, sad, upset, et al because we all saw this upcoming ‘win’ from outer space. Beyond lots of cursing, I really don’t have much today…
Congrats on hitting 1K articles. That’s a great achievement! Thank you, Jack!
P.S. I loved the snark, sarcasm and hilarity of yesterday’s article. I literally lmao when I read your comment about no leftover ocean. The cognitive dissonance literally broke me. It was great!! 👍
I appreciate you Jack. I don’t always have time to read. I’ve been very busy with my Dad who just passed on Friday. Sometimes life events take precedence to the shit show of our country. I am back now. Keep on keeping on!
1,000 articles shows your passion and resolve to report what needs to be seen! Please keep your resolve (though it has not been in evidence so far) to take an ENTIRE day or two break each week to enable you to write those next 1,000 articles.
Jack is correct that the calendar itself makes the argument, so let me start with the calendar.
File the date: February 28. That is when this began. File the second date: June 17, when a memorandum was signed and a sixty-day window was announced to the public as evidence of progress. File the third date, sometime before mid-July, when the window closed again, unremarked, without a second announcement, because governments that fail rarely hold a press conference to say so. Note which of these three dates got a headline and which did not. The pattern is not subtle once you see it: victory is announced, failure is absorbed silently into the next news cycle, and by August the sixty-day window has become, without anyone quite deciding to forget it, simply part of the landscape.
This is not a uniquely American habit, though Americans practice it with unusual sincerity. Regimes under strain — and I use that word deliberately, because a democracy under sustained economic and military strain is a regime under strain, whatever its constitution says — tend to substitute the language of momentum for the language of measurement. Trump did not say the strait is open. He said we are defeating Iran very badly. Note the construction. It describes an emotional state, not a fact on the ground. It cannot be falsified by a closed shipping lane, because it was never a claim about the shipping lane. This is a very old rhetorical move, and it works exactly as well now as it did the last dozen times a government facing a stalemate needed the public to feel like the war was almost over.
Jack is correct about the geography, too, and geography is where I want to spend some time, because geography is the part of this story that resists propaganda the longest. Twenty-one miles of water. Iran’s only obligation is to continue existing next to it, which is not an obligation at all — it is simply where Iran is. The United States’ obligation is to compel a change in behavior through the application of force, indefinitely, using ships that are — file this — now past the longest continuous deployment in the Navy’s records, crewed by sailors whose families are going to journalists because the chain of command will not answer them directly. When a state’s information architecture fails its own soldiers’ families before it fails the public, that is usually the leading indicator, not the trailing one.
Here is where I will withhold the analogy I am clearly gesturing toward, because you already know it, and naming it does the thinking for you in a way that flatters no one. What I will say is this: wars that are described domestically as nearly won, by leaders who cannot specify the condition under which they would be won, tend to end in one of two ways. Either the condition quietly changes — victory is redefined downward until it matches whatever outcome actually occurs — or the war continues past the point where anyone in government believes the original justification, sustained now by the sunk cost of everything already spent. Six months in, an ammunition shortage serious enough that the Pentagon is asking contractors to accelerate production, and a Pacific fleet posture that the linked sourcing describes as now absent a single carrier — those are not the marks of a war approaching its first outcome. Those are the marks of a war approaching its second kind of ending.
One more date, and then I will stop, because the housekeeping matters less than the pattern but the pattern matters less than what you do with it. In March, the strait was, by the administration’s own description, another country’s territory and none of our business. In August, the same administration announced it intends to annex it. Note the distance between those two positions, and note that no public accounting has been offered for how one became the other. States that cannot explain their own reversals to their own citizens are not hiding a secret strategy. They are hiding the absence of one.
Jack, you’re going to have to stop telling the truth. People aren’t used to it….
Ha! Mary Ann McGee...you're right.
-Jack
but Never Stop Jack ❗
Not a chance, Karen Scofield...not a chance!
-Jack
Oh, the other thing to add to the discussion is that Diesel was $7.49 and 7.59 in Southern California while on vacation in July. The 4 dollar gas everyone is talking about is peanuts. Just saying.
Sweet Jesus, indeed.
Jack, congratulations on your 1K article! I sincerely appreciate your straightforward, no fluff reporting! You always tell us exactly where things stand and what we need to do to combat what this damned lawless "administration," er, uh mafia is doing. (Apologies for the insult to the mafia).
Thank you!
TimE...thank you; and "apologies to the mafia" got a laugh out of me lol. At least they had a code.
A thousand of these...ONLY happens because people...like YOU...keep showing up to read them. Appreciate you being one of them!
-Jack
My pleasure sir!
thank you
more cowbell...you're most welcome.
-Jack
1,000 articles!! Wow that is an amazing accomplishment. I appreciate your incites.
I am so relieved on how big we are winning in Iran! Higher gas prices, the weakness of the USA government on full display, the incompetence of Sec Hegseth and Trump also confirmed. We couldn't be bigger winners!! I mean who would have thought that a global choke point would be such a problem! Perhaps if our leaders had paid a little more attention in HS World History they might have an basic concept of how this works. Heavy on the sarcasm today lol.
