Trump's bombing of Iran nuclear sites now seems more like a tornado blowing the roof off the house and wrecking the furniture.

 

We should know Trump by now, shouldn’t we? He doesn’t have time for “talk,” has not the slightest patience for any other side’s concerns and interests. If the other side doesn’t cave-in immediately to his “terms,” he just walks away, heedless of how the other side will react to being left at the alter. Or he might issue orders to send in the troops against American citizens protesting ICE thuggery, or send in those thugs armed at a swap meet…

 

…or bomb the hell out of something, like what we are being told that Trump authorized at three nuclear sites in Iran. Nothing Trump does is done without first consulting his bloated gut, and if it tells him a certain action will make him feel wonderful it will be done, no consultation with his brain is necessary. If the response to his actions is not “wonderful” to certain segments of the population, he then consults what passes for a brain, which he uses to devise various schemes of revenge and retribution.

But while John Bolton—who convinced Trump to abrogate the nuclear deal during his first term in the first place—now has an excuse to say something “nice” about Trump after the bombing of those Iranian nuclear sites, what exactly was accomplished is not clear. The “official” story was “mission accomplished,” but as NPR points out in this story 1 this action may only have been a bee sting:

U.S. officials say that strikes conducted on three key Iranian nuclear sites have devastated its nuclear program, but independent experts analyzing commercial satellite imagery say the nation's long-running nuclear enterprise is far from destroyed.

"At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven't been hit," says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who tracks Iran's nuclear facilities. "If this ends here, it's a really incomplete strike."

In particular, Lewis says the strike doesn't seem to have touched Iran's stocks of highly enriched uranium. "Today, it still has that material and we still don't know where it is," he says.

Israeli intelligence images days before the attack appeared to indicate trucks were located at targeted sites, Isfahan and Fordo, for the purpose of sealing tunnels and hauling material away, likely the enriched uranium stored at the facilities. Although the infrastructure used to enrich uranium may have been damaged and rendered unusable at the targeted sites for the time being, the material they created in the interim was likely saved and hidden away at a yet unknown site.

It is interesting to note the Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was basically told to return to her corner and be a “nice girl” when she suggested that intelligence reports indicated that Iran was three years away from developing a nuclear weapon, which could be interpreted as Trump having a little more than just two weeks for a "diplomatic" agreement. But he couldn't wait that long, indicating that talk bores him, unless he's the one doing it.

Yet in the aftermath of Trump’s bombing run in Iran, we are told by intelligence experts that Iran’s nuclear program, if no further action is taken, is “only” delayed for 2-5 years, which is in line with previous estimates, which seems to suggest that other than putting large holes in the ground, Trump’s claim that peace is at hand is indicative of his failure to understand that talk is hard work, and people don’t like getting punched in the face just because they don’t agree with what you say.

But Trump doesn’t really want “peace”; he thrives (or thinks he does) on creating chaos that he then claims that only he can “fix.” As noted before the problem is that Trump has no time for “talk”; diplomacy is a waste of time because either you agree to his “terms,” or he walks (or punches you in the face). We have seen this with North Korea, and the result was that he made Kim Jong-Un look like a fool to his own people, and North Korea now has 50 nuclear warheads and the capacity to build a half-dozen a year. Not surprisingly Trump has said absolutely nothing about North Korea lately, let alone suggested “bombing” its bomb-making facilities.  

And what about Russia? No one knows what Trump and Putin said to each other during their phone calls, but what is clear is that Putin does not feel he has anything to fear from Trump if he continues to bomb civilian sites in Ukraine and kill dozens of innocent people at a time. In fact a clue to Putin feeling he has a friend in Trump is revealed in what passes for a “press conference” in Russia when a questioner inquires if Putin will respond to the U.S’ bombing of Iran and if he is bound by security treaties with Iran to offer them military support:

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

Putin responds to such questions as if he wishes not to offend Trump. He claims to feel no obligation to aid Iran militarily in retaliation against Israeli or the U.S. attacks. It seems clear that in their secret communique Trump and Putin have a quid pro quo in which they agree not to criticize the other or employ direct military opposition—meaning in the case of Russia, Trump nixing any further military assistance to Ukraine.

So what did the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites accomplish after the first “shock and awe”? Something akin to a tornado blowing the roof off of a house, and wrecking the furniture. Iran has threatened  retaliation, and has already struck a U.S. military base in Qatar, and is threatening to cut-off the Strait of Hormuz from oil traffic. How will Trump respond to that? Well, um, he is telling oil companies not to raise prices, and he is supporting a PAC that seeks to replace Kentucky senator Thomas Massie, who had the audacity to criticize the attack; now what about Marjorie Taylor Greene?

