Fr. Godfridus Langaniems

[Seth Harp @sethharpesq]

The idea that the US did it on purpose to kill the kids of IRGC soldiers would be less conspiratorial if Pete Hegseth and all his top guys hadn't made literally their entire careers on arguing that war crimes are cool and there should be no limits at all on American violence.

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

We are being lied to continuously about the Iran War. You can’t say their military has been wiped out and then we watch Iran fire missiles day after day killing and injuring our military and hitting their targets with precision accuracy.

But it’s not just Trump that is lying.

Others in the admin are lying and others are silent which makes them equally responsible.

This has gone past blaming Trump to blaming all of them.

And they will now be stained by blood from the Iran War that they either support and lie about or are too cowardice to condemn.

Blood stains from the girls school, innocent people, our own military service members for an unprovoked war that Americans are against is what they will carry forward into election cycles in the future after Trump is gone and can no longer punish them for what he grotesquely calls disloyalty.

Oh you have presidential aspirations do you?

Well you better start acting like an adult instead of a clown and publicly loudly stand with the American people, against this war, whom you plan to beg for votes in the not too far distant future.

No one in the admin or the party gets a pass.

You’ve been warned.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

More leaked Israeli intelligence designed to pressure Trump to bomb Iran. What a surprise!

[Mark Mitchell, Honest Pollster @honestpollster]

I am committed to representing ONLY Americans, and to ensure I can do that, I have taken this step.

Please follow and support me - the American people need an uncorruptible referee!

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

Summary: The US, Israel & the Lebanese gov are planning a Lebanese civil war and are toying with the idea of asking the Sharaa government in Syria to participate as well.

Because if there is one thing the region hasn't had enough of, it's civil war...

https://t.co/t3uiwHnwTw

[Adil Haque @AdHaque110]

Netanyahu told Blinken, to his face, that he was blocking humanitarian aid as a form of collective punishment.

This alone should have automatically triggered U.S. laws prohibiting arms transfers.

[Josh Hochschild @JoshHochschild]

“[B]ecause the wisdom of the ancients was that of the theological poets, … the first sages of the gentile world; and because the origins of all things must by nature have been crude… we must trace the beginnings of poetic wisdom to a crude metaphysics.” —Vico, The New Science

[Rich Baris THE PEOPLE'S PUNDIT @Peoples_Pundit]

The worst part about this news, which does appear to be true after making a few inquiries, is that this will do NOTHING but harden the resolve of the Iranian people, whose opinions neocons have lied about to you, the president and themselves. https://t.co/ypZVTv2xkU

[Josh Hochschild @JoshHochschild]

Werner Jaeger on why a classical dramatic play (or modern movie!) must differ from Homer’s poetry:

“The concentration of an entire human life into the brief but impressive plot of a tragedy, and its presentation to the eyes and ears of the audience, produced a far stronger temporary effect than the leisurely narrative of epic poetry. The vividly and directly experienced emotion of Dionysiac ecstasy justified the tragedian in concentrating the whole story of a myth into one fateful climactic event. This was quite different from the technique of epic poetry, which told the traditional story for its own sake, and until the end of its development did not envisage the myth as a single tragic whole—as is shown by the structure of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” (Paideia, vol 1, p. 249)

[Josh Hochschild @JoshHochschild]

Plato revises the story of Odysseus at the end of Republic. In Book X’s afterlife story, “the myth of Er,” Odysseus gets to choose how he will be reincarnated, and having been cured of his ambition he chooses the quiet life of an ordinary citizen (620c).

Plato thus redeems him as a model of justice, after earlier criticizing the Homeric version of Odysseus, in Book I, as an inspiration for Thrasymachus, holding that the nature of justice is to benefit friends and harm enemies (334b).

[Josh Hochschild @JoshHochschild]

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, on Sophocles’s portrayal of Odysseus in Philoctetes: “Odysseus behaves in the play according to precisely the same canons which govern his behavior in the Odyssey. He does good to his friends, harm to his foes.… If he cannot get the aid of the bow by open means, his cunning will devise deceitful means. In the Odyssey that cunning is treated unambiguously as a virtue; and it is of course for his exercise of the virtues that a hero received honor. But Neoptolemus sees Odysseus’ stratagem to deceive Philoctetes as dishonorable. Philoctetes had been grossly wronged by the Greeks who had left him to suffer for nine long years on Lemnos; Philoctetes has nevertheless received Neoptolemus and Odysseus with trust. Even though he now refuses to come to the aid of the Greeks at Troy, it is wrong to deceive him. Sophocles uses Odysseus and Neoptolemus to confront us with two incompatible conceptions of honorable conduct, two rival standards for behavior. It is crucial to the structure of the tragedy that Sophocles offers us no resolution of this conflict; the action is interrupted, rather than completed by the intervention of the semi-divine Heracles, which rescues the characters from their impasse.”

[Robert Barnes @barnes_law]

Do the Iranian People Want Regime Change? https://t.co/0QHBMmy0w5

[Sam Husseini @samhusseini]

These clips of JFK have been found by @MonikaWiesak and she should be credited for her excellent work.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

When people wake up and want to make claims about how many protesters Iran killed in January, how do they decide which number to use? It is based on day of the week, or lyrical flow, or numerology, or some other factor?

[🔻agitprop + absurdity🔻 @agtprpnabsrdty]

A months-long Sky News investigation into the US double-tap strike on a Minab girls' school found the Pentagon had tracked the site by satellite since 1987 and could still count children's shadows in the courtyard before firing anyway.

What the evidence shows:

Three Tomahawk missiles fired from the USS Spruance, 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea, hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on Feb 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Witnesses described a second strike hitting the exact spot where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same site. Death tolls range from 156 to over 170, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, had its own website, and was geolocatable through open-source materials any analyst could have pulled in minutes.

Built to fail:

The Pentagon's own machinery for preventing exactly this outcome had already been dismantled. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent and cut CENTCOM's civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one, months before the war started. A May Pentagon Inspector General report found the office had become a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then blamed for not warning anyone.

Accountability buried:

Four months on, CENTCOM's commander told reporters the investigation was near complete, yet nothing has been released. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question, adding that mistakes are made and war is nasty. The mistake was choosing not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.

My take: A military that surveilled a schoolyard for four decades didn't fail to see the children, it decided in advance that seeing them wouldn't change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information.

[Brandon Weichert @WeTheBrandon]

Israel has deployed AT LEAST one of their six Dolphin-class diesel-electric submarines. These boats are believed to be capable of carrying up to 16 nuclear-tipped Submarine-Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCMs). The Israeli sub was spotted heading toward the Red Sea.

LINK IN COMMENTS

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

One of the most insane lines I’ve ever read — from infamous NATO propagandist Nathalie Tocci. These monsters will get us all killed.

[Rich Baris THE PEOPLE'S PUNDIT @Peoples_Pundit]

Was a HUGE show tonight.

@barnes_law and I told a western audience what Iranians really think about their government and military operations.

Spoiler: Everything neocons told you and the president is a lie, with implications for the war.

And @honestpollster made his return!

[Curt Mills @CurtMills]

No surprise. What I’ve been hearing through countless back channels. But nonetheless: an abject scandal and tragedy for the United States

[Nescio @BookEmperor]

@barnes_law Trump went from pretending to be a madman to being a madman.