1K articles! That makes my day. Keep up the great work but as noted elsewhere, take a day or two for yourself once in a while. We need you to #HoldFast! :-)
Happy 1,000th, Jack! That truly is winning, winning at sharing, at opening minds, and bringing minds of similar perspectives , questions, and concerns together. Thank you! I’m so glad I found you on here and can appreciate reading your articles plus the responses by you and other people as often as possible.
As far as “Winning” within the topic of this article goes, a couple of substitute lines came to me from a song that began “Over and over and over again…”. The substituted lines are:
Over and over and over again, we’re losing in this war.
Over and over and over again, I wonder what’s in store.
At least no more lines came to me.
Heaven help us all if we “win” anymore!
To borrow your quote…… Sweet Jesus..
I am so tired of winning… and very pissed, sad, upset, et al because we all saw this upcoming ‘win’ from outer space. Beyond lots of cursing, I really don’t have much today…
Congrats on hitting 1K articles. That’s a great achievement! Thank you, Jack!
P.S. I loved the snark, sarcasm and hilarity of yesterday’s article. I literally lmao when I read your comment about no leftover ocean. The cognitive dissonance literally broke me. It was great!! 👍
I would add to the cost all the lives lost on both sides
I appreciate you Jack. I don’t always have time to read. I’ve been very busy with my Dad who just passed on Friday. Sometimes life events take precedence to the shit show of our country. I am back now. Keep on keeping on!
I’m so very sorry you’ve lost your dad…losing our parents is so difficult! Take care of yourself right now!
So very sorry for the loss of your dad. It is definitely the precedent for you . I hope you are ok
I'm signed up for the next thousand! Your articles reassure me. Thank you, I need all the reassurance I can get.
1,000 articles shows your passion and resolve to report what needs to be seen! Please keep your resolve (though it has not been in evidence so far) to take an ENTIRE day or two break each week to enable you to write those next 1,000 articles.
Good news...the downfall of Cheetolini starts Tuesday...
A little smart-assery in today’s article! Congratulations on a thousands! I value them all!
Jack is correct that the calendar itself makes the argument, so let me start with the calendar.
File the date: February 28. That is when this began. File the second date: June 17, when a memorandum was signed and a sixty-day window was announced to the public as evidence of progress. File the third date, sometime before mid-July, when the window closed again, unremarked, without a second announcement, because governments that fail rarely hold a press conference to say so. Note which of these three dates got a headline and which did not. The pattern is not subtle once you see it: victory is announced, failure is absorbed silently into the next news cycle, and by August the sixty-day window has become, without anyone quite deciding to forget it, simply part of the landscape.
This is not a uniquely American habit, though Americans practice it with unusual sincerity. Regimes under strain — and I use that word deliberately, because a democracy under sustained economic and military strain is a regime under strain, whatever its constitution says — tend to substitute the language of momentum for the language of measurement. Trump did not say the strait is open. He said we are defeating Iran very badly. Note the construction. It describes an emotional state, not a fact on the ground. It cannot be falsified by a closed shipping lane, because it was never a claim about the shipping lane. This is a very old rhetorical move, and it works exactly as well now as it did the last dozen times a government facing a stalemate needed the public to feel like the war was almost over.
Jack is correct about the geography, too, and geography is where I want to spend some time, because geography is the part of this story that resists propaganda the longest. Twenty-one miles of water. Iran’s only obligation is to continue existing next to it, which is not an obligation at all — it is simply where Iran is. The United States’ obligation is to compel a change in behavior through the application of force, indefinitely, using ships that are — file this — now past the longest continuous deployment in the Navy’s records, crewed by sailors whose families are going to journalists because the chain of command will not answer them directly. When a state’s information architecture fails its own soldiers’ families before it fails the public, that is usually the leading indicator, not the trailing one.
Here is where I will withhold the analogy I am clearly gesturing toward, because you already know it, and naming it does the thinking for you in a way that flatters no one. What I will say is this: wars that are described domestically as nearly won, by leaders who cannot specify the condition under which they would be won, tend to end in one of two ways. Either the condition quietly changes — victory is redefined downward until it matches whatever outcome actually occurs — or the war continues past the point where anyone in government believes the original justification, sustained now by the sunk cost of everything already spent. Six months in, an ammunition shortage serious enough that the Pentagon is asking contractors to accelerate production, and a Pacific fleet posture that the linked sourcing describes as now absent a single carrier — those are not the marks of a war approaching its first outcome. Those are the marks of a war approaching its second kind of ending.
One more date, and then I will stop, because the housekeeping matters less than the pattern but the pattern matters less than what you do with it. In March, the strait was, by the administration’s own description, another country’s territory and none of our business. In August, the same administration announced it intends to annex it. Note the distance between those two positions, and note that no public accounting has been offered for how one became the other. States that cannot explain their own reversals to their own citizens are not hiding a secret strategy. They are hiding the absence of one.
#HOLDFAST
I would compare Trump to a brain-damaged chimpanzee but quite frankly, that’s downright insulting to brain-damaged chimpanzees everywhere.