We could have seen a tit-for-tat exchange of missiles, or a self-imposed “ceasefire”; in fact we are being told that a "ceasefire" has been called between Israel and Iran, which of course Trump is taking personal credit for. One suspects that the U.S. public would have less appetite for "war" if people are killed in the service of Israel that “dragged” the country into their quagmire. But the reality is that the U.S. has had a rather poor track record in “winning” foreign wars since 1945 when engaged in countries with non-Western cultures, religions and political philosophies. 

Still, while Trump has claimed he opposed involving the U.S. in foreign wars, like everything else he “promised” before the election (mass deportation and political retribution accepted), that would be just as likely another lie, if he thinks it will raise his sinking poll numbers. "War" may be off the table at the moment, but if Iran doesn't want to "deal," then what? It's nuclear program is far from "dead."

The only thing "true" about lies is that they are said.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief of propaganda, is alleged to have suggested that if you tell a little lie, people brush it off as inconsequential, but if tell a “big lie” loudly and often enough, people will accept it as “fact.” This of course has been the strategy behind Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which continues with the “big lie” that everyone they are detaining and deporting are “violent criminals” and “violent gang members.” 

The truth is that most of those being detained and deported are “everyone” and “anyone” as directed by Stephen Miller, who has apparently been blindsided by the truth that, as many studies have indicated, immigrants (including the “illegal” kind) are much less likely to commit crimes (including the “violent” variety) than U.S. citizens. 

Instead of admitting the truth, ICE agents (who seem less "human" and more like "Terminator" robots) are being directed to be more "creative" about who is subject to arrest unlawfully without a warrant 3 . Naturally, racial profiling is supposed to be "creative," such as arresting pregnant U.S. citizens because they look "Mexican" 4 .

 As Lawrence O’Donnell points out here…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i71ypGa9M-k

…people are finding it difficult to deal with the fact that virtually everything that comes out of the mouth of anyone in the Trump administration (especially Karoline Leavitt and Tricia McLaughlin) is a falsehood or misrepresentation. Even when a lawmaker in the state of Minnesota is assassinated, Trump only had time to insult Gov. Walz.

Meanwhile Republican Sen. Mike Lee didn' have time for the truth either, choosing to believe the killer was a "Marxist" conducting a "Nightmare on Waltz (sic) Street" attack. The killer turned out to be a Trump supporter and anti-abortion fanatic. 

Of course Sen. Joni Ernst has a similar perception of life, claiming she is concerned about the lives of potential victims of an Iranian attack, but making light of her own terroristic desire to endanger the lives of thousands of her own constituents to pay for tax cuts for the rich: "We all die," was her response to a questioner, just some quicker than others, presumably. Besides, billionaires are "superior" to the people who actually have to do the work to make them rich; after all, they are "replaceable." Ernst later doubled-down on  her inhuman remark, posting a video of herself in a graveyard. The typical Republican "patrician" attitude about the "plebes."

Truth is not the point of the Trump administration; you either "love" what he does or you are subjected to the likes of Steven Cheung—a man whose gross overweightness keeps him in the shadows but also informs his psychology—who employs juvenile and profanity-laden attacks on Trump’s critics, the kind  of language that many believe actually reflects Trump’s own diminishing capacity for intellectual process, upon which O’Donnell reflects upon here…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyev-HWo04s 

…and it is clear that Trump’s mental state, lack of an educated intellect and failure to grasp fundamental civics (you think this guy could pass a citizenship test, which asks easy, very basic questions?)  is either being coddled out of fear, or taken advantage of by people with their own evil agendas (i.e. Stephen Miller). The weakness of Trump’s mind and any semblance of being what George Bush called “the decider-in-chief” or what desk Harry Truman was talking about where “the buck stops” was on full display when just days after he gave a directive to ICE field offices to refrain from chasing down farm workers in strawberry fields…

 

…because "We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have, maybe, what they're supposed to have, maybe not…We can't do that to our farmers. And leisure, too. Hotels. We're going to have to use a lot of common sense on that," was as predicted quickly reversed.

But is anyone listening to Trump anymore in his administration? He is weak-minded and can easily be “persuaded” to “forget” what he said minutes earlier when his mind is re-stuffed with personal grievance and vindictiveness. Apparently because Trump was angered by the lousy attendance of his personal” birthday parade that was over-shadowed  by the 6 million people who came out across the country for the “No Kings” protest, we are told by by McLaughlin that

The President has been incredibly clear. There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE's efforts. Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability. These operations target illegal employment networks that undermine American workers, destabilize labor markets and expose critical infrastructure to exploitation.

Of course this was a canned response to put in Trump’s mind, since we know from his Truth Social posts Trump is incapable of translating his jumbled thoughts into coherent sentences. But there is nothing “logical” about McLaughlin’s statement as it applies to farm workers and workers at food production plants, which employ mostly immigrants because those are the only people willing to do such unhealthy and at times dangerous work. 

Yet farm workers (and that statement was in response to inquiries about the reversal) are labeled as “violent criminals” and deporting them is about “public safety, national security and economic stability.” Deporting these workers do the exact opposite of what McLaughlin is claiming; the only “rationalization” for this is quotas, cruelty and racism.

Do people really believe farm workers are “violent criminals”? No, except maybe extreme MAGA-types who keep insisting that the issue is only about being “illegal” when what we really should be talking about is if the whole basis of this country’s immigration policy is illegal, especially asylum policy which is in conflict with international law and the fact that Republicans torpedo any meaningful immigration reform because they want to use immigration as a political weapon.

As long as I am on this track, I am using my “old” laptop to write this post because the new one I purchased just this past February is inoperative at the moment. Why? I’ve been having what could be memory or operating system instability that only increases with each “update,” but then a week ago there was a bios “update” which I allowed to occur because I thought it was meant to “fix” all the issues I was having.

Unfortunately, the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" warning about whether to apply this bios update is in operation here. Instead, it not only made the issues I was having worse, but “introduced” new, much worse problems. The operating system went into a “loop” of shutting down and restarting; running chkdsk from the command prompt indicated no issues with the SSD drive, so it was clearly  a software issue. When I rebooted from an iso image the Bitlocker screen would appear, I would input the recovery key provided on my account page, and after spinning for five minutes it would return to the recovery key input prompt again. 

I admit I had never heard of Bitlocker before,  but it apparently is something Microsoft decided to implement to “outsource” security, and there is no way to bypass if Bitlocker  keeps you locked out even when you can access the troubleshooter blue screen.

Who do I blame?  Indian coders—many we are told are “pressured” by family to get into tech—for being incompetent? Well, Ok, not all coders are Indian, although we are told that a “majority” of coders at Microsoft are “non-Americans,” and that 30 percent of code is “written” by AI. But there is still that question about the capabilities of coders these days. On DevRant some guy called “shubhadeepb” tells us

Why most of the Indian developers code so bad? I face it very often, with my colleagues, with the freelancers we hire, even with our clients.

I am an Indian, and I feel so much disgusted (& sad as well) when a client tell us that they have a dedicated team to rework on the code which they outsource from India. If you visit a freelancing website you will see that the Indian developers have the least price, and they bid on literally anything even without understanding what they need to do. And finally when they get a job, they complete it, but with a fully f*cked up code and the worst architecture possible.

I have a lot of friends working in IT, and I personally know that they do not have any passion about programming. They just work for money, nothing else. I don't understand, why? My 7 years of IT career is probably not long enough to find a suitable answer for this 'why'.

I think I’m going to dig out my old Windows 7 Sony Vaio with its internal Blu-ray drive and see if that thing is still functional.  But in the meantime I ask myself why if according to the Pew Foundation there are 700,000 Indians in the country illegally— Infosys, an Indian company that Microsoft employed for IT-related work, was fined $34 million for “systemic visa fraud and abuse of immigration processes”—why are we  not hearing about ICE raids in tech companies detaining people with fake or non-existent work visas? I mean, are not people who are at least partially responsibly for Windows 11 being the most “buggy” operating system ever in need of rapid deportation if they don’t care if they are making people's lives heck?

We are told that H-1b and B-1 visa fraud is “complex," that visas are easily manipulated and forged, and that deception used to obtain H-1b and B-1 visas are “tricky” to uncover, and DHS and ICE agents don’t have “time” to get into things they don’t understand. 

Thus the “prioritization” of low-hanging fruit such as workers in farm fields and food processing plants. Funny how DHS can “easily” find “fraudulent” work permits in low-income agribusinesses and dangerous roofing work, but they cannot “find” illegal immigrants in tech industries, Amazon or Google that are built on workers with fraudulent work permits.

Maybe it is because Trump wants to “reward” people like Kash Patel who we find here 1 has nothing better to do with his time but directing agents to tackle and arresting U.S. senators for asking questions or engaging in 2020 election conspiracies based on “unverified tips.”

Back to the lying by the Trump administration. As O’Donnell points out, when all you are fed are lies, misinformation and fabrication, the “mainstream” media simply reports the latest statement as the “fact” that this or that was said. It doesn’t matter if what was said is true or not, it is the “view” of the administration, and “policy” is derived from that view, even if it is based on lies.

But what we can see through the lies is that the Trump administration has no real “guiding philosophy” outside of racial animus and white nationalism that fuels its mass deportation and anti-DEI mania; everything else from economic and foreign policy is confused and a mess. Politico notes that the Senate parliamentarian "nixed" language in the big bad bill to "zero out" funding for the "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slash some Federal Reserve employees’ pay, cut Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board," since those provisions "are all ineligible to be included in a simple-majority budget reconciliation bill." 

One must remember that these departments were created after the Great Recession, itself a product of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was in response to the financial abuses that brought on the Great Depression.

And how can it not be when this administration is full of incompetents and self-seekers like Hegseth, Noem and RFK Jr. who have little more than politicized “opinions” about what their jobs are, those who should know better, like Marco Rubio, who is walking that tightrope just hoping not to fall on his face, or those who have not the slightest justification for their positions, like Linda McMahon, who are tasked to do nothing more than oversee the destruction of their departments. 

Behind the scenes it is probably Miller who is running this shit show, but Trump still has the “title,” which he uses not to unite the country but use to exact his revenge fantasies, which the courts have occasionally stepped in as the “adult” in the room to put a "pause" on. 

How does the media "present" this? We are supposed to believe that Trump can "weigh" anything in that little mind of his…

  

….with no basis in reality (real “reality” is in the other headline) since Trump is completely clueless about what do and issues like cause and effect. We were told that Trump snuck away in the middle of the night from the G7 meeting in Canada before it concluded. Why? French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that Trump was returning to the White House so he could somehow broker a “ceasefire” between Israel and Iran—you know, like the one Trump promised to broker between Russia and Ukraine (note that Trump has not said a word about, let alone exchanged a “love letter” with,  Kim Jong Un)

Of course Macron was likely just being sarcastic knowing Trump’s “record,” but Trump of course didn’t understand the “irony.” Trump claimed that he preferred not to discuss “policy” on the telephone but “face-to-face,” meaning he doesn’t like his ignorance to be exposed too much when asked hard questions or asked to explain his “reasoning.” 

But Trump has time to talk to Putin for hours, which we don’t know the “details” of. We only know the “result” of them, like Putin feeling free to carpet bomb civilian sites in Kyiv. What did Trump tell Putin that he thinks he has Trump’s “blessing” to kill innocent civilians—something that Ukraine’s own attacks in Russia are not doing? 

Trump might say that Putin is "crazy," but Trump's short memory solves all such problems for him; he just "remembers" that Putin is a "victim" like he is when exposed by the truth. Trump's "empathy" is also limited by his short-term memory; clearly as we have seen in his muted response to the assassinations and attempted assassinations of Minnesota lawmakers by a MAGA voter, Trump only “cares” just long enough to insure it isn’t himself who looks “bad.”

But of course there is the truth,  and the truth is that Trump wanted to get away before Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived to the G7 meeting to discuss matters about the war. Simple as that. Why doesn’t he like Zelenskyy? Because he didn’t submit to Trump's blackmail of withholding Congressionally-approved military assistance and provide “dirt” on Joe Biden during the 2020 election.  It is just that simple. Trump is nothing if not a grudge holder. 

Whatever he decides to do with Iran with that bunch of incompetent and inept people “advising” him will be more likely a game of dartboard, wherever an ineptly-aimed “decision” dart randomly lands. It will be “justified” according to “need.”

But we can trust the media to tell the “truth”? Well, certainly not ABC News these days. When reporter Terry Moran was fired for posting something that was true about Miller, the truth was that ABC News had been desperate to find a "reason" to fire him after Moran had not been "nice" to Trump in regard to that photo-shopped image in that interview. ABC News executives apparently believe that Trump will be "nice" to them in return.

Once this country reaches the point where those who are supposed to defend the truth against an administration of dangerous pathological liars who sending this country into a whirlpool of self-destruction cringe into a mass of spineless jelly, then what else is there to do but take to the streets? Trump can't send the National Guard to every city or town.

Out of curiosity I wondered what the No Kings protest in Knoxville looked like. According to a local news station 2 7,000 protesters took to the streets—and most them looked middle-aged or older, many of them probably “liberal” members of the faculty at UTK. These protesters lamented that few “young people” showed up to protest Trump and his inhuman authoritarian rule...

 

…meaning of course students from the university. All I can say is that nothing much has changed since I was there. So much for saving the "